Dr Mason spun his trolly around to face him. ‘Doesn’t that make pills an awfully easy way out?’ he said harshly.
‘Not an easy way out, Doc. An easy way in. It’s how you look at it. Anyway, what’s so wrong with things being easy?’
‘Some people might say the easy things weren’t worth having.’
‘Like sunsets, I reckon. Or a good sexy song.’ Charlie laughed again, and turned back to Katherine. ‘Them religions had to prop up the old ways. Life was hard, life was brutal. Don’t you believe a word of it.’
Dr Mason thanked him, and led Katherine away, out into the corridor, down in the elevator. ‘You see, they’re not in the least sedated,’ he said. ‘Not in the old sense. Mood control has come a long way since the old bromide.’
Katherine stared at him, angrier than she even understood. ‘Like a seal with its trainer,’ she said. ‘Clap, clap, bounce the ball . . . And you still think showing me all this will make me want to come here?’
‘You had to know exactly what it was you were rejecting. And why you were rejecting it.’
The elevator arrived at the ground floor. She stumbled out needing to escape, then turned. She wasn’t quite finished with him. He had no right. Most of all, he had no right to demand reasons. ‘I honestly think I’d rather join a row of dribbling idiots than the chemical camaraderie of that lot up there.’
‘I can find you some dribblers, if that’s what you want.’
She nearly struck him. ‘You laugh at me, and you laugh at them. You’re not fit to be a doctor.’
His face stilled and he looked away, far more hurt than she would have expected. ‘Whatever else my failings may be, I can promise you that I find neither you nor the afflictions of the old in the least amusing.’
It was a ridiculous conversation. People pushed past them, got into the elevator. He seemed totally unaware. ‘Obviously you will want another doctor. I believe you saw Dr Clarke a couple of times. If you need any help, phone the Center and they’ll put you through to him. I’ll make sure he receives your documents. And good luck.’
He bowed very slightly, and left her. She wanted to protest: she hadn’t meant it. She didn’t want Dr Clarke, she wanted him. He knew her. He understood her. He was her only way in through the professional carapace. And yet, knowing her he had brought her to this terrible building, and the people he had shown her frightened her more than death itself.
She watched him walk away across the crowded foyer. She would never see his Dr Clarke. Wherever she was, whatever happened to her, she now had no one to turn to. Which was, after all, the historic animal condition. She pulled herself together and walked out of the hospital, out into the sunny late morning of her twenty-fourth remaining day. If she hurried she might get to Vincent Ferriman before lunch.
~ * ~
The next on my list of people who I reckoned would help me to understand the only true and continuous Katherine Morten-hoe was the man she worked with at Computabook. I arrived at his office around ten, when I could be sure that Katherine would still be hospitalized and not liable to come barging in. Vincent had warned me he was still keeping me very much in reserve as far as she was concerned. I’d finally got through to him while he was having his breakfast: I had questions I wanted to ask about the poor bloody students. He fielded the questions so neatly that he might in fact not have been fielding them at all. Except that from what I knew of him, the better he fielded the more he had to field.
Katherine’s Peter was a disappointment. Either he liked her very much, and so wasn’t telling, or he disliked me very much, and so wasn’t telling. He said she came to work early and went home late. She was a thoughtful boss, he said. She didn’t despise her work, but she didn’t over-revere it either. She kept a sense of proportion in all things . . . Well, no, he said, perhaps she didn’t have all that much of a sense of humor. The woman he described was nobody, certainly not Katherine Mortenhoe.
Maybe I wasn’t his type. Some fags went for me, others didn’t. Either way, there were many things I’d do for NTV, but that had never been one of them.
I tried a different line. ‘Did she ever talk to you about her first husband?’ I asked.
‘Should she have?’
‘Come on. He must have been important to her. After all, she kept his name even after her second marriage.’
‘Perhaps she liked it. It’s a nice word. Words mean a lot to her.’
I doubted if it was as simple as that. ‘Then she never mentioned him?’
‘If I said never, then you’d go away and make something of it. Of course she mentioned him. But she never confided, not about him or about anything else. We worked together, that’s all.’
They’d worked together for three years, which is a long time in these progressive days. Was she really such a private person? ‘So she mentioned him. What did she say?’
He looked at me sideways. ‘I tell you one thing,’ he said, ‘she was wasted here on these romances.’
‘Was that what her first husband said?’
‘He couldn’t know. He was one of those ugly men, all chin and rugged good sense.’ So she hadn’t confided, merely shown him a photograph. ‘He couldn’t know anything. Even I didn’t know till a couple of days ago.’
I waited, sort of neutral. If he’d decided to tell me something, he would. ‘She could’ve been a great writer,’ he said. ‘A really great writer.’
‘You can’t mean those novels she did while she was still at college.’
He shook his head. ‘This was very recent. I’ve been going over her notes. She was on to something really big. If you media men hadn’t got at her she’d have done something fantastic. A totally new approach to computer fiction.’
He must have caught my expression. ‘All right, so computer fiction isn’t all that it might be. But you only get out what you put in. And she knew she had so little time . . . What she was putting in was great — the book would have been real, and all hers. Huge. Savage. Angry.’
He was terribly excited. He might have been talking about his favorite man, but hardly about the work of the Katherine Mortenhoe I thought I knew. ‘Gould I see these notes?’ I said.
‘You’re welcome. But they won’t mean much. Rebuilt associations, situations freed, word-stores relinked — you need training for that sort of thing.’
I allowed him his little victory. Which was big of me, seeing I’d no alternative. ‘So?’ I said, cool like.
‘So I’m going to work on it. It could be great. I always knew there was more to her than she let show. If there’s enough to give me her intentions, I’ll finish it. The testament of a tomorrow person. Wow.’
Wow indeed. Of course, I’d always imagined (silly me) that tomorrow people would somehow be calm and compassionate and all-wise — if they were going to be huge and savage and angry I didn’t see they’d be much of an improvement on today people. But I thanked her Peter for the tip. As guardian of her greatness he needed all the encouragement he could get.
Obviously my next call had to be on Gerald Mortenhoe. Apart from anything else, the business of the name still niggled at me. Certainly it was a nice word: but old-fashioned Harry would hardly have agreed to it without a fight. And in those early, romantic, new-beginning days, would a fight have been worth it, simply for the sake of a nice word? A word that linked her to an ugly man, all chin and rugged good sense?
Katherine was a puzzle. I’d seldom come across anybody with so few contacts, so few friends, so little family. After Gerald there was nobody. Except Harry, and I’d have to wait on him till we were formally introduced. Vincent’s hack scouts had even been around to her Residential Block and drawn a blank on hello-across-the-hallway acquaintances. Harry had his Hobby Room rivals, but Katherine had nobody. And according to her case history she didn’t even have b.o.
The day was still sunny, so I decided to drive the eighty-odd miles out of the city to Gerald Mortenhoe’s school, top down, feeling big and shiny. My car was sharp, and ve
ry expensive, part of the new rich life I hadn’t quite grown used to. I drove out through the streets of the inner city slowly, catching the cool reflection in shop windows whenever I could. People turned their heads, and I felt for once not gray with three months’ sleeplessness (the drugs were wonderful, weren’t they, weren’t they?), but young and vivid. Incognito behind my hirsute fur-suit, but somebody all the same. Somebody.
If I’d been less of a Somebody the marchers might have let me through.
I came on them first as I tried to cross the southern Ring Road. I was fifth in a queue of cars, and they let the first four over. Me they decided they didn’t like. I didn’t altogether blame them — in that car I had to be someone high up either in business or government or the trade unions. Or — worst of all from their anti-pap point of view — a commercial entertainer. So they sat down on the road in front of me and the police started hauling them away. More marchers were arriving all the time, of course, so that every time a space got emptied it was immediately filled again. Besides, arrests on that scale were impossible, so those hauled away would quietly pick themselves up and wander back to sit again. The police began to sweat, and to lose whatever cool they had ever possessed, and the truncheons came out, and the boots. Beyond the marchers I could see water cannon arriving.
The scene was developing, and I just wasn’t worth that sort of fuss. So I turned my swank-wagon and drove back the way I’d come. There wasn’t even a cheer. Behind me the sitters simply got up and started walking again.
The next junction I tried was similarly blocked. And the next. And the next. Four abreast, quiet, with a placard to every fifth rank, the marchers passed the long hood of my car, shouting occasionally, tiredly, but mostly just hating silently as they trudged. Since the order forbidding marches in the center precincts, the Civil Liberties people had sworn to lay a solid cordon around the entire city. A hundred miles of marchers, in orderly fours. And nobody had believed it possible. We lived with marches much as we lived with winter rain. They were inconvenient, even debilitating, but never downright impossible to cope with.
Now however, as I watched the weary, varied, relentless procession stretching as far as I could see in either direction along the bright suburban streets, always changing but always the same, I wondered. A hundred miles of marchers was no longer vulgar rhetoric. It was people.
At the next blocked junction I saw an NTV camera team at work. I sighed. If I’d told Vincent I was coming out this way he could have saved a lot of company money. I turned the car yet again and worked my way farther westward. By now I was angry, otherwise I’d have gone back to base and borrowed a small gray car from the pool — though even these were not always getting through if the marchers didn’t like the drivers’ faces. It was a ridiculous situation. Whatever the particular grievance — I’d long ago lost count — it didn’t justify this sort of petty, arbitrary tyranny.
At this, my sixth attempt to get out of the city, I decided to stand no further nonsense. I was no manipulator (oppressor had long ago been replaced in their limited invective), I had even sometimes in the past been on their side: if they wanted to get their ribs kicked in on my account, that was their affair. I tucked the car close in behind a milk truck that was bound to be let through, and pressed on. If they tried to get in between me and it they’d have to get out again pretty damn sharp.
I set out the reasoning of the previous paragraph with no comment. It was easy to arrive at and impossible afterward to forget. Given this reasoning it was right and proper, almost inevitable, that I should run the big front wheels of my car over two of the marchers before I could stop. If they wanted to get their lives crushed out on my account, that was their affair.
I sat very still in the curious shuffling silence of possibly a thousand feet. The man under my car (he was elderly, if that makes it better or worse) began to groan. The woman under the other wing pressing was quite quiet. On my own behalf let it be said that I was not so much afraid of the marchers as horrified, too little and too late, at what I had done.
Looking back on it, I know that the silence, and then the groaning in the silence, must have existed only in my mind. Where it exists still. For surely those sitting in the road, those crowding in front of me, those whom I did not run over, must have made some instant objection? But it is still the shuffling silence, and then the groaning, that remain with me far more vividly than the anger that followed. They tore at the car, at me. They screamed and pounded. It was blank stupidity, not a wish for expiation, that stopped me raising the windows, erecting the hood. I gained the impression that one of the men tearing at me was the dead woman’s son.
After the interminable length of the silence which never happened, it seemed no time at all before I was rescued by the police. Time to think briefly of Vincent’s investment and the insurance that would cover it, and of how I would ever face Tracey and Roddie Two if I survived, and then the police were beating away the hands, and the placard poles, and the devouring faces. The first policeman to reach me glared as wildly as any of those he was beating away. ‘Bastard,’ he shouted. ‘Murdering bastard.’
The car door was already open, and he dragged me out onto the ground. The marchers stood back, watching him kick me. It was they who were kicking me, kicking him even, for all the kicking they had ever received. I curled up tight, protecting my balls, my belly, my eyes. I was possibly two feet away from the body of the woman I had killed. For some reason the toe of the policeman’s boot hardly hurt. Then other policemen arrived, and hauled me to my feet. Under cover of my shouting and swearing one of them got his punch-happy face down to my ear. ‘You can forget Judge’s fucking Rules,’ he told me, ‘if you want us to get you out of this alive.’
As they manhandled me away, wrenching my arm behind my back and kicking me as they went, I’ll swear the man under my car was still groaning, unnoticed by his avengers. He groans still, when my night is particularly dark.
The police had set up their mobile headquarters van in a side street. They tossed me in, and slammed the door. There was a gray steel desk, and behind it a control panel with switches, four closed-circuit TV screens, and a pornographic calendar. On one of the screens I recognized my car, on its side now, its radiator kicked in. It was suddenly very quiet, apart from a walkie-talkie’s turned-down croaking. Outside I heard distantly the siren of an approaching ambulance. I was helped to my feet.
‘May I see your wallpaper, sir? Driving license, insurance certificate, mobility permit, civil offenses card? We have to be sure you exist.’
The gray-faced, gray-natured police inspector was undoubtedly making a joke. I handed over my wallet and let him help himself. My face was bleeding in half a dozen places. I felt battered as much by the crowd’s hatred as by their hands. The inspector sorted through my documents. ‘Ah yes. . . Even with the beard, my sergeant thought he knew you. Quite a fan, I gather.’
If he expected something, a professional simper, he didn’t get it. I stood and stared at him, the fear and sweat on me cooling.
‘Well now, sir, we can’t have this, can we?’
He was entitled to ham, entitled to his fun. ‘May I sit down?’ I asked.
He nodded to the sergeant, who left his control panel, came around the desk, and moved a chair, holding it for me like a waiter till I was comfortably settled.
‘We can’t have honest, celebrated citizens obstructed about their lawful occasions. Police College Handbook, part one, chapter one, page one.’
He leaned down and got a bottle of vodka and two glasses from somewhere behind his desk. ‘A present from an admirer,’ he said, and half-filled both glasses. The last time I’d been to a cop movie there’d been this line, ‘Not now, thank you, sir. I’m on duty.’ The sergeant gave me one of the glasses, closed my fingers about it for me.
‘Honestly,’ I said, ‘I never saw them. One minute I was close behind the milk truck. The next, I was . . .’
I ran out of confessional steam. The inspector emptie
d his glass and refilled it. ‘It happens to the best of us,’ he said. I sipped my own drink. Either he was being very funny indeed, or I didn’t like the direction the interview was taking.
A red light flashed on the control board. The sergeant hurried back to it, put on earphones, and began giving quiet orders into a microphone. On one of the TV screens I could see an ambulance nudging through the crowd toward my car. ‘I ran over two people, Inspector. A man and a woman. The woman was dead. I’m sure of it.’
‘A complication, certainly. But they don’t die easily, these people.’
‘A complication?’
‘Inquest, coroner’s report, you know the sort of thing. Nothing we can’t handle, mind. But things would be easier without an actual mortality.’
I drank my vodka. I’ve always hated vodka, but I drank it down. ‘A woman is dead,’ I said, ‘and a man is injured, possibly quite badly.’
The inspector smiled sadly. ‘Pour encourager les autres,’ he said. Evidently he knew some history. ‘We’ll bring you to court of course. But not for six months or so, and in a different part of the country. The world moves on — I don’t imagine you’ll have much trouble.’ He smiled again. ‘Frankly, my dear sir, you’ve done us all a great favor.’
The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe Page 13