The Doctor Is Sick

by Anthony Burgess

  Edwin was slid back on to a trolley, wheeled to the lift and taken up again. The world never changes to greet the hero. The young man with the Punch-back was being pommelled and coughing up dislodged sputum. R. Dickie sat placidly like a king on a bedpan. The newcomer with the dragged leg and the egg-beater hand had had his head shaved; he roamed the ward, dragging and whisking, in a bobbed woollen cap. He came up to Edwin, looking down on him from thick goggles, his grey moustache quivering.

  'Gest na var welch purr?' he said.

  "I think that's very likely,' said Edwin.

  'Gorch,' nodded the man and, seeming satisfied, moved out of the ward to the lavatories. R. Dickie said:

  'Doesn't speak English like you or me. That's his brain, see. They'll put that right for him and then he'll be comin' out with the King's English - though it's the Queen's English really, ennit? - as good as you or I or anybody here. Poor old man. Mr Ridgeway his name is, and he knows some of the streets round where I used to work. He can't say the names so good, but you can see what he's gettin' at. Standin' here by my bed this mornin' he was, recitin' these names off. Thinks the world of me, you can see that. Marvellous, ennit?'

  The drugged day went by, Edwin listless in bed. In the evening two visitors came for him. One, the big moustached man, he recognised: the belcher of Siegfried's horn call and crier of 'Nothung!' Les, he remembered, was the name. With Les was an exotic woman Edwin needed time to take in. 'A letter,' said Les, 'from your missis. She asked me to bring it. Bruised you a bit round the neck, haven't they?'

  Edwin read:

  'DARLING,

  'Am writing as promised though nothing much to say of course. Hope you all right. Bearded man who is named Nigel and an artist is taking me to sort of wine drinking club this evening. Will try to come week-end. Be good, dearest.

  'SHEILA.'

  'This is very kind,' said Edwin. 'Very kind indeed. But you needn't really, you know, have bothered.' Les's companion was a swarthy round-faced woman, obviously Mediterranean, in a blue jumper that strained at the breasts' heavy pressure, a skirt patterned with names of dishes - kebab, risotto, pilaff, chow mien, nasi goreng. She had sharp dark eyes, much blackbird-black hair, and innumerable warts. Her throat was tattooed with a cryptic sign. Edwin awaited an introduction, but Les said:

  'There was nothing on tonight, so I thought I might as well come here as anywhere else. Last night was Sieg and tomorrow night's Gott, but there's nothing doing tonight. Heavy work, and you need a night off. Singers go on about what they have to do, but I tell them that they ought to try lugging bloody Valhalla about and making sure that you know where the bloody Rhinegold is, ready for throwing back into the water. Lost it once, and there they were frantic looking for it. That's why they took me off props and back on the heavy stuff.' He looked capable of coping with the heavy stuff, thought Edwin - massive oak shoulders, a neck like a chopping-block, a chest like two kettledrums. He had sat down on the bed's edge, but his lady remained standing, arms folded, smoking.

  'There is, I think,' said Edwin, 'a chair somewhere over there.' The trouble was that R. Dickie had so many visitors: his bed looked like the bed of the dying Socrates.

  'Carmen doesn't mind standing,' said Les. 'That's not her real name, Carmen, but I first met her when I was doing the opera, and it seemed to fit, somehow. A sod that is for changes - tobacco factories, bullrings, brigands' caves. But not as bad as Aida. You have to practically set up the whole of Egypt for that, pyramids, Suez Canal and all. This gentleman,' said Les carefully to Carmen, 'is ill. That's why we've come to see him.' Carmen bowed. 'She doesn't speak much English,' said Les. 'She'd been lured over from North Africa, you see, on the job.' He winked. 'I got her out of that, though. You'd think she'd be grateful.'

  'Yo hablo Espanol, senora,' said Edwin. Carmen now spoke. She showed a smiling mess of decay, gum recession and metal, and said:

  'Blimey, you 'ear? 'E spik lak good man. Why you not spik lak 'im? You bloody zis fackin' zat all time. Senora, 'e say. Bloody ole bag an fackin' 'oor, you say. Why you not be good man? No money you give one day, two, sree. One day I go. Blimey, yes, get good man. Lak 'im I get.'

  'She's a bit narked about not being really married,' said Les evenly. 'I've told her I can't, not in this country. Got one in Gateshead. Good thing, in some ways, to have one somewhere else. Keeps them on their toes.'

  Carmen had picked up one of the nude magazines. 'Notty,' she said, giving Edwin a carious leer. 'You very notty.' And she performed a brisk sequence of thrust and recoil, giggling.

  'Stop that now,' said Les. 'You don't seem to learn. This is England, not North Africa. We're civilised here. A child of nature,' he said to Edwin, 'that's her trouble.'

  'Blimey, I not do dutty sing when I do zat.'

  'No, we know you meant nothing rude, but there's times and places, you see, lass. At the moment we're here in this hospital visiting this gentleman whose wife we know and who you say you like. You savvy that?'

  'Who wife? 'Im wife? 'E got wife?'

  'Yes, yes, the one that bought you the double gin when you did that sort of fandango the other day. The one whose hair you combed.'

  'Oh, 'er? Black 'air, but not very match. I got more black 'air, I not lak 'er too match. She bloody ole bag too. She dance wiz Grik man.'

  'Never mind who she danced with,' said Les, 'because that's her affair. And don't let's have any of this calling other women whores and bags just because you're jealous.' He rasped nastily at her. 'I didn't bring you here to meet a respectable and educated gentleman in order that you could insult him to his face. We're visiting the sick,' he explained. 'A corporal work of mercy, as they say.'

  'Oor and bag you call me, yes. Blimey, I 'ear. When I get you 'ome I mek enough 'ell, yes. Oh blimey.'

  'I did not call you a whore and a bag,' said Les, patiently but loudly. 'I said that that's what you're not to call other women, especially this gentleman's wife. She is a lady, which is more than what you are.'

  'You call me not leddy? Oh blimey, I show you now.' She made for Les, but he, with an easy arm, an arm used to knocking down Valhalla and draining the Rhine, grasped her wrist. 'You stop zat now,' she cried in pain. 'Oh blimey.'

  'All right, then, you behave a bit better. Sorry about all this,' he said to Edwin. 'I can't take her anywhere, as you can see.' Edwin observed that the ward was much interested in this pseudo-marital quarrel. He tried to dissociate himself from it by moving down farther in the bed, but the bed itself had become, appropriately, the battlefield. Carmen tried to bite. Les said:

  'Biting, eh? Biting and scratching like a little puss-cat, eh? We'll soon stop that, won't we, my little passionflower?'

  'Yo me voy cagar----'

  'And we won't have any of those rude Spanish words, either. This gentleman knows what they mean, being educated, and I've got a bloody good idea, though I'm ignorant. Ignorant, that's what you think I am, don't you, my little black beauty?' He turned her wrist like a tourniquet.

  'Oh blimey, you bloody fackin' 'oor.'

  'That very rude word might just about apply, but the last one will not, my African mountain-blossom. So I'll thank you to keep your dainty bloody dirty little trap shut, see?'

  'I get you yet, you see I not.'

  'Not is right,' said Les. 'Not is the word. And now I'm taking you out of here before they throw you out.' There was no nurse to be seen, no sister, but the negro orderly hovered, fearfully undecided. 'We'll come in and see you again,' said Les, 'if I can get her to behave. I'll get this bloody primitive wildness knocked out of her before she comes here again, you see if I don't.' Tougher, less neurotic, than Jose of the opera, he dragged her out. 'Hope you're better,' he called from the door.

  Edwin thought that perhaps this delegation notion of Sheila's was not, after all, such a good idea. When all visitors had gone R. Dickie called across, chummily:

  'Them relations of yours?'

  And later Dr Railton came in, massaging his lips, to say:

  'You're
supposed to keep quiet after these tests, you know. Lie still, keep quiet, that's what you're supposed to do. I hear that you've been shouting the odds or something, at least that's what one of the sisters told me. Don't do it, don't upset yourself. You'll need every ounce of stamina you can find before we've finished with you.' He sat down on the bed. 'Well, we've all had a good look at today's pictures. There's definitely something there, we think. But we've got to make absolutely sure by looking a bit deeper. The day after tomorrow we're going to pump your brain full of air and take more pictures. That'll show, that'll be definitive.' He laughed boyishly and slapped Edwin's hidden thigh. Then he said good night and returned, as Edwin supposed, to his trumpet. Strumpet, trumpet, pump it full of air.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  'I suppose,' said the voice at his back, 'you'll be getting to know this sensation pretty well by now.' Edwin sat in a kind of pillory, his buttocks bare, in another room of the cellar, attended on either hand by new, less boisterous, nymphs in white raiment. The doctor had already announced himself as a psychiatrist, here for a fortnight's brush-up on his neurology, and his tones were professionally soothing. 'A few c.c.'s,' he soothed, 'of cerebrospinal fluid.' The needle penetrated deep, Edwin's vertebr collapsed as before, the floor became littered with knobs and discs tossed like chicken-bones at some heroic banquet, his life juice spattered everywhere. 'Nicely, nicely,' said the doctor. Soon a test-tube of spinegin flashed by.

  'And then we restore the balance. Having taken something out of your cerebrum, we proceed to put something in. Something quite harmless. Something that costs the hospital nothing. Air. Yes, air. This air will, after the manner of air, rise from its point of entry up to the brain, circulating freely. Then the work of these charming ladies commences.' The honied voice made Edwin drowse, while the charming ladies were heard, felt, to simper.

  The air entered coyly, eased its way up the bony chimney, split up into quiet crocodiles tramping corridors they had never seen before. Suddenly Edwin felt strong thirst and nausea.

  'Keep very still now.'

  'I think,' he said, 'I'm going to be sick.'

  'No, you're not. You've nothing in your stomach to be sick on. Now just keep that head still.'

  The nausea eased but the thirst persisted. Edwin had visions of the brown shaggy pierced breasts of coconuts, ice-cubes clattering clumsily into a pint of gin and ginger-beer, a running kitchen-tap and himself held under it, snow crammed into his mouth, his teeth crunching lemons. A picture clicked. Good, now another. Click.

  'Now we pull your head upside-down. You'll be able to feel the air bubbling about inside. Can you? I believe it's a funny sort of a sensation.'

  They resented his body, Edwin could tell that. It was in the way, a long clumsy shoot out of the potato they were trying to roll around. If only the head could be, perhaps painlessly, temporarily severed and then, with some epoxy resin or other, fitted back. The air hissed about in all the convolutions and curlicues of Edwin's brain, and the ladies in white, panting, coaxed it to the eye that would see everything. Click. And again click. It took most of the morning.

  'You'll have a rather nasty headache for a couple of days,' said one of the ladies. 'You won't have to move around very much.'

  'And what happens to the air?' Edwin felt unreasonably sorry for it, imprisoned in that labyrinth. 'Can it be sucked out again?'

  'The air,' they said, 'will be absorbed.'

  He and the air were trolleyed back to the ward, where a conference of clinical sneerers was in progress. Lying still in his bed, Edwin listened to his own dressing-gowned neighbour and the two youths in pullovers who had come up from the medical ward, their speech impeded by the set eerie grimace they all shared.

  'I mean, if I saw you in the street, and we was both the way we are now, I'd think you was taking the mike out of me, wouldn't I?'

  'It might be the other way round, depending on who looks first.'

  'Dead sinister. Could make a packet in one of them horror films.'

  Suddenly Edwin had the sensation that his own face had twisted and fixed itself, compulsively, in an homme qui rit mask. He felt each cheek in turn with his left hand, then reached over to his locker for his shaving-mirror. The air in his skull and his head seemed to split. He lay back again, convincing himself that, if he were to speak, the same flat sneering vowels he now heard would be emitted from his own spread mouth. He said aloud, loudly:

  'Ye Old Tea Shop is a solecism. The "Y" is a mistake for the Anglo-Saxon letter called thorn, which stood for "TH".'

  The conference was silenced. The pullovered youths said they thought they'd better be going down to lunch. Edwin was aware of being watched narrowly by those nearest to him. Oh, well, if they thought he was mad---- Anyway, his mouth was still mobile, as capable of rounding as of spreading; at least he'd proved that.

  Another long yawn of a day, a huge mouth into which dull meals were thrown. At visiting-time a small man in an old baggy suit, cap and muffler, shambled in. He had a piece of paper in his hand. This he showed to an Italian ward-maid who was removing chrysanthemums. She pointed to Edwin's bed. 'Il dottore?' she said, without satire. The man, still capped, shambled over.

  'Told me to come 'ere,' he said, standing at ease. He was a youngish man, though lined, and his incisors and precanines seemed to have been yanked out as a single wedge. ''Er. She told me to come.'

  'It's very, very kind,' said Edwin.

  'Beat me at shove-ha'penny at dinner-time. Didn't think she'd beat me, I didn't, and I didn't 'ave the price of a pint on me. So couldn't buy her one. So she made me come 'ere instead.' He continued to stand at ease, but kept his eyes at attention. They were pale blue eyes and they looked fixedly at the blank wall opposite.

  'You needn't stay if you don't want to,' said Edwin.

  'Got to. It's only fair. She beat me at shove-ha'penny.' There was a lengthy pause. Edwin said:

  'What do they call you?' This, he was sure, was a man with no real name.

  ''Ippo.'

  'Hippo? Why do they call you that?'

  'That's what they call me. 'Ippo.'

  'It's quite a distinguished nickname really, I suppose. Have you ever heard of St Augustine of Hippo?'

  The man stood easy. He turned his eyes on Edwin with something like animation, saying: 'Funny you should say that. That was the school just round the corner from where we was. Sinter Gastin. We used to knock 'em about a bit comin' 'ome. Didn't stay there long, though.'

  'No?'

  'Up and down, we was, up and down for a long time. My old governor was very 'ard. Knocked 'ell out of us kids. So now I can't read nor write. Not proper.'

  'What do you do for a living?'

  'What comes in, you know. A bit 'ere and a bit there. Carryin' the boards about a bit just now. Advertisin'. One front, one back, as it might be a sandwich. Don't know what's written on them, though. Might be anything.'

  'Yes, I see what you mean.'

  'But that's the way it is.'

  'Of course.' There was another very long pause. Edwin said: 'I've had rather a tough day. I'd like to sleep. You can go now, if you want to.'

  'I'll stick it out.' He was grimly at ease again.

  'There's no need to if you don't wish.'

  'She said I'd got to.'

  'I see. But I'm going to try and sleep, just the same.' Edwin lay on his side, watching this conscientious little man through his eyelashes. But feigned sleep became real sleep: the dull headache was something to escape from. When he awoke all visitors had long since gone. He wondered what the time was and looked painfully towards the locker-top where he normally kept his wrist-watch. The watch was no longer there. Curious. He sat up and looked again. Really anxious, for this watch had been a present from Sheila, an expensive present too, he opened up the locker's two compartments. It was not easy to search through the jumble of towels and discarded dirty pyjamas while still in bed. Very gingerly, Edwin started to get out. The air bounced all over his brain and the pain hammered excr
uciatingly. On his knees, he searched both locker-compartments, searched beneath the locker, behind it. No watch. Well, serve her damn well right. It was her idea, wasn't it? - sending in the odd disreputable characters she met in the public bar, thieves, adulterers, possibly murderers too. The pain in his anxious head was now nearly insupportable. He was just dragging himself back to bed when Dr Railton came cheerfully in.

  'Good at disobeying orders, aren't you?' said Dr Railton. 'Sometimes I wonder how you managed to achieve the rank of doctor.' This was evidently, to this M.B., Ch.B., a sore point. 'It's a matter of elementary common sense, after all, to avoid pain if one possibly can.'

  'It was my watch, you see. I was looking for my watch.'

  'Never mind about your watch now. We've more serious things than watches to talk about. Perhaps we'd better have the bed-screens round.' He dragged the screaming curtains-on-wheels to the bed where Edwin now lay again, creating a sinister fragile little private room.

  'You're not going to do anything now, surely?' said Edwin.

  'Not now, no. I want to tell you about the results of the tests you've been having.'

  'Yes?'

  'There's something there all right. That's been amply confirmed. Now we know exactly where it is.'

  'But what is it?'

  'Never you mind what it is. It's something that shouldn't be there, that's all. That's all that you need to know. Something that will have to be removed.'

  'It's a tumour, I suppose,' said Edwin. 'That's what you told my wife, I suppose. You shouldn't try and entrust her with secrets. It's not fair. Why couldn't you tell me?'

  'Why upset you before it's absolutely necessary? Not that it's really anything to be upset about. The operation's a simple enough matter.'

  'Supposing it's malignant?'

  'I don't think it is that. You can never be sure, of course, but I don't think it is that. The layman,' said Dr Railton, depressing imaginary trumpet-valves on the bed-cover, 'the layman tends to get emotional about medical terms. Cancer, gastric, malignant. Just take it that there's something in your head which is doing you no good at all, and that something can be removed swiftly, simply and painlessly. I'm sorry,' said Dr Railton, 'that we had to burden your wife with our suspicions. She's a strongly emotional type. But there was the business of getting her permission to operate, if operating became necessary.'