Quicksand Read online

  "I'm pretty certain I can. I don't know much about hypnotism, but while I was at university one of my lecturers gave us a demonstration when some of the students asked about it. I remembered that you can make it easier next time if you give posthypnotic instructions, so before waking Urchin up I told her over and over, for about five minutes on end, that next time she was in my office watching that clock she would go into trance."

  "Quick-witted of you," Alsop approved. "Well, now you know, what do you propose to do about it?"

  "That was what I was just about to ask your advice on."

  "I wish I could decide whether that's proper professional diffidence or sheer cowardice. . . . Hypnosis is a dodgy business at best, though I think it's needlessly neglected, so you'd better start by reading a couple of decent texts on it. Then, presumably, you'll want to try and open her up a bit. Get her talking about her background, which according to your notes she's refusing to do."

  "Where I did think it might be useful," Paul ventured, "was in trying to settle once and for all whether she's honestly learning English or just relearning it."

  "Let me think about that for a moment" Alsop drew a cigar from his breast pocket and rolled it between his fingers, pondering. "Yes . . . yes, that's definitely important. Have you run any association tests on her yet?"

  "No, of course not."

  "Might be a good idea, before her English is admittedly perfect. Inconsistencies might show up, when she denies understanding some emotively charged words although it's clear from her reactions that she did. Chuck a few extra words into a standard list -- things you suspect she may be shying away from. Time her responses and plot them up on a graph in the usual way, except that instead of looking for clues to repressed material you'll be looking for a decision to pretend she doesn't understand. If she's faking, there's bound to be a random pattern of long pauses."

  Paul nodded. "Thank you. But do you mean me to do this while she's hypnotised, or while she's in the normal state?"

  "Good gracious, young fellow, she's your patient!" Alsop said sharply. "But why not try it both ways and compare the results?"

  Somewhat to Paul's dismay, when he followed up Alsop's suggestion that he read some texts on hypnosis, he found there were only two volumes on the subject in the hospital library, and one of those was a paperback for the curious layman. None of his colleagues, moreover, had taken more than a passing interest in hypnosis, so he had to make the best of what there was.

  The university lecturer who had demonstrated the technique for his curious students had claimed, approximately, that it was so easy it would have been universally adopted if it had been more than intermittently useful. He was right about that; Paul was almost alarmed to find how simple the known methods were.

  Satisfied that he had extracted the key material from both books, he diffidently tested it on Urchin at her next interview. She knew perfectly well what he was trying to do the moment he started the induction, and jumped to her feet, looking wildly about her as though intending to run away.

  Abruptly her manner changed. She let her tense arms fall limp to her sides, hesitated, then slumped back into her seat with an expression of total resignation. Paul, watching warily from his own chair, interpreted the actions into words.

  -- What the hell?

  Once she had made the decision not to resist, she went into trance within minutes, and he began to scrape away at the barrier of secrecy she had erected around herself.

  Progress was encouraging, if fitful. At first she tended to answer absent-mindedly in her own language, but repeated reminders that he didn't speak it gradually eased her into English. Sometimes she laughed for no apparent reason, and once she burst into such violent tears that he had to cut the session short and give her a tranquilliser from the stock in his desk.

  That, and the hope of resolving Urchin's case, were the only two props sustaining him at the moment. The days were leaking away, and he still had not plucked up the courage to tackle Iris about her pregnancy. It was beyond question now, yet the words for an open challenge eluded him. Tranquillisčrs muted the problem to the point where he could cope with his work, and Urchin's step-by-step yielding of answers to his questions convinced him that the work was worth doing.

  But what he really wanted was a miracle.

  He could see in her eyes the minute back-and-forth tremor that matched the rhythm of the scythe; thinking of all the tranquillisers he had swallowed in the past few days, he wondered what would happen if he increased his own susceptibility and wound up hypnotising himself.

  -- Here comes a candle to light you to bed, here comes a chopper to open your head and show me what's inside. . . .

  Though his every nerve screamed with impatience, he put off the most direct questions until he had methodically completed word-association tests as Alsop had advised, and satisfied himself that the pattern of random hesitations which emerged could equally well be explained by pretended ignorance or genuine ignorance.

  -- Bloody waste of time. Still, I suppose it had to be done.

  At last, however, he felt she was sufficiently cooperative to make a frontal attack worthwhile. He began the crucial session with a recapitulation of some previous material, for he had early fallen into a trap through excessive eagerness. Inquiring obliquely about her background, he had sketched in a sort of verbal impression of a horrible childhood, in some sort of vast institution with guards like jailers, as a result of which she regarded the whole world as a prison and its people as being divided into warders and inmates.

  Perhaps because he so often felt walled in by the bowl of hills in which Chent stood, Paul had been on the point of accepting that this material connected to an orphanage, which to a child might serve as model for the world, when he suddenly realised she was talking about this hospital. He had avoided by the skin of his teeth the classic Freudian error of projecting his own anxieties into the admissions of a patient.

  Accordingly, he preceded the day's main task with some general questions.

  "Urchin! Do you know who's talking to you?"

  "Doctor Paul."

  "That's right, Urchin. Listen carefully to what I say. Who are you?"

  "Arrzheen." A pause; then a burst of her own language. That had happened the last time he asked the same thing.

  "Talk to me in English, Urchin. Talk in my language."

  "Yes, I will."

  "Do you know where you are, Urchin?"

  "In Doctor Paul's office."

  "Yes, but what is the place where we both are, the place where you live and I work? What do people call it?"

  "Many names. Chent. Chent Hospital. The crazy house, the madhouse, the nut-house, the looney bin, the asylum, the old people's home, the stitchatution!"

  -- She's obviously been collecting all the descriptions she can find. Old Mrs Webber never could pronounce "institution" properly!

  "What sort of place is Chent, Urchin?"

  "Where they put crazy people to get them out of the way." She was grasping the arms of her chair hard enough to whiten her knuckles, but although this was a loaded subject her voice was steady.

  "Are all the people here crazy?"

  "Not you, not Dr Bakshad, not Sister Wells, not Nurse Kirk."

  -- Has she got the distinction, or . . .?

  Paul cogitated. "How about . . . let's see . . . Nurse Woodside?"

  "She's a little crazy."

  He was inclined to be amused at that; you could make out an excellent case for Urchin being right. He took a deep breath and advanced the interrogation another key step.

  "Why are you here, Urchin?"

  "Because you -- No, you're not sure. Because somebody believes I'm crazy too."

  -- Interesting!

  "Why do they think that, Urchin?"

  "Because I have to learn English. Because I don't know about many things, this kind of clothes, knife-and-forks, tell the time with clocks like that." She pointed past him at the statuette of Time, and the gesture turned int
o a groping motion as though she was trying to pick words out of the air. "Everything is so different!"

  The last word peaked on a cry of despair. He waited for her to calm down; then he set about putting the remark into context.

  "Where's your home, Urchin?"

  She looked momentarily blank. "Here!"

  -- Funny. Wouldn't think "home" was a difficult concept. The patients talk all the time about the homes they've left, or hope to go back to. . . .

  "Where did you live before you came here?"

  A hesitation. "Not . . . not far away."

  "What did you call your home?"

  That produced an incomprehensible sound, apparently a word of her own language. Paul sighed and made one last attempt.

  "The first time I saw you, in the woods: where had you come from then?"

  "There!"

  Paul made a resigned note consisting in the single word Topsy .

  -- I'spect I just growed!

  "What do you find so different, Urchin?" he pursued.

  "People are different -- look different, dress different. Different-ly. The way they talk the way they do things. Everything everything."

  "And you're here because you find everything is different."

  "No!" She jerked upright as though annoyed at his lack of perception. Is because -- it's because -- it's because you think me different."

  Paul cocked an eyebrow. This was a nutshell analysis of the status of the insane implying considerable insight on Urchin's part. Before he could frame his next question, however, she burst out in a way that suggested weeks of pent-up frustration about to let go.

  "I was so frightened you would think me crazy because I don't know all that!"

  "But you said I didn't think you were crazy," he murmured.

  "Not!"

  'Then why should 'somebody' think you are?"

  "Because I can't explain what I am."

  Paul hardly dared draw the breath to utter the next question; he sensed he was on the verge of a breakthrough. "What are you, then?"

  "I -- " An enormous painful swallow; her whole body was racked with conflicting tensions. "I can't tell you," she said finally.

  "Why not?"

  "They made me not to tell."

  "Who are they ?"

  Another phrase in her own language. A repetition produced no clearer answer. He tried an oblique approach.

  "Are 'they' telling you not to talk to me now?" he suggested, thinking of paranoiac voices.

  "No. They told me not to."

  "Long ago?"

  "Yes . . . no . . . long for me, long ago for me."

  "Can they reach you here at Chent? Can they talk to you now, or can you talk to them?"

  "No." The word quavered between pale lips, and she linked her fingers and worked them nervously back and forth.

  "Then if they can't reach you, they can't hurt you, can they? So you can answer my question."

  Silence. Inwardly seething, Paul preserved an expression of calm while he cast about for yet another argument.

  -- So near and yet . . . In the woods where I first found her: talks as if she sprang from the ground! What was it she said to me then? I can bear it in memory, I think. Ti -something?

  Aloud, he said on the spur of the moment, "Urchin, what does tirake-no mean?"

  Faintly she answered, "Like you would say, 'how do you do?' Except it means -- it means exactly 'who are you?'"

  Paul jolted upright. "Is that what you say when you meet somebody, where you come from? Instead of 'hello?'"

  "Yes, when you meet somebody, ask who you are."

  "Arrzheen! Tiriak-no? Tell me! Tell me in English -- tiriak- no?"

  "Visitor," Urchin said. No voice carried the word, only a hiss of breath. "Person from other. . ."

  "Other . . . what?"

  "Other time!"

  Paul was shaking so much he could hardly hold his pen; his clothes were clammy with tension-induced sweat. But by force of will he overcame the excitement of his triumph and inscribed on his memo pad his final note for the day.

  And in a fit-of uncontrollable exuberance he added to it six exclamation marks.

  *28*

  For once the visions that his imagination conjured up to distract him from his work for the rest of the afternoon were not of disaster but of impending achievement. He wanted to share his good news with somebody, but there was no one available: Alsop could not be reached, Natalie had gone to Birmingham again with Roshman, and Mirza was away at an interview for another post he'd applied for.

  This last, which Paul hadn't heard about, brought him back to earth with a jolt.

  -- The so-and-so! He never told me he was thinking of moving on. Chent without Mirza would be intolerable. But I can hardly wish a good friend bad luck, can I?

  Short of Holinshed, that meant Iris would be the first person he could tell about his breakthrough. At first the idea was unattractive; bit by bit, though, he began to warm to it.

  -- She won't understand the full implications, of course, but I can make it clear enough to impress her, and . . . Yes, I can suggest going out to dinner to celebrate (I think I have enough cash in my pocket) and talk about how much it'll mean to my career to publish an account of Urchin's case and then I can work the conversation around from professional advancement to the subject of starting our family!

  It all seemed so straightforward in the heat of the moment that he hummed a cheerful tune as he rushed through the rest of the work awaiting him. Counterpointing the thoughts in the forefront of his mind, phrases and sentences occurred to him which would be useful in the paper he was now definitely going to prepare.

  -- The influence of changing environment on the content of the dreams and waking fantasies of psychiatric patients has become a subject of great concern in recent years. Since the archetypal symbol of charging horses was first found to have been supplanted by the image of a thundering steam locomotive . . .

  -- Fear of spiritual failure, particularly the compensatory phenomenon which induced weak personalities to conclude that if they could have no other claim to notoriety they might at least be selected by God for exceptionally harsh punishment, has been dethroned as the primary constituent of mental disorder by elements related to sexuality. However . . .

  -- The following remarkable case involving systematised delusions of otherworldly origins elaborated by a patient of outstanding intellect, whom we shall refer to as "U," suggests that elements derived from still other features of our changing society may well enter into our . . .

  He was half minded to set about drafting a preamble there and then, and got as far as rolling a sheet of paper into his typewriter before realising that for all he knew the fragmentary admission he had secured today from Urchin might be strenuously denied tomorrow. He shrugged and got to his feet. A better way of using his time would be to tackle Iris while he still had his excitement to buoy him up.