Lucia

by Alex Pheby

  Move on, dancer.

  In the next window, Chinese dolls. Dance for him with your hands clasped behind your back. Spin in the way a carousel spins. Horses impaled through the sternum with a spiral gold rod. Ride at a gallop. Names calligraphed, illuminated at the initial, soldiers and drums, soldiers and beards, strings of gems like the curtain that separates the front from the rear of a butcher’s shop, horse meat smoked and salted.

  —You have on the wrong shoes for this type of weather and consequently must go home.

  Is there a law against inappropriate footwear? If so, to whom is the law addressed? Which party is punishable under it? Is it she that wears the inappropriate footwear, or he that provides the inappropriate footwear? To whom is recourse made, under the law? There is certainly no point going to a dying girl in the snow – if she had appropriate footwear she would wear it, and there is none at home. If she returns home without money she will have what little remains of her life beaten out of her. The question of who wears what shoes will not arise under any circumstances, regardless of any citation written, since her guardian cannot read. Even when sober. He would not read anything provided by this girl unless it were the date stamped on a coin, or the promises printed on a bank note.

  She moves on.

  In one panel the deceased was shown surrounded by priests. Egyptian paintings, while figurative, are also ritualised, and their ritual function outweighs any overweening commitment to verisimilitude; expressions are always neutral, the better to preserve the likenesses of individuals, and types are all depicted the same so their function is recognised in the afterlife. So, these priests all appeared the same and all expressionless, and on the surface the scene was innocuous enough. The face of the deceased, of course, was scored out, but the positioning of her limbs was unusual. There are certain gestures and poses that symbolise certain emotions and the deceased was depicted in a supplicative, or fearful, pose, as if she was resistant to the attentions of these priests. If she had committed a crime and was called before an authority for her punishment she might have appeared like this, but she was surrounded by those who would have been paid to attend to her needs in the afterlife.

  Among the living hears it on this day

  The coffin is inscribed with texts helpful to the deceased in her journey through the Duat.

  STAFF OF THE INSTITUTE

  OUTSIDE GENEVA, JULY 1934

  It’s been a nightmare ever since Miss Joyce moved here. I know we made mistakes, but then we didn’t know what we were doing. You can’t expect to get it right first time, or really know what went right and what went wrong until you’ve seen it done properly.

  We’d only read it in books.

  We used the wet room, which was where we bathed and showered her, and sometimes where we laundered the sheets. It’s about the size of a decent dining room – twenty by twenty, something like that – and tiled in green.

  The bath is a long concrete trough, not too high. It takes a lot of water to fill it, so the taps are like old-style pumps, something that you might see at one end of a horse trough in a western. They don’t need pumping – one is on the mains and the other draws from an immersion in the room above – this was a godsend, so we thought, because it meant we didn’t have to heat the water and bring it in.

  There are showers at one end, sinks, and the whole room drains into a grate in the middle so that you only have to sweep the water from the sides with a stiff broom to do a decent job of drying down. There are no windows to open – light comes from electric strip lights in the ceiling, and the steam goes out through vents. It smells a bit fusty most of the time, but we bleach it regularly and it never gets too bad.

  We planned to do it in the afternoon – morning and evening would be too busy, and it was a quiet time for most of us, being when they’d have their after lunch nap – which was another consideration – you’ve got to feed them eventually or it affects their mood, and the book said no food for two to three hours before, and to make sure she’d evacuated her bladder and bowels.

  The aim is to get their temperature up high as if they are in a fever – the book the doctor read was very praising of a fever’s ability to cure almost anything. A fever burns away bacteria and viruses, it purges toxins through the skin, carries them away in the sweat, and it puts the body and mind back to square one, letting it build itself back up to normal when the fever goes. It has a kind of sense to it, though we all wondered what use that was likely to be to a mental case.

  In our experience, mental cases aren’t caused by viruses or infections, but by problems in the person themselves. No amount of getting hot is going to sort that out.

  The book said to fill a bath with hot water at a temperature of 95°F and then slowly raise the temperature to 105°F and to keep it there for an hour. This wasn’t too difficult since you can dial a temperature on the immersion and the thermometer in the tank turns the light off when it’s right. We left one of us in the boiler room – so to speak: it’s more like a glorified airing cupboard – so they could sit there and keep an eye on that side of things. That was a cushy job, we all thought.

  If we could have filled the bath in one go with 105°F water that would have been easy, and if water didn’t naturally cool down, that would have been easier still, but as it was we had to start with 95°F water and then raise it and keep it there. What we decided on was to leave the tap running on a bath of water at 95°F and keep refilling 105°F water until it was done. Rather than let the plughole drain the bath, which would have caused problems with it running out too fast or slow, we bunged the overflow pipe up with cloth, left the plug in and decided to let the water spill over. One of us was there to broom it down the drain.

  We started off with the three of us: one in the airing cupboard, one with the broom, and one to take care of the bath, but as soon as Miss Joyce came in we got an inkling that this wasn’t going to be enough. She was in her bathers, so we didn’t have to strip her at least, but she did not want to get in the bath. It was too hot, she said. Right enough it was hot: the hot tap had been running for a while, but we hadn’t thought that it might be too hot to get straight in. Fair enough – that was a mistake. Some people prefer to get in the bath when it’s luke and then add the hot until it gets to the right temperature. Anyway, she put one foot in and then wouldn’t come near again. She went over to the corner and pushed herself back against the wall, staring us all down like she was going to fight if we came to put her in.

  This was only a couple of minutes in.

  We know enough, from hard experience, to understand that there’s no underestimating a patient when she gets it into her mind that she doesn’t want to do something, even if she is as skinny as a handful of pipe-cleaners, so I went and called for reinforcements.

  When they arrived I slipped the lock and let them in.

  —Can’t they give her a sedative?

  Possibly they could, but bathing patients is our job and most doctors don’t appreciate writing a script out just to make our jobs easier. And I didn’t want to ask since the doctor on the rota had a reputation (as it turns out, he would have been fine with it – he certainly was the next time – but there you go). So we rounded on her, one from the left, one from the right and I went down the middle.

  It’s best to be polite and pleasant in matters like this, and you can avoid a lot of wrestling with a few nice kind words. It’s like when you want to get a horse into a horse box, or a child into its bed – there’s no point shouting at them.

  Not all of us feel the same way though, and each to his own, but I always put a stop to any cursing and rough treatment on my shifts and everyone knows that well enough by now. That said, this was one occasion when I was tempted myself to have words with the madam.

  Whether she was doing it on purpose or not, she had an uncanny knack of finding sensitive areas with an elbow, or knee. She wasn’t making it easy on herself, and though we are professional enough not to let little accidents affect the way we c
arry out our duties, we certainly weren’t of a mind to let her wilful behaviour win the day.

  Once we’d got her out of the corner and into the bath, that wasn’t the half of it. Putting her in the bath spilled a good quantity of water about the place on its own, but she thrashed like a cat in a bag once she was in. We had her by the shoulders and knees, but the bath was half empty in no time. She kept making waves, and when we tried to keep her still and hold her beneath what water was left it made her face go under, which she really didn’t like… more so than anything else.

  Soon there was barely any water in the bath for her to be held under and we were soaked and also very hot and bothered – the place was like a sauna – so when there was a lull we let her sit up while the bath filled again.

  She was much quieter for that time; whether she’d seen the error of her ways, or was exhausted from the struggle, or whether the hot water was doing its job, we didn’t care. But as far as the treatment went, this was another mistake – we didn’t get her to a temperature of 95°F and then gradually raise the temperature to 105°F. Whether this was important in terms of its medical effect we weren’t qualified to judge, but it was the first thing we were asked to do, and we hadn’t done it. All the water was coming in at 105°F and there wasn’t a great deal we could do about it. Actually, it wasn’t the first thing we were told to do – she hadn’t had breakfast and lunch, we got that right, but now was the time that one of the others pointed out that she hadn’t evacuated her bladder and bowels – she’d been asked to, but said she wasn’t ready.

  Anyway, we’ll draw a veil over that.

  When the bath was filled with fresh hot water we were already in there for half an hour and some of us were getting overheated – they went out, leaving me and one other to carry on.

  Now, the treatment requires that the patient lies beneath the water with as much of herself under as possible – all the body from head to toe, except the nose and mouth, and then only the minimum necessary for breathing. Whoever’s idea this was must only have been thinking of doing it to people who, by and large, are co-operative and who don’t mind having their face under water. I don’t like having my own face under the water, and I know lots of people who feel the same. I think most people would get panicky if they had to lie for an hour in boiling water with only their lips and nose poking out.

  So, I can understand why she wouldn’t like it, but we had our orders and this is what we were ordered to do.

  By now she was a bit drowsier than she had been, and a bit more compliant, but she was also slippier and anyone who has seen someone having a nightmare will know that no matter how drowsy you are, you can still thrash about. I made the decision to get in the bath with her, to straddle her, and, with the help of the other attendant, to hold her head and face mostly under the water. I stripped down to my underwear, which was the only sensible thing to do in the circumstances, and, while my colleague subdued her a little bit, I climbed in.

  Now, one of us was supposed to rub her skin with a hard brush and so bring the blood to the surface where it could pick up the heat and thereby create the fever that was going to make her better, but no-one had a hand free. It would have been hard in any case to get it rubbed on her, and she was still in her swimmers and neither of us felt right getting them off her, so we left out that part of the treatment too.

  The water was very hot, as I’ve pointed out, and the parts of me that were under were red as a lobster and this seemed to amuse my colleague enormously, and though it’s easy from a distance to say that this was unprofessional behaviour, it was also a very farcical situation, and we are only human.

  Most people are not required, in the run of their daily jobs, to strip off and get in the bath with mad women and hold them until they go into a fever, so a certain amount of leeway must be given. None of us had done any of this before; we were given orders and we tried, to the best of our abilities, to follow them through with the equipment we had at our disposal.

  We did keep her there for the hour, and for most of it she was very well behaved, very still, and even if we must have looked ridiculous, as I freely admit, and that the things we did were unusual, the treatment itself was unusual and that if the doctor had any better suggestions he should have given them to us before we began, when they would have been useful, not standing in the doorway to the wet room an hour and a half after the procedure started and when I’m in my pants and the other attendant was soaked through.

  It’s certainly not right to suggest there was any funny business going on – I’m a married man, in the eyes of God, and no-one should think that either of us were doing anything other than what we were paid to do, and if she says any different she is either lying or has misremembered. Or she is too mad to understand what was happening to her. If there’s any issue with my honesty being called into question then I suggest the authorities look into my record, speak to my manager, and remember not to jump to conclusions.

  Anyway, from this point on no-one will be using that technique. None of my colleagues will agree to cover that work, and if the doctor tries to insist then he will need to find qualified staff in that procedure, since he clearly doesn’t think we’re qualified to do it.

  There are alternatives, too. Having spoken to colleagues it would be better to raise the temperature by using electric blankets – that way the patient could be kept restrained in bed, where she no doubt prefers to be, and an electric under-blanket put on and then sheets, then a plastic sheet (an incontinence sheet would work well) on top. The patient should be dressed in warm pyjamas, socks, and a woollen hat, then another electric blanket put on top of her. It would be much easier to monitor the temperature that way too, without the attendants having to do it via the water, and also her pulse – something the doctor should have had us do the first time round (it shouldn’t go over 140) but which he forgot.

  If she struggled it would be much easier to hold her down in bed rather than in the bath, and there would be no need to get undressed at all, unlike in water where you can’t just get into the bath with your clothes, shoes and watch on. You have to strip down, regardless of what that might look like to the unsuspecting onlooker.

  You’d have to look out for the flex and make sure it didn’t pull the plug out of the socket, but that’s easy compared to a water bath, and the doctor, if he’s so good at watching over everyone, as he makes out, could watch to make sure the plug doesn’t come out while the attendants are busy making sure his precious patient keeps hot. It’s no doubt the kind of job a doctor is suited to, one which means he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty and instead can just give the fruits of his enormous wisdom to everyone around him and do what he does best, which is to know it all without having to do any of it.

  If electric blankets are too expensive, another way is to give the patient malaria and let the fever raise her temperature. None of us knows how that would work, but you can get the malaria bug and inject it into a patient and then let them have the fever, then cure the fever with quinine. No doubt the doctor will consider this far preferable than to rely on us, who he doesn’t seem to have any faith in. He prefers to believe in the ramblings of a mad woman than to trust people who have been employed here for the best part of twenty years.

  Whatever he tries, he shouldn’t rely on the patient taking any of it lying down – she hates all of this stuff with a vengeance and complains of the heat even if the window is closed when it is raining – she needs her fresh air and will not be deprived of it. She is, in general, a very difficult customer, whether it’s me looking after her or anyone else. To suggest anything different is just showing his ignorance. We are aware he is new, but that excuse only works for so long, and if he knows he’s new why doesn’t he understand to rely on us old hands a bit more and support us where we need support? Especially since we were only obeying his orders. It’s not our fault if he orders us to do things that are impossible, or which require us to do unusual things.

  In any case – she�
��s back in her room and shows no sign of getting better.

  I called my colleague over and asked him for his opinion. He made some joke or other, the exact wording of which I can’t remember, but it was something in poor taste. However, in that infuriating way he had, he indicated something in the inscriptions that I had missed.

  May Geb be gracious to you

  On the day of burial the catafalque is dragged by men and oxen to the tomb site, accompanied by mourners who beat their breasts in sorrow. The dance of the muu-dancers is performed at the door.

  THE IB OF LUCIA JOYCE

  LES ATELIERS DU VIEUX COLOMBIER, PARIS, SUMMER 1927 (CONT.)

  She is surrounded by white, as if she is within a white balloon, the extent of which is vast, practically infinite, since there are no edges of it for her to reach.

  If she walks or runs or gallops across its inner surface she will never meet an obstruction. But this is only an illusion brought on by cold and the snow cover. Eventually she comes to a single plank left at an angle between 45° and 60° to the ground leaning against the wall, and she sits under it.

  If one spreads out one’s fingers – perhaps do it now… no need to stretch, lightly is fine – the plank is as wide as the distance between your thumb and the outer edge of your little finger. If you cannot be induced to do the things you are asked to do, then imagine five, six, seven or eight inches depending on the size of your hand – then that would be the width of the plank, which is not, no matter what size your hands might be, wide enough to protect a dying girl from snowfall.

  Even if it were wide enough, the cold wind would find no impediment from it, nor the snowfall on which she sits. Just as this insufficient shelter seems to be all that she has, that too is taken away by a person from the other side of the fence – to be used to make their own shelter, no doubt. It’s too late anyway – she has fallen into a reverie, this girl – the kind of reverie one falls into immediately preceding death, where the wishes one has are granted by God in the only way that remains, as a kind of hallucination on the themes of one’s desire, such as a drowning sailor experiences after capsizing at sea.