-- Cure her, discharge her, look after her while she finds her feet in
the strange outside world, make sure her medical supervision ceases to
be my responsibility, be able to approach her as a pretty girl instead
of a case-history.
That was no good either. For one thing, the optimism he was preaching
to himself was so pale and unreal beside the previsions of disaster his
subconscious kept spawning, unbidden. For another . . .
-- Cure her? How the hell, when she acts more rationally than Iris
does? She's the one who needs therapy, the wife scared witless by the
idea of performing her natural functions as a woman! I should have come
straight out and told her so, instead of beating around the bush and
waiting for "nature to take its course." She's unnatural, that's the
long and the short of it. Wait till doomsday, she won't change.
The sherry bottle was empty. Ten minutes till the pubs closed. Time to
drive to the Needle and get some more liquor.
-- In this state? Well, if I'm very careful . . .
But instead he opened cupboards, looked in drawers, hunted the house
high and low, until in the bathroom medicine cabinet he found the bottle
labelled "Alcohol 100%, for medicinal purposes only."
-- Not much different from vodka, I suppose. . . . Suppose it were
surgical spirit denatured with methanol, that poisons, blinds and
ultimately kills: what would I do?
He couldn't answer that question. But mixed with orange juice and chilled
with a cube of ice it made a passable drink.
-- As to Urchin, I was all set this evening to start drafting the paper
about her. I must have been crazy. I'm not even going to tell Alsop that
I've made a breakthrough, just in case I'm being overeager. They'll look
at me, judging by appearances, and maybe with luck they'll say, "Paul's
bearing up well, isn't he? His wife left him, you know, but then she was
always rather a cold-hearted bitch and treated him disgracefully." And
only I will know that it's success with Urchin's case that sustains me,
until I'm sure beyond a shadow of doubt that it's all coming right,
and then I'll . . .
He realised with a stab of dismay that be was addressing himself aloud,
because his mind was so foggy it needed that crutch to guide its thoughts
forward. When he prevented himself from forming the words with his lips,
the terrors rushed in on him again.
-- Alsop will . . . Holinshed will . . . Iris will . . .
Angry, he made to pour another of the fierce cocktails he'd concocted
with the raw spirit, but put his glass down an inch this side of the
table-top. It smashed on the floor. Kicking it aside, he seized a
replacement and filled it to halfway.
-- Iris won't complain about having to clean up behind me. That's a
consolation, isn't it?
Spilling a little from the can, he added orange juice and sipped.
The fierceness stung his palate; gasping, he put in more juice.
-- This time it's not a question of being obsessed by the things that
might have gone wrong but I somehow escaped. The hopes and fears of
all the years are met in me tonight. Got to face facts, Paul. Lost,
one marriage, finder please don't inform Dr Paul Fidler.
"You out there," he said mildly. "All those other Paul Fidlers --
are you listening? Years you've plagued me with your damnable sorrows,
making me worry till I was sick about the things that didn't happen to
me but happened to you -- understand me? Failed your scholarship exams,
got thrown out of medical school, never picked your way back to sanity
after the breakdown but spent the rest of your life in the bin, got
turned down by Iris when she broke off the engagement -- lucky bastard,
you! Well, how do you like it the other way around for a change? I'm in
the cart this time, I'm thinking the dismal thoughts, and I hope to God
you rot with them."
Swaying, one hand clutching the glass as if it were a torch casting light
to guide him, the other poised to fend off furniture, the banister rail,
the bedroom door, when each in turn threatened to come around and hit
him in the face, he made his way to the bedroom and turned down the
covers. Tugging aside the pillow, he realised that he had taken away
his pyjamas. The overnight bag was still in the car, forgotten.
-- Never mind. Who's to care? Damned silly clothes we men wear nowadays,
this tie keeps trying to strangle me, doesn't want me to take it off,
no wonder I'm pulling on the wrong end, oh,
damn
the thing.
He pitched forward on to the bed. Around him the house stood empty
except for the hordes and hordes of other Paul Fidlers, trapped in the
dead ends of disaster, mourning silently that not even this last one of
their infinite number was to escape into freedom.
*31*
-- It's the density of the events you see, coming on me thickly like
a hail of midgets and a rainstorm. This and that I could cope with one
at a time but I have only two pairs of hands to catch them as they go
past. It's the difficulty of chess where you can't move to take the
other player's piece because you'd expose yourself to check. I sit on
the black square and fume at the people going past me on the white ones.
He grew aware that Urchin had stopped talking a long time ago and
now sat, statue-still, watching the elsewhere vision she had been
describing. Hypnotised, she would not care if he neglected to put
another question yet awhile. She would not even react to the sound of
the desk-drawer sliding if he eased it open and took out another pill
from the stock he kept there.
-- Which of them? Careful, bad to put myself to sleep by accident
. . . oh no, I took the sleeping-tablets home, didn't I? Sleep at home,
almost overdid it this morning woke up late and had to come in without
breakfast. But shaved. Mum's the word, keep it from showing outwardly,
mum's the wife but I wonder if she's had the abortion already, bloody
half-shaped human thing gone ground with garbage to the sewers of
London. No wife no mum no bloody good. God damn look at the time
on the clock, get on with the work chop-chop, get ahead chopped off
ouch. Settles it. Tranquilliser.
He swallowed the pill. Waiting for it to work, he looked at the scrappy
notes he had mechanically copied down while Urchin was talking. Only part
of his mind could have been wandering.
-- Part I. bad enough, isn't it? Oh God, what shall I do? It's sleeping
badly that's doing it, it must be the shortage of sleep, but I daren't
take more pills than I'm taking already. The silent noise in the house
at night, the creaks of settling floor-boards which between waking and
sleeping I mistake for footsteps, calling out and thinking for one slim
instant Iris will reply and it will all have been a nightmare. Not because
I love her so much losing her had made me desperate, just because I got
used and can't adapt to being alone again. Maybe I should shut up the
house and move to the hospital; after all the place isn't mine anyway,
bought with Iris's inheritance. But to lie awake under that cracked bell
every night . . . ! Has Alsop noticed? I suppose he must have. Thank God
he hasn't taxed me with it directly. Wants to see bow I can keep personal
problems from interfering with my work, no doubt. So far: yes. Better able
to concentrate on the diploma course without distractions ("there may be
said to be a continuous spectrum between the isolated traumatic experience
and the disorienting environment which may give rise to schizophrenic
responses") and the routine of every bloody day ("do this please Nurse
ask Matron if she would kindly do that Nurse I wonder if you'd oblige
me by doing the other Dr Alsop") and of course there's Urchin, but . . .
The notes on his pad danced before his eyes, evading his clumsy attempts
to grapple with them and deduce the content of his next question.
-- I don't know. Maybe he isn't satisfied with the progress I've made
regarding Urchin. After all I haven't told him the whole story yet, just
in case I'm wrong because being wrong about her on top of everything
everything . . . Or perhaps he hasn't inquired too closely because
he's decided I'm a write-off. How can one be sure with a slick bastard
like him?
He looked at Urchin, and a sudden wave of affection rose in him.
-- Good girl, keep it up. You're all that stands between me and ruin,
did you know that? Ace in the hole, pull you out one of these days and
dazzle everybody with my sleight of mind, "such insight, Dr Fidler,
such perspicacity, this major contribution to the theory of gabblephobia!"
"Tell me more," he said aloud. "Tell me more about . . ." And couldn t
remember what the subject was, but she saved him the trouble, and talked
on, the button having been pushed.
-- Meantime: maybe I should take a holiday or something. But to spend a
fortnight in some place I've never heard of, nobody to speak to night
after lonely night except people I never saw before and never want to
see again! If I could go where Urchin lived before she came to Chent . . .
Bit by bit, now the dam had been broken by his chance inquiry in her own
language, he was assembling a picture of Urchin's world. Turning back
the pages of his notebook, he found that although he might have copied
down key-words and abbreviated sentences automatically during the past
several sessions with her, on a second inspection they conjured up with
present-time vividness the entire statement to which each corresponded.
-- It's like my own life, isn't it? Forking outwards. And she's trapped
in a dead end.
The idea, with the overtones of forking, was lightning to him, illuminating
a whole great landscape of possibilities.
-- I see! Yes, I'm sure I get the picture now. Not so much a visitor as
an explorer and researcher, but when she had to answer my first question
she hadn't enough words to do more than approximate it.
He broke in, regardless of the fact that she was still speaking. "Urchin,
when is this 'other time' you come from?"
"I can't explain. It's away from this one."
"A long time ago, or still to come?"
-- Harmless, to play with words and humour a lunatic's delusions.
Nonetheless: strange, somehow fascinating. A way out of this world which
traps me. If I could only . . .
"N-no." She was shaking her head in despair. "Not in front, not behind.
Northwest."
She turned and gazed at him with pleading eyes, as though beseeching
his comprehension.
-- Mustn't let you down, girl, or you might let me down, and . . .
Northwest? Off ahead but at some kinky weird angle?
He said carefully, "Did you expect to come here?"
"No!" A sudden gleam of hope. "You -- all this" -- a gesture to embrace
the office, Chent Hospital, the world at large -- "not in our history."
"What did you expect to find?"
"They" -- he still hadn't established "their" identity, but they were
apparently some figures of authority -- "send to report on . . ."
She fumbled for the right term. "On Age of Muddled . . .?"
"Confusion?" Paul ventured.
"Right! To answer many questions because history had got . . . well . . .
broken. To leave written accounts in special places for finding later."
"Were you expecting to go back?"
She hesitated; then she answered almost inaudibly, "It's not possible to go
back. Time runs forward at fixed speed, limit like speed of light."
-- I'm not sure I follow that, but there's a weird kind of consistency
in all these things she's said. . . .
He leafed back through his notes again.
What is your history, Urchin? Have you found out what makes it different
from ours?"
"Rome."
"What?"
The tranquilhiser had given him back some of his powers of concentration;
he was absently sifting his earlier records in the hope of finding further
clues.
-- But what to make of all this baffles me. Vague hints about a pastoral
world without cities, people living to be a hundred and fifty, the epitome
of Utopian wishful thinking!
"Rome," Urchin said again. "You call your kind of writing Roman, don't
you? There are very few and bad books about history in the library,
but -- Wait, I show you." She opened her battered portfolio, which she
had brought to this as to all recent sessions.
"Just tell me," Paul sighed.
Disappointed, she let the case slide to the floor. "If you say. Romans
were conquerors, beat all others in what you call Mediterranean Sea,
came to here even. Left strange writing, strange language. For me
history says were people from . . . aaah!" She snapped her fingers,
momentarily infuriated with herself for forgetting a word. "Middle Asia,
that's it. Asia . . . Learn writing in North Italy, near what you say
Alp Mountains, cut on edge of piece of wood so." She sawed the side of
her right hand across the index finger of her left.