D. Compton - The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

A quarter of an hour later the police had the students’ car in sight. An arrest was expected at any minute. ‘That’s quick,’ I said to the joe.

He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Computers,’ he said, as if that explained everything and without computers he’d have been a master of crime himself.

The commercials were next, then a talk show called Owl People. The link man was elderly, and obviously on speed. A tramp wandered in to the coffee bar, blowing from the cold and flapping his arms. ‘Let’s see your fucking money,’ the joe said, and the tramp wandered out again.

I hurried after him, wanting to give him fifty, a hundred pounds, anything to make that joe look small, but he’d disappeared. By the time I got back — and Christ, it can be cold at three a.m. even in spring — the police had cornered the students up in the north of the city and there was talk of guns. That was all Katherine Mortenhoe needed: an early morning bullet behind the ear in some garish tower suburb. That way we’d all (she also?) be spared a great deal of trouble. And never get to know the answers to a lot of our questions. And never — just possibly — get a lift out of a dying fellow-creature’s possibility of joy.

Even without Owl People the next fifteen minutes would have been long. With it they were interminable. The speedy link man hit a reaction, and let his guest tell four long bad jokes in a row. After that even the commercials were cute. Sitting by the chattering telly in that garbage dump of a coffee bar, it seemed to me infinitely worse that Katherine Mortenhoe, whom I had never met, should be denied a mere few weeks than that forty years of life should be taken from some other normal, healthy person. Unless of course that other normal, healthy person should happen to be me.

All right, so I was being flip. No doubt I was afraid of being anything else. If I need an excuse, well, it was nearly four a.m. and the new drugs were marvelous, weren’t they, weren’t they?

So the fifteen minutes passed, and the next news flash had Katherine safe and sound, already on her way to a hospital, suffering from nothing worse than shock. The students, once surrounded, had bleakly decided against yet another ‘students’ last stand’ and had chosen instead to live. And to fight another day. So they’d given themselves — and Katherine Mortenhoe -up, only one of them being shot actually to death in the process. Even so, the another day’s fight of the remaining three was likely to be delayed for around twenty-five years (with good behavior).

The whole episode therefore, as far as it concerned Katherine, was over in little under an hour. It was trivial, only briefly exciting, and not really worth having detailed, except that it gave her possibly her final nudge into Vincent’s arms. At least, that was how I saw it at the time. Its opportuneness told me two things: first, that Vincent knew his job (which I was already aware of), and second, that Vincent was in a hurry. He must be feeling, I decided, that Katherine Mortenhoe’s days were slipping away through his fingers like sand.

I was glad there was no one around to tell those students whose cause they were really going to rot their youth away in jail for. Only me, and I wasn’t that sadistic.

Katherine had hated the students, grotesque in their moment of glorious revolution. Among themselves they spoke an intentionally incomprehensible guerrilla slang, emphasizing their separation from past and present and future. They even wore a sort of uniform, the necessary tattered flak-jacket. And Guevara dead and you’d have thought buried these many years. She despised their thinking, which was no more than feeling. It gave them an uncaring freedom. When there was nothing to do, you did something. You short-circuited forty million years. She despised them, and even found them slightly shocking.

For their part, the students resented her, and treated her as a commodity. And they put the blame on her when the police appeared on their tail not three minutes after getting away from her block. They accused her, ridiculously, of having someone to watch her flat — as if her fucking life were so fucking precious. In jail men and women died every day of the year, young men and women, brave men and women — what right had she to think herself so fucking special?

It wasn’t worth telling them that their premises were wrong or, worse still, unimportant. Their words, like their lives, were rhetorical, a gesture that undoubtedly something at some time had made necessary. Katherine saved her energy for holding on to the back of the seat in front as the car skidded through the deserted city. They would have spat her pity back at her.

Then the hump of a roundabout had loomed improbably, impossibly, in front of them, its massed flowerbeds colorless in their searing headlights, and the car had mounted it, and turned over, and stopped. She realized suddenly that she might, at any time since her abduction, have been killed. And recognized, as she lost consciousness, the heavy, childhood scent of wallflowers.

She woke to a rigor. Dr Mason was standing by her bed, watching her pulse and respiration on the screen, and it was some seconds before she worked out why she shouldn’t be glad to see him. Then Vincent’s letter came to her, and his sincerity over the telephone, ‘So many people involved, Mrs Mortenhoe… A leak is possible at so many levels… ,’ and the whole affair was suddenly terribly long ago and unimportant, and she needed Dr Mason as her only way in through the professional carapace.

He saw she had opened her eyes, and smiled at her. ‘You bumped your head,’ he said. ‘Not even very hard. You’re fine.’

‘And those silly students?’

He frowned. ‘When you get these rigors, Katherine, you should try to relax. If you do they’ll take less out of you. Try breathing deeply.’

She tried breathing deeply. The rigor eased. She didn’t repeat her question — if he wanted to spare her unpleasantness she’d let him. The students had never managed to be particularly real to her, more like actors in a bad film. And she’d read about how they filmed all those bullet wounds: they stopped the camera and painted them on.

‘I wrote to you,’ Dr Mason said. ‘Special Delivery. I wanted to keep in touch.’

She remembered the remains of Harry’s bundle of letters. ‘I got so much mail,’ she simplified, ‘in the end I just stopped opening it.’

‘I was afraid of that. I had no other means of contact.’

‘You’ve got contact now,’ she said, and turned over, and went to sleep.

When she woke properly it was midmorning. Dr Mason was back, or had been there all the time. ‘You’re getting up,’ he said. ‘Can’t have you lying there feeling sorry for yourself. Harry called and I told him you were fine. He wanted to come over but I said you’d be home after lunch.’

She remembered Harry. ‘He’s not very good at hospitals,’ she said.

‘That’s what I thought. Well now, breakfast first, and then we’re getting you up.’

Over breakfast he asked her about her paralysis up in the Castle, and she told him what she could. He was fascinated. So much so that she almost wished she could have another one there and then, just to oblige. But it wouldn’t quite come.

Then he changed the subject. ‘You’re keeping cheerful?’ he said.

She couldn’t quite believe the question. ‘Cheerful?’ she repeated.

‘It’s very important. I can easily give you some cheerers if you’re not.’

‘I haven’t really thought about it.’

‘Of course not.’ He hesitated. ‘I sometimes underestimate you, Katherine. I’m sorry.’

She finished her breakfast in silence. If he was going to fail her like that he could go away. Come to that, why was he there at all, he with his closely stacked appointments at the Medical Center?