The Doctor Is Sick by Anthony Burgess Read Free Book Online Page B

bilabial fricative and its persistence through centuries of colloquial English. Sam Weller did not, of course, interchange ‘v’ and ‘w’: he used a single phoneme for both – the bilabial fricative. But a recorder like Dickens, untrained phonetically, would think he heard ‘v’ when he expected ‘w’, ‘w’ when he expected ‘v’.
    â€˜Now,’ said the girl, ‘don’t open your eyes. Keep them tightly shut. I’m going to flash a very strong light on to them. Try and keep perfectly still.’
    In his brain arms seemed to close round the bilabial fricative, to protect it from all these people with their white coats and lights and humming machines. Then the flash came: a sharp coloured pattern was etched on the inside of his lids, hideous and somehow obscene. ‘Oh, Christ,’ said Edwin, ‘that was horrible.’
    â€˜Was it?’ said the girl. ‘Now, once more.’
    Again the obscene sharp pattern – cones, cubes, globesin malevolent colours which he could not define. The humming of the engine stopped. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘That’s the lot. You can open your eyes now.’ She hummed as tunelessly as the machine had hummed while she took off Edwin’s hair-net and detached the damp salt gobbets of cotton-wool. Then, with cool indifference, she said: ‘You can go back to your ward now.’
    Edwin stood outside in the corridor shaking with a rage which he found difficult to explain. ‘Bitch,’ he said under his breath, ‘bitch, bitch.’ But he had already forgotten the electro-encephalogram girl. It was as though the obscene flash had engendered a sudden and rather surprising hatred for his wife. He felt insulted that she should have thought it necessary to lie, so as not to hurt his feelings. He looked at his wrist-watch: nearly midday. He would telephone her and make it absolutely clear that she was under no obligation whatsoever to visit him if she didn’t wish to. Or, better, he would be greatly obliged if she would cease to visit him altogether. ‘Leave me alone,’ he wanted to say, ‘with my disease and my bilabial fricative.’ And then he saw that that, of course, wouldn’t do at all. Moreover, the task of finding copper to make the telephone call would be, he foresaw, wearisome. Let it go, he decided.
    She came that evening, alone, sniffing with a genuine chill, and he, as was inevitable, said:
    â€˜You shouldn’t have come.’
    â€˜Yes, that’s what I thought, too, but I felt – well, it can’t be much fun for you, after all, not seeing anybody.’
    â€˜But it isn’t just anybody I want to see, is it?’
    â€˜No, I suppose not. Oh, I do wish it were all over.’ She spoke the words fervently, as though her insolvement inhis disease were more than the empathetic one of a mere loving wife. And he thought that she must have been entrusted with some secret about the disease and its prognosis. She could never keep a secret with ease: it was agony for her not to have the freedom to blurt everything out to the very person who must be the last to know; it was cognate, Edwin supposed, with her sexual incontinence. He said:
    â€˜If Railton’s told you something that I’m not supposed to know—— Well, you know me well enough. I can take anything. And I don’t like secrets any more than you do.’
    She got up from the bed’s edge nervously. ‘I’ve told you already,’ she said. ‘It was just nothing, just about everything being all right and I wasn’t to worry, that’s all. Honestly.’ Her eyes had a pleading look. She said: ‘I suppose I ought to go now, really. They’ll be ringing that blasted bell any minute now, and I hate anybody telling me to get out.’
    â€˜But you’ve only just come. There’s plenty of time.’
    â€˜Look,’ she said