Age of Iron

'What do you want to see?' said Vercueil. 'I want to see you as you really are.' Diffidently he shrugged. 'Who am I?'

'Just a man. A man who came without being invited. More I can't say yet. Can you?' He shook his head. 'No.'

'If you want to do something for me,' I said, 'you can fix the aerial for the radio.'

'Don't you want me to bring the television up instead?'

'I haven't the stomach to watch television. It will make me sick.'

'Television can't make you sick. It's just pictures.'

'There is no such thing as just pictures. There are men behind the pictures. They send out their pictures to make people sick. You know what I am talking about.'

'Pictures can't make you sick.'

Sometimes he does this: contradicts me, provokes me, chips away at me, watching for signs of irritation. It is his way of teasing, so clumsy, so unappealing that my heart quite goes out to him.

'Fix the aerial, please, that's all I ask.'

He went downstairs. Minutes later he came stamping up with the television set in his arms. He plugged it in facing the bed, switched it on, fiddled with the aerial, stood aside. It was mid-afternoon. Against blue sky a flag waved. A brass band played the anthem of the Republic.

'Switch it off,' I said.

He turned the sound louder.

'Switch it off!' I screamed.

He wheeled, took in my angry glare. Then, to my surprise, he began to do a little shuffle. Swaying his hips, holding his hands out, clicking his fingers, he danced, unmistakably danced, to music I never thought could be danced to. He was mouthing words too. What were they? Not, certainly, the words I knew.

'Off!' I screamed again.

An old woman, toothless, in a rage: 1 must have looked a sight. He turned the sound down.

'Off!'

He switched it off. 'Don't get so upset,' he murmured.

'Then don't be silly, Vercueil. And don't make fun of me. Don't trivialize me.'

'Still, why get in a state?'

'Because I am afraid of going to hell and having to listen to Die stem for all eternity.'

He shook his head. 'Don't worry,' he said: 'it's all going to end. Have patience.'

'I haven't: got time for patience. You may have time but I haven't got time.'

Again he shook his head. 'Maybe you've also got time,' he whispered, and gave me his toothed leer.

For an instant it was as if the heavens opened and light blazed down. Hungry for good news after a lifetime of bad news, unable to help myself, I smiled back. 'Really?' I said. He nodded. Like two fools we grinned each at the other. He clicked his fingers suggestively; awkward as a gannet, all feathers and bone, he repeated a step of his dance. Then he went out, climbed the ladder and joined the broken wire, and I had the radio again.

But what was there to listen to? The airwaves so bulge nowadays with the nations peddling their wares that music is all but squeezed out. I fell asleep to An American in Paris and awoke to a steady patter of morse. Where did it come from? From a ship at sea? From some old-fashioned steamship plying the waves between Walvis Bay and Ascension Island?

The dots and dashes followed on without haste, without falter, in a stream that promised to flow till the cows came home. What was their message? Did it matter? Their patter, like rain, a rain of meaning, comforted me, made the night bearable as I lay waiting for the hour to roll round for the next pill.

I say I do not want to be put to sleep. The truth is, without sleep I cannot endure. Whatever else it brings, the Diconal at least brings sleep or a simulacrum of sleep. As the pain recedes, as time quickens, as the horizon lifts, my attention, concentrated like a burning-glass on the pain, can slacken for a while; I can draw breath, unclench my hailed hands, straighten my legs. Give thanks for this mercy, I say to myself: for the sick body stunned, for the soul drowsy, half out of its casing, beginning; to float.

But the respite is never long. Clouds come over, thoughts begin to bunch, to take on the dense, angry life of a swarm of flies. I shake my head, trying; to clear them away. This is my hand, I say, opening my eyes wide, staring at the veins on the back of my hand; this is the bedspread. Then as quick as lightning something strikes. In an instant I am gone and in another instant I am back, still staring at my hand. Between these instants an hour may have passed or the blink of an eye, during which I have been absent, gone, struggling with something thick and rubbery that invades the mouth and grips the tongue at its root, something that comes from the depths of the sea. I surface, shaking my head like a swimmer. In my throat is a taste of bile, of sulphur. Madness! I say to myself: this is what it tastes like to be mad!

Once I came to myself facing the wall. In my hand was a pencil, its point broken. All over the wall were sprawling, sliding characters, meaningless, coming from me or someone inside me.

I telephoned Dr Syfret. 'My reaction to the Diconal seems to be getting worse,' I said, and tried to describe it. 'I wonder, is there no alternative you can prescribe?'

'I was not aware that you still regarded yourself as under my care,' replied Dr Syfret. 'You should be in hospital getting proper attention. I can't conduct a surgery over the telephone.'

'I am asking for very little,' I said. 'The Diconal is giving me hallucinations. Is there nothing else I can take?'

'And I say, I can't treat you without seeing you. That is not how I work, that is not how any of my colleagues work.'

I was silent so long he must have thought he had lost me. The truth was, I was wavering. Don't you understand? I wanted to say: I am tired, tired unto death. In manus tuas: take me into your hands, care for me, or, if you cannot, do whatever is next best.

'Let me ask one last question,' I said. 'The reactions I am having – do other people have them too?'

'Patients react in many different ways. Yes, it is possible your reactions are due to the Diconal.'

'Then if by some chance you have a change of heart,' I said, 'could you telephone a new prescription through to the Avalon Pharmacy in Mill Street? I have no illusions about my condition, doctor. It is not care I need, just help with the pain.'

'And if you change your mind and want to see me at any time, Mrs Curren, day or night, you have only to pick up the telephone.'

An hour later the doorbell rang. It was the delivery man from the pharmacy bringing a new prescription in a fourteen-day supply.

I telephoned the pharmacist. 'Tylox,' I asked: 'is that the strongest?'

'What do you mean?'

'I mean, is it the last one prescribed?'

'That is not the way it works, Mrs Curren. There is no first and no last.'

I took two of the new pills. Again the miraculous draining away of pain, the euphoria, the feeling of being restored to life. I had a bath, got back into bed, tried to read, fell into a confused sleep. In an hour I was awake again. The pain was creeping back, bringing with it nausea and the first edge of the familiar shadow of depression.

The drug over the pain: a shaft of light but then darkness redoubled.

Vercueil came in.

'I have taken the new pills,' I said; 'They are no improvement. Slightly stronger, perhaps; that's all.'

'Take more,' said Vercueil. 'You don't have to wait four hours.'

A drunkard's advice.

'I'm sure I will,' I said. 'But if I am free to take them whenever I like, why not take them all together?'

There was silence between us.

'Why did you choose me?' I said,

'I didn't choose you.'

'Why did you come here, to this house?'

'You didn't have a dog.'

'Why else?'

'I thought you wouldn't make trouble.'

'And have I made trouble?'

He came toward me. His face was puffy, I could smell liquor on his breath. 'If you want me to help you. I'll help you,' he said. He leaned over and took me by the throat, his thumbs resting lightly on my larynx, the three bad fingers bunched under my ear. 'Don't,' I whispered, and pushed his hands away. My eyes swam with tears. I took his hands in mine and beat them on my chest in a gesture of lamentation quite foreign to me.