Free The Parasite Person by Celia Fremlin Page B

upside-down “Ys”. No feet, usually. A lot of them didn’t even have heads, so idle must his right hand have been feeling, so disinclined for the slightest bother or effort.
    Hastily, Martin shuffled the defaced page out of sight beneath the pile. Any minute now, Helen would be in with that damned Timberley interview, and even though she wouldn’t say a word to interrupt him, it would be impossible for her not to notice the little brutes if they were still uppermost. Having safely hidden them, he now set to work on a fresh piece of paper to inscribe once more that Endogenous Depression heading, once again underlining it with painstaking precision. It would merely look as if he’d finished one section and was just about to embark on the next. No one could guess that he hadn’t written a single sentence all evening.
    It did cross his mind that this sort of thing had been a lot simpler in Beatrice’s day. No need, with her, to hide the fact that he was stuck, because she hadn’t cared a damn whether he was stuck or not: hadn’t even understood the meaning of that unhappy state. Miserable though it had been to be married to a woman who shared no single one of his interests, and couldn’t care less about his career, her indifference had nevertheless given him a certain freedom of which, at the time, he’d been totally unaware.
    Freedom to be idle, bored, unsuccessful, in a rotten mood. Freedom to spend whole evenings doodling and daydreaming at his desk without the smallest risk of anyone looking in to enquire how he was getting on. Beatrice didn’t care a damn how he was getting on. She would never even have noticed that he hadn’t written a word all day, or given a second thought to the fact that sheet after sheet of expensive typing paper were covered with vacuous little intruders from his subconscious.
    If it was indeed his subconscious that was responsible. Weren’t subconsciouses supposed to be full of dark guilts and traumas, too terrible for the conscious mind to contemplate? And yet when you gave it its head, just look what it came up with! Matchstickmanikins, without face or character, symbolising nothing. Trying to arouse in himself some twinge of Freudian guilt, he tried adding a penis to two or three of them; but it was no good. It didn’t stir up any traumas. It just made them look like camera tripods.
    *
    The sounds through the wall were different now. Helen was pushing her chair back, putting the lid on her typewriter. Her light step crossed the passage, and now he could hear her in the kitchen, clitter-clattering softly with kettle and crockery.
    Tea, perhaps? Or a nice frothy mug of cocoa, sugared exactly right? Whatever it was, he loved the sound of her preparing it, it made him feel cossetted and cared-for. With a warm feeling of anticipation, he began to clear a space on the desk for the mug, jug, glass, beaker, cup of whatever it might turn out to be.
    Damn! More pin-men, on this second sheet! Angrily, he crumpled it up and flung it in the waste-paper basket. What a mercy he’d noticed, and in the nick of time, too! Any moment now, the drink would be ready and she’d be at his elbow.
    “How’s it going, darling?” she would murmur, lightly stroking his not-yet-thinning hair; and, “Fine,” he’d answer. “Just fine.”
    Supposing, though, he were to answer “Bloody awful!”, which was the truth? Why, at once she would be all sympathy, her whole soul would spring into helpfulness as at the touch of a switch.
    “Shall I check your conversion tables?” she would offer eagerly, all the tiredness wiped from her face at the mere thought of it; or, “Shall I re-draw the 1968 graphs in accordance with the new base line? That might throw fresh light on …”
    And so it might. She really did understand the problems he was wrestling with. Over the past months, ever since they had become lovers, she had read up the subject assiduously, and was able to make really useful suggestions. And