SIX

I was cracking up. Certain of it. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? Renegades. Cunts. I was not coming apart in the mental sense: that much I felt reasonably sure about. No, this was different. You see, bits of me were breaking loose, shaking free inside, kidneys, heart, spleen, even my intestines, were all freeing themselves from their moorings, lifting their roots from the brittle shell of my body which seemed to want nothing to do with keeping its respective components in place. That business of removing me from the hospital had taken its toll. They should have known better than to fool around with someone like me. What right had they? But then, what were my rights?

I had a recurrent dream which began to impose itself on my conscious thoughts, an image of John bending over me as I lay on a mortuary slab. He lifted his glasses, straining to recognize me, knowing he should be able to put a name to this thin corpse, but he shook his head and walked away. I, in my turn, was viewing the scene from a corner of the cold room, maybe I was an attendant or something, and I too came and looked at the body, shook my head and walked away.

The day after my arrival at One World John came in search of me, full of warmth and pleasantries, perhaps in atonement for his gruff manner of the previous day. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll go outside. We have much to discuss.’

A thaw had set in during the night and much of the drive and rear courtyard were wet and clear of snow. He wheeled me out beyond some outbuildings from which there came the sound of men tending light machines. I heard the squirt of a motorbike passing along some distant road beyond the woods surrounding us. He stopped in a small garden, an enclosed area of small tufted lawns, a greenhouse, bare flower-beds still speckled with white where the sun had not yet reached, and a pond. He took a stick and prodded at the ice floating on the top of the water. ‘Did you ever keep fish, Peter?’ he asked. ‘No? I should make more time. A man in my line of work can only profit from the relaxation afforded by such a simple pastime.’ He smiled, his teeth nicotined and uneven. ‘I put four carp in here. They didn’t last a week. I wonder often about the quality of the water. I have a weakness for handsome fish, but I’m afraid the science of keeping them in perfect health baffles me.’

I wished he would get to the point. He threw the stick to the opposite side of the pond then knelt down in front of me. He took my hand and warmed it between his.