The Best Person to Keep You Sane

Rimmer was outraged at Lister's accusation. 

Even though it was True, he felt it was so out of kilter with his own image of himself, he was able to summon up genuine indignation. 

True, he did it, but it wasn't like him!

'Fifty-odd years? Alone with you?'

'What's wrong with that?'

Lister stopped and put down his trunk. 'I think we should get something straight. I think there's something you don't understand.'

'What?' said Rimmer.

'The thing is,' said Lister as kindly as he could: 'I don't actually like you.'

Rimmer stared, unblinking. This really was news to him. He didn't like Lister, but he always thought Lister liked him. Why on Io shouldn't he like him? 

What was there not to like?

'Since when?' he said, with a slight crack in his voice.

'Since the second we first met. Since a certain taxi ride on Mimas.'

'That wasn't me! That guy in the false moustache who went to an android brothel? That wasn't me!'

Rimmer was outraged at Lister's accusation. Even though it was true, he felt it was so out of kilter with his own image of himself, he was able to summon up genuine indignation. As if he, Arnold J. Rimmer, would pay money to a lump of metal and plastic to have sexual intercourse with him! It just wasn't like him.

True, he did it, but it wasn't like him!

'I've never been to an android brothel in my life. And if you so much as mention it again, I'll . . .' Rimmer faltered. He suddenly realised there wasn't very much he could do to Lister.

'I don't get it. What point are you trying to make?'

'The point I'm trying to make, you dirty son of a fetid whoremonger's bitch, is that we're friends!' Rimmer smiled as warmly as he could to help disguise the massive incongruity he'd walked straight into.

'Sniff your coffee and wake up, Rimmer; we are not friends.'

'I know what you're referring to,' Rimmer nodded his head vigorously. 'It's because I gave you a hard time since you came aboard, isn't it? But don't you see? I had to do that, to build up your character. To change the boy into a man'

'Oh, do smeg off.'

'I always thought you saw me as a sort of big brother character. Heck - we don't always get on. But then, what brothers do? Cain didn't always get on with Abel . . .’

'He killed him.'

'Absolutely. But underneath all that they were still brothers, with brotherly affection. Heaven knows, I didn't always get on with my brothers - in fact once, when I was fourteen, I needed mouth-to-mouth resuscitation after all three of them held my head down a toilet for rather too long - but we laughed about it afterwards, when I'd started breathing again.’

'You're not going to persuade me not to go into stasis. I am not spending the rest of my life with a man who keeps his underpants on coat hangers.'

Rimmer held up his outspread palms in a gesture of innocence. 'I'm not trying to persuade you '

'Then what's all this about?'

'I don't know. I'm not sure what anything's about any more.

Here comes the emotional blackmail, thought Lister

'It's not easy, you know, being dead.'

'Uhn,' Lister grunted.

'It's so hard to come to terms with I mean death. Your own death. I mean, you have plans . . . so many things you wanted to do, and now. . .'

'Look - I'm sorry you're dead, OK? It was cruddy luck. But you've got to put it behind you. You're completely obsessed by it.'

'Obsessed??'

'It's all you ever talk about.'

'Well, pardon me for dying.'

'Frankly, Rimmer, it's very boring. You're like one of those people who are always talking about their illnesses.'

'Well!' said Rimmer, his eyes wide in astonishment.

'It's just boring. Change the disc. Flip the channel. Death isn't the handicap it once was. For smeg's sake, cheer up '

'Well!' said Rimmer. And he couldn't think of anything else to say. So he said 'Well!' again.

'And quite honestly, the prospect of hanging around and having to listen to you whining and moaning, and bleating and whingeing for the next three quarters of a century, because you happen to have snuffed it, does not exactly knock me out.'

'Well!' said Rimmer.

'Fifty years alone with you? I'd rather drink a pint of my own diarrhoea.'

'Well!'

'Or a pint of somebody else's, come to that. Every hour, on the hour, for the next seventy years.'

'I can't believe' - Rimmer was shaking - 'you've just said that.'

The three of them clumped noisily to the habitation deck, and were quarters when they heard the voices.

'Shhh!' Lister held up his hand.

Faintly at first, then gradually increasing in clarity, the sound of a heated argument filtered down the corridor.

'What did you call me?'

 'I said you were a bonehead, Bonehead!'

'I'm a what?'

'It's no wonder Father despised you.'

'I was his favourite.'

'His favourite boneheady wimpy wet!'

'You filthy, smegging liar!'

'Everyone hated you. Even Mother.'

'Pardon?'

'You're a hideous emotional cripple, and you know it.'

'Shut up!' ,

'What other kind of man goes to android brothels, and pays to sleep with robots?'

'THAT WASN'T MEEE!!!!'

'Of course it was you - I'm you. I know.'

'Shut UP!!'

'You've always been afraid of women, haven't you?'

'Shut UP!!!'

The argument had begun at eight o'clock, shortly after supper. It was now five hours later, and it was showing no signs of abating. 

Neither of them could remember why it had begun or, indeed. what it was about. They just knew they disagreed with one another. It was all-out verbal warfare. They'd gone beyond the snide sniping stage; they'd gone past the quasi-reasonable stage, when each pretended to put his case coolly and logically, and would begin with phrases such as: 'What I'm saying is . . .', 'The point I'm making is . . .', and prevent the other from speaking with the perennial: 'If you'd just let me finish . . .'

They had made exactly the same points in a variety of different ways for nearly two hours, before tiredness crept in and the argument turned into a nuclear war.

Rimmer's double had launched the first nuke: the bonehead remark. 

Bonehead. Rimmer's nickname at school. He was really quite irrationally sensitive about it. The word yanked him back to the unhappy school-yards; reminded him of the mindless taunts of his cruel peers, of the dreadful mornings when he ached to be ill so he wouldn't have to go on the green school shuttle and have 

That Word daubed on his blazer in yellow chalk. He was branded. It was a brand that might fade, but would never completely disappear. He might be eighty years old, and successful as hell, but if he bumped into an old classmate he would still be Bonehead.

Before the double launched the bonehead nuke, Rimmer was unquestionably on top in the argument. The double had said something stupid, and Rimmer had been at the stage of saying: 'Give me an example of that,' knowing full well there were no examples to give. 

He was strutting up and down in his pyjamas, arms folded, a man in control, a man in command, when the bonehead nuke looped across without warning and blew him away.

'Pardon me, Bonehead.'

Rimmer actually physically staggered. Their arguments had never escalated this far before. They'd gone up to Def Comm Three, but never past it. Rimmer had to employ the time-honoured device of pretending not to have heard him properly, while his psyche's lone bugler sounded muster, and his tattered thoughts tried to regroup and launch an offensive.

But his double had capitalised on Rimmer's temporary silence by immediately launching three follow-up nukes in quick succession. The one about his Father hating him. K A B O O M! The one about him being a hideous emotional cripple. K A B O O M! And the one about him being afraid of women. K A B A B A B O O M!

Rimmer was about to use a nuke of his own. His left leg had gone into spasm caused by rage. His eyes were wide and crazed. And he didn't care any more. He was going to use the nuke. The nuke- to end all nukes. The total annihilation device. When his double used it instead.

'Oh, shut up,' the duplicate sneered, 'Mr Gazpacho!'

Rimmer stood, his mouth half-open, swaying dizzily. He felt as if someone had sucked out his insides with a vacuum cleaner.

'Mr What?' he half-smiled in disbelief. 'Mr What??'

'I said: "Mr Gazpacho, " D E A F I E!’

'That is the most obscenely hurtful thing anyone has ever

said . . .’

'I know,' the double grinned evilly.

Rimmer's hatchway slid open.

'That's the straw that broke the dromedary!' Rimmer screamed back at his double. Then he turned and padded into the corridor where Lister, Kryten and the Cat were standing. 'Ah, Lister. You're back,' he said quietly.

'Everything all right, is it?' Lister asked.

'For sure,' Rimmer smiled. 'Absolutely.'

'No problems, then?'

'Nope.'

'Everything's A-OK?'

'Yup! Things couldn't really be much hunky-dorier.' 

'It's just - we heard raised voices.'

Rimmer laughed. 'That's quite an amusing thought, isn't it? Having a blazing row with yourself'

From the sleeping quarters the double's voice screamed: 'Can you shut the smeg up, Rimmer! Some of us are trying to sleep!'

'I mean,' Rimmer continued, ignoring the outburst, 'obviously we have the odd disagreement. It's like brothers, I mean . . . a little tiff, an exchange of views, but nothing malicious. Nothing with any side to it.'

The double screeched: 'Shut up, you dead git!'

Rimmer smiled at Lister and, perfectly calm, he said: 'Excuse me -I won't be a second.'

He walked slowly down the corridor, paused outside the hatchway, and bellowed at maximum volume: 'Stop your foul whining, you filthy piece of distended rectum!'

Lister, Kryten and the Cat shuffled uncomfortably and examined the floor.

'Look, it's pointless concealing it any longer,' said Rimmer, walking back towards them. 'My duplicate and I . . . we've had a bit of a major tiff. I don't know how it started but, obviously, it goes without saying: it was his fault.'

Rimmer had been avoiding himself since the argument. He didn't know how to begin a reconciliation conversation. Things had been said which . . . well, things had been said. Hurtful things. Bitter, unforgivable things which could never be forgotten. Equally, he couldn't just carry on as if nothing had happened. So he spent the day in the reference library, keeping out of everyone's way.

It was 4.30 p.m. when he finally swallowed the bile and slumped reluctantly into his sleeping quarters, looking curiously unkempt. His hair was uncombed and unwashed. A two-day hologramatic growth swathed his normally marble smooth chin. His uniform was creased and ruffled. He flopped untidily into the metal armchair.

His double sat on the bunk, looking moodily out of the viewport window. As Rimmer entered he'd looked round over his shoulder, then turned back without acknowledging him.

They sat there in silence. One minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. Bitter, accusing silence. They were both masters at using silence, and right now they were using it in a bitter, accusing way. After twenty minutes of stonewalling, Rimmer could take no more.

'Look . . .' he began, 'I want to apologise for . . .' Rimmer faltered, uncertain as to precisely what he was supposed to apologise for. 'I want to apologise for everything.'

'Ohhhhh, shut up,' his double said dismissively.

Rimmer's eyes shrank, weasel-small. 'You don't like me, do you? Even though I'm you, you don't actually like me. Even though we're the same person, you actively dislike me.'

His double turned from the window. 'We're not the same person.'

'But we are. You're a copy of me.'

The double shook his head. 'I'm a recording of what you were, what you used to be. The man you used to be before the accident. You've changed. Lister's changed you.'

Lister? Changed him? Preposterous.

'I haven't changed. In what way have I changed?'

'Well, for a start, you've just apologised.'

What was it his father used to say? 'Never apologise - never explain.'

'I'm sorry,' Rimmer apologised again; 'it's just - I want us to get on.'

'Oh, don't be pathetic.'

Rimmer closed his eyes and leaned back on his chair. Was it just him? Was it some dreadful flaw in his personality that prevented him from having a successful relationship even with his own self? Or would it be the same for most people? Would most people find their own selves irritating and tire- somely predictable? When he saw his face in the mirror in the morning, that was the face he carried around in his head: he never saw his profile; he never saw the back of his own head; he didn't see what other people saw. It was the same with his personality. He carried around an idealised picture of himself; he was the smart, sensitive person who did this good thing, or that good thing. He buried the bad bits. He covered up and ignored the flaws. All his faults were forgiven and forgotten.

But now he was faced with them; all his shortcomings, personified in his other self.

Rimmer had never been aware how awesomely petty he was. How alarmingly immature. How selfish. How he could, on occasion, be incomprehensibly stupid. How sad he was; how screwed-up and lonely.

And he was seeing this for the first time. It was like the first time he'd heard his own voice on an answering machine. He expected to hear dulcet tones, clear, articulate and accentless, and was embarrassed and nauseated to discover only incoherent mumblings in some broad Ionian accent. In his head he sounded like a newsreader; in reality, he sounded nasal and dull and constantly depressed. And meeting himself was the same, only worse, raised to the power 1000.

And there were other things. He was at least thirty per cent worse-looking than he thought. He stooped. His right leg constantly jiggled, as if he wanted to be somewhere else. He snored! Not the loud buzz-saw hunnnk-hnnnunk of Lister; his own snore was, if anything, more irritating - a high pitched whiny trill, like a large parrot being strangled in a bucket of soapy water. It was a terrible thing to admit, but he was reaching the devastating, inescapable conclusion that he, as a companion, was the very last person he wanted to spend any time with.

Was this the same for everybody? Or was it just him? He didn't know.