One Foot in the Grave Read online

  Perhaps it was the memory of the Foyle inquiry that made Pibble, even in his semi-trance, conscious as soon as he was at last drifted into the surgery that this visit, though a routine part of the Flycatcher creature’s metabolism, was at the same time an incident in its sickness. The awareness faded as he roused himself to cope with his role as patient, but never quite vanished.

  When Pibble had first visited the surgery, he had been past noticing­ much more than it seemed to have a remarkable amount of equipment in it. Later, as his mind improved, he assumed that the display was mainly there to impress the patient, to imply that his fees were being spent on all that was latest and most fashionable by way of geriatric miracle; even to hint that when the old heart finally faltered, or the old spleen ceased to do whatever it was spleens did, Toby Follick would fetch out from a cabinet some chrome and plastic knickknack which would take over the functions of exhausted flesh and begin another whole lifetime. There was still some truth in that picture—no doubt it was why Follick’s employers had sanctioned the expenditure—but it was also now apparent that Follick needed the gadgets as much for his own sake as his patients’. They gave him the same kind of thrill of possession that a roomful of netsuke or Tang grave ornaments might give a collector of such stuff. They fed his self-image as the super-competent healer, but they also fed Pibble’s image of him as the comic conjurer, on stage now, surrounded by glittering­ cabinets into which bowls of goldfish would disappear and be transformed­ into monstrous bouquets of plastic tulips.

  Follick preferred to see his patients on stretchers, even when they were well enough to walk. There was no comfortable chair in the large, light room, and Maisie perched on a stool to take down any notes or instructions. The thin whine of dust extractors filled the room, and a tall gray cabinet against the inner wall blinked a few lights on and off, apparently at random. The sense of a life being lived at Flycatchers, of which the patients and staff were only cellular parts, was especially strong in the surgery.

  “Well, what have you been up to since I last saw you?” said Follick. “Exploring the Orinoco?”

  “Ur.”

  “He got himself up this morning,” said Jenny, speaking through the filter of discipline. “His room was empty. I found him down in the offices, talking to his friends.”

  “Did you now? Did you now?” said Follick, apparently delighted by the surprise.

  “He was a bit tired after that, but he’s had a rest since. He had a couple of low days, like you said he would, but he started picking up yesterday.”

  “Fine, fine. Let’s have a look at the documents.”

  Follick moved out of Pibble’s line of vision, so he lay quiet, not thinking of anything much, until his eye was caught by Maisie. There was an oddity about her pose as she too waited, a tension which she was trying to disguise by lolling, as far as the stool allowed her. He thought she was deliberately avoiding his eye until he realized that the target of her nonattention must be Jenny.

  She straightened but at the same time relaxed as Follick muttered a snatch of jargon for her to take down. Jenny came into Pibble’s line of sight to peel off his blanket. Ritual apparently demanded that this task should be done by the acolyte, but that the priest himself must remove the final veil, the examination shift, which was the only garment patients wore for these encounters. Follicle performed the rite and began to press Pibble’s flesh with an abstracted air, like a man in a supermarket pressing a Camembert to see if it is ripe, while most of his mind is on the young mum in the tight yellow jersey who is leaning over the cooler cabinet to compare butter prices.

  “These abrasions and contusions are healing, Jenny?”

  “Yes, slowly. They still hurt him a bit.”

  “Quite a bit, I should think, if he got himself up this morning and went on the gad.”

  “He walked back to his room without a wheelchair. I didn’t help him much.”

  “Um. Tell me, Jimmy—this is a medical question and not bloody inquisitiveness—why did you do that? Just for a gossip?”

  “No. Something I wanted to …”

  “And did it hurt?”

  “A bit. Sore, not proper pain.”

  “Right … you see, what I’m getting at is this. In a sense I oughtn’t to be treating you, because I’m a geriatrician and you’re not old enough for me. Apart from the atherosclerosis in your legs, you aren’t beyond late middle age. Your eyesight and hearing are better than most people’s, your muscular coordination is fine, you’re continent, your heart’s in reasonable nick and so on. As I’ve told you before, it’s all a question of getting the blood to the brain. Now, we’ve been talking as though your problem was that you had low blood pressure, and in a sense that’s true. On the other hand I could show you plenty of medical textbooks which say there’s really no such condition as low blood pressure.”

  “Uh?”

  “It occurs, of course. It’s quite common—in cases of shock, for instance. But it doesn’t go on and on, an illness in its own right. One way of describing your case is that you are in a permanent state of mild shock. Right? Of course this wasn’t apparent when you first came in, because you’d run yourself down so far, but now we’ve had a chance to sort you out. … Let me make a guess. Sometime about eighteen months ago, or perhaps a bit more, something happened which stopped you in your tracks. …”

  Mary’s face, the color of dirty snow on the glistening pillow. The coffin on the crematorium chute, the twiddling organ music, the chute empty. He hadn’t even seen her go.

  “All right, you don’t have to tell me what it was. But listen, if you’ve followed what I’ve been saying, you’ll see that there’s a limit to what we can do for you, and we’ve about reached it. Pills and comfort can take you this far, but from now on it’s going to be up to you—it’s going to be up to your moral energy, your willpower. I haven’t talked to you about this before because, to be frank, I didn’t think you had it in you. But since last Thursday I’ve changed my mind. You can do it if you want to, and in that case I think I can help you a bit more. With your cooperation I want to try a little experiment.”

  “Ur?”

  “A little experiment,” repeated Follick, brown eyes glistening, as if the phrase were a magical formula with which he proposed to conjure up the spirit of healing. “Crank him up to semi-recumbent, will you, Jenny. Maisie, will you hook up the encephalograph and the cardiograph, and then if both of you wouldn’t mind waiting out in the anteroom … Maisie, I’m not taking any calls for half an hour … that’s high enough, Jenny … now I’m going to tape a few terminals on … there … and there … cover him up, Jenny … and you hold this in your right hand … grip it firmly and don’t let go … and finally there’s the hat … um … not too tight? Great. Thanks, Maisie. Thanks, Jenny.”

  Pibble felt oddly detached, a mere spectator of Follick’s bustling and eager performance. The rubbery terminal he had been given to grip, the absurd little padded skullcap with its moon-man cables snaking out of it, which Follick had shown him before adjusting it to nestle on his scalp, the glossy gadgetry, Follick’s own almost factitious joy in the employment of his toys—all these seemed such obvious precursors of a trick which wasn’t going to work—or was going to work in the way the performer least expected. Pibble watched him cross to the wall and press a switch in one of the cabinets. A small but very intense white light blazed into being. Follick came back and vanished behind the stretcher. There was a thump and a rustle. Pibble bent his neck, rolled his eyes up to their limit, and found himself staring straight up two dark nostrils. He deduced that Follick had perched himself on Maisie’s stool at the stretcher head.

  “Don’t look at me, James. I want you to concentrate on that light over there. Try not to look at anything else. Grip that terminal a little tighter. Concentrate on the light.”

  Follick’s voice changed, becoming deeper and quieter, without any emphasis
at all, but despite the flatness suffused with a steady energy as he repeated and repeated his instructions. The light swam and floated in greeny blackness, an obsessing glare. There was nothing else in the world except the light and the dull, insinuating drone.

  “Good. And now your heart is going to beat a little faster. A little faster. Don’t think about it. Just look at the light. Good. Your heart is beating a little faster. Good. Tell me about your mother now.”

  Mamma, thin and straight, stalking away along the pavement in a black ankle-length dress and the curious little hat which marked her out as a Saint of the Revised Chapter. Jimmy, not quite eighteen, leaning against the low brick wall of the front garden and watching her in a muddle of pity and guilt and irritation, aware that during the course of their short and almost wordless quarrel about whether he should go with her to chapel, he had finally decided to apply to join the police cadets.

  “Good. Good. Keep the heart steady. Steady. Now you are going to raise your blood pressure just a little. Raise your blood pressure. You can do it. Raise your blood pressure. Keep your heart steady. Steady. Watch the light. The light. Now tell me about this shot you heard.”

  Shooting gallery at Hendon. Instructor stripping automatics in front of a small, bored class, Pibble somewhere in the middle of them. Glare of lamps on concrete. Faint smell of fine oil and fainter still of burnt powder. Concrete dust and boredom the main atmosphere. From the gallery proper the unsystematic crack of shots fired at moving targets. One shot, and all was changed. Light and smells the same, but now the boredom was something else. The instructor paused in mid-sentence, laid down his weapon, turned to the padded door, opened it, stared, shut it. Why had they all known? How had the communal shudder begun even before the instructor had turned from the bench? Had the sound differed physically when the cadet who had been practicing (blond, acne-speckled, enormous) had put his pistol against the roof of his mouth and fired that last shot? The questions continued to ache long after the equal mystery of why the young giant had suddenly felt compelled to die had ceased to seem to matter.

  “Good. Good. Keep your heart steady. Watch the light. Steady. Steady. Keep your blood pressure up. Good. Good. Now tell me about the shot you heard five nights ago, when you were in your room at Flycatchers.”

  The voice, even as it asserted the need for steadiness, had faltered slightly. Something—frustration, or fear, or merely inattention—had caused a crack in the dull surface. Till that moment Pibble’s world had been filled with the light and the voice, but through the fissure a tiny wisp of consciousness escaped. He was aware that he had been using his throat muscles, aware that he was under some kind of pressure from which there was no escape, physical or mental, in the present. Refuge lay in the past, in childhood, in the years of health. This wisp of free consciousness moved his lips.

  “Don’t know.”

  “You found a body, you remember?”

  Tall blind house, up by the railways. The neighbors silent in doorways, ominous presences, like trees. The man at the door, bare torso, pajama trousers; muscular, unsurprised. “Bit of a dust-up with the missus, Sarge. Nothing special.” His whitish eyes flickering to the street and back. Silence of June dusk. More watchers now, and nearer. Whose side. …

  “We’ll just come in and have a word with her, sir, if you don’t mind. Have a look out in the garden, Jim my lad. That yell came from somewhere at the back. Hey! No, you don’t! …

  Two in the morning. Sergeant Stacker’s tall brow gleaming in the office gaslight. “Can’t expect that sort of excitement every time you go out on the beat, my lad. They’d known all along, those neighbors, but it’s not the sort of street goes talking to coppers.” Telephone tinkle. “Hello. Hello. Yes … if I weren’t a religious man … thanks for letting me know. Jim, my boy, they’ve found another pit in the garden. Three more, and not one of them ten years old. That makes nine … and if I hadn’t been showing you round the manor. . . .” Stacker fatherly, solemn, doing his best to reassure the new recruit, but himself shaken, shaken …

  “Good. Good. Slow your heartbeat a little. It’s too fast. Slower. Slower. Good. Blood pressure up. Up. Good. Good. Watch the light. The light. The light. Now I want you to forget everything that happened before you came to Flycatchers. Forget everything before you came to Flycatchers. Watch the light. Forget everything before you came to Flycatchers.”

  The crack was wider now; wider not because of any further irresolution in the voice, but because of a rebellion inside Pibble against the command, a command, effectively, to cease to be. He was what had happened to him before he came to Flycatchers. Time since then had been a vacuous afterlife. No! He watched the light still, but was aware of himself watching it. He heard the voice, but was conscious of its being Dr. Follick’s voice. And Jenny was waiting in the anteroom. …

  “Watch the light. You’ve let your heartbeat slow. Faster a little. Faster. And your blood pressure. Raise it. Raise it. Good. Good.”

  It was important to accept the voice, to watch the light. The process was healing. There was some other reason … no matter. He let the light obsess him again, allowed the voice to become disembodied. But swimming down into these vaguenesses he clasped to himself that central No which he had clutched from the surface. He would not forget.

  “Now tell me what Mr. Crewe is thinking.”

  Mike is thinking about one of his girls, the Greek one, probably. Water rattles on the car roof, not because it is raining, but because the traffic is jammed under the as yet unfinished M4, whose construction seems to produce this drizzle. Pibble watches Mike smiling to himself, and feels that mixture of envy and contempt with which the sexually impacted confront the free-and-easy. A twitch of movement beyond Mike’s profile, minute but characteristic. “Don’t look for a moment, Mike. We’ve been recognized. Chappie in the Jaguar next to you. Can’t put a name to him.” Pause. Four men in the Jag seem interested in something further over. Mike twists, winds down window, adjusts wing mirror. Jam moves. “I think I know the chappie in the back, sir. Difficult from that angle, but it might be Dicey Martin.” “Sure?” “No.” “Still, they knew who we were, I think.” “Yes, sir. Sergeant Colnaghi was saying something in Mess last week about Dicey Martin getting ready to pull a big one.” “Colnaghi’s in Serious Crime, isn’t he? Like to stop and give him a ring? We’ve got ten minutes to spare. Let them get away first. …” Which was how Martin and five others were picked up halfway through the Heathrow Bullion Raid, and how Mike Crewe got his file moved into the rapid-promotion sector.

  “Good. Good. Keep your heartbeat there. Steady. Steady. Raise the blood pressure. Raise the blood pressure. Watch the light. Steady. Steady. Forget what happened to you before you came to Flycatchers. Can you forget it? Can you forget it?”

  No! yelled the mind, but the drugged lips merely mumbled the dimmest of negatives.

  “Very well. Now keep the heartbeat steady. We’re doing fine. The blood pressure is up a little. Keep it there. Keep it there. You are going to practice raising your blood pressure three times a day, at nine, two, and seven in the evening. Three times a day. Nine, two, and seven. You will practice. Now you can relax, relax. Good. In a minute I will switch off the light and you can wake up. Relax. Relax. Now tell me how much you know about what is going on.”

  “That’s the sickening thing about our job, young James. If you’re any good, you get to know what happened, more often than not. Like a traffic cop, you can look at the skid marks. But that’s all past history. What wouldn’t you give to know a bit of present history? Tell me frankly, young James, how much do you know about what’s going on?” A slight lowering of the voice was enough to change the emphasis of the last sentence. Beyond the partition the clientele of the Seven Stars boomed bonhomie. Dickie’s glance, intent but mocking; his wallet out as if to begin ordering a fresh round; Dickie casually letting it fall open. . . .

  Light became dark.

&
nbsp; “. . . tenners, the old sort,” a voice was saying. “A great mound of them, half a year’s pay. He was letting me see them on purpose.”

  The voice was Pibble’s own, quiet but remarkably firm for the first few syllables, but then dwindling into a weary mumble. He stopped talking. The dark became the daylight of the surgery, with the ghost of that intense spot still swimming through it in greens and reds on the retina. Follick came round to where he could look down at the stretcher. The excitement was still there, mixed now with an air of baffled wonder. Another goldfish bowl had become a bunch of tulips, evidently.

  “Sorry about that, James,” he said. “I got a bit further in than I meant. You see, the idea is to concentrate your physical attention on things like the light and the grip in your hand, and your mental attention on mental events by getting you to talk. I lure the sentries out of the way, if you see what I mean, and that allows me to sneak in and plant a few suggestions into the autonomous nervous system while the normal control levels are distracted. It’ll be interesting to see if we get anywhere. You’re quite a good subject for your age, you know. How much can you remember?”

  “Not much … like dreams … Dickie Foyle … Mike … old Stacker …”

  “Don’t worry. That’s why I sent the nurses out. It’s all in absolute confidence.”

  “Ur.”