by Robin Ince
The smell hit him immediately.
Dr. Barber climbed awkwardly down the ladder, and, wincing, pulled the hatch closed to contain the foul odour.
It was impossible to tell what had killed the patient: dehydration from the exhausted saline drip was the most likely culprit, followed by starvation from the empty feeding tube; possibly septicaemia from the festering abrasions at his wrists and ankles. It would have been painful, in any event. Some scant consolation.
Dr. Barber would address himself to the problem of disposing of the body in due course. First he needed a cup of tea.
He climbed the ladder, and pushed against the hatch.
A bolt of pain surged through his arm and straight down his left side. Dr. Barber flinched, swayed, and fell from the ladder, landing painfully in a seated position.
He scrambled to his feet and climbed the ladder again. He tried to raise his left arm but it wouldn’t respond. His right arm, still broken, was curled uselessly against his body. His left, meanwhile, refused to obey his brain.
With a superhuman effort, and sweating with agony, Dr. Barber hauled his left hand upwards to the hatch. He felt the smooth surface against his palm, but as he tried to push against it, searing, blinding pain coursed through him. He tried again. The pain intensified. The hatch did not budge. Dr. Barber collapsed, exhausted, at the foot of the ladder.
He’d seen, and treated, enough injuries like his own to be able to form a decent prognosis. The strength would not return to his left arm for at least two weeks; his broken right arm would be useless for twice that time.
Dr. Barber did not bother even contemplating calling out for help. The polyurethane would absorb his cries, and even if anyone were to hear, would he really want to be discovered in his cellar next to a mutilated and decomposing body?
The same problem would apply if he phoned for assistance, assuming he could get any signal in the insulated cellar . . . then Dr. Barber remembered that his phone was in the pocket of his jacket, hanging on the bannister, just a couple of metres away, on the other side of the immovable hatch.
Dr. Barber sat in the chair and looked at the purplish body of the patient on the table.
He sighed. It didn’t matter now. The experiment was over. His work was done. His life and that of the patient had been inextricably enmeshed for five years, bonded forever in pain and remorse. It made perfect sense that they should remain together now. Without his patient to attend to, his life had no purpose anyway.
Dr. Barber scanned the shelves of the cellar. There were, he knew, instruments and substances there which he could use to hasten his own end. Perhaps he would do that in due course.
Or perhaps he’d just wait. He knew how to wait. He was patient.
For Everyone’s Good
al murray
This room is my room. It’s been my room since I came here, when my stepmother decided enough was enough, that we had done all we could at home. My teeth hurt so much, I never once calmed of their pain, and she and my father couldn’t stand my moaning, and father hated that it distracted me so I would not read. I came here when I may have been twenty-five, I may have been twenty-six, it is all so long ago and numbers were never clear to me nor friendly.
We came up the avenue; the trees are so tall now, they have had to cut some down to make room for how broad they have grown; there are bumps where the stumps were, like tree echoes. The trees I first saw when they were young like me, their leaves have come and gone more times than anyone could count, all those unfriendly numbers, and beyond the pond where sometimes we would go to play with boats, always under the eye of the Coats – I called them Coats, did the others? Some of the others were children, I don’t remember them so well, and I don’t know where the others have gone now too – there is a low, grey building, and coloured carriages come and go all day. They sit in lines and wait all day. If a carriage can wait all day you must be very rich. Maybe it is a palace, or a zoo like the one in the park I went to with my sisters before I came here, though the animals must all be indoors.
Our carriage was black, though we had taken the new train that made my stepmother very nervous, and then taken the black carriage to the house. As the trees went past the window my stepmother, Mrs Evans (she took my father’s name but I liked to call her Mrs Evans when the pain in my teeth and my busy thoughts let me speak) did not look me in the eye. She had not looked me in the eye since the train left London. She often looked at the floor, the wall, my pinny, rather than look at me. When she spoke, and said my name, it was as if she was talking about someone else, or something she could not hold.
My mother held me but she had died when I was still a baby, so Mr Evans, my father, said. We would try to read together, and he would begin patiently always, until his patience had dripped out of him like the last drops of tea in a pot, and the air around him would ache, his shoulder would sink and he would sigh, deep, unhappy sighs. I would sigh too and I would try harder to read, to speak, to say I understood, but my teeth hurt, and my stomach would grind and I would feel him push me away even by doing nothing. I still want to read, but books seem of another world now, an old world, my father’s world that sent me away.
Mrs Evans took me up the stairs here at the house, and we were greeted kindly. She drank tea and talked to Dr Carter, a man with a kind face for strangers, a different face for everyone who had his acquaintance. Acquaintance: a word I could never see when it was in a book, the letters were not friendly. When Mrs Evans left, and hands had been shook, goodbye madam, goodbye doctor, sir, Dr Carter saw to it that my clothes were taken somewhere safe, so very safe they have not returned. And then one of the Coats came and cut my hair. I loved to brush my hair for calm and now that calm has gone.
The colourful chariots come and go from the zoo palace; they have lamps, the light swoops through the night. They brought me to this room, and although the view has changed, and although the Coats no longer come, days remain the same, followed by nights. No one comes to bring me food anymore, but that means no one raps my knuckles when I won’t eat, it means that Dr Harold Carter or Dr Martlett Trevelyan or Dr James Grey who was married to Dr Martlett Trevelyan’s daughter Eliza won’t raise their voices any more, bind my hands, scrub my teeth with the wire brush, no one pours the cold water on my back, no one shouts at me when I cannot find the words, or will not play their games, or sing along, or drink my tonic that grips my tummy.
And Mrs Evans, my stepmother, she doesn’t come to see me, she came only twice. The second time she came her eyes said goodbye, but like when I got stuck with a word reading with father, the words would not come out of her mouth. I said what I knew, I said I know you won’t see me again, and I pulled at my hair, and I wept more tears, the kind that do not work, not like my sisters’ tears which can get you all sorts of things, but not out of this house and home.
Mr Evans, my sisters’ father now I suppose, no longer mine, never did come to see me. We stopped reading together long before the train came to take me – did we take the train to come here to the house? The air would ache all around him. He would close the door, and he and Mrs Evans would talk behind the door, and he would shout sometimes surely to make sure that I heard him through the door, and while they would never say my name I think they talked of me. I know they talked of me. ‘What shall we do, Larissa? Our daughters cannot have this distraction as they grow older! This can only corrupt, damage their lives. One so, so feeble of mind.’
Mrs Evans would reply: ‘But Charles, what does compassion dictate?’ This was Mrs E’s – yes, I know my alphabet thank you to Alice the Coat – favourite word, a word that she only said when deciding what to do with me. ‘Com-passion’ what can it mean? My sisters played upstairs, Emily reading to Tess, reading so well Mr Evans would say, reading like they were born to it. Reading like it was their nature. Reading like their family would read.
One day that conversation included Dr Carter,
Dr Harold Carter ABCDEFG, whose coach was a very dark rose red. His coach waited, he wore a gold watch and chain, and he could use the watch to decide what time it was. I like to tell the time for myself, clock faces say so little. Dr Carter closed the door but did not shout, so I do not know what he said, though it is all so long ago I could not remember it well enough even if I could recall. It was one of their talks about com-passion and they decided I am sure for the train to come and take me to the carriage and trees going past on either side. I pushed my ear to the keyhole and told myself be quiet and wait! I am quite wrong, I can remember though I might not understand.
Dr Harold Carter says: ‘The girl is no longer a girl, she is a woman now, yet still a child. But now lives as a woman who, if allowed to have offspring of her own, may add further to this world’s woes.’ The world’s woes now? Are mine not enough? I think but I have to be quiet and cannot understand. ‘It is our moral duty, and a duty of compassion’ – com-passion, com-passion, com-passion is here to decide again – ‘to your late wife’s daughter, and to society itself, the body of the nation, to ensure her care takes place somewhere where she, and no other, can come to harm. It is your and our moral imperative. For everyone’s good’ and with those words I stopped being quiet, and cried more useless tears and my teeth they hurt and I scratched my gums until Mrs Evans, her face in thunder, sadder than the sighs my father gave when I spilt my soup and wailed because it was hot on my legs, took me to my room past my reading sisters and to my bed. And the air in the whole house moaned and I sang with it and I wished that I could read the way they wanted me to, and that for once my teeth and tummy did not hurt and that com-passion would go away.
And many years later, many years after Dr Martlett Trevelyan who never spoke of com-passion had said as if I could not hear that I had no family beyond these walls. And I would sleep long days and nights, days and nights would come and go as they always do. And I had slept for so long that day that no longer did the dreams about my sister coming bother me. I had heard the Coats talk about her, the woman who wrote books, and I was her sister, the girl who could not look at them with the air starting to ache as it had around Mr Evans. I was her sister, that is why they talked about me, I was her sister. Her books. Her books were books that, so said the Coats, everyone was reading. She had become they said ‘quite famous really – but they’re not the kind of books I ever read, Mary’ they said to me. The world knew who she was, and would remember her maybe, but she had forgotten me, Emily Evans had forgotten me.
I had slept so long that Dr Harold Carter no longer came, that the trees had grown as tall as the house and the palace had grown beyond the lake. A long time I was alone in the house, but now there are new people in my room. They are like Mr and Mrs Evans though I never did hear Mr and Mrs E speak of love to one another so. And they do not like books, they do not like to read, they sit and watch pictures on the wall where my chair would lean and Alice would sit and sing and brush my hair sometimes and bring me calm. Mr Evans would not like them not at all, and Mrs Evans would have to show her com-passion again: they do not read! But Mr Evans will not come to visit them ever, for it would mean he would need to come and see me and it is for everyone’s good that he does not, and surely mine most of all. And so I sit beside the sofa, and brush my hair, and watch this man and this woman as they seem to live here by themselves and in the room next door where they sleep. No doctors come, no Coats. All is calm. My teeth no longer hurt, though sometimes in other rooms I hear the air begin to moan and cannot help myself and I moan as well. The man and the woman don’t like this, he tells her it is the wind blowing through the building and she calms down but maybe he knows it’s more. If I moan perhaps they will remember me. And he did see me once, me whom no one cared to see, he caught my eye, and did not look away the way my family did, at least not right away.
This room is my room, and it has been my room since my stepmother decided enough was enough. She has not come to take me home, and I will wait until she does.
mary evans, daughter of the writer and explorer charles evans and his first wife mary (née clement) and sister of the novelist emily evans (The Church of Glass, Buttermore Farm) died of pneumonia in November 1946, having outlived her more famous family. She died in the room she had first been assigned to upon being committed at the famous Dunswood Hall Asylum for the Feeble Minded and Imbecile in Sussex under Dr H. Carter in 1899. Miss evans’ funeral was unattended.
A View From A Hill
stewart lee
A Christmas Ghost Story
I arrested Mr Lee at 7 a.m. this morning as an accessory to multiple charges of arson, assault and grievous bodily harm. I have received confirmation from Scotland Yard that he will spend the festive season in the cells, with no possibility of bail. Mr Lee used his one phone call to contact his wife, who, he said, was furious that he was now unlikely to make it to his brother-in-law’s by the evening of the 24th. Amusingly, he claimed this was the only good thing to come out of the whole affair. I laughed, but I have just heard that he is a ‘comedian’, so I am no longer impressed by his ability to make light of the situation, and feel that what seemed a special moment between us was, for Mr Lee, just business as usual. Nonetheless, Mr Lee maintains, with some degree of certainty, that this is, on balance, his worst Christmas to date.
Detective Inspector Montague R. James, 24/12/12
My best Christmas was 1988, though it wasn’t strictly Christmas. It was December 21st, the winter solstice. But as my companion that evening, Julian Fullsome-Swathe, explained, the 21st had always been the date of Christmas until someone moved the calendar by four days. He couldn’t remember who exactly, but it was three in the morning and we were some distance into our second Thermos flask of magic mushroom tea, which made all notions of the measurement of time seem rather slippery. Julian and I were undergraduates in our final year at Oxford. He was top public school stock and stiff-uppered military background, going back centuries, and lower middle-class forelock-tugger. But I liked Julian, and was genetically and socially predestined to serve him.
In recent months, Julian had become intent on pursuing various experiences which, he explained darkly, he would never be able to enjoy subsequently due to the secretive career path on which he had chosen to embark after graduation. This was Oxford in the eighties: our elderly English professor was romantically rumoured to be a talent scout for the intelligence services, and Julian was perfect state-assassin material. And now, in the final months before the black cloud of unknowing that he was entering finally and fully enveloped him, I was leading him along a wintry Wiltshire Ridgeway by starlight, aglow on psilocybins I’d purchased from the didgeridoo player who lived in a converted ambulance in the public car park at Port Meadow.
High above the Ock valley we scrabbled through the Iron Age undulations of the White Horse hillfort until we beheld through a light frosting of fresh fallen snow, the elegant flanks of the prehistoric hill figure itself, four hundred feet of chalk, flourished outlines hugging the graceful curves of the upland, a view as close to a holy vision as a confirmed agnostic like myself might ever achieve, and one of the few sights that still stirs in me troubling twinges of the scoundrel patriotism.
Then, as now, I fancied myself a keen folklorist, and my study bedroom was littered with dusty tomes. I explained, breathlessly, to Julian that the horse might commemorate King Alfred’s 871ad victory over the Danes at the Battle of Ashdown; or date back 3,000 years to the later Bronze Age; or have been formed when the ground was stained by the very blood of the dragon Saint George was said to have slain. The state of mind we were in, all three explanations seemed equally probable.
‘They say that if England is threatened, the horse will rise up from the hill and take revenge,’ I said. Julian, who had come prepared, was now cranking out his favourite childhood song, Jackie Lee’s theme from the 1965 Yugoslavian children’s TV series The White Horses, from a scratched 7-inch single on a vintag
e portable Dansette. ‘The White Horse is rising, Stewart,’ he said. ‘Can’t you see it?’
Even before my arrest, Christmas 2012 hadn’t been going well. I’m a stand-up comedian for a living. I cope reasonably well with the job itself. It’s the promotional duties I find degrading. I have a stand-up DVD available for purchase, Carpet Remnant World, which has sat as a non-mover at number twelve in the Amazon charts for two months now. Viewed as a niche art–comedy turn, I can’t afford to supply my product to supermarkets at a cheap enough price per unit to make them stock it; panel show promotional opportunities don’t work for an act as lugubrious as mine; and whenever I am interviewed I manage to say something ill-considered which, when decontextualised by Jan Moir, makes for a minor Daily Mail horror story, to the understandable embarrassment of friends and relations.
To show willing to my financial backers, I usually spend the months surrounding the release dates of my work writing supposedly amusing think pieces, appended with DVD details, for liberal broadsheet newspapers. Their readerships comprise, for better or worse, my key audience, and I attempt assiduously to maintain their loyalty, and their respect, by flattering their intelligence, while simultaneously insulting their core moral and political values. So far this December I have compared John Cage to Ant and Dec in the Guardian and, in the Observer, I have drawn spurious parallels between David Cameron’s News of the World text messages and Shakespeare, between I’m a Celebrity . . . . Get Me Out of Here! and Kafka’s Metamorphosis, and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan and Michael Gove’s education policies. I have a simple and repetitive comic formula, which I despatch in the voice of a semi-fictional version of myself.
This year my publicist had been uncharacteristically keen that I write a piece for a magazine called ShortList, which is given away free on the street to passers-by and offers expert advice on style and fitness, the latest in films, gaming, culture and technology to time-poor young professionals in search of an off-the-peg identity they haven’t earned. I doubted that anyone that liked my work would read it, and tried to wriggle out of her request, but our financial backers were keen for me to ensnare the lucrative male grooming market, and it was agreed that I would submit to ShortList an amusing, 1,000-word, end-of-year round-up of things I hated about 2012.
