Mantissa (3 page)

“What are you doing?”

She did not look down. “Please don’t talk, Mr. Green. I want you to concentrate on tactile sensation.”

His eyes wandered down the opening of the white coat, and then up again, in a third access of astonishment, to her still averted face. He had not taken literally the remark about wearing nothing.

“I don’t know what you’re trying to do.”

“I’ve just told you. We must test your reflexes.”

“You mean…”

She looked down with a distinct touch of impatience.

“You must have had to produce specimens during past examinations. This is no different.”

He pulled his hand away. “But I… you…”

Her voice was suddenly strict and cold. “Look, Mr. Green, Nurse and I have many other patients to attend to. You do want to be cured, don’t you?”

“Yes, of course, but –”

“Then close your eyes. And for goodness’ sake try to be a little more erotic. We haven’t got all day.” She leaned across him, supporting herself on either side of the pillow. “Now both hands. Anywhere you like.”

But he kept his hands where they were, back on the pillow.

“I can’t. I don’t know you from Adam.”

The doctor took a breath.

“Mr. Green, the person I want you not to know me from is Eve. Or are you trying to tell me you’d rather have this treatment from a male nurse and doctor?”

“I take exception to that.”

She stared sternly down. “Do you find my body repellent?” Her voice and eyes were peremptory now, brooking no refusal. He glanced down from the face to the shadowed breasts, then turned his head aside.

“I can’t see what this has got to do with –”

“What you call ‘this’ happens to be the most up-to-date and approved method for your condition.”

“I’ve never heard of it.”

“A few minutes ago you’d never heard of your wife and children. You are suffering from severe memory-loss.”

“I’d have remembered this.”

“Can you remember your politics?” He said nothing. “Your religious beliefs? Your bank balance? Your profession?”

“You know I can’t.”

“Then you will kindly trust me to know what I’m doing. We don’t undergo long years of training in my particular specialism in order to have our professional judgment questioned – and above all on such silly grounds. You’re in perfectly good physical health. I examined you thoroughly yesterday. Your genitalia are quite normal. I’m not asking for the impossible.”

He remained with his head turned away; then swallowed and spoke in a lower voice.

“Couldn’t I… on my own?”

“We’re not testing your ability to produce mere
sperm,
Mr. Green.”

There was something he did not grasp about the contemptuous emphasis she gave “sperm,” as if it were synonymous with scum or froth.

“It’s so embarrassing.”

“You’re in a hospital, for heaven’s sake. There’s nothing personal in this. Nurse and I are simply carrying out standard practice. All we ask is a little cooperation. Nurse?”

“Still negative, doctor.”

“Now no more nonsense, Mr. Green. I have a perfectly ordinary female body. Shut your eyes and use it.”

Her voice and look were like nothing so much as those of a nanny, of the old school, admonishing a dilatory infant to perform another natural process.

“But why?”

“And will you
please
stop asking these pointless questions.”

She looked away at the wall behind the bed, forbidding any further discussion. In the end he closed his eyes and gingerly raised his hands to find the hanging breasts. He did not caress them, but merely held them. They were in themselves warm and firm, pleasant handfuls; and he became aware of a faint tarry fragrance, like that of myrtle flowers, no doubt from some antiseptic soap she used. But he was much less conscious of the doctor’s femininity than of an anger inside himself. At least he knew he must very recently have undergone a severe trauma, that his mind must be in a particularly delicate and fragile state – and here they were, not only taking gross advantage of his weakness, his still partly drugged condition, but (far worse) disregarding totally any moral feelings he might have.

To his acute dismay, for Nurse Cory had not stopped her ministrations, he felt the beginning of an erection. Perhaps the nurse made some silent signal to the doctor, for she spoke in a slightly less carbolic voice; rather that of a Minister of Tourism addressing a delegation of foreign travel agents, and obedient to a hopeful text, composed by some civil servant who had never actually met a foreign travel agent in the flesh.

“Now I suggest you explore other regions of my body.”

It was too much. He let his hands fall back on the pillow, though he kept his eyes shut.

“This is obscene.”

Dr. Delfie was silent a moment, then, exhibiting a much less pleasant aspect of her socially and intellectually superior background, curtly and coldly incisive.

“If you must know, Mr. Green, your memory-loss may well be partly caused by an unconscious desire to fondle unknown female bodies.”

He opened his eyes in indignation.

“That’s a totally unwarranted assumption!”

“On the contrary, it has every warrant. Monogamy is a biological nonsense, a mere transient accident of history. Your true evolutionary function, as a male, is to introduce your spermatozoa, that is, your genes, into as many wombs as possible.” She waited, but he said nothing. She went on in a lower voice. “I repeat. Run your hands elsewhere.”

He sought for something in her eyes: the faintest trace of humor, of irony, of humanity even. But there was none. She was implacably indifferent to his scruples, his modesty, his sense of decorum. In the end he shut his eyes and found the breasts again, then felt cautiously upwards to the delicate throat, to the angles where the neck joined the shoulders; then down to the breasts again, to the sides, the curved indent of the waist, with the light linen of the opened tunic on the backs of his hands. The doctor shifted, and raised a knee onto the side of the bed.

“Anywhere you like.” His right hand moved inwards; stopped. “Come on, Mr. Green. You’ve touched the pubic area before. It won’t bite you.”

He withdrew his hand.

“That’s another thing. What about my wife?”

“Mrs. Green is fully aware of the nature of this treatment. I explained it to her before you woke up. I have her signed consent in my office.”

One ancient fact, a merciful ally, suddenly blew back into his consciousness. He opened his eyes again, and stared up accusingly into hers.

“I thought there was a thing called the Hippocratic Oath.”

“A doctor shall use all the means in his or her power to cure the patient in care. If I remember.”

“Proper means.”

“The proper means is the most efficacious means. Which is what you are getting.”

The nurse’s invisible hands would give him no peace. He looked a moment longer into the doctor’s eyes, then found he could not bear their now quite overt irritation and disapproval. He once more closed his own. After a moment Dr. Delfie crouched lower over him. A nipple touched his lips, then again, and the scent of the myrtle flowers was stronger, evoking in some lost recess of mind sunlit slopes above azure seas. He opened his eyes, in twilight now, tented beneath the sides of the tunic; once more he was invited to suckle the insistent breast. He twisted his head to one side.

“Brothel.”

“Excellent. Anything that spurs your libido.”

“You’re no doctor.”

“Bonds. A whip. Black leather. Whatever you fancy.”

“This is monstrous.”

“Would you like Nurse to undress?”

“No!”

The doctor withdrew a little.

“I do hope you’re not a racist, Mr. Green.”

He kept his head averted. “I demand to see the doctor in charge.”

“I am the doctor in charge.”

“Not when I get out of here. I’ll have you struck off the register.”

“I trust you’ve noticed that already you are searching far less for words. So perhaps there is –”

“Go to hell. Piss off.”

There was a silence. The doctor’s voice became even icier.

“You may not be aware of this, Mr. Green. But all resorts to the imagery of defecation and urination are symptoms of culturally induced sexual guilt and repression.”

“Bugger off.”

There was yet another silence. Then the nurse spoke.

“We lost it, doctor.”

He heard an impatient outbreath from Dr. Delfie; a hesitation, then she took her knee from where it rested and stood by the bed.

“Nurse, I’m afraid there’s nothing for it. We’ll have to do a PB.”

There was a rustle of fabric. He gave a newly alarmed look from the pillow, to see the doctor, who had taken off her tunic and now stood quite naked, hand it across the bed to the nurse. She glanced down at him with an equally naked vexation.

“You’re only getting this because you’re a private patient, Mr. Green. I can tell you now I wouldn’t tolerate your behavior if you were on the National Health. Not for a moment.” She folded her arms. “Quite apart from anything else there is a considerable waiting list for beds in this ward. We work under great pressure.”

He summoned his strength and braved her eyes.

“What’s a PB?”

“A plexicaulic booster.” She glanced impatiently back at the door. “Nurse, do please hurry up. You know what a case load I have today.”

Nurse Cory had, during this exchange, gone to the door and hung the white tunic on a hook there. She had not turned back, but unpinned the front and unfastened the back of her apron, and hung that up as well. Now she was absorbed in unbuttoning her blue dress. At the doctor’s voice she hastened the task, slipped the dress down her brown arms, and placed it over the apron; crowned the hook with her cap, slipped out of her shoes. She walked back, supplely and lightly, as naked as the doctor, to her side of the bed. He stared, both mesmerized and panic-stricken, at the dark and the light female bodies. They were the same height, though the twenty-year-old nurse was not so slim; nor so clinical, for he thought he detected a certain sardonic amusement in her look down at him, in the ghost of a pout that haunted her mouth. The doctor spoke again.

“Before we begin I think I had better inform you that your obstinacy may not be quite so moral as you imagine. We are by no means unfamiliar here with patients who resist treatment because they hope we shall be forced to employ perverted practices… so called. We do very occasionally apply them in cases of genuine and persistent erotic recalcitrance. But never at an early stage like this. So if you are secretly attempting to drive us to coeno-nymphic or pseudo-terguminal stimulation, I can tell you now – no chance. Is that clearly understood?”

“I don’t even know what they are, for God’s sake.”

“And the same applies to the Brazilian fork.”

“Or that!”

This brought another brief silence. The doctor assumed the look of a schoolmistress who knows she is being deliberately provoked to lose her temper. Her hands went to her hips.

“And one last thing, Mr. Green. We also take the dimmest possible view of crypto-amnesia.” She paused, to make sure the warning had registered. “Now on your side. Facing me.”

The nurse’s hand slipped under his left shoulder, coaxing him around.

“Go on, Mr. Green. Mrs. Grundy says. Be a good boy.”

He cast a suspicious and resentful look at the smiling West Indian face, but eventually turned on his side. With a neatness of movement and simultaneity of timing that suggested considerable experience his two medical attendants were immediately on the bed as well, on their respective sides. Nurse Cory lay against his back, while the doctor disconcertingly pressed her back against his front. He felt them both squirm a little, respectively forwards and rearwards, as if to secure him more firmly in the vise of their two bodies. A gratuitous wriggle of the black girl’s loins against his bottom, as she did this, confirmed what he had already suspected about her. He stared at the doctor’s dark hair, the wisp of scarf an inch or two from his nose. There was a brief silence. Then the doctor spoke. Her voice was quieter, in an evident, but not entirely successful, attempt to make a less peremptory approach.

“Right. Now kindly place your left hand on my breasts.”

She lifted an arm towards the ceiling. He hesitated, but then did as he was told; as one might, at the behest of a driving instructor, place one’s hand on some knob or switch. The doctor lowered her arm. Her hand came to rest on his, to keep it where it lay.

“Now listen closely, Mr. Green. I will try to explain one last time. Memory is strongly attached to ego. Your ego has lost in a conflict with your superego, which has decided to repress it – to censor it. All Nurse and I wish to do is to enlist the aid of the third component in your psyche, the id. Your id is that flaccid member pressed against my posterior. It is potentially your best friend. And mine as your doctor. Do you understand what I am saying?”

He felt Nurse Cory kiss, then lick, the nape of his neck.

“This is an infamous abuse of personal privacy.”

“I’m afraid that is your superego speaking. This procedure bears some resemblance to mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, just as amnesia is akin to drowning. Do you follow me?”

He stared at her hair. “Under the very greatest protest.”

She took a breath, though her voice remained deliberately neutral and matter-of-fact. “Mr. Green, I’m bound to tell you that I expect this kind of attitude in the culturally deprived. But not in patients of your background and education.”

“Moral protest.”

“I cannot pass that. Your mind is where I need help.”

“I may for the moment not know who I am. But I’m damn sure it wasn’t someone who’d have ever –”

“Forgive me, but that is hardly a logical statement. You don’t know who you are. There is therefore an equal mathematical possibility that you were sexually promiscuous. Statistically I can reveal that it is rather more than an equal chance. In your particular social grouping and profession. Which latter is one, I must also warn you, that has an extremely long and well-recorded history of general incapacity to face up to the realities of life.”