The Doctor Is Sick by Anthony Burgess

Author:Anthony Burgess
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Weak as kittens and water Edwin let himself be led to the car. But he felt himself protected by an armour of shirt and socks, a casque of curls, the talisman of a ring. The ring, however, he at once remembered, was still in the pocket of the stage smock that lay, with the stage crook, in that lavatory. At the wheel, Bob said:

‘You should eat smoked salmon with brown bread and have red pepper on it, really. Now, I could nip out on the way to the flat and get those things, I suppose, but I don’t trust you, see. You might take a leap out and get lost again. I don’t bear any ill will about it, but I’m not having that happen.’ He spoke like a man whose time was valuable. ‘So we won’t be having brown bread nor red pepper with that smoked salmon. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘We could,’ said Edwin with hope, ‘go into a shop together, couldn’t we? There’d be no chance of my nipping away then, would there?’ Oh, wouldn’t there? he thought.

‘Oh, yes, there would,’ said Bob. He shook his head, sad, world-weary. ‘And at traffic lights, too. That’s why, as you see, I’m keeping to the side-streets. It’s not very far, my flat isn’t, that’s one thing. We won’t be long getting home now.’ He spoke comfortingly, as though he were delivering Edwin from the frightful evil of freedom. Edwin looked out at freedom as the car sped on; pianos and candelabra in display windows; an illiterate milk poster; teenagers sitting over plastic coffee in a grotto, ill with ennui; the creamy square dead eyes of a television shop; people. ‘Won’t be long now,’ Bob repeated, as if to allay a natural impatience.’ Just round here, see, and at the end there. There, you see.’ Edwin saw: a block of flats built in pre-war days, when flats spelt somehow Teutonic vigour, now, in the dark, cheerless-looking as a great workhouse. ‘I’m at the top,’ said Bob. ‘It’s better up there, really. Out of everybody’s way. They used to have lifts once, so they tell me. Not now, though. Funny how a lift could just disappear, isn’t it? We’ve got to climb all those steps at the end.’ Bob stopped the car near the foot of a topless configuration of iron stairs with iron rails, each landing lighted dimly by a swaying bulb. A long climb, thought Edwin, and anything could happen on the way – a lithe vault over the first banister; a frantic knock at somebody’s door and a shout of ‘Police, police’; Bob tripped up and sent hurtling down, the salmon leaping with him; Bob brained with his own wine bottle, cunningly nicked out of the box. But it was not to be. Bob said:

‘You go first up those steps.’ This was while they were still in the car, Bob’s mad watchful eyes on Edwin, his long arms reaching at the back for the box. ‘And I’ll be following close behind and there’s not to be any more funny business, see.

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