The Parasite Person (16 page)

“Who else?
I
can’t type. I told you, we had this careers mistress at school, and she was always saying, ‘Whatever you do, girls, don’t ever learn to type, else that’s what you’ll have to do.’”

That’s what you have to do anyway, Martin could have told her, whether, you’ve learnt or not; but this didn’t seem to be quite the moment.

“Well … okay,” he conceded reluctantly, and counting on it all blowing over before long, “But it’s a bit rough, you know, at this stage. I’ve always relied on Helen to—”

“Of course you’ve relied on her! Of course you’ve leaned on her … told me how marvellous she is … the whole can’t-do-without-her
bit! Recognise it?—‘Can’t-do-without-her?’ That’s the victim talking about his Parasite Person …!

“And you know, Prof, it figures. Why do you think you’ve been so depressed ever since you moved in here? Why do you think leaving your wife didn’t make you feel any better? It’s because Beatrice wasn’t your Parasite Person, she was merely beastly to you, and that’s different. As soon as I’d talked to her for a bit I realized that she wasn’t a Parasite Person, but merely a beastly person. Whereas Helen, bloody Saint Helen …”

Martin was irritated rather than upset by this tirade. Women were like that: once get two of them into your life, on however innocent a basis, and sooner or later the jealous scenes start, and the tantrums. The thing to do was to keep your head down and make no promises.

“Okay, okay,” he said, carefully not specifying what it was, precisely, that was, or was about to be, okay. “Calm down. No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want.”

Sensing that Ruth’s anger, meeting no opposition, was already losing impetus, he decided that the moment was ripe to change the subject, and at the same time to re-establish his role as boss.

“That Timberley interview, Ruth. Did you do the call-back there, as I asked you to?”

It worked. At once she looked less like the Red Queen and more like a young research assistant—a
very
young one, indeed.

“Oh, Prof, I meant to tell you at once, the moment I got in, and I would have if you hadn’t gone for me like that. It’s great, it really is, the Timberley scene! It bears out everything we’ve been trying to prove, it’s the case-history to end case-histories! The way it is, it’s like this: old Mr T has had a heart attack—lugging that old lump around, I suppose—and has been whisked off to hospital. And the old lump?—what did I tell you? She was on her feet within hours of the ambulance fetching him away, and by the next day she was cleaning up the place, going to the shops, chatting with the neighbours. It was like magic, one of them said, to see her like that … see her changed into a normal ordinary woman after all those months.

“And I got a super interview out of her, Prof. The time you did
her, it sounded like she never spoke at all but she speaks now all right—and how! She told me all about how her depression started, how it coincided with Mr T’s retirement, him being home all day kind of thing. She hates him, she says. She only realised she hated him when she saw him driving away in the ambulance, and then it suddenly swept over her how terrified she’d been of him all these years. Such revelations! You’ve never heard anything like it—the archetypal Parasite Person he must have been! Just listen to this …!”

D
ESPITE
M
ARTIN’S PRUDENT
policy of keeping his head down when jealous women were fighting over him, it still seemed to take the best part of a week before the thing began properly to subside.

In a way, it was more Helen’s fault than Ruth’s, Martin reluctantly decided, for though Ruth had blown her top (as she would have put it), had shouted and stormed and said horrible things about Helen, it wasn’t as if Helen knew anything about it, and so it seemed a little unfair of her to be just as upset as if she had known.

Martin had gone about the whole business as kindly and tactfully as he knew how. He hadn’t been such a fool as to tell Helen it was
Ruth’s
idea that she should stop typing the interviews. He presented it, on the contrary, as his own idea, framed entirely with Helen’s welfare in mind.

“It doesn’t seem fair on you, darling, when you have such an awful lot to do anyway—running the flat, cooking marvellous meals for me, and a full-time job as well. It’s not right.”

A charming speech: but so much solicitude, so suddenly,
naturally
took Helen by surprise.

“But Martin, darling, I
love
doing your typing for you, you know I do! I’ve told you: I love the feeling of being involved in your work. And, you know, the exams are over now, there’s only another week and a bit to the holidays … things are beginning to let up all round. I’ve got heaps of time now, truly I have.”

So Martin had to start again.

“That’s sweet of you darling. I do appreciate it, and don’t think I’m not grateful for all the marvellous amount of work you’ve done
for me already. But you see, the thing is, darling …”

What on earth he was going to go on to say, Martin would never know: he had vaguely hoped that the sentence would finish itself somehow. But it never did. Helen was too quick for it.

“You mean
Ruth
doesn’t like me typing her interviews! That’s it, isn’t it? She’s asked you to stop me doing it …”

The speed of a woman’s mind! More terrifying than any guided missile!

“Well …” Martin looked this way, looked that way, anywhere except at his beloved, and fumbled for words.

“Well, okay, Martin. If that’s how you want it,” and though she spoke quietly, he knew that she was bitterly hurt. “The only thing is, though, who
is
going to type them? They’re coming in fast now, you know, you’ll never have time to do them all yourself.”

“Oh, Ruth will do them,” Martin intervened eagerly, full of relief that the problem seemed to be changing from an emotional to a merely practical one. “She says she can do them herself, as she goes along. She says it will be easier that way….”

“But I thought you told me she couldn’t type?”

Helen seemed genuinely puzzled, and Martin found himself cursing, not for the first time, the concerned and loving attention that Helen paid to every single thing he told her. It left no loopholes anywhere.

In the end, of course, it all blew over. Helen wasn’t one to bear grudges, and soon she had settled into her new no-typing routine quite happily. Really, there was plenty for her to do, what with running the flat and protecting him from visitors, telephone calls, or anything else tiresome that might disrupt the flow of his creativity.

*

It was going marvellously well, really marvellous.
“Interesting,”
his supervisor had cautiously pronounced, pulling at his moustache uneasily and trying to hide (lest the cat should jump the wrong way) that he was really quite impressed.

By this time, however, Martin was less bothered by his
supervisor’s
opinion than he could ever have imagined possible: because by this time all sorts of other things were beginning to happen. He
had written, at top speed, and in a state bordering on panic lest someone else should get in ahead of him with the same idea, a short summary of his findings for one of the learned journals, and it had been accepted almost at once, with a nice letter from the Editor thrown in, predicting that his readers would find Martin’s ideas “stimulating and provocative”.

And this was not all, Somehow, the Press had got on to it, and two reporters, one of them on a national paper, had rung him up and asked for an interview. In the event, neither of them had actually turned up, despite Martin’s alacrity in accepting: but no doubt the Press were like that, he hadn’t had any dealings with them before; and anyway, it was still very exciting. Even to be stood-up by a top-ranking journalist is quite an experience for one whose whole life has been lived so far in tantalising obscurity.

The local paper had done him proud.

“Is
THERE A
P
ARASITE
P
ERSON IN YOUR
M
IDST
?” had been the headline, and a not-too-inaccurate summary of his theory had followed, together with a very flattering picture of him sitting at his desk, finger-tips together, and with an enigmatic smile on his lips. It wasn’t often that photographs came out just right like this, both flattering and exactly like you. Martin sat and looked at it for hours.

At least, he would have done, if the pressures hadn’t been building up the way they were. As he had predicted at the beginning, the concept of a Parasite Person draining away your talents and energies, gorging itself on your remarkable gifts and undoubted genius, touched a chord in all kinds of people. There was something in it for everybody, and there, at the top of the pile, turning out corroborative evidence like a factory turning out tins of cat-food, sat Martin Lockwood.

Keeping up the pace: that was the problem now. The heady joys of success—the euphoria, the incredulous joy—were all that he had ever dreamed. What he hadn’t quite envisaged was the way you had to keep at it to fulfil the ever-mounting, ever-flattering demands to which, in his jubilation, he kept saying “yes” … and “yes” … and again “yes”. Already he was committed to an article on “Parapsychology and the Parasite Person”; and another, for a
business magazine, on “Parasite Persons in Management”. Most urgent of all, there was a piece for
Readers’
Roundabout
on “The Parasite Person in Myth and Legend”. They were actually going to pay him for it, and in his headlong delight he’d said that he could produce it by the weekend.

Myths. There must be hundreds of myths illustrating his theme … thousands of them. Why spend hours—days—weeks—poring over those weighty historical tomes that filled shelf after shelf after shelf of the Humanities Wing of the library? One myth is as good as another. Anyone can make up a myth. Slipping a new sheet into the typewriter, he found his fingers almost doing it for him:

Where will I say this story comes from? Hell, why should I say anything? A story like that wouldn’t be copyright, even if it was genuine. If they lean on me about it, I’ll say Venezuela. Who wants to go to Venezuela? It’s delectable places, like Yugoslavia, that you have to be careful about, where proving you wrong can be
combined
with a delightful holiday, sea-bathing and scuba-diving and the rest.

Of course, for the thesis itself he’d have to provide references, footnotes about sources, and so forth.
Readers’
Roundabout
might not be too bothered, but the learned journals would, and if the name of Martin Lockwood was to be honoured in
both
fields, in the Groves of Academe as well as in the bestseller lists, then he must watch his references.

References … references … Were they really such a
stumbling-block
? Even on the learned journals, do the editor and his staff
really
check on every last one of your references? Especially if these references happen to come from a fairly out-of date number of a small and now-defunct journal …?

Next afternoon—and it was an afternoon well-spent—Martin was once again to be found in the Humanities Section of the library making a list of the journals which had folded up within the last ten years or so.

There seemed to be dozens of them! Delightedly, he copied out the titles; and then turned his attention to authors. What sort of names did the authors of obscure psychological articles tend to have? Looking through the still-extant journals he found—again to his delight—that an incredible number of the names in this field were not only foreign, but virtually unpronounceable and
unspellable
as well—Odajnyk, Wicsniowiecki, and such. Who would have the nerve to bandy names like
that
with him at his Viva, or across an editorial desk …?

He almost crowed aloud in his quiet alcove among the library shelves. Anyone could invent names like that, and he defied anyone—anyone at all, no matter how expert—to prove that such a character
didn’t
exist, and that it
hadn’t,
some time in the sixties, written such-and-such an article for such-and-such a now defunct journal?

He’d guessed it would be easy, but even he hadn’t guessed it would be
this
easy. That evening, the quotes flowed from his fingers as if in a dream, and it was fun, real rip-roaring fun, matching the right unpronounceable name to the right type of quote. So engrossed was he in this fascinating task that when the phone went, and Helen answered it (as of course she almost always did, these days), he was barely aware of it. But after a while, something in her voice caught his attention, and he found himself listening.

“Yes, that’s right,” she was saying: and then, “Oh, about six or seven weeks ago, I should think…. Yes, he came to interview them. Yes…. yes….”

And then came a pause, quite a long one. Then:

“Oh dear! Oh, I
am
sorry! Yes…. Yes, I suppose so, it
is
a mercy in a way, she’d have been so absolutely lost without him….”

Then, after another long pause, and in a slightly different tone:

“Oh! Oh … well…. Just a moment….”

Here Helen turned from the phone.

“Sorry to interrupt you, darling,” she said, “but it’s about the Timberleys…. Some rather sad news. Mr Timberley had a heart attack, and—”

Martin was impatient. He’d already heard all about it.

“Yes, yes,” he interrupted. “Ruth told me. She says that Mrs T …”

“Only survived him by a few hours,” finished Helen. “Of course, in a way, it was a mercy, because—”

She’d got it all wrong, muddled it somehow, or else this woman she was talking to had; but what the hell? He was itching to get back to his work.

“And so …?” he enquired, in that tone which shuts people up with minimum delay.

“And so,” Helen repeated, in the dry tone she sometimes used when she thought he was being a bit heartless, “And so Mrs Hobbs—the neighbour—she wants to know what to do about the budgerigar? There doesn’t seem to be any family, you see, and she’s ringing us because your card, Martin, was the only clue she had to
anybody
who might have known them. But the thing is—the immediate thing—this budgerigar. She can’t take it herself, she says, because she has two cats, and so just
wonders
—if you don’t mind, that is—if
we’d
take it for the time being? I could fetch it after school tomorrow, it would be no trouble. It would be nice, don’t you think, to feel that there’s
something
we can do for the poor souls …?”

Martin couldn’t see that it would be nice at all. And he didn’t believe Helen when she said that the bird would be no trouble. Pets were
always
a trouble, and it was just silly to pretend otherwise.

“His name is Tweetie,” Helen pleaded, just as if this made any difference to the problem; but when he looked up to protest, and met her eager, anxious gaze, he changed his mind. After all that fuss about Ruth and the typing, only so recently resolved, he didn’t want
another
fuss, this time about a budgerigar, for God’s sake.

“I’ll clean the cage myself—and feed him—and everything,” Helen was pleading; and on this understanding, Martin permitted himself a grudging nod of acquiescence.

And the next time the telephone went, it was as if God himself
was ringing up to reward Martin’s generosity and forebearance.

It was Television. They wanted to do a programme about the Parasite Person, with him, Martin Lockwood, for the centre-piece.

It had happened! This was the moment towards which his whole life had been leading. He had arrived!