My thoughts like bleating sheep
Press in and drive away
The blissful oblivion of sleep
Several more lines had been erased with venom, as though Claire despised herself for committing them to paper in the first place. Two more had been rewritten:
No answers; only consequences
The empty kitchen, cold as stone
Another emphatic deletion before:
As I sit at the breakfast table, alone.
There was no more. He tore the page from the pad and put it in his pocket. Then he phoned Malcolm on his mobile number. And got straight through.
"Malcolm? It's Neal. They're going to operate on Claire."
"Operate? I thought she was all right."
"It's psychosurgery. She's signed the consent form."
A pause and a muffled sound. "Well, well. I never thought she had it in her."
"I don't think she has. I think it's a spur-of-the-moment thing that she'll regret. How can we stop it?"
There was another pause. It was obvious Malcolm was in a meeting.
"Have you talked to the doctors?" he said.
"Yes. Legally they have an air-tight case. They won't budge."
"You aren't suggesting we break in there and spirit Claire away?"
"No, of course not. But maybe they've overlooked some loophole in the law which we could invoke to get the operation delayed."
"Hmm, it's possible, I suppose. I'll get in touch with Bardon. He's been sitting idle for the past year, anyway. It's about time he got his legal teeth into something juicy."
"Malcolm, thanks. I don't know how I'll ever repay you."
"In the present circumstances it would be indiscreet of me even to drop a hint."
He sat waiting all afternoon, drinking Bombay Sapphires with lemonade, the only drink in the place. The big photograph of himself and Claire on holiday in Tanzania still hung over the mantelpiece. Taken three years before on Claire's twenty-first birthday, it showed her, russet-haired in a calico dress, exuberantly posing arms flung wide while he, lean and dark and intense, held her around the waist as if she might otherwise fly away.
At six-thirty Malcolm phoned back. They had no levers. The operation would go ahead.
Malcolm sounded paternally concerned. "What are you going to do now?" "Get stoned," Neal told him.
He drank himself into a stupor, and when he woke the following morning he went out and bought more booze and began drinking again. Reporters started ringing, leaving urgent messages on the answerphone, wanting to know what was happening. The doorbell rang several times during the day but Neal didn't answer it until he recognized Malcolm's particular staccato. Malcolm, as burly as any bouncer, pushed his way in through a small pack of reporters, forcing the door shut behind him. Reassured by his presence, Neal passed out on the bed, and then it was dawn and he was rising out of a night of turbulent dreams into the first new day of Claire's transmogrified existence.
He phoned the hospital and was told that she was still under sedation. They advised him to call again tomorrow. Perhaps she'd see him then. Malcolm, genial and affable, cajoled him into going out that evening to watch the City Players do "Macbeth" at the New Criterion in Jermyn Street. He found the play tedious in the extreme, the cast incapable of breathing fire into the Master's exquisite lines. Malcolm shared his disillusionment, remarking that they "behaved like a herd of cows, masticating lines as if they were fodder."
Neal laughed, though it sounded like the cry of an endangered species.
"It's to be expected, though," he said. "We're breeding a world of manicured people who function perfectly but are thoroughly devoid of creativity."
Malcolm dabbed his lips with a paper napkin (they were in a restaurant).
"I must admit we do appear to be heading that way," he agreed.
"Claire's a fool. She'll regret the operation." He wanted Malcolm to agree with him.
Malcolm steepled his fingers under his chin.
"It's a little different with Claire, Neal," he said. "I hesitate to judge her because I don't know her too well, but it seems to be that she's been in need of some form of treatment for a long time."
"Maybe. But not this drastic."
"Wouldn't you call attempted suicide rather drastic, too?"
"It's a performance. She never intends to kill herself."
"She might succeed one day by accident."
He shook his head. "I'm surprised at you, Malcolm. I thought you disapproved of any manipulation of the personality."
Malcolm did not respond to this.
"I'm not saying that people with psychotic illness like schizophrenia shouldn't benefit from surgical intervention," Neal felt compelled to explain. "God knows they need help. But Claire simply feels some things more intensely than most. That's what makes her an artist." Malcolm poured more wine for them.
"When I was sixteen," he said, "I was in a similar state to Claire--a confused suicidal mess. I had psychiatric treatment which enabled me to see that I was a social misfit not because of my feelings but because I was denying them. My therapist brought about a change in my mental state which was beneficial to me."
"Yes, but he didn't tamper directly with your brain."
"Actually, it was a she, but no matter. Her tools were psychological rather than chemical, it's true, but her aim was the same as that of the psychosurgeons--to modify the individual consciousness."
"But you did it out of your own volition, through a process of self-enlightenment. Psychosurgery is so mechanistic. It's a denial of free will."
"How so? Claire made the decision to undergo the operation freely. It's just that the process of self-enlightenment, if you want to call it that, is now achieved through extraneous action, though objective rather than subjective processes. Personality restructuring is a far more exact science these days. Older methods were far more random and uncontrolled--and much less effective."
He stared at Malcolm, saying nothing. Malcolm studied his wine glass. "I'm not saying that psychosurgery is necessarily a good thing. But this much is clear: if you have grave mental problems which are interfering with your life--by which I mean endangering your very existence or that of other people--if this is the case, then I think that psychosurgery is often the only possible solution. What I object to is the gratuitous modifications which people with no deep-rooted emotional problems undertake."
"So you think Claire has done the right thing?"
"I'm afraid so, Neal."