Mesmerised by Michelle Shine Page B

in?’
    ‘I’ll go and get him for you,’ she says, the wideness of her hips inhibiting the climb up the narrow stairs. ‘Would you like a tisane?’ she calls down .
    ‘I would love a cup. Your tea always makes me feel better; there must be something of your spirit in it.’
    I can’t see her face. I hope she is smiling. I look around the hallway at lilac walls and a gilt-framed convex mirror, shaped like the sun. By the door is one of my sketches of the Seine.
    Monsieur Armand takes me by surprise. His wiry old frame leans over the balustrade.
    ‘Young Gachet, how can I help?’
    ‘Last time I was here you had glass tubes in a wooden rack.’
    ‘I have them still.’
    ‘ May I use them?’
    ‘If you come up to my laboratory, yes you can.’
    I reach into my pocket, pull out a homemade envelope, and wave it in the air.
    ‘Come upstairs then, follow me. I’ve figured out a way to clean the blasted things so that there’s no trace of a previous element polluting the glass.’
    ‘With heat.’
    ‘Yes, with heat.’
    As I climb the stairs black motes swirl in a cone of light.
    ‘It’s the chimney flue, it’s not drawing properly, and the sweep’s gone missing. Smoke’s billowing out into the house. The other evening I heard this scratching and flapping and the next day a roast pigeon fell into the grate: Dinner, a mistimed Christmas delivery, but too charred to eat. The old sod should get it right.’ He chuckles. ‘But anyway it’s caused clouds in the house and my wife hasn’t stopped complaining about the soot.’
    The acrid scent hits my nostrils and I flinch. We arrive at the laboratory door. Monsieur Armand stands before it with his hand immobile on the handle as if waiting for permission to go in. Then he opens it. Inside, the room is quiet and still.
    ‘It is as I left it last night,’ he says.
    Misty sunlight half obscures my sight, but the tray with glass tubes gleam on the worktable before me. I marvel and hesitate.
    ‘Go on,’ he says, waving me forward. ‘Start. I’ll sit over here.’
    He sits down on a stool in the corner of the room, lifts a tom e from a bookshelf onto his lap and heaves it open. I stand before the table and carefully open my envelope until it is a symmetrically creased piece of paper, then I make a funnel out of one of the sides. I take a tube and nearly topple the rack. Glass chinks, threatening to break. Armand and I lock eyes. I pour several granules of Phosphorus 3c into a tube: the result of several hours work. My heart pounds; I am afraid of my own clumsiness.
    From my jacket pocket I pull out a bottle of neat alcohol and suck it up through a syringe. I squint and squirt 99 drops, each one a silken, transparent veil for the glass tube. There is a box full of corks on the table. I look towards Armand who is still staring straight at me.
    ‘Go on,’ he says, ‘Take.’
    I pick up a cork and stop the cylinder.
    ‘I need a leather bound book,’ I say, with a rasp in my throat. He raises his eyebrows and I gingerly lift a volume onto the desk. With the tube secure in my fist, I pound the side of my hand against animal skin several times, fiercely agitating the liquid.
    ‘ Phosphorus 4c,’ I tell Armand.
    He nods. ‘Why 4c?’
    ‘ It’s been diluted by one part in a hundred four times. Sometimes I go to 1M by diluting a thousand times. The more dilute, the higher the potency. Less is more.’
    ‘Less is more,’ he repeats and I can see that although he is intrigued he does not believe it.
    From another pocket I take more syringes. Using a new one, and squinting to be accurate, I force one reluctant drop from the mixture I have just made and watch it skate down the glass. Once again I bang the solution against the book.
    ‘ 5c,’ I say to Armand, already starting to repeat the process again.
    I use up all ten bottles in the rack but when I finish I have only raised the potency to 13c. To achieve 30c I will have to return a couple of times. I explain this