The Doctor Is Sick by Anthony Burgess Page A

doctors, at a loose end, came in and joined him. There were friendly greetings, and the female voices grew louder, moved some way along the short female road to hysteria. Hysterikos, hystera , the womb. But Freud had shown that there was no connection, despite the etymology.
    â€˜And what sort of a time did you have in Italy?’
    â€˜It was all right, I guess. Molto buono .’
    â€˜Do watch those vowels,’ said Edwin, almost automatically.
    â€˜We drank the vino and tried to make the señoritas. Molto bella .’
    â€˜It’s in Spain they have the señoritas ,’ said one of the radiographers, ‘not in Italy.’
    â€˜They’re the same, whatever you call them, wherever you go. All women are the same, made to be made.’
    â€˜They’re not all the same,’ said a provocative radiographer, ‘thank you very much.’
    â€˜Don’t thank me, sister. Well, time to have a go at that artery.’
    The small underground room seemed full of people, upside-down faces all round Edwin, jovial advice as the Canadian doctor tried to grasp the squirming artery. ‘Like as if it’s alive,’ he said. ‘Like a snake or something. Now,’ he said to Edwin. ‘I’ve got a sort of dye in this syringe, a dye made out of iodine. When that starts circulating it’ll colour the blood vessels, and when they take a picture of it that’ll show what’s wrong. Okay?’
    But the artery had a life of its own. Edwin could see the eyes on it, fascinated, as though watching a death-duel of small fierce animals. ‘Goddam it,’ said the doctor, ‘just can’t get it in.’ Then came a general shout of triumph as contact was made, the artery was pierced, and the dye was shot into it. A white-coated young lady with cool hands started to feed the artery with a saline solution. Preparations were made for the radiography.
    â€˜You’ll feel,’ said one of the loud women, ‘a feeling like of hotness all along that side. Very hot. But don’t move, whatever you do.’
    The taking of the pictures seemed, to confused Edwin, to involve the shouting of signals. At the loud cry of what seemed to be ‘Take’ the heat came, and more. A pain that seemed green in colour and tasted of silver oxide, that, moreover, seemed to show, by some synsthetic miracle, what the momentarily tortured nerves looked like, shot down his face, gouging his eyes out, extracting teeth withcold pliers. Again, it was not a matter of pain: it was a matter of the sick realisation of what perverse experiences lurk waiting in the body.
    â€˜You’re being very good,’ said the saline girl. ‘Really you are.’ And his right arm was, for an instant, stroked. There was an interval. The other artery now had to be pierced and filled with colour.
    The insignificant becomes, when doubled, the significant. A crude sprawling blot on paper makes, when the paper is doubled and opened out again, a pattern which, though still crude, is literate. And so the repetition of the processes on the other side of his neck gave Edwin a strange image of beauty. The test became a ritual. The snaking artery was caught, tamed, force-fed. Edwin’s thing of a head was posed under the flying machinery, there was the hysterical cry from a distance, and again there was the complex of oxide taste, green pain – as though a tree were shouting out – and the tearing-out of teeth and eye. ‘Good,’ they all said. ‘That’s over.’
    Edwin was slid back on to a trolley, wheeled to the lift and taken up again. The world never changes to greet the hero. The young man with the Punch-back was being pommelled and coughing up dislodged sputum. R. Dickie sat placidly like a king on a bedpan. The newcomer with the dragged leg and the egg-beater hand had had his head shaved; he roamed the ward, dragging and whisking, in a bobbed woollen cap. He came up to