Get Well Soon

Push Button Objects - ATP Track

Geoff was lying in bed propped up with pillows. His enormous, large-pupilled eyes stared out of cavernous sockets, his skin was white and clammy with sweat. But almost more appalling even than the face was his neck, his unbelievably thin neck. And from the sleeves of his nightshirt projected two knobbed sticks, his arms, with a pair of immense skeleton hands fastened to the end of them, like rakes at the end of their slender shafts. Then there was the smell in that far away sick-room. The windows were tightly shut, and the air was hot and heavy with a horrible odour of stale sick breath and the exhalations of a sick body - an old inveterate smell that seemed to have grown sickeningly sweetish with long ripening in the pent-up heat. A new, fresh smell, however pungently disgusting, would have been less horrible. It was the inveterateness, the sweet decaying over-ripeness of that sick-room smell that made it so peculiarly unbearable. Kenneth shuddered even now to think of it. He lit a cigarette to disinfect his memory. He had been brought up on baths and open windows. The first time that, as a child, he was taken to church, the stuffiness, the odour of humanity made him sick; he had to be hurried out. His mother did not take him to church again. Perhaps we're brought up too wholesomely and aseptically, he thought. An education that results in one's feeling sick in the company of one's fellow-man, one's brothers - can it be good? He would have liked to love them. But love does not flourish in an atmosphere that nauseates the lover with an uncontrollable disgust.