Read The Treatment and the Cure for Free Online

wasn’t any point.
    The sexual arousal had gone. You sat staring around the room. You thought again of tidying up, but it seemed too much trouble. Torn butts of cinema tickets lay on the floor. Films were your only luxury and you spent most of your money on them. In a cinema you could float out of yourself into the bodyless world of feeling on the screen. To stop being yourself was lovely, it was happiness. Films had one terrible drawback though … they came to an end. The lights always came on and the real world was there waiting.
    Last night you’d seen “Dr Zhivago” for the seventh time and the return afterwards had been very bad. The final scene, where Lara walks out into the street under huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin, to disappear forever, “a nameless number on a list afterwards mislaid”. had filled you with a sort of ecstasy of grief.
    You wanted to explode, literally, like a skyrocket, into nothingness. That was feeling, pure, untouchable, and you’d gladly have died right there in the seat rather than return to yourself and face the street outside with its squalor of traffic and people.
    On the bus ride home you tried to keep that scene unspoiled in your mind, staring straight ahead with blank eyes like a shellshock victim, and whispering “Lara, Lara” under your breath. It was no use. The conductor came for the fare. Then a fat man sat beside you. The dirt on the floor and the traffic and the grinding of the bus’s gears and the press of the fat man crept steadily through your consciousness until Lara was completely gone and all beauty and feeling with her. You were just yourself again, a shabby youth on a dirty bus. You knew it couldn’t continue.
    Dave Lamming has been getting shocks almost every day. He’s had ten now and is like a zombie. He can’t talk, or eat, or control his bowels, and the mess in his trousers stinks very much. His eyes are vacant and stare straight ahead, and if you try to talk to him, he’ll just stare at you and maybe smile in a strange way, as if he half understands what you’re saying, but he doesn’t really understand anything, not even his own name. About four or five days after the last shock he starts coming out of the zombie state and then he’s just very confused and can’t remember anything. He doesn’t know where he is.
    “What’s this place?” he keeps asking. A hundred times a day. “What’s this place?”
    “The railway station,” Ray Hoad tells him.
    “Is the train coming?” Dave wants to know.
    “Yeah, any minute now.”
    So Dave sits patiently on the verandah, waiting for the train. Then he gets anxious.
    “Why doesn’t it come?” he asks.
    “Won’t be long,” says Ray Hoad. Ray even tries to sell him a ticket. After another few minutes Dave has forgotten that this is the railway station.
    “What’s this place?”
    “The surgical ward,” says Ray Hoad. “You’ve just had your appendix out. It was touch and go. Complications set in.” Dave feels his abdomen.
    “You’ll have a whopping bill to pay, mate,” says Ray Hoad. Dave feels his pockets.
    “I’m broke,” he confesses. “I can’t pay.”
    He goes to the office to tell them he can’t pay the bill for his appendix. Electric Ned is there with Arthur. Through the glass partition we see Dave waving his hands and talking. We feel the joke’s gone too far. Electric Ned and Arthur are looking our way. They know someone’s been having fun with Dave. You drift into the background, away from Ray Hoad. Ray’s not worried though. Ray Hoad isn’t bothered by anything. He’s our best at sport too.
    There’s a rough little field between the ward and the main gate, and at weekends the screws take us out to play cricket in the summer, or soccer if it’s winter. It’s lovely out there on a fine afternoon, the sky very clear with maybe just a few wisps of white cloud floating up high and the leaves of the trees touched with sunlight at their edges, so that if a breeze stirs