Gay Phoenix Read online

  ‘In fact, we were left with two possible explanations of this odd nautical performance. The man may simply have been holding tenaciously to a fixed purpose. He had set out for Adelaide, and was determined to make it. Tenacity was at least a quality we had to credit him with in a general way as soon as we began to get hold of something of his story. On the other hand – but, of course, the two explanations don’t totally exclude one another – he may have been quite dotty for some time – more or less capable of navigation, but in some hallucinated state which precluded a rational course of action.’

  ‘Perhaps Buzfuz believed himself to be still surrounded by blue water.’ This suggestion came from a man called Merryweather, whom Appleby had at once recognized, upon being introduced, as the most notable person present. The name of David Merryweather was written rather large in the annals of Antarctic exploration. ‘But I don’t know that such an error would be a hallucination,’ Merryweather went on. ‘A fellow is hallucinated when he believes something – or somebody – to be there that isn’t there at all. It’s always been my guess that the albatross in the poem fills the bill. I can’t remember whose poem, but it made a tremendous impression on me as a kid. Started me off, really.’ Merryweather, who was about seven feet tall, and broad in proportion, suddenly blushed like a girl – being moved to indict himself, it was to be supposed, of egotistical interruption. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But interests me, rather. Happened to me. Suddenly a third fellow tugging the sledge. Useful – if he’d really been there. Unnerving, since he certainly wasn’t.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ the judge said, ‘this unfortunate patient of Tim’s had an experience of that kind. Tim, what about that? Might he have miraged up a second man, tugging at the ropes with him?’

  ‘Nothing’s more probable.’ Budgery nodded appreciatively. ‘His brother, you know, Colin Buzfuz’s brother Adam.’

  ‘And now let me go on.’ Professor Budgery had the art of smoking a cigar as he talked, but had paused briefly to give a critical eye to it. ‘Our distressed mariner was immediately hospitalized, and I soon heard enough about him to take over his bed myself. For days we monitored him – my two housemen, my registrar and I – pretty well round the clock. I tell you, I sat by the fellow myself for an hour at a time!’ Budgery chuckled. ‘And the others shared out the remaining twenty-three hours between them.’

  ‘Capital!’ Mr Justice Somebody said. ‘But it wouldn’t work on the bench.’

  ‘I suppose not. The chap in the dock would object, eh? But now I’ll tell you. Colin Buzfuz’s was an astonishing case of intermittent retroactive amnesia. He had a memory on which the curtain went up and down much as in the theatre at the end of a pantomime. It eggs on the audience to applaud, doesn’t it? We were almost applauding ourselves.’

  ‘This was simply the result,’ Merryweather asked, ‘of his having had a thin time?’

  ‘It was obviously more than that. The aetiology, when we untangled it, was fairly complex. There was the hunger and thirst and exposure – which must have counted for a good deal. But he’d been clipped on the head when his mast came down. Or so he said. There was no physical sign of it by the time we examined him. But then a quite surprisingly long period of time was involved. Months had passed – months, I tell you! – since his first disaster had overtaken him. There’s always something honestly physiological at the bottom of those capers of the mind, if you ask me. A trauma, in the only exact sense of the word. Not that his immaterial part hadn’t been under stress as well. His brother Adam had been killed before his eyes – and when they were bang in the middle of the Pacific, and a thousand miles from anywhere.’

  ‘When that mast came down?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘It seemed to have been then – and his own clip on the nut as well. He was left in a bad way, but managed to step the jury-mast, and just went on sailing. He remembered clearly – in moments when he remembered anything clearly – that he’d twice got into regular shipping routes, and actually been hailed on several occasions. There must have been craft that would have been glad enough to pick him up and turn an honest penny on him. But he sailed on like the Flying Dutchman.’

  ‘Wasn’t there a lookout for him by that time?’ Merryweather asked curiously. ‘All that sort of thing is very well covered nowadays, so far as the high seas go. A fellow has to make for my old haunts if he wants to remain unpestered. Even quite small craft with nothing but corpses aboard can be quite a hazard. So Flying Dutchmen aren’t encouraged.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But that sort of crazy traipsing round the seven seas pretty well on duckboards and on 2,000 calories a day has become uncommonly fashionable. People disappear for years on end, and nobody bothers about them. Or so I gathered. And loners tend to be loners in the domestic sense as well. He travels the fastest who travels alone, and so forth. No waiting wife or weeping kids.’ Budgery said this with a snap suggesting that, despite his sociable airs, he was a lonely man himself. ‘But to proceed. Colin Buzfuz ended by running aground on a cannibal isle.’

  ‘Buzfuz,’ the judge said, ‘seems a less and less appropriate name for the fellow. But we are all agog. Did he suffer a further traumatic experience in a cooking pot?’

  ‘Not so far as his recollection went. The cannibals enjoyed many of the blessings of civilization – but not, it seems, that of wireless telegraphy. There was a trading post, manned by a Dutchman of a wholly non-flying order, and a vessel put in four times a year to pick up cargo. Lord knows what. Copra, would it be? Or perhaps just coconuts.’

  ‘Copra is coconuts, my dear Tim,’ Merryweather said tolerantly. ‘Do step on it. The hour grows late.’

  ‘Very well. Colin Buzfuz put in a perfectly agreeable three months on his island, marred only by that blankness of mind from time to time. Typee-stuff, one supposes. Dusky beauties. And not even a dose of the pox anywhere.’

  There was a faintly disapproving silence, which Budgery thought to dissipate with more brandy.

  ‘And then?’ the judge asked.

  ‘That’s the end of act one. Act two opens with Buzfuz simply having the Jabberwock patched up by his copper-skinned cobbers, and then off he set again. Whereupon the real horrors began. The chap had the very devil of a time. Eventually he arrived, safe but far from sound, in our extremely dismal Outer Harbour. You remember what is first to greet one? A hoarding announcing that some soap or other is guaranteed under the pure food act. The land of the sapophagi, one might say.’ Budgery paused on what was evidently a favourite joke. ‘But at least he was an object of considerable curiosity. Even our excellent Governor came down to the hospital to have a chat with him. Unfortunately he was in a coma at the time. Buzfuz, I mean, not the Governor. My God, how we fought for the life of that much travelled Odysseus!’

  ‘Well, we pulled him through – and filled our notebooks meanwhile. He really was of interest. You see – and here’s the really weird thing – he wasn’t at all sure which brother he was.’

  There was another silence – decidedly an impressed silence, this time. Adelaide’s professor of clinical medicine had clearly reached the denouement of his narrative. It was difficult to see that anything more could follow.

  ‘Unique in the literature?’ Appleby asked respectfully.

  ‘Oh, absolutely. We raked through everything we could lay our hands on. No trace of such a bizarre disorder anywhere on the record. In a general way, I suppose, it was classified within the area of disassociation of the personality. But none of the mad doctors – and the world is full of them nowadays, God knows – had ever run up against this particular quirk before. Here was a man claiming – quite confidently, and as soon as he was in a state to claim anything at all – to be Adam Buzfuz, the younger of two brothers who had set out from England on a crackpot voyage in the Jabberwock donkeys’ ages ago. The yacht was his brother’s property, he explained, and his brother’s name was Colin. He had been simply crewing for C
olin, as he’d done once or twice before. He rather suggested, at the same time, that he knew a good deal more about the sea than Colin did.

  ‘Not unnaturally, we started off by accepting all this as gospel. It tallied with the ship’s papers, and with the logbook Colin Buzfuz had kept almost to the moment of that mast’s coming down in a storm and killing him. After that, there was every appearance of Adam’s having taken over the keeping of a proper record – only very imperfectly, as one might expect from his recurrent amnesiac condition. In fact, it occurred to nobody to doubt that it was a fellow called Adam Buzfuz whom, with such skill as we possessed, we were nursing back to life. It was quite a shock to me, I must confess, when I discovered we were wrong. More significantly, I had to consider what sort of shock it was going to be to him, when we explained to him that he wasn’t the chap he supposed he was. There seemed to be a case for going about the job gently.’

  ‘Very judicious,’ Appleby said. ‘But just how did you discover the truth of the matter?’

  ‘We had a pretty bad slip-up, for a start. Our patient was tricked out with an identity disk, which is decidedly a device for identifying people. But one of my young men, having no notion we were going to have a problem on our hands, simply noted the patient’s blood group, stowed the thing away, and forgot about it. It came back into his head in the end, of course, but not before we’d suffered quite unnecessary bewilderment. He got a bit of a rocket, as you may well imagine.’

  ‘It was Colin’s identity disk?’ Appleby asked.

  ‘Certainly it was. But let me get the sequence of events right. Here had been Adam Buzfuz, as we supposed him to be, tucked up in my intensive care ward, and doing not too badly. It struck me, however, that we ought to get hold of his medical record, if it could be done with any reasonable speed. And – sure enough – in a file on board the Jabberwock were the medical cards of both the Buzfuz brothers. That means no more, you know, than a British National Health Service document, with a number to it, and the name of the owner’s GP. But it enabled me to cable home, and Adam Buzfuz’s history came out to me in a matter of hours. It recorded nothing of the slightest interest. But it did fail to record something! My patient’s left hand was minus its index finger – the consequence, clearly, of an accident, and not a congenital malformation. But there was no mention of anything of the sort on the record.’

  ‘Nor – I’d suppose – need there have been. Or not positively.’ The judge said this. ‘Various obvious explanations are possible. So I don’t, my dear Tim, really see–’

  ‘Quite so, George, quite so.’ Professor Budgery was delighted. ‘And that makes all the odder what I was suddenly prompted to do. It was something not altogether regular, perhaps. Colin Buzfuz was no patient of mine. A dead man can’t be anybody’s patient, can he? So cabling to Colin’s doctor for Colin’s record was not quite the thing. Still, I did it. And what did I learn? That Colin Buzfuz had lost his left index finger in some domestic accident or other as a young man. It was when I was still chewing over this that my young fool of a houseman remembered the identity disk. So that was that. Here, snug in bed, we had a character called Colin Buzfuz pretending to be his own younger brother Adam.’

  ‘Pretending?’ Merryweather asked.

  ‘The wrong word, of course. Convinced he was his own younger brother Adam. Better still just taking the thing for granted. He was Adam; he’d seen his elder brother killed, and he’d consigned him to the deep; and now here he himself was – after the cannibal isle and all the rest of it.’

  ‘He was now giving you a whole story?’ Appleby asked. ‘Talking reasonably and coherently, except just for this single curious misapprehension?’

  ‘Just that.’

  ‘Do you know,’ a voice said out of the darkness of the verandah, ‘I don’t find this at all strange? People do at least forget their own identity from time to time – just as we all forget other people’s, or at least their names. For instance, there was Dr Tennyson – the poet’s father. He went to call on a new parishioner, and the servant who opened the door asked him his name. Dr Tennyson couldn’t remember his name, so he turned away and took a walk through the village to think the thing out. He met a rustic character who tugged his forelock and said “Good day to ’ee, Dr Tennyson” – or words to that effect. “My God, my man, you’re right!” Dr Tennyson said. And so he was able to get on with the day’s work. Amnesia is simply a grand name for commonplace occurrences of that sort.’

  ‘Very good, William!’ Budgery said cheerfully. ‘A capital story. But you must admit that my patient went one stage further. He believed himself to be somebody else.’

  ‘Nothing to that, either.’ William, who sounded younger than his fellow diners, was airily dismissive. ‘There’s a kid in Freud who was convinced he was a cock. He’d do nothing but crow.’

  ‘Identification even with inanimate objects is not unknown.’ Appleby was prompted to join in this amiable fun at the expense of Adelaide’s professor of clinical medicine. ‘My own grandfather actually died while believing he was a motor car. Not that he was simply at the wheel of one, but that he was one. His last breath went into making what he judged to be the appropriate noises. Of course, cars weren’t so thick on the ground then as now.’

  ‘Which is a relevant point, no doubt.’ Budgery was entirely amenable to nonsense. ‘You might have expected my patient – who, unlike Appleby’s grandfather, survived – to suppose himself a yacht. Not a bit of it. He was simply his own brother. A remarkable instance – don’t you think? – of family solidarity. But there was a real problem. Don’t shut me up before I come to that. What the devil was I to do?’

  ‘Nothing at all, I’d suppose.’ It was the young man called William who said this. ‘If Colin wanted to be Adam, why not let him be – at least for the time being? It wasn’t doing any harm. Unless, of course, you were beginning to get enquiries from relations, and so on.’

  ‘There wasn’t a chirp of that sort. And, as a matter of fact, leave the thing alone was pretty well what I did. You see, the delusion didn’t remain a settled one. Quite suddenly the chap would be talking about his poor dead brother Adam, and would accept without protest or any appearance of bewilderment remarks implying that he himself was Colin. That, it seems, is how dissociated personalities work: first one takes over, and then the other. I read it all up, and thought the situation out for myself. I wasn’t at all keen, if the truth be told, to let my patient fall into the hands of the professional alienists. They’d simply start telling him he was in love with his mother, or God knows what. Drive him a damned sight madder than he was already.’ Professor Budgery delivered himself of this persuasion with complete assurance. ‘After all, the chap was sick, but he was on the mend. He was putting on weight, and there’s really nothing more definitive than that. And a better circulation of blood to the brain: in proportion as that happened, all this confused thinking about himself would fade out. Time was on his side – and on mine.’

  ‘Did you discover,’ Appleby asked, ‘whether they occasionally knew about one another’s existence?’

  ‘What’s that? Oh, I see! It can be expressed – can’t it? – schematically. A person suffering from this sort of dissociation sometimes believes himself to be A, and sometimes B. A may know of the existence and erruptive behaviour of B, and B of the existence and erruptive behaviour of A. Alternatively, A may have the advantage – so to speak – over B, or B may have it over A. The one may know he possesses a dual personality, and the other may not. Yes, my dear Appleby, I’ve read all about that too. Most interesting, I agree. But I confess to being a practical man. My job was simply to coax Colin into asserting himself; into keeping his chin above water, so to speak, for progressively longer periods each time he surfaced. It required a good deal of tact, I’m bound to say. Colin could be encouraged, but Adam didn’t at all care for being contradicted or snubbed. Colin came in time to discuss his aberrat
ions rationally, but when it was Adam who was around he went on – you might say – fighting for his life.’

  ‘It’s rather curious,’ Merryweather said, ‘this spectacle of an older brother wanting, so to speak, to be his own younger brother. I’d be less surprised by its happening the other way on. Did you gather that the dead man, Adam Buzfuz, had had about him anything that was particularly enviable? Would he have been more successful, or wealthier, or in the enjoyment of better health, or a more attractive personality than Colin? If I had to guess, I’d put my money on Adam Buzfuz’s having been a more popular boy than his elder brother. A thing as batty as this you’ve been telling us about is said to have its roots in childhood, more often than not.’

  ‘It has its roots, if you ask me, in a casually encountered virus, or – as in this case – in a blip on the head.’ Budgery was robustly sceptical. ‘And, in Buzfuz’s case, it all cleared up. As soon as we got him ambulatory, the bouts of amnesia, or fugue, or whatever it was to be called, contracted sharply. Within a month, he was himself again. The expression is rather apt, wouldn’t you say?’

  The company seemed to agree that it was apt. Appleby was conscious of a faint stir, as if people were beginning to think of dispersal and bed.