Murphy (9 page)

‘Then you know how I feel,’ said Murphy.

‘That same Ticklepenny,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘who for more years than he cares to remember turned out his steady
pentameter
per pint, day in, day out, is now degraded to the position of male nurse in a hospital for the better-class mentally deranged. It is the same Ticklepenny, but God bless my soul
quantum mutatus
.’

‘
Ab illa
,’ said Murphy.

‘I sit on them that will not eat,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘jacking their jaws apart with the gag, spurning their tongues aside with the spatula, till the last tundish of drench is absorbed. I go round the cells with my shovel and bucket, I—’

Ticklepenny broke down, took indeed a large draught of his lemon phosphate, and altogether ceased his wooing under the table. Murphy could not take advantage of this to go, being stunned by the sudden clash between two hitherto distinct motifs in Suk’s delineations, that of lunatic in paragraph two and that of custodian in paragraph seven.

‘I cannot stand it,’ groaned Ticklepenny, ‘it is driving me mad.’

It is hard to say where the fault lies in the case of Ticklepenny, whether with the soul, the stream or the lips, but certainly the quality of his speech is most wretched. Celia’s confidence to Mr. Kelly, Neary’s to Wylie, had to be given for the most part 
obliquely. With all the more reason now, Ticklepenny’s to Murphy. It will not take many moments.

After much hesitation Ticklepenny consulted a Dublin
physician
, a Dr. Fist more philosophical than medical, German on his father’s side. Dr. Fist said: ‘Giff de pooze ub or go kaputt.’ Ticklepenny said he would give up the booze. Dr. Fist laughed copiously and said: ‘I giff yous a shit to Killiecrrrankie.’ Dr. Angus Killiecrankie was R.M.S. to an institution on the outskirts of London known as the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. The chit proposed that Ticklepenny, a distinguished indigent drunken Irish bard, should make himself useful about the place in return for a mild course of dipsopathic discipline.

Ticklepenny responded so rapidly to this arrangement that the rumour of a misdiagnosis began to raise its horrid head in the M.M.M., until Dr. Fist wrote from Dublin explaining that the curative factor at work in this interesting case was to be sought neither in the dipsopathy nor in the bottlewashing, but in the freedom from poetic composition that these conferred on his client, whose breakdown had been due less to the pints than to the pentameters.

This view of the matter will not seem strange to anyone familiar with the class of pentameter that Ticklepenny felt it his duty to Erin to compose, as free as a canary in the fifth foot (a cruel sacrifice, for Ticklepenny hiccuped in end rimes) and at the cæsura as hard and fast as his own divine flatus and otherwise bulging with as many minor beauties from the gaelic prosodoturfy as could be sucked out of a mug of Beamish’s porter. No wonder he felt a new man washing the bottles and emptying the slops of the better-class mentally deranged.

But all good things come to an end and Ticklepenny was offered a job in the wards at the seneschalesque figure of five pounds a month all found. He accepted. He no longer had the spirit to refuse. The Olympian sot had reverted to the temperate potboy.

Now after a bare week in the wards he felt he could not go on. He did not mind having his pity and even his terror titillated 
within reason, but the longing to vomit with compassion and anxiety struck him as repugnant to the true catharsis, especially as he could never bring anything up.

Ticklepenny was immeasurably inferior to Neary in every way, but they had certain points of contrast with Murphy in common. One was this pretentious fear of going mad. Another was the inability to look on, no matter what the spectacle. These were connected, in the sense that the painful situation could always be reduced to onlooking of one kind or another. But even here Neary was superior to Ticklepenny, at least according to the tradition that ranks the competitor’s spirit higher than the huckster’s and the man regretting what he cannot have higher than the man sneering at what he cannot understand. For Neary knew his great master’s figure of the three lives, whereas Ticklepenny knew nothing.

Wylie came a little closer to Murphy, but his way of looking was as different from Murphy’s as a
voyeur’s
from a
voyant’s
, though Wylie was no more the one in the indecent sense than Murphy was the other in the supradecent sense. The terms are only taken to distinguish between the vision that depends on light, object, viewpoint, etc., and the vision that all those things embarrass. In the days when Murphy was concerned with seeing Miss Counihan, he had had to close his eyes to do so. And even now when he closed them there was no guarantee that Miss Counihan would not appear. That was Murphy’s really yellow spot. Similarly he had seen Celia for the first time, not when she revolved before him in the way that so delighted Mr. Kelly, but while she was away consulting the Reach. It was as though some instinct had withheld her from accosting him in form until he should have obtained a clear view of her
advantages
, and warned her that before he could see it had to be not merely dark, but his own dark. Murphy believed there was no dark quite like his own dark.

Ticklepenny’s pompous dread of being driven mad by the spectacle constantly before him of those that were so already, made him long most heartily to throw up his job as male 
nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. But as he had been admitted on probation for the term of one month, nothing less than a month’s service would produce any pay. To throw up the job at the end of a week or a fortnight or any period less than the period of probation would mean no compensation for all he had suffered. And between going mad and having the rest of his life poisoned by the thought of having once worked for a week for nothing, Ticklepenny found little to choose.

Even the M.M.M. found it no easier than other mental hospitals to procure nurses. This was one reason for the
enlistment
of Ticklepenny, whose only qualifications for handling the mentally deranged were the pot poet’s bulk and induration to abuse. For even in the M.M.M. there were not many patients so divorced from reality that they could not discern and vituperate a Ticklepenny in their midst.

When Ticklepenny had quite done commiserating himself, in a snivelling antiphony between the cruel necessity of going mad if he stayed and the cruel impossibility of leaving without his wages, Murphy said:

‘Supposing you were to produce a substitute of my
intelligence
’ (corrugating his brow) ‘and physique’ (squaring the circle of his shoulders), ‘what then?’

These words sent the whole of Ticklepenny into transports, but no part of him so horribly as his knees, which began to fawn under the table. Even so a delighted dog will sometimes forget himself.

When this had exhausted itself he begged Murphy to
accompany
him without a moment’s delay to the M.M.M. and be signed on, as though the possibility of opposition on the part of the authorities to this lightning change in their personnel were too remote to be considered. Murphy also was inclined to think that the arrangement would find immediate favour, assuming that Ticklepenny had concealed no material factor in the situation, such as a liaison with some high official, the head male nurse for example. Short of being such a person’s minion, Murphy was inclined to think there was nothing Ticklepenny could do that 
he could not do a great deal better, especially in a society of psychotics, and that they had merely to appear together before the proper authority for this to be patent.

But what made Murphy feel really confident was the sudden syzygy in Suk’s delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in paragraph seven. Of these considered separately up to date the first had seemed a mere monthly prognosticator’s tag, compelled by the presence of the moon in the Serpent, and the second a truism on the part of his stars. Now their union made the nativity appear as finely correlated in all its parts as the system from which it purported to come.

Thus this sixpence worth of sky, from the ludicrous broadsheet that Murphy had called his life-warrant, his bull of
incommunication
and corpus of deterrents, changed into the poem that he alone of the living could write. He drew out the black envelope, grasped it to tear it across, then put it back in his pocket, mindful of his memory, and that he was not alone. He said he would present himself at the M.M.M. the following Sunday morning, whenever that was, which would give Ticklepenny time to manure the ground. Ticklepenny would not go mad before that day of rest so favourable to Murphy. To those in fear of losing it, reason stuck like a bur. And to those in hope …?

‘Call me Austin,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘or even Augustin.’ He felt the time was hardly ripe for Gussy, or even Gus.

Having now been seated for over an hour without any ill effects, carried through his daily fraud and found a use for a pot poet, Murphy felt he had earned the long rapture flat on his back in that most pleasant of natural laps available, the Cockpit in Hyde Park. The need for this had been steadily increasing, now in a final spasm of urgency it tore him away from Ticklepenny, into the Gray’s Inn Road. Under the table the legs continued to fawn, as a fowl to writhe long after its head has been removed, on a void place and a spacious nothing.

Vera, remarking that he did not call at the cash-desk on his way out and that his bill lay where she had put it, supposed the onus of payment to have fallen on the friend. However she made 
quite sure that it would not fall on her by putting the two bills together when she made out the second. All this happened as Murphy had foreseen. The comfort he had been to Ticklepenny was dirt cheap at fourpence.

Half the filth thus saved went on a bus to the Marble Arch. He told the conductor to tell him when they got there, so that he might close his eyes and keep them closed. This cancelled the magnate in Oxford Street, but what were magnates to a man whose future was assured? And as for the Harpy Tomb, by closing his eyes he could be in an archaic world very much less corrupt than anything on view in the B.M. Crawling and jerking along in the bus he tried to think of Celia’s face when she heard of the engagement, he even tried to think of the engagement itself, but his skull felt packed with gelatine and he could not think of anything.

Murphy adored many things, to think of him as sad or blasé would be to do him an injustice or too much honour. One of the many things that he adored was a ride in one of the new
six-wheelers
when the traffic was at its height. The deep oversprung seats were most insidious, especially forward. A staple recreation before Celia had been to wait at Walham Green for a nice
number
eleven and take it through the evening rush to Liverpool Street and back, sitting downstairs behind the driver on the near side. But now with Celia to support, and Miss Carridge making her own of his uncle’s interests, this pleasure lay beyond his means.

Near the Cockpit a guffawing group was watching Rima being cleaned of a copious pollution of red permanganate. Murphy receded a little way into the north and prepared to finish his lunch. He took the biscuits carefully out of the packet and laid them face upward on the grass, in order as he felt of edibility. They were the same as always, a Ginger, an Osborne, a Digestive, a Petit Beurre and one anonymous. He always ate the first-named last, because he liked it the best, and the anonymous first, because he thought it very likely the least palatable. The order in which he ate the remaining three was indifferent to him 
and varied irregularly from day to day. On his knees now before the five it struck him for the first time that these prepossessions reduced to a paltry six the number of ways in which he could make this meal. But this was to violate the very essence of assortment, this was red permanganate on the Rima of variety. Even if he conquered his prejudice against the anonymous, still there would be only twenty-four ways in which the biscuits could be eaten. But were he to take the final step and overcome his infatuation with the ginger, then the assortment would spring to life before him, dancing the radiant measure of its total permutability, edible in a hundred and twenty ways!

Overcome by these perspectives Murphy fell forward on his face on the grass, beside those biscuits of which it could be said as truly as of the stars, that one differed from another, but of which he could not partake in their fullness until he had learnt not to prefer any one to any other. Lying beside them on the grass but facing the opposite way, wrestling with the demon of gingerbread, he heard the words:

‘Would you have the goodness, pardon the intrusion, to hold my little doggy?’

Seen from above and behind Murphy did look fairly obliging, the kind of stranger one’s little doggy would not mind being held by. He sat up and found himself at the feet of a low-sized corpulent middle-aged woman with very bad duck’s disease indeed.

Duck’s disease is a distressing pathological condition in which the thighs are suppressed and the buttocks spring directly from behind the knees, aptly described in Steiss’s nosonomy as Panpygoptosis. Happily its incidence is small and confined, as the popular name suggests, to the weaker vessel, a bias of Nature bitterly lamented by the celebrated Dr. Busby and other less pedantic notables. It is non-contagious (though some observers have held the contrary), non-infectious, non-heritable, painless and intractable. Its ætiology remains obscure to all but the psychopathological wholehogs, who have shown it to be simply another embodiment of the neurotic
Non me rebus sed mihi res
. 

The Duck, to give her a name to go on with, held in one hand a large bulging bag and in the other a lead whereby her
personality
was extended to a Dachshund so low and so long that Murphy had no means of telling whether it was a dog or a bitch, which was the first thing he always wanted to know about every so-called dog that came before him. It certainly had the classical bitch’s eye, kiss me in the cornea, keep me in the iris and God help you in the pupil. But some dogs had that.