Quicksand (22 page)

 

 

-- Oh, no. Oh,
no
!

 

 

"Goes for eight days, it says on the dial," Mirza reported with
satisfaction, closing the glass of the clock after winding it. The scythe
resumed its lunatic wagging.

 

 

"Shut up," Paul said.

 

 

Taken aback, Mirza hesitated. "I'm sorry," he said at length. "I thought
it was a bit of a giggle. What's wrong?"

 

 

Paul stabbed his cigarette into an ashtray. "It's from somebody I hoped
never to hear of again -- a man called Maurice Dawkins. He was one of my
first patients. Used to attend a group-therapy session I ran. Classic
manic-depressive, prognosis . . . well . . . uncertain. He developed a
fantastic transference and fixated on me so severely it became a bloody
nuisance."

 

 

"Queer?"

 

 

"As the proverbial nutmeg. But with such a load of guilt about it he
couldn't fall for anybody who might reciprocate -- only for people with
whom there was no chance of them joining in."

 

 

"Poor devil," Mirza said sincerely. "What happened eventually?"

 

 

"I got him off my back the first couple of times, and he showed good
response to treatment. We got his cycle flattened out, and in fact
we heard nothing about him for over three months. Then there was some
crisis in his business -- he's a partner in a firm of antique dealers --
and his fixation took charge again. The first sign we had of it was when
he sent me a present out of the blue. Like this. Only the first time it
was a mirror."

 

 

He made a helpless gesture. "Then there were phone-calls, and then he
camped out on my doorstep one evening and I found him when I got home
from taking Iris to the theatre. We got him straightened out, same as
before, and there was an interlude of calm, and then God damn if the
same pattern didn't repeat."

 

 

"What did he send you the second time?"

 

 

"It's not bloody funny!" Paul rasped.

 

 

"No. Sorry." Mirza looked down at his fingertips. "Are you expecting
him to chase you all the way to Chent? Surely your old hospital would
have more sense than to tell him where you've gone."

 

 

Paul hesitated. "The trouble is," he said finally, "he knows some friends
of Iris's. He could trace me if he wanted to."

 

 

-- But that isn't all he knows. Damn the man. Damn him.

 

 

"If you don't mind," he went on, "I'd better find out who's in charge
of his case now and warn him." He reached for the phone.

 

 

"It sounds like a bind," Mirza said sympathetically, and went out.

 

 

Waiting for his call to London to go through, Paul lit another cigarette
with shaking fingers. The hideous clock mocked him with its grinning skull;
he stared at it but did not see it. His mind was obsessed with one of
the worst visions of impending disaster that had ever struck him.

 

 

-- What in hell made me think that confessing my secret to Maurice
was a good idea? Comfort, reassurance: "It could happen to anyone, it
even happened to me." And the trouble I had to go to, keeping him away
from Iris for fear he should let the truth slip. If she were to find
out now . . . I can hear her telling me that the reason she won't have
my children is because of their tainted heredity. It was a breakdown
from overwork, not a psychosis, but she wouldn't want to be told the
difference. I should have been honest five years ago. I've dug my own
grave. . . . No. I haven't dug anyone a grave. You don't put aborted
foetuses in graves. You just throw them away.

 

 

 

 

He sat imagining this dreadful prospect for fully ten minutes after
speaking to the former colleague who had taken over Maurice's case, until
he realised with a shock that Urchin was due for her daily session shortly
and he was in no state to cope with her. Guiltily, he did something
which he had last been compelled to do when Iris left for her visit to
the Parsonses and he was worried that she might stay away for good.

 

 

He went down to the dispensary and stood for a while contemplating
the tranquilliser shelf. The pharmacist was busy on his weekly
stock-taking at the other end of the room. At length he settled for
something comparatively innocuous: a few Librium capsules in their ugly
green-and-black gelatine shells. Much practice during his breakdown had
enabled him to swallow them without water, and he took one immediately.

 

 

Waiting for the accompanying bubble of air to come back, he stared at
the ranked boxes, jars and packets.

 

 

-- A cupboardful of miracles, this! Powdered sleep, tablet sleep,
liquid sleep; energy in pills, in vials, in disposable syringes; drugs
to suppress hunger and stimulate appetite, to relieve pain and to cause
convulsions . . . Will the day come when a descendant of mine stands in a
dispensary and selects a tablet labelled
Instant Sanity, adult schizoid
female Caucasian 40-50 kilograms
? Christ, I hope not. Because --

 

 

The anticipated burp arrived. Since he had momentarily forgotten that
was why he was standing here, it erupted with maximum noise, and the
pharmacist turned his head and grinned. Sheepishly Paul moved away.

 

 

-- Because long before we get to the Instant Sanity pill dreadful things
will have happened to us. Drugs to keep the masses happy, like opium in
last-century China and the British hashish monopoly in India; drugs for
political conformism ("AntiKommi for those left-wing twinges"), for sexual
conformism ("Straighten up and fly right with Ortho-Hetero twice a day"),
for petty criminals, for deviates, for anyone you don't like. Pills for
bosses to give their workers, pills for wives to give their husbands . . .

 

 

But that idea abruptly switched the fantasy from waking nightmare to a
sore subject in real life, and he determinedly shut the matter to the
back of his mind as he returned to his office.

 

 

The clock, which Mirza had thoughtfully adjusted to the right time,
showed that Urchin was due any moment. He snatched it up and dumped it on
a shelf behind him, where he at least didn't have to look at it, though
thanks to Mirza its gentle ticking would last a week or more now. As he
sat down, an alarming idea occurred to him and he twisted to watch the
minute-hand reach the half-hour mark.

 

 

-- If it chimes as well, I think I shall throw it out of the window.

 

 

But he was spared that; only the clock overhead in the tower sounded.

 

 

And here was Urchin being delivered by Nurse Woodside, and he hadn't
the vaguest idea what he was going to do today.

 

 

When he had worked through the preliminary chat -- mainly answers to
Urchin's inevitable questions about words she'd run across lately but
couldn't fathom the meaning of -- he still had no fresh ideas, so he
merely reviewed some of his earlier ones. She still would not connect
herself with any country in the atlas bar Britain; she still would not
draw a picture of any scene except familiar views of the hospital and
its grounds; she still declined to sing him any song apart from mimicking
the sounds of a current pop hit which she must have heard
ad nauseam
on the radio.

 

 

Dispirited, Paul contemplated her, at a loss for any other inspiration.

 

 

-- It's not that I haven't learned, a great deal about you, Urchin.
I have a stack of paper nearly an inch thick listing what I know.
Trouble is, what I've found out doesn't hang together. You refuse
to eat or even touch meat, but how the hell do you reconcile adamant
vegetarianism with breaking Faberdown's arm? I know pacifists who manage
the reverse of that and preach non-violence over steak and potatoes, and
it doesn't seem nearly so incongruous. And if you are amnesiac and can't,
rather than won't, talk about your background, why hasn't it affected the
rest of your mind? If your auditory memory is so good you can imitate the
garbled sounds of a pop song practically as exactly as a tape-recorder,
and your knowledge of English is already incredible, then . . .

 

 

She was looking past him at the clock with an air of vague disquiet.

 

 

-- Urchin, Urchin, what
am
I going to do about you? Look: either
you're a sane foreigner, in which case it serves no purpose to pretend
you don't know what I'm talking about, or else you've invented a fantasy
life in a private world. And if that's the truth, with your intellect you
damned well ought to have made a better job of it! You ought to welcome
my willingness to string along with the gag; you should have ingenious
answers ready for questions on any subject. Blazes, even Maurice used
to do better than this when he was in his manic phase. He'd elaborate
huge fantasies on the basis of what the real world offered, and be as
eager to have other people join in the game as a child making a pirate
ship from an upturned table.

 

 

For a moment his eyes met hers. Uncomfortable, perhaps realising she had
disappointed him, she could not face his gaze but looked past him again.

 

 

-- So . . . what next? Association test? Inadequate vocabulary.
No, I'm afraid it's a matter either of sheer patience or breaking down
her resistance with drugs. And frankly I don't know where to start.

 

 

He sat for a while longer in silence, reviewing the possibilities that
modern chemotherapy offered, and concluded at last that he wasn't going
to get anywhere today. Since there was other work to be done, he roused
himself and stood up.

 

 

She didn't react to his moving. Bewildered, he stared at her. Her eyes
were open, glazed, and her mouth was a little open too.

 

 

"Urchin?" he said idiotically.

 

 

She said something in her own language, but no part of her body except
her lips stirred. Alarmed, he stepped to her side and was about to touch
her when a great light dawned. He followed the direction of her gaze,
and saw that a bright gleam from the window was caught on the oscillating
scythe of the clock, sliding back and forth like a metronome.

 

 

It looked as though Maurice Dawkins had done him a favour after all.

 

 

 

 

 

 

*27*

 

 

"What do you think of hypnotism as a therapeutic technique?" Paul asked Alsop.

 

 

"Underrated," the consultant answered promptly. He set aside the
stand-up-and-yell list for the day, which he had been reading through
prior to interviewing the first patient, and added, "Why?"

 

 

"I've discovered that Urchin seems to be fantastically susceptible to it."

 

 

"Have you indeed? How?"

 

 

"By accident, to be honest," Paul admitted, and recounted the episode.
Alsop gave an impressed nod.

 

 

"You've got a valuable gift, young fellow."

 

 

"I don't think I . . .?"

 

 

"Did you never hear it said that what sets the genius apart from the
plodder is the ability to see what happens and not what he expects
to happen? You're quite right, of course; if she went under of her
own accord in just a few minutes she's an absolutely extraordinary
subject." He hesitated. "Do you think you'll be able to do it again?"

 

 

"I'm pretty certain I can. I don't know much about hypnotism, but while
I was at university one of my lecturers gave us a demonstration when some
of the students asked about it. I remembered that you can make it easier
next time if you give posthypnotic instructions, so before waking Urchin
up I told her over and over, for about five minutes on end, that next
time she was in my office watching that clock she would go into trance."

 

 

"Quick-witted of you," Alsop approved. "Well, now you know, what do you
propose to do about it?"

 

 

"That was what I was just about to ask your advice on."

 

 

"I wish I could decide whether that's proper professional diffidence
or sheer cowardice. . . . Hypnosis is a dodgy business at best, though
I think it's needlessly neglected, so you'd better start by reading a
couple of decent texts on it. Then, presumably, you'll want to try and
open her up a bit. Get her talking about her background, which according
to your notes she's refusing to do."

 

 

"Where I did think it might be useful," Paul ventured, "was in trying
to settle once and for all whether she's honestly learning English or
just relearning it."

 

 

"Let me think about that for a moment" Alsop drew a cigar from his breast
pocket and rolled it between his fingers, pondering. "Yes . . . yes, that's
definitely important. Have you run any association tests on her yet?"

 

 

"No, of course not."

 

 

"Might be a good idea, before her English is admittedly perfect.
Inconsistencies might show up, when she denies understanding some
emotively charged words although it's clear from her reactions that
she did. Chuck a few extra words into a standard list -- things you
suspect she may be shying away from. Time her responses and plot them up
on a graph in the usual way, except that instead of looking for clues
to repressed material you'll be looking for a decision to pretend she
doesn't understand. If she's faking, there's bound to be a random pattern
of long pauses."

 

 

Paul nodded. "Thank you. But do you mean me to do this while she's
hypnotised, or while she's in the normal state?"