One-On-One

by Philip Spires

  C But you didn’t particularly know him did you?

  T Of course not. I never went to church, had no contact with it. No, he was just doing his job, bless him, visiting a sick lad from the parish.

  C He was a former miner...

  T The researchers got it right again, Chris...

  C Get on with you, Tom Cartwright, I can remember him. He was called Bert[4]!

  T [laughs] I can remember him sitting next to the bed with a stainless steel puke bowl in his hand, full to the brim of my gastric product. He reached out and touched me - there’d be hell to pay if he did that nowadays, stroked my forehead and ruffled my hair. Then, in a gentle, uniquely parson-voice avuncular, he said, “’Ave it off, lad. It’s fo’ best.”

  [CG and TC both laugh, several inaudible comments punctuate]

  T I could have killed him! It’s not exactly what I wanted to hear.

  C But he was right.

  T [quietly] Indeed, he was. Spot on. And that’s what happened next. They took the right leg off above the knee, of course, because the tumour was on the femur, and left me a problem that still stumps me...

  C Ho ho...

  T I then had seemingly endless courses of treatment that went on and on. I had a lot of radio and some more chemo, a right mix of stays in hospital, visits to out-patients...

  C You were seventeen when you lost your leg.

  T Yes, just. I was different from you. With yours, they tried to save the leg, didn’t they?

  [CG nods and mumbles agreement]

  T ...and then they amputated later, when they concluded they would have to sacrifice your good looks.

  C I’m interviewing you, Tom, please...

  T Sorry. Yes, I was seventeen. If I remember correctly, and I know I do, you were the first person to visit me, the first person from outside my own family, I mean.

  C I remember it well.

  T So do I, strangely enough. [CG smiles] The experience is not to be recommended. The pain was incredible...

  C For the viewers’ benefit I will cut in with a note of explanation. I can also offer this from my own personal experience, of course. As you may know, Tom Cartwright - as was - and I both lost legs. We both had bone cancer, and we both suffered amputations...

  T Different legs...

  C It wouldn’t have been the same leg, would it? [laughing] The pain Tom is currently referring to is what we felt after the operations, not before. It’s not a real pain...

  T It bloody well is!

  C It’s not real in the sense that it’s something physical that’s causing it...

  T It bloody well is!

  C But the pain is a phantom pain; it’s in the leg that isn’t there.

  T Yes. True. But it itches. It twitches. It hurts. It aches. It kicks out without warning and you stub your toe...

  C That doesn’t exist...

  T It exists in here [TC taps his forehead and leans forward] and that’s where the pain is, where all pain is. Pain is a neurological response to something the brain has interpreted. It’s as real as any pain.

  C ...and then?

  T Well, as you obviously know, the recovery was a little slower than expected. I wasn’t mobile at all for quite a while because the scar was slow to heal. I got around on crutches, but had to spend most of the time in hospital. Unlike you, Chris. You stayed mobile for much of the time while they were trying to save your leg.

  C And I was able to visit you in hospital.

  T Thanks again. But I was able to repay the compliment a few months later. But then, your wound healed a lot quicker than mine.

  C Indeed it did. You were on crutches for some time.

  T Yes, and then I was fitted with a prosthesis for the first time, and started to get used to it. It was like carrying round a climbing frame strapped round your waist. It weighed a ton. And the knee was sprung, so the joint only bent when you sat down. When we stood up, we had to clip the knee joint with a catch to hold it rigid, to make the whole leg a single, unbending structure. To walk, you had to learn to swing it forward from the hip and then use it as a pivot to take a step.

  C I remember you were quicker to get used to it than I was. I needed to use a crutch as well, alongside it, for quite some time.

  T Perhaps I was more determined...

  C I doubt it.

  T Then I might have simply had more body strength to lift it.

  C Quite possibly.

  T And then there was more treatment, a regime that made both of us as sick as dogs, if you remember.

  C Though usually not at the same time. How could I forget?

  T It wasn’t until the spring of 1970, when we were both just about eighteen that we started to feel just a bit more human.

  C Speak for yourself, Tom Cartwright. I was still in hospital in the May. I even did some of my A-level exams on a hospital ward.

  T I remember. Our schools were very good to us, weren’t they?

  C The teachers were just fantastic.

  T And then we both survived. It worked, whatever ‘it’ was.

  C And, Tom, how much do you think the disease and subsequent amputation affected your life? What did it change?

  T [TC smiles, and follows with a little cynical giggle] What a stupid question... How much on a scale of zero to what, Chris? It was the Daily Telegraph that banned the word ‘very’ from its lexicon, I believe, because it conveys no meaning.

  [Cut to CG full face. She raises her eyebrows, but does not speak]

  T It changed everything, Christine. You know that from your own experience. I couldn’t run. I had to learn to walk again. I regularly tried to stand on something my brain assumed was still there and fell over. Having one leg is not the same as having two.

  C Is that a platitude?

  T [pauses] It is. And I suggest people who think it’s a platitude should have one off to try out the experience, and then reassess their position. Which will probably be seated...

  C How do you think your life might have been different, if you had kept both legs?

  T [laughs] It would have remained bipedal! [TC laughs again. He is greatly amused and a full ten seconds elapse before he can continue] How can I possibly answer, Chris? Life is the life that life provides. Perhaps I could have done an audition for Tarzan, with a chance of landing the part. And then, who knows? A Hollywood career, house in Beverley Hills, a fistful of marriages, one fewer divorces, advertising contracts, world’s media at my door... [TC pauses. Both participants are in shot. TC looks CG directly in the face for five seconds] On the other hand, I might have become a coal merchant and gone out of business like the rest. It’s not as if anyone has an option. Something we call chance throws things your way. You either catch them or they hit you, sometimes both.

  C [pauses to look at her notes] And what do you think the chances were? Knowing what you do now about statistics and probabilities, what was the likelihood that two of us, from the same village, at roughly the same age, and at the same time should develop similar conditions, receive different treatments, though similar in some respects, and then survive?

  T Obviously the problem has interested me throughout my life since then. I did some research on the subject, and I suppose that was the motivation that provided much of the direction for my later work.

  C In what way?

  T There were studies. After I graduated...

  C ...with a degree in Mathematics...

  T After I graduated, I did a master’s degree. I was interested in applied mathematics, not statistics, but I came across some studies in epidemiology. They looked at our ‘hotspot’ for adolescent tumours amongst others, and declared they weren’t significant, statistically significant, that is.

  C And you thought they were.

  T It suggeste
d there might be more to consider than what the epidemiologists included. Much more...

  C And it was beginning to consider those wider issues that eventually led to your ability to model and predict the movement of markets?

  T [nods]

  C And that’s our focus for next time. Haji Salleh Abdullah, Tom Cartwright, thank you for talking to me, One-On-One. [leans forward to offer handshake, which is accepted]

  [credits]

  2 The original referred to a specific town, the name of which has been redacted.

  3 Redactions.

  4 Redacted

  The Green papers (continued)

  The tone was different, almost fawning. He was newly relaxed, comfortable with Christine’s presence, now almost a cloak he could wear. There was surely manipulation and opportunism in the air, an air of confidence that cannot have grown without being nourished. My new assessment had coalesced during the interview and only grew as the day passed, without changing its shape or significance. It rained again. So, frustratingly, the mikes would pick up nothing except an incessant drumming of water on roof. I became newly and acutely aware that I had not witnessed their interaction during the previous storms.

  It had rained the previous evening, which is why my account cut short, and remained incomplete. I could, one supposes, have speculated, read meaning into every laugh, smile, toss of the head, flick of the hair, change of pose... But it would, of course, have been a worthless exercise in futile invention. The only currency in our lives is the accurate. Reality can only be claimed in full afterwards, when mere accuracy is necessarily re-examined and knowledge is added to the interpretive mix, but without detail the bigger picture simply does not form, takes no shape. There is no overview without the close-ups.

  I watched, I assume I did watch, throughout. Christine had said they should discuss the second programme. After all, another debacle like the first attempt had to be avoided at all costs, since it might put the whole project in jeopardy. Frankly, neither Christine nor I, nor anyone else involved understood why Cartwright had accepted the commission, but Christine, somehow, had convinced him it was in his interest that the programmes be made, and even broadcast. I still believed he had an agenda, some overarching goal that could only be achieved via this exposure, but I had remained unsure as to what that might have been. As the rain pelted the house, as the noise drowned all sound and lightning broke all images, the unknown communication I could recognise, but not understand, began to fill in the pictures.

  Achievement of legitimacy has been suggested as Cartwright’s motive, but his overall position on that score would surely not be affected by an airing on television. Humanity? Who was the man behind the headlines? Was he to become no longer an ogre, no longer an ideological enemy, a financial terrorist? But did anyone ever doubt who he was, where he came from or what he did? Was there ever any point in merely confirming any of this? Motives? Certainly we wanted to know what these were, and that remained the reason behind our initial contact to suggest these interviews. And then, we surmised, surely he would let something slip, would reveal a chink that we could prise open to reveal his true aims and also who else might share them. But what were his own motives? What were his goals? And had he thus far offered anything to provide us with the slightest clue as to what these were? Was there anything to suggest that our fears were anything more than merely our own fears?

  Or perhaps there might be another interpretation. Perhaps, just perhaps, we had all suddenly and unwittingly become part of his plan, unwittingly and incompetently co-opted into assisting a process we were actually trying to arrest. Suppose, just suppose, that he himself felt he had reached a point of completion. Let’s imagine a bigger plan, one that saw achievement of great wealth and notoriety as a first stage in a grander, more ambitious project. What might follow?

  Now there can only be one answer to that question, and that must be a new phase, one in which the potential for power that wealth generates is consolidated into something real and lasting, something tangible, something unassailable. But power in our world, our global, information-rich village, is linked to profile. There is no power in anonymity, except when the hidden hand is the one that creates and controls the profile of others who become its front. Otherwise, it’s the public profile, its extent, its penetration, rarely its quality, that counts.

  Mere celebrity is not enough, and exclusivity is nothing, unless it follows mass conquest. A palace on a hill, adorned for posterity’s sake with the finest devotional bling that artists of the day could offer was once such a goal. It would be gloated upon by a despot, whose main ambition was to be closer to his god by separating himself further from those he exploited and killed to create his wealth. But today such figures are no longer tolerated. In effect power works the same way, now as then, but today it operates by cajoling those masses it must still exploit, and not by threatening them. Wealth and celebrity, and thereby power, must now be created with common assent: it can no longer merely dominate, though domination remains its ultimate goal and its capital.

  Thus in his current garb, Cartwright had reached, in pre-modern terms, the limit of his forces’ capability. In older, imperial terms, he needed more troops, more ammunition and crucially more territory to bolster his supply capability, if his project were to move to the next level, from fiefdom to empire. And those can only be secured via the opening of a new front. But of course in the world as we know it, battlegrounds are for media space and time, not for lands or serfs. Now, conquering the airwaves delivers the property. If you can influence what people think, you control them, and their territories. Did Cartwright share such an analysis? Had he decided it was now time to pull the rank his recently-achieved status might command? And were we, in our desire to pin him down, to understand his motives and identify the power we firmly believed drove him, were we now by default offering him that very precious commodity that even his new wealth could not buy, a new empire of exposure?

  Speculation was pointless, but like much that is pointless, inevitable. For me, watching through the rain became more than a pastime. The process may have relied more on imagination and invention than observation, but I am now convinced that it was fruitful, that the results are the meaning that might offer shape to the fact.

  The rain did not apologise for its presence. It started like a shower turned immediately to full. It didn’t spit and spot, and then grow gradually stronger; no, it just began. There was no accumulation of sound, no summation of steadily increased intensity; no, this was a drumming, a constant that began and did not cease. I lost vision occasionally, momentarily or, on one occasion, for several minutes after what I must assume was a severe lightning flash. My pictures flickered at best, but also broke up into disconnected squares, pixellated like bad satellite television, but enough endured to connect the bones of a conversation I could not hear, no matter how I tried to filter and focus.

  Cartwright had warned Christine early on that neither of them would sleep if there was rain. What I, and no-one else involved understood, it now seemed, was that the noise would render our sound systems quite useless. Their automated level sensing exists to allow us to hear whispers from afar above a general, but not dominant ambience, but when there is a bass drum skin vibrating less than a metre above, they cannot register anything apart from the noise. Even rainfall, if punctuated by any variation or silence, will allow the software to recreate from the fragments a full and uninterrupted signal. But when everything is drowned by a simple, constant background noise of drowning intensity, only the rumble survives.

  Christine was comfortable, of that there was not the slightest doubt. She was still without her prosthesis, still burdened by a never-previously perceived need to hop whenever she moved, a burden that could only be lessened by the support of a wall, a door frame or a balustrade. But it was an assistance she was happy to accept and learn to rely on. As time passed, it bec
ame clear how Cartwright’s house worked well for the two of them. The encircling balcony, with its balustrade at convenient height, meant that progress around, rather than through the house was relatively easy. It was built so that there was a permanent crutch that moved alongside the progress. So it seemed that Christine was happy that a new public acceptance of her physical status should replace the continued and determined denial which, for years, had been her norm. With her false leg, the twenty metres of Cartwright’s front and side balconies en route to the toilet at the back would have taken her no longer than an able-bodied person to travel, but there, last night, one-legged and at the hop, she needed almost five minutes of stumbling and leaning, all the time being drenched by rivers of run-off from the uneven ends of the palm-leaf roof, but she did it. When she returned, she fell into her now habitual chair with an air of achievement like an aura. The exertion was significant and, on falling back into her preferred chair, there followed a good minute of panting, hyper-ventilation when her chest rose and fell like bellows inside her blouse. Christine, never at the front of the queue when it comes to physical exertion, looked both surprised and elated by herself, radiantly - though for me also silently - proud and effusive about her achievement. I had long grown accustomed to her fastidiousness of appearance, her neatness and completeness of presentation, so I admit I found this drenched, bedraggled, distinctly stringy and imperfect aging woman hard to recognise as my wife.

  Cartwright laughed, almost uncontrollably, as Christine sat. He reached across and patted her condescendingly on the shoulder and then stood and unexpectedly went to stand directly under the nearest torrential leak through the roof edge, a fall that splashed inside the balcony rail. He was soon completely drenched. He held his arms out wide as the water cascaded down his body, as if indicating a newly-shared innocence. I needed no sound to understand what he said. “Look, no hands,” was the clear message and probably also his very words as, no doubt, he peed his pants to demonstrate to Christine that her exertions may not have been necessary. He laughed as he stepped away from the torrent and spoke again as he smoothed the surplus water from his hair and arms.