D. Compton: The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe

‘A few weeks in the hospital, Doctor. I could easily manage it.’ She battered like a moth.

‘Stop it, Katherine.’ It helped them both for him to be angry. ‘Stop it. There is no cure for your condition. You must listen to me. There is no cure for your condition.’

For a moment, before the shutter went down, I saw her poor face. Vincent had said he didn’t mind a bit of involvement. He was going to get it.

Her skin pricked. All over she felt so hot.

She didn’t ask Dr Mason what he meant. Neither did she argue. She understood him instantly, what he was telling her, and she believed him because she had always believed him and he had always been right. He was her one way through the professional carapace… To the new truth she applied the old shift, moving it away, relating it to anxieties she could understand. She thought of the renewal.

‘How long have I got?’ she said.

‘We should have contacted you earlier.’

‘How long have I got?’

‘The check program held things up.’

‘How long have I got?’

‘Not very long.’

‘How long?’

‘According to the computer, four or five weeks.’

It was suddenly terribly unfair that he should be so cross with her. It wasn’t his renewal they were talking about. He, lucky man, had been married fifteen years. She decided it was time Barbara did another of Aimee Paladine’s doctor books.

‘Thank you for telling me.’ Aimee’s doctors were definitely more sympathetic. ‘If it’s only that long, then I shan’t have to worry.’

‘You must try to understand—’

‘I do understand.’ She smiled to prove it. ‘Well, we all have to die some time.’

She stood up, crumpled her Kleenex, and threw it into the bin by his desk. ‘Well,’ she said again, ‘I’ll be on my way, then. There’s a lot of things to see to.’

Quite final. She was going. She wanted to go. Then he stood up also. ‘I think you should hear me out,’ he said. I want you to understand your condition. And the progress you can expect in your symptoms.’

‘Will they be messy?’

‘Sit down, Katherine. You must realize that this has been a terrible shock. It’s no use pretending anything else. It would be better if you talked about it.’

‘I am talking. I asked if my symptoms would be messy.’

But she sat down. He was expecting her to cry again. Crying was supposed to be therapeutic. It was strange to think that she would never cry again. She turned and stared at herself in the mirror: she didn’t look like a woman who would never cry again. She looked just like the woman she had seen in the mirror some ten minutes before. She imagined Barbara sorting phrases: Was it really only ten minutes? Only ten minutes that had changed Amanda from a vigorous, beautiful woman with all her life before her, into a gaunt, walking corpse? ‘Walking’ corpse was strong, of course, but it had gone down well in the past.

‘Is that a one-way mirror?’ she asked.

‘What an odd question.’

‘It’s just that I feel I’m being watched… I don’t mind being watched, I expect I’m worth watching. Something special. You know?’

‘One in twenty million.’

‘I thought so. Nobody of my age dies very much.’

‘You asked me about your symptoms.’

‘Go on — tell me about my symptoms.’

‘It is necessary first of all to understand the atypical nature of your physiological and psychological condition.’

Understand the atypical nature of her physiological and psychological condition… ‘Fuck your long words, Doctor,’ she said, having only four weeks. ‘Just fuck ‘em. For me. Will you? Please? Please?’

And then, but not to oblige him, she cried.

She cried for Harry. She watched herself cry, watched in the mirror, watched herself change, her face lose its pinched-up shape, her elbows cease to matter, and was pleased with the tragic effect. She was crying precisely, exactly, and solely for Harry — who would cry in his turn for her, but not enough.

‘Basically, yours is an affliction of the brain cells, Katherine. Or rather, of the circuits connecting them. In physical terms, these connections are breaking down: a condition that snowballs once it reaches a certain point, and is quite irreversible. We used to attribute this condition solely to information overload, and postulate inherent physical limits to the amounts and speeds of image processing possible in the human brain. Exceeding these limits over lengthy periods induced a complex of symptoms we called Gordon’s Syndrome. After the famous pathologist. Our difficulty was in differentiating between true Gordon’s Syndrome, which was terminal, and the more usual stress conditions that were not…’

Outside the window she could see the topmost branches of a tree, misty with tiny yellow-green leaves. She cried for these instead, but decorously now that Dr Mason thought he had her attention, poor little things in a world with only four weeks to live.

‘…We now understand that information overload is only half of the picture. True Gordon’s Syndrome occurs only when the breakdown of neural circuits is accompanied by certain psychological phenomena. Very subtle and far-reaching phenomena. For want of a better word, I must call it outrage. The wave patterns it produces in the brain are unique. The nearest we have found to them are the patterns produced during acute physical nausea. But in the case of true Gordon’s Syndrome the nausea is not physical, but psychological. It induces, instead of abdominal spasm, a species of neural spasm. This aggravates the neurological overload already present to the point where nerve-endings burn out, circuits become permanently destroyed.’

No, the little leaves would go on after her. Of course they would. Everything, everybody, would go on after her. She turned back from the window, and nodded intelligently. Quite clear. Neurological overload. Destroyed circuits. She got her mouth back into the shape it had been before she started crying, and began to make a list in her head of the people she would tell. Darling, it’s the neurological overload, you see. It’s the burned-out circuits, he says. They’re like permanently destroyed… The list of people was like her Christmas list: it started long and got shorter upon examination. Upon examination it was found to have names, but no faces. Even her father’s face was vague, blurred by the stepmothers in between. She moved around: jobs, flats, districts, cities. The names moved around also. Did you send cards to, did you mention neurological overload to, people whose faces you couldn’t remember?

‘I’m not suggesting that this sense of outrage is conscious, Katherine. I’m sure it lies much more deeply than that. All we know is that on a fundamental level it has caused you to resist. When you refuse to accept a physiological reality — in your case, neural overload — the prognosis is bad. In your case, recurrent seizure. Cell damage. The computer shows a clear pattern. Irreversible. And cumulative.’

Harry. She’d have to tell Harry. But he thought her appointment wasn’t until tomorrow. She could tell him then. Or perhaps even later. Or perhaps not at all. A Celia Wentworth heroine would believe things weren’t really real if they weren’t really talked about.

‘You possess outstanding sensitivity, Katherine. I hardly have to tell you that. Somewhere along the line that sensitivity has rebelled. Against a person, against a single event, perhaps against a whole life-style. And a pattern has been established, gradually gaining momentum… I hope you understand that we cannot help you. And I hope you understand why.’

She noticed that Dr Mason had stopped. He appeared to think he had said enough. Burned-out circuits… It reminded her of poor Barbara. In two years, the last two years, three hundred Wentworth, Paladine, Pargeter volumes, each fifty thousand words to page-proof stage in fifteen minutes, each first impression of ten thousand blocked and bound within four days, three million books, a hundred and fifty million Wentworth, Paladine, Pargeter words. Poor Barbara.