by Will Self
Miss Dearth . . . Miss Dearth? She doesn’t respond but she hears, oh yes, she does. They go on and repeat the same procedure for the three male guinea pigs, who are to be found becalmed in their backwater of the men’s dormitory. Busner has charged Inglis with ensuring that all of them are got up every morning, cleaned, dressed and shaved. She was sarcasm itself: Ooh, par-don me, Doc-tor, but you want me to pre-tend dey goin’ onna journey? Her hands on her hips, her breasts proud, a reddy flush in her cheeks. Busner thought bitterly, Was her go-slow ever called off? but only repaid her with sincerity, saying, Yes, yes, I want you pretend that – because they are going on a very strange journey and they can’t very well do that smelling of urine – or with bed sores. This is, nurse, a hospital, not a concentration camp! Which is a conviction he simply doesn’t feel: coercive institutions, he knows, only aggravate their inmates’ sickness. What was it Marcus had said of his time at the Hatch? mere trench warfare against mental disease . . . Inglis is, Busner reflects, the sort who knows my type . . . it is pointless to try . . . And yet: sex begets more sex, and he is steeped in it, so it might be worth a try . . . Her sex gapes darkly ahead of me . . . a tunnel – a corridor –. Are we done here? Mboya says, and they go on with Busner’s head aching with the effort of containing the old booby hatch as it was in its heyday, with its six miles of corridors, and its rigid segregation of male and female, a notionally self-supporting community with its own farm and orchard, its water supply, sewage-treatment works, gasworks – gas! – burial ground, brewery, laundry, tailoring shop, cobbling workshop, upholsterer and – most crucially for the solution – railway spur . . . He recovers his wits in the act of caressing Helene Yudkin’s plump neck same as when we had the labrador in Willesden and it needed worming. Despite Mboya’s skilled clamping of her jaws, Yudkin, who is at least seventy, has the vigour to grind her teeth in time with the flexing of her epiglottis. The noise drags him in its undertow back to . . . Miriam and her ridiculous machine for polishing beach-garnered pebbles that sits slushscraping by the back door. Busner marvels that she complains of there being no washing machine yet tends happily enough to this tumbling drum, the shiny products of which end up scattered all over the flat – on tables, down the back of seat cushions, a small shingle beach drifting across the kneehole desk Maurice gave him when they married. When Busner challenged her over the handicrafts avalanche, Miriam said, The boys love them, don’t you boys? And Mark and Daniel chorused obediently, Yes, Mum, which was fast becoming a ritual – the way she expressed that One for me and another one for me, Pardon me – comes to three! Miss Yudkin’s foam rubber is fleshy to the touch, on the Formica side table sits a gelid dish of ying stewed rhubarb and yang custard that no one has troubled to feed her. On the arm of the chair her twisted hand dances fingertrot, handango, thumba, its digits saucily entwining and scissoring, the nails high-flicking the worn nap. It’s a choreography that he knows he could resolve into quite distinct movements, if he could find the time to analyse it, and that these could in turn be broken down into different sorts of action. But what were they? Did Helene Yudkin recapitulate her own workaday repetitions – those as seamstress, or bakery assistant? Both positions he’d found out that she once filled. Or were these domestic digitations: the turning on and the turning off, the sweeping up and the dusting down? Or, again, maybe she saw them – if at all, so sunk was she in her Parkinsonian netherworld – as simply divertimenti. It didn’t help him to hold this analogy at bay: that before the war the hospital received all the Jewish admissions in the London County Council region . . . because? Convenience, he supposed, keeping kosher, maintaining access to the bearded weirdos and the dubious spiritual benefit of their legalistic mumbling . . . Hergheraaaaghrrerrr, her nose – if it could only be abstracted from all the rest of her – was attractive, its wings dusted with powder, nostrils porcelain fine . . . Moving them may also have been of a piece with the exodus from the East End to the north-western suburbs – a wilderness on the way. Whatever the reason, the end result was this: that over a thousand of them had been concentrated here when the Luftwaffe’s bombs fell on Poplar, Whitechapel, the Docks and my own randomly selected people . . . But what might be said of the Jewish enkies in relation to the rest? Did they manifest the same divergence as the English Jews from the general population – being exactly the same, only much, much more so? Herrrerrrg’herrr –. For a moment Miss Yudkin hesitates, her throat bobs, the L-DOPA begins its hopefully fantastic journey, then she resumes Hergheraaaaghrrerrr, and Mboya says, Shall we? So they stalk with great trepidation into the next embayment of the female dormitory, where a manatee with a human face lies on her iron-framed catafalque. You’re worried, Mboya says as they stand regarding Leticia Gross, whose great flanks have quaked free of the covers. Naturally, Busner replies, look at her, she remains exactly the same: deafeningly inert. Mboya, as anxious as Busner and at least as exhausted – if not more – nevertheless gets it, understands the still greater mass that is packed into the woman-mountain, a violent compression – the stuff of her hammered mechanically into her casing – that necessarily implies its opposite: an equally violent explosion – great blubbery chunks of her flung in our faces, our whites hosed down by blood spouts, and this succeeded by a tidal wave of noise louder than an H-bomb . . . We can’t go on like this, Busner goes on. It’s not that I think the L-DOPA is toxic even at these high doses – although he knows nothing of the sort, says it only for their mutual reassurance – rather, it’s that if Whitcomb does start poking his hooter in, without any results I’ll be unable to justify the expense. Mboya sighs and adds, Then there’s Inglis . . . The fall forward of Busner’s chin is cushioned, I’m getting chubby . . . You can’t, he laughs, get the staff nowadays . . . but he knows the reverse is the case: the staff they have don’t get the patients – they resent the extra work involved in caring for the wholly incapacitated post-encephalitics, preferring more tractable neurotics, bullyable depressives and eager-to-please psychotics. The nurses also resent the reorganisation of the ward required by the increased number of male patients – and all the upset this brings. But most of all they resent Busner, who, unlike most of his predecessors, rather than being content to rely on their greater familiarity with the patients, insists on imposing his own rubric, one that involves regular feeding, grooming and toilet assistance. In fairness to them it is a tall order: their pay has been frozen, their children’s free milk has been taken away, the price of beer is rising so fast they’re obliged to brew their own . . . and moreover there aren’t enough of them: heavy and recalcitrant patients cannot be levitated to the ward’s only WC, would that they could – he plunges into schoolboy reverie
. . . a happy moment: the levitating game, fingers prised into the ticklish armpits and legcrooks of the one chosen for this signal honour while the rest of us chanted breathy balloon held squeaking . . . then gently nudged him up effortlessly to the outstretch of their arms, awed by the eclipse of the classroom light in its green metal coolie hat by his grey serge bottom . . . They approach Leticia Gross’s bed, Mboya tut-tutting at the dollops of her that squeeze between the sidebars. I don’t know how she does it, he says – and indeed, it is a total mystery: she’s incapable of raising a spoon to her rosebud lips, the nurses are more often culpable of innutrition rather than overfeeding, yet here she very much is, weighing in at a couple of Henry Coopers or more . . . Busner has long since cornered her funny little husband, who comes scurrying on to the ward most days, natty in a snap-brimmed hat with a loud paisley band – he has backchat for all the staff and patients, a stream of innuendo that Busner doubts he truly grasps, so innocent does he seem . . . Confessions of a Dedicated Carer . . . because then he settles down to ministering to this queen bee, fetching and carrying, straightening and laving – but when challenged he was aggrieved: I only give ’er the food she’s given, Doc, he protested. I’m sure it ’as all the whatsits she needs – vitamins an’ such. She was always, he sighed, such a dainty little fing, per-teet if you kno
w what I mean, an’ now juss look at ’er minced morsels! Busner wondered whether the innuendoes were a form of compulsion as well, a tic-of-humour rather than a sense of one? But he said nothing of this to Simon Gross, just as he forbore from observing that it was over forty years since his wife had been anything much besides wholly inert – what would it be like if she were to come back? If this swollen grub were to split open – what might emerge? A dainty flapper, slim arms at her sides, feet lifted in the Charleston? Doubtful. – No, I don’t understand it either, Enoch, but it’s another of these things that convinces me that the very essence of this disease is paradox. Mboya grimaces: he too has seen others of the enkies who’re eaten up by their malady – a morbid cachexia that leaves them newsreel starvelings whose lopsided heads have been threaded on to the barbed wire, so that they jerkily tabulate their own fast-approaching deaths. Its own railway spur. But, while there are those who’re brutalised by the Nazi pathology, others such as Leticia are abusively pampered, fed up by it to a point where they can be put on show for visiting Red Cross delegations – not that you’d want them to get too close to this! They have let down the sidebars, her breast exhales towards them, a fleshslide releasing a pocket of fresh gas and another of stale sweat ruinous in its intensity . . . It’s frothy, man, and this despite the reverent swabbing of her innermost grooves that Busner has seen her husband doing – much as another man might clean his much loved car. There is no neck for Busner to stroke in order to provoke her swallowing reflex, only Plasticine coils of fat, one upon the next but all the colour of five-day-old brisket – there could be maggots in ’em . . . he wafts away a fly. With Leticia they had thought to continue injecting the L-DOPA into her flesh – after all, she’d so much of it to spare. This was sheer prejudice, because it soon transpired that every square inch of her had its own susceptibilities: she howled when they pricked her, her skin inflamed around the puncture sites, her ruptured veins wormed to the surface . . . They had to find another way. Up by her mouth the smell is a worse compounding of food and tooth rot, her head is sunk deep in the folds of her neck, her still pretty face is sunk deep in the folds of her head. The precision of her features is at odds with the waywardness of the microphonic monologuing she softly lisps, fthuck this, fthuck that, fthucking cunt, fthucking arthole, fthuck it . . . fthuck it . . . a superficially chaotic series that Busner feels sure, if subjected to sustained deep-level analysis, would reveal the same complex regularities – arithmetical progressions, basal rhythms and sophisticated counterpoints – that he has detected in all the oscillations of his enkies, especially now that he’s withdrawn them from their phenothiazide, their butyrophenone, their amantadine, and all the other muck that ensures they keep the 4/4 beat ooh-ee, chirpy-chirpy cheep-cheep –. Enough! Scouting around for a way into this petaline mouth with its foul scent while Mboya stands idly by, the embattled psychiatrist thinks of the nurses’ station, which is well stocked with tin ashtrays and packets of Guards, No. 6, Kensitas, Peter Stuyvesant . . . a largesse of stinging smoke that often seems to him to have been savoured, then exhaled, simply in order to inflame the patients, since the main means of repression that the staff employ is to deprive them of their own fags. I want one. He had given up when he left Willesden – but not because of Doll. No, he associated the mingling of smoke with all those other promiscuities: the messes of mung beans spooned from a common pot, the jazzy linkages of the loud wallpaper that swirled up the stairs, the entwining of the long hair of visiting psychiatrists who’d gone native with the filthy ponytails of the residents, the hooped scarves hula-hooping other hooped scarves . . . And then there were conjunctions still more suspect – such as their refusal ever to link the men and women in their care to the term mad, or any of its synonyms – crazy, deranged, off-his-or-her-head – but only the uselessism: disturbed. The disturbed men and women copulated, and fucked with the heads of visiting psychoanalysts so that they became engorged Looby Loos whose bellies split open and out tumbled all their passive-aggressive subpersonalities . . . I’m going to bum a fag off Inglis when we’re done here, Busner says, and Mboya says, Okay, fine, but how’re we going to do this, I can’t see her swallowing the capsules voluntarily, can you? And Busner says, I’m going to find a funnel and length of tubing that fits it, and you’re going to open those caps and mix the powder with some water, and that’s how we’re going to get it down her. Mboya says disconsolately, It’ll be like we’re force-feeding her. No, Busner checks him, force-feeding her is exactly what we’ll be doing. Off he goes, casting about scratched walls and worn-out floors for the items he needs. He passes Yudkin in her chair — passes Miss Dearth in hers . . . He stops, turns, enters the special little nook he has secured for her, which has an offcut of window and so an offcut of a view. She sits head up, shoulders back, her face – that wrinkled void – has Kodachrome and definition, gone is the blurring of the palsy that makes of so many of the post-encephalitics the restless subjects of long exposure. Instead, she looks right at him with focused blue eyes – blue! – and, speaking clearly and distinctly through the plates she must have put in herself, says, Ah, Doctor Busner, good of you to stop by, d’you think you could ask Nurse Inglis if I might have a cup of tea? Stanley does not hear this, for he stands with his back to the housemaid and entranced by all the comings and goings in a dovecote, a solid flint-knapped cylinder which is supported by stone brackets high up in a traverse of the kitchen garden’s wall. Or perhaps, she adds, a glass of ale – there’s a jug in the pantry? He hears this but flirts with the notion that it is one of the busy little doves that speaks, poking its pearly head from its nook, ruffled up and coo-coo-concerned . . . White splashes lumped grey and brown stain the brick path beneath his booted feet, the ammonia mixes with the freshness of the dog roses, Stanley hears the sluggish b’boom-b’boom-b’boom of his heart, a single feather falls revolving on the axis of its quill, white, less so, white, less so. At last he about-faces: she isn’t pretty, her face is flat and wide, her hair khaki under her mob cap, her teeth a sort of obliquity in a disproportionately small mouth. Still, she is young – and fresh, and he senses willing, for she sees me upstanding, a hero with a corporal’s stripe on my shoulder and my fine shanks well turned in my borrowed gaiters, my cap badge shined and my webbing blancoed this very morning, in the Albany, as Adeline looked on petulantly and said, What the devil’re you bothering with that for? And Stanley, naked except for his cap, had grabbed his cock and, tugging back the foreskin so that the pink umbrella opened, brandished it at her, crying, Now don’t chide me, my poppet, ain’t I still your mutton lancer? Adeline had laughed – although not in a particularly nice way.
– Sir? Her coquettishness, such as it is, is all in the Oxfordshire burr and the hip she tilts with her own hand. They are alone in this far-flung sector of the extensive gardens – the others will be at tea and talk under the fruit trees on the far side of the house. Alone in a cacophony of cucumber frames, a volley of raspberry canes . . . over there will be loads of eats, ham gashed open on a plate beside a loaf with a healed scar and a mess of stewed fruit brains. Lording over the tea things will be the skull-head who, Adeline had told him, was indeed an earl. The housemaid isn’t pretty and there are blackberry stains on the hand that holds the hip Wallie, Wallie, Wall-flowers, Growing up so high – All these young ladies, Will all have to die, but she is young and fresh and for once he does something simply because he can, and because he is angry with Adeline — boldly, he is upon her, her cry choked off by his mouth. There is a moment’s resistance – time for him to taste the tartness on her teeth, smell the purloined Pond’s on her suet cheek – then she yields, We shall want you and miss you, But with all our might and main, We shall cheer you, thank you, kiss you, When you come back again . . . This, Stanley thinks, I will take back with me: her dove’s tongue darting timorously, her small hand finical, trapped in mine, the hollow of her back fitted to my forearm and arching . . . back, layers upon layers of cloth sliding in all their secret ways. The housemaid
accommodates her body to his, nesting in, relaxing, going . . . all at once limp. Jack Johnson KO’ed in the 26th round – there is no articulation to her limbs any more – all the tendon strings have been cut. Her tongue slops on his lip, and as he tastes, then gags, on the saltsplash of her blood he hears the unmistakable sound whip-cracked-into-suet: a head-shot echoing around the flinty trench. Her forehead and one eye are gone, her mob cap lies on the earthen pellets between the thorny stems of the roses, escaping from its tripe frills are hanks of her khaki hair, beneath which is the stewed fruit of her brains. Stanley lowers her down to the ground gently, swaddled, she is – in death. — I propose this, says the skull-head they all call Bertie, that when boys have attained the age of eighteen they should be sorted into three categories – quite arbitrarily . . . He speaks like this: in perfectly ordered sentences, the words marching out from his bony hole in single file . . . – Those in the first category should be put to death painlessly in a chamber filled with lethal gases, those in the second category should be deprived of a limb – or possibly an eye – while the unfortunates in the third category should be exposed both night and day to the most deafening noises conceivable. This must be continued, the Donner und Blitzen of shells falling, the mechanical turmoil of the machine guns, until they have all succumbed to nervous affliction – deafness, mental blindness, speechlessness, all the way unto madness . . . Bertie pauses long enough for Willis to put his oar in: And then? The skull-head’s sockets swivel towards him dark with understanding – still, he takes his time to respond, carefully anointing a triangular slice of bread with butter, then blackberry jam, before tucking it under his top teeth. – Presently – he chews on the scrumptious irony – they shall be liberated to form the virile future manhood of the Britannic nation. This scheme of mine will, I think, be assented to by the great majority as being altogether more humane – and certainly œconomical – than the present mode of prosecuting the war. They sit opposite Stanley on an uncomfortable-looking high-backed wooden bench with asphodels carved into it: Bertie beside Adeline, Adeline beside Willis. Their heads are almost entangled in roses that twine themselves around a trellis. Their hostess – whose name Stanley caught, held momentarily, then lost – had excused herself a while since, saying, I must go and lash those Jerry corpses together with wire so the farm-hands may drag them away to be rendered down into tallow . . . He had thought her haughty in spite of the painted-over curse spot on her long top lip. Haughty and draped in yards of creamy chiffon – he was bemused as to what assistance the two odd hounds could give to her war work. Short-coated on their backs and heads, shaggy at their haunches, they bounded ahead of her as she swept through the orchard and disappeared behind the rounded end of a double-decker yew hedge.
