The Vivisector

by WHITE, PATRICK

  ‘He’s been unconscious for two days. He’s my brother. He’s had a stroke.’

  ‘Arr!’

  The noise vibrating disintegrating distributed itself in pins and needles throughout his body.

  Rhoda’s voice a little drill. ‘I’ve never owned a floor-polisher. How often do you have to renew the wax?’

  ‘When it looks dirty, dear.’

  Must burst the too-clean curtains all around him.

  A woman or sister a same white did just this.

  ‘Why, Miss Courtney, didn’t you notice? He’s recovered consciousness. ’

  Rhoda’s face ought to look less looking more frightened.

  ‘He is. Isn’t he? Yes, sister.’

  Too many sisters Rhoda Lena the nameless starch.

  ‘You must talk to him from time to time, Miss Courtney. You never know how much gets through to them.’

  Rhoda’s gar gargoyle looking petrified down. ‘Yes, sister.’

  Sister went. Rhoda perched. Where is lean old bloody Lena?

  ‘Do you hear me, Hurtle? Ruffles died. I didn’t even cry. I think you can reach a point where you’re beyond crying. And all my cats have always been dirty, selfish, cruel, lazy. Don’t know why I ever kept them. Except you’ve got to have something. And men were never interested.’

  Rhoda didn’t believe he in any way worked not certainly by earwork. Didn’t believe other sisters. Only herself.

  ‘Oh, dear! Do you think the others in the ward will have heard the rubbish I started talking? You forget these are only curtains.’

  Not not this pale painfully vibrating ice encasing two of them he hear he couldn’t help couldn’t fend Rhoda’s eyes her eyes pricks her hiss pissing testing temperature of ice reducing to melt.

  ‘I was only ever interested in men. Not their minds—their minds are mostly putrid—but their bodies. Their lovely strong straddling legs. Their backs. Whatever else they know—whatever feeds their vanity—they can’t know about their own backs.’

  Rhoda had the indergestion by whispers. Got the hiccups.

  ‘I’m only—hpp—tiring you, Hurtle.’

  Didn’t believe it anything about him her cat her buried brother she was Rhoda only only why had she come clean.

  ‘There’s nothing I can—nothing I was ever able to do for you.’

  God’s sake another crying sister. A hiccupping handkerchief.

  ‘This is Dr Westmacott, Miss Courtney. Miss Courtney is Mr Duffield’s sister.’

  ‘Distinguished brother.’

  ‘Smy brother. Never think of him as anything—hpp.’

  Professionally kind man with all sisters floating backward through zese why wires trapeze or tram tram trampoline slipping with new wax.

  When he could walk, or shuffle, say a few words, if not compose a sentence, or not more than to refuse the mauve blancmange, they said he might go home. Rhoda came. She didn’t bring a taxi; regardless of expense she engaged a hire car. He wondered what the patients watching from the balconies would think. He would have liked to look less conspicuous; but that was not possible: he couldn’t answer for his right side. For that matter, his whole tingling body was only nominally his.

  ‘The tinkling,’ he complained.

  ‘The what?’ Rhoda tried to smile what she understood as a sweet smile.

  He was too busy shuffling to the car in the way the therapists had tried to teach him. He had never been good at ‘learning’ things: he had functioned intermittently by painful vibrations followed by illumination. But now that he vibrated all the time, the light wouldn’t switch on.

  ‘Why the hire?’

  ‘Well, it’s a big occasion, isn’t it? And you have the money. Miss Harkness told me you’ve got pots of it. So we decided to spend some of it on you.’ Rhoda was sitting as upright as she knew how, her legs dangling. ‘Doesn’t a car like this make you feel “diplomatic”?’

  Rhoda and him the dips!

  She had meant it as a joke, and thought he was enjoying it, whereas he was searching for a lost word.

  ‘Few—near—real.’ he said at last. ‘My own funeral!’

  It was going to be difficult for them both: not only because of words; there was noise too. He couldn’t protect his ears, except with his left hand, and often he couldn’t be bothered. It might be better to get it over quickly: to die of the explosions of glass and clashing of cymbals.

  ‘Isn’t it very noisy?’ What might have been a protest, wasn’t really: they had told him he should develop the habit of conversing; and the nice little girls would have been pleased to think he was trying.

  ‘Not particularly,’ Rhoda said. ‘In fact, this is rather a quiet bit. Don’t you remember Centennial Park? And there’s a golf course over there. You’re probably still a bit sensitive to noise.’

  He was at the molten core of it. Himself the noise perpetually disintegrating.

  He would have liked to cry; but his handkerchief was on the wrong side. Wouldn’t ask bloody Rhoda. Cursed with a dwarf. She, cured with him. When there were comfortable upholstered normal people walking throwing bread to ducks in parks.

  And Rhoda said: ‘I hope you’re not going to be unkind, Hurtle, because all that anybody wants is your recovery and happiness. ’

  He wondered whether their thoughts and remarks were inflicting themselves on the hire-car driver’s blackheaded neck.

  Rhoda had got one of her her her minions to carry down a bed and set it up in the living-room—as though she was preparing to nurse you into a state of dependence. When it was from just that sort of thing that he had to run away. Was already beginning.

  ‘But how can I look after you?’ she moaned.

  Rhoda!

  ‘The stairs are what. Sister and Miss Therap told me exercise.’ He was already beginning to drag himself up, kneel whenever, there was all evening: to escape from Rhoda. ‘Just the job.’

  It was of the utmost importance that he return into himself: find out what was left.

  ‘Nobody stops the cats’ meat.’ He was too exhausted, but attempted to explain. ‘Take away—I don’t steal your knife.’ He was kaput at three stairs below the up landing. ‘Eh? Rhoda?’ It went ricocheting down, unlike anything he had ever used. It was the new, incalculable self.

  ‘But what am I to do? Up and down stairs! Who will take care of you?’

  ‘Don Lethbridge,’ he remembered and gasped.

  The door shuddered open on the dust of his cold closed belonging room. He burrowed like a screw into an old instinctive screwhole. At its kindest the smell was sawdust, at its blackest burning rubber.

  Don Lethbridge was his luckiest bet yet.

  Rhoda said: ‘He’s willing to come. He’ll come morning and evening. But the times will vary depending on the classes he has to attend. He can help you learn to wash and dress yourself. And things of that nature.’

  Rhoda blushed, but not enough: her flesh remained a pale veil barely covering her thoughts as she visualized necessities of the body. Imagine how he would lay on the fine gauze of paint for Rhoda the bride surrounded by her straddling strongbacked men. Safe, safe enough. He wouldn’t paint. Except in blacks, in Chinese.

  ‘What else?’ he asked.

  ‘There was the question of payment. We discussed that.’

  Good old Rhoda couldn’t guess at Ron Cuppaidge’s real role. Weren’t sure yourself, only that something vast was painfully vaguely forming.

  ‘I told him that of course you were going to pay him for his help. A student can always find uses for a little extra money.’

  ‘Heaps of money.’

  Because without this Cup Lethbridge he couldn’t hope to entertain? a secret existence so necessary to the un-reason.

  ‘Well, I didn’t want to raise the poor fellow’s hopes too high, because you know you are mean, Hurtle.’

  He wanted to try out a laugh, and dared. ‘Mean as old bacon yourself.’

  However his laughter sounded, Rhoda appeared to enjoy it: she laughed ba
ck. They were enjoying it together. He felt better.

  Rhoda, remembering, got her prim serious look. ‘Actually he said he’d be only too glad to do it for nothing—if he might look at the paintings when he comes.’

  Were Rhoda and the young man conspired?

  ‘What did you?’

  ‘I said it was a matter I wasn’t in a position to decide. You would have to talk it over together. I had no idea how you’d react. You’re such a peculiar man.’

  ‘But not mean. Generous when—when necessary.’

  She went down the stairs in gigantic clopping salt-boxes sighing for her respiratory system and things peculiar. Herself included, he imagined.

  ‘No stinge!’ his lopsided voice roared after her.

  Then sinking back he began sweetly deeply sleeping because of what had been arranged. And woke up trying to see what he had dreamt about. He never dreamed now, though. His dreams had been withered in one stroke. Even if his thoughts were beginning again. Would somebody new hold open the right door?

  ‘Sir? Mr Duffield?’

  The lad at the door had yellow lank hair, and by that light a look of something else. Of a spotty downy archangel. On Hero’s island. Only there they were black, on blue sky.

  ‘Miss Courtney told me to come up.’

  What to ask him to do? Hadn’t thought enough about it yet.

  ‘What was it?’ His own voice sounded pitiful. ‘Have to remember, ’ he said at last. ‘Only beginning to find my way about.’ Not through a new mind, through the wreckage of an old one. ‘A vandal broke in!’ He tried another of his new laughs.

  But his servitor wasn’t as tough as Rhoda. Or hadn’t lived with deformity. Lethbridge looked away. Blotches of embarrassment came in his cheeks nourished in milk bars and on greasy twists of limp chips. Long yellow hair, visible pelvis and saucered buttocks were a mod re reen—Renaissance!

  ‘Miss Courtney says I’m to help you wash and dress.’ Though of indeterminate sex, the creature sounded determined enough.

  If it had been Kathy’s gunpowdery arms. But warmth was of the past.

  ‘Washing and dressing? That’s the least of it!’ Somebody else’s cough came out of him. ‘The body can get a bit smelly, I suppose—in waiting. Yes, feet. Feet, Cuppaidge!’

  The relieved buttercup of a lad went quickly out, down, to conspire—all always conspiring—with Rhoda.

  What was it had made you ashamed? While he was gone, you dared look in the glass, saw the lip pulled down into a flap or stilled clapper anyway lopsided.

  Looked away.

  But this is what you have to do to ac cepe: a kind of delicious French toad stool, darling, which Maman is sure you’ll adore when you’re accustomed to it. Learn to use the withered arm. Dried mushrooms you soak in water, use the water, the mushroom itself has served its purpose: throw it away.

  The Don brought in an old enamel basin could remember seeing somewhere rust-pitted in the yard rain spitting from long forgotten. He peeled the slippers off you the stiff socks.

  ‘Pongifaction might set in.’ This was a joke for the servitor. Who didn’t respondle. The Don was no Sancho. Hands seriously flowing through yellow soap. The dangling light from hair.

  One foot was dead. Both all all were his vibrating pain dividing and multiplying. For ever, it seemed.

  The lad knelt and flowed around the dead fungus as though life depended on him. Never had it with a boy. Could have been another funny joke the lolloping Lifebuoy appendicles and winking arsehole. Or: un délice gastronomique pour Maman. Non-poisonous toad stools.

  Complain. ‘The good foot tickles, Don.’

  A corner of the body left didn’t mean anything more than a tickle. The body wouldn’t renasce. Nor the mind. The spirit an only hope. It flickered a little above the warm soapulent water.

  It didn’t flicker it stabbed him to watch his servitor’s curved backbone the hanging light of unconscious flossy hair. To recognize the vulnerable indestructibility of a fellow spirit.

  Don Lethbridge wasn’t to be caught looking at the paintings but you could tell he was worming his way into them by odd means of perception.

  ‘Look!’ It was cruel, but unavoidable at some point. ‘Here is some filthy money to spur.’ Spurn? Forgot how it finished.

  Out from under the pillow he fished the notes to dangle for the archangel-servitor. Who took it like some young neophyte prostitute disgusted-greedy.

  They didn’t speak to each other much. Everything was implied and disguised. Their bodies came resentfully gratefully in contact. Their minds touched gingerly amazed. The disciple blushed amongst his down and pimples.

  ‘What are you aiming, Cuppaidge’—must learn to remember ends of sentences however painful the found object—‘to achieve—in paint? Your peculiar goal.’

  The lily was spinning on her moorings she was so embarrassed.

  At last Don Lethbridge grew reckless. ‘Well, I suppose I’m sort of trying to realize a feeling or a thought or emotion in pictorial terms sort of.’

  ‘You? Balls!’ He couldn’t make them round enough. ‘Don’t tell me!’ So shaken the vibrations must have burst through. ‘You! The first and only!’

  Laughter and visible needles weren’t going to scuppaidge the Don. He was shining with his own vision. Which you recognized as the twin.

  ‘See you in the morning, sir. Give you a hand with the washing and dressing. And anything else.’

  All the wrong subjects kept coming to the surface in your relationship with this sally willow.

  ‘All right, Don.’

  ‘Not if I drive you up the wall!’ Now it was the twin’s turn to laugh.

  ‘Please. I’m only going to try to remember—what I want you.’

  Don Lethbridge took up the freckled basin which was beginning to dominate the room the way objects will. He carried it out. Didn’t even say good-bye. You don’t when almost all is implied.

  Try to remember why you sent for this second gaoler. Not that anyone escapes ever. Not with the door wide open. Not very far.

  ‘Where are you going, Hurtle?’

  ‘Exercising.’

  ‘Oh, dear! I ought to be going with you.’

  Supposing he dropped dead, stroked again, in Oxford Street, Rhoda’s conscience would never forgive her for her brother’s murder; on the other hand, she had looked after too many cats: she was too tired, though she no longer fed the neighbourhood.

  ‘Exercise is all very well, but don’t overdo it.’

  Two or three times he had gone to the class organized for fellow victims. They had wanted him to bowl a hoop. Too many mirrors. Too many grunting cunts and elderbellied stockbrokers. His own grotesque contributions corresponded too clearly to their gyrations.

  ‘I won’t! I won’t! I insis! Snot my meteor.’

  All his stars had shot unaccompanied on an often unexpected but well defined, fiery curve. He wasn’t for constellations, unless the constellation were was were fragments of his own daring.

  ‘I’ll recover—if you let me—in my own way. In the streets,’ he added.

  That was dishonest. He didn’t believe it for a moment. Only that the streets were rivers of life. And to bathe in the waters of—could could.

  So he advanced with the hopscotch shuffle and corner technique along the river banks grasping railings with his good hand whenever he failed to make home.

  There was never any rest in this game he had begun, no it had been begun for him, his half-shrivelled body pursuing the course it had been started on, his mind more hesitant because too green and tender, shooting in all directions from old cutback wood, feeling for recognizable holds, and suspicious of its own growth. He was reduced to this. When he had always got there by jumping out into darkness flying flying then landing on what his presence made believable and solid. After the first spitting and gnashing of teeth, they had believed in what he showed them. Would show them again, too. Ready for the jump. If the spirit would only move in him. But the spirit plopped and slu
cked like hot lazy mud.

  Oh God it was the colour of the sky he must try to remember. He hadn’t seen it before or since. ‘Extra indigo’ was the code word he had used while lying parcelled on the pavement. This same place.

  In his vertigo he propped himself up on the shop window. What if it happened again of course it couldn’t most unlikely it was only emotion from being in the same place and remembering the code word for the colour.

  She ran out all jiggle joggle still a sexy bloody woman wanting to air her feelings on him.

  She began to speak out of flaking lips, addressing someone supposedly deaf or moronic: ‘Oh, Mr Duffield, I’m so very glad to see you’ve made such progress. You know me, don’t you? I’m Mrs Cutbush.’

  She too was looking uneasily at the pavement. At the Place. Afraid it might happen again.

  ‘It’s wonderful to think!’ she harped.

  The gull had by now almost devoured the starling in her hair. Must tear the guts out of that poor creep her husband.

  ‘Haven’t seen Miss Courtney. Is she, I hope, well? I expect she misses Miss Katherine Volkov.’ The gull seemed to swoop, squawk. ‘There’s no one in our little circle who doesn’t believe they have the only right to Kathy.’

  This Mrs Cotbus, who had probably saved his life, wanted to destroy something even more important in him. Mustn’t let her smudge the indelible writing.

  Lucky he had the window to lean on; instead of relying on conversation he read out an answer of sorts: ‘Fonds d’artichauts, citrique, eau, sel. Laver avant cooking. artichoke bottoms.’ Tactless word in Cutbush circumstances; but she drove him to it.

  She looked along the street, away from him. ‘The unusual lines aren’t what you’d call popular,’ she said.

  To console her, he told her: ‘Keep at it, and they will be.’

  ‘Cecil’s too artistic for a man—for a business—a business man.’ Her throat swelling turned a confession into an accusation: she couldn’t forgive poor old Cec his unusual line in cuissons. ‘That’s our whole trouble,’ she said.

  Probably a good woman, and the grocer, who had saved your life by Triple O, good also, if ‘artistic’. Two goods could obviously make a bad marriage.