thermometers, pumice in many bathrooms, and platypuses … well, in the zoo or on television. Even in Tasmania I suppose you don’t exactly fall overthem, but you might see one if you were swimming in a stream there, and actually if it was a male he might give you a nasty dig with his venom-spur – and serve you right for thinking it was your stream and not his. It’s entirely normal for platypuses to be the way they are, that’s the point. There’s nothing unnatural about lactating through the pores, without benefit of nipples, and having the milk run down abdominal grooves for your young to lick up, it’s just not the human style of motherhood. Still, we’d rather treat ourselves to a shudder of wonder than make a little more room in our pigeon-holes.
At the time I was attuned to a cruder logic. Since I was debarred from so many ordinary activities, it seemed to follow that I would have a special affinity for the esoteric. That would balance the cosmic accounts nicely. My bailiwick would be the occult and the perverse.
I thought Mouni Sadhu might have written another simpler book, and pestered Mrs Pavey through Mum until she came up with a much smaller volume called In Days of Great Peace , which was more like an autobiography and didn’t really engage me. I read about Mouni Sadhu’s visit to a spiritual leader in Southern India called Maharshi, whose face expressed endless friendship and understanding, how Mouni Sadhu dissolved into tears which washed away the stains of multiple incarnations and so on, and I thought ‘how nice for him’ without going any deeper.
Discreet off-stage cough
I must have read the sentence, ‘He walked with difficulty, as his joints and knees were affected by acute rheumatism’, and yet felt no particular quickening of interest. What else was I looking for, if not a guru with arthritis? The fit was incredibly close, yet I missed it. It was as if I was being protected by a sort of lightning conductor, from premature contact with energy of a high order. I put the book aside unaffected, at least on the surface. In this way a leading player in my life gave notice of his existence with a discreet off-stage cough, waiting in the wings, years before he made his entrance proper.
People value what they pay for. The things they get for free, such as a national health service, tend to be under-appreciated. I wasn’t going to make that mistake. Morale is important. I was deeply in debt to asystem which was the envy of the world, and I didn’t want anyone to imagine they had inserted a metal hip into an ingrate. As soon as I decently could, as soon as there was a chance of being believed, I had been saying how pleased I was with the operation. Despite everything I passed congratulations on to the surgeon who had done the work at Wexham Park – Mr Arden – saying how marvellous it was to have a hip that worked, a hip that didn’t just sit there. Modern medical science was wonderful, just wonderful. I was a new person, with my new hip! Hip hip hurray!
But maybe one Hip hurray! was celebration enough. When a little time had gone by, I started mentioning that of course the other hip, the one that hadn’t been replaced, had never been as bad as the one that had. Which was true, but all the same I was working up to something in my naïvely devious way. It was rather a waste of money – of people’s taxes, when you came right down to it – to operate on the other hip, when really I was fine now.
Then Ansell came and sat on my bed and routed my little scheme. She said, ‘John, you do know that you’re going to have to have the other operation, don’t you?’ A doctor sitting on a bed in Men’s Surgical didn’t mean you were dying, as it had when I was on the children’s wards, but it wasn’t exactly relaxing. I was in for some sort of scolding.
I tried to bluster, but blustering doesn’t really work from a horizontal position. It helps if you can loom. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was
At the time I was attuned to a cruder logic. Since I was debarred from so many ordinary activities, it seemed to follow that I would have a special affinity for the esoteric. That would balance the cosmic accounts nicely. My bailiwick would be the occult and the perverse.
I thought Mouni Sadhu might have written another simpler book, and pestered Mrs Pavey through Mum until she came up with a much smaller volume called In Days of Great Peace , which was more like an autobiography and didn’t really engage me. I read about Mouni Sadhu’s visit to a spiritual leader in Southern India called Maharshi, whose face expressed endless friendship and understanding, how Mouni Sadhu dissolved into tears which washed away the stains of multiple incarnations and so on, and I thought ‘how nice for him’ without going any deeper.
Discreet off-stage cough
I must have read the sentence, ‘He walked with difficulty, as his joints and knees were affected by acute rheumatism’, and yet felt no particular quickening of interest. What else was I looking for, if not a guru with arthritis? The fit was incredibly close, yet I missed it. It was as if I was being protected by a sort of lightning conductor, from premature contact with energy of a high order. I put the book aside unaffected, at least on the surface. In this way a leading player in my life gave notice of his existence with a discreet off-stage cough, waiting in the wings, years before he made his entrance proper.
People value what they pay for. The things they get for free, such as a national health service, tend to be under-appreciated. I wasn’t going to make that mistake. Morale is important. I was deeply in debt to asystem which was the envy of the world, and I didn’t want anyone to imagine they had inserted a metal hip into an ingrate. As soon as I decently could, as soon as there was a chance of being believed, I had been saying how pleased I was with the operation. Despite everything I passed congratulations on to the surgeon who had done the work at Wexham Park – Mr Arden – saying how marvellous it was to have a hip that worked, a hip that didn’t just sit there. Modern medical science was wonderful, just wonderful. I was a new person, with my new hip! Hip hip hurray!
But maybe one Hip hurray! was celebration enough. When a little time had gone by, I started mentioning that of course the other hip, the one that hadn’t been replaced, had never been as bad as the one that had. Which was true, but all the same I was working up to something in my naïvely devious way. It was rather a waste of money – of people’s taxes, when you came right down to it – to operate on the other hip, when really I was fine now.
Then Ansell came and sat on my bed and routed my little scheme. She said, ‘John, you do know that you’re going to have to have the other operation, don’t you?’ A doctor sitting on a bed in Men’s Surgical didn’t mean you were dying, as it had when I was on the children’s wards, but it wasn’t exactly relaxing. I was in for some sort of scolding.
I tried to bluster, but blustering doesn’t really work from a horizontal position. It helps if you can loom. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I was
Similar Books
