Rehabilitated – Episode One
by Martin Smith
‘Biggles Baddeley Wolfe, you’ve served five centuries of a life sentence. Do you believe you have been rehabilitated?’
‘Rehabilitated, you say?’
‘Yes. Do you believe you are ready to be reintegrated into the Literary Canon?’
‘Beats me, boy. It seems to me that this rehabilitation you’re banging on about is just some weasel word a two-bit hack of a wannabe writer like yourself dreamt up so you can parody a famous scene from a classic prison movie and whip up a fable or fractured fairy tale and flog it off to some hoity-toity rag and get a measly pay cheque and a bloated sense of conceitedness. Do you want me to play along with your game? You know, apologise for what happened? Is that where we’re heading with this?’
‘Contrition is the first step towards rehabilitation.’
‘Then sure, I’ll say it, if it’ll help. I’m sorry. Sorry for sitting in a cell for the last five hundred years with a head full of regret, a heart full of sorrow and a bumhole full of ’roids. Sorry for my life ending up a pile of shite of unimaginable foulness. And most of all, I’m sorry for not stepping back from the woods all those years ago and drawing in a deep breath and thinking through my actions and their consequences before being caught up in that dumb act that caused all that hurt, pain and suffering. But there ain’t a thing I can do about that. That headstrong, cocky, young pup’s dead now, leaving behind just me—a foolish, dithering, old wolf—sitting before you.
‘Rehabilitated, you ask? I’m stuffed if I know. But hey, don’t let me get in the way of you fabulists churning out your fatuous fabrications and slapping each other’s backs at those love-ins you call literary festivals, all while you thumb your snooty noses at us little folk, us flawed folk, us so-called miscreant folk. Use us, abuse us, disuse us. Do what you like. I’m too old and too tired and too obdurate to give a fuck. So, you obtuse oaf, you just scribble Rejected on that parole form of mine again, and let’s get on with our nugatory lives.’
Shackled, stooped and dressed in prison-grey, the wolf sat back and sighed and looked up and out a small window into a blue, cloudless, limitless sky.
After much head-nodding and whispering amongst the review panel, the head review officer scrawled Approved in a cramped hand at the bottom of a yellow form.
‘Biggles Baddeley Wolfe, the State grants you a second chance.’
‘No shit?!’
At dawn, BB Wolfe stood outside the prison gate. He had a change of socks and an apple in his bag, a pencil stub behind his ear and ten dollars in his back pocket. For the first time in half a millennium, he was a free wolf. So this is what rehabilitation looks like, he thought.
The terms of his parole were simple. Don’t stalk anyone. Don’t eat anyone. And don’t go back to the woods. He looked down at the scrap of paper in his hands and read the address on it: Scumton House for the Almost Rehabilitated, Not in the Woods. He looked up at the grey sky and then scanned the horizon from east to west. Slinging his bag over his shoulder, he stared at and then kicked the dust at his feet, deep in thought. He had choices. Life choices. Turn east and get on dying at Scumton House or turn west and get on living in the woods.
BB turned west.
An hour and a half later, BB approached the crest of a hill. By his reckoning, the woods would be within sight once he reached the top. He lowered his hat so the brim rested just above his eyes and pulled the collar of his jacket up and around his neck. Best not attract any parole officers, he thought. Oh, how he longed for the sight of the emerald forest, the earthy, citric aroma of the spruce pine and the whoosh of wind rushing through the canopy. Home. Yes, that’s it; he was coming home.
He reached the top of the hill and looked out beyond and … gasped! The woods—his woods—had disappeared, replaced by a single skyscraper surrounded by a sprawling metropolis with not a wooded tree in sight.
He plodded forward in disbelief, muttering under his breath about the rapaciousness of progress, the greed of property developers, the fecundity of spiralling population growth and his ill-luck at having to forfeit his den in the woods to pay his legal fees, just before the boom had set in. ‘Land on title,’ his father had always counselled him. And now, all because of one stupid act, he’d blown a fortune.
BB spied a phone booth in the distance. He walked up to the booth, grabbed the phone book and flipped through the pages until he reached the Gs. He ran a middle claw down the listings, past Geppetto, past Ghouls, past Goblins until the tip of his claw rested below Goldilocks. ‘There you are,’ he said. He removed the stub pencil from behind his ear and placed his tongue firmly in his cheek and wrote a name—G … r …—and an address: 122 Woodland Drive.
‘Right, time to complete my rehabilitation,’ he said, and with a more determined step, he headed off in search of Woodland Drive, somewhere in the metropolis formerly known as the Woods.
