Umbrella

by Will Self

  At Balham, Stanley is awakened by the ragged fusillade of carriage doors slamming – sparrows’re the same as the crumbs they peck at on the platform: they’ve been brushed off by the sky. Willis is snoring fitfully – he is an engine with no traction on the present, no means of drawing it into the future. With a start the train pulls out, with a second start Stanley realises he has been clutching the card in Cameron’s trouser pocket all this time, and at last he withdraws it so he may read what is written there in the warm waves of sunset breaking against the grimy window. The very patterning of the inky droplets where Adeline’s nib caught against the engraving of her name and address suggests a wantonness confirmed by, Four thirty, Tuesday next – be sure not to forget your pills, this said again and again by some daughter-in-law or other with that patronising grimace that is the forte of the Janus-faced middle aged, who look down on old and young alike. Busner savours the slight pleasure of wilfully forgetting her name: at any rate it was the same daughter-in-law who got him the days-of-the-week compartmentalised pill box which lies – this, he can remember – beside the egg timer on the shelf above the bread bin. Winching up his tracksuit bottoms and snapping their elasticised waistband around his paunch, Busner meditates on pills and forgetting. Really, he could do with a still larger compartmentalised box, divided into four, within which to place his weekly boxes. Twelve of these might then be housed in an annual box, a certain number of which could reside in a small crate, optimistically provided with sections for the years 2011 until, say, 2025, and labelled: The Rest of My Life. He remembers this – the scrag-end, the residuum – even as he recalls his own hands fumbling up the little lid and tipping out the white pill for his raised cholesterol, the speckled capsule for his elevated blood pressure and the big orange Smartie that remedies some deficiency or other about which he cannot be arsed to ask his GP, although he thinks it might be to do with his gall bladder. No, he is not insensible to ironies big and small: these are not the sweeties of the elderly, any more than pharmacies are our confectioners – we do not stand on the dark floorboards, thruppenny bits held so tightly in our hands that they stamp pink portcullises, and point to this jar or that, requesting a quarter of lemon bon-bons and then thrilling as she tips the big jar so they tumble into the scoop of the scales in a puff of sweet powder. No, the molecular structure of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors is the scaffolding with which we build Our Father’s many mansions out over the void, well beyond our allotted plot of three score by ten – we need them to survive, but they could probably go on without us . . . There! He has swallowed them together with a mouthful of tepid water slung back from a plastic beaker decorated with diagonal lines of other pills. He leans with a hand either side of the sink: fat old man’s hands spattered with melanomas and implanted with shocks of hairs . . . What a peculiar thing to happen to a little boy . . . Busner flicks the tiny lid of the compartment that is Thursday up and down. How many pills, he considers, did I actually prescribe in a working lifetime behind the sweetshop’s counter, tipping the jar so that barbiturates, tranquillisers, hypnotics, sedatives, anti-psychotics, antidepressants and all the rest of the harlequinade tumbled out? Certainly, he had prided himself on his sensitivity – and abhorred those colleagues not worthy of the name who were too free with the medication . . . And there’d been years outside of the system when I rejected it altogether . . . Yet, in the end, I tipped the jar . . . I tipped the jar . . . Would his old office up at Heath Hospital be big enough to contain this entire poisonous jumble? No! Not the ward either! There were times, he knew, when he’d got hold of lots of powder to be encapsulated, or mixed up in a lab beaker so it could be slung back, or else injected intramuscularly with very large syringes – It hurts . . . it hurts, Doctor, it hurts . . . He finds himself once more in the bedroom and discovers one leg slung across the knee of the other. He has a sock rolled up and the old yellow dog scratches to get in – but where to, where should he go? All my working life, Busner thinks, I’ve looked out on to woodland, or grassy meadows. It had always been economics as well as part of the cure to touchdown the dark starships of the asylums in the claustrophobic countryside of southern England. The final thirty years of my careering, these too had included long static periods spent staring through the fly-spattered windows of his office on to the Heath, which rose up, massy, oak upon oak – here the juicy splodge of a mulberry, there the Tuscan taunt of a Lombardy poplar . . . And enclosed as these vistas may’ve been – smallish clearings in the ever-encroaching forest of brick – still he had longed to get out, to drop his routines constricting like trousers and clip-clop away into ferny dells, an unlikely satyr seeking out the naiads of the duck ponds, blue-green algae in their hair . . . And now? He realises he had been wrong, sort of. That there was precious little outside of that constraint: the body . . . the mind . . . it all falls apart. You find yourself free to settle this new-found-land: sleeping on a flattened cardboard box ’mid the dank and rubbishy shrubbery of a traffic island – a Ben Gunn in the community, around whom the world turns, and turns. So what? He was dressed now in the oldster togs his youngsters despise: the relaxed fit of tracksuit bottoms, a sweatshirt with Santa Fe 1997 International Experimental Psychology Conference on its saggy blue breast, a smelly old Donegal tweed jacket and cheap training shoes nothing else besides looks . . . dirtier. He was dressed now and therefore he must go out. First, though, the tense prowl from room to room of the flat, eyes sweeping surfaces for keys, wallet and the deliciously apt Freedom Pass – and also a tan hat with a wide brim made of some synthetic stuff not stiff enough to prevent its creasing. He knows not whence this ugly headgear came, only that he’s fond of it: it feels appropriate, this coronet of his own old sweat tight around his temples. He decides against taking a book: for it is so very tiring now, to winch up disbelief in the energetic doings of characters so much younger than oneself – and as for academic literature, he had forsworn it – and as for philosophy, this he did all the time. I shall pick up a newspaper, he thought, and, catching a glimpse of his rather hippyish form in a mirror, he wonders at this atavism of apparel, is it an inversion of foetal ontogeny, in which the phenotype passes through previous fashion stages? Soon there will be gaiters and gloves . . . I will probably die, he thinks, clad in animal skins. Hairy dags are caught in the thick pile of the fitted carpet that runs down the stairs and along the dusty ravine of the hallway, under the rectangular sun of the transom, to where the letterbox pukes leaflets. Too late, he sees with superfluous clarity the telescopic umbrella lying on top of the boxes beneath his bedroom window: its black nylon sleeve and black leather-effect handle. When . . . he pauses, musing . . . did the umbrella first become an article to be routinely forgotten rather than assiduously remembered? Surely, to begin with, they would’ve been expensive items, invested with strong affect and not to be casually abandoned . . . as nowadays, given their cheapness and ubiquity – Busner’s attention has blipped to his unmoved bowels, and so he self-remonstrates: do not fear them as he finds himself in the street and at the bus stop a few yards from his front door, waiting, because that’s what you do at a bus stop, and pleased by his own aimlessness – a lack of planning that, sadly, then becomes its complete opposite by reason of being observed. Also in grey tracksuit bottoms – although these are flared and have a silvery stripe down them – an alcoholic puts a lot of effort into his own imposture. When the bus comes he will sidle on by the back door, together with his can of tsk, tsk . . . Tyskie – a Polish lager, presumably. The drinker has a thick green puffa jacket and a thin nose spidery with one big broken blood vessel. He makes conversational stabs at the old probably my age woman wrapped up beside him, Luvverly day fer April, ’ow long you bin waitin’? who clutches a Yorkshire terrier to her chest, one stiff little leg scratching the air. La puce à l’oreille. The alcoholic isn’t, Busner judges, drunk enough to be this disinhibited, instead he diagnoses . . . what? A few years ago he would’ve marked the man down simply as a self-medicating schizophrenic, sousing his voices
in lager – but now? Well, the dead weight of that pathology is decomposing – here be psychosis, certainly, but also a personality disorder, developmentally ingrained, that makes the man unable to grasp how inappropriate his sallies are, ’E’s a cute wee doggie, can I ’old ’im? let alone capable of registering the fear that uglies her face. It is a lovely day – there’s no need of an umbrella, any more than there is of another era of epithetic psychiatry, for it’s the same diff’: a personality disorder is only a hysteric or a melancholic by another name . . . The spider is within biting range, Wot’s ’is name? and at last Busner feels he must intervene, put a stop to his compulsive soul-doctoring, so he turns away from the playlet yet is still reluctant to abandon the bus stop because the idea of a bus ride remains appealing: an avuncular conductor unwinding the ticket from his metal belly, the subdued cheque of the moquette, the world held gently respiring beyond the dirt-speckled window at a safe distance . . . He wishes he had a paper printed with the world to wrap this one in – but doesn’t want to miss a bus by crossing the road to the newsagent. Still, the traffic heading towards Archway is dense enough, a constipation of lorries, vans and cars of such bulk that Maurice wouldn’t have been ashamed to be seen driving one . . . The traffic grinds so . . . it snarls out fumes . . . I am vulnerable! He staggers – an old man coughing on stinking reflux – and rights himself with the stanchion of the bus stop emery-rough to his fingertips. The wooziness dispels and there it is: the shield I seek held by a squire so intent that his cotton surcoat has been twisted out of shape by the strap of his heavy leather shoulder bag . . . always the bags. Busner hefts the memory of bags long since abandoned: gas-mask ones from army surplus, woollen ethnic pouches with tasselled hems, and canvas rucksacks with leather straps. He’s not so out of touch that he doesn’t realise what it is he’s looking at – but it takes a while, during which he sees only the spirituous twist from a bottleneck point into an iridescent panel that stretches, yaws, then furls away into nothing. He sees only this and the digits that flick and dabble against the screen, index finger and thumb pinching, then parting, pinching then parting again. What is this ticcing? Busner wonders, for, if he abstracts the shield of light with which the boy fends off the flaking stucco of the terrace across the road, he sees only this: one arm and its dependent hand held rigidly extended, the other arm crooked, its hand fidgeting – what did we call that? For this he need not struggle: pill-rolling comes unbidden. Pill-rolling, while the boy’s fixation on his tablet computer – the eyes at once keenly focused and utterly vacant – is that not a form of oculogyric crisis? If so, it’s one Busner joins in: this is the world to wrap the world in that he’d sought, a palimpsest worked up out of nothing, sliding away from nothing, panels over- and underlying one another, A crucial component of any incoming government’s policy will be to avert the industrial action that is widely expected, should public-sector cuts be as deep as anticipated ousted in an eye-blink by a smirking Osborne, who in turn is annihilated by the floret of a single virion that floats in a space at once endless and measurable in microns. The H2N5 Virus has proved far less infectious that initially supposed, an inquiry by the WHO has established that transmission rates be – Gone, supplanted by the bullying concertina of the bus’s door. The squire, having sheathed his shield, mounts ahead of Busner, who follows on behind, swipeeping his Freedom Pass under the indifferent ear of the driver: there is no jolly conductor, only this morose single-operator, his eyes fixed on the distant horizon of the terminus. The boy swings himself up on to the stairs and Busner follows stiffly after him. On the top deck there is the lobby Muzak of electric-blue seat covers and dulzure moulded plastic. The bus humps into the slow-moving traffic stream and the boy collapses oof! into one seat, the retired psychiatrist oof! into the one behind. Go slow, Busner thinks, that’s what they called it back then – and they were called council workers, dustbin men and hospital porters – or ancillary staff: he has the notion that public-sector workers was yet to be coined, besides, the public sector was still growing then and gobbling up shipbuilders, electronics companies – and there was British-bloody-Leyland! The horse-lipped posh one with the lisp – a pipe-smoker, some thought we’d all end up as good little Soviets. Bit of a cunt, really, him and Wilson both. All pipe-smokers are cunts! He barks and the boy’s fringe yanks his lashless eyes around Baby Blue . . . The shield is fending off the world, its emblematic flu virion quests for anywhere to bind . . . Busner covers his mouth and heaves his bark into a simulated cough, the boy pill-rolls the virion into a Mercator projection with a rash of spots upon which numbers of infected and beneath these of fatalities are picked out twice: actual and predicted. It strikes Busner, who never fancied himself as any kind of epidemiologist, that there’s a noteworthy reversal going on here, namely: the communication of the statistics moving faster than the disease itself, whereas, how far would you need to go back in order to reach an epidemic that outstripped its own news? Not the Asian flu of the seventies, but possibly the post-First World War flu pandemic and its more peculiar prequel? He looks upon the map, its virions – and thinks of how the boy’s ticcing links macro- and micro-quanta . . . I – we – were interested in the way these tiny repetitive motions were abruptly magnified into operatic gestures Co-mmend-a-tore! A production where? Almost certainly Covent Garden – which wife? Whichever . . . she sat purse-lipped in the stalls as a Commendatore two storeys high, his back cloak indistinguishable from the backcloth, carried off the Don. She was unmoved by the stagecraft, desirous only that I be carried off with him. He smirks: to take a libretto personally, that requires a formidable suspension of disbelief –! Then checks himself: yet I cannot remember which wife it was . . . and so admits: this goes beyond mere solecism towards a fundamental lack of feeling. The bus wrangles some cyclists across the intersection by Tufnell Park tube, then caroms on along Junction Road. To either side are convenience stores, estate agents, more estate agents: the city digesting its own substance and so adding more shitty value to what once must’ve been solidly middle-class homes, front gardens full of hollyhocks tended by Pooters, their stems swaying in the breeze of a passing horse-drawn omnibus . . . fertiliser for ’em close to hand. Now those gardens all gone, all dug up and replaced by a single storey of retail hutches tacked on to the terrace behind. What did they have then? Bicycle parades, Alexandra Day parades, Jubilee parades . . . What did they bequeath us? Shopping ones. The bus has achieved Archway and the scummy-black tower stacked with social services that sucks up in swirls the drunk, the deranged, the poor . . . Busner is not surprised to see the man from the bus stop alight here, Tsykie still in hand, and together with a tiny whirlwind of leaves and plastic bags down-draughted by the Tower, he waltzes north across the three lanes of tarmac towards the Whittington. It’s a direction Busner fervently wills the bus not to take – on this bright day, this day of early-spring freedom, the last thing he wishes to do is to revisit any of these secret compartments in which the insane slosh about. In those days, on short-term locums, or simply in pursuit of patients lost in the vortex of the system, he couldn’t afford the time necessary for the wonderment these scenes demanded: the tiled pool of the locked ward at the Whittington, the wall of psychosis that hit you in the face as the lift doors parted – the taste of it catching at the back of the throat, urine in carbolic, the unremitting low susurrus of distress from out of which came the occasional yell of full-blown anguish. Then . . . then . . . there was no gainsaying the necessity for categorisation, for generalisation – a diagnostic framework was . . . a life-preserver. He sees himself as he was: bobbing among the drowned and the saved, although distinguishing one from the other was as futile as naming a wave . . . Now, though, one does break over him: a young man, his just-issued hospital gown split up past his hips, exposing the split of his buttocks – not that Busner hadn’t seen thousands like him, peak after trough, running away nauseously under neon to the artificial horizon – it was only that this one had been so overdosed with Haloperidol that he flowed,
dripping in mandrops, off his bucket seat and on to the scummy floor. Doshtor, he slushed, Doshtor, can you help me? And so this one recollection takes the place of all the forgotten ones, all the others I couldn’t help either . . . Bitterly, Busner now prays that the bus won’t go up Highgate Hill, he bows down, pressing his head on to the top of the seat in front, and gravely he concedes: It was always the individual who should’ve mattered, never the category, for was I not my brother’s keeper? The boy with the haircut and the iPad has gone – he is alone on the top deck as the bus heels round the bend and on to the steep acclivity of the Archway Road. Through wide windows the sun cooks up rubber and vinyl stew – but still the flesh is cold and old and the mind that believes without any evidence that it’s inside a head gropes for warmth in the embraces of the past, which’re all that remain to me now . . . doddery that I am. Busner thinks first of teenage kisses – so momentous at the time, a gastrocnemius swelling above a white ankle sock – then of all the rest of it: the goose-pimply fumbling that had been separated by a handful of autumns from the mummy cuddles he couldn’t remember, and so – more for him than for most – was a substitute for them. He winces to think of his penisumbilicus, winces still more as he returns to his current crumpled condition, cells popping like bubble wrap . . . the slow withdrawal from touch and be-touched, now, a kiss would be truly momentous, the lips of another drawing back and back and back – a skull’s rictus. There had been – not five months since – a humiliatingly failed