Ingenious pain, Andrew Miller [little red riding hood ebook .txt] 📗

the play lurches towards it final shape. Mr Hobbes suffers an anal prolapse and is replaced at short notice by John Johnson, a deranged schoolmaster. God speaks to the Collins twins, dictates to them new lines concerning the inheritance of a glue factory in Brentford. Theseus is slightly madder than he was. Mr Rose, stripped of his coats, his wig, understanding everything, admitting everything, herds them towards their first night.

The keepers grow lax. They sprawl, smoke, play dice; sleep off their binges. Dot and James, loitering during the last week ever

nearer to the door of the hospital, now sHp unregarded into the building and lose themselves amid its passageways. They peer in at rooms until they find one suitable to their purpose. A broad room, empty but for a hundred, two hundred, five hundred strait jackets piled up together; a single high barred-window for light; the noise of the world muffled like a dream. They He on the jackets; the jackets sigh and give off their breath of sweat, dog blanket, midden. All the spices vented by the soul in mortal combat. This, thinks James, is how purgatory will smell.

Dot raises her skirts. James kneels, lightly touches her. She shivers then leans forward, tugs his breeches to his knees, finds his cock, plays her tongue around its head. It is a pleasure as vast, as shocking, as any pain that has come to him since St Petersburg. He reels away from her, gets awkwardly to his feet. He is afraid. Dot goes to him, holds him from behind, her head resting at the nape of his neck. He turns inside the ring of her arms, kisses her, hard on her mouth. They shuffle towards the bed of jackets, tumble backward, knocking teeth together, faces. His entrance is savage. Like the force used to stab a man or to kill an animal. He dreamt it would be gentle. Dot gasps, punches his ribs. The buckle from one of the jackets cuts into his knee as he moves. The pain is a black rope; he cUngs to it. He is laughing now, like a true madman. He sees that she is laughing too, and frowning and crying, fighting him and licking his face. He pulls out of her and spends over her belly. She wipes it with her hand, then wipes her hand on one of the jackets. James lies on his back beside her. There is a fly in the room, having followed them perhaps from the garden. A fly the only witness. Dot says: 'We must go back now.'

He calls her 'My love. My dearest'. She does not seem to be Hstening. He would like to tell her about Mary, and how he used to be one thing, one kind of man, a half-man. And how he is changed, like a man who has walked through an

enchanted mirror, a man who has woken dishevelled from the grave. He thinks: Indeed, I am like Lazarus. Did Lazarus have a wife?

We must go now,' she says.

Through the little window, blunt distorted sunlight falls between them. It strikes her hair, his patched shoes.

'Dot?'

She puts a finger to her lips.

'Dot, my life.'

'Peace, Jem.'

She is by the door. She holds out her hand to him. He takes it soberly in his. They go back to the garden. They are not running now. They have been away some fifteen minutes. Oberon is sending Robin Goodfellow to search for the magical flower. They have not been missed.

Augustus Rose, four o'clock on a Saturday evening, walks with the Physician in front of the Bethlehem hospital, showing him the tiers of seating the carpenters have been erecting for the last three days. There is still the noise of saws, a sudden crescendo of hammering, the tuneless whistle of a workman, but the work is largely done. Seating for two hundred, the first of whom may be expected in less than three hours' time.

The hospital wears its grandest face. Its windows show the sky over Moorfields, the streaks of feathery cloud. The gardens have been clipped. The smell of the honeysuckle comes near to hiding the stink of the Necessary. Only the bars on the windows of the

upper floors and the cries like those of seagulls suggest that this is not the tranquil suburban seat of a grandee.

The Physician has changed his clothes and wears now a suit of resplendent plum in which to receive his guests. Rose dawdles with him on the lawn, indicates the court, the woods, the nooks and bowers where the action will take place. They have not talked of the money. They shall talk of it later. There is a mutual, workable distrust between them. Neither shall cheat the other by much.

The Physician says: 'There is nothing in the play to excite them too greatly? I would not want them doing any violence to the audience. That would not do at all.'

Rose says: 'It is a calm play. A very mellow play. It quite drugs them.'

'The woman called Dorothy Flyer. You have had no trouble with her?'

'Dot Flyer, sir, is our brightest light.'

The Physician says: 'I have given orders she is to be handled most firmly should she give us cause. They must fear us, Mr Rose.'

'I am sure that they do.'

The Physician jingles the silver in his pocket, mutters: 'For their own good.'

They stand watching the workmen. The last of them is stowing his tools in a canvas sack, wiping the warmth from his face with a cloth. A dog cocks its leg against one of the benches. The carpenter kicks at it, misses. At length Rose says: 'Should you care to meet your players?'

'My players, sir?'

'They think of you as their patron. You have no idea, sir, how large you are in their minds.'

The Physician nods, allows himself a smile. He says: 'By all means, then. Let us see them.'

Rose slips his arm through the Physician's. They saunter towards the great door of the hospital, towards the moat of shadow that

surrounds