The Doctor Is Sick (18 page)

And then commercials came cheerfully on. ‘Spindrift,' said a large-mouthed happy woman, ‘washes everything, but everything, in the minimum of time and with the maximum of efficiency.'

‘No, no, no,' said Edwin. ‘I'm not having it, it's not fair.' A hidden trio sang:

The cheap little waltz-tune accompanied the gyrating of a white square machine with Edwin's name on it. ‘No,' he repeated. ‘No, no.' And he switched off. In this home of a kettle-mobster there was no clock, so time shuffled round the room in bedroom slippers. Edwin, very much faster than time, began to look at things. Bob had one or two rather dull books with screams, stockinged thighs and décolletages on the covers. Edwin deliberately tore up one of these and scattered the flakes of paper on the floor, watching with satisfaction the sprindrift of odd isolated words as they snowed to the worn carpet. Bob's whips had lashed his blood to a desire for violence. It was easy to manhandle the old couch and armchair, rip them open and scatter the stuffing. The sideboard, already much bruised, Edwin had pity on. He shattered the television screen without mercy, however, and tried to hurt, though with little success, the refrigerator. Ripping open a pillow in the
bedroom he was surprised but pleased to find wads of five-pound notes, so he put several of these in his pockets. Opening the window, he threw out all of Bob's whips except one. This he proposed to use not as a device for pleasure, but as a surprise weapon as soon as Bob should return. The face, he thought, eyes, mouth. And then he paused, shocked beyond measure at his rapid degeneration. What on earth had got into him?

Words, he realised, words, words, words. He had lived too much with words and not what the words stood for. James Joyce had been such another, with his deliberate choice of a sweetheart from a sweetshop, his refusal to correct a visitor who had called a painting a photograph, because ‘photograph' was so lovely a word. But James Joyce at least had not told a gangster that he had done a tray on the moor just because he liked the sound of it. A world of words, thought Edwin, saying it aloud and liking the sound of it. ‘A whirling world of words.' Apart from its accidents of sound, etymology and lexical definition, did he really know the meaning of any one word? Love, for instance. Interesting, that collocation of sounds: the clear allophone of the voiced divided phoneme gliding to that newest of all English vowels which Shakespeare, for instance, did not know, ending with the soft bite of the voiced labiodental. And its origin? Edwin saw the word tumble back to Anglo-Saxon and beyond, and its cognate Teutonic forms tumbling back too, so that all forms ultimately melted in the prehistoric primitive Germanic mother. Fascinating. But there was something about the word that should be even more fascinating, to the man if not to the philologist: its real significance when used in such a locution as ‘Edwin loves Sheila.' And Edwin
realised that he didn't find it fascinating. Let him loose in the real world, where words are glued to things, and see what he did: stole, swore, lied, committed acts of violence on things and people. He had never been sufficiently interested in words, that was the trouble.

And then all that business about resenting being treated as a thing. That was very much the pot calling the kettle black-arse, wasn't it? He'd treated words as things, things to be analysed and classified, and not as part of the warm current of life. Now certain lovely words like ‘cerebral' and ‘encephalogram' and ‘neurological' were getting their violent own back. And in this foul flat flagellation had been real whips, not Roman
flagellum
, diminutive of
flagrum
, and look gentlemen, how fascinating this interchange of ‘I' and ‘r'. And what pleasant alliteration, he thought, that was: foul flat flagellation. And what interesting ambiguity. ‘Oh, shut up,' he said aloud. Kinky, that was right, he was kinky. ‘L' in Spanish was ‘r' in Portuguese:
blanco, branco
. And ‘glamour' was, ha ha, really ‘grammar'. Remarkable. Oh, shut up.

He suddenly felt very tired. Perhaps those sleeping tablets were acting at last. He sliced himself another helping of smoked salmon and finished the bottle of champagne. Hiccoughing (stupid mistaken analogical spelling, that) violently, he lay down in his clothes on Bob's disordered and unclean bed. In his wig, too. A very well-fitting wig.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Just before he awoke properly he knew that he expected that he would think he was back in the hospital, so he awoke properly to know exactly where he was and everything that had happened the evening before. He guessed from the light that this was a reasonable hour to wake – the hour of palpating the cheeks after shaving and hearing the dry rattle of cornflakes falling into a soup plate. Near him a magazine lay open at a pornographic picture – a fully clothed woman cracking a whip – and the room's general squalor, worse in this morning light, was mitigated only by the regimentation of empty bottles on the floor. Edwin gently raised from the bed his headache and champagne mouth and, having found a kettle in the kitchenette (if they called watches kettles, what did they call kettles?) put on water for tea. Then he went to the tiny dark bathroom with its bits of soap, many rusty blades, and stubbly filthy ring round the washbasin. Bob's razor was a ghastly clogged engine, but he put it to his cheek and submitted to a halfhearted rough scrape. Back in the bedroom, looking down to the street, he saw naughty boys on the way to school, whipping each other. Bob should be pleased: who knew what convinced young flagellants might not emerge here?

Seeing these boys, Edwin had an idea. There was no stationery anywhere around in the flat, but there was plenty of toilet-paper and, in Bob's dressing-table drawer, a variety of lipsticks. Edwin took one whose metal tube was stamped
Orchidaceous
. Lovely name, lovely word.
Orchid: a ballock. Crypt-orchid: a flower found growing in a church. On three panels of toilet-paper Edwin wrote redly and greasily: PRISONER TOP FLOOR FETCH HELP. He folded this message inside a five-pound note, went to the kitchen and wrapped both around a chunk of very hard bread. There was no string anywhere, but he secured all with a tie of Bob's and then threw the parcel out of the window. Two boys ceased their lashing and counter-lashing to run to the middle of the road after it. They ignored the toilet-paper, letting it fall again in their excitement at handling a five-pound note. They looked up at the window, waved to Edwin, and danced off. What a morning: whips and money. Edwin saw the message blown across the road, plastered an instant against a lamp-post, then spun and whirled by wind about the whirling world. Wild and whirling words, my lord.

Then down the street, early on the job, trudged 'Ippo, the unsavoury meat of a sandwich. The agency he worked for had evidently transferred him to its secular department, for the front slice, as squinting Edwin could see, said SPINDRIFT MEANS CLEAN. And the back slice read: THINGS COME CLEAN WITH SPINDRIFT. What the hell was this Spindrift? A device for cleaning, true, but whether a machine or a powder had never been made clear. That would do for Dr Railton. Send in your suggested quiz questions on a postcard. What are you, Spindrift, a powder or a machine? Edwin shouted down, loud as he could with London morning lungs:

‘'Ippooooooooo!'

'Ippo looked around, in a manner of this-isle-is-full-of-noises.
He had imagined it only, he decided: ancestral voices in the London air thick with ghosts. He trudged on. Edwin, having coughed, called again:

‘'Ippoooooooooooooo!'

'Ippo stopped this time, took in the cardinal compass-points and then, shifting dimensions, the heavens from housetop to zenith to housetop. At last he saw waving Edwin and cheerfully waved back. He lived in a world of mainly phatic gestures. Satisfied, he trudged on.

Edwin sighed and went to attend to the kettle, which had rarefied much of its water to steam. He made tea and hacked smoked salmon and breakfasted in gloom. Was it for this that he had been reserved – a whipping-boy for a member of the Kettle Mob? It was not what his parents – the dead kindly parson, Greek scholar; the horticultural and crypto-theosophist mother – had ever envisaged for their only son. After breakfast, smoking a cigarette of Bob's, Edwin went to the living-room window and opened it wide. To his incredulous joy he saw Charlie the window-cleaner at work, three storeys down and two windows to his left. He called.

‘Good morning,' said Charlie without irony. ‘Get around a bit, don't you? Changed the colour of your hair, too. Still, that's your business and not mine.' He rubbed away with his squeaking washleather, frowning.

‘Listen,' said Edwin. ‘Listen carefully. I know this sounds romantic and Byronic and whatnot, but I'm a prisoner here. My jailor's gone away, having locked the door, and I just can't get out. He'll be back sometime this morning and then he'll probably try to kill me. Can you please help?'

Charlie thought a little, frowning, seeming to compute.
‘That flat,' he eventually said, ‘is Bob Courage's. He's a kinky sort of a bloke. And he's locked you up in there. That's it.' He thought further and said: ‘It's no good. This ladder won't reach as high as where you are. We generally come in there and clean from the sills. Not that all that number has them done. Unclean lot of beggars, I'd say.' And he rubbed away again.

‘Well,' said Edwin, ‘could you tell somebody about it, please? There must be some way of getting me out of here. Somebody could blow the lock open, for instance.'

Charlie thought. ‘You'd want a peterman for that,' he said. ‘Don't think I know any as are free at the moment. You could have the lock picked, of course. That's probably the best way.'

‘Yes, all right, but who's going to do it?'

‘Any of the lot round there,' said Charlie vaguely. ‘I haven't got time myself,' he said. ‘Some of us has to work,' he added with indignation. ‘We can't all afford the luxury of being locked up waiting for a kinky bloke to come back with a load of kettles. I know him well enough, Bob Courage.' He resumed cleaning petulantly.

‘Money,' said Edwin, ‘I've got money. Please. This may be a matter of life and death.' He flashed a bundle of fives towards Charlie.

‘I don't want your bleeding money,' said Charlie. ‘You know what you can do with your money. When I do a thing I do it because the bloke I'm doing it for is
my pal
. I don't know whether you're my pal or not. Not proved it one way or the other, have you? But your missis is different, if you see what I mean. She's drunk with me and had a game of darts and stood her round with her own money. And I know she'll be upset to beggary if she finds
out that you've been carrying on with kinky blokes like that. So I'll go and get Harry Stone and Leo Stone and tell them what's happened, and between them they should be able to sort things out a bit. Just wait till I've finished this pane here and then we'll see what we can do about it.' He flashed a somewhat theatrical smile up at Edwin and then carefully completed the passage he was engaged on. Edwin was now convinced that everybody except himself was mad, but it afforded him little comfort. His thudding heart anticpated the return of Bob, kettle-laden and kinky and not too happy about the flagellation of his flat. But Charlie, fifteen minutes later, said: ‘That looks really nice, that does, nice and shiny, but do those sods appreciate it? Not on your nelly they don't. Satisfied with any amount of old dirt and tripe and droppings and that, but art for art's sake is my line. Perfectionist is what I am. Such types should get head trouble and that more than you lot, but there it is. Now I'm going ashore.' He whistled himself down the ladder, pausing halfway down to shout to Edwin: ‘Look after this gear while I'm gone and don't let anybody mess about with it. Shan't be all that long.' At ground-level he stretched like a man newly arisen, not descended, and then ran athletically round the corner.

The wind blew paper and leaves about the street, and once Edwin thought he saw the brief return of his toilet-paper message. A car stopped outside the block of flats and Edwin felt very sick as he fancied a familiar look about it. But the man who got out limped and looked harmless as a rent-collector. Edwin went across to the other side of the flat and peered out of the bedroom window. The street basked in the week-day calm of a residential area, hardly disfigured by men or vehicles. Edwin picked up the only
whip left and walked restlessly about the flat, cracking and swishing.

At the end of an immeasurable slab of time Edwin fancied he heard another car draw up outside the block. He went to the bedroom window again and, to a relief as immeasurable, saw a taxi spilling out Charlie, a black mongrel, and two identical men, though one carried a bag. He waved wildly and continued to wave as the party mounted the iron staircase and the taxi moved off. When he was clearly visible to his, he hoped, rescuers, Harry Stone gave him a full gaze and said insincerely: 'Jesus Christ Awmighty. 'E's grown 'is 'air again,' he added. ‘Take a shufti at vat flamin' big 'ead of curly 'air.' Leo Stone comforted his twin with a very reasonable exposition of how such a thing could come about in so short a time, and Edwin confirmed this by doffing his wig an instant. Harry Stone seemed not altogether appeased. ‘Vat nap on it's growin',' he said. ‘Vat'll want a good going over before tomorrow night.' When the team reached the front door Edwin went into the hallway and waited, like one who sets the table when he sees the chicken going into the pot. For the job was a long one. The dog Nigger snuffled under the door and Leo Stone mentioned the word ‘peterman' and Charlie said: ‘That's just what I said, a peterman.' Instruments clinked and probed, and the lock always promised coyly to yield and always, at the last moment, refused. ‘A right bastard,' said Harry Stone. ‘Dead ‘ard, vis one is.'