Shouts From Down Under

D? Yep. Just D

Once upon a time,
D.
May this character rest in peace.

The novel called D
by Australian Author, Marcus Gibson,is well worth reading.

If you can find it to buy that is.

Some of these obscure books, I do not know why they never became best-sellers!
This story is about a boy who was placed in a mental institution because they thought he was crazy. He wasn't given a name. Just the letter. D.
The reason he exhibited strange behaviour from birth was that he could hear from other peoples ears. So that all the noises that other people were hearing were all conducting straight into D's head in one go. The cacaphony drove him mad with terror as a child, obviously because he didn't understand the meaning or what was happening.
His physicians used him as a research rat; they experimented by depriving him for sleep 24/7. They kept this up for month after month. He never slept. But he did write! The doctors realised that his only enjoyment was writing. They restricted his paper and gave him only one pencil. After a time the pencil wore down to a stub. Then to nothing. They waited to see what D would do with no pencil. They were not enjoying his torment, just coldly calculating his reactions for research.

But D was a resourceful young man. The doctors saw everything he did on the cameras placed in his cell and bathroom. He was never let out.
One day D went into the shower. They saw him take a cake of soap, put it in his mouth, jump up high in the air and come down on the concrete edge of the shower. He deliberately broke his own leg so that he would be taken out of the cell and put in the asylum hospital recovery ward.
While he was there he swiped another pencil from a nurse / doctor, whatever.
But when they returned him to the cell, they took the pencil and paper away, still keeping him awake, to see what he would do.
A new nurse came to work at the asylum. D fell in love with her.
One day she came into the cell to be presented by a bunch of perfectly formed deep red roses.
D had made the roses out of ripped up sheets, he'd cut himself and dripped the blood on the white sheets, then formed the pieces of red material into perfect flowers. He somehow made stems, possibly out of coat hangers, I can't remember, its some years since I read this book.

Like I said, a very different, fascinating read by a little known author.

Sparky