Flame and Slag (15 page)

The nurse said, “It isn’t uncommon, nothing to worry about. Didn’t you know you were partially colour blind?” — slotting the spotted test cards back in her folder.

“Will it get worse?” I asked.

“Possibly, as your eyesight deteriorates with age. Through here, Mr Stevens, the doctor will see you now.”

He was middle-aged, heave-ho hearty, kneading and finger prodding back and front around the damaged zone. “Pass water all right?”

I said, “Water is all I can pass. Mind if I get dressed? I don’t like being pawed over.”

“Bowels all right?”

“So long as I’m careful.”

“Why the resentment, Mr um-Stevens?”

“I used to be a miner; now you’re treating me like a bloody cog.”

“We’re all cogs in different ways. Righto, put your clothes on.” He watched me dressing. “How tall are you?”

“It’s on that report sheet,” I said. “The nurse measured me a few minutes ago. All I need now is a price label stuck on my forehead.”

“Five feet nine?” he suggested.

“Five feet nine for the last eight years.”

“You’ve lost an inch or so,” he said.

I said, “Put it down to grafting in low seams before they invented Meco loaders. Where do I go next?”

“It’s dinner time, um-Rees,” — grinning safely dispassionate as a monastery barber. “Follow the other chaps into the canteen. One of the instructors will take care of you.” He barked sharply as I opened the door, “Mr Stevens, why don’t you stand upright?”

“Joke, mate,” I said. “That’s a real gem of a joke.”

“All right, take it easy,” — his untouchable grin tiding across his schoolboy face.

Underground you eat your grub-time sandwiches in small-knit groups, identities anchored, sharing thought-ponds as much from necessity as comfort. The talk might range from feeding a sick dog M & B tablets, sensational orgasms and classical footballing to the contingencies of politics anywhere around the newspaper and telly world. You’re a blackened man eating whitened bread under artificial light in a manufactured airstream. Unlike travelling on the London Underground, you hear earth grumbling its own language.

A bloke in the canteen queue wanted to know where I come from. I told him; he was from Cardiff — Kérdiff, he said, addressing me as
Taff
, him being worldy, Kérdiff sophisticate. We were all crocks and cripples. Leg irons, walking-sticks, club feet, jarred psyches, neurotics, scarred hearts, ulcerated stomachs, passenger limbs, flayed minds, diverted I.Q.s, dammed imaginations, the white-coated instructors coming down the line, selfishly self-assured as classified robots. We were alphabeted off to specific tables. Mr Oliver was looking after esses to zeds — we had a Cockney-Jew rehabilitee named Zangwill who suffered a breakdown while serving in the Army. Married to a Maesteg wife, Zangwill had a nose thicker than simply hooked from tribal chromosomes; a ponderous, bluish beat knee of a nose. He wanted to become a postman. No more than that. Bottom echelon Civil Servant, Zangwill the Post from Aldgate to somewhere in Glam., South Wales, with his Humpty physique, heron legs and desperation to serve. Life had ransacked Zangwill of his Hebrew inheritance.

As we (rehabilitees) drifted out from the canteen, trainee chippies, brickies, fitters, capstan setters, draughtsmen, tool-makers, radio and television mechanics crowded in from the workshops. Mr Oliver gave us toning-up tests to measure our productive aptitudes, dismantling and reassembling old telephones, clocks (if you had the innocent nerve), old radio sets, bits of engineering, carburettors, degutted magnetos. Dandruff had reached Mr Oliver’s eyebrows and he wore five pens and a pressure gauge in the pockets of his artificial suede waistcoat. Every half-hour or so his desk phone rang for the next man to visit the psychologist. Industrial psychologist, presumably one of those as opposed to any other sort.

My turn came on the third morning, but while journeying home on that first evening I pissed between stations. Had to, compelled without mercy, gale draught blowing through the open compartment door and four tidy commuters squinting a mixture of disgust and awe, as if I’d thrown an epileptic fit.

“Can’t hold it in,” I blabbed. “Accident to my pelvis; lost control ever since.”

We discussed our defects, all of us pretending we were birds of a feather, but I felt like a traitor. Wednesday morning the psycho (as ex-servicemen rehabilitees called him) made me feel criminally traitorous. He was youngish, unwrinkled, pale as lard, with trained eyes, ears and voice, and the lips he was born with spread like pupae beneath the perfect ovals of his nostrils. His immobility teased colourless pictures inside my head, doggy-spectrummed images of him buried to the neck in running slurry like Ellen’s father, but Mr Harcourt surfaced fiercely on gleaming skis, riding the tip-slide with Olympic verve, precision, his face deadpan as if it didn’t belong to his body.

Mr Harcourt’s smallest movements were magnetic, like rapier flicks.

“Have you thought about learning a new trade?” he said, G.T.C. time ticking my lifetime in that scrupulously chared, polish-smelling office. The man was doing his job; had to do it efficiently, otherwise he wouldn’t be sitting on his side of the desk.

“I’m writing these days,” I said.

There was something strangled, gone dead in him. “Well, they say there’s one good book in all of us. What’s yours called?”

Then Mr Harcourt exposed himself, emptily jolly as the middle pea in a pod of five: “Ah, another
Rape of the Fair Country!
Splendid. Don’t misunderstand me, it’s an exciting project; I’m with you all the way; I admire creative people, but surely you have to think about earning a living. You can see the problem; I mean your wife and children. By the way, how does she feel about this writing? Does she find it unusual?”

I said, “Let’s be honest. If I told you, it wouldn’t make any difference.”

“Are you happily married?”

“It comes and goes,” I said.

“Happiness comes and goes?”

“And marriage.”

He scribbled on his note-pad and signalled a query with his silver-plated Biro. “Explain what you mean.”

I said, “My wife and I are happily married.”

“You don’t want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re only concerned with me making a living. You wouldn’t bother a monkey’s fuck if I was half-batchy so long as I made a living.”

“Er, that isn’t a very original metaphor.”

“It wouldn’t do for the men who come in here to be original.”

Genial as PLJ in a heatwave, he remarked, “At least you’re the most offensive.”

“That’s all right,” I said, suffering my own bluntness. “Now we’re discussing you as well as me.”

“Mr Stevens, I’m here to help you, despite what you seem to think…”

“And help yourself,” I said.

“Perhaps a clerical training course. Will you…”

I said, “Mr Harcourt…”

“…write two thousand words for me? Any subject you like. Hand it in to Mr Oliver.”

Desperately point-blank, I said, “Every fucker wants to be a literary giant. Teach a bloke to read and he’s the bloody Lord Muck of the holy word.”

“You seem to have the old four-letter verb on the brain this morning,” he said, bland as Vick in a sore throat. “I’ll speak to Mr Oliver. You’ll want some privacy to write the essay. We’ll call it an essay. Write anything you wish.”

I said, “You’re on the look-out for material. I’ve stopped being a man in your eyes.”

“Good morning, Mr Stevens,” he said.

The dandruffed instructor cleared elbow-room on a bench littered with broken light switches. “This will do fine,” he said, checking on his wristwatch. “You’re being allowed two hours. Let’s see, four sheets of foolscap, pen — here, borrow this one. Anything else you want? No. Right. What about tea-break? Wait, bring it over to my desk. Right?”

“If you say so, Mr Oliver.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Pardon?” I said.

“This is Mr Harcourt’s responsibility. Education always begins upstairs after the second week, but you’re a special case; yes, for the next two hours,” — urgency brightening his light brown eyes as he strode away to Zangwill, who had jabbed a screwdriver into his chest, the small puncture blossoming a ragged red rosette on his white shirt.

I used a couple of pages to show off, conjuring up twisty titles:
PERSIFLAGE VIA JAY VAWN, MAMGU
(grandmother)
DAYS AND NIGHTS, FLOWERING DUFF, REQUIEM FOR MISS WILSON, CYNONS BY RANK AND DEFILE, THE GOB-WALL SHEIK, SILICOTIC FANCIER, THE ELLENITE TOW, CHAMT OF THE STALLED MECO, HERE-UNDER DAI HIMSELF, SYMPOSIUM ON CARBON, MOTION FOR SEVEN HAULIERS, CUTTING PWCINS UNDER MOUNT SION, MONOGRAPH ON CLOD, DUMP-END BLUES, ON THE TAMPER, THE ELLENIC CONCORDANCE, SOIREE BELOW THE AERIALS, GUMMING MASTER, OUVADE FOR GWALIA, THE MANAGERIAL TIC, SONGS FOR THE BARONESS, WEIGHBRIDGE TO DIGNITY, NINERS IN MY GROTTO.

Here I stopped and went out to the breeze-block-built lavatory, a cadaverous long-shanks bloke named Tony Webber squatting like a coolie against the wall, cruel clockwork motions jerking him as he retched blood. I fetched Mr Oliver. Somebody else ran for the Centre doctor. Five minutes later they slid Tony Webber into an ambulance; that was the last we saw of him. I went back to showing off, cooking titles until tea-break.

The instructor was standing behind me. “Making progress?” he said.

I gave him the foolscap sheets. “Nothing special, Mr Oliver, but if I can stay the pace for the next hour something should come.” He was reading worriedly, wriggling his specked eyebrows. “Crystalline stuff,” I said, “like the Flying Roll crossed with the millennium’s diagnosis of tumult.”

“Be careful, fella. We’ve seen some queer cases coming to this Centre. Now, take my advice; start all over again. I’ll scrap this lot. You can’t play silly-bees with Mr Harcourt. We’re here to find out what you can do, and then you’ll get the best training available over in the workshops. Don’t you want to be independent?”

“Not if you are. So long, god, see you after tea-break,” I said.

He stuttered, “Fella, hey-there-hey,” but I kept on walking.

Mr Harcourt shot his cuffs and machine-gunned his Biro. “I recognize some of the mining jargon,” — his smile hanging like two minutes’ silence on Poppy Day. “But I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage most of the time. What does this mean:
The Ellenic concordance
? Ellenic and Ellenite. Explain the significance.”

I said, “Am I on the couch now?”

“Well, obviously, unless writers express themselves clearly they fail to communicate. This isn’t my language, nobody’s but your own I suspect, and I should say it promises very little for your success as a writer. It’s-um, clever-clever, copied from some style or other. Have you done any work for newspapers or magazines?”

Scant raindrops began to peck at the window-panes, waxing to fat, slippery purrs that brought silvery-green tones into the room.

“Aye, it’s clever-clever” I said

“Ellenite, Ellenic, presumably Ellen. Is she…”

“My wife.”

“Do you want to be an office worker?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

“You’re going to have a lonely time, my friend. Journalism?” — glancing up from his busy ball-point.

“No, thanks.”

“Do you want to be lonely?”

“Is there any alternative?” I said.

“You are suffering,” — the intonation of Egypt lost behind veils and muffled gong-beating in his voice. “Because you’re suffering you’ve created a barrier between yourself and society.”

I said, “Against this place in particular.”

“Yes, all right, as you say,
against
. And what happens if you fail to communicate? Does your wife have faith in you?”

The rainstorm spun swiftly away and his eyes glinted flat as beads in a ju-ju above he held stillness of his body.

I said, “Are you married?”

“Answer my question. Drop the barrier for a moment.”

“Faith?”

“Does she have faith to prevent you from destroying your marriage? That’s what I mean.”

I tried to declare myself truthfully, like salt disappearing in water. “I’m living with a kind of dying. When I win I’ll be reborn.”

“Ha, death, rebirth! Most of us cannot afford to worry about dying and rebirth. Perhaps it’s easier for you to mystify the circumstances of your injury instead of facing up to reality. Are you, Mr Stevens?”

I said, “Let’s define reality.”

“Now you’re being facetious. This Government rehabilitation centre is real, yet you reject all it stands for after only two days. You’ll think differently after twelve weeks, plus a further six months’ vocational training.”

He was becoming slightly bored, irritated, pushing his notepad out of alignment with his right hand, his ball-point clicking under his thumb. I waited on him, more
against
than bored, sullen with dread, the pen suddenly winnowing across the pad again. Sunshine starred the wet window-panes. Heavy machinery hummed down on the ground floor, marrying the dulled resonance of a trainee singing at the top of his voice.