Incredible Bodies

by Ian McGuire

  The nun turned to look at Morris. It was Darian Cavendish.

  ‘Jesus Christ, it’s Darian!’ he said.

  Darian winced at the blasphemy. Bernard, who Morris quickly realised was hardly less flummoxed than he was himself, began to blather an apology. Darian stopped him with a shake of her black origamic head. She offered Morris a spooky smile. Her squared-off, isolated face and her dark, bodiless body struck him as having the clumsy and nauseating quality of a very early form of special effects.

  ‘Is this … are you …’ he paused, ‘quite serious?’

  Darian looked at him emptily. She looked as uncomfortable in a nun’s outfit, he thought, as she had in every other outfit he had seen her in. But now perhaps that was the point.

  ‘I was never a great practical joker, Morris. I think Bernard can attest to that.’

  ‘Oh absolutely,’ Bernard agreed. ‘I mean absolutely not.’

  ‘So yes, Morris, I am quite serious. It was not a snap decision. I have been in contact with the Sisters for some years. My resignation …’ she paused for several uncomfortable moments to rearrange the folds of her habit, and when she began again her voice was a notch higher, ‘… my so-called resignation from the university only hastened a process that was already, you see, well underway.’

  ‘I see.’ Confronted by this sour and unexpected apparition, Morris felt suddenly and ravenously hungry. Faced with the possibility of having to make conversation with a newly consecrated Darian Cavendish, he discovered that all he really wanted to do was eat – to chomp through breast and wing, to fill his mouth with wine-soaked baby carrots, to gorge on the semi-liquid ooze of Sir Savalot croquettes. His hunger, as he leaned on the jamb, unwilling to commit himself to the living room unless absolutely forced to do so, had the frenzied thrill of lust.

  ‘Will you be joining us for dinner, Darian?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh no.’ Darian seemed faintly shocked by the suggestion. Morris wondered if there was some kind of curfew involved.

  ‘Darian has something for you,’ offered Bernard.

  ‘For me?’ Morris remembered the job interview, the Nietzsche jibe. Was this payback time? Or, more terribly, was it possible that Darian now regarded them all – Bernard, herself and Morris – as linked, bonded by their sufferings (however arrived at, however escaped from) between the salient and ever-dripping jaws of the Crocodile? Was it possible that this was a social call?

  Bernard proposed a top-up. Morris pursued him into the kitchen.

  ‘What is this?’ he hissed. ‘Is she really a nun? Don’t they have a probationary period? How’s the coq au vin?’

  ‘She was fast-tracked, Morris. They’re a dwindling band. Think about it – shame’s gone. Commit a mortal sin these days and all you get is a cuddle and twelve months’ counselling. And without shame what have they got left? A bride of Christ? You think the kids are going to go for that? I mean, look at the outfit. I’m all for tradition, but she looks like she’s been mummified by Moss Bros.’

  ‘Bernard,’ Morris urged. ‘What are you on about?’

  ‘They need the numbers, Morris. Plus they got their hands on her bungalow, which, given the property boom in Gooseberry Hill, must have been worth a packet. Oh she’s a nun all right – and she probably gets the corner cell and extra salt on her gruel.’

  ‘So why is she here?’

  Bernard shrugged and raised the clanging lid on the coq au vin. They both peered in.

  ‘It’s part-irradiated in the factory,’ Bernard said. ‘It won’t come to any harm.’ He looked back at Morris. ‘She says she has some information you might be able to use.’ Bernard opened the oven and glanced at the croquettes. ‘That’s all I know,’ he closed it again, ‘and all I need to know.’

  Morris carried the two brimming sherry flutes back into the living room. Darian took hers and sucked off the meniscus with a slurp.

  ‘Thanks ever so,’ she said.

  Morris still found it hard to look at her.

  ‘You think I’m a fool,’ she said.

  Morris hesitated.

  ‘That’s fine. You don’t need to be polite. I’m rather beyond politeness now.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose you are.’ Morris wondered whether that didn’t also mean she was beyond revenge.

  Darian took another sip.

  ‘You may be right, of course,’ she went on, ‘but foolishness is not the worst of sins. There are others, as we both know, far more corrosive, far more cancerous. Lust, for instance.’

  Morris swallowed.

  ‘Lust for power – that monstrous gargoylism of vanity and pride. You know of course of whom I speak.’

  ‘I can’t help you,’ Morris said.

  ‘Help me?’

  ‘With the Crocodile. I can’t go back there.’ As he said it, Morris’s eyes prickled. He felt like a small child who was being asked to go back into the deep end.

  Silently, one of Darian’s pale, clawish hands disappeared into the worsted waves of her habit and emerged with a long white envelope.

  ‘I don’t come here with a request, Morris, I come with a gift.’

  ‘A gift?’

  ‘You are acquainted with the theology of grace, I presume. It is normal to think of God’s grace as unbidden and undeserved, but in my opinion we pay too little attention to its inconvenience. It really can be terribly inconvenient. Look at me: I had a rather lovely bungalow in Gooseberry Hill; now I share a loft room at our convent in Porksby. And you, Morris, well you were looking forward to your dinner this evening, coq au vin, I believe. You certainly weren’t planning on talking to me, or hearing my particular, peculiar story, or receiving,’ she glanced at the envelope, ‘my particular, peculiar gift. Yet here I am.’

  ‘Here you are,’ echoed Morris, wishing that Bernard had chosen the schooners rather than these dinky flutes, and at the same time wondering why the thin layer of fear produced by the first sight of Darian’s envelope was now warming, bubbling, into something closer to excitement.

  ‘Allow me to explain myself,’ Darian continued. ‘My roommate at the convent is Sister Unke from Utrecht. Unke has now retired due to ill-health but for many years she was a nurse at the University of Utrecht Medical Centre. Her specialism was physical rehabilitation. She worked with accident victims of various kinds – quadriplegics, paraplegics, stroke patients and so on.’

  Morris nodded. The white envelope, sealed but outwardly unmarked, seemed to him to throb with the very possibilities – of action, of justice, of righteous retribution – which Bernard’s nihilistic lifestyle had been built to deny. Its appearance on his coffee table seemed thrillingly impolite.

  ‘Sister Unke took her degree in physiotherapy. She is an excellent masseuse.’ (An unwelcome image flashed into Morris’s mind. He blinked it away.) ‘But she also believes, as we all do, in the power of prayer, and at the hospital she would always pray for her patients. Of course it rarely worked.’

  Morris raised his eyebrows. Darian noticed.

  ‘It is one of the fallacies of secularism, Morris, to equate faith with stupidity, even with a kind of blindness, whereas the opposite is closer to the truth. It is the faithless, in my experience, who turn away from death, from suffering, who give themselves over instead to foolish fantasies of immortality, painlessness, speed. We tend to the sick, Morris. We bury the dead. Prayer isn’t like writing a prescription. It’s a way of giving up control again and again. A way of reminding ourselves that anything can happen.’

  Outside, a late bus barked, a rogue firework cut a swizzling purple corkscrew above the leafless branches of Bernard’s magnolia tree. Darian grinned.

  ‘Sometimes people heal, Morris. Sometimes the dead rise up, the lame throw away their crutches, the speechless find their tongue. I’ve seen it happen. Sister Unke saw it happen many times. Many times, yes, but there is one occasion which is of particular interest to us. He was a young Dutchman who had been paralysed from the waist down in an accident. He was very bright, he came from a well-
known family, but nothing could be done. Unke’s job was just to teach him the exercises, keep his spirits up. But being Unke, she also prayed. She prayed unceasingly. One day the young man moved his toe. The next day he moved another toe, then his foot. Within three months he could stand with a stick. Within six months he was walking again. It was beyond medical explanation. There was no precedent. It was a miracle.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘You have asked me that once already, Morris. You may prefer a different word, I realise, a different paradigm. But I speak of a mystery for which the appropriate language was given to us quite some time ago.’

  ‘Who was this person?’

  ‘Can’t you guess?’

  (He could guess.)

  ‘It can’t be true.’

  Darian raised her eyebrows. The skin of her forehead rippled over her wimple like a pie crust.

  ‘I didn’t expect an act of faith, Morris,’ she said tartly. ‘I came with evidence.’

  ‘An affidavit?’

  ‘Two. Plus the medical records.’

  ‘Is that legal?’

  Darian closed her eyes slowly and then opened them again.

  ‘Sister Unke is very old. There is the possibility of several miracles. One needs to build a case.’

  ‘You’re going to canonise her?’

  ‘Please don’t be crude, Morris. These things are the work of decades. For today our interests are less elevated.’

  ‘You’re saying Dirck van Camper is pretending to be disabled, that really he can walk? It’s preposterous.’

  ‘It is blasphemous, Morris. That is my,’ she paused, ‘angle, if you will. It is a denial of God. It is an act of monstrous crudity and ingratitude.’

  Morris’s world was undergoing a kaleidoscopic rearrangement – shards of colour and light, hectic geometries of chaos and form, shaped and dissolved before his eyes. The envelope was dynamite. If even half of it were true he had Dirck van Camper by the balls.

  ‘Theoretically it’s superb, of course,’ he said after a minute of frantic thought. ‘You have to give it to him. He’s dissolving the binaries – healthly/crippled, sick/well. It’s dialogic.’

  ‘Yes.’ Darian’s face looked as though she had bitten hard into a lemon. ‘Sister Unke said there was some such nonsense talked when she confronted him over his refusal to abandon the wheelchair, over his insistence that the rehabilitation be curtailed. She didn’t understand a word of it, of course, but I imagined that it had something to do with whatever passing fad Mr van Camper has lashed himself to. What is it now? Disability Studies?’

  Morris nodded. Looking into Darian’s nervous, ferrety eyes, he had a sudden and frightening sense of her capabilities, of the vast and inhuman scope of her moral imagination.

  ‘As I said,’ Darian tapped her waxy fingertips on the white envelope, ‘it is a gift. How you use it is entirely up to you.’

  ‘Isn’t that rather reckless?’

  Darian drained the last of her sherry and squinted at him.

  ‘I’ve just become a nun, Morris,’ she snapped. ‘Does that strike you as the act of a sensible person?’

  Chapter 34

  Adam d’Hote had come back. Zoe couldn’t believe it. His torso, by all accounts, still looked like it had been run over by a gang of mountain bikers; his face had the colour and firmness of a two-week-old melon. The man was obviously sick, but he was back. Zoe was demoted to the list (it actually existed, she had seen it) of occasional panellists. What was more, she felt painfully, maddeningly certain that d’Hote’s Lazarus-like rise had been prompted by his overhearing the Zoe-fuelled rumours of his ultimate demise. How exactly the strains of this rather well-orchestrated piece of misinformation had reached d’Hote’s bedside Zoe didn’t know, but she was prepared to make a guess: Bathsheba Ffytche. Pam had decamped to the Dimblebys and Bathsheba had made her play – she was acting producer, she had the sickly and manipulable d’Hote in her pocket and she was playing up the Underseel fiasco for all it was worth. Zoe doubted there was a cameraman, an editor, a tea boy at the BBC, who didn’t now know that Zoe Cable and the insane Underseel assailant had once been lovers.

  The flat in Chiswick was off. She was back in Coketown. Legless in Gaza was still a possibility, yes, but without her profile as presenter for Going Critical the lager louts at XSTV were noticeably less ‘turned on’ by the concept. And to add to the final gravitational tug of this tide of unforeseen reversal, in her nine months’ absence Dirck van Camper had taken firm control of the Hub. She still got a salary but almost nothing else: he had fiddled with job descriptions, changed accounting practices, brought in his own (one hundred per cent disabled) secretarial staff. She had seen the memos. His work, she had to admit, was superb. Organisationally the Hub was now glass-smooth; it offered her no niche, no cranny, nowhere even to start. She was shut out, it seemed, from her own creation, which had been transformed under the four-wheeled stewardship of Dirck van Camper into the behemoth of disability studies. In the great atlas of crippledom there was no country, no province even, in which Dirck did not have his special, well-trained and fiercely loyal envoy. He was the Metternich, Zoe thought, of bodily dysfunction.

  Zoe did a lot of Qi Dong, a lot of Jujitsu. She visited Mr Chan.

  ‘So what’s up, Mr Chan?’ she said. ‘Why’s life giving me the finger?’

  Mr Chan, who was from Ormskirk, was not a good listener. He was, in his opinion, paid to pierce.

  ‘There is neither good luck nor bad luck,’ he said wearily, ‘only Tao.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘You heard.’

  ‘That’s what it says on that calendar.’

  ‘So it does.’

  Zoe thought about this. She thought about the great rondello of Tao, the crashing electric ocean of Is. She decided that Mr Chan was, as usual, right. There was no wrong step, only limited vision. Wrong and right were just terms, words; she knew that. It was a question, as always, of shifting the paradigm, shaking the kaleidoscope – waiting for a different pattern to emerge, for blowback to become opportunity, for churn to become chance. She still remembered the kidney-shaped pool; she could still smell the mesquite. For a solid week she rolfed, she visualised, she balanced her chakras. She waited for insight to arise, for the tedious murk of the necessary to settle and the glowing loophole of the just barely possible to appear. On the Monday she paid a visit to Dirck van Camper.

  ‘Zoe!’ Dirck said, as though he had not been expecting her, as though he had not planned meticulously for this day. ‘Welcome!’ He reversed away from his wrap-around smart desk. ‘How are you? I hope you are enjoying yourself.’

  ‘Doing what exactly, Dirck?’

  Dirck van Camper wobbled his head and looked uncertainly in the air.

  ‘Ah, whatever.’

  ‘There have been a lot of changes,’ Zoe said. ‘Nine months away and I hardly recognise the old place.’

  ‘The ramps, you mean, the automatic doors, the hearing loops. These are small things.’

  ‘Yes they are small things. I was thinking more of the alteration in my job description, the changes in committee structure, the rewriting of several key funding proposals.’

  ‘All passed by the Centre,’ said Dirck. ‘And of course approved by Donald.’

  ‘What the fuck does Donald have to do with this? Faculty has no power over the Hub.’

  Dirck smiled. ‘That’s what we call “old thinking”, Zoe,’ he said. ‘These days there is a fruitful symbiosis between the two of us.’

  ‘Donald will eat you up,’ she said.

  Dirck van Camper tossed back his head and chuckled.

  ‘Zoe, you really are rather melodramatic. Donald and I are great friends. My stepmother is coming over next week; the Faculty and the Hub are jointly sponsoring her seminar on body dismorphia. Donald is very excited. You really should attend.’

  ‘I don’t think so, Dirck.’ She dropped her grey Borbonese rucksack on the floor and sat down. She crosse
d her legs. She was wearing a suede prairie skirt, dayglo clogs and a singlet crocheted out of fusewire.

  ‘What is that smell?’ said Dirck.

  ‘Pineapple and naphthalene. By the way, I’ve always wanted to ask: what exactly is wrong with you, Dirck?’

  ‘Wrong?’

  She nodded at his legs.

  ‘Ah Zoe. There is nothing wrong with me. You should know that. I have changed, I have become different, the unfortunate incident was in that sense,’ he paused as if for thought, although Zoe was certain he had delivered this nugget innumerable times before, ‘enabling not disabling. It opened me up to perspectives, to understanding, I would never otherwise have known.’

  ‘I see,’ said Zoe. ‘But still, it must make you very angry.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘To think that someone, some unknown person, has robbed you of your faculties. Oh I know, I’ve heard the enabled/disabled stuff a million times, but let’s face facts Dirck: you’re on wheels; you wear nappies. There’s an element of humiliation.’

  Dirck clenched his jaw.

  ‘I choose to live without the coercive fantasy of bodily perfection. All that fascist normativity,’ he took a deep calming breath, ‘is behind me now. And by the way, I don’t wear nappies.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Zoe backing off slightly. ‘I imagine it would be behind you. Still, you must be curious.’

  ‘Curious?’

  ‘To know who did it. Who exactly made you different. Because although you talk about choice, it wasn’t really your choice, was it Dirck? It was someone else’s. The person in the red car.’

  ‘Who said it was red?’

  ‘Oh, you didn’t know? I thought you might have noticed the colour as you went down. As it reversed over you. I supposed you might have caught a glimpse.’

  Dirck sucked in his already sunken cheeks. His eyes tightened.

  ‘Are you offering information, Zoe?’

  ‘Well that would depend, wouldn’t it, Dirck? In my opinion certain pieces of sensitive knowledge should be shared only by colleagues of equal professional standing.’

  ‘But you are of course much more senior than myself, Zoe.’