The World Was All Before Them

by Matthew Reynolds

  ‘This is blackmail,’ he remembered himself objecting.

  ‘No,’ she had replied, looking at him blankly, her eyes suddenly like plastic, impossible to see through: ‘It’s just there’s no point.’

  And then he had said that maybe there was a way of doing it. Yes, the thing to do was for her and Albert to be out at the boat. And to call the surgery from there asking for a visit. She could say she was very worried about Albert, that he wasn’t responding to questions, something like that. That he was twitching uncontrollably. That they were temporarily resident on the boat and she wasn’t able to get him to the surgery. He, Philip, would come as he would to any patient stuck at home. And then he could talk the matter through with Ash and her together, as parents.

  He sees the disciplinary panel of the GMC. A line of men with greying hair and concerned expressions. Staring at him more in sorrow than in anger. ‘You have conspired with a patient’ the chair intones, ‘to lie to a receptionist, to make an appointment under false pretences, so as to enable you to intervene in a domestic situation in blatant contravention of good practice.’ The chairman reaches out towards the big red button set in the desk in front of him. Bang! – Philip is sent shooting up through a hole in the roof, rotating, somersaulting, spiralling, flailing, until, grrn, he hits the gritty plain of outer darkness. His teeth are smashed, his mouth is crammed with sand.

  Now he found that he could smile at that nightmare vision; but back then . . . He saw himself through twilight, lying in bed, rigid, eyes open, reiterating the pros and cons, scanning the consequences while Sue slept tranquilly beside him. Whereas actually, he told himself confidently now, with this letter in his hand, and the ethanol in his bloodstream, and the sun on his cheeks, all that had happened was that he had acted with initiative to promote health. He had put the good of the patient above any puny personal considerations. It was a bloody good bit of doctoring.

  And compared to what Sue had got involved with at the gallery! Though in fact, now he reflected on it, perhaps Charlotte’s gamble – no, let’s be frank – her downright bloody lie, was what gave him the idea, or at least helped him have it. Made him realise it was possible to do that kind of thing. Would Sue be . . . he hoped Sue would be alright this weekend. Because Charlotte was clearly rather a complicated woman. Probably worse than Janet. And without the excuse of a difficult child. Just 100% ego. Just: who should be centre stage? – well, me of course. Look out for no. 1.

  Sue’s smile. Sue’s searching eyes. She formed a blurry presence in his mind, though with bits of her body in sharper focus. A pale right shoulder, the delicate clavicle like the bone of a bird. His fingertips touching her cheek. Her searching hazel eyes looking down on him as he lay. Her head lying dozy on his chest. He delved for his phone and thumbed:

  ‘Go for it, my sweet creative curator,’ Sue read, and smiled. Then she turned her attention once more to Charlotte who had a sheet of A3 paper spread in front of her, half blackened with scribbles and lines.

  ‘So what you’ve given me,’ Charlotte was saying, chairman-like, ‘is sense, sensation. Being connected to lots of different things. Global. Community. Environmental.’

  ‘We need a space’ – Sue was thinking it out – ‘like the inside of our heads. Dark, bodily. And there’ll be openings. Screens. Not just two of them, like eyes, because actually our eyes are channels for lots of different streams.’

  ‘Like a TV.’

  ‘Yeh because in our lives there is: telly, computer, phone . . . and then also, in parallel, there’s the rest of the world that’s not actually on a screen. Our eyes are insect eyes.’

  ‘Since everything is mediatised now.’

  ‘But that’s the thing – that’s what I want to get beyond. That’s what the Elton Barfitt show was going to say and I’m just not sure it’s right. I know you love them but I don’t think it’s quite right.’

  ‘No, no: I’m open. Anyway’ – Charlotte put on an ogre’s voice – ‘I absolutely hate them now.’

  ‘Right.’ Sue grinned at her. ‘So what I think is, we keep hold of the body, we make people aware of the body, like I was saying before. Like I said’ – she was remembering – ‘right back in the meeting with Omar when Al Ahmed cancelled. So we have this dark organic space with maybe a heartbeat.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And coming into it we have images.’ She was thinking of Charlton Heston. She was thinking of the man in the blue overalls with the moustache who looked like Charlton Heston: ‘Not kitsch ones,’ she said. ‘Really good ones.’

  ‘To show that the Société du Spectacle’ – Charlotte said the French words cockneyishly, half-ironically – ‘is not in fact all spectacle.’

  Sue felt a scrape of irritation. Too trite! ‘Or at least,’ she said, ‘it isn’t always. It’s just it is possible, sometimes, for an image to really hit you, bite you.’

  ‘So,’ said Charlotte: ‘I’m imagining a bank of screens in our dark bodily place.’

  ‘Yeh,’ said Sue.

  ‘And on them?’

  ‘Images. Live streams.’

  ‘Yeh but what sort?’

  ‘Well for instance’ – something surprising was appearing in Sue’s mind: ‘Do you remember that coffee pot, or did you see about it, that coffee pot in some lab, from right back at the beginning of the internet, of webcams, so they could all see when it was full?’

  ‘I heard about it.’

  ‘It’s actually a really strong image. It’s haunting. It was just something on the web, but it’s got staying power. It’s tiny. Black and white, so really shades of grey. And what you’ve got is this bulbous technological shape intruding from the right. If you don’t know what it is, you’re thinking, like spaceship, test-tube, bit of a power station maybe. Or it’s referencing surveillance cameras with something threatening coming out of the shadows. And it’s got this ancient look. The graininess. What it adds up to is something visually almost tactile. So for instance we could re-create that.’

  ‘Is it environmental, though? Or global?’

  ‘Yeh, coffee’s global. Course it is.’ Sue paused, smiling, as Charlotte saw the point. ‘And, it gets into your body. Completely affects you. Messes with your nerves. It’s like there’s a physical connection between your heart and bloody Colombia.’

  ‘So speaks the abstinent one,’ said Charlotte.

  Sue was remembering when Philip pointed the coffee machine thing out to her. That’s right, when he was moaning about his conditions of work, the rabbit-hutch of a room and how even the coffee was terrible. This, by contrast, he had said, pulling up the image, was a workplace where they gave proper recognition to coffee. And she had said: ‘You could always just stop.’ And he had answered: ‘Nope, I need an addiction. It keeps me closer to my patients.’

  Philip had opted for a second pint of the sticky beer that had come 258 miles by lorry and boat to reach him from a village near Leuven in Flemish Brabant. He had got what he wanted from Ash, i.e. Ash had agreed to stay longer, to give them a couple of months to work with. But he was definitely a troubling figure. Splinter in a toe. Philip saw him again sitting on an upturned tea-box in the boat. Albert had been fidgety, of course he had been: but he was so obviously attached to his dad. He was playing a game of shifting wooden tiles around in a frame to make pictures, that was it, and looking up every now and then to check his dad’s expression. Like a dog, if you took away the negative aspects of that comparison. And the dad seemed attached to his boy too. Every now and then he would catch his gaze and smile back and you could see Albert getting a shot of happiness from that, of calm. But still there was something very reserved about Ash. Yes, it was as though he was receiving homage, and giving . . . what was the word, largesse. And the reason for that was that he thought of himself as being in fact insanely important. Because he didn’t think of himself as fundamentally belonging to his child, or as fundamentally being in a relationship. He thought of himself as belonging to the whole wide world.

&nbs
p; There was a screech of chairs. Some people were easing their way around the big table between him and the shallow front wall, beyond which, at a lower level, was the road. It was really nice the way the sun sank along the channel of that other road that forked off, bang along the middle of it, along the dotted line, so that its rays would stay focused on him warmingly as long as they possibly could. Like that channel in the original Star Wars the fighters have to zoom along to zap the pleasure spot. Or actually in fact more like those prehistoric temples. Like Stonehenge, lined up for the sun to shine a ray between its stones. For some reason. Though when was this building . . . ? He turned to look up more searchingly over the frontage of the pub that he had glanced at many times before. Must be early nineteenth century. You don’t think of people building sun terraces back then.

  ‘Well I’ve got absolutely nothing to report,’ Philip heard someone saying at that bigger table, a guy, though you couldn’t really see anything of him with the sun behind him. Just silhouettes.

  ‘Same job. Still no girlfriend. I’m the one who’s keeping it . . .’

  ‘Keeping it ree-al,’ came a growling, Americanised voice from one of the others.

  ‘Keeping it . . .’ he hesitated until he found: ‘keeping it shit, more like.’

  ‘Do you teach any 6th-form classes?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘There you are then.’

  Philip was thinking about Ash again. No job. Certainly no maintenance being paid to Janet. But he must live very cheaply. Probably he had someone somewhere drawing social security for him illegally by proxy. Justify it by the intensely important work he was doing for the salvation of humankind.

  ‘Or Key Stage Two. You’re like: “Hello ladees!”’

  ‘Get out of it.’

  What rankled was the way Ash had made him feel like a, well frankly like a beggar. What he, Philip, had been talking through with him were perfectly straightforward measures for the benefit of his child. How to avoid having to medicate Albert, or at least, in the worst-case scenario, keeping the medication at the lowest possible dose. How to help him get the most out of school. Etc. Which had made the air of patronage pretty hard to bear. Philip blushed at the memory, despite the continuing effects of the sticky beer; the proliferation of relaxing alpha waves along his nerves. You would say something to Ash and he would receive it graciously. It would go into him like a stone into a pool. And then there would be silence. While his lordship weighed the suggestion against numerous massive cosmic considerations. Janet, meanwhile, sat waiting on a little wickerwork sofa, leaning into it, her arm stretched out along its back. Albert played with his game on the floor. Until, after some time, Ash graciously pronounced. At the root of it, Philip decided, was fucking meditation. Because in fact, when you thought about it, being the one who meditates is an immensely powerful position. You are in contact with numinous forces. You are simply more important than everyone else. It’s religion in a nutshell. Because you don’t only think, but actually know, or rather think you know; no, are certain you know (what are the words for this? – you are certain you know even though what you are certain you know is obviously claptrap) that people are not what they seem, not what science shows them to be. You happen amazingly to have privileged information to the effect that we are all parachuted onto the world for a brief instant from some super duper other place. And what’s it like, exactly, that other place? Oh, we can’t say anything except that it’s really, really special. Any evidence, at all, of any kind, even a tiny smidgen of evidence, just a speck, a quark of evidence, that will stand up to any rational inspection? Certainly not, how vulgar of you to ask. How simplistic.

  Philip was aware of his thoughts bulging and swaying as the ethanol began to mess with his synapses. Getting a bit irritable too from low blood sugar. Eat soon. But he wanted to press his line of reasoning to a conclusion. Because obviously Ash wasn’t against the natural world like those other religious nutters. He was the opposite of Mother Teresa. But by making the world itself spiritual he ended up just as bad. Because it meant that you simply weren’t facing up to the problem. Because obviously it was a complete fantasy that everyone was going to start living on carbon-neutral canal boats and eating organic pulses. And by going around saying that that was what should happen you were diverting attention from what really needed to happen, i.e. properly thought-through, evidence-based scientific solutions. Which could be so beautiful. Because they could be so clever. That was what was really human. Rather than this mumbo-jumbo about spirituality which basically came down to feelings of light-headedness induced by psychosomatically lowered blood pressure and not eating enough. It was the same thing that was so exciting about being a doctor. Using your intelligence to understand what was wrong with someone, and mend it. Of course there were dangers. Of course you have to keep in mind that people are not machines, that the cure sometimes can be worse than the disease, that hospital intervention especially could strike some patients as industrial. But he was aware of all that. Lots of doctors were. No one was more sensitive than he was, than young Dr Philip Newell was, to the shortcomings of technological medicine. That was what his handling of Albert and Janet, and, sod him, Ash, was all about. But you had to hold on to the benefits as well. Because they were, frankly, magic. Just look at everyday extraordinary things like salbutamol or MMR or ibuprofen. Show those to a medieval person, or in fact somebody pre-war. They’d think you were an angel.

  The sun had gone now. The pint was nearly gone too. All the shadows had disappeared, or rather it was as if they had got drawn up over the houses and trees and cars and street signs which had themselves now become shadowy, greyish. Now Philip could see the bunch of lads across from him, one with neat short hair and glasses, one with a pony-tail; one in a suit and tie; another in dusty industrial trousers – maybe a plumber? – and thick boots.

  ‘I turned up at work with no database training,’ pony-tail was saying: ‘And I didn’t blow it up. Flew it by the seat of my pants!’

  The air felt suddenly chilly. Time to go.

  ‘It was the most beautiful scene in, like, cinematic history!’

  He wondered how Sue was doing. Checked his phone: nothing there.

  ‘There’s plenty of more interesting stuff than tattoos, in all fairness.’

  Pick up a takeaway on the way home? No there was enough in the fridge. Easier to have pasta with something. Bit of telly. Earlyish night because it was his turn for Saturday morning surgery. Followed by a quick beyond-the-call-of-duty visit to Grace Hanworth, check her pain relief for the weekend. Because it didn’t seem right to leave her at the mercy of the out-of-hours people in what was very probably her last few weeks alive. Anyway, he owed her. They’d had some very interesting conversations. So sharp and pragmatic. Seeing what the best thing to do was and advocating it. Absolutely no sentimentality. Ha! – he said to himself suddenly – get her together with Ash the father of Albert. She’d knock the nonsense out of him! Because in a way they had some similar attitudes, but it was the development of them, the quality of reasoning that was so different. Philip saw himself wheeling her on a trolley across the bumpy meadow to Ash’s boat, her yellow, wizened face wobbling, her pale eyes focused intently somewhere in the sky. And then when they got there she would sit up at ninety degrees and hold forth. And Ash would be blown backwards by the force of her words until, splodge, he slipped over the muddy verge of the river. Now, that was a happy thought. Chirpily, Philip trotted down the hard, dry terrace steps, and set off along the solid pavement.

  Meanwhile Charlotte was saying: ‘And the screens need to be . . .’

  ‘We need to get hold of a load of old-fashioned box TVs.’ Sue had now moved from the table. She had paced Charlotte’s blue and beige striped rug and was perched on the fat, rounded arm of one of the cream Habitat-or-equivalent armchairs. ‘There must be millions of them around.’

  Somewhere in the spaceless space of Sue’s mind was an idea of herself, little, cross-legged in front of the e
normous wooden room with its enormous, curving, plate-glass grey window.

  ‘If they haven’t all been smashed up,’ said Charlotte.

  At the rounded corners of the curving window the grey darkened to black. She must have been, what, five? – four? Now she was standing in front of the enormous room and her face was at the height of the middle of it. Three maybe. Morph became a hole in the table and someone vanished into it.

  ‘Remember how different they were from what we have now, how heavy they were, how much they took up space?’

  Her mother curled up on the baggy chair behind her. Its flowery swirls.

  ‘They were like’ – said Charlotte.

  The two of them, the curtains drawn, shafts of warm light where the dust sparkled. The two of them cosy with their attention on the screen.

  ‘It was like having a power station in the middle of the sitting room,’ Sue pressed on. ‘When you switched it off there was something solid still there, an enormous magical machine still there. You could bash into it. Whereas now . . .’

  Though now her mother was still there, that whole scene was pretty much still there, just as it had always been.

  ‘Now they basically disappear,’ said Charlotte, glancing at her flatscreen which was over the mantelpiece like a mirror.