And he wasn’t running north. He had re-orientated himself and was running back into the ghetto, the idiot. He laughed at himself as he ran and walked and ran again: a left at the second crossing, then there was a warehouse, then a right.
There was no sign of the taxi, but as he ran the doctor thought about the boy. The boy was a genuine cabman, the doctor felt sure of that. The way the boy had said ‘my cab’ – ‘Don’t piss in my cab’ – convinced him so. And the boy wasn’t an ordinary crook, else he would have seen to it that he grabbed the hundred bucks before he lost his passenger. The boy wasn’t corruptible, the doctor knew. Instinctively he hadn’t tried any bribes, knowing from the boy’s face that they wouldn’t work. The boy had a gun. It seemed to follow that the boy was a boy with a cause and the doctor knew very well what kind of cause that might be.
So he turned his thoughts to Silence and her situation. Doing so he was beginning to discover why he was heading back that way. Silence, in the boy’s eyes, must be a traitor to the cause. She had harboured the man he knew to be ‘no fucking dentist’. She had harboured a man wanted by the members of this cause. Moreover, what was doubly dangerous, she had been involved with the members of this cause. She was herself wanted by the police and presumably therefore protected by the members of the cause. In their eyes she had therefore double-crossed the cause. No wonder the dentist had fled.
It would take the doctor about twenty minutes to reach the dentist’s house, he thought, so long as he took no wrong turn. At least he had the dentist’s knife.
When he reached the street he paused. His legs were feeling very weak. Then looking along the dim row of houses he couldn’t find the dentist’s surgery sign. It had been painted on a globe light shade. Indeed the more he looked at the street, the less confident did he feel. The situation was nightmarish. He was at the end of the right street. He knew he had taken no wrong turning. Yet it wasn’t the same street. Hardly any cars were parked in it. There weren’t any lights in the windows any more. There was nobody to be seen. Not a car. It was a ghost street. He felt as bewildered as scared. Slowly he walked along.
There wasn’t a dentist’s sign because it had been stoned. There weren’t any dentist’s windows because they had been smashed. The lace curtains swung about in the gaping space like ignominious white flags. The doctor felt the crunch of broken glass under his feet. He was being watched. He was sure of that. He turned round sharply, but nobody was there. Yet he was being watched. Not watched by one pair of eyes, the doctor thought, but by a hundred or more. The lights might be out but the people were still in their houses. Maybe the sight of a couple of shadows made the doctor sure of that: something did.
At the limit, courage closely resembles cowardice. It has its own motor: Go-man-go or Run-man-run. The doctor looked tense but composed as he stepped up then walked straight into the house.
She was naked. They may have gang-banged her first, but probably not. Nobody will ever know. She was standing, or almost standing, stark naked. Her back was like an uncooked steak that had been thrashed by a tennis racket strung with wire.
And the doctor thought, Maybe it is Sunday, but there is no longer any belief. So help me, they didn’t do as much to Christ.
Yes, it could be called standing. She was bowed, but she was on her feet, not her knees, exactly between the waiting-room and the surgery, in the doorway. She was making absolutely no sound. Not a moan. No sound at all.
‘It’s me,’ the doctor said. ‘I’ve come for you. You knew I would. Show me your face. I don’t care what they’ve done to it, show me your eyes.’
She must have been at the limit of consciousness, because when she turned round he thought for an appalling second that they had taken her eyes. The whites only were showing. But that wasn’t true. She came back. The yellow eyes returned, but they were empty of all expression.
Her face could have been worse. It was bruised, smudged and scratched but it wasn’t so bad.
Then the doctor saw that she wasn’t tied to the door as at first he’d thought. Her hands weren’t tied there, just a few inches above her big head. They were nailed. Nailed to the lintel with one big square nail.
‘God,’ the doctor murmured, ‘they won’t have left me any tools.’ But somehow he got it out. With his bare hands. As he put it in his pocket, he thought, I want it in my grave, I do. He was holding her up now, dragging her into the surgery. The doctor could never have used the little knife, but when she lost consciousness he thought, If I had a gun I would shoot her in the temple now, because there is a god; there is a careless god. So bloody careless he makes us in his own hopelessly split image and Silence here pays in pain.
The doctor was aware that his courage was no longer coming from the money or the rum. It was coming from an historic horror: man’s enslavement of man. It was an indomitable courage, a bitter courage now. He had the energy of guilt. For a second she woke. But she did not recognise him. Even his face was changed.
The dentist had been right to leave. His chair was torn from its moorings, his instruments and files scattered all over the floor. Not an hour had gone by since the boy told the doctor, ‘You’re no fucking dentist.’ Communications have grown to be very fast in the slowest, surest war of all: the one that some merchants started when they pulled the boats away from the African and Island coasts.
Water for her. ‘Christ,’ he said, ‘it’s in our hands, not yours, not God’s.’ He told Silence. ‘You kept me parched, you big black. Tip your head back now.’ And in his hand, because all the vessels were smashed, he brought water from the tap in the corner to the place by the door where she lay. He must have made the journey twenty or thirty times. ‘Don’t you want to sit up. Not even now? Don’t want to sit, don’t want to talk? Don’t you want to say one word to me now?’
Not that his own words mattered any more. The tone did. The tone was not so arrogant as to give confidence. It promised no relief. But he said with every breath, I’m not going to go, I’m not going to leave you, not ever, not until the end. ‘So kneel, okay, kneel if that’s better for the pain, kneel, or get on all fours you big cow, why the hell did you do this for me?’ And he thought, Maybe it is only in our impossible love for each other that we can defeat the carelessness of God.
‘We have to put something over your shoulders,’ he said and she watched him as he took off his shirt. He said, ‘It’s damned cold outside but I’ll wear your sweater, I’d like to do that.’
She shied away from him only for a second, but he caught her by the arm. She was sitting on her heels now. He said, ‘We have to put something over your back because of that boy in hospital, the one with the burns. We got to cover the wound because we don’t want things crawling out of the bandage.’ She stayed absolutely still and he opened up the shirt. Just before he put it round her he thought, Woman, we need a sculptor to catch you sitting on your heels, waiting for more pain. For here is the result of the power and the glory of God and the indelible cruelty of man.
She hardly flinched. Out loud he said, ‘Oh dear, why did I find myself such a big moose, why did I ever take that particular door? Look, you know who I am. Idiot, I came back. Now big animal, get up on your feet. Please get up on your feet. Oh my darling Silence, help me to help you to stand.’
They found her jeans. They found no boots. That bit wasn’t so hard. They even found a beautiful, ironic mouthful of rum. She put the white coat on, this time. He took the sweater. She was standing now with her bleeding hands held straight in front of her. The doctor saw that something had to be done about them. He could see no bandage, though there was plenty of cotton wool. There was also some mild disinfectant, normally used for mouthwash. The doctor filled a basin and diluted the disinfectant. She obeyed him absolutely now. He pulled her over to the basin by her wrists and dipped her hands in the water. It evidently wasn’t so painful as she had expected.
By the basin the doctor found a big pair of rubber gloves. He wished Silence’s hands were smaller, because
he could have packed the gloves with cotton wool. But he managed some sort of covering to the wounds with lint and wool dipped in the same disinfectant, then as gently as he could, stretching the gloves open with his own slim strong fingers, he pulled them over her hands.
So now she was in jeans, shirt, a white surgery coat and red rubber gloves. He put her plastic coat over all that, buttoning it like a cloak. He found a scarf belonging either to the dentist or some patient who had left it behind. He tied that round her neck. He had her sweater, his torn trousers and his coat turned up at the collar. But she looked round for something and he saw she was barefoot. ‘I suppose you want your Cinderella slippers? Christ, that’s really you. A moment like this when I’m calling forth the saints and you’ve got to have your horrible spangled slippers!’ He found them for her and she even looked a little content. He smiled and said, ‘We’re a couple of swells.’ She just looked at him: and looked. He pressed her arm very gently. He said, ‘And we’ll walk up the avenue, yes, we’ll walk up the avenue.’
He took her out by the elbow. It was as if she couldn’t believe a return of the love which she had never been able to explain in herself: that’s how she stared at him.
Enemies, meaning people, frightened people could have been waiting outside with stones or guns. The wind had come up. The doctor and Silence both felt it hard and cold as they took the first few steps. Shakily they stepped down to the sidewalk and paused for a second in the iciness, their feet on frosted snow and broken glass.
The wind seemed to freeze the doctor’s tired face. He’d put on his spectacles for some reason as they came out of the door. Perhaps he thought the lenses would give him some protection. The lines on his face looked very deep in the street light. Beside his, her face looked rounded and smooth in pain. The doctor looked all the way round the houses. Perhaps that’s why he put his glasses on. But he didn’t need them. He could feel that the night was filled with eyes.
His own family wouldn’t have recognised the doctor now. They never knew he had a temper as terrible as this. He yelled at the windows which only appeared to be empty. ‘Thank God. Oh yes. Thank God there are thousands of eyes upon us now!’
And as they walked down the street, heads appeared at the windows behind them, the onlookers gradually becoming less cautious. None of them tried to stop the couple and none of them offered to help.
Lord knows how she managed to walk. She rose to the occasion. She was too confused probably to think exactly what their walk might mean to those who saw it. She was amazed still that the doctor had come back to her, pulled her back from death. Maybe surprised that nobody shot at them. Nobody threw a single stone. They walked with more and more confidence until they were both almost straight-backed, like an ancient couple determined not to reveal their infirmities. Look what’s become of Adam and Eve; that’s what the doctor thought.
So the eyes dwindled away. And the wind blew across this strange couple. It blew hard and cold across the lake, until there were no longer any eyes. Even the stars and moon were covered with clouds coming in from the northeast. It was then necessary for them to walk only for the benefit of each other. We are walking under the vigilance of no eyes at all, the doctor told himself, looking from her extraordinary face up to the dark and empty sky.
By a miracle, or through the strength of this rum love of theirs, they covered the four miles and reached the park which is no-man’s-land in this present undeclared war. At night it is avoided by everyone except the junkies and jackals from both camps: but that night the wind was too cold even for them.
They were only a quarter of a mile into it when the doctor saw the irony of things. Not even the taxi-drivers came into the park at nights, because they were afraid, so nobody would find them until morning. And even under one of the scrubby bushes they would not stand a chance of survival through the night. Not at this temperature. Silence was already very shaky, with her eyes tightly closed; she was swaying on the point of collapse. The doctor no longer considered his own state of health. He talked to her, but even talking was pain in that wind. And as the clouds came over thicker it grew very very dark. Nobody could frighten them now.
Twice she collapsed. The second time he had to kick and swear at her and call her coward. He said terrible things to her, made obscene threats, then tugged and pulled until she was on her feet again. The park was as wide as a desert, it seemed, as cold as the Pole.
Then the doctor began to hear banging noises. He headed them towards the sounds until they heard machinery running and he knew they were near the railway. A long building loomed in front of them and as they got closer they were met by an undeniable odour and the desolate, restless lowing and kicking of cattle. The doctor thought of hoboes and thought of them, the two of them, riding the freight train with all the cattle. But then he remembered the cattle weren’t going any further than this either.
They got in out of the wind and Silence collapsed and lay on her side in the straw. Engines juddered in the marshalling yards and shunted trucks clanged in unmelodic scales. The smell of disinfectant did battle with the animal smell and neither was winning. A door flapped on its hinges, trying to destroy itself in the wind. The doctor went off in search of it, the cattle didn’t frighten him in the least, he felt he loved them. He felt he wanted to open all the doors and let them out into the park. He wanted to laugh. The wind tears were laughter tears starting before the laugh. Then there was a blood-curdling scream. For a second he thought it to be one of the animals. But when it came again he knew it was Silence’s scream. He dashed back along the cattle pens.
Nothing terrible had happened. The big door had slammed shut at the other end and she’d woken up in the pitch dark. She must have thought she was in hell. He talked through her awful shouting and found her wrist and face and throat and told her funny silly truths and lies about how they were safe. ‘For heaven’s sake,’ he said, ‘we’re in the best place. Give me animals any day. If we judge from the people we know. The cattle are lowing, a crib for a bed.’ Again it was the tone, not the words. She steadied and he managed to coax her into the warmth of the house itself. The doctor arranged some clean straw as best he could, and she sank back in it. She lay on her tummy half beside and half across him with her head in his neck. Almost at once and together, they slept.
At 7 a.m. they began to move the cattle to the slaughter-houses. By 8 a.m. the doctor had betrayed her.
A slaughterhouse is very like a hospital. At an unearthly hour the doors were slid back and the lights switched on. The slaughtermen and porters came in noisily, shouting to each other and waking the dozy cattle. Silence was still alive and still asleep trustingly in his arms. He simply thought, I’m damned if I’ll wake her to pain. Moreover, he wasn’t feeling like exercise himself. Half cramped by the weight of her body, but also weakened by his wound and the exertions of escape he felt almost incapable of movement.
Of course, it wasn’t long until someone spotted them. In fact it was a uniformed porter who seemed at that time of the morning to find it hard to believe his eyes. He was at first startled, then amused because he thought they were junkies or lovers. Then he looked defensive and concerned. He called to his buddy who was already wheeling great carcasses of meat through from the other side. The doctor thought, This is a place where delicacy is not observed. There was a great deal of noise by now in this echoing place and the cattle waited patiently.
Two more came over and a fat one who had been at work with a shovel and sounded Irish recognised the two of them.
‘That’s her,’ he said at a glance, ‘that’s the one they call Silence. That’s the one they want.’
Then looking at the doctor he snapped his fingers.
‘Jesus!’
‘Ewing,’ the doctor said.
‘That’s it,’ he said.
Their subsequent actions were enough to kill any kind feelings the doctor might still have entertained for the citizens of this city. The fat porter knew he was on to something of valu
e. Even in his profession he must have seen something of the state of the pair, but he could have had no finer feelings, no compassion. None. ‘You two stay exactly where you are. Just you two stay there. D’you hear me? You stay absolutely still.’ He sounded threatening.
The cattle bellowed, frightened, smelling hot blood. The young man had a hurried conference with the other after which he called out, ‘Down the middle, fifty-fifty,’ as he hurried away stumbling. Silence still slept.
A moment later the doors at both ends were shut. Their bolts clanged home. In another couple of minutes the uniformed one and the fat Irishman appeared back. He had a little camera. It had a flashbulb, and that woke up Silence.
Something about her yellow eyes, or the sudden movement of her head, must have surprised or even alarmed the onlookers – and now there were ten or twelve of them – at the other side of the iron bars. In embarrassed reaction there was a little titter of laughter.
The doctor said, ‘Close your eyes.’
A moment later some big policemen shouldered their way through. There was one quite senior man. He was extremely nice and polite. He said, ‘Thank God you’re alive, doctor,’ and told his assistant to clear everybody else out. The porter had taken another two snapshots. He had what he needed.
Then the inner door was unlocked and two officers crawled through. The doctor told them to be very careful of Silence. They said, ‘Don’t you worry, doc, we will be,’ and for a second the doctor could not or would not understand the way they said that. They helped her through the door of the pen civilly enough while the doctor explained about her hands and her back. They assimilated the information without any show of emotion. They’re trained that way, the doctor thought.
Household Ghosts Page 46