A cold coming we had of it
Alan Brien
The rain rippled like melting Cellophane down the windows of the sex boutiques. It spattered on the surface of the gelid, glycerine canals in little coronets as if a myriad of tiny invisible fishes were biting rhythmically at the dancing flies of non-existent anglers. A wet city, waterlogged beyond all its capabilities of absorption, leaked at every pore, puddling the excess between the cobbles.
The damp rose in my boots, exploded in slow-motion stars on my kneecaps, climbed in capillary action up my sleeves, spread downwards like a gradually growing cape over my shoulders, beaded itself on my bare head like bubbles on an old paintbrush. As I moved I squelched, a slug creature from the black lagoon. trying to remind myself I once, aeons ago, probably before mankind had risen from the swamps, was going to write an article about Amsterdam in the run-up to Christmas.
I realised I didn't care—about Amsterdam, about journalism, about the Sex Quarter, which was where I was at when what I take to be the Plague, though doctors may have some other anodyne name for it, hit me. I looked to the right at the supposedly live women, centred in their giant six-feetsquare screens—and they seemed like plucked birds, their underwear mere paper frills, offered for sale, or rather hire, in some Dickensian poulterers transformed by timewarp into a twenty-first-century purveyor of potties de luxe.
They had been well-fattened, forcibly fed on who knows what Food of the Gods, possibly nailed by one foot to the floor like Strasbourg geese, carefully trained never to meet the eye of the passer-by, so that we outside must always be the accosters, bursting through into their fish-tanks with some such excuse as that we were getting out of the rain like visitors to provincial museums.
To the left, the display was even more static, if that were possible. The shelves behind the streaming glass were packed with what, at first glance, appeared like Hamley's toys for growing boys—colourful, plastic, baroque objects in a garish jumble bearing a distant, if exaggerated, resemblance to real life equivalents. Not quite to scale, perhaps. Needing batteries, possibly even main drainage. Requiring close attention to their instructions in four languages, warning the lucky recipient never to connect point A to flap Q without ensuring that X was earthed. It took me a while to wipe the silly parental grin off my face as I realised what that severed head of a grinning, gawping blonde ('Init motor'), that lonely, big-breasted, pubic-hilled torso ('hygienic, washable'), those phallic, purple parodies, often double-ended, were intended to be used for.
As the paradox struck me, prostitute and substitute, live action by mechanical robots or mechanical action by live robots, jowl by cheek and cheek by jowl, I began to cough. Why hadn't I done that before? It was going all round the town. Coughing was the new language, a kind of Esperanto, the inter national medium of wordless communication. Urgh, urgh! Two seats, two tickets, two drinks. Yarraghlle? Front stalls, first-class, old gin ? Ack! The cheapest ! The influence, flowing down from the skies (hence the name), was spreading westwards across Europe, no doubt, according to Dr Sproat and 'Big Nurse' Thatcher, dropped by Soviet stratospheric carriers.
I followed it back to London, and it followed me back—we travelled in tandem, the Cough and I. And I began to think, quite seriously, that we all ought to be taught how to do it. My first night here I lay awake trying to work out what the Cough, like Maupassant's L' Norio, wanted from me. It felt to me as if I were a long tube, like a hollowed-out Boy Scout pole, from pelvis to neck, with a rusted lid on top. Of all bodily intakes, food, drink, warmth, sight, sound, breath is the most vital. Three minutes without it and most of us are beginning to imagine, probably correctly, that the end is near.
The Cough, or rather this new cough I hear hawking and scraping all round me, arranges itself so that (a) you need it; (b) you can only have it by breathing in; (c) you can never breath in as much as you are going to cough out. In which case, QED, and COD, you are, as New York mortuaries used to stamp the dockets when I was a police reporter there twenty years ago, DOA— Dead On Arrival. But, of course, you aren't, though nearly so. To cough that rusty lid off the top of that skinny pole, you must channel and direct and control the air in your lungs to the right target at the right time: Aaaaah, hurrrrrh, wh0000p, clack, spatch-a-ratch-glug-glug . . . glug! It isn't a pretty sound, but you need it. The people around, those who love you, wife, husband, father, mother, child, boss, accountant, dentist, neighbourhood liquor store manager, pretend to be on your team, almost certainly are. But they can't endure beyond the whoop! let alone the clack!
This is understandable. For unless you cough in front of a mirror (Not recommended —A Doctor), you have no idea how your cough mounts into a ghastly, awful, choking, pop-eyed, purple-checked, heart-stopping paroxysm, reaching, retching, seeking, searching to the very verge of apoplexy. And yet, stopped anywhere before the (what can only be called) Orgasm of the Cough, you might as well have never started. Indeed, it may well lead to several minor, but racking, fits which are highly unattractive and nastysounding yet bring no relief to the sufferer.
The cougher must be allowed to Cough. If you don't like it (and why should you ?), get the hell out of the neighbourhood, or at least earshot. Many a man—I have no evidence but aaaah, hurrrrrh, whoboop—has died of not-coughing because his loved ones have thought him so ugly and worrisome just trying to get up the energy for a good clack, spatch-a-ratch-glug-glug.
I am now recovered from the Cough. I cured myself, so I say, by lying awake almost all night trying to analyse just what is the
best way to Cxxgh—I'm getting a bit nervous, especially for a rationalist, of naming the unholy name in full. But think my strategy worked. Over and over, while breathing shallowly and gently, I tried to work out just where the air should go to break the blockage most effectively. Then I coughed, and coughed, and coughed, and coughed.
Around me, they shouted for me to stop it, to save myself, to watch out for my heart,
and asked was I insane ? But I was right. And I kid you not. Would 1 joke about the Cxxgh? The Plague has passed on so why should I try to fool anybody ? I could still write a lovely piece about Amsterdam, even ignoring the Sex Quarter, but this will do more people more good. Learn how to cough. Cough and be damned. And we could all be there next pre-Christmas to ask each other—who does what to whom with which and for why?
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