Mefisto (14 page)

Grafts. Forceps. Gauze. Such words, I tremble still.

Now came a new kind of pain, pain’s big brother, it caught me in its burly grasp and pulled me this way and that, it would brook no nonsense, even my ministering angels threw up their hands before its masterful onslaught.

This was recovery.

– Yes, Dr Cranitch murmured, it’s knitting nicely.

I could not lift my left arm higher than my shoulder, my right was a hinged brown stick. I had no nipples. Half the skin of my stomach had gone to patch my legs, my back. My face now was a glazed carnival mask, with china brow and bulging cheeks, hawk nose, dead eye-sockets. Above it the skull was a tufted leathern helm, the skin taut and glassy, like dried-over slime.

– It will heal, Dr Cranitch said. As good as new, almost.

But I was different. I was someone else, someone I knew, and didn’t know. I had stepped into the mirror. I frightened myself. That mad face. Those eyes.

My first, faltering little steps. I shuffled crabwise to the door, hands flapping in fear, stood panting there, eyes shut, then in panic staggered headlong back to the bed, missed it, fell on the floor. Followed by a quaking bout on the bedpan. For a minute, though, I had forgotten the pain. It came back now, bounding and barking, and licked my livid face into flame again.

She held my hand, my elbow. Her mannish grasp. She watched my feet, in old grey felt slippers, inching along.

– Come, she said quietly, under her breath. Come along.

What a pair we must have been, this big, broad, sad woman, and I, bent and hobbling, hairless as a babe.

– Can’t. Can’t.

Stopped, stood still, would not go on, or back. She waited, saying nothing, she had seen it all before. We reached the window. She parted the venetian blinds, the crackle as the blades bent made me grind my teeth. Bright sunshine outside, a bank of barbered grass sloping away to railings and a wall, then in the distance the city shimmering in a blue haze. The city! Too much, too much. At the window-sill a fuchsia bush with wasps. Too much. I lay down on the floor and sobbed, pressing my pitted cheek to the cool rubber tiles.

– Come along, now. Come along.

Her freckles, my burns.

I began to explore my little world. There was a wooden locker beside the bed, a metal chair, a waste bin lined with a plastic bag. In an alcove there was a washbasin, and a mirror screwed to the wall. A rich, deep, silver crack ran athwart the glass, slicing my face diagonally in two from temple to jaw. The locker was empty, except for a shrivelled brown apple core and a holy medal on a pin. And the black notebook. The cover was scorched. I shut the door on it.

Miss Barr was a big blonde person with ruddy cheeks and prominent, pale blue eyes. She wore a white tunic and starched white trousers, and white ankle-boots with thick crêpe soles. Her straw-coloured hair was tied back tightly in a knot, I imagined her, first thing out of bed each morning, gathering it up and giving it a good, hard wrench, stretching the skin at her temples, making those eyes bulge. She smelled of soap, lint, liniment. I used to dream about her. My sleeping self quailed before her, weak with anticipation of exquisite harm. The first day she came into my room she rolled up her sleeves and said briskly:

– Right, my man. Physio for you.

I thought she was mad, I did not know what she was talking about. She seized my arm, my leg, peering.

– Golly, she said, you certainly made a bags of yourself. But fear not, we’ll soon set you to rights.

We heaved and hauled together, like decrepit wrestlers, groaning. She had a tendency to fart. She told me about her childhood, spent mainly among horses. At once I pictured her, a sort of centaur, flying over the greensward, snorting. Sometimes I pictured myself too, astride her, the breeze in my face, hearing the thunder of hoofs, feeling her great heart hammering under me. She put her knee in my spine, sat on my chest, bent me over her shoulder.

– Pull, pull! she shouted. Get those sinews stretched! We’ll make a new man of you yet.

The day I left my room. That was a day to remember. I sat cross-legged on the bed, with my hands in my lap, my eyes fixed on the door, then saw myself, as if it were someone else, rise and turn the handle and walk out. A long, low ward lined with beds, with figures in them, sitting up and looking at me. All those eyes! I had expected a vast emptiness, huge halls, the odd, solitary figure turning away. A small man in slippers and a sort of smock approached me. Smoked skin, sallow eyeballs, a lick of greased black hair. He greeted me with easy familiarity, grinning on one side of his sharp little face.

– Well well, he said, our mystery man.

He led me along the beds, introducing their occupants. He did not ask my name. He was a card, with a brisk line in raillery. Old chaps chortled, young ones smirked. All tried not to see me, my scabs.

– I’m for the knife, myself, he said, indicating the smock.

Some beds he passed by in silence. Bandaged skulls, wax faces, dazed, impenetrable eyes.

– Brain cases, he whispered darkly. You want to watch them.

His name was Sykes, Stokes, something like that. He offered me a plum from a bag on his locker.

– Had an accident, did you? he said.

Next day when I came out he was gone. The sheets had been stripped from his bed, the door of his locker stood open. Only a plum stone remained, stuck to the bottom of a tin ashtray. The knife had done for him. My cicerone. No, my Virgil. For this is hell, after all.

Sighs, groans. Shouts in the night. An old man puking up gouts of green stuff, leaning over the side of the bed, a young nurse holding his forehead. Slow, wet coughs, like the noise of defective suction pumps ponderously labouring. In the huge, white-tiled bathrooms, little labels exhorting patients not to spit in the handbasins. Everywhere the same thick cream paint, smooth as enamel, clammy as skin. I wore a mouse-coloured dressing-gown with faded red piping. Someone had died in it, I imagine, before it passed to me. I walked and walked, slouching along the vermiform corridors, dragging one foot. People looked away from me, visitors especially, the uninitiates. Young doctors frowned, a sort of bland grimace, as at a show of bad taste. I passed on, hauling my pain behind me.

Pain had a smell, flat, grey, faintly sweet, I imagined a mixture of scurf and faeces. It was how I recognized my fellow sufferers, the ones for whom pain was a constant presence, a sort of second, ghostly self. There was the silence too, a special kind. We would sit in what was called the recreation room, a group of us, doing nothing, not saying a word, and yet communing somehow, like participants in a seance.

There were times when I fancied I was only this ectoplasm, floating, transparent, invisible to the hale. One day I found my way on to the maternity ward, and stood at the glass wall of the nursery, gaping at the rows and rows of prune-faced mites in their plastic cots, and was for a moment baffled, an old ghost stumbling on a new world. They looked like me! I pressed my forehead to the glass, yearningly. A mother in a pink bed-jacket glanced up from her babe and shrieked, and I was led away, shaken, speechless, that one foot dragging behind me, in the grave.

I thought of all my dead. I thought of Sykes, or Stokes, who had gone under the knife. He was not anywhere any more. Oh, part of him was still about, in the morgue, probably, and probably still in better shape than I, with half my flesh fallen from the bone. But the rest of him, that grin, the sharp glance, the jokes, where was all that? Gone. That was death. No cowled dark stranger, no kindly friend, not even empty space, with all the potential that implies, but absence, absence only. The nothing, the nowhere, the not-being-here. But how then this something, wafting me onwards irresistibly, as if all around me a great, slow breath were being indrawn?

– Don’t die, Father Plomer said. Not a good idea.

He sat beside the bed, regarding me gaily, with his legs crossed, swinging one large, black-shod foot. He was the hospital chaplain. He had an aura of shaving balm and warm wine.

– Of course, he said comfortably, life is a wretched thing, and practically worthless. Yet we must live, all the same.

I was tired of him, his big smooth face and plummy voice, his genial detachment.

– For what? I said.

To laugh was complicated, with my face, I did not do it often. He smiled, compressing his lips, as if he were nibbling a tiny seed in his front teeth.

– Why, he said, to practise for the eternal life to come!

Now it was his turn to laugh, he leaned back, his glasses flashing, ha, ha, haa! A vision came to me of his face peeling from the skull, the crimson flop, the sinews, gleet, glint of bone, the eyeballs wallowing.

– I think we have a young pagan here, matron, he said. Oh yes, I shall have to take him in hand.

She stopped behind him and looked at the back of his head in silence for a second, then turned away. He laughed his laugh again, a series of soft, plosive puffs, his lips pursed as if he were blowing smoke rings.

He taught me to play chess. He had a plastic travelling set, we balanced it between us on the edge of the bed. It did not take me long to learn. It was a kind of moving geometry. He played a ramshackle game, swooping about the board, making sudden, lunging moves and then taking them back again with a giggle, only to get himself at once into a worse muddle.

– You’re better now? he said to me, frowning over a tangle of pawns. Improving, I mean? Check, by the way. Or is it? No.

He stared owlishly at the board, humming unhappily under his breath. His last remaining bishop made a bolt for freedom. He had not noticed my knight.

– Yes, he said distractedly, life, life is the …

The knight reared, slewing sideways, stamped to a stop.

– Mate, I said.

He gave a little shriek of surprise, throwing up his hands.

– Why, so it is! he cried, laughing. So it is!

Go out, they told me. Take a walk, yes. Go into the city, see the sights, mingle. Simple, ordinary things. It’s all there, waiting for you, your birthright. Be one of the living, a human being. They gave me clothes, a shirt, shoes, trousers, a coat. When I dressed I felt a sort of excited revulsion, as if I had put on not only someone else’s outfit, but someone else’s flesh as well.

ON THE HOSPITAL
steps I stopped. A high gold autumn evening was sinking over the rooftops. Forever after I would think of the city like that, like a waste of magnificent wreckage, going down. My hands shook, stuffed into these unaccustomed pockets. Such space, such distance. I was dizzy, I felt that if I fell I would fall upwards, into the limitless air. A panic of disconnected numbers buzzed in my head. Grass, trees, railings, the road. The road! A bus hurtled past, swaying on the bend. It might have been a mastodon. The evening visitors were arriving. I turned my face away from them and plunged off down the drive.

Oh, that first autumn. Vast tender skies, branches soot-black against blue, a sense of longing and vague hurt in the dense, luminous air. I wandered the streets like an amnesiac, everything was new and yet unaccountably familiar. I recall especially that brief hour at the exhausted end of evening, when the shop workers had gone home, and everything was shut, and a mysterious quiet settled everywhere. Then the beggars and the drunks came into their own, the dustbin-pickers, the frantic old women who lived out of shopping bags, and those ragged but strangely robust young men with blue chins and crazed eyes, marching headlong down the middle of the pavements, swinging their arms and furiously muttering. They seemed to know something awful, all of them, some secret, the burden of which had blighted their lives. And I was one of them, or almost. An apprentice, say. An acolyte. I stalked them for hours, loitering behind them on canal bridges, or under archways, where the pigeons strutted, and dust and bits of paper swirled in eddies, and everything was spent and grey and heart-breaking. I can’t explain the melancholy pleasure of those moments, from which I would turn away lingeringly as the last light of day drained down the sky, and the street lamps came on fitfully in the blued autumnal dusk.

Oh, the squares, the avenues, the parks. A smoky, sunlit morning, smell of washed pavements, fish, stale beer. A carthorse clops past, dropping dark-gold dungballs. Snarl of traffic. A sudden dark wind, making the day flinch. Then rain. In the park the dripping trees circle slowly around me, halt when I halt. The spidery dome of the bandstand teeters, threatening. Sun again, a drenched glare. Stop on this corner, by this bridge. A butcher’s shop, a greengrocer’s, a red-brick bank like a child’s toy house, with gold lettering in the windows and a big hanging clock. A workman with a ladder strapped to his bike waits at the traffic lights, whistling. A lorry shudders to a halt with a gasp of brakes. What is it, this sense of something impending, as if a crime is biding its time here, waiting to be committed? The lights change. I detect the slow ruin of things, the endless, creeping collapse.

And then the nights, silver and burnished black, the shadowed buildings crouched under a tilted moon. A neon sign flicks on and off, on and off, in strange silence. Somewhere a woman laughs. In a windswept street by the river two old men in rags are fighting. They caper weakly, panting, swinging their arms, their coat-tails flying. Thick smack of fist on flesh and one goes down, the other takes aim, kicks, again, then hard again. The wet street gleams. A newspaper blows along the pavement, plasters itself against a grille. A huge seagull alights on the road, fixing me warily with one round eye. I pause in a doorway, wait, eager and afraid. Some dirty little truth is being wearily disclosed here. The gull flexes one wing, folds it again. The tramp on the ground coughs and coughs, holding his face. The other one has run away. Foul breath of the river, dark slop of waters, slide, and slop again. Hush! What conjured spirit …? Hush!