Angelica's Grotto

4 Fountain of Youth

It was ten days before Klein received a letter giving him an appointment with a clinical psychologist, Mrs Lichtheim. In the interval he began to make notes for a study of the nudes of Gustav Klimt and he attended diabetic, eye, cardiology, vascular, and foot-health clinics at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital.

On these visits he passed and repassed the fish in the lobby. They lived in a long, narrow, green and bubbling world and had been listed, Klein assumed, in the builders’ manifest:

So many thousand bags cement

So many thousand cement blocks

1 No. 12 assortment XL Matissoid Mobile Atrium Shapes

1 world (long, narrow, green, bubbling)

16 lobbyfish (assorted)

While appearing to take no notice of Klein and the rest of humanity the fish explained to their children, ‘What you see on the other side of the glass is an ichthyocentric world: it is as it is only because we are here to observe it.’ Klein sensed this and avoided eye contact.

There were not very many young people queuing up for the clinics Klein visited; mostly they were others of his age group in wheelchairs and on sticks, many of them limping and halting in sandals, slippers, trainers, and divers bandages and offbeat bespoke surgical-appliance footgear. He spent half-days waiting to see registrars and consultants while nurses of many ages, weights, and shapes marched, ambled, and frisked past him. He mentally undressed the good-looking ones down to their lissome and beautifully articulated skeletons as, like a greyhound in a walking-frame, he followed with his eyes the nimble rabbits of his desire.

When his name was called he popped as required. He popped himself on to and off tables; he popped on and off his tops and his bottoms, his shoes and his socks, always ‘for me’. ‘Just pop yourself on or off for me,’ said registrars and consultants. Nurses and house officers also required him to pop in one way and another for them. Eventually he popped into the street and made his way home to the word machine that silently asked what he had popped for it lately.

During that time he also reported to Charing Cross Hospital for his monthly visit in a drug trial for the use of bezafibrate in arterial disease of the lower extremities. The nursing sister counted the number of tablets remaining, took his blood pressure, and asked him whether he had experienced headaches, nausea, impotence, or ennui since taking the tablets which were either placebo or active. When she finished with him he was bled a little by the turbanned phlebotomist while they talked about world and local news and weather.

He had a thallium scan at Royal Brompton Hospital and a femoral angiogram at Chelsea & Westminster. He wrote a prescription request to his GP for more insulin, diltiazem, Imdur, captopril, frusemide, omeprazole, and aspirin. He bought a new bottle of glyceryl trinitrate tablets for angina and a new bottle of trisilicate of magnesium for oesophageal reflux. He stocked up on pine bark extract for his lower vascularities, green-lipped mussel extract for his knees, extract of gingko biloba for circulation in the brain and other extremities, and multivits just in case.

‘I have no inner voice and must speak my thoughts aloud,’ he said, ‘but I feel pretty good actually. I represent a triumph of the medical arts and the never-say-die spirit of the NHS. In clinical circles all the receptionists have a smile for me and I am known to consultants and other golfers as “he who declines to hop the twig”. In operating theatres I have more than once topped the bill; I am accomplished in nil by mouth and there is talk of getting me a permanent locker for my dentures. Life isn’t what it was but it’s a lot better than it’s going to be.

‘Now there comes to me a memory and I can smell the trees, feel the hot sun through the leaves. It was on the Appalachian Trail or it might have been somewhere else: my best friend Jim and I, hot and sweaty, pushing our bikes up a woodland road over a little mountain. At the top of the slope was a spring. I remember a stone trough and the clear cold water. There were leaves in the bottom of the trough and tiny crayfish. The water gushed from the pipe and it was a foreverness of itself, the endless quenching of all thirst. We drank it like an elixir and stuck our heads in the trough among the leaves and the crayfish and became new and strong and untired, for ever refreshed by the magic of that clear cold water that sparkled in the sunlight and the shadows on the mountain.’