Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

I was taken to the medical clinic for treatment, but in other respects it wasn’t exactly the outcome I had planned. The injuries were much worse than I had intended. I had partial second-degree burns on the front and back of my torso as well as my upper arms.

What surprised me was that I seemed to be able to tune out the pain. I mentioned this to the nurse.

‘It’s a side-effect of the nerve damage,’ he said gently, as he tweezed out a piece of charred shirt from my skin.

But that wasn’t the case. I could feel the action of his tweezers and it certainly wasn’t pleasant, but I could disown it in a way that diminished its hold on me. I could make it not mine.

That evening, when I was left on my own to eat my supper, I took my fork and inserted its tines into the top of my right thigh. It hurt, but by the exercise of my will, or perhaps more accurately by an operation of my consciousness which involved withdrawing my identification from the right leg, I was able to discount the pain to the point where I could push the fork all the way in, up to the arch at the top of the prongs. It was the fear of infection and of puncturing a large blood vessel more than the pain itself which persuaded me to pull it out. It emerged from my thigh with a faint squelch.

I’ve always been a coward, physically — though not, I would hope, morally. Yet here I was, suffering objective physical agony, and finding myself untroubled by it. Something had altered in my relationship to my body. I found myself able to behave with a thrilling disregard for its well-being. This body wasn’t there to be cosseted and protected, but to be flung with abandon into every calamity, to be bounced like a rubber ball on concrete, hurled like a racing car around hairpin corners. What was it Leonora said when I pranged the Renault on our second worst holiday ever, in Salies-de-Béarn? Yes — nothing handles like a rental. And this disregard for my physical integrity held out the possibility of freedom. For all that I loved my old carcass, it wouldn’t have been up to what came next.

*

The drop from the clinic window was about twenty-five feet, but I cut off six of them by hanging from the sill before I let go. A change of clothes, a spongebag with fourteen pounds in loose change inside it, and a travel-card that I’d stolen from one of the nurses preceded me. I went out just after midnight and lost consciousness on impact. I had sprained my right ankle, fallen backwards and knocked myself out cold.

For a brief moment I dreamed of flying. I was pulling the trigger of a rifle and a white bird was dropping from a branch. I was the bullet. I was the bird falling. I swooped through space, past blurring starlight, and seemed to hear a strange, consoling music and soft human voices. I was on an armchair in Ron Harbottle’s study; a carriage clock ticked heavily in the silence; I was squeezing up a tiny climbing frame to rescue an infant Lucius from the top of a slide; I was breaking apart a dried fish with my fingers; I was on parade with shaven-headed conscripts; a woman I’d never seen before was admonishing me outside a metro station in Russian: ‘Tebya sglazili!’ Someone has laid a curse on you!

I woke to find that I had landed in a puddle. The icy water brought me round and the pain — my ankle, the burns, the ache at the back of my head — focused my consciousness. In the sky above me, the Plough and the Bear gleamed faintly through the light pollution. The air was, in that evocative phrase of Lermontov’s, as fresh and clean as the kiss of a child. After the stink of the DHU and the neon and antisepsis of the medical clinic, it was like being born anew.

The first police siren wasn’t audible for almost fifteen minutes, which suggests a blameworthy lack of vigilance on the part of whomever was monitoring the security cameras. No doubt they unpicked the footage fully later that morning. I like to think of White in attendance as they screened the pictures to the staff responsible and the police. The images would have shown a bundle coming out of the second-storey window of the clinic, followed a beat later by a long figure dropping and lying still for a moment. He gets slowly to his feet and hops awkwardly around to the delivery entrance at the rear of the unit. There he equips himself with a broom for a crutch, takes a loaf of white sliced bread from the pallet of deliveries to the kitchen, and disappears into the early morning darkness.

I would have gone off their screens at that point. I was changing out of my gown and using it to strap the ankle in order to move with more alacrity.

The Bethlem sits in large and pretty grounds. It was moved in the 1930s to a former estate. Each department is housed in a separate building. Between them lies an expanse of lawn, criss-crossed with roads and dotted with mature trees. I crouched in the tentlike shelter of a huge fir. It was heady with the stink of fox. I changed swiftly, jarring my sprained ankle as I pulled on the trousers. The wave of pain was remote, like a flash of lightning on the horizon. Someone called out as I hobbled off site; I didn’t know if they’d seen me or not.

I was under no illusions about the extent and minute accuracy of twenty-first-century surveillance. Footage taken from the camera onboard the 119 that I took from the end of Monks Orchard Road would have been corroborated by the usage record of the travelcard, and there were four or five other passengers on the night bus if they needed witnesses. But I was gambling that I was ten or fifteen minutes ahead of them, and that there was still one place where I could count on hiding.

Mitcham Common in the darkness was as remote and quiet as the Peak District. It was almost daylight by the time I got home and I was half afraid that I would run into the Mauritian milkman. There was a For Sale sign outside the house. The spare keys were in their plastic bag under the acanthus.

I lay down to sleep in the cupboard under the eaves, but before going to sleep, I couldn’t stop myself wandering round the house. The downstairs and the children’s rooms had been emptied. It looked bigger without the furniture. There were ghostly negatives on the walls where Lucius and Sarah’s posters had once hung. My study was largely untouched. There was still a hundred pounds in my copy of Borras and Christian’s Russian Syntax. I picked up my father’s Parker 45 and was shocked how small it seemed in my adapted hand. ‘My name is Nicky Slopen,’ I wrote on the back of an envelope in faltering ink.

*

Later that day, I was woken by muffled sounds and the ingratiating voice of an estate agent: ‘… plenty of storage space,’ he said, as he opened the door close to my feet. There was a flash of sunlight and he shut it again. I held my breath. ‘The couple who lived here have sadly split up.’ He made no mention of my murder. He didn’t want to trouble them with the gloomy association. The woman asked if it was in the catchment area of Lucius’s old school. And down they went. I waited for the clump of the front door before venturing out of the cupboard.

I wondered if the police would bring themselves to look for me here. It was in a sense the obvious place, but in another it presented a problem for Dr White. He had to disparage my claims that I was who I said I was. It would be politically difficult for him to admit that I might be in here.

As it turned out, they didn’t check the house for five days, by which time I had created a false back for the cupboard with sheets of plywood. I slept during the day and only emerged after nine to buy vacuum-packed food from the Tamil grocers, whom I trusted because their support for the Sri Lankan separatist movement made them constitutionally hostile to the police. I also brought home bags of ice for my ankle. I went in and out along the alleyway between the houses to avoid the neighbours.