by Will Self
A ticcing baby, a drooling baby, a baby neutered and decerebrised . . . It sits on the ward floor, its eyes fixated on nothing. The nurses aren’t interested in it, nor are they bothered by me, un farfelu – of which there are more than enough at Friern, remember: it isn’t only the lunatics who’re confined to the asylum. It – she – has lost control of everything, but specifically her bowels. She sits on her shit cushion and a cleaner has mopped around her a shiny disc of urine and bleach. This, he thinks not for the first time, must be what sewers smell like: a mélange of detergent and excreta, the sacred and profane confined together in airless tunnels. Akinesia, apathy, autonomic disturbances – she sweats, she salivates, Busner senses the acid churn in her engorged spleen, he envisions ulceration. To counteract these stark facts I have jargon – for he has been doing his reading. It is far easier to look upon her Unknown Pauper Lunatic face if he puts it in these terms: profound facial masking. It is far less uncanny to describe these half-shuttered and unseeing eyes as exhibiting lid clonus. Her face is a child’s one, the features clear, unblemished – but sunk deep within a pimpled wimple of flesh. It – she – is aphonic. – Missus Gross? Missus Gross? Missus Gross? He pressures her to no avail, for ve haff no vays of making her talk. Busner enlists a reluctant nurse and together they heave the woman-mountain upright. While she exhibits diminished flexion of her trunk in addition to dangerous obesity, once she has her legs gathered beneath her she does her bit willingly enough. The trouble is that she cannot retain her standing posture – even in her tarpaulin dress with its bold rectangular pattern she is no Centre Point: she lists – and would topple over, were it not for this unprecedented two-to-one staff-to-patient ratio. The nurse sneers: I can’t stand ’ere all afternoon. In point of fact she’s been assisting Busner for five minutes at most. She whines: I’ve the meds to do, Doctor, there’s plenty of others as needs me. Which is a lie: No one needs you. So Busner cleans her up himself. In the shit-packed crannies of her Michelin thighs he discovers not professional detachment but a deeper engagement, for this is simply changing a nappy, something he has done – although not often – to bolster his feminist credentials. The patient lies beached across her specially reinforced catafalque of a bed, and as he sponges around her pudenda she groans a’herrra! and grinds her teeth while her bare feet patter on his shoulders – several flies settle close to her very bits, but none of this matters. She’s mine now, my Twiggy . . . grown Redwood. A bed sore in the region of her hip dressed, that dressing sheathed in underwear chivvied from reluctant staff, Busner fetches his tripod and Bolex camera. He is operating intuitively – there is no clear idea. In Willesden and before, he used photography to present objective images to the deluded with which to counter their disordered ones. To the same end he employed a tape recorder after injecting them with sodium pentothal. Sometimes he guided them on LSD trips – all of it, as he now admits, had only variable results. This is different, however: Leticia Gross is wholly inert, holed up deep inside her voluminous fat, and moving images of her colossal inanition seem entirely besides the point. And yet . . . And yet . . . he has a hunch. As with Audrey Dearth, he senses singing within her a crazy polyphony of exaggerated tics, a pickingitupandpickingitupandpickingitup, a hairflickinghairflickinghair-flicking, a scratching and a reaching, and a perseverating. He sets up the camera and she fills the viewfinder: a Matterhorn, her eyes arêtes, her cheeks ice flows. The light is drab, yet he presses the button and waits . . . and waits . . . — Eventually, Busner tells Jonathan Lesley, I got one of the nurses to find me a bulldog clip and some rubber bands and I managed to jerry-rig it to film continuously. This reel is only twenty minutes but these other three are an hour apiece. Lesley wears a leather headband and leather wristbands and leather trousers and nothing else. He has pimples on his shoulders . . . the spitting image of hers. He sits over the Steenbeck twisting the heavy Bakelite knobs – it is hot in this hutch, the wooden superstructure of an old train shed alongside the mainline into Euston. A mote-filled beam of light infiltrates the blackout cloth pinned over the window, the spools whir faster and faster, while on the editing machine’s screen Leticia Gross’s inscrutability shivers wind over a pool of flesh, the very edge of her babyish lip smirks infinitesimally as some whitish thing swells in the bottom-left-hand corner – Ratatatatatat! flaps the film’s tail. La Gio-fuckin’-conda, Lesley says, and that’s twenty minutes of her screen test. Expertly he feeds the next reel on to the spools – it is, Busner thinks, his only expertise. At the Concept House in Willesden, where Lesley flaunted the grand title of Multimedia Coordinator, he expertly fed himself into the patients, who weren’t called that. It was this abuse, quite as much as the shit-daubed walls, the broken window panes and the ambulance calls, that led Busner to tire of the whole botched experiment in community therapeutics. Whirrrrr! Leticia’s lip resumes smirking as the whitish thing blooms into a hand that travels halfway to her face before ratatatatatat! That’s the fastest forward this thing’ll go with 16-mil, says Lesley, and Busner, who is leaning with hands on the back of the swivel chair the self-styled guerrilla filmmaker hunches in, wonders if it is because Lesley sweats sexual incontinence through every pore that he is experiencing an impulse to stroke down from his shoulder to his nipple while kissing behind his filthy ear? Things at home aren’t good – tense, Miriam eyeing me more and more coldly even as the summer builds – whirrrrr, the hand continues its moon shot, the mouth crinkles, shadows move across the cratered face, shadows Busner now realises must be those of staff and other patients passing between Leticia Gross and the window. If, he thinks, if . . . old photographs were so slowly exposed that they captured entire minutes of the past, imprisoning the purely contingent smears of passers-by, and the grimaces of sitters bitten by whalebone and pinched by celluloid on glassy cells coated with silver nitrate, then what can be said of these films? Surely this: that they take the hours we so lackadaisically lose and gather them back up into a permanent and enduring Now. Ratatatatatat! But before this a vision that both men saw: a simpering moue appearing on Leticia Gross’s face while her fingers play with stray hair. Blimey, says Lesley, I think she was flirting with you, Zack. Yes, Busner thinks, a flirtatious gesture that it took her two hours and twenty minutes to make, while moreover – this he speaks aloud – I wasn’t there. Lesley pays no attention and Busner thinks: he will always be in cooperatives, and that’s profoundly wrong because there isn’t a particle of cooperativeness in him, all is savage barter. These sessions on the Steenbeck have had to be traded off against a repeat prescription for Valium . . . which is ill advised. Lesley’s current cooperative is the London Film one, but Busner can imagine him pushing Maccabees to suicide, or Communards to the barricades – Enoch would know which one of the disciples he’d be . . . — The tinfoil new currency makes a muffled jingle in Busner’s pocket as he strides along. Up here there is neither the abrasive bitumen and pretentious plasterwork of the lower corridor, nor the tacky refurbishment, which, beginning in the central block, is spreading throughout the first range of the hospital, a plywood virus self-replicating in the form of strip-lights, painted partitions inset with wire-gridded glass, boxed-in seating units and aggressively neutral linoleum. On one of these padded benches, outside the Patients Affairs Office, Busner sees, as he passes, three middle-aged men who, without their hectoring internal voices, would probably be chronic complainers. In their shiny old Burton suits – blue, brown and browner – they appear to have been recently discharged from one army, only to find themselves in this: one that shambles rather than marches, arms permanently sloped. With their cruelly knotted nylon ties and waistcoats of many buttons . . . they are already out of joint – the future is arriving open-collared and with a zzzzip! Not that it can be seen coming from up here: the first-floor corridor Busner walks along would be considered painfully long in any other establishment, but here it is a mere connective . . . linking madness to melancholy. Past the doors to wards 24, 25, 26 and – confusingly – 54 he strides. At the far end
the corridor he turns right and from here Busner has a view down on to a cylindrical aviary in which a clutch of budgies and parakeets strum at the wire. Such cruel constraint! the bridling of all instinct into peck-peck-peck, flightless wing-beats and a head-down clawing across the roof of their world . . . He must go on, conscious that only now that he has internalised the hospital’s layout can he properly apprehend its fabric: the metrical repetition of lancet window, buttress and embrasure, covered uniformly by a cracked salt-pan of off-white paint. Which is worse? he wonders. The lavish boredom of applying it or the ennui of its neglect? On he goes with a steady slap-slap-slap along this sap towards the Medium Secure Unit at the far end. Behind its steel door he can hear faint cries and raucous singing: Je-sus blood ne-ver failed me yet! And he wonders if in there are boys with spirit, or if it is only the usual gurning and head-banging – the bottom of the pops. Still, better perhaps than the chronic wards, which have a totalitarian lack of imagination, being as they are rectangles within rectangles within rectangles, whose inmates are subjected to the rectilinear punishment of having their cigarette packets and matchboxes taken from them. Pausing by another window as he turns the final corner into the forty-yard stretch leading to Ward 20, Busner glances across the cane-stitching and the tarpaper roofs of the Gardening Department. Beyond this there’s an orchard of stunted apple trees – a month previously he had gone to walk in their shade, only to discover that none was higher than his shoulder. A truck parked on the road alongside the orchard is being disburdened of crates full of Corona, and after this there are only a few more annexes and auxiliary buildings before the wall that separates the hospital’s grounds from its sloping netherworld of sewage farms and shitty little fields that patchwork down to the North Circular. After that an excremental trudge across a golf course and up streets lined with semis to the next escarpment, where stands Ally-Pally: a gothic pile of shit twinned with Schloss Weltschmerz . . . Perhaps, he thinks, the patients should be taken there for an outing? He can see his new cohort ticcing in time as they circle a drained boating pond studded with the crumbling concrete daises that once supported ack-ack. What would they find inside the cavernous Palace itself? Nothing: teetering stacks of gilt-painted chairs piled up after wedding receptions and the ghost of the first television signal howling in its barrel vaulting. Tucked under Busner’s arm are buff cardboard folders stuffed with the photographs he has taken of the post-encephalitics – the wheedling of them into place is well under way, with Audrey Dearth the first to be moved. All those boarding schools at least taught him this much: how to wheedle, how to cut the totalising corners, and, as he turns the last one into the ward, he sees them all arrayed, a multitution, the redbrick gymnasium of St Cuthbert’s mortared to the concrete science block at Highdown, which in turn is cemented to the pink granite of the chapel at Clermont, the eaves of whose roof project over the fives courts of Charterhouse, a series of open-topped boxes that decline in height until they become the bike sheds of Heriot-Watt, thrust deep down in the wynds of the old town . . . — This reverie would have continued, had the doors not swung open on the spitting, biting, screeching chaos of a saloon-bar brawl between cadavers. Busner’s first thought is: Oh, shit! it’s Enoch’s day off – because no further explanation is necessary for why it should be that two elderly women patients are fighting right beside the glassed-in nurses’ station, one of whom has her teeth sunk in the thick fold of flesh beneath the other’s chin, and so worries her – already the parquet is blood-spotted. A black-bag-mountain of a slack-faced woman with hay hair that at first he only recognises as a newly corralled and precious enkie! Gnasher’s teeth sunk so deep that the other patient is able to jerk her pinhead back and forth –. Busner’s second thought is: My files! For he has involuntarily flapped his arms and so they have flown – jettisoning photographs, papers and the enlargements of single cine film frames. Bloody hell! This stuff represents months of work, the careful mapping of all the moves necessary to ease this patient from that ward to this after making a space for them by discarding another to the hospital’s own crematorium, to the outer world or, on some occasions, simply by swapping them over, but in all cases thereby advancing the game – which is how Busner conceives off it: a game of draughts played out on the eighty-yard-long squares of the hospital’s wards. Patients are draughts – staff as well: Mboya has leapt over Perkins to join the enkies on 20 . . . if only Perkins could be sent to the crematorium. What’s this?! he bellows at a nurse called Inglis, who flings herself at the mêlée, What’s this?! she bellows right back. You can see what it is, Doctor! Reluctantly he hugs Leticia Gross’s Ally-Pally shoulders – reluctantly, because despite the flecks of blood and saliva, and the squealereaming of the two women, he grasps that it is impossible to free her without loosening the other’s jaws. Inglis gasps: Get the um-brella, Doctor! Get the umbrella! Which is a euphemism he knows to be widespread among the staff, and which he abhors. – Eeeerarrr’rrra’rrra –! – Doctor, please! Inglis, Busner intuits, is not much liked by Mboya, although he himself has found her to be competent enough – more importantly, she shows an interest in what he’s trying to achieve. He can only surmise that it’s some African-West Indian antipathy, the roots of which he can have no ken – but he wishes they wouldn’t, he needs allies. Slipping in the paper slew, he levers himself up too slow – another nurse has arrived, umbrella in hand, a sedative bead swelling at the end of its . . . ferrule. This nurse, Vail, whose white face is flushed, says, Doctor – will you? And he cries: No, no! above the Rarrr’rrra’rrra –! You be my guest! then turns away from sad cracked heels stamping as needle jabs into scrawny thigh to gather up the images of the others, besides it’ll be me who stitches and dresses Leticia’s wound – apart from Mboya, he still doesn’t trust the nurses with my property. Later, Busner sees the attacker in a quiet room, through the Judas – she is pathetic in the extreme as she slumps, stuporous, meditating upon a plastic potty. She’s no bigger than a child, her cheeks caved in: they’ve taken her plate. In the stubble – lice? – covering her small head he sees the distinctive scars of a prefrontal lobotomy. Inglis had already told you so: What you ’spectin’, Doc-tor, if’n you bring new patients on to a ward? You know what dese folk’re like – dey can’t be doing wid change, dey hate it. Dis one, she be out of sorts ever since the fat woman come up from 24, she bin goadin’ her an’ ridin’ her an’ goadin’ her some more . . . All of which is understandable, Leticia Gross’s very bulk inviting an assault simply because it’s there. Although there are others of the others who should prove more irritating to the common-or-garden inmates of Ward 20 – the scatty schizoids and once-rebellious girls, whose bastard babies have long since abandoned them to the madhouse so that they may go to seek a better life. It is, Busner thinks, like any other war zone, what with its higher attrition rates for men – twenty per cent of them dead every year in the mid-forties – while their womenfolk, their menstruation suppressed by the drugs, are left behind to become this swelling embolism of the geriatric . . . Weaned off their useless – and indeed contra-indicated – medications, Busner’s emergent cohort has been spread the length of the ward, but, while amphetamine withdrawal has plunged the somnolent post-encephalitics – such as Leticia Gross – into still more extreme torpor, the hyperkinetics, now that they are no longer sheltered by the umbrella of chlorpromazine, have emerged into a downpour of tics, spasms and jerks, lightning-strike actions so forceful and precipitate as to appear virtually instantaneous. For the sleepy enkies their carers have devised certain strategies – simply to get them moving. There are musical sessions with Miss Down, and more mechanistic measures still: the holding and then the letting fall of ping-pong balls, or the wearing of loudly ticking watches to provide them with a tempo that can be used to recalibrate the complex series of motions they must relearn, every time, in order that they may . . . stand up. But with the wakeful enkies – these dark starlets – it is only by giving them a screen test, then slowing down the resulting films, that Busne
r is able to resolve their akathistic whirr into its component parts, so identifying – in Helene Yudkin’s case, to take just one – no fewer than eighty-seven different tics, among them: hair-patting, nose-tweaking, neck-flexing, bra-strap-snapping, ankle-rotating, foot-tapping, knee-lapping, copper-bracelet-rotating, tongue-darting, earlobe-pulling, neckline-adjusting, leg-crossing-then-uncrossing, inside-of-cheek-chewing, saliva-swallowing, brow-furrowing, shoulder-hunching, breath-holding-then-expelling, finger-wiggling, skirt-hem-yanking, etcetera. Which is to say nothing of what cannot be captured by the lens, namely her verbig-verbig-verbig-verbig-verbigeration: the unending repetition of words of words of words, or of phrases of phrases of phrases, that often seems to operate in counterpoint to her ticcing, one conducting the other. Yudkin, a petite, dark, near-perfect Sephardic princess, whose planed face appears both time-locked in girlhood and supernaturally unaffected by the monsoon of movement that sweeps across it again and again and again, is Busner’s most compelling photographic subject. His films of her, when run through Lesley’s Steenbeck sixteen frames per second, are an incomprehensible whirl of movement, but slowed to eight, then four, then two frames, the Nouvelle Vague stares him in the face: it is only their orchestration that makes her actions appear outlandish, discretely they are all within the normal gestural repertoire – their orchestration and their syncopation — for, as Busner spends more and more of his time examining the films, he begins to discern a complex relationship between the tics involving phased alternations between the small and virtuosic cuticle-flicks and hair-end-splittings, and those sealion yawns and gorilla-chest-beatings that have an operatic grandeur. It has taken weeks for him to capture one of these transiliences with his camera, so abrupt are they, but, having witnessed one in slow-motion, he can now also see it from una corda to sostenuto during live performance, just as he can spot the gathering wildness and fracturing arrhythmia to Yudkin’s ticcing that is often – although by no means always – the prelude to an equally abrupt transition from hyper- to aki-, from up to way on dooown, from Jacques Tati slapstick to the one stuck frame, in which she will then remain with all that baroque musicality reduced once more to a single, monotonously sustained note . . . Helene Yudkin may confront Busner with the most extreme form of this syndrome, yet he remains more strongly attached to Audrey Dearth – her primacy will, he thinks, always ensure her primacy. And at times such as these, as he walks by a bay of three beds in the men’s dormitory, occupied by three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion Messrs Ostereich, Voss and McNeil, each different in physique yet contorted by the same hypotonic lack of posture, he wonders: Am I surrounding her by quaffers of nepenthe, while she remains in constant psychic pain? The bed she sits on is tightly made but at least unbarred, and she has her own locker. Her posture reminds him of the prefrontal in the quiet room: her tiny bent body is on strike, her cerebral cortex has withdrawn its labour, her facial masking is beyond profound – it is a tragic rictus, so inert that a fly alights and takes a leisurely stroll along her top lip. What can she be thinking? For he is sure that she is: from small hints – snatches of vocalised thought – heard fumbling from the enkies’ mouths, Busner has become convinced that whatever the damage to their diencephalons, their hypothalamuses and their substantia nigras, these derelict brains are still inhabited. In the upper storeys of these rundown minds true sentience remains – although surely ferociously disturbed by its decades of imprisonment in a jail within a jail. He places his reconstituted files on Audrey’s bed and from one of them removes a sheaf of photographs that he fans out, black and white on the grey institutional blanket. See, he says pointlessly, when I filmed you the other day, Miss Dearth – Audrey – I was, um, struck by something . . . She makes no acknowledgement of his presence – why would she? You do not acknowledge a ghost that goes on: Same as before, you were making these motions that I’ve seen you make many times . . . His soft hands patty-cake the air, rotating invisible wheels, pulling upon immaterial levers. It is, he knows, a poor imitation. When she does it, she is both precise and consistent, and the actions – so obviously the operation of machinery – partake of its solidity, its power, the rhythm of its engine without its being there! Eighty-one years old and still beavering away – but at what? . . . exactly like this, and I wonder, can you tell me what it is you’re working at? Busner’s question leads leaden-footedly, because already he believes he knows. At the Film Coop, when they were snipping up the 16-millimetre negatives and developing them, some smarty-pants drifted through the dark room to scrounge a pellet of hash off Lesley, and, seeing the prints pegged up to dry in the hellish light, he said, Freaky, that old biddy’s working an invisible turret lathe – then expatiated: See, she’s turning a flywheel with that hand, plain as – it’s the one that moves the lathe bed – and that’s gotta be her yanking on the lever that shifts the turret up and down . . . and see here, here she’s pulling on another lever, the one that opens the chuck up to release the finished piece. Yeah . . . the smarty-pants was inordinately pleased with himself . . . it’s a turret lathe, deffo. Busner asked: But what is it she’s making? And the hash-head reverted to truculent type: How the fuck should I know? I mean, I juss did a summer job in a metal basher’s up in Wolverhampton – those lathes’re used for any bit of metal needs turning. Besides, he snorted smug wraith in rotten cheesecloth, it’s invisible, ain’t it. Now Busner leans in to that Bovril mouth to hear, We’re’erebecausewe’re’ere because e’re’ere because we’re’ere, the same palilalia he gets from many others of the others. One by one he brings the enlargements up to her face – but whatever it is that so transfixes her, it isn’t what’s immediately before her eyes. She drones on, becausewe’re’erebecausewe’re’ere, and he’s enraged – for an instant he is prepared to strike her. She is Miriam and all other recalcitrant women to him . . . Then a slippery strip detaches itself from the last print and spins to the floor, What’s this? a second negative of the film Lesley must’ve done two that he unthinkingly holds up between thumb and forefinger to the window . . . I wonder what the hot dish’ll be in the canteen today –? Two of the frames are out of synch’: in one her right hand pulls the invisible lever, her left turns the transparent flywheel, but in the next her left hand operates the lever the chuck? while her right remains idle. Busner looks to the third frame and finds that it is sequential with the first! The front wheels of the shitty and shit-coloured Austin hit the edge of a massive pothole on Winnington Road and the entire car lifts off its axle Fosbury-flopping inside the chassis: I’m driving on the moon, what can it mean? When the enkies tic they do it at great speed – hence the filming, hence the frame-by-frame analysis: he wants to see individual tics siphoned off from the seemingly incontinent spray of movements – but this . . . this is incomprehensible, this intercutting of time. He runs his laser gaze along the rest of the strip, Am I transcriptase? And discovers five frames at the beginning of the sequence to which this errant frame belongs, but: what can this mean? He has no difficulty in finding it credible that, at a neuronal level, she has succeeded in jumping from one sequence to the other and then back – it’s at a cerebral one that he experiences bamboozlement: her brain . . . is outside of time . . . so far away . . . in another place . . . in another phase of development, Willis said when they all pitched up that morning – the varsity men, one or two others from the discussion club, and Stanley, whom they all regarded with a queer sort of respect, especially after Cod Drummond arrived with a handcart piled high with picks, shovels and all else necessary for the undertaking. And Stanley, while in nowise wishing to swank, did take up a pick and give it a few experimental swings with a view to conveying that he was altogether at his ease with such work, just as he was at his ease with another phase of development, a phrase he liked and that kept running through his head as the work progressed and the sun rose above their hot heads. Another phase of development sounded like one of Willis’s pamphlets on political economy – which Stanley had done his level best to get through, though
he feared he must be frightfully dense, for, try as he might, pretty soon after he began reading sleep would be the next phase of development. The varsity men were bloomin’ daft to look at – they’d all come in bags, sporting collars and cricketing pullovers. Their notion of navvying meant buckling on the gaiters they probably wore for a little rough shootin’ in the country. For the first hour or two, while they hammered away at the cobbled roadway that ran up from the High Street, their spirits continued to rise – then their lack of experience began to tell. In truth, Stanley had no more familiarity with manual labour than these beefy chaps – some of whose faces were aflame – yet what he did understand was that all work has a rhythm appropriate to its duration, one that should be nicely judged to preserve vim. The varsity men nattered on – clearly, whatever their belief in Willis’s brand of socialism, this was still a tremendous jape for them: and, since they had never, ever worked, work was their day trip. They took cobblestones and, using picks for mallets, tried out croquet shots. Drummond did his best to keep ’em in line, strutting this way and that in the roadway, telling one chap to pound down the earth, a second to cart off the debris, a third to go to the Coach & Horses and fetch some ginger beer. – Ginger, mind. He was an ape of a man, Drummond, his head big as two rugger balls, but, for all his stamping around and bellowing, the varsity men only laughed, then, if he persisted, ragged him, which was easy enough to do. – Oh, I say, Cod ol’ man, have you been to visit the ape in the zoo? No – why not? She’s been bally well fetched all the way from darkest Africa to visit with you, you ought to show her some courtesy – some fellow feeling! Tha-at’s right, Cod, show some fellow feeling – they’ve dolled her all up for you, or is it that you aren’t partial to African ladies of your – sorry, I mean the species? This way and that Drummond stamped, the white dust covering his moleskin trousers – his face was purple, the handkerchief he’d tucked under the rim of his hat a transparent veil through which the folds of his fat neck could be seen quite clearly one-two-three, he is me: not at ease, never will be, with these types, despite my . . . conjunction with Adeline, a liaison that made of Stanley a man in the fullest sense, quite unlike these inexperienced . . . virgins the lot of ’em, unless, that is, you entered on their account the sort of beastliness she had told him went on at their schools and colleges, and which Stan could well believe, not being an innocent and having seen exquisites strolling about the ’Dilly and certain seedy sorts who favoured Guardsmen and who frequented the pubs by Scots Gate . . . hands, backs . . . necks – a martial bearing down . . . beastliness. The work proceeded throughout the long, hot August morning – they would dig up the old cobblestones and level the roadway, although Willis had arranged for proper contractors to come and lay the new macadam surface, because this was patently no work for raggle-taggle boys playing at being working men. The cricket pullovers lay in a mound on the verge. The varsity men joshed Drummond, whose misfortune it was to have a fish tail too big for his mouth, it flapped about on his lower lip, foam-flecked – hence, Stanley supposed, Cod. The men from the discussion group – Addison, Poole – travailed with greater diligence, yet equally ineffectually, while Willis, whose show this was, took it upon himself to explain matters to passers-by, at first city-bound gentlemen on their way to Hampstead Underground Station, then grocers’ and butchers’ boys, and eventually a van of ladies who came promenading under parasols, followed by nursemaids pushing perambulators, each distinct echelon equipped with rugs and hampers and all the other impedimenta required for a constitutional and a sit-down on the grass at somewhere called the Vale of Health, which Stanley had never heard of before – although Willis told him, portentously, that it had been the haunt of poetical types, that Johnnie Keats and ’is ilk. To his credit, Willis demonstrated his own socialistic convictions by making no distinction – he would waylay anyone, regardless of whether they were respectable or not. He would treat an insolent telegram boy to a lecture on the dignity of labour and a bemused carter – who clearly wished he had one – to a sermon on the ugliness of the machine. He would placate irate householders, explaining that the small curve of roadway and its embankment were, in the letter of the law, private property – his own – and that, while no permission was needed from the Borough, he had in point of fact signalled his intent with comprehensive plans posted for all to see at the town hall in Belsize Park. — Willis stands now, his beard hooking to his breast, his specially tailored Jaeger cycling suit very close-fitting, his stockings equally so – a Spy cartoon, altogether a brilliant man, Adeline said, what with his pamphleteering and his lecturing for the extramural departments of the University. – You haven’t an idea in your head . . . she coiled on top of Stanley, hissing, one leg between his, the other athwart them, her face on his belly, her breath on my John Thomas . . . They swapped their roles all the time, she-be-me, me-be-her, no other he believed, devoutly, could ever understand Adeline, sobbing in green chenille for the loss of him . . . My little Pierrot! And Stanley tripping quite as tearfully along the rutted track from Norr to Carshalton, passing Rose and Grace and Tully the footman, coming from the station, back from their afternoon off, who went on up the hill without a backward glance at the fair young man – they recognised him not, while he had spied on them all from their lady’s boudoir, and from the lane hidden by lime hedging – inside and out, spying on these others . . . another kind of servant, maybe? Certainly, in service and moving along concealed passages and back stairs of his and his mistress’s devising. Cod Drummond would, Stan considers as he drops a cobblestone with a dull chink, always be in service as well: Omdurman, Krugersdorp, Lhasa . . . Hampstead High Street . . . a soapy tang rises on the hot air from down there, where a laundry must be . . . in the sultry noonday heat Stanley throws back his head, a single cloudy bolster lies on the divan of the sky – he thinks of standing, awed, inside the belly of a Zeppelin, and looking down its bellying nave. He thinks of Colonel Cody’s sycamore seed plunge – Adeline had promised him a combined ticket, he would fly the figure-eight course at Hendon, then she would join him to see the War in the Air at the Hippodrome in Golders Green: the spidery models of aircraft creeping above the audience’s heads on invisible wires. He would not speak of this to Willis, despite his being a strange sort of confidant: he knew of their relation, yet was blinded to its carnal essence by his own peculiarities – a bachelor rising forty who brought bouquets to the West End stage doors not with any motive, unless it be to discover leading ladies unchaperoned in their dressing rooms and lead them unto the kindly light of a socialism, which implies no loss for anyone, only gains all round . . . It is my pyorrhoea, he had explained to Stanley with the frankness he believed exemplary of the New Man. Stanley laughed: Pardon? My pyorrhoea, Willis said again, baring his inflamed gums in their reddish and hairy net. It makes it next to impossible for me to . . . ahem, become intimate with a woman . . . Stanley did not altogether believe this, thinking it more likely that, while a bicycle saddle between female thighs might kindle passion, the brutal leather would only bear down still more on what little manhood the apostle of free love possessed.
