The Doctor Is Sick

by Anthony Burgess

  After Lennie Bloggs had been screamed off, the main event of the evening was announced. 'The Bald Add Honest of Greater London,' said the compere. 'This competition has been organised by Megalopolitan Pictures Incorporated in connection with their film sensation Spindrift featuring Feodor Mintoff, baldheaded heartthrob of the silver screen, on general release next Monday.'

  'What is this?' said Edwin. 'What's going on? How did my name get into it?'

  'You get in vere and win,' said Harry Stone. 'Ve name's neiver 'ere nor vere. A cohen sidence, vat's all. You play your cards right and you'll win.'

  'But,' said Edwin, 'I thought you said that had all been fixed. I thought you said it had all been arranged.'

  'As good as,' said Harry Stone. 'Look at vem over yobs takin' part. Vey don't stand an earfly compared wiv you. You're 'andsome, you are. Look at vat 'ead. You 'ave confidence in vat 'ead and you'll win. Go on, now. Vey're all marchin' on.' And he gave Edwin a push stagewards.

  'Twisters,' said Edwin, 'a pair of twisters. I'm not going on.'

  'You're on, boy,' said Harry Stone. 'Bester lack.'

  Edwin found himself in a circle of baldheads, marching round the stage as at prison-yard exercise. The audience cheered. Television cameras were trained on them and, on a small monitor screen, Edwin saw himself in miniature trudging round and round looking angrily out at several million viewers. In the orchestra pit the jazz band was slowly surfacing on a hydraulic platform, playing an old music hall song called 'Hair, hair, hair, he's got none on his noddle'. The leading trumpeter looked suspiciously like Dr Railton. On stage, on a rostrum with a table and mark-sheets, sat three silly beauties of television fame. An even sillier man with a floppy evening tie ran on, acknowledging the cheers of the audience with extravagant waves. 'Sorry I'm late,' he said, speaking somewhat adenoidally, 'but I just got blocked in the passage.' The audience roared. 'I've just been out with a girl,' he said. 'She was a nun. Yes, a nun. She'd have nun of this and nun of that and nun of the other.' The audience collapsed. 'Some lovely bonces here tonight,' he said. 'Real skating-rinks for flies. Look at that,' he said, slapping Edwin's like a bottom. The audience nearly died. 'Now,' he said, 'march round, you lot. Here,' he said, 'we have three lovely pieces of homework who are going to judge - Ermine Elderley, Desiree Singe and Chloe Emsworth. First of all, we eliminate the duds. Right, girls? Write down the numbers that don't stand a chance. March, slaves, march. Music, maestro.' And he lashed the competitors with a whip of air, the while the band played and the audience cried its glee. Round and round shambled the bald. 'Stop!' yelled the flop-tied man. The silly pretty judges giggled and presented their consensus. 'Fall out the following,' he cried, in a mock sergeant-major's woof that had the audience helpless. 'For'y. Firty-free. Twenny-six. Noin'een. Twelf. Foive.' Off went the eliminated, hairless to no avail. 'And,' yelled the flop-tied man, 'WE SHAKE THE BAG. Too many still in,' he said, sad. 'A lot of zombies. March, clots, march. Lefrye lefrye lefrye.' He whipped the shambling circle again, the drummer adding the synchronised crack of a rim-shot. The audience wiped streaming eyes. At the next elimination the flop-tied man dismissed two little ducks, legs eleven, doctor's chum, Downing Street, Kelly's eye, and various others. Edwin was still in. 'It's in ve bleedin' bag,' called Harry Stone from the wings.

  The final elimination left Edwin and four others still circling on the stage. Now it was to be a matter of placing in bald merit order. The flop-tied man raced around as if ready to expire with excitement. The audience was ready to expire with joy. 'Here it is,' he cried. 'It's coming up now.' The melodic instruments ceased playing and only a drum rolled in slow crescendo. 'I can't see,' said the man, tottering round with a paper before his twitching eyes. 'Sure and it's a terrible thing for Oi'm bloind intoirely.' The audience micturated in mirth. 'Now,' he said in a cavalry officer's voice, 'it has all come cleah. And the winner is the winner is the winner is Numbahhhhh EIGHT.' In his excitement Harry Stone ran on to the stage and into the camera sights, trouserless. He ran off again. The band played 'Why was he born so beautiful?' with zest and some accuracy. Edwin was led downstage, linked by the flop-tie man.

  'What's your name, son?' he asked Edwin. 'What did your mother call you?' Edwin told him. 'Isn't that lovely?' the man told the audience. 'Doesn't he speak posh? Ever so soup-and-fish. Now have you, as Mr Bald Adonis of Greater London, any message for the great viewing public?'

  Edwin saw the first trumpeter, now clearly revealed as Dr Railton, leave the stand quickly and go off. 'I've nothing to say,' said Edwin, 'except that the sooner I get out of here the better.'

  'Oh, so that's the attitude, is it?' said the flop-tied man in mock indignity. 'What's the matter, I smell or something? Well, here's somebody you'll like, son. Isn't she lovely, eh?' On came a gold lame vision with nacreous shoulders, bosom, smile, to the noise of music, cheers and whistles. 'Here she is, your sweetheart and mine, if we were lucky, that is. RAYNE WATERS,' he announced. The audience went mad. Rayne Waters kissed Edwin's baldness then put her arm in his. Edwin saw a cheque in her slim flame-tipped fingers: for ten pounds only. Surely the Stone twins had insisted it was a hundred? Rayne Waters spoke in a mid-atlantic accent, cunningly designed to give no offence to Americans.

  'This must be a very big moment for you,' she said. Edwin was sure that he saw men in uniform in the wings, institutional men impossible to resist.

  'Not really,' said Edwin. 'I've known bigger moments, much bigger. As a matter of fact, I feel somewhat ashamed at having been a party to all this. So typical, isn't it, of what passes for entertainment nowadays? Vulgarity with a streak of cruelty and perhaps a faint tinge of the perversely erotic. Shop girls blown up into Helen of Troy. Silly little men trying to be funny. Stupid screaming kids. Adults who ought to know better. Here's my message to the great viewing public.' He leaned forward and spat full into the microphone a vulgar, cruel, erotic word. There was a sensation. History was made. Edwin ran to the prompt side wings and quite certainly found strong men, directed by Dr Railton, ready to take him. On the O.P. side were the Stone twins fighting ineffectually with other institutional toughs. 'You'll 'ave to make a bleedin' jump for it,' said Harry Stone. 'Give me vem bleedin' trousers back first.' Edwin ran back onstage, took a jump from behind the floats and landed on the musicians' hydraulic platform. Stands and music collapsed flutteringly and tinnily, and a piano-accordion played a dismal chord as it went over. Edwin leapt into the audience, hearing anger behind him and a dog's bark. The audience were frightened and held back their skirts as Edwin raced up the rake of the auditorium. But one member of the audience stopped him in his flight to say: 'May I just briefly express my entire agreement, sir, with what you said just then?' From the stage it seemed that a voice cried: 'Stop him. A danger to the public. A cerebral tumour. May run beserk at any time. Don't let him get away.' This encouraged the audience to give Edwin plenty of room for his escape. A woman screamed and shouted: 'Come over here, Alfie, stay with me, Alfie, it's a bogeyman, Alfie.'

  Edwin reached the top of the mild hill and looked down at the stage. He thought he heard Harry Stone's fighting voice above all others crying. 'Take vat in ve bleedin' cake-'ole.' Nigger was giving a growl preludial to trouser-ripping. There was a certain well-lighted confusion on the stage and somebody trying to apologise to the television audience. Edwin escaped through curtained EXIT and found himself in the vestibule among yearning cut-outs of film stars. He ran panting across the soft-footed carpeting, the colour of digestive biscuits, to the great glass doors and the street. A known voice greeted him.

  'Got a little bone to pick, haven't we?' said Bob Courage. 'You and me, eh? And perhaps the boys. Very annoyed they were about what you did. Come on, get in.' A cruel grip braceleted Edwin's right wrist, Bob administered a token backhanded slosh on the nose as an earnest of things to come, and then Edwin was shoved into the front seat, licking a spurt of nose blood.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  'This time,' said Bob, as they sidestreeted west, 'there's no s
moked salmon in the back of the car. This time there's nothing for you except what you've got coming. And have you got it coming? I'll say you've got it coming.'

  'It was your own fault,' said Edwin. 'That's what comes of being kinky.'

  'Don't try and annoy me,' said Bob, as comfortably glowing pubs flashed into the safe and happy past. 'Don't think you can make me stop the car to give you another one on the snout and then you nip out smartly. Oh, no.' They passed a building site with cranes dipping and hammers knocking at night work. 'Sold five kettles there,' said Bob with pride, 'only the other day.' He turned fiercely on Edwin. 'Don't think you can get round me that way, because you can't. I know you for what you are. You kicked my telly in. You threw my whips out of the flaming window. You pinched my money. But I'll have it all back, never fear, in one form or another.'

  'That was fake money,' said Edwin.

  'Oh, fake money was it?' said sarcastic Bob. 'Shows how much you know about it, doesn't it? Well, if you want to know the truth, only part of it was fake. The rest of it was real. You always mix up the bad and the good, the fake and the real, just like in real life. As it might be you. Because a fake is what you are. That's what you are, a fake. Just like some of those fives that you pinched.'

  'At least my eyes aren't crossed,' said Edwin.

  'Trying to be funny, eh?' said Bob. Trying to draw me out, eh? I know what you're referring to, never fear. You're referring to that bird with the helmet on pretending to be Rule Britannia. Well, he was very sensitive about that, him that did it. He was past his best, let's be honest, but there was nobody who could come in a mile of him once upon a time. Very funny,' sneered Bob. 'You know the truth about your eyes? They're false eyes, that's what they are. Just like that hair you had on. False eyes, pretending to be kinky, but no more kinky than my bottom. A deceiver, that's what you are. A snake in the grass. But you'll get what's coming to you, never fear.'

  'What are you going to do with me?' asked Edwin. He was indifferent, really, to the prospect of pain, having suffered an arteriogram and an inflation of the skull. But he was intrigued by the notion of a masochist devising as a punishment something that would hurt and, by solipsist logic, thus give pleasure.

  'I haven't quite made up my mind yet,' said Bob. 'But I'll think of something that the boys can do to you. Some real sort of torture that'll make you yell blue murder.'

  'So the boys are there, are they?' said Edwin. 'This is going to be fun.'

  Bob gave him a long sly sidelong look, driving with speed still down a back street free of traffic. 'That's where I think you're a liar,' he said. 'You won't think it's funny at all. You don't like that sort of thing. You're a pretender, that's what you are.'

  'How would it be,' asked Edwin, 'if I were to give you a good going-over, with whips and everything? Great big whip-lashes on your back, with the blood pouring out all over the floor and you howling for mercy. That would be lovely, wouldn't it? And it would be a real punishment for me, seeing that I'm not kinky.'

  'Don't,' said Bob, clenching his teeth and raising his shoulders in response to imaginary back-blows. 'Don't tempt me. You've got to have your punishment. That's only right and fair and just. You've got to suffer. Don't mention things like that,' he warned. 'It's not fair to try that on when I'm driving.'

  'Do you think,' asked Edwin, 'I could put my wig on? I feel very sensitive about this bald head, you know.'

  'And you'll feel sensitive somewhere else,' said Bob, 'before the boys have finished with you. Keep those hands down where I can see them. I'm not having any more funny business from you, not likely I'm not.' He drove on, breathing deeply. 'Jock's brought in a bloke who's kinky in a different way. He's going to burn all the hair off your legs with lighted matches. That gives him a thrill. Hard to understand, but it does. He came round to see me the other day,' said Bob, now as in amiable conversation, 'to see whether we could get together. Proper excited he was about these lighted matches.' Edwin knew that this was pure fiction, Bob trying pathetically to scare him. 'But,' said Bob, 'it's whips that appeal to me most, really. And you, you bastard,' he said nastily, 'threw them into the street. All those lovely whips, my collection, worth a fortune, and you chucked them into the street. Sheer wanton wickedness, that was.'

  'I take it you must have got them back,' said Edwin, 'or some of them. Otherwise how would you know I'd thrown them into the street?'

  'Mister Clever, eh?' said Bob. 'We saw through all your little game. A big pretender, you are, pretending about Perroni's mob and all. Because this is the season when Perroni's mob lays off for a time, Perroni being in the South of France. Didn't come off, that, did it? You trying to push the blame on to poor bloody Perroni. Not that I've got any time for Perroni, mind you. Real bastard, he is. But that's typical of the way your mind works.' He brooded over Edwin's iniquity. 'Had to walk round threatening all the kids of the neighbourhood to get those whips back. And they aren't all in yet. One kid threatened me back, just imagine. Said he'd whip me with one of my own whips, real hard. That put me in a very funny position, that did.'

  Bob now had to turn into a wide thoroughfare with shops and lights and people. Edwin could see him grow nervous, his gloved fingers twitching on the wheel. 'Bloody nuisance, this is,' he said. 'Traffic lights there, and wouldn't you just like to nip out of the car when they change. But I'm going to jump them. Untrustworthy you are,' he scolded, 'deceitful.'

  'Look,' said Edwin, 'whether you like it nor not, I'm going to put my wig on.' He whipped it from his chest, breaking off a shirt button in the process.

  'Oh, all right,' said Bob peevishly. 'Put it on if you want to. Had about enough of you, I have.'

  'Good heavens,' said Edwin reverently, looking hard across Bob at a shop window on the right-hand side of the street. He still held the wig in his hand. 'What a wonderful display over there. For Christmas, I suppose. All those whips.' Bob turned his head right, unable to resist, and Edwin clapped the wig on Bob's head. It was somewhat too large and came forward over his eyes. Bob cursed in surprise, took both hands off the wheel to tear the curls away, at the same time slamming both feet hard down. The car stopped, quite correctly, as the amber light came up. Edwin depressed the door catch and tumbled out on to the road. In two seconds he was on the pavement, using a fat walking couple (married, obviously; grown alike in fatness) as a shield. He made various Charlie Chaplin runs and checks, then, seeing a public lavatory ahead, rushed to it with thanks. He pelted down the steps into the echoing vault, saw grave men with both hands occupied at the urinals, the rows of penny-in-the-slot cabinets d'aisance. His haste and sudden cry of pain (not a bloody penny in his pocket) were not taken amiss in this place of public relief. If Bob should come skeltering down now----

  Edwin saw a man in a lounge suit and homburg, evening paper under his arm, taking change from his pocket and selecting a penny. As he inserted the coin in its metal bed and pulled at the opening knob, Edwin dashed across, said: 'Will explain,' then pushed the man in the cabinet, followed him, and clicked the bolt. Such places are not roomy. Edwin and the man stood as close as lovers, the man open-mouthed. 'I am surprised, Spindrift, really I am,' said the man, who having cleaned the first daub of shock from his face, stood revealed clearly as Mr Chasper. 'Couldn't it have waited till tomorrow morning at the office? I mean, there are certain places where a man has a right to be alone.'

  'I'm being chased,' said Edwin, 'being pursued by a madman.' That sounded ridiculous, but what else could he say?

  'It looks as though we're in the same boat,' said Chasper.

  'Hardly boat. I've been kidnapped,' said Edwin. 'I just escaped from his car.'

  'Yes,' said Chasper. 'Now if you'd be good enough to open that door and let me get out - I'm in rather a hurry, you see.'

  'You carry on,' said Edwin. 'I won't look.' Then he heard the thunder of a descent, Bob hurtling in late pursuit, then Bob calling: 'Where are you, you bastard? I know you're there somewhere.' He began banging on the lavatory doors in order. 'Speak,' wh
ispered Edwin to Chasper. 'Say something to him.'

  'Whatsh all thish here?' It was the voice, presumably, of the lavatory attendant, annoyed at the noise; it did the place no kind of good. 'Whatsh going on?' Edwin noted the wet palatalisation of both the alveolar fricative phonemes.

  'It's this man,' panted Bob. 'He got away. I know he's in here somewhere, the bastard.' He hammered at the door next to Chasper and Edwin. 'He's a bloody thief,' said Bob.

  'Thish izh a reshpectable plaish, thish izh,' said the attendant.

  'Come out of there,' called hammering Bob. 'I know you're in there.'

  'You wait your turn,' came the next-door voice, adding the bourdon of a blast of healthy excretion. Bob banged at the cabinet of Dr Spindrift. Mr Chasper called clearly:

  'Is it a bald man you're looking for, a man in a hurry?'

  'Yes, yes, yes----'

  'He came in and went out again. I saw him running.'

  'The bastard,' said Bob, and could be heard thundering out and back up the stairs.

  'Very bad-mannered,' said Chasper. 'Didn't even say thank you.' He sat, fully trousered, on the lavatory seat and looked up sternly at Edwin. 'You realise, of course, that, though I have no jurisdiction whatsoever over your private life, this sort of thing tends rather to let the side down. Do you spend your leisure time in Moulmein being chased into public lavatories?'

  'I'm very grateful,' said Edwin, 'for what you did then. I'm afraid all this adds up to rather a long story.'

  'That,' said seated Chasper, 'I can well believe.' Dreamily he said: 'Professor Harcourt, of sainted memory, was arrested in a public lavatory in Nottingham of all places. Showing photographs to people, would you believe it? Well,' he said, throned homburg-crowned, holding his newspaper sceptre, 'I'm glad we've had this little talk. You don't by any chance know what happened to my curly-brimmed bowler, do you?'

  'I wish I had it now,' said Edwin. 'It's terribly draughty up here.'

  'Well, do drop in again sometime,' said Chasper. 'I'm sorry I have to hurry you out like this, but I've some business to do, tolerably urgent. So glad to have been of use.'