For the next ten minutes or so a great stillness filled the room. Only the soft pendulum of the spoon marked any passage in time.
“Have you had enough, Edmund?”
The bandaged man nodded and smiled.
“Very well, try to sleep now,” Nicholas said, pulling the blanket up to the man’s neck and setting his pillows at a lower angle. He then collected the plate and spoon and walked past the waiting men and out of the tall doors. He sat down on a broad bench in the corridor and briskly tapped the metal spoon against the china plate. Solli blinked and stumbled forward like a sleeper missing a step in a steep dream. Hector and Jerry also blinked back into action. All three came and quietly sat at his sides.
“Now, Solomon, you were asking about Uncle Hymie? He is in the treatment room receiving interruption like poor Edmund there.”
“Treatment?” said Solli.
“Yes, they have come from Maudsley with interruptions, an invention from the colonies, as I understand. Something that stops the frowning, they say. But I think they are separating him, slicing away his visibility. The exact opposite of what I have been doing for centuries.”
“Why are they doing it, Nicholas?” asked Hector.
“They said to stop the ‘mood swings,’ making them ‘better’ by tapping out the headaches.”
“Tapping?” said Solli, stiffening back into his clothing, his skeleton of violence gleaming. He exchanged quick black glances with Jerry. “Tapping with what?”
“A spike and a hammer, I think Edmund said.”
“Where?” demanded Solli, his rage back and doubled.
Nicholas extended a languid arm. “Treatment room B. Turn left at the end at the second corridor.”
The words had barely left his soft grinning mouth and they were gone.
“Good, now we can talk alone, have you ever seen a mood swing? I think they must keep it in the gardens somewhere.”
He paused for a moment as if his mind had wandered outside to look for the allusive swing, hanging from a distant branch of one of the older trees in the walled grounds. He eventually returned, delighted to find his old friend still sitting at his side.
“Anyway, how are you, Hector?”
Hector felt ashamed about his previous behaviour to this extraordinary being. Now it all seemed so distant, with only his insulting language standing proud like an ugly rock in a quiet lake.
“I am very well, Nicholas, how are you?”
“Soho.”
Hector ignored the possible mistake in language in case it was another invitation to join a scree of meaningless jokes. He had only just got over the last one.
“I must apologise for my bad language when last we met.”
“Ah! You mean the Huns Toft,” said Nicholas gleefully.
It was worse than Hector hoped for, he had actually remembered the words, or rather his version of it.
“Yes,” he said very quietly. “I am sorry.”
“But what does it mean, Hector? I have never heard it before.”
The old man shrunk inside. “It’s just bad language, that’s all.”
“But it must mean something, all words mean something.”
He was not going to let go. Hector did not know if he was like a dog with a bone or a cat with a mouse. He secretly prayed for the former.
“It is the back end of an animal.”
“What animal?”
“A dog.”
“Ah! I see.”
Patients and doctors were walking past. Each one acknowledged Nicholas and stared at his companion. They all seemed purposeful and busy and engaged in the serious business of real life.
“Is it its arse? Is that what you called me, a dog’s arse?”
“No, not exactly.” Hector was talking to his shoes again.
“What then?”
“Well, it’s a female dog.”
There was a silence while Nicholas stroked his chin and thought very deeply. Hector wanted to interrupt this and change the subject, but did not know how. And anyway it was nearly over, might as well brazen it through.
* * *
—
Three corridors down and at a right angle were the treatment rooms. Each with benches arranged outside. Little groups of men dressed in skimpy gowns sat waiting for assessment or treatment. Solli looked for Uncle Hymie among the vacant flock. There was no sign of him and he bit his lip in anxiety. Suddenly his attention was seized by a wheeled stretcher bumping out of the rubber doors of treatment room B. Its occupant did not look like the rest of the patients waiting. It looked like the spoon sucker he had just seen with Nicholas. He made straight for the trolley and held it fast in his small white hands.
The attendant stopped and sneered down at Solli. He was a large man, who had not bothered to shave that day.
“What you want?” he barked.
Solli looked into the patient’s eyes, looked for a response, personality, or even life. What he saw changed the seething anger that he had carried all day, transmuted it by the violent application of fear. His eyes then found those of the burly attendant.
There are modes of communication that the superior human still shares with the animals that we deem to see as lower: expressions of dominance and power that are far more vital than all our words put together. Moments where the primitive must be trusted and obeyed. The large man was looking at one now and instantly knew that all his strength and size was meaningless before the ferocity of the small man who was gripping the trolley.
“What happened to him?” said Solli in a voice that an iceberg would be envious of.
“New treatment,” said the attendant without a moment’s hesitation.
Solli took one hand off the trolley and made a minute adjustment of his neck, his eyes never leaving the looming man.
“It’s a Yank thing, they’re trying it out over here, at the Maudsley. All hush-hush and now they are trying it here.”
“In there?”
The attendant nodded and Solli was gone in a black-chromed blur.
* * *
—
“A bitch arse?” said Nicholas, very pleased with his deduction.
“Almost,” said Hector, resigned to the humiliation of his exposure.
More occupants of the hospital passed them and stared, including a stern-looking nursing sister who had heard every word they’d said.
* * *
—
Solli heard Hymie’s voice two rooms down the antiseptic-smelling corridor. A group of four men in surgical gowns and two nurses stood around a table talking quietly. Hymie’s voice was corralled inside them. He was strapped to the table and his head was in a clamp. The authoritative tones of the most senior doctor could be heard above all others. A voice that had been trained by privilege, pampered with conceit, and smoothed by never encountering doubt. All attention was on him. Nobody saw or heard Solli enter the room and stand behind them. Hymie was equally ignored, talking to himself about this and that, a nurse occasionally shushing him when his volume interrupted the speech of the eminent man who was enjoying his audience and seemed to be conducting their admiration with a slim baton that he had in his hand and waved about in a casual manner. It looked like one of Mrs. Fishburn’s knitting needles. Except that it was thicker at one end and tapered to a hard sharpness of gleaming steel. Mid-sentence the doctor gave a slight nod and the two nurses and one of the other doctors descended on Hymie, putting a gag in his mouth and a strap around his jaw, tightening his head in the clamp. The distinguished surgeon moved towards his patient, still talking, and Solli saw that in his other, inarticulate hand he held a hammer of stainless steel.
* * *
—
“I got it. A dog bitch’s cunt. That’s what you called me. A cunt of a bitch.”
Hector grumbled agreement and
Nicholas slapped his thighs and rolled about on the bench, guffawing and greatly savouring his new name.
“I shall wear it in the plural,” he said, tears filling his laughing eyes.
“What is this plural you speak of?” asked Hector.
“It’s when we sleep together again, as one. The great union of angel and man.” He could barely hold the words together between his castanet-like outbursts of off-key braying guffaws. “It’s what you have been sent for, so we can do it together and make a barrier, a ripple under the river.” Tears were spraying Hector from Nicholas’s hysterical head. “The bitch cunt and the Jew embracing eternity in the mud!” He slapped his thigh again and wiped his face on his sleeve.
Hector formed the next question in his mind and filled his mouth with the taste of it when the corridor suddenly turned into a cattle market. Something had grabbed him up by his arm and tried to do the same with Nicholas. It was Jerry, wide-eyed and frantic.
“We gotta go, now, quick, hurry.”
There was the sound of a distant hand-cranked bell and a horde of running people. In its centre and moving quickly through the teeming mass was Solli, pushing his confused uncle in a wheelchair. The old man was wearing a loose-fitting smock, which refused to cover his sagging genitals and hairy knobby legs. When he saw Hector and Nicholas, he waved energetically, almost standing up in the chair. Solli put a blood-soaked hand on his shoulder and forced him back down into the fast-moving seat, dropping something shiny in the process. A snapped-off steel rod bounced brightly against the wooden floor.
“Come on, Prof, we got to go, scarper quick, like,” said Jerry.
“But why?” asked the confused Hector.
“ ’Cause Solli’s done a doctor.”
Hector had no idea what was going on as he was gathered up in the tide. Nicholas refused to move, Jerry’s hand having had no more effect than seaweed trying to push a cliff.
At the front Solli scooped his uncle up out of the chair and carried him down the front steps, the old man whooping with delight at such a game. Hector and Jerry followed, the young thug’s eyes watching the retreating entrance for signs of pursuit. On the street they hailed a taxi.
“The Pavilion, Whitechapel,” insisted Jerry. The cabbie, who had quite a lot to say about the motley passengers, their attire, and their comic destination, changed his mind when he saw Solli’s eyes in his rearview mirror. Only Hymie spoke as they sped across town. Solli patted the old man as if in agreement, his fierce gaze locked on the passing streets. Hector attempted to follow the gushings of Yiddish cockney and not to look at Solli’s bloodstained hand and sleeve, and Jerry closed his eyes and pretended to doze. They stopped outside the Pavilion and carefully helped Hymie out, who was ecstatic at being “home.” Hector followed a few paces behind the hobbling uncle and supporting nephew. Jerry gave the cabbie a handful of scrunched notes and said, “Stumm.”
The cabbie blinked, nodded, and was gone.
“What is happening, Jerry? Won’t they come to take Hymie back across the river?”
“No, Prof, they won’t come here and we can never cross the Thames again, Solli has burnt all our bridges. We are all here together now.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
Cyrena Lohr was sitting in her parlour when she heard that Eugène Marais had died, and that it was believed he had committed suicide. The news attacked a cherished, unlived part of Cyrena’s life, the place where she had fantasised about a close relationship existing between them, where they would mutually guide and support each other in all the years that they had been separated. In the place where their meaning and ages were alike. Beneath that dream were the very real memories of her father and her childhood. That superstructure that formed the foundation of all her most reliable and enjoyable recollections. A suicide always hacks away at such supports. The rareness of Marais just made the cruel axe even blunter, more pointless. There was nobody to share her pain with. The grief and disbelief locked claws in her lonely heart in her empty house two thousand miles from where she last saw him. She climbed the staircase, stopping on each stair for a minute or two, her heels kicking the back of the step for reality. Her hand stroked the polished banister, feeling its firmness and the space between her grip and its surface. The view from each step she noticed for the first time. The difference, the uniqueness. How could he do it? How could he leave everything so unfinished? She moved through her favourite room touching things. Their temperature and texture imprinted them beyond sight in her innermost recess as if they were exotic, fabulous troves. She opened the glass-panelled door and smelt the city and the wilderness combine. A homeland that was suddenly more precious than any single person. For isn’t it so for all that touches our animal brain? The old lizard mind notched just above the spine, surviving on a starvation diet forever. Then the meaning of the things in her room and the view from her stairs only found words to explain them. Their real sensations had crossed the chattering library of the frontal lobes without friction or a whisper. Their essence now uncapped as sign, direction, and pulse. She sat on her balcony and faced the Vorrh, closing her eyes and breathing it in. Seeking comfort without implication from its sultry, passionate indifference.
The next morning she decided to go to where he died. To see the place in which he faded.
Again she contacted Talbot. She hated playing the hurt and needy female, but she knew it was what he wanted. She explained her grief, isolation, and urgent need. She promised to explain it all to him on her return. Hinted at long evenings of intimate confession. The plane was waiting on the runway the next morning. It was the same as before but with a different interior, its skeletal furnishings extracted and replaced by plush, regular seating. Two other passengers were already seated. A wizened white woman and a tall black man dressed in a blue robe. He stood when she entered and the old woman winced, tutted, and looked away, staring out of the oval window. Cyrena smiled and took her assigned seat. Ten minutes later they were heading south, after circling over the Vorrh.
This time the journey was vague and numbed, the colours from above and below holding her and the plane in a blur of swaying, meaningless hugging. Before they landed for refuelling, the old woman moved into the seat next to Cyrena, peering back at the other passenger sitting at the rear.
“Disgusting,” she said in a snarling hiss. “Disgusting that we have to share a compartment with that.” She stabbed her thumb towards the back of the seat. “And how can ‘they’ get the money to buy a ticket? It cost me a fortune.”
Cyrena took off her green Italian sunglasses, stared at the bitter harridan, and said, “He is my personal Obeah-man and his prayers will keep the wings attached to this plane. Please do not speak again or he will lose his concentration.”
The old woman’s mouth dropped open and she shrivelled back along the row of seats. Cyrena replaced her glasses over her magnificent eyes. On the next part of the flight there were only two passengers. It was somewhere over the sea of white sands that she first spoke to him. She had walked to the little bar counter at the back of the plane to stretch her legs and spine, balancing on the undulating thin carpet over the two inches of metal, over the vastness of blue vacant air. On her return she caught his modest eye. He said, “Thank you,” without looking up.
“For what?”
“I heard what the other lady said.”
Cyrena was surprised and mortified. How could anyone hear such a whispered conversation in the loud compartment of the juddering plane?
“Oh!” she said.
“The lady disliked me travelling with you.”
“I think that lady would dislike travelling with anybody, including herself,” said Cyrena.
The man grinned broadly through his troubled face. “Then, madam, you don’t object?”
“Not at all.”
The plane lurched in a pocket of swollen air. Cyrena stumbled backwards and then stopp
ed, held in grip of crystal breeze, as if the interior oxygen of the plane had caught her and kept her from falling and guided her gracefully to the nearest seat. She was breathless and looked at three of her fingers held gently in the young man’s sensitive hand.
“Are you all right, madam?”
“Yes, yes, thank you.”
He let go and normality shuddered with the noise of the engines back into the cabin. He quietly sat next to her, offering a glass of water. She had no words to say, so she just sipped and slid into a remarkable and unexpected sleep. The stranger covered her with a blanket and adjusted her elegant spectacles that were pushed askew on her beautiful face.
When she awoke he seemed to be asleep in the next seat. She blinked and tried to remember the sequence of events that she knew was strange, but could not find them on the other side of her glowing sense of well-being. She had dreamt of the tree. The tree that Marais had guided her to, all those years ago. The tree where she had seen something wonderful that he seemed anxious or even scared about. She had been there again, bathed in a warm, overpowering light that was beyond vision and the irritations of sight. It had followed her into waking in the same way that it had waited for her in dream, and she knew that her fellow passenger had assisted in some way in the dissolving of the boundaries. She watched him carefully, looking for signs of recognition. There was a sense of ease about him that had nothing to do with contentment. Nor was it casual apathy. It was a positive known direction rather than a lack of feeling or interest. She had become an expert at recognising that, even if it had been a late and spiteful lesson in her essential optimism. Then, without knowing why, she stretched out her hand and moved it above the sleeping man. Moved it in a slow flat rotation as if caressing an invisible halo that floated around and over his gentle head. The steward came into the cabin and broke the intimate moment without dispersing the atmosphere of blessing. He announced that it was thirty minutes before landing and that it might be “bumpy” again as they crossed the last jagged ranges and flattened plains. The other passenger was concerned again about her well-being. She told him that she was more than fine and had enjoyed the flight in his company. He beamed openly.
The Cloven Page 29
