Scan

She took an onion, hard and sound in its papery brown coat, and slit off its tight coat, sliced it in half. This loud grinding and thumping was like being deep in the bowels of a ship, down in the engine room with the men in boilersuits.

Narrowing her eyes against the tear-producing fumes, she cut the onion halves into fine layered crescents, then turned each half and diced the slices into lozenges. Think it through, she told herself, if you really can’t stop thinking about what’s happening. Magnetism is measured in gauss and tesla. Concentrate. Remember how it works. A fridge magnet has a pull of about 100 gauss, or 0.01 tesla. This machine has a magnetic field of one tesla, or 10,000 gauss.

Once she could smell the oil heating she used the blade of the knife to send her diced onion over the edge of the chopping board and into the pan. There was a small sizzle and she turned the flame down. People would look uncomfortable or upset and say, anything they could do, and treat her like a trip to the dentist.

So when the onions were soft and see-through, she’d add the rice. Flesh itself had become see-through thanks to the X-ray, whose discovery at the turn of the last century had whipped the press into a state of lubricious excitement. Not only could you see up her skirt, leered the papers, but with this machine you could now see all the way.

Push the enamelled grains round with a wooden spoon, oiling them all over, introducing them to the onions. So here she was lying in a powerful magnetic field and next they would unloose a flood of highfrequency radio waves on to the scene. At this, all the water in her body — about seventy per cent of her — would rise up. The hydrogen nuclei within her myriad water molecules would respond in a dance, aligning themselves into patterns which a computer would transform into images of whatever monster it was that was crouching in there.

Add some stock, then wait until it’s absorbed; add some more and stir again. The tesla is the unit of magnetic flux density. The becquerel is the unit for measuring radioactivity.

Death is a black camel that lies down at every door. Watch it, it mustn’t catch.

Surely it must be nearly over now. The noise was getting louder. Don’t be tempted to rush it. The noise changed, the motorized bed started to move backwards, and she opened her eyes. She thought, ‘My luck has run out.’

‘All right there, are you?’ said the nurse as she came out of the tunnel.

‘Fine,’ she smiled, breathing again, yawning, rubbing her face with her hands to revive the blood flow. She couldn’t wait to get away from the machinery and the credit-card swipe, the stale swagged grandeur of the reception area.

Walking columns of water, she thought as she hurried down Weymouth Street. Even thought could be photographed now, the synaptic spark in a rat’s brain like a jag of lightning. What happens to thought, though, when the meat goes off?

She didn’t have to go into work until after lunch and it was still only eleven-fifty. A sub at work who had needed chemotherapy last year had described how she’d followed each session with a blast of retail therapy. Cheer herself up with a new lipgloss? Hardly. She bared her teeth, then dialled his number on her mobile and waited, grimacing; heard the start of his voice message and cut the call straight off.

Behind the railings of the central garden in Manchester Square stood several large soot-eating plane trees just in leaf, bluebells brightening their roots. Where had her health gone? She went up to the railing spikes and took in some deep breaths, smelling the wet hawthorn on the other side. There she had been, taking it for granted, its good behaviour and innocence; next thing she knew it was all over the place, it was in hysterics, threatening to leave her. Then it had packed its bags and walked out, slamming the door behind it.

Somewhere round here was an art collection, tucked away above the scrum of Oxford Street. ‘I’m sick of thinking about myself,’ she muttered. ‘I don’t want to think about me.’ Here it was, at the top of the square, this red brick mansion—the Wallace Collection. She walked up to the swing doors. It was free.

Along the centre of the entrance hall reared a marble staircase, winged snake-necked griffins biting its banisters. She went and stood over by the fireplace to one side of it. The clock on the mantelpiece was ticking in her ear. She checked the time it told against her watch, and it was right: twelve o’clock.

There came a silvery chiming from the room opposite, and distant carillons from other rooms too, the sound of midday chimes and striking mechanisms. I don’t want to obey these rules, she thought, that everything’s always going to be over and everyone must die.

She crossed into a room dominated by a massive free-standing chronometer on top of which lounged old Father Time, winged and bearded, and a baby holding a scythe. The clock itself, not content with mean time alone, also showed solar time, the passage of the sun through the zodiac, the age and phases of the moon, the date, the day of the week and the time at any place in the northern hemisphere. It was a skeleton clock: through the glass side panels you could see its elaborate working parts, the spring which must be wound once a month and the pendulum maintaining the regular beat.

This room was full of china in glass cabinets, soft-paste Sèvres porcelain bulb pots and tea services in sea green, salmon pink and lapis blue. She took a laminated information sheet from the box by the door and started to read about cailloute and vermicule gilding, relishing the terminology of an unfamiliar technique where none of it remotely involved medical procedures. Cailloute meant pebble-like and vermicule was worm-tunnel. After the initial biscuit-firing came the glazing process; then the paste was fired again and painted with cherubs or marine scenes or triple wreaths of foliage and flowers tied with ribbon. Last of all came the gilding. Honey and powdered gold had been brushed on to these vase brims and teacup handles three centuries ago, then fired, then burnished with a dog’s tooth to increase the shine. A dog’s tooth!

When they put art on a hospital wall it was to do with the need not to be reduced to a lump of gristle and malfunctioning cells. Here was Catherine the Great’s ice-cream cooler with a ground of bleu céleste. But a garage doesn’t worry that it smells of oil and petrol; why shouldn’t a hospital smell of surgery? They had not all been sent to the guillotine as might have been expected; the Sèvres factory had carried on making porcelain but with revolutionary symbols, Phrygian bonnets and tricolore flags instead of cherubs and roses.

She walked into a large gallery room and here he was again, in this little painting at eye level, the greybeard with his grizzled wings. At his feet was an infant holding up an hourglass. Time was just another name for death, she got the point. He was sitting to one side playing a lyre, providing the music for four beautiful heavy-limbed dancers who moved hand in hand in a ring and faced outwards, fearless as children.

There are the facts of life, she thought, the predictable traps and horrors. What struck her now though was the irrelevance and centrality of emotion in human life and how the facts happened anyway, whatever you chose to feel about them.

Turning off into another room she was caught by tender greens and blues and glimpses of amorous outdoor parties. Le Petit Parc, she read, La Fête Galante. A girl in loose lustring looked away, the nape of her neck exposed to outdoor kisses, while her companions lounged and whispered in each other’s ears, waiting for the lover who stood tuning his lute. In the mid-distance a man looked out to sea through a telescope.

Homesickness for the recent past brought savage nausea. Garlands of fade-free flowers these paintings promised; musical fountains and trees in perpetual leaf. She wanted to climb up over the edges of their frames, and clawed at the air. Her legs dissolved.

***

‘Oh, I’m still here,’ she said, or tried to say, some minutes later. ‘I thought I was in a tunnel.’ Her view of things was from a different angle. Just then the scene above her whirled away as something else bulged inside her head, and burst.