The Weird Part 81

But in the morning she was gone.

Her clothes lasted a little longer, which worried me, as I had visions of A. R. committing flashery around and about the neighborhood, but in a few days they too had faded into mist or the elemental particles of time or whatever ghosts and ghost-clothes are made of. The last thing I saw of hers was a shoe with a new heel (oh yes, I had gotten them fixed) which rolled out from under the couch and lasted a whole day before it became I forget what, the shadow of one of the ornamental tea-cups on the mantel, I think.

And so there was no more five-year-old A. R. beating on the door and demanding to be let in on rainy nights. But that's not the end of the story.

As you know, I've never gotten along with my mother. I've always supposed that neither of us knew why. In my childhood she had vague, long-drawn-out symptoms which I a.s.sociated with early menopause (I was a late baby); then she put me through school, which was a strain on her librarian's budget and a strain on my sense of independence and my sense of guilt, and always there was her timidity, her fears of everything under the sun, her terrified, preoccupied air of always being somewhere else, and what I can only call her furtiveness, the feeling I've always had of some secret life going on in her which I could never ask about or share. Add to this my father's death somewhere in pre-history (I was two) and then that ghastly behavior psychologists call The Game of Happy Families I mean the perpetual, absolute insistence on How Happy We All Were that even aunts, uncles, and cousins rushed to heap on my already bitter and most unhappy shoulders, and you'll have some idea of what's been going on for the last I-don't-know-how-many years.

Well, this is the woman who came to visit a few weeks later. I wanted to dodge her. I had been dodging academic committees and students and proper bedtimes; why couldn't I dodge my mother? So I decided that this time I would be openly angry (I'd been doing that in school, too).

Only there was nothing to be angry about, this time.

Maybe it was the weather. It was one of those clear, still times we sometimes have in October: warm, the leaves not down yet, that in-and-out suns.h.i.+ne coming through the clouds, and the northern sun so low that the ma.s.ses of orange pyracantha berries on people's brick walls and the walls themselves, or anything that color, flame indescribably. My mother got in from the airport in a taxi (I still can't drive far) and we walked about a bit, and then I took her to Kent and Hallby's downtown, that expensive, old-fas.h.i.+oned place that's all mirrors and sawdust floors and old-fas.h.i.+oned white tablecloths and waiters (also waitresses now) with floor-length ap.r.o.ns. It was very self-indulgent of me. But she had been so much better or I had been it doesn't matter. She was seventy and if she wanted to be fussy and furtive and act like a thin, old guinea hen with secret despatches from the C.I.A. (I've called her worse things) I felt she had the right. Besides, that was no worse than my flogging myself through five women's work and endless depressions, beating the old plough horse day after day for weeks and months and years no, for decades until her back broke and she foundered and went down and all I could do was curse at her helplessly and beat her the more.

All this came to me in Kent and Hallby's. Luckily my mother squeaked as we sat down. There's a reason; if you sit at a corner table in Kent and Hallby's and see your face where the mirrored walls come together well, it's complicated, but briefly, you can see yourself (for the only time in your life) as you look to other people. An ordinary mirror reverses the right and left sides of your face but this odd arrangement re-reflects them so they're back in place. People are shocked when they see themselves; I had planned to warn her.

She said, bewildered, 'What's that?' But rather intrigued too, I think. Picture a small, thin, white-haired, extremely prim ex-librarian, worn to her fine bones but still ready to take alarm and run away at a moment's notice; that's my mother. I explained about the mirrors and then I said: 'People don't really know what they look like. It's only an idea people have that you'd recognize yourself if you saw yourself across the room. Any more than we can hear our own voices; you know, it's because longer frequencies travel so much better through the bones of your head than they can through the air; that's why a tape recording of your voice sounds higher than'

I stopped. Something was going to happen. A hurricane was going to smash Kent and Hallby's flat. I had spent almost a whole day with my mother, walking around my neighborhood, showing her the University, showing her my house, and nothing in particular had happened; why should anything happen now?

She said, looking me straight in the eye, 'You've changed.'

I waited.

She said, 'I'm afraid that we you and I were not are not a happy family.'

I said nothing. I would have, a year ago. It occurred to me that I might, for years, have confused my mother's primness with my mother's self-control. She went on. She said: 'When you were five, I had cancer.'

I said, 'What? You had what?'

'Cancer,' said my mother calmly, in a voice still as low and decorous as if she had been discussing her new beige handbag or Kent and Hallby's long, fancy menu (which lay open on the table between us). 'I kept it from you. I didn't want to burden you.'

Burden.

'I've often wondered' she went on, a little fl.u.s.tered; 'they say now but of course no one thought that way then.' She went on, more formally, 'It takes years to know if it has spread or will come back, even now, and the doctors knew very little then. I was all right eventually, of course, but by that time you were almost grown up and had become a very capable and self-sufficient little girl. And then later on you were so successful.'

She added, 'You didn't seem to want me.'

Want her! Of course not. What would you feel about a mother who disappeared like that? Would you trust her? Would you accept anything from her? All those years of terror and secrecy; maybe she'd thought she was being punished by having cancer. Maybe she'd thought she was going to die. Too scared to give anything and everyone being loudly secretive and then being faced with a daughter who wouldn't be questioned, wouldn't be kissed, wouldn't be touched, who kept her room immaculate, who didn't want her mother and made no bones about it, and who kept her fury and betrayal and her misery to herself, and her schoolwork excellent. I could say only the silliest thing, right out of the movies: 'Why are you telling me all this?'

She said simply, 'Why not?'

I wish I could go on to describe a scene of intense and affectionate reconciliation between my mother and myself, but that did not happen quite. She put her hand on the table and I took it, feeling I don't know what; for a moment she squeezed my hand and smiled. I got up then and she stood too, and we embraced, not at all as I had embraced the Little Dirty Girl, though with the same pain at heart, but awkwardly and only for a moment, as such things really happen. I said to myself: Not yet. Not so fast. Not right now, wondering if we looked in Kent and Hallby's mirrors the way we really were. We were both embarra.s.sed, I think, but that too was all right. We sat down: Soon. Sometime. Not quite yet.

The dinner was nice. The next day I took her for breakfast to the restaurant that goes around and gives you a view of the whole city and then to the public market and then on a ferry. We had a pleasant, affectionate quiet two days and then she went back East.

We've been writing each other lately for the fist time in years more than the obligatory birthday and holiday cards and a few remarks about the weather and she sent me old family photographs, talked about being a widow, and being misdiagnosed for years (that's what it seems now) and about all sorts of old things: my father, my being in the school play in second grade, going to summer camp, getting moths to sit on her finger, all sorts of things.

And the Little Dirty Girl? Enclosed is her photograph. We were pa.s.sing a photographer's studio near the University the other day and she was seized with a pa.s.sionate fancy to have her picture taken (I suspect the Tarot cards and the live owl in the window had something to do with it), so in we went. She clamors for a lot lately and I try to provide it: flattens her nose against a bakery window and we argue about whether she'll settle for a currant bun instead of a donut, wants to stay up late and read and sing to herself so we do, screams for parties so we find them, and at parties impels me toward people I would probably not have noticed or (if I had) liked a year ago. She's a surprisingly generous and good little soul and I'd be lost without her, so it's turned out all right in the end. Besides, one ignores her at one's peril. I try not to.

Mind you, she has taken some odd, good things out of my life. Little boys seldom walk with me now. And I've perfected though regretfully a more emphatic method of kitty-booting which they seem to understand; at least one of them turned to me yesterday with a look of disgust that said clearer than words: 'Good Heavens, how you've degenerated! Don't you know there's nothing in life more important than taking care of Me?'

About the picture: you may think it odd. You may even think it's not her. (You're wrong.) The pitch-ball eyes and thin face are there, all right, but what about the bags under her eyes, the deep, downward lines about her mouth, the strange color of her short-cut hair (it's grey)? What about her astonis.h.i.+ng air of being so much older, so much more intellectual, so much more professional, so much more well, competent than any Little Dirty Girl could possibly be?

Well, faces change when forty-odd years fall into the developing fluid.

And you have always said that you wanted, that you must have, that you commanded, that you begged, and so on and so on in your interminable, circ.u.mlocutory style, that the one thing you desired most in the world was a photograph, a photograph, your kingdom for a photograph of me.

The New Rays.

M. John Harrison.

M. John Harrison (1945) is an award-winning English writer best-known for the quasi-fantastical Viriconium Sequence of stories and novels. His most recent works have been in a science fictional mode, with Light (2002) managing to be contemporary, futuristic, and deeply weird. Harrison is known as a consummate short story writer for his ability to wed the supernatural or the suggestion of the supernatural with deep psychological portraits of flawed people. 'The New Rays' (1982) fuses weird science with Harrison's usual devotion to place and character. His work has influenced many writers, including Neil Gaiman, China Mieville, and Clive Barker (all included in this anthology).

When I first arrived here it was after a hideous journey. We were ten hours on the train, which stopped and started constantly at provincial stations and empty sidings. It was packed with young conscripted soldiers shouting and singing or else staring desperately out of the windows as if they wished they had the courage to jump. We got one cup of coffee at a halt in the Midlands. In the confusion of getting back into our seats I took out the little gilt traveling clock which W.B. had given me the first time I was ill, and somehow lost it. A young boy pus.h.i.+ng his way down the carriage helped us look for it. For a moment he seemed to forget where he was; then he looked round suddenly and lurched off. I was inconsolable. Two nights in succession I had dreamed the name of a street, Agar Grove.

We arrived late in the afternoon, just in time to watch the city dissolve into black rain, water and darkness. During the night I woke up and had to go down the corridor to the lavatory. The hotel was cold and squalid at that hour. There was a gas leak. When I looked out of a window some men were digging up the street. It was still raining.

The next morning I had my preliminary visit to Dr. Alexandre in Camden Town. I was reluctant to leave the hotel, and delayed by pretending I had lost my money along with the clock. 'Perhaps the young soldier stole it. Anyway we can't afford the taxi fare.' Then I went to the wrong address and banged on the door until W.B. lost his temper and we had one of our typical quarrels in the road. I told him that the journey had confused me: but really I was frightened that Dr. Alexandre would prove unsympathetic. In the end he drove off in the taxi, shouting, 'I wash my hands of you. It was you who wanted to come here.' I went immediately to the right house and stood on the doorstep, not wanting to go in. After I rang the bell I could hear scampering and laughter inside, followed by a faint drumming sound as if a machine had been switched on and off.

Dr. Alexandre had a beautiful crippled girl who answered the door and acted as interpreter. Through her he told me that he could effect a complete cure. I didn't believe that for a moment. Everything seemed suddenly useless and shabby although the clinic itself, with its odd maroon decor and chromium lamps, seemed nice.

To get rid of this depression I had a cup of coffee at the corner, then went to a picture gallery for the rest of the morning. In one or two small rooms at the back they had an exhibition of new artists. I was particularly struck by a picture of a woman of my own age. The background was a buff-colored wall with two trees in front of it, completely flat trees which looked as if they had been pasted on to the wall. Behind this, from a ledge or balcony, two more flat trees emerged. They were all lifeless and stunted. In front of them a youngish woman was sitting listlessly, her sullen unfocused stare the same color as the wall, her throat swollen with goiter. Everything was flat except her throat, which had a ma.s.sive, sculptural quality.

When I got back to the hotel W.B. had gone, leaving a note which said, 'I know you are frightened but you have to have some thought for other people. Write to me when you have settled in.'

I can describe Dr. Alexandre quite easily. I have the feeling that he can help people but also the feeling that he is an unscrupulous impostor. He is the kind of man who wears a dark suit. His eyes are blue and demanding, quite unintelligent in the wrong light. He is frightened that soon he will be repatriated or interned. He has a soothing voice but one which, you sense, could easily say: 'I cannot have you here disturbing the other patients if you do not give me your full cooperation. We are in this together. You must cooperate with me fully and then we will make good progress together against your disease.' When the lame girl translates for him she unconsciously mimics his fussy gestures.

The new rays are intermittent and difficult to focus. When they come they are sometimes the stealthy gold or russet color of a large, rea.s.suring animal; sometimes a wash of rose like a watercolor sunset. (I warm to these particular rays and, despite the knowledge of the pain to follow, allow them to comfort me. I feel no time pa.s.s, I feel no physical sensation at all; I am laved, washed quite clean, and experience nothing.) But most of the time they are a blue-black color which fills the bare treatment shed with shadows and imparts to the teeth and spectacles of Dr. Alexandre and his a.s.sistant a kind of jetty gloss. They come with a desultory buzzing which you feel in the bones of your jaw; or a drumming noise which rises and falls, the sound of heels drumming briefly on an iron pipe, sometimes near, sometimes unbearably far away. It is the sound of loss, and the giving up of all dignity. Dr. Alexandre and his a.s.sistant put on their goggles and nod at one another.

It appears now that they are not even sure where the new rays are from. The discovery was accidental, and took place many years ago in some laboratory where it was ignored. Since he does not yet fully understand the nature of the rays, it's entirely possible that Dr. Alexandre will kill me sooner than my disease. Standing there in my dressing gown, feeling sore and violated by the laxatives which are an important part of the treatment, I couldn't help but laugh out loud at this idea; but when I tried to explain, the lame girl thought I was making a complaint and refused to translate. I was embarra.s.sed.

At the hotel I sat in the bathroom trying to write a letter. Two c.o.c.kroaches crawled from under the carpet and crawled back again. 'Dear W.B., When I try to imagine you at home in our lovely house all I can remember is one yellow chair and the smell of Vinolia Soap.'

On treatment mornings I get up early and walk through the rainy streets by the river, or travel aimlessly here and there on the Underground, so I have some part of the day to remember unspoiled. We aren't supposed to eat and drink for five hours before a treatment, but all my good intentions go by the board in warm damp cafes at Baker Street or Mornington Crescent. At that time of the morning no one speaks to you. All you have for company is the image of yourself in the steamy mirrors behind the counter, a woman younger than middle-aged, in a good coat, drinking another cup of coffee to stop herself fainting on the train.

Off a corridor at the back of the clinic there are two or three pleasant little waiting rooms. They are very modern and aseptic, with contract furniture, aluminum window frames, and a bed over which is stretched a white plastic sheet: but the walls are a cheerful yellow and you can switch on a little radio. You undress here. After a few minutes Dr. Alexandre's a.s.sistant comes in and gives you a kind of bluish milk to drink, explaining that it will clear out your insides and at the same time coat them with a paste which will attract the rays. He goes out of the room and you begin to feel dizzy and nauseous almost immediately. Soon you have to choose between the sink or the little lavatory with its yellow paper on a roll. You can't lock the door in case you faint. By the time he comes back with the wheelchair you are too tired to stand. He will put your clothes away and help you comb your hair and then wheel you out to the treatment shed.

The shed has a sour concrete floor sloping to a drain in the middle. It is cold and, unlike the waiting rooms, retains the smell of vomit, rubber, and Jeyes fluid. It occupies a muddy open s.p.a.ce thirty yards behind the main building. This is for reasons of safety, claims Dr. Alexandre. I suspect he is afraid of accidentally curing pa.s.sersby, but you cannot risk a joke like this with the crippled girl. 'The doctor is so sorry for the present inconvenience to patients,' she translates earnestly. 'He hopes they will not complain.' And she gives me a savage stare. In fact I quite like the shabby bit of garden which is the last thing you see before you go into the shed. A few lupins, gone desperately to seed, add something human to the clutter of duckboards thrown down hastily to prevent the wheelchairs and builders' barrows from bogging down in the mud. There is often a fire burning here, as if a gardener or workman were about, but you never see him.

In the black and chaotic moment when the rays arrive, Dr. Alexandre and his a.s.sistant struggle into their loose yellowish rubber suits and round tinted goggles. Once they are covered from head to foot like this all their kindness seems to be replaced by panic. They grab you roughly: there is no turning back: up on the table you go, trembling as you help them fasten the straps. Before you can open your mouth they force into it the vile rubber wedge which stops you biting your tongue. The focusing machine has already begun to buzz and rattle faintly as it picks up the initial burst of rays. Soon the whole hut is vibrating. Dr. Alexandre stares at his watch: he wasn't ready for this: there's real panic behind those round blue lenses now. Hurry up, he urges you with gestures. Hurry up! You bruise your feet pus.h.i.+ng them into the stirrups. A thick vibration like the taste of licorice creeps into your lungs and along your spine. The buzzing has invaded you. Black light splashes across the room. Here it comes, here it comes...

If you are getting your treatment free of charge, you have to agree to have it without an anesthetic. You mustn't pa.s.s out.

Through the most abyssal vomits and discharges, when the rays seem to be laying down a thick coat of poison in every organ, you can still hear the urgent, earnest voice of the crippled girl. 'Are you conscious? Can you raise your head? Are you aware that you have lost control of your bowels? We must know.' Into your field of vision, blackness spraying off his smooth goggled rubber head, bobs Dr. Alexandre's a.s.sistant, anxious that nothing should escape the record. And into the exhausted calm after the blue-black shower has abated and all three of them have taken off their goggles, the uncertain foreign tones of Dr. Alexandre fall, and you must be awake to answer his questions.

Sometimes the rays don't arrive at all. What bliss to be let off with a cup of tea in the reception room and told to go home again!

A fortnight after I got here it turned foggy, first a black fog, then a yellow one which filled the streets like gas; but I didn't miss a treatment. One of the blue bodies got out and drifted about in the garden for a while before it was caught. There was such an expression of puzzlement on its face: as if it knew it had been in the garden before but could not remember when. After a while a man came out and pushed it back into the treatment shed, grumbling and flapping his arms.

The same day I fell asleep on the train on the way back to the hotel, and dreamed I was disembarking from a s.h.i.+p. When I went up on deck with my case and umbrella, a cold wind came off the land and blew my hair into my eyes. It was just before dawn, and the funnels of the s.h.i.+p were dark against a greenish sky like heavily worked oil paint. Down on the shadowy quay m.u.f.fled figures waited for the pa.s.sengers. Everybody except me knew where to go and what to do. I shuffled forward, trying to pretend I knew too. The sun rose while the queue was still slowly leaving the s.h.i.+p. The land never seemed to get any brighter. When I woke up somebody had stolen my red gloves, which had been on the seat beside me.

W.B.'s letters, full of solicitude and domestic calm and 'the dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white boughs of the ash trees when I take my evening walk,' drove me out into the fog, to the picture galleries and cafes. I couldn't stay in the hotel on my own; they look at you so accusingly if you are ill and on your own. In a cafe n.o.body notices you at all. You can eat your piece of sponge cake, read your letter, and leave. 'Seventy pence please.' 'Fifty-two pence please.' And you go out with the simple vision of a human face turning away forever, into streets which seem to be populated with wounded soldiers big, lost-looking boys whose surprised eyes stare past you at something which isn't there.

'I'm feeling so much better,' I wrote untruthfully to W.B. The rays seemed to have settled in my bones like a deposit of poisonous metal, and I could hardly get out of bed the day after a treatment. 'And I get on well with the other women.'

Actually we have no time for one another. Despite our diversity we are all very much alike a desperate, frightened bunch, concentrating on the only important business we have left, which is survival. We exchange nods as we are hurried along the corridors by wheelchair, too self-involved to speak. In the common room where without turning your head you can see a countess with 'anemia of the brain,' the mistress of a discredited novelist, and three young prost.i.tutes seeking a cure for some new venereal complaint we sit like stones. Many of the others have been here for a year or more. If we have a social hierarchy, these old hands are the cream of it. They have their heads shaved once a month so that their hair doesn't soak up the smell of the treatment shed. They 'live in' and look down on the outpatients, whom they call 'weekend invalids.' Through their stiff cropped stubble, which gives them as surprised a look as the wounded boys in the streets, I perceive the bony vulnerable plates of their skulls.

When the blue bodies get loose they sometimes wander into the clinic itself, as if looking for something. One evening when the fog was at its height, Dr. Alexandre's a.s.sistant took us downstairs to see one. They were keeping it in a small room with white lavatory-tiled walls. It was supposed to have been left on a bench, but when we arrived it had somehow fallen off and got itself into a corner among some old metal cylinders and stretcher-poles. Its face was pressed into them as if it had been trying to escape the light of the unshaded overhead bulb. Dr. Alexandre's a.s.sistant ran his hand through his hair and laughed. What could he do, he seemed to be asking, with something so stupid? He pulled it back on to the table where it lay blindly like a mannequin made of transparent blue jelly.

'Come and touch it,' he encouraged us. 'There's nothing to be frightened of. As you can see it has no internal organs.' It was quite cold and inert. When you touched it there was a slight tautness, a resistance to your fingertip similar to the resistance you would get from a plastic bag full of water; and a dent was left which remained for two or three minutes. When one of the women began to cry and left the room, Dr. Alexandre's a.s.sistant said, 'They have no internal organs. They are not alive in any way medical science can define.'

Before he could move away I asked him, 'What becomes of the poor things after we have finished with them?'

I lay in bed for three days at the hotel, very ill and depressed, wondering if it was all worth it. To W.B. I wrote, 'Why this mania of mine to stay alive? I feel no better, I can't even go for a walk or eat a piece of cake! I hate myself for hanging on.' When I caught sight of myself in the mirror I was so thin that my shoulder blades looked like two plucked chicken wings. Sleeping fitfully during the day, I dreamed that I had a goiter which drained all the virtues of the world around me. Everything around me grew two-dimensional and unrealistic, while the thing on my neck fattened up like a huge purple plum. I woke up in a sweat and found myself staring out of the window at a square of sky the color of zinc.

Later I found that someone had telephoned me, but the hotel people hadn't thought to wake me up. They said they had made a mistake about my name.

At night I could hardly sleep at all. I stared out of the window; listened to the boys singing under the sodium lamps in their mournful, half-broken voices. Far away a man blew inexpertly on a bugle. One boy lifted up the stump of his arm, which looked as if it was covered with black tar. I thought that if W.B. would let me change my mind and start paying for the treatments I might feel less downcast.

The mornings are dark now, and quite cold. You cannot see inside the cafes for steam; it billows over the pavement where people are b.u.t.toning themselves into their overcoats. As winter approaches, and the women wheel their prams a little quicker along the streets by the river, a thin wind rises round Dr. Alexandre's clinic. Some little-understood property of the new rays, it seems, is rotting the walls of the treatment shed, so that when you get down on the table now you are surrounded at once by little icy drafts smelling of decayed wood. The wall-clock, a very delicate mechanism, stopped and had to be replaced. When they opened it up all its working parts were covered with damp furry mold.

Outside Dr. Alexandre's office window a couple of low shrubs struggle with the desolation of the treatment shed garden, their grayish leaves and waxy orange berries covered with a film of dust or thin mud according to the weather. Inside, the doctor sits impatiently behind a desk piled high with papers, manila envelopes, rubber tubes. Behind him are some green metal shelves, so overloaded with the patients' files that they curve in the middle. It was raining the afternoon I was there. A desk lamp was burning in the dim room and the crippled girl was staring out across the garden through the streaming window pane. 'The doctor wishes to say something to you,' she told me, turning reluctantly to face into the room. 'He asks me to say that you must not worry the other patients with questions. It will only hold up your own progress, as well as interfering with theirs. A positive att.i.tude is very important.'

I cleared my throat. 'I can see that,' I said cautiously.

The doctor wrote something on the margin of the file in front of him. Suddenly he held up his hand for silence, stared hard at me, and said with great difficulty and slowness: 'Matter is cheap in the universe. It is disorganized, but yearns to be of use. Do you see? We do nothing wrong when we create these blue bodies. We violate no laws.' He put the cap carefully on his pen then leaned back in his chair and remained silent for some minutes, as if the effort of speaking English had tired him out. The crippled girl watched me triumphantly from the window.

'I only want to be sure I'm doing the right thing,' I explained. 'It's that I don't quite understand what happens to them when they're finished with.'

'Do we not give you these treatments free?' Dr. Alexandre reminded me gently.

After this he made the girl translate for him again while he examined me. 'The doctor says you are not making fast progress. You are not sleeping. Why is this? He thinks you should move into the clinic if you wish your treatments to have the best effect. Your disease does not wait. Please do not talk to the other women in the common room. Everything here is humane and legal.'

All I want from life is this room. If I can successfully identify myself with its red candlewick bedspread, the mustard wallpaper and the thin light coming in through the curtains, I won't have to admit to anything else.

I decided not to move into the clinic. But I couldn't stand the hotel any longer. When I went to the lavatory in the small hours there was always someone there to stare at my hair or clothes; if I found the courage to complain at the desk about the silver-fish in the bathroom, the woman said it wasn't very convenient for them to have me always asleep in the room during the day. Then W.B. arrived, and there was a fuss about transferring us to a double room. They weren't going to let us have one at all until I said I would be moving out soon.

One night we lay in bed talking. Suddenly he asked me, 'What are you thinking?' and I answered, 'That I had died and the doctor had gone to tell you.'

I thought that if I could get furnished accommodation somewhere I would feel better. In furnished accommodation you can sleep all day, come and go as you like. But in Bayswater in November it was difficult. They were all too expensive or they didn't want single women.

At first I didn't mind. I treated it as a holiday. A tremendous lonely wind blew us up and down the streets, past the cats, milk bottles, and pots of geraniums in bas.e.m.e.nt areas. I felt elated, as if we had recovered something of our youth. Then came a week of really difficult treatments; the rays were more intractable than ever; I was very tired. We started to argue about Dr. Alexandre. W.B. was all for him now. 'After all it was your decision to come here.' Soon we were having a blazing row in the hotel lobby. The woman behind the desk watched exactly as if she was at the cinema, nodding slyly to the other guests when they came down to see what was happening.

'You disgust me, stewing in your self-concern!' shouted W.B. I ran out into the street for some air and fell over.

After that I walked around for a while not quite knowing where I was, until I got the idea of going into a gallery and sitting down in front of the first picture I came to.

It showed a woman standing by a yellowish sh.o.r.eline covered with boulders. The sea was slack and cold. In the background, where the bay curved round into a promontory, some wooden frame houses, and a gray sky streaked with more yellow, were one or two indistinct figures a man, another woman, perhaps a child in a white confirmation dress with their backs turned. It had a sort of exhausted calm. I heard myself say quietly: 'There is something detestable about all these attempts to preserve yourself.' Once I had understood this a complete tranquility came over me, and I realized I hadn't felt so well for a long time. I laughed softly. I was hungry. Soon I would get up and run all the way back to the hotel, but first I would have a cup of coffee and perhaps some battenburg cake.

A man in a lovely gray suit came and stood uncertainly next to me. 'It has a certain atmosphere, this one, doesn't it?' he said. He sighed. 'A certain atmosphere.' He had come to tell me the gallery was closing; I saw that it was almost dark outside and suddenly remembered W.B.

When I got up to go I felt odd and a bit tired. The attendant put out his hand to help me and I was horrified to see vomit pour unexpectedly and painlessly out of my mouth all over the sleeve of his suit. I stood trembling with cold, surrounded by the sour smell of it, until they got the name of the hotel from me and put me in a taxi. 'At least I didn't do it on the picture,' I thought on the way back. 'At least it was only his sleeve.' In the hotel lobby I found all my cases piled by the door. The woman behind the desk wouldn't let me go up to my room.

'Your friend left some time ago I'm afraid,' she said. I stared at her. 'If you recall my dear, you did tell us you'd be moving into furnished accommodation when your friend left.'

In the end they agreed to let me have the room for one more week.

I was ill all the next day. I stayed in the room trying to eat soup but I couldn't keep anything down, not even water, and if I closed my eyes and concentrated I could hear a far-away buzzing, like a noise at the end of a corridor. I wrote letters to W.B. ('Please forgive me and take me away from here') and tore them up. When the maid came in there was a row about the state of the sheets, but they can't get rid of me now until the end of the week. I made them change the bed. In the end I was so frightened I decided to go and see Dr. Alexandre and find out why I was this ill.

It was quite late when I arrived at the clinic. A strange woman came out of the common room wiping her mouth on a paper serviette, and walked off down the pa.s.sage without speaking. There was the distant sound of a tray being dropped in the kitchens. I had the impression that things were going on here much as they did during the day, but at a reduced and much duller pace. I went to the rooms I knew, one after the other, hoping I would remember how to find Dr. Alexandre's office. The waiting rooms were unlocked: I sat in one of them for a bit, touching the familiar plastic bed-sheet with my hand and turning the hot water on and off in the little sink. Later I stood in the dark in the garden in case I could see the office from there. But a bluish light came from under the treatment shed door, so I went back in.

By now I couldn't remember where anything was. I went downstairs and tried a door with frosted gla.s.s panels, but it was only an empty linen cupboard. While I was in there I heard someone coming. One of the blue bodies had got into the pa.s.sage and was drifting towards me, pale and bemused-seeming under the downstairs lights. It kept looking back over its shoulder, blundering into doorways, and entangling its limbs in the heating pipes which ran along the walls. The crippled girl came round a corner and began to urge it along impatiently.

I stared at her in surprise. I said, 'I didn't know you were having treatment.'

'You aren't allowed down here,' she said. 'Go back upstairs before someone finds you.'

The blue body bobbed gently between us, waving its hands about in the air like a policeman directing the traffic. It touched her face; examined its own fingertips. It was the exact image of her, molded in cool blue jelly. She pushed it away.

'I'm sorry,' I said. 'I can't seem to find the doctor. Perhaps you could help me. I feel rather ill.'

She looked at me like a stone. 'Patients aren't allowed downstairs after nine o'clock,' she said. She drove the blue body out of the linen cupboard, where it had been trying to thrust its head in among the pillow slips, and started to man-handle it through a door further along the corridor. I followed her and stood outside watching. She had to struggle with it physically to keep it moving. Her hair fell into her eyes. Once she got it into the room, which was similar to the one in which Dr. Alexandre's a.s.sistant had shown us our first blue body, she dragged it on to a table and lay down next to it. It stared inertly at the ceiling for a time, then slowly turned to face her. One of its legs slipped off the table. She put her arms round it and tried to get it to press itself against her, encouraging it with little clicks of her tongue.

When nothing happened she got off the table with an irritable sigh, went to the door, and looked up and down the corridor. No one was there. Then she got back on to the table again. This time something seemed to happen but before I could see what it was the blue body fell off the table, pulling her down with it. She began to shout and scream with pain. I went closer and saw that they were partly joined together along their legs. The blue body had penetrated the muscles of her calves. She was flailing about, calling, 'Push us together! Help!' The blue body stared at the ceiling, opening and closing its mouth.

'What are you doing?' I said.

'For G.o.d's sake!' cried the crippled girl. 'Help us join back together!'

I backed away and ran upstairs to the common room and sat down. Later that night there was a lot of coming and going, and I heard Dr. Alexandre and his a.s.sistant shouting in the pa.s.sages.

When I first came here it was like a picture painted on a sodden, opened-out cardboard box. I remember the train slowing down between garden fences from which dangled bits of rag; and convolvulus spilling like white of egg out of a rusty old car abandoned in a sc.r.a.pyard. Some of the soldiers said goodbye to us; most of them went silently away up the platform. All I want now is to stay in this room sleeping and reading. The maid says very politely, 'Could you go downstairs for a bit, miss, we want to give the place a thorough going over.' They know they will be getting rid of me tomorrow. W.B. will come and fetch me. We are going over to France, where he has heard of a man who has had above-average success with a new chemical.

Last night, listening to the barges full of conscripts being towed up and down the river, the men singing their mournful songs, I thought: 'Places are not so easy to escape from.' I will never go back to Agar Grove, but I see my own blue bodies everywhere. Sp.a.w.ned in the violence and helplessness of the treatment shed, shadows of myself cast somehow by rays that no one properly understands, they bob and gesticulate dumbly at the edge of vision. How many times have I said, 'I would do anything at all to be cured!'

Now that I have done everything I feel as if I have been complicit in some appalling violation of myself.

The Discovery of Telenapota.