E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten
Fremlin The Parasite Person
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31287-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten
ISBN: 978-0-571-31287-0
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
Celia Fremlin (1914-2009) was born in Kent and spent her childhood in Hertfordshire, before studying at Oxford (whilst working as a charwoman). During World War Two, she served as an air-raid warden before becoming involved with the Mass Observation Project, collaborating on a study of women workers, War Factory. In 1942 she married Elia Goller, moved to Hampstead and had three children. In 1968, their youngest daughter committed suicide aged 19; a month later, her husband also killed himself. In the wake of these tragedies, Fremlin briefly relocated to Geneva. In 1985, she married Leslie Minchin, with whom she lived until his death in 1999. Over four decades, Fremlin wrote sixteen celebrated novels - including the classic summer holiday seaside mystery Uncle Paul (1959) - one book of poetry and three story collections. Her debut The Hours Before Dawnwon the Edgar Award in 1960.
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“IT WAS A cry for help,” the young woman told him, nestling contentedly against her pillows. “Suicides nearly always are, aren’t they, and that’s what mine was. So come on. Help me.”
Martin raised his eyes from his notebook and looked at his subject uneasily. This wasn’t the idea at all.
“Look,” he said, “I’m not a social worker. I thought they’d explained to you? This is research that I’m doing. I’m working in the Department of Social Psychology on a research project about depression, and it would be of the most enormous help to us if you’d …”
“I don’t want to be of enormous help to you. Why should I? I’m the one who attempted suicide—right? And so I’m the one who ought to be helped. Not you.”
From the well-stocked fruit-bowl on her bedside locker, she selected a nice plump grape and popped it into her mouth, watching him the while beneath lowered lids. He fumbled with his papers, trying to find her record sheet.
“Ledbetter, Ruth. Aged 19, unemployed. Formerly Psychology student at Mendel College, dropped-out during second year. Admitted to hospital 2.30 a.m. on Monday Feb 2nd having ingested massive overdose of Mogadon …”
Mogadon. That labelled it phoney, right from the start. Everybody knows—well, a psychology student, even a dropped-out one, certainly should—that it is virtually impossible actually to kill yourself with Mogadon. In fact, the whole thing was quite splendidly typical, almost a text-book case. Typical age, typical restless life-style, typical choice of non-lethal drug. It should have been a marvellous interview, if only she’d be more co-operative. After so inauspicious a start, Martin wondered if it was worth while going on? If she was going to act up like this, expecting to have her answers wheedled out of her syllable by syllable, it might be better to scrap her here and now. Chalk her up among the “Don’t Knows” and be done with it?
“Well?” she said. Her pale, pointed little face, still yellowish from the overdose, was tilted challengingly in his direction, and with this small bit of encouragement Martin decided to plough on.
“Look,” he began, “Look … er …” (What was the damn girl’s name? Ruth. That was it.) “Look, Ruth, I don’t want to worry you if you’d rather be left alone; but if you could bring yourself to answer just one or two questions. Like—well … What actually was it that finally drove you to this … well … this very drastic …?”
“Can’t you say ‘Suicide’? You suffer from a lisp, or something? ‘Suicide, suicide, suicide!’ Go on, say it! That’s why you’re here, for Chrissake, because I’m a suicide! That’s the only reason why you’re talking to me at all. It’s a bit late in the day to be pretending you’ve never heard of the word!”
Frowning slightly, Martin took it all down verbatim. There was no way this was going to fit into any of his categories, but at least she was talking, that was the main thing. He set himself to probe further, using the method proper in a depth-interview, which is to follow along the lines which the subject himself had opened up.
“‘Suicide’, then. You’re quite right, we should be talking frankly to each other. Your suicide attempt, okay? Would you say it was a sudden decision—a sudden uncontrollable impulse? Or had you been depressed for some time …?”
“Depressed? Who’s talking about being depressed? I wasn’t depressed in the least. I was just into suicide, that’s all.”
Martin frowned yet more deeply, but he kept his cool—his scientific detachment, as he liked to regard it.
“Into suicide,” he repeated, in the correct depth-interview manner, quoting her own words back at her in a neutral, non-judgemental sort of tone. “And what was it, would you say, that got you ‘into suicide’ in the first place?”
“Oh.” She pondered for a moment. “I think I mostly wanted to get into something that there wasn’t an Evening Class in. It’s not so easy these days. They’ve got Tarot cards already, you know, at the Houndsditch Institute, and I’m told they’re starting Levitation in September. You have to go so far to be way-out these days that over the edge is where it’s at.”
“‘Over the edge is where it’s at,’” Martin repeated gravely, scribbling away in his notebook while he spoke; and then, the non-judgemental stance cracking for a moment, he found himself protesting: “But you know, Ruth, you can’t go in for suicide like you go in for yoga. It’s—well—it’s too final.”
“Too final for who? Look, Prof, if I’m into suicide I’m into finality, aren’t I? I tell you, I’m hooked on finality like it was Valium, they can’t get me off it. And like they said, don’t mix it with alcohol. And so I did mix it with alcohol, and did I take off! Wow! That was something! It really was! Eeeee … eeeeee …!”
These last sounds, with their shrill, long-drawn-out note of glee, were impossible to transcribe in shorthand, and so Martin left a space for them, hoping that he would remember, when the time came, what the space stood for. In the days when he’d done his own typing, this sort of thing hadn’t mattered so much; but now that he had moved in with Helen, who loved him so passionately, and who strove so earnestly to be the sort of help to him in his career that his wife had never been, it was a little bit more complicated. Adorably, she had taken over the typing-up of his interviews as her own special chore, and so anxious was she to get everything exactly right that it was really quite an embarrassment at times.
“Is this ‘perverted’ or ‘parental’?” she would worriedly enquire, and for the life of him he could hardly ever tell. Nor could he bring himself to explain to her—so conscientious was she, and so full of faith in him—that honestly it didn’t matter a damn, either would do, an interview was an interview, and the important thing was to have sixty-four of them in the bag before May 4th.
May 4th. Barely three months away now, and already he was badly behind schedule. Less than a dozen interviews completed so far and more than fifty still to come.
Concentrate, Martin, concentrate, get the damn thing done. One more is one more….
“‘Finality’,” he repeated, picking up her key word in the approved manner. “Even the finality of death, would you say? Your own death?”
“Look, Prof, Death is the in-thing, didn’t you know? Don’t they tell you these things up there among the brain-freaks? Death is in, brother! Death is the Now-thing. Up-to-the-minute, fat-free, problem-enriched Death. Watch out for it on the Commercials: Death Dyes Whiter. ‘Well, they said anything could happen,’ remarks the blonde in the bikini when she finds herself standing before the Throne of God….”
Martin hadn’t got half of this down. It was always harder when they went off the beaten track like this. His shorthand speeds, acquired rather late in life, were better adapted to those interviews where the subject answered as he was expected to answer, the sentiments falling easily and naturally into one or other of Martin’s five carefully-thought-out categories.
Not that he wanted all his subjects to give the expected answer, not really. On the contrary, like any other social scientist, he lived in hopes of turning up results so startling, so unprecedented, as to turn establishment assumptions right on their head. Perhaps he would even end up on television, putting some revered celebrity or other firmly in place in front of millions of viewers….
Or at least (less ambitiously) he hoped that something a little bit new might turn up; something which might—just might—open up some area of research which hadn’t already been picked clean by hordes of predecessors in the field.
So, “Just a minute,” he said, and scribbled ferociously to catch up. Now he came to write it down, he was beginning to realise that she hadn’t really told him anything at all. Despite all this self-display, she had in fact revealed nothing of her problems. She had answered none of his questions, and had thrown no light whatsoever on the real motives for her suicide attempt. And as for depression, which was what the whole survey was supposed to be about, she had simply denied it.
Oh well, never mind. At least there were some good quotes here. Good quotes can always be dragged in somehow, somewhere.
On, then, to Question 5. Few of them could resist this one, even if they’d been a bit sticky earlier on:
“Do you feel there was anyone in your circle who could have helped you through this bad patch if they’d been more caring … more understanding …?”
“Like who?” She looked at him guardedly. “What are you getting at?”
What indeed? Martin played for time, scribbling energetically. “Well: what I really meant was, isn’t there anyone among your friends who …?”
“Friends! Oh, you’re talking about friends. You didn’t say. Look, Professor, I got friends like you got dandruff—just for brushing-off, kind of thing.”
Had he got dandruff? Nervously, Martin tried to glimpse the shoulders of his dark suit, swivelling his eyes round so far that he felt as if he’d sprained them.
He couldn’t see a thing. He’d have to examine the suit later.
“Just one or two more questions, Ruth, and then...
