The Doctor Is Sick

  'It isn't pain that's the real trouble ever, you know. It's the feeling of disintegration, however subjective.'

  'Never mind,' said Dr Wildbloode, 'never mind. It's coming away nicely. Nearly finished now.' The sister, Edwin saw from the tail of his eye, had a test-tube ready. 'Right,' said Dr Wildbloode, 'I think that's it.' Edwin heard a faint squirting out. He said:

  'Can I see that?' The sister coyly granted a quick peep of the tubeful. 'Like gin, isn't it?' said Edwin.

  'Burnett's White Satin,' said the sister, surprisingly. 'That's a lovely one taken neat.'

  'Now,' said Dr Wildbloode, 'you just lie quite still till tomorrow morning. Lie on your back, quite still.' He went away, nodding mildly. The bed-screens were squeaked away, and Edwin lay exposed to the ward, a new recruit to the brigade of the prone.

  'Marvellous what they can do these days, ennit?' said R. Dickie.

  It was, in a way, refreshing to be prescribed complete passivity, to be ordered to become a mere thing. It was satisfying, too, to know that one was contributing to the uniformity of the ward. There was now not one who was not rooted, like a flower, in bed. Even the sneerer lay staring at the ceiling, beguiled by hopes of a mended set of nerves. But the becalmed order could not last. Well-made men in caps and uniforms arrived to take away a patient in a far corner. He, drooling and evidently incurable, responded to valedictions with 'Urr', propped in a wheelchair.

  'Good-bye, Mr Leathers.'

  'Ta ta, mate.'

  'Keep smiling till we meet again.'

  The vacuum was speedily filled. A tall scholarly-looking man was led in at tea-time, propelling himself like a walking toy, stiff in one leg, his right arm busy as an egg-whisk. A new part was added to the mealtime percussion band - a tremolo of knife and teaspoon.

  After tea the ward sister came with a message for Edwin. 'Your wife's been on the telephone,' she said. 'She says she's caught a bit of a cold and is staying in bed. You're not to worry, she says. She'll be in to see you tomorrow.'

  Just before dinner Dr Railton came in, very cheerful. 'Hallo, Doc,' he said to Edwin. 'They've done the lab test on your fluid. I checked the reading with the other ones that were done. It's gone up, if anything. There's a hell of a lot of protein there.' He rubbed his hands. 'But we'll push on. We'll find out what's wrong. We'll send you out of here a fit man.' And, himself a fit man, a robust trumpeter, he left, smiling.

  There was no visitor for Edwin. R. Dickie had several. 'Here,' he said to a small boy, 'go and be a good Samaritan to that gentleman over there. Nobody's come to see him. Shame, ennit? You go over there and have a bit of a word with him, cheer him up a bit.' The small boy came to Edwin's bedside and was soon absorbed in the nude magazines, Charlie's present. He sniffed a good deal and tried to wipe his nose on Edwin's bedclothes.

  When the visitors had left, R. Dickie said: 'He's a good little lad, enny? Gives no trouble to nobody. Any time,' he said generously, 'you've got nobody comin' to see you, you can always have one of mine. I get plenty.' He saw visitors and grapes as of the same order.

  The new patient had a nightmare. 'Aaaaah,' he called over the dark. The sneering neighbour of Edwin obliged with fresh football results. The Punch-like young man coughed. Edwin lay awake thinking of the wonder of the word 'apricot'. 'Apricock' in Shakespeare, the later version due to confusion of stop consonants. 'Apricock' led back to an Arabic form, 'al' the article glued to the loan-word 'prcox', early, an early-ripe fruit. How charming is divine philology. But did it really have any greater validity than the nightmare in the corner, the dream football results? Sheila ought to have come to see him, cold or no cold.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Next day Edwin was called down to the cellars for an electro-encephalogram. 'Electro-encephalogram' was a pleasing scholarly word reduced, on the signboard outside the door, to EEG - a mean cartoon cry. Edwin was met by another crisp snowy girl who told him to lie on a table. He asked her, chattily, what she understood by the middle term of 'electro-encephalogram'.

  'We just call it EEG,' she said. She fixed a net over Edwin's hair, pressing salted wet cotton-wool under each node. 'It's rather a long word otherwise. I don't know why they want to make them so long.' She was preoccupied with her preparations, a very red tongue-tip protruding as she wired Edwin to her machine. This machine was like an organ console with dials, a mile of paper threaded over its surface in a pianola roll.

  'What exactly does this show?' asked Edwin.

  'Sort of electrical impulses from your brain,' said the girl. 'I don't quite know what they do with them, but that's what it's for. Now all you have to do is to relax. Open and close your eyes when I tell you, and don't move.' The girl sat down at her console. Behind her was a glass panel, beyond that a man and a girl technician larking silently. Where, wondered Edwin, was the aquarium, this side or that? The couples looked at him as if he were a thing, laughed at their own joke, went off together. Edwin felt unaccountably angrier than he had felt for a long time. He said:

  'I don't think you really believe we're human beings at all. A couple of X-ray plates, those bloody electrical impulses of yours - sorry, I apologise, for the swearing. What I mean is----'

  'Do you mind?' said the girl. 'I've got my work to do.'

  'That's just it, isn't it? You've got your work to do and you assume that you're doing it with something inert, something passive. You forget that I'm a human being.'

  The girl looked at him in a new way. 'If looking at me excites you,' she said primly, 'you needn't look. You can keep your eyes fixed on the ceiling.'

  Edwin was horrified. Was that, then, one of her professional hazards, or a carry-over from her social life, or some pose learnt from films or television? 'I didn't mean that at all,' he said. And, having made that disavowal, he felt a sort of rudimentary desire, or a desire for desire, stirring in him.

  'We're here,' said the girl reasonably, 'to help. To make you normal again. Now keep your head still and your eyes open.'

  What would the doctors say, he wondered, if he suddenly found sex flaring up in him again and attacked, like a satyr, one of these prim snowy nymphs of technicians, ravished her on her own machine, with the paper still flowing through, the ink-pens tracing madly away? They should really, he supposed, be pleased. He looked at the girl, whose eyes were down watching the electro-encephalic pattern pour steadily out. She lifted her eyes for an instant, caught his gaze, primly looked down again.

  'Close your eyes now.'

  His eyes closed, Edwin could feel more clearly the beat of the eyeballs, the blood coursing through. It was young blood still. He tried to fill the blank space with a harem - a languorous spread of haunches, navels, nipples, arms - but he sensed no response in his loins, only a slight constriction of the throat.

  'Open them now.'

  In hate Edwin stripped the girl of her stiff whiteness, tore off the flowered dress underneath, crushed her against the glass panel. Primly she kept her eyes down. It was no good: the most violent act of the imagination could produce no response. He sighed, a mere lay-figure in striped pyjamas lying on a hard bed, a ridiculous hairnet with electrodes on him, feeding a machine.

  'Do keep your head still. Now close your eyes again.'

  Edwin thought of a little article he had proposed to a magazine on Popular English Studies, an article on the bilabial fricative and its persistence through centuries of colloquial English. Sam Weller did not, of course, interchange 'v' and 'w': he used a single phoneme for both - the bilabial fricative. But a recorder like Dickens, untrained phonetically, would think he heard 'v' when he expected 'w', 'w' when he expected 'v'.

  'Now,' said the girl, 'don't open your eyes. Keep them tightly shut. I'm going to flash a very strong light on to them. Try and keep perfectly still.'

  In his brain arms seemed to close round the bilabial fricative, to protect it from all these people with their white coats and lights and humming machines. Then the flash came: a sharp coloured pattern was etched on the inside of his lids, hideo
us and somehow obscene. 'Oh, Christ,' said Edwin, 'that was horrible.'

  'Was it?' said the girl. 'Now, once more.'

  Again the obscene sharp pattern - cones, cubes, globes in malevolent colours which he could not define. The humming of the engine stopped. 'All right,' she said. 'That's the lot. You can open your eyes now.' She hummed as tunelessly as the machine had hummed while she took off Edwin's hairnet and detached the damp salt gobbets of cotton-wool. Then, with cool indifference, she said: 'You can go back to your ward now.'

  Edwin stood outside in the corridor shaking with a rage which he found difficult to explain. 'Bitch,' he said under his breath, 'bitch, bitch.' But he had already forgotten the electro-encephalogram girl. It was as though the obscene flash had engendered a sudden and rather surprising hatred for his wife. He felt insulted that she should have thought it necessary to lie, so as not to hurt his feelings. He looked at his wrist-watch: nearly midday. He would telephone her and make it absolutely clear that she was under no obligation whatsoever to visit him if she didn't wish to. Or, better, he would be greatly obliged if she would cease to visit him altogether. 'Leave me alone,' he wanted to say, 'with my disease and my bilabial fricative.' And then he saw that that, of course, wouldn't do at all. Moreover, the task of finding copper to make the telephone call would be, he foresaw, wearisome. Let it go, he decided.

  She came that evening, alone, sniffing with a genuine chill, and he, as was inevitable, said:

  'You shouldn't have come.'

  'Yes, that's what I thought, too, but I felt - well, it can't be much fun for you, after all, not seeing anybody.'

  'But it isn't just anybody I want to see, is it?'

  'No, I suppose not. Oh, I do wish it were all over.' She spoke the words fervently, as though her insolvement in his disease were more than the empathetic one of a mere loving wife. And he thought that she must have been entrusted with some secret about the disease and its prognosis. She could never keep a secret with ease: it was agony for her not to have the freedom to blurt everything out to the very person who must be the last to know; it was cognate, Edwin supposed, with her sexual incontinence. He said:

  'If Railton's told you something that I'm not supposed to know---- Well, you know me well enough. I can take anything. And I don't like secrets any more than you do.'

  She got up from the bed's edge nervously. 'I've told you already,' she said. 'It was just nothing, just about everything being all right and I wasn't to worry, that's all. Honestly.' Her eyes had a pleading look. She said: 'I suppose I ought to go now, really. They'll be ringing that blasted bell any minute now, and I hate anybody telling me to get out.'

  'But you've only just come. There's plenty of time.'

  'Look,' she said deliberately. 'This doesn't do any good. I mean, it's so artificial. We've nothing to say to each other really, and we both keep looking at our watches in a surreptitious kind of way. It's true, isn't it? It isn't normal, this kind of thing - it makes me all jumpy. And you know I hate hospitals.'

  'You mean you don't want to see me, is that it?'

  'Oh, it's not that. While you're in here I get a feeling that it isn't really you at all. And it isn't, is it? It's you sick. It's you sort of suspended - you know what I mean, suspended animation. And I hate this lack of privacy and this clock-watching and the artificiality of it all. So would you mind very much if I didn't come in every night?'

  'Well,' said Edwin slowly, 'if you really feel that way about it. I do understand, you know, don't think I don't. Could you,' he asked, 'possibly write me letters?'

  'I could do that, yes. Yes, that's a good idea.'

  'Although it does seem a bit stupid, doesn't it, when you only live a couple of hundred yards away.'

  'And,' said Sheila eagerly, 'there are quite a number of people in the Anchor who'd be only too pleased to come and visit you. So you won't be too lonely.'

  'All right, if you want it that way. You mean I can look forward to a procession of colourful low-life characters to cheer my solitude?'

  'Well, it was kind of them to offer, wasn't it?'

  'And when are you coming to see me again?'

  'Oh, in a few days. At the week-end. Please, Edwin,don't tie me to anything. You know how I hate being tied.I'll come fairly soon, honestly I will.'

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  The tests that followed required more than a single white-coated operator, so that greater opportunities presented themselves for treating Edwin as a thing. Impotent on a cellar table, he could be discussed or, when a social mood prevailed, ignored. The tests were intimate and searching, so that he was fingered more, heaved about more, recalcitrant parts of his body were scolded more. But when he was particularly docile and plastic he was elevated to a pet's level and patted.

  The doctors wanted an arteriogram. A pink vermilion-lipped pudding of a nurse squirted a tranquilliser into his buttock, then he was wheeled into a lift and carried below. Radiographers greeted him cheerfully - maturer women, and perhaps more virginal, than those he had met on previous occasions. He was slid on to an operating table under the nozzles and eyes of X-ray apparatus, and there was happy talk and bustle while the doctor, opener of arteries, was awaited.

  'I've put a new cone in, Mabel.'

  'Oh, good-oh.' A yell above Edwin's head.

  Edwin saw faces, upside down, peering at him incuriously. The inverted human face is horrible: too many holes, far more monstrous than any monster from outer space.

  'And what did she say then?'

  'She said she wasn't going to wait all her life looking for the right man. By the time she'd found him, she said, it'd be too late anyway.'

  'Who's she to go on about waiting for the right man? Have you seen that hair?' There was a puff of derision.

  The inverted face

  Of any given member of the human race

  Is far more monstrous than

  'Hiya, girls.' It was a Canadian doctor, keen-faced and with thick hair en brosse. He was young and evidently most accessible to the laity. 'This our patient? Hiya, Mister.'

  'Doctor,' corrected Edwin.

  'Yes?' said the doctor. 'That's right, I'm the doctor. Now I'm just going to give you a small local.' He grasped the artery on the right side of Edwin's neck and pumped in his ansthetic. Then he sat down and waited. Two other young doctors, at a loose end, came in and joined him. There were friendly greetings, and the female voices grew louder, moved some way along the short female road to hysteria. Hysterikos, hystera, the womb. But Freud had shown that there was no connection, despite the etymology.

  'And what sort of a time did you have in Italy?'

  'It was all right, I guess. Molto buono.'

  'Do watch those vowels,' said Edwin, almost automatically.

  'We drank the vino and tried to make the senoritas. Molto bella.'

  'It's in Spain they have the senoritas,' said one of the radiographers, 'not in Italy.'

  'They're the same, whatever you call them, wherever you go. All women are the same, made to be made.'

  'They're not all the same,' said a provocative radiographer, 'thank you very much.'

  'Don't thank me, sister. Well, time to have a go at that artery.'

  The small underground room seemed full of people, upside-down faces all round Edwin, jovial advice as the Canadian doctor tried to grasp the squirming artery. 'Like as if it's alive,' he said. 'Like a snake or something. Now,' he said to Edwin. 'I've got a sort of dye in this syringe, a dye made out of iodine. When that starts circulating it'll colour the blood vessels, and when they take a picture of it that'll show what's wrong. Okay?'

  But the artery had a life of its own. Edwin could see the eyes on it, fascinated, as though watching a death-duel of small fierce animals. 'Goddam it,' said the doctor, 'just can't get it in.' Then came a general shout of triumph as contact was made, the artery was pierced, and the dye was shot into it. A white-coated young lady with cool hands started to feed the artery with a saline solution. Preparations were made for the radiog
raphy.

  'You'll feel,' said one of the loud women, 'a feeling like of hotness all along that side. Very hot. But don't move, whatever you do.'

  The taking of the pictures seemed, to confused Edwin, to involve the shouting of signals. At the loud cry of what seemed to be 'Take' the heat came, and more. A pain that seemed green in colour and tasted of silver oxide, that, moreover, seemed to show, by some synsthetic miracle, what the momentarily tortured nerves looked like, shot down his face, gouging his eyes out, extracting teeth with cold pliers. Again, it was not a matter of pain: it was a matter of the sick realisation of what perverse experiences lurk waiting in the body.

  'You're being very good,' said the saline girl. 'Really you are.' And his right arm was, for an instant, stroked. There was an interval. The other artery now had to be pierced and filled with colour.

  The insignificant becomes, when doubled, the significant. A crude sprawling blot on paper makes, when the paper is doubled and opened out again, a pattern which, though still crude, is literate. And so the repetition of the processes on the other side of his neck gave Edwin a strange image of beauty. The test became a ritual. The snaking artery was caught, tamed, force-fed. Edwin's thing of a head was posed under the flying machinery, there was the hysterical cry from a distance, and again there was the complex of oxide taste, green pain - as though a tree were shouting out - and the tearing-out of teeth and eye. 'Good,' they all said. 'That's over.'