The Elected Member

by Bernice Rubens

  But Minister refused to join them. ‘ ‘E’s new,’ he said suspiciously, ‘ow d’you know where’e’s been, and what ‘e’s brought in on ‘im, on ‘is person, I mean. You can’t be too careful in a place like this. ‘E should be vaccinated,’ he shouted, 'god knows where’e’s been till now. And we can catch it. Keep away mate,’ he said addressing himself to Norman, ‘every man for ‘isself in this place.’ He moved over to another table, and sat down where the filth was known and less fearful. The three men already at the table ignored his arrival, and Minister sat down in isolated splendour. ‘Oo wants this muck?’ he shouted. The three men shoved their plates forward without looking at him. He doled it out in three parts, very meticulously, first the meat, then the potatoes and vegetables, and with less success, the gravy. ‘God knows where that lot’s been,’ he muttered. ‘That one what’s sitting over there. Why didn’t no-one wake me up when ‘e came? No-one notifies me and you all bloody well know it’s my job,’ he shouted at them.

  ‘You having any visitors this afternoon, Minister?’ one of his table-mates said. He wanted to get back to some normal conversation, but he couldn’t have chosen a more tactless topic. Minister got up silently and left the table.

  He walked down to the cleaning cupboard at the end of the ward and he took out a disinfectant spray. Then he walked to Norman’s table, and standing a few feet from the object, according to the instructions of the label, he sprayed the newcomer with the liquid. He stayed to empty the whole bottle, while his object, conditioned to a lifetime of subjugation, sat, unmoving. Minister planted the empty bottle on the table and went back to his bed. The newcomer looked at his disinfected dinner and pushed it away. ‘You can have mine if you like,’ Norman said. ‘I’m not hungry.’

  The man shook his head and Norman left him. He had no curiosity about the newcomer and was completely indifferent to his silent despair. He decided to go out again on the lawn. At least that would be dean. They wouldn’t be there, crawling all over the place, and if they were, better outside where they belonged, than in the ward where they were driving him as mad as the rest of them.

  The sun was now settled directly over the grass, and he curled himself into the warm canvas of his chair. He would sit out the visiting hours; he didn’t want to witness Minister’s afternoon. But the sun began to irritate him and he dragged his chair underneath a tree. He was glad that most of the men were still inside. He could not bear their outdoor laughter, yet, at the same time, the general silence of the place was frightening. It had been the same kind of day, with the same kind of warm threatening stillness that had witnessed Billy’s breakdown; it was the tedium of constant light and heat that had screwed his brain to cracking point. Norman felt that if he stayed out in the light much longer, he himself would crumble. But the alternative was the ward, in his bed, crouched under the darkness of the blankets, but therein lay an even greater menace. He was in the position of not knowing what to do with his body, neither did he know which part of him was begging a hiding-place. He had to hide his eyes away, because it was they that saw them, and his nose that smelled them, and his body itself that itched with them, these too needed concealment. But his mind was clear and unafraid. Yet his body and his mind were indivisible, and he would have to carry them under the blankets, assuring his mind that he understood its immunity. The sun filtered through even under the thickly branched tree, and it frightened him, because he knew it was going to cause trouble. The only dark room in the hospital was the lavatory, but you could never lock yourself in. You had to announce your going, and your stay there was timed. It was this horrifying lack of privacy that he knew would finally destroy him.

  He got up, kicked over the chair and idled back down the corridor. He counted the tables alongside. Five of them and the fourth sported a tea-stained cloth that had not been changed since his arrival. He already had a terrible familiarity with the place, a kind of intimacy one has with one’s own home, to the extent of overlooking certain inadequacies because they have become liveable with. He rarely thought of his own home now. Its geography had become blurred. When he did occasionally think about it, he saw no layout of rooms. He picked up single images, Bella in her white socks, David’s favourite chair, his mother plaiting the Sabbath loaves, and Esther poring over her books. Together, they seemed to him the driving force that had propelled him into his present isolation.

  Me turned down the covers of his bed, and carefully wiped the sheets with sweeping movements of his hand. As he got into bed, he noticed Minister staring at him from the other side. He was reminded of his first day’s admission to the place and that stare that had so unnerved his father. He pushed himself down between the sheets, and covered his head. It was dark and warm inside, and he tried to concentrate on just these two comforts. Theo as he grew used to it, it was no longer dark, and the heat was stifling. Perhaps he could smother himself, he thought, but he didn’t want to die. He just wanted to sleep it all away and to wake up when everything was clean and touchable. He felt himself sweating and he ascribed that to the heat. Then his body itched and he put that down to the heat too. He had to. He had to lie to himself sometimes otherwise he would have had to surrender completely. He scratched his body and tried to think of other things to take his mind off his pain. He wondered whether Minister was still staring at him, and he peeped above the blankets across to his bed. But Minister wasn’t there. He was probably in the lavatory preparing for his ordeal. They were clearing away the lunch plates and the newcomer still sat at his table. It would be at least an hour before the visitors began to arrive, and that was the worst time of all, the waiting, and the terrible fear that you couldn’t entertain them while they stayed. The muttered rehearsed soliloquies in the garden. ‘How are things at home then?’ ‘How’s the car?’ ‘Yes, I’m much better, thank you,’ and the long painful silences that no amount of rehearsal could overcome. ‘Yes, you’d better go now or you’ll miss the bus. See you next week,’ and the monologues would come to an end and start up all over again, with no variation from week to week, peppering the smooth lawns with droppings of vocabulary, and relieved at last to be called to face their ordeal.

  Norman watched the newcomer make a move to rise from the table. Then he thought better of it, and sat down again. A beam of sunlight shot suddenly through the ward, and Norman hid from it, cursing. He lay under the blankets and enjoyed the dark again, but the heat welled up on him. He heard the tea-bell which rang only a quarter of an hour before visiting-time, and he marvelled that he’d been able to lie in his own sweat for so long. He decided to get permission for a bath. He would sponge himself cool with cold water, and already at the thought of it, he felt much better.

  He got out of bed and went to the nurse’s room. The nurse told him that Minister was bathing but that he should be out soon, because he was expecting visitors. ‘Sprucing himself up for his Mum,’ the nurse smiled. ‘You got anyone coming today?’

  ‘No,’ said Norman with relief. ‘But I’d sooner be out of the ward when the visitors come. It depresses me. A bath’s a pretty good way of killing time.’

  ‘It’s open.’ the nurse said. ‘Tell Minister to hurry, and you can have fifteen minutes yourself. I’ll be up then.’ He handed Norman a clean towel from the cupboard behind him. As he passed it over, his eyes narrowed, and still smiling, he said, ‘You’re always bathing, aren’t you?’

  Norman laughed. ‘It’s this place,’ he said, ‘it’s dirtier than a bloody coal-mine.’

  ‘Well,’ the nurse said generously, ‘you’re entitled to your own opinion, I suppose.’

  Norman walked down the corridor. The sun pierced the glass windows that lined one side, and again Norman was assailed by the foreboding that had dogged him all day. But at least, upstairs in the bathroom, there was a dark rubber curtain he could draw and keep it for a while out of his sight.

  He reached the top of the stairs and saw it again, dribbling through the bathroom door, and he was surprised that Minister, who hated the l
ight as much as he, hadn’t bothered to draw the curtain. He would call him and wait outside. He valued his own privacy sufficiently to have respect for someone else’s. ‘Minister,’ he called softly. There was no answer. Norman thought Minister couldn’t have heard him. A man often became deaf in his bath. So he called again, louder this time. Again there was no answer, but what disturbed Norman, was not so much Minister’s silence, but the absolute and overall silence that practically shrieked from behind the door. He wanted to open it, but he was frightened. He dared not analyse his fear but he knew it was bound up with the shaft of sunlight beneath the door, and the terrible silence within.

  Gently he pushed the door slightly ajar with his foot, and he looked through the narrow crack. He saw the top end of the bath. He noticed how dirty the taps were, and he got over with cursing them and the establishment before he took in the rest of what was visible. Minister’s one foot was resting between the hot and cold taps. The other had fallen into the water. There was nothing very strange in this position, except that both feet were clad in Minister’s boots, and a number of little cellophane packets were floating around his ankle, like gathering scum. Even this strange sight did not unduly worry Norman as he stood there in the crack of the door. It was explainable. Minister never took his boots off, and he’d probably fallen asleep in the bath. Yet Norman felt suddenly very cold. There was something else about the scene that he refused to acknowledge, and nothing would have induced him to have opened the door wider and investigate. He thought that the water in the bath was red, a very deep red at times, and sometimes streaky. He thought of his family’s favourite word, and in these circumstances he was more than prepared to accept it. He was hallucinating. He was ‘seeing’ things. They were wrong about the silver-fish, of course, utterly wrong. but all men saw things in times of stress, and today Was one of those times for him, with that terrible sun and the men’s silences. So he stared at the water for a long time, and willed it to be an illusion. But as he grew colder, the water seemed to deepen in colour. He shivered. He had to acknowledge it. The red water was no more hallucination than the silver-fish, and he was betraying himself even to doubt it. If he, Norman Zweck, saw something, then it was positively there. And this blood water was no exception. Looking through the crack in the door, and feeling the cold crawl over him, he thought of David, and he sickened at the recollection. Most people could live a whole lifetime, without once witnessing its termination, willful or otherwise. Why in God’s name, he sobbed to himself, had he been so elected, cast as some ugly ubiquitous coroner. He pushed the door open wide.

  Minister lay with his head submerged. His arms had turned blue to the elbows, and they floated lifelessly. The boot of the foot in the water, had rotted with the heat. The sole had come apart from the uppers, revealing Minister’s hiding-place. Norman was tempted to gather the packets of white together, but he was reminded of his last case at the Bar, when Bertie Cass had taken his mother’s ring from off her dead finger. He watched them floating there, and he resisted, but the waste appalled him. He rushed out of the door. He felt tears running down his face. Sometimes he had pitied Minister, sometimes he had had compassion for him, but never, until this moment had he truly loved him. He was shivering with cold and crying uncontrollably. He was crippled with his panic, yet for the first time in many long weeks, he wanted so much to live. He ran down the corridor screaming, ‘He’s dead, he’s dead.’

  At one of the tables, a couple were sitting, and Norman could only suppose that the woman was Minister’s mother. He took her by the shoulders and shook her like a medicine bottle. ‘You killed him,’ he screamed, ‘you fucking whore. You killed him.’

  The nurse took him to his annexe, and when he could speak, he brought up his story. The nurse made a telephone call, and within a matter of minutes, the affair was under cold and clinical control. All visitors and the patients who expected them, were sent out onto the lawns. Minister’s visitors were taken care of by the doctor, and the general ward was locked. Only a few men remained inside, together with the newcomer, and they were asleep.

  Norman sat on his bed, his face buried in his hands. The sun was beginning to trouble him again, and his grief was giving way to increased panic. He now realised that his source had been forever cut off. He now had but one week’s supply, and the whiteless pain-racked days would be upon him. He fingered the edge of his dressing-gown and worked the little packets to the hole in the end. After a few minutes manoeuvring, he held his whole survival in his hands. He put one packet back in its hiding place in a split second of sanity to save against a rainier day. ‘What the hell,’ he muttered to himself, and emptying the pills onto his palm, he swallowed them whole.

  He sat on his bed for about an hour, shielding his eyes from the sun, and peering at the sleeping figures around him. He could not think of Minister. When he tried, it was as if it had all happened many years ago, and he only had the vaguest recollection of the story, as if he had half-woken from a bad dream. What occupied him was the army of silver-fish on the floor. They were coming out of the blinding sun towards him, slowly in platoons, and with audacious confidence. He watched them come towards him, and at his feet. they gathered their forces for the super human climb up his body. He watched them, terror-struck, and heard their slow and regular breathing. As they moved, they left their droppings behind, and the whole length o’ the ward floor was carpeted with their tracks. He watched with horrible fascination how they manoeuvred themselves into little groups at his feet. He thought of lifting his foot, but he knew that if he tried to crush them, they would overwhelm him. There surely could be no greater terror in anybody’s life, and although he loathed them, yet he had to acknowledge that they were sacred, that they were the only evidence of his own sanity. And so he watched them assemble like pilgrims at his feet. They had chosen him too, like his parents and his sisters, and he stood there, their reluctant disciple, rooted in fear. And suddenly they invaded him, and he was lost.

  He opened his mouth to scream, but he heard nothing. At the end of the ward, he saw the Hoover, that had been hurriedly left, its cable dragging, when the news of Minister had come through. He ran down the ward, switched off the plug, and picked up the cable. Then, with a strength that astonished him, he ripped the cord in two. He spread out the coloured wires before switching it on again. Then he crawled along the floor to his bed, electrocuting them along the skirting. All this time, the newcomer had been watching him, and he let out a scream that woke the rest of the men and all were infected by Norman’s panic. When he reached his bed, he stood up and attempted to apply the naked wires to his body. Two nurses rushed in and held him. He dropped the wire, and looked at them pleadingly. 'put me to sleep,’ he whimpered.

  The nurse obliged, and whether it was the blinding sun or the needle that paralysed him, he never knew. His muscles turned to water, and he felt himself departing, and in his raging mind, he thanked them.

  Over the next week there was an epidemic of break’ downs in the hospital, and a subsequent rash of deep sleeps. For when Minister died, a business empire crumbled, and its clients were legion and broken.

  Chapter 17

  Esther arrived the following day. Rabbi Zweck was sitting on the balcony when he heard the door-bell ring. He was restless with anticipation, and he got up from his chair to give his body something to do. But standing up, he felt suddenly vulnerable, and he knew that if he had to go and meet her in the hall, he would collapse. It wasn’t the physical exertion of standing on his feet, it was the feeling of being completely unprotected, and for this meeting, which he feared as much as he longed for, he needed support. So he sat down again in his chair. The arms encased him and he felt less exposed. It was much more a position of receiving, and that was what he was about to do with the daughter he had refused for almost twenty years.

  He knew he had done wrong in rejecting her and it was not enough to excuse it with his loyalty to Sarah. He no longer felt sinned against and he hoped she would be able to
forgive him. He would have to ask her about her husband, though he knew it would be painful, but that too, was part of her coming home.

  He strained his ears to hear her voice, but Auntie Sadie and Bella were drowning it in their welcome. He hoped that they would leave them alone together, especially in the beginning when he would first see her. He would be guilty, embarrassed and excited in turn, and he didn’t want witnesses. He turned his chair to face the door.

  He watched the door open and he could hardly contain his excitement. The door-frame was empty for a while, and he could hear her hesitation outside. ‘Esther,’ he called. He thrilled at the name, and the flood of her childhood overwhelmed him. Her fair curls that he ruffed, and her wiry almost boyish frame, that he watched every morning running down the street to school. It was this moving and vital image that he had carried in his mind daily through her long absence. So when she appeared in the doorway, he started a little, trying to hide his shock. He smiled at her but he suffered a terrible inner anger that he had so stubbornly missed out on her womanhood. Now her growth was past, her face and her figure was settled. She had grown fat and her face was lined. All that could happen to her now, was that the ageing of her body would intensify, but there could be no further radical change. He felt as if he’d walked out on the middle act of a play, and was trying to pick up the threads of the story.