Elephant Man - Christine Sparks [50]
But then one morning, about four days after Carr-Gomm’s visit, Treves was examining the hip whose disease or injury caused Merrick to limp, and he asked,
“How did this happen, John? Do you remember?”
“Somebody kicked me—” A tense silence followed these words, and Merrick seemed to be holding himself stiff. “—in the workhouse,” he added at last.
“I see.” Treves kept his voice casual, but excitement was taking hold of him. This was the first time Merrick had ever volunteered the word “workhouse.” “And did it hurt a lot after that kick?”
“Yes. For a long time—I couldn’t walk properly. So they sent me to hospital.”
“What did the hospital say about it? Can you remember?”
“They said it was cracked—I think. But it was too late to treat it. The crack had got diseased.”
Tubercular complications, Treves thought mechanically, following a neglected injury.
“Do you know how old you were then?”
“The—workhouse people said I was seven. I’d been there five years. I was two when my mother left me.”
“Do you remember your mother?”
“Oh yes!” Merrick’s face was incapable of expression. Nonetheless it seemed to Treves that a great light broke across it at the mention of his mother. “She was very beautiful. She could not help leaving me there, you must not think badly of her. She didn’t know how it would be …” Merrick choked suddenly as though he were weeping. “… she didn’t know … or she’d never …”
“John, you don’t have to talk about the workhouse,” said Treves quickly. “It’s all over.”
Merrick looked at him. “But you wanted to know,” he said simply. “You asked me many times to tell you …”
“Yes, but not if it’s going to distress you so much.”
They left it there, but the following day Merrick again brought up the subject, although Treves could tell it was an effort. But Merrick seemed determined to force himself, as though he had decided to refuse his benefactor nothing, whatever the cost to himself. The story took several days to come out, not merely because Merrick constantly grew too upset to continue but his difficulty in speaking made it a slow process.
Treves, listening attentively, found himself being drawn into Merrick’s nightmare world as though it was his own. He had the sympathetic imagination to put himself in his patient’s place and see things through his eyes, and now it was as though his own safe, happy world had flown apart into a thousand pieces, to be replaced by the unending hell of deformity and life as a public spectacle.
There was the grief of abandonment, the freezing sense of being alone in a hostile world. There was food, never quite enough and never appetizing; clothes that were passed on as others grew out of them, clothes that were falling to bits, crawling with lice.
There was “the difference”; the child’s mind, clear and sharp in its dreadful prison, soon became aware that other children survived by banding together and giving each other the care others would not give. But none of these rough-hewn little families wanted him. If he approached he was driven off with jeers and blows. Even in the workhouse children played—but not with him. At meal times he would find himself alone at one end of the table as the others drew away. Often he would have nothing to eat, for the others snatched his food and he was too clumsy to defend himself. He was “different,” but he did not know why. There were no mirrors.
He knew he was ugly, because they said so, although he didn’t know what ugly meant. But he heard it so often that eventually the word “ugly” became a name to which he would respond. Then they would howl with laughter.
There was the kick—indistinguishable at first from other kicks, but the pain did not stop. At the hospital he encountered people who were seeing