by Alex Pheby
Afterwards, they need to remain isolated for a good period to let the serum do its work, and that is easier in these places than it is with someone who lives at home. It’s hard work convincing a patient that he needs to leave his job for six weeks, but these ladies are in a place set up for isolation, and if they are resistant to the idea then they can be put in padded rooms where they minimise the harm they can do to themselves, or they can be sedated (which is often the way with the more intractable cases anyway). Be sure to schedule return visits regularly, and remember that monitoring is charged at the same rate as a clinical appointment. There is a printed calendar on which follow up appointments can be marked off and left with the receptionist for her to enter into the appointment book. We also have branded pens and pads if you feel it would be useful to give the front of house staff a small gift and thereby cement your relationship with them. Ditto the expenses account for lunches and drinks, though please reserve this for doctors and budget holders.
It is very important that patients are not only monitored after treatment by the local medical staff, but that the positive effects of the serum are independently noted by our staff, and also effectively and repeatedly communicated to the medical and administrative staff formally and informally. Ideally we would like for our serum to become the default treatment for all existing and incoming patients – it is what makes taking on these troublesome cases worthwhile in the first instance, from our side – and this is most likely to be achieved through recommendations from staff to the executive of the institution, and through the dissemination of information across the medical profession. Positive word-of-mouth can mean the difference between profit and loss and affects all of our well-beings, patients included. We do our bit, publishing books and papers in journals, but you should feel you have a role in the reputation of our product too, and should consider yourself an ambassador. Review the materials we have sent you, liaise with the technicians, and in all ways try to embody the values of the firm. This should not be difficult; we are doing excellent work with an excellent product and we should all feel proud of our achievements to date and look forward to a bright future.
On the other hand, if there are adverse reactions to the serum, these should be played down, and the patients removed from the list of those we treat. If all we can expect is complaints, and if the positive effects of the serum are always hidden by a mountain of vexatious enquiries and legal threats, then we should bow out immediately, especially if the patient or their family are in the public eye, or are in any way capable of influencing policy makers. There is, it seems to me, such a thing as bad publicity, regardless of what people say, and while an endorsement from a well-known figure would be helpful, the opposite also holds true. As we know, any negatives of the treatment will be likely to be from mistakes in diagnosis – the serum would never have done any good – or in aftercare, or from circumstances out of our control. There’s no need to take any responsibility for these outcomes, or to suggest that there is something wrong with the product, or your behaviour, and you should certainly not admit to any error, formally or informally, but particularly not formally.
Any complaints should be forwarded to me directly and I will liaise with the patient myself – or her representatives if she is too unwell to manage her own affairs – and keep you informed of developments.
And on the same wall there was a depiction of the deceased, again in the position of fear or supplication, but this time in an empty chamber.
I am by no means as intuitive as my colleague, but it did occur to me that perhaps the deceased had been ill, had received treatment unwillingly and unsuccessfully, and, perhaps, that she had then been isolated. Perhaps the disease was communicable, and then it occurred to me that perhaps this was precisely it – this deceased’s family, though high ranking, and requiring that she be buried in the proper manner, had worried that this woman’s disease would be communicable not only to those living, but also to those in the afterlife, and had taken steps to ensure that she never reached it.
I went about with this new supposition, one I did not confide to my colleague, and here were scenes that suddenly might give support to the argument – here she was attended to by priests carrying the implement, and there she was censed with purifying smoke.
May Horus be gracious to you
All are weeping and raise their arms in grief at the passing of the deceased into the land of the dead.
THE BA OF LUCIA JOYCE
GENEVA AND NORTHAMPTON, SEPTEMBER 1934 ONWARDS
One cannot imagine a horse on a small table.
The rooms are quiet and very neat. There are no windows, but curtains hanging on one wall – if one draws them aside there is a picture frame, but no picture within it. If one wishes, one can imagine a picture. Perhaps this is its function: pull aside the curtain, please. What do you see? What would you wish to see? What would you not wish to see?
Above the dado is white, and below it is yellow.
There is an armchair, quite comfortable, but there is no cushion. One might smother oneself with a cushion. Is that possible? One can certainly smother one’s mother with a cushion, in a book, but can one smother oneself? Possibly not, since the last stages of smothering require pressure to be applied after the victim has lost consciousness, which one cannot do to oneself. One might take the pieces of stuffing from a pillow and stuff them into one’s own throat, clogging up the pipe through which the lungs get oxygen, or jamming the stomach with wadding – this might be effective. It is certainly not a practice that doctors ever advise, and there must be a reason for that.
In a pile beside the armchair are books – not the sort of books in which mothers are smothered, but the opposite kind, in which nothing difficult or inflammatory is found – bedtime stories, and works of non-fiction on safe topics: the gardens of Italy, and the histories of countries far away.
On the table on which one cannot imagine a horse (which is not to say that if one were on the table one could not imagine a horse, which would be incorrect, but is to say that one could not imagine a horse being on the table) is a tablecloth. The tablecloth is large enough so that it covers the modesty of the table’s legs down past the knees, and around the hem are pretty flowers in blue and yellow. A horse, should it stand on this table, would have several problems. Firstly, it would have a difficult time finding enough room for all its hooves. The distance between a horse’s forelimbs and hindlimbs is quite substantial, while this table is only small.
Also, the table is poorly constructed and from cheap materials and does not have much weight-bearing potential – a horse is heavy, and consequently the table would break if the horse was induced to put its weight onto it.
Lastly, there is a tablecloth on the table which would slip and ruche up if the horse made even the slightest movement, so the whole thing is impractical, and hence unimaginable.
Lastly, having a horse would be in violation of the rules, since these are rooms for solitary confinement, and this table is provided to give the solitarily confined a place to eat their dinners off, and not for the placing on of additional guests, horses or otherwise. Whether no-one can see through the window when the horse is stood on the table and thereby witness the breaking of the rule against guests is irrelevant, since there is no conceivable way that the horse could gain entrance to the rooms since the same people who enforce the rules are the same people who bring in guests, horses included.
If one puts one’s palms flat on the tablecloth, and then moves them around in concert, then the tablecloth moves with them, which means that the wood beneath is polished, which is the last reason that a horse must not be placed on it, since, like a tea cup, their hooves leave rings on the polish that do not come out without hiring a French polisher. Except these marks would be semi-circles, and though horses’ hooves are thought to be lucky, and can be seen next to leprechauns and other lucky-to-find creatures in drawings, this would not be lucky at all. Not in this case. Not unless one wishes to be shoute
d at and chided as a slut and sent to one’s room to await the return of the father, who knows his way around a belt.
So, if one cannot have a horse on a table, and hence cannot imagine it, and if the imagining of it would be to imagine something so impractical-seeming that it would be hilarious if one could, one cannot also imagine setting fire to it by lighting the tablecloth. Still less can one imagine inducing the horse to stay where it is on the tablecloth rather than jumping down, particularly if one is in the kind of bleak mood attendant on the desire to immolate oneself in the manner of Brünnhilde in the ending of the Götterdämmerung. The imagining of ridiculous things and the desire to immolate oneself are inimical, and there’s no way you could do it without the horse.
One will remember there was a great deal of talk of that horse, sung in German, of course, and the delight with which it wishes to join its master in the festive, joyous flames of his pyre. Horses aren’t aware of treachery, even if it is treachery brought about by a magical potion, and hence can neigh unselfconsciously with delight at the thought of burning to death on the funeral pyre of their master. Human women are capable of remembering it, and it is only by taking the example of the delighted and tortured horse, writhing in the flames righteously, that they can convince themselves that they are willing, let alone able, to burn themselves to ash. This would be an effort, even if it were to make right all wrongs and bring down heaven itself in a wall of flames. Or of red and yellow tissue paper onto which light has been shone and a fan directed at from below.
So anyone who suggests that the action of setting fire to a tablecloth was done in the spirit of Brünnhilde in the ending of the Götterdämmerung is, frankly, mistaken, though it makes for a nice story on paper. Silence the shrill clamour of your grief – that certainly sounds right, and it is one of the things said daily by attendants, though in less operatic language, and not sung so beautifully, or in German. Silence the shrill clamour of your grief, they say, or I’ll come in there and give you something to grieve about. Silence the shrill clamour of your grief, you mardy old bitch, or I’ll come in there and give you a kick in the cunt (ho-ho). Silence the shrill clamour of your grief, for God’s sake, you’re driving me crackers.
Anyway, that is not said to Brünnhilde in the ending of the Götterdämmerung it is said by her, which any idiot knows, so if that’s your idea, then you’ve made a mistake.
This table is a great deal better for the placement of a glass of milk than it is for the standing of horses, though if one were to compound one’s error and put both the milk and the horse on the table at once, milk would certainly be spilled. The laments of children addressing themselves to their mothers over the loss of their sweet milks would be certainly heard, though by the mother probably not, since she never comes near enough to hear anything, never comes within a chair’s throw of the place, and no lament in the world can be heard over the distances that woman determines to keep from the source of the spillage, no matter how sweet the fucking milk.
There was a woman once called Hazel, who was very rich and very beautiful and there are men for whom that combination is utterly irresistible, no matter how much doleful and languorous (but ultimately troubled) young women love them, which is fine. It is certainly not Hazel’s fault. It is not she that made the promises. It is not she who made herself a secret. It is not she who left herself for herself and left anyone else wondering what it was about themselves that made them unloveable. Nor was it she that grieved, understandably, at being jilted. Nor was this compounded by her parents’ overreaction to the whole thing, as if she was now a churn of soured milk that somehow they had been lumbered with and which would be impossible to fob off onto anyone. She did not find herself falling in with the wrong crowd, vulnerable, and being made to do things, horrible, and now kept as some dread secret lest the world collapse around them and everything they’d all worked for.
Can’t you see?
It certainly wasn’t Hazel’s doing, though curses on her regardless for drawing him away from her, using her glamour, and turning him away from his true love. And she was a married woman already.
If one intended to make a pyre from the legs of that table, and splinter up the wood of the table top, then it would be a tiny fire. Every year, thousands of hedgehogs are burned on Guy Fawkes Night since they seek shelter from the cold and try to hibernate in the bonfires awaiting burning. This pyre would scarcely worry a hedgehog at all… perhaps a baby one. If one were a Roman, whose intention it was to encase a hedgehog in clay, cook it, peel away the clay (thereby removing the spines) and then feed on the unusual meat within, this pyre wouldn’t be fit for purpose at all, and one would find oneself disappointed. To imagine a disappointed Roman, all in his toga, and a hedgehog, all covered in clay, is silly, and are silly thoughts the kinds of thoughts that go through the heads of people who intend to murder themselves by setting themselves alight?
It doesn’t seem likely.
And all this before you add the horse.
Northampton does lie on a river. It is the river Nene, and while the Nene is not the Rhine and could never be mistaken for it, it does share some of the same letters in its name. If one opens the curtains on a glassless window and attempts to see the Nene through it, then one cannot see it. Nor can one see the Rhine, unless one crosses one’s eyes and, in the chaos that this makes in the brain, the right eye seeing left and the left eye seeing right, and the two sides muddling together so that neither side is clear and in the wrong place anyway, then one can superimpose a brief and simplified image of either river in the gap that leaves. If one has seen either river. This does make it rather difficult to then turn back and do what needs to be done to the table before one builds the pyre on which one intends to burn the corpse of one’s lover, induce his horse to immolate itself, and then immolate oneself on that pyre, even if the tiny blaze could provide enough heat for so much immolation.
There would be no point scorching oneself; it would just add insult to injury. If one were to survive an immolation with a nasty burn to the skin of the calf, an irritated and fractious horse, and an unburned corpse, this would be insulting. A modern cremating oven must be capable of reaching temperatures of 870–980°C, which is 1,600–1,800°F, and then remain between these temperatures until the body is reduced to ash. The idea that the fuel available from the dismantling of the little table on which a solitary confinee has their supper in a windowless room would be sufficient is frankly ridiculous.
The image of a pyre gathered on the banks of the river Nene is also ridiculous, and Northampton is so far from heaven that even if the pyre was the hottest pyre the East Midlands had ever seen, the idea that it would reach to heaven and there immolate an entire pantheon of gods is also ridiculous.
He was very handsome, though, and very sweet. His accent particularly, and so charming and clever, if anyone were to be burned on a magnificent heaven-destroying pyre then ought it not to be him? Who better to be the kindling with which such a blaze is ignited, and the greedy and selfish gods punished for their greed and selfishness? He had neither of those two traits, willing to marry without a dowry and almost willing to overlook the charms of a wealthy and beautiful heiress in favour of a sken-eyed and maudlin waif who would go on to live her life in a room with a blank picture for a window and an impossible horse for company.
By gathering the whole tablecloth together and then hanging it out as if it were laundry day between outstretched arms and then bringing one’s hands together and folding it not evenly, but only vertically, it is possible to make a roll of fabric that can be laid on the table in a circle; that much one can say. That much is an undisputable fact. One match between the back teeth and the other in the hand, once struck, this circle of cloth can be made to burn, though it might take a few tries. If a new match is required, crunch down the old one, chew, and take another from the box, or the book, or from the pocket where they are always to be found amongst the lint, waiting for when they are needed, but not making a bulge that a
nyone will notice.
Safety matches are no use.
Once it is burning, one can use the chair on which one usually sits and eats whilst staring at the curtains, to give access to the table, where one can stand within a ring of fire, if one so wishes. Again, this is without a doubt true. You may try it yourself, if you wish.
Do so now.
Take cloth (you may not have a table cloth to hand, but anything will do) and do what is described above. You see? It is easy. So that much is true. If you own a horse, induce it to immolate itself. If you own the corpse of a lover who has died, attempt to cremate it – you will find that these two things are impossible, so you will have to satisfy yourself by standing within the ring of fire.
By doing the above you will insulate yourself from the world, for the setting of fires of this sort is a kind of magic, and now, if you have done as you were asked, you will be surrounded by a magical fire that can only be breached by your true love (providing they are not already dead). When that person comes, if they still exist and are within a distance that makes it practical for them to come to you (and you have not made it impossible for them by putting the door on the latch, or telling them you have gone back to your own country and are not to be found in your usual haunts and that you love another woman, I’m very sorry, and that you always have, I’m very sorry, and that it is entirely your fault, and that anyway you felt that pressure was being placed upon you, yes, but not just by your father, by you and your constant knife-edge balancing act between sanity and insanity, between happiness and unhappiness, and much as you love them, can’t you see it would never have worked and this is better in the long run?) if you have not done that, then your true love will be able to come upon you in the state you are now, perfectly preserved and hopefully they will have matured to the point where they do not make ridiculous statements like the foregoing, but will have developed some fucking spine. Your perfectly preserved youth will be their reward for having come so far from their childishness. If one can say that about them then perhaps they would truly deserve a horse that would immolate itself on their behalf, cheerfully in the joyous flames, and also a wife who would joyously fling herself on his pyre, and in doing so set a fire that would rise and burn the very heavens asunder and kill all the gods on the banks of the River Nene in Northampton.