Quicksand Page 17

  "Sorry," Paul said. "But thanks very much, Mirza. You've just given me a brilliant idea."

  *26*

  A tap came on the door of Paul's office. Without turning, he called an invitation to enter.

  The visitor was Mirza, carrying a bulky package which he dumped with a bang on the corner of the desk. "For you," he announced.

  "What?"

  "I saw it in the porter's room just now and offered to bring it up for you. Wish I hadn't. It's heavy." Mirza perched on the window-sill, both long legs at full stretch.

  "Very kind of you," Paul said. He laid down his pen, offered Mirza a cigarette from a packet on the desk, and absently lit one himself while scrutinising the parcel. His name was on the label all right, but the address originally written beneath was that of the hospital where he had worked before coming here; someone had scored it through and substituted Chent's.

  "No trouble," Mirza said. "As a matter of fact, I suddenly remembered a few minutes ago that I wanted to ask how your brilliant idea turned out."

  "Which idea?"

  "The one that hit you in the Needle the other night."

  "Oh!" Paul leaned back in his chair and gave a short laugh. "It didn't work too well in practice, I'm afraid."

  "Was it something to do with Urchin?"

  "Tell me something, Mirza: do you read minds, or do you simply listen at keyholes?"

  "I take it that's a way of complimenting me on my omniscience. But it's not a very clever guess. You've been thinking about practically nothing else for weeks."

  Paul tapped the first ash from his cigarette. "Yes, I'm afraid that's true . . . Well, if you really want to hear about it . . .?"

  "You said I gave you the idea. I'm naturally interested in the fate of my offspring."

  -- He could have chosen another metaphor than that.

  Paul hid his desire to wince. He said, "All it amounts to is this. Although Urchin now seems to understand and even speak English pretty fluently, she's been refusing to talk about herself. She may be genuinely unable to -- she may be amnesiac, in other words -- or she may be so scared of saying the wrong thing that she's afraid to, because being not only in a strange country but shut up among lunatics she has no guide to what's right and acceptable. I thought I'd try and put her in a more familiar context and get her mind running on wherever it is she comes from."

  "Sounds reasonable," Mirza opined. "How did you set about it?"

  "She made a tape for me when she first came here -- just a couple of minutes talking in her own language -- and the philology department at the university sent it back when they gave up trying to identify it. So I hid the recorder and switched the tape on without her noticing. It shook her so much I thought I was getting somewhere, but she realised what I'd done almost at once, and she was so angry at being tricked she clammed up worse than ever. Then I've tried to get her to draw scenes from the place she comes from, and sing me a song that she likes -- obviously the music she hears on the radio isn't the kind she's used to -- but I've drawn a blank so far. Still, not to worry; it's early days yet."

  Mirza stretched forward to drop ash into the wastebasket. " Nil carborundum -- that's the spirit. I wish you luck, anyhow. She seems like a nice person, and it would be a pity to have her stuck in Chent for the rest of her life. . . . By the way, aren't you going to open this?" he added, tapping the parcel.

  Paul gave him a suspicious glance. "It's not some sort of surprise package you've made up, is it?"

  "Cross my heart," Mirza grinned. "It's just my 'satiable curiosity, I'm afraid."

  "Oh, very well."

  Shrugging, Paul slashed the string and peeled back the outer wrapping of paper and corrugated board. Inside that was a wooden box.

  "No wonder it was heavy," Mirza commented.

  The lid of the box was tied, not nailed, and came away easily. Underneath, almost buried in a welter of wood-shavings and still more corrugated board, was a clock.

  -- What in the world . . .?

  He lifted it out. It stood a foot and a half high. The dial was set in a kind of pedestal of polished brown wood with brass pillars at each corner. That much was ordinary; the rest was a gigantic sick joke. For above the pedestal stood a shiny brass figure of Father Time, naked skull grinning under a draped hood, one bony hand clutching an hour-glass, the other a scythe. Removal of the clock from its packing had triggered off the last energy stored in its spring, and as he turned it upright the scythe began to wag back and forth in rhythm with its ticking.

  A line of fine writing was engraved across the base of the statuette: In the midst of life we are in death.

  "Why, that's fabulous!" Mirza exclaimed, darting forward to examine it more closely. "I wish I knew people who sent me presents like this."

  "You're welcome to it," Paul muttered. "I think it's hideous."

  "Oh, come now!" Mirza said. The scythe had stopped its wagging and he was touching it with a fingertip as though testing the sharpness of the blade. "Grotesque, yes, but rather splendid nonetheless. Who's it from?"

  "I have no idea."

  Mirza picked up the box and rummaged among the shavings." Maybe there's a note. Yes, here we are. And the key for it, too."

  He handed Paul a single sheet of pale pink notepaper, folded once. It bore a short message which he read with dismay.

  "When I spotted this it reminded me of you, and of the fact that I never did give you a token of my appreciation. I hope it reaches you safely. I did phone the hospital the other day but they wouldn't tell me where you were. Regards -- Maurice."

  -- Oh, no. Oh, no !

  "Goes for eight days, it says on the dial," Mirza reported with satisfaction, closing the glass of the clock after winding it. The scythe resumed its lunatic wagging.

  "Shut up," Paul said.

  Taken aback, Mirza hesitated. "I'm sorry," he said at length. "I thought it was a bit of a giggle. What's wrong?"

  Paul stabbed his cigarette into an ashtray. "It's from somebody I hoped never to hear of again -- a man called Maurice Dawkins. He was one of my first patients. Used to attend a group-therapy session I ran. Classic manic-depressive, prognosis . . . well . . . uncertain. He developed a fantastic transference and fixated on me so severely it became a bloody nuisance."

  "Queer?"

  "As the proverbial nutmeg. But with such a load of guilt about it he couldn't fall for anybody who might reciprocate -- only for people with whom there was no chance of them joining in."

  "Poor devil," Mirza said sincerely. "What happened eventually?"

  "I got him off my back the first couple of times, and he showed good response to treatment. We got his cycle flattened out, and in fact we heard nothing about him for over three months. Then there was some crisis in his business -- he's a partner in a firm of antique dealers -- and his fixation took charge again. The first sign we had of it was when he sent me a present out of the blue. Like this. Only the first time it was a mirror."

  He made a helpless gesture. "Then there were phone-calls, and then he camped out on my doorstep one evening and I found him when I got home from taking Iris to the theatre. We got him straightened out, same as before, and there was an interlude of calm, and then God damn if the same pattern didn't repeat."

  "What did he send you the second time?"

  "It's not bloody funny!" Paul rasped.

  "No. Sorry." Mirza looked down at his fingertips. "Are you expecting him to chase you all the way to Chent? Surely your old hospital would have more sense than to tell him where you've gone."

  Paul hesitated. "The trouble is," he said finally, "he knows some friends of Iris's. He could trace me if he wanted to."

  -- But that isn't all he knows. Damn the man. Damn him.

  "If you don't mind," he went on, "I'd better find out who's in charge of his case now and warn him." He reached for the phone.

  "It sounds like a bind," Mirza said sympathetically, and went out.

  Waiting for his call to London to go through, Paul lit another cig
arette with shaking fingers. The hideous clock mocked him with its grinning skull; he stared at it but did not see it. His mind was obsessed with one of the worst visions of impending disaster that had ever struck him.

  -- What in hell made me think that confessing my secret to Maurice was a good idea? Comfort, reassurance: "It could happen to anyone, it even happened to me." And the trouble I had to go to, keeping him away from Iris for fear he should let the truth slip. If she were to find out now . . . I can hear her telling me that the reason she won't have my children is because of their tainted heredity. It was a breakdown from overwork, not a psychosis, but she wouldn't want to be told the difference. I should have been honest five years ago. I've dug my own grave. . . . No. I haven't dug anyone a grave. You don't put aborted foetuses in graves. You just throw them away.

  He sat imagining this dreadful prospect for fully ten minutes after speaking to the former colleague who had taken over Maurice's case, until he realised with a shock that Urchin was due for her daily session shortly and he was in no state to cope with her. Guiltily, he did something which he had last been compelled to do when Iris left for her visit to the Parsonses and he was worried that she might stay away for good.

  He went down to the dispensary and stood for a while contemplating the tranquilliser shelf. The pharmacist was busy on his weekly stock-taking at the other end of the room. At length he settled for something comparatively innocuous: a few Librium capsules in their ugly green-and-black gelatine shells. Much practice during his breakdown had enabled him to swallow them without water, and he took one immediately.

  Waiting for the accompanying bubble of air to come back, he stared at the ranked boxes, jars and packets.

  -- A cupboardful of miracles, this! Powdered sleep, tablet sleep, liquid sleep; energy in pills, in vials, in disposable syringes; drugs to suppress hunger and stimulate appetite, to relieve pain and to cause convulsions . . . Will the day come when a descendant of mine stands in a dispensary and selects a tablet labelled Instant Sanity, adult schizoid female Caucasian 40-50 kilograms ? Christ, I hope not. Because --

  The anticipated burp arrived. Since he had momentarily forgotten that was why he was standing here, it erupted with maximum noise, and the pharmacist turned his head and grinned. Sheepishly Paul moved away.

  -- Because long before we get to the Instant Sanity pill dreadful things will have happened to us. Drugs to keep the masses happy, like opium in last-century China and the British hashish monopoly in India; drugs for political conformism ("AntiKommi for those left-wing twinges"), for sexual conformism ("Straighten up and fly right with Ortho-Hetero twice a day"), for petty criminals, for deviates, for anyone you don't like. Pills for bosses to give their workers, pills for wives to give their husbands . . .

  But that idea abruptly switched the fantasy from waking nightmare to a sore subject in real life, and he determinedly shut the matter to the back of his mind as he returned to his office.

  The clock, which Mirza had thoughtfully adjusted to the right time, showed that Urchin was due any moment. He snatched it up and dumped it on a shelf behind him, where he at least didn't have to look at it, though thanks to Mirza its gentle ticking would last a week or more now. As he sat down, an alarming idea occurred to him and he twisted to watch the minute-hand reach the half-hour mark.

  -- If it chimes as well, I think I shall throw it out of the window.

  But he was spared that; only the clock overhead in the tower sounded.

  And here was Urchin being delivered by Nurse Woodside, and he hadn't the vaguest idea what he was going to do today.

  When he had worked through the preliminary chat -- mainly answers to Urchin's inevitable questions about words she'd run across lately but couldn't fathom the meaning of -- he still had no fresh ideas, so he merely reviewed some of his earlier ones. She still would not connect herself with any country in the atlas bar Britain; she still would not draw a picture of any scene except familiar views of the hospital and its grounds; she still declined to sing him any song apart from mimicking the sounds of a current pop hit which she must have heard ad nauseam on the radio.

  Dispirited, Paul contemplated her, at a loss for any other inspiration.

  -- It's not that I haven't learned, a great deal about you, Urchin. I have a stack of paper nearly an inch thick listing what I know. Trouble is, what I've found out doesn't hang together. You refuse to eat or even touch meat, but how the hell do you reconcile adamant vegetarianism with breaking Faberdown's arm? I know pacifists who manage the reverse of that and preach non-violence over steak and potatoes, and it doesn't seem nearly so incongruous. And if you are amnesiac and can't, rather than won't, talk about your background, why hasn't it affected the rest of your mind? If your auditory memory is so good you can imitate the garbled sounds of a pop song practically as exactly as a tape-recorder, and your knowledge of English is already incredible, then . . .

  She was looking past him at the clock with an air of vague disquiet.

  -- Urchin, Urchin, what am I going to do about you? Look: either you're a sane foreigner, in which case it serves no purpose to pretend you don't know what I'm talking about, or else you've invented a fantasy life in a private world. And if that's the truth, with your intellect you damned well ought to have made a better job of it! You ought to welcome my willingness to string along with the gag; you should have ingenious answers ready for questions on any subject. Blazes, even Maurice used to do better than this when he was in his manic phase. He'd elaborate huge fantasies on the basis of what the real world offered, and be as eager to have other people join in the game as a child making a pirate ship from an upturned table.

  For a moment his eyes met hers. Uncomfortable, perhaps realising she had disappointed him, she could not face his gaze but looked past him again.

  -- So . . . what next? Association test? Inadequate vocabulary. No, I'm afraid it's a matter either of sheer patience or breaking down her resistance with drugs. And frankly I don't know where to start.

  He sat for a while longer in silence, reviewing the possibilities that modern chemotherapy offered, and concluded at last that he wasn't going to get anywhere today. Since there was other work to be done, he roused himself and stood up.

  She didn't react to his moving. Bewildered, he stared at her. Her eyes were open, glazed, and her mouth was a little open too.

  "Urchin?" he said idiotically.

  She said something in her own language, but no part of her body except her lips stirred. Alarmed, he stepped to her side and was about to touch her when a great light dawned. He followed the direction of her gaze, and saw that a bright gleam from the window was caught on the oscillating scythe of the clock, sliding back and forth like a metronome.

  It looked as though Maurice Dawkins had done him a favour after all.

  *27*

  "What do you think of hypnotism as a therapeutic technique?" Paul asked Alsop.

  "Underrated," the consultant answered promptly. He set aside the stand-up-and-yell list for the day, which he had been reading through prior to interviewing the first patient, and added, "Why?"

  "I've discovered that Urchin seems to be fantastically susceptible to it."

  "Have you indeed? How?"

  "By accident, to be honest," Paul admitted, and recounted the episode. Alsop gave an impressed nod.

  "You've got a valuable gift, young fellow."

  "I don't think I . . .?"

  "Did you never hear it said that what sets the genius apart from the plodder is the ability to see what happens and not what he expects to happen? You're quite right, of course; if she went under of her own accord in just a few minutes she's an absolutely extraordinary subject." He hesitated. "Do you think you'll be able to do it again?"