[2003] LOSS & PORPHYRY the novels  

0003 – Part 1 – The Trip back from Paris Bio Conference 1977  

As the heat of a perfect summer morning began to mount, my bright yellow Cortina estate car sped north along the A1 autoroute from Paris to the Channel Coast. The forests near to Paris were behind, and the autoroute was curving its way through rolling open countryside. At the wheel, I had long since lapsed into the trance that protected me from the mind-numbing boredom of driving long distances on motorways. Driving on auto-pilot, I was busy reviewing my personal situation.

I was in the process of concluding that, against the odds, I was much better placed than I had any right to expect. Just a month previously I had finally come to blows, albeit at a political rather than physical level, with my own management. My views on future sales policy, about to be applied to the main-line products, had increasingly diverged from the conventional wisdom. It was inevitable that I would lose the ensuing battle; and I had duly lost it. Why I had ever chosen to fight was a mystery to everyone; most of all to me. In truth I had been right, and I was still convinced that events would ultimately validate my arguments - as indeed they later did! But in commerce, and particularly in sales, discretion is the one golden rule; and a loser who is proved to be right merely loses again a second time. Nobody, least of all a sales manager, wants to be shown that he has taken the wrong decision. However, I continued to reason perversely in view of my then choice of profession, that integrity was still important. Indeed, to the discomfort of my colleagues and to the dismay of my family, I regularly chose to indulge in such honesty; where others would have favoured discrete pragmatism.

I had fully expected to be posted to some commercial equivalent of Siberia. I was, though, fortunate to be working for a company which was humanitarian enough not to dismiss its dissidents, but it was still ruthlessly efficient enough to bury them where they could do the least damage in future. I had received my posting; and had feared the worst. But, as the past two weeks had shown, the punishment had not been as severe as I had expected. Indeed it was beginning to look as if, by some quirk of good fortune, my future was rosy. The new group, to which I had been assigned, was certainly well outside of the mainstream of the business. I would never make it to the board, but I had never deluded myself that such an option was open to me. I had none of the political skills that such a career demanded. The new medical group was a backwater, and to that extent it was a banishment. But it was becoming clear that it would be a very comfortable, and rewarding, backwater. The products were technically excellent and the marketing budgets were substantial. Maybe the mainline salesmen would have considered it provincial, but most other salesmen would have given their eye-teeth for it.

I had just spent two weeks being introduced to the products. To my surprise I had found them fascinating. To my even greater surprise I had not fainted when they were demonstrated. The machines were not the sterile, almost intellectual, computer systems I was used to. They were, instead, blood processing machines; and in use they were attached to very human bodies. Like many others before me, I had always been squeamish about such things. I had even avoided biology at school because I couldn't face the idea of having to dissect rats. Now I was confronted with a direct involvement in cutting up human beings; and when offered the posting I had feared I would cope even less well with this, and had argued long and hard against it. But my fears had been groundless. They had been put to the test, during my recent training, by a morning spent at the Salpetriere Hospital in Paris.

From the viewing gallery that meandered above that hospital's suite of operating theatres, it had been impossible to avoid total exposure to all that modern surgery demanded. Surprisingly, it had not been the open heart surgery that I had found most challenging to my equilibrium. Somehow, in that operation, the green draped torso was totally depersonalised. Even from above, where you could see far more than from the floor of the theatre itself, you couldn't see a recognisable human face attached to the patient. There was a disembodied leg with a shallow incision along its whole length. From this had already been taken the vein which was to be transplanted to the heart; and the surgeon was busy stitching the gash closed. Otherwise, all that was visible was part of the chest itself. But even that was covered with adhesive plastic; to reduce the risk of infection, but making the torso look remarkably like part of a dummy from a shop window. When the time came, the scalpel's incision straight down the length of the breastbone produced surprisingly little blood, and the few severed blood vessels that did bleed were quickly cauterised into a charred black inoffensiveness. By the time that the rib cage was finally exposed, the flesh looked more like a medium rare steak, criss-crossed with sear marks, than a human being. It was, however, that indelible memory which later influenced the joint decision of those undergoing this shock training to choose a Chinese restaurant for lunch rather than the alternative of a steak house. Chinese food bore no resemblance to the butcher's shop they had inhabited for the morning.

The alienation, the dehumanisation, continued with the application of a piece of mechanical engineering that would have seemed more at home in a car workshop. The reverse of a vice, it used sheer brute force, applied by a sweating surgeon turning its anachronistic crank, to force apart the rib cage. Only then was the chest cavity exposed, with the small pink organ that was the heart beating inoffensively at its centre.

It was, perhaps, an ironic comment on the hierarchical organisation of most professions that it was only at this point that the senior surgeon deigned to make his appearance; much like a primadonna saving herself for the best arias. His juniors in the surgical team, who had sweated hard for two long hours to get to this stage, had to deferentially move aside as their master stepped into the limelight; and delicately sutured the replacement arteries onto that exposed heart. Then, the aria completed and the audience applause over, he withdrew into the wings whilst the lesser mortals returned to put everything together again.

Much more alarming was the hip replacement operation next door. It should have been less gory, and certainly was far less life threatening for the patient. But what was happening was much more immediately recognisable. Once again there was little that could be seen; just a thigh exposed amidst a sea of green table cloths. But it looked so much like a leg of pork being butchered that it still held its everyday significance; and yet I had been simultaneously, and shockingly, aware that it belonged to a human being. That butchered leg, so inhumanly assaulted, seemed to sum up the most offensive aspects of surgery. But, even so, I had confronted my fears and survived. I too had been able to distance myself from the pain and mutilation of the whole process.

"I thought that was a very good meal we had last night." Pat, had been immersed in her own reverie; on a rather less elevated subject than mine.

I took a little time to answer; having been startled by the juxtaposition with my own more macabre thoughts. It took that time to put that obscene leg of pork out of my mind before I could give my attention to the previous night's repast: "Yes, it was a good meal. I was surprised how good the frog's legs were." It had been the first meal in a good French restaurant that their two children had attended, and I had taken the opportunity to be uncharacteristically adventurous myself; hence the frog's legs. I had previously tried snails and found them much overrated, tasting of nothing but spinach and garlic; and certainly of insufficient culinary excellence to justify overcoming my innate aversion a second time. But, to my surprise, the frog's legs had been very tasty; rather like a particularly flavoursome chicken.

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