The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  He thought about it, and the more he thought about it the more delectable seemed the prospect of getting help—competent, professional help, not Walter’s reluctant and intermittent fumblings—with his frightful arrears of interviews. And not merely help; unless he had misunderstood her, she was proposing to take over the job completely, to do the whole lot of them herself, just like that. The very idea of it set his heart pounding with sheer, incredulous relief. To get the bloody things done, without having to bloody do them! It was like a dream come true.

  If only it did come true? If only there wasn’t some snag somewhere?

  He looked at his prospective assistant thoughtfully: at the pale, sharp features, the bright, calculating eyes.

  The hell with it! Of course she was calculating, and so, for that matter, was he: why else would he be looking her up and down like this, weighing up the advantages and possible disadvantages of employing her? Everyone calculates, applies the What’s-in-it-for-me test to any new project. They’d be fools not to, and the last thing he wanted was another fool on the job.

  Yes, he decided, she’d do. She had brains, she had determination, and above all she had the cheek of the devil, which, particularly in the case of depth-interviewing, is a qualification in itself.

  “What are your qualifications?” he asked. He didn’t want her to think it was a walkover, getting this job, though of course it was: at 80p an hour, how could it be otherwise? Nor did he want her to think he would take just anybody, though of course he would, that’s how he’d got Walter. But you don’t get that sort of bad luck twice in a lifetime, surely?

  “Qualifications? Oh, well, of course I haven’t got a degree or any of that crap,” she answered him, as if this was a recommendation in itself. Which of course it was, in a way: a graduate would kick up no end of tedious fuss about the pay scale. “Walter said it didn’t matter,” she continued. “He says he hasn’t got one, either.”

  Walter this. Walter that. Martin felt uneasy.

  “A friend of yours, is he?” he asked cautiously. He was wary of this sort of thing. He didn’t want the two of them getting together on the job, comparing notes, ganging up on him. It could easily happen.

  Her reply was reassuring.

  “What, a creep like that?” she exclaimed. “You’ve got to be joking!” and once again Martin’s heart warmed towards such perspicacity in one so young. “No,” she hastened to explain, “I only met him the once, and why I chatted him up, it was so’s he could fill me in about the job. You know; what it was like, kind of thing. What you were like. To work for, I mean.” She paused. “He said you were okay,” she concluded, tolerantly, “except when you were in one of your moods.”

  In one of my moods! Martin almost choked with fury.

  “What Mr Cummings is pleased to describe as ‘one of my moods’,” he explained coldly, “refer without exception to those numerous occasions when he has let me down without warning and for reasons so trivial as to be nothing short of downright insolence. Now I hope, Ruth, that if we do decide to take you on, you’ll put your back into the work, make a decent job of it. I can’t afford to have another assistant mucking me about, missing appointments, upsetting my schedules. I hope that’s understood? If you do a job for me, you’ll do it well and thoroughly? Right?”

  “Oh yes. I’ll do it well and thoroughly, all right,” she assured him; and for a moment it seemed to Martin that she was making the words sound like some kind of a threat: but of course that was ridiculous. “So don’t worry about that, Mr Lockwood. There’s just one more thing, though—”

  He was waiting for this. For some minutes now Martin had been turning over in his mind how to break it to her about the 80p an hour. Not that this was the way the Grants people put the case to aspiring employees: £3.00 per interview was the figure they quoted, with little congratulatory squeals for the lucky applicant about to lay his hands on such loot. But 80p an hour was what it actually came to, by the time you’d telephoned your subject to fix an appointment, had found your way to his address at No. 144 on some God-forsaken Council Estate, with all the doorways labelled 1–11, and then waited around until he came back from the doctor’s, the dry-cleaners, the betting-shop; and then, on top of all that, actually getting the interview, typing it out when you got home, pages of it, sometimes, half of it illegible and having to be filled in out of your own head….

  How to present all this enticingly, that was the problem. Martin decided on the detached, breezy approach. If all else failed, he could top-up the meagre pittance from his own pocket: it would be uneconomic, but worth it, in the way that champagne is uneconomic but worth it, or a weekend in a five-star hotel.

  “About money,” he began, “I have to warn you, Ruth, that the rates we can afford to pay—that the Grants Committee can afford to pay, that is, it’s not really anything to do with me—”

  She interrupted him.

  “Who said anything about paying? I don’t want any pay. I’ll get you your interviews for nothing.”

  In a way, it was wonderful. In a way, it solved everything, particularly the problem of how the Grants people would view the prospect of allotting him a second assistant. “But you’ve got Walter Cummings already,” they’d say, looking it up in their filing system under C. And if he suggested scrapping Walter and replacing him by this obviously more efficient young woman, their eyes would widen reproachfully. “But don’t you realise, Mr Lockwood, that Walter comes from a Broken Home!” they’d say, in hushed voices, as if he’d switched on an electric razor in church: and if (as had once happened) he allowed himself to retort that he wasn’t surprised, Walter was enough to break any home, they’d gasp in horror, as if he were Grippen himself, and he would practically hear his prospects of promotion clanging yet another notch or two downwards.

  So Ruth Ledbetter’s unprecedented quixotry was in one way a godsend. In another, it was slightly unnerving.

  If she wasn’t in it for the money, then what was she in it for?

  “I’m just interested,” she explained smugly. “Any objections?”

  Lots: but Martin couldn’t think how to put them into words. What they added up to was a profound and all-embracing mistrust of people who act from motives other than those of self-interest. Such people weren’t playing fair, it always seemed to Martin, and dealing with them was like playing chess according to a revised set of rules known only to your opponent: defeat is certain. Unselfish people are frightening, he felt, in the same way that lunatics are frightening; you never know what they may do next.

  On the other hand, this Ruth Ledbetter didn’t look like an unselfish person. The narrowed eyes, watching him, were shrewd and sharp; the small mouth had a greedy look about it, which Martin found obscurely reassuring. You just couldn’t imagine this girl doing good for its own sake, though of course good of a sort, for somebody—maybe for Martin Lockwood?—might easily emerge as a by-product of her activities. Thus might a famous surgeon cure people of their cancers, not in order to cure them of their cancers but in order to become a famous surgeon.

  But who cares? Certainly not the lucky patients.

  “I think we are going to make a good team, Ruth,” he said carefully, “I think we are going to understand one another. Now, come over here, and let me explain to you exactly what it is I am trying to do.”

  CHAPTER XIII

  “A BIT SHORT on plot, aren’t you?” she commented, slapping Section III down on top of the pile. “When’s something going to happen?” and then she listened attentively, just as if she hadn’t known she was talking rubbish, while he explained that this wasn’t a work of fiction, but a factual scientific study.

  “You could have fooled me,” she remarked, and then: “I thought fact was supposed to be stranger than fiction? How come your facts aren’t? Where do you find such boring facts, anyway? D’you advertise, or something?—‘Boring Facts Wanted for Academic Do-Or-Die Sale. Outworn Ideas and Second-Hand Theories of All Kinds, for Sale or Exchange. Jargon, P
latitudes, and Miscellaneous Gobbledygook for Fancy-That Stall …’”

  “Look, Ruth, it’s all very well to laugh. You don’t seem to understand at all the way a research project like this has to be mounted. You see—”

  “Sorry, Prof! I’m kinda fooling. Like, you drive me to it some way, did you know that? Thing is, I’m an academic really, just like you, and I can’t stand to see a good subject go to waste. Depression is a good subject. A bloody good subject. Real sick. But the way you handle it, it’s like the Bluebeard story if she hadn’t got around to unlocking the forbidden door. Just, he came home and said ‘There’s a good girl, I knew I could rely on you,’ and they’d sat down to supper and lived happily ever after.

  “You see, Prof, I know about depression. Like, I was the one who unlocked the door and was there waiting when Bluebeard got home. I tell you, Prof—Oh, shit!”

  The sound of the telephone startled Martin, too, but Ruth was on her feet first, and rushing across the room. She snatched up the receiver, and a few seconds later laid it down, gently.

  “A wrong number,” she reported off-handedly, coming back to her seat; and Martin didn’t argue. In a way, he wished everyone would handle telephone calls this way. It would add years to one’s life.

  “Bluebeard?” he prompted her, as she settled back in the big chair, legs tucked beneath her. “You were talking about Bluebeard.” He didn’t want her to lose the thread just when it was beginning to get interesting. His mid-morning boredom had shrunk to a tiny dot, on the very edge of consciousness, and he wanted it to stay that way. “About opening the door into the closet,” he continued, “or the attic, or whatever the hell it was …?”

  Irritatingly, Ruth shook her head.

  “You should have listened to me last night,” she reminded him smugly; and though Martin felt damn sure that she hadn’t said anything about Bluebeard last night—it would have roused him, surely, if she’d used a bit of vocabulary that much off the beaten track?—he let it pass.

  Besides, she was obviously dying to tell him. A moment later she was talking again.

  “You poor sods with your degrees,” she said. “You’ve blinded yourselves with print so’s you can’t see people any more at all. Instead of faces, you just see long words sprouting above their collars. You talk to me about facts, but actually you aren’t seeing any facts at all, just print and typing paper and carbon. I’ll tell you something, Prof. The facts about depression are stranger than fiction. One hell of a lot stranger. If you looked, like I’ve looked, then you’d see what I see. And then you’d have a thesis to write, by God you would! Bluebeard wouldn’t be in it, nor Dracula either. Well, yes, perhaps Dracula. We’ll make an exception of Dracula, right? You’d see why if you’d listened to what I told you last night. About my mother. Remember what I said about my mother?”

  Her mother … her mother. She had said something … but then they all said things about their mothers, the same things, over and over, how could he be expected to distinguish one mother from another? Too protective … too indifferent. Too strict … too permissive. Too loving … too unloving. Too sluttish … too houseproud. By now, Martin had an actual picture in his mind of this composite creature, this amalgam of imcompatible qualities: a large, amorphous oblong, slow-moving and vaguely transparent, somewhat like a jelly-fish in texture, you could prod it into any shape you liked with the ball of your thumb.

  “Your mother. Ah, yes,” he said. “She took away your confidence, wasn’t that it?” Surely he was on pretty safe ground here?

  “No, she did not!” Ruth retorted sharply. “You’ve got it all wrong. I took away her confidence. And you know how I did it? I used to give her depressions. Like you might give someone an injection of paraldehyde. Right?”

  Right. That it could hardly be. Wrong, surely, by any ordinary standards? Or maybe she was just pulling his leg? But right, no.

  Still, he didn’t want to slap her down as she deserved, not yet, anyway. The bizarre interchange was really doing him good, he hadn’t felt as well as this in months. Maybe the human intellect needs a certain amount of nonsense, like roughage, to render the slabs of hard, established fact digestible?

  Hoping for further mild shock-therapy, Martin played her along, as in a depth-interview.

  “Your mother,” he repeated. “You used to give her depressions.” He kept his voice carefully non-judgemental, in the approved manner. “Now, why did you do that?”

  “Why? To punish her, of course,” said Ruth. “I’d have thought that was obvious.”

  “Ah. Yes. To punish her.” Martin paused, radiating non-surprise at the top of his bent. “Punish her for what?” He made the question sound casual, an afterthought.

  “For what? For being my mother, of course!” Ruth snapped. “What more do you need?” and while Martin was thinking out a suitably non-judgemental answer to this one, Ruth forestalled him with a further question:

  “Aren’t you going to ask me how I did it?” she demanded, in a slightly aggrieved voice, as if he had omitted some essential courtesy, like saying “Please”, or “Thank you”. ‘Go on, ask me how I did it!” and without waiting for him to comply, she continued:

  “The first time I did it, it was kind of an accident, like that bloke in history, or is it literature, who invented roast pork by burning a house down with a pig inside. That’s how it was for me the first time, but after a bit I found it didn’t have to be such a big deal. I found I’d kinda learned the knack; you do, you know, like with killing a chicken, you don’t need to use much force at all, just the right kind of flick of the wrist. I could put her in a depression just whenever I liked. She couldn’t make it out at first, what was happening, because I was being ever such a good daughter to her at that point; but after a while the penny dropped, and she got real scared of having me around. It got so she wouldn’t let me into the house; changed the locks, all that jazz, but it didn’t matter because by that time I’d found I could do it from a distance just as easily. Tele-damage, you might say. Like I’d got her wavelength kind of thing, I could tap her from anywhere….

  “It’s a sort of faith-healing in reverse, you see. The laying-on of hands. At first, you actually do have to lay your hands on the person, that’s why she thought what a loving daughter I’d turned into, hugging and stroking her; but after a bit they get kind of sensitised to you, and you can do it to them even down the telephone.

  “Look, Prof, do me a favour. Take that look off your face. Faith-healing’s respectable these days, hadn’t you noticed? It’s in the learned journals as well as on telly, the Russians are into it too, it’s a military thing over there, and so it’s got to be serious, right? Even the medicos are falling over themselves to believe in it. They have faith-healers on the wards of the big teaching hospitals like mascots, to prove how up-to-the-minute they are. Remember that comparative study reported in the British Medical News where they measured the rate of healing of fractures when …”

  “Of course I remember,” snapped Martin, meaning not that he remembered (how should he?) but that he could well believe it, you could get away with anything these days provided only that you could somehow get in with the editors of the relevant journal. “But I don’t see,” he objected, “how this has got anything to do with my survey? It’s depression I’m working on. Not fractures.”

  “‘Not fractures’.” She mimicked his dismissive tone. “Nor hernias either. Nor detached retinas. Okay? It’s the principle of the thing I’m trying to explain to you, Prof. Like I was trying to explain it to you last night.”

  She giggled. “It was ‘sleep-deprivation’ prevented you listening to me that time. And so what is it that’s preventing you now? Like, isn’t there any time in the twenty-four hours when you’re capable of giving your mind to anything?”

  Wasn’t there? The question didn’t bear thinking about.

  “Go on,” he said, grudgingly: and on, almost too fluently, she went.

  And on, and on. She was loving it; and so,
to his growing amazement was he. Lunch was forgotten, and though it was nearly four o’clock before she finally left, he found himself actually sorry to see her go.

  This was a new experience to him. He couldn’t remember, ever before, having felt other than pleased—nay, delighted—to see a visitor go, even after an hour or so; and this had been five hours, at least.

  Something cataclysmic had happened to him, the implications of which he was only now beginning, dimly, to comprehend.

  *

  And so it came about that when Helen arrived home an hour or so later, she found her lover not merely not in a coma or dead, as the staffroom speculations might have led one to suppose, but pounding away at the typewriter in such a trance of inspiration as she had never before witnessed, and had scarcely dared to hope for. She had heard the muted thunder of it while still coming up the stairs, but had not believed her ears. Entering the flat, and finding her wildest hopes confirmed, her first thought was to avoid interrupting him, and she had tiptoed reverently past the open sitting-room door, almost choked with relief and with joy that somehow, from somewhere, he had found the inspiration so long and so desperately sought.

  What could she cook that might worthily celebrate this miraculous turn of events? All her weariness gone, her feet no longer aching as they skimmed back and forth across the kitchen lino, Helen’s mind was in a turmoil of love, and pride, and special white-wine sauces, and she knew, as one sometimes does, that this was an evening she would remember for the rest of her days.

  CHAPTER XIV

  THE FIRST INKLING Helen had that something other than spontaneous inspiration was at the back of Martin’s extraordinary transformation was when Beatrice phoned, early the next morning. Like most Other Women and the corresponding wives, Helen and Beatrice had started off with the tacit determination to cut one another dead on all occasions. This always looks, on the face of it, to be far the most dignified course, as well as the least painful all round: but in the event it nearly always turns out to be sadly impractical. Sooner or later the warring pair are forced into communication, if only to determine the whereabouts of the loved one’s thick pullover, or to attempt to shuffle off responsibility for housing his six-foot-high steel filing cabinet among the knick-knacks in the sitting-room. Mostly, this sort of thing can be debated over the telephone, icily, and with due regard to the current state of hostilities; but sooner or later the time comes when a face-to-face confrontation becomes unavoidable, and the two are compelled to meet. This first meeting is usually embarked on with the avowed intention of quarrelling; but all too easily this initial determination slides over almost imperceptibly into mutual condolences about the by-now evident shortcomings of their shared mate, and an uneasy kind of rapport can spring up which it is impossible to categorise. You can’t call it friendship when the participants are so evidently enemies, and when the only reason they have made contact at all is on account of the harm they are doing each other, and will continue to do.