The Parasite Person Read Online Free

never bothered with soup unless there were visitors, and even then it was only out of a tin. Happening to mention this fact to Helen, quite casually, during one of their long, cosy talks about Beatrice’s inadequacies, Martin had been amazed and delighted by the immediate and unprecedented consequences. Soup for starters, at every meal cooked by Helen, ever since. Home-made soup, too. Every Friday she would bring back great knobbly parcels of bones from the butcher and stew them up over the weekend to make the basis of a wonderful variety of luscious soups for every evening of the week. Lentil soup it would probably be tonight, with a delicate sprinkling of freshly-chopped mint. He’d noticed the lentils left to soak in a bowl first thing this morning. Clever girl!
    “If my liver did play up—” the small insistent voice broke in upon his mouth-watering reverie “—if my liver did play up, would you come and ask me some more questions?”
    Like hell he would! The interview was too long already, as well as practically useless. She only wanted to show off some more, buggering up the computer with her pretentious wisecracks.
    “Well, no, Ruth, I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said, dropping his outstretched hand at last and taking a step back from the bed. “I’ve got other interviews lined up, you see,” (God, if only that were true!) “and in this sort of work we have to keep to a very strict schedule. Otherwise …” He groped for some plausible get-out: “Otherwise … well … bias , you know. We have to be very careful to eliminate bias….”
    A non-sequitur if ever there was one: and lest she should catch him out over it (after all she was an ex-student of psychology, with at least a year or two’s training in catching other psychologists out) he hurried on:
    “So you see, Ruth, I’m very sorry, but I’m afraid I won’t be seeing you any more….”
    Her head was pressed back hard against the pillows, black hair splayed out, and she continued to stare at him with her big green-flecked eyes, slightly bloodshot at the moment from the ordeal she had put her body through.
    “Like to bet on it?” she challenged; and then, raising her voice slightly as he began to move away:
    “Did you know, Prof, we’re called the Pre-Morts here on this ward? Good, isn’t it? ‘Pre-Morts!’ And down in the basement they have the Post-Morts! Maybe that’s where we’re going to meet next—had you thought of that? Like, if I was to have another go, tonight, and you were the last person to have talked to me? Asked me all these questions? You’d be in it then, Prof, up to the neck, right? It’s a fifty-fifty chance you got, because fifty percent of us here do have a second go, and that’s a statistic. Check it out if you want, but there’s no need, us Funnies know the score. Well, we should do, shouldn’t we, seeing we’re the fans …!”
    *
    Her laughter, clear as a child’s, followed him the whole length of the ward, ceasing only when the heavy swing doors fell softly back into place behind him, sealing off the Pre-Morts and all their doomed concerns inside their proper enclosure, well away from the busy, important world outside.

CHAPTER II
    M ARTIN BACKED OUT of the Visitors’ car park, conscious, as he turned his head left and right, of the boyish lock of hair flopping to and fro against his forehead. There was a touch of grey in it now, but it still seemed to suit him, just as it had once suited the brilliant, rebellious student who still cowered somewhere inside him, immobilised by the lapse of time, and haunted for ever by an early promise that had somehow never been fulfilled.
    An open scholarship to Oxford. A First in P.P.E., followed by a startlingly successful research year, and then, before he was twenty-two, a paper read to the prestigious Durkheim Society, and subsequently published as a leading article in their Annual Proceedings .
    What had happened to it all? Where had the years gone,