Dentressangle walked briskly beside him, the heels of her stilettos cracking across the red linoleum like small arms fire. The corridor had high ceilings and hanging lamps with white glass lampshades, dingy, functional, and ugly. It was painted yellow—the sick yellow of pus—and smelt of urine, disinfectant and faecal incontinence. It was just the two of them now, Georgette having presumably returned to her caretaking duties.
They passed an old man in a grey woollen dressing gown, standing at a Zimmer frame—the half-shaved cheeks sprouted weed patches of grey stubble, the toothless jaw worked aimlessly, the rheumy eyes behind smeared pebble lenses saw nothing. Loofah turned quickly away, preferring instead the sight of his friend, with her endless stockinged legs striding elegantly up the unappealing corridor and her tiny dress gripping her firm curves. A small bubble of warmth burst in his belly; Dentressangle was right—she truly was a magnificent specimen.
A far-off cry echoed down the corridor, though whether of a woman bringing new life into the world or of a tormented soul leaving it, he could not tell.
The two of them now floated gently in his head as he walked: the elegantly attired Frenchman—Loofah's deliverer from the termite queen and from the carnivorous toilet—and his lovely alter ego, slowly unbuttoning her mink trimmed nurse's uniform, smouldering with eternal invitation.
A middle-aged nurse, her uniform a modest version of Dentressangle's own, pushed a wheel chair past them; its passenger was an old lady in a faded nylon nightdress with a tartan blanket tucked over her swollen legs, and with woolly white hair resonant of a surprised sheep.
Then the two figures were joined by two more—the cardiganed double and the glittering surgeon, both watching with cold malice—and the four of them rotated slowly round each other in a cerebral mobile: two friends, two enemies—two enemies, two friends.
There was another cry, much closer—male this time, a bellow of pain. The smells of half-disinfected excreta, the uniforms, the wheelchairs: a knot of anxiety tightened in Loofah's bowels.
'You are in full sureness that you are knowing what to do?' asked Dentressangle.
'Yes, yes,' lied Loofah, 'Just get us out of this place, will you?'
A door opened as they passed. An anguished groan emanated from inside, followed by a noise of falling furniture. Loofah stopped, transfixed by horror, as a uniformed figure backed out. He knew at once it was her, the deadly twin of his present companion come to haul him back to the clinical torture chamber. He shrieked and grabbed for Dentressangle.
The figure turned and he saw that she was carrying not a scalpel but a tray with a plate of cabbage, shredded and boiled to a grey malodorous purée, and in place of the raptor's pain-hungry snarl was a plump and motherly smile. Loofah slumped with relief.
'Mr Johnson won't be wanting his dinner,' said the nurse confidentially. In the room behind her an old man writhed on the linoleum, clutching at his belly with gnarled hands. The wrinkled white face was twisted in agony and a thin trickle of green slime spurted from his withered lips.
'I do so like it when they pass on,' she went on, quietly closing the door on the alarming scene and turning to go, 'It just makes the whole thing worthwhile.'
'My friend,' purred Dentressangle, firmly holding the errant hand against her flesh, 'You are—how you say?—a little bouncy.'
The door opposite now opened and another plump nurse pushed a wheelchair into the corridor. Her charge was a young man; wrapped in white towels and trembling uncontrollably, his face was streaked with drying blood, his hair stiff with mucous. He appeared to be no more than seventeen or eighteen—though there was a rosy freshness to his skin, a newly minted gloss, which belied even these paltry few years.
With some difficulty, Loofah recovered his hand. 'I hate hospitals, Norbert,' he said, 'I just want to get out of here.'
'But this is not un hôpital, my friend. It is a house for the old persons. You are having rien to fear here—at least not for a few years yet.'
'An old people's home,' repeated Loofah slowly, as the distinctly youthful patient was wheeled away.
At the end of the corridor another door closed discretely as they passed leaving a lingering image, vague and uncertain like a scent of long ago. It was an image of what appeared to be human remains on the linoleum floor—a wrinkled and empty skin split down the front with the innards sucked out, still wearing its blood-spattered nightdress—and of a young girl, her naked flesh slippery with mucous, standing in front of the window, trembling and whimpering as two solicitous nurses rubbed her down with white towels.
'You're right, Norbert, I am a little jumpy,' said Loofah, 'But I really do not like this place.'
'I am understanding, my friend. Le monde for you is full of great scariness. Which is why it is bestest for you to stay avec your cher ami until you have the ableness to go back to your home.'
She stroked the front of Loofah's jacket with immaculately manicured fingers. Over her shoulder Loofah saw two nurses hurrying a wheelchair towards them.
'And this will not be long, I think,' murmured Dentressangle, 'All you must be doing is—.'
'Yes, I know what I must do,' sighed Loofah, 'I rarely get a chance to forget it.'
He stepped aside to let the wheelchair through. In it an old lady grunted and convulsed, spewing green foam onto her faded pink nightie. In the flash-glance as she passed he thought he saw a livid gash in the wrinkled skin at the top of her nightie—he was surely mistaken, of course, but the flesh at the top of her sternum seemed to be splitting.
At that moment a pair of revolvers opened fire from other the end of the corridor and a female voice screamed out: 'Nobby!'
It was Georgette—now a nurse, though as immodestly uniformed as her master—tottering towards them in clacking high heels, nearly slipping on the polished linoleum as she ran. She was waving frantically and her expression spoke of an urgency bordering on panic.
Loofah sat in a plastic upholstered seat watching without interest as two youthful Australians unfolded the intimate secrets of their profoundly inane lives to him while, on the other side of the double swing doors, Dentressangle and Georgette conferred in urgent whispers. They seemed to be taking forever, and Loofah was becoming a teeny bit bored.
He shared the television room with one other, a vast saturnine figure topped by an unkempt mass of white hair with eyebrows like two Persian cats balancing on his brow. The old man wore the obligatory grey dressing gown and sat mumbling to himself, oblivious to both Loofah and the young Antipodeans. With its once mighty flesh crumbling over a broken frame, this could have been the Dorian Grey portrait of some immortal rugby prop forward.
The vacant mumblings of his companion blended seamlessly into the no less vacant chuntering from the television set to form an exquisitely soporific composite of soothing noise. A horse-blanket of fatigue descended over Loofah, smothering his senses. His eyelids became turgid and then slid closed of their own accord, sinking him slowly into a gentle pool.
At first the pool was empty, just soft darkness and the babbling noise, as of a nocturnal brook. Immeasurable time slipped by and then, with evolutionary slowness, the blackness seemed to coalesce to form a shape, a living shape, the shapeless shape of an amoeba, a quivering protozoan with a membrane of sun-burnished bronze. And on this membrane emerged a human face, a face he knew. Then the protoplasm polarised and it tore itself into two halves, two new shimmering orbs of golden flesh. Faces emerged on each orb, each identical, each the same as the first—this time, however, he knew that one was his friend, the other his enemy. He looked from one to the other, trying to decide which was which—the faces, however, were indistinguishable.
Even as he was struggling to resolve his dilemma, the creatures divided again and four faces swam inside his skull, each smiling with bland, androgynous reassurance. Then again they divided to make eight, and again to make sixteen. In no time his head was filled with a plankton cloud of protozoan life, some dividing, some smiling out at him, some vaguely male, others verging on the female. A tiny worm of worry now wriggled into being at the centre of this vast swarm of sun-tanned amoebae; for some of them were his enemies and some his friends—but which was which, which was which, which was which?
'You can be trusting me,' said one of the faces.
Dentressangle was looking out at him from the television screen. Or rather two Dentressangles were looking out at him: a young man and a girl, his twin. They stood side by side in lurid beach clothes, each clutching a Malibu board, their bronze flesh burnished to perfection by the South Pacific sun.
'You can be trusting me,' repeated the couple, speaking in unison and beaming him a joint smile as bright as the rolling surf.
'Can I?' murmured Loofah, beginning to emerge from his torpor.
'Naturellement, my friend,' they said, from behind him, 'I will be back in pas de temps at all, this I promise.'
Loofah turned quickly, to the two immodestly clad nurses standing behind his chair.
'Georgette here will stay with you,' continued Dentressangle, 'And please, my friend, for your own safeness, do not be leaving her side.'
The Frenchwoman spoke quickly, an edge of tension in her voice; even the lovely veneer of her face showed a slight warp of angst. As Georgette flashed him what was clearly intended to be a disarming smile, Loofah shook his head sharply to dispel the last traces of dream-fog.
'Of course I won't, Norbert, you can trust me,' he said, 'But just one thing: when you come back, how will I know it's you and not—and not the one who looks like you?'
It was noble of Dudley to volunteer so readily for identity-tag duties, thought Loofah, as the doors swung closed on Dentressangle's elegant backside. He blinked twice, trying unsuccessfully to banish a persistent image of the little tin of shoe polish nestling down the front of the Frenchwoman's black lace knickers. Why couldn't she have just put him in her pocket like anyone else?
'She won't be long,' purred Georgette. Not wasting a second after her master's departure, she had now sidled up to him and was pressing her groin against his thigh. Loofah grinned awkwardly and gulped; still transfixed by the thought of himself as a tin of polish, her closeness made him prickle with a strange discomfort.
'But we've still got plenty of time,' she went on, her lips close against his ear, 'To show you that I forgive you for leaving me in that horrid garden.'
The girl slipped delicate fingers under his jacket, sliding them gently over his chest. He felt her warm breath on his face and a soft wetness inside his ear.
'Don't Georgette,' he said, weakly, 'This is an old people's home.'
'That's alright,' she whispered, 'There's no-one to see us.'
But just then, as if to contradict her, the mumbling old giant cried out. He was now contorted over the plastic upholstery, his body racked by convulsions. His eyes were rolled back into his head and white foam spilled over his chin.
'Don't worry about him,' said Georgette, 'He’ll soon go back to sleep. I do know about these things, you know—I am a nurse.' She pressed her soft chest against his and slid her thigh up his leg, while with her right hand she groped at his belt buckle. A hot sweet stickiness trickled down Loofah's spine and his bones began to liquefy.
Then the old man bellowed again. He was now thrashing violently, spewing vomit over his dressing gown. The chair slid out from under him and he crashed onto the linoleum.
Like a sluice of iced water the sudden commotion brought Loofah to his senses—and in the distraction, he saw his chance. With an elegant waltzing motion he disentangled himself from the girl's octopus limbs and stepped smartly behind an empty chair.
'Don't you dare push me away!' cried the girl, her kittenish smile now an angry pout—behind her the double doors smashed open and a navy uniformed matron burst into the room.
'But Georgette, there's a sick person and you're a—.'
'Nurse!' bellowed the matron from across the room.
Georgette turned, blank-faced with surprise.
'Don't just stand there, girl,' shouted the matron, 'Hot water, towels—now!'
Georgette looked from the matron to Loofah.
'Duty calls,' he said, with a shrug.
'Move!' screamed the matron.
Loofah retreated to the far side of the room, from where he watched queasily across a sea of plastic upholstered easy chairs as the matron and her reluctant assistant tended their convulsing patient.
At first the huge body thrashed about like a dying epileptic, while they struggled to hold him down. A pool of urine was spreading out from between his kicking legs and he spewed green vomit onto the linoleum and the girl's dress. Georgette squirmed and winced as each of her patient's excreta splattered onto her, all the while suffering an artillery barrage of abuse from the short-tempered matron.
The convulsions then took a different pattern. The old man began to twitch, quivering like an amoeba about to divide. His neck bulged like a frog's throat, his face twisted into a rictus grin, and his belly ballooned out, acutely and unexpectedly gravid. Then blood spurted from his neck in a spraying geyser as the stretched flesh began to split. The girl shrieked, covering her face with blood-smeared hands.
'Bloody trainees!' cursed the matron, to herself.
When it was over, they sat him up. The withered husk slipped off his back, the old face crumpling like a discarded mask, its eyebrows and hair clotted with blood and vomit. The new face, though eerie in its factory freshness, was classically beautiful and would not have shamed a Greek god. His hair, still wet with mucous and plastered to his sculpted skull, was the colour of a raven's wing, as were the generous eyebrows that arched over his deep set eyes, these also as black as jet.
The matron covered the trembling youth with a towel and began pummelling new life into his fresh skin. Georgette knelt beside him, her face and uniform smeared and stained, and gawped.
'Come on, girl, don't just sit there—get rubbing.'
She picked up a towel and wiped it absently over his arm, letting the soft material mould to the bulging mass of his biceps.
As they helped the neonate—who tottered unsteadily—to his feet it became clear what a magnificent specimen he was, towering over them with shoulders like mountain ridges, a cliff-face chest, and Doric column thighs. Freshly toned muscle rippled under the girl's now energetic towelling.
The matron draped a towel over his shoulders and stood back to admire, a craftswoman proud of her work. The girl, however, kept towelling, rubbing his thighs and buttocks with ever more enthusiasm.
'That'll do, nurse.' Georgette looked up, her face filled with disappointment. 'The patient needs a shower now—see to it, please.' She brightened immediately.
'And mind you don't miss anything,' added the matron, 'I want every bit of him as clean as new whistle.'
The girl's gaze slid slowly down over the youth's towering body—a dreamy vacancy glazed her eyes and she smiled distantly. Then she seemed to recollect and looked anxiously across at Loofah.
'It's alright, Georgette,' he said, 'I'll wait right here for you—I promise.'
They emerged through glass doors in a Neo-classical portico onto a York stone terrace. On the barbered lawns beyond the balustrades nurses pushed old men and women in wheel-chairs, while fresh-faced young folk strolled about in ill-fitting dressing gowns, stretching new limbs, filling rejuvenated lungs with the clean, cool air.
'There you go,' said the matron, 'Straight down the drive, left at the end and you're in the village. There are one or two buses, but I don't know how frequent they are out here. Where is it you are wanting to get to?'
'I'm not exactly sure,' Loofah replied, 'You see, I'm supposed to be looking for something, but I don't know quite where it is.'
'You're looking for something, but you don't know where it is?' The matron's tone was disapproving—she was clearly a woman who had little time for any sort of vagueness.
'It's called "a heart of darkness". To be frank with you, I haven't got a clue what it is, let alone where it is.' He paused. 'You wouldn't happen to know yourself, would you?'
'Never heard of such a thing,' she said, emphatically. Then she seemed to soften a little. 'But why not look in at the fête before you go? They're having it on the green behind the church. There'll have all sorts of bric-a-brac there—you might just be lucky. You'll have no trouble finding it—you can see the church steeple from here.'
The grounds of the home were encircled by a wall of stately copper beech, the dark foliage shining like carved mahogany in the brilliant sunshine. To the left of the drive a grey stone steeple thrust up from behind the tallest trees, stabbing at the innocent blue sky with its weather vane.
'It certainly might be worth a try.' Loofah paused. 'I hope you don't mind my asking,' he went on, rather tentatively, 'but are you with the Secretariat?'
The matron seemed to find this amusing. 'Good Lord, no,' she exclaimed, over a guffaw, 'I'm just a citizen—though I do try to do my bit.'
'And do you happen to know a Monsieur Dentressangle, a foreign gentleman?'
This time she was most definitely not amused—she bristled, folding her arms under her ample bosom. 'I know of this person, yes,' she replied, coldly, 'Why do you ask?'
'I understand that he is—with the Secretariat, I mean.'
'He most certainly is not!' she exclaimed, with a frown, 'Monsieur Dentressangle is a visitor—it is quite impossible for a visitor to an official, of that I can quite assure you!'
After some cursory small-talk, during which he tried—with only partial success—to smooth her obviously ruffled feathers, Loofah bade his farewell.
'Oh, I nearly forgot,' he said, as he was turning to go, 'If it's not too much to ask, do you think you could you give the trainee nurse my apologies and tell her that I was called away on urgent business? I'd be ever so grateful.'