The Doctor Is Sick by Anthony Burgess Page B

more exultant. Soon the song tailed off for the business of pausing to stand back to scrutinise – an odd buzz here, a short whirring passage there – and at last the sculpture was completed.
    â€˜That looks good, really fine.’
    â€˜Bello,’ the Italian agreed.
    â€˜You wait,’ said Mr Southey, ‘and I bring you a mirror.’
    â€˜No, no,’ said Edwin. ‘No, no, no.’ His fearful fingers roamed over his scalp, palpating, sliding. ‘For God’s sake cover it up.’
    â€˜Everybody,’ said Mr Southey, ‘appreciates a little bit of appreciation. That’s nothing to ask. You have a look in a mirror.’
    â€˜You heard me,’ said Edwin. ‘I don’t want to see it, I don’t want to know anything about it. Just cover it up.’
    â€˜Ingratitude,’ said the negro. He brought a woollen cap that fitted snugly. Then Edwin risked a look in his shaving mirror. He saw little Edwin in his pram – the little Edwin of a photograph his mother had had framed for the front room – but little Edwin with sharp mistrustful eyes, a jowl, and a day’s growth of beard. He clattered the mirror back on to the locker-top and lay still in bed. The Italian swept away a whole barber-shop-floor-load of hair; the negro wheeled off the bed-screens. Edwin now felt himself at last a full member of this prone club of pilgrims.
    The staff-nurse came round to say: ‘Do you sleep sound enough?’ She spoke in the comfortable voice of Manchester.
    â€˜Enough,’ said Edwin.
    â€˜Eh, you don’t sound too convinced. We’d better be on the safe side. Tomorrow morning we want you to be nice and muzzy, half-dead, if you see what I mean.’ She emptied a generous helping of tablets out of her bottle. Edwin sluiced them down.
    He was soon asleep. His dreams were polychrome, stereoscopic. Three big dogs couched in the wood he was walking through turned out to be the folds of a python. He smiled in his dream: that was meant to be sex. He dropped down well after well after well. At the bottom of one well he encountered the expected: large crawling insects, an animated drawing out of an 1860 Punch , a severed marble head out of a film by Cocteau whichrepeated monotonously the word habituel . He was sitting on Brighton sands, surrounded by smiling people, and was desperately trying to hide his bare feet. At the bottom of the final well there was only darkness, no more images.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Edwin awoke with mechanical suddenness, with no hint of a margin between dead sleep and complete wakefulness. He even sat up, fully aware of where he was, what he was there for. He had no idea of the time, but it was full night, with brilliant plenilunar light washing London. He awoke with a very clear intention, feverishly sharp, of an acuity undoubtedly, he saw, induced by the large dose of sleeping drug: that nobody should cut his head open, that there should be no excision of any tumour, that he should live – however briefly – and die – however soon – as he was, whether sick or well. He felt wonderfully well, as a matter of fact.
    Death, anyway, was in the hospital: you could hear it snoring in the ward. Life was outside. He must leave at once. For if he returned to sleep his intention might be blunted by morning drowsiness; there would be too many to fight; they would pump a deader sleep into his buttock before he knew where he was and have burly men wheel him off to the theatre. Then it would be too late. It had to be now.
    Enclosed by her frail walls of bed-screens, the night sister sat at her desk with its dim light. She was, he knew, an American girl over on a year’s exchange. From Missouri or somewhere.
    How bloody stupid he had been to trust Dr Railton and everyone else. To them he was already a thing, could not be less of a thing if he died under the anaesthetic:regrettable: Dr Spindrift has changed into a mere chunk of