by Will Self
‘Good morning, Simon,’ said Valuam. Simon drew a frond of wool out from the cuff of his pullover and let it ping inaudibly back into a tight spiral. Simon was wearing a very handsome pullover, made up of twenty or so irregular wool panels in shades of beige, grey and black. He pinged the thread again and fell to worrying a bloody stalk of cuticle that had detached itself from his gnawed paw.
‘Simon and I felt it would be a good idea if he came to stay on the ward with you for a while, Anthony.’ The woman uncrossed her ankles and hopped up on to the examination table. Her steely hair was sharply bobbed, one bang pointed at the youth who was her indigent son. She took a shiny clutch bag from under her arm, popped it open and withdrew a tube of mints which she aimed at me.
‘Polo?’
‘Err … thanks.’ I took one. She smiled faintly and took one herself.
‘How do you feel about that, Simon?’ Valuam held his foetal face on one side, his basso voice sounding concerned.
‘S’alright.’ Simon was rotating the cuticle stalk with the tip of a finger. He was also starting to rock back and forth.
Valuam consulted the papers attached to his clipboard. ‘Mmm … mm …’ He snuffled and ruffled the case notes while the steely-haired woman and I regarded one another peripherally. She really was pretty chic. At neck and wrist she was encircled with linked silver platelets cut into shapes; her clothes were made out of varieties of vicuna and rabbit; her stockings were so pure you could see the mulberry in them. I couldn’t quite get the measure of why she was so blase about Simon’s voluntary committal. Genuine lack of caring? A defence mechanism? Something more sinister?
‘You were discharged last October, Simon,’ Valuam had found the right place, ‘and went to the Galston Work Scheme. How did that go?’
‘Oh, OK, I guess. I did some good things; worked on some of my constructions. I enjoyed it.’ Simon had given up on the cuticle, he looked up at Valuam and spoke with some animation. His face was quite green in hue and distorted by weeping infections. It was like watching a colour screen where the tube has started to pack up.
‘But now you’re in pretty bad shape again, aren’t you?’
‘Yeah, I guess. I’m fed up with living with the bitch.’ Simon’s mother winced. ‘She puts me under pressure the whole time. Do this, do that. It’s no wonder I start to freak out.’
‘I see. And freaking out means stopping your medication and stopping going to the Galston and stopping your therapy and ending up looking like this.’
Simon had relapsed into torpor before Valuam had finished speaking. The cuticle had claimed his whole attention again. We were left regarding the top of his unruly head.
Valuam sighed. He ticked some boxes on the sheet uppermost on the clipboard and twisted sideways on his plastic chair to face the woman. ‘Well, I suppose he’d better come in for a few weeks then.’
‘I’m glad you see it that way, Anthony.’ She eased herself off the examination couch with a whoosh of wool and silk and patted herself down. ‘Well, goodbye then, Simon. I’ll come and see you at the weekend.’
‘Bye, Mum, take it easy.’ Simon didn’t look up, he’d found some antiseptic and fell to swabbing his bleeding finger with tight little arcs. His mother smiled absently at Valuam as if acknowledging his sartorial failure. I stood to one side and she nodded at me as she swished out of the cubicle and away.
Valuam got up and scraped the chair back against the wall.
‘I have someone to see here, Misha, would you mind taking Simon up to the ward?’
‘I’m, er, not sure I’ll be able to find my way back.’
‘Oh, that’s OK, Simon knows the layout of the hospital far better than he knows his own mind.’
I wasn’t sure whether I was meant to share in this sick irony – but looking at Valuam’s miscarried countenance I could see that he wasn’t joking. Simon seemed not to have noticed.
I followed the abstraction of Simon’s pullover back through the twisting lanes of the casualty examination area. Even before we’d gained the corridor I found that I’d completely lost my bearings. Simon, however, didn’t hesitate, he plunged on unswervingly, walking with long fluid strides. We travelled like a couple arguing; he would make gains on me of some twenty yards and then I’d have to put on a spurt to catch up with him. To begin with I feared that he was actually trying to lose me, but whenever there was a choice of directions and he was some way ahead he waited until I was close enough to see which way he went.
The nature of the corridors we bowled along was perceptibly changing. The machines that stood at intervals against the corridor walls were becoming more obviously utilitarian – parts were now painted black rather than chromed or rubberised – they had petrol engines rather than electric pumps. The walls themselves were changing, they were losing their therapeutic hue and reverting to concrete colour, as was the floor. Lights were becoming exposed, first the odd neon tube was naked and then all of them.
This part of the hospital was beyond the world of work, it was a secret underworld. From time to time we would pass workers clad in strange suits of protective clothing: wearing rubberised aprons, or plastic face masks, or Wellington boots, or leather shoulder pads. They looked at us inscrutably. It was clear that they were intent on their jobs; maintaining the whine, stoking the hum, directing the howl. It was also clear the Simon wasn’t taking me back to the ward, he had business here. I caught him on a corner.
‘Where are we going, Simon?’
‘To see something, something worth seeing. I promise you won’t be angry.’
‘Can you tell me what it is?’
‘No.’ He wheeled away, calling over his shoulder, ‘Come on, it’s not much further.’
The corridor walls gave way to sections of masonry. Embedded in them were the filled-in remains of long-dead windows. I realised that we had reached the place where the new hospital had been grafted on to its predecessor. There were the marks of cast-iron railings, pressed and faint, like fossilised grass stems. More than ever I sensed the great weight of the hospital crouching overhead. A dankness entered the air; at intervals trickling pools of water seeped up on to the floor. Eventually Simon stopped by a set of double doors, old doors belonging to the former hospital, the top halves glassed with many small panes. He pushed them apart on failing rails.
We were in some sort of conservatory. Round, twenty-five feet across, fifteen feet up the walls gave way to a dirty glass dome, which arched overhead, almost out of sight in the gloom. There was daylight here, filtering down weakly through the tarnished panes. Water dripped audibly. In the centre of the room stood a giant machine for doing things to people. This much was clear from the canted couch positioned halfway up its flank. Otherwise it resembled a giant microscope, the barrel obliquely filling the uncertain volume of the room, the lens pointing directly at the couch. The whole thing was festooned with hydraulic cabling. It had originally been painted a kitchen-cream colour but now it was corroded, atrophied.
Simon and I stood and looked.
‘Good, isn’t it.’ His voice was full and resonant. He’d lost his sullen edge.
‘Yes, very striking. What was it for?’
‘Oh, I’ve no idea. I got left alone one night in casualty and just started wandering about, I found this. I don’t think anyone’s been here for years. Funny, really, because it’s right in back of the MDR.’
‘MDR?’
Simon beckoned me over to the grey-filmed window opposite the door we’d entered by. I circled the giant machine, stepping over the edge of the vast plate that riveted it to the floor. Bits had fallen off the machine – bolts, braces, other small components – but given the scale of the thing, they were large enough to bruise your shins if you knocked against them. Simon was vigorously rubbing the windowpane.
‘Look, can you see?’ There was no sense of sky, or the outside, but light came from somewhere. Outlining a squat blockhouse, clapboarded with massive concrete slabs. It was like some defence install
ation. ‘That’s the Mass Disaster Room. If there’s ever a nuclear attack, or an earthquake, or something like that, that’s where all the equipment is kept to deal with it.’
‘Well, like what?’
‘I don’t know, no one will tell me. I only found out about it because I came across the door with the notice on it.’
We stood at the window for a while. The conservatorylike room, the giant machine, the blockhouse. All thinly lit by an invisible day. There was something eerie about the atmosphere. The eeriness that washes over when you step obliquely out of a populous area – from a crowded park into a little grey copse – and look behind you at the life that still goes on, children and dogs.
Back up in the ward Busner was hurrying about the place, gathering together all the staff members. A circle of chairs had been roughly arranged in the association area. Anthony Valuam and Jane Bowen were already seated and engaged in earnest discussion when we arrived. Valuam showed no curiosity about where we had been. Simon himself had reverted to sullen, disturbed type as soon as we arrived at the ninth floor. He disappeared into a shifting knot of movers and shakers and was gone from sight.
‘Sit down, Misha, do sit down.’ Busner flapped his poplin-bumped turkey-skin arms. I sat down next to Mimi, the voluptuous nurse, who had been and gone to the optician. The rest of the staff began to trickle into place, auxiliary as well as medical. There were canteen ladies here in nylon, elasticated hair covers, and psychiatric social workers with rolled-up newspaper supplements. They chatted to one another quite informally, swopping cigarettes and gesturing. The patients took no notice of this assembly – which to my mind more than anything else underlined their exclusion from the right-thinking world.
Busner called the meeting to order.
‘Ahm! Hello everyone. We’ve a lot to get through today, so I’d like to get under way. We don’t want to run over, the way we did last month. Before we come to the first item on the agenda I’d like to introduce to you all a new member of staff, Misha Gurney. Some of you will, no doubt, have heard of his father,’ Busner’s face purpled at the edges with sentimentality, ‘who was a contemporary of mine and a dear friend. So it’s an especial pleasure for me that Misha should be joining us on the ward as the new art therapist …’
‘Wait till you hear what happened to the old art therapist …!’ Before I had had time to wheel round in my chair and see who had whispered in my ear, Tom was gone, soft-shoe shuffling down the corridor.
From then on the meeting deteriorated into the usual trivial deliberations that – in my experience – seem to accompany all departmental meetings. There were discussions about the hours at which tea could be made, discussions about shift rostering, discussions about patients’ visitors. My attention began to falter and then died away altogether. I was staring fixedly over the shoulder of a middle-aged woman who liaised with the ward on behalf of the local social services department. Through the two swing-doors, between her and the entrance to the dormitories, I could see Clive. He was staring at me fixedly, or so it seemed; his great globular eyes were incapable of anything but staring. He was rocking from side to side like a human metronome. If I narrowed my eyes it appeared as if his bizarre messianic hair-do was rhythmically pulsing out of the cheek of the middle-aged social worker. This trick hypnotised me.
Mimi jabbed me in the ribs. ‘Misha, pay attention!’
Busner was saying something in my direction. ‘Well Misha?’ he said.
Mimi whispered, ‘He’s asking what you intend to do in the art therapy session this afternoon.’
I started guiltily. ‘Um … well … err. I intend really to, ah, introduce myself to the patients with a series of demonstrations of different techniques and then invite them to show their own work so that we can discuss it.’
This seemed to satisfy Busner. He turned to Jane Bowen and whispered something in her ear, she smiled and nodded, tapping a yellow biro stem on the edge of her clipboard.
Soon after this the meeting broke up. I drew Mimi to one side.
‘Thanks for that, you saved my hide there. I was miles away.’
‘Yeah, absurd isn’t it. Zack’s like most benevolent dictators, he seems to think that by letting us all discuss a load of trivia we’ll feel that we have an important decision-making role in ward policy.’
‘How long have you been working here?’
‘Oh, quite a while. Ever since I qualified, in fact. There’s something about this ward. You might say that it and I were made for one another.’ The middle-aged social worker came over to where we were standing, Mimi introduced us and then they went off together to discuss a patient. The social worker was blushing furiously. It wasn’t until later that I realised she had thought I was staring at her throughout the ward meeting.
I took my sandwiches up on to the Heath for lunch and sat on the bench with the idiot. He went on ranting and rocking in a muted way, inhibited no doubt by my presence. I offered him a sandwich, which he accepted and then did hideous things to.
I looked over the city. The light pattern had been reversed as I was walking over from the hospital and now the vast ziggurat was bathed in bright light, while the bench where the idiot and I scrunged cheese through our teeth was in deep shadow. Tom had told me that he referred to the hospital, privately, as the Ministry of Love; and it was true that the sepulchral ship forging its way through the grid of streets had something of the future, the corporate about it, mixed in with the despotic past.
The wind whipped across the flight deck entrance to the hospital as I re-entered by the main gates. Well-heeled patients and visitors were being landed by taxis and minicabs, while their poorer fellows struggled against the up-draft that roared off the hospital’s oblique walls – air crewmen and women lacking enlarged ping-pong bats with which to semaphore.
On the ninth floor I met Jane Bowen. She was right outside the lift. Her hands fidgeted at her mouth as the doors rolled open.
‘Well, Misha, where have you been?’
‘I took my sandwiches up on the Heath. I like to get a little fresh air during the day.’
‘Well don’t make a habit of it.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘Zack prefers it if all the staff eat in the canteen on the ward …’
‘You can’t be serious … !’
‘Obviously it isn’t imposed on anyone. You’re free to do what you want. But Zack has good reasons for it and you need to witness lunch to understand them.’
The association area was thronged with patients, they eddied round the counter in the eating area – more of an enlarged serving hatch really – and then gravitated from there to the medication queue. Busner stood in the centre of it all, like some Lord of Misrule. He’d donned a shortie white coat which rode up over his rounded hips. The coat pockets were stuffed to overflowing, and because of the way he was standing it looked as if he was wearing a codpiece. Busner waved his arms around his head and turned circles on his heels, his face contorted, with pain? With hilarity? It was impossible to say.
I approached him through swirls of the committed.
‘Ah, Misha, I’ve tangled my spectacles cord up in my tie at the back. Can you see what’s going on?’ He turned his back on me and I fiddled with the two strands where they had become entwined. ‘Ah, that’s better.’ He clamped the spectacles on to the red grooved bridge of his nose. ‘Now I can see. We’d better sort out your materials for you.’ He led me over to a wall cupboard at the far end of the dining area from the serving hatch and opened the ceiling-high doors. Inside there was a mess of materials and half-finished attempts at something or other. ‘Gerry wasn’t great on ordering the materials,’ said Busner, stepping forward into the cupboard and crunching pieces of charcoal sticks beneath his heels, ‘but everything is here that you could need. I should take it easy, let them come to you and show you what they’re up to – try and build up some trust.’
Busner put a cloyingly affectionate arm around my shoulders, he didn’t register my w
ince. We stood side by side, facing a shelf full of streaked tins of powder paint.
‘Your father would have been proud of you, Misha. He would have understood what you’re doing. You know, in a way I feel as if you’re coming home to us here on the ward, that it’s the right place for you, don’t you agree?’ I muttered something negative. ‘I’m glad you feel the same way, come and see me when the session is over, tell me how it went.’ He wheeled away from me and tracked a series of charcoal arcs across the lino. I was left alone – but not for long.
* * *
Tom materialised. At his shoulder was a thirtyish man of medium height and build, unremarkable in lumberjack shirt and denims, remarkable for his arms and his countenance: arms which struggled to escape his body and pushed forward long, muscular, mechanical arms. His face was stretched tight away and zoomed towards his flaring brown hair. The whole impression was one of contained speed.
‘This is Jim,’ said Tom, ‘he can’t bear to wait, he wants to get started right away.’
‘Yeah. Hi. Jim.’ He thrust a tool at me, I shook it, he retracted it. ‘I really look forward to these sessions. I’d like to work on my thing all the time, but they won’t let me.’ I pulled the double doors open wider.
‘Which one is it?’
‘Here.’ He pulled down a sort of sculpture, made from clay, from one of the higher shelves, his long arms cradling the irregular shape protectively. He turned and set it down on one of the rectangular melamine tables.
It was a large piece, perhaps some three and a half feet long and half that wide. Jim had used a base board and built on it with clay. The work had the kind of naive realism I associated with children’s television programmes featuring animated figures moving around model villages. The work depicted a descending curve of elevated roadway which I immediately recognised as the Marylebone Flyover. Jim had neatly sculpted the point at which the two flyover lanes remerged with the Marylebone Road, there were tiny clay cars coming down off the flyover and one of them had knocked into a small Japanese fruiterer’s van which was coming in from the Edgware Road. Two miniature clay figures were positioned in the road gesticulating. The whole thing cut off at the point where the Lisson Grove intersection would be to the east and where the flyover reaches its apex to the west.
