The Underground Man (14 page)

It was early morning when I next opened my eyes. I knew straight away there was something wrong. There was no newness to the day. That was the problem.

I stumbled over to the mirror above the mantelpiece. My hair stuck out in the usual places but my eyes were wild. My head looked as if someone had removed it and glued it back on. An absolutely shoddy job. My neck had twisted right round and got lodged there. I had to turn my body sideways to get a proper look at me. My mouth was all agape with pain.

I remember Clement coming in. And me collapsing. This happened very slowly. Seemed to take an age.

I have the vaguest memory of Clement carrying me down the back stairs to the tunnels. I remember the sound of his huge feet on the old stone steps.

When I next came to my head was in the crook of his
elbow. He cradled me as we went along. Out of the carriage window I saw a blur of red brick as we sped down the tunnels. ‘I am in pain,' I told him.

He looked down at me and gave me a grave nod.

‘Where are we going, Clement?' I asked him.

‘We have found you a neck-man, Your Grace,' he replied.

When I next opened my eyes we were pulling up outside an unfamiliar row of cottages, with me propped up in the carriage like a broken doll and still swimming in a dream. I saw Clement stroll up one of the garden paths and knock at a low gabled door. Saw him turn and walk back towards me. I recall the carriage door opening, him leaning over me and the cold morning air coming in. Then I was heft up into his arms again and gently carried towards the tiny house.

I leaned my head against Clement's shoulder and gazed up at his large round face as he marched me up the narrow path and ducked his head under the lintel. Then I found myself in a plain white room, warmed by a modest coal fire. My shirt was unbuttoned for me and pulled over my spinning head and I recall being eased back onto a trestle table, which was covered with a single sheet. Being naked amongst so much whiteness made me feel like a corpse on a mortuary slab.

‘Good morning, Your Grace,' said a kind voice above me. ‘My name is Conner.'

‘Good morning, Conner,' I croaked back at him. ‘And what is it you do?'

‘I'm a bone-setter,' he said.

‘A neck-man?'

‘In a manner of speaking, yes. So tell me, Your Grace, how are your bones this morning?'

‘O, they are old bones, Conner, and in very poor shape. My back is all locked-up.'

‘Well, then,' said Conner, ‘I shall do my best to unlock you.'

‘O, I wish you would,' I said.

I was in such discomfort I had hardly opened my eyes, but as he turned me onto my stomach I caught a glimpse of the chap. He was youngish, stout and florid, with dark brown curly hair and a neat moustache. He wore a clean white apron over his daily clothes and had his shirt sleeves rolled up past his elbows, revealing an impressive pair of forearms.

As I lay my cheek on a lavender-scented pillow, I felt a large warm hand rest on my shoulder. ‘A little oil,' he whispered, ‘… for lubrication.'

And in the gully between my shoulder blades I felt a sudden liquid heat. My mind, at first, was thrown into terrible confusion, not sure if the sensation was pleasurable or adding to my distress. Meanwhile, tiny harbingers of ecstasy shot out in every direction beneath my back's cold flesh, as the warm oil crept confidently along the shallow valley of my spine.

‘You have had breakfast, Your Grace?' he asked me, easing the oil into my shoulders with neat circular movements of fingers and thumbs.

‘I have not, Conner – no,' I wheezed from under his mighty hands. ‘Clement brought me straight from my bed.'

‘I thought I smelt bacon,' said Conner.

‘That would be yesterday's bacon,' I replied.

‘Ah,' he said, his thumb-circles now expanding. ‘Strange how a smell can linger.'

And he kept up this gentle banter as his hands encouraged the oil into my flesh. Most of our conversation was of little significance and evaporated as soon as it was out, but I found
an underlying kindness to it which gradually put me at my ease so that in a few minutes I was able to admit, ‘I think I have been a little agitated this last day or two.'

To which Conner replied, ‘That is understandable, Your Grace. A body does not like to be tied up in knots.'

And now his fingertips pressed deeper into me, tracing precise symmetrical eddies down either side of my spine. ‘And how does a body come to have so many knots in it?' I enquired.

‘O, a hundred different ways, Your Grace. I should say accumulation of tenseness is most common. Or a sudden twist of the head, perhaps. Sleeping badly is another … too many pillows, too few …'

And blow me down if, as he spoke, he wasn't working his magic on me. His fingers seemed to draw the pain right out of me, like a spell. And looking back I see how, unlike the ignorant Dr Cox, Conner actually encouraged me to voice my anxieties, dealing with each one of them there and then – smoothing them away with his fingertips and the soothing flow of his voice.

‘Tell me, Conner,' I said, ‘do you not worry that some of the bad feeling you draw from a patient might come to rest in you?'

He bent down and whispered in my ear, ‘What I do, Your Grace, is think of myself as a chimney … that way, any ill feeling just passes right through.'

‘A chimney,' I said. ‘Yes. Very good.'

Then he turned me onto my back and moved round to the head of the table, taking care to keep a hand on me all the while. I must say, having my chest exposed to the room made me feel decidedly vulnerable, but I was quickly reassured by Conner's trusty fingers as they gently slid under my neck. He raised my head an inch or two off the table and held it there in the cradle of his hands and for the first time I felt able to open my eyes and briefly survey the scene. Like an infant I
looked all about me. In a far corner of the ceiling I spotted a cobweb, slowly waving above an otherwise spotless room. And now Conner had my head in the palm of one hand while the other slowly worked its way down my neck, his fingers checking the condition of each vertebra before moving on to the next. I noticed that the walls of the surgery were completely bare. Not a picture or a chart in sight.

‘Give me the full weight of your head, Your Grace,' he told me. ‘I will not let you drop.'

Then, by almost imperceptible degrees, he began to rotate my head – a most peculiar sensation, which initially induced in me near-vertigo, so that it was all I could do to resist an urge to lock my muscles up and bring the whole process to a halt. I felt like someone's puppet, not to say a little foolish. The room shifted around me mechanically. But after a minute or two of having my head eased this way and that, I felt myself becoming, first, unspeakably comfortable, then mercifully heavy-lidded. I recall drowsily dwelling on the complexity of the joints which could accommodate such a complicated manoeuvre and wondered at the many muscles being called into play as my skull swung slowly through space.

Conner's voice came to me from a great distance, saying, ‘I think I might make a small manipulation, Your Grace.'

From the cradle of his huge hands I dreamily concurred.

I was asked to take a deep breath and to slowly let it out. So I filled my old lungs right to the top and began exhaling into that small white room and began to feel for the first time in many weeks that I had located a quiet corner in which to meditate. The world was slowing-up most pleasingly.

Then Conner suddenly yanked my head eastward with such incredible power and violence that an almighty
crack
went bouncing between the room's bare walls.

I was absolutely horrified, not least because I feared my head had just been pulled clean off my neck. I feared also that
some small but important bones had just been rendered useless. I pictured me lying in my own cottage hospital, in a bed with all manner of devices strapped around my head. My anxiety must have been evident, for Conner said wistfully, ‘It is a dramatic sound, sir, is it not.'

I agreed that it was and asked, rather sheepishly, ‘Are there more?'

‘There are,' he replied.

After checking the whereabouts of another vertebra or two (which were, by now, most definitely on the move) he calmly asked me to fill my lungs up and to let the air out, as before. Well, I did as I was told and was exhaling (more self-consciously this time round) when my head was suddenly jerked over to the west, emitting another great bony crack.

‘Now take a minute or two to recover yourself, Your Grace,' said Conner. ‘And when you are ready, I would like you on your front.'

Well, to be quite honest, I was worried that when I rolled over my head might stay behind on the pillow. The sound produced by Conner's manipulations was like a full tray of crockery being dropped on a stone floor and continued to ring in my ears. So when I finally dared to lift myself off the table I was much relieved to find my head was still attached to the rest of me – if not quite as surely as before.

Now my cheek was back on the lavender-scented pillow, with Conner's fingers inching methodically up and down my spine, searching for clues. When they came across something suspicious they halted and, while one hand crept out along a rib to the left, the other went off to the right. On the odd occasion when the fingers came upon some nexus of painful muscle they would rub, quite firmly, for half a minute then gently check over the surrounding terrain and, when they were satisfied that all was in order, would return to the trail. My back felt as if it was a human puzzle which Conner was
intent on solving, joint by aching joint. ‘I'm all over the place,' I confided.

‘O, you're going back together just fine,' he replied.

‘How on earth does a man's back become so higgledy-piggledy?' I asked.

‘When one bone goes astray,' Conner informed me, ‘others will tend to follow. The body tries to restore some balance but sometimes can do more damage than good.'

‘So one might end up a little like … a Chinese puzzle,' I suggested.

‘Exactly, Your Grace,' he replied.

Then he rolled me onto my side so that I faced away from him, tucked one of my arms right under me and brought my left leg up to my chest, all accomplished with such facility I was inclined to congratulate the man. He simply tapped me gently behind a kneecap and the leg folded obediently into place. Seemed intimately acquainted with every spring and joint inside me; to have as much command over my body as I had myself. Not since I was a young lad playing with my father had I been so ably thrown around.

He pulled my raised hip gently towards him with one hand, while his other eased my shoulder toward the table top. He held me there a second, leaned closer and asked, ‘Are you ready, Your Grace?'

I must have whispered some sort of tentative assent; in truth, I had not the first idea what terrible contract had just been agreed.

My shoulder went down into the table. My pelvis went the other way. Between these two opposing forces my spine had no choice but to surrender. Every vertebra in my back made a popping sound – one after the other – like the rasp of a fresh pack of playing cards. Who would have thought one's body could be made an instrument to produce such exotic sounds? I was grateful I had on my baggy trousers for a
tighter pair might not have come through the experience intact. This occurred to me as I was rolled over onto my other side and my head buried deep in Conner's apron (which had about it a faint whiff of carbolic), whereupon the whole noisy business was repeated, my spine now arching in the opposite direction but producing the same startling sound.

Then I was left to lie on my back to recover, and consider how, when I eventually came to take my leave of Conner, I should anticipate doing so a much taller man. I took a deep breath to reassure myself that it would not always be followed by the crunching of my spine. My bone-setter, meanwhile, had gone over to a bowl of water and was now busy soaping his hands. ‘Tell me, Conner,' I called over to him, ‘do you believe in auras?'

A moment's silence. Then, ‘Well, I would have to know what such a thing was before I could say if I believed in it.'

‘It is a light or a heat which emanates from a man.'

‘Well, I wouldn't know about light, Your Grace, but there is certainly heat. That I know for sure.'

I chewed this over. ‘Do you believe in spirits, Conner?' I went on.

‘Why do you ask?' he replied.

And so I explained about my general state of mind and the moon in the woods and the boy who has been following me around. ‘Do you see the boy?' was his only question.

‘I suppose I must do, yes.'

‘Then surely you believe in him, Your Grace?'

‘Well, that may be true … but I cannot tell if he belongs in the real world or in my imagination.'

‘With respect, Your Grace, how much does it matter which world he inhabits, if he is real enough to be seen?'

‘I take your point,' I said.

Conner swung my legs off the table and helped me get to my feet. Told me to let both my hands hang loose by my
sides. He stood behind me and, when I had found my balance, moved his fingers slowly up and down my spine.

‘That's a little less higgledy-piggledy, Your Grace. In fact, not a bad arrangement at all.'

Then he came round and stood before me, placed a hand on either shoulder and generally took me in.

‘Shoulders roughly the same altitude,' he said.

And for the first time I looked him full in the face. He was as kind and handsome as I had imagined, but while his voice was full of purpose I thought I detected about him some remoteness … an almost unanchored air. As he spoke his eyes seemed to wander, as if they could not concentrate and preferred to cast about for cobwebs up above. Perhaps he is just a trifle shy, I thought to myself, and has difficulty looking another man in the eye – that is sometimes the case. It was another moment or two before I realized that Conner was, in fact, blind.