Brian Aldiss - Somewhere East of Life

In the long antiseptic corridors, green LCDs winked, often accompanied by hums and growls. The entrails of a glacier received him.

Under cover of his ghostliness, he invaded Rosemary Kepepwe’s office. All there was neat and anonymous, conventional down to the stained coffee mug on the filing cabinet. On the desk beside a monitor screen stood a framed photograph of husband David. Shining black, he smiled into the camera, standing beside a large fish on a weighing-scale. Burnell recognized an Isle of Wight Sea-Fishing Trophy when he saw one. Another photograph showed two smiling boys in their early teens, with Barker standing meditatively beside them. He wondered about their lives. There was small ground on which to speculate. Dr Kepepwe was little more than an embodiment of kindness and a fast backhand.

Burnell’s steps were solitary on the antiseptic tiled stairs. No use to question who had lived, survived, faded away under pain-killers, within these walls. The quota of patients had been cleared out. He was almost alone.

The news was bad. The hospital awaited a new intake: dying and wounded from a fatal engagement in the Crimea. Military men from all the armies involved were being flown here for treatment. Together with the soldiers heading for the Radioactivity Unit would be sick scientists – scientists, Burnell had been told, who had flown out to Bulgaria to deal with a nuclear plant going critical, and had suffered high doses of radiation. The emergency militarization of the hospital was being carried out under a cloak of secrecy, as all Swindon knew.

Taking a service lift up to the roof, he reflected that at any day now the wards would be filled with men harpooned by their wounds, poised on the brink of final white-out. What of the dead Larry? Had something in his cannonball head been moved to imitate the wider carnage taking place across the Crimea, Georgia and elsewhere? Had poor Larry mistaken Bishops Linctus for Stavropol, and died believing in his own gallantry?

On the roof of the hospital stood air-conditioning plants, breathing out their stale breath. The grimy air of Swindon had painted them black. Burnell went to the parapet and looked over. In the darkness, evidence for the town was mainly electric; lines of street lights, glows from houses, beams of car headlights. By such tokens, the presence of humanity could be hypothesized.

A cat approached him, daintily balancing along the parapet. It came without fear, to manoeuvre under one of his arms. As soon as he stroked it, the cat began to purr. Burnell put a cheek against the neat little head and addressed it affectionately.

Overhead the stars shone, remotely promising something better than the brief rush of biological existence. Engines sounded somewhere below them. Three heavy transport planes passed over Swindon, heading from the West towards the eastern stars. Burnell kept an arm protectively round the cat in case it was scared.

When he returned to his ward, to his nest in the glacier, the cat followed. In clear light, the animal was seen to be a bundle of long black fur. From its forward extremity, like glowworms in a thicket, the odd eye or two winked out now and again. Burnell stroked its more accessible parts, and it spent that night on his bed. He slept badly, harassed by thoughts of Larry and his mother.

In a fit of loneliness in the small hours, he held the warm body of the cat to his chest, comforted by it. He consoled himself by telling himself that the days would pass.

And so they did. And they brought Stephanie to him.

By the time Stephanie arrived, Burnell was acclimatized to hospital routine. He exercised early in the morning before visiting the psychotherapist and underwent tests in the afternoon. In the evenings he read. To awaken and find the stray cat had gone was the least of Burnell’s worries. Yet the animal’s absence reinforced a sense of emptiness. The humble creature, unable to bear his company, he supposed, had disappeared into the warren of the building.

After much hesitation, he phoned his father in Norfolk. It was Laura, his stepmother, who answered the call.

‘Your father is somewhere in the garden, dear, talking to the gardener, showing him what’s what. He had to sack the last man. They’re so unreliable. The new man seems rather promising. He comes with wide experience, although he’s lame. I suppose that doesn’t matter. I’ve spoken to his wife.

‘The garden’s not at its best, though the iris bed looks splendid. Irises don’t mind the drought so much. We need rain badly.’

He listened to that precise theatrical voice. It conjured up the distant world of Diddisham Abbey, and the life lived by his father and Laura. When he had the chance, he explained to Laura what had happened to him.

‘Oh dear!’ she exclaimed. ‘What pickles people do get into. To have one’s memory stolen. Well, you’ll just have to try and get it back, dear. Do you want me to come over and visit you? I suppose I could do that. I suppose I should. You know your father isn’t able to come.’

‘That’s all right, Laura, thanks. I’ll manage.’

‘You do sound terribly depressed. I don’t wonder. Poor soul. Look, ring me again soon, is that a promise?’

The visits to Dr Rebecca Rosebottom were no more comforting. To maintain his morale, Burnell woke early and exercised in the empty gym for an hour. He showered, shaved, and breakfasted, to present himself in the Rosebottom clinic on the second floor at nine-thirty.

Burnell sat on one side of her cold hearth, Rosebottom on the other, in not particularly uncomfortable chairs.

Rebecca Rosebottom reeked of ancient wisdom and more recent things. She dressed, she mentioned in an aside, in astrological fashion. Old portions of embroidered curtain material were draped across her body in contradictory directions, presumably to indicate this in the ascendant and that in the descendant, and the other undecided over the bosom. She could have been in her fifties or sixties, her head being spare of flesh and of an apple-and-thyme jelly colour, above which rose a wreath of matted grey hair. Her disinclination for movement reinforced a mummified appearance.

She told Burnell on the second morning that she knew he was a Buddhist.

‘I don’t think so, Rebecca.’

She encouraged him to talk. Burnell had always regarded himself as a listener. His architectural pursuits had not been an encouragement to conversation. After his mother had died, he had never been able to get close to his father. He had thought his father always involved with international business affairs. Unexpectedly, he now found himself pouring out the troubles of those adolescent years: how his brother had been classified as schizophrenic, how his father had married again, how confused he was about the new wife.

‘You felt it was natural that you should feel antagonistic to Laura.’

He plunged into his complicated feeling for the beautiful actress his father had brought home unannounced. Laura was kind and amusing; yet to accept a replacement for his mother was disloyal. Then came his father’s accident in Rome, when he had broken his spine in a car crash and lost the use of both legs.

He had considered himself haunted by bad luck. He had tried to commit suicide. In some strange way, he felt an identification with Larry Foot, the killer of Bishops Linctus. He could only wonder if he had committed any crimes during the years for which memory was missing. He was sure Stephanie would know.

‘You’re dependent on her and what she says.’

‘How should I know?’

Through questioning, they established that it was an entire ten years which had been stolen. Rosebottom ventured the thought that the theft had taken place abroad, since EMV was strictly regulated in Britain.