Mesmerised (8 page)

I stretched out my legs underneath the pew in front and read until the gas lamps on the floor
had stopped whistling and the majority of candles on the altar had spluttered their last hint of light.

P
hosphorus Three

May 5th

‘
The truth is in nature, and I shall prove it.’

Paul Ceza
nne

Monsieur Armand doesn’t answer. I knock again on his door. Eventually, Madame Armand lets me in. She wears a grey serge dress and a white starched apron. She has a linen kerchief pinned in her hair. She waddles. But despite the simplicity in her looks there is wonder in her grey eyes.

‘You’re always so positive. How do you do it?’ I onc
e asked her over a cup of home-grown chamomile tea.

‘Growing things,’ she said. ‘
They have a passion for me.’

‘And you for
them.’

‘And me for
them,’ she agreed, lifting her cup in a toast.

‘Ah Madame Armand,
I was just wondering … Monsieur Armand, is he in?’

‘I’ll go and get him for you,’ she says, the wideness of her hips inhibiting the climb up the narrow stairs. ‘Would you like a tisane?’ she calls down
.

‘I would love a cup. Your tea always makes me feel better; there must be something of your spirit in it.’

I can’t see her face. I hope she is smiling. I look around the hallway at lilac walls and a gilt-framed convex mirror, shaped like the sun. By the door is one of my sketches of the Seine.

Monsieur Armand takes me by surprise. His wiry old frame leans over the balustrade.

‘Young Gachet, how can I help?’

‘Last time I was here you had glass tubes in a wooden rack.’

‘I have them still.’

‘
May I use them?’

‘If you
come up to my laboratory, yes you can.’

I reach into my pocket, pull out a homemade envelope, and wave it in the air.

‘Come upstairs then, follow me. I’ve figured out a way to clean the blasted things so that there’s no trace of a previous element polluting the glass.’

‘With heat.’

‘Yes, with heat.’

As I climb the stairs black motes swirl in a cone of light.

‘It’s the chimney flue, it’s not drawing properly, and the sweep’s gone missing. Smoke’s billowing out into the house. The other evening I heard this scratching and flapping and the next day a roast pigeon fell into the grate: Dinner, a mistimed Christmas delivery, but too charred to eat. The old sod should get it right.’ He chuckles. ‘But anyway it’s caused clouds in the house and my wife hasn’t stopped complaining about the soot.’

The acrid scent hits my nostrils and I flinch. We arrive at the laboratory door. Monsieur Armand stands before it with his hand immobile on the handle as if waiting for permission to go in.
Then he opens it. Inside, the room is quiet and still.

‘It is as I left it last night,’ he says.

Misty sunlight half obscures my sight, but the tray with glass tubes gleam on the worktable before me. I marvel and hesitate.

‘Go on,’ he says, waving me forward.
‘Start. I’ll sit over here.’

He sits down on a stool in the corner of the room, lifts a tom
e from a bookshelf onto his lap and heaves it open. I stand before the table and carefully open my envelope until it is a symmetrically creased piece of paper, then I make a funnel out of one of the sides. I take a tube and nearly topple the rack. Glass chinks, threatening to break. Armand and I lock eyes. I pour several granules of Phosphorus 3c into a tube: the result of several hours work. My heart pounds; I am afraid of my own clumsiness.

From my jacket pocket I pull out a bottle of neat alcohol and suck
it up through a syringe. I squint and squirt 99 drops, each one a silken, transparent veil for the glass tube. There is a box full of corks on the table. I look towards Armand who is still staring straight at me.

‘Go on,’ he says, ‘Take.’

I pick up a cork and stop the cylinder.

‘I need a leather bound book,’ I say, with a rasp in my throat. He raises his eyebrows and I gingerly lift a volume onto the desk. With the tube
secure in my fist, I pound the side of my hand against animal skin several times, fiercely agitating the liquid.

‘
Phosphorus 4c,’ I tell Armand.

He nods.
‘Why 4c?’

‘
It’s been diluted by one part in a hundred four times. Sometimes I go to 1M by diluting a thousand times. The more dilute, the higher the potency. Less is more.’

‘Less is more,’ he repeats and I can see that although he is intrigued he does not believe it.

From another pocket I take more syringes. Using a new one, and squinting to be accurate, I force one reluctant drop from the mixture I have just made and watch it skate down the glass. Once again I bang the solution against the book.

‘
5c,’ I say to Armand, already starting to repeat the process again.

I use up all ten bottles in the rack but when I finish I have only raised the potency to
13c. To achieve 30c I will have to return a couple of times. I explain this to Armand.

‘Seems like a lot of cleaning up to do for an experiment that is all about shaking up pure alcohol. But of course, my friend, you may come back,’ he says, with one hand against my back leading me out into the tiny hallway. ‘Before you
go, some homemade wine? A little bit stronger than the wife’s herbal,’

‘I’ll take both,’ I reply.

‘Both,’ he says, chuckling. ‘Such a diplomatic man.’

Arrival of Spies

May 6th

‘People don’t realise what it feels like to be constantly insulted.’

Edouard Manet

There is an outbreak of men f
rom the Faculty at the hospital. There are clusters of them at Charcot’s hypnotherapy demonstrations, walking up and down the main staircase, holding meetings in the corridors. If it weren’t true, it would be comical, the way they divert their attention away from me each time I turn around. I catch Charcot in the corridor.

‘
Doctor Charcot,’ I call, running towards him as he begins his descent of the big stone stairway. Whenever we cross paths in the common parts of the hospital, he purposefully accelerates his step. I slide across the marble floor towards him then pace down the steps behind him. ‘You yourself have said that the therapeutic effects of my consultations with Manon are helping her. I’d like to have the opportunity to do the same thing with Bella Laffaire.’

Charcot stops midway on the stairs. He eyes me suspiciously and dismisses me with a wave of his hand.

‘Catch me tomorrow Gachet. I have an important meeting that I have to attend. Can’t be late.’ He turns around and continues on his way.

I’m starting to think I should have left
this post years ago. I should have seen the signs and taken my cue to walk away. I am clearly not appreciated for what I have to offer. I’m a firm believer that humans are like trees, in that if we allow our branches to be blown in the direction of the wind, we will be all right. If we fight the force and pull in the opposite direction then something eventually snaps. Melancholia keeps me rooted to this place and I’m starting to wonder if the condition might be catching.

Manon sits on the side of a bed, arms rigid, hands clutching bedclothes, legs swinging to and fro. I prop myself up on the bed opposite, and sketch her bowed head, then squint to look at my work.

W
hen her sister died, Manon ran naked and screaming through the streets, a temporary insanity that soon turned into melancholia with taciturnity and glumness and little interest in eating, sleeping or anything else except for causing self-harm.

‘
Doctor Gachet, I need to talk to you,’ she says now, looking up at me with shining eyes.

She is in one of her excited moods. My role is to administer medication but I find if I allow patients to relax in my company and converse at their free will, they feel less isolated and very often do not need a high dose of any drug to control their mood.

‘Talk then, I have time.’

‘My mother came to me in a dream. She was chasing me. There was meanness in her. She used to love me. Now that she is dead she hates me,’ she says, balling her fist and biting down hard on her knuckles. ‘I’m a horrible person, that’s why. That’s why I’m here.’

‘Because you are a horrible person?’ I ask.

‘I am, aren’t I?’

‘Why do you think that?’

She laughs.

‘Is that a picture of me?’ she asks, feeling her face with her open palm as if exploring why she might be a good subject to draw.

‘It is, but it’s only th
e start of one, a vague outline. Would you like to see?’

‘That doesn’t look like me,’ she says, screwing her face up
like a prune.

‘Try squinting.’

‘Nah.’

‘You were saying about horrible?’

‘Have you ever seen the sea? I’ve seen a picture. My mother is a mermaid under the sea,’ she says.

May 7th

‘Ah,
Doctor Gachet,’ Charcot says, with a slight spring in his step as if he is pleased to see me. He smiles broadly. ‘This is Doctor Ipsen.’

Doctor
Ipsen clutches his hands behind his back. He has fawn coloured hair, round wire-framed glasses magnifying his small eyes, and lips pursed as if to hide a supercilious smile. I recognise him. He is one of the fanatics who have been following me around.

‘We have good news for you. As you ingeniously suggested, I wrote to the Faculty of Medicine, you know, about your request. Most surprisingly, they replied asking for an invitation to make numerous site visits. I’m sure you’ve seen
Doctor Ipsen walking around with his colleagues.’ Charcot gestures towards the other man who nods again, this time smiling broadly. ‘They think your suggestion is a very good idea.’

As much as I’d like to believe in the marvel of this offer, there is something not quite genuine about these two men. It is a feeling that I cannot quite prove but I do acknowledge to myself that to be out of synchronicity with the world in one’s thoughts, is yet another symptom of melancholia. My legs tremble slightly.

‘Doctor Ipsen will sit in with you when you consult. He’ll note down your prescriptions and monitor the effects. I trust you are delighted with this arrangement.’

‘We might as well start the first session now,’
Doctor Ipsen says. ‘Bella Laffaire, I believe, is waiting in the room you first brought her to. It is thought that it would be a good idea for you to pick up on her treatment exactly where you left off during her admission.’

‘Fine, but right now, I have a busy schedule.’

‘We’ve rearranged your schedule,’ says Doctor Ipsen.

‘I believe regularity of appointments to be an important part of
my treatment here. Patients wait for and expect my visits. They shouldn’t be disappointed.’

‘We’re here to treat patients not to please them,
Doctor Gachet,’ says Charcot.

Ipsen’s
chin is propped on his fingers. He wears the same detached expression that Charcot often directs at his patients. I hesitate for a few seconds.

‘Perhaps
Doctor Gachet has changed his mind.’ Ipsen says.

‘Well,
all right,’ I say.

‘
Then lead the way.’

As I walk down the corridor I hear the rustle of my perpetrators behind me. The odour of the usual cabbage wine brings on a sudden nausea. We arrive and
I open the door. Bella Laffaire is already inside, slumped on the floor. There is a chair beside her. I am pleased to say it is Nurse Morrisot, not Marguerite Bottard, who bends over her.

‘Bella
,’ I greet her, half-bowing. ‘Nurse Morrisot.’

Nurse
Morrisot turns towards me, smiles and lowers her head.

‘Well gentlemen, are both of you s
taying, or just Doctor Ipsen?’ I look around. There is a hospital bed against each wall, and apart from the chair, no other furniture.

‘I notice there is only a chair for one,’ I say.

The air is a little stifling. I turn to open a window and hear the door slam.

I turn back.

Charcot has left the room.

A
blast of cool air seems to have blown away my negativity. I realise that if I can relax into things I might even have some fun. I have allowed Doctor Ipsen to claim the chair and he is moving it to a more innocuous position. Nurse Morrisot instinctively goes to help. With a hand on her arm I hold her back.

‘It’s a man’s job,’ I insist
. ‘Like putting out the rubbish. Wouldn’t you agree Doctor Ipsen? … Nurse Morrisot, would you grab some notepaper and a board to lean on. The bed over there will be your chair. I want you to jot down every word anybody says. Don’t worry if you miss a few, it’s bound to happen. If there’s silence then I want you to write down any observations you might have. I don’t want your opinion, just things that you can substantiate, things that you notice going on in the room. I need a piece of paper and a pencil too for my own observations. Paper, Doctor Ipsen?’ I ask.

Ipsen’s
body goes into a voluntary spasm as if my words sicken him. He is wide-eyed with his chin in his hand as I sit on the floor with my legs crossed in front of my patient. Nurse Morrisot returns with the writing materials.

‘Bella
… may I call you Bella?’ I whisper, reaching out a hand to stir her. She lifts her head from the floor and I look into her hooded eyes. Her pupils are very small. She is obviously drowsy. Someone has dosed her with an opiate.

‘I can’t take Bella’s case whil
e she is in a stupor. The drug acts like a curtain, leaving us in the dark as it shuts out her symptoms.’

‘But didn’t you see her before she was admitted? There were your symptoms. According to reports
they were very vivid I believe.’

‘I need to monitor the progress. If you hand her to me like this at each consultation I will have nothing to go on. I will see her only in one drugged state after another. This experiment will be useless.’

‘She is violent, Doctor Gachet. Do you suggest we put other patients and more importantly, staff, at risk?’

‘She needs to be on a
minimum dose. What is she on?’

‘
Laudanum,’ Nurse Morrisot replies.

‘Very well, you will
be in charge of her medicine then that too can become part of the experiment,’ Ipsen says. He narrows his eyes as if he has smoke in them. ‘But you have to prescribe something homeopathic too.’

‘I’d rather wait till I see her next and just reduce her
laudanum for now.’

‘I believe
the first time she sat amongst these walls you saw her in all her vivid madness, did you not? What more do you expect the patient to tell you? Do you expect to have a polite conversation?’

‘
Doctor Ipsen, is this your diagnosis?’ I ask.

He does not answer.

‘Are you diagnosing mania?’ I ask again.

Once more he does not reply.

‘Perhaps lunacy, insanity, madness, as you have already stated.’

His lips remain glued together.

‘I’ll prescribe
Platina
1M, one dose, based on my initial impression. But I’ll have to bring it with me when I next come to the hospital on Thursday. Nurse Morrisot, what dosage of laudanum is she on at the moment?’

‘One spoonful, hourly.’

‘That dosage could kill an elephant, drop it by half, and send a messenger to come and get me if that causes any problems. Doctor Ipsen, I’d like to see Bella again on Thursday during my session here. I would appreciate it if someone tells Doctor Charcot that I wish to see Manon on that day as well. Doctor Ipsen, I thank you for this opportunity but I have patients waiting for me at home.’

Doctor
Ipsen leaves the room hastily without responding. His abandoned chair falls over in his wake.