The Doctor Is Sick (5 page)

‘They're all right,' she said, staring at him fearfully. ‘They're quite clear. Can you find your own way back to the ward?'

Edwin could. He entered it to find a ward-round in progress – a great man proceeding from bed to bed with his satellites, one of them Dr Railton. This, he knew, was Mr Begbie, eminent neurologist, famed discoverer of Begbie's syndrome. The negro orderly, awed and hushed as at a pontifical high mass, motioned Edwin to his bed, made him, with poultry-shooing movements, enter it. He waited, perfectly still, as for the eucharist to come.

Mr Begbie had a tic under his left eye. So dentists sometimes had visible caries, so the cobbler's child was the worst shod. ‘And you,' said Mr Begbie, ‘must be Mr Spindrift.' The satellites in white gave encouraging smiles; Dr Railton seemed anxious as a lance-sergeant at a general inspection.

‘Doctor
Spindrift.' That had to be made clear. ‘Doctor of Philosophy,' he expanded. All smiled more broadly.

‘Yes. And you were sent here by——'

‘I was sent by the Tropical Diseases Clinic. I went straight there from Moulmein.'

‘Yes. And who actually employs you?'

‘The I.C.U.D. The International Council for University Development.'

‘Very well,' conceded Mr Begbie. He wrinkled his nose as though this organisation were suspect. He looked through the file he held with greater concentration. ‘Yes, yes,' he said. ‘What's all this about a battleship?'

‘A battleship?'

‘You seem to be obsessed with battleships, according to this.'

‘Oh, that.' Edwin laughed. ‘I see what's happened. I get migraine sometimes. The pain seems to be accompanied by a vision of a battleship sailing straight into my frontal lobes.' There were smirks at the extravagance of the image; the ward sister looked outraged at Edwin's pretence to anatomical knowledge.

‘That,' said Mr Begbie, ‘doesn't sound like migraine at all. Well, we shall see, we shall see what can be done.' He sighed, with the weariness of one who has helped so many, received so little gratitude. The procession proceeded to the sneerer. He was patted on the back by Mr Begbie.
‘We'll straighten that face out,' he promised. ‘Never fear.' The face, to Mr Begbie, was just another limb. The white birds swooped on to R. Dickie. His voice came through, muffled, with compulsive question-tags: ennit? wunnit? It was, agreed Mr Begbie, it would.

Just before luncheon another of the legion of the cool, the neat-haired, in a white smock with bare pink arms, came to conduct a sort of pummelling therapy on the Punch-chinned, Punch-humped young man in the winter-sports cap. She punched him vigorously, and he responded by coughing profoundly and spitting into a sputum-cup. A brisk trade was done in bedpans. Bottles were called for; sly micturition was achieved under the bedclothes. And then Edwin's afternoon treat was announced.

‘A lumbar puncture,' said the sister. She was a pinch-nosed Scot who trilled the r's with relish ‘They're going to take some of the fluid from your spinal cord. Then they'll take it to the laboratory. Then they'll see what's wrong with it.'

‘I've had that done already,' said Edwin, ‘twice.'

‘And,' said the sister, ‘ye'll have it done again.' Mistress of repartee, she returned to her office.

Some humorist in the catering department had decided on stewed brains for luncheon. Softer-hearted, some other cook had provided potatoes cooked in four different ways, a tiny potato anthology. The black man came with the ice-cream, gleaming sardonically at Edwin. Edwin read his philological magazine – a humourless American wordcount of
The Owl and the Nightingale
. Stewed brains, indeed.

In the pleasant time of afternoon torpor, haunted still by the taste of after-luncheon tea, the bed-screens were wheeled round Edwin. ‘Good-bye, mate,' said R. Dickie.
‘See you in the next world.' A doctor in glasses, mild of face and younger than Dr Railton, came to Edwin, announcing himself as Dr Wildbloode. ‘My colleague,' he said, ‘is at a rehearsal. He plays the trumpet, you know.' The sister hovered behind. Edwin was made to lie on his side, his buttocks and lower back exposed. ‘Nice clean skin,' said Dr Wildbloode. ‘This won't hurt much.' He shot in a local an
sthetic. ‘There,' he said. ‘Lovely.' There was a fumbling and clatter of tiny glass and metal. ‘Now,' he said, ‘I'm going to draw off a few c.c's. Just lie quite still.' Edwin was aware, as though several miles away, of a deep prick, and then his vertebr
seemed, dully, to collapse. ‘Lovely,' said Dr Wildbloode, ‘coming away nicely.' Edwin felt unmanned, the core of his being slowly being extracted. He said, as though it were an important discovery:

‘It isn't pain that's the real trouble ever, you know. It's the feeling of disintegration, however subjective.'

‘Never mind,' said Dr Wildbloode, ‘never mind. It's coming away nicely. Nearly finished now.' The sister, Edwin saw from the tail of his eye, had a test-tube ready. ‘Right,' said Dr Wildbloode, ‘I think that's it.' Edwin heard a faint squirting out. He said:

‘Can I see that?' The sister coyly granted a quick peep of the tubeful. ‘Like gin, isn't it?' said Edwin.

‘Burnett's White Satin,' said the sister, surprisingly. ‘That's a lovely one taken neat.'

‘Now,' said Dr Wildbloode, ‘you just lie quite still till tomorrow morning. Lie on your back, quite still.' He went away, nodding mildly. The bed-screens were squeaked away, and Edwin lay exposed to the ward, a new recruit to the brigade of the prone.

‘Marvellous what they can do these days, ennit?' said R. Dickie.

It was, in a way, refreshing to be prescribed complete passivity, to be ordered to become a mere thing. It was satisfying, too, to know that one was contributing to the uniformity of the ward. There was now not one who was not rooted, like a flower, in bed. Even the sneerer lay staring at the ceiling, beguiled by hopes of a mended set of nerves. But the becalmed order could not last. Well-made men in caps and uniforms arrived to take away a patient in a far corner. He, drooling and evidently incurable, responded to valedictions with ‘Urr', propped in a wheelchair.

‘Good-bye, Mr Leathers.'

‘Ta ta, mate.'

‘Keep smiling till we meet again.'

The vacuum was speedily filled. A tall scholarly-looking man was led in at tea-time, propelling himself like a walking toy, stiff in one leg, his right arm busy as an egg-whisk. A new part was added to the mealtime percussion band – a tremolo of knife and teaspoon.

After tea the ward sister came with a message for Edwin. ‘Your wife's been on the telephone,' she said. ‘She says she's caught a bit of a cold and is staying in bed. You're not to worry, she says. She'll be in to see you tomorrow.'

Just before dinner Dr Railton came in, very cheerful. ‘Hallo, Doc,' he said to Edwin. ‘They've done the lab test on your fluid. I checked the reading with the other ones that were done. It's gone up, if anything. There's a hell of a lot of protein there.' He rubbed his hands. ‘But we'll push on. We'll find out what's wrong. We'll send you out of
here a fit man.' And, himself a fit man, a robust trumpeter, he left, smiling.

There was no visitor for Edwin. R. Dickie had several. ‘Here,' he said to a small boy, ‘go and be a good Samaritan to that gentleman over there. Nobody's come to see him. Shame, ennit? You go over there and have a bit of a word with him, cheer him up a bit.' The small boy came to Edwin's bedside and was soon absorbed in the nude magazines, Charlie's present. He sniffed a good deal and tried to wipe his nose on Edwin's bedclothes.

When the visitors had left, R. Dickie said: ‘He's a good little lad, enny? Gives no trouble to nobody. Any time,' he said generously, ‘you've got nobody comin' to see you, you can always have one of mine. I get plenty.' He saw visitors and grapes as of the same order.

The new patient had a nightmare. ‘Aaaaah,' he called over the dark. The sneering neighbour of Edwin obliged with fresh football results. The Punch-like young man coughed. Edwin lay awake thinking of the wonder of the word ‘apricot'. ‘Apricock' in Shakespeare, the later version due to confusion of stop consonants. ‘Apricock' led back to an Arabic form, ‘al' the article glued to the loan-word ‘pr
cox', early, an early-ripe fruit. How charming is divine philology. But did it really have any greater validity than the nightmare in the corner, the dream football results? Sheila ought to have come to see him, cold or no cold.

CHAPTER SIX

Next day Edwin was called down to the cellars for an electro-encephalogram. ‘Electro-encephalogram' was a pleasing scholarly word reduced, on the signboard outside the door, to EEG – a mean cartoon cry. Edwin was met by another crisp snowy girl who told him to lie on a table. He asked her, chattily, what she understood by the middle term of ‘electro-encephalogram'.

‘We just call it EEG,' she said. She fixed a net over Edwin's hair, pressing salted wet cotton-wool under each node. ‘It's rather a long word otherwise. I don't know why they want to make them so long.' She was preoccupied with her preparations, a very red tongue-tip protruding as she wired Edwin to her machine. This machine was like an organ console with dials, a mile of paper threaded over its surface in a pianola roll.

‘What exactly does this
show
?' asked Edwin.

‘Sort of electrical impulses from your brain,' said the girl. ‘I don't quite know what they do with them, but that's what it's for. Now all you have to do is to relax. Open and close your eyes when I tell you, and don't move.' The girl sat down at her console. Behind her was a glass panel, beyond that a man and a girl technician larking silently. Where, wondered Edwin, was the aquarium, this side or that? The couples looked at him as if he were a
thing
, laughed at their own joke, went off together. Edwin felt unaccountably angrier than he had felt for a long time. He said:

‘I don't think you really believe we're human beings at all. A couple of X-ray plates, those bloody electrical impulses of yours – sorry, I apologise, for the swearing. What I mean is——'

‘Do you mind?' said the girl. ‘I've got my work to do.'

‘That's just it, isn't it? You've got your work to do and you assume that you're doing it with something inert, something passive. You forget that I'm a human being.'

The girl looked at him in a new way. ‘If looking at me excites you,' she said primly, ‘you needn't look. You can keep your eyes fixed on the ceiling.'

Edwin was horrified. Was that, then, one of her professional hazards, or a carry-over from her social life, or some pose learnt from films or television? ‘I didn't mean that at all,' he said. And, having made that disavowal, he felt a sort of rudimentary desire, or a desire for desire, stirring in him.

‘We're here,' said the girl reasonably, ‘to help. To make you normal again. Now keep your head still and your eyes open.'