Seven Lies by James Lasdun Page A

chorus of voices, all declaiming the same words like a massed, menacing choir.Strange as they were, these phenomena seemed to me entirely natural: it was fitting, somehow, that a dead person should see the world of the living through a veil of swarming small print, hear it through a perpetual buzzing or rustling in one ear. Even now, when I learn of a death, the image that comes into my mind is of the deceased person suddenly thrust into a realm where the inhabitants all suffer from acute tinnitus and weep fluorescent orange tears.
    In his remote fashion, Dr Serkin seemed to find these side effects amusing, or at least intriguing, and by association I myself seemed to grow fractionally more interesting in his eyes. As the weeks passed, I sensed a distinct desire on his part to communicate. His habit of mind was apparently such that anything he wished to say had to negotiate its way through a labyrinth of defensive caution, and consequently tended to come out in the form of odd little non sequiturs or else remarks too elliptical or ironic for me to fathom. Not that I was interested in doing so, any more than I was in his more direct attempts to make me open up about myself; an attitude that in retrospect I regret, as I suspect now that he was trying to help me.
    After the questions about my side effects, he would exchange his look of private amusement for a more businesslike expression, gesturing at me to remove my shirt so that he could begin the painstaking auscultations that preceded the examination of the X-ray. I sat there passively while he tapped and thumped me, listening through his stethoscope to the secret, involuntary confessions of my body. Once, while he was doing this, he began to question me quite insistently:
    â€˜So you thought you’d broken a rib? That’s what brought you to the hospital?’
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜Fell down some stairs or something?’ Tap-tap-tapping my sternum.
    â€˜Yes.’
    â€˜How?’ Inching the cold stethoscope across my chest.
    â€˜I was running. I tripped.’
    â€˜That’s all?’
    â€˜There was a loose stone.’
    â€˜It’s interesting that your heart starts pounding like a jack-hammer when you tell me this.’
    He glances at me. His eyes are large and distantly kind. Unillusioned, but without cynicism. Cord intact. Taking my X-ray from its folder, he clips it to the light box and puts the previous week’s X-ray up beside it for comparison, switching on the light.
    â€˜The duty doctor who admitted you mentioned he’d noticed abrasions around your throat. What would that have been from?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’
    â€˜Was somebody trying to strangle you?’
    The choral effect kicks in.
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜None of my business, eh?’ Fifty voices interrogating me in unison. Commas and colons raining in thick squalls across my eyes . . . I dispense a shrug, saying nothing.
    â€˜By the way, you have an unusually large lung capacity. Did you know this?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜In the old days that would have been seen as the sign of a tremendous élan vital .’
    Sullen monosyllable from the patient.
    â€˜Which was not unreasonable, given that the oxidation of tissue is the basis of life, and that the lungs provide the meansfor that oxidation. Would you say that describes you, an unusual vitality? Stefan?’
    â€˜I don’t know.’ Withdrawing into the tightest corner of myself.
    â€˜It’s true, you seem more a Werther type than a Mynheer Peeperkorn . . . But on the other hand . . . well . . . under certain circumstances certain qualities take the form of their opposite. Like a tarot card upside down. Only sometimes it’s the context that’s upside down, not the card, if you take my meaning. I assume they teach you the tarot at school?’ A sudden sardonic glimmer; it and the words themselves vectoring on a point too remote from my frame of reference for me to