Her voice was taking on the color of genuine enthusiasm.
“And not just on the walls. On the floor too, perhaps. The carpets or the tiles. The curtains, the furniture, the clothes!”
Godwin gave a thoughtful nod. Yes, this one was going to take. It was an absolutely flawless combination. One push in the right direction—the investment, as he had estimated, of about forty-eight hours’ worth of his time—and the job would be complete. Of course, there was the usual matter of convincing her about her new reality, but that was Hermann’s problem, not his, and after that it would be plain sailing.
Once again he found himself hankering after something at least a trifle more demanding. But that was pointless.
She had flushed the toilet and was stepping into the shower. Checking, she glanced back.
“You must think I’m an idiot. Don’t you?”
“No, if you’ve got it in you, it can start tomorrow. Or even today.”
She curled her lip at him.
“No, I’m serious.”
He was sitting in a chair with splayed metal legs; if he tilted it far enough back, he could open the nearer of the wardrobes. At full stretch he slid its door aside.
“When you’ve finished showering, you can take your pick of this lot. Do you like the idea?”
She was staring in disbelief. “But—but aren’t those terribly expensive?”
“What makes you think so?”
“Well, they look like…” Eyes wide, lips wet because she had unconsciously licked them, she hesitated. “They look like the latest fashion.”
He jerked a brown tweed coat off its hanger and held it where she could read the label. It said Peasmarsh. Her eyes rounded.
“I’ll take you to see Hugo & Diana later on and get you a complete new outfit.”
“You know them?”
“I know a lot of people.”
“But I can’t possibly afford—!”
“There are always more things.” This time he said it with the platitudinous flatness of a self-evident truth.
“I still can’t afford—”
“Who’s asking you to? Get in that shower and make the most of it.”
Still she lingered, her eyes fixed on the ranked clothes. He said after a while, “You have exactly three choices. You put on your rags and tatters, stained with vomit, and return to the whorehouse you came from. Or you do the same and go whining and begging back to your mother, or the school she sent you to, which amounts to the same thing, because you said last night your mother will be in America for at least another week. Or you can do as you like for the rest of your life, which will belong and healthy. It’s up to you. But I shall in any case leave here in approximately five minutes, and whether I go where I’m next going on my own is for you to decide. At all events I shall certainly not let you stay here by yourself, even if it means putting you out in the street with nothing on. Is that clear?”
He spoke with deliberate harshness. She drank in every word, and the moment he had finished, walked toward him and laid her right hand on his arm, smiling.
“Do you know something?”
“What the hell is it this time?”
“I’ve never told anybody this before. Never in my whole life. Not my best friends.”
“Then it probably isn’t worth saying. Get on and have a shower like I told you!”
She stood her ground, clutching his hand tightly now.
“No, you’ve got to listen! Sometimes I’ve dreamed—sometimes I’ve tried with all my heart and soul to believe—that my father who ran away when I was still a baby wasn’t my father. That one day it would turn out the real one could never acknowledge me because he was married and a very important figure in politics or something, maybe even someone royal, only now his wife was dead and he could come and tell me the truth and he’d take charge of me and straighten out my life”—the words were coming in a torrent now—“and be masterful and of course because we’d never known one another properly I’d find it impossible to think of him as really being my father, he’d be just a man behaving the way a man ought to behave, and his wife would have been frigid or ill or something for years and years, so when we finally had the chance to be alone together chemistry would sort of take over and—”
She was flushing clear down to breast level and her free hand was hovering suggestively over her bush and her voice was becoming low and breathy. He shook free of her.
“Four minutes,” he said. “And I would keep my promise to put you out in the street naked. If you’d rather go back in the gutter and stay there.”
She took half a step back, clenching her fists. “You weren’t like this last night!” she accused.
“You were so full of Dutch courage I don’t know what you were like yesterday. Apart from stupid. And that seems to hold good for this morning as well, so—”
“You bastard!”
“Have it your way.” He bent over and gathered up the foul bundle of her torn clothes and threw it at her. She made no attempt to catch it. “Put them on and get out. Or don’t bother, and still get out. You’ve had your chance.”
“You know bloody well I couldn’t possibly do that!”
“Of course I do! So why are you still pretending that you can?”
There was a silence during which her face crumpled and she tried to find somewhere to look that wouldn’t make her start crying again: the bed, the open wardrobe, the luxury suite of shower and bidet and toilet all in matching avocado porcelain with gold-plated fitments, the incredible window offering its view of subtropical beaches lined with palm trees and fringed with white-foaming breakers.
Eventually, when he judged she had endured enough, he let his voice soften.
“Poor kid,” he said. “Poor silly kid. Nobody ever made you choose for yourself before, did they?”
Dumbly she shook her head, still trying to find a place to rest her gaze.
“It was all done for you. You didn’t choose to be raised in a one-parent family. You didn’t choose to be sent to a boarding school. You didn’t really choose to run away from it. You were driven to that, weren’t you?”
She nodded, screwing her eyes shut to prevent tears leaking from them. She failed; they made snail tracks down her cheeks.
“And when you did take the only big decision of your life you discovered you had no faintest notion how to cope with the real world. Isn’t that the long and the short of it? You thought you were going to see some ‘real life’ for once. You want that most of all. But you never had the chance to learn what’s real, did you? You were brought up to mistake the fake for the genuine, the smart for the substantial, the fashionable for the durable, the impressive for the thing worth having.”
She had kept her eyes shut; now she was rocking back and forth on her heels, making every motion into a nod that emphasized her agreement with her entire body. Her fists were clenched before her at the level of her waist, and her knuckles stood out pale against the rest of her hands.
“Which is why when you meet the real you think it’s an acid flash!”
“But it can’t be real!” she said doggedly, still with her eyes closed. “I mean, a place like this in a street like this…!”
“Have it your way. I won’t stop you. Get back to what you believe to be the real world. Pick up those clothes and put them on!”
Spinning on his heel, he slammed shut the wardrobe door.
“No! No!” Terror rang in her voice; she raised her hands before her as toward off a blow, and her eyes widened in the beginning of belief. Godwin noted these reactions with less than complete approval. Everything was going so fast, so predictably. There was no real challenge in his kind of work any more. If only he had been set to tackle someone relatively invulnerable…
But here he was, and here she was, and that was that. He was obliged to make the best of things.
Rasping: “What the hell is unreal about my home? I suppose that bed’s a fake, right? You spent all night on a patch of b
are boards! And it’s actually freezing cold in here and you’ve got goose pimples all over you! And I had the Peasmarsh labels made up and paid for them to besewn into phony clothes your size specially so when you turned up I could impress you! And you didn’t drink freshly squeezed orange juice and freshly brewed Blue Mountain coffee and you didn’t fill your belly with free-range eggs scrambled with Cornish butter and chopped chives and you didn’t wipe your stupid arse with tissue off that roll right there!”
By now he was panting with the force of his diatribe and she was flinching and casting about as though in search of somewhere to hide.
“Ah, shit!” he exploded by way of a climax. “I thought I was doing you a favor. Most people think it’s kind of a favor to be offered their heart’s desire. So you’re different. So you’d rather wallow in the dirt until you rot.”
“No!” She clutched at him, the tears still streaming down; she was snuffling now, as her nose filled with fluid. “No, it’s just that nobody ever gave me this kind of chance ever in my whole life before! I mean, you can’t blame me for finding it unreal! Can you? Can you?”
“Ah, hell… I suppose not.” With careful timing he put one arm around her and gave a squeeze; it coincided precisely with the next time she exhaled and obliged her to take an unusually deep breath.
“Okay, make it ten minutes instead of five. But I warn you: you’ve already wasted half of them, and Hermann doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
Infinitely relieved, on the point of stepping under the shower at last, she hesitated.
“Who’s Hermann?”
“Someone who can straighten out that mixed-up head of yours. Stop asking questions! If you can’t learn to take things for granted, you won’t make out in the world where I live. And you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
“You think I could?”
“That’s up to you. From me you get today’s help, and that is all!”
Eyes bright now, lips pressed tight together for fear of letting out something else better unsaid, she turned the shower control at random and succeeded in half scalding herself. Godwin sighed. One of these days, one of these years, maybe he’d be called to tackle some really tough assignment, or at least an assignment which would feel as tough as those he had undertaken in the past.
Maybe, though, that was inherently impossible now. Maybe he understood his techniques too well, deployed them with excessive facility…
No. That couldn’t be the case. Surely not. So the next one, with a bit of luck, might occupy him for a reasonable length of time, give him a sense of working at full stretch, of achievement, of fulfilment. But it wasn’t, of course, for him to say.
He could only hope, and hope that his hoping might be noticed.
“You’ll find knickers to fit you in that drawer,” he said, pointing, when Gorse emerged from the shower frantically toweling down. “Two minutes to go. You’d better hurry.”
The weather was cool today, but dry. There was, of course, a cruising taxi at the end of the street; the driver spotted Godwin’s signal and waited for him. They picked their way among a horde of bored Sunday-morning children, mostly inspecting rubbish to find out whether it was salable. One of the front wheels from the Mark X Jaguar had been stolen during the night.
“Why do you live here?” Gorse demanded.
“Anywhere is as good as anywhere else,” Godwin sighed, closing the door of the cab and announcing their destination. He was getting bored with her inability to see what to him was plain as pikestaffs.
At least she took the hint and held her tongue for the duration of the journey.
The taxi dropped them in the Sunday vacancy of Wimpole Street. Gray stone façades frowned down as they made their way to the house where—as reported by a discreet, well-polished brass plate—Dr. Hermann Klosterberg maintained his consultancy.
“I wish I knew why you’d brought me here,” Gorse complained as she followed reluctantly in Godwin’s wake.
“I already told you” was his sour reply. But his mood was already changing, precisely as he had expected, and it took no more than a glance to inform him that hers was also.
Set between ranked wrought-iron railings, the richly colored teak door opened to his touch. There was time to glimpse a high-ceilinged hallway with a fine Persian carpet on the floor and several eighteenth-century landscapes in thickly gilded frames before he ushered her into the first room on the right.
This too was high-ceilinged, but nonetheless it was dark. The walls were papered with a somber pattern; the furniture was of an old-fashioned solidity; the curtains were of dark green velvet, held back with tasseled ropes of old gold, while the carpet was of a deep wine-red and seemed to absorb not only footfalls but every sound from the outside world. There was a couch stuffed with horsehair and covered in black oilcloth over which a rug was thrown, occupying a prominent position, while the only decorations consisted in three oil paintings: portraits of Freud, Jung and Ernest Jones.
At a rolltop bureau, from which he turned in a swivel chair to greet them, they found Dr. Klosterberg himself. He was a round-headed man of medium build, his hair close-cropped and graying, wearing an unremarkable dark suit with a dark blue tie. He affected pince-nez, behind which his pale eyes gleamed. He exuded an air of grave authority. Altogether he was an archetype of the psychiatrist rôle.
Beside the couch, looking as though a four-foot fir cone had been carved out of anthracite, then flattened like a cowering hedgehog, lay Adirondinatarigo. Godwin bent to pat it on the tapered end and was rewarded by a protuberation that disconcertingly exposed a band of mucous membrane as softly glossy as the inside of a human cheek, but yellowish-green and ever so slightly luminous. The mood improved further as more pheromones escaped into the air.
Simultaneously he said, “Hermann, nice to see you again. This is Gorse. Just Gorse at the moment. She’s trying to decide on a surname to go with it.”
“Then she should consult Ambrose, as you and I did,” Hermann murmured. “Some of his opinions may be questionable, but of his ability to sense the overtones of nomenclature there is no doubt… How do you do, Gorse?” he added, extending his hand with a beaming smile.
She shook with him absently, staring at the scaly black mass beside the couch. “What on earth is that?” she demanded. “I could swear I saw it move when God touched it.”
“Oh, that’s Canaptarosigapatruleeva,” Hermann said dismissively. “No need to worry about it. Just forget it’s there. For the time being, that is. Later on, you can get properly acquainted with it.” He bent slightly and touched one of the thick, dull-shiny, overlapping scales; it rose a centimeter and exposed another patch of membrane, this time of a fir-tree green. “Do sit down,” he added. “And what seems to be the trouble?”
The atmosphere conduced to openness. Almost before she had sunk into the chair which Hermann indicated for her, Gorse had begun to pour out her life story, far more truthfully than to Godwin last night. His back to the bureau, his elbows on the arms of his swivel chair, his fingertips arched together, Hermann listened with complete attention. All the while Potanandrusabalinicta lay immobile except for an occasional ripple of its carapace.
When the breathless recital was at an end, Hermann gave a slow nod of comprehension. It was apparent from his expression that he had grasped the essence of her problem.
“First let me assure you,” he said after a pause far deliberation, “you are by no means alone. Professional ethics naturally forbid me to mention names, but I can state that friends of mine—I never use the term patient, for reasons I’m sure I needn’t spell out to someone as perceptive as yourself—friends of mine, then, whom you would instantly recognize were it permissible for me to identify them, prominent in the theater, in music and literature, in politics and diplomacy, in commerce and so forth, have sat here in this room and described just such a constellation of perplexities. In certain cases they had been plagued with them for many years of their adult life, because what they had faile
d to appreciate until they were well advanced in years was the necessity of learning to yield to the impact of the collective unconscious at unpredictable intervals. Precisely because it is an unconscious, it declines to obey the dictates of clocks and calendars. That knack once acquired, however, even the regrettable aftermath of experimentation with chemical substances like the ones you have tried diminishes to insignificance. Are you familiar with the concept of the collective unconscious, by the way?” His bright, pale eyes flickered to the portrait of Jung, as though to furnish her a clue.
“I’ve heard of it,” she said after a moment’s hesitation. “Isn’t it supposed to be where we get our dreams from?”
“I’m afraid that’s an oversimplification,” Hermann said with a thin smile. “Essentially it’s a pool of shared experience—shared among all of us because we happen to be human beings—which may or may not have an ‘objective’ existence.” The interpolated quotation marks were perfectly audible. “Almost all of us have had the experience of, for instance, entering puberty or becoming parents or confronting a rival or suffering hunger, and so on. And of course we have all had the experience of being born. Inevitably certain patterns of behavior are selected for among the countless possible patterns our cerebral neurons could create. You’ve heard that there are more possible neuron connections in a human brain than there would be particles in the observable universe if it were packed solid? And I’m talking about any given brain: yours, mine, Godwin’s.”
She gave a cautious nod. Godwin, repressing the impulse to utter a loud sigh of boredom, leaned back in his chair. It was plain that Hermann’s words were sinking into her mind like ink into a dry sponge, leaving their traces everywhere. She wasn’t even making a pretense of resistance.
One of these years…
“… isolation from which, after so many millions of years of imprinting during the course of our evolution, can trigger an urge toward self-destruction. But you are triply fortunate.”
PLAYERS AT THE GAME OF PEOPLE by John Brunner Page 5
