Sacred Hunger - Barry Unsworth [61]
After some minutes the plain and closely argued Latin text succeeded in putting other thoughts from his mind. It had fascinated him and struck him as paradoxical from the start that this treatise, destined to change beliefs held since Galen’s time and assert a new path for the blood, should still be couched in the strict form of scholastic disputation unchanged since the Middle Ages.
He had got as far as chapter eight, in which the author explains his reasons for the forming of his famous hypothesis. To restore himself he looked at the beginning of the third paragraph, one of the most profoundly influential in the history of medicine, and marvelled once again at the miraculous tentativeness of it, almost casual, like a man working from dream to truth: Coepi egomet mecum cogitare … I began to bethink myself whether it might not have a kind of movement as it were in a circle …
He was interrupted by the appearance at his door of McGann, a small, tight-faced Scot, one of the men who had been deloused and hosed down on the captain’s orders soon after sailing. The working rig he had been issued with was too big: his canvas smock hung round him and he wore the baggy breeches rolled up to his knees.
‘Beggin’ your pardon, Doctor,’ he said, removing his woollen bonnet to show a cropped head, ‘I hae been pissin’ pins an’ needles again, an’ ’tis unco’ painful.’
‘I have told you why it is,’ Paris said. ‘And you knew it well enough before.’ Nevertheless, he was glad in a way to see the man there. His medical duties had so far been less than onerous. He had seen to the lacerations on Wilson’s back; he had pulled a tooth for a man called Bryce, which had been broken in some shore fight and subsequently rotted; he had dressed a burn for Morgan, the cook, and given a course of mercury to McGann for his gonorrhoea. It was not much, in more than two weeks at sea. ‘You are past the worst of it,’ he said. ‘You have no venereal chancres. Your general health is not impaired.’
McGann glanced up at this. His eyes were watery grey beneath sandy brows and they possessed a kind of spurious alertness. The nature of his disease gave him no apparent disturbance. It was no more then an item in the sum of difficulties and small stratagems that his life represented. ‘ ’Tis unco’ painful,’ he said again.
‘No doubt it is,’ Paris said. ‘They talk about the pains of love, don’t they? But it will pass.’
McGann made no immediate move to withdraw, but remained where he was, cap in hand, eyes lowered, as if waiting for some gift of words that he could carry away with him. Or possibly something more tangible, Paris thought. He had grown more sensitive to faces of late and he had seen in McGann’s a sort of ultimate reduction to the necessities of survival. Everything possible in the way of misfortune and abuse had been endured by the small-featured, freckled face before him, with its pursed-up mouth and spurious shrewdness of expression. McGann’s life seemed entirely a matter of improvisation, of seeking advantage, however small, from every occasion.
‘I don’t know what you want from me,’ the surgeon said. ‘You are quite fit for duty. All you are now suffering from is a slight inflammatory discharge of mucus from the membrane of the urethra.’
McGann seemed impressed by this, though he kept his eyes respectfully lowered. ‘Jimminy-jig,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a’ that too, have I? Where is it situated?’
Billy Blair, hoisting out the punt to try the current along with Sullivan and the taciturn Wilson, felt the change too, some essence of scent dissipated by distance. He raised his blunt nose and sniffed at invisible shores. ‘We are gettin’ south,’ he said. ‘Soon be up wi’ the Canaries. I can smell them bleddy pine trees an’ spices. Blair has the keenest nose of anyone. I can smell them African wimmin already. I can smell the palm oil in their cunt-thatches.’
It was said, as much as anything, as an attempt to deflect Sullivan from the grievance of his forcible