The Parasite Person Read online

  “‘Suicide’, then. You’re quite right, we should be talking frankly to each other. Your suicide attempt, okay? Would you say it was a sudden decision—a sudden uncontrollable impulse? Or had you been depressed for some time …?”

  “Depressed? Who’s talking about being depressed? I wasn’t depressed in the least. I was just into suicide, that’s all.”

  Martin frowned yet more deeply, but he kept his cool—his scientific detachment, as he liked to regard it.

  “Into suicide,” he repeated, in the correct depth-interview manner, quoting her own words back at her in a neutral, non-judgemental sort of tone. “And what was it, would you say, that got you ‘into suicide’ in the first place?”

  “Oh.” She pondered for a moment. “I think I mostly wanted to get into something that there wasn’t an Evening Class in. It’s not so easy these days. They’ve got Tarot cards already, you know, at the Houndsditch Institute, and I’m told they’re starting Levitation in September. You have to go so far to be way-out these days that over the edge is where it’s at.”

  “‘Over the edge is where it’s at,’” Martin repeated gravely, scribbling away in his notebook while he spoke; and then, the non-judgemental stance cracking for a moment, he found himself protesting: “But you know, Ruth, you can’t go in for suicide like you go in for yoga. It’s—well—it’s too final.”

  “Too final for who? Look, Prof, if I’m into suicide I’m into finality, aren’t I? I tell you, I’m hooked on finality like it was Valium, they can’t get me off it. And like they said, don’t mix it with alcohol. And so I did mix it with alcohol, and did I take off! Wow! That was something! It really was! Eeeee … eeeeee …!”

  These last sounds, with their shrill, long-drawn-out note of glee, were impossible to transcribe in shorthand, and so Martin left a space for them, hoping that he would remember, when the time came, what the space stood for. In the days when he’d done his own typing, this sort of thing hadn’t mattered so much; but now that he had moved in with Helen, who loved him so passionately, and who strove so earnestly to be the sort of help to him in his career that his wife had never been, it was a little bit more complicated. Adorably, she had taken over the typing-up of his interviews as her own special chore, and so anxious was she to get everything exactly right that it was really quite an embarrassment at times.

  “Is this ‘perverted’ or ‘parental’?” she would worriedly enquire, and for the life of him he could hardly ever tell. Nor could he bring himself to explain to her—so conscientious was she, and so full of faith in him—that honestly it didn’t matter a damn, either would do, an interview was an interview, and the important thing was to have sixty-four of them in the bag before May 4th.

  May 4th. Barely three months away now, and already he was badly behind schedule. Less than a dozen interviews completed so far and more than fifty still to come.

  Concentrate, Martin, concentrate, get the damn thing done. One more is one more….

  “‘Finality’,” he repeated, picking up her key word in the approved manner. “Even the finality of death, would you say? Your own death?”

  “Look, Prof, Death is the in-thing, didn’t you know? Don’t they tell you these things up there among the brain-freaks? Death is in, brother! Death is the Now-thing. Up-to-the-minute, fat-free, problem-enriched Death. Watch out for it on the Commercials: Death Dyes Whiter. ‘Well, they said anything could happen,’ remarks the blonde in the bikini when she finds herself standing before the Throne of God….”

  Martin hadn’t got half of this down. It was always harder when they went off the beaten track like this. His shorthand speeds, acquired rather late in life, were better adapted to those interviews where the subject answered as he was expected to answer, the sentiments falling easily and naturally into one or other of Martin’s five carefully-thought-out categories.

  Not that he wanted all his subjects to give the expected answer, not really. On the contrary, like any other social scientist, he lived in hopes of turning up results so startling, so unprecedented, as to turn establishment assumptions right on their head. Perhaps he would even end up on television, putting some revered celebrity or other firmly in place in front of millions of viewers….

  Or at least (less ambitiously) he hoped that something a little bit new might turn up; something which might—just might—open up some area of research which hadn’t already been picked clean by hordes of predecessors in the field.

  So, “Just a minute,” he said, and scribbled ferociously to catch up. Now he came to write it down, he was beginning to realise that she hadn’t really told him anything at all. Despite all this self-display, she had in fact revealed nothing of her problems. She had answered none of his questions, and had thrown no light whatsoever on the real motives for her suicide attempt. And as for depression, which was what the whole survey was supposed to be about, she had simply denied it.

  Oh well, never mind. At least there were some good quotes here. Good quotes can always be dragged in somehow, somewhere.

  On, then, to Question 5. Few of them could resist this one, even if they’d been a bit sticky earlier on:

  “Do you feel there was anyone in your circle who could have helped you through this bad patch if they’d been more caring … more understanding …?”

  “Like who?” She looked at him guardedly. “What are you getting at?”

  What indeed? Martin played for time, scribbling energetically. “Well: what I really meant was, isn’t there anyone among your friends who …?”

  “Friends! Oh, you’re talking about friends. You didn’t say. Look, Professor, I got friends like you got dandruff—just for brushing-off, kind of thing.”

  Had he got dandruff? Nervously, Martin tried to glimpse the shoulders of his dark suit, swivelling his eyes round so far that he felt as if he’d sprained them.

  He couldn’t see a thing. He’d have to examine the suit later.

  “Just one or two more questions, Ruth, and then we’ll be through. I don’t want to tire you, my dear, or pry into areas of your life that may be painful; but have you—how shall I put it?—have you a partner? A sex partner—a boyfriend?”

  “Like I told you. Dandruff. You suffering from amnesia, or something?”

  “I’m sorry …” Martin’s eyes swept uneasily over the final three questions, all of which presumed some kind of affirmative reply to Question Six. Did you confide in him? Do you feel that he could have helped you more than he did? Do you feel that he let you down in any way?

  Mostly, they opened up like flowers in springtime to these sort of questions, pouring forth griefs, resentments, hang-ups that could be dealt out like a pack of cards under his prescribed headings. Guilt, Hostility, Self-Justification, Revenge—there was a slot for everything.

  But no slot for Dandruff. The computer wouldn’t be able to handle it. Martin sucked the end of his biro, and decided to bring the thing to a conclusion.

  “Now, Ruth,” he said, putting a sort of penultimate note into his voice to show her that the end was near, “I’m very grateful to you indeed for answering all these questions.” (Actually she hadn’t answered a single one of them, but let that pass.) “It’s been most interesting. Now, before we finish, is there anything you would like to ask me?” A cunning one, this. It was surprising how often it released not a question, but a whole new batch of confidences.

  But not this time. The girl looked him up and down warily, then took up the challenge.

  “Tell me how you got me?” she demanded. “I mean, so okay, you’re out collecting suicides like a kid collecting conkers. But why me? We’re all death-freaks in this ward, you know, we’ve all had a go. So what made you pick on me in particular?”

  Because you’re a C-class female, under twenty-five. Because you’ve been under treatment for depression at least once during the past two years. Because this hospital you’re in doesn’t take me too far out of my way. Because the psychiatrist who runs the Thursday clinic happens to be an old
acquaintance of mine and so he lets me have the odd peek at his confidential records …

  “It’s a special technique known as Random Sampling,” Martin explained blandly. “It’s a bit too technical, I’m afraid, for the ordinary layman, but …” He let his voice tail away, and began shuffling his papers together, indicating that the interview was at an end.

  “Well, goodbye, Ruth,” he said, standing up with an air of finality and holding out his hand. “It’s been a great pleasure meeting you, and I’m most grateful for all your help. I expect you’ll be out of here in a day or two, eh?”

  She should have taken his outstretched hand by now, and be murmuring words to the effect that she was the one to be grateful … a chance to get it off her chest … feeling better already … that sort of thing. The big, hearty smile with which he had started his little speech was drying on his face; and still she made no move.

  “Why do you expect I’ll be out of here in a day or two?” she enquired. “You don’t know anything about it. For all you know, my liver might start playing up again.” It sounded like a threat.

  “Ah. Well.” Martin was at a loss for a suitable reply. What do you say about a liver that is playing up again? Or—even more difficult—one that merely might be playing up again?

  It was all very tricky. Besides, it was already gone six, and in not much over an hour Helen would have one of her delicious dinners ready for him—a three-course dinner, starting with soup. His wife had never bothered with soup unless there were visitors, and even then it was only out of a tin. Happening to mention this fact to Helen, quite casually, during one of their long, cosy talks about Beatrice’s inadequacies, Martin had been amazed and delighted by the immediate and unprecedented consequences. Soup for starters, at every meal cooked by Helen, ever since. Home-made soup, too. Every Friday she would bring back great knobbly parcels of bones from the butcher and stew them up over the weekend to make the basis of a wonderful variety of luscious soups for every evening of the week. Lentil soup it would probably be tonight, with a delicate sprinkling of freshly-chopped mint. He’d noticed the lentils left to soak in a bowl first thing this morning. Clever girl!

  “If my liver did play up—” the small insistent voice broke in upon his mouth-watering reverie “—if my liver did play up, would you come and ask me some more questions?”

  Like hell he would! The interview was too long already, as well as practically useless. She only wanted to show off some more, buggering up the computer with her pretentious wisecracks.

  “Well, no, Ruth, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said, dropping his outstretched hand at last and taking a step back from the bed. “I’ve got other interviews lined up, you see,” (God, if only that were true!) “and in this sort of work we have to keep to a very strict schedule. Otherwise …” He groped for some plausible get-out: “Otherwise … well … bias, you know. We have to be very careful to eliminate bias….”

  A non-sequitur if ever there was one: and lest she should catch him out over it (after all she was an ex-student of psychology, with at least a year or two’s training in catching other psychologists out) he hurried on:

  “So you see, Ruth, I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be seeing you any more….”

  Her head was pressed back hard against the pillows, black hair splayed out, and she continued to stare at him with her big green-flecked eyes, slightly bloodshot at the moment from the ordeal she had put her body through.

  “Like to bet on it?” she challenged; and then, raising her voice slightly as he began to move away:

  “Did you know, Prof, we’re called the Pre-Morts here on this ward? Good, isn’t it? ‘Pre-Morts!’ And down in the basement they have the Post-Morts! Maybe that’s where we’re going to meet next—had you thought of that? Like, if I was to have another go, tonight, and you were the last person to have talked to me? Asked me all these questions? You’d be in it then, Prof, up to the neck, right? It’s a fifty-fifty chance you got, because fifty percent of us here do have a second go, and that’s a statistic. Check it out if you want, but there’s no need, us Funnies know the score. Well, we should do, shouldn’t we, seeing we’re the fans …!”

  *

  Her laughter, clear as a child’s, followed him the whole length of the ward, ceasing only when the heavy swing doors fell softly back into place behind him, sealing off the Pre-Morts and all their doomed concerns inside their proper enclosure, well away from the busy, important world outside.

  CHAPTER II

  MARTIN BACKED OUT of the Visitors’ car park, conscious, as he turned his head left and right, of the boyish lock of hair flopping to and fro against his forehead. There was a touch of grey in it now, but it still seemed to suit him, just as it had once suited the brilliant, rebellious student who still cowered somewhere inside him, immobilised by the lapse of time, and haunted for ever by an early promise that had somehow never been fulfilled.

  An open scholarship to Oxford. A First in P.P.E., followed by a startlingly successful research year, and then, before he was twenty-two, a paper read to the prestigious Durkheim Society, and subsequently published as a leading article in their Annual Proceedings.

  What had happened to it all? Where had the years gone, that he should find himself turned forty, and with nothing to show for it but a run-of-the-mill lectureship at a run-of-the mill polytechnic? Where, now, was all that early promise, that arrogant, devil-may-care iconoclasm and drive?

  He knew the answer to this one. It was right here inside him still, unused and undiminished. The question to be asked was not where it was—that was easy—but when it was that this early promise had begun to be of no use any more? Being promising had been his stock-in-trade as far back as he could remember; it was the thing he had lived by, had gloried in, and had so taken for granted that he had somehow never noticed the years chipping away at it, diminishing it, until, all unawares, he must have crossed that awful frontier in life where early promise has to be replaced by actual achievement. Only when his fortieth birthday loomed—quite suddenly, it had seemed, out of the clear dawn of youth—had it hit him, like a spear of poisonous light, that it is no good being “promising” at forty. You have to have done something.

  By now, he should have landed a professorship somewhere. By now, he should have published a number of controversial articles in the learned journals, not to mention several books, both academic and popular. His name should be on the lips of colleagues and rivals everywhere—Martin Lockwood, the enfant terrible of Social Psychology, the irrepressible whizz-kid, the rebellious newcomer whose revolutionary views were setting the whole Establishment by the ears.

  But he wasn’t a newcomer any more. His views were revolutionary no longer. By now, whole books had been written about them, but not by him.

  What had happened? Whose fault was it? It had to be someone’s.

  It was Beatrice’s fault, of course. He should never have married her.

  It was only since he’d known Helen that he’d fully realised how hopelessly inadequate a wife Beatrice had been to him, right from the beginning. Until then, he’d vaguely assumed that all women were like that—all wives, anyway—self-pitying, self-absorbed, bored by their husbands’ careers, resentful of their colleagues, uncomprehending of their ambitions. It had taken Helen to show him how wrong he was—to teach him that a woman who is gloriously feminine and sweet can also be a tower of strength to a man, a true helpmeet in trouble, and an efficient collaborator in the furthering of his career. All the things, in fact, which Beatrice had never been.

  Not that Helen had ever pointed this out, in so many words, she was far too kind. She had never even hinted it. On the contrary, she had always gone out of her way to be nice about Beatrice, never allowing a word of criticism to pass her lips, and leaning over backwards to try and see her rival’s point of view—even, sometimes, trying to persuade Martin to see it, too:

  “Oh, no, darling, you know how Beatrice hates being alone in the evenings; I do think yo
u should be getting back to her now.” Or: “Look, darling, it’s not quite fair to expect Beatrice to see it our way, when she comes from such a very conventional background.”

  That sort of thing. And the paradoxical thing was that it was just this unwavering generosity of Helen towards her rival that somehow, for Martin, highlighted his wife’s defects to such an extent as to render them no longer endurable to him. Helen’s tolerance, her lack of resentment, seemed somehow to set him free to be more intolerant, more resentful, than he had ever dreamed of being before. Safe in the ambience of his mistress’s gentle wisdom, he could allow his own spirit to boil and splutter with such rage against his wife as he had never known was in him. And though Helen might chide him gently for these explosions, reminding him that “She can’t help it, you know, darling,” or “I’m sure she’s doing her best, according to her lights,” she somehow did it in such a way that he never felt that he had gone too far, or had put himself in the wrong by these tirades. Helen understood him as no one else had ever done; understood that the long-repressed disappointments and frustrations of his marriage had to be got out of his system somehow, and how better than by pouring them forth into a sympathetic ear such as hers?

  And as if all this wasn’t enough, she was proving herself a marvellous little housewife as well. Tonight, for instance, late though he was bound to be, there would be no fuss or recriminations; no “Where have you been all this time?” or “Well, don’t blame me if it’s all dried up!” No, there would be a delicious three-course meal done to perfection at whatever time he walked in; and candles on the table too, very likely, which she would light when she heard his key in the door.

  What a woman to be driving back to through the February drizzle! What a lucky man, at long last, he was!

  First, though, he must call in at home and pick up some shirts. Call in at 16, Hadley Gardens, that is—Helen hated him to use the word “home” for the house which, until the last few weeks, he had shared with Beatrice. He could understand Helen’s objection, of course—it was flattering in its way—but all the same, it’s difficult not to think of a place as “home” when you’ve lived there for nearly fourteen years.