The Web

Cats and X-rays

Three days in and he was bored out of his skull. Appropriate enough, he thought, as I’m surrounded by them. He didn’t just mean those on the necks of his colleagues; but the images of thousands of x-rays and cat scans in the filing room that he was now working in, a windowless department of a big city hospital.
Skulls, tibia, fibula, ulna, radius. He could picture little girls reciting the words in some playground skipping game: Skulls, tibia, fibula ulna, radius, phalanges, vertebra, patella. Tibia, from the word for flute because they used to use them to play on. That’s some good recycling, he thought, picturing now a couple of honeys tootling out a tune on his leg bones after his death. Maybe before, he mused, if, say, he was in a terrible accident and lost his lower legs, which were immediately rendered down and sent off to the flute factory. Could happen. He didn’t mind the bone; but the thought of pictures of soft tissues made him feel a bit off. The term, too, ‘soft tissues’, like there was something clean and hard about the bone stuff and something ineradicably gelatinous and disgusting about the other.
He was soon filing in his sleep. He asked his manager if he could claim overtime pay for this and she said ‘In your dreams,’ which was a bit predictable, he thought, before planning how to fill out the necessary paperwork while asleep.
He overheard the porters…naw, she’s a Rain Man. So no conversation for the porters like loquacious taxi drivers. What kind of way is that to talk about someone? Bleedin’ troglodytes, porters…only football could interest them…..small of stature and mainly tattooed, but that wasn’t fair, some were kind in their foul-mouthed manner, maybe less scary than smooth-talking and icily polite doctors.
Trying to find a file he thought that maybe they should have a photograph of the patient on the cover like the back cover of a novel. Herein is some of the work of a particular genius, but the novels would nearly all be horror stories, grand guignol, ‘orrible murders..
Passing the time when sorting files by making up bands…lots of James Browns…they don’t feel good.
Ghost shadows on smoky film. The underlit filing room seemed to take on the smoky dimness of the films as if they were leaking. The management didn’t want to spend money on new lights because they knew the whole place was soon to be history..
As he searched for one film or another he thought that, given the city’s ageing population, it is no surprise that many of the names are seen now as old-fashioned. Men seem nearly all James or John; women, Margaret, Jessie, Jeannie. One day the Jades and Ashleys, Deans and Waynes will conjure up the image of aged faces. Others stand out; a Scaramangas One man is named for the battle of Cambrai; or a summer idyll spent there, but no, he was born in 1918.
Names of colours black brown grey white green…no-one called purple or tope or beige. Mr Camel meet Mr. Teal. People called glass wood steel…how come steel and no brass or bronze? No iron? That statue of bronze that came to life…Talos…in the stacks. People as colours and things. A couple of people with the surname Hailstones!)
As he moves among the stacks he thinks of the myriad radio, television, cell phone waves passing through him and the stored images. Perhaps future technology will be able to pick up his image on those films, if any are still to be found.
The youngest girls talk of their nightly boozing. One asks him, during an argument with her friend over who looks the youngest; what age she is. He knows she is twenty-one but thinks she looks twenty-five, the drink already beginning to take its toll, but says fifteen to keep her happy, meanwhile thinking that she has the mind, not the face, of a fifteen- year- old. She says, one day, that she is looking forward to going home to a long bath. He tells her that, given her shape, a wide bath might be better. She just laughs because she knows there isn’t anything wrong with her shape.
At tea breaks, some go out to smoke, some to collect chairs and place them in a corridor with a view of the outside world. To be more exact, it is a view of the Victorian cemetery; the Necropolis, the city of the dead. He thinks that passers-by must think them all fixated with death, but they just want to see some sky. The horizon is heavy with mausoleums.
The swishing noise of the trolleys’ rubber wheels on corridor floors like water rasping past a boat’s prow…the stretched out passenger, often hollow- cheeked, oblivious, seeming closer to death than life, the trolley a boat, the corridor the Styx, the porter Charon. He went home and continued his reading of The Iliad.
He heard someone advise on how to book a patient for an MRI, Magnetic Resonance Imaging. They should ask the patient if he or she had ever worked with metals, usually it was men; men who’d worked in heavy engineering before most of it went west or more accurately, east, the shipyards and foundries, the works producing engines and ships and big stuff for the oil industry. If they’d ever had a bit of metal in the eye they couldn’t get the MRI because the fragment would heat up and blind them. And women were told not to wear make-up because it sometimes had traces of metal in it and it could fry the face aff ye missus.
As the autumn drew on the whole thing became more depressing. He only had one pair of boots and they squeaked horribly. He couldn’t walk down a corridor without people looking up, back, round. Patients waiting to be x-rayed or CT’d watched him pass to the accompaniment of cacophonous squeaks. Maybe, he thought it will take their mind of the procedure and what it might reveal, just for a few seconds. Squeak squeak; one year, squeak, squeak; six months, squeak, squeak; don’t even bother going home. It got to be too much and he changed to a seasonally inappropriate pair of rubber soled trainers. Now he could catch them all unawares.
He managed to keep a check on his boredom. The angry young man had long become an irritated ageing one. One day, though, it was just like old times. He managed to lose it with a woman over the source of the River Tay.
‘Near Balloch? I don’t think so. More likely Loch Tay, don’t you think?’
She knew she was wrong, turned to another worker and started to ask her wasn’t it irritating the way that this one always had to be right?
He couldn’t stand being discussed as if he wasn’t there. And also couldn’t stand people being wrong about the source of rivers. So he told her to shut it and not address him again, nor even mention his name to anyone, to do some work for a change and stop peering round her computer at him like some stupid fat owl. His voice and face went very tight, vision blurred and blood drained from his face. Why do some faces go red with rage and some white?
He didn’t want to rag-doll anyone. In fact, he wasn’t sure what the term meant. ‘It’s when you take the piss out of someone, give them a really hard time, like kicking around an empty track-suit’, he was told.
He rag-dolled the river woman when she wasn’t there. Made jokes that would long survive his presence and be quoted against her. The river woman wasn’t popular. Like when she claimed that she’d been sitting on a beach in Turkey and some young local lads had thought she looked like Princess Di. Like she had actually expected anyone to believe that! Balloch!
As the digitalisation progressed the file-room got ever quieter. The workers themselves seemed to become obsolete, analogue, as anomalous as a ticking clock on a spaceship Some were wiped, left and weren’t replaced.
He felt some regret for the film. He realised one day that they reminded him of the films he had printed from when he worked, years before, in a photographic lab., pictures he printed from large-format glass negatives donated by shipbuilders to the museum of ships…warships on sea-trials swiftly moving down the river dark and dangerous outlined against the snow-covered hills. Images of creaking ribs and plates long rusted to nothing. Others were of the rich interiors of ocean-going liners showing wood-panelled walls, fine carpets, and enormous hothouse plants all to make the ship seem a gentleman’s London club and not a frail ship on a savage sea.
On his last day it rained heavily. As he walked up the corridor which connected the old hospital with the new buildings and which was lined on either side by windows streaming with rain, he held his black, wet, unfurled folding umbrella to one side. He noticed that ahead of him were several people similarly carrying black, wet, unfurled folding umbrellas, a line of them, the short dark umbrellas loosely pendent and dripping onto the corridor floor. It was like a procession of warriors returning from battle, the severed heads of their enemies swinging from one hand.
　
　

The Mill at Gyre

Rock and Doris

　
I thought he was developing into a remote control addict, leaping compulsively from channel to channel. He denied it. Said it was art, a modern take on montage. He was a John Heartfield or Hannah Hoch of the disappeared, juxtaposing for mere seconds images that left only a fading flare on the mind’s eye. Nothing to be traded, dealt, gloated over by grasping heirs or predatory capitalists. I still thought he was turning into a remote control addict.
He once told me of a bus journey he had taken from Dublin to Belfast. The driver played the radio all the way. One DJ, well, he wasn’t a DJ because he didn’t play records and he wasn’t a shock-jock because he wasn’t a fool and anyway the term hadn’t been invented then; he was a chatterer, a bit of a comedian. Gerry something. Today he was asking listeners to call in with their stories of remote control addiction. One man told of the self-help group that he attended. They’d sit in a circle and pass around a remote control, learning how to pass it on, give it up without a struggle, and how they would substitute it at home for a pool-cue with which they would change channel, turned off channel-hopping through the sheer inconvenience of the thing. He got a bit tearful. The whole busload of people was killing themselves laughing. He wasn’t sure now if the whole thing wasn’t a joke by Gerry something. Probably. The next caller was a Blackrock woman terrified of spiders and one had turned up in her bath, could Gerry go round and remove it. Gerry was busy, but another woman phoned to say she lived in the same part of Dublin as woman number one and would go round and remove the spider, she not being afraid of them at all. Gerry said stay on the line and we’ll give you that address.
Anyway, back to remotes. The husband had told me that story and yet here he was, self-help groupless, stabbing at the zapper like a mad thing. Then I began to detect a pattern after all. Whenever anything about illness came on he couldn’t move fast enough to change the channel. Didn’t matter if it was to a home makeover programme, or, as they seem to want us to call them ‘show’, like in America, and a series is to be a ‘season’ like a string of hospital dramas are as momentous as spring.
Anyway, it could be that or hymns from unfeasibly full churches or even a party political broadcast, no matter, as long as it was a refuge from SARS or CJD (Human Variant), which sounds like an android. Even Parkinson rather than Parkinson’s, which amount to much the same thing in my book.
Then the newspaper. Usually he would read it right through, excepting the obviously too boring stuff: cars; travel, business; most sport; most lifestyle; gardens; ads; small ads; births and deaths. All right, so he missed out quite a lot, but he defended himself by saying that the car stuff was just advertising, even when criticising one car, it was only to promote another. Travel was all about white middle-class English people and their amusing mishaps, promoting the sacking of ‘undiscovered corners’ by rapacious readers, sandaled locusts. There’s an image. Grasshoppers in espadrilles. The business pages were just crime reports with the perpetrators getting away with it, usually, or actually rewarded, knighthoods for services to the fridge industry. Eat your heart out, Lancelot. The other ignored stuff was mainly padding, cul-de-sacs for has-beens and never-wases.
So it was front page, home news, international, letters, editorials, columns and the remaining sport. And the crossword. Then it changed. Now it was just the football results. Those and the crossword. No matter how long it took, he would study the clues; get angry they beat him.
Mercury’s hat, he told me, is called a ‘petasus’, worked it out with only a little help from his smaller classical dictionary. Then came ague. Obscure illness that has dropped five. Four letters. Ague. Easy enough, went unfilled. As did any other clues with poor health. Crossword abandoned. Keep Out notice.
I like crime novels but have never felt that interested in complication for its own sake. I can’t be bothered with following the plot where Poison X only works if the 13.20 from King’s Cross arrives at Little Deducing before Virgo is in conjunction with the MCC breaking for tea. I’m more into Chandler’s belief that when the story gets too complicated, have a man walk into the room with a gun.
My man walking into a room with a gun moment was when…hold on, let me backtrack a little (the gunman begins to open the door, hesitates, and retreats, closing the door gently). One day we were walking into town. It was very busy and people constantly had to dance/manoeuvre past one another; the hands extending to the side, shoulder and head movement denoting which way they intended to waltz onward. Often with that little polite, pursed-lip smile. But on one occasion, my husband did that other look; the one small men do when manoeuvring past much taller men, the sideways look-away, sudden interest in the far-off, ok you’re tall but I could nip in and give you a few in the bread-basket before you knew what hit you, ok Lofty? look.
Only it wasn’t that look. It was a get me out of here look. A something has appeared that I do not wish to be around look. The tall man had a jaw destroyed by cancer. The husband would have jumped aboard a passing bus full of ravenous tigers to get away. That was a big clue I suppose, but the moment when the hesitant gunman made it into the room was one morning when I had started at the sight of him.
‘What’s up?’
I pointed at his left eye. ‘Your eye looks all bloody. Like you’ve been scrapping in the street except there’s no bruising.’
He checked it in the mirror and said that if he got off to the doctor’s before nine, he’d be seen without an appointment. That night he returned with eye drops and an appointment at the eye department of the Royal; the Princess Alexandra Eye Pavilion.
‘Have you ever heard a dafter name? Pavilion! Princess Alexandra! It makes eye-doctoring sound like a sport. One for toffs. Russian toffs. Romanovs on horseback! No doubt ol’ Alex’ll be there, in the outpatients, swinging her eye-mallet… “out of the way, serfs. My eye!” ‘Course, it’s all down to some snivelling little bureaucrats, sook up to the establishment with a name like that and they confer some piddling little so-called honour that you can impress everybody at the golf club with.’
He didn’t seem bothered about the eye, apart from being self-conscious at having to wear sunglasses when it wasn’t that sunny, felt like a poser. It came to me that he wasn’t overly bothered about his own health. He was suffering from hypochondria all right, but it was a kind of hypochondria by proxy, a variation of the Munchausen thing. He began to worry if I had the slightest thing, a sniffle, sore throat, anything at all. How thoughtful, you think, but it didn’t feel that way. It felt more like I was a car newly bought and anxiously examined every five minutes by the owner for the tiniest mark, given the half-closed knife tour, slow and deliberate, is that a scratch? And he still turned the page or changed the channel if illness was the theme.
Can you beard a lion? That sounds like the phrase, but it sounds a bit silly and I’m sure that it’s not meant to. I cornered him one day in the kitchen. By the toaster.
‘Is there something you’re not telling me? Healthwise? Mine or yours, I’m not sure which. Whom. Who. Anyway, what’s going on? Are you sick? Am I?’
They don’t still do that, do they? Tell the spouse and not the, eh, other spouse? How can you leave a few exquisite watercolours behind, if you haven’t been warned in time to learn how to paint? In watercolour?
He just stuffed his mouth full of toast, mumbled something about me still being in dreamland and took his tea through to the front room, turned on the television news.
I shouted after him. ‘Is it your eye? If you need to get an eye-patch, you’ll look just like…’ I couldn’t think of anyone with an eye-patch at that moment. Except Nelson. And I was trying to think of someone less heroic. Or exciting, like a pirate. And maybe that would have hexed him. Ended up with him losing an arm or getting a wooden leg. From sustainable forest timber, hopefully.
One day I came home and he had managed to get it down on paper. Or at least tried to. I won’t quote him straight, that wouldn’t be right. It’s like books of people’s letters, you feel a bit strange reading them, like you’re hanging over the author’s shoulder as he writes, a ghostly presence, where he should be the ghost as he is the one who is dead, probably. Though I suppose there are plenty of writers who have every intention that their letters should be published as another proof of their genius. Even when they demand that their executor burns all their work, they have innocently chosen an executor who is pyrophobic. Not sure there is such a word, but you know what I mean.
Anyway he told me how his own ageing, likelihood of illness, possibility of catastrophe and certainty of death didn’t bother him unduly, he could handle it. How sometimes when he was about to fall asleep, he thought that he wouldn’t really mind if he never woke up. Each night he would dream the same dreams, as familiar as well-thumbed novels. What do you call a novel that no longer is?
What was far worse for him, to him, was the idea of me becoming ill, diseased, changing from one being to another in front of him even just through ageing, transformed from a graceful aspen in the breeze to a gnarled, lightning-struck old chestnut. That image is mine, not his. The cheek. How he would never be able to think of me other than as I ended up through calamity or just being alive for longer in the world. How he didn’t want his memory to rewrite how we were at first together, on holiday, walking down the street, in our first home. He couldn’t escape from the idea that what I was to be would backwardly transform what I had been, his memory would have him as a young man in love with whatever blighted specimen it was my fate to become. He didn’t say ‘blighted specimen’, that’s another of mine. It was a dread that was invading his mind like a malignant, no, the other word for a weed you can’t get rid of, pernicious, a pernicious weed with its roots threading throughout his idea of us, me, him and the space that was to be filled by our personal cataclysm, and there was no pill, book or doctor that would change the situation.
He’d left me.
Maybe it’s a bit like when Rock Hudson was dying. He didn’t want people to know about his disease because he said that that would then dominate how people would remember him, not through his films. And he was right. Like now. He wanted his movies to stay with people, not the reality. And this from someone, God bless him, with a very self-deprecatory opinion of himself as an actor, of his films. He wanted Rock and Doris to live on, Pillow Talk where the pillow stays white as the driven snow and as cold. All those films that they keep tying to remake but can’t because we’re all so much more cynical.
So my Rock wanted his Doris in a movie, ninety minutes of not getting old, or damaged, or dead. He didn’t get sick, he was a Rock that crumbled for fear that I would. Doris in decay, had her day, gone away. Except I’m not.
And, of course, I have the certain knowledge that I will live to one hundred and three, nary an ill day, never an unfortunate collision between me and the planet or the objects on it, not a hair shall be stirred from its place other than romantically on wild Atlantic shores. My mind will put razor blades to shame. Men seem to have that need, the escape route, the hidden track into the hills, the ship taking on hands for a great adventure. Most make do with voyaging the library shelves, but some think they can do better. It’s childish, but I didn’t make them, I don’t accept any blame. He has gone and the space left behind is wavering, becoming part of the everyday. It has been like throwing away an old copy of Peter Pan. Now I can do the crossword without having to undo all his solutions that aren’t, and quicker than he ever managed. Mercury’s hat and all.