The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

by Brooke-Rose, Christine

  – Aaaah. Go on.

  – No, you go on.

  – Do you remember that nasty nurse you disliked so much, from Trinidad she was and one day she came out in a loud voice with Everyone says the patients in Ward Fourteen are impossible.

  – And this was greeted with a stony silence and I was killing her with a look, she was near me you see so she said Oh, I don’t mean you. And I said no dear you mean the plants.

  The laugh is that of a delighted child.

  – Go on.

  – No, you titillate me now.

  – Do you remember how impressed I was when I took you out the second time and you knew so much about it all? We were travelling by tube and you said to me, do you know, you had to shout in my ear because of the noise, but of course nobody heard, despite the crowd, you said, do you know, out of all these people you see every day travelling on the tube twelve and a half per cent have a permanent colostomy. And I said, what did I say?

  – You said, oh you really seized the opportunity, it was such clever repartee, you pressed against me with the weight of the whole crowd on you as the train jolted round the bends, and you murmured in my ear, or shouted maybe, my beloved put his hand by the hole of the door and my bowels were moved for him.

  – And despite the noise you heard it and blushed furiously and laughed to cover it and shouted back into my ear I am black but comely which of course wasn’t true and the train screeched to a stop.

  – Don’t stop, don’t stop.

  – Aaaah.

  – Go on, go on.

  – Do you remember an inn Miranda do you remember an inn and the tedding and the spreading of the straw for a bedding and the fleas that tease in the high Pyrenees do you remember an inn.

  – I remember I remember the house where I was born the little window where the sun came peeping in at mor-or-or-orn.

  The wind which has the rhythms of identity rattles the shack’s corrugated iron roof. The rain shimmies down the small high window, a long way from the mattress on the floor. The four raised knees make a table mountain under the army blanket, the two bodies placid in the tabernacle, the male to the left, the female to the right reflecting the sensory observations as the moon reflects the sun. Memory has occurred, in a state of comatose suspension. Limply the right hand of the male holds the left hand of the female, the two outer hands lie quietly alongside. The squint is not visible in this position, nor would it be in any other, except as preformed knowledge peering through the blackness. But look at the closed eyelids they are the right colour. The wind which has the rhythms of completed union rattles the shack’s corrugated iron roof. The rain shimmies down the small high window.

  – Listen, they’re playing our tune.

  Sooner or later some interruption will be inevitable, an itch to scratch or a bladder to go and empty or sleep perhaps and some disallowable dream. But now there is only immobility. Everything that moves increases risk.

  – You haven’t been bringing me my gruel in here for some time, have you?

  – No, that’s true.

  – Goodnight.

  – Goodnight.

  During the hammering the conversation takes the form of the hammering, which has the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. Lost high-pitched words lurch suddenly into a lower key whenever the hammering stops.

  – if you don’t mind.

  – No, I don’t mind.

  – … big idea?

  – I don’t know, but it’s all got to be taken up, Mr. Swaminathan said.

  – Hey, stop hammering when you talk. I can’t hear you.

  – Mr. Swaminathan said it’s all got to be taken up, and that wall’s going to be knocked down too.

  – Yeah, I heard, but why all …

  – I suppose the bathroom alone isn’t big enough.

  – Hey? Stop hammering. You’ve got no …

  – I know, I’ve been told that before. I can hear myself though, and I can hear you through my hammering.

  – … Vocational Training.

  – Surely you’re too young to have gone through the Resettlement Camp?

  – What you talking about? Stop hammering. What Resettlement Camp?

  – I thought you said you’d had Vocational Training.

  – Voice training, stoopid. I don’t usually do this kinda work, I’m a anger. They like us as singers, you know. Quaint you see, oldey worldey.

  When you love somebody

  Forget it

  The hammering has the high-pitched ring of metal on metal, one hammer hitting the chisel on the beat, the other slightly off the beat. The voice is completely audible through the hammering and is charged with an aggressive gaiety not at all present in the languorous snarl of the speaking voice. The gaiety is not infectious.

  When you want somebody

  Scrap it

  Oh, whe-he-hen you gotta ye-he-hen

  Turn it in

  The long metal chisel is hammered in some fifteen centimetres under the pink marble slab. The size of the pieces into which the marble slab breaks varies in direct ratio to the angle at which the chisel is held from the floor. The more horizontally the chisel can be held, the larger the pieces. But the chisel can be held horizontally only when inserted either, as at the Start, from inside the edge of the sunken bath, or, as now, from a side where another slab has already been removed, so that the chisel is being held at a level with the under-flooring. Between two slabs the chisel must be held almost vertically and tapped very gently into the dividing line. The singer does not tap gently.

  – … get to the wall, then it won’t be so easy.

  – Oh I don’t know, they’ll be free of access on one side.

  – Stop hammering I can’t hear a word you say.

  – I said they’d be free of access on this side. The really hard ones were the first.

  – Yeah and I did more’n you did of those.

  The singer holds his chisel obliquely and cracks the slabs into smaller pieces. He pauses a great deal.

  – I wonder what they’re gonna do with all those pieces.

  – I don’t know. A pink terrace in crazy pavement, perhaps.

  – Stop hammering you old loony.

  – A pink terrace in crazy pavement.

  – Say, you’re in the know, ain’t you? Who you in with?

  – That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on –

  – What you saying?

  Mr. Swaminathan stands in the pink marble bathroom and sways gently from one foot to another. Mr. Swaminathan paces up and down the pink marble bathroom, counting his own steps. The foreman does not pace up and down but advances cautiously from one two-metre distance of his measuring-rule to the next. He is a tall Asswati, taller and handsomer than Mr. Swaminathan. He has delegated the crouching measurements around the bath and coppershell washstands to the young Colourless worker who hums as he measures, but apparently jots nothing down. The bathroom measures about six metres by eight by four. It is bare of towels, sponges, soaps, jars, bottles, pots, brushes. The rails and racks for these things merge into the pink marble walls or floor, imperceptibly breaking their surface with hollows and curves. Mr. Swaminathan’s eyes strike an atonal chord. The bathroom window, at eye level, is about two metres wide, and half a metre high, almost wholly filled with a sky intensely blue. From this position, three steps away and to the left, only the distance to the right can be seen, the sea of olive groves and the Settlement of dark brown shacks like flies regimented on a flat patch of ground. Just beyond the Settlement the town sprawls in a sunlit haze, tall where it is not squat, grey where it is not golden.

  – with the wall, d’you think? I’m talking to you.

  – I’m sorry, Mr. Swaminathan. I was trying to pick out my house.

  – Yes, well I haven’t got all day. Hmm. You-er-live in the Colourless Settlement? I gather the bungalows are very comfortable. One per mated capita now, isn’t it? That’s a wonderful improvement. There’s nothing like that in th
e town, well I suppose you know, the overcrowding there is insoluble. And as for the big cities –

  – Gee, I know some people’d call ’em shacks.

  – Well, that’s a matter of opinion. They were built by Colourless people in the first place, weren’t they, admittedly a very long while ago, for holidays, before the er –

  – Well says the tall Asswati foreman I think we’d better leave them to get on with it and deal with the wall when my two builders come back. After all the marble has to be removed before it’s knocked down.

  Mr. Swaminathan’s eyes strike an atonal chord, confusing the neural cells which complain by discharging a high mad microvoltage. It is not, however, his eyes which do this but the memory of his eyes having possibly done so, or the psychic presence, now hammered into by the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. A recording engineer might perhaps separate the components of the mixture. If the hammering were extracted, the lost sentences that came and went and returned in reconstructed form might be recovered and heard. The internal conversation, however, is too intimately compounded with the sentences that came and went to be separated by mechanical means. Except perhaps by bombardment with beta-particles.

  – Well I’m tired, I guess we can have a rest now.

  – But we’ve only done a fraction of it.

  The marble slab has come away entire, without breaking at all.

  – Hey, have you seen the view from this window? We’re quite high up, considering.

  – Considering what?

  – Oh, I dunno. Considering it’s a bathroom and all.

  – Don’t you think we should try and get as far as that wall? They’re always accusing us of being lazy. Mr. Swaminathan might come up any minute.

  – Say, you’re a dadda’s boy, ain’t yer? Mr. Swami this and Mr. Swami that. You got a yen for him or what? You listen to me, you gotta go slow, go slow in everything you do for ’em, otherwise it’s a mug’s game. What’s all this for, anyway?

  – Mr. Swaminathan said something about a hair-dressing salon for guests at the big ball.

  – Did he now? Big ball, eh? Hey, there’ll be extra servants needed, won’t there, butlers and drink servers, you know, circulating. And hairdressers, right here in the pink marble. Well, hairdressers’ assistants anyway. D’you think we’d stand a chance?

  – I thought you said you were a singer?

  – Yeah, well, not exactly. I go to night-school, see. I’m waiting for the big time. I take on jobs like this ’cos I can keep my voice in while I work. Oh boy when the big time comes! It’s all a question of luck. Being heard at the right moment by the right person. That’s discovery.

  – You mean you’d sing while handing out champagne or shampooing ladies’ hair?

  – Well. You never know. Oh boy, to get my fingers lathering and scratching in all that thick black hair. D’you think they’d take me on?

  – I don’t know, what are you registered as?

  – Yes, what are you registered as?

  – Oh, hi-yer boss. We were just having a wine-break. No wine though.

  – I asked, what are you registered as?

  – I’m all things to all men I guess.

  – Don’t be impertinent. You’re nothing to me and you may as well go.

  – Oh now look here, boss –

  – I said go. Wait downstairs in my office for your wages up till now.

  The pieces of marble are strewn all over the floor. It is essential to pick them up and pile them in the corner which has already been demarbled. Some are triangular, some are trapeze-shaped, some are just small chips. One is a whole rectangular slab, which came away entire.

  – Now then. Can you cope by yourself for the time being?

  – Yes, I think so.

  – Bad lot, that one. He not only won’t work himself but prevents others from doing so. It was the same in the pavilion. Delinquent of course.

  – He told me –

  – Yes, I expect he did. Well it all comes to the same thing in the end. What did you say you were registered as?

  – Well, er, if you’ll excuse my saying so, I’m all things to all men too.

  – It’s all a matter of tone, isn’t it. You’re all right. You’re a serious chap, you seem to grasp the nature of reality. You know, it’s not so easy for us as you may think. All privilege brings its inhibitions and the privilege of health is no exception. There’s an irrational fear that lingers on, it’s understandable, and in some cases justifiable. I just thought I’d mention it.

  The conversation is real, repeat real. Sometimes it is sufficient merely to desire intensely. The law is known as the attraction of opposites.

  – The law is known as the second law of thermodynamics, namely, that warmth cannot flow from a cold to a hot body, from a weak body to a strong, from a sick spirit to a healthy spirit, without the application of external circumstances.

  It is sometimes sufficient to say nothing, or in this instance to stop the gentle throwing of marble pieces on to the pile of variously shaped slabs in the corner, for the sequence to continue.

  – It is thus very difficult for the strong to love the weak, and for the healthy to love the sick, since no warmth is received from them or for that matter needed. The energy radiated from the strong can only flow into the weak in the form of temporary pyrexia, or even hyperpyrexia, which makes them weaker and sicker until dead cold, because it cannot flow back. You understand, don’t you?

  – Mr. Swaminathan, you don’t have to explain.

  – Sometimes it is kinder to explain at the beginning. It may prevent a tumorous growth.

  – You mean in the imagination?

  – Imagination is not an organ, it is a function. And when you recall this conversation, remember also that memory is not a place in the brain but a function of neural energy. So much energy is wasted through friction, dissipated, disorganised, it is important to preserve what there is, otherwise all molecular motions of love would be random ones, unable to impart uniform motions to other atoms. Then the universe would die, of maximum entropy.

  – The diagnosis, however, would be a post-mortem.

  – There you go again with your sick talk. Some people think that cold Colourless bodies should be done away with, to protect the universe, you know. But I am not such an absolutist. For one thing, it’s unscientific. What did you say you were before the – er displacement?

  – I was a humanist.

  – I didn’t mean your politics. They didn’t see you very far, anyway, did they? I meant your identity. Oh well, it doesn’t matter, identity is only an instrument after all.

  – Mr. Swaminathan, I want to ask you one small thing. And that is, well, if you could, once a day, when I pass you on my way up here, just once a day, nod to me. It would help me so much, it would help to confirm my existence. This swaying of yours, you see, it’s such a negative sort of gesture.

  – Well I will give the matter my consideration. It may not be very wise. Obsessions feed on so little. You are evidently still seeking that external circumstance. But then after all it might be a matter of common courtesy, you being here in this house, working. Perhaps really it would be kinder to sack you.

  The feeling is one of euphoria. The veins in the pink marble leap out like a white network made to catch falling eyes. Existence takes the form of the hammering, which has the high-pitched ring of metal hammer on metal chisel. Identity is only an instrument, a hammer for example, hammering a metal chisel. Two instruments, to be precise, or one instrument and its objective. The gesture of work is its exactitude. It is important to hang on to that. The white veins in the pink marble tremble and nod, they sway and stretch out to catch the excited atoms. An oscillograph might perhaps reveal whether the hammering which now drives its high-pitched ring of metal on metal into the neural cells also drives into the memory of the conversation, memory being a function, not a place. An electroencelograph might perhaps separate the components of the conversation into the elements of
silence, reality and unreality. A recording engineer might then dub the unreality with the hammering, if of course the hammering is not already part of the mixture. The piece of marble has broken into a shape exactly like the Matterhorn pink on a picture postcard. That the physical presence has occurred is not in doubt, for the visual image, though rapidly fading, is more distinct than in other circumstances, whereas the psychic presence is less strong than it is when there has been no physical presence, less engulfing, not engulfing at all. It is difficult, however, to be equally certain about the conversation, despite the ringing echo of certain phrases, such as the swaying, you see, protects me from levitation, which is unscientific. Did Mr. Swaminathan say, or did he not, the swaying, you see, protects me from levitation, which is unscientific?

  – Mr. Swaminathan, you said in the street that memory is a primitive organ in the left hemisphere of the brain, reflected by the right hemisphere as the moon reflects the sun?

  – You don’t want to believe everything you hear from the man in the street.

  – But Mr. Swaminathan, you did say, didn’t you, that denial is the only true human power, rather than free will, and that negation is the shadow self which permits man to find unity?

  – Well that’s another story.

  – But is there a story behind the story?

  – That’s a very good question. I congratulate you on having avoided the trap.

  During the hammering, the conversation is one-sided. Highly intelligent questions pertinent to the conversation are posed with a rush of ease, but remain essentially unanswered, for the imagination has not sufficiently identified to compose exactly the same answers as those composed by an alien set of neural cells. This proves that the unhammered conversation has been real since unimaginable replies occurred, though difficult to reconstruct, and fading fast.