Christine Brooke-Rose: The Brooke-Rose Omnibus

A conversation occurs.

A microscope might perhaps reveal animal ecstasy among the innumerable white globules in the circle of gruel, but only to the human mind behind the microscope. And besides, the fetching and the rigging up of a microscope, if one were available, would interrupt the globules. If, indeed, the gruel hadn’t been eaten by then, in which case a gastroscope would be more to the point. And a gastroscope at that juncture of the gruel’s journey would provoke nausea.

— Mrs. Mgulu looks quite ill, you know, but then she will complicate life for herself. She was expecting toys for the children this morning, and it was important they shouldn’t see them arrive, so they were sent out with the nanny and Mrs. Mgulu stayed home, so that delayed her, and by the time she got to town she was late for the hairdresser and he kept her waiting, though really, she doesn’t need it, her hair looks lovely and smooth, in the middle of all those preparations, and pheasants too, and seven servants away ill. Well, she was grateful to me, I can tell you, she even gave me a bonus. So I bought a tin of pineapple fingers. You never know when it may come in useful.

A rectangle of light ripples on the wooden table. The wrinkled wood inside the rectangle seems to be flowing into the wrinkled wood outside it, which looks darker. If the source of rippling light were not known to be an oblique ray of winter sun filtering through the top segment of the slightly swaying beads over the doorway, the wrinkled wood might be thought alive, as alive, at any rate, as the network of minute lines on the back of the wrist. But the minute lines on the back of the wrist do not flow as the wrinkled wood seems to flow. A microscope might perhaps reveal which is the more alive of the two.

The rectangle of light is only a refracted continuation of the oblong thrown on the red stone floor between the doorway and the table. The beads ripple the light of this oblong also, turning the red stone floor into a red river. Sometimes it is sufficient to envisage a change for the change to occur. The hanging beads are still, however, and the red river is only a stone floor.

— Take one or more tins of Frankfurt sausages allowing two per person gently split each sausage down the middle and insert one pineapple finger into each split simmer in pineapple juice for two to three minutes meanwhile open a tin of either spinach or garden peas and warm up but do not boil in thick bottomed saucepan serve the pineapple sausages piping hot on a bed of spinach or garden peas. That sounds very good. Would you like some more gruel?

The circle of gruel in the bowl is greyish white and pimply. It steams less, and appears quite flaccid. In the rectangle of rippling light a fly moves jerkily.

The squint is not so blue, or so wide, in the luminosity thrown by the oblong of moving light on the red stone floor and the rectangle of rippling light on the wooden table. It is good that the gruel was not brought but come to, arrived at. Sooner or later movement, which is necessary but not inevitable, will lead to attainment. Yet, frequently, the gruel is brought.

— Mrs. Ned’s tub was broken, you see, and I helped her mend it. So naturally I arrived too late this morning to catch Mrs. Jim. Mr. Marburg the butler said she waited as long as possible, but then she had to go or she’d get the worst of the market. Because of course she knew from yesterday that I would have a message for her to give to Mrs. Tom, but she didn’t know that Mrs. Ned would delay me with her tub. So then when she got back I hadn’t been able to give her the message. Well in the end it didn’t matter because Mr. Marburg the butler was most obliging and said he would contact Mrs. Tom and himself give her the message, but he charged me for the call, pocketing the money no doubt because I can’t see that Mrs. Mgulu would know one way or the other, but he said she keeps a careful check on such things.

Some of the gruel’s globules remain attached to the rounded white sides of the bowl, which looks like the inside of the moon. Nobody has ever photographed the inside of the moon. To see inside a bladder the instrument is called a cystoscope. The inside of a bladder is framed in pink.

Yet frequently, the gruel is brought. It has then been sufficient merely to imagine movement for the movement to occur. Or not, as the case might be.

The skin around the eyes, both the mobile eye and the fixed eye, is waxy. But the eyelids are the right colour. More so, at any rate, than usual, at least in the luminosity thrown by the oblong of moving light on the red stone floor.

— Yes, I am pale, but look at my eyelids, they are the right colour, for the time of year, I mean.

— So they are. It is a pity, of course, that the colour has gone out of fashion.

— Very witty. But you are talking to yourself. This dialogue does not necessarily occur.

The waxiness is due to a deficiency in the liver.

In the rectangle of rippling light on the wrinkled wood of the kitchen table there is no fly.

— Did you bring the Duodenica ? It said during or after meals, or was it before? What does it say?

The formula printed on the bottle marked Duodenica is Aluminium glycinate (dihydroxy aluminium aminoacetate) 850 mg. light magnesium carbonate B.P. 150 mg.

— I think you ought to take this, not me.

— Oh thank you, I was hoping you’d say that. Then you can have this heart extract, o point two grammes of heart extract, corresponding to o point eight o six grammes of fresh organs. Or this one. It’s for the bladder. Hexamethylene tetramine crystallised and chemically pure both preventive and curative diuretic it constitutes an active dissolvant of uric acid especially for all infections of bilious and urinary ducts colitis angiocholitis pyelitis pyelonephritis etcetera its antiseptic powers are reinforced by a minimal addition of potassium citrate to the hexamethylene tetramine. By the way did you go to the Labour Exchange this morning?

The waxiness could even be due to cancer.

The bedroom door is framed by the kitchen door. In the short passage, almost cubic in its brevity, the lavatory door to the left is certainly another possibility. To the right of the kitchen door, facing the lavatory door, the door to the front verandah room, where the lodgers live, is not a possibility. If the waxiness were due to cancer then the eyelids would not be the right colour, but of course the colour of the eyelids might have reflected the luminosity from the rectangle of rippling light. On the other hand, the luminosity thrown by the rectangle of light would also have affected the waxiness of the skin elsewhere around the eyes. A microscope might perhaps reveal, a teinoscope might perhaps reveal, from this position between the small high window and the mattress on the floor, through the cubic passage and the angular framework of the kitchen door, that the squint is less wide and less blue, less noticeable in the luminosity thrown by the oblong of moving light on the red stone floor. A telescope might perhaps reveal a planet off course, a satellite out of orbit.

The transverse bar of the window is dark and flaking with age. At eye-level it is empty of flies. The old wood has cracked considerably, as if the flies had caused much commotion in their wintry love-making. Flies do not make love, they have sexual intercourse. Only human beings make love. The transverse bar at eye-level is quite empty. The vertical bar is empty too, and the window-sill, and the window-panes, and the vertical wall around the window, and the other three walls, and the low cracked ceiling, all are empty of flies in their wintry occupation.

— Occupation?

— I am a builder.

Behind the trellis the bland black face looks patched like wet asphalt with curved oblongs and blobs of white light.