Umbrella

by Will Self

  . . . is that with Churchill at the War Office it may be the opportune time for you to consider a transfer, not that I’m in a position to know whether such a move can be readily effected . . . I do know Sir Clemens, man-of-the-hour . . . all that. He, I believe, has tremendous sway at the Admiralty . . . Albert swallows heavily and feels his Adam’s apple rasp against his collar, So, and, in Euclidean terms: exactly so. Now he can see the precise parabolas, and he can call down the speaking tube and order them to train the big guns on Phillips’s commercial target. To ask for a more precise identification – details of ensigns flown, manning, etc. – would’ve been crass as well as impertinent. Still, Albert knows this much: that Phillips’s dabbling with the Mercers’ Company is pretty much that: a blind. He had had a wholesaler from his own pater – but more or less run it down. There are investments here and others there – he alludes to visits to Armstrong at Jesmond Dene, and to his role – in a purely non-executive capacity – as one to be relied on to make up the numbers for foreign buyers. There is a special lodge, set apart in the woods . . . a delightful situation, with its wide windows facing out across a leafy ravine . . . Lohengrin’s horn sounds wistful in the gloaming: too-too-tooraa-boom-de-ay! Risqué young ladies in merveilleuse dresses kick their legs, showing the boys much more than they’ve ever seen before . . . Cliquot! Cliquot! cries Sir William, his gull-wing moustaches soaring about above the upturned bowl of the electrolier, for this is a showroom for his products. The foreign wallahs admire the table decoration wrought from the casing of a 22-pounder, and the rifle-cartridge cruets – an experimental machine gun fires bread pills, while from the dumb waiter the silent ones decant soup . . . Y’know, Phillips says, and Albert finds such pathetic awkwardness in the right-angling of their chairs as he struggles up towards asking about his benefactor’s lumbago – but Phillips trumps him: I am most gratified by your rapid advance, you have more than justified my faith in you . . . His hand sets down his ruby of port, then ascends in arithmetical gestures . . . ten times more – twenty! Albert, unused to drinking this much, wonders if Rutherford’s elementary particles of light have slowed, because he sees ten or twenty distinct hands – or are they ghosts of hands no longer existent? He raises his knee to where it would need to be were the leading hand to descend upon it – if, that is, there were the remotest possibility of them ever, ever touching, instead of circling and circling and circling . . . whirligogs, which isn’t tactful, he thinks, besides what is it, Scots dialect? Golliwogs, on the other hand, must be just as offensive and yet they’re commonplace – there’s one on Daniel’s bed, its woolly black face stifled by the white pillow . . . – I say. I say?!! – Mboya . . . I can’t go on. I mean, we’re working together so closely, we – I. He stops, the noise about them in the canteen is terrific, the clashing of scores of knives on plates, forks on knives, the grinding of so many robotic mandibles all linked to the same chain that loops down from the low ceiling driving them on through sausage, chips and beans. From the slim paperback tucked in the pocket of Busner’s white coat floats this conundrum: I respect Jack because he does not respect me . . . and he sighs, ahhh, and thinks, What kind of idiocy is this? Ronnie . . . Ronnie – you’ve gone to bloody pieces! From a gaping serving hatch the dinner ladies labour hard to supply this industry of mouths, but why, why must they bash-bash-bash with their ladles so? Why – why’re we all so ravenous, the patients too? Whitcomb told me he’d an obsessive who wouldn’t say boo. Looked in his hamster cheeks, found paperclips, screws, bulldog clips . . . Sent him down to Gower Street, they X-rayed him, then cut him open, found thruppenny bits, syringes – with needles! – several teaspoons, fondue forks, a yard of garden hose – with the squirty thing . . . Why? A comforter, without doubt – also a schizophrenic incorporation that betokened an inability to see the object as . . . the other. And us? Busner looks around him at the ravening mouths . . . We would like to eat the hospital. Take the Hatch from the serving hatch and put it down the hatch . . . He grimaces and Mboya cannot tell if this is directed at him or at Busner’s forkful of mash with its pebble-dashing of beans. He says, Doctor Busner? And Busner cries, That’s it! That’s what I wanted to say. Mboya, can’t we call each other by our first names? Mine is . . . He sets down his cutlery . . . Zachary, but mostly I’m Zack. Mboya takes the hand, his own is dry, amazingly dry in contrast with his face, which today looks pulpy, that’s a truly dreadful shaving rash. Feeling the hardwood of Mboya’s hand, Busner thinks, Surely this is the wrong way round? We should’ve been introduced with surnames and handshakes, this further intimacy demands . . . what, a kiss? Mboya smiles. Enoch, he says, and Busner laughs. Yes, Mboya says, shaking his head ruefully, like Enoch Powell. No, Busner counters, I was thinking that we’re both biblical prophets. Mboya ends the clasp and begins to intone: In those days it shall come to pass that ten men shall take hold of all the languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you. The psychiatric nurse and the psychiatrist sit in silent contemplation for a moment, then: Zechariah, Chapter 8, Verse 23. Busner is appalled by it all, and cannot take his eyes off the cross Coptic? that hangs around Mboya’s neck, but Mboya laughs a laugh I haven’t heard before, one that’s warm, companionable, and says, Don’t worry, Zack, the churchgoing is pretty much done with now, I got the cross because Hendrix was wearing one on the cover of one of his albums. Still, you can take the boy out of the mission school. He stuffs the cliché with a mouthful of sandwich, and Busner is momentarily silenced by egg and cress being tumbled in the pink cement mixer, before expostulating, You don’t mean to say you know the entire bloody thing off by heart? Mboya shrugs, No, ’course not – but a good portion, I’m blessed with a pretty near photographic memory. Busner would like to ask Mboya all about himself, there’s much that’s intriguing: his almost accentless English, his air of containment, which is familiar because I share it. Also, he has been at Friern for over a decade, he must know a lot . . . Instead Busner says: I want to photograph the post-encephalitic patients, will you help me? And Mboya drops one heavy eyelid over a bloodshot white. He’s tired, Busner thinks, we’re all tired – like we’re all ravenous. Mboya sucks his cheek, chk-chk, shutter clucks. – D’you want me to use my memory, Zack, because I do remember most of them –. No, no, Busner begins in all seriousness. I have a 35-millimetre and a Bolex for cine films . . . then he realises: You’re teasing me! And this is the most pleasingly intimate thing that has happened to him in a long time, to be teased. Teasing him is what Miriam did when they were first together, and this gentle ridicule somehow annulled all the grosser abuse he had suffered at boarding school – the anti-Semitic taunts, his underpants torn from him in the changing room, Henry quite powerless to intervene . . . She doesn’t tease him any more, though – she has modulated her critique into humiliation. Busner pushes his plate to one side, he begins to roll and then unroll the end of his tie once Maurice’s, which is heavy, knitted silk, one of the few left.

  Mboya says, Zack, it would make sense if you’re going to photograph them to have them all in the one place – on the same ward. Busner nods. – Yes, yes, my thoughts exactly – and now there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do this . . . — For throughout the asylum system a cultural revolution has taken place: mixed wards, and together with these soixante-neufards! He had discovered two feisty young things arranged exactly thus and in full view on his acute ward over at the Halliwick, and thought, Good luck to ’em, and would’ve discharged them right away purely on the basis of this healthy sexual function, were it not that once the head had withdrawn from the tight pocket of the covers its eyes were extremely dilated – even by psychotic standards – while the ungummed mouth said: I put my ear innit annit toll me you wuz cumin wiv yer dyman eyes YOU KILLED THE COSMONAUTS! Then the nurses came running and that was that. Already Busner suspected that the acute staff were aware of his diagnostic legerdemain, for, try as he might, the speciousness of it all overwh
elmed him. So, confronted by hysterical misery, he simply imposed on it his own commonplace unhappiness: On mornings when he was low Busner diagnosed depression, on those when he was low but had also drunk too much coffee, manic depression. And on mornings when he gripped the sides of the sink and saw staring back at him from the mirror a tousle-haired Ancient Mariner whose eyes could not meet his own, and whose temples rang with the rhymes of myriad surrealistic voyages, he shaved, got dressed, drove the Austin to Friern Barnet and diagnosed the first patient he saw either as schizophrenic or as hypomanic, depending on the toss of a coin, confident that whichever one it is . . . it’ll all come out in the wash. — Mboya says, There’re a couple on 45, three on 34, one very poorly old fellow on 31 . . . He counts them off on his teak fingers. Despite his amazement at this cataloguing, Busner doesn’t want to interrupt his flow, so simply removes a Woolworth’s shilling jotter from his jacket pocket, notes these down with the red Biro, then adds the one he saw on 14, and four they had both seen who ticced in time to the noise of the injection-moulding machinery in the Industrial Therapy Workshop, which was clearly audible through the walls of 26. Mboya is well ahead of him, though, for not only has he ranged the entire escarpment of the hospital – from the Fellowship Resocialisation Unit in the east to the Medium Secure Unit in the west – but he also has a hunter’s eye for the others, picking them out unerringly from the human morass. When he is done the whereabouts of twenty-two enkies have been established. – Twenty-two for definite, Zack, there’re another four or five I can’t be absolutely sure about . . . Busner bridles internally prickly pride of the isolate at how frequently Mboya is using the just-tendered first name, his new toy . . . and so says doubtfully, How do you know, Enoch? How can you tell them apart? The nurse speaks forensically: Like people with Tourette’s, the post-encephalitic patients exhibit all sorts of hyperkinetic behaviour. You’ve seen it for yourself: they yawn, they sniff, they gasp and pant like worn-out dogs, then hold their breath ’til fit to burst . . . Busner holds his own breath as he stares at this prodigy, who remarks, Yes, staring, they do a lot of that too – I should’ve thought any psychiatrist worth his salt would’ve noticed that their fixation is so different to the way schizophrenics’ eyes wobble about. Then there’s their bellowing and their cursing – such cursing! Zack, I swear, I’ve heard gutter talk coming out of these little old ladies – your Miss Dearth too. Busner has an urge to interrupt – B-b-b- – that’s forestalled by Mboya’s traffic policeman hand, and – Yes, urges, that’s what they have: uncontrollable urges. Y’know, when I went to the Newspaper Library over in Colindale and looked up first-hand accounts of the epidemic You did that? I read how they were labelled as moral aments, McConochie’s poor shades, even juvenile psychopaths. There was one ward right here that was dedicated to keeping these patients under lock and key – poor souls! Think of it, Zack, they didn’t know why they were coming out with such . . . such obscenities, or why they had to grab and to touch, but you can imagine how such behaviour was dealt with in the twenties . . . Busner feeling himself enslaved by this onrush of the factual, struggles to assert . . . mastery. Erethisms, he says, by which I mean an uncontrollable sexual arousal – and he hopes I don’t sound patronising. But Mboya only ducks his head to accede and continues: It’s astonishing, Zack, the more you look it into it, the more you discover that the post-encephalitics have borne the brunt of every successive wave of psychiatric opinion. To give only one example, you’ll’ve noticed how Mister Ostereich on 14 sticks out his tongue at anyone who comes near him – and it stays that way. In the literature this is called flycatcher tongue, but in the thirties, when Bleuler’s ideas gained purchase here, it was decided that this was consciously willed by the patient – and aimed at the psychiatrist! They are alone now in the canteen apart from a pimply girl in a snood who mops the tea puddle beneath the incontinent urn. Far off in the bowels of the hospital there are whistles and yelps fractured by the whooshclack of swing doors. Busner pinches the buttons on his snazzy digital watch – it isn’t that he has things to do, it’s more that he feels overpowered: in Leicester Square, where black bags are heaped, flies buzzing around them, and so I stick my tongue between sloppily tied rabbit’s ears to seek out the shape of the bits of my parents discorporated by the Luftwaffe, then discarded . . . – I’m not keeping you, Zack, am I? – No, no, please . . . Enoch, it’s only that I’m overpowered by your – I don’t what to call it – your diligence? Enthusiasm? Mboya has been using a banana with which to indicate moral aments and their negativism, and now he tries to peel it, but the overripe skin buckles, so he slits it deftly with a thumbnail, saying, I’m not a prophet, Zack. Busner starts. – What? Events are taking a sinister turn . . . but Mboya chews on. – I’m not a prophet, Zack – you said that we’re both prophets, but in the Bible Enoch wasn’t a prophet, he foretold no rivers of blood, nor did he circle the walls of this asylum blowing his trumpet to bring them down . . . the banana skin fingers his . . . He was the son of Jared and the great-grandfather of Noah and Methuselah’s father – in Hebrew the name means initiated, disciplined . . . dedicated. That you are, my friend, but why? Mboya leans forward across the table and Busner twitches shamefacedly. — Miss Down does the music-therapy session on Tuesday afternoons in the room above the chapel – I’ve taken Mister Ostereich and Miss Yudkin, who’s on 20. She plays that Scott Joplin rag – the one in the film – the whole time, and our pair respond terribly to it, all their tics get much, much worse – the music jerks them about, da-da-da-dadda-da-dum-da-dum! If Miss Down plays a military march it’s even worse – but the other day she played this piece and it was very slow, stately, I’d call it, and they both began to dance, swaying this way and that so fluently – these patients who’re catatonic most of the time, dancing about . . . I was so struck by it when she’d finished I asked Miss Down what the piece was and she said it was by Brahms, one of his six pieces for piano, opus something-or-other, so I went and got an LP with it on, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo . . . Busner is nonplussed by Mboya’s complete lack of self-consciousness, humming away in the staff canteen . . . Well, you get the picture – not my sort of thing, but I sort of got what it was they were responding to, the slowness, the gentle swing . . . If you wanted, I could make a cassette of it and bring it in – I bet it’d work on them if you played it to other post-encephalitics. — It was a long speech, and now it was done Mboya seemed a little embarrassed, which was, Busner thought, understandable, for while there was diligence here there was also a great deal of passion. Passion the stately Kikuyu takes away with him as he turns west out of the canteen doors and heads for Ward 14, his almost-Afro spinning down the rifled corridor — west, because it makes no sense to speak of left or right at Friern, any more than it does in politics, which is the sort of thing Whitcomb might say at a wine-and-cheese party in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, where he stands with a beaker full of the wine merchant’s contempt and perving some peanuts, while his partner in intercourse asks him above jerks and spasms of middle-class hilarity, But what do you think, Doctor Whitcomb – do you believe Lord Longford may actually have a point? An inquiry initiated not because he is a psychiatrist, and thus should be expected to have an opinion on the criminality or otherwise of the insane, but inspired solely by the close resemblance he bears hairy topiary, skin lawn to Packenham, Frank that was. That, Busner thinks contemptuously, is how it is with Whitcomb. They sit low and more or less opposite one another in their armless Danish Modern easy chairs: soft, oblong slabs joined in at obtuse angles. Over Whitcomb’s shoulder clambers an examination couch covered in black vinyl. There’s a brown button in the notch behind his carefully shaved jawbone, and when Busner looks away to suppress the urge to lean forward and press it, all at once he cannot remember what Whitcomb so much as looks like. The consultant says with uncharacteristic bluntness, Why? And Busner says, It seems to me there’s a genuine opportunity to be grasped here – both a therapeutic one, and possibly a research one as well.
Whitcomb murmurs, A genuine opportunity . . . He compulsively repeats your words – it’s a tic! Nowadays, Busner notices these everywhere . . . well, I appreciate that, Busner, but I confess I’m surprised, it’s been – what? – only six months since you came to us and then you were definite about no longer wishing to pursue your research work after the, um, debacle of your, ah, therapeutic community. Whitcomb isn’t so hidebound that he doesn’t conduct his own therapy groups – Busner has sat in on one of these milieus, as the consultant calls them, and found it to be a miserable business, the patients pressured by him into confessing to relationships and other – in all likelihood – non-existent errors, then subjected to all sorts of criticism by their brow-beaten peers. Whitcomb sitting there, Red-Guarding it over them, his collar getting rounder, and higher: the cadre responsible for this suburban Erewhon, where the sick are punished and their criminal persecutors sympathised with . . . I’m not saying the Board’s offer of the position was conditional on your not doing research, but I think we both know it was assumed that you would . . . need an aerial photograph for reconnaissance. The one on Whitcomb’s wall shows the hospital from around five thousand feet? its façade picked out by the full glare of a summer day, the oaks, London plains and mulberries massy along the front wall and main drive, the lawns striped . . . Presumably it came with the office and was taken by some flyboy shrink, who, after the war, got his RAF pals to do a sortie from Hendon armed with a camera. But why, Busner muses, would anyone want such a thing? The only way to cope with Friern is to lose yourself in it so the hospital becomes a world entire – this comforting prospect of a vast country house, sited on the bluffs of North London, is not the real hospital at all. The truth demands no elevation – but a plan: the fuselage of the central block, the outstretched wings – the bomber droning over the city, ready to release its psychotic payload . . . — The war had been, Marcus had told him, a nadir among low points – the patients weren’t on the ration, they got only job lots of whatever was available. There had been a cargo of corn flour, so that’s what they were given: cornbread, three times a day, until ulcers appeared on stick legs, hair fell from swollen heads and some bright spark realised they had pellagra! A deficiency disease illustrated in the literature by pictures of poor Negroes in the Deep South. The doctors and nurses went to the war – and the only ones left to serve beneath the campanile were the patients, who were mostly Jews, for the Hatch had become the laager for any Jew in the LCC area who showed symptoms of mental illness – a thousand of them, who clustered there and waited, as the Victorian buildings, so cheery from the air, sopped up mould from the damp ground. The lavatories blocked up with their dysenteric diarrhoea, the bacon-curing plant fell doubly redundant, the shoe and upholstery workshops lay idle, the brewery and the bakery too – the entire Samuel Smiles pride of the place declined into self-helplessness as the war came to it, stray bombs obliterating three of the villas used to isolate tubercular patients, and another rogue one shattering all the windows at the back of the second range on the women’s side. The war came to the hospital and eventually the patients fled. Busner doubted the existence of spontaneous remission in wartime – it was more likely, he thinks, that the scream of ordnance became louder than the voices, so they fled for the safety of the deep-level tube platforms where their miserable faces were indistinguishable from those of the other humped figures. They fled – yet there were always more to take their place: the shattered, the traumatised and the abandoned, vulnerable enough to be preyed upon by the building itself, sucked down into its century-old swamp, where their mouths filled with barbiturates and paraldehyde – for these weren’t rationed either. Outside in the mizzle stood the Unknown Pauper Lunatic, verdigris in his eyes, so what could he see? Surely not the world-in-a-droplet at the end of a needle that, plunging down from above, injected glucose into the hospital’s grey hide and so awakened it to the daymare of now – from which it is impossible to . . . desist. Busner maintains my cool. — Well, as I say, the research aspect is only a possibility – and I absolutely appreciate the Board’s position. It’s much more that I think I can do something for these post-encephalitic patients if I can get them in one place. Just now, he smiles, I spend quite a lot of my day running from one end of the hospital to the other –. As soon as the words are out he wishes he could snaffle ’em back up. Whitcomb smells . . . Brutal – he must be sporty, so slaps it all over to mask the sweat acquired behind the chain links . . . thwock! Oh, well played –! The consultant says tersely: Others of our colleagues seem to manage perfectly well, this is a very, ah, extensive hospital – you knew this when you joined us . . . Busner waits to be certain this is all Whitcomb has to say, he’s loopy enough to believe in insubordination, then makes a cleverer gambit: There are costs to consider. I mean, I can’t guarantee anything, but I think that concentrating the post-encephalitics will both make caring for them easier – and therefore cheaper – and also allow us to look into the possibility of discharging some of them –. – Discharging some! Whitcomb flings up his hands and says, Well, good luck to you there! Busner presses what he hopes is his Advantage Busner: We’ve had one death on 20 this week already and there’s a second patient who isn’t thriving. I’m not expecting to do this all at once, just piecemeal . . . Up go the hands again, it is, Busner realises, Whitcomb’s minstrelsy – Lordy-lordy! You’ve worn me down, man, but one thing, don’t expect me to deal with Admin over this, let alone the medical staff – this is your baby, Busner, you deal with it.