Newton’s Niece
DEREK BEAVEN
For Philip and Lyn
Contents
‘You’re sticking me back in it.’ The bland little consultation space, the beige of the chairs, the rust of the curtains, the hard paleness of the walls began to unweave. Their presence gave way; even the cyclamen on the ledge failed. I sensed tears needling my eyes. But I pressed on in an effort to describe the reciprocal image of my feeling: ‘There’s a room. I have to go in.’
‘What’s in the room?’ Brendan’s voice penetrated as if through a stretched film, a membrane.
At length: ‘So many things. I don’t know which are true.’
I smudged away the tears and murdered the memory of the room. Brendan and the July Saturday morning came back into focus, but not before another distinct and separate trace flapped in from the past. I was ten. I was holding the lid on a curious glass jar. I had just dropped a swab, soaked in poison spirit, through its neck. The magnified, common, beautiful, garden tiger moth panicked briefly at the bottom of its prison. I held the jar up to the panes of an old sash window, to see sunlight strike the bars on its still faintly moving wings.
I didn’t tell Brendan about the moth. What was the use? None of it made any sense then.
He shifted in his chair and glanced at the clock. It pleased him to measure his sessions with a battered Fifties-style travelling alarm clock, illuminated in green with radio-active paint. It glowed in the dark, he said. Generally, I felt comfortable with Brendan: he had a worn but perky air about him. His spectacles grabbed on to the concern in his face and tucked into spills of comb-resistant hair, so that when he nodded their gold arms ticked away in a sign of genuine warmth. But I was annoyed with him just now. I was distressed and couldn’t show it. If I’d turned to jelly at work and come to howl it out in front of him, or dashed my head against the wall to burst the build-up, he might have registered. But the wicked injunction that had been laid on me prevented the disclosure even of symptoms – although I think something inside was smuggling messages out in the hope that he’d catch on.
He didn’t. He was on the wrong track. But even if, by some miraculous accident of speech, he should have come up, there and then, with the very names that were beginning to haunt me – Barnabas Smith, the two Benjamins, and Isaac Newton – they would not have triggered my violent rage or incandescent recognition; not then.
And this was the end of another session; troubling my sensitive eyes against an invisible barrier. Brendan put an arm on my shoulder and saw me to the door. Confused by this gesture, I thrust myself back into the hot street. For my true companions at that time were creatures of nightmare and poetry: I’d given up the attempt at teaching and was working by day as a cleaner in one of those terrible old mental hospitals, one of the last. By night, antique half-birds and, yes, moths, came to hold converse with me – products, perhaps, of my imagination.
The steering wheel felt sticky. I left Slough with the sun on my roof and headed towards the motorway intersection, hoping my rusty Ford would bear the rigours of the M25. And, as always, perhaps, half-hoping that it wouldn’t. Mid-journey the peculiar breathing started again. I found myself panting, and wondered what it was that should manifest thus. I hung on to my faint suspicions and the concrete perspective ahead; they kept me going.
The Ford held together. I got crossly on with my shift at the hospital. It was in the children’s block, the chronic section – poor damaged souls.
There’s a subtle comfort in working with a mop and bucket, a kind of atonement that keeps a nagging voice off your back. I could begin to make inroads against the tide of chaos; even if the dirt was ingrained, it was not Victorian, as it was in the main building. The children lived in a separate Unit – built in the Sixties as a square, unlovely and functional contrast.
I mopped restlessly down corridors, and privately across wards, behind cabinets or under beds, some of which contained speechless and tragically handicapped occupants, their wasted limbs stretched out in a sort of not-sleep. Tied, I suddenly thought, to their beds. Seco, my workmate of the day, left me alone. By lunchtime I’d reached the foyer at the main entrance to the block. It was a sensitive area. I hated having my work messed from all the coming out and going in while it was still wet. The coast looked clear. I needed only a five-minute window to get the whole floor done and dried.
Four minutes later the expanse of grey tiles shone sweetly with a fast-evaporating film of radiance, until the glass doors swung open with a flapping of white coats, and two pairs of medical soles left their thoughtless imprint on my wet floor. My blood seethed. It was the thin boss doctor, the callous one who soon after all this would be prosecuted for running a negligent ship, and one of his henchmen. As they charted their course, clipboards waving, between the double doors and the wards, I caught a snatch of their conversation.
‘Of course, she’s painting again,’ the henchman was saying.
‘What? Ms Jay? More slogans? More Action Now posters? Ha, ha,’ his laugh more like a cough. ‘Anyway, when?’
‘No.