fussy gestures.
The new rays are intermittent and difficult to focus. When they come they are sometimes the stealthy gold or russet color of a large, reassuring animal; sometimes a wash of rose like a water-color sunset. (I warm to these particular rays and, despite the knowledge of the pain to follow, allow them to comfort me. I feel no time pass, I feel no physical sensation at all; I am laved, washed quite clean, and experience nothing.) But most of the time they are a blue-black color which fills the bare treatment shed with shadows and imparts to the teeth and spectacles of Dr. Alexandre and his assistant a kind of jetty gloss. They come with a desultory buzzing which you feel in the bones of your jaw; or a drumming noise which rises and falls, the sound of heels drumming briefly on an iron pipe, sometimes near, sometimes unbearably far away. It is the sound of loss, and the giving up of all dignity. Dr. Alexandre and his assistant put on their goggles and nod at one another.
It appears now that they are not even sure where the new rays are from. The discovery was accidental, and took place many years ago in some laboratory where it was ignored. Since he does not yet fully understand the nature of the rays, it’s entirely possible that Dr. Alexandre will kill me sooner than my disease. Standing there in my dressing gown, feeling sore and violated by the laxatives which are an important part of the treatment, I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at this idea; but when I tried to explain, the lame girl thought I was making a complaint and refused to translate. I was embarrassed.
At the hotel I sat in the bathroom trying to write a letter. Two cockroaches crawled from under the carpet and crawled back again. “Dear W.B., When I try to imagine you at home in our lovely house all I can remember is one yellow chair and the smell of Vinolia Soap.”
On treatment mornings I get up early and walk through the rainy streets by the river, or travel aimlessly here and there on the Underground, so I have some part of the day to remember unspoiled. We aren’t supposed to eat and drink for five hours before a treatment, but all my good intentions go by the board in warm damp cafes at Baker Street or Mornington Crescent. At that time of the morning no one speaks to you. All you have for company is the image of yourself in the steamy mirrors behind the counter, a woman younger than middle-aged, in a good coat, drinking another cup of coffee to stop herself fainting on the train.
Off a corridor at the back of the clinic there are two or three pleasant little waiting rooms. They are very modem and aseptic, with contract furniture, aluminum window frames, and a bed over which is stretched a white plastic sheet: but the walls are a cheerful yellow and you can switch on a little radio. You undress here. After a few minutes Dr. Alexandre’s assistant comes in and gives you a kind of bluish milk to drink, explaining that it will clear out your insides and at the same time coat them with a paste which will attract the rays. He goes out of the room and you begin to feel dizzy and nauseous almost immediately. Soon you have to choose between the sink or the little lavatory with its yellow paper on a roll. You can’t lock the door in case you faint. By the time he comes back with the wheelchair you are too tired to stand. He will put your clothes away and help you comb your hair and then wheel you out to the treatment shed.
The shed has a sour concrete floor sloping to a drain in the middle. It is cold and, unlike the waiting rooms, retains the smell of vomit, rubber, and Jeyes fluid. It occupies a muddy open space thirty yards behind the main building. This is for reasons of safety, claims Dr. Alexandre. I suspect he is afraid of accidentally curing passersby, but you cannot risk a joke like this with the crippled girl. “The doctor is so sorry for the present inconvenience to patients,” she translates earnestly. “He hopes they will not complain.” And she gives me a savage stare. In fact I quite like the shabby bit of garden which is the last thing you see before you go into the shed. A few lupins, gone desperately to seed, add something human to the clutter of duckboards thrown down hastily to prevent the wheelchairs and builders’ barrows from bogging down in the mud. There is often a fire burning here, as if a gardener or workman were about, but you never see him.
In the black and chaotic moment when the rays arrive, Dr. Alexandre and his assistant struggle into their loose yellowish rubber suits and round tinted goggles. Once they are covered from head to foot like this all their kindness seems to be replaced by panic. They grab you roughly: there is no turning back: up on the table you go, trembling as you help them fasten the straps. Before you can open your mouth they force into it the vile rubber wedge which stops you biting your tongue. The focusing machine has already begun to buzz and rattle faintly as it picks up the initial burst of rays. Soon the whole hut is vibrating. Dr. Alexandre stares at his watch: he wasn’t ready for this: there’s real panic behind those round blue lenses now. Hurry up, he urges you with gestures. Hurry up! You bruise your feet pushing them into the stirrups. A thick vibration like the taste of licorice creeps into your lungs and along your spine. The buzzing has invaded you. Black light splashes across the room. Here it comes, here it comes…
If you are getting your treatment free of charge, you have to agree to have it without an anesthetic. You mustn’t pass out.
Through the most abysmal vomits and discharges, when the rays seem to be laying down a thick coat of poison in every organ, you can still hear the urgent, earnest voice of the crippled girl. “Are you conscious? Can you raise your head? Are you aware that you have lost control of your bowels? We must know.” Into your field of vision, blackness spraying off his smooth goggled rubber head, bobs Dr. Alexandre’s assistant, anxious that nothing should escape the record. And into the exhausted calm after the blue-black shower has abated and all three of them have taken off their goggles, the uncertain foreign tones of Dr. Alexandre fall, and you must be awake to answer his questions.
Sometimes the rays don’t arrive at all. What bliss to be let off with a cup of tea in the reception room and told to go home again!
A fortnight after I got here it turned foggy, first a black fog, then a yellow one which filled the streets like gas; but I didn’t miss a treatment. One of the blue bodies got out and drifted about in the garden for a while before it was caught. There was such an expression of puzzlement on its face; as if it knew it had been in the garden before but could not remember when. After a while a man came out and pushed it back into the treatment shed, grumbling and flapping his arms.
The same day I fell asleep on the train on the way back to the hotel, and dreamed I was disembarking from a ship. When I went up on deck with my case and umbrella, a cold wind came off the land and blew my hair into my eyes. It was just before dawn, and the funnels of the ship were dark against a greenish sky like heavily worked oil paint. Down on the shadowy quay muffled figures waited for the passengers. Everybody except me knew where to go and what to do. I shuffled forward, trying to pretend that I knew too. The sun rose while the queue was still slowly leaving the ship. The land never seemed to get any brighter. When I woke up somebody had stolen my red gloves, which had been on the seat beside me.
W.B.’s letters, full of solicitude and domestic calm and ‘the dark woods lighted so mysteriously by the white boughs of the ash trees when I take my evening walk,’ drove me out into the fog, to the picture galleries and cafes. I couldn’t stay in the hotel on my own; they look at you so accusingly if you are ill and on your own. In a cafe nobody notices you at all. You can eat your piece of sponge cake, read your letter, and leave. “Seventy pence please.” “Fifty-two pence please.” And you go out with the simple vision of a human face turning away forever, into streets which seem to be populated with wounded soldiers—big, lost-looking boys whose surprised eyes stare past you at something which isn’t there.
“I’m feeling so much better,” I wrote untruthfully to W.B. The rays seemed to have settled in my bones like a deposit of poisonous metal, and I could hardly get out of bed the day after a treatment. “And I get on well with the other women.”
Actually we have no time for one another. Despite our diversity we are all very much alike—a desperate, frightened bunch, concentrating on the only important business we have left, which is survival. We exchange nods as we are hurried along the corridors by wheelchair, too self-involved to speak. In the common room—where without turning your head you can see a countess with ‘anaemia of the brain,’ the mistress of the discredited novelist, and three young prostitutes seeking a cure for some new venereal complaint—we sit like stones. Many of the others have been here for a year or more. If we have a social hierarchy, these old hands are the cream of it. They have their heads shaved once a month so that their hair doesn’t soak up the smell of the treatment shed. They ‘live in’ and look down on the out-patients, whom they call ‘weekend invalids.’ Through their stiff cropped stubble, which gives them as surprised a look as the wounded boys in the streets, I perceive the bony vulnerable plates of their skulls.
