by Will Self
All cheeks are rouged but Audrey’s – who is used since infancy to Albert’s prodigious calculations . . . Am I right, sir? His skin has an unhealthy colour and his body, Stan thinks, is twisted out of all decency. His is a curious character, being at once a gibbering wreck and a Tartar to boot. He has scratched himself a sort of dugout behind a cattle bier built with the glossy-red bricks used in these parts. — Am I right, sir, Stan repeats, you’re not able to go on? The officer cowers – he’s lost his cap so there’s no real way of establishing to whom he belongs, if anyone – he could even be a spy – there’s talk of such characters: immaculately shined boots, in officers’ uniforms but without regimental badges, members of an international army of the higher orders. The others of Stan’s section are boiling the dixie for tea and propping opened tins of maconochie in the embers of the fire. He’s a tall man, the officer, which makes his craven-baby posture each time one of the 4.7s that surround them fires a salvo all the more pathetic. But whenever the bombardment ceases, his voice resurges, building in timbre and volume until he speaks with parade-ground authority: You mustn’t imagine, he says, that I’ve always been as you see me – I’m a regular, I was with the BEF at the beginning of the whole show – you understand, Corporal? I was seconded to the French Fifth Army, but not for liaison – I’m NOT STAFF! – yelped above a salvo that rolls away to a serenely ignorant horizon. In its wake Lufty says, Steak, tripe and onion, and Feldman counters: Fried fish and fried taters . . . We were near Châlons on the Marne, the officer continues, it was a fine summer evening like this – except, he snorts, not like this at all because it was beautifully silent, YOU KNOW SUCH EVENINGS, CORPORAL, when the light begins to fade to the west and this becomes in some fashion mixed up with all that silence, A LARK CRYING OR A DOG barking in a farmyard sounds as peaceful as the breath of a sleeping babe . . . There is a longer lull in the firing and squatting down Stanley scrutinises the officer: the man is, he thinks, at least forty years of age and has the mobile wishy-washy face and buck teeth of a rabbit. His madness Stanley views compassionately only as this: a soiled and ill-fitting suit of clothes he wears on top of his uniform. Kills all insane persons in fact? Yes, in mercy and in justice to themselves . . . comes to him, an exchange between characters in a torn book recovered from a dugout after a direct hit, a novelette about a perfect New Amazonia of the far future, wherein stately Hermiones and Beryls do away with the feeble-minded . . . by means of the black drop. The smell of the heated maconochie has become in some fashion mixed up with the elemental cordite, and so Stanley considers this: might it be possible to eat a field piece? – We were sitting there watching the sunset – the officer sits hunched in his crazy billet, his moustache scratching between his well-tailored knees – the Frenchie and me both smoking our pipes, and the fading light was precisely, mark me, precisely like the silk chiffon sleeves of the dress my sweet young wife had worn to the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy, what . . .? Maybe only a month or so before the Boche invaded, when, without any warning at all, the WHOLE HORIZON BURST INTO FLAME . . . All scenes of this nature are, Stanley believes, deathbed ones. All speeches of this type – halting, impassioned – are valedictions demanding mourning right away. He has heard more than my fair share at the Front, and come to believe that they summon the bullet, the mortar and the shell . . . Fuck Widow Twankey ’ere, says Lufty, who’s come up to the ruined bier and stands with his steaming mess tin in his hand, looking down at them. Lufty’s nose has a bloody knob of cotton wool stuck to its end with plaster, his chestnut hair is all awry, his brown eyes blink uncontrollably . . . Fuck Widow Twankey ’ere, he says again and kicks a toe-load of the parched earth on to the cowardly officer. Stanley relapses still more on to the resounding ground, NO, he shouts, BRING ME OVER MINE – I’ll ’ear ’im out. Go on, he says to the officer, who, now it’s been said, he recognises to be more panto’ dame than rabbit, GO ON! It was . . . the officer resumes in the aching silence after the concussion . . . an artillery bombardment on a wide front – the first either of us had seen. Up until then – and this was August of ’14 – no one had ever seen such a thing, you understand? Stanley nods and takes his own mess tin from Bobby, the Squad Number Five, who’s shaking almost as badly as the officer. It is a measure of how far gone the man is that he does not respond to the smell of the food – he is beyond any sustenance, out there in the shadowland he has captured and holds alone. Horror gripped me, he says, like a bloody bastard ague – y’know, Corporal, that Frenchie and me, we were regulars, we’d seen war but it was war with hard blows and straight dealings – now we both knew, as we looked upon that curtain of fire, that everything had changed, that this . . . thing – whatever it might be – had us in its grip, it was holding us tight in its grip, it would keep us in this grip SHAKING WITH THE EFFORT of holding us so tightly, gripping – and it would never let go its gripping. D’you see? All the shells, all the mines and the mortar rounds – your machine-gun ones too, they’re only its shaking, d’you see? The shaking of that MONSTROUS HAND WHICH never moves, can never move.
The officer has extended his clenched fist: it shakes above Stanley’s mess tin, but he goes on wielding his spoon, dipping for the blackish lumps of potato and flipping them aside. Each time the nearby battery fires another salvo, the officer’s wrist jerks dramatically, And whosoever will let him take the water of life freely . . . Stanley rattles his teeth with the corner of the mess tin and the watery broth bleeds from the sides of his mouth. He rises up from his haunches too fast and the fuchsia sky and white gun smoke swirls about him, then he staggers, rights himself and kicks the dust from furrow to furrow of the fallow field, the mess tin dangling from the end of his arm, turnip flecks . . . balling in the dirt. A few paces from the smouldering fire Corbett and Feldman sit either side of the belt-filler. It pulls Feldman in by a length of pocketed canvas, and it rotates Corbett’s arms with a turn of its hand-crank. It resembles, Stanley thinks, a giant apple-corer, but instead of peel there’s this lumpy tongue of .50-calibre machine-gun rounds. Pull, rotate, pull, rotate . . . so the belt-filler makes use of its animal components: pull, rotate . . . pull, rotate . . . On the far side of the tumbled-down fence the jellyfish of camouflage netting rises and falls soundlessly . . . in this ocean of noise – the gunners, stripped to the waist, scamper about the heaving creature, their devil’s tails of braces bouncing on their backsides. Up above an aircraft comes whining back from the lines – a Blériot Experimental – Stanley can see from five hundred feet below the black box of the camera clamped beside the cockpit, and the delicate damsel flies him back to the models he made before the war – how he had thrust himself suddenly silver skyward . . . there to stare directly down upon a broad green field across which surged flying wedges of blue-coated hussars, their cuirasses and helmets coruscating, a battle elegant and silent excepting a piano accompaniment . . . — When they came into the trenches at the Redoubt, the London Pals withdrew, leaving behind their hastily buried dead – rotting hands and feet punching and kicking from the parados – and their rubbish: a litter of tin cans that rattled in the night as the rats did their rounds under the singing wire, and their stupid fucking signs: Leicester Square, Piccadilly – Fulham Road too – painted with blanco on to bits of board that they’d stuck in the mud. They had thought, Stanley understood, that they were making of these corpse-heaps and grave-craters a landscape that neared home – with the fosses of Hampstead and Harrow and Crystal Palace lumping up in the distance, and the tidal flats of the Thames between them and the Fritzes. — He had seen it differently: London, the workshop of the world, with its cutlers, welders, carriage-makers, turners, pianola-assemblers, piecework cobblers chewing on brads ’til they spit blood – London, with all its frenzied bending and shaping and fabricating this-out-of-that had really been an anticipation of this. Standing in the July field, his cock in his hand, piss thick as soup hosing the earth between his boots until it liquefies, Stanley Death feels his way towards a future he already occupies, a f
uture in which annihilation will be assembled piece by piece – a bayonet thrust here, a trench mortar going off there, a shell arcing way over there where the Eindeckers strafe the trenches, but all of it under the same roof and part of the same process: the bantams and the big ’uns, the puling varsity boys and the hobbledehoys fed in from the railheads, each one sheathed in buff, then fed on into the reserve trenches, then hand-cranked to the front line, then methodically taken apart. It was indeed as Bertie had said: they were of the third category, and so were to be subjected to the noise that went beyond noise, shaking bone in flesh and flesh in skin, until all that was left were maconochie in the mud and the rest in streamers hanging on the old barbed wire. Although my Lord Skull was wrong about the machine guns: their ceaseless hammering manufactured not turmoil but a perfect system, one that holds him in thrall, leaves him standing cock in hand. Many of the Tommies – half of Stanley’s section included – believe as an article of faith that the war will go on forever, that having reached this state of absolute stasis – the armies evenly matched, their offence and defence cancelling to nought – that it can never stop . . . leastways until the last two men are poised, rifles parrying, bayonets pricking, and so topple forward into eviscerating extinction. Finally putting it away and strolling back to where the others lie, stunned by their feed and the barrage and a bottle of vino they pass from hand to hand, Stanley dissents: It is a matter of time, he thinks, of how you understand time: Nisi agit non est. The scientific adventurer pushes forward the crystal bar and the days zoetrope past and the housekeeper zips through the flickering laboratory again and again. He pulls up on the bar and she does it backwards, again and again. The drapes swish open and swish closed, the wind rises, falls, howls once more and the walls crumble away to leave him in his complicated cage of an apparatus, the weeds coiling up about its posts, struts and ribs . . . still Stanley is there, it is now – now and forever Feldman lovingly oiling Vicky, poking the rag into the grooves of her water jacket and running it along them dexterously. The others – Lufty, Bobby, Corbett and the Sergeant – are playing crown and anchor, laying the mothsoft cards down tenderly on an ammo box. They behave towards one another with elaborate and superstitious care. Luff may have stage fright, being the newest member of the cast, but the others have seen many performances – they cannot believe they will all make it through the forthcoming big show. But why not? Now is forever, the jellyfish dances in the ocean of noise, the shocked officer lies in spasm on his side, his hands and feet sketching possible trajectories in the dirt that follow some map or plan long since encrypted in his otherwise jumbled mind, Marcus must’ve come in by the main gates, turned right off the roundabout and puttered along the preposterously named Western Avenue, passing Blythe House, Villa No. 3 and the Upholstery Workshop, then manoeuvred his way between the spur and the Occupational Therapy Annexe, before finding a place to park. Busner watches him from above as he unloads his scaffolding-pole arms and legs from the car – that it would be a Morris Traveller was predictable, although not in fact a prediction the younger psychiatrist had made. What could be foreseen, he thinks, was that these portable biers would soon enough be dumped in the cabbage patch, their olde worlde bodywork – half timber, half sheet metal – rotting into compost. Marcus, his feet splayed, bends over to carefully lock the car’s door before disappearing from view. He must know, Busner thinks, of some secret tunnel into the castle keep . . . But surely, he says aloud, meeting Marcus at the ward’s entrance, it wasn’t still there after what, thirty years? The old man looks him up and down before replying – Marcus appears more intent and focused than Busner remembers him from the spring. He eyes Busner’s white coat . . . he’d like it off my back. On the contrary, he says at last, change at the Hatch was always a drawn-out affair, Shabbat without end – maybe it’s why I remember the nights best. There was no requirement for me to be there, of course, but that awful . . . inertia was more bearable in the darkness. Some nurses patrolled from ward to ward – perambulators they were called – others just sat there by their nightlights, no reading . . . sitting there – another kind of catatonic, if you see what I mean. Walking with Marcus from the nurses’ station into the day-room, then into the dormitories, Busner is grateful for at least some bustle: a cleaner mopping a glossy-brown coat on to dun lino, Hephzibah Inglis clopping by on her hard heels deigning to smile, Vail coaxing senile Mister Hedges to eat none too gently . . . Why, Busner puzzles, do I want the ghastly bloody place to look good? But he knows, it was always thus: each time he returned to Redington Road, his skinny legs bruised and his flabby tummy pinched, his trunk wadded with laundry often distempered by his own fearful piss, he’d soon enough be extolling the school’s virtues to Uncle Maurice – how they’d won so many rugger matches, not that Zack had been playing – or put on a splendid As You Like It, not that Zack had been acting, although acting was what he did: nothing could be allowed to tarnish the lustre of the Founder’s Trophy. And now – as then – Busner longs to run away and hide . . . Enoch emerges prefectorial from a curtained-off cubicle and, introducing them, Busner expects racialism from Marcus – but far from it, he loves thy neighbour and shakes his hand warmly while Busner explains, Mboya is my right-hand man, then launches into a little speech: I honestly feel we’ve achieved an amazing breakthrough here, Doctor Marcus. You said when we met that when you were here in the thirties it wasn’t treatment you were engaged in but trench warfare against mental illness – just now you said that any change was a drawn-out business, well, I believe L-DOPA is our . . . our . . . tank – it’s enabled us to break out of the trenches, to end the war of attrition and to make a rapid advance! Busner cannot take back the note of stupid triumph, or ignore the shadow of doubt that passes across Marcus’s face. They have reached the first post-encephalitic patient, Reginald call me Reggie Voss. He came back to us, Busner says, last week – Monday, wasn’t it, Enoch? Yes, Mboya says, Monday and on a comparatively low dosage of the drug. Marcus stoops down in his three well-made pieces of suit despite the heat, and brings his duckbill in to Reggie’s soft and guileless face. They must be, Busner thinks, close contemporaries: the tall and short – yet what worlds separate them! Marcus ironised by his own imagined sufferings – and those of others – Voss just roused from slumbers innocent of napalm and Calley, spy planes and Apollo, what dreams must he have? May I ask you, Marcus says, what it is you’re doing? Reggie, outfitted by Oxfam, sits in the chair by his bed, a stack of some sort of certificates on a tray across his knees. Each of the thick cards is impressed, in green, with the stylised silhouette of a tree, and as he speaks he continues uninterrupted the task of taking one, signing it with a Parker flourish, wafting it to dry the ink, then adding it to the pile of the already authenticated. These, Voss explains, are trees in Israel – I mean, he laughs, not the trees themselves, obviously, but the p-p-p- – desperate that his guinea pigs should perform well, Busner nearly intervenes, but Voss recovers licking spittle: shlupp-upp-p-paperwork for ’em. Y’see – he continues signing and speaking – I’m by way of being a Zionist, if you know what that is, and just about the time I was taken poorly there were grants and purchases of land being made. I’d plans to go out to Jaffa, y’know – yes, yes . . . and now I’ve discovered that all we dreamed of has come to pass! Then . . . he falters . . . I found out that both my parents had passed away – a terrible loss, yes, but when Cyril – Busner whispers: His nephew – told me there was this sum of money that was mine in the Cooperative Society’s bank, well, I knew pronto what I oughta . . . that is make for them – grow for them a memorial . . . in our homeland. Cyril – a treasure he is – looked into it all . . . the whole business, see . . . Busner anxiously notes the flapping of Voss’s left hand, his breathing is rapid and shallow – the former, he hopes, is merely gestural, the latter not tachypnoea in the Parkinsonian sense but healthy excitement . . . now they’ll have a forest of their own! Yes, the Charles and Hester Voss Forest! On the heights above Hebron, with cedars of Lebanon, yes, oaks and
all sorts – yes! Voss’s slippers thrum on the lino, ink spots dash across the candlewick bedspread. Marcus covers the dumpling hand with his large and bony one, It is marvellous, he says – but then as they leave the forester he turns snide: From Burnham Wood to Golders Green, eh . . . Busner ignores this – he’s struggling with the resurgence of his own palilalic verbigeration as he tries to impress on Marcus the miraculous character of these . . . – Renaissances, rebirths – that’s what they are. Really, you must understand, Reggie Voss there – he was manifesting the most extreme opisthotonos – bent back, right back – and ticcing all the time. He could barely speak – only grunt, barely feed himself let alone go to the lavatory – and now you see him, Marcus, d’you see him –. – Yes, yes. Marcus puts the same dread hand on Busner’s arm. I do see it, Busner, and I’m of course familiar with the condition of post-encephalitic patients . . . their insensibility, their agitation . . . Does he really remember, though? Tormented by the idea that Marcus takes me for a charlatan, Busner bridles his enthusiasm, and, as the unusual ward round progresses, he attempts to give a calm clinical picture of the reborn. It’s hard, though – what to say of Andrew McNeil, who, before being started on L-DOPA, was so hypotonic he couldn’t be propped up in bed let alone maintain a seated posture, whose voice was a faint whisper, whose face was twisted into a grimace now anguished, now terrified, whose troubled sleep was indistinguishable from his waking nightmare, and who, upon resurfacing from the stagnant pond where he had floated face up for more than forty years, told the psychiatrist he had experienced it as a continuous present, an awful and unchanging Now? It occurs to me, Busner proposes as they stand watching McNeil – red-nosed and ruddy-cheeked, a garden gnome, happily engaged with a crossword – that it’s movement that’s essential for the formation of memories – that memory is a somatic phenomenon, and so if a mind can no longer manipulate its body in space, it loses the capacity to orientate within time . . . He tics with his tie, and would reach for a Biro to note this insight down were Marcus’s expression not so hopelessly sceptical . . . The ward is hot, the angled casements seem not to vent the sodium hypochlorite vapours and urinous eddies, but only draw in the far-off shushing of traffic on the North Circular. — Busner is gripped by terrible doubts. Is it all a dream, my dream? Is it me who needs awakening? The elderly patients stirring for the first time in decades . . . turning to one another and speaking with such animation, not of their ordeal but of a universe of trivia regained: ballpoint pens and Nimble bread . . . might they be better off –? He can only press on: I’d like you to meet Mister Ostereich here . . . De Gaulle standing tall, back turned to his visitors, he does something to a photograph frame with a flannel . . . He’s the most, ah, eloquent of the patients who’ve been given L-DOPA. Ostereich carries on wiping – so Busner persists with his own flannelling: He has described for me vividly what it’s like to think of nothing – yes, thinking of nothing, he says, is not the same as thinking nothing, so, no Zen state of enlightenment at all but . . . but a dreadful copybook sort of arithmetic, two-equals-two-equals-two, like that, over and over again. Or else, I am what I am what I am – like that, but this isn’t an ex-is-tential question, it’s only . . . only an iter-iter- . . . iteration of identity, its fact, nothing more, two-equals-two, I-am, d’you see? Marcus withers at him – Mboya appears anxious, Busner is saved by Peter Cushing, re-emerging from the laboratory of his past and including them all in a stare both accusatory and baleful. He says, For all this time I now realise that I was a sort of picture frame, you best believe it – quite like this one . . . He fumbles with the clips, Mboya moves to assist him, but Ostereich wards him off . . . No, no, no need for you – I have it, like this, see, tip-top . . . Ostereich has freed the photograph, which shows uniformed bandsmen stiffly posed around the brassily silent cacophony of their instrumentation . . . This is me . . . he holds the frame in front of his face . . . the framing of nothing, I had lost the general idea of what it was to have . . . a general idea! His tongue comes out to moisten his lips and Busner wills it back in! no fly-catching today, thank you very much . . . Ostereich’s nose was broken, Busner imagines, in a Vienna playground in the early nineteen hundreds – he couldn’t have served with that name, at least not in the British Army. Gratifyingly, Marcus is disposed to engage with Ostereich: And now, he asks, how do you feel now? The reborn one’s Adam’s apple bobs, his milky eyes well. – It is . . . It is . . . he chooses words from a child’s lexicon . . . altogether fab-u-lous, quite gorrrgeous! Germanic r’s are ironed in to his locutions . . . I feel that Doctor Busner here must have transfused me . . . He waves the flannel and the photograph . . . taken my diseased blood and replaced it with champagne! As they leave the Viennese behind, Marcus says, You think yourself, what, a Christian Barnard of the mind, is it? That it’s as that confused old man says: you’ve transplanted their brains – or that it’s as simple as apheresis? No, no, man, no drug could do this – no matter how revolutionary. You’ve seen results from pathology, I assume, you understand the histopathology, yes? You’ve seen the full extent of the lesions in these patients’ brain stems, hmm? This is real observable organic damage, Busner, scrambled eggs – you get that, yes? What Busner appreciates is the pecking Missus Marcus must’ve been subjected to as for aeons she lay flayed on the plastic runners of the St John’s Wood flat, together with cold cushions, the bony elements of old gas-fires, chopped liver . . . going off. He can taste the despair. Marcus is, he reflects, the sort of man who, tiring of civilisation and all its discontents, wants to be alone – yet insists on someone else being alone with him: a hostage, the Geoffrey Jackson to his Tupamaros guerrillas. Still, there’s no real harm in him – he cares. More than anything Busner desires the approval of this near-homonym of his uncle, so he holds his breath and counts one, two, three . . . now that five of the post-encephalitic patients have begun to care for themselves the staff’s workload has lightened – their tigerish bitterness poured back into its tank. I think . . . he at last exhales, that you may be underestimating the brain’s capacity for functional reorganisation, Doctor Marcus. It seems to me that science is not well advanced enough for us to assess the impact of a global dopamine deficit – you see . . . these patients, living statues they were, and now see them: doing crosswords, signing certificates – speaking, like Mister Ostereich, with great insight about their condition, surely this proves that health goes deeper than any disease? Mboya continues to hang about nearby – Busner senses his mind churning down below, keeping him hovering on this wide smooth apron of the moment, while beyond there is sea spray, the crude shapes of Channel freighters . . . Where does he live? Tooting – and alone: a used tea mug set down on an old laminated wireless . . . a carpet cleaner, its brushes furred with lint . . . The long journey to Arnos Grove every day, his black hair brush drawn through the smutty flue – he says he doesn’t mind – he reads. Busner knows this because his charge nurse is more up to date than I am, and talks over lunch in the canteen of the veil, and the master–
