The Vivisector (82 page)

A corner of the body left didn’t mean anything more than a tickle. The body wouldn’t renasce. Nor the mind. The spirit an only hope. It flickered a little above the warm soapulent water.

It didn’t flicker it stabbed him to watch his servitor’s curved backbone the hanging light of unconscious flossy hair. To recognize the vulnerable indestructibility of a fellow spirit.

Don Lethbridge wasn’t to be caught looking at the paintings but you could tell he was worming his way into them by odd means of perception.

‘Look!’ It was cruel, but unavoidable at some point. ‘Here is some filthy money to spur.’ Spurn? Forgot how it finished.

Out from under the pillow he fished the notes to dangle for the archangel-servitor. Who took it like some young neophyte prostitute disgusted-greedy.

They didn’t speak to each other much. Everything was implied and disguised. Their bodies came resentfully gratefully in contact. Their minds touched gingerly amazed. The disciple blushed amongst his down and pimples.

‘What are you aiming, Cuppaidge’—must learn to remember ends of sentences however painful the found object—‘to achieve—in paint? Your peculiar goal.’

The lily was spinning on her moorings she was so embarrassed.

At last Don Lethbridge grew reckless. ‘Well, I suppose I’m sort of trying to realize a feeling or a thought or emotion in pictorial terms sort of.’

‘You? Balls!’ He couldn’t make them round enough. ‘Don’t tell me!’ So shaken the vibrations must have burst through. ‘You! The first and only!’

Laughter and visible needles weren’t going to scuppaidge the Don. He was shining with his own vision. Which you recognized as the twin.

‘See you in the morning, sir. Give you a hand with the washing and dressing. And anything else.’

All the wrong subjects kept coming to the surface in your relationship with this sally willow.

‘All right, Don.’

‘Not if I drive you up the wall!’ Now it was the twin’s turn to laugh.

‘Please. I’m only going to try to remember—what I want you.’

Don Lethbridge took up the freckled basin which was beginning to dominate the room the way objects will. He carried it out. Didn’t even say good-bye. You don’t when almost all is implied.

Try to remember why you sent for this second gaoler. Not that anyone escapes ever. Not with the door wide open. Not very far.

 

‘Where are you going, Hurtle?’

‘Exercising.’

‘Oh, dear! I ought to be going with you.’

Supposing he dropped dead, stroked again, in Oxford Street, Rhoda’s conscience would never forgive her for her brother’s murder; on the other hand, she had looked after too many cats: she was too tired, though she no longer fed the neighbourhood.

‘Exercise is all very well, but don’t overdo it.’

Two or three times he had gone to the class organized for fellow victims. They had wanted him to bowl a hoop. Too many mirrors. Too many grunting cunts and elderbellied stockbrokers. His own grotesque contributions corresponded too clearly to their gyrations.

‘I won’t! I won’t! I insis! Snot my meteor.’

All his stars had shot unaccompanied on an often unexpected but well defined, fiery curve. He wasn’t for constellations, unless the constellation were was were fragments of his own daring.

‘I’ll recover—if you let me—in my own way. In the streets,’ he added.

That was dishonest. He didn’t believe it for a moment. Only that the streets were rivers of life. And to bathe in the waters of—could could.

So he advanced with the hopscotch shuffle and corner technique along the river banks grasping railings with his good hand whenever he failed to make home.

There was never any rest in this game he had begun, no it had been begun
for
him, his half-shrivelled body pursuing the course it had been started on, his mind more hesitant because too green and tender, shooting in all directions from old cutback wood, feeling for recognizable holds, and suspicious of its own growth. He was reduced to this. When he had always got there by jumping out into darkness flying flying then landing on what his presence made believable and solid. After the first spitting and gnashing of teeth, they had believed in what he showed them. Would show them again, too. Ready for the jump. If the spirit would only move in him. But the spirit plopped and slucked like hot lazy mud.

Oh God it was the colour of the sky he must try to remember. He hadn’t seen it before or since. ‘Extra indigo’ was the code word he had used while lying parcelled on the pavement. This same place.

In his vertigo he propped himself up on the shop window. What if it happened again of course it couldn’t most unlikely it was only emotion from being in the same place and remembering the code word for the colour.

She ran out all jiggle joggle still a sexy bloody woman wanting to air her feelings on him.

She began to speak out of flaking lips, addressing someone supposedly deaf or moronic: ‘Oh, Mr Duffield, I’m so very glad to see you’ve made such progress. You know me, don’t you? I’m Mrs Cutbush.’

She too was looking uneasily at the pavement. At the Place. Afraid it might happen again.

‘It’s wonderful to think!’ she harped.

The gull had by now almost devoured the starling in her hair. Must tear the guts out of that poor creep her husband.

‘Haven’t seen Miss Courtney. Is she, I hope, well? I expect she misses Miss Katherine Volkov.’ The gull seemed to swoop, squawk. ‘There’s no one in our little circle who doesn’t believe
they
have the only right to Kathy.’

This Mrs Cotbus, who had probably saved his life, wanted to destroy something even more important in him. Mustn’t let her smudge the indelible writing.

Lucky he had the window to lean on; instead of relying on conversation he read out an answer of sorts: ‘
Fonds d’artichauts, citrique, eau, sel. Laver avant
cooking. artichoke bottoms.’ Tactless word in Cutbush circumstances; but she drove him to it.

She looked along the street, away from him. ‘The unusual lines aren’t what you’d call popular,’ she said.

To console her, he told her: ‘Keep at it, and they will be.’

‘Cecil’s too artistic for a man—for a business—
a business
man.’ Her throat swelling turned a confession into an accusation: she couldn’t forgive poor old Cec his unusual line in
cuissons.
‘That’s our whole trouble,’ she said.

Probably a good woman, and the grocer, who had saved your life by Triple O, good also, if ‘artistic’. Two goods could obviously make a bad marriage.

Just then Cecil Cutbush steamed out from behind glass, trying to be a grocer, and churchwarden, and the Progress Association and ex-councillor all rolled into one. ‘Well, Mr Duffield, you’re looking a picture! A living picture!’ Still a personage, he laughed for his appropriate remark; but at once the queen in him began to queer things: realizing the personage had crushed the wrong, the stroked hand, Cec was reduced to sensitivity. ‘So sorry—so clumsy.’

And Mrs Cutbush was disgusted, less by the clumsiness and sensitivity than the interruption. She would have liked to stay, perving undisturbed on a great man to whom she had given suck that day on the pavement, almost sucked up into her womb as her own baby and lover-husband.

Unluckier for the grocer’s wife when Mrs O’Hara came clacking hard towards her wanting the sago and split peas.

The noise, the people’s inquiring faces, were becoming diabolical. Mrs O’Hara had a hairy raspberry on one nostril. But worst, the needles at work, in the dead flesh as well as the live. Your mind was just about popping out: the lid wouldn’t hold it if you didn’t didn’t.

Stagger on. Or back. Sisters are colder.

But the grocer insisted: ‘I’ll walk some of the way, Mr Duffield’; although he was wearing his apron and pencil.

Cutbush could have been waiting all his life to make a declaration of love. First he looked over a shoulder to be sure his wife had taken Mrs O’Hara inside. At least he had learnt one lesson: he didn’t attempt to touch; their affair was going to be ‘spiritual’.

As you shambled endlessly in the direction of Flint, the grocer tiptoed in company. He was still a large man, if no longer upholstered, and his plush vanished. Age, it seemed, had made Cutbush fluid: he moved like plastic with half its volume of liquid inside. Coming at them from the sea, the wind agitated his wide trousers: they were flapping like flags, or a skirt.

For his great unburdening, the grocer was beginning to choose the unsaleable delicacies among words: exotic stock which had gone dusty rusty on his frustrated shelves, oozing oils from Palermo, rancid juices from the Côte Basque. He licked his lips.

‘Mr Duffield—’ he selected the name, and held it up—‘I have never had an opportunity to tell you how much it has meant to us—to us—our comparatively small, but no less
avid
minority—to have you living in our midst.’ His nostrils enjoyed it the more for smelling slightly off. ‘Our confraternity may be under-privileged, and despised by some, but no one can deny that we appreciate the Higher Things. To walk past your home is, for us, a deeply moving experience. Flint Street has become a place of pilgrimage. ’

Oh Lord oh lard lard if you could only reach Flint your own pilgrim seize the cold pure rose by her thorns before being larded up in homogrocerdom.

‘You remember the night we inadvertently met at The Gash? When the moon came up? I was severely troubled at the time, by conflicts between my home life and my—temperament. I often wondered afterwards whether the distinguished, anonymous—and handsome—stranger, had noticed any signs of stress. Then, several years later, a malicious individual I happen to be connected with, explained a certain painting to me. I was horrified—which is what Malice had been hoping for—till suddenly I realized that, unbeknownst to myself, I had been consummated, so to speak!’

Oh Lard! The grocer’s whispers were thunderous, his words working like sheet lightning.

‘It was more than that. It was like as if, after attending regular service for years in a not very eyesthetical church, the same surroundings was illuminated by a—
religion!
’

O Lord save us it was the grocer who was going to have the next stroke. Scuttle scuffle away to Rhoda the cold rose a sister.

‘Of course I never told anybody that we’d sort of given birth. I never pointed out to the wife that barren ground can sometimes be what the seed needs. I suppose I’m what people would call a coward.’ The grocer didn’t attempt to hide the drops which were beginning to ooze. ‘I’ve often thought Judas must have been of a homo-sex-ual persuasion.’ Poor bugger didn’t seem to know the thing had caught on.

Anyway, now that all was said, the unsavoury disciple flapped to a standstill. Murk couldn’t obscure Luv: the big dope was shining with it.

‘Forgive me, Mr Duffield, if any indiscretion on my part has embarrassed you. I wouldn’t want—never ever—to be an embarrassment to the one I I I.’ He couldn’t make it.

Piteous what they lay on your altar, itself a rickety affair, so much shoved out of sight, from bottles of cheap port to unconfessed putrefying sins.

‘Grateful for our interesting conversary, Mr Utbus. Mustn’t be late for my lunch. My sister—my—my Rosa—will be hungry.’

If you knew how, you could use words to get out of anything unpleasant, or important, which was why social intercourse had been invented.

Rhoda said, ‘Where have you been? I’d begun to worry. You knew I was planning something hot for luncheon.’

‘Yes, Rhoda.’ The exercise or intercourse made the words feel almost normal on his tongue. Had to edge into his chair though, accommodate his dead side. That done, he said, and again it felt smooth: ‘I’ve been intercoursing. I had a nice talk with your friends Mr and Mrs Cutbush.’

Rhoda appeared upset. ‘What about?’ The cubes of fibrous chuck almost shot out of the casserole; the lengths of half-cooked carrot might have bounced if she hadn’t been prudent. ‘What about, Hurtle?’ Naming him made her sound angrier.

‘About business. And religion. And sex.’

Rhoda went a thinned-out white. ‘I hope you haven’t been overdoing it,’ she said. ‘I shall be the one to blame, because I’m responsible for you.’

On the contrary he felt so strangely normal, perhaps thanks to poor old Cec Cutbush his lover. The lip subtle, almost supple enough, it could begin to pour at any moment. If he had had a sister Rosa of creamy pork flesh enormous Karl Druschki bubs he might have committed comfortable incest and painted a pagan goddess instead of looking for a god—a
God
—in every heap of rusty tins amongst the wormeaten furniture out the window in the dunny of brown blowies and unfinished inscriptions.

Ah, he saw! He knew what he must tell Archangel Lethbridge the art student and footwasher. He didn’t throw his fork, but let it fall in the soupy mess in front of him. The fork clanged against the plate.

‘What is it?’ Mumbling through the blue-grey gristle, Rhoda frowned furiously.

‘Eureka!’

‘I—
what?
’ She hadn’t received a classical education.

He got away, laughing at what he had found and what he must do.

Rhoda was livid. No Frau Druschki, more like one of those Japanese pellets which need a tumbler of water to flower. In other days, he might have exploded the variations on Rhoda’s paper rosette opening into an underwater rose. He couldn’t now. There was no time for trifles.

 

While the torments of the body persisted, mind was no longer the irreparable mosaic, thought began fitting into thought, there were less shattering bursts of frustration: he might almost have hit on the secret of the maze. Even so, it would probably never become too easy. Nor would the dead arm, the dragging leg, give up their electric life although officially written off. He developed a technique of presenting himself sideways when acquaintances couldn’t be avoided. Human turnips frightened him at times, themselves obviously frightened by the company of what they considered half a vegetable. (How electrified they would have become if he could have introduced them to half the shocks in that so-believed vegetable arm.) Rhoda frightened him most. She understood him so little after all, he began to wonder whether he understood Rhoda, whether he might catch sight of a different person standing naked in the ruins of the conservatory. And the gentle Don, particularly when you caught him looking too discreetly at the paintings: what was he seeing? Was he falling into the same trap as Cutbush?