As Simple As Hunger

by D Des Anges

  The sign by his rooms had been both replaced and covered with a sheet of glass, screwed into a new wooden frame with four brass screws, and perhaps in retaliation for having to afford the School of Non-Occult Medicine this much respect, the sign-writer had taken pains to misspell their names. Even Rill was rendered as ‘Ryll’.

  The door was still barricaded, and Benjon had to lean with all his lacking weight on the panels until the stacks of journals gave enough to admit his ribcage, swaddled in his coat as it was.

  “Mind your scarf,” Katherine reminded him, from Rill’s desk. She had commandeered (it was the word she used to cover both borrowing and stealing) Rill’s compound Wireless receiver, and pulled it into position for reception. “Phew. You reek of vinegar, Silverstein. What have you been pickling?”

  “Labial musculature,” Benjon said, electrified and quite ready to share his new passion. “The complexity of movement of the tongue, also is rooted in –”

  “Not so soon after lunch, thanks,” Katherine warned, stooping to push pins through contact points within the receiver’s wood-sided body, her thick and tangled flaxen hair falling in the way.

  “We have a new sign,” Benjon groped for a new topic, frozen in place by her position on the wrong side of the room.

  “I saw. I am now Doctor Katherine Marshall Waremansdogger, which is Willets. I’d put my five down on it, but Rill beat me to that.”

  “Why is the uh, the—”

  “Interrogation broadcast in two hours, with a ten minute plus/minus margin of error,” Katherine said with unnerving eagerness, “and Rill’s receiver takes an age to warm up.”

  “Will it be very loud?” Benjon asked, still buffeted by the change in role in the room and already dreading the high-pitched screams and squeaks that accompanied the questions in these broadcasts. “I have to make account of my discoveries and failures to the Dean by next week and I have yet to start –”

  Katherine snorted and did not answer, hunching again to insert another set of pins across further contact points. It was evident Rill had been tampering with his receiver in the hope of greater levels, for as Benjon recalled they rarely required such extensive calibration before reception.

  She had, Benjon recalled too late (it having been so long since the last interrogation broadcast) an unpleasant fervour for this particular facet of patriotism which he felt fell out of favour with the rest of her manifestly sensible nature. When he had put it to Hajar, she had simply said she thought Katherine’s hair looked stupid and that people were complex.

  “Will you at least give me warning when it’s to come on?” Benjon whined, and heard himself whine, and was disgusted. The building would almost certainly come alive with students and staff scurrying to their receivers like street merchants to a flogging (he bit down on his tongue) when the broadcast was to begin. He would be warned.

  “Really, Silverstein,” Katherine sighed, as she sat back from the receiver and angled the wooden top back into place with one finger, “I am always surprised that no one has called you to confess your allegiances, you have all the makings of a traitor.”

  Benjon stiffened, but Katherine had the tone of voice he knew now as not serious, and only a short moment of his heart pounding like a distressed bird against the bars of his ribcage ensued.

  “I don’t care for the bloody bugs one way or another,” he said, as archly as he could, and he meant it. “I dislike the noise.”

  * * *

  In his second visit to Edinburgh of the month the skies were a little more welcoming, and although the hill path to Albion Broadcasting was as gruelling a climb as ever, there was no such stringent arrival time required of him, and the cobbles were dry. Benjon plugged away up the rise without pausing, and reached the summit with weak and wobbling legs accompanied by an unjustified but palpable sense of pride.

  He had, on this occasion, remembered to bring his letter of invitation, and so of course, on this occasion, the Broadcasting porters (two of them, this time) sat out in the unseasonable dry, drinking tea from varnished wooden cups and discussing something impenetrable in low voices. They barely looked at him as he stumbled through the entrance, and paid no mind to his ownership or not of anything as trifling as a letter of invitation.

  Inside the waiting room once more, Benjon had opportunity to study the painting. It was brightly-coloured and, in the manner of satires, hardly anatomically correct, but to Benjon’s untrained eye it seemed lively and good-humoured, for all that it walked a fine line between acceptable fun and a visit to the Magister of Edinburgh. It was a line which he had overshot more than once.

  He startled back away from the painting when footsteps approached, but their owner seemed unaggressive: a tall, thin-faced man with an embarrassment of eyebrows even thicker than Benjon’s, his manner easy and loose in a way that Benjon’s never was.

  “Waiting for someone in particular?” the tall man asked in what Benjon assumed was a friendly voice. He had an accent.

  Mindful of the dual nature of his visit, Benjon said, “Ferdinand,” rather than ‘Greytooth’. The Overseer of Pilbrook’s broadcast brawling would doubtless be unreachable for hours, the stooped old man stubbornly took great joy in bending the passage of others’ time to suit himself. Since Benjon had first begun to come to Albion Broadcasting, he had never once seen Overseer Greytooth arrive at the time he had set for his underlings and guests, a trick at which the Arch Chancellor of the University also excelled.

  To his surprise the tall man’s face divided in a wide smile, and understanding came to his eyes. “He’s probably in the back rooms. I’ll find him for you – I’d take you down there, but there are rules and no one wants any more electrocutions.”

  Benjon could not tell one way or another whether this new individual was making a joke, but he had acquired from the halls of the dead a cadaver who had perished with electricity and the damage to his internal organs had been confounding and substantial. There was no desire in his heart for such an end. His cadaver had been singed on the inside.

  “Just a moment,” the tall man said, dashing away down a corridor with a kind of childlike eagerness which Benjon found perplexing and inimitable.

  Outside, a loud growl from the skies indicated that the storm was about to break, and Benjon thought with unease of the walk back to the station, of the thick black glue of soot and rain that would build on his scalp and coat, and of the cold rooms of his house. It was not practical to heat them, the cadavers decomposed too quickly as it was, but to stand in them wet and tired was to invite illnesses he could not afford.

  “Hah, barely a second,” the tall man said triumphantly, returning and cutting through Benjon’s thoughts without greeting. “He’s just coming. Wasn’t near the transmitters at all. Fortunate for you – sorry, must go – will try to get coffee sent to you, Goodman—?”

  “Silverstein,” Benjon said automatically, “Gooddoctor.”

  “Oh,” the tall man said in a less friendly voice. “Oh well.”

  And with this, he loped away through one of the many doors, vanishing into the cogwork of the broadcast machine.

  Benjon had only a moment to spare on the incoming rain when the doors nearest opened a crack and the Moor he had met when he came to argue against the Wiltshirist stuck his hand through the gap in greeting.

  “Er,” said Benjon, wishing very much that he would avoid shaking it. He made an awkward bow in the hope of placating the needs of manners, but Ferdinand seized him by the wrist and pulled him through the narrow gap bodily. Every nerve of Benjon’s skin set up a complaint that made his ears sing, but as soon as he was through the door Ferdinand released him.

  “The door’s heavy,” Ferdinand explained. “Thank you, Gooddoctor Silverstein, I didn’t say. Thank you.”

  Benjon said nothing, and followed Ferdinand through the exhaustive labyrinth of corridors within the keep.

  “If you can suggest a cure,” Ferdinand went on, in a low and urgent voice, “I would be more gratefu
l than you can imagine. I will pay… anything you ask. I am not poor. ”

  Realising that he would never have a better opportunity, Benjon said, “I had something other than money in mind.” It was only when Ferdinand gave him a sharp look that he knew the phrase might be received very differently to the way it was intended. “I meant, I mean, I meant, it would be better to… a favour, not coin.”

  “What kind of favour?” Ferdinand asked, not relaxing at all. He really was very large, and the tension between them made Benjon so uneasy that he very nearly forgot the thread of his supposed subterfuge. Doors passed them by as the maze swallowed Benjon and his Moorish guide more deeply.

  “I had hoped to ask it of Hugo—”

  “Difficult,” Ferdinand said, slowing his pace. “Getting him to agree to anything is like wrestling with an eel even when he’s, well, himself.”

  “I thought you were his –” Benjon began, stumbling over the word which Hajar had assigned without qualm or quailing.

  “Shh,” Ferdinand said, reaching across the corridor to open one of the many doors. “Even for me. He’s a stubborn old bugger.”

  Benjon concentrated on not choking at the word ‘bugger’ thrown about with such coolness in the vicinity of the truth, and ducked into the room after Ferdinand.

  Ferdinand offered no explanation as to the room’s common use, and Benjon requested none. In the centre of it stood Hugo Waldren, who now seemed ill-at-ease and overwarm, although the latter might have been only the effects of the many lights.

  Benjon ran a professional eye over the Wireless Celebrated, the great satirist and genteel buffoon of, among other things, the wildly popular What’s My Purpose?. There was no lividity, no sign of scratching, no gaseous distending, no puffiness aside from age, no lankness, no peculiarities in posture which might suggest some underlying derangement of the body. He could see no unnatural hue in the eyeball, no crusts around the nose or mouth, and all told Hugo Waldren seemed to be exceptionally hale for a man of his years.

  “You are making a lot of fuss about nothing,” Hugo Waldren said, directing the remark to Ferdinand, as if he had not one single care on his mind. “I am at the height of virility, the pinnacle of health. Could give a ride to a cow.”

  “Hugo, please,” Ferdinand said.

  Benjon had, in his preference for avoiding all contact with living skin, long since perfected the science of discerning symptoms from a thorough examination with the eye, and thus far Hugo Waldren was as he said, in rude good health. But Benjon thought he could see something in Ferdinand’s assessment now, something in the vein of being not quite right. If Ferdinand, who no doubt knew Hugo Waldren – Benjon took a deep breath – intimately, could not discern quite the nature of this aberration, then Benjon, whose instincts were as vague as dispersing mist, was baffled.

  “Do you sleep well?” Benjon asked, beginning his litany of usual questions with the intent of circling around until something resembling a true symptom could be lit upon.

  “Yes,” Hugo Waldren said happily.

  Ferdinand muttered: “He does not sleep now.”

  Benjon frowned and pulled at his lips thoughtfully. “Is your hunger increased? Has it shrunk?”

  “I eat quite normally,” Hugo Waldren assured him, with a kind of affable smile that took everyone within range into its arms and declared them brothers.

  “He gorges himself,” Ferdinand said in the same low, worried rumble.

  “Is there fever?” Benjon asked, peering at Hugo Waldren’s sea-coloured eyes with the glint of mania or the dullness of fever in his mind: neither were present, but he felt as if what looked back at him were unusual.

  The question fell toward Hugo Waldren, but he addressed himself to Ferdinand, and it was Ferdinand who replied first.

  “There is no fever, no sweats, no bleeds,” he said, wary-seeming.

  “Is there any symptom I might not discern through looking?” Benjon asked, eager to keep his hands to himself and not find himself squeezing segments of a Wireless Celebrated’s abdomen, however much his colleagues might envy him if they knew.

  There was hesitant inhalation, and Ferdinand said with awkward inflection, “His … carnality … is unusually diminished,” as one who is not used to using such terms.

  Benjon decided that his next coffee would contain a second dose of bromine and nausea would be a small price to pay for the freedom from urges.

  “He doesn’t fuck anymore,” Ferdinand added, as though Benjon’s silence were the product of misunderstanding.

  Benjon did not succeed in suppressing his grimace, and Hugo Waldren said, “Ferdinand,” in a reproachful voice.

  There was a silence as awkward as any that Benjon had found himself in for some time, and Hugo Waldren smiled vaguely at them both. He seemed to be treating the enterprise as some sort of game, and was not as offended or cautious as Benjon might have expected. There were no pointed looks cast at Ferdinand, no guarded remarks, only this happy acquiescence and, if Ferdinand’s interjections were to be believed, untruths.

  “We must continue this later,” Hugo Waldren said abruptly, stepping around them both as if they were furniture, “I will be needed in a moment.”

  And Hugo Waldren left the small, overheated room so suddenly that Benjon was unable to ask his unearned favour or make any of the subtle threats with which Hajar had primed him; he merely stood with his tongue off-guard and his arms limp, alone in the white room, with Ferdinand.

  “He’s not needed anywhere,” Ferdinand said under his breath. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him but this is giving me the shits. This is not at all right.”

  * * *

  Benjon’s negotiation with Greytooth was as it ever was: Greytooth was late, without apology, and blustered and smiled and called Benjon a rotten prick, and suggested that while he, Greytooth, had no great love of hearing Mabeline Pilbrook in distress, he had even less love of hearing one half of his debate sit almost mute and repeat one line as if he had it tattooed on the inner side of his eyelids or tied to his tongue. Greytooth contrived to imply that he would find some way to have Benjon flogged a third time if he didn’t somehow find the line between ‘dull’ and ‘breaking the law’ and walk it as did Hugo Waldren’s painting.

  On the train home, damp and sooty, Benjon reflected that he at least knew why this risky painting was so displayed, although his mind was still on his failure to implement Hajar’s blackmail plan. Perhaps Hugo Waldren had been in earnest about continuing the examination later. Perhaps there was still time, and the situation could be improved.

  He was still pondering this when he skidded down the final four steps of the great stone staircase at Durham station, in the dark, and bruised his coccyx. After this undignified descent, he fixed his thoughts to the dangerous business of finding his way home, and therein to the pressing matter of finding clothes which had not been subject to the abuses of the weather and the railway.

  Some hours later, when he was dry and filled his empty stomach with hot coffee with rather less care than he’d shown in finding his way home, the examination had all but slipped from his mind. The preservation of a fresh lateral half of a lower jaw and associated muscle structure was time-consuming and not the centre of his skills, and Benjon had already made an unforgiveable mess of the right half.

  He was pulled from his labours and the ever-present swarm of flies by a thunderous pounding on the door.

  Benjon kept hours of the clock that disagreed with those of most rational men – according to the men who classified themselves as rational – which led those finding themselves alone in those hours to very occasionally call upon him to steal his coffee. They rarely stayed: the stench of rotting bodies and vinegar were cited, though he was oblivious to any such discomfort.

  Benjon laid down his instruments and made an unhurried feint for the door. Sometimes if he was slow coming, they went away, assuming he had succumbed at last to sleep.

  But the pounding continued, neither more nor less
insistent, and Benjon picked his way through his abundant equipment and rotting samples.

  He cared little for his appearance: it was the middle of the night, anyone calling on him now got what they deserved. Benjon wiped his hands on the front of his shirt all the same, smearing bloody vinegar across the linen.

  When he hauled the door open with a tut of impatience, he was expecting either a drunk Wulf or a very drunk Edith, trying to attain sobriety for their separate reasons: he had not the imagination to consider for a single second before his eyes adjusted to the dark that the figure he would confront on his doorstep was Hugo Waldren.

  Chapter 3

  The waves around the Mitarbeitertransport were choppy and dark, but small enough to allow the little boat passage; as the Winterzeitwinde took rare recess to let thirteen variously seasick oilmen return to the rig with supplies, non-essential communications (messages for anyone not Super Rachelsson) and the pox.

  Aberdeen was rife with the pox, because of the oilmen, but they never laid the blame with their fellows, only (loudly and often) the women through whom they shared their welts and emissions. The Prefect of Aberdeenshire had long since given up outlawing whoring as more futile than turning back the waves.

  John Lancaster had drawn the short straw for seats, and was packed like baggage into a space so little wider than his pelvis that his greased canvas suit alone would have dug into his hips even before it was necessarily insulated with wool.

  The Mitarbeitertransport plunged and reared, and John, wedged tightly into his mean seat, was the only man who did not reach for his neighbour or stanchions to keep his place. Machellsen retched, to the cries of those nearest him, but did not vomit.

  It was often that shore leave for the oilmen did more harm than a sixmonth on the rig in gales, deafening themselves with machines, but John struggled only with anticipation when ashore, watching the few birds visible from his grey flat window, and listening to What's My Purpose? with the relish of a man denied all broadcasts for half a year, and making no headway at all with origami.