The Doctor Is Sick (6 page)

What would the doctors say, he wondered, if he suddenly found sex flaring up in him again and attacked, like a satyr, one of these prim snowy nymphs of technicians, ravished her on her own machine, with the paper still flowing through, the ink-pens tracing madly away? They should really, he supposed, be pleased. He looked at the girl, whose eyes were down watching the electro-encephalic pattern pour steadily out. She lifted her eyes for an instant, caught his gaze, primly looked down again.

‘Close your eyes now.'

His eyes closed, Edwin could feel more clearly the beat of the eyeballs, the blood coursing through. It was young
blood still. He tried to fill the blank space with a harem – a languorous spread of haunches, navels, nipples, arms – but he sensed no response in his loins, only a slight constriction of the throat.

‘Open them now.'

In hate Edwin stripped the girl of her stiff whiteness, tore off the flowered dress underneath, crushed her against the glass panel. Primly she kept her eyes down. It was no good: the most violent act of the imagination could produce no response. He sighed, a mere lay-figure in striped pyjamas lying on a hard bed, a ridiculous hairnet with electrodes on him, feeding a machine.

‘Do keep your head still. Now close your eyes again.'

Edwin thought of a little article he had proposed to a magazine on Popular English Studies, an article on the bilabial fricative and its persistence through centuries of colloquial English. Sam Weller did not, of course, interchange ‘v' and ‘w': he used a single phoneme for both – the bilabial fricative. But a recorder like Dickens, untrained phonetically, would think he heard ‘v' when he expected ‘w', ‘w' when he expected ‘v'.

‘Now,' said the girl, ‘don't open your eyes. Keep them tightly shut. I'm going to flash a very strong light on to them. Try and keep perfectly still.'

In his brain arms seemed to close round the bilabial fricative, to protect it from all these people with their white coats and lights and humming machines. Then the flash came: a sharp coloured pattern was etched on the inside of his lids, hideous and somehow obscene. ‘Oh, Christ,' said Edwin, ‘that was horrible.'

‘Was it?' said the girl. ‘Now, once more.'

Again the obscene sharp pattern – cones, cubes, globes
in malevolent colours which he could not define. The humming of the engine stopped. ‘All right,' she said. ‘That's the lot. You can open your eyes now.' She hummed as tunelessly as the machine had hummed while she took off Edwin's hair-net and detached the damp salt gobbets of cotton-wool. Then, with cool indifference, she said: ‘You can go back to your ward now.'

Edwin stood outside in the corridor shaking with a rage which he found difficult to explain. ‘Bitch,' he said under his breath, ‘bitch, bitch.' But he had already forgotten the electro-encephalogram girl. It was as though the obscene flash had engendered a sudden and rather surprising hatred for his wife. He felt insulted that she should have thought it necessary to lie, so as not to hurt his feelings. He looked at his wrist-watch: nearly midday. He would telephone her and make it absolutely clear that she was under no obligation whatsoever to visit him if she didn't wish to. Or, better, he would be greatly obliged if she would cease to visit him altogether. ‘Leave me alone,' he wanted to say, ‘with my disease and my bilabial fricative.' And then he saw that that, of course, wouldn't do at all. Moreover, the task of finding copper to make the telephone call would be, he foresaw, wearisome. Let it go, he decided.

She came that evening, alone, sniffing with a genuine chill, and he, as was inevitable, said:

‘You shouldn't have come.'

‘Yes, that's what I thought, too, but I felt – well, it can't be much fun for you, after all, not seeing anybody.'

‘But it isn't just
anybody
I want to see, is it?'

‘No, I suppose not. Oh, I do wish it were all over.' She spoke the words fervently, as though her insolvement in
his disease were more than the empathetic one of a mere loving wife. And he thought that she must have been entrusted with some secret about the disease and its prognosis. She could never keep a secret with ease: it was agony for her not to have the freedom to blurt everything out to the very person who must be the last to know; it was cognate, Edwin supposed, with her sexual incontinence. He said:

‘If Railton's told you something that I'm not supposed to know—— Well, you know me well enough. I can take anything. And I don't like secrets any more than you do.'

She got up from the bed's edge nervously. ‘I've told you already,' she said. ‘It was just nothing, just about everything being all right and I wasn't to worry, that's all. Honestly.' Her eyes had a pleading look. She said: ‘I suppose I ought to go now, really. They'll be ringing that blasted bell any minute now, and I hate anybody
telling
me to get out.'

‘But you've only just come. There's plenty of time.'

‘Look,' she said deliberately. ‘This doesn't do any good. I mean, it's so artificial. We've nothing to say to each other really, and we both keep looking at our watches in a surreptitious kind of way. It's true, isn't it? It isn't normal, this kind of thing – it makes me all jumpy. And you know I hate hospitals.'

‘You mean you don't want to see me, is that it?'

‘Oh, it's not that. While you're in here I get a feeling that it isn't really you at all. And it isn't, is it? It's you sick. It's you sort of suspended – you know what I mean, suspended animation. And I hate this lack of privacy and this clock-watching and the artificiality of it all. So would you mind very much if I didn't come in every night?'

‘Well,' said Edwin slowly, ‘if you really feel that way about it. I do understand, you know, don't think I don't. Could you,' he asked, ‘possibly write me letters?'

‘I could do that, yes. Yes, that's a good idea.'

‘Although it does seem a bit stupid, doesn't it, when you only live a couple of hundred yards away.'

‘And,' said Sheila eagerly, ‘there are quite a number of people in the Anchor who'd be only too pleased to come and visit you. So you won't be too lonely.'

‘All right, if you want it that way. You mean I can look forward to a procession of colourful low-life characters to cheer my solitude?'

‘Well, it was kind of them to offer, wasn't it?'

‘And when are you coming to see me again?'

‘Oh, in a few days. At the week-end. Please, Edwin,don't tie me to anything. You know how I hate being tied.I'll come fairly soon, honestly I will.'

CHAPTER SEVEN

The tests that followed required more than a single white-coated operator, so that greater opportunities presented themselves for treating Edwin as a thing. Impotent on a cellar table, he could be discussed or, when a social mood prevailed, ignored. The tests were intimate and searching, so that he was fingered more, heaved about more, recalcitrant parts of his body were scolded more. But when he was particularly docile and plastic he was elevated to a pet's level and patted.

The doctors wanted an arteriogram. A pink vermilion-lipped pudding of a nurse squirted a tranquilliser into his buttock, then he was wheeled into a lift and carried below. Radiographers greeted him cheerfully – maturer women, and perhaps more virginal, than those he had met on previous occasions. He was slid on to an operating table under the nozzles and eyes of X-ray apparatus, and there was happy talk and bustle while the doctor, opener of arteries, was awaited.

‘I've put a new cone in, Mabel.'

‘Oh, good-oh.' A yell above Edwin's head.

Edwin saw faces, upside down, peering at him incuriously. The inverted human face is horrible: too many holes, far more monstrous than any monster from outer space.

‘And what did she say then?'

‘She said she wasn't going to wait all her life looking for
the right man. By the time she'd found him, she said, it'd be too late anyway.'

‘Who's she to go on about waiting for the right man? Have you seen that hair?' There was a puff of derision.

‘Hiya, girls.' It was a Canadian doctor, keen-faced and with thick hair
en brosse
. He was young and evidently most accessible to the laity. ‘This our patient? Hiya, Mister.'

‘Doctor,' corrected Edwin.

‘Yes?' said the doctor. ‘That's right, I'm the doctor. Now I'm just going to give you a small local.' He grasped the artery on the right side of Edwin's neck and pumped in his an
sthetic. Then he sat down and waited. Two other young doctors, at a loose end, came in and joined him. There were friendly greetings, and the female voices grew louder, moved some way along the short female road to hysteria.
Hysterikos, hystera
, the womb. But Freud had shown that there was no connection, despite the etymology.

‘And what sort of a time did you have in Italy?'

‘It was all right, I guess.
Molto buono
.'

‘Do watch those vowels,' said Edwin, almost automatically.

‘We drank the
vino
and tried to make the
señoritas. Molto bella
.'

‘It's in Spain they have the
señoritas
,' said one of the radiographers, ‘not in Italy.'

‘They're the same, whatever you call them, wherever you go. All women are the same, made to be made.'

‘They're not all the same,' said a provocative radiographer, ‘thank you very much.'

‘Don't thank me, sister. Well, time to have a go at that artery.'

The small underground room seemed full of people, upside-down faces all round Edwin, jovial advice as the Canadian doctor tried to grasp the squirming artery. ‘Like as if it's alive,' he said. ‘Like a snake or something. Now,' he said to Edwin. ‘I've got a sort of dye in this syringe, a dye made out of iodine. When that starts circulating it'll colour the blood vessels, and when they take a picture of it that'll show what's wrong. Okay?'

But the artery had a life of its own. Edwin could see the eyes on it, fascinated, as though watching a death-duel of small fierce animals. ‘Goddam it,' said the doctor, ‘just can't get it in.' Then came a general shout of triumph as contact was made, the artery was pierced, and the dye was shot into it. A white-coated young lady with cool hands started to feed the artery with a saline solution. Preparations were made for the radiography.

‘You'll feel,' said one of the loud women, ‘a feeling like of hotness all along that side. Very hot. But don't move, whatever you do.'

The taking of the pictures seemed, to confused Edwin, to involve the shouting of signals. At the loud cry of what seemed to be ‘Take' the heat came, and more. A pain that seemed green in colour and tasted of silver oxide, that, moreover, seemed to show, by some syn
sthetic miracle, what the momentarily tortured nerves looked like, shot down his face, gouging his eyes out, extracting teeth with
cold pliers. Again, it was not a matter of pain: it was a matter of the sick realisation of what perverse experiences lurk waiting in the body.

‘You're being very good,' said the saline girl. ‘Really you are.' And his right arm was, for an instant, stroked. There was an interval. The other artery now had to be pierced and filled with colour.

The insignificant becomes, when doubled, the significant. A crude sprawling blot on paper makes, when the paper is doubled and opened out again, a pattern which, though still crude, is literate. And so the repetition of the processes on the other side of his neck gave Edwin a strange image of beauty. The test became a ritual. The snaking artery was caught, tamed, force-fed. Edwin's thing of a head was posed under the flying machinery, there was the hysterical cry from a distance, and again there was the complex of oxide taste, green pain – as though a tree were shouting out – and the tearing-out of teeth and eye. ‘Good,' they all said. ‘That's over.'