More Pricks Than Kicks (20 page)

When his entire nape was as a bride's adorned (bating the obscene stain of the picric) and so tightly bandaged that he felt his eyes bulging, she transferred her compassion to the toes. She scoured the whole phalanx, top and bottom. Suddenly she began to titter. Belacqua nearly kicked her in the eye, he got such a shock. How dared she trespass on his programme! He refusing to be tickled in this petty local way, trying with his teeth to reach his under-lip and gouging his palms, and she forgetting herself, there was no other word for it. There were limits, he felt, to Democritus.

“Such a lang tootsy” she giggled.

Heavenly father, the creature was bilingual. A lang tootsy! Belacqua swallowed his choler.

“Soon to be syne” he said in a loud voice. What his repartee lacked in wit it made up for in style. But it was lost on this granite Medusa.

“A long foot” he said agreeably “I know, or a long nose. But a long toe, what does that denote?”

No answer. Was the woman then altogether cretinous? Or did she not hear him? Belting away there with her urinous picric and cooling her porridge in advance. He would try her again.

“I say” he roared “that that toe you like so much will soon be only a memory.” He could not put it plainer than that.

Her voice after his was scarcely audible. It went as follows:

“Yes”—the word died away and was repeated—“yes, his troubles are nearly over.”

Belacqua broke down completely, he could not help it. This distant voice, like a cor anglais coming through the evening, and then the
his
, the
his
was the last straw. He buried his face in his hands, he did not care who saw him.

“I would like” he sobbed “the cat to have it, if I might.”

She would never have done with her bandage, it cannot have measured less than a furlong. But of course it would never do to leave anything to chance, Belacqua could appreciate that. Still it seemed somehow disproportioned to the length of even his toe. At last she made all fast round his shin. Then she packed her tray and left. Some people go, others leave. Belacqua felt like the rejected of those two that night in a bed. He felt he had set Miranda somehow against him. Was this then the haporth of paint? Miranda on whom so much depended. Merde!

It was all Lister's fault. Those damned happy Victorians.

His heart gave a great leap in its box with a fulminating sense that he was all wrong, that anger would stand by him better than the other thing, the laugh seemed so feeble, so like a whinge in the end. But on second thoughts no, anger would turn aside when it came to the point, leaving him like a sheep. Anyhow it was too late to turn back. He tried cautiously what it felt like to have the idea in his mind. … Nothing happened, he felt no shock. So at least he had spiked the brute, that was something.

At this point he went downstairs and had a truly military evacuation, Army Service Corps. Coming back he did not doubt that all would yet be well. He whistled a snatch outside the duty-room. There was nothing left of his room when he got back but Miranda, Miranda more prognathous than ever, loading a syringe. Belacqua tried to make light of this.

“What now?” he said.

But she had the weapon into his bottom and discharged before he realised what was happening. Not a cry escaped him.

“Did you hear what I said?” he said. “I insist, it is my right, on knowing the meaning of this, the purpose of this injection, do you hear me?”

“It is what every patient gets” she said “before going down to the theatre.”

Down
to the theatre! Was there a conspiracy in this place to destroy him, body and soul? His tongue clave to his palate. They had desiccated his secretions. First blood to the profession!

The theatre-socks were the next little bit of excitement. Really the theatre seemed to take itself very seriously. To hell with your socks, he thought, it's your mind I want.

Now events began to move more rapidly. First of all an angel of the Lord came to his assistance with a funny story, really very funny indeed, it always made Belacqua laugh till he cried, about the parson who was invited to take a small part in an amateur production. All he had to do was to snatch at his heart when the revolver went off, cry “By God! I'm shot!” and drop dead. The parson said certainly, he would be most happy, if they would have no objection to his drawing the line at “By God!” on such a secular occasion. He would replace it, if they had no objection, by “Mercy!” or “Upon my word!” or something of that kind. “Oh my! I'm shot!” how would that be?

But the production was so amateur that the revolver went off indeed and the man of God was transfixed.

“Oh!” he cried “oh …! … B
Y
C
HRIST
! I
am
S
HOT
!”

It was a mercy that Belacqua was a dirty lowdown Low Church Protestant high-brow and able to laugh at this sottish jest. Laugh! How he did laugh, to be sure. Till he cried.

He got up and began to titivate himself. Now he could hear the asthmatic breathing if he listened hard. The day was out of danger, any fool could see that. A little sealed cardboard box lying on the mantelpiece caught his eye. He read the inscription: Fraisse's Ferruginous Ampoules for the Intensive Treatment of Anaemia by Intramuscular Squirtation. Registered Trademark—Mozart. The little Hexenmeister of Don Giovanni, now in his narrow cell for ever mislaid, dragged into bloodlessness! How very amusing. Really the world was in great form this morning.

Now two further women, there was no end to them, the one of a certain age, the other not, entered, ripping off their regulation cuffs as they advanced. They pounced on the bed. The precautionary oil-sheet, the cradle … Belacqua padded up and down before the fire, the ends of his pyjamas tucked like a cyclist's into the sinister socks. He would smoke one more cigarette, nor count the cost. It was astonishing, when he came to think of it, how the entire routine of this place, down to the meanest detail, was calculated to a cow's toe to promote a single end, the relief of suffering in the long run. Observe how he dots his i's now and crucifies his t's to the top of his bent. He was being put to his trumps.

Surreptitiously they searched his yellow face for signs of discomposure. In vain. It was a mask. But perhaps his voice would tremble. One, she whose life had changed, took it upon herself to say in a peevish tone:

“Sister Beamish won't bless you for soiling her good socks.”

Sister Beamish would not bless him.

The voice of this person was in ruins, but she abused it further.

“Would you not stand on the mat?”

His mind was made up in a flash: he would stand on the mat. He would meet them in this matter. If he refused to stand on the mat he was lost in the eyes of these two women.

“Anything” he said “to oblige Sister Beamish.”

Miranda was having a busy morning. Now she appeared for the fourth or fifth time, he had lost count, complete with shadowy assistants. The room seemed full of grey women. It was like a dream.

“If you have any false teeth” she said “you may remove them.”

His hour was at hand, there was no blinking at the fact.

Going down in the lift with Miranda he felt his glasses under his hand. This was a blessed accident if you like, just when the silence was becoming awkward.

“Can I trust you with these?” he said.

She put them into her bosom. The divine creature! He would assault her in another minute.

“No smoking” she said “in the operating-theatre.”

The surgeon was washing his invaluable hands as Belacqua swaggered through the antechamber. He that hath clean hands shall be stronger. Belacqua cut the surgeon. But he flashed a dazzling smile at the Wincarnis. She would not forget that in a hurry.

He bounced up on to the table like a bridegroom. The local doc was in great form, he had just come from standing best man, he was all togged up under his vestments. He recited his exhortation and clapped on the nozzle.

“Are you right?” said
Belacqua
.

The mixture was too rich, there could be no question about that. His heart was running away, terrible yellow yerks in his skull. “One of the best,” he heard those words that did not refer to him. The expression reassured him. The best man clawed at his tap.

By Christ! he did die!

They had clean forgotten to auscultate him!

Shuah, Belacqua, in a Nursing Home.

T
HOUGH
this was stale news to Mrs Shuah, for she had inserted it (by telephone) herself, yet she felt, on reading it in the morning after paper, a little shock of surprise, as on opening telegram confirming advance booking in crowded hotel. Then the thought of friends, their unassumed grief giving zest to their bacon and eggs, the first phrases of sympathy with her in this great loss modulating from porridge to marmalade, from whispers and gasps to the calm ejaculations of chat, in a dozen households that she could have mentioned, set in motion throughout her bodily economy, with results that plainly appeared at once on her face, the wheels of mourning. Whereupon she was without thought or feeling, just a slush, a teary coenaesthesis.

This particular Mrs Shuah, as stated thus far at all events, does not sound very like Thelma née bboggs, nor is she. Thelma née bboggs perished of sunset and honeymoon that time in Connemara. Then shortly after that they suddenly seemed to be all dead, Lucy of course long since, Ruby duly, Winnie to decency, Alba Perdue in the natural course of being seen home. Belacqua looked round and the Smeraldina was the only sail in sight. In next to no time she had made up his mind by not merely loving but wanting him with such quasi-Gorgonesque impatience as her letter precited evinces. She and no other therefore is the Mrs Shuah who now, after less than a year in the ultraviolet intimacy of the compound of ephebe and old woman that he was, reads in the paper that she had begun to survive him.

Bodies don't matter but hers went something like this: big enormous breasts, big breech, Botticelli thighs, knock-knees, square ankles, wobbly, poppata, mammose, slobbery-blubbery, bubbubbubbub, the real button-busting Weib, ripe. Then, perched away high out of sight on top of this porpoise prism, the sweetest little pale Pisanello of a birdface ever. She was like Lucrezia del Fede, pale and belle, a pale belle Braut, with a winter skin like an old sail in the wind. The root and the source of the athletic or aesthetic blob of a birdnose never palled, unless when he had a costive coryza himself, on Belacqua's forefinger pad and nail, with which he went probing and plumbing and boring the place just as for many years he polished his glasses (ecstasy of attrition!), or suffered the shakes and grace-note strangulations and enthrottlements of the Winkelmusik of Szopen or Pichon or Chopinek or Chopinetto or whoever it was embraced her heartily as sure as his name was Fred, dying all his life (thank you Mr Auber) on a sickroom talent (thank you Mr Field) and a Kleinmeister's Leidenschaftsucherei (thank you Mr Beckett), or ascended across the Fulda or the Tolka or the Poddle or the Volga as the case might be, and he never dreaming that on each and all these occasions he was pandering to the most iniquitous excesses of a certain kind of sublimation. The wretched little wet rag of an upper lip, pugnozzling up and back in what you might nearly call a kind of a duck or a cobra sneer to the nostrils, was happily to some extent amended by the wanton pout of its fellow and the forward jaws to match—a brilliant recovery. The skull of this strapping girl was shaped like a wedge. The ears of course were shells, the eyes shafts of reseda (his favourite colour) into an oreless mind. The hair was as black as the pots and grew so thick and low athwart the temples that the brow was reduced to a fanlight (just the kind of shaped brow that he most admired). But what matter about bodies?

She got out of the narrow bed on the wrong side, but she was never clear in her mind as to which was the right side and which the wrong, and went into the room where he was laid out, the big bible wrapped in a napkin still under his chin. She stood at the end of the bed in her lotus chintz pyjamas, as glazed as those eyes that she could not see, and held her breath. His forehead, when she ventured to lay the back of her hand across it, was much less chilly than she had expected, but that no doubt was explained by her own peripheral circulation, which was wretched. She caught hold of his hands, folded, not on his breast as she would have wished, but lower down, and rearranged them. Scarcely had she gone down on her bended knees after having made this adjustment when a spasm of anxiety, lest there should be anything the matter with this corpse that rigor mortis had apparently passed over, straightened her up. She hoped it was all right. Baulked of her prayer, baulked of a last long look at the disaffected face, its contemptuous probity that would fall to pieces, she took herself off to prepare her weeds, for it would not do to be seen in lotus chintz. Black suited her, black and green had always been her colours. She found in her room what she had in mind, an Ethiope one-piece gashed and slashed with emerald insertions. She brought it to her work-table in the penannular bow-window, she sat down trembling and began to fix it. It was like being up in the sky in a bubble, the sun streaming in (through the curtains), the blue all round her. Soon the floor was strewn with the bright cuttings, it went to her heart to rip them they looked so lovely. Not a flower, not a flower sweet.

One insertion in the Press

Makes minus how many to make a black dress?

She was so sad and busy, the sobs were so quick to ripen and burst in her mind and the work was so nice, that she did not notice a fat drab demon approach the house nor hear his uproarious endeavours not to intrude on the gravel. Up came his card. Mr Malacoda. Most respectfully desirous to measure. A sob, instead of bursting, withered. The Smeraldina whimpered that she was sorry but she could not admit this Mr Malacoda, she could not have the Master measured. Mary Ann's leprous features were much abused with the usual. In a crisis like this, however, she was worth ten or fifteen of her mistress.