The Mortdecai Trilogy (22 page)

All things are taken from us, and become
Portions and parcels of the dreadful Past.

 

The Lotus-Eaters

 

To this day I still do not know where it was that I awoke nor, indeed, how long I had been separated from my cogitative faculties, bless them. But I think it must have been somewhere awful in the North-West of England, like Preston or Wigan or even Chorley, God forbid. The lapse of time must have been quite three or four weeks: I could tell by my toenails, which no one had thought to cut. They felt horrid. I felt cross.

‘I have had a Nervous Breakdown,’ I told myself crossly, ‘the sort of thing that one’s aunts have for Christmas.’ I lay motionless for what seemed a long time. This was to deceive
them
, you see, whoever they were, and to give me time to think about it all. I soon became aware that there were no
them
in the room and that what I wanted was a great, burly drink to help me think. I decided, too, that since they had kept me alive they must want something from me and that a drink would not be an unreasonable
quid pro quo
for whatever it was, if you follow me. (You will observe that the very recollection of that time interferes with my well-known lucidity.)

Another thinking-bout persuaded me that the way to get such a drink was to summon whatever chalk-faced, black-uniformed,
Kafkaesque she-policewoman was standing guard over me. I could find no bell to ring so I heaved myself out of bed and sat down absurdly on the floor, weeping with puny rage.

My getting out of bed must have triggered some sort of alarum, for the swing-doors swung or swang and an apparition appeared. I examined it narrowly. It was clearly the photographic negative of a chalk-faced, black-uniformed police-woman.

‘You are clearly a photographic negative,’ I cried accusingly. ‘Be off with you!’ Her face, you see, was of the deepest black and her uniform of the brightest white: all wrong. She giggled, showing, paradoxically, about forty-eight large
white
teeth.

‘No, mahn,’ she retorted, ‘negative. Ah’m not under-developed, jest underprivileged.’ I looked again; she spoke truth. As she scooped me up and lifted me into bed (oh the shame of it) I was even more convinced, for my nose was flattened by one of her magnificent 100-Watt headlamps. Despite my effete condition (oh, all right, I know that’s not the right word but you know perfectly well what I mean) I felt the old Adam surging about freely in my loins – and I don’t mean the gardener. I desired more than anything else in the world to go out and slay a dragon or two for her: the thought was so beautiful that I began to weep again.

She brought me a drink; rather a thin one but undeniably alcoholic. Enoch Powell had lost my vote for good. I cried a little more, rather relishing it. The tears, I mean, not the drink, which tasted like milk from a dead sow. It was probably Bourbon or something of that sort.

Much later she came in again, smiling enormously, and stood with her back to the open door.

‘Now – here’s Doctor Farbstein to see you,’ she chortled richly, as though it was all a huge joke. A great, jolly, bearded chap brushed past her splendid bosom (I swear they
twanged
) and came and sat on my bed. He was full of fun.

‘Go away,’ I piped feebly, ‘I am an anti-Semite.’

‘You should have thought of that before they circumcised you,’ he roared merrily. A stray beam of sunshine (perhaps we weren’t in North-West England after all) struck splinters of gold from his brave Assyrian beard; Kingsley Amis would have recognized them instantly for beads of breakfast egg but I am a romantic, as you must
have realized by now, even if you have still not read my previous adventures.

‘You have been quite ill, you know,’ he said, keeping his face straight and trying to sound grave and concerned.

‘I am
still
quite ill,’ I retorted with dignity, ‘and my toenails are a disgrace to the National Health Service. How long have I been in this pre-Lysol
guet-apens
, this quasi-medical Lubyanka?’

‘Oh, ages and ages it seems,’ he replied cheerily. ‘Every now and then they tell me you’re stirring and I pop in and shoot you full of paraldehyde to stop you chasing the nurses and then I forget you for days on end. “Letting Nature take its kindly course” is what we call it.’

‘And what have I been eating, pray?’

‘Well, nothing much, really, I fancy. Nurse Quickly tells me that the dust lies thick on your bed-pan.’

‘Faugh!’ I said. I realized then that I was indeed on the mend, for it takes a strong man to say ‘faugh’ properly and with the proper curl of the upper lip.

But I realized, too, that this was a man who was a match for me unless I could soon put him down. I summoned up my most aristocratic glare.

‘If you are indeed a doctor, as your ah sunburned accomplice claims,’ I grated, ‘perhaps you will have the goodness to tell me who your employers are.’

He leaned low over my bed and smiled seraphically, his beard splitting to disclose a row of teeth which seemed to be a random selection from Bassett’s celebrated Liquorice Allsorts.

‘
SMERSH!
’ he whispered. The garlic on his breath was like acetylene.

‘Where have you been lunching?’ I croaked.

‘In Manchester,’ he murmured happily. ‘In one of the only two fine Armenian restaurants in Western Europe. The other, I am happy to say, is also in Manchester.’

‘I shall have some Armenian food sent in,’ I said, ‘and with no further delay or shilly-shallying. See to it that there is lots of
houmous
. And whom do you really work for?’

‘You would be horribly sick. And I work for the Professor of Psychiatry in the University Hospital of North-East Manchester, if you want to know.’

‘I don’t care how sick I would be – it would provide employment for these nurses, who seem to be disgracefully underworked. And I don’t believe a word of this North-East Manchester nonsense: only London is allowed to have points of the compass, everyone knows that. You are clearly one of these impostors, probably struck off the register for using an unsterilized button-hook.’

He leaned close to me again.

‘Arseholes,’ he murmured.

‘That too, probably,’ I rejoined.

We became rather friends at that point – was it what he would have called aversion-therapy? – and he agreed that he might see his way to sending in a little
houmous
and hot Armenian bread and perhaps a touch of that lovely sour-bean salad with a chick-pea or two sculling about in it. He also said that I might be allowed a visitor.

‘Who would visit me?’ I asked, shedding another ready tear.

‘There’s droves of them,’ he leered, ‘queues of juicy little
shicksas
wanking in the waiting-room; it’s becoming quite a health-hazard.’

‘Oh, bollocks,’ I said.

‘Suck ’em,’ he replied. Salt of the earth, some of these doctors.

Having settled the amenities he became less human and got down to business.

‘I won’t bother to tell you what’s the matter with you,’ he said crisply, ‘because you’d only ask me to spell it and I can’t. You might call it traumatic massive neurasthenia if you were a country GP thirty years out of date. Someone of your age might well call it a nervous breakdown, which is how mentally inadequate people describe a syndrome of boring signs and symptoms exhibited by people who find that they have bitten off more than they can emotionally chew.’

I thought about that.

‘The answer to that,’ I said at last, ‘is in the plural again.’

He thought about that.

‘Now I come to think of it,’ he said judicially, ‘you could just be right. However, what matters is that I’ve had you under heavy sedation for a good long time and I think you’re now pretty well all right – at any rate, as all right as you were before, ha ha. You may find yourself crying a little from time to time but it’ll pass. I’m going to give you stimulants now – one of the methedrines – they’ll soon sort you out. In the meantime,
just go on using the Kleenex, ha ha, and cry as much as you like.’

My lower lip trembled.

‘No, no!’ he shouted, ‘not now! Because here’ – and with this he flung open the door like an exhibitionist’s mackintosh – ‘here is your visitor!’

It was Jock who stood in the doorway.

I felt the blood draining out of my brain; I think I may have shrieked. I know I fainted. When consciousness came back there was still Jock in the doorway, although I clearly – all too clearly – remembered having kicked his head in, weeks before, as he lay in the grip of that quagmire.

He was grinning uncertainly, as though unsure of his welcome; his head was bandaged, there was a black patch over one of his eyes and new gaps in his few, strong, yellow teeth.

‘You all right, Mr Charlie?’ he asked.

‘Thanks Jock, yes.’ Then I turned to Dr Farbstein.

‘You disgusting bastard,’ I snarled, ‘you call yourself a doctor and spring things like this on your patients? What are you trying to do, kill me?’

He chuckled happily, making a noise like a cow defecating.

‘Psychotherapy,’ he said. ‘Shock, terror, rage. Probably done you a power of good.’

‘Hit him, Jock,’ I pleaded. ‘Hard.’ Jock’s face fell.

‘He’s all right, Mr Charlie. Honest. I been playing gin rummy with him every day. Won
pounds
.’

Farbstein slid out, doubtless on his way to spread a little more sunshine elsewhere. He was probably a very good doctor, if you like that kind of doctor. When I felt a little better I said ‘Look, Jock …’

‘Forget it Mr Charlie. You only done it because I asked you to. My mum would have done the same if she’d been there. Lucky you wasn’t wearing boots, reely.’

I was a bit startled: I mean, I suppose Jock must have had a mummy at some stage but I couldn’t quite visualize her, least of all in boots. I suddenly felt desperately tired and fell asleep.

When I awoke, Jock was perched decorously on the end of my bed, looking hungrily out of the window at what can only have been a giggle of passing nurses.

‘Jock,’ I said, ‘how on earth did they …’

‘Range Rover. They got a sort of winch on the axle; wound me out with it. Didn’t half hurt. Dislocated me shoulder, cracked a couple of ribs and give me a double rupture in me actual groin. All sorted out now.’

‘Is your eye, er, badly hurt?’

‘It’s gorn,’ he said cheerfully. ‘You put the leather smack into it and I was wearing me contack lenses. The nurses like me patch, romantic they call it. I’m not having no glass eye, bugger that, me uncle had one and swallowed it, never got it back.’

‘Goodness,’ I said feebly, ‘how was that?’

‘He put it in his mouth, see, to warm it up and make it so it would slip in the socket easy, then he hiccupped, having been on the piss the night before. Down it went. Cured the hiccups but he never saw the eye again.’

‘I see.’ How the other half lives; to be sure. There was a long and happy silence.

‘
Never
got it back?’ I wondered aloud.

‘Nah. Me uncle even got the croaker to have a look up his bum but he said he couldn’t see nothink. “Funny,” says me uncle, “I can see you as clear as anythink, doctor.” ’

‘Jock, you’re a bloody liar,’ I said.

‘Mr Charlie?’

‘Speaking.’

‘You don’t half owe me a lot of wages.’

‘Sorry, Jock. You shall have them as soon as I am strong enough to lift a cheque-book. And, now I come to think of it, I’ve got a hefty Employer’s Liability insurance policy on you; I think you get two thousand pounds for an eye. Out of my own pocket I shall buy you the finest glass eye that money can buy, even if I have to pay cash. Please wear it in the house; you can save the romantic black patch for your wenching expeditions.’

Jock lapsed into an awed silence: in his world people only get two thousand pounds by doing highly illegal things which earn you five years in the nick. I fell asleep again.

‘Mr Charlie?’ I opened a petulant eyelid

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘this is still I.’

‘You remember when you went to see that Colonel Blucher geezer at the American Embassy?’

‘I remember vividly.’

‘Well, he’s here. Well, any road, he comes here every day almost. He’s got them all jumping except Doctor Farbstein; I reckon Doctor Farbstein reckons he’s a Kraut.’

‘That figures.’

‘Funny thing is,’ he went on, ‘he never asks me nothing–Blucher I mean – just asks are they looking after me and would I like a Monopoly set to play with the nurses with.’

I waited while he subsided into helpless giggles.

‘Jock,’ I said gently when he had finished. ‘I know Colonel Blucher’s here. As a matter of fact, he’s right behind you, standing in the doorway.’

He was. So was a huge, black, automatic pistol, which was pointing unerringly at Jock’s pelvis. (Very nice, very professional: the pelvic region doesn’t move around nearly as much as the head and the thorax. A bullet there, smashing through bladder and privates and all the other butcher’s offal we keep in our pelvic girdles, is just as certain as one between the eyes and, I’m told, a great deal more painful.)

Blucher ostentatiously flicked on the safety-catch and magicked the pistol away into the waistband of his trousers. That is a very good place to carry a pistol while you still have a waist-line; afterwards the bulge becomes a little ambiguous.

‘Sorry about the dramatics, gentlemen,’ he said, ‘but I thought this might just be a good time to remind you that you are alive right now because I put in a request for you. I can change my mind at any time I feel I have to.’

Well,
really
! I cringed of course, but it was only partly funk: the rest was embarrassment at his lamentable bad taste.

‘Are you aware,’ I asked bravely, ‘that you are occupying space which I have other uses for? Or rather, for which I have other uses?’

‘I like P.G. Wodehouse too, sir,’ he rejoined, ‘but I would hesitate to use any kind of flippancy in the situation you find yourself in. Or rather, in which you find yourself.’