by Will Self
slave relationship, in the Lacanian sense. I shall, Busner thinks, suggest he consider analytic training – introduce him to some people at the Tavistock, enough is . . . enough. Which is what Miriam says: Enough is enough. She’s no Missus Marcus and has drawn for him a final line to cross: Either we all go away on a proper holiday, together, or I’ll take the children, with the firm expectation very Miriam, that that you will not be here in this flat when we return. Not there . . . with the fired-clay tiles and the thrownness of pottery lamps, not there . . . with the straw placemats . . . and the book with the headless, legless woman-suit on the cover . . . handles at its hips . . . An image it would doubtless be . . . outrageous to admit – even to himself – that he finds . . . arousing. His post-encephalitic patients, he knows, experience a strange sleeeeeewwooooowing down of thought . . . the turntable dragging treble back to bass . . . a stickiness as oneinsightstrugglestodetachfrom . . . the next. A life in the day – also its exact opposite: a pell-mell—onrush of the mind’s stream that makes it impossible to grasp the shape of thoughts before they are . . . torn apart. Standing there with Marcus, he cannot tell which it is that afflicts him. Have they been like this for seconds . . . or hours? I’m com-plete-ly craz-eee – The thing I find most remarkable, Busner, Marcus remarks conversationally, is not the coming back to life of your enkies, but the mixed ward – I’d heard about ’em, of course, but it’s still quite a revelation to see male and female patients together. Seems to me this is the thing that’ll combat institutionalisation – at least until Mister Powell does away with the asylums altogether. Marcus strokes and pets his pot-belly in its tailored papoose – his expression as he looms over his younger colleague is kindly, at odds with what he says next: It’ll all end badly, Busner, mark my words – what goes up . . . Well, I detect in you a need to make a big splash, be the big I-am. I’ve asked about and heard you were mixed up with that buffoon Laing – I daresay this L-DOPA represents another cure-all for you, that having failed to do away with schizophrenia, you’re now set on abolishing another disease . . . One of G. C. Cook’s aphorisms, isn’t it: A universe comes to life when you shiver the mirror of the least of minds – but by the same token there’s the mirror cracked, the mirror shattered . . . Well, ahem, possibly I express myself a little forcibly –. No, Busner says, no, it’s fair enough, you must say what you think . . . And crush me . . . but please reserve your judgement until you’ve met some more of the patients, spoken with them. Marcus clears his throat, her-herg-h’herm, a lengthy and complacent gurgle. I came, he says glutinously, specifically to see my Miss Deerth, may we do that now? For what we see is what we choose, What we keep or what we lose for-èver . . . Sometimes, Busner thinks, the pop singers put it best, and to Marcus he is caustic: Death – she prefers her given name, now she’s come back to life . . . Don’t – let – it – die, Don’t let it die-ie-ie . . . Why, Busner wonders, am I quite so plagued by these tapeworms spooling through my mind? Is it my unconscious ventriloquising through Hurricane Smith? And there’s no thunder without lightning . . . — Is the figure dead? It’s a male – for certain – and lies on its back, arms and legs flung up and apart, neck and head also elevated. Perhaps, he thinks, such violent deaths can only be visited – graphically at least – on the formerly stronger sex. Is there a suggestion of neckwear? He fondles his own unnoosed throat sympathetically. The black silhouette sprawls at the base of an orange triangle outlined in black, above it – and presumably to blame for its violent spasm – there is a single bold lightning strike. It reads danger of death along the base of the triangle – which strikes Busner as not commanding, rather laconic: Were you, old chap, to shin up the pitted concrete stanchion and, by poising on that bolt and swinging your other foot wide, circumvent the bunch of razor-wire, you’d be able to caress the porcelain, grasp the crackling hum . . . Would you, he wonders, in the last jolt of time before your heart short-circuited, and you were left dangling and jerking, with rotten smoke drifting from your ears, be able to feel, with fingertips questing for life, the steely filaments plaited into this hank of high tension? Busner pants, breathless from his rapid descent down from Alexandra Palace through the green nullity of the park, and, although there’s no one about to witness his frailty, he disguises it as a sigh, Aaaaaah . . . Anyway, he decides, whatever my age, my weight . . . my training shoes would probably earth me. Between them on the stale cake of the path lies a single thick-cut chip – how awful to have this menu description readily to hand! Busner interrogates it with his gaze, tracking over the subtle tans of its fried glaze. Anything – fugue, or trance, or otherwise blind enslavement to the force of the subcortex, is better than this: the walk-in wardrobe labelled treatment room, the tight huddle of white coats and grey nylon tunics observing the niceties, Excuse me, d’you mind? While buckling restraints, checking the pulse, injecting the five mils of intravenous curare, and wiping the dried saliva of the last victim from the rubber mouth-guard. Aaaaaah . . . No one, he believes, would know me: a slope-shouldered and knock-kneed moseyer through a dusty São Paolo square, no evidence in my string shopping bag of the Nazi doctor I once was . . . Mid-afternoon and there isn’t a soul to see him as he makes his way through the Queen Anne wheelie-bin sheds and landscaped parking spaces of a, quote, prestigious housing development, unquote, We were only obeying orders . . . It was a sort of group-think . . . These Busner finds to be pathetic justifications, when the truth was: We were making it up, improvising . . . using whatever there was to hand . . . Before ECT they had put patients into comas with insulin, then resurrected them with glucose sweet life ebbing in and out of them . . . Or infected them with malaria, believing that the high fevers and hallucinations would drive out psychoses, a scorched-earth policy that was dignified: pyrotheraphy. Maybe these bizarre – and wholly unscientific – procedures had had some benefit, but only because of the fuss that was made over patients who otherwise were locked up on the ward and imprisoned in their own screaming heads . . . But really, the fuss was for the psychiatrists and the nurses, who dug holes in brain tissue and then filled them in – it was part job creation and part The Good Old Days: shticky plaster on the wounds, everyone involved a quick-change artist, rushing from unit to treatment room so they could do their turn . . . He had believed then – what? He hoped he’d been more honest than his older colleagues, who thought their manipulations were surgical, excising mad thoughts and the mad bits of the brain that thought them – whereas Zack knew that mental illnesses were creations quite as much as inflictions – worlds starker and simpler than those of health, but totalities for all that. This would have been back in the seventies, a white-lined decade . . . along roads . . . around sports pitches, and white piping describing your ball sack in the blackout . . . Sheepily thick sideburns that needed shearing – my own included. George Best . . . the corrupt and booze-raddled face of Reggie . . . Maudsley – Maudlin – Maudling . . . Each era . . . new and old blended . . . the utterly familiar paintjob slapped on . . . Then . . . along the passage of the years, appears utterly alien and distempered once more. How could we have gone there/thought that/worn that/mouthed that/read those/taken part in such happenings, ma-an? Didn’t we get it: Nothing comes of nothing. Standing before a bow window crammed with tulle, behind it the ghosts of strangers’ domesticity, Busner can no longer ask of himself, Where am I going? He knows – and understands also that using net curtains to guard your privacy is as futile, surely, as employing tenses to divide time? He sees the tubular-steel-legged beast of burden, smells the carbolic and hears the pathetic imploring of the Cordelia who’s forgotten to learn her lines and so imagines – I’d like to go back to the ward now, please, I’d – please . . . – that hers is a voluntary role: Nothing comes of nothing . . . What was his name . . . the black chap? Mugabe? No, Mboya, that’s it. He’d been far more pragmatic. It works, he’d said, we don’t know why it works but it does – and he always said the whole disgusting thing, electro-con-vul-sive the-ra-py, not the sanitised initials we all took
refuge in, so conflating it with its harmless and diagnostic cousin. Enoch said, Zack, I’ve seen men and women who were lost to the world come back after it – It. April radiation on the back of his neck as he moves on along the road, Preposterous! It’s not meant to be this way, the sun should shine in the past and in midsummer only, illuminating the tow-headed kids, hands clasped and swinging dizzily in just-threshed hayfields, it beats down on the huge roundel of the ornamental bed which had been planted the previous year with rings of blue lobelias, white asylum and red begonias for the thirtieth anniversary of the Few. With this target plainly before him Busner can no longer pretend to aimlessness – from the ornamental bed on the roundabout swings out all the rest of it: the diverging roads, parked along them the odd Ford Anglia or Hillman Hunter. He sees the waxy banks of rhododendron screening off the Willow Shop, the Staff Club, Blythe House and Villa No. 3 – he sees the lawns, lush green where the gardeners’ watering cans have wavered from the beds, otherwise parched tawny, in places scraped to grey by the repetitive circling of patients let out to be exercised by their demons. He cannot deny where he’s going, only cavil that while he did tape on the electrodes on occasion, I did pull the lever, pull the lever, pull the lever . . . but not at Friern, I never did it at Friern . . . For there, in case meetings, he hung back and made myself small . . . shrinking away from what he saw as simply another demonstration: electricity as spectacle, Humphry Davy at the Royal Academy, with admiring ladies looking on, pulls the lever and the nurses and doctors pointedly ignore the contortions on the couch, the bucking, biting and jerking, and the ozone smell and the singed-hair-smell . . . The sun should shine down on childhood – on his own and those of his children. He can see them – all except Mark, who stands at the edge of the lawn in the shadowland, already wearing at the age of seven . . . eight? his uncle’s life-mask –. The cars are tightly parked along Alexandra Park Road, with only an inch or two separating one rubber neoplasm from the next. So bulbous, the cars: vehicles in utero, in common with so much else in this timorous and ageing era, they’ve been shaped and smoothed so that their Thalidomide wing-mirrors and morbidly obese wheel arches can present no danger of death. Inside the steely cauls vestigial arms pull and push at levers, vestigial feet push pedals, the repetitive and compulsive motions damped down by an amniotic fluid of new car smell . . . They bounced when the current took them – a detail he had never heard spoken of: that their bodies were for long seconds vulcanised. If he glanced about the treatment room at that precise moment – whichever hospital it was in, the ’Bec or Napsbury – Busner would see the same studiously vacant faces bent to this strap or that button, or perhaps laying a technically conciliatory hand on the bound limb of the black silhouette that sprawled before them, Aaaaah . . . He’s reached a main road – beyond it electronic signboards on poles, beige-painted steel bafflers, waxed redbrick – all the gubbins of a newly renovated overground station. Or is it a hospital – because, now he ponders it, all the city appears implanted with hospitals: small cottage ones in detached villas and terraced rows, large concrete ones dating from the sixties, seventies and eighties that now house multi-generational tribes of the economically paralysed – then there are the glass- and wood-slatted ones, more recent these – that act as sun-traps for convalescent bourgeois. Not to mention . . . the private ones, which are ranged around courtyards, their mock-Regency façades discreetly masking the moans of OxyContin addicts. He feels the talismanic shape of his Freedom Pass through the soft stuff of his tracksuit bottoms – Freedom in what sense? Only a monetary one, for, far from allowing him to do whatever the hell I want, it’s sharp corner spurs me on . . . to train, tube or bus, where he must sit: conscious but completely powerless to influence the route taken by the vehicle – as powerless as . . . its driver. Hot grease spots Busner’s throat as he marches across the road in time to the p’pop-pop-pop-p-p-p-p’popping. He shushes along the privet alley, mounts the bridge, bongs over the tracks and descends to the Station Road, where, beyond minicab madrasa and fret-worked Taj Mahal, he locates a kiosk-sized café, in its window entrance gap-toothed lettering P E & ASH, 2 GG, A ON, AUSAGE, HIPS & EANS. There’s a newsagent next to the café – he might sit, the Guardian folded to a single column and tucked underneath the lip of his plate, as men of my age in all ages do, the eggy vapours condensing on the inside of his glasses, making it quite impossible to read about the cardigans being worn on the campaign trail. He is hungry – and the antidote for famine is well known: white sacks stencilled UN F D AD P O AM. But what was the antidote for chlorpromazine? Kemadrin? Kema- Kema-droll . . .? Chemodoll? It is as he exercises his liberty and the barrier opens that Busner realises: There can be no resistance any more – no gg or usage, no procyclidine or orphenadrine, let alone mere diazepam, can tranquillise the through train that blasts past, sending diesel shockwaves dirtying over him . . . Along comes Zachary, trailing guilty streamers and wondering only this: If time, the March Hare, has got there first – time, lolloping along the gutters, yellow lines toothpasting from its rear end, so that on the streets where this spoor has been laid nothing can ever stop again: the traffic must course on, just as the National Grid sparks through rail and brain. . . . Along comes a slow stopper, from where he stands by a Plexiglas-fronted cabinet full of these curiosities: berry-flavoured water, Skittles, A Mars a day makes you work, rest and . . . Busner can see a few passengers gathered by the doors, their bodies swaying, pathetic counterweights to the train’s mighty inertia. Gracie said this: that once, when she went see her people at Reading, she changed trains at Windsor and people were still speaking of it – how the Russian troops had come through in the night. One train must’ve stopped for a while, and they got out, walked up and down the platform, arm in arm, looking up at the Castle keep, their soft fur-lined boots soundless on the flags. Anyroad, the next morning all the slot machines had been jammed with rouble coins. Fancy that! Those daft Russkies trying to get out bars of Fry’s and what-not an’ juss loosin’ all their brass, they must’ve been browned off. Rouble’s probly a lot of money in Russiya . . . Audrey had only wondered: Do they really have slot machines on Windsor Station? but now she laughs good-humouredly at dear Gracie, who’s done so much to make the painfully cramped cubicle they share bearable – pinning up grey silesia over the single windowpane because it’s a trifle gayer than blackout cloth, although such fripperies risk the ire of the hostel’s superintendent, Missus Varley, who, maddened by whatever tincture it is she keeps in her own room – or the lack of it – dresses down the girls, slaps and fines them. Gracie, sucking on her bottom lip with her skew-whiff teeth, leaves off her rearrangement of the mementos with which she’s lined the single shelf above her black iron cot to say: Wotcher laughin’ at, Ordree? then comes over to where Audrey sits on her own cot, lays a hand on her arm: Aw! Yer not laughin’ at all, yer cryin’, aincha? Wonderment in this, because Audrey Death is known to all the canaries to be hard as nails. — Audrey looks at the sulphurous hand on the embroidered sleeve of her best blouse and says, No, don’t worry, dear, I’m not crying – or laughing at you – I’m only trying to stop . . . this . . . Her hands speak for her, scampering on her lap: fugitive creatures that, tethered by my arms, can flee no further. At first glance they appear seized by bumbling chance, only Audrey who experiences their darting and their digging from within knows it is not random at all, but a peculiar elaboration upon the repetitive motions they have been describing all day: the yanking of the levers and the turning of the hand-cranks that operate the filling machine, the hammering of the mallet she wields to pack down the last cupfuls of Trotyl and the final wads of guncotton into the shell casings. Yes, an elaboration peculiar and subtle, because it is not these motions alone that her poor hands replicate, there are also – in the casting off of looped forefinger and thumb – those of the turret lathe she operated for six months in the New Fuse Factory, just as the sideways flicking of her right-hand little finger represents the fossilised trace of all those grosses of p’s struck dur
ing her three years as a typewriter for Thomas Ince & Coy, Manufacturers of Umbrellas, Fine Ladies’ Walking Parasols, Garden Tents and Beach Pavilions, etcetera. More dreadful yet, the uncontrollable crooking of the thumb on the same hand reaches back still further to the hours of thimble drill at the National School in Fulham, as does the tweezering together of her left thumb and forefinger, a tic, Audrey realises, that occurs precisely once in every seven yanks on the invisible headstock lever, and which runs a hot wire through her nerve fibres from the needle drill that once accompanied it. – C’mon – come on! Gracie grasps the mad hands in hers and their energy runs up her arms, shivering her timbers. Dear Gracie, whose skin and hair now match, so that once she’s pinned it up and stands before the glass putting on her paint for the concert party, to Audrey it seems she is creating her drooping lower lip, her small eager pink eyes and her ever-so-slightly sunken cheeks for the very first time. Dear Gracie, who preserves in her tin trunk the dried-out nosegay he bought her at Barnet Fair, together with all the Field Service postcards Gunner John Smith has sent her from the Front – two or three a week – making a pack as thick as it is wide, which, on the one occasion Gracie permitted her to hold, Audrey could not desist from riffling, so that, despite their sender’s diligent crossings-out, they blurred into a single – and more sincere – incomprehension. Jingling . . . jingling . . . jingoism . . . Audrey hasn’t shown her friend the cards she receives from her own sweetheart – missives that in their own way are perfect complements to the Gunner’s War Office effusions. I’m ready, she says, blowing out the candle. Gracie has opened the door and the gasoliers in the passage make of the photograph of my own sweetheart on my own shelf an Ivory-light: Stanley Death, Corporal, Machine-Gun Corps, whose image floats in the central panel of a leather-bound triple frame, flanked to the left by the Cheriton Bishop Deers, and to the right by Violet the Hello Girl, posing in her VAD uniform beside a Doric column on the capital of which sits a field telephone. Stanley, lolling in his oval of lost time, his hair combed straight back from his fine brow, his face unsullied as yet by war or any other carnality, his expression proud and puckish, while between his creamy flannel knees there is propped one of his own flying machines, its flimsy parallelograms, triangles and circlets of wood and wire covered in glacé silk. Albert has only half the picture, Audrey thinks, as she walks behind Gracie along the corridor of the hostel – a single-storey cage knocked up expressly to house the canaries – and what can Datas do if he doesn’t have all the data? . . . So you’re wrong, sir! Audrey knows the Arsenal’s production not by statistics and calculations but by touch and feel. Of the thirteen thousand, eight hundred and twenty-four 50-pounder shell casings filled daily in the Danger Buildings, she adjudges a large percentage – perhaps as high as fifty – will be duds: the wadding too loose, the mixture of Trotyl and guncotton incorrect. Moreover, of the thousands of casings as yet unfilled and piled up under tarpaulins, in sheds and lean-tos, Audrey knows that many will have been imperfectly brazed and welded – the tonic wine of rainfall drips through their torn seams . . . Gracie, no more than the other girls whose boots rapper-ti-tap on the rough pine floorboards, should not be blamed – she should be walking out with her young man beside a giggling brook, white linen skirts pressing upon nodding irises and perky primroses, not serving as a helot under the whip-eye of Missus Varley, who stands grudgingly counting them out into the summer evening. The hostel’s superintendent, Audrey reckons, steals at least three shillings every week out of the ten the munitionettes hand over. Embezzles – and squanders still more on keeping the gas-jets lit solely to provide her with a pretext for barging unannounced into the girls’ cubicles, on the lookout for the little bottles of Sanatogen so many of them have come to depend on. Bottles she confiscates – and drinks. Dear Gracie takes Audrey’s arm and they follow behind the others as they scatter across the broken and uneven ground, raucous geese with russet and tawny plumage. Out here on the fringes of the city there are forlorn paddocks housing windy horses, the broken-down fences are kept standing by nettles – a jerry-built row of houses is unfinished, it simply stops short in a tumbledown of rabbit hutches and pigsties. Down towards Greenford a handful of factories up thrust their stubby chimney fingers, smearing sooty marks on the glowing sky, while from the unseen river comes the desolating t’t’t’tooooooooooot! of a tugboat. Long before the war and its blackout this region was, Audrey thinks, benighted – a dark penumbra around the London sun. The lych-gate of the mouldering church the girls wade past through meadow grass lies drunk on its perished hinges – the graveyard is coiled with barbed blackberry wire. Whence, Audrey fumes, will Gilbert’s gleaming towers and motor-car highways come? What machine can thresh plenty out of this chaff? Light stripes the underside of drapes and doors, delineating the church hall, and Gertie, the corker in the lead, turns towards it, striding high-hipped and more manly than any man, the others in her train. They are living in that precise moment of the earthly revolution when colour fades, silver nitrate dusts the grass and the gravel surrounding the hall, and gathers in drifts along the ditches – all is resolved into dark shapes and quaint silhouettes . . . We ’ad t’do it, didn’t we, Ordree? Gracie says out of the blue – and, despite the unexpectedness of this remark, Audrey knows of what she speaks, so, drawing Gracie tightly to her, close enough to feel the eccentric beat of her toxified heart, she replies, Yes, we ’ad t’do it, we ’ad t’do our bit, no matter what we thought about the sheer folly of it, and the dunderheaded vanity, we ’ad to set aside our own ambitions for the duration – we couldn’t abandon ’em over there. Dear Gracie whimpers, An’ . . . an’ I’m awlright, ain’t I, Ordree? Audrey recalls the peachy young thing in suffragette colours that she met at the WSPU meeting near Arnold Circus and is grateful that eventime has drained Gracie’s skin so she can with conviction say –. I say, says a one-legged boy with officer’s crowns on his collar and a comical fez on his head, who leans against the wall of the hall, you gels have a confounded cheek! The others have clattered inside and now the Honeysuckle and the Rose blooms out from the open door. – We’ve an absolutely spiffing feed all set out, and you’re loitering out here gassing. The boy’s jaunty air, the flash of the monocle across his breast as he swings round on his crutch to usher them in – are the false notes plucked upon his broken body. The cold black barrels of his pupils bore into his ghostly face . . . Chu Chin Chow. There is indeed a spiffing feed: bottles of ale and ginger beer, pots of meat paste, four large cottage loaves and a tin basin full of éclairs. We scrounged ’em from a baker’s in Sidcup, the boy explains, juggling himself between his crutch and a laughable pipe he should ’ave a rattle . . . Chappie said we were robbing him out of house and home, but when I marched the whole squad on to the premises, well, he could hardly refuse us – sacrifice an’ all that argy-bargy . . . He falls silent as the singing lulls to an end, its short-lived harmony supplanted by the ceaseless monotony of the anti-aircraft batteries at Eltham Palace. In here Audrey sees there is colour: the blacked-out windows have been dressed with red, white and blue bunting, as have a framed photograph of Queen Alexandra and a framed text of the Lord’s Prayer. There are poesies of summer wildflowers tied with ribbon to the chair backs – it’s as gay as all get out, apart from the vellum faces of the poor cows, and the broken and bandaged bodies of the British bulldogs – whose hair shocks from tightly wound crêpe, their faces are masked by it, their arms are slung in it, and, as Audrey travels from wound to wound, the Tommies commence their own miserable rondeau: We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere! to the accompaniment of Jews’ harps, mouth organs improvised from combs and tissue paper, and the grim drubbing of an upright long past tunefulness: Rainin’, rainin’, rainin’, always bloomin’ well rainin’, Rainin’ all the mornin’, Rainin’ all the night . . . is seamlessly joined, then smoothly gives ground to: Where are our uniforms? Far, far a-waay, When will our rifles come, p’raps, p’raps one da-aay –. Why, asks Gertie the corker, do they still sing thes
e songs? They’re home now . . . A chubby-faced sergeant hangs on her words but cannot answer – has he not noticed the orange tint to her exuberant locks, or wondered why she wears white cotton gloves to nosh on an éclair? He sweats copiously, labouring over his next breath, H’herrr, h’herrr, spittle greenish and blood-flecked gathering at the corners of his mouth. B’herrr, he manages, b’herrr – then fights his way through the tangles of tobacco smoke to the door and is gone, heaving, into the night air. Audrey ignores Gertie’s question – because surely it’s obvious: they sing the songs of over there, because from now on and forever they will remain over there – this is no quick turn, the chairman will never hammer them off. There’s no escaping it – lying in flooded shell hole or bloodied dugout, the sleepers can never awake! Every faltering trump must surely be their last – yet still another h’herrr comes, there’s no gassing – they’re all gas cases . . . The Welsbach mantle in its wire globe flares brighter than the sun, Missus Varley, her face caricatured by Bass – Insist on Seeing the Label! – stares through the cracked pane of forced gaiety at Audrey, who sinks down on to a providential chair and discovers herself eye-level with the groin of the boy-amputee. He – or a draper’s assistant – has pinned the trouser leg up under the skirts of his tunic so that it appears that half his leg remains, but now, from the way the cloth lies flat, Audrey can tell it’s all gone. Behind the complexities of his button fly she knows of this: the aimless target of traumatised flesh and sawn bone, his poor little ding-dong a’donging down there in the dark, boneless, never able to support him . . . She leans forward, hugging her nausea to her breast, seeing amputees hung about with false legs: the pleats of an irrational dress that hides where they are divided. Her breath catches, then curdles in her throat – the hands that Gracie stilled go to work again, finding a plastic wheel and twisting this, seeking out a moulded handle and yanking that. The tabletop tips water into a lap that’s ceased to exist — for she’s lying flat on her back with the young officer saying, Are you all right, Miss Death? She thinks: How does he know my name? She thinks: there was smoke from his pipe and the fags of the others, smoke caught and combed in and over and pulled through, and now there filters through the disinfection of the ward this litany: Guards, No. 6, No. 10, Peter Stuyvesant, Kensitas, Senior . . . Senior . . . and again: Guards, No. 6, No. 10, Peter Stuyvesant, Kensitas, Senior . . . Senior . . . Busner is strongly inclined to supply the Service, what harm can there be in it? It’s so very sad to hear this plaint of longing from the next bed, as he bends to the handle and cranks this one upright. Since he’s resumed smoking Busner sees smoke everywhere – although the patients are forbidden to in the dormitories, he sees it here as well, bluey-grey and strained by the white bars of the bedsteads, curling up brownish to satirise the fire-resistant ceiling tiles – above this hypocritical ceiling what? the original Victorian plasterwork, egg-and-dart, scrolls and scallops . . . petrified smoke. Her paper-thin eyelids crinkle – but don’t retract. Marcus has been enthroned on an easy chair dragged in from the day-room, and Busner bows to him, saying, She’s extremely elderly now, as you can see. Marcus holds a mug – Tottenham Hotspur’s cockerel prances around it. He deigns, Yes, well . . . obviously. I mean, she was well advanced in middle age before the war. Well preserved, though, had a head still – full head . . . of striking red hair. She’ll need some consoling for its loss. Busner is grateful the older man is talking to him at all, I need consoling for my loss. Biddable patients are rewarded by the nurses with cigarettes – latterly they’ve had to reward him as well. Dazedly, Busner examines her: blood pressure, pulse, instead of an intrusive thermometer a damp hand against her dry forehead. Eyes shut, Audrey listens to his huffing – smells it smoky and sour. She has no patience for his air of perpetual bumptiousness – already she understands that he expects a lot of her, and if she struggles to make sense of this strange new world it is only in order to deny him . . . everything. I do believe she’s awake, Busner, says the other one . . . Marcus? Another Jew-boy, but she remembers him as upright, handsome, correct . . . dapper, moreover, always willing to speak to me as if I were a sensible person, notwithstanding that I couldn’t reply. Until now. Marcus puts the cockerel down on the adjustable table that Busner has levelled and leans forward. It is not, Busner thinks, a face I’d like to be confronted with immediately upon waking from a half-century’s nap – that duckbill and those gaping nostrils would hardly console me for the loss of my hair, my life, the world-that-was and everything . . . east of Aden. Still, Marcus can at least perform this senior service: to act as a time chamber within which Audrey can rest a while as she’s decompressed by his chat – all that heavy Victoriana, the lead-glass domes sealing off stuffed and supercilious dodos that must stand about on the dusty tallboys and dirtied doilies of her mind. Marcus can sort out all this bric-a-brac and in its place tell her about . . . about . . . polystyrene – yes, that. And PVC too. He can introduce her to the ringing emptiness of inflatable plastic chairs and Habitat lampshades – and to nets clinking with glass floats strung along the walls of trendy bistros. He can bring her up to speed on the flatulence induced by home-brewed –. Oh, good heavens! Audrey cries, eyes wide open, Who on earth is this old man! Busner, worried that he’s about to get the giggles, abandons himself to his craving: I think I’ll leave the two of you alone for a while so that you can get . . . reacquainted. He strolls away down the dormitory, looking in on the right at a Rodin draped in sheets and left in storage: Missus Gross. In sympathy with his overworked staff, Busner’s disappointed to note that her niblet of a husband isn’t about this afternoon — since awakening, Gross’s voracity has become still more excessive: she bullies the nurses, compelling them to bring her whatever they can scrounge, and, terrified that she might . . . perhaps, roll over and crush them, they do: worker termites in the service of a tyrannical queen. Outsized plates of chips from the staff canteen, steel basins jumbled with stale éclairs and the big mixing bowls shivering with the jelly she particularly favours – jelly she incorporates into her own wobbly Tupperware with loud slurps and percussive lip-smacks. As a practitioner Busner is disappointed the proper Charlie isn’t about to fetch and carry and cadge, thus taking the pressure of her monstrousness off his staff, – but as a civilised man he is glad: no one person should have to deal with this. Good afternoon, Leticia, he says, attempting a breezy neutrality. She looks up from the mirror of a powder compact with which she’s been examining her face in many tiny eyefuls. I’m delighted, he continues, Angel Delighted to see you take an interest in your appearance – it’s been a long time since you’ve cared . . . The indefinite nature of this long time is deliberate on Busner’s part, although of all the post-encephalitics Leticia Gross is the least affected by her time-travel – from hot jazz to teeny bop she hasn’t missed a beat, and the velocity of her internal metronome is immediately evident: she drops the compact into the mess of screwed-up sweet wrappers and gnawed lolly sticks that Busner now notices is shoved between the sheet and her slab thigh. As two flies wobble aloft, she puts her disconcerting sky-blue eyes on him and, splitting her baby pout, buzzes a speech, Idon’tknowabouthatDoctorBusner IonlyknowwhatIdoesrightnowwhenwe’retalkingtogetherwhenI’mthinkingaboutthewaryou’venonotiontherewasnothingtoeatatallnonothingtheydidn’tgiveussomuchastherationwhichwewererightfullyentitledtoshockingehifCharliehadn’t’vecomeupmostdaysIshould’vestarvedhegavemebreadofftherationthat’swhatitwashetellsmenow’courseIdidn’tknowatthetimehalfgoneIwasothersin’eretheygavesomemuckto’emandtheygotawfulsicktheirhairfelloutandeverythingb’lievemeonthisoneit’strueIswear . . . that he is able to understand – with difficulty – only because he’s taken the time to sit with her, concentrate and measure the prodigious speed and accuracy of her diction with stopwatch and tape recorder, so discovering that she can reach five hundred words per minute without missing so much as a single syllable. From deep in the core of Leticia Gross – I’dliketoknow exactlywhatitwastheywerefeedingthosepoorsoulssomesortagruelremindedmeofburgoonotthatIhadsuchb
utmyfatherservedintheGreat Warandhesaidtheygave’emasortaporridgeofcrackedwheatbutthiswasn’twheatCharliesaysitwascorntheygotfromtheYanks – these waves of healthfulness vigorously radiate, penetrating all the fatty lagging, and in the ten days since the L-DOPA has winched this colossus up Busner has spent as many hours alone with her, entranced by the exactitude of her recollection, If only Marcus could be bothered to pay attention to this: HewentdowntoCarswellStreetwherethey’dopened uparecruitin’officebuttheysent’imback’omesayin’therewasnocalljustthenformarriedmenbesides’isjobwhichwasasafiremanatthattimeonasmallPortAutoritylighterwaswhatd’yousayessentialthat’sithewaswellpaidmindweallus’adshoesan’nicethings, perhaps he would change his tune – after all, could the organic damage really be that extensive if it left this much intact? Moreover, the forced quality of her reminiscence was a phenomenon Leticia Gross was perfectly well aware of: thereIgoagainDocrabbitin’on, so that to follow the insightful thread paid out by this ever-wakeful Penelope was to enter the labyrinthine night-without-end before L-DOPA, so as to experience alongside her its narcolepsies, sleep paralyses and daymares of premature burial. Leticia revealed to him the lowering underworld of the post-encephalitic, wherein the myriad tics, jerks and spasms acted to bore the tunnels and hollow out the burrows required by a multitude of subpersonalities – selflets, which were at once regressively primitive and highly organised. The revolting urges of the aggressive woman-mountain – her hoarding of crumpled rubbish, crusts of bread, her own faeces! were in his eyes only the behavioural counterbalance to her astonishingly lucid overview – it was Leticia who told Busner how she had to match everything, whether in the phenomenal world – one teaspoon aligned with a second, two hairclips with two more – or that of ideas, for, she said, she could not think of anything without picturing it mirrored, yoghurt pot-with-yoghurt pot, pain-with-pain. Alerted to it, Busner then found evidence of this tendency to symmetrise in all the others – although Leticia’s own coinage for it, arithomania, seemed more apt, conjuring up as it did the past she had been torn out of, its newsreels of single figures surging together in Chaplinesque festination to form a silent murmuration of people . . . On the third day Busner had given Leticia a Biro and a large stiff-backed exercise book that she could prop against her sugarloaf belly. He had done so – he now accepts – in expectation of some redemption: her purging herself through clarity of expression, eloquence – all the usual rot. Now, opening the marbled covers, he’s overwhelmed to discover the impetuosity of her thought has been replicated in her script. The first few pages are patterned with a dense and incised cuneiform that presses Brailleishly into the verso, the next recto and several more besides – but from leaf-to-leaf this convolvulus throws out suckers, at first to the lines above and below, then further afield. Ten pages on an entry headed with yesterday’s date consists of only four and a half words, Imusthaveanenem— – the Latin absence of spacing corresponding to her splutterance – that take up an entire page, which, when he turns it expecting confirmation of her paranoia, is followed by a perfectly formed a stretching top to bottom and side to side, Giotto’s circle . . . He isn’t altogether surprised, because the bizarre – and shameless – anal fixation that Leticia Gross’s journal reveals has already been relayed to him by the appalled nurses, and at that precise moment is echoed by her hoarsely bellowing, Imusthaveanenema! Imusthaveanenema! Imusthaveanenema! the imprecation following him – blushing, shamed – as he beats a hasty retreat from her nook, turns tail and speeds towards the nurses’ office. Wits are collected into two lots as Busner fiddles filter-tip from foiled sachet. 1. I could, he thinks, alter her dosage of L-DOPA and maybe try her out on some amantadine to see if this has any impact on these . . . these . . . side effects. 2. The perfection of that a is surely, he hypothesises, another facet of the symmetrising – it is diagrammatic of a smaller a – or a larger one. Mister Ostereich – if he’d stayed in Vienna he could’ve been part of its School . . . had told Busner there were times when for him any symbols – words, numerals, pictorial – were experienced as a sort of map, one that if concentrated on became a map of a map that was itself a map of a further map. This strikes the psychiatrist – sucking in, holding, eyes pricking with teary relief – as possibly the phenomenological correlate of the post-encephalitic mind physically mapping the manifold under- and overlays of its own hellish pathology. Immured in glass, Paaaah! the substantial cloud of dun smoke releases him: a tubbyish genie in his early thirties wearing a wrinkled white coat who props on the corner of a steel desk painted institutional grey-green in the distant reaches of a North London mental hospital while Evonne Goolagong thrills the Centre Court crowd by flashing her frilly knickers –. Hephzibah Inglis snaps open the door and bustles inside in a flurry of annoyance. – ’Oo say you can take me fags like dat, Doc-tor – go buy yer own! I spec’ you earn what? Four mebbe five times my pay – you should feel shame with yersel’, and she snatches up the pack of cigarettes and tucks it away in his tunic pocket, For fuck’s sake d’you want a number-bloody-one? In the kissing pink of dawn Stanley sees a lipstick smear of privation bow across Bobby’s white face. To cheer him up as they make their way into the eerie woodland of splintered trunks and fractured boughs, Stanley puts on the toffee nose of Grahame-White and says, I say, old fellow, what a splendid show! But only Feldman, who’s hefting along Vicky, manages a laugh. Stanley knows why: laughter can be nothing but a cackle around the Devil’s cauldron – the smoke from lachrymatory shells clings to the shredded foliage, while at treetop height woolly bears detonate with flatly malevolent crumps, shedding shrapnel and dirty black fur. — The section had come up through Naours and Saint-Gratien, stopping from time to time to consult the field-issue maps that were, Stanley thought, maps of maps that were themselves only the maps of all this . . . fucking confusion. They’d swung along the chalky road to Albert, where they’d been issued with steel helmets and side arms. Now, as he stumbles over roots and tears himself from brambly embraces – dragged down by the deadweight of his pack, Vicky’s spare barrels and the Colt .45 – Stanley marvels at the sentimental feelings he harbours for the Redoubt – the almost leisurely stand-tos, with such homely noises as the cheeping of baby rats, the breezy rattle of tin cans caught on the wire, and the very occasional dull whiplash of a Jerry sniper’s bullet. At Crucifix Corner, where the bulk of the infantry were wheeled left towards Thiepval, the section had tended right in the direction of Fricourt, then slowed, picking its way between the locust masses of men feeding upon the land . . . The barrage is due to be lifted any minute now, and, although the machine gunners will hang back, the fear stirs in their guts, churning them, so that one after another Stanley’s comrades fall out to puke their burgoo and the sweet ghost of their rum ration. Stanley alone remains free from nausea – true, he feels its accompanist fingering his throat with great sensitivity, and so is able to scent the difference between the shells as they shriek overhead towards the German lines. He sniffs judiciously at the pitch-pine vapours that drift down from every second or third one, and which he identifies as . . . eau de dud. Not that it’ll make any difference – we all know, they all know, even the fucking top brass know by now that artillery fire, no matter how accurate, can never breach wire. The projectiles plunge down and the wiry embroidery hoicks up lazily to expose for long and salacious moments earth-soiled bloomers, then tumbles just as lazily back into place, only a little disordered by the violence of the assault. He feels fear – I’m no Enigmarelle, no automaton. He feels fear, and in the din that jumbles up his works – the cogs, gears and springs that keep him moving relentlessly forward – he rummages for the sureties of childhood: If you ’ave any more, Missus Moore, I dunno what we’ll do, I’m sure! Our cemetery’s so small, There’ll be no room fer ’em all! Don’t ’ave any more, Missus Moore –! The Long Toms and howitzers firing from miles back have stopped. The curved and delicate eggshell of light fractures with the reedy pee-eeet! of officers’ whistles. They drop down into a sunken lane, passing the heavy ammo boxes f
rom hand to hand. One we did earlier: a staff officer lies back against the bank, his dead face quite composed, his ridiculous cockade embellished naturally by fronds of bracken. There’s nothing but Tickler’s jam, Tickler’s jam! where his bottom half oughta be – nearby lies his enormous Percheron horse, quite still but without a mark on it – which is some sort of relief, because now the barrage has lifted they can all hear the screaming of horses and mules hit by the premature bursts of . . . those fucking duds. Stanley feels fear as he quick-steps carefully between the cloddish hooves – he conjures up the Old Man taking the lead along the lane, the skirts of his rabbit-skin coat flapping, the friendly smoke from his seegar chucking jolly little clouds over his shoulder that sport in the steadily strengthening sunlight. Corbett, who has the mastery of map work, consults the small square of where-we-are and they mount the bank again, back up into the rotten-egg stench of the gassed wood. Stanley feels fear – he knows fear: the breathless terror of numbly pulling on the flannel bag, becoming enshrouded in chemical reek, the where-we-were reduced to a small square of mica that frames popping eyes and gaping mouths, while diaphragm heaves, chest shudders, head spins with the . . . effort . . . not . . . to . . . breathe –! Paaaah! and the world disappears into his own mist. Stanley feels fear – but he feels hunger more. The worst thing about this entire fucking war, he thinks as they skulk towards the light and the relentless chattering of the enemy Maxims, is the lousy fucking poverty – the eleven measly bob a week, the hard biscuit teeming with weevils, the piss-green tea, the chatting along the seams of shit-browned long johns, the bully beef – and the rats, cleverer than the men, crawling on their heads while they slept to get food bags hung from joists. Had it been a dream, or was it when he’d served briefly as a batman? The piss-yellow champagne foaming in real glass goblets, bloody big bowls of rhubarb, cold meats fanned out on plates, or else quivering in aspic. A phonograph set up, triplets of piano notes d’doo-doo-dooing from its flaring muzzle. An entire salmon – naked, boned and laid out on cucumber petticoats –! Ha! He laughs aloud at his own idiotic maundering – for no officer, no matter how well supplied with cigars from Fox’s, cocaine pep pills from Harrods and the latest Rudyard Kipling or G. C. Cook from Hatchard’s, could lay his lily-white hands on a whole salmon! No, they’d partaken of mutton chops, right enough, with new potatoes, peas and string-fucking-beans . . . – Some more, sir? As he manipulated a pair of spoons, in their eyes the least of individual minds . . . a wop waiter at Simpson’s, Stanley had prayed devoutly for a Jack Johnson to KO them there and then, silence the scratching tune and their daft banter. He had been born to soar aloft, yet here he was dishing it up to these pink-faced shavers. – More beans, old bean? Ha-ha! – underground, in a tomb-in-waiting. One side of Stanley’s pack drags heavier. Down at the bottom of it, stuffed under the shit-stained long johns and the scrounged bully, is a pair of Luger pistols wrapped in a German officer’s greyback and shoved in a pickelhaube. Pausing to catch his breath, his hand laid tenderly on a deep and evilly jagged gash in thou, gentle hornbeam, Stanley identifies the helmet’s blunt spike digging into his kidneys thru’pence, frying in their own blood and piss . . . His comrades hang on to such things as souvenirs – but these aren’t: they’re arms for a future rising. He sees himself still in uniform but wearing the pickelhaube – he stands on the front steps while the parlour maid, distressed by this apparition, trips away to find the master of the house, who comes to the door with a sheaf of official papers in one hand and a horsehair flyswatter in the other. Well, what d’you want my man? asks Albert De’Ath, feigning not to recognise his brother. Stan raises the Luger and holds its barrel against Bert’s raw oyster. Four million rifles, Stan says matter-of-factly, two hundred and fifty thousand machine guns, fifty-two thousand aeroplanes, twenty-five thousand artillery pieces and one hundred and seventy million shells, Am I right, sir? Albert for once takes no umbrage, only bows meekly to the inevitable. Stepping over his surprisingly corpulent dead body, Stan strolls along the hallway to what he supposes is a breakfast room. Here a potted palm cascades on a stand, and rack of freshly made toast steams on an oval mahogany table. Stan takes a piece, butters it with an ivory-handled knife, then pushes it whole into my dry mouth – the corners stabbin’ the insides of me cheeks . . . It tastes of boot blacking – and cordite, beyond any shadow of doubt he is scared – terror is the ground vibrating beneath my feet, ground that heaves a hundred yards in front of where the section has taken cover, its piecrust buckles, earth-juice spurts flashing tastily into the cacophonous four-beat b’-b’-b’-boom! that should have preceded it. Stanley is scared – and his fear is a hungering: he could eat the hornbeam for a joint, the tangle of undergrowth at its roots for a salad. He could crunch up Vicky’s three spare barrels in their webbing bundle – and shovel down a box of ammo for puddin’. He could eat and eat and eat – no one, he wagers, has ever before experienced such a shameless voracity. He will consume the dead Mutton Lancers and the straggling back Scots Guards, he will help myself to the ruins of a small farmhouse and its shattered outbuildings despite their already having been feasted upon by the Hun’s artillery. He will feed his way across the broad and churned valley, then munch his way up the chalky rise, snaffling the bodies of the fallen, using their bayonets to pick his teeth, until he reaches the wire, rolls into it and kips the kip of the stuffed. Then . . . later . . . no enemies any more, only the sweet . . . sweet enema of putrefaction: Bliss! Ah, well lads! Corbett shouts the second the barrage lifts. S’pose we better get forward and put up the ol’ um-ber-ella! And forward they go, inching their way snail-like around giant clods and raw gouges until they reach the cover of the remaining brick walls — a lovely situation for Vicky, what with a smooth bit of tiling to set her legs on, and the bottom half of a window to poke her muzzle through. Dark burgundy dapples on broken red pantiles, there’s a botheration of greenbottles around some two-days-since dead thing – and, for all that, miraculous damsons still whole on the one remaining branch of a scythed orchard, and Vicky rat-a-tat-tat-trilling with pleasure between his hands as Feldman, legs spread and top-to-tail, feeds her the belt. It would be pretty cushy were it not that even with his pack off Stanley cannot help but wrench his head up and around to the left, where some invisible object compels his attention. As they reach the end of each belt, back goes his shoulder, round and up swings his head. Now, now, Stan, says Corbett, keep steady at that range – and he crawls forward to check it. Stanley understands wherefrom comes his compulsion: for hours and days now, weeks slotting into the canvas pockets of months – so that the entire year and a half trails across the foreign field – he has lain on his belly listening to the incoming sing over the machine gun’s drumming, and his spasmodic assessments of whether – and if so which way – he should go for cover have left him with this permanent crick, this, and his magnificent powers of espial: the Tommies’ queer superstition is also Stanley’s addiction to counting by threes – three fags, three shells, three lots of food, three nights, three days, three brass, three rats, three cups of vino, three tots of rum, with three of any-bloody-thing it’s always the third that’s got your number, so watch out for it, keep counting, always keep counting. They fire continuously for hour upon hour, the bullets spitting in a jet low across the valley. Every fourth round is a tracer to help them keep the range – but the day is so bright these are barely visible. They change one barrel and then the second – they run out of water for Vicky’s redingote by about ten thirty and, with no source readily available, take it in turns to piss in her reservoir. The smell of hot urine intensifies the Devil’s fart of the cordite, the sweetly rotting flesh of fruit – and men. Terror gathers in the gun’s grips and shudders through him with the recoil – it might be safer, he thinks, if he were to flit back through the wood with Luftie on the ammo run – although the truth is that for Stanley there can be no danger of death, no dark patch spreading across the tiles. His asinine moniker has put paid to that – each new man who joins the Death squad
has this impressed upon him: ’E’s a fucking ’uman rabbit’s foot, the Lance ’ere, or a Cornish pixie – go on, lay yer ’and on ’im, ’e won’t mind . . . There can be no danger of death when it’s death who’s the danger, a transposition that sets Stanley off on another futile train of thought: Why is it that he has this overpowering need to match things up, to put a box of matches in one pocket if there’s a box in the other, to ensure there are the same number of rifle cartridges in each of his pouches, to wind on his puttees with an equal number of turns? And it isn’t only things – ideas, fleeting apprehensions, the ghosts of formerly finer feelings that flit across the waste land of his terror, all must be married up so that they precisely match: two-equals-two-equals-two, an iteration of equivalence that he fervently believes will cancel out the lethal threes. Vicky giggles about this: rat-a-tat-tat, rat-a-tat-tat, and she sings also: We’re ’ere because we’re ’ere because we’re ’ere, as she tickles the backs of Stanley’s hands with her trigger guards. And, despite the absence of the land ironclads and the presence to the west of a river lazing through its bends, there is a similar neat vee in the chalky bluffs against which the machine gun cries out, and so he is enabled to make the necessary pairing between Norr and . . . here. Three years have passed since he stood by the window of the empee’s country house and Wallie, Wallie, Wall-flowers, Growing up so high – All these young ladies, Will all have to die . . . The men in their creamy-linen uniforms spoke, as he recalls it, of Bulgaria and certain alliances and the Irish – it was always the poor fucking Irish, dying for a post office or a sessions – and here is Stanley Death raining down death on a Daimler he cannot see but which he is busily disassembling, his bullets methodically shearing off one mudguard, then the next, drilling out the spokes from the wheels, unbolting those wheels from their axles, hammering the chassis into scrap, and finally pulverising its engine into all its component parts.
