Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

The betrayal seemed vast and unconscionable. I could only think of Nicholas’s death, his broken body in the wheel arch. I seemed to hear the coroner’s voice in my head. I smashed my way through the glass, gashing my forehead and hands in the process. I howled at Leonora, my voice horribly changed. ‘Why is she here?’ I asked her. ‘Do you know what they have done to your husband?’ Blood dripped from my accusing finger. Candy’s painted mouth was frozen in a mute zero of disbelief. I told them who I was. The horror on Lucius’s face will live with me forever.

I fled and tried to hide in the communal gardens, but the police tracked me within half an hour by my bloodstains. The section was granted even before they found the CCTV footage of my vigils outside the house. I was in the DHU the following day.

Extracted from Dr Webster’s Journal

*

Cambridge. Strange to be here, but strangest of all to be going for this reason. Dismal cheap hotel. Embarrassed about my own behaviour. I tell myself that I’ll only need to go on this wild goose chase once. It’s a form of reality testing. There are only three possibilities: one, that Q’s is a severe and complex psychotic delusion which bears no relation to reality; two, that it’s a severe and complex psychotic delusion which bears some relation to reality; and three. Three is the one that I’m most worried about.

Am I insane to even be, even to be contemplating this? I don’t feel mad. As Q would say.

I realise I’m on ethical thin ice — it’s a mark of how much Q has got under my skin that I can hear him complaining about that metaphor. The issue around reading his diary. His testimony, he calls it. Maybe this foolish quest simply to assuage my guilt about violating his privacy?

So much militates against Q’s story. I’ve seen a photo of Dr Slopen and he’s physically quite distinctive: lean and tending to fair-haired. It just goes against common sense. So why am I here?

In Q’s earliest sessions he talked in more detail about the procedure he claimed to have undergone: I failed to make notes on it as I was following PW’s advice to pay attention to underlying affect. In any case, I suspect Q’s understanding of science sketchy at best.

Feel like I’m turning into that minicab driver with the smelly car. He looked like Gandalf: ‘Conspiracy theories. It’s an interesting area if you’re mentally stable.’

*

He’s much as I pictured him. Older, but still handsome. The hair a bit thinner than described but just enough of it to coax into a quiff. It helps that I’m a woman. He’s the kind of old-fashioned sexist who fusses over the girls and saves his academic crushes for the boys.

I arrive at three thirty and touchingly he’s laid out a proper tea for both of us: swiss roll, toast and honey, Tunnock’s caramel wafers. ‘So rare to get visitors. Life’s slowed down since I retired. Can it really be ten years?’ he says, sounding theatrically dizzy at the rate time is passing. I wonder out loud how he keeps track of his old students. That makes him terribly serious all of a sudden. ‘I remember every one of them, my dear.’ I understand that it’s important to him to have done his job well. What else is there? No Mrs Harbottle. No little ones to worry about.

‘And you say you’re a doctor, but the medical kind, Miss Webster?’

I nod. Say how much I enjoyed English A level, but after Dad died …

He sweeps the unpleasantness hastily aside. I remember that’s one of the reasons I did medicine. All this reading about love, death, insane passions, but when someone presents you with it in real life, you turn away. Hiding away in books, as though the answer’s in The Franklin’s Tale. He asks politely about my work. I tell him.

‘It’s Bedlam, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. The Bethlem Hospital. Now part of the Maudsley Trust. You’ll be glad to know conditions have improved.’

‘I should hope so.’ He stirs his tea and dislodges something from his dentures with his tongue. ‘Though you probably have more famous alumni than we do.’

I tell him I’m interested in an old student of his.

‘He’s not a … patient of yours?’

Of course not. That would be highly unprofessional. I say the name and he straight-bats it. ‘Very talented. I was so sad to hear that he’d died.’

‘Were you in touch?’

He shakes his head. ‘I can’t think when I saw him last. But it was many years ago. What’s your interest in him?’

‘I’ve got a patient who says he’s Nicholas Slopen reincarnated.’

I’m surprised how easily it comes out. It seems to amuse him.

‘The poor fellow must have done something heinous in a previous lifetime.’ He drops it like a bon mot but there’s also a genuine hint of bitterness towards his old protégé.

I’m aware that at this point I don’t much like Harbottle. All that posing as a national treasure. The obvious narcissism. The ingrained sense of entitlement. Quite possibly I’m chippy, reminded of those floppy-haired Oxbridge wazzocks I did my training with, who were always stealing bits off cadavers and throwing bread rolls in restaurants. But it’s liberating not to care what he thinks of me. It feels safe to be straight with him. He can’t fire me.

‘The thing is,’ I say it slowly, ‘I half believe he is.’

‘Believe he’s …?’

Something a bit panther-like about him as he lowers his head as though ready to spring on a flaw in my logic.

‘I don’t think he is. But I half believe it. Beliefs aren’t rational. They’re what we invest our emotions in.’

He looks doubtfully at me but says nothing. I remember my sixth-form English teacher ticking me off for using the word ‘empathy’ in an essay, as though it was an arcane bit of psychobabble.

‘He seems to know a lot about you,’ I say.

‘Possibly he’s an ex-student, or knew Nicholas? It’s possible to find out all sorts of things these days. The internet.’

He says ‘the internet’ like it’s a far-off place he’s never been, Timbuctoo perhaps, but from where I’m sitting I can see a wifi router half hidden behind four volumes of Gibbon.

‘What does he look like?’

‘He’s six foot, thickset, heavily tattooed.’

‘Doesn’t sound like a Downing man.’

I set my cup on its saucer and get the print-out from my shoulder-bag. ‘Would you mind if I read you something?’

He makes a flourish with his hand.

I begin: ‘Ronald Harbottle was then fifty-three …’

He’s much more comfortable with this. This is caressing his ego. And he relates more easily to me now that he can pretend I’m one of his students. He gets a thoughtful look in his eyes, turns his head into the air at an odd angle, fingers his chin, smiles at the familiarity of it. ‘Pencilled annotations of the master’ makes him close his eyes like a cat getting its back scratched.

I feel oddly nervous as I begin the section about Matilda Swann but I push through. His smile becomes more fixed. I read more quickly and find I’ve gone further than I intended. At the end, the words ‘usurped by an old man’s vanity’ hang uncomfortably in the room like a fart neither of us will own up to.

Harbottle sips his tea. ‘He was a bloodless little shit,’ he says with surprising mildness.

The clock on the mantelpiece begins the Westminster half-hour chimes. He gets up and stifles it in annoyance. ‘But it’s accurate as far as I remember. That’s not what you want to hear, is it?’

I shake my head. ‘It’s not really good for anyone if this man is telling the truth.’

‘Well, rest assured, my dear, he isn’t. We may no longer be creatures in a Newtonian universe, but there’s still gravity and, I don’t know, the Laws of Motion to be obeyed. Just because there’s an area of uncertainty about the nature of reality, that doesn’t mean all bets are off.’