The Parasite Person (10 page)

On the other hand, this Ruth Ledbetter didn’t
look
like an unselfish person. The narrowed eyes, watching him, were shrewd and sharp; the small mouth had a greedy look about it, which Martin found obscurely reassuring. You just couldn’t imagine this girl doing good for its own sake, though of course good of a sort, for somebody—maybe for Martin Lockwood?—might easily emerge as a by-product of her activities. Thus might a famous surgeon cure people of their cancers, not in order to cure them of their cancers but in order to become a famous surgeon.

But who cares? Certainly not the lucky patients.

“I think we are going to make a good team, Ruth,” he said carefully, “I think we are going to understand one another. Now, come over here, and let me explain to you exactly what it is I am trying to do.”

“A
BIT SHORT
on plot, aren’t you?” she commented, slapping Section III down on top of the pile. “When’s something going to
happen
?” and then she listened attentively, just as if she hadn’t known she was talking rubbish, while he explained that this wasn’t a work of fiction, but a factual scientific study.

“You could have fooled me,” she remarked, and then: “I thought fact was supposed to be stranger than fiction? How come
your
facts aren’t? Where do you
find
such boring facts, anyway? D’you advertise, or something?—‘Boring Facts Wanted for Academic Do-Or-Die Sale. Outworn Ideas and Second-Hand Theories of All Kinds, for Sale or Exchange. Jargon, Platitudes, and Miscellaneous Gobbledygook for Fancy-That Stall …’”

“Look, Ruth, it’s all very well to laugh. You don’t seem to understand at all the way a research project like this has to be mounted. You see—”

“Sorry, Prof! I’m kinda fooling. Like, you drive me to it some way, did you know that? Thing is, I’m an academic really, just like you, and I can’t stand to see a good subject go to waste. Depression
is
a good subject. A
bloody
good subject. Real sick. But the way you handle it, it’s like the Bluebeard story if she hadn’t got around to unlocking the forbidden door. Just, he came home and said ‘There’s a good girl, I knew I could rely on you,’ and they’d sat down to supper and lived happily ever after.

“You see, Prof, I
know
about depression. Like, I was the one who unlocked the door and was there waiting when Bluebeard got home. I tell you, Prof—Oh,
shit
!”

The sound of the telephone startled Martin, too, but Ruth was
on her feet first, and rushing across the room. She snatched up the receiver, and a few seconds later laid it down, gently.

“A wrong number,” she reported off-handedly, coming back to her seat; and Martin didn’t argue. In a way, he wished everyone would handle telephone calls this way. It would add years to one’s life.

“Bluebeard?” he prompted her, as she settled back in the big chair, legs tucked beneath her. “You were talking about Bluebeard.” He didn’t want her to lose the thread just when it was beginning to get interesting. His mid-morning boredom had shrunk to a tiny dot, on the very edge of consciousness, and he wanted it to stay that way. “About opening the door into the closet,” he continued, “or the attic, or whatever the hell it was …?”

Irritatingly, Ruth shook her head.

“You should have listened to me last night,” she reminded him smugly; and though Martin felt damn sure that she hadn’t said anything about Bluebeard last night—it would have roused him, surely, if she’d used a bit of vocabulary that much off the beaten track?—he let it pass.

Besides, she was obviously dying to tell him. A moment later she was talking again.

“You poor sods with your degrees,” she said. “You’ve blinded yourselves with print so’s you can’t see
people
any more at all. Instead of faces, you just see long words sprouting above their collars. You talk to me about facts, but actually you aren’t seeing any facts at all, just print and typing paper and carbon. I’ll tell you something, Prof. The facts about depression
are
stranger than fiction. One hell of a lot stranger. If you looked, like I’ve looked, then you’d see what I see. And
then
you’d have a thesis to write, by God you would! Bluebeard wouldn’t be in it, nor Dracula either. Well, yes, perhaps Dracula. We’ll make an exception of Dracula, right? You’d see why if you’d listened to what I told you last night. About my mother. Remember what I said about my mother?”

Her mother … her mother. She
had
said something … but then they all said things about their mothers, the same things, over and over, how could he be expected to distinguish one mother from
another? Too protective … too indifferent. Too strict … too permissive. Too loving … too unloving. Too sluttish … too houseproud. By now, Martin had an actual picture in his mind of this composite creature, this amalgam of imcompatible qualities: a large, amorphous oblong, slow-moving and vaguely transparent, somewhat like a jelly-fish in texture, you could prod it into any shape you liked with the ball of your thumb.

“Your mother. Ah, yes,” he said. “She took away your
confidence
, wasn’t that it?” Surely he was on pretty safe ground here?

“No, she did not!” Ruth retorted sharply. “You’ve got it all wrong.
I
took away
her
confidence. And you know how I did it? I used to give her depressions. Like you might give someone an injection of paraldehyde. Right?”

Right. That it could hardly be. Wrong, surely, by any ordinary standards? Or maybe she was just pulling his leg? But right, no.

Still, he didn’t want to slap her down as she deserved, not yet, anyway. The bizarre interchange was really doing him good, he hadn’t felt as well as this in months. Maybe the human intellect
needs
a certain amount of nonsense, like roughage, to render the slabs of hard, established fact digestible?

Hoping for further mild shock-therapy, Martin played her along, as in a depth-interview.

“Your mother,” he repeated. “You used to give her
depressions
.” He kept his voice carefully non-judgemental, in the approved manner. “Now, why did you do that?”

“Why
?
To punish her, of course,” said Ruth. “I’d have thought that was obvious.”

“Ah. Yes. To punish her.” Martin paused, radiating non-surprise at the top of his bent. “Punish her for what?” He made the question sound casual, an afterthought.

“For
what?
For being my mother, of course!” Ruth snapped. “What more do you need?” and while Martin was thinking out a suitably non-judgemental answer to this one, Ruth forestalled him with a further question:

“Aren’t you going to ask me how I did it?” she demanded, in a slightly aggrieved voice, as if he had omitted some essential courtesy, like saying “Please”, or “Thank you”. ‘Go on, ask me
how I did it!” and without waiting for him to comply, she continued:

“The first time I did it, it was kind of an accident, like that bloke in history, or is it literature, who invented roast pork by burning a house down with a pig inside. That’s how it was for me the first time, but after a bit I found it didn’t have to be such a big deal. I found I’d kinda learned the knack; you do, you know, like with killing a chicken, you don’t need to use much force at all, just the right kind of flick of the wrist. I could put her in a depression just whenever I liked. She couldn’t make it out at first, what was happening, because I was being ever such a good daughter to her at that point; but after a while the penny dropped, and she got real scared of having me around. It got so she wouldn’t let me into the house; changed the locks, all that jazz, but it didn’t matter because by that time I’d found I could do it from a distance just as easily. Tele-damage, you might say. Like I’d got her wavelength kind of thing, I could tap her from anywhere….

“It’s a sort of faith-healing in reverse, you see. The laying-on of hands. At first, you actually do have to lay your hands on the person, that’s why she thought what a loving daughter I’d turned into, hugging and stroking her; but after a bit they get kind of sensitised to you, and you can do it to them even down the telephone.

“Look, Prof, do me a favour. Take that look off your face. Faith-healing’s
respectable
these days, hadn’t you noticed? It’s in the learned journals as well as on telly, the Russians are into it too, it’s a military thing over there, and so it’s got to be serious, right? Even the medicos are falling over themselves to believe in it. They have faith-healers on the wards of the big teaching hospitals like
mascots
, to prove how up-to-the-minute they are. Remember that comparative study reported in the British Medical News where they measured the rate of healing of fractures when …”

“Of course I remember,” snapped Martin, meaning not that he remembered (how should he?) but that he could well believe it, you could get away with anything these days provided only that you could somehow get in with the editors of the relevant journal. “But I don’t see,” he objected, “how this has got anything to do with my
survey? It’s
depression
I’m working on. Not fractures.”

“‘Not fractures’.” She mimicked his dismissive tone. “Nor hernias either. Nor detached retinas. Okay? It’s the
principle
of the thing I’m trying to explain to you, Prof. Like I was trying to explain it to you last night.”

She giggled. “It was ‘sleep-deprivation’ prevented you listening to me that time. And so what is it that’s preventing you now? Like, isn’t there
any
time in the twenty-four hours when you’re capable of giving your mind to
anything
?”

Wasn’t there? The question didn’t bear thinking about.

“Go on,” he said, grudgingly: and on, almost too fluently, she went.

And on, and on. She was loving it; and so, to his growing amazement was he. Lunch was forgotten, and though it was nearly four o’clock before she finally left, he found himself actually sorry to see her go.

This was a new experience to him. He couldn’t remember, ever before, having felt other than pleased—nay, delighted—to see a visitor go, even after an hour or so; and this had been five hours, at least.

Something cataclysmic had happened to him, the implications of which he was only now beginning, dimly, to comprehend.

*

And so it came about that when Helen arrived home an hour or so later, she found her lover not merely not in a coma or dead, as the staffroom speculations might have led one to suppose, but
pounding
away at the typewriter in such a trance of inspiration as she had never before witnessed, and had scarcely dared to hope for. She had heard the muted thunder of it while still coming up the stairs, but had not believed her ears. Entering the flat, and finding her wildest hopes confirmed, her first thought was to avoid
interrupting
him, and she had tiptoed reverently past the open sitting-room door, almost choked with relief and with joy that somehow, from somewhere, he had found the inspiration so long and so
desperately
sought.

What could she cook that might worthily celebrate this
miraculous
turn of events? All her weariness gone, her feet no longer
aching as they skimmed back and forth across the kitchen lino, Helen’s mind was in a turmoil of love, and pride, and special white-wine sauces, and she knew, as one sometimes does, that this was an evening she would remember for the rest of her days.

T
HE FIRST INKLING
Helen had that something other than
spontaneous
inspiration was at the back of Martin’s extraordinary transformation was when Beatrice phoned, early the next
morning
. Like most Other Women and the corresponding wives, Helen and Beatrice had started off with the tacit determination to cut one another dead on all occasions. This always looks, on the face of it, to be far the most dignified course, as well as the least painful all round: but in the event it nearly always turns out to be sadly impractical. Sooner or later the warring pair are forced into communication, if only to determine the whereabouts of the loved one’s thick pullover, or to attempt to shuffle off responsibility for housing his six-foot-high steel filing cabinet among the
knick-knacks
in the sitting-room. Mostly, this sort of thing can be debated over the telephone, icily, and with due regard to the current state of hostilities; but sooner or later the time comes when a face-to-face confrontation becomes unavoidable, and the two are compelled to meet. This first meeting is usually embarked on with the avowed intention of quarrelling; but all too easily this initial determination slides over almost imperceptibly into mutual
condolences
about the by-now evident shortcomings of their shared mate, and an uneasy kind of rapport can spring up which it is impossible to categorise. You can’t call it friendship when the participants are so evidently enemies, and when the only reason they have made contact at all is on account of the harm they are doing each other, and will continue to do.

Nevertheless, something
has
grown between them, in the teeth of all expectation—and indeed all intention—to the contrary, and a
point comes when both begin to realise, albeit below the level of consciousness, that they would be lost without each other. Their long-standing mutual hostility begins to seem like the one firm rock amid the turmoil of change that is breaking over both their heads. “At least she still hates me,” they can reassure themselves, “so I must be doing
something
right.”

Thus it was not altogether surprising that Beatrice, in her indignation and bewilderment that morning, should turn to Helen to confide in—to have a row with—something. Of course, for decency’s sake, she pretended that she was startled and
taken-aback
that it should be Helen and not Martin who picked up the phone: but what else, actually, could she have expected at this hour? She’d been married to Martin, after all, for fourteen years, 365 mornings per year, plus three extra for leap-years.

“That bloody girl!” she spluttered; and, “Speaking,” said Helen resignedly before she’d had time to think about it, and to realise that the remark, being in the third person, could not properly be referring to herself. “Sorry—I mean this is Helen. Did you want to speak to Martin? He’s still asleep, I’m afraid. He had rather a late night last night …”

It was true. The strange, demonic energy which had had him in its grip when Helen had arrived home, had lasted all evening, and far into the night. For hours he’d crouched over the typewriter, tense and purposeful as an athlete on the starting-line, bashing at the keys with two fingers like one possessed, pausing only
occasionally
to dash off a few notes, huge dramatic scrawls from a thick felt pen, slanting across the page like streaks of black lightning. Then back to the typing again, the noise of the keys racing against some invisible clock inside his head, until Helen herself began to feel breathless, as if she had been running up hill all evening long. At one point, she’d thought he wasn’t even going to stop for the specially prepared dinner, and was torn between disappointment that she’d gone to all that trouble for nothing, and joy that his inspiration should have so completely taken over. In the end, he had knocked off for long enough to eat the meal, though he brought his papers to table and scarcely spoke to her while he ate.

Helen was not affronted by this: it was wonderful. She could tell,
too, by the way he forked it into his mouth, that he was, on some level, enjoying the food. In its small way, it was contributing to the ecstasies of creation, and Helen was proud and happy that this should be so.

*

Midnight. One o’clock. Two o’clock. In the end she had gone to bed without him, and had fallen asleep to the ongoing sound of the typewriter pounding triumphantly through the small hours.

*

“Can I give him a message?” she said to Beatrice, settling the receiver in her left hand and reaching for pencil and paper with her right. “I’d rather not wake him if you don’t mind, because you see …”

“A message! Yes, you bloody
can
give him a message!” and Helen sat, pencil poised. “You can tell him, from me, that if he wants to make beastly disgusting unfair insinuations against me, he can bloody well make them himself, to my face, and not send that sneaky, two-faced lying little bitch to do his dirty work for him! I’ve had enough of her, tell him! That’s the
second
time! If she comes to the house again, tell him, she’ll get a jug of cold water in her face! I mean it! I’ve got it standing just inside the door, all ready …!”

Helen’s brain was spinning. “Look, Beatrice, I’m sorry; I’m sorry you’re upset, but I don’t know
what
you’re talking about.
What
girl …?”

“How do
I
know what girl? I don’t know anything about his girls any more, why should I, that’s
your
worry now, thank goodness, not mine! But when it comes to sending them round here, casting horrible aspersions, absolutely unjustified, not a word of truth in them …! ‘A Parasite Person’, that’s what she called me, if you please! A
Parasite
!
Me.
And it’s not even as if I
was
getting
the bloody alimony yet, it may be months, my solicitor says! A Parasite, indeed! How would
you
like it, a sly, foul-mouthed little bitch hardly out of her teens standing there in your own drawing-room calling you names like that?”

“Well, I wouldn’t,” said Helen reasonably. “I’d be very annoyed. I’d ask them what they meant by it—what it was all
about? Look, Beatrice, she must have said
something
… Didn’t you even find out her name …?”

“Oh, her
name
!
And what’s the use of
that,
I’d like to know, when I’d never heard of her in my life before? Ruth, she called herself. Ruth-bloody-Leadswinger or something of the sort, in case that leaves you any the wiser, it doesn’t me …!”

In Helen’s mind, everything suddenly clicked into place. The Ledbetter interview. Ruth Ledbetter, the girl Martin had
interviewed
in hospital after her suicide attempt. So
that’s
who it was who’d turned up so mysteriously in the middle of the night, and had seemed so mysteriously familiar. It was her style of speech that was familiar, not her person: all those slangy abbreviations and throwaway Americanisms that had been so wearisome to decipher and transcribe.

So she’d visited Beatrice, too, uninvited? What was she up to? What was going on?

“Look, Beatrice,” she was beginning; but suddenly the phone went dead. She had been cut off—or was it merely a fault on the line?

Hastily dialling the once-forbidden number—it still felt
peculiar
, and rather wicked, like steaming-open a letter—Helen rang back; but it was no use, she just got the engaged signal.

Perhaps Beatrice was ringing
her
back? Better give it a chance.

Perhaps Beatrice, too, was giving it a chance? They could go on like this for ever. Helen shrugged, noted that it was by now well past eight, and hurried into the kitchen. If Martin wasn’t going to wake up before she left—and it looked as if he wasn’t—then there was still a chance of getting to school nice and early, like yesterday. Also like yesterday—it now occurred to her—she’d have yet another amusing anecdote to tell.

The ex-wife’s irate phone-call. The identity of the mysterious midnight visitor. They’d love it.

Indeed they did love it: and of course none of them—least of all Helen—had any idea of just how much these snippets of light entertainment were going to cost, and to whom.