A Valid Alternative
A Valid Alternative
It was the second appointment of the day, and her next patient looked completely healed. Farah was horrified.
“Mrs, ah, Mrs Jones,” she stammered as the old woman shuffled towards her, the tapping of her cane muffled by the office carpet. Unconsciously she stepped back. “You look, ah, well- you look well!”
It was true. The octogenarian’s eyes were brighter, no longer the colour of old milky cereal; her wisps of grey hair thickened into proper wavy tufts, the tremors gone from her steps, and the hunch in her back unfurled from a parabola into something closer to an exponential curve. Even her skin looked better – the wrinkles smoothed, her flesh no longer threatening to slough off with every jiggle, and that unsettling jaundiced tint faded to the point where it had stopped looking like someone had tie-dyed the old woman in urine.
“Oh doctor!” she cried. She dropped her wooden stick onto the pumice-tone carpet and pulled the stunned ‘doctor’ into a frail-armed hug. “You’re a miracle-worker! I’m so much better.”
She really was. The Mrs Jones who stood before her in a pewter-knit cardigan, nylons and a calf‑length navy skirt looked, and moved, and smiled, and smelt like a woman ten years younger than the one Farah had seen last week. Which still made her, you know, unconscionably old. But it was still, overall, a remarkable improvement – which was, to not put too fine a point on it, both badly impossible and impossibly bad.
***
“What do you mean, it worked?” Alex demanded.
The three of them had taken one of the back tables at Starboard Bao, their regular casual haunt and slinger of a “Two-For-One Terrifically Tasty Teriyaki Tuesday” special that had in the past been a source of great consternation. Today however, nobody gave a melted shit who was going to miss out on being included in the discount, because they were all looking at Farah as if she’d just announced she could vomit spiders.
“I mean, it worked,” Farah whispered, glancing around at the empty tables like a mobster searching for the FBI, “She’s better. Healthier. She’s improved!” She tugged at her sari, her fingers worrying at the stitches in the pink and gold drape as if seconds away from tearing it off and running screaming from the room.
“Carmella Jones,” said Kim, levelling Farah a deadpan glare, “The eighty-seven-year-old with the Alma double-B?” Farah didn’t even bother to ask what the fuck that meant – five years of being a high-life Asian RaverTM had left Kim with a borderline encyclopaedic knowledge of Louis Vuitton as irrepressible as it was useless. She’d moved on from that life, of course, but only because her dentist had told her that if she kept grinding her teeth on MDMA she’d need dentures at 35.
“I don’t know what her fucking handbag is.”
“But Carmella Jones. The old lady.”
“Yes her, did I fucking stutter?!”
“What do you mean, better?” asked Alex, his amber eyes narrowed in a squint and his fingers pursed together before his lips in the universal sign of a white guy about to play Devil’s Advocate, “Better how?”
“Better, better,” Farah hissed. She ducked her head down, beckoning them closer, her dark eyes wide. “She moves faster. She’s shaking less. Her back’s straighter, her hearing’s clearer, she’s fucking… her hair’s growing back!”
There was a long, stunned silence. Finally, Alex spoke.
“Maybe it’s the placebo-” he started, only to be cut off by Farah’s furious glare.
“If you say the fucking placebo effect,” she swore, knuckles curling white around a plastic chopstick, “I will shove this through your fucking eye.”
“But maybe-”
“It’s not the placebo effect!” Farah cried, throwing up her hands, all pretence of subterfuge forgotten, “Can the placebo effect cure blindness? Can it get rid of fucking liver spots?!”
There was another long pause.
“Maybe she’s about to cark it,” suggested Kim, kneading a knuckle into her maroon-colour lips, “I’ve heard that you know. Right before someone dies, they suddenly start looking great.”
“This isn’t better,” insisted Farah, her voice once again dropping into a hush. She leant in across the table, forcing the others to join her in conspiracy. “It’s healthy. Genuinely healthy. She’s improving across the board. The treatment fucking worked.”
The three of them stayed stuck there, elbows leant across the table, fixed with expressions a mix of confusion and awe.
“Well shit,” said Alex.
***
It had all started in that very restaurant. Maybe not that exact table, but one close to it – approximately a year ago, when the three of them had trudged one after the other into the Starboard Bao to drown their sorrows and collectively commiserate that they were, to not put too fine a point on it, each completely fucked. Farah had just had dinner with her parents; Kim had just been dumped by Stephan; Alex had just been legally declared a piece of shit. All three had heads full of their problems, and all three of their problems had just come to a head.
Farah’s problems, really, traced back to her ill-advised and frankly reckless decision to be born with a vagina. While this may not have posed a significant problem in other households, Farah’s parents were Bangladeshi, and while loving and competent and all that other stuff also viewed a woman’s choices in life as being between an arranged intra-cultural marriage to a complete stranger or (begrudgingly) a spectacularly successful professional career. Farah, whose desire to marry unknown Bangladeshi men had always lay somewhere between negative and none, elected for the second option, and so had been unenthusiastically allowed to study medicine, which her parents reluctantly conceded was a passable substitute for being sold into domestic sexual servitude.
The first issue with this plan, however, was that Farah was a little dumb. Not a lot dumb, mind you, just not quite smart enough to be a doctor, or at least not quite smart enough to be allowed to study to be one. When her college admission results had come through too low to get her into pre-med Farah, in a panic, had simply lied about her own success and told her non‑English-speaking parents she’d been accepted into Medicine at a lesser known university. This in itself wasn’t a complete lie, because she had been accepted – but into Medical Science, not Medicine, the equivalent of being allowed to learn to shovel horse poo instead of being a veterinarian. This too had initially seemed like it might only be a speed bump rather than a roadblock – after all, Farah had reassured herself, lots of people who did Med Science went on to do Med – but unfortunately not long after arriving at college Farah encountered her second issue, which was, unfortunately, that she quite enjoyed having fun.
Fun, for the most part, is a subjective term, but here in her college dorm, freed for the first time from her parents’ strict and hawkish supervision, Farah Akhtar discovered that her interpretation of fun involved late nights, wild dancing, copious booze and a wide variety of drugs. None of these things, together or by themselves, were necessarily fatal to a successful academic career, but ‘necessarily’ is a weaselly bitch of a word, and before long Farah found her grades dropping like so much Ecstasy. Naturally, this caused her to experience a deeper and more urgent panic, which she attempted to alleviate by doubling down on partying; which in turn led to even lower grades, which led to more debauchery, which led to lower grades, and by then the snowball was free and rolling unobstructed down the hill. For half a decade Farah lurched between failure and distraction with the intensity of a man determined to shovel himself free from a ten-foot hole – until one morning she awoke to find herself with substantial debt, a dormitory eviction notice, no degree, and few memories from her five years of education beyond shotgunning Smirnoff Double Blacks and letting strangers snort ketamine off her tits.
Her parents, of course, thought that she was doing tremendously, and expected her to graduate in the spring.
***
Kim’s story, on the other hand, was less a tale of faltering academic ambition than it was of misplaced confidence and unsecured gold-digging. Five-foot-one, with a natural cosmetic surgery ‘After’ face and a self‑proclaimed ass you could bounce a quarter off, Kim Liu had arrived in Farah’s dorm already well and truly on board with all the fun things you could acronymise – MDMA, PCP, THC, LSD and EDM, but most of all simply D. Kim loved the D, so much so that within two months of entering college her name in common parlance was normally preceded by ‘Cockpocalypse’, which she wore far more as a badge of pride than a derogative title. She was a hurricane, a conqueror, right up until she met Stephan – at which point she immediately sprang back into the role of doe-eyed virgin, who just so happened to be able to tie cherry stems with her tongue.
Stephan Wang, the only child of Mainlander parents tied deep to the CCP, was exactly the kind of man Kim had been waiting for. Six-foot-two, ruggedly handsome and dressing near exclusively in Armani, he spent the summer of his twentieth birthday hopping between his parents’ penthouse in Singapore and their chateau in Bordeaux, and the summer of his twenty-first driving his new McLaren 720 through the streets of his college town. Ostensibly, he’d come to university to study Business and Marketing, but this was in much the same way Kim had ostensibly come there to study Social Work, and both of them wanted their qualifications like Saharan nomads wanted a sand pit. Stephan picked up keggers and party drugs like he’d been born to it, and Kim picked up him like he’d been born for her.
Once Stephan and Kim hooked up, in her eyes her degree was over. Overnight, she went from never having to buy drinks to never having to buy anything, and within three months the pair were moving into a four-bedroom condo in an exclusive postcode. They were an Instagram power-couple, dining at the best restaurants, taking the flashiest holidays, always late, always immaculate, and always very much ‘in love’. Kim’s tastes moulded to Stephan’s tastes, his family became her family, and she began taking squealing shopping trips with her girlfriends to look at oversized diamond rings.
Then one day, Kim turned twenty-five and came home to find her stuff on the driveway. The couple were no more; Stephan, it turned out, had simply gotten bored and, like he’d done with his McLaren, was trading her in for a younger model. Kim, who’d hitched herself to his ship without tying the knot, was sent adrift – alone, broke, rudderless, and with no marketable skills beyond those she could advertise on Craigslist.
***
Alex, finally, was a different story. The sole male in their little threesome, he was the only one who’d actually finished his degree, and the only one who’d ever held any sort of real job. Clean-faced, tall and sandy-haired, Alex had traipsed happily through his law degree on a steady diet of Dextroamphetamine and Passes, until he’d come out the other end one day technically a lawyer, in much the same way men technically have nipples. In a field as cutthroat and competitive as the law Alex by right should have been an unemployable failure, but his father and his father’s fellows and his frat-fellows’ fathers were all lawyers and so, with the smug, irrefutable confidence of a well-connected white man, Alex had simply waltzed out of graduation and into an Associate’s position with a District judge.
Luck, however, is an addictive drug. Also an addictive drug, as it turns out, is cocaine, which Alex soon discovered was great for getting through weekends, weekdays, weeknights and weeks. So fond was Alex of Colombian marching powder that he began selling the stuff to help supplement his legal income, and before long found himself standing in the parking lot of a local high school negotiating prices with a pair of teenagers who assured him they were over eighteen. They were over eighteen, in fact – significantly over, old enough to have graduated high school, attended the police academy and then gone undercover to pull the ol’ Twenty-One Jump Street. Before he knew it, Alex was being slapped against a police car and handcuffed by men less able to grow a beard than he was while vehemently protesting his innocence.
Had Alex’s dip into alternative income strategies been his only folly, it is likely the whole drama would have gone down as a wayward blip on the young man’s otherwise smooth and pleasant life. He could have come clean to his parents, who could have fronted for a very good attorney, who could have done what very good attorneys do and got the nice young white man out of court with a clean record and a wrist-slappy fine. But luck, as already stated, is an addictive drug, and when Alex’s luck was tested by arrest he doubled down, decided nobody else was going to find out about his indiscretions, and resolved to represent himself.
It is a common sentiment in the legal profession that a sensible lawyer does not represent themselves in Court in much the same way a sensible proctologist does not spelunk inside their own butthole. Alex, somehow having missed this lesson, proceeded to make matters worse by icing his shit decision to self-represent with a coat of double-shit frosting by asking the judge he worked with for a character reference under the guise of having been done for low-range drink driving. The District judge, whose friends were primarily alcoholics and who felt sorry for this nice young white man with a bright future, happily provided the reference Alex asked for, which Alex happily took to his hearing, unaware that there was a reporter sitting happily at the back of the court. Hearing the true nature of his crime and that Alex was being supported by his judge, this reporter’s ears pricked up, and the very next day a scathing piece ran in the local newspaper, sending the whole fraud crashing down. Alex’s judge was furious. The sentencing judge was furious. And the Legal Profession Review Board, whose job it was to shit on misconducting lawyers from great heights, were absolutely scathing as they declared Alex dishonest, unprofessional and unrepentant, and revoked his legal qualifications from then until the end of time.
***
Thus it was that the three very miserable friends, who had known each other for years in the intimate, honest, oblivious way only party friends do, had sat around a mojito pitcher at the Starboard Bao and bemoaned their mistakes, their grades, and their bleak futures.
“What am I going to do?” lamented Farah, still in her college jumper, the one with the vomit stain in the centre, “I can’t keep lying forever. My parents are eventually going to figure out I’m a dropout, and then I’m completely screwed.”
“At least yours don’t know yet,” mumbled Alex, still in his sapphire-blue suit from the hearing, the top buttons undone to reveal his singular chest hair, “Mine are furious, they’re cutting me off. I need to get a job.”
“We all need jobs,” sobbed Kim, still in her clothes from moving, which for some reason included ‘Juicy’-emblazoned booty shorts, “I’m not meant to work.”
“I don’t need a job,” Farah spat back, “I need a medical job. I need to be a fucking doctor. That is the only thing my Dad will accept.”
“My Dad sent me a link to RadioShack,” said Alex, not really listening, “On their hiring page, for a store clerk. Moving boxes. Moving fucking boxes.”
“I need a cap,” moaned Kim, and on that they all agreed.
A few minutes later, once they’d gotten through the cocktail pitcher and swallowed their MDMA, Farah started up again.
“I don’t understand why it’s so important to them,” she continued, “They don’t even listen to doctors. You know I’m not allowed to give blood? Not allowed to give fucking blood!”
“Because of the drugs,” Kim nodded sagely.
“No, not because of the fucking drugs,” Farah snapped, “Because they grew up with some horseshit myth about needing ten drops of water to make one drop of blood and ten drops of blood to make one drop of cum.”
“But you’re a girl,” said Alex.
“Yeah, so they think it’ll make me infertile or something. I don’t know! It’s nuts!”
“My folks too,” Kim said with a sigh, leaning back and balancing on the rear legs of the wicker-frame chair, “When they were last in Beijing Mom tried to buy powdered tiger bones to help Dad fuck better. Powdered. Tiger bones.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“That’s horrendous.”
“I know,” said Kim, rolling her eyes, “Like, why not just take Viagra? Why resort to this magical bullshit nonsense that obviously doesn’t work?”
“It’s like my aunt,” said Alex, shaking his head, “She sells these diet shakes. Endlessly, every day, three or four fucking Facebook posts. Diet shakes and seaweed wraps and essential oils, thousands and thousands of dollars, all absolutely useless. It’s ridiculous, it’s like bitch, stop joining new pyramid schemes, just eat less and go for a fucking run.”
“But do they work though?” asked Kim, appearing curious.
“What?”
“The diet shakes.”
“No of course not,” replied Alex, “They just give you fucking diarrhea.”
“And yet thousands of people buy them,” lamented Farah.
“Thousands of idiots,” added Kim.
“Wish they’d give us money instead,” sulked Alex.
The three lapsed into silence. And then, after a few seconds, almost at the same time, they all slowly turned to look at each other.
“Wait,” said Farah, “Hold up.”
***
They called it ‘Harmonic Resonance Therapy’ and it was, scientifically speaking, utter crap.
It was Alex, in the end, who came up with the term, and all three of them agreed that it sounded sufficiently technical to dupe the average moron into thinking it was legit. The reasoning, which they made up after they’d figured out the name, went simply like this:
The body is made up of cells, and cells are made up of atoms, and atoms vibrate.
Each type of cell, therefore, vibrates at a certain frequency.
Those cell frequencies can be affected by other waves of sound.
Changing the cell’s vibration changes the properties of the cell.
Therefore, using the right combination of frequencies, cells can be resonated to trigger a particular cellular action or response.
Therefore, treating patients with a carefully selected package of frequencies can cause the body to heal, shed fat, cleanse toxins and destress.
Every point beyond the first was, of course, absolute nonsense. Nevertheless, it didn’t take long for Farah, Kim and Alex to get a complete HRT treatment plan comprehensively worked out, which they printed and stuck on their wall.
The patient enters the clinic. In a private one-on-one session, the ‘practitioner’ sits them down and asks what their problem is, and what they’d like to have solved.
The practitioner listens to the patient talk for about ten to fifteen minutes, after which (having made notes and nodded along thoughtfully) they recommend that the patient undergo Harmonic Resonance Therapy and explain how it ‘works’.
The practitioner then ‘tests’ the patient’s ‘cellular resonance’ in a variety of ways, including but not limited to having them hum into a tube, taking cotton bud mouth swabs, dissolving plucked hair in store-bought acid, and holding a low-volume speaker playing white noise up to the ‘problem area’.
The practitioner then tells the patient that they will ‘review’ the ‘test results’, and to come back in a week to receive their ‘personalised resonance package’.
This first ‘consultation’ is ‘discounted’.
With the patient gone, the practitioner finds a random meditation song off Spotify; whale noises, rainforest sounds, Tibetan chanting, something like that. They download it, fiddle with the pitch and pacing, and change the file title to the patient’s name followed by a random assortment of characters. This becomes the patient’s ‘personalised harmonic resonance composure’.
A week later, when the patient returns, the practitioner has them take their shirt off and lay down on a massage bed surrounded by small speakers.
These speakers are supplemented with a random assortment of coloured crystals (put in front of the speakers), scented oil diffusers, and a warm towel on the patient’s back. The practitioner continually explains the treatment using pseudoscientific terms like ‘structural matrix’, ‘energy actualising’ and ‘thermo-sonic activation’.
The patient then lays on the massage table while the speakers around them play the calming meditation song off Spotify.
After laying down in a warm room beneath a hot towel listening to calming music for half an hour to an hour, the patient inevitably feels relaxed and ‘better’.
The patient then receives ‘their’ ‘personalised harmonic resonance composure’ in a format of their choosing (USB, CD, email), as well as a detailed diagram and instructions for how to set themselves up for ‘treatment’ at home. The practitioner explains that continuous home treatment is necessary to prevent ‘harmonic de‑alignment’.
Home treatment requires no less than six individual ‘specialised’ speakers, which can be bought from the clinic for a ‘discounted’ (wildly inflated) price.
The practitioner recommends the patient return for ‘professional treatment’ once a fortnight or once a week. If the patient feels that they improve, it’s because of the treatment. If the patient feels they don’t improve, it’s because the home treatment has been done too little or incorrectly, or the patient needs to come in more.
After three nights of Ecstasy, vodka-lemonade and No-Doz, they had it all worked out. Everyone would have a role. Alex, with his legal background and newly acquired job at Radio Shack, would arrange the premises lease, acquire the speakers, and make sure their ‘therapy’ technically avoided breaking any law. This last part turned out to be remarkably easy, for it turned out there were plenty of regulations surrounding legitimate medical industries, but very few regarding ‘alternative’ ones – meaning that with the addition of enough weasel words (‘may’, ‘non-clinical’, ‘results may vary’) the group could essentially do and claim whatever they want.
Farah and Kim’s jobs were, bluntly, to be ethnic. Technically it was also Farah’s job to provide the medical knowledge – whatever vague, misleading biological phrases she could half-remember from years spent half-sleeping through lectures – and Kim’s role was to decorate their office, but that was only part of it. No, Farah and Kim’s role, as Alex excitedly explained to their initial salty stares but eventual resigned acceptance, was to be both the mystical bearers of exotic knowledge for the white clients, and the reassuringly familiar touchpoints for the minority ones. As Alex had pointed out, and as the other two reluctantly agreed, birds of a feather flocked together – and when it came to picking healthcare, legal, or really any services, people from ethnic groups inevitably gravitated towards their own kind. Alex had seen it time and time again while working for the judge – non-English speaking families hiring expensive some-English speaking lawyers from their own ethnic background, who without exception came to court sporting expensive jewellery, bags and clothes. Invariably, when these lawyers actually opened their mouths or wrote anything it was immediately apparent to every legally-trained person there that they were, professionally speaking, absolutely terrible – but the people who were paying them couldn’t understand what anyone was saying, let alone the intricacies of it, and so only saw the successful member of their own tribe arguing confidently and, Kim pointed out, looking very, very rich. If they were rich, they must be successful. And if they were successful, naturally, they must be good.
So it was settled. Alex would bring the setup. Farah would bring the jargon. And Kim would bring the decorative eye, the style and the fashion sense that subconsciously said to minorities: ‘This is legitimate. This works.’
***
Their ‘clinic’ opened half a year later in a small three-room office, adjacent to a pharmacy in a semi-expensive part of the city. The past few months had been a flurry of activity; of Farah photoshopping immaculately false qualifications and scouring her textbooks for phrases and explanations that sounded convincing if you didn’t know what they meant; of Alex moving stock at Radio Shack, and being far too white to be a suspect in their recent up‑tick of speaker theft; and of Kim scouring the second-hand markets for re-usable or convincingly-counterfeit brand-name items, yet somehow still racking up an expense bill of over twenty thousand dollars. Throughout all this, Farah managed to convince her parents that the university had messed up the times with her graduation, Alex was awarded store-person of the year, and Kim took them all shopping for appropriately ornate traditional racial attire. Then, before they knew it, the day had arrived, and the Harmonic Resonance Treatment Centre opened up its doors.
Initially, things were slow to take off. The three friends had anticipated this and so, in between rotating begging their parents for money and re-selling Ecstasy, took to the Internet to sow the seeds of their new phenomenon online. Farah put up a fairly authentic looking ‘scholarly’ article on a Wordpress site. Alex advertised a 2-for-1 deal on Groupon. Kim letter-dropped flyers in Mandarin. And all three of them spent a good deal of time spoofing Google and Yelp reviews, as well as infiltrating Moms’ Groups on Facebook under a variety of fabricated names.
Their first patient was a woman by the name of Margaret Thatcher, no relation. She was 57, had three children, two of which she still talked to, and was herself a tantric sex therapist struggling with the heavy loss of a six-week relationship. She presented in orange fisherman’s pants and a sarong wrap, complaining of pain in her stomach that was probably just gas. Nevertheless, Farah took her into the treatment room and, after checking that she wouldn’t prefer therapist Liu who’d ‘just had an appointment open up’, ran her through the whole bullshit process. Margo was immediately onboard. She’d always believed strongly in the ‘healing power of sound’, she assured Farah, ever since she’d attended a meditation retreat that involved a significant quantity of humming. So Ms Thatcher went out, came back, received her ‘treatment’, and went home clutching a CD of her ‘personalised harmony’ claiming she felt miles better and grinning from ear to ear.
Next was Doogan Roberts, a white thirty-four-year-old truck driver who’d accidentally bought two two-for-one vouchers on Groupon and was admittedly sceptical it’d help his back pain – until about the third session, where the combination of hot oils and being towelled off by beautiful women had him convinced the therapy was adding years to his life. After him came a group of Chinese women, who all agreed with Kim that they’d heard of this ancient therapy in China; a recently-divorced mother who wanted to undo her disobedient children’s ‘vaccine injuries’; several old ladies who disliked taking tablets and had just happened to be walking by; and two of Farah’s aunties who were excited to see their ‘grown‑up doctor’ and her revolutionary new practice blending ‘Eastern tradition with Western science.’
From there, the whole thing just snowballed. They got pain sufferers, diabetics, pre-school teachers – a woman who wanted sounds to help supplement her fruit-juice diet and a man named Snow, no first or last name just Snow, who managed a start-up social media platform for people’s pets. The ‘specialised’ speakers started selling out so fast that Alex had to actually buy some with his staff discount to supplement his stealing, and Farah and Kim were so booked up they hiked their prices to procure some peace – which counterintuitively only seemed to make their services more desirable, and eventually give each a day a waiting list ten clients deep.
But these were petty grumbles amongst jubilant grins. Overall, things were fantastic; the practice was successful, their families thought they were being productive, and they had good money coming in. Finally, they could afford more than the bare essentials – a non‑shoe‑box apartment, first-hand designer furniture, their own individual bags of cocaine. The group was ecstatic. Life was looking up. It was all going as well as anyone could have hoped for.
And then, out of nowhere, to their utmost horror, the treatments started to work.
***
A week after the first recover-ee had arrived, Farah Akhtar sat in the cold dark of her office and reassured herself that it was going to be okay. Carmella Jones getting better had been a fluke. And Margaret’s stomach pain going away, well that had always been gas. Same with Doogan’s back. Gas. Just gas. And now he’d farted it out, see? Coincidence. Coincidence. Same with Mrs Chen’s dermatitis. And Mr Burgess’s acne scars. And fat Linda’s diabetes. Sometimes things just go away, right? It was all just one big… coincidence. She let out a shaking breath and smoothed her sari, then drew herself up, got to her feet and opened the door to her next patient.
“Mrs Khan,” she said. To her utmost relief the leathery grandmother who staggered to her feet looked as rickety as ever. “Come in. How are you feeling?”
“Oh well, you know peyari” smiled the old woman as she hobbled into the room. Farah closed the door behind her. “My right leg’s a bit stiff.”
“Oh that’s no good,” replied Farah, releasing a discrete and thankful sigh, “Do you want to try and do something about it?”
“Oh I don’t mind a bit of stiffness,” Mrs Khan chuckled, “Far better than the alternative.”
“What’s the alternative?” Farah asked, glancing down at her notes for the first time.
“Gone peyari,” the old woman frowned, “Blown off. By a landmine. In 1952.”
***
There was no way to keep it from getting out. Mrs Khan had a granddaughter, a journalist working for a local TV station. They called the practice, said they were coming by with a camera crew, and before Farah, Kim and Alex knew what was happening they were standing outside the shopping centre staring down a TV camera and a microphone.
“A miraculous new therapy,” the reporter was saying, her voice echoing as if a million miles away, “Pioneered right here by three young innovators, that looks to change the face of modern medicine. Tell me, what is the science behind your discovery? How did you uncover this revolutionary new technique?”
Farah chewed ferociously at her bottom lip. Kim’s shoulders hunched as if she was trying to crawl down her own throat. Alex blinked rapidly, trying his darndest not to be sick.
“Um,” he stumbled, his mouth suddenly cotton-dry. The camera lens beamed. “You know. Um. Late nights. Parental support. A lot of hard work.”
