Umbrella

by Will Self

  De’Ath – De’Ath? This sally Albert does not hear, it is not until – I say, De’Ath, if we don’t look lively we’ll get caught behind that four – which comes together with an unprecedented hand on his shoulder, that he grasps these two syllables apply to him personally, as much as legally. Mayhew, lopsided by his full bag, smiles down at Albert, dimples eat the neat ends of his burnt-cork moustache. As they leave the changing room and cross in front of the grandly named clubhouse towards the 1st tee, Albert assesses Mayhew’s lurcher gait – he may be too meagre to carry his own bag, yet this hardly matters: urchins come trotting from the tattered shadows of the crack willows along the brook, desperate to lug it for him for thru’pence or less. Moreover, on the train to Hanwell, Mayhew admitted to a handicap in single figures. No virtue or skill of my own, he’d flannelled – apparently the Mayhew family home had backed on to a course. There had been seaside summers messing about on sand dunes and on the links near Rustington – then a half-blue at the varsity. As the stopper pottered alongside the Great Western line through Royal Oak, Acton and Ealing, Albert’s immediate superior indulged his own modesty. Albert was grateful for Arbuthnot, whom Mayhew had introduced as doin’ something jolly tedious at the Bank, but who was spiffed up as flashily as a Jew stock-jobber, what with his lavender spats, silk hatband and buttonhole big enough for bumble bees. Arbuthnot seemed only to have been waiting for the train to chug away from Paddington before he got out his flask and offered it round, saying, To spite His Majesty I’ve taken it up for the duration. And when it came to Mayhew’s humbug he did not mince his words: Give it a rest, Mayhew, ol’ man. To hear you talk you’d think you didn’t so much as enter into the swing, physically speaking – that the Holy Spirit did it all for you! Arbuthnot, his carnal countenance blue and red blended mutton turned, laughed loud – laughed longest. Now, wiping his full and saturnine lips with a snowy pocket kerchief and passing his also well-stocked bag to one of the caddies, Arbuthnot notices that Albert is still carrying only the two clubs he had with him on the train – the mashie niblick and an equally ancient spoon – takes this in, and absorbs also the désordonné of the younger man’s costume, which, in the clear May daylight, presents a brutal contrast with his own natty golfing togs: elasticated tartan stockings, pale green plus-twos that flatter his heavy thighs, and a matching windbreaker covered with an assortment of belts and straps. He says, Are those your only clubs? And when Albert admits to this, the banker goes on, Well, you’re welcome to the use of whichever of mine you please – damn it, you might rather prefer to leave those behind and simply share the bag. One does not ascend so far and so fast in the Service by taking offence – not that one becomes incapable of perceiving those utterances that, whether intentionally or not, should occasion such – but the banker means exactly what he says, and this is of a piece with his whole manner, with its easy and unforced egalitarianism, so unlike that of Mayhew, who, hearing their exchange, hastens to chip in: Why, De’Ath, I should’ve offered before – of course, you must feel free. And when Albert demurs, Thank you, sir, and thank you, Mister Arbuthnot, I’d as soon stick with these, I’m familiar with their, ah . . . peculiarities, and to be frank I welcome the challenge, Mayhew presses uncomfortably: Come-come, De’Ath, I think no such formalities on the course – here we’re all golfers first and only secondly . . . before becoming confused, so uncomfortable is he with saying gentlemen. Albert has some sympathy, as he appreciates the brilliance of his own personation: by no means affecting to be what he is not, while his flat, neutral accents and perfect diction no longer give any clue to the Foulham boy he once was. Don’t av any more, Missus Moore, Don’t av any more, Missus Moore . . . Not so: there will be thousands more of his stamp recruited in the halls by the White-Eyed Kaffir . . . Albert understands far better than his companions that war is always an opportunity. At last Mayhew manages to force out: . . . civil servants, then bends to place his tee, straightens, waggles, sights to where the fairway doglegs between stately oaks, dips a knee prettily as the club’s head comes up, then swipes and digs. His ball bounces once, twice, and disappears into the rough – from wherever Mayhew’s handicap derives, Albert muses, it cannot be his drive. — Walking down the drowsy avenue from Hanwell Station, past two new villas and an old rectory of a piece with its ancient yew and oily crows, Arbuthnot and Mayhew had discussed the deposition of the national reserves, the sack after sack of gold sovereigns that had been loaded into the Bank – so many, Arbuthnot had contended, that the City constabulary had held up all the traffic on King William Street so that the motor vans, motor cars – and even drays taken on by a few of the larger local branches – might form an orderly queue. A housemaid who had been punishing a carpet in the front garden of one of the villas left off and blushed prettily as the three men strolled past. Albert saw over on the far side of the railway line the black chapel spire, redbrick chimneystacks and umber masonry towers of the County Asylum. The lunatics were probably brought in by rail or road – but why not by the Grand Junction Canal? He heard their cries lapping at the coal wharves . . . lunatic women . . . they were being classified now in terms of their usefulness for the effort – why not children, then, imbeciles, perhaps? After all, they’d serve quite as well as . . . machine-gun fodder. The difference a year made – where would they be in three? He, Hi, gave ’er a knock, Which made the old woman go hipertihop, He, Hi, hipertihop . . . Now, having observed the tussock that hides Mayhew’s ball for a decent while, Arbuthnot bends to poke in his own tee, saying, I’ve waited until now to propose my wager. The two caddies who have been taken on snigger – and the four who were not, and who sit ankles crossed in a row a few yards off, snigger also . . . the sycophants of sycophants. Arbuthnot’s behind presents a billowy expanse . . . barges tacking downriver under full sail . . . but when he straightens he brings with him one of the new ten-shilling notes, taut between his fingers with Bradbury’s signature floating in the sky and framed by high, wispy cirrus . . . I’ll either award this to the best of my companions’ rounds, he says, or pocket it for good. Mayhew makes another blunder . . . he flounders, the Lusitania sucks him down . . . – Don’tcha think that’s a little steep, old chap? and compounds this with a nod of the club in the direction of Albert, who quickly says, Not at all. Indeed, if you’ll oblige me, Mister Arbuthnot, may I double you? And he takes a pound note from his pocket book. – You see I have one of these new instruments of my own shrewdly withdrawn in anticipation of precisely this eventuality . . . Arbuthnot vigorously assents – and Mayhew has no option but to add a pound of his own to the kitty. Arbuthnot takes up his stance, which is brutally compact. He manages the difficult feat, for such a heavyset man, of raising up his arms to the perpendicular. Albert thinks there is too much force in the drive, although club meets ball with a clean crack! so that it ascends, whistling faintly, in a steep Minniewerfer parabola, which, long before it reaches its zenith, Albert calculates will overshoot its target. A two-hundred-and-sixty-yard par 4, pinched into an hourglass by the oaks, firing over these risked the ordnance falling into a mine crater at the back of Fosse 8 – which is what happens to Arbuthnot’s ball. The safer course is to lay down covering fire in the no-man’s-land in front of the trees, then employ a mid-range iron to target the green – which is what Albert does, despite lacking both driver and suitable iron. He understands every nick and bump in his spoon, knows to several decimal points the angle of its face: once his swing has been calibrated he needs must exert no effort, only allow firing pin to meet cartridge unimpeded so that the ball hipertihops to a halt twenty yards short of the trees. Mayhew requires two strokes to clear the rough, Arbuthnot three to blast out of the bunker, the sand spraying from his hoggish delving. Advancing to his perfect lie, Albert swaps clubs, leans back into his downswing and lofts his ball over the embroidery of the oaks. A cleanly cut divot falls back to the earth and he takes his time tamping this down before waving the victorious mashie niblick overhead as he makes for the green, calling out, Sorry about that
. . . The two older men look on in silence as, using the flat back of the gripped-down spoon, Albert sinks the seven-yard putt. With the evidence of his companions’ frailties afforded by the 1st hole – and no more knowledge of the further seventeen other than their length and par, as detailed by the notice in the clubhouse – Albert has already played ahead. He will, he thinks, almost certainly win by thirteen strokes – fourteen if there is some radically unforeseen circumstance. En route to the 2nd tee Arbuthnot pauses to light his pipe and indicates with the match that Albert should tarry with him. Are you, he asks, his carp’s mouth blowing smoky bubbles, one of Sam Montagu’s men or Lloyd George’s? His heavy-lidded eyes have lost the glazed hilarity they had in the train – his gaze is not cold but appraising. Albert replies, I hardly think I’m a personage of sufficient stature for either of those gentlemen to’ve noticed me . . . His own eyes drift across to the tee, where Mayhew is performing curious knee-bends. I hardly think, Arbuthnot says caustically, that Mister Mayhew would be of sufficient stature for these gentlemen to notice him, were he not supplied with such an able Number Two. Some Ahrensmeyer, or Datas, with shrewd acuity must be seated inside this barrel of a man, who now pokes his matchbox between two staves. Albert says, What, if you don’t mind my asking, Mister Arbuthnot, precisely is your position at the Bank? – Oh, p-pooh-pooh, Mister De’Ath, I believe you can do better than that, but since you ask . . . there are smoky pennants streaming overhead, a dandelion head is crushed down below . . . I make certain there are sufficient funds available for your new Ministry to be able to settle its bills on presentation – when will you be starting at the Arsenal? He turns away and moves through the white star haze towards the 2nd tee. Running for more than four hundred yards in a long lazy s down to the Uxbridge Road, and skirting the obvious hazard of a millpond, the hole favours those able to marshal their forces for a rapid advance. Mayhew’s caddy stoops to place his tee, Mayhew stoops to place his ball – he waggles his club and his shoulders, settles his stance, then again waggle, settle, and again waggle, settle. Albert’s own shoulders squirm in sympathy – the last thing he wishes is for his chief to lose face! The drive is an adequate one, although Arbuthnot tops it by at least fifty yards. Both men play efficiently up to the green, while Albert lags judiciously before mercilessly wielding the niblick to sink a twenty-five-yard chip-and-run. And so the three men divide the hole at three strokes apiece, 1 over par. The next four, which take the golfers towards the village of Southall before their flank is turned by a lane and they retreat east back to the River Brent, are plain sailing: broad fairways, complacent bunkers and mundane hillocks. Albert doesn’t have to try too hard to persuade Mayhew that his skill is in the ascendant. Arbuthnot, however, looks Albert in the eye queerly at regular intervals. We could, he says, as they stand observing a puffed Mayhew undertake more knee-bends, have played the Brent Valley course, I have membership there as well. So do several Jews, Mayhew adds apropos of the new cabinet, and I understand they’ve need of a motor-charabanc to take them round the nine such is their laziness –. And parsimony! Arbuthnot adds, then all three laugh – he himself laughing the longest. On the 9th tee Albert realises he is drained of energy by the effort of keeping his swing in check: his back is galvanised by tension, a stress that winds about his arms, pricking and ripping at his nerves and ligaments with sharp barbs. The hole is the most interesting thus far: running for a hundred and thirty yards down a gentle slope, to where a screen of alders hides the point at which the fairway hooks round. Through the shivergreen of leaves, high up on the far bank, Albert sees the pin piercing the kidney of cropped grass – it is only good sportsmanship to point out to his companions that the river is merely a blind. Really? Mayhew queries, pressing the turf with the toe of his shoe, feeling for mines. Bolstered by his subordinate’s hidden directives, he has begun to play the part of a magnanimous victor. Albert says, I rather think that it’s here the course’s architect has lavished all the invention of which the holes thus far have been deprived – I wager that behind the trees there is a water feature right beside the river. Mayhew bleats again: Really? When bedevilled by hectoring telegrams from the Front conceit is a mask Mayhew oft dons – it is this that Albert sees obscuring his features, and through holes cut in it his moist and unmanly eyes scan the mid-distance. Fool! Your country needs not you . . . For Mayhew has called for a 3 iron, where any save the most expert would play short, accepting two shots to the green as the price for a safe par 3. There’s nothing now that Albert can do to save him – nor all the whey-faced younger brothers in an ague of terror who have been chucked away on this desperate manoeuvre. So sunk is Albert in this contumely that he neglects to observe the girlish jink of Mayhew’s knees – is aware only of the repugnant slowness of the ball, towed upwards through the deceptively irenic air by steam pinnaces that whistle towards Constantinoples of cloud. They buzz, the machine-gun bullets – or so Albert has heard officers on leave remark: buzz as they make serrate soft things – flesh, cloth, brain matter . . . So it proves with Mayhew’s ball, which, gaining insufficient height, fatally pauses, is sheered by the buzzing wind, then plummets. Uncharacteristically, Albert pictures this: the tear in the bilious slime, the dimpled moonface bobbing up in the bloody and stagnant water. The caddy will, he thinks, be prevailed upon to wallow in and retrieve it – no willingness to it, only a dull-witted and hungry compliance. Suddenly he licks the metallic nib of his anger I gave him every opportunity! It is a transformation that clever crapaud registers at once, despite his being more than half blotto, and Albert giving, he is certain, no indication other than the exaggerated deference with which he waves Arbuthnot up before him on to the mound. The banker plays safe, his ball hipertihopping down the incline to lie exactly as it ought for a long chip to the green. There is a point in one’s construction of a golf swing – or so Albert believes – when the player achieves that state of mind described by the Hindoo holy men: with the yogic assumption of the stance – arms up and away, the whole length of the torso twisted precisely on the bipod – force becomes inimical to the meditative calculation of angles: the arc the club’s head will describe and that of the once-smitten ball. All has been decided – the stroke is a ghostly conclusion, void and without form. Moreover, the conflict is not with his ostensible opponents – who are feeble creatures, their features poorly moulded in soft lead – but with the course, this wholly arbitrary strip of land, the tangled dells and ungrazed-upon meadows of which have been invested with a terrible and futile significance. The course is not blameless – it has drawn this fire down on itself by reason of its very marginality. Its manifest features, streams, copses, isolated and venerable elms, mean nothing any longer, indeed, they are only there at all to provide bearings from which the combatants can get their range. Albert’s long body unwinds and rewinds, and, as he unwinds again, he feels in every fibre the perfection of the stroke – the mashie niblick, he also, both might have been made for this moment alone. Cheer-o, Mayhew mutters – the three of them, the caddies and hangers-on too, are all floating away with the air ball, which mounts and mounts the pneumatic column for a long while, then poises, then drops. All anticipate the hippertihop on the green, the white scut of the invisible coney – yet there is nothing. It appears, Mayhew says as they go on, that you too have come a cropper. Arbuthnot smiles his lipless toady smile – my anger amuses him! And it all unfolds as Albert foresaw: the caddy wading in the mucky mere diverted from the stream, while Mayhew, increasingly intemperate, paces the bank, yelping commands. It isn’t until Arbuthnot places a weighty hand on his shoulder that he settles down, accepts the two penalty strokes and the new ball. While the two of them play up to the green Albert stalks its hinterland, parting quiff after quiff of grass, each time seeing only what he expects: a straggle of old beech mast, a catkin, a strewing of parched sheep shot . . . Albert disdains his own self-doubt, although it remains important that it be one of the others – although not necessarily Mayhew – who, on withdrawing the pin to retrieve his
own ball, cries out in astonishment, Oh, I say! before stooping to pluck out the second that lies coddled in the cup and calling to Albert: Does yours have a mark that you recall? Albert calls back hoarsely, Three hearts! He hears not Arbuthnot’s terse congratulation or Mayhew’s feigned one – he ignores the ragged cheers of caddies and hangers-on, he strides on to the next tee, releases the ratchet, swings the bipod forward, tightens the ratchet, settles into his stance, grips the club, flicks his eyes to the horizon, clicks the springloaded wheel to select the range, cranks the handle and lays down covering fire, beneath which he can advance his reputation. Two birdies in succession – an eagle at the 12th. If the first half of the match was distinguished by a terrible stasis as Albert’s imposture held them all in check, now there is a delirious release into mobile warfare, as the trio quarter the remaining area of the course, then quarter it again. Pigeons hang in the hawthorn beside the 17th tee, their bodies quite disgustingly plump writhing amidst the thorns. It is stand to, and to the west the sun seeps through watery cloud, to the east all the Mary Annes and Mays in the villas of Castlebar Hill and Drayton Green poke the banked-down ranges with care: coal must be brought home by pram, a half-hundredweight at a time. Already the flow of commuters back from the station is choked off by death – while smoke rises from chimneypots and streams madder towards the next dawn. A sudden spring shower silvering slates – and on the 18th tee stands Mayhew, pushing away the brolly his cabby has taken from his bag and opened. – No, man, I cannot see from under it. There is the pull and then the pull again of mud on Albert’s boots as they walk towards the clubhouse – clods of ire fall away and he is inclined to leniency. As they wait their turns to use the boot scraper, Mayhew and Arbuthnot pay off their caddies with the florins and half-crowns in their waistcoat pockets before withdrawing wallets from animal-damp tweed. Astonishing, Mayhew says as he hands over the pound note, what was it in the end – six, seven strokes? Albert is succinct: Fourteen. Mayhew flutes ruefully, And all achieved with two clubs – no driver, and no putter either . . . Still – he dabs his pantomime moustache – some might argue that only having two makes things easier, choosing the right club being part of the skill . . . of . . . the game . . . He falls silent. Albert accepts Arbuthnot’s pound note and handshakes from both men – he leans on his spoon and mashie niblick the Norwegian at the Pole, while the hip flask is passed amongst them, then he uses the niblick’s head to ease out the muddy slug trapped in the right-angle of heel and sole. I shall take the position at Woolwich, he says, each word lightly slapping Mayhew’s rain-washed cheeks, the shell crisis needs must be addressed. Incarnadined, Mayhew’s face is a wound suffused with indignant hurt: And you . . . you’re the man for the task – you believe? Yes, Albert says, that’s precisely what I believe. — He leaves them there, and, grabbing his jacket from the hook in the changing room, strides off to Hanwell Station, the shafts of the clubs grinding in his blistered hand. At Paddington he realises the weather has closed in in earnest, when, making his way along the platform, he has to dodge this way, then that, to avoid the tips of umbrella struts that snipe for his eyes – the enemy of the tall man in this crowded stone trench. Three ladies lurk by the ticket barrier – the youngest steps forward and stares at him boldly from the black-straw grotto of her hat. Albert notes her fashionably short skirt, she has slim ankles – les attaches fines, the French would say – she says, Shirker, which he affects not to hear. Shirker, she says again, struggling to contain herself as she is tossed from the hand of righteousness to that of decorum . . . which drops the catch. She drums her gloved hands on his chest. Now, now! Her older companion a chinless drab restrains her by the hips and happily. You’ve only to give it to him, Lucy. The third of their party ashamed, possibly? taps the platform to one side of her boots and then the other with the point of an umbrella Albert recognises as having been manufactured by the company with which his sister holds a position. This sturdy body is hatless – or rather her hair, worn in a Mikado tuck-up, is her hat. What’s this! And this?! his assailant cries, but Albert, while perfectly aware of what is transpiring, remains powerless to intervene: he treads water some way off, looking back at the tall, limber young man, the golf clubs in one of his hands, the skirt of his cricketing pullover visible between the flaps of his jacket, and the muddy spatter on his trews which are still tucked into his stockings. – Do you not see yourself, my fine fellow – d’you not? There are brave men dying at Ypres, while you – you . . . Albert considers the third woman’s movements to be mysterious, almost ritualised: the way her divided skirts sway as she taps the platform here, then there. Were this peacetime, someone might intervene, as it is he imagines that the passers-by – who hurry on, faces averted, cold grey gabardine shoulders rain-shot – have delegated this task, for they have more pressing ones: lager beers to be poured away into the gutter of Charlottenstrasse, cuckoo clocks torn from the walls of cafés and unceremoniously unwound, the complicated filigree of a Beethoven sonata somehow picked apart . . . Miss . . . Albert begins, he can feel the sharp corner of the Minister’s letter in his breast pocket and wonders whether he should withdraw it with a flourish. However, he who is typically so attentive is lost for now in the steam and the smutty smoke that lies in a bank above them, ill omened by the occasional gasolier – up there rainwater cascades over the glass curves of the roof, alongside there is the flesh-eating clank of buffers marrying. Somehow a long white feather has flown into his hand. Propping the clubs against his belly, Albert takes his time examining it, running his fingertips along its silkygrating bars. Miss . . . he begins again, but seeing this: her wild-eyed expression of triumph. He ceases and turns on his heel, the mashie niblick and the spoon raised in a lofty salute. As he does so he laughs full-throatedly, because from the expression on the third woman’s face he believes she has deduced – it could be the influence of her coiffure – that it is Albert who is the Lord High Executioner. Missus Hedges will, he thinks, have ox tongue for supper, lolling over the rim of the dish, each papilla plainly visible from up here are the water tower and the campaniles of the first range of the hospital. He can’t make out the second range – which, if his recollection is correct, only had a single storey – but whether this is because it’s been demolished, or it is hidden by the first from this vantage, he cannot decide. — He got off the bus in Muswell Hill and stood for a long time looking in the window of an internet café, trying to make sense of it all: the plastic decals stuck on to the inside of the window advertised LEBARA with exaggeratedly joyous African faces, this being, he gathered from the listing of national flags and associated charges, a service that allowed you to call Swaziland, Rwanda and Gabon for mere pennies per minute. Who were these happy exiles, he wondered, yakking away for hour upon hour, their verbigeration wavering around the world? I needn’t’ve because at that moment one had emerged in a spiffy maroon leather jacket, from the zippered pockets of which he took first one, then a second, then a third mobile phone – instruments of communication that he swapped from hand to hand, and when he had two in one, over and over. It bothered Busner, to whom it seemed the greatest profligacy: treating these artfully designed jewels of micro-circuitry as worry beads, then pausing to tell their nodules, then resuming once more shk-shk, clack-clack, over and under, back and forth. Now, from his peak perspective, he can scan entire sectors of northern London – from the Parnassus of Totteridge right round to the Elysian Fields of Epping Forest – not, of course, that he can identify all the bits in between, although where three grim multistorey blocks riotously assemble might be Edmonton. It would be a cliché and a lie to say that his nose had led him there, any more than his feet had taken him – feet that, swollen and complaining, have bullied him into removing his training shoes. — No, sitting on the bench, gazing across the vale of the North Circular to what used to be Friern Hospital, Busner reflects with some small satisfaction on his first morning as a penitent. He had set off from Kentish Town with no plan or preconceived route, yet at each point where the w
ay divided, memory, that ever-present helpmeet, had showed him the right one. Truth to tell no matter how random his transit, Busner’s conscience could’ve reeled me in – my spore, my coprolites, my coiled mess, is scattered that widely. All offences are compounded, he realises belatedly, by the perpetrator not cleaning up afterwards – by first walking away, and then staying away. Behind him he senses the cavernous interior of the building, its acreages of rotten flooring, the tiles flaking away from the underside of its lofty ceilings . . . It is, Busner feels, an unloved and unlovely thing: Paris has Sacré-Cœur, Rio its cloud-cloaked Redeemer, but what was on top of London – Ally Pally. No doubt at its inception there had been boating, a switchback railway, the godly tootle of a record-breaking organ, massed brassy oompahing – all the busy relaxation of that Imperial era. Still, whenever he had ventured inside – no matter which decade – Busner had stumbled upon the same botched pantographs of municipality: a bamboo arras lost in a booming hall, freestanding screens of neon-indigo nylon ill-concealing gilded stacking chairs piled up to thrice head-height, grimly stained shafts tunnelling down into kitchen mausoleums . . . Betja—, Betje—? No, nobody could make out a case for the thing – yet here it still was. It had burned – when? A couple of times at least and no doubt caught a packet in the war, yet was simply too big to be destroyed. Busner grimaced: fire was to it a form of agricultural technique, merely sweeping away the dead drifts of old catering trolleys so that new shoots of the same old decrepitude could spring up. You got troll feet, says a child who has arrived at his bench and stands sneering down at them. Busner smells salty breath and registers chewing that, despite its only this moment having claimed his attention, still seems incessant. The child – a boy? – wears some sort of smock with a cartoon face on it that also gurns. The child works its small jaws once, twice, three times, then fly-catcher tongue: a tic-like flexion. I am . . . Busner begins, and his fancy hardens into this conviction . . . a troll. The child’s eyes widen pleasingly – but then along comes its mother, a regatta-striped buggy zigzagging from the ends of her fleeing arms. Predictably she’s anorexic – a common enough sequel to untreated post-partum depression. He is delighted that she wrenches the child away and buckles it into the pushchair, yanking the strap up so that its smock bunches. Double bogies skitterolving on the smooth path, they are leaving nothing behind except this: the small face aimed back at him and still chewing, still tongue-ticcing, still gobbling up the troll. In seconds they are on the terrace below Busner am I hungry? then gone. Some epochal signal had been beamed from the roof of the Palace, this much he knew: a wooden puppet broken down into its constituent waveforms and then reassembled a mile or two away by clever Scotsmen. — With the mildly fungally infected big toenail of one foot Busner scratches the sole of the other – what was it he had said to Mimi? The Palace of Pain and the Palace of Pleasure facing one another across the slough of suburban despond. And what had she replied? Nothing. One, two, three . . . some years later, after he’d walked away from the shit I’d done, it occurred to Busner that she might have been paradoxically affected by all the hours she had spent encapsulating L-DOPA for him surrounded by those clouds of dopaminergic dust. By contrast with the sculpture court he had curated on Ward 20, she seemed with each successive encounter to be losing the power of voluntary movement more and more: standing forlorn by the bench, slight in her white coat, her hair-net bulging with her blonde curls, monkey-muzzled by her facemask, her forehead sweat-damp – Carry on, Chemist! He had joshed her – but there was no need to, her eyes were transfixed on her own hands as they ticced about the equipment, pouring, measuring, tapping, cranking and turning as she enacted the very real pill-rolling necessary – or so I believed – to put a stop to its Parkinsonian mimicry. Only when we touched did she unlock, did her synovial fluid flow, so that I felt her muscular rigidity liquefy into spasticity. We slow-danced around the lab, her face buried in my shoulder, Bay-bee, bay-bee, sugar me, she mumbling of this and that, an increasingly strident palilalia in which the names of colleagues, their malpractices and the leaden crassness of the administration became tossed into a word salad. With my lips to her neck, I felt her pulse speed up: one-twenty, one-thirty, one-forty, gotta get my candy free, w’hey-hey –! A bouncy little jig, punctuated by the whip-crack-into-rice-pudding of the snare drum’s rim shot. There was no talk ever of fiancé or wife – such is the dark mirror of adultery, in which both parties elect to see nothing, instead, her letting drop an appointment at the FPA licensed everything — so, as the weeks and then the months passed, our lovemaking became characterised by bizarre notions and their attendant motions: a wheelchair left in a corridor would be commandeered to mechanise our coitus, while on another occasion we purloined the mobile hoist used to lower paraplegic patients into their baths. We braced ourselves in corners and against the undersides of shelves. Dyspnoea . . . She pants, this – her thumb? – thrust whole into my anus is capricious . . . her tongue, travelling round and round my ear . . . compulsive. Leaning back astride me, she’s possessed by a mass of subhuman manias and still her pulse continues to accelerate: one-forty, one-fifty – if she were my patient I’d administer a massive dose of parenteral barbiturates. She blinks, she grinds her teeth, her shoulders shake with a dreadful palsy as her pubic hair scratches frantically in mine, One for you and one for me, Pardon me – comes to three! Balanced impossibly, as a pin could never be on its point, to one side the abyss of frenzy, to the other that of stupor – with no warning there is the inspiration of a leviathan! she holds her breath for ten . . . twenty seconds . . . an agonising half-minute, during which he has to take in the Rembrandt lighting: her breasts heaving, flayed of their clothing, her dirty cherub’s face, her unloosed hair a gilt sphere. And more: the pong of excess bleach caught on fraying linoleum, the mid-distant dissent of a distressed inmate terminated by doorslam, the drug dust that tickles his own nose, before: Paaaaaaaaahhh! Peanut breath is violently expelled and he is blown into a salt globe full of floaters, motes, spiralling animalcules, fish oil, wallpaper paste, gentlemen’s – relish. Soon enough he will have to relearn once more the complex sequence of actions required to stand up . . . What happened to Mary Quant? Max Factor. — It doesn’t work for me, Enoch Mboya says, I just don’t find it funny. Well, Busner chides, you’re being obtuse as well as prudish – what’re you, some sort of Mary Whitehouse? Mboya takes a pinch of oaken skin in thumb and forefinger, scrutinises it, then replies, Hardly. They laugh edgily – they are deep in now, the pair of them, conspirators, really. Whitcomb’s authorisation was obtained for the purchase of the L-DOPA, but, beyond scanning the journal article Busner thrust before him, he has shown no interest in the trial – which is as well, because it’s not a trial at all, there being no control! He titters, and Mboya who’s sorting the latest batch of capsules into the compartments of a dispensary tray, looks at him reproachfully. Recently Busner has started to feel that his charge nurse is reading my thoughts, so engrafted have they become. Busner voices his next – What’d be the point of a control? – even though he’s only reiterating what they’ve both said many times in the weeks leading up to giving the selected group of patients the drug, and many more in the anxiety-distended week since. Indeed, Mboya says, there’d be no point to a placebo: they don’t know what we’re giving to them, and nor do we for that matter. Both boldly going psychonauts have qualms: next-of-kin consent has been obtained at best haphazardly: a form which was composed by Busner has been Cyclostyled by Admin. and in vague terms it outlines the experiment. Mboya, Inglis, Vail and others charged with the care of the post-encephalitic patients have pressed these on the few relatives who still visit, and when called upon Busner has made himself available to answer their questions. In these encounters he makes use of a doctorly gambit he despises: talking down unless they up their game. To a very few of the few – only one or two – he admits: We know nothing much, L-DOPA has had some therapeutic results with ordinary Parkinsonian patients, however, this is a different form of the disease
– if, indeed, it’s the same disease at all. He forbore from adding: Besides, what’ve they – let alone you – got to lose? Nor did he point out that these pecking, bobbing and stuffed bodies were barely human, being to all intents and purposes lame ducks whose government subsidy might – altogether reasonably – have been withdrawn years or even decades before. Why let ’em go on, the shitbuilders? The enkies’ children appeared to have suffered from the disease’s fallout – prematurely aged, they limped on to the ward. In his mind’s eye Busner always pictures them as wearing macs of pre-war neutrality, or else supporting themselves with duff umbrellas. Their bri-nylon shirts were damp through and mildewed – they were Harold Steptoes, orphaned children of parents who yet lived, biologically adult yet balking at all the busyness of life – financial, emotional and sexual. Of course, he understood that such children and spouses who still visited had to be self-selecting for exactly these characteristics, after all. How little would you have to have in your life in order to prioritise this thankless – and frankly useless –task? Shall we? Mboya says, the Coptic Bishop with his tray of wafers – and so their round begins, since neither of them trusts anybody else to dole out the precious sacrament, especially now that they have chosen – Mboya being included in the clinical decision – to massively increase the dosage. One hundred, two hundred – up to five hundred milligrammes could be given by depot injection, but not entire grammes of the stuff. They had increased the dosage, and they had restricted its allocation to only six patients: four of the somnolent-opthalmoplegics, who were utterly extinct and sunk in the deepest catatonia – Messers Ostereich, Voss and McNeil, and the prodigious Leticia Gross – and two who, albeit stifled, still exhibited all the jerks, spasms and flurries of hyperkinesias – Helene Yudkin and Audrey Dearth. Audrey Dearth . . . Busner feels no especial guilt about what is plainly favouritism, for her alternations between the dread entrancement of oculogyric crisis and the busy operation of her invisible lathe are peculiar, even for this most paradoxical of malaises. Seeing her now in the day-room, her tiny frail form enveloped in a chair, he feels she embodies a living past that forever eludes the most penetrating of thinkers – no veil of ignorance, or otherwise theoretically woven partition in the also theoretically woven fabric of the mind, but a real barrier, that he – I! – will penetrate, once, that is, we actually touch, for still it seems to him that they are forever approaching one another along all 1,884 feet and six inches of the lower corridor – forever approaching, but yet to touch . . . Ready? Mboya asks. Busner nods – they have assumed their positions, Mboya opens her jaws, then Busner slings in the two capsules, each of which contains a gramme Brighton Aquarium – fishy treats for performing dolphins. Audrey remains impassive, taken up by the Saturnian gravity and alien surface of a loose polystyrene tile some way above her head. Busner follows the L-DOPA with a slosh of water from a beaker, then falls to stroking her neck chicken skin don’t snag as Mboya marries her gums. Audrey’s dentures sink back down in the remaining water the toy diver at Mark’s bath time . . . the distortions in the Perspex bugsbunnying the incisors. Do they, Busner muses aloud, ever put them in for her? Mboya shrugs. There is silence in the day-room apart from her subtle gulp. Glancing towards west-facing windows, full of the risen sun, Busner is appalled by the alien white planet they all inhabit and the grossly etiolated forms that promenade its smooth surfaces, oh, so slowly . . .