Murphy (15 page)

With these and even less weighty constructions he saved his facts against the pressure of those current in the Mercyseat. Stimulated by all those lives immured in mind, as he insisted on supposing, he laboured more diligently than ever before at his own little dungeon in Spain. Three factors especially encouraged him in this and in the belief that he had found his kindred at last. The first was the absolute impassiveness of the higher schizoids, in the face of the most pitiless therapeutic bombardment. The second was the padded cells. The third was his success with the patients.

The first of these, after what has been said of Murphy’s own bondage, speaks for itself. What more vigorous fillip could be given to the wallows of one bogged in the big world than the example of life to all appearances inalienably realised in the little?

The pads surpassed by far all he had even been able to imagine in the way of indoor bowers of bliss. The three dimensions, slightly concave, were so exquisitely proportioned that the absence of the fourth was scarcely felt. The tender luminous oyster-grey of the 
pneumatic upholstery, cushioning every square inch of ceiling, walls, floor and door, lent colour to the truth, that one was a
prisoner
of air. The temperature was such that only total nudity could do it justice. No system of ventilation appeared to dispel the
illusion
of respirable vacuum. The compartment was windowless, like a monad, except for the shuttered judas in the door, at which a sane eye appeared, or was employed to appear, at frequent and regular intervals throughout the twenty-four hours. Within the narrow limits of domestic architecture he had never been able to imagine a more creditable representation of what he kept on calling, indefatigably, the little world.

His success with the patients was little short of scandalous. According to the text-book psychotic, with his tendency to equate those objects, ideas, persons, etc., evincing the least element in common, the patients should have identified Murphy with Bom & Co., simply because he resembled them in the superficial matters of function and clothing. The great majority failed to do so. The great majority discriminated so
unmistakably
in Murphy’s favour that even Bom lost a little of his high colour. Whatever they were in the habit of doing for Bom & Co., they did more readily for Murphy. And in certain matters where Bom & Co. were obliged to coerce them, or restrain them, they would suffer Murphy to persuade them. One patient, a litigious case of doubtful category, refused to exercise unless
accompanied
by Murphy. Another, a melancholic with highly developed delusions of guilt, would not get out of his bed unless on Murphy’s invitation. Another melancholic, convinced that his intestines had turned to twine and blotting-paper, would only eat when Murphy held the spoon. Otherwise he had to be
force-fed
. All this was highly irregular, little short of scandalous.

Murphy was revolted by Suk’s attribution of this strange talent solely to the moon in the Serpent at the hour of his birth. The more his own system closed round him, the less he could tolerate its being subordinated to any other. Between him and his stars no doubt there was correspondence, but not in Suk’s sense. They were
his
stars, he was the prior system. He had been 
projected, larval and dark, on the sky of that regrettable hour as on a screen, magnified and clarified into his own meaning. But it was
his
meaning. The moon in the Serpent was no more than an image, a fragment of vitagraph.

Thus the sixpence worth of sky changed again, from the poem that he alone of all the living could write to the poem that he alone of all the born could have written. So far as the prophetic status of the celestial bodies was concerned Murphy had become an out-and-out preterist.

Free therefore to inspect for the first time
in situ
that ‘great magical ability of the eye to which the lunatic would easy succumb’, Murphy was gratified to find how well it consisted with what he knew already of his idiosyncrasy. His success with the patients was the signpost at last on the way he had followed so long and so blindly, with nothing to sustain him but the conviction that all other ways were wrong. His success with the patients was a signpost pointing to them. It meant that they felt in him what they had been and he in them what he would be. It meant that nothing less than a slap-up psychosis could consummate his life’s strike.
Quod erat extorquendum
.

It seemed to Murphy that of all his friends among the patients there was none quite like his ‘tab’, Mr. Endon his ‘tab’. It seemed to Murphy that he was bound to Mr. Endon, not by the tab only, but by a love of the purest possible kind, exempt from the big world’s precocious ejaculations of thought, word and deed. They remained to one another, even when most profoundly one in spirit, as it seemed to Murphy, Mr. Murphy and Mr. Endon.

A ‘tab’ was a patient ‘on parchment’ (or ‘on caution’). A patient was put on parchment (or on caution) whenever there was occasion to suspect him of serious suicidal leanings. The occasion might be threats uttered by the patient or it might be simply the general tenor of his behaviour. Then a tab was issued in his name, specifying in all cases where a preference had been expressed the form of suicide contemplated. Thus: ‘Mr. Higgins. The bellycut, or any other available means.’ ‘Mr. O’Connor. 
Venom, or any other available means.’ ‘Any other available means’ was a saving clause. The tab was then passed on to the male sister, who having endorsed it passed it on to one of his male nurses, who having endorsed it was from that time forward responsible for the natural death of the bastard in question. Of the special duties entailed by this responsibility, perhaps the chief was the control of the suspect at regular intervals of not more than twenty minutes. For it was the experience of the Mercyseat that only the most skilful and determined could do the trick in less time than that.

Mr. Endon was on parchment and Murphy had his tab: ‘Mr. Endon. Apnoea, or any other available means.’

Suicide by apnoea has often been tried, notably by the
condemned
to death. In vain. It is a physiological impossibility. But the Mercy-seat was not disposed to take unnecessary chances. Mr. Endon had insisted that if he did it at all, it would be by apnoea, and not otherwise. He said his voice would not hear of any other method. But Dr. Killiecrankie, the Outer Hebridean R.M.S., had some experience of the schizoid voice. It was not like a real voice, one minute it said one thing and the next minute something quite different. Nor was he entirely satisfied as to the physiological impossibility of suicide by apnoea. Dr. Killiecrankie had been too often had by the resources of organic matter ever again to draw the Canutian line.

Mr. Endon was a schizophrenic of the most amiable variety, at least for the purposes of such a humble and envious outsider as Murphy. The languor in which he passed his days, while deepening every now and then to the extent of some charming suspension of gesture, was never so profound as to inhibit all movement. His inner voice did not harangue him, it was unobtrusive and
melodious
, a gentle continuo in the whole consort of his hallucinations. The bizarrerie of his attitudes never exceeded a stress laid on their grace. In short, a psychosis so limpid and imperturbable that Murphy felt drawn to it as Narcissus to his fountain.

The tiny body was perfect in every detail and extremely hairy. The features were most delicate, regular and winning, the 
complexion olive except where blue with beard. The skull, large for any body, immense for this, crackled with stiff black hair broken at the crown by one wide tress of bright white. Mr. Endon did not dress, but drifted about the wards in a fine dressing-gown of scarlet byssus faced with black braid, black silk pyjamas and neo-merovingian poulaines of deepest purple. His fingers blazed with rings. He held tight in his little fist the butt, varying in length according to the hour, of an excellent cigar. This Murphy would light for him in the morning and keep on lighting throughout the day. Yet evening found it still unfinished.

It was the same with chess, Mr. Endon’s one frivolity. Murphy would set up the game, as soon as he came on in the morning, in a quiet corner of the wreck, make his move (for he always played white), go away, come back to Mr. Endon’s reply, make his second move, go away, and so on throughout the day. They came together at the board but seldom. One or two minutes was as long as Mr. Endon cared to pause in his drifting, longer than Murphy dared snatch from his duties and the vigilance of Bom. Each made his move in the absence of the other, inspected the position with what time remained, and went away. So the game wore on, till evening found it almost as level as when begun. This was due not so much to their being evenly matched, or to the unfavourable conditions of play, as to the very Fabian methods that both adopted. How little the issue was really engaged may be judged from the fact that sometimes, after eight or nine hours of this guerrilla, neither player would have lost a piece or even checked the other. This pleased Murphy as an expression of his kinship with Mr. Endon and made him if possible more chary of launching an attack than by nature he was.

He was sorry for himself, very sorry, when eight o’clock came and he had to leave the wards, Mr. Endon and the lesser friends and exemplars, the warmth and smell of peraldehyde, etc., to face the twelve hours of self, unredeemed split self, now more than ever the best he could do and less than ever good enough. 
The end degrades the way into a means, a sceneless tedium. Yet he had to welcome the inkling of the end.

The garret, the fug, sleep, these were the poor best he could do. Ticklepenny had unscrewed the ladder, so that now he could draw it up after him. Do not come down the ladder, they have taken it away.

He did not see the stars any more. Walking back from Skinner’s his eyes were on the ground. And when it was not too cold to open the sky-light in the garret, the stars seemed always veiled by cloud or fog or mist. The sad truth was that the skylight commanded only that most dismal patch of night sky, the
galactic
coal-sack, which would naturally look like a dirty night to any observer in Murphy’s condition, cold, tired, angry, impatient and out of conceit with a system that seemed the superfluous cartoon of his own.

Nor did he think of Celia any more, though he could
sometimes
remember having dreamt of her. If only he had been able to think of her, he would not have needed to dream of her.

Nor did he succeed in coming alive in his mind any more. He blamed this on his body, fussy with its fatigue after so much duty, but it was rather due to the vicarious autology that he had been enjoying since morning, in little Mr. Endon and all the other proxies. That was why he felt happy in the wards and sorry when the time came to leave them. He could not have it both ways, not even the illusion of it.

He thought of the rocking-chair left behind in Brewery Road, that aid to life in his mind from which he had never before been parted. His books, his pictures, his postcards, his musical scores and instruments, all had been gradually disposed of in that order rather than the chair. He worried about it more and more as the week of day duty drew to an end and the week of night duty approached.

The garret, the fug, fatigue, night, the hours of vicarious autology, these had made it possible for him to do without the chair. But night duty would be different. Then there would be no appeasement by proxy, for Mr. Endon and his kind would be 
sleeping. Then there would be no fatigue, for watching could not fatigue him. But he would find himself in the morning, with all the hours of light before him, hungry in mind, docile in body, craving for the chair.

Saturday was his afternoon off and he hastened to Brewery Road. In a way, the one way, the immemorial way, he was sorry to find Celia out. In all other ways, glad. For whether he answered her questions or not, told the truth or lied, she would know that he was gone. He did not want her to feel, at least he did not want to be present when she felt, how far all her loving nagging had gone astray; how it had only served to set him up more firmly than before in the position against which it had been trained, the position in which she had found him and would not leave him; how her efforts to make a man of him had made him more than ever Murphy; and how by insisting on trying to change him she had lost him, as he had warned her she would. ‘You, my body, my mind … one must go.’

It was night when he reached the garret with the chair, having satisfied himself on the way up that no one was about, least of all in the w.c. Almost at once gas, reminding him that he had forgotten to turn it on, began to pour through the radiator. This could not alarm him, who was not tied by interest to a corpseobedient matter and whose best friends had always been among things. He merely felt greatly obliged, that he had not to let down the ladder and go and repair his omission.

He lit the radiator, undressed, got into the chair but did not tie himself up. Gently does these things, sit down before you lie down. When he came to, or rather from, how he had no idea, the first thing he saw was the fug, the next sweat on his thigh, the next Ticklepenny as though thrown on the silent screen by Griffith in midshot soft-focus sprawling on the bed, suggesting how he might have been roused.

‘I lit the candle,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘the better to marvel at you.’

Murphy did not move, any more than one does for an animal, or an animal for one. The instinctive curiosities also, as to how 
long Ticklepenny had been there, what he wanted at that dead hour, how he had contrived to intrude with the ladder removed, etc., were too indolent to discharge in words.

‘I could not sleep,’ said Ticklepenny. ‘You are the only pal I have in this kip. I called and called. I threw my handball against the trap, again and again, with all my might. I got the wind up. I ran and got my little steps.’

‘I suppose if I had a lock put on the trap,’ said Murphy, ‘my pals would come in through the skylight.’

‘You fascinate me,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘fast asleep in the dark with your eyes wide open, like an owl is it not?’