Читать книгу How the Dead Live - Уилл Селф - Страница 14

Chapter Four

Sydenberg is on his way – goody gumdrops. Sydenberg, the last tailgating medic in a queue which stretches back to the late forties. You cannot fault me when it comes to providing employment for these interns, I’ve always been a zealous customer of the house call. For what is hypochondria, if not the midwife of all the other, littler phobias? When the girls were kids I’d get Virginia Bridge out at the drop of a hat. My motives were mixed, I guess, because as much as I wanted her insipid reassurance, I also liked to observe Yaws with his auxiliary squeeze. It amused me when, like a kid himself, he was confronted with an ice lolly in either hand, not knowing which one to lick.

I also liked the doctors’ being at my beck and call– or so I thought. I realise now that all I ever represented to them was diseased throughput; another sick shell of a human requiring a missing component to be bolted on. Modern Times – no wonder these assembly-line workers find themselves unable to cease making diagnoses when their day’s work is done. Sydenberg is by no means among the worst; certainly better than that snotty twerp Lichtenberg who ‘psychoanalysed’ me in the early fifties. I remember that all too well. He was a friend of Kaplan’s – and there was a sinister congruence in the attitude they’d take towards my crise de nerfs in any given week. I said at the time, ‘You two are in cahoots!’ but they denied it.

Lichtenberg was an orthodox Freudian who related every single aspect of my psyche to my early childhood. Well, while my childhood may have been extra shitty, I should’ve been concerning myself with Dave Junior’s – which was actually under way. But no, Kaplan was in favour of the analysis, the Eight Couples Who Mattered (our incestuously entwined coterie of friends) were in favour of it, and the fact that it kept me mired in the past hardly seemed relevant – at the time. Lichtenberg actually gave me licence, encouraged me to have affairs. He felt it would help me to undermine my negative relationship with my father. Bullshit. The truth was that all this Freudian sex talk was the preview, a blabbermouthed precursor of all the feckless promiscuity that was to follow in the sixties. Although not for me – by then I’d relapsed to the talking bit. Mostly. I wonder what Lichtenberg would say regarding the current impasse? Probably quote Freud: ‘The aim of all life is death.’ I wish I’d killed the creep when I had the chance.

From city to city, from burg to burg. Sailing through the bergs and into the arctic night. Sydenberg is one of those English Jews who are more English than the English. Actually, nowadays, almost anyone is more English than the English. Since the late seventies the English have abandoned their reserve, their coolness, their rustic urbanity. They’ve always complained about their ‘Americanisation’, meaning chain stores, supermarkets, advertising – but what they’ve failed to account for all along is the creeping cosmopolitanism that’s transforming their culture – if not their precious fucking society. I noticed in the seventies – that bulbous decade that the English were beginning to get wiseacre Jewish American humour, to find it genuinely funny – and that was the beginning of the end. The indigenous Jews were too dull and conformist a group to crack real jokes. They were the ones left behind in Liverpool while the rest of us headed on to the New World. As soon as they made some money they retreated, Rubens-like, to the ‘burbs, to live out their days in colourless indifference. Jewish Anglicans. The English had to turn to American Jewry for entertainment, and so began the proper Jewing of London. Now every little Cockney punk you meet cracks wise, kvetches, shmoozes and cheats. Great.

Anyway, Sydenberg – here he is: tall, stooping, grey, bespectacled. His suit – unlike my body – is double-breasted. He carries an ugly, modern, vinyl attaché case, which he places by the side of the bed before methodically retracting himself down to my level. Bedside manner – what an expression. All the doctors who’ve ever come to my bedside have looked, suitably enough, utterly uncomfortable. I mean, what could it be like for them to be completely at ease – to put you completely at ease? They’d have to put their cases down, then pull their pants off and get into bed with you. Now that would be a bedside manner.

‘So, you came home, Lily?’

‘As you can see, Dr Sydenberg, as you can see.’

‘How’s the pain?’

‘It hurts.’

‘And the nausea?’

‘Sickening.’

‘I see.’

He does see, he sees through thick bifocals which prise his oyster eyes open with enlargement. I wish he had a better bedside manner, though. I wish he’d get into bed with me – I want someone, anyone, to hold on to. I’ll try another tack. ‘I’m frightened.’

‘Of dying?’ Good man. Direct – I like that.

‘Of dying, of what they’ll do to me after I die.’

‘You told me that this didn’t concern you, that you’d told Natasha and Charlotte to have your body cremated and drop your ashes in a skip, or a bin, or anywhere.’

‘I’m worried they won’t – Charlotte’s too sentimental, and Natty’s too stoned.’

‘Well, given your convinced materialism this would hardly matter – would it?’

‘I don’t want to be embalmed.’