Grey Area

by Will Self

  4. This brings me to the issue of Dr Anthony Bohm. As Board members are aware, Bohm was Busner’s conduit for the secret testing of Inclusion. Bohm was paid to prescribe Inclusion to his patients, and to provide Busner with an adequate control. Unfortunately Busner did not confine himself to bribing Bohm. Indeed, despite the handsome sums paid to him, the threat of personal ruin and professional disgrace which that money represented does not seem to have been Bohm’s main motivation. Judging from Busner’s journal, Bohm was an ideological convert to Inclusion, as was MacLachlan, the local pharmacist who distributed the Inclusion prescriptions.

  Busner persuaded them all that the illegal prescription of an unlicensed, untested psychoactive drug was a positively humanitarian gesture. How he managed this I cannot say. The account of his relationship with these parties that his own journal gives is fantastic and almost certainly false.

  After arriving at Worminghall, assessing the damage and immediate potential for toxicological fall-out, my next thought was to secure Bohm. However, when I got to the health centre I found that he was away, allegedly on holiday in France for two weeks. At the pharmacy I got the same story. I need hardly emphasise to the Board how important it is for the containment of the Inclusion incident that Bohm – and Maclachlan – are apprehended on their return to the UK. Until we have interviewed them there can be no guarantee that the prescription of Inclusion to ordinary NHS patients in the Worminghall locality can be effectively covered up.

  5. Busner’s disappearance and Dykes’s ongoing condition are, of course, the most worrying aspects of the whole Inclusion débâcle. If we could be certain that Busner was dead it would be possible for us to abandon the complex subterfuge required to convince his family that he is still attending a neuro-pharmacological conference in the USA. On the other hand, were he to reappear it would open the way to attaching the culpability to Busner himself.

  The Dykes problem is bound up with Busner. Dykes has had a complete mental breakdown. Psychiatrists who owe no loyalty to the company are convinced that his ravings about having ‘included’ Dr Zack Busner into himself, are just that: ravings.

  Nevertheless, having spoken to both Dykes and his wife myself, I am now convinced that he is suffering from an Inclusion-induced psychosis of some kind. Should he recover and be discharged from the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, the company may have some awkward questions to answer. And if we wish to pronounce Busner dead, we will have to come up with a body.

  In conclusion: the Inclusion trials are far from over. If you examine Busner’s journal and Dykes’s diary I think you will gain some idea of just how potent and dangerous a drug Inclusion is.

  It does not come within my remit to criticise company policy. However – as some of you will no doubt recall – I joined Cryborg eight years ago, specifically to deal with the bad press the company was receiving in the wake of the Rutger breakout. Given that I was able to persuade an overwhelmingly hostile media that there were sound medical reasons for surgically bifurcating the feet of African tribesmen in order to provide them with two giant prehensile toes, any aspersions cast on my loyalty to Cryborg are unwarranted.

  Be that as it may – I am appalled by what transpired at Worminghall. On the day of the incident, arriving at the Facility after a breakneck drive from London, I found the buildings inside the compound deserted.

  I ran from one to the next. Their floors were scattered – not with the debris I expected – but with piles of things, objects of all kinds, and intact. There were antique victrolas and pharmacological reference works; laboratory equipment and cuddly toys; pill boxes and plastic pachyderms; fruit and electronic components; curling equipment and ancient votive statuary; stuffed animals and exercise equipment; sporting trophies and antiquarian books; model trains and silverware; samovars and sousaphones; clothes and carpet off-cuts.

  There was no obvious explanation. It was a remarkably diverse assemblage of stuff. There wasn’t even enough room in the Research Facility to house it all. The buildings were overflowing; things bulged from windows and spilled out through doors.

  I worked my way across the compound towards the farthest building, the one housing Busner’s laboratory, his office and the Inclusion cyclotron. As I drew closer I began to see a pattern in these drifts of impedimenta. The car batteries and Eskis; tin cans and slipper socks; VCRs and fondue forks, formed a series of concentric circles, covering the entire area of the Research Facility. Busner’s laboratory was the epicentre.

  Entering the building I found evidence that gave me a partial explanation. The cyclotron had exploded. Busner’s laboratory and office were wrecked. Equipment and papers had been hopelessly mangled together. The concentric rings of objects that covered the rest of the Facility were some kind of embroidery, an elaboration of the shock waves of the explosion.

  These waves or rings were present in the laboratory as well. As they diminished in size, so did the objects that composed them. At the outer edge of the laboratory the rings comprised Rotadexes and file holders; typewriter ribbons and plastic beakers; Bunsen burners and test-tube racks. Whilst the smaller rings were made up of paper clips and drawing pins; biros and match books; fragments of glass and fragments of mica. The smallest rings were just dust.

  The rings were disconcerting. Their utter regularity, the way they retained circularity by running up and over the buildings – or even traversing them altogether – implied both conscious agency and blind force. I was bewildered. Even more unsettling were the two bound notebooks that sat in the middle of the smallest ring. They were so at odds with the evidence of destruction that they must have been placed there after the explosion . . .

  You look once more into the pocket of the shiny folder – purely out of idle curiosity. You certainly don’t expect to find either of these mysterious notebooks – how could their bulk be contained within its two shiny dimensions? When you hefted the folder earlier on it just wasn’t sufficiently weighty – yet there they both are, wedged down tight, behind a sheaf of order forms. Hawke had included both of them – as he said he would. He also wrote a further rider, on a Post-It Note attached to the first notebook:

  Please note: the term ‘log’ is slightly misleading. For while what follows does present some calibrated information on the course of the Inclusion trial, the document by no means displays the dispassionate, observational approach one would expect from a psychiatrist and a clinician of Busner’s standing. It is more accurate to describe the notebook as Busner’s personal journal.

  R.P.H.

  First Extract from Dr Zack Busner’s Log

  5th October

  Anthony Valuam waylaid me in the corridor this morning and suggested that I lunch with him and one of the research directors of Cryborg Pharmaceuticals next week. I surprised myself by agreeing. On balance I think that, whatever they propose, it can hardly be less ethical than the work I am currently doing at Heath Hospital.

  12th October

  Lunch was far better than I expected. Gainsford, the research director, took us to Grindley’s Upstairs. I enjoyed my rack of lamb, but perhaps disgraced myself by setting fire to rolled-up Amaretti papers and watching them float up to the ceiling.

  Gainsford wants me to resign my consultancy and come and work for him at Cryborg. He was rather coy about the project he has in mind. He made a big pitch, saying Cryborg would pay me four times what I’m currently earning. If this is really the case I will be making far more than I ever have – even during my heyday as a TV pundit in the early seventies.

  I told Gainsford that nothing could be more antithetical – even now – to my concept of mental health treatment, than working for a multinational drug company. He simply laughed. He’s a little man, his round face decorated with one of those mini goatee-and-moustache combinations. While he spoke it twitched, registering his circumspection.

  22nd October

  Through Valuam I have intimated to Gainsford that I might be interested in leaving Heath Hospital to work for Cryborg. Gain
sford phoned me today and told me that he could only fill me in on the project if I was prepared to sign some sort of corporate secrets waiver. I agreed to this readily enough – I love secrets. We arranged to meet at the Cryborg head office in Victoria next Thursday.

  30th October

  It’s a drug trial, how droll. But what a drug. I understand now why Gainsford was so insistent on secrecy. The range of applications and the potential market for the drug is absolutely staggering. From the evidence Gainsford presented to me it is clear that Cryborg are on the verge of a really major advance in neuro-pharmacology.

  The drug has been tentatively given the name ‘Inclusion’. It is relatively easy to produce, being derived entirely from the cadaverous and faecal matter of an obscure insect parasite. Once the psychoactive ingredient is isolated it can be stabilised using a specially devised cyclotron. Gainsford demonstrated the whole procedure for me in a laboratory adjoining the main Cryborg boardroom.

  Gainsford wants me to test the drug for him. The catch is that the trial has to be conducted in secret – and on the general population. This is obviously why Cryborg approached me. Even though my conduct as a professional has been impeccable over the past fifteen years I am still known as an unorthodox practitioner; a whacko shrink who is prepared to undertake courses of research well outside the mainstream.

  Nevertheless, were money the sole consideration I would have given Gainsford short shrift. However, my curiosity had been awakened – and once that’s happened there is little that can stop me. The evidence that Gainsford presented on Inclusion was remarkable. This clearly showed that astonishing results had already been achieved using Inclusion for the following broad range of reactive depressive symptoms: anxiety, insomnia, stress, impotence etc. There is no known toxic dose for the drug either.

  Could this be the panacea we have been searching for for so long? I no longer have any faith in the talking cures, nor do I find it easy to prescribe drugs like the tricyclics, which I know will only help a very small number of the patients who are referred to me. That the refined crap of a bee mite might prove to be the salvation of our growing legions of misery is fantastic enough and ironic enough to be believable!

  5th November

  A sad day for me. I handed in my notice to Archer, the senior administrator at the Health Authority. He insisted on having a long chat with me about my future – I was evasive. Under instructions from Gainsford I have not admitted to anyone – even my family – what the precise nature of my employment at Cryborg will be. Archer wouldn’t let it lie. He kept on bleating about what a loss it was, how he’d thought I would stay at Heath until my retirement, how they needed me to fight the depredations of the Government. Whenever the conversation flagged, he would crank it up again like some Klaxon, until he was wailing away again, saying we should keep in touch, how he thought of me as family etc. He’s the sort of person who gives gregariousness a bad name.

  13th November

  I’m winding down my work on the wards. My replacement is yet to be decided on, in the meantime Jane Bowen will cover Ward 8 and Anthony Valuam Ward 9. I feel far more emotional about leaving Heath Hospital than I thought I would. Particularly as Misha Gurney – one of my patients and the son of my old friend Simon Gurney, the sculptor – committed suicide last night. They found him early this morning in one of the abandoned radiography suites in the hospital basement. He had hung himself. Poor, sad boy. Perhaps Inclusion might have helped him. Now we’ll never know.

  24th November

  Gainsford drove me up to Worminghall in the Chilterns today, and we toured the new Research Facility. He had been given a very large Toyota saloon by the Cryborg car pool, which was unfortunate as he is almost too small to reach the pedals. Driving out of London we had a number of near misses, but once we got on to the M40 Gainsford put on the cruise control and knelt on the driving seat. We both relaxed and he began telling me about Inclusion in far greater detail.

  Apparently Cryborg have for a number of years employed a young research chemist called Sumner, to explore the Amazonian rainforest. Sumner’s job is to get as close as possible to the various Amerindian tribes and discover the secrets of their medicinal plants. Naturally Cryborg are not alone in this – the drug rush has been going on for at least a decade now. Apparently, in some remote parts of South America, the research chemists outnumber the tribespeople.

  Of course, most pharmacologists have treated the toughened roots, waxy leaves and gungy pastes brought back from these expeditions with the utmost scepticism. And really, most of the ‘discoveries’ have proved to be nothing but the chemical equivalent of the raffia tat and facial mud sold by pseudo-ecological shops.

  But Sumner had more luck. He was far more adventurous and determined than his rivals, and journeyed long into the rainforest on trips that lasted for months. Trips during which he moved entirely within the ambit of tribal groups of hunter-gatherers that had never seen a European before.

  According to Gainsford, on one such trip Sumner encountered the most bizarre group of indigenes imaginable. These people – who called themselves the Maeterlincki – had a life-cycle (metaphysic, socio-cultural form, collective psychopathology) entirely bound up with the harvesting of honey. Honey produced by terrifying swarms of cliff-dwelling bees.

  The Maeterlincki’s knowledge of these valuable domestic animals is comprehensive, pragmatic and highly sophisticated. Despite the fact that they maintain a view of the cosmos that is entirely apiacentric. For, according to the Maeterlincki, each of their individual consciousnesses is merely the slumbering reverie of a single bee. A death in the tribe coincides with a bee awakening.

  Needless to say, this rather baroque belief system gave rise to incredibly complicated explanations by the tribal elders, when they were asked by Sumner how it was that they presided over the establishment and then decay of entire bee colonies, whilst their own life-spans were no longer than a few hours.

  Sumner became intrigued by the Maeterlincki’s skill as apiarists and went with them to witness the honey harvest. He watched, while they climbed up the granite outcrops where the bees built their hives, and extracted the vast, dripping golden combs. The comb-extraction teams were made up of three tribesmen. (The actual harvesting of the honey is taboo for women.) One of the men would perform a mime of a bee – intended to distract the swarm; the second would remove the combs from the hive; the third would stand by as a decoy and allow himself to be stung – usually to death. Sumner said he had never witnessed such indifference to pain as that displayed by the sacrificial member of the team.

  Sumner stayed with the Maeterlincki for six months. Long enough for him to gain their trust, and for the tribal elders to allow him to become an initiate. The initiation involved the ingestion – in its raw form – of the substance that Gainsford has since named ‘Inclusion’.

  I am able to include here some of Sumner’s own description of the initiation rite. When we reached Beaconsfield (Junction 2), Gainsford suddenly announced that he had a friend he wanted to visit who lives in the precincts of the Bekonscot Model Village. He left me in the Toyota, together with a copy of Sumner’s field report to Cryborg. I popped out of the car a few minutes later and ran across the road to Pronta-Print, where I photocopied the following:

  Extract from Dr Clive Sumner’s Field Report to the Cryborg Research Division

  On the morning appointed for my initiation I went, together with Colin and Paul, the other two members of my cell (marginal note: Remember, the Maeterlincki’s social organisation is entirely apian. Z.B.), to the base of the granite outcrop.

  Colin cut and trimmed a long, hollow bamboo tube, whilst Paul prepared the sacred dust for ingestion. He broke open one of the desiccated hives, which had been abandoned by its colony.

  The hive was a great, tattered bundle of dried and flaking material with the texture of papyrus. It was roughly ovoid, but with a flat back, where the bees’ mucilage had cemented it to the rock. Paul split it open and invited me
to examine the hive’s internal structure. This was unusual – to say the least – and it was at this point that I began to suspect that I was on the verge of an exciting and unusual discovery.

  The interior of the hive had the familiar structure of serried ranks of hexiform chambers, connected by minute passageways radiating from the central chamber of the hive, where the queen once resided. But within the hive a secondary structure had been constructed: a hive inside a hive.

  This subsidiary hive had the same hexiform chambers and minute passageways, but they were far smaller. These chambers were delicately positioned in the very interstices of the apian chambers. I asked Paul what had caused this. He directed me to look closely at one of these small chambers, which was no bigger than a quarter of a pinhead. Entombed within it was the perfectly preserved cadaver of a mite.

  Wringing the explanation for this phenomenon out of Paul and Colin was a tiresome business. As I have written above, the Maeterlincki lack much of the conceptual equipment that we take for granted and their language is devoid of certain key terms necessary for the description of social forms. But here is a paraphrase of my cell-fellows’ ‘Song of the Bee Mite’:

  These parasitic mites are quite unlike ordinary bee mites. Rather than infesting the actual body of the bee, they attack the structure of the hive, creating, as I had observed, a secondary hive. The Maeterlincki explained that this invasion was accompanied by a gradual shift in the hive’s social organisation. The normal and successful ratio between workers (sexually undeveloped females) and drones (sexually productive males) was reversed, so as to favour the development of more drones and fewer workers.