On one of the endless grey afternoons of London, Nicholas was lying on his bed listening to his radio when Dr. Barratt poked his head around the door. He immediately sat up and pulled the headphones off. Tinny sounds of audience laughter could be heard escaping.
“Good voices?” asked the doctor.
“My favourite,” said Nicholas.
Barratt came into the room and pointed at the single unused chair. “May I?”
“Please do, it’s nice to have a visitor.”
Nicholas swung his legs around so that he sat side-on, looking and waiting for his guest to start the conversation. Barratt was not a blunt man, but he had little time to waste with the formalities and niceties of polite conversation, especially while working inside the less-than-normal confines of the Bethlem Royal Hospital. He was wearing his usual rumpled white coat over another of his tweed sports jackets and grey flannel trousers. Nicholas noted that he must have been in a rush that morning, because there were several tuffs of unshaved skin on his face where the hasty razor had missed its target. Nicholas was fastidious about shaving, never missing a single hair. He could take up to an hour shaving one of the inmates. Especially those that twitched and jumped about unexpectedly. He had never nicked a patient in all the years that he had been there, and nobody knew how many years that had been. He had never had to shave himself, because hair had only ever grown on his head and eyebrows. Not a whisker or a curl occurred anywhere else on his smooth neotenous body.
“Nicholas, what do you know about Dick and Harry over at Spike Island?”
“Do I have a full minute on that question?”
“As long as you want,” said the already frowning doctor.
“Well…I have never met them, but I knew that they were there because we are alike, the three of us. I know that Hector Professor Shoe-man went to visit them. He told me. And that while he was there, there was a bit of trouble. That’s all I know. Oh, and the fact that they came from France. Why do you ask?”
“I ask because I have just received some new information about them.”
“When?”
“Today. Dr. Hedges, who was looking after them, rang me this afternoon.”
“On a telephone?”
“Yes, on a telephone.”
“I would like to see and use a telephone. I imagine it’s a bit like my radio, but I could talk back. Maybe I could answer some of the questions or even set a subject myself. Maybe I could—”
And here Barratt interrupted him. “I am not here to talk about telephones, Nicholas.” His snappy tone silenced the room for a few minutes. The man and the Erstwhile sat and gazed at the shrunken, ailing plant in a dented enamel pot that was the only ornament in the room. A few moments later Barratt said, “How do you know anything about them?”
“Um, that’s a difficult one. I just know they are there and then people tell me the rest, I suppose. I remember that some of us came. Me and another here. Them in France. Some in Denmark. And you told me the rest.”
“I did?”
“You said that two like me had come to the Spike.”
“When?”
“Some years ago.”
Barratt was just about to repudiate that he’d had any part in the fuelling of these fantasies about angels and animated corpses, when he remembered the auto-interning.
“I said they were like you because they buried themselves.”
“Exactly,” said Nicholas, pleased that their communications were going so well. “And of course we must not forget the two new ones in Germany. Do they have names too?”
“How did you know about them?”
“Hector told me all the details.”
“No, I mean before he arrived.”
Nicholas suddenly made a face of total blankness, the colour instantly drained and the eyes fixed in innocent moronic surprise. The immediate mask was so acute and theatrical that it made Barratt begin to smile and he had to compose himself to continue in a sterner tone.
“Somebody in London sent a box of insects to the address where the German ones were being kept. The retirement home where Schumann lived. They reacted wildly.”
Nicholas kept the same strange face without moving a muscle. It was very familiar. Barratt had seen it before, but not here and not attached to patient 126.
“Well?” he demanded.
Nicholas just looked at him with the same raised eyebrows and expressionless unblinking eyes. Barratt had had enough. He stood up and started to leave the room.
“Please, Doctor, why did you ask about Deek and Hari?”
Now he was using politeness and funny pronunciations to irritate Barratt even more.
“Because they have disappeared, vanished, done a bunk.”
“Oh, that’s no surprise.”
Barratt stopped in his tracks. “Do you know where they have gone, did anyone or ‘thing’ tell you?” he asked in an annoyed tone.
“Not yet, I thought that you might.”
Barratt grunted.
“They must be full right up with all the parts they have gleaned in that sad hospital. Too heavy to go in the ground. Now they must split up to find another two Rumours to make a plural with. That’s the problem when we are found in pairs or brought together in the same cage. Much better like me, on my lonesome.”
Barratt went limp, allowed his gravity to slump in the direction of the door.
“But, Doctor, you forgot to ask the important question.”
Barratt’s face started to take on the same look of incongruity as Nicholas’s comic stare.
“All right. In for a penny in for a pound. What question is that?”
“For points, not money,” he said seriously.
“Yes, very well.”
Nicholas changed his face into a beaming smile.
“Why did we all leave the great Vorrh and come to see you here, of course.”
“Vorrh…”
“Yes, I have told you about it before. The forest in Africa with the garden of paradise at its heart.”
“Oh yes, that,” said Barratt in peeved resignation.
“The answer is that we came to try to understand why you are all so stupid.” Nicholas then clapped his hands and stood up. Barratt made for the door. “And to protect the tree of knowledge from you.”
Barratt was in the corridor when Nicholas called after him.
“Would you like to see one of its cuttings?”
He turned to look just for a second or two at Nicholas framed in the doorway, waving the miserable plant in his direction, with the same set expression of startled imbecility on his face. Then he turned his back and stormed down the passage.
Barratt began to slow as recognition seeped in. He stopped dead when it arrived. The face that Nicholas had adopted was that of the silent Hollywood comedian Harry Langdon. Where had patient 126 ever seen his films? How could he produce such a perfect copy? Barratt slowly turned to go back and ask him, but sluggishly halted at the thought of the kind of answer he would get.
All conversation with Nicholas was exasperating, with his constantly turning the tables on the normal condition of question and answer and cause and effect. Of course this was not unusual in Bedlam, but Nicholas’s technique seemed designed to get under the good doctor’s skin. It was driven by what looked like a self-righteous disrespect for all that Barratt stood for. It was never offensive, just intensely irritating, especially when Barratt tried his hardest to understand the Erstwhile’s point of view. The time before last had been the worst. In an attempt to deepen the communication Barratt had started talking about William Blake and had asked Nicholas to explain one of the paintings of his ol’ man, as the Erstwhile called him. Barratt tried with three different pictures and each time got the same answers: “I don’t know” or “I wasn’t there for those ones.”