‘I can’t find the travel brochures,’ she said.
He woke more easily now. ‘There were reporters,’ he said. ‘Didn’t you have a hard time getting in?’ And then gathering consciousness, ‘I was up till nearly two. Where were you?’
She sat down on the bed and told him. About Mr Mathies-son, about the crash, about her early morning visit to the police station. He enjoyed, as he always did, hearing about her exciting life. Neither of them spoiled the moment with allusions to the other’s bad behavior.
‘So now we’ve got three days’ grace,’ she said. ‘Getaway time. Over the hills and a great way off.’
‘Won’t they follow us?’
‘Not if we’re clever. We must make clever plans. Starting with those travel brochures you showed me.’
He withdrew a little. ‘You didn’t seem all that interested,’ he said. ‘I . . . threw them away.’
‘Never mind.’ She kissed him on the forehead. ‘We can easily get some more.’
‘I promised Vincent I’d let him know if we left town.’
‘You’ll have to break your promise.’
‘I sort of signed something.’
‘What can he do, my darling? He’ll never have the face to take you to court.’
Harry fiddled with the bedclothes. ‘It’s all very well for you,’ he said, almost inaudibly.
Katherine considered. It was indeed all very well for her: in a few weeks’ time she’d be out of it beyond the reach of the longest legal arm. And poor Harry wouldn’t. He’d worry dreadfully. Perhaps she was asking too much of him.
‘Harry . . .’ She didn’t quite know how to say it. ‘Harry love, what exactly did you tell Mr Mathiesson?’
She asked him, though she didn’t want to know. He frowned, trying to remember.
‘Which one was he? There were so many reporters.’
‘What did you tell him about our renewal, Harry?’
‘There were so many reporters.’
‘He was from the Morning News. He was a clever one — I bet he looked up the Registry. I just wondered what you’d told him about our renewal.’
‘Oh, that one. You mean the one from the Morning News.’ There was a long pause. ‘Do you really think I’d discuss our renewal with a reporter, Kate?’
‘I just wondered. He said—’
‘Reporters say anything. Anything at all. As if I’d discuss our renewal with — Anyway, what could I say?’
‘He’s dead now, Harry. So it really doesn’t matter.’
‘But you believe him. You think—’
‘He’s dead, Harry. And besides, I didn’t believe him. I knew perfectly well you’d never—’
‘What did he say? Tell me what he said.’
She stood up. ‘He was a silly, squalid little newshound. And it’s time we had some breakfast.’
She rang off, and went out of the bedroom, along the passage, into the kitchen. But the line remained, if faint, still inconveniently connected.
‘You wouldn’t have brought him up if you hadn’t at least partly believed him.’
She ran water loudly into the stainless steel sink. Brought him up ... it was a good way of putting it. Mr Mathiesson was vomit; sour, stinking vomit. She wouldn’t allow him, his lies, to take Harry away from her even for a moment. Harry appeared, naked, in the kitchen doorway.
‘You’d always’ — baring his soul — ‘choose to believe other people rather than me.’
She smiled at him desperately, having no other refuge. Till the doorbell rang, and saved them both. She pushed past Harry, went to the door, opened the grille.
‘Can’t you see the sticker?’ she said.
‘Postman. Prepaid personal delivery.’ He held up a bundle of letters.
‘I don’t want them.’
‘Mrs Mortenhoe? The office don’t like it when I don’t deliver.’
She set the door on its chain, and opened it. The postman passed the letters in through the crack.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘A lot of people paid a lot of money to get these letters to you on your doorstep.’
She took the letters and closed the door.
‘Mrs Mortenhoe? What’s it feel like, Mrs Mortenhoe? I read about you in the papers, Mrs Mortenhoe. At the office there was plenty wanted this job, Mrs Mortenhoe, but it was me on the rota.’
She snapped the grille shut, and returned to the kitchen. Out of deference to the postman outside the door Harry had wrapped a towel around his waist. She gave him the letters, she didn’t want them, and stood reconstituting milk for his cereal. The last time a letter had been delivered was two years before, a court summons for excessive water use. Now, suddenly, at one time, there were thirty-two.
Harry opened them carefully, using a kitchen knife, fumbling the enclosures, telling her everything she didn’t want to know about each. The first he picked was from a bedding manufacturer, sending her a colored catalog, and promising her the bed of her choice, queen-size, ‘for as long as she might reasonably be deemed to have need of it,’ plus five thousand pounds, in return for the right to use her name in his worldwide advertising. The decision was hers, of course, but a representative would call that afternoon at three with several private demonstration models in case she felt, in her present situation, disinclined to visit her neighborhood showroom.
Other enterprises were less discreet. If she had been willing, with only four weeks left, to live her dwindling days to the full via a wide range of soft drinks, hair conditioners, chocolate bars, hi-fi sets, sexual appliances, nicotine-free cigarettes, and instant spray-on wallpaper, she could, Harry calculated, enrich her residual estate by some seventeen thousand pounds. Furthermore, a mountain leisure center famous for its Rocky Haven Waffles offered her four weeks free accommodation for herself and her husband, plus a single room and exclusive use of the camp chapel for an additional seven-day period. All this in exchange for the simple statement that if she’d only discovered the mountain air (and the Waffles) sooner she was sure she’d have lived to a hundred and ten. Their representative would be calling at two-thirty.
There were wheelchair brochures, and some tasteful electronic respirators, both firms offering immediate delivery, no deposit terms, and representatives already on their way. Jesus Christ the Second, in orange ink on purple paper, offered no money and wanted none, demanding access to Mrs Martin Lois’ immortal soul instead.
Among a crop of TV and newspaper proposals there were also, addressed to Harry but given away by their black-edged notepaper, several communications from morticians.
Reading all this lasted straight through breakfast and on into the morning. Harry was a great one for letters, taking them very seriously, as proofs that he existed. Prepaid personal delivery letters proved in addition that people wanted him to exist. At first Katherine humored him. After the first six or seven, however, she began to find the whole thing excruciatingly funny. He tried to join in her laughter, but went on all the same carefully putting on one side all those letters that contained firm offers of goods or cash. This made her laugh more than ever. Poor, dear, provident Harry . . . Her own collection was of representatives’ arrival times. Between two and six that afternoon seventeen salesmen were expected, eleven of these having chosen the peak period between two-thirty and four. And every single one of them would get no farther than the front-door sticker.
‘Harry,’ she said, suddenly not laughing, ‘Harry love, just how much did Vincent Ferriman offer you when you talked with him a couple of days ago?’
Harry looked up from a casket catalog he was trying not to let her see. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said.
‘Was it as much as seven hundred thousand pounds?’
‘I told you, it doesn’t matter. None of all this matters. I wouldn’t touch a penny of their bloody money.’
‘I might, Harry. If they paid quickly enough I could have a mink and two Cadillacs, and all those things a girl is supposed to want.’
‘Now you’re being vulgar
.’
How sweetly pompous he was. ‘Is it really vulgar to want to be cosseted in my declining weeks?’
‘We mustn’t talk like this.’
‘I’m afraid we must, Harry.’ She leaned across the table, gathered all the pieces of paper and tapped them into a neat pile which she kept on her lap. He was right: her laughter had been vulgar. But then, so had all the letters and brochures been vulgar. ‘We must talk properly,’ she said, ‘about the future.’
He got up. She realized he was still wearing his ridiculous towel. He went about the kitchen arranging things that didn’t need arranging. He was rather fat. He needed her comfort, not her questions, but he couldn’t always be given in to. ‘After I’m dead,’ she said firmly, pleased with her courage, ‘after I’m dead you must get away. You’ll have to leave your job. You’ll need a new one. You’ll need money.’
‘We have money.’
Indeed they did. That was why the flat was tiny. That was why they didn’t own a hologram, or rent a newspaper receiver. They were saving for a self-contained domestic unit in a good retirement area. They were saving for their old age. She tried to find this as funny as the brochures had been, and failed.
‘You’ll need a lot.’
‘What for?’
‘You’ll need to make a new start.’
‘What for?’
Childish self-pity wouldn’t stop her. A new life had to be envisaged for him, full of satisfactions he’d make for himself. He didn’t want to hear, of course. He wanted to be hugged, and told everything was going to be all right. She’d lie to him later, but not at this moment. He shouldn’t have let her see how fat he was.
‘You don’t make friends easily. You should have a nice home, smart car, plenty of good cassettes and expensive food . . . Then again, how about job qualifications? I don’t expect you’ll find another place all that easily. You’ll need money for all this. Lots of money. And then there’s the question of another wife—’
He didn’t often turn on her. He believed himself henpecked, and was happy secretly to resent it and never do anything about it. He thought of this as self-control (which it wasn’t), and it made him feel superior. Just occasionally, however, the humiliations were too great even for him.
‘What’s the matter with you,’ he said, ‘is that you won’t dare think about the things that really count. Instead you fill your head up with money, and bad jokes, and what’s going to happen to me, and who you hate and who you don’t, and how you’re going to fool the reporters, and . . . anything except what really counts.’ He flapped his arms. ‘Soon you’re going to die, Kate. You’re going to get iller and iller, and finally die. That’s what you ought to be thinking about. Just stop nagging at me, Kate. There are more important things to be getting on with.’
He stopped. He’d made his speech. And he’d misjudged its length. Halfway through there’d been contact: four sentences later she’d had time to clothe his words in his paltry nakedness, in the areas of flab that joggled as he talked. If he got much more worked up, she thought, his towel would fall off.
She squared the papers briskly in her lap. His undignified outburst was best not mentioned. ‘I tell you what,’ she said, ‘if we’re both not going in to work today, let’s have an outing! Get out of this flat. We’ve got the sticker if anyone bothers us. Let’s go and see the Castle. It’s ridiculous how people living in a, city never get to see the sights it’s famous for.’
She stood up, dazzled him with her smile, and went out of the room, taking the letters and brochures with her . . . Perhaps some response, some explanation was needed. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve got some clothes on,’ she suggested over her shoulder, going into the sitting room and putting the papers carefully away in the desk.
~ * ~
I arrived at the Clinic punctually, full of my transport motel breakfast, full of spring and the old-fashioned joys of. The MEN were ready for me. The Micro-Electro-Neurologists. Their white plastic casings were called clothes: their means of audible communication went by the name of speech. Three of them, photosensitive, audio-linked, tactile-orientated, their discerners clicking, their programs running AOK, they locomoted around, hooked up to, the mechanism returned for confirmation.
Me.
Or such of me as concerned them.
Which such, on that liberated, spring-in-the-blood morning, wasn’t much such.
They fixed me. ‘Try not to blink,’ they said, and stared down dazzling needles. So I tried not to blink, and thought of wealth and fame and Vincent and Katherine Mortenhoe. And Tracey who would wait until these were all, miraculously, behind me. Until, miraculously, I had bought myself back.
‘Watch the point of light,’ they told me. ‘Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film. Wait for the injection. Now watch the point of light. Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film. Wait for the EEG. Now watch the point of light. Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film.’
Once, accidentally, they said, ‘Does this hurt?’ to which I said, ‘Yes,’ because it did. And thought of Tracey.
They told me at last, rubbing their sensitive, multidimensional manipulators and simulating joy, that implant function was up to expectation. I didn’t argue. Implant function had been up to expectation from the moment the bandages came off. And in glorious Trucolor too. They hummed and buzzed, and said their only remaining doubts concerned impedance in retinal nerve endings. (My retinal nerve endings.) Acute darkness caused circuit hunting. Circuit hunting, if protracted, caused burn-up. And burn-up — how nicely they put it — caused permanent destruction of retinal function. Permanent destruction of retinal function.
It was a cheering thought — not new, but never before expressed so baldly. I shared their concern. It would be downright irresponsible of me, after all this expense, to end up blind.
They said they were glad they’d dealt with the problem of sleep. The new drugs were marvelous, weren’t they? Weren’t they? And pre-burn-up pain gave ample warning, should I ever carelessly wander into a darkened room. Perhaps I should carry a flashlight in case of emergencies. And a card too — they’d had one printed — to go with my blood group and health insurance in case I had an accident. Apart from anything else, the power pack in my neck could become dangerously radioactive if tampered with. But I wasn’t to worry. Worry caused hypertension, and hypertension made people accident prone. The new drugs were marvelous, weren’t they? Weren’t they?
I promised them I wouldn’t worry. And the new drugs were indeed marvelous. I really, honestly, hardly felt tired at all. But where now was Tracey?
They patted me. Total unconsciousness, on the other hand, was perfectly safe. It triggered electrical changes, sensor blackout. It jargoned jargon. I told them I was glad to hear it and thanked them. At least I understood my son a little better now. Possibly it was his closeness to me, his prophetic soul, that had made him so congenitally afraid of the dark.
They released me from their various appliances and I went, trying not to run, out of their mat-black gadget box, out into sunlit offices and the more human inquiries of the doctors. And after the doctors, the psychiatrist. When all I wanted was to get away and buy that flashlight, and a good supply of batteries.
‘My favorite cyborg,’ he said, not rising. ‘You must come and tell me all about it.’
‘All about what?’
A degree of aggression would be expected. Not that I cared. Dr Klausen didn’t sit at a desk, but in one of those womb-things hanging on a chain from the ceiling. There were three other chairs in the room, and he did nothing to help me choose. Presumably the one I picked would be significant. Of something. To put the interview on its right footing I chose a hard, upright chair that left me facing the window, with Klausen almost in silhouette against it. If I was to be interrogated, then I was to be interrogated. Not of course, that I
cared.
‘Tell you all about what?’ I said.
‘You’re a professional interviewer. You know how much time can be wasted by the subject pretending not to understand the question.’
‘I also know how much time can be wasted by making the question too unspecific.’
I was expecting him to twiddle his chair on its piece of chain, but he didn’t. ‘If you want a battle, we can easily have one. This isn’t a selection board — you went through that months ago. If I was wrong then, it’s certainly far too late to reverse my decision now.’
‘Then what am I here for?’
‘Typically, you never asked my reasons for recommending you.’
That ‘typically’ got me. ‘And, equally typically, you’re going to tell me all the same.’
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 9