D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘I told you, it doesn’t matter. None of all this matters. I wouldn’t touch a penny of their bloody money.’

‘I might, Harry. If they paid quickly enough I could have a mink and two Cadillacs, and all those things a girl is supposed to want.’

‘Now you’re being vulgar.’

How sweetly pompous he was. ‘Is it really vulgar to want to be cosseted in my declining weeks?’

‘We mustn’t talk like this.’

‘I’m afraid we must, Harry.’ She leaned across the table, gathered all the pieces of paper and tapped them into a neat pile which she kept on her lap. He was right: her laughter had been vulgar. But then, so had all the letters and brochures been vulgar. ‘We must talk properly,’ she said, ‘about the future.’

He got up. She realized he was still wearing his ridiculous towel. He went about the kitchen arranging things that didn’t need arranging. He was rather fat. He needed her comfort, not her questions, but he couldn’t always be given in to. ‘After I’m dead,’ she said firmly, pleased with her courage, ‘after I’m dead you must get away. You’ll have to leave your job. You’ll need a new one. You’ll need money.’

‘We have money.’

Indeed they did. That was why the flat was tiny. That was why they didn’t own a hologram, or rent a newspaper receiver. They were saving for a self-contained domestic unit in a good retirement area. They were saving for their old age. She tried to find this as funny as the brochures had been, and failed.

‘You’ll need a lot.’

‘What for?’

‘You’ll need to make a new start.’

‘What for?’

Childish self-pity wouldn’t stop her. A new life had to be envisaged for him, full of satisfactions he’d make for himself. He didn’t want to hear, of course. He wanted to be hugged, and told everything was going to be all right. She’d lie to him later, but not at this moment. He shouldn’t have let her see how fat he was.

‘You don’t make friends easily. You should have a nice home, smart car, plenty of good cassettes and expensive food… Then again, how about job qualifications? I don’t expect you’ll find another place all that easily. You’ll need money for all this. Lots of money. And then there’s the question of another wife—’

He didn’t often turn on her. He believed himself henpecked, and was happy secretly to resent it and never do anything about it. He thought of this as self-control (which it wasn’t), and it made him feel superior. Just occasionally, however, the humiliations were too great even for him.

‘What’s the matter with you,’ he said, ‘is that you won’t dare think about the things that really count. Instead you fill your head up with money, and bad jokes, and what’s going to happen to me, and who you hate and who you don’t, and how you’re going to fool the reporters, and… anything except what really counts.’ He flapped his arms. ‘Soon you’re going to die, Kate. You’re going to get iller and iller, and finally die. That’s what you ought to be thinking about. Just stop nagging at me, Kate. There are more important things to be getting on with.’

He stopped. He’d made his speech. And he’d misjudged its length. Halfway through there’d been contact: four sentences later she’d had time to clothe his words in his paltry nakedness, in the areas of flab that joggled as he talked. If he got much more worked up, she thought, his towel would fall off.

She squared the papers briskly in her lap. His undignified outburst was best not mentioned. ‘I tell you what,’ she said, ‘if we’re both not going in to work today, let’s have an outing! Get out of this flat. We’ve got the sticker if anyone bothers us. Let’s go and see the Castle. It’s ridiculous how people living in a, city never get to see the sights it’s famous for.’

She stood up, dazzled him with her smile, and went out of the room, taking the letters and brochures with her… Perhaps some response, some explanation was needed. ‘You’ll feel better when you’ve got some clothes on,’ she suggested over her shoulder, going into the sitting room and putting the papers carefully away in the desk.

I arrived at the Clinic punctually, full of my transport motel breakfast, full of spring and the old-fashioned joys of. The MEN were ready for me. The Micro-Electro-Neurologists. Their white plastic casings were called clothes: their means of audible communication went by the name of speech. Three of them, photosensitive, audio-linked, tactile-orientated, their discerners clicking, their programs running AOK, they locomoted around, hooked up to, the mechanism returned for confirmation.

Me.

Or such of me as concerned them.

Which such, on that liberated, spring-in-the-blood morning, wasn’t much such.

They fixed me. ‘Try not to blink,’ they said, and stared down dazzling needles. So I tried not to blink, and thought of wealth and fame and Vincent and Katherine Mortenhoe. And Tracey who would wait until these were all, miraculously, behind me. Until, miraculously, I had bought myself back.

‘Watch the point of light,’ they told me. ‘Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film. Wait for the injection. Now watch the point of light. Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film. Wait for the EEG. Now watch the point of light. Watch the pencil. Watch the red and then the green. Watch this film. Watch this different film.’

Once, accidentally, they said, ‘Does this hurt?’ to which I said, ‘Yes,’ because it did. And thought of Tracey.

They told me at last, rubbing their sensitive, multidimensional manipulators and simulating joy, that implant function was up to expectation. I didn’t argue. Implant function had been up to expectation from the moment the bandages came off. And in glorious Trucolor too. They hummed and buzzed, and said their only remaining doubts concerned impedance in retinal nerve endings. (My retinal nerve endings.) Acute darkness caused circuit hunting. Circuit hunting, if protracted, caused burn-up. And burn-up — how nicely they put it — caused permanent destruction of retinal function. Permanent destruction of retinal function.

It was a cheering thought — not new, but never before expressed so baldly. I shared their concern. It would be downright irresponsible of me, after all this expense, to end up blind.

They said they were glad they’d dealt with the problem of sleep. The new drugs were marvelous, weren’t they? Weren’t they? And pre-burn-up pain gave ample warning, should I ever carelessly wander into a darkened room. Perhaps I should carry a flashlight in case of emergencies. And a card too — they’d had one printed — to go with my blood group and health insurance in case I had an accident. Apart from anything else, the power pack in my neck could become dangerously radioactive if tampered with. But I wasn’t to worry. Worry caused hypertension, and hypertension made people accident prone. The new drugs were marvelous, weren’t they? Weren’t they?

I promised them I wouldn’t worry. And the new drugs were indeed marvelous. I really, honestly, hardly felt tired at all. But where now was Tracey?

They patted me. Total unconsciousness, on the other hand, was perfectly safe. It triggered electrical changes, sensor blackout. It jargoned jargon. I told them I was glad to hear it and thanked them. At least I understood my son a little better now. Possibly it was his closeness to me, his prophetic soul, that had made him so congenitally afraid of the dark.

They released me from their various appliances and I went, trying not to run, out of their mat-black gadget box, out into sunlit offices and the more human inquiries of the doctors. And after the doctors, the psychiatrist. When all I wanted was to get away and buy that flashlight, and a good supply of batteries.