by Stephen Fry
“Well, I say ‘father,’ but I mean godfather, obviously.”
“Godfather?”
“Godfather,” my voice sounded dry and reedily inadequate, “you know, which is like a father, isn’t it?”
“You are not related to David?”
“Not really.”
“Not really. I see.”
As if making out a prescription, she took a small white notepad from a drawer in the desk and started to write on it.
“Why,” she asked as she wrote, “obviously?”
“I’m sorry?”
“You just told me that when you said father you meant godfather, ‘obviously.’ Why obviously?”
“Well . . .” I began to feel a great need for a Rothie, “I suppose it isn’t that obvious, now you come to mention it. You being outside the family, nothing would seem obvious to you, would it? I mean, other people’s lives . . . mystery. Blank mystery. Wouldn’t you say?”
“But you’re outside the family too, it would seem.”
“Ah well . . . yes. In that sense. Mm.”
“David’s injury, according to the papers from the front desk, was sustained when he caught his penis in a zipper.”
Penis, what a ghastly word. Not right from a tall woman with chilly eyes and solid breasts.
“Yes, zipper, that’s right.”
“Although the jeans he is wearing . . .”
“Have a button-fly. Yes, well, obviously he changed out of the original trousers.”
“Obviously again?”
“Well, there he is, you know. Having a pee, catches the pecker. I didn’t know what to do. So I rushed and got another pair of trousers for him and then . . .”
“You were present when he was urinating?”
“No, well, obvi . . . naturally, he called out, didn’t he? I rushed up . . .”
“Up?”
“To the bathroom . . .”
“All this took place in a bathroom?”
“Yes! In a bathroom. What did you expect, a bakery? A hair-dressing salon?”
She wrote down a few words.
Her silence and patience were excessively irritating. I moved a hand to the pocket of my jacket.
“I hope you aren’t thinking of smoking, Mr. Lennox?” she said without looking up. “This is a hospital.”
I sighed. She spoke again, still writing.
“Why are David’s clothes so soaked, I wonder?”
“It’s been raining, Dr. Fraser. It’s been raining for most of the afternoon. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Yes, Mr. Lennox. I had noticed. Such weather causes us to be very busy with serious accidents, Mr. Lennox.” I was beginning to hate the way she kept repeating the name. “But to return to your story. As I understand it, David’s little misadventure took place in a bathroom? I can understand, at a stretch, why he might change trousers after his accident, but why he should then stand outside in the rain . . .”
“I had to get the car out, didn’t I? Look, why all these questions? Surely this kind of thing must happen often enough . . .”
“I am happy to be able to tell you, Mr. Lennox, that it is in fact pleasantly rare for a child to be admitted to this hospital with human bite-marks to the penis.”
“Ah.”
“Yes. It is even more rare for a busy casualty surgeon to be obliged to listen to stories of bathrooms, urination, zippers and changed trousers when it is plain to the meanest intelligence that the mud-, semen- and blood-stained jeans and hysterical state of the boy in question tell quite another story.”
“Ah,” I said, “well . . .”
“What makes this case rarer still is the fact that the child has been brought into casualty by a man I immediately recognised as the poet E. L. Wallace, but who gives his name as plain Edward Lennox.”
“Well, for goodness’ sake, if you knew who I was in the first place . . .”
“This E. L. Wallace claims to be the boy’s father,” she went on, “and when this is exposed as a complete fabrication, he asks me to believe that it was ‘obvious’ that he meant he was really only the godfather.”
“Which I am.”
“I think, Mr. Wallace,” she said, resting her chin on her hands, “that you should tell me the name of the child’s real parents now, don’t you?”
I ignored this question. “I’d like to speak to Davey, please.”
“I am sure that the police, when I ring them, would disapprove of my allowing you to do any such thing.”
“The police? Have you run mad? What on earth have the police got to do with anything?”
“Please don’t shout, Mr. Wallace.”
“I’m sorry, but look . . .” I leaned forward and lowered my voice. “All right. Let’s talk as grown-ups and mature people of the world now, shall we? I confess that the story about the zip was a little bit of a white lie. But surely, just because a pair of lovers suffer an unfortunate mishap . . .”
“David is fifteen years old, Mr. Wallace. I have no doubt that in the Bohemian world that you inhabit . . .”
“Yes, yes, yes. Never mind about your rancid second-hand ideas of Bohemia. The young must be allowed to experiment surely? I mean . . .”
“I have a boy of David’s age myself, Mr. Wallace!”
“Well, if it comes to that, Dr. Fraser, so do I.”
She looked at me aghast. “You do?”
“Certainly. And if the same thing happened to him, do you think I would kick up a great stink about it? Of course not. Make a fuss and the whole thing gets blown up out of proportion. You know what the young are like. Guilt, resentment, anger, aggression. No, no. The last thing in the world you should do is make some big deal out of it. That’s not Bohemianism, that’s plain common sense. I absolutely forbid the involvement of the police. And leave the parents out of it too, that’s my advice. I’ll see him now, if I may.”
She stared at me with round eyes, the notepad forgotten.
“Well!” she said finally. “I must say for sheer bloody nerve you take first prize, Mr. Wallace. This is what is meant by ‘poetic licence,’ is it?”
“Oh, for hell’s sake!” I had frankly had it with this stiff-bosomed prude. “You’re a doctor, not a damned social worker. Don’t you have some oath that forbids you from gossiping about the private lives of your patients? I mean, Jesus, woman, what is it with this country? Why do bossy creatures like you insist on sticking your inquisitive noses into other people’s affairs all the time? Just stitch the boy’s prick up, give him some pills and send him on his way. What the hell business is it of yours how he got his injuries and with whom? Just leave us alone, will you?”
“It may interest you to know, Mr. Wallace, that I am a magistrate. A Justice of the Peace.”
“And a member of Calvinists Against Cocksucking and Housewives Against Fellatio, no doubt. What you do in your private life is a matter of complete indifference to me. And what a young boy does in his should be of equal unimportance to you. You’re a doctor, your job is to heal, not to preach.”
She gave me another hostile glare and reached out her hand for the telephone. “If I don’t have the name and address of David’s parents this minute, Mr. Wallace, I shall call the police.”
I sighed. “Oh, very well. Very well. And I suppose you want the name of the parents of the girl too, so you can fuck up two families at once, is that it?”
“Girl? What girl?” She stared at me in astonishment.
“What girl, what girl? What do you mean ‘what girl’? Did you think he was being sucked off by a giraffe, for God’s sake?”
“No, Mr. Wallace. I assumed that you were the other party.”
It was my turn to give the look of pop-eyed amazement.
“WHAT? You thought what?”
“Please, Mr. Wallace, lower
your voice.”
“You thought I . . .”
I’ve spent a lifetime having people of Dr. Fraser’s stamp throw words like “Bohemian” at me, but I truly believe that if I have a fault it’s that I’m not as dirty-minded as most. They call me a cynic and sceptic too, but that’s because when I see a thing I call it what it is, not what I want it to be. If you spend your life on a moral hill-top, you see nothing but the mud below. If, like me, you live in the mud itself, you get a damned good view of clear blue sky and clean green hills above. There’s none so evil-minded as those with a moral mission, and none so pure in heart as the depraved. All the same, it was probably stupid of me not to have seen what she had been driving at.
“If there has been a mistake, Mr. Wallace,” she was saying, “I assure you I am very sorry, but you must see that it is my duty to establish the facts in cases like these. The parents are . . . ?”
“When I tell you,” I said, “you will understand why I am worried about any police involvement and subsequent publicity. The boy’s parents . . .” I paused dramatically, “. . . are Michael and Anne Logan.”
Her mouth dropped open.
I nodded heavily. “Precisely.”
“Do you know, Mr. Wallace,” she said, “I thought David looked familiar from the first. I’ve met him. Lady Anne and I serve on the same bench.”
“Is that right?” Big bloody surprise. I could picture her sentencing poachers and flashers to death with relish. “Well, it so happens that there is a young girl staying at Swafford at the moment, Clara Clifford. She is the daughter of Max Clifford, whom perhaps you also know?”
“I know of him of course . . . I didn’t know he had a daughter.”
“She’s fourteen. Now, to cut a long story short, I was walking in the woods at Swafford this afternoon and I heard a scream. When I got there I discovered that youthful eagerness and inexperience had brought Davey to the pass you have witnessed. Unfortunate and embarrassing, but hardly a matter for the police.”
She gave me another long look.
“And you really are David’s godfather?”
I raised my right hand. “Poet’s honour.”
She smiled and for the first time I saw the ghost of something attractive and even erotic lying behind her skeweringly blue eyes.
“If you like,” I offered, “you can take an impression of my bite-mark. Isn’t that usual forensic practice?”
“I think what I’ll do,” she said, rising to her feet, “is go and have another word with David. Would you mind staying here for a moment?”
“No, no. I can read your letters.”
“Nothing very interesting there,” she said with a laugh. “You will find an ashtray in the middle drawer, however.”
I composed a little present for her in the notepad.
There’s a beautiful doctor called Fraser
With a glance like a surgical laser;
If you’re guilty of sin
She’ll stare at your chin
And save you the price of a razor
Underneath I wrote, “Limericks are the best I can come up with these days. I’m only sorry there are no good rhymes for ‘Margaret’ . . . with love Ted Wallace.”
Under that thick ice, I thought, lay the perfectly preserved remains of a passionate heart. I believed I knew exactly the kind of sounds she would make at the moment of orgasm. Something between a creaking gate and a pouncing jaguar. Humby-ho. I would never get a chance to prove myself right.
Davey stood a little sheepishly by the reception desk while she took charge of his paperwork. A thoughtful nurse, or perhaps Dr. Margaret herself, had given him a handful of glossy magazines to hold in front of his groin. Behind them protruded a thick white bandage.
“I’ve used sutures,” she told me. “They will dissolve in one or two days.”
“No permanent damage?”
“He’ll find it a little painful to pass water for a while and even more painful to . . .”
“Quite.”
“Otherwise he’ll be fine. I’m sure he’s a good healer.”
“You speak truer than you know,” I said, to a thunderous look from David.
“I’ve also given him a tetanus booster and some antibiotics.”
“And he can redress the bandage himself after each piddle, can he?”
“Oh, he’ll have no trouble, will you, Davey?” she said, laying a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll be okay,” he mumbled, writhing like a pint of live bait at the embarrassment of being talked about over his head as though he were a five-year-old.
The journey out of Norwich passed in silence. I was too preoccupied with avoiding bollards and lorries to talk and David had his own thoughts to contend with. Once we had cleared the city boundary and settled ourselves behind a pleasantly slow-moving van, I felt relaxed enough to speak.
“Fortunately,” I said, “that doctor is a friend of your mother’s.”
“She said. Will she tell Mummy anything?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”
“I might,” said Davey, greatly to my surprise.
“Well, if you think that would be a good idea.”
He shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “She has to know what Simon did. It was wicked. It was evil.”
“Now, hang on.” I took my eyes off the road for a second to look at him. “What would you expect Simon to do? I mean he comes upon a scene like that . . .”
“He knew. He knew perfectly well what was happening. He knew and he was jealous. He wanted to humiliate me and destroy me. He’s always been jealous, you see. He’s like the brother in the parable of the Prodigal Son. He can’t bear being ordinary and he can’t bear Mummy and Daddy thinking I’m different and special.”
“And that’s what you are, is it? Different and special?” It still stuck in my craw to repeat that ghastly word.
“You know I am, Ted.”
“At the risk of sounding obvious, isn’t everyone?”
“Well, that’s true as well. I don’t actually believe that what I do is anything so extraordinary. I think anyone could have my power if they really wanted it.”
“Even me?”
“Especially you! You’ve already had that power, when you were a poet. You wrote ‘Where the River Ends,’ didn’t you?”
“I’ve always thought my power as a poet came from studying form and metre and, of course, the poems of others, not from tapping some mystical source. And,” I thought it was about time to give it to him straight, “I hate to disappoint you, but ‘Where the River Ends’ is not about the purity of nature and its contamination by man.”
“Yes, it is. It’s about pollution.”
“It’s about the fact that the poetry of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gregory Corso was included on the school syllabus.”
“What?” He stared at me as if I had gone mad.
“Poems are inspired by real things, real shitty, concrete things. I was making a bitter joke about how the pure wellsprings of poesy were being fouled by people I thought of as inadequate and talentless nobodies. I deliberately used the tired old metaphor of rivers running to the sea just to satisfy my desire to describe those poor harmless American poets as floating turds.”
“Well,” said Davey, shifting again, “I don’t see what difference that makes. Your poem still has my meaning, doesn’t it? The river starts as pure and then, as it goes through each town and through the city and to the sea, it becomes darker and dirtier and more disgusting. Your poem still says that. I don’t suppose anyone who reads it knows about those poets. It is about purity.”
“Yes, but the point is you can’t start a poem by wanting to write about some capital-letter idea like Purity or Love or Beauty. A poem is made of real words and real things. You start with the base physical world and you
r own base physical self. If some meaning or beauty comes out of it, then that is, I suppose, the wonder and relief of art. You want gold, you have to go down a mine to hack it out of the ground, you have to sweat your guts out in a filthy forge to smelt it: it doesn’t fall in gleaming sheets from the bar of heaven. You want poetry, first you have to muck in with humanity, you have to fight with paper and pencil for weeks and weeks until your head bleeds: verses aren’t channelled into your head by angels or muses or sprites of nature. No, I don’t see that my ‘gift,’ such as it ever was, has anything in common with yours at all, Davey.”
David chewed on this for a while. “So what exactly are you saying?”
“I don’t know, my old darling. That’s the bugger of it. I don’t know.”
A car behind me honked its horn and I noticed that I had slowed down to under thirty miles an hour. It occurred to me that with clever gadgetry you could easily chart the emotional state of a driver from his variations in speed and aggression at the wheel. I considered the idea of cars having sensors installed which would pick up driving inconsistencies and calculate their cause by reference to some electronic table compiled by a competent psychologist. The data selected from this table would then send signals to a display on the roof. “Attention! The driver of this car has just had a terrible row with his wife.” “This driver is besotted with his new mistress.” “This driver is in a foul bate after being unable to find his spectacles this morning.” “This driver is in an even, equable temper.” I was convinced, as that retired police commissioner used to say, that it would constitute a major contribution to road safety. The only flaw, I supposed, lay in the possibility that experienced drivers were more adept than me at driving consistently whatever their mood.
We caught up with the van ahead and I shook myself from this pointless reverie. This is the worst of driving, your thoughts get sucked into long tunnels, as into a sleep. You don’t, as it were, breast the waves of thought, you are borne along by them and you end up drifting.
I glanced across at Davey. He was slumped in his seat in that slack-jawed, eye-glazed lolling stupor at which adolescents excel.
“Perhaps it would help,” I said, “if you told me more about the exact nature of your powers. I think I have a goodish idea, but you can fill in the gaps.”