Practice Makes Perfect

‘So you think you’re going to sleep, do you..?’

The voices whispering in the dream are Emily’s, a composite voice now, then polyglottal, synthesised but unhappy, straining at the stitches, mouths like wounds, dark purples and red blooms, bluish, sticky, glistening, metallic on the tongue and in the ear, pulsing faintly for a fluttering last then still...

Here I am, Mrs James Henry, wife of Professor James Henry, of the University Hospital of Westwich, blinking in the half-light, reaching out for a whisper in the dark. This insomnia is beginning to wear on me. I’ll make an appointment with Dr Quint in the morning, after James has left for the University. He has to be in early tomorrow, for a nine o’clock seminar. They love him at the University. All his students love him. He’s always going away on conferences, giving papers, lecturing. He’s so knowledgeable. Mrs James Henry is left quite in the lurch, wondering what on earth he sees in her…well, apart from the obvious, of course. Yes, he sees that alright, and a lot more besides. But cut it out now! We’d better not start thinking along those lines, had we…a fine story this would make if we carried on like that!

James won’t be going to the University tomorrow in any case; well, he’s in no fit state to work now, is he? They will have to get by without his expertise, his soft, soft hands. I love his hands. Soft and white and cool, always so cool, with tapered fingers and perfectly manicured nails. He always took such great care of his hands. He had to: they were healing hands, after all.

I’ll get up and make myself some stimulating coffee. Its delightful that I can now smoke in the kitchen...thankyou so much for your tolerance.

I don’t know what’s come over me recently. I never used to feel like this. It feels like the world has gone a little hazy round the edges, as though someone had nicked an organ in passing and light was leaking from the world; it felt like I was losing some definition, and the sounds I heard now had an additional metallic tonality, like I was listening to a poor recording of whatever it was I could hear. What was it I could hear? I couldn’t distinguish it. It was beyond my clear comprehension, and I always come back to the same place: I shrug my shoulders, and think that it will be alright, so long as I concentrate on being me.

I need some peace and quiet. That’s what James said. He was really very reasonable, very understanding, even when I’d refused him the last time. He had that sort of resigned look about him when he heard the word no. I’d expected more trouble, but he just accepted it. Personally, I think it was the least he could do. Leave me alone for a bit. I told him so, and he agreed just like that. It was quite strange, unless I’m fool enough to think he isn’t fucking someone else somewhere, some tight-arsed little intern, here or in America. He always looks so virile when he comes home from America, as if he has refuelled on something that isn’t available over here.

I wished he’d let me in on the secret, and then he did, and I wished he hadn’t.

When he came home after that sabbatical in California, he made the most peculiar suggestions…that was when it started, back in 1986. I was quite shocked, although I shouldn’t have been really. He’s a colourful character, a genius, one might say. Now I have learned not to be shocked, and I must say, he is a very good teacher. Practice makes perfect, that was his rationale; he was a workaholic, loved his art, loved the intricacy, loved the blueish purple veins and stringy tendons, the pulsing meat of us. He is, quite simply, a genius…they burn brightly, with greater intensity, and extinguish themselves quickly, so it’s said. He was so patient with me, laughing when my clumsy fingers could not feel, stepping in when I faltered. I should consider myself fortunate to be on the receiving end. I should consider myself the luckiest girl in the world to have become Mrs James Henry. I believed I was when he agreed to leave me alone, but that was just the start of it. When I understood the idea of practice, I used my head, made him an offer he could not refuse. Of course he accepted. It was a straight business deal, as simple as that.

What’s that? What did I hear? The silence at this time of night is quite deafening. Any sound is amplified by nothingness; we seize upon it in a clamour to know ourselves, what we are, and why we are here...or not, as the case may be. It’s a complicated idea, and not one I like to dwell on at this time of night. The nothingness frightens me, but inevitably I do think about it. I think about how we’re stuck on the surface of this little blue ball that hangs in a vast ocean of nothingness. I think about how nothing has any meaning unless we look inside, under the surface. Inside, we might find the meaning. Outside there is only the world, and nothingness. I am Mrs James Henry! I’m holding out my identity like an actor with a crucifix in a shaky low-cost horror show. It’s pathetic really. I am Mrs James Henry, the only Mrs James Henry, candidate for the title of mad woman in the attic. James laughed when I said that. It was good to hear him laugh, although after a while, I thought about him laughing and decided that I didn’t like the way he laughed because it felt like he was laughing at me. And it sounded like someone was laughing with him too, at me. It had that metallic shadow. It was Emily, perhaps. I screamed at him to stop, to listen, to try to hear this other laughing that stopped with him whenever he did, but I couldn’t make him stop, and he got angry in the end, and locked himself away from me.

It’s very hard when he does that. He cuts himself off, and it’s hard on me; I need his radiance to illuminate my world. I need his essence to pour over me, like a blessed shower of light, bathing me. He catches me up in his strong arms, and whirls me around, pirouetting on his strong legs, so really I don’t know who I am…I quite forget everything.

It’s blissful to forget. I remember telling him; I tried to tell him how it was, and he seemed to listen, yes he did. He looked into my eyes, gathered up my tattered self in his certain and unshaking hands and pushed it back in through the hole in me. I loved him for it then, and knew he would not, could not hurt me. But I have been foolish. I’ve been a silly girl, thinking silly things like this. The imagination is a treacherous creature, and quite without scruples. Yes, voices…I’ll say! It’s all sing-song screaming…
aaaaiiiiyaaah! Keeping me awake, driving me slowly round the twist with that pitiful crying. Screaming blue murder, some of them. Of course, I only have to come downstairs to remember again. There it is…the door, down there, to the furnace room.

Switching on the light, and knowing that I will switch it on again another million times, trying to forget, holding a guttering flame to this life of mine that is so obscured by swirling yesterdays. I am old and gray, and switching on the light, still trying to forget another thirty years from now. Switching on those memories, even though they’re ancient and decayed. Switching on those faces, with their pitiful slanty eyes...

It was our anniversary tonight, James. You have forgotten! That is why I took your little man too. We’ve lasted all these years, bonded by the passion that drove us. All these years, you and I, driven through the tears, the sleepless nights we spent while the walls were sweating memories. Them and us, us and them, you said James, or did I? I forget now which of us was the one who dreamed it first. There you are, dribbling into your pillow. Quite innocent, a venerable old professor, a learned man, an authority, and everywhere respected, and me, reflected in his radiance. He was a great teacher, but his student became greater. I needed his light to show me the way forward. Practice makes perfect, I needed reminding; I needed his rationale. I became the amanuensis, writing with my scalpel.

Well, it’s only a matter of imagination really. People have the most amazing minds. They can imagine themselves in all sorts of funny situations. So can I, actually. I’ve always had a very vivid imagination. The games we’ve played…games of make-believe, making it up as we go along. We’re riding the big wave of the imagination, like Silver Surfers. You remember the Silver Surfer, don’t you? I liked those stories, but you were always a little sniffy, as though you should be using the time more profitably, doing something absurdly intellectual no doubt, which you’re so very good at. You’re so bloody cerebral, aren’t you? Me, I need to feel it. I like to feel the pulsing slipperiness of it. You just like to look. You don’t like getting those beautiful hands of yours dirty, do you?

But you do like to explore…I know what you like. Remember, I know what you’re like, James, but you don’t know what I’m like, even after all these years, and all we’ve accomplished together. We reached new heights in our day….

I don’t remember the last time you kissed me.

But it’s good that we live in the wilds. The silence here is absolute. You can’t hear a thing, except perhaps for the coughing of deer, the cries of hunting birds, the deafening sounds of the forest at night. It roars, but it’s absolutely quiet. I like this paradox. James says it’s one of Life’s little jokes, but then I must always ask about Death’s little jokes and he’ll shoot me a look that could slit my throat from ear to ear and leave my head hanging by a tendon. I have learned to be wary of this look; it signals danger. I must not overstep that dotted line, like the one that is painted on surgery patients...cut here.

You remember Emily, don’t you? You remember how we used to laugh when I opened one up and it spurted across the tiled room like a pipe with a leak. We laughed and laughed, because we could. We smeared ourselves, our bodies glistening, sticky, hot and wet. Do you remember that now dear...do you remember what we did? Emily said she would give anything. She said so in that sing-song voice they have. You must remember that surely? Oh, I’m disappointed. You don’t want to remember?

Professor James Henry, surgeon-teacher, you loved life so well. You wanted to know the ins and the outs of it, the very beating heart of it. You want to look beneath the onion skin, beneath the mere appearance of things…you want to know how it all works…the infinite wonder of it has you under its irresistible spell. You won’t forget now. You have been a great teacher James, but I was a brilliant student. You didn’t realize, did you? But then, you’re only human after all. You can’t expect to be perfect. You just didn’t think it through thoroughly enough, did you? You were insufficiently prepared, in the long term, I mean. It’s very unlike you. I think you must have forgotten Emily, though, and that is not a good thing to do. We must remember those who have given so much to us, musn’t we? Practice makes perfect…that’s what you always say, dear. It’s not a reason, it’s a way of life.

Oh, in the short term, of course. I rolled over and gave you anything you wanted. I was Mrs James Henry, but not Emily. I was not a poor wide-eyed strung-out orphan-girl trying to make an escape from some rat-riddled shanty town. No, I am the Mrs James Henry, and a worthy understudy, don’t you agree? Just look at the stitching…so delicate…When we were young and carefree, before Emily, you said I was sharp enough to cut myself. You seem to have forgotten, or perhaps it just got swallowed up in the monstrosity that we created. I remember how angry you became when I called you Victor. Emily paid for that, in more than blood and tears; it cost her an arm and a leg. The violence grew inside us like a storm that had to blow itself out…and Emily cried herself to sleep that night.

Let me just wipe that dribble from your mouth. There. It’s so unseemly for a surgeon to dribble. Do you remember Emily? I think you might. The anaesthetic will wear off soon, so we will have to give you something more to make you comfortable. The thing is this, James: we got carried away, didn’t we? Lost our direction somehow. It just didn’t seem to matter what we did any more. It didn’t matter that Emily cried and cried, and in fact, that made us laugh even harder...it made it easier to make the latest primary incision, so that our ballet could begin again...it makes my pulse quicken to think on it even now.

Soon of course, it will be my turn to be put away and forgotten. We all have this cross to bear. It’s what happens when we outlive our usefulness. We are cropped, harvested perhaps for the little we may have, truncated in our prime. You said I didn’t have the legs for it…but I think I’ve proved you wrong, haven’t I?

Remember Emily, my dear? Our maid….do you remember her now? Here let me plump your pillows…are you comfortable? The operation was a success, my love. Here it is, I’ll hold it up… can you see it? Who could believe such a tiny little thing like that could be the cause of so much trouble?

*

The brown-haired policeman is very gentle. This is good. I need them to be gentle with me, so that I can answer their questions.

Yes, the operations were long and arduous, but he had taught me well, you see. I was his pupil, and he was the master.

Yes, I nearly killed him twice and had difficulty pulling him back from the brink; he lost a lot of blood. But then again, he had less need of it then, if you see what I mean. The amputations were trickier than when there were two of us...but I managed somehow. I thought he might have been pleased with the stitching, but he didn’t say anything about it at all. Not a word! He was always such an ungrateful man - you couldn't please him. Actually, he never said another thing to me because a couple of weeks later, I took out his tongue. He'd done the most disgusting things with it, and it sickened me, so it had to go.

Anyway, I used to ask him about Emily; I asked him, but he refused to remember. You could see it in his eyes. He simply refused! So then I removed his penis, and it was the shock that killed him I suppose. It was the final straw for both of us. I admit I went too far myself that time. He only recovered consciousness just long enough for me to let him know what I’d done, and then I lost him. I couldn’t believe he’d even forgotten our anniversary...after all I had done for him...after all we had been through together.

He always said that vivisection was an important part of a surgeon’s work, no matter what the implications were. He said that knowing was infinitely preferable to not knowing, and I agree with him, even now. It’s just that he dirtied the idea…what he did afterwards with those poor girls, while they were still alive too… He didn't think I knew but I did. Sorry, I'm digressing...all in good time...what was that you said?

Yes, a succession of maids came, pretty little brown girls, all wide-eyed, usually from the Phillipines or Indonesia, and then more recently, a lot of flat faced girls from the interior of China. They came from places where life is cheap. James can’t be bothered remembering their names, so they all have one name only, and she is called Emily. They come, they work for us for a year or so, just long enough to get to know a little of them, and then James will take them downstairs to the operating suite beneath the Furnace Room, and order another.

No, you’ll have to look for things like that yourself, I’m afraid. I never knew where he kept his contacts. Probably in his head, I should imagine. He was a careful man, very precise. He had to be. He was practiced. That was what he taught me: practice makes perfect.