The orderlies were violently offhand; they manhandled the patients into the lifts like awkward, fifty-kilo bags of Spanish onions. Then they stood menacingly in the corners, lowering over their livid charges, their temples pulsing with insulting health. Occasionally a patient would be wheeled into the lift who was clearly the wrong colour for the direction we were headed in (this was evident as soon as the lift reached the next floor) and the orderly would back the chair or table out of the lift again, the faces of both porter and cargo registering careful weariness at the prospect of another purgatorial wait.
We reached the sub-basement. Valuam turned to the left outside of the lift and led me along the corridor. Down here the colour scheme was a muted beige. The persistent susurration of the air-conditioning was louder than on the ninth floor and was backed up by a deeper throb of generators. The industrial ambience was further underscored by the pieces of equipment which stood at intervals along the corridor, their steel rods, rubber wheels, plastic cylinders and dependent ganglia of electric wiring betrayed no utility.
The beige-tiled floor was scarred with dirty wheel tracks. We whipped past doors with cryptic signs on them: ‘Hal-G Cupboard’, ‘Ex-Offex.Con’, ‘Broom Station’. The corridor now petered out into a series of partitioned walkways which Valuam picked his way through with complete assurance. We entered a wide area, although the ceiling here was no higher than in the corridor. On either side were soft-sided booths, curtained off with beige plastic sheeting. The beige lights overhead subsonically wittered. We passed stooped personnel — health miners who laboured here with heavy equipment to extract the diseased seam. They were directed by taller foremen, recognisable by their white coats, worn like flapping parodies. Valuam turned to the right, to the left, to the left again. In the unnatural light I felt terribly sensitive as we passed booths where figures lay humped in pain. I felt the tearing, cutting and mashing of tissue and bone like an electrified cottonwool pad clamped across my mouth and nose.
At length Valuam reached the right booth. He swept aside the curtain. A youth of twenty or twenty-one cowered in a plastic scoop chair at the back of the oblong curtained area. On the left a fiercely preserved woman leant against the edge of the examination couch. On the right stood a wheeled aluminium table. Laid out on it were tissues, a kidney dish of tongue depressors, and a strip of disposable hypodermics wound out of a dispenser box.
Valuam pushed a sickly yellow sharps disposal bin to one side with his blue foot and pulled out another plastic chair. He stretched and shook hands with the woman, who murmured ‘Anthony’. Valuam sat down facing the youth and untucked his clipboard from the crook of his arm. It was left for me to lean awkwardly in the opening, looming over the gathering like a malevolent interloper. I was conspicuously ignored.
‘Good morning, Simon,’ said Valuam. Simon drew a frond of wool out from the cuff of his pullover and let it ping inaudibly back into a tight spiral. Simon was wearing a very handsome pullover, made up of twenty or so irregular wool panels in shades of beige, grey and black. He pinged the thread again and fell to worrying a bloody stalk of cuticle that had detached itself from his gnawed paw.
‘Simon and I felt it would be a good idea if he came to stay on the ward with you for a while, Anthony.’ The woman uncrossed her ankles and hopped up on to the examination table. Her steely hair was sharply bobbed, one bang pointed at the youth who was her indigent son. She took a shiny clutch bag from under her arm, popped it open and withdrew a tube of mints which she aimed at me.
‘Polo?’
‘Err … thanks.’ I took one. She smiled faintly and took one herself.
‘How do you feel about that, Simon?’ Valuam held his foetal face on one side, his basso voice sounding concerned.
‘S’alright.’ Simon was rotating the cuticle stalk with the tip of a finger. He was also starting to rock back and forth.
Valuam consulted the papers attached to his clipboard. ‘Mmm … mm …’ He snuffled and ruffled the case notes while the steely-haired woman and I regarded one another peripherally. She really was pretty chic. At neck and wrist she was encircled with linked silver platelets cut into shapes; her clothes were made out of varieties of vicuna and rabbit; her stockings were so pure you could see the mulberry in them. I couldn’t quite get the measure of why she was so blase about Simon’s voluntary committal. Genuine lack of caring? A defence mechanism? Something more sinister?
‘You were discharged last October, Simon,’ Valuam had found the right place, ‘and went to the Galston Work Scheme. How did that go?’
‘Oh, OK, I guess. I did some good things; worked on some of my constructions. I enjoyed it.’ Simon had given up on the cuticle, he looked up at Valuam and spoke with some animation. His face was quite green in hue and distorted by weeping infections. It was like watching a colour screen where the tube has started to pack up.
‘But now you’re in pretty bad shape again, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, I guess. I’m fed up with living with the bitch.’ Simon’s mother winced. ‘She puts me under pressure the whole time. Do this, do that. It’s no wonder I start to freak out.’
‘I see. And freaking out means stopping your medication and stopping going to the Galston and stopping your therapy and ending up looking like this.’
Simon had relapsed into torpor before Valuam had finished speaking. The cuticle had claimed his whole attention again. We were left regarding the top of his unruly head.
Valuam sighed. He ticked some boxes on the sheet uppermost on the clipboard and twisted sideways on his plastic chair to face the woman. ‘Well, I suppose he’d better come in for a few weeks then.’
‘I’m glad you see it that way, Anthony.’ She eased herself off the examination couch with a whoosh of wool and silk and patted herself down. ‘Well, goodbye then, Simon. I’ll come and see you at the weekend.’
‘Bye, Mum, take it easy.’ Simon didn’t look up, he’d found some antiseptic and fell to swabbing his bleeding finger with tight little arcs. His mother smiled absently at Valuam as if acknowledging his sartorial failure. I stood to one side and she nodded at me as she swished out of the cubicle and away.
Valuam got up and scraped the chair back against the wall.
‘I have someone to see here, Misha, would you mind taking Simon up to the ward?’
‘I’m, er, not sure I’ll be able to find my way back.’
‘Oh, that’s OK, Simon knows the layout of the hospital far better than he knows his own mind.’
I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to share in this sick irony — but looking at Valuam’s miscarried countenance I could see that he wasn’t joking. Simon seemed not to have noticed.
I followed the abstraction of Simon’s pullover back through the twisting lanes of the casualty examination area. Even before we’d gained the corridor I found that I’d completely lost my bearings. Simon, however, didn’t hesitate, he plunged on unswervingly, walking with long fluid strides. We travelled like a couple arguing; he would make gains on me of some twenty yards and then I’d have to put on a spurt to catch up with him. To begin with I feared that he was actually trying to lose me, but whenever there was a choice of directions and he was some way ahead he waited until I was close enough to see which way he went.
The nature of the corridors we bowled along was perceptibly changing. The machines that stood at intervals against the corridor walls were becoming more obviously utilitarian — parts were now painted black rather than chromed or rubberised — they had petrol engines rather than electric pumps. The walls themselves were changing, they were losing their therapeutic hue and reverting to concrete colour, as was the floor. Lights were becoming exposed, first the odd neon tube was naked and then all of them.