Umbrella

by Will Self

  coupling at a conference on affective disorders. Her packaging had been corrugated cardboard – although that wasn’t it. Conferences, ah! always his favoured arena of seduction: there was something undeniably arousing, was there not, in the juxtaposition of the rigid squaring of the carpet tiles in the conference suite of a former polytechnic and the rippling pliancy of flesh? Between the expansive tedium of the plenary session and the bolting down of Lambrusco minutes later? Between the buttoned-up formality of introductions and the she-be-lying across the blue-and-bluer-striped duvet of a student study-bedroom? Cheerily looking his limpness in the eye, she’d said, Why not try Viagra? And he, struggling to insert the old yellow dog into the noose of his underpants, said doomily, No, I rather think not. For what on earth would that be like: his chemically engorged rocket blasting off across Stevenage or Solihull, dragging behind it the payload of his sagging body? No. It would be better to accept things the way they were: impotence as the rhythmic introjections of desire: a steadily growing column of inadequacy working its way up inside him and sending out little thrills of numbness. No, better to accept gulls mobbing along the freshly painted white lines of a playing field, and when people remark, Where’ve all the sparrows gone? simply observe, The gulls have eaten them. Besides, it wasn’t only the bare facts recalled that had grown so vivid – nowadays there was also retouch, resmell and rehear – the whole sensorium geared up to revisit all that fucking, licit and otherwise, but now shorn of guilt. — When he had been at it, each disco dip had cancelled out the one before while violently enjoining the next – sex was like that. Moreover, when you were in its gooey clutches, repetitive actions sustained equally repetitive reveries: out of all those subtly different hip-thrusts, lip-slurps and neck-caresses only the one was seized upon and returned to again and again to serve for self-stimulus. The bus stops, leaning into the high kerb beyond the Jackson’s Lane Community Centre, engine-gasp smokes the window of a fried-chicken takeaway, Busner’s forehead vibrates against the toughened glass: he sees diamonds of mirror set in mirrored batons, he sees the Mandelbrot set of the Formica they reflect, he sees himself, trousers and pants at half-mast, shirt-tails flapping against tautened buttocks as he canters across North London from one site of special psychotherapeutic interest to the next – from Heath Hospital to the Whittington, from there to St Mungo’s, from that rundown pile to the Tavistock, and from there to the Bowlby Centre in the east, in the environs of which he trips and falls headlong! He regains consciousness to find he’s digging into a soft plot of fertile ground – a nutritionist or an occupational therapist, a nurse or a fellow doctor. These had not, he now thought, been affairs – with all the sophistication the term seems to imply – but rather coital sight-gags, complete with white-faced clowns, their mouths thickly smeared with lust’s greasepaint. Obviously, with such choreographed pratfalls, nobody really got hurt – or so he’d liked to imagine. But since his manumission he could examine his libidinous enslavement from every angle – physical, emotional . . . gulp! moral – and it had to be admitted Last night I saw my mama singin’ a song that as sex begets in the first instance more sex, so Woke up this morning and my mama was gone bad behaviour sets the gold standard for more of the same: infidelity at fixed rates. The bus lows pitifully as it passes by the Bald Faced Stag in East Finchley, and Busner, penitent, applies the lash: I always had an eye for those who were inclined to stray – but what is this? In a world so plagued by catchy tunes that it resembles a burr this was one of the catchiest: Last night I heard my mama singin’ a song, Ooh . . . That first time they did it they had undoubtedly been a little bit tipsy despite its being the middle of the day. He had resolved not to go to the pub at lunchtime – what was it, a valedictory drink for a colleague? Anyway . . . she’d been there, and when he went back with her to see about the batch she’d locked the door decisively behind them. I thought, what’s this? A few shandies for the lady, now a hand-shandy from her? The pharmacy was hidden in the warren of rooms that surrounded the main stores – many of them long disused, full of the queerest stuff: old school desks, coat trees, the abandoned instrument cases of the disbanded asylum band. Matrons or shrinks came to pick up drugs from a hatch like a canteen servery that they reached along a dead-end corridor, ooh-eee, but we’d already been doing secret things in her small lab in back of that, ooh-eee chirpy-chirpy cheep-cheep –. That was it! It was everywhere that summer, a cloud of dopaminergic dust that puffed up floury under the green bowl of the lampshade. He stands watching Mimi Hanson operate the device and thinks of Missus Fitz, his uncle’s cook, turning the mincer’s handle so that meat worms squirmed. Mimi finishes tipping the powder into the hopper, replaces the measuring beaker on the bench, and, thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely as she clips the empty capsule into its runnel and deftly depresses the lever to marry this tiny vessel with the funnel’s tip, he notes the diamond solitaire on her finger. Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, Pound at thy powder, – I am not in haste! Some springloaded shuttle is released by her chipped-red-varnished nails, a paten revolves, the capped capsule comes on its little tray, Mimi picks it up and turns to face him, staggering ever so slightly under her neuropharmacological load. Two grammes, she says, her voice kazooing prettily through her cotton mask. I can adjust it to do one and three but halves are more diff –. He is on her, his angle so finely calculated that his pelvis pots her buttocks into the pockets of his hands, while his thigh is between hers and his mouth partakes of the same filter, their tongues nuzzling at either side of the mask, their teeth nipping it aside. She oofs a shandy burp as they cooperate poorly in the three-legged race to the floor. Busner’s hands yank apart her laboratory coat, pull up the hem of her dress, pull down her exasperating net of tights and panties – she smells sweetly acerbic – sherbet lemons? Her tightly curly hair is near white-blonde – a fleece. They must’ve knocked over a glass vessel on their way down, for, as she grapples with his belt buckle and zip, he can hear the gently grinding noise of this rocking to a rest. Futilely now – for she is a bare and forked thing before him and there’s no stopping this – he hopes this wasn’t the eighty ounces of L-dihidroxyphenylalanine, costing two thousand pounds! that arrived only this morning from Sandoz in Switzerland. The lino presses prosaically on the heels of hands, his knees – it catches at his toenails, while he contorts into the sacred pomp of entering her, and Mimi, with her head and her breast and her arms should drop dead! In these times allocated for abandonment Busner is at his most professional, haaaa-haaa-ha, she exhales as, at last, he unmasks her: a kidnap victim who it would seem wishes only to be ravished by her captor, for she pulls him into her with those nails and for a few seconds at least there is nothing present to him but sherbet lemons intensifying into a high coital sweat . . . He frees her breast from its enclosure – the aureole is far larger and paler than he expects, the nipple is recessed and so he hunches to feed upon it. Ha’ha’hnnn! She bites his ear and he diagnoses her mobile spasm as athetosis, her jerking as myoclonic. To beat off these medical terms he looks at her face, only to find her bright blue eyes compelled by something behind and to the left of her – an oculogyric crisis! In Mimi’s open mouth he chances upon the wet glint of her fillings – her shivery curls sweep the precious dustfall. He feels the beginning of detumescence and to stiffen his resolve calls upon Miriam’s face smeared sideways across the familiar pillows: the image of conjugal right assists wonderfully in the committal of professional wrong, and, as the encephalitic on the floor bends backwards clutching at my sides, he wonders: Does she do the same, am I her fee-fee-fee-aaahn-say?! He pulls out suddenly and the spatter of his sperm on her skin, her clothes and the lino alerts them both to the insanity of what we’ve done. There will be more intimacy enforced, he thinks, by my mopping this up than there was in the cause of it – first times are necessarily social, small genital talk . . . From hers in the pub, and before when he explained the highly experimental nature of what they would be doing, Busner gathered that for all the g
irlishness of her ribbed white tights and daisy-patterned summer minidress, Mimi was entirely serious. An infanta, she was, returning from the pub . . . in the sedan chair of her transparent plastic umbrella. He had laughed at her in the spring squall, and she said: I don’t want to get my hair wet . . . hobbled by his own garments he kneels awkwardly – there must be a cloth of some sort in the sink sunk into the lab bench. In esters of musk her face is blank – tendons are threaded through the dewlap below her chin – she shivers awake, her hands reach up and draw his blockhead back down to her belly. In the wooden trench far below the sheltering skylight, the flushed bodies resume their battle – by a thin loop the mask retains its hold on one of her lobeless ears, and from this there radiates out, along the dingy corridors, through the swing doors, across the stifling airing courts and down the wailing wards, a widening whorl of perturbation that courses through all the human flesh it encounters, amplifying hysterical misery into nerve-tingling pleasure – through flesh, and through walls that wobble and pulse. Through walls and in electrostatic rings that travel down all 1,884 feet and six inches of the hospital’s central corridor, constricting and dilating its cold old plasterwork. Cracks appear in the patients – they are fragmented with joy, doctors and charge nurses come running, their sedative-tipped bayonets already fixed . . . yet they cannot prevent the patients from hammering their heads against the floor bump-bump-bump! or sweeping up the drifts of spilled L-DOPA – Busner labours and sweat wells from the sticking plaster he had wound round the handle of the club, a mashie niblick picked up from a market stall in Beresford Square when he went for a dekko. Albert smiles down at his own feet planted lumpily in their woollen stockings on the bare floorboards of the changing room. He smiles, and thinks of how it is that an awareness of a splinter is always a posteriori – he can hear Mayhew and Arbuthnot moving around behind him, screened by the jackets that hang from the pegs set above the benches. There is the distinctive tang of deeply penetrated dried perspiration – sweat produced, equally identifiably, he feels, by useless exertion – mixed up with liniment, linseed oil and gutta-percha . . . then comes the sharp scrape of a cleated boot, the soft slap-flap as trews are belted – but he has no specialist clothing to don or equipment to prepare, instead he wears the trousers from his third-best office suit, a light flannel shirt and his old Bancroft’s cricketing pullover. Albert smiles again: he will, he thinks, tuck the trouser cuffs into his stockings – this will give him greater freedom in his stroke as well as provide the semblance of plus-twos. — When he was shown in to the Principal Overseer’s office, the man hadn’t known what to make of the golf club tucked under Albert’s arm – or else he hadn’t noticed it. Either way, Albert forbore from mentioning it and they went on to inspect the Danger Buildings, the foundries and the machine shops, with the club still in his hand. At one point he employed its handle – then unbandaged, its worn leather grip open-pored – to poke into the bronze cap of a shell casing lying on a workbench, so that he could lift it up and examine its polishing in the sateen sunlight that swagged down from the high windows. What had the PO thought? Presumably that this was some novel type of swagger stick, since, although he was also a civilian, he seemed terribly flustered by having to deal with another one – one who was also, potentially, in such a senior position. On one or two occasions he had said sir to Albert and sketched a salute. The PO was a much older man in a wing-poke collar and coat of nineties cut, with a complexion – which Albert guessed was normally ruddy – that had been leached by nerves. It could have been Albert’s ramrod-straight bearing that confused the man – not that this was for show, being an entirely legitimate product of all that footer and cricket, and, latterly, now that Mister Wilton had had his way, late evenings purloined on the links. He moved, he knew, with an athlete’s unconscious grace – and, although his superiors depended upon Albert for his exceptional brain power, his reasoning and his recall, while stiffening their resolve with his unimpeachable probity, he, in turn, relied on his body . . . long-stemmed, palest green and unearthly . . . rhubarb, grown on composting dung heaps in the kitchen gardens of Surrey. Rhubarb in last night’s pie set before her lodgers by Missus Hedges, her cheap stays clicking, her bulldog face pouchy with pleasure. If he were to be accepted by Fair Rosalind . . . by her people . . . there would be an end to this domestic simplicity, instead: new furniture, accouchement sets – all the fussing necessitated by baby linen and the paying therefore. She might, he thought, bring with her seven or eight hundred a year . . . But this was idle fancy, so far was he from wooing her – he had only seen her once or twice, tipped his hat as she and her illustrious uncle passed down the Ministry stairs. To think of it was utter folly! Although, did he not deserve her, or some thing like her? Had he not kept himself clean, affixed his eye to the nail through Our Saviour’s hand, not permitting it to stray to a loosely pinned bodice? Sitting there, Sunday after Sunday, digging up coin for the velveteen sack poked along the pew, listening with a connoisseur’s ear to the bronchial moan of St Jude’s unrestored organ, Albert views the catechism in the same light as the Annual Statistical Table compiled by His Majesty’s Stationery Office: he knows them both by heart, and both ensure the maintenance of his Faith in the Trinity of the King, Kitchener and the Welsh Wizard –.