Machines in the Head Page 6

  ‘She won’t move now for eight hours, and then she’ll come round enough to be washed and fed, and then we’ll send her off for another eight-hour snooze.’

  The visitor had come close to the bed and was also looking down at its occupant. The vague distress accumulating in his mind crystallized for some reason about this inanimate form which seemed, to his stimulated sensibilities, to be surrounded by an aura of inexpressible suffering.

  ‘I don’t know that I altogether approve of such drastic treatment for psycho-neurotics,’ he was beginning, when suddenly a tremor disturbed the immobility of the anonymous face, the eyelids quivered under their load of shadows. The man watched, fascinated, almost appalled, as, slowly, with intolerable, incalculable effort, the drugged eyes opened and stared straight into his. Was it imagination, or did he perceive in their clouded greyness a look of terror, of wild supplication, of frantic, abysmal appeal?

  ‘She’s not conscious, of course,’ the superintendent remarked in his benevolent voice. ‘That opening of the eyes is purely a reflex. She can’t really see us or hear anything we say.’

  Smiling, white-headed like a clergyman, he turned and walked across to the open door. The other doctor hesitated for a few seconds in the ill-smelling room, looking down at the patient, held by an obscure reluctance to withdraw his gaze from those unclear eyes. And when he finally moved away he felt uneasy and almost ashamed and wished that he had not come to visit the hospital.

  THE BLACKOUT

  ‘I CAN’T REMEMBER ANYTHING that happened,’ the boy said. ‘It was like a blackout, sort of.’

  He twisted his thin body uneasily on the couch where he was lying, and for a second his face, which seemed much too startled and meek and vulnerable for a soldier’s face, was turned up towards the doctor sitting beside him; then he looked very quickly away.

  Queer sort of looking bloke for a doctor, he thought, noticing transiently beside his shoulders the crossed legs in shabby grey trousers, the worn brogues with mended soles. He wished that the doctor were not there. The doctor’s presence made him uneasy, although there was nothing to cause uneasiness about the look of the man.

  The couch was comfortable. If he had been alone in the room the boy would have quite enjoyed lying there with a pillow under his head. The room was small and there was nothing at all alarming about it. The walls were pale green, enclosing no furniture but the couch, the chair on which the doctor sat and a desk. There was a calendar with a bright picture hanging over the desk. The boy could not see what was in the picture because, in order to look at it properly, he would have had to turn his head around in the doctor’s direction. The sun was shining outside the window, which was open a bit at the top. The glass panes had been broken in a raid and replaced by an opaque plastic substance so that you couldn’t see out. The boy wondered what was outside the window. He thought he would like, vaguely, to get up, open the bottom half of the window and have a look and also to examine the picture on the calendar. The presence of the doctor prohibited him from doing these things, so he looked down at his hospital tie and began fidgeting with the loose ends of it. The tie had been washed so often that it had faded from red to deep pink and the cotton fabric had a curious dusty pile on it, almost like velvet, which communicated an agreeable sensation to the tips of his fingers.

  ‘Which is the last day you can remember clearly?’ the doctor asked.

  ‘The day I was due to rejoin my unit,’ the boy said, reluctantly detaching a fragment of his attention from the pleasant feel of the tie.

  ‘Do you remember what date it was?’

  ‘September the eleventh.’ He wasn’t likely to forget that date, so hypnotically, fascinated with dread, he had watched it racing towards him through the telescoped days of his embarkation leave.

  ‘Do you know what the date is today?’

  He shook his head, looking down at the tie, and his very fine, limp hair fluffed on the pillow where it was longest on the top of his head.

  ‘It’s the eighteenth. You started remembering things when you were brought in here yesterday, so that means your blackout lasted five complete days, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so,’ the boy said and waited, in apprehension, for the bad part to begin.

  Why can’t they leave you alone? he was thinking. Why must they go on poking and prodding at you when all you wanted was to be left in peace? It wasn’t as if you would ever be able to tell them what they wanted to know or as if they’d ever understand if you did. His fingers, pleating the ends of the tie, gripped more abruptly the softness from which they no longer derived any satisfaction.

  ‘You remember everything that happened while you were on leave quite distinctly?’ the doctor asked him.

  ‘Yes, oh yes,’ the boy said at once, speaking fast, as if he hoped, by bringing the words out quickly, in some way to terminate the matter without touching on what was most painful.

  ‘And where did you spend this leave?’

  There now, it’s begun now, the bad part’s beginning, he thought in himself. And recognizing helplessly the preliminary movement of that thing which from the outset had filled him with a profound unease, he remained silent now while his mind ran from side to side, seeking the unknown avenues of defence or escape.

  ‘Well, where did you spend your leave?’

  The doctor’s voice was casual and almost friendly, but there was much firmness in it, and also there came along with it the dangerous thing preparing to launch its attack, which could not be trifled with.

  ‘I went home to my auntie,’ the boy said, whispering.

  Like looking back down a long tunnel he began remembering now that tenement place off the Wandsworth Road, the water tap out on the landing and the room always chock-a-block with the washing and cooking and the dirty dishes and pots that his mum never could keep upsides with, what with her heart, and his dad coming in drunk as often as not and knocking her about till the neighbours started opening their doors and threatening to call a policeman, and himself feeling shaky and sick and trying not to make a noise with his crying as he hid there crouched up in a ball of misery under the table. His auntie used to come visiting sometimes when his dad was away, and she was not old at all, or frightening or frightened at all, but so pretty and young and gay that maybe that was the reason he always thought the word auntie was a word you used as a kind of endearment, in the way sweetie and honey were used. When he was eight years old his dad got TB and gave up the drink, but it was too late then, his mum was dying already, and when his dad died later on in the san he felt only happier than he had ever been in his life because he was going to live with his auntie for ever and ever and there would be no more shouts or rows or crying or staring neighbours.

  He remembered the little dark house where the two of them lived then in Bracken’s Court – tiny and old-fashioned and a bit inconvenient it was with those steep stairs with a kink in them where his dad would surely have broken his neck if he’d ever come there after closing time – but cosy, too, like a dolls’ house, and they’d always been happy in it together, even after the arthritis stopped his auntie from going out to her dress-making. When he left school he’d been taken on as messenger at the stationer’s and later had got a salesman’s job inside the shop and worked hard and was getting along well, so that it hadn’t seemed to matter too much that she could do less and less of the work they sent her at home, because he was earning almost enough to take care of them both and soon it would be more than enough the way things were going. Then the war had come, and she had got worse, she had those bad headaches often and couldn’t manage the crooked stairs. Then he had been called up, and he had hated it all, hated the army, hated leaving home, hated losing his good job, hated the idea of being sent overseas to fight, but most of all hated leaving her badly off now, financially insecure, bombs falling perhaps, and she alone with her crippling pains and no one reliable to take care of her; she who had always been sweet and lovely to him and deserved taking care of mo
re than anyone in the world. When he thought of what might become of her if he were taken prisoner or killed it was more than he could bear, and he almost wished she were safely out of it all. Yes, when she went down with flu or whatever it was during his last leave, he almost hoped she wouldn’t get well, it broke his heart so to leave her like that. But these were some of the things which never could be explained, and he wished only to be left alone and not be made to remember.

  But the questions had to go on.

  ‘What are the last things you remember doing before you left your aunt’s house that final day?’ the doctor wanted to know.

  ‘I spent a goodish time straightening up and cleaning the place so as to leave everything shipshape,’ the boy said. ‘My auntie being an invalid more or less I wanted to leave things as easy for her as I could.’

  Out of the end of his left eye he could see the doctor’s crossed knees and the feet in their mended shoes, and for an instant rebellion rose in him because this was a man no different from himself who by no divine right of class or wealth or any accepted magic sought to force memory on him. But there was something beyond that: beyond just the man who could be opposed with obstinacy there was the frightening thing which he had to fight in the dark, and he knew that he dared not remain silent because his silence might be to that thing’s advantage, and he went on, speaking low and mumbling as if the words came out against their will.

  ‘We had tea about four. Then I went up and packed my kit. Then it was time to go for the train. I said goodbye and started for the station. King’s Cross I had to go from.’

  There was a long pause, and at the end of it came the doctor’s voice asking if that was the last thing he could remember, and the boy’s voice telling him that it was, and then there was silence again.

  ‘That’s queer,’ the boy said suddenly into this silence. And now his voice sounded changed, there was astonishment and dismay in it, and the doctor uncrossed his knees and looked at him more closely, asking him, ‘What’s queer?’

  ‘I’ve just remembered something,’ the boy said. ‘That time I told you about when I left the house, it wasn’t the last time, really.’

  ‘Not the last time you were in the house?’

  ‘No. I’ve just remembered. It’s just sort of come back to me somehow. When I’d gone part of the way to the station I found I’d left something important behind, my pay-book I think it was, and I had to sprint back to fetch it.’

  The doctor took a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket and lighted one with his utility lighter, which never worked the first time he thumbed it, and blew out a little smoke. He seemed in no hurry at all about asking the next question.

  ‘Can you remember how you were feeling when you went back?’

  ‘I suppose I felt a bit flustered like anyone would about leaving my pay-book,’ the boy said, defensive suddenly and blindly suspicious of some unimagined trap.

  Looking into the tunnel he remembered fumbling under the mat for the key which was left there for the next-door woman who came in to give a hand. Was it as he came in or as he was going out again that he stood at the foot of the stairs where they crooked in the angle of a dog’s hind leg out of the living-room? It was dusk, and he remembered the silence inside the house as though there were a dead person or somebody sleeping upstairs. Yes, she must have been asleep then, he thought, but whether he went up to her was not in the memory but only the noise of his army boots clattering away on the paving-stones of the court, and as he came out into the high street a church bell was ringing.

  The doctor asked, ‘What happened afterwards?’

  ‘I can’t remember anything more,’ the boy said.

  ‘Nothing whatever? Not even some isolated detail?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, after a while. ‘I think I remember looking for the station entrance, and a big bridge with a train shunting on it up high.’

  He was aware, just then, of danger skirmishing all about in the green-walled room, and lying there on the couch his eyes were still down where they seemed safe on the pink ends of the tie, his hands clenched now and his neck and shoulders gone tense; and he not knowing if it were through his words or his silence that the danger would strike.

  Why did a church bell keep ringing in the tunnel like that? It was a very deep tunnel into which he was being forced. He did not want to go down in the tunnel again. He was afraid. But because of the unknown thing whose immediate agent was the casual, near-friendly voice, nothing could save him from that black exploration split by the doleful and ugly clang of a distant bell.

  ‘As if someone had died,’ he said out loud.

  ‘Who do you think might have died?’

  No, no. Not that. Don’t let it come, the boy thought, fighting desperately against what had all the time been waiting there behind every word; the worst thing, the intolerable pain, the fear not to be borne. And at once his nerves started to twitch and tears sprang in his eyes in case she might not have been sleeping but dead in the silent room at the top of the steep stairs, investigated or not by him he was, agonizingly, somehow unable to know.

  Running in panic along the tunnel he remembered the alleyway, like something in a film he’d seen once, blank walls leaning nearer and nearer to suffocation, and, at the bend, a lamp-bracket sticking out with a dangling noose; only no corpse was at the end of the rope. And always the hurrying army boots and the bell ringing, till he did not know if it was the noise of his own steps or the church bell clanging inside his head. The noise was part of his hunger, and he remembered, further along the tunnel, scrounging about at night where a street market had been and finding, finally, in the gutter, a piece of sausage, grey, slimy, like the wrist of a dead baby, and the terrible thirst that came on him afterwards, and how he drank out of a horse-trough, scooping the water up with his hands, and it seemed all wrong because they killed animals painlessly. Then there was that open space, a heath or a common, where he had vomited and lain on the ground, his hair in the rough grass. He felt weak and stiff from the vomiting and clouds of insects were around him, settling on his face and hands and crawling over his mouth because he was too weak to flap at them, but in the end it got dark and the insects went away then and left him in peace.

  Faster and faster he ran to escape from the tunnel and the tolling noise of the bell. And at last he was outside, the tunnel was getting smaller and smaller until it vanished, and there was respite from the tolling, nothing left now but the room with the doctor quietly smoking, sunshine outside the window, the calendar on the wall.

  The boy was not lying on the couch any more but bending over with hunched shoulders as if hiding from something, his head on his raised knees in the posture a person might take crouching under a table, and although he was crying he was no longer thinking of the tunnel or of the dangerous secret thing which had scared him so terribly or about anything he could have put into any words.

  ‘It was like a blackout. A blackout. I can’t remember,’ he kept on hopelessly mumbling among the tears.

  FACE OF MY PEOPLE

  BEFORE THEY TOOK OVER the big house and turned it into a psychiatric hospital the room must have been somebody’s boudoir. It was upstairs, quite a small room, with a painted ceiling of cupids and flowers and doves, the walls divided by plaster mouldings to simulate pillars and wreaths, and the panels between the mouldings sky blue. It was a frivolous little room. The name Dr Pope looked like a mistake on the door and so did the furniture, which was not at all frivolous but ugly and utilitarian, the big office desk, the rather ominous high hard thing that was neither a bed nor a couch.

  Dr Pope did not look at all frivolous either. He was about forty, tall, straight, muscular, with a large, impersonal, hairless, tidy face, rather alarmingly alert and determined-looking. He did not look in the least like a holy father or, for that matter, like any sort of a father. If one thought of him in terms of the family he was more like an efficient and intolerant elder brother who would have no patience with the weaknesses of yo
unger siblings.

  Dr Pope came into his room after lunch, walking fast as he always did, and shut the door after him. He did not look at the painted ceiling or out of the open window through which came sunshine and the pleasant rustle of trees. Although the day was warm he wore a thick, dark double-breasted suit and did not seem hot in it. He sat down at once at the desk.

  There was a pile of coloured folders in front of him. He took the top folder from the pile and opened it and began reading the typed case notes inside. He read carefully, with the easy concentration of an untroubled single-mindedness. Occasionally, if any point required consideration, he looked up from the page and stared reflectively at the blue wall over the desk where he had fastened with drawing pins a number of tables and charts. These pauses for reflection never lasted more than a few seconds; he made his decisions quickly, and they were final. He went on steadily reading, holding his fountain pen and sometimes making a note on the typescript in firm, small, legible handwriting.

  Presently there was a knock, and he called out, ‘Come in.’

  ‘Will you sign this pass, please, for Sergeant Hunter?’ a nurse said, coming up to the desk.

  She put a yellow slip on the desk, and the doctor said ‘Oh, yes’ and signed it impatiently, and she picked it up and put a little sheaf of handwritten pages in its place, and he, starting to read through these new papers with the impatience gone from his manner, said ‘Ah, the ward reports’ in a different voice that sounded interested and eager.