The Parasite Person

by Celia Fremlin

  Nevertheless, something has grown between them, in the teeth of all expectation—and indeed all intention—to the contrary, and a point comes when both begin to realise, albeit below the level of consciousness, that they would be lost without each other. Their long-standing mutual hostility begins to seem like the one firm rock amid the turmoil of change that is breaking over both their heads. “At least she still hates me,” they can reassure themselves, “so I must be doing something right.”

  Thus it was not altogether surprising that Beatrice, in her indignation and bewilderment that morning, should turn to Helen to confide in—to have a row with—something. Of course, for decency’s sake, she pretended that she was startled and taken-aback that it should be Helen and not Martin who picked up the phone: but what else, actually, could she have expected at this hour? She’d been married to Martin, after all, for fourteen years, 365 mornings per year, plus three extra for leap-years.

  “That bloody girl!” she spluttered; and, “Speaking,” said Helen resignedly before she’d had time to think about it, and to realise that the remark, being in the third person, could not properly be referring to herself. “Sorry—I mean this is Helen. Did you want to speak to Martin? He’s still asleep, I’m afraid. He had rather a late night last night …”

  It was true. The strange, demonic energy which had had him in its grip when Helen had arrived home, had lasted all evening, and far into the night. For hours he’d crouched over the typewriter, tense and purposeful as an athlete on the starting-line, bashing at the keys with two fingers like one possessed, pausing only occasionally to dash off a few notes, huge dramatic scrawls from a thick felt pen, slanting across the page like streaks of black lightning. Then back to the typing again, the noise of the keys racing against some invisible clock inside his head, until Helen herself began to feel breathless, as if she had been running up hill all evening long. At one point, she’d thought he wasn’t even going to stop for the specially prepared dinner, and was torn between disappointment that she’d gone to all that trouble for nothing, and joy that his inspiration should have so completely taken over. In the end, he had knocked off for long enough to eat the meal, though he brought his papers to table and scarcely spoke to her while he ate.

  Helen was not affronted by this: it was wonderful. She could tell, too, by the way he forked it into his mouth, that he was, on some level, enjoying the food. In its small way, it was contributing to the ecstasies of creation, and Helen was proud and happy that this should be so.

  *

  Midnight. One o’clock. Two o’clock. In the end she had gone to bed without him, and had fallen asleep to the ongoing sound of the typewriter pounding triumphantly through the small hours.

  *

  “Can I give him a message?” she said to Beatrice, settling the receiver in her left hand and reaching for pencil and paper with her right. “I’d rather not wake him if you don’t mind, because you see …”

  “A message! Yes, you bloody can give him a message!” and Helen sat, pencil poised. “You can tell him, from me, that if he wants to make beastly disgusting unfair insinuations against me, he can bloody well make them himself, to my face, and not send that sneaky, two-faced lying little bitch to do his dirty work for him! I’ve had enough of her, tell him! That’s the second time! If she comes to the house again, tell him, she’ll get a jug of cold water in her face! I mean it! I’ve got it standing just inside the door, all ready …!”

  Helen’s brain was spinning. “Look, Beatrice, I’m sorry; I’m sorry you’re upset, but I don’t know what you’re talking about. What girl …?”

  “How do I know what girl? I don’t know anything about his girls any more, why should I, that’s your worry now, thank goodness, not mine! But when it comes to sending them round here, casting horrible aspersions, absolutely unjustified, not a word of truth in them …! ‘A Parasite Person’, that’s what she called me, if you please! A Parasite! Me. And it’s not even as if I was getting the bloody alimony yet, it may be months, my solicitor says! A Parasite, indeed! How would you like it, a sly, foul-mouthed little bitch hardly out of her teens standing there in your own drawing-room calling you names like that?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t,” said Helen reasonably. “I’d be very annoyed. I’d ask them what they meant by it—what it was all about? Look, Beatrice, she must have said something … Didn’t you even find out her name …?”

  “Oh, her name! And what’s the use of that, I’d like to know, when I’d never heard of her in my life before? Ruth, she called herself. Ruth-bloody-Leadswinger or something of the sort, in case that leaves you any the wiser, it doesn’t me …!”

  In Helen’s mind, everything suddenly clicked into place. The Ledbetter interview. Ruth Ledbetter, the girl Martin had interviewed in hospital after her suicide attempt. So that’s who it was who’d turned up so mysteriously in the middle of the night, and had seemed so mysteriously familiar. It was her style of speech that was familiar, not her person: all those slangy abbreviations and throwaway Americanisms that had been so wearisome to decipher and transcribe.

  So she’d visited Beatrice, too, uninvited? What was she up to? What was going on?

  “Look, Beatrice,” she was beginning; but suddenly the phone went dead. She had been cut off—or was it merely a fault on the line?

  Hastily dialling the once-forbidden number—it still felt peculiar, and rather wicked, like steaming-open a letter—Helen rang back; but it was no use, she just got the engaged signal.

  Perhaps Beatrice was ringing her back? Better give it a chance.

  Perhaps Beatrice, too, was giving it a chance? They could go on like this for ever. Helen shrugged, noted that it was by now well past eight, and hurried into the kitchen. If Martin wasn’t going to wake up before she left—and it looked as if he wasn’t—then there was still a chance of getting to school nice and early, like yesterday. Also like yesterday—it now occurred to her—she’d have yet another amusing anecdote to tell.

  The ex-wife’s irate phone-call. The identity of the mysterious midnight visitor. They’d love it.

  Indeed they did love it: and of course none of them—least of all Helen—had any idea of just how much these snippets of light entertainment were going to cost, and to whom.

  CHAPTER XV

  “THE RÔLE OF the Parasite Person in the Aetiology of Endogenous Depression” was his provisional title. It had come to him during yesterday’s unprecedented bout of galloping creation, and this morning, to his intense relief, it still looked good.

  This was not always the case, as he well remembered. Even in the old days, when his creative powers had seemed to be at their zenith, even then an idea that had seemed to be of world-shaking brilliance and originality in the small-hours would sometimes dwindle, under the harsh morning light, into a mere jumble of pretentious platitudes, leading nowhere. Remembering this, he had woken this morning in a sweat of terror lest just this should have happened now; that all those pages of typescript reeled off in the white-heat of inspiration, all evening and half the night, should prove to be just one more sleep-crazed delusion, destined, by daylight, for the dustbin. So great had been this fear that he had lain for more than an hour, eyes closed, imagining himself still asleep, imagining himself still dreaming, imagining himself suddenly dead of a heart-attack—anything to put off the moment of intolerable disillusionment which lurked—Did it? Didn’t it?—among that uncorrected, unexamined mound of typescript on his desk.

  He had heard the alarm clock go all right; had felt the soft creaking of Helen getting out of bed, trying not to wake him; had been aware of her soft, considerate drifts of movement around the flat as she got herself ready for work; and finally—what he’d been waiting for all along—he heard at last the careful closing of the front door that meant she had really gone.

  And only now, alone with his destiny, did he feel he had it in him to leave his bed and set off on the awful voyage of discovery into the sitting-room.

  *


  It was all right! It was all right! The briefest glance through last night’s outpourings showed him that his creative excitement had not, after all, been illusory. He was on to something, he really was; something new, and exciting, and wildly controversial, exactly as he’d always dreamed. And the title was perfect, couched as it was in acceptably scholarly form, and yet provoking curiosity far beyond the drily academic. The common reader—even the commonest of them—would surely find himself at least momentarily intrigued and titillated?

  Parasite Persons. The phrase had been Ruth’s in the first place, though it was not she who had thought it would make a good title. It didn’t, she pointed out thoughtfully, kinda grab you. Not unless you knew what parasites were.

  “Like, give the poor devil a break who designs the book-jacket,” she urged. “And the publicity stuff too, for the movie, you don’t want to forget that. It’s kinda not very photogenic, is it, a parasite? Not when you come to really think about it; how many legs it has, that sort of thing. Like, is it bug-eyed, tentacles, all that stuff? Or bi-focals and a stuffed shirt? See what I mean?”

  Martin saw. And what he saw thrilled him to the very marrow. Book-jackets! Film adaptations! This girl was thinking for him thoughts which he himself hadn’t dared to think in years! She moved among his most secret ambitions as if this was her native habitat, thus giving them a sort of substance, a legitimate place in the map of the future. It was wonderful. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before, and he found himself riveted by her every word.

  “How about Vampires Anonymous?” she suggested, as they sat drinking to the new venture in vodka, having missed their lunch. “Anyone can draw a vampire. You know. Fangs, and blood dripping from them, that kind of thing.”

  Was it the case that “anyone” could draw a vampire? Martin felt very sure that he himself couldn’t, he’d have no idea at all how to start. Did the thing have wings, and if so were they vaguely like a bat’s? And how did they fold up, straight down the sides, obscuring the arms, or crossed-over at the back, like a swift or a house-martin?

  Still, no point in accentuating the age-gap by admitting to such ignorance, so he gave a grunt of non-committal encouragement.

  “Vampires Anonymous by Martin Lockwood,” Ruth declaimed gleefully, downing the remains of her vodka. “How does that sound?”

  It sounded just fine: but not in the least like a PhD thesis by a respected lecturer in Social Psychology. There was no way Dr Frost was going to accept such a title, no matter how unexceptionable might be the material subsumed thereunder.

  And, of course, the material wasn’t going to be unexceptionable. That was the whole point of the thing. It wasn’t until Ruth had taken herself off, a little before four, that Martin, alone at last with his thoughts, began fully to realise the immensity of the thing that had happened; that within his grasp, at long last, was the new and revolutionary hypothesis for which he had so desperately been seeking. Vampires or Parasites—who cared? It was the idea that was going to count; the startling—and surely original?—idea that depression is not an illness at all, but a crime. A crime perpetrated by one person upon another from motives of personal gain. Like burglary. In fact, it was burglary, on the psycho-somatic level. It was theft, the appropriation by one person of another’s energy and joy in living, which the thief then stores away for his own use, leaving the victim an empty husk, a hollow ghost of a person, without joy, without zest, and incapable any longer of carrying on successfully either his work or his social life.

  “Show me a depressive,” Ruth had said, at some stage during the long, extraordinary afternoon, “and I’ll show you a Parasite Person. A buoyant, cheerful, outgoing type, with sympathy and kindness coming out of their ears, and devoting an amazing amount of time and trouble to ‘cheering up’ the poor bloody victim.

  “Wonderful, wonderful people, everyone’s going to say, so kind, so patient, falling over backwards to try and help the ungrateful depressive, pulling out all the stops—care, compassion, the lot. And all the while they are growing fat on the happiness and hope they are quietly draining out of their victim. You see them growing popular, successful, admired by tapping their victim’s zest and energy and enthusiasm, and diverting it into themselves. Like you could pipe-off someone’s water-supply from higher up the stream, and if it didn’t occur to them to go and look, they’d just think the stream had run dry.

  “That’s what they do think, most of them,” Ruth had continued. “They think they’ve run dry because their mothers didn’t breastfeed them, or because Vietnam was all their fault, or because they aren’t drinking skim-milk, or decaffeinated grape-juice, or some damnfool thing or other. And when that doesn’t work, they go running to a doctor, who’ll send them to a shrink, and he’ll give them some bottles of pills and a whole load of new things to think it’s because of.

  “And all the time, of course, they shouldn’t be going to the medical profession at all, they should be going to the police. Dialling 999. That sort of thing. That’s what you do when you find you’ve been robbed….”

  It was fascinating. Martin tried to visualise the reactions of a policeman to such a summons; or the girl on the end of 999 come to that. He had his notebook out by now, writing down the best bits, and wondering, with a peculiar, mounting excitement, what in the world he was going to do with them.

  Because it was all nonsense, obviously. The scientist in him was growing more and more queasy with every paragraph; and yet for some reason he was unable to think of any precise grounds for rejecting the whole thing out of hand. There was nothing you could pin down quantitatively of course, to prove or disprove such a theory, but that was often the case, it didn’t get you anywhere. Really, it was the general implausibility of the thing that condemned it, together with the impossibility of testing it. What sort of an experiment could you set up? Where would you find your controls? How define your Parasite Person to exclude ordinary, bona fide helpers and sympathisers?

  “There are no bona fide helpers and sympathisers,” Ruth countered dogmatically. “Anyone who voluntarily stays around a depressive is doing it for what he can get. Though of course he has to give something too, up to a point, just like a farmer has to feed his cows if he wants to get the milk and the lovely lovely meat, right?

  “It’s a con trick, you see, ladling out sympathy and patience like ladling pig-swill into the trough. Along comes the pig, squealing with joy and gratitude, but only because he’s never heard of bacon….”

  Some good quotes here, undoubtedly. Martin was getting it all down verbatim now, and thoroughly enjoying himself.

  But all the same, it would not do. No way.

  “The trouble is,” he said, “that intriguing though all this may be in theory, you haven’t got one scrap of evidence that anything of the sort actually happens. Nor do I see how you can get any. All right, so you might be able to show that many depressives—most of them, if you like do tend to have some character around who goes in for acting supportive, cheering them up, and so forth. Even going to extraordinary lengths to do so, like that Timberley couple—you’ve read that one, have you?” He gestured towards the pile of completed interviews through which, at his instigation, Ruth had been leafing.

  She looked up, suddenly alert, her whole body tense and eager, like a hound that has just picked up the scent.

  “The Timberleys! Now there you are! An archetypal example of just exactly what I’ve been saying! Here we have the greedy, hungry, compassionate old man living off his immobilised old wife like a tapeworm off its host! How cheerful he was, according to your record, how optimistic, in the face of his frightful situation! What a wonderful husband, the neighbours were no doubt saying. But didn’t it strike you to wonder how he could keep it up? Where it all came from, the stamina to actually enjoy his hideous life? It came from her, of course. Read through this stuff again, and you’ll see that it’s her energy, her cheerfulness that he’s living on, fastening himself on to her like a maggot on a piece of ro
tten meat. And everyone looking on, meantime, and saying how saintly he is!

  “Now, that would be a test case, Prof, if it’s tests you’re wanting. Listen: how about if I was to get Mr T. the Tapeworm out of that house for half a week, and how about if Mrs T. was to be on her feet by the end of that time, chatting with the neighbours, cleaning the place up, off to Bingo, that sort of thing? Would that count as evidence? Would it? Would it?”

  Against his better judgement, Martin was impressed.

  “If that were to happen, one would indeed begin to—but look, Ruth; it won’t do, it really won’t. Just one case can’t be cited as evidence of anything, no matter how remarkable it may be in itself. One would need a series of such cases, the whole thing carefully set-up, with proper controls. Otherwise—well, okay, you might get the odd case-history startling enough to impress the layman, but unless the numbers were large enough to be statistically significant….”