Quicksand Page 2

  So too with Ferdie Silva, like Mirza an immigrant but unlike him of European extraction, born in British Guiana: a sallow, stolid man whose chief attribute was the unspectacular one of patience.

  -- I can't work up enthusiasm over someone's patience!

  Then: over what? Anything? Not today, not now. His brain had congealed before the prospect of accepting what Mirza said straight out, what he himself knew intellectually but dared not let seep into total awareness for fear it would overload his mind with pseudo-real visions of the consequences. Best to spin out uncertainty as long as possible.

  He felt poised in this instant of time, as an impossibly slow spinning top might poise before falling. He could almost sense the rotation of the earth, carrying him past the successive doorways leading to his alternate futures. It was within his power to move forward into whichever he wished, to go on putting up with things as they were or to make a clean break and any of half a dozen fresh starts, or to set in train events leading to a break being forced on him. He could picture with painful clarity the likely form that each of those futures would take. Only the act of choosing between them was beyond his present ability.

  Passive, he absorbed snatches of what was being said.

  "I think young Reynolds is on the mend. He got quite animated telling me about the right time to plant flowers this afternoon. I must find out if there's a patch of garden he can have."

  Groping, Paul attached the name to a person: a youth who had at first lied to his mother about going to work and spent his days riding about on buses, then progressed to refusing to get out of bed.

  -- To be cured with a plot of ground and a packet of seeds? God, how wonderful to find such an easy solution!

  "Watch out for Lieberman next time you're on duty. They found another key under his pillow this morning."

  -- Lieberman the master locksmith. See something locked, open it. Anything. When he tried the cages at Dudley Zoo they sent him here, and now . . .

  Paul jangled the heavy bunch of keys in the side pocket of his jacket.

  -- What's the difference between me and a jailer? No prizes for the first correct answer.

  "Paul, you're looking pale today. Anything the matter?"

  Natalie, eyes monstrous behind pebble-thick glasses, was regarding him.

  "I didn't get much sleep last night," Paul apologised hastily. "It was my duty. And that bloody cracked bell . . . !"

  "If you didn't live out in luxury you wouldn't notice it," Phil Kerans said. "Since the first week I was here I've simply learned to ignore it."

  "Can't ignore it now," Ferdie Silva put in, glancing at his watch. "Time to move along."

  There was a chinking of piled cups, a stubbing of cigarettes. It was just about sunset, and the wind had risen enough to moan in the mock battlements of the building.

  "I have an idea for augmenting our budget," Mirza said. "Let's rent this place to a horror film company. Dracula Meets the Headshrinkers would pack them in at the local flea-pits!"

  "We're packed in tightly enough here," Natalie said. "How near are we to capacity, Paul?"

  Paul started and thought back to the chart on the wall of his office. "We have a couple of discharges due for tomorrow," he said. "Which will leave . . . uh . . . eighteen bed-spaces empty."

  "It's a record," Kerans grunted. "I hope you're keeping quiet about it, or they'll send us twenty new admissions."

  The clock chimed. Natalie gave an exaggerated wince and looked for Paul to respond, which he did belatedly, and then she was gone. The rest of them moved in her wake.

  "How are you fixed for work this evening, Mirza?" Paul inquired as they emerged on the landing. "Time for a quick one before supper?"

  "I wish I could," Mirza answered. "I think you need company. But. "

  "It's not your duty tonight, is it?"

  "No, it's Natalie's, I think." Mirza gave a consciously mock-wicked grin. "I have a date, though, and it's too . . . ah . . . tentative to risk making her hang around."

  "Another new one?" Abruptly Paul found himself trying to imagine Mirza through a woman's eyes: tall, lean, his skin not much darker than a heavy sun-tan, his English far better than most Englishmen's, his features classically regular . . .

  -- God damn.

  "I've told you before," Mirza said, smiling. "It's prophylactic. I gather Holy Joe is winding up to a session on the mat because he doesn't approve of my goings-on -- what else could you expect, though, of someone named after the idiot who turned down Potiphar's wife? But if push comes to shove I shall tell him what I've told you: I'm insuring against a breach of ethics. Your poor repressed womenfolk nursing their desire to be raped by a nigger would be all over me, and I couldn't stand them off if I didn't . . . ah . . . make adequate provision elsewhere."

  The self-deprecating mockery left his tone abruptly.

  "Paul, this girl had a friend with her when I met her the other night -- rather a dish. But you wouldn't be interested, would you?"

  Paul shook his head and tried to swallow, finding his mouth was desert-dry.

  "A marriage like yours is no basis for a proper understanding of women," Mirza said, so clincally it was impossible to take offence. "Try looking at it from that point of view. It may be a consolation. . . . I'm sorry, Paul. Believe me, I really am very sorry indeed."

  He touched his friend lightly on the shoulder and was gone.

  *3*

  After the first pint of beer Paul thought about a second and went to the toilet while making up his mind. Tiredness leadened his limbs -- pressure of work had kept him in the office far later than the official quitting time -- but at least he had a more concrete reason for not going home yet than the mere prospect of a cold empty house and a meal out of cans: a sad drizzle of rain was muttering at the pub's windows.

  -- On the other hand, why stay in this dismal dump?

  In the hope of waking himself up a little he splashed his face with cold water. Wiping the wet away with the automatic roller-towel -- overdue for changing again, hanging fully out of its white enamel dispenser like a lax pale tongue from a dinosaur's mouth -- he stared at himself in the mirror.

  Not a remarkable person, this Paul Fidler. Rather a round face without great character, his eyes turned to echoing circles by puffy dark lower lids and exaggerated half-moon eyebrows. Dark brown hair above the face, crisp and rebellious; below, a decent medium-priced suit, white shirt, green tie. . . .

  -- To look at: a Kerans-type second-rater in the making?

  The trend of his thoughts alarmed him. He dropped the towel as if it had stung him and thrust his way back to the bar. He needed to take the pressure off. He ordered a Scotch and carried it to the corner table where he had been sitting before alone.

  -- I have this sense of waiting . But . . . what in hell for?

  The fact that the feeling was familiar didn't make it any more palatable. It had reverberated along his life-line in advance of almost every major event of his existence, pleasant or unpleasant, each pulse spawning in his imagination a horde of possible worlds: failing to win the scholarship he banked on, being ploughed in his medical course, losing Iris after becoming engaged to her against all his expectations, being turned down for this post as psychiatric registrar at Chent. Sometimes, between sleep and waking In the morning, those unrealised possibilities became so real be mistook them for memories and carried nightmare into the daytime.

  -- And during my breakdown, of course, they were real.

  He tossed back half the whisky to douse that idea. Somehow things had worked out for him in the end. So far.

  -- But this time, not. The next big event looks like being squalidly commonplace: the collapse of a marriage.

  He stared about him, vaguely searching for some jolting incongruity in his surroundings to provide temporary distraction, but the Needle in Haystack boasted nothing out of the ordinary except its peculiar name. The only reason he came here was because it stood handy to the hospital. Thirty years ago it must have been a
village local and might have been interesting; now the town of Blickham had linked itself to Yemble with a pseudo-pod of straggling postwar houses and the latter counted for a suburb rather than a village.

  The best the pub could do by way of a surprise was to show him a smart young executive type in a fleece-lined car-coat buying Nurse Davis another sherry. Nurse Davis was from Trinidad, a cocoa-coloured girl with immense dimples in her cheeks, and her escort's family would probably have a fit if they got to know.

  But this led him straight back to the proposition Mirza had made after the tea-break, and there, as when following so many other trains of thought today, he stopped at a blank wall.

  -- In principle, damn it, why object? I know practically for sure about Iris and that suave bastard Gellert. . . . But the desire isn't there. We are the hollow men. Tap my chest: I boom with empty echoes.

  The after-work clientele had dispersed to go home and eat and the ones who would stay until closing time had not yet begun to arrive. Only a few diehard regulars and himself remained. The staff were watching television; from Paul's corner the screen was a narrow white blur and the sound a mere irritating grumble. Nurse Davis and her companion left. A wake survived from their passage.

  -- Wake: a funeral ceremony. Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables. Should I have another? Lunch was ghastly and I didn't even eat the biscuits at teatime. The hell with it.

  Hiding her annoyance at missing the next two minutes of the TV programme, the landlord's wife pushed his glass up to the udder of the inverted whisky bottle and replaced it next to the soda syphon. He had expected her to take the money he'd laid down and say nothing, but she spoke after all.

  "Had a bad day, have you, Doctor? You look a bit peaky."

  "Hm? Oh . . . yes, I do feel rather tired."

  -- She must have all the hospital gossip, since so many of the staff drop in every day. Is there gossip about me too? What does it say?

  Almost, he asked her point-blank, but she was gone to the till with his jingling coins.

  Sitting down again at his table, he fumbled out cigarettes and was about to light one when the outside door slammed wide. Everyone froze. Everyone stared. The man in the doorway was an apparition.

  Hatless, his head was wrapped in a scarlet scarf of blood from a cut on his scalp. One eye was vastly swollen into a black bruise. Three scratches were crusting on his cheek. Mud fouled the legs of his trousers, his shoes, the hem of his damp fawn raincoat. He held his left arm cradled in his right, swaying at the threshold and seeming terrified that he might brush the jamb with the hurt limb.

  "Harry!" the landlord's wife said faintly, and her husband thrust up the bar-flap and strode toward the intruder.

  "My God, what happened to you? Been in an accident? Flo, get him some brandy!"

  Customers on their feet now included Paul, walking mechanically around this table, those chairs, to get where he was going.

  "Ambulance," the man said in a petulant high whine. "Oh Jesus, my arm."

  Shaking, the landlord guided him to a padded settle and made him sit down. He rapped at his wife for being slow with the brandy.

  "Harry, there's Dr Fidler," she countered, glass in hand but making no move to fill it.

  Paul was trying to make sense of the man's condition. A car smash? Presumably; perhaps he'd run off the road into a ditch and got muddy climbing out. . . .

  He found his voice and addressed the hurt man. "Yes, I'm a doctor. Let's have a look at you." And to the landlord, aside: "Get me a bowl of warm water and some disinfectant and anything you have in the way of dressings. Hurry!"

  The other customers had burst into excited chatter. Paul snapped at them to stand clear, eased the man into a lying position with his head on a cushion the landlord's wife gave him, and dropped on one knee.

  -- Funny. Those marks on the cheek: from nails? The way the grooves are arranged . . .

  But those were the most superficial injuries. He tugged the clean handkerchief from his breast pocket and lightly separated the hair beginning to clot with blood. The man flinched and started to draw rapid hissing breaths to distract himself from the pain. The cut looked worse than it was; he must have an X-ray, naturally, but probably there was no fracture. As to the black eye: one ordinary shiner, like the scalp more spectacular than dangerous.

  -- Which leaves that arm he's nursing.

  The landlord produced the bowl of water and announced that his wife had gone for plaster and cotton-wool. Paul leaned close to the hurt man.

  "Can you straighten that arm?"

  A headshake, breath gusting between clenched teeth.

  "Have you any other pain except your head, face and arm?"

  Another headshake. Good: the depth of his breathing certainly indicated he could hardly have injured his rib-cage.

  "Is the pain worse above or below the elbow?"

  With his right forefinger the man pointed towards his shoulder.

  -- So: presumably a fractured humerus. Just possibly a dislocated shoulder . . . ? No, the joint feels normal enough.

  Paul rose to his feet. "Get me some sharp scissors, please," he told the landlord. "Or a razor blade would do."

  "Here!" The injured man struggled to sit up. "What for?"

  "Lie still," Paul soothed. "I shall have to cut the sleeve away and look at that arm."

  "But this is my best suit, and I only bought the raincoat last Thursday!" Very pale from shock, the man nonetheless forced himself into a sitting position, so swiftly that Paul could not prevent him.

  "But you said your arm is too painful to straighten," Paul sighed. "And anyway if you try to get your coat off you're liable to grind the ends of the broken bone together, and that would be sheer agony."

  "It's broken, is it? You sure?"

  "I can't be completely sure till I get a proper look at it, but I think it must be."

  "But I only bought the coat last Thursday," the man protested again. His eyes, rolling, fell on the landlord's outstretched hand proffering a packet of razor blades, and he made a weak attempt to open his coat with his good arm before Paul could intervene.

  The fly of his trousers was undone, letting the white of underpants show through.

  Some of the bystanders giggled and exchanged nudges. Paul wanted to bark at whoever thought this was funny, but he was too busy steadying the hurt man, whom the pang from his arm had shaken severely.

  "I warned you," Paul said. "You can always buy another coat; arms are a bit harder to come by. I'll be as gentle as I can, but I'm afraid this is going to be painful whatever I do."

  Unwrapping the packet of blades the landlord gave him, he was struck by a thought. "You did phone for an ambulance, didn't you?" he demanded.

  The landlord blinked. "Well . . . no, actually I didn't."

  "Why on earth not? Look at the state the fellow's in!"

  "But I thought you could just take him across to your hospital," the landlord countered. "It's only a few yards along the road."

  "Hospital!" The hurt man reacted. "There's a hospital that close? Then why are you fooling around in here?"

  "I'm afraid it's no good to you," Paul answered. "You need proper surgical facilities. We'll have to move you to Blickham General."