I bought him another pint and asked him some more questions about his parents. I could see him struggling to fit the vague memories of these strangers’ visit into the concepts of ‘mother’ and ‘father’ – concepts that did at least seem somehow familiar to him.
‘She was my mother…’
‘Is your mother. They came yesterday,’ I prompted. ‘She became very upset. Do you remember?’
Then he stood up.
‘Please, I have to go…’ He touched his groin.
The lavatory of the Star and Garter was in a whitewashed lathe and plaster shed on the edge of the small carpark at the rear. I lead Gerald through the saloon bar and down a shadowy passageway to the back door and steered him into the odorous gents.
‘I’ll see you in the bar,’ I said. ‘I’ll order some sandwiches.’
The meagre sandwiches arrived but there was no sign of Gerald. I looked into the gents but he had gone. Then I saw him across the road some thirty yards off and called his name.
‘There you are,’ he said, relieved, coming over. ‘I couldn’t find.’
‘Did you come back to the pub?’
‘The pub?’
‘Where we had our drinks.’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t know.’
I took him back inside and showed him our coats, our drinks and the stiffening rounds of sandwiches. It distressed him to see how quickly he had forgotten everything, how quickly the residue of fresh impressions was wiped away, allowing no memory of a way back to form, even one so recent as a few minutes ago.
We walked back to the hospital each in a deep and preoccupied silence. I was thinking that this severe short-term memory crisis made a solitary life virtually impossible to lead: Gerald Gault could lose himself and his known world within seconds.
Preliminary Diagnosis
Patient 39 (Lt Gerald Gault) is severely handicapped, though at first glance this does not seem apparent to the casual observer. The damage to the posterior sections of his brain has incapacitated his ability to process, analyse and retain information. Despite the patchiness of his field of vision, Patient 39, with effort, can see. It is in his understanding of what he sees that the problem lies. He can see a middle-aged man and a woman but cannot recognize them as his parents.
The injury has also affected his use of language. He can retain bits of information. He knows when he needs to go to the lavatory but having gone there cannot piece together the route back. His life has become an endless series of labyrinths.
Wednesday
Gerald sat in a deckchair in the herb garden. He was leaning back looking up at the patches of blue sky between the swift clouds.
‘What day is it?’ he asked.
‘Wednesday.’
‘I think it was on a Wednesday that I was hurt.’
‘Can you finish this sequence? Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday –’
‘– Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.’
‘Excellent. Now what day comes before Friday?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Never mind.’
We sat quietly for a while.
‘When I see blue I think of Sylvie.’
‘Why?’
‘Because of the desert, when I was lost.’
Saturday
Mr and Mrs Gault came again today and spent an hour or so with their son. Gerald had understood enough of their relationship (I had explained again who they were, why they wanted to see him) to address them as mother and father, but it was clear this was an act of politesse rather than affirmation that anything had changed.
The great difficulty – perhaps tragedy would be a better word – with Gerald is that the frontal lobes and anterior sectors of his brain remain undamaged: thus he still has the capacity to recognize his defects. He knows how badly he is damaged and how his world was fractured and he struggles, as much as his strength permits, to overcome his problem. I can see how intensely he suffers as he tries to reconstitute his world and his life. Yet in a deep sense he remains a man, a human being.
Monday
I took Gerald to the cinema today, to a matinee. We watched an anodyne film about a young couple falling in and out of love before love triumphed at the end. I told Gerald to squeeze my arm when he didn’t understand what was happening. Not a very scientific experiment, but from the almost continuous pressure on my arm it was apparent to me that only the very simplest acts of everyday life – walking down the street, opening a door, getting out of bed – made any sense to him. The rest was incomprehensible. When at the end the couple duly made up and kissed he was still baffled.
Later, walking back to the hospital we tried to analyse what the difficulty was.
‘Everything was so fast,’ he said.
‘What about the girl?’
‘Yes, I liked her.’
‘Did Sylvie look like her?’
He nodded his head vigorously as he thought.
‘Yes… I think the same…’ He touched my hair.
‘Hair. Sylvie had blonde hair?’
‘Blonde hair. Yes.’
Wednesday
Gerald has been trying to write. He handed me these lines today, product of several days’ effort.
‘My name is Gerald Gault, I am twenty-three years old. Sometimes I get sad at how pathetic my life is. But I want to prove I am not a lost cause, that my life is not hopeless. I need to learn to remember. I need to have the kind of mind I had before I was hurt. I need to find Sylvie so we can be together again. When I am together with Sylvie I will be a man like other men. We will get married and we will live in a house by the sea. We will have two children – a boy and a girl. We will be very happy.’
Sunday Night
I was called out to see Gerald. He had asked for me most insistently, the nurse said. When I went into his room he was in his pyjamas and dressing gown.
‘My head is hurting me,’ he said. ‘Things are changing in my head.’
‘I don’t think so, Gerald,’ I reassured him. ‘Every day you grow a little better. You’re beginning to write. Slowly, slowly you’re beginning to understand more.’
He delicately touched the back of his head where the scars were. ‘No, I think…’
‘Show me where your nose is, Gerald.’
He looked at me. ‘Nose?’
‘Point to your eye.’
He screwed up his face. He was like a man in a dark room looking for something precious he’d lost. If only he could switch on a light.
‘My eye… I don’t know.’
I ordered a sedative and the nurse put him back to bed. Just as I was leaving he said, ‘When is Sylvie coming to see me?’
‘One day soon.’
‘I want to see the blue sky and Sylvie, like in the desert.’
I went back over to him.
‘Do you remember the desert?’
‘When I was with Sylvie, yes. The sky was very blue.’
‘Do you remember the dead soldier? The German soldier?’
‘No. Sylvie was there. She said: “Je t’aime pour toujours.”’
I looked down at him. He took his spectacles off, folded them and laid them on the bedside table. He smiled, happy with his memories of Sylvie.
‘Goodnight, Doctor Moran,’ he said.
Monday
Gerald Gault died in the night of a massive brain haemorrhage. I went to look at his body and as far as I could tell it appeared as if his death had been both instantaneous and dramatic. His mouth was slightly open and there was a perceptible arch to his brows as if he had been caught in the middle of uttering a phrase such as ‘Oh, really?’ or ‘How interesting!’ I telephoned his parents and was glad to speak to his father, though half way through our short conversation I could hear Mrs Gault’s choking, throat-raking sobs in the background as she guessed from her husband’s expression and his posture – the hunched shoulders, the back half turned – what the news must have been.
I went out into the hospital gardens and strol
led the gravelled pathways for ten minutes or so. Building blue-grey clouds in the east screened the morning sun, though occasionally sharp and vivid passages of blue meant that the lawns and arbours were bathed in sudden sunlight. A fresh sturdy breeze moved the tops of the elms and the ash trees where they lined the small stream and the noise of their growing whisper masked the domestic drone of an aircraft coming into land at the RAF base. Impromptu currents of air shook the rhododendron bushes and the laurels, making them shudder and thrash as if some beast were trapped or lurked behind their dense leaves. Pentecostal, I thought, or valedictory? And for a moment I allowed myself to picture this agitation of late-summer wind as Gerald Gault’s soul taking final leave of the hospital and its precincts.
Gerald Gault’s soul. Patient 39’s soul… What did it add up to? In the few weeks that I had known him it was plain to me that Gerald’s case – his peculiar and particular agonies – was among the most complex and perplexing that I had ever seen. That part of his undamaged brain that most sustained him had been a memory of something his imagination had once produced. His imagination had not been damaged by the shrapnel that had penetrated the back of his head and what became real to Gerald Gault was a consoling phantasm, a dream, an urgent wish. It was more solid and tangible to him than the fragmented physical world that he found so hard to shape and comprehend.
A love of the colour blue and false memories of a non-existent girl called Sylvie were all that remained of Gerald Gault after his terrible injury: such fragile, ephemeral foundations – too insubstantial a thing to build a new life on? Perhaps that is all any of us require. As I walked back to my office I saw a thrush stabbing at worms on the cloud-shadowed lawn. Patients were being urged indoors by the nurses. A door banged somewhere. The wind tugged at my tie and jacket and spots of rain began to patter on my uplifted face.
The Mind/Body Problem
He looks at his father. His father is on the phone confirming the bus to the airport. One hand holds the phone, the other a 20 lb barbell. His father, a huge man, is wearing tiny swimming trunks that only just contain his buckled genitalia. He turns his hairless, tapered caramel body to reveal that one buttock has freed itself from its sling of magenta spandex.
He looks at his mother. His mother puts the finishing touches to her meal replacement drink: she adds two sliced bananas and sets the blender to pulse.
His name is Neil Tobin (it’s the same name as his father, annoyingly). He is nineteen years old, six feet tall, weighs nine stone four, and suffers from asthma, psoriasis and, he’s now almost 100 per cent sure, some form of near-persistent arrhythmia in his heart. He takes out his inhaler and gives himself a couple of squirts. His mother, Tanya Tobin (she’s American), comes in to the conservatory where he’s sunbathing and asks him yet again if he’s sure about the gym, honey. Yes, I’m sure, he says.
Open University course A211 – Philosophy and the Human Situation. Summer holiday essays are a choice between ‘Can minds exist independently of matter?’ and ‘Are minds really nothing but matter?’ He knows what this is. This is the mind/body problem.
The coach is full of bodybuilders, male and female, members of Neil and Tanya Tobin’s gym/health club ‘Body’s East’. The proprietors stand outside the bus in their trainers and track suits bidding farewell to their son. The bodybuilders are off to Florida for two weeks and will then fly to Las Vegas for the finals of Mr and Ms Olympia. Neil reassures his mother that he’ll be fine. The club’ll be quiet, Tanya observes, as most of its regular members are travelling to Florida for the finals. Neil agrees, bids them farewell, kissing his mother, shaking his father’s big hand. Enjoy, enjoy.
Neil begins his reading: ‘In philosophy the mind/body problem asks the question whether there is a mental sphere of existence separate from the physical sphere, and if so, how do the two interact? If I cut my finger how does my mind know it hurts?’
‘So,’ says Lion Davy, looking knowingly at Xanna North, ‘We got a new boss.’
‘Yeah. You’d better watch your step, Lionel,’ Neil says.
‘Lion.’
‘Lionel.’
‘If you call me Lionel you have to call her Sandra.’
Neil adds some Angostura bitters to the glucose mixture until it turns a pale pink. He tastes it: suitably unpleasant and astringent. He reaches for his Portuguese dictionary and, on his label machine, types out: ‘NAO PARA VENDA COMERCIAL’ and sticks it on the plastic bottle. He suspects that the injunction is ungrammatical but he doesn’t care, the foreign languages always work. He’ll say it comes from Brazil. He puts the bottle with the others in the cupboard under the reception desk and locks it with his key.
As his mother predicted the gym is indeed quiet. The ranked machines – the ab-benches, leg-presses, stair-climbers, the squat racks, the cycles, the steppers, the treadmills – stand idle. Someone comes in for a Jacuzzi. Xanna’s aerobics class at ten o’clock has three clients (school holidays). Lion spends his day polishing, dusting, waxing the floor. He used to be a cleaner until he started to work on his body.
‘One more extreme position argues that human bodies are simply a form of complex machine (today we might rather say physicochemical system) working purely according to physical principles. In such a depiction of the human being there is no room for consciousness, as we would routinely describe it.’
Later, Neil passes an hour on the net looking vainly for a prescription skin cream with a mild water-based cortisone. He’s grown somewhat suspicious of the heavy cortisone creams his dermatologist happily prescribes. Neil is sensing a thinning of the skin, not to say aggravation, of those hard-to-treat plaques of psoriasis that badge his body (the elbows, the backs of the knees, the baffling, spreading patch an inch to the left of his navel).
For want of other clients he sells Xanna his Brazilian steroid drink for £18 (staff discount).
‘It’s brilliant, apparently,’ Neil says.
‘Where you get this stuff?’ Xanna asks. ‘Nao para venda… What’s that mean?’
‘I track it down on the web. Then I source it through my contacts.’
Xanna turns away, already twisting off the cap. ‘New member’s in,’ she says.
Neil heads up the stairs for the gym with the new member’s membership swipe card. The name on the card says D. Babcock. In the gym he sees Lion and three of the usual regulars – Chuck, Dave, Nigel – on the weights. He mouths ‘new member’ to Lion and is pointed towards the far corner by the big floor-to-ceiling window that looks obliquely out on the promenade and the English Channel beyond, grey like streets. D. Babcock turns out to be a young woman. She’s doing a barbell squat and Neil can see that not only is she shredded, she’s big, damn big.
‘We can think of ourselves biologically and we can think of ourselves historically. The idea that we can conceive of ourselves in any transcendental way is nonsense. Everything we know about our nature is the product of our limited experience and all too fallible biology.’
Body’s East draws the serious male and female bodybuilder from a large catchment area – as far as Brighton in the west and Dover in the east (as well as the bread-and-butter aerobics/health-club crowd). Tanya has modelled the club on Floridan enterprises where she used to live and work and both she and Neil Snr put its renown and success (the Tobins make a good living) down to the slick US feel (its can-do efficiency, the piped music, the incredibly friendly staff) that they have aped here on the south coast of England. But Neil Jnr knows that many people patronize the club for all the exotic grey-market supplements he secretly supplies from ‘abroad’.
The new member (showered, changed) comes into the shop where Neil is refilling shelves with supplements, protein boosters, RTGs and MRPs. She buys a can of XXX-POWR-FUEL.
‘Is this any good?’ she asks
‘Well,’ Neil says, ‘it has protein stacked with Ectdysteron – which is useful – and there’s no high cyclamic index maltodextrins. After your workout you need a good osmotic, glycogen load carb source.
It’s not bad. We have our own house brand – better.’
‘Right. Yeah…’
He can spout this kind of detail for hours. Neil hands over her change and introduces himself. She tells him her name – the D stands for Doreen, Doreen Babcock. He talks to her about the gym, the services they offer, and hints at the possibilities of acquiring bodybuilding supplements not available without prescription. I get them from abroad, Neil says, meaningful: Mexico, the former Soviet Union, the Eastern Bloc… She looks intrigued. She’s very small, barely five feet, and in her loose sportswear her muscle mass is mainly concealed. Many of the serious women bodybuilders, Neil has noticed, are extremely petite – his mother being a case in point. Doreen’s corded throat and the dilated bas-relief trees of her vascular system (on her neck, her forearms) show the effort she puts in. Her jaw muscles bulge and broaden what would have been a pretty face with a snub nose – if she weren’t looking so drawn from her exercise. She has a small shading of acne just below her ears – a real give-away. Neil knows what she’s doing to herself and what she’s taking. She’s going for a competition cut: massive fat-burn, maximum definition. He wonders if she’s a pro. Her dyed blonde hair is naturally curly and her accent is local. She’s been recently transferred from Brighton: she works in Barclays Bank on Teasdale Street.
A couple of days later Neil goes into the Barclays Bank and moves his account there from the HSBC. Doreen Babcock is a personal account executive and she looks smart in her official navy blazer and skirt. The material of her jacket strains across her broad, tapered back but her legs, Neil observes, are surprisingly slim and normal. In her uniform she looks top heavy, unsteady on her very high heels. Neil has almost £10,000 in his account. They make a date for a drink later that evening.