Umbrella

by Will Self

  More tea, Miss Dearth? Busner asks. The old woman – lady? – has an erect bearing, sitting straight up in bed. She speaks with a peculiar accent as well – cockney elocuted to death? No, she says, I think not, Doctor Busner, but may I ask – they dangle on her every clipped vowel, brown suede and black leather kicking in the dense atmosphere of the summertime ward – why it is that you refer to me as Miss Dearth, when my given name is Death, D-e-a-t-h, precisely so. I can conceive that such a name may seem not fit for a hospital – not encouraging . . . There’ve been times, I admit, when I’ve given ground to common superstition and styled myself De’Ath, but, so far as I’m aware, all my official documentation – at the Labour Exchange and suchlike, census forms and so forth – will have me registered as Death, Audrey. Busner and Mboya exchange looks – they hear what she says, they listen amazed to the way she is saying it: her small sharp chin is no longer digging into her sternum, her eyes are neither transfixed nor anomalously mobile in a masklike face – indeed, face and eyes synchronise together in the subtle interplay of normal expressiveness. Gone are the puckering, pursing and pouting of the Parkinsonian mouth, its compulsive grimacing, its incessant chewing. The presence of her dentures gives her jawline definition, plumps up her cheeks, and when she smiles – which she does – the prosthesis is perfectly charming. All this is, Busner thinks, still inadequate to the task of expressing the quality of her resipiscence – a return to good health of a miraculous nature. – I – I daresay Miss, ah, Death, that at least initially – upon your admission that is . . . he desires to chafe the backs of her hands, hold them palm-down and strum with his thumbs vein, bone and tendon . . . your details were taken down correctly, but that was a long time ago, you’ve been here at Friern Hospital . . . Busner’s cadences are low and hesitant, the extreme oddness of it all is threatening to gum me up . . . his thoughts have a jammy stickiness . . . and he cannot drag his eyes up from below the bed, where a baby-blue plastic potty loiters with obscene intent: the chambermaid has long gone – it remains . . . a very long time. Audrey’s face, scored into innumerable long-playing grooves scratches . . . – I know that, Doctor Busner – I am not a fool and nor have I been in a complete swoon these past years. If you wish to form some idea of the constitution of my mind, it may well aid you to think of me as a sort of soldier but recently returned from the Front, and afflicted with a very peculiar case of shell shock. Busner is caught and held, he realises, by the selenian serenity of her features. It’s a shocker: she is a beautiful woman, and presumably always has been. Turned at last from the darkness, she shines with self-possessed awareness of her own sex-appeal. – Can I ask you, then, Miss Death – and please, I hope this doesn’t offend you – what year this is? A cosmic anxiety disrupts the ancient’s face – her fingers travel to her throat, her face. – I . . . I . . . Well, you can hardly expect – she ironises herself with mock-gentility – me to bother with such commonplaces. Busner, wishing to let her off the hook, pulls the sphygmomanometer from his coat pocket and Mboya rises to assist – but Audrey has pushed up the cuff of her nightie automatically, it’s a conditioned reflex. While they make the routine observations – Pulse one-twenty, BP one-seventy over one hundred and . . . one-thirty over seventy-five – she attempts her own arithmetic: Is it nineteen-twen—, no, nineteen-thir—? She struggles to articulate the never-uttered decades, until her physician, despairing impulsively of making this in any way bearable, spots a copy of the Daily Mail left on a nearby bed and says, Grab that paper would you, Enoch. Taking it from him Audrey, unfolds its rattling skirting. She looks to her hands and stumbles, Wh-Whose are these . . . old hands, is – is this my morbid affliction? Then a photograph of the Lunar Roving Vehicle on the front page catches her eye. – What an otherworldly motor car, she says, the chauffeur appears to be wearing a diving apparatus – and the brolly they’ve mounted behind the dickey is . . . is upside down! She laughs, a jollily ascending lark the psychiatrist foresees shattering its skull on the transparent hardness of Now – but, recovering herself, Audrey becomes attentive to the paper’s masthead and soundlessly shapes the syllables of the date. Slowly she refolds the paper and, passing it back to Mboya, says to Busner, Will you ask the blackie to fetch me my dressing gown? He looks to see how Mboya is taking it, but the charge nurse, whose long legs are casually crossed, only smiles sardonically and jiggles one foot so that it throws back its flared cowl. You do understand, Busner says, the situation – what year it is, how long you’ve been here? She composes herself before she replies, interleaving her fingers and arranging her laced-up hands on the turned-back sheet. He watches this intently, alive to her tremor – is it increasing in amplitude, in frequency? She folds her Crimplene throat and says, Er-hem, the situation – as you term it, Doctor Busner – is indeed quite extraordinary, but bear in mind that for me it has been quite, quite extraordinary for a very long time. If this specific or paregoric, or whatever it is you’ve dosed me with – what d’you call it by the by? He says: L-DOPA. She says, Eldoughpa, eh, – well, if this eldoughpa stuff continues to do its bit, then perhaps I will have the opportunity to tell you quite how extraordinary it has been for me. However, now is not the time, nor can we sit here all day twiddling our thumbs . . . The post-encephalitic is doing just that, the digits twirling with exceptional speed and suppleness. Busner gulps, riveted by the spinning thing, until along comes Enoch, stately enough and bearing a lime-green Terylene robe, its shapelessness emphasised by his modest headway. The garment is ugly, far too big for her and with a horrid fake-lacy collar – he expects her to reject it, and perhaps for the unaccountable resurrection to end right here, throttled by its multitude of tiny nooses. But no: Audrey takes the gown, holds it aloft, throws back the covers, slides her legs out, rises and twirls the cape around her shoulders. In profile: the reworking of Annigoni’s Queen for whom the wonky bedside locker, the filmy-plastic water jug, the chipped green paint of the wall – all is folded into a backdrop, a distant landscape of blue ruled-over hills. Hands clasping the gown together, she advances perfectly steadily, – Excuse me, and Busner jumps up and pulls his chair from her progress – they watch, the nylon curtains clinging to them, as she proceeds the length of the dormitory and on into the rest of the ward. Stately, yes, and also legato, her hidden legs supplying the rhythm upon which her melody of movement is sustained, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo! The two men are seized by the akinesia of others of the others whom she passes by – one paralysed by a pillar, a second arrested half risen from a chair – and whom she nods to, acknowledging these frozen subjects of her icy realm. Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo! On she lilts in her own netherworld – the ill-lit tunnel system of her affliction. Audrey has a word to describe her condition: I am unmusicked, she would whisper to herself – un-mu-sicked, but now she’s musicked again. Another patient, not a post-encephalitic, sits at a table, a pencil in her hand its point inserted in a cogged Perspex disc that whirls in her fingers, throwing off graphite rings across the donated paper. Outside the windows it is early afternoon and a heavy summer downpour draws Spirograph patterns on the puddles spreading across the flat roof of Occupational Therapy. — What was it, Audrey reflects, that Gilbert had said – yes! A universe comesh when you shiver the mirror . . . shiver the mirror of what may appear to be – on the shuperficial level – the leasht of individual mindsh. Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo . . . I am the piano – my memory the roll, my thoughts Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo . . . The pane she leans her forehead against is hard and cool – that it is transparent doesn’t mean it isn’t there. He had said that thing and she was furious – furious! – that she had come all the way from Woolwich after a twelve-hour shift, braving the crowds in Beresford Square to struggle dangerously over the steering gear and ascend to the top deck by way of the stairway’s rail, paid her ha’penny and then another tu’pence on the tube up from London Bridge – escaping the thunderbolts underground toge
ther with thousands of others who lay there in mounds on the platforms – only to have him smuggle her like a common trollop into his rooms above the colour shop on the Gray’s Inn Road so that she might hear this – this! the puffed-up little popinjay declaiming these lines to her from his latest infantile fantasy, which lay there in light tinged greenish by the desk lamp’s shade. Lay there, line below line of his girlishly rounded handwriting in green ink, in a quarto-sized manuscript book covered with green morocco that sat upon a similarly mounted blotter, handwriting that described – or so he had glossed it – his approbation of his own works, blinding him to the depredations exacted by hers – a society of the not too distant future in which the sprawling cities had been gathered up into pinnacles of glass, steel and concrete, of the sort lately found on Manhattan Island, leaving the countryside free not only for agricultural production – since, due to the chemistry of Herr Haber, this would require a fraction of the arable land employed heretofore – but a new Xanadu of pleasure gardens, and indeed entire tracts that could be allowed to revert to their autochthonous state, the greenwood providing for young men who would otherwise, perhaps, grow too softly effete – what with the ending of all wars through the institution of universal plenty – to practise the old chivalric arts of queshting, joushting and sho forth . . . Audrey had been furious that she’d lent so much as an ear, let alone her intellect, to this lantern lecture, one that contradictorily diminished the magnitude of his pomposity and his conviction that it was his principles – rather than his weak lungs – that placed him on an upper storey of his own glassy moral pinnacle, one vastly elevated from the trenches where the Tommies choked to death on gas and blood, or the munitions factories where the Thomasinas lost their teeth and hair to quicksilver poisoning, or even yet the residents of a humble suburban villa near to Woking – three waif-like kiddies, a poor drab of a wife – who were lucky – according to Feydeau, whose general approval of his comrade’s freedom from all convention balked at this – if they clapped eyes on their father and husband more than once or twice a year. It had been cold outside – along by Mount Pleasant there were banks of refrozen snowmelt pitted with the city’s inexhaustible filth, and a special constable picking at the rime on his tin hat. At the hostel it would be colder still. Hating herself, Audrey had subsided on to the chaise-longue given to him by Venetia Stanley. Hating herself, she allowed him to unbutton, then undress her, in the smarting haze of his Logic smoke – and hating them both, she lay beneath him jerking not with pleasure provoked by his caresses but the repetitive motions of operating the lathe – twirling, cranking, pulling – that had been dinned into every nerve-fibre throughout the twelve-hour shift. Spent, in repose, there remained at least this charm clinging to Gilbert: his utter disregard of his pigeon chest or the scabrous pate that showed through his feathery hair in the steady illumination radiated by the large gas fire’s white-hot coralline elements. He lay back in her arms and used the cork tip of his Logic to link with smoky ribbons the surrender at Kut, the battle of the Four Courts, the routing of Villa’s desperadoes and Smuts’s Kilimanjaro escapade, pinning these to an immaterial map that showed the whole shtate of play, and how it was that – despite all contrary indications – the harmonioush reconshiliation of capital and labour under the leadership of the scientifically enlightened and philosophically minded was closhe at hand . . . Audrey deprived him of his Logic and smoked to its bitter end . . . His Dream, the postcard is captioned, the photograph is a montage: a Tommy stands beside a bit of fence fringed with sweet william and marguerites. His rifle dangles from his shoulder, lethal as a butterfly net, his cap tips back at a bank-holiday-boater angle, and a stubby pipe is tucked in his hand. It’s his wispy moustache and whimsical expression, as much as the ridiculous props and a painted backdrop of the setting sun cloudily encircled, that suggest the war is being fought near Epsom, and which make the peculiar womb that floats above and behind his head all the stranger: is the baby-face in the womb His Dream? Or does his sweetheart, in point of fact, bear no resemblance to this winsome thing – her hair pinned up, her lips pricked red – but is instead a fat baggage of a fishwife, her bosom sagging, her tongue coarse in her broken mouth? Gilbert snuggled further into Audrey, the featheriness polishing the side of her breast is this my mind child? He smelt of old flannel and fresh tobacco – she could scarcely contemplate the sordid business of rising, washing out her privy parts, then dressing for the fourth time that day: she had made ready in the dark at Plumstead, and when she arrived at the Arsenal changed into her rough ticken overall. At the end of the shift she had stripped it off, stuffed it in its bag and hung it on her hook in the shifting house before getting her incendiary hair down from its ugly net. Shifting house . . . Gilbert’s rooms were a sort of shifting house, one in which she changed – as did he, although the skin he stepped into was always either too big or too small for him: at times he loomed large over the city, his words uncial type at the head of newspaper articles, his speeches calling forth turbulent crowds, his chubby face with its dishrag of moustache affording him this curious distinction: a great weight of inoffensiveness. Wealthy enough, for a so-called socialist, his suit coat slung over the back of his chair showed wartime privation, the collar and cuffs turned, the buttonholes worked over. A tin of Iron Jelloids shone greenish on the desk, proof, if any further were needed, of her lover’s anaemic weakness. — There were six operations to be performed on Gilbert Cook – six operations to cut his threads, internal and external, and to cut his recesses. Audrey’s arms moved in and out, her fingery bits pressed into him here and then there – Ah! No! No – No! He bucked and squirmed and his heels drummed on the chaise-longue – but, thinking of the soot-black buildings and monstrous slapperti-slapperti-slapperti-bang! of the overhead belts that powered the lathes, Audrey swung her headstock over him and continued her operations automatically, kissing him behind his ear, at the nape of his thick neck – she was tired but her desire to control him was on direct drive, she could not stop until the fitter came to regrind her cutter. She smoothed over the swarf on his lower belly and grasped the fifth piece to gauge it and turn it upside down . . . Gilbert gasped, Oh! In the soot-blackened buildings that house the New Fuse Factory, they never see the shell cases, only the fuse caps, and of those caps Audrey sees only their pins. – Aha-h’n-ha-ha! Adjusting her position so that his left buttock wound into the very threading of her, Audrey felt the complexity of glacé silk moving over and under. – Ha-ha-h’n-ha! There was Iron Jelloid breath in her nostrils – they never see the shell cases, only imagine their smoothly tapered brassy cones thrust into the breaches of the guns by Vesta Tilleys in rational dress. They never see the shell cases . . . Gilbert Cook has insinuated his hand behind his back and so he plays upon her while she works upon him, until with a clumsy Oof! he sits up, leans over and retrieves the latex prophylactic from where it lies beside the chaise-longue, rolls it back on and puts it inside her, not troubling with the tin of lubricant. The cold rubber smells in her mind, the headstock completes its six precision operations, the fuse pin drops down on to the tray below, Vaseline spurts from the lathe . . . They never see the shell cases and yet without the utmost assiduousness on their part they will remain just that: cases, inert sheaths full of nothing. Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo, the little melody that the autopiano salesman said was by Johannes Brahms infiltrates Audrey not as melody but as the subsiding rhythm of their coitus – a term gleaned from a booklet given her by Hilda Peabody and read by dwindling candlelight in the matchboard cubicle of the Plumstead hostel. The oil – the lubricating oil. They issue the lathe operators with aprons, but there’s nothing done to protect their hands – the oil causes rashes, lividly pink corruptions of the skin that fill Audrey with funk, funk that in turn drives her on towards still more danger, past the Examining Shops, where defective caps and detonators are weeded out, down the muddy cobbled lane seamed by rails that runs between the new buildings, their tan brick as yet unbesmirched, surro
unded by freshly seeded grassy plots upon which swank newly planted trees in June’s green tulle. Beyond these lies the riverbank of reeds and sedge and marsh mallow, its white heads crazed a little by the wind. If she keeps her head level, Audrey can feel the last drops of astringent lotion cupped in their lower lids. Once every sixteen days they wash out the canaries’ eyes, and for the next five or six hours the world kaleidoscopes, doubly so if Audrey looks into the oily waters of the ditches dug around the Danger Buildings, which are connected to a larger channel that debouches into the river, spreading rainbow swirls within which stretch and curl the weird designs of those Futurists whose own oils she had seen with Gilbert Cook at the Manor House Gallery before the war. Was it this they had been attempting to portray – these spillages back into the past? The Danger Buildings have their own dirty-side canteens and on balmy days such as this the doors are left open so that sparrows fidget in from the wider world and peck at the crumbs that fall from the canaries’ yellow hands. Sitting at one of the long refectory tables, staring out through the doors, her mouth gummed up with potted meat, Audrey is confused by all the disruption: the ugly blare of a marching band hauling past the British Grenadiers is accompanied by this solo shout: Eight-five-seven-nine! Which also means Or-dree! Because for that old lay, the Deputy Principal Overseer, there are no names. A motor car pants past a chauffeuse at the wheel, and for a moment, framed by the doorway, Audrey sees a short kinematograph of a familiar right-angled triangle cleaving the sweetly choking engine fumes. – 8579, Death? The DPO is right by her, staring down at the remains of the munitionettes’ tommy – crusts, crumpled-up wax paper, tin mugs – with official gravity: for all her bulk she’s not the hungry-gutted type. – You are Death, aren’t you? She pronounces the name with relish, pleased by this exception to the rules. Yes, miss, that’s me. Virile, that’s the word for the DPO – instead of gussying herself up with key- and watchchains, she should be playing a trouser role. She says, Mister De’Ath, the Controller of Artillery Production, is here to do an inspection of the Danger Buildings – he isn’t, by some caprice of Jove, a relation of yours? Audrey is emphatic: No, miss, no relation at all that I’m aware of. The DPO hooks her thumbs in her broad leather belt. Capital! she says, in that case you shall help Mister Harris to show him round – come along now. She leads Audrey out of the canteen and then heads straight out through the shifting house. Audrey, still in her khaki overall, cap and Arsenal shoes, calls, Miss, I’m in my dirty-side togs, but the DPO doesn’t break her stride, flinging back: Well, young lady, you can hardly give him an accurate impression of the work we do here if you’re in your ball gown and pearls! Albert waits in the sunshine beside his official motor car: he is slender, youthful, so very tall in his top hat, emphasising cut-away coat and well-tailored striped waistcoat. The only marks of the burthen he bears are two comical smudges underneath his bulgy grey eyes that might be greasepaint. While he is introduced to her and Mister Harris, Audrey’s brother doesn’t show – as she knew he wouldn’t – the least sign of having recognised her. The Prime Minister, or so they say, has engaged a suffragette driver – Audrey wonders if Bert has been compelled to a similar gesture, but the young woman – girl, really – behind the wheel has the silly painted face of a debutante, and wears her peaked cap and gauntlets with the affected, dégagé manner of someone at a promenade concert. Moving through the shifting house under the drear light that washes down from the high windows, Audrey doesn’t hear the explanation of the safety procedures, but Don’t av any more, Missus Moore, Missus Moore, please don’t av any more! The more you av, the more yull want, they say, An’ enuff izzas good as a feast any day! And sees Rothschild brandishing his moustache cup so that tea spatters across the oilcloth, and Olive with dull eyes and the imbecilic expression of a calf soon to be poll-axed held to his cheesy cheek. Auntie, who takes care of the shifting house, shows the Controller the fillers’ fireproofed gowns and explains how, while soft and pliable when new, they are now stiff with the impregnation of mercury and powder. If you please, Mister De’Ath, we had better get on, says the DPO, there is a lot to see and I’m certain your time is valuable. In her tone Audrey hears not contempt but the steely resistance of a social superior forced to bend to an inferior. Bert, she supposes, must hear this off-key note all the time, although he gives no sign of it as the DPO talks up and down to him of the shift system, and points out the regulations posted on the wall together with hortatory posters: HIS LIFE IN YOUR HANDS, A CLEAN WORKPLACE IS ESSENTIAL. From time to time he turns to his secretary – a ferret-faced young man who has the crabbed walk of the club-footed – to ensure he is taking notes for form’s sake. – And over here, Mister De’Ath . . . they troop across to the ambulance basket and the DPO hands Bert the inventory, which he runs his Datas eye down, committing immediately to memory lint dressings x 20, Germolene tubes x 20, hydroperoxide ointment x 20, etcetera . . . Then the DPO, her frogging of key- and watchchains clinking, takes her leave: If you’ll spare me, Mister De’Ath, I must give the shift absentee list to the Principal Foreman . . . — Mister Harris pushes the swing doors to the Filling Shop and their rubber skirts drag in all the furious hubbub, the clatter of the chain hoists and the slap of the drive belts and underlying it all the relentless salvos of score upon score of wooden mallets, rising and falling and hammering a leaden rhythm into the Honeysuckle and the Rose. Moving towards the singing canaries, Audrey feels those other bodies carried between the shape of Bert and the shape of her: casts, plaster-white and plaster-light of Vi and Olive . . . and Stan . . . Missus Moore, who lives next door, is such a dear old soul, Of children she ’as a score! Bert, Audrey knows, sends small but regular sums of money to Cheriton Bishop, sums that enable their parents to keep Olive at home rather than sendin’ her to the booby-hatch. Vi is well situated at the GPO as a hello girl, her empty head filled with salutations, digits, valedictions, over and over. She is, Mary Jane writes, walking out with a —. – Miss Death? They have reached one of the benches where Trotyl and guncotton is wadded in alternate layers into the 50-pounders. It is clear that Mister Harris wishes Audrey to demonstrate, for he asks the canary to step aside – she does so, jaundiced hands fidgeting with the stuff of her tunic. The Trotyl’s aroma has sweet rotten pears insistence, that of the guncotton is pervasively metallic and oily, and, for all the ventilation, it lies in the air just as the handfuls of fibrous lather lie on the bench, one of which, heedless of his manicure! Albert lifts to his pyramidal hootah. Strange to think of him leaning back in a shaving saloon, guncotton covering his long face while the barber strops his razor . . . Strange to think, the Controller says – and, despite his voice being raised, it is evident he soliloquises as much as he speaks to the others – that when this material is subjected to a further process, it becomes constituent of silver nitrate, which is used for the kinematographic film. Audrey thinks, at least the Tommies have steel helmets now: everyone has seen the kinematograph, seen the umbrellas clustering in the muddy gutter, then lofted over the top into the buzzing rain . . . The guncotton in the Filling Shop, Audrey imagines, is already impregnated with all these quicksilver scenes: it has the power to throw up spouts of dirt, shatter the limbers of gun carriages, the fetlocks of horses, the skulls of men – or only provide the means to show this: the whirlwind reap’d for the dear, dear folks back home His dream . . . Albert, the Controller, wishes to know the precise detail of the routine, and so Mister Harris gives him the overall picture: the numbers on each shift, the separation of tasks, the forming, pressing and filling machines, the division of the sexes with skilled male fitters kept back from the Board . . . for now. When the Foreman defers to Miss Death on the matter of the detail, saying, We would’ve preferred to keep this young miss in the Fuse Shop, she’s a skilled lathe operator herself, Audrey interrupts, Pardon me, Mister Harris, I’m mostly concerned with the filling machines, but I do some manual work as well, as it pleases Mister Simmonds, besides it helps all concerned, we feel, to distribute the tasks a little more evenly
. . . Everyone sees what she means, which is that the Trotyl should be distributed a little more evenly. The canaries who for twelve hours a day take the wads of guncotton and pack them into the shell cases, then sprinkle in the Trotyl, then tamp this violent-rending-asunder-in-waiting down still more with mallets, before packing in more guncotton, sprinkling in more Trotyl, until . . . until no one in their right mind could conceive of all the mayhem crammed into the smoothly tapering brass cylinders, with their nipped waists and fetching bonnets. The canaries, who are paid a supplement that they spend on gay ribbons with which to lace their boots, in defiance of their grim and unflattering uniforms, the canaries, whose hands, necks and faces bear the sickly taint of the explosives they handle all day, the canaries, who trill cheep-cheep-cheep the home fires burn-ing as their own eyes smart, the canaries, who are, Audrey thinks, the little sisters of the blue-gummed pieceworkers slathering on arsenic – yes! a poisoned sisterhood, with their cheeks whited-out by Westray’s, no surprises, then, that they don’t want to av any more . . . She is done and leans her hip hard against the bench, the mallet dangling from her hand, the filled 50-pounder cradled in her arms, her burning cheek pressed against the cold brass. The Controller says, Thank you, and, tucking his watch back in his pocket, turns to Mister Harris and Mister Simmonds the Overlooker, who has come scurrying up, his moley nose questing for preferment. – With four fillers per bench and forty-eight benches per building, and assuming this munitionette is exemplary – say a minute faster than the representative filler – that means only thirteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four filled per day, insufficient to keep up with the rate at which casings are being cast and braised or caps turned. You will show me, Mister Harris, where you’re storing the unfilled backlog, a stockpile the men at the Front won’t thank you for.