The Papers of Tony Veitch Read Free Page A

be captioned ‘Who’s next?’ Laidlaw turned towards the doorway to casualty.
    â€˜Hey, you! Big man. Ah’m talkin’ to you. Gi’es a fag!’ Laidlaw went over.
    â€˜Here, son,’ he said. ‘So far you’ve only managed mild abrasions. Is this you trying for intensive care?’
    The boy looked momentarily blank at the medical references but the tone was Esperanto.
    The boy said, ‘Come on. Ah asked a wee favour.’
    â€˜So don’t make it sound like a threat.’
    Laidlaw gave him a cigarette.
    â€˜You put the tipped end in your mouth. Then you light the other bit.’
    The boy was smiling. Laidlaw turned to the casualty room. It is a single, long, arched place, both basic and ornate, like a Victorian nissen hut. Laidlaw entered it like a time-warp.
    The first things he noticed were a couple of ghosts of his youth, two constables whose faces were fresh-laid eggs. Near them stood a group wearing doctors’ white coats. Laidlaw hoped they were students. All of them, policemen and doctors, looked young enough to have been given their uniforms for Christmas. Suddenly, Laidlaw was Rip Van Winkle.
    He checked the treatment room on the right. While two nurses looked on, a doctor was remonstrating with a boy whowas stripped to the waist. From hairline to belt, the boy was blood. The red made the place look like a dressing-room for one of the more preposterous Elizabethan tragedies, say Titus Andronicus .
    â€˜No problem!’ the boy was saying.
    Physically, he seemed to be alright. Laidlaw could see a long cut on the back of his neck and nothing else. He was obviously enjoying that taste of the heroic your own spilled blood can give you. Probably the worst thing they could do for him would be to wash him clean. Then he would have to settle for himself again. Laidlaw didn’t know him but perhaps he would.
    Starting opposite the treatment room is a row of cubicles. They presented Laidlaw, as he went, with a succession of tableaux that might have come from a contemporary mystery play. A girl whose eyes were still in shock was holding a bloodstained bedspread, waiting for someone or something. There was a young man with a left eye like a piece of bad fruit. He was protesting hysterically about injustice while a doctor attended him. A woman was crying while her arm was being bandaged. ‘He gives me some awfu’ kickings,’ she was saying. A middle-aged man was explaining to a nurse, ‘It’s a kinda shifting pain,’ while two young policemen looked on. Laidlaw recognised a familiar art, that of postponing arrest by young policemen through the contraction of sudden, mysterious maladies.
    Cubicle E, the one Laidlaw knew to be used for delousing, was empty but showed signs of recent use. He recognised nobody, except perhaps the two plain-clothesmen who had just come in. He didn’t know them as individuals but he knewthat style of moving on tramlines of professional preoccupation. They merged with the rest of the scene as subtly as Mormons.
    Looking back along the room, Laidlaw found nothing specific to him, only the city processing its Friday night pain. The place was a confessional. You came here to admit to frailty, brittle bones, thin skin, frangible organs – the pathetic, haphazard machinery we make bear the weight of our pretensions.
    Most of all, you came to admit to blood. It was everywhere here, on the people, the swabs, the floor, the coats of the doctors. Like a betrayal, it leaked out of the spurious certainties we make of our natures. Like honesty, it was difficult to look at.
    Laidlaw felt here more strongly what he had against that other room he had just come from, where Ena and Donald and Ria were still sitting. It told lies. This one tried to do the same, no doubt, but it at least was compelled to unavoidable admissions of its common humanity. That other room was simply exclusive. It was based on inaccurate assumptions about