Newton’s Niece

Dross

‘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. Real painting. She’s been up in the Art Room since this morning. I’m told she asked to have the dark room set up. Someone brought her some negatives. Alright to let that go on?’

‘If she knows what she’s doing. Bit of a special case. She’ll be OK. Everything’s more or less screwed down, I’m assured. Don’t want to cross her again and have to sedate. Or risk the not-eating game.’ They stopped to glance at a notice-board.

‘Copying the photographs. Domestic reminiscence. But with each one some preoccupation seems to gain in strength. She’s … well, strikingly intent.’

‘Ah yes. Characteristic. Give a bit of leeway. However I don’t think we want to run the risk of over-stimulation. Don’t want her drinking the stuff. Silver, what is it … iodide? Or am I hopelessly out of date? You never know, if the press gets hold of it. Ask a nurse to pop up every now and then.’ Moving on, their voices attenuated.

I caught: ’The cocktail as usual, then?’

‘For the time being, I think so. Don’t you? Just increase the … ’ They turned a corner and disappeared from view, severing the name of the drug.

I rammed my mop into its strainer and twisted savagely. Then I applied myself to the smudges and footprints even though I could see through the doors, approaching fast, a posse of chattering nurses likely to ruin everything. But I knew who the doctors were talking about.

Saphir came from the girls’ wing to complete the damage.

‘That’s not my bucket is it, Jacob?’

‘No.’

‘It’d better not be, that’s all. Wait till I catch the bastard who’s got it. Seco. Where’s he bloody gone?’

She swung off with panache. She covered her legs with a black shalvar, and managed to make even her cleaner’s overalls look expensive. She was a medical student doing a Summer job. Her pretty black braids, seen from behind, touched my recollection somehow. But my memory was shot to pieces – I’d learned that, at least, from my sessions with Brendan.

Later, after lunch, and when I’d finished my share of the washing-up, Seco the Italian grounded my bucket and forced me to be composed. He sat me down in the little scullery, insisting I take one of his Marlboros. Technically he had seniority. He said I should learn to relax – like him; and not to work so hard – like him.

‘You gonna bust youself. Take it easy for Chrissake.’

But if I stopped my scrubbing I felt threatened, today more than ever. The cigarette tasted like its own ash. When it was finished I moved towards my mop.

‘Sit down. You want another? Why you’re so keen? This place is a dump. A dirty dump. Iss gonna stay that way no matter how much you do.’

I waved away the second cigarette. ‘No thanks, Seco.’ But I sat down again with him; and felt … panicky. My breath shortened and the scullery, its stainless-steel certainty slipping on the instant into doubt, receded with a sick faintness that reminded me of Brendan and the morning.

Before I could make a fool of myself I grabbed on to the remnants of the conversation. That woman the doctors were talking about -‘Ms Jay’. I’d seen her. She connected something, somehow, but not from now. From before … whatever that meant. She reminded me …

‘Where’s the Art Room, Seco?’

I donno. You interested in Art? In Italy we know what is Art. These folk here just make … what you call it … splashes. Like mud. They too far gone, mate.’ He wound his finger significantly at his temple. ‘Waste of time. They don’t know one end of a pintbrush from another.’ He looked out of the window and gestured towards the main buildings. ‘Iss over there somewhere, anyway. I donno.’

‘How could I get over there?’

He looked at me as if to wind the finger again.

‘No. I mean this afternoon. Now. This shift. I need an excuse.’

‘Just go. Go over to get chemical. For you bloody toilets. Say we run out.’

‘Yes, but Mr Prime’ll check. He’ll come over with me.’

‘So tip what we got away. Down the pan.’ ‘Ah. Yes. Good idea, Seco. Thanks.’ Doing violence to the drains. ‘No problem. You have another cigarette. Then maybe we start.’

Sun slanted in through the reinforced windows. Heaven splashed over the taps, bright steel. We finished the washing-up, Seco and I. The torrid July day made us sweat in our overalls. Our rubber gloves stuck to our hands as we put away the cutlery, made all the work-surfaces acceptable, and trundled the heated trolley wagons back to their parking stations. Seco called another time-out. I was on edge. We’d exhausted the tales of his taxi-driving in Rome a week ago. We had not much left. Seco – whose name, because of what he claimed was my impure pronunciation, reminded me of the sharp taste of wine – let his smoke drift out into the sunshaft. Sitting on his stool, he kept watch through the windows for any of the managers venturing nosily to visit us, across the heat-drenched lawns.

‘Eccolo!’

‘What?’

‘Mr Prime. He’s come out.’ His cigarette was suddenly at the ‘ready’ position, angled back, palmed with the quickness of an old hand.

‘Where?’ I peered across the grass to the office door. A small grey-haired man in a coat of authority was poised, clipboard in hand, on the brink of paying us a call. But he turned further than our direction, and marched off towards C block, which was a kind of vast terrapin hut, to inspect the geriatrics.

‘OK. No worry,’ said Seco.

In the dining-room beyond the serving hatch, the male nurses were finishing the last of the difficult ones, poor children in their bruised crash helmets, or gleaming, rigorous callipers. At last Seco threw his cigarette down. Its remnant melted fine geography into a floor tile.

‘It’s arright. We mop here first. You control that bucket. I this one.’

‘Seco …?’

‘Si?’

‘I’m not feeling … I don’t think I can …’

‘What?’

I stopped. I held on to the mop handle. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’

‘OK. Whose turn the toilets, yours or mine?’

‘Mine. I think I …’

‘It’s OK. I take the machine. I scrub the dining floor. We finish here, OK?’

‘OK.’

The toilets over here were unlike the crazing art-porcelain originals of the old building. There everything was excessive and mad, in a fantastic Pre-Raphaelite way. Here they were kickproof steel. When I first started the job I was confident that I could take them all on, block by block, and restore their shine; in, say, a couple of months. Now I knew by a sort of intuitive calculus that their rate of moral decay would forever just outstrip my labour; the backsliding fungus and slime had its old ammoniac eye on my workrate. I could never win. Yet I hung on to the delusion that if I worked still that little extra bit more furiously, a spurt might at last put me right with them.

Following Seco’s advice, I checked the store cupboard and found only one and a half industrial standard containers left, which I put by the door of the toilets to compose themselves for their journey downwards. Then, armed with my other chemicals, I entered, prepared to begin.

Appalling! An opera of neglect. I hadn’t seen them for a couple of weeks, having been assigned elsewhere by Mr Prime; and yesterday Seco had volunteered to do them. But I’d left them gleaming last time. My colleagues could have held the fort at least.

They were disgusting.

‘Seco!’ I accosted him.

‘Si.’

‘Have you seen these?’

‘Dio! Terrible!’ He tapped his teeth.

‘But didn’t you do them yesterday?’

‘Sure.’

‘Then how did they get like this?’

‘These folks got no idea how to crap.’

What could I say? All my hopes, all my works, all my days: a personal waste. I set to furiously. I did not speculate then as to why it could be that I was hurling myself, with such intensity, into such a humiliating task, in so ruined and appalling a world.

A Chymical Toilet

It was the pits of the world – Cloaca Mundi, a kind of hell – inhabited by those for whom there was no hope of release. In the toilets you found the evidence. Some biological devil was at work. He made it his business to dehydrate the colons of these innocents so that they were mostly costive, and you might mop cruel khaki rocks about the floor, their sharp edges sometimes bloodied from a final passage.

On odd occasions a witty anomaly would appear in one of the corners: a starfish, or a dead wren. Always on the stand-easies grew encrustations which it took hours to remove with even the most powerful chemicals – a testimony to years of skiving cleaners. I speculated on the human interiors whose fluids had marked the deposited limescale. They’d given it such drama and so flamboyant a coloration. Satan had here his stony monument, and the story of his penetration into this world found here its only inscription. Well, no, not its only inscription. Some of them daubed: formless, wordless, lonely brown fingermarks on the walls of cubicles. I recognised the father and mother of all expression: without language; without design, representation, code; without signification of any sort; without hope of being heard – perhaps the damnedest and most tragic artistic cry.

I thought of Michelangelo painting the Sistine Chapel. We write our own story on the walls of our world; we project ourselves on to our account of the past – and the future. I did not think of Isaac Newton stitching his own version of things with meticulous and mathematical care into the very fabric of the universe so that scarcely a mouse could wriggle out from under those skirts.

Occasionally a naked madman lay unconscious on the stone floor. When I saw my first I’d thought he was dead. I went over, pulling off my rubber gloves, and knelt by his head. The memory of a star reflected in a pool of blood had flitted in, and out, of my mind. From where? From what? Then I’d noticed the fitful rising of his back. I took the details to one of the bored male nurses.

‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘He’s OK. It’s the heat.’

‘But he’s lying on the stone.’

‘Just leave him. He’s OK.’

Unable in my condition to recognise negligence, I’d gone back and mopped around the terrible exhibit.

I began on the walls. Working my powders into a biting lather, I sought out the villainy of the place. I restored a fallen glory square foot by square foot, dodging the bouncing corrosive splashes that leapt off the tiles and paintwork towards my eyes. Inhaling God only knew what combination of active vapours, I mopped; I bucketed, seized with a grim enthusiasm. And the treasures of the floor and walls went raw into the jakeses from my brush and dustpan: sludges, geodes, hair, dead insects and arachnidae, a rubber glove and tainted paper waste, a mouse’s skull and tail, a set of used plasters, dust and tomato, the ghost of a prophylactic and several other unnameable matters. I didn’t flush.

Time rubbed on in my frenzy. I hardly noticed. Until suddenly I was assaulted through the high-stationed open windows by an infernal roaring and clanking. Then the frosted screen of the sky was blotted out. I identified the rattle of a huge diesel; presumably it was an apartment-sized delivery juggernaut parking close up next to the glass. So I found myself dark within one cubicle, scrubbing and deafened. It was a mechanical and stinking dark, and gave rise to non-visual sensory streaks: a trace of recaptured taste, and, with my hyperventilation, a recalled other smell mingling in my nostrils with the present fume. My lips pulled back from my teeth in a frightening grimace. I stilled them automatically.

Even as I tried for calm the cubicle floor grew unsteady. The seals and grouts sweated. Something hurt violently in my head, and something else was illuminating the wall in front of me. I swung round to look up and back for the source of the rays, but there was only noisy, noisome dark, and the shouts of men outside. But when I regained my balance and turned back, forms were cast on to the surface in front of me. I tried to erase them from the wall of the cubicle with my scrubbing: bright transfers which began to declare themselves as lewd cartoons. They animated their moments, unrolling themselves beyond my brushstrokes. Still in my ears was the unstoppable roaring of the engine.

They held an initial fascination, these workings. They glowed and ran and re-expressed themselves. They scudded across the wall of the one cubicle and led me beyond, hiding themselves in the pipe-work where my brush couldn’t reach. I panicked again with that wretched desperate feeling in my stomach. They were mine. They took me fast and crazy round the whole place, dabbing and scouring. The more I tried to dash them out the brighter they became, some too obscene, others too gorgeous – episodes from the history of my world. They defied cleaning powder and led across roughnesses of plaster, the dull drum of coated metal, the ridged slide of tiling, back to my original cubicle. She was there, that woman the doctors were talking about. Her long locks gleamed over water. I stared across a lake whose surface was immense. It was as though I stood upon a cliff. The moon’s reflection – the moon itself – whirled in incredible rings and gears. It winked. It was loose in its chapel with water and tides.

I moved into action once my stomach had finished heaving. Putting off the need to drink, I groped to empty my whole container of powder into that bowl, and then, as my eyes normalised to the persisting but ordinary gloom, went on to all the others areek with their abominable soups. Next I made them ready for their final flush by stirring and diving with my brush, lest the huge energy of the event I’d just witnessed should eructate again out of the U-bend.

The lorry moved away while I was finishing the last. The rattling of its diesel drew off from my little lavatorial cave and the sun streamed in.

When I opened the cubicle door I saw there were great sweeps of foam where I’d brushed. Powder was everywhere. My rubber gloves felt claggy.

I wanted to leave it all behind there and then, but merely poking my head out into the corridor brought back the shrunkenness of the fallen world, and the wretched taste in my mouth. I’d seen too much; it had to be expunged. There was nothing for it but to mop the walls properly this time; to squeeze out in the bucket all that revelation.

In a while, though, more stable and beginning to relax, I recalled the whole ulterior purpose of today’s entry into the toilets: the Bleach! That was no problem. My canisters tipped up conveniently over the well of the moon and stars. How simply the stuff gurgled down as if to give my whole vision a longed-for chemical white-out.

Now I could legitimately make my way over there. Standing by the last bowl, I cast an idle eye over the legend on the yellow plastic container I held in my hand:

NOT TO BE USED IN CONJUNCTION WITH OTHER LAVATORY CLEANERS

I mustn’t share it with Seco? A joke? And then the mocking air went green and clutched at my eyes with caustic fingers. I gasped – the worst thing I could have done, because it made me gasp again. Instead of getting out I found myself coughing stupidly at the mirrors over the wash-basins, trying, as I gazed at my reflection, to make sense of the greenness and painfulness of things, and the seemingly relentless malice of the day.

Seco appeared at the door.

‘Eh, Jacob! Saphir says …’ He sniffed, choked, coughed, shouted, and yanked me from the faint green cloud. ‘Santa Siberia! What! You do a Devil’s fart?’

We coughed and retched our way out – out along the corridor by the dining-room, through the foyer I’d mopped that morning, through the double glass doors and right into the rose garden, where he fell to roaring hysterics. And while I comforted my eyes and jerked up a bit more corroded spittle from my insides, he pirouetted among the rose-bushes. Thus among their gaudy blooms, he shed his urbanity and shrieked with laughter. The sun flashed on his sharp Roman teeth.

‘For God’s sake stop laughing and get me a drink, you bastard!’

‘OK OK. I get for you. You lie on the grass. What the hell you doing in there?’ And he coughed and giggled all over again. I stretched myself on the corner of the dry lawn. ‘Eh? What was it?’

‘What’s so damn funny? I could have been killed in there.’

Seco’s eyes narrowed and his grin froze. ‘I save you, mate. You got no gratitude with you bloody toilets. I’m Secondo. I’m second son – Lucky. Lucky for you, eh?’

‘Yes. Sony. Thanks very much. Now for Christ’s sake get me a drink. Please.’

‘That’s better. Otherwise I take you back to you damn toilets and I kill you.’

While he went off to the scullery I lay back. The sun worried the prickly-watery feeling in my eyes. My chest hurt from the gas, my stomach from the retching. I shifted a bit to my side and gazed over the mass of the asylum. Against the tough heatwave-blue stood the observation tower – what else could it be, that great fat Italianate finger, widening at the top to accommodate a windowed look-out under its pinnacles? The whole thing was a celebration of imprisonment, in two colours of brick topped with its gilt pyramid of a roof. It watched over the colony of suffering as if with a magnificent eye; or perhaps was a mere deserted symbol. Either way the effect was that we all policed ourselves, uncertain whether God was really watching from above.

A thought struck me as Seco was returning with the drink.