The Parasite Person (11 page)

“T
HE RÔLE OF
the Parasite Person in the Aetiology of Endogenous Depression” was his provisional title. It had come to him during yesterday’s unprecedented bout of galloping creation, and this morning, to his intense relief, it still looked good.

This was not always the case, as he well remembered. Even in the old days, when his creative powers had seemed to be at their zenith, even then an idea that had seemed to be of world-shaking brilliance and originality in the small-hours would sometimes dwindle, under the harsh morning light, into a mere jumble of pretentious platitudes, leading nowhere. Remembering this, he had woken this morning in a sweat of terror lest just this should have happened now; that all those pages of typescript reeled off in the white-heat of inspiration, all evening and half the night, should prove to be just one more sleep-crazed delusion, destined, by daylight, for the dustbin. So great had been this fear that he had lain for more than an hour, eyes closed, imagining himself still asleep, imagining himself still dreaming, imagining himself
suddenly
dead of a heart-attack—
anything
to put off the moment of intolerable disillusionment which lurked—Did it? Didn’t it?—among that uncorrected, unexamined mound of typescript on his desk.

He had heard the alarm clock go all right; had felt the soft creaking of Helen getting out of bed, trying not to wake him; had been aware of her soft, considerate drifts of movement around the flat as she got herself ready for work; and finally—what he’d been waiting for all along—he heard at last the careful closing of the front door that meant she had really gone.

And only now, alone with his destiny, did he feel he had it in him to leave his bed and set off on the awful voyage of discovery into the sitting-room.

*

It was all right! It was
all
right
!
The briefest glance through last night’s outpourings showed him that his creative excitement had not, after all, been illusory. He was on to something, he really was; something new, and exciting, and wildly controversial, exactly as he’d always dreamed. And the title was perfect, couched as it was in acceptably scholarly form, and yet provoking curiosity far beyond the drily academic. The common reader—even the
commonest
of them—would surely find himself at least momentarily intrigued and titillated?

Parasite Persons. The phrase had been Ruth’s in the first place, though it was not she who had thought it would make a good title. It didn’t, she pointed out thoughtfully, kinda grab you. Not unless you knew what parasites
were.

“Like, give the poor devil a break who designs the book-jacket,” she urged. “And the publicity stuff too, for the movie, you don’t want to forget that. It’s kinda not very photogenic, is it, a parasite? Not when you come to really think about it; how many legs it has, that sort of thing. Like, is it bug-eyed, tentacles, all that stuff? Or bi-focals and a stuffed shirt? See what I mean?”

Martin saw. And what he saw thrilled him to the very marrow. Book-jackets! Film adaptations! This girl was thinking for him thoughts which he himself hadn’t dared to think in years! She moved among his most secret ambitions as if this was her native habitat, thus giving them a sort of substance, a legitimate place in the map of the future. It was wonderful. It was like nothing he had ever experienced before, and he found himself riveted by her every word.

“How about
Vampires
Anonymous
?”
she suggested, as they sat drinking to the new venture in vodka, having missed their lunch. “Anyone can draw a vampire. You know. Fangs, and blood dripping from them, that kind of thing.”

Was
it the case that “anyone” could draw a vampire? Martin felt very sure that he himself couldn’t, he’d have no idea at all how to
start. Did the thing have wings, and if so were they vaguely like a bat’s? And how did they fold up, straight down the sides, obscuring the arms, or crossed-over at the back, like a swift or a
house-martin
?

Still, no point in accentuating the age-gap by admitting to such ignorance, so he gave a grunt of non-committal encouragement.

“
Vampires
Anonymous
by Martin Lockwood,” Ruth declaimed gleefully, downing the remains of her vodka. “How does
that
sound?”

It sounded just fine: but not in the least like a PhD thesis by a respected lecturer in Social Psychology. There was no way Dr Frost was going to accept such a title, no matter how
unexceptionable
might be the material subsumed thereunder.

And, of course, the material
wasn’t
going to be unexceptionable. That was the whole point of the thing. It wasn’t until Ruth had taken herself off, a little before four, that Martin, alone at last with his thoughts, began fully to realise the immensity of the thing that had happened; that within his grasp, at long last, was the new and revolutionary hypothesis for which he had so desperately been seeking. Vampires or Parasites—who cared? It was the
idea
that was going to count; the startling—and surely original?—idea that depression is not an illness at all, but a crime. A crime perpetrated by one person upon another from motives of personal gain. Like burglary. In fact, it
was
burglary, on the psycho-somatic level. It was theft, the appropriation by one person of another’s energy and joy in living, which the thief then stores away for his own use, leaving the victim an empty husk, a hollow ghost of a person, without joy, without zest, and incapable any longer of carrying on successfully either his work or his social life.

“Show me a depressive,” Ruth had said, at some stage during the long, extraordinary afternoon, “and I’ll show you a Parasite Person. A buoyant, cheerful, outgoing type, with sympathy and kindness coming out of their ears, and devoting an amazing amount of time and trouble to ‘cheering up’ the poor bloody victim.

“Wonderful, wonderful people, everyone’s going to say, so kind, so patient, falling over backwards to try and help the ungrateful
depressive, pulling out all the stops—care, compassion, the lot. And all the while they are growing fat on the happiness and hope they are quietly draining out of their victim. You see them growing popular, successful, admired by tapping their victim’s zest and energy and enthusiasm, and diverting it into themselves. Like you could pipe-off someone’s water-supply from higher up the stream, and if it didn’t occur to them to go and look, they’d just think the stream had run dry.

“That’s what they
do
think, most of them,” Ruth had continued. “They think they’ve run dry because their mothers didn’t
breastfeed
them, or because Vietnam was all their fault, or because they aren’t drinking skim-milk, or decaffeinated grape-juice, or some damnfool thing or other. And when that doesn’t work, they go running to a doctor, who’ll send them to a shrink, and he’ll give them some bottles of pills and a whole load of new things to think it’s because of.

“And all the time, of course, they shouldn’t be going to the medical profession at all, they should be going to the police. Dialling 999. That sort of thing. That’s what you do when you find you’ve been robbed….”

It was fascinating. Martin tried to visualise the reactions of a policeman to such a summons; or the girl on the end of 999 come to that. He had his notebook out by now, writing down the best bits, and wondering, with a peculiar, mounting excitement, what in the world he was going to do with them.

Because it was all nonsense, obviously. The scientist in him was growing more and more queasy with every paragraph; and yet for some reason he was unable to think of any precise grounds for rejecting the whole thing out of hand. There was nothing you could pin down quantitatively of course, to prove or disprove such a theory, but that was often the case, it didn’t get you anywhere. Really, it was the general implausibility of the thing that condemned it, together with the impossibility of testing it. What sort of an experiment could you set up? Where would you find your controls? How define your Parasite Person to exclude ordinary, bona fide helpers and sympathisers?

“There
are
no bona fide helpers and sympathisers,” Ruth
countered dogmatically. “Anyone who voluntarily stays around a depressive is doing it for what he can get. Though of course he has to give something too, up to a point, just like a farmer has to feed his cows if he wants to get the milk and the lovely lovely meat, right?

“It’s a con trick, you see, ladling out sympathy and patience like ladling pig-swill into the trough. Along comes the pig, squealing with joy and gratitude, but only because he’s never heard of bacon….”

Some good quotes here, undoubtedly. Martin was getting it all down verbatim now, and thoroughly enjoying himself.

But all the same, it would not do. No way.

“The trouble is,” he said, “that intriguing though all this may be in theory, you haven’t got one scrap of evidence that anything of the sort actually happens. Nor do I see how you can get any. All right, so you might be able to show that many depressives—most of them, if you like
do
tend to have some character around who goes in for acting supportive, cheering them up, and so forth. Even going to extraordinary lengths to do so, like that Timberley couple—you’ve read that one, have you?” He gestured towards the pile of completed interviews through which, at his instigation, Ruth had been leafing.

She looked up, suddenly alert, her whole body tense and eager, like a hound that has just picked up the scent.

“The Timberleys! Now there you are! An archetypal example of just exactly what I’ve been saying! Here we have the greedy, hungry, compassionate old man living off his immobilised old wife like a tapeworm off its host! How cheerful he was, according to your record, how optimistic, in the face of his frightful situation! What a wonderful husband, the neighbours were no doubt saying. But didn’t it strike you to wonder how he could keep it up? Where it all came from, the stamina to actually
enjoy
his hideous life? It came from
her,
of course. Read through this stuff again, and you’ll see that it’s
her
energy,
her
cheerfulness that he’s living on, fastening himself on to her like a maggot on a piece of rotten meat. And everyone looking on, meantime, and saying how saintly he is!

“Now,
that
would be a test case, Prof, if it’s tests you’re wanting. Listen: how about if I was to get Mr T. the Tapeworm out of that
house for half a week, and how about if Mrs T. was to be on her feet by the end of that time, chatting with the neighbours, cleaning the place up, off to Bingo, that sort of thing? Would
that
count as evidence? Would it? Would it?”

Against his better judgement, Martin was impressed.

“If that
were
to happen, one would indeed begin to—but look, Ruth; it won’t do, it really won’t. Just
one
case can’t be cited as evidence of anything, no matter how remarkable it may be in itself. One would need a series of such cases, the whole thing carefully set-up, with proper controls. Otherwise—well, okay, you might get the odd case-history startling enough to impress the layman, but unless the numbers were large enough to be statistically
significant
….”

“How much?” she asked sharply, like a skinflint housewife at a market stall. “Out of these sixty-four subjects that we have to interview, how many would have to recover dramatically after the removal of their Parasite Person, before it would be counted as ‘statistically significant’?”

Martin hesitated. Statistics were tricky things, and a lot depended on the particular editor, and on the power currently wielded by those likely to be ranged against whatever it was you were trying to prove.

“Six?” Ruth suggested tensely. “Eight?”

Still Martin would not commit himself. Certainly, six or eight case-histories of instant cures such as Ruth was envisaging would make
some
impact: If not in academic circles, then certainly in the popular press, if you could once get the facts through to them. It was the kind of hypothesis that would catch on. There is a paranoic streak in almost everyone, not least in depressives, and the notion that their troubles were all someone’s fault, and that they were being literally battened-on by their nearest and dearest, could become the big craze of the decade.

The rationale of it, though.
Some
sort of explanation would have to be adumbrated as to how the transaction could possibly take place. One person’s energy being physically misappropriated by another—it all sounded too airy-fairy for words, even by today’s permissive standards of scholarship. “Tapping” energies; “Draining
away” happiness; as if it was gas or electricity, and plugging it into your own mains … This was science fiction stuff. Too intrinsically improbable to warrant serious investigation.

It’s not
fair,
was his next thought, like a child deprived of an ice cream. In the field of astronomy they were allowed—nay,
encouraged
—to investigate things far more intrinsically improbable than anything Ruth had dreamed-up. Solar Wind, Galactic Noise, the Black Holes, the Expanding Universe, the Red Dwarfs, the White Dwarfs, the Supernovae—and no one ever demanded of
them
an explanation of why the universe should be like this rather than like something else. It just
is,
would be the smug reply, and what lucky, lucky people you are to have us here to tell you so.

And the sub-atomic physicists, even more so. They only had to come upon a particle that contravened the known laws of physics, and, as if butter wouldn’t melt in their mouths, they altered the known laws of physics accordingly.

Why couldn’t the Social Sciences be more like that? It was most inequitable; but there you were. You had to take your chosen discipline as you found it and play the game according to the rules. Unless, of course, you became one of the giants, like Freud, and invented a new game which caught on because it was more fun to play, and thereafter, as the inventor, you were allowed to make up the rules as you went along. Martin’s mouth fairly watered at the mere thought of it.