D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

The state of communion withered. The bones beneath people’s faces were just as true, and the heroism just as possible, but the people themselves were remote, totally alien. They were TV people. And Vincent had leaked the name Katie Mortenhoe so precisely that it was already all around the building, and would be all around the city by morning.

I left. I wondered whom I was trying to kid that the people there were remote and alien. Remote from me? Alien to the man with the TV eyes? I took a taxi, thinking luxury for the rest of my life, and fought the inverse snobbery in me that despised it. Katherine Mortenhoe was the romantic, not I. Sitting comfortably in the back of the taxi I suddenly remembered something, and laughed. ‘Hear all, see all, say nowt,’ the man had said, staring, as if with a dirty story, into my eyes. If he’d known whose eyes he was really staring into, Vincent’s eyes, NTV’s eyes, he’d have shit a brick.

I seem to remember I went to a cinema that night. Or it might have been a casino. The cinemas blur in my mind, and so do the casinos. The one safe thing to say is that I didn’t go home. If you didn’t sleep in it what else was a home for?

Katherine had woken early that morning. Her sleep had been by courtesy of Dr Mason, and she felt her waking to be his doing also. One morning she would not wake, and would not sleep either. He had measured out her life for her, four weeks, twenty-eight days, give or take a day. He had hardly been generous. Presumably twenty-seven days now, give or take a day.

She felt panic at the hours’ passing. She sat up, pushed the bedclothes hurriedly back.

For what?

She pulled them up again and lay down and stared at the early spring sunlight on the ceiling. Was the sun going to shine for her every day? She remembered a summer holiday, a children’s playground, paddle boats, a tiny village for guinea pigs, swings for her dolls, sunshine… and the helicopter pad beside it all with regular departure flights back to the city. She’d been six, or maybe seven, with a new mommy. After the first week she had refused to go to the playground, although it was the best place. Her father had thought her such a funny, brooding child, not to be able to bear the whir of her regular departing hours.

It had been possible then, simple even, to deal with the difficulty. She played in another part of town.

Harry had suggested this, suggested that they went away, suggested that they played in another part of town. But there was nowhere far enough. She said yes and no to him, and listened to his plans. But she knew that she would go on working at Computabook for as long as she could, and then -in self-defense, if not for Harry’s sake — she would kill herself. Organisms wore out, broke down, stopped. There was nothing to make a song and dance about.

Harry slept on. She turned over in the bed and closed her eyes: it wasn’t a bonus that the sunlight was inexpressibly beautiful, it was a sentimental, unhelpful delusion. Beauty was one of the human mind’s most straightforward pleasure mechanisms. Beauty that broke your heart was sick. She got up soon after and made breakfast, quelling the shake in her hands that was new from yesterday.

Recurrent rigor, Dr Mason had said, but she quelled it firmly all the same. And took no capsules for the tightness, not exactly a headache, around her scalp. Her pulse rate was normal, and her morning visit to the lavatory not particularly traumatic. Progress would be slow at first. Above all, there was no longer any need for her to worry. Four years of listening and watching and wondering were over, and the realization made her curiously lighthearted. If there was one thing she hated, it was people who thought and talked of nothing but their health.

Then Harry came into the kitchen with a careful, graveyard face.

‘You couldn’t sleep,’ he said.

‘On the contrary, I slept excellently.’

It was only to Harry that she used phrases like ‘on the contrary.’ Harry, and difficult people on the telephone.

‘Nothing seems to keep me awake,’ he said guiltily.

‘I told you, I slept like a log.’

‘And now I’ve let you get the breakfast.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake.’

He sighed, tiptoed meekly to the table, and sat down. She stood over him.

‘What’s the matter? Has somebody died?’

He burst into tears. There were some things she didn’t have to put up with.

‘Coffee’s in the pot,’ she told him, grabbed her handbag, and went out.

Left alone, Harry cried for a long time. Then he looked at his face in the bathroom mirror, rang the Licensing Bureau and told their answering service he wouldn’t be in that day because his wife was sick. The travel agent’s booklets for which he had made a detour on his way home the previous evening after Vincent had broken the news (so sympathetically) to him were lying on the table by the telephone. He picked them up and tore them systematically into little colored squares which he threw away down the garbage chute. Back in the kitchen again, he started to cry.

Katherine was even earlier on the streets than usual. It was so quiet she could hear her own footsteps. Her high spirits returned. A giant vacuum truck came along the slip road on its way back to the depot, and she thought how tidy it would be simply to lie down in front of it (when the driver wasn’t looking) and disappear into the works forever. You’d meet the oddest people…

Without thinking, she started as usual up the ramp of the street walkover. Below her the carriageways were clear as far as she could see in either direction, so she ran back down the ramp and, for the thrill of it, climbed the drag barrier, and crossed by the road itself. She paused on the center reservation: from where she stood the familiar blocks were strange and exciting, the sun extra bright on sands that human feet had never trod. A solitary truck whined in the distance and she clung to the center drag barrier, laughing as it blurred past her, unimaginably noisy, doppler-effecting itself away into a new distance, indistinguishable from the old. She caught an instantaneous glimpse of the driver’s mad face, staring at her as if she were the one who was mad. Then he was gone, his apocalyptic moment traveling with him down the road. She climbed the barrier and crossed the remaining carriageways on her toes, like a cat.

She was still so early that she decided she’d walk all the way to Computabook. The exercise would do her good. And nobody got mugged at five in the morning: the muggers and rapists were safely at home by then, counting their boodle or writing up their doings for the papers. But she stopped off at the neighborhood Post Office first, to see if there was any mail. There were three in the box, two for Harry and one for her.

Hers had the discreet NTV symbol on the back flap.

She replaced Harry’s two carefully for him to pick up later on his way to work, and stuffed her own conclusively into a slot marked Overseas Mail Only. She didn’t want it. She didn’t want anything to do with it. Then she spent the next half-hour getting it back, persuading the man at the sorting office counter three floors down that she’d posted it by mistake. He asked her for proof of identity, examined her driving license, her Computabook pass, her blood-group sticker, her travelator season ticket, her pedestrian’s permit, her Social Security card, currency card, diners’ card, voter’s card, civil offenses card (unmarked), and post box registration certificate, and then said he would have to ask his superior who didn’t get in till nine. So she screamed at him, and waved her arms about, and called him coarse names till he handed over the letter because he didn’t like to see a lady get upset.