Murphy by Samuel Beckett Page B

believed there was no dark quite like his own dark.
    Ticklepenny’s pompous dread of being driven mad by the spectacle constantly before him of those that were so already, made him long most heartily to throw up his job as male nurse at the Magdalen Mental Mercyseat. But as he had been admitted on probation for the term of one month, nothing less than a month’s service would produce any pay. To throw up the job at the end of a week or a fortnight or any period less than the period of probation would mean no compensation for all he had suffered. And between going mad and having the rest of his life poisoned by the thought of having once worked for a week for nothing, Ticklepenny found little to choose.
    Even the M.M.M. found it no easier than other mental hospitals to procure nurses. This was one reason for the enlistment of Ticklepenny, whose only qualifications for handling the mentally deranged were the pot poet’s bulk and induration to abuse. For even in the M.M.M. there were not many patients so divorced from reality that they could not discern and vituperate a Ticklepenny in their midst.
    When Ticklepenny had quite done commiserating himself, in a snivelling antiphony between the cruel necessity of going mad if he stayed and the cruel impossibility of leaving without his wages, Murphy said:
    ‘Supposing you were to produce a substitute of my intelligence ’ (corrugating his brow) ‘and physique’ (squaring the circle of his shoulders), ‘what then?’
    These words sent the whole of Ticklepenny into transports, but no part of him so horribly as his knees, which began to fawn under the table. Even so a delighted dog will sometimes forget himself.
    When this had exhausted itself he begged Murphy to accompany him without a moment’s delay to the M.M.M. and be signed on, as though the possibility of opposition on the part of the authorities to this lightning change in their personnel were too remote to be considered. Murphy also was inclined to think that the arrangement would find immediate favour, assuming that Ticklepenny had concealed no material factor in the situation, such as a liaison with some high official, the head male nurse for example. Short of being such a person’s minion, Murphy was inclined to think there was nothing Ticklepenny could do that he could not do a great deal better, especially in a society of psychotics, and that they had merely to appear together before the proper authority for this to be patent.
    But what made Murphy feel really confident was the sudden syzygy in Suk’s delineations of lunatic in paragraph two and custodian in paragraph seven. Of these considered separately up to date the first had seemed a mere monthly prognosticator’s tag, compelled by the presence of the moon in the Serpent, and the second a truism on the part of his stars. Now their union made the nativity appear as finely correlated in all its parts as the system from which it purported to come.
    Thus this sixpence worth of sky, from the ludicrous broadsheet that Murphy had called his life-warrant, his bull of incommunication and corpus of deterrents, changed into the poem that he alone of the living could write. He drew out the black envelope, grasped it to tear it across, then put it back in his pocket, mindful of his memory, and that he was not alone. He said he would present himself at the M.M.M. the following Sunday morning, whenever that was, which would give Ticklepenny time to manure the ground. Ticklepenny would not go mad before that day of rest so favourable to Murphy. To those in fear of losing it, reason stuck like a bur. And to those in hope …?
    ‘Call me Austin,’ said Ticklepenny, ‘or even Augustin.’ He felt the time was hardly ripe for Gussy, or even Gus.
    Having now been seated for over an hour without any ill effects, carried through his daily fraud and found a use for a pot poet, Murphy felt he had earned the long rapture flat on his back in that most pleasant of natural laps