Free The Other Side of You by Salley Vickers Page B

a place you can be transported to behind the scenes, is there? Another country called “Death”?’
    ‘The ancients thought so,’ Gus said. ‘I trust them. They’d a feel for the mysteries. Hades, for instance. Mind you, it was a pale sort of a place. Achilles hated it. When Odysseus visited Hades, Achilles told him he would rather be the meanest ploughboy alive than the great Achilles deprived of life.’
    ‘But there was Socrates,’ I said. ‘What about him? He chose suicide, didn’t he?’
    ‘Yes, but for the Greeks suicide was always linked with courage. It takes courage not to be defined by life and courage consciously to enter the biggest of all unknowns. Socrates wasusing his life, sacrificing it, you could say, to make a point to the Athenians about their law. He was insisting that they act rationally, put their money where their mouth was and apply the law’s sentence for the crime he had not been acquitted of committing. It wasn’t that he wasn’t able to bear life. Quite the contrary. He was so unfussed about it he knew how to play with it! He could have escaped the sentence, and it was clear they were keen as mustard that he should. That was the correct form: you applied the death sentence, the culprit made appropriate arrangements with his chums and tactfully buggered off. The last thing the authorities wanted was Socrates’ death on their hands. But he wasn’t having it. He put the frighteners on them by not caring enough about saving his own skin. You see, Socrates knew something else. His last request before he downed the hemlock, which incidentally wasn’t such a jolly way to depart as people suggest—it would have given him shocking stomach pains—was that a cock be sacrificed to Asclepius. One of his better jokes.’
    ‘Why is it a joke?’ Another thing I liked about Gus was that he never made you feel that what you didn’t know or understand mattered a straw.
    ‘Asclepius was the god of healing. If you think about it, Socrates pays his last respects to a healer at the point when there was about to be nothing left of him to heal. I reckon he was saying, life is a sickness and death is a welcome recovery from it. Remember, there’s no cure for being alive!’
    ‘I told her that,’ I said. ‘I told my patient it was you who told me. It was one of the few things I’ve said which seemed to get through.’ Which was when I remembered the conversation we’dhad about painting. ‘Actually, there’s another thing. She shares your taste for Caravaggio.’
    ‘Does she indeed?’ said Gus. ‘You know, I’d follow that up, if I were you. Caravaggio knew about suffering. And passion. And death. There was nothing babyish or covered up about Caravaggio!’

10
    M Y APPOINTMENT WITH D R H ANNAN’S COUNSEL WAS NOT till eleven so I had time, the following morning, to drop by the National Gallery.
    I renewed my acquaintance with Titian’s Man with a Blue Sleeve. I like that blue. And I adore Titian’s supreme confidence. You can see it reflected in his nobleman, who’s so clearly a bastard but one of those bastards you can’t help but admire.
    It was almost twelve years since I’d looked at the Caravaggio and I’d forgotten, if I’d ever registered, how young the risen Christ looks. His cheek is almost childishly smooth, the rounded curves defying the recent experience of death, as if in dying his bloom has been renewed. Poor Jesus. I’d never considered it before but how appalling to undergo that agonising death, and have all the relief of its being over, and then have to endure the redoubled torment of coming back.
    I looked again at the stupefied pair receiving the news of this unlooked-for return. The hand of the disciple to the right, which comes springing out of the frame, as if the third dimension has been given literal shape, is the left hand, the sinister side, the hand of the unconscious, plucking life and flinging it at us out of the dark.
    I’d not taken in the painting