Patrick White - The Vivisector

‘Miss Courtney says I’m to help you wash and dress.’ Though of indeterminate sex, the creature sounded determined enough.

If it had been Kathy’s gunpowdery arms. But warmth was of the past.

‘Washing and dressing? That’s the least of it!’ Somebody else’s cough came out of him. ‘The body can get a bit smelly, I suppose — in waiting. Yes, feet. Feet, Cuppaidge!’

The relieved buttercup of a lad went quickly out, down, to conspire — all always conspiring — with Rhoda.

What was it had made you ashamed? While he was gone, you dared look in the glass, saw the lip pulled down into a flap or stilled clapper anyway lopsided.

Looked away.

But this is what you have to do to ac cepe: a kind of delicious French toad stool, darling, which Maman is sure you’ll adore when you’re accustomed to it. Learn to use the withered arm. Dried mushrooms you soak in water, use the water, the mushroom itself has served its purpose: throw it away.

The Don brought in an old enamel basin could remember seeing somewhere rust-pitted in the yard rain spitting from long forgotten. He peeled the slippers off you the stiff socks.

‘Pongifaction might set in.’ This was a joke for the servitor. Who didn’t respondle. The Don was no Sancho. Hands seriously flowing through yellow soap. The dangling light from hair.

One foot was dead. Both all all were his vibrating pain dividing and multiplying. For ever, it seemed.

The lad knelt and flowed around the dead fungus as though life depended on him. Never had it with a boy. Could have been another funny joke the lolloping Lifebuoy appendicles and winking arsehole. Or: un délice gastronomique pour Maman. Non-poisonous toad stools.

Complain. ‘The good foot tickles, Don.’

A corner of the body left didn’t mean anything more than a tickle. The body wouldn’t renasce. Nor the mind. The spirit an only hope. It flickered a little above the warm soapulent water.

It didn’t flicker it stabbed him to watch his servitor’s curved backbone the hanging light of unconscious flossy hair. To recognize the vulnerable indestructibility of a fellow spirit.

Don Lethbridge wasn’t to be caught looking at the paintings but you could tell he was worming his way into them by odd means of perception.

‘Look!’ It was cruel, but unavoidable at some point. ‘Here is some filthy money to spur.’ Spurn? Forgot how it finished.

Out from under the pillow he fished the notes to dangle for the archangel-servitor. Who took it like some young neophyte prostitute disgusted-greedy.

They didn’t speak to each other much. Everything was implied and disguised. Their bodies came resentfully gratefully in contact. Their minds touched gingerly amazed. The disciple blushed amongst his down and pimples.

‘What are you aiming, Cuppaidge’—must learn to remember ends of sentences however painful the found object—‘to achieve — in paint? Your peculiar goal.’

The lily was spinning on her moorings she was so embarrassed.

At last Don Lethbridge grew reckless. ‘Well, I suppose I’m sort of trying to realize a feeling or a thought or emotion in pictorial terms sort of.’

‘You? Balls!’ He couldn’t make them round enough. ‘Don’t tell me!’ So shaken the vibrations must have burst through. ‘You! The first and only!’

Laughter and visible needles weren’t going to scuppaidge the Don. He was shining with his own vision. Which you recognized as the twin.

‘See you in the morning, sir. Give you a hand with the washing and dressing. And anything else.’

All the wrong subjects kept coming to the surface in your relationship with this sally willow.

‘All right, Don.’

‘Not if I drive you up the wall!’ Now it was the twin’s turn to laugh.

‘Please. I’m only going to try to remember — what I want you.’

Don Lethbridge took up the freckled basin which was beginning to dominate the room the way objects will. He carried it out. Didn’t even say good-bye. You don’t when almost all is implied.

Try to remember why you sent for this second gaoler. Not that anyone escapes ever. Not with the door wide open. Not very far.

‘Where are you going, Hurtle?’

‘Exercising.’

‘Oh, dear! I ought to be going with you.’

Supposing he dropped dead, stroked again, in Oxford Street, Rhoda’s conscience would never forgive her for her brother’s murder; on the other hand, she had looked after too many cats: she was too tired, though she no longer fed the neighbourhood.

‘Exercise is all very well, but don’t overdo it.’

Two or three times he had gone to the class organized for fellow victims. They had wanted him to bowl a hoop. Too many mirrors. Too many grunting cunts and elderbellied stockbrokers. His own grotesque contributions corresponded too clearly to their gyrations.

‘I won’t! I won’t! I insis! Snot my meteor.’

All his stars had shot unaccompanied on an often unexpected but well defined, fiery curve. He wasn’t for constellations, unless the constellation were was were fragments of his own daring.

‘I’ll recover — if you let me — in my own way. In the streets,’ he added.

That was dishonest. He didn’t believe it for a moment. Only that the streets were rivers of life. And to bathe in the waters of — could could.

So he advanced with the hopscotch shuffle and corner technique along the river banks grasping railings with his good hand whenever he failed to make home.

There was never any rest in this game he had begun, no it had been begun for him, his half-shrivelled body pursuing the course it had been started on, his mind more hesitant because too green and tender, shooting in all directions from old cutback wood, feeling for recognizable holds, and suspicious of its own growth. He was reduced to this. When he had always got there by jumping out into darkness flying flying then landing on what his presence made believable and solid. After the first spitting and gnashing of teeth, they had believed in what he showed them. Would show them again, too. Ready for the jump. If the spirit would only move in him. But the spirit plopped and slucked like hot lazy mud.

Oh God it was the colour of the sky he must try to remember. He hadn’t seen it before or since. ‘Extra indigo’ was the code word he had used while lying parcelled on the pavement. This same place.

In his vertigo he propped himself up on the shop window. What if it happened again of course it couldn’t most unlikely it was only emotion from being in the same place and remembering the code word for the colour.

She ran out all jiggle joggle still a sexy bloody woman wanting to air her feelings on him.

She began to speak out of flaking lips, addressing someone supposedly deaf or moronic: ‘Oh, Mr Duffield, I’m so very glad to see you’ve made such progress. You know me, don’t you? I’m Mrs Cutbush.’

She too was looking uneasily at the pavement. At the Place. Afraid it might happen again.

‘It’s wonderful to think!’ she harped.

The gull had by now almost devoured the starling in her hair. Must tear the guts out of that poor creep her husband.

‘Haven’t seen Miss Courtney. Is she, I hope, well? I expect she misses Miss Katherine Volkov.’ The gull seemed to swoop, squawk. ‘There’s no one in our little circle who doesn’t believe they have the only right to Kathy.’

This Mrs Cotbus, who had probably saved his life, wanted to destroy something even more important in him. Mustn’t let her smudge the indelible writing.

Lucky he had the window to lean on; instead of relying on conversation he read out an answer of sorts: ‘ Fonds d’artichauts, citrique, eau, sel. Laver avant cooking. artichoke bottoms.’ Tactless word in Cutbush circumstances; but she drove him to it.