Umbrella

by Will Self

  Adeline sops up Audrey’s face – her eyes swell, cheeks plump up, lips thicken, as she absorbs pert nose, trowel chin, flaming auburn hair. An Ophelia, she thinks, of a Pre-Raph’ sort, lying on her back not in water – but in the effluvium of manufacture, her madness – a sort of palsy – obscured by this murk. She says, I confess, I cannot see much of Stanley in you, my dear – nor of your elder brother. Audrey is dismayed – a reagent that converts most of her ire to raging curiosity, and she effervesces: Have you met him? Adeline smiles and says, No, though I’ve read enough about the phenomenon that is Albert De’Ath in the newspapers to feel as if I have –. The girl returns with a trestle that she kicks open beside them, then goes out and comes back again with a laden tray of tea things that she sets down on it, Chinese or Indian, Miss? she asks, but Adeline says: That won’t be necessary, Flossie, we can manage for ourselves. Once the girl has gone, Audrey, rubbing freed hand with gloved one, says caustically, It’d be no affectation at all, Missus Cameron, if you were to ask Flossie to take some tea with us – I hardly think she’s any more socially inferior than I. Adeline laughs unaffectedly – nor does she commit the crime of saying anything at all. Settling back in the settee, Audrey feels her wet petticoat chafe against her calves. Adeline inquires after preferences: Milk, lemon, sugar? – The tea has a perfumed aroma and a mildly brackish taste: Oolong, Audrey observes, Gilbert used to have it all the time before the war. Now he blames the Kaiser’s submariners for upsetting his beverage habits. Adeline raises one perfectly plucked eyebrow. Is that all he blames them for? she says, and this is evidence of a sympathy that has flared up between them, here, beside a tall vase of late-flowering hydrangeas, here, where a volume is laid casually on a window seat, The Forsyte Saga on its spine, here, next to diamond panes rattled by the October storm. — Night has arrived expectedly, and Adeline rises to draw the curtains – which are cambric and decorated with diamond patterns of tiny yellow flowers to match the yellow-grained wallpaper. I might roll my dampness across them, Audrey thinks, impress myself upon them – repeat the pattern of me: I-am, I-am, I-am. Adeline says, I thought that I’d enjoy the house far more than I have. I take the blame for all the wood panelling, the shutters and the frankly rather . . . asinine furnishings. I’d thought – well, what? I suppose that by allowing the medieval inclinations of our celebrated architect full reign he’d create for us a paradisical setting within which the old ways might be re-established . . . old honesties . . . the barriers between man and woman, mistress and servant, might . . . dissolve –. She interrupts herself with more laughter: Utter bosh, naturally – worse than bosh, a species of cant. Two years ago I had a local joiner come and cover the panelling in here, then I had it papered as you see. It’s here that I spend almost all my time – it’s a pleasant enough room, gay and bright, yet no sooner did your brother go to France that it became . . . well, a sort of tomb for me. Oh, a flowery enough bower round it – she stabs with her teacake to the right, the left – I’ll grant you, but still a tomb and moreover one that’s inside of this tomb of a house, which in turn is lodged inside another sort of grave altogether. Please – please don’t think I ask for your sympathy, M-Miss D-Death – Audrey? Still, she has it: the squirming of her on the settee, the grabbing and twisting of a small cushion in her strong hands, is far from refined – not pretty at all. The pine cones spit a resinous scent that should be pleasing – especially when mingled with the fresh flowers and the butter liquefying on Audrey’s teacake. It matters, Audrey sees, that as Adeline manipulates so is she manipulated by those vast and impersonal forces that hold all small beings in thrall. She has not only Audrey’s sympathy but her pity as well – which would surely push her further down into the bloody mud. Poor, poor privilege that availeth you nought . . . Such good causes . . . the clamour of which presumably once filled your echoing time, are now those that augment the power that has robbed you of your lover – a loss that has, if it is possible, parted you still further from your kowtowing husband, who sits in the echoing House, raising his topper when instinct moves him to baaa more platitudes – while you . . . you are like Gilman, with time enough on your soft hands to be tormented by your wallpaper . . . Adeline is convulsed by the giant’s fingers pressing into her breasts, her sides, the softly vulnerable pit of her – they poke her unfeelingly – she is nothing, Audrey thinks, but an instrument with which to communicate the trivial nature of human sentiment, a telegraph key repetitively jabbed dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, or a Hello Girl’s switchboard into which are thrust the hard points of connection, when all the giant wishes to convey is goodbye-goodbye-goodbye . . . You must, Adeline sobs, forgive me, I do miss him so awfully badly . . . She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve, presses it to one coon eye, then the other, staunching her uselessness, her passivity. Audrey, whose own hands fret with the myriad shocks following on from her work, has at least this consolation: that she is a part of the giant – an infinitesimally small part, perhaps a hair twisting on the muscled expanse of his back, but, for all that, a part – whereas this fine lady is nothing at all. Audrey bites into her teacake, savours its warmth and delicacy – bread is at tenpence a loaf, and its price rises more and more, leavened by the blockade of Canadian wheat. Her hostess should be out there in the wind and the rain and the darkness withal, sowing the winter seed and clad in travesty: a kirtle gathered at the waist by a plaited cord of sisal. There – not in here, in her gay tomb, bemoaning the days when the goings on of the SPR or the anti-vivisectionists were enough to fill her empty life with meaning . . . Did you, Adeline asks plaintively, have much news from him – any letters? Audrey is angrily piteous – not dishonest. No, she says, Stan was never a writer – a reader, yes, when we were kids we all read, but before we little ones could he went to the library, read the latest scientific romances, then told ’em to us – that’s me and our sisters –. She stops, then resumes: But not writing, not even when he fell under the sway of your friend Willis, no . . . especially not then. And you, Adeline, did he write to you?

  They sit there watching the fresh batch of pine cones Adeline has thrown on the fire go up in smoke, and Audrey muses, Are we parties to the same eldritch vision? A Zeppelin downed by the guns that subsides, all its fiery cathedral of buttresses, arches and beams burning in the night sky – then: the dull ashy corpse of it scattered across the furrows of an Essex field, the ruination of flight – Icarus, raped and defiled for the readers of the much attenuated pages of the picture papers . . . I have, Adeline says, one or two of the models that he made – of flying machines. Willie wants very desperately to play with them but I shan’t allow it. I have these too. She rises abruptly, crosses her candlelit tomb. Opening the lid of a writing case, she withdraws a package of postcards tied up with black ribbons like her hair that he loosed. Audrey knows what they are – she does not bother to feign interest when Adeline unties the bundle and passes them across, only flips through them as she might a novelty flicker book, engineering not movement but this stasis: I-am, I-am, I-am, I-am — for what Stanley Death had done with these Field Service postcards was the same as he had with those sent to his sister, and doubtless to Samuel and Mary Jane Deer as well. Whereas the authorities had enjoined the writer to cross out one phrase or the other to create the semblance of a missive, Stanley had scored them all through except for this essential declaration: I am quite well, I have been admitted to the hospital sick/wounded, and am going on well/and hope to be discharged soon, I am being sent down to the base, I have received your letter dated/telegram/parcel, Letter follows at first opportunity, I have received no letter from you lately/for a long time. The command Signature Only had been deleted as well, as had the stentorian If You Make Any Other Mark on this Card it will be Destroyed. When Audrey received the first of many such as these, she had wondered at the response of the military censor to her brother’s furious effacements of all but the fact of his existence. Packet after packet full of men dispatched across the Channel, wave upon wave of them sent over the top, b
ag after bag of these pathetic cards posted back to Blighty, it was all, surely, a product of the same narrow-mindedness: no order had been disobeyed, so Stanley’s cards might be passed. Or perhaps the censor – who Audrey envisaged sat in a safe bureau, miles from the Front, beside a warm stove, a glass of something to hand and a Froggy doxy too – was amused by initialling these crazy ragtime communiqués, so scrawled PFL – it was always the same man – laughingly. I-am, I-am, I-am, – two I-ams per card, scores of them sent to her, to Adeline – and no other words from him in the ten interminably lengthening months since he had returned to France. I-am, I-am, I-am – a magic spell, chanted by a terrified child in the drained-out nothingness before dawn, I-am, I-am, I-am – Audrey sighs dispiritedly, aware suddenly of her own flickering existence and deathly fatigue. They both know that only one product derives from these formulae: that . . . he is not. – You don’t imagine –. Adeline cannot continue. She tries again: They say missing and presumed . . . so you don’t think –. And once more fails. Neither of them is a believer – in Jesus or Pan. All hope is abandoned – all vitality drained away . . . the rain that drives against the window is no more than . . . evaporation, condensation, caused by fluctuations in temperature, air pressure . . . all eminently, tediously discoverable . . . no mystery: he is not. Adeline binds the wound, returns it to the writing case. She pulls the plaited cord of sisal and, when Flossie enters, asks for whisky, soda and the cigarette box. When they have come Audrey sips fire and smoke, then rises from the settee to flick brimstone on to the fire and lifts her skirt to dry her petticoat. Adeline says, Forgive me, I should’ve proposed a hot bath and a change of clothes when you arrived, most remiss –. – Thass orlright, Addyline – she slurs and cockneyfies deliberately – you ’as made the hoffer now, an’ I ’umbly accepts. — The bath is over six feet long, with sides so high that as she lies in the puddle of hot water at the bottom of it the enamelled rim gravemouths above her I fell inter a box of eggs, All the yeller run down me legs, All the white run up me shirt, I fell inter a box of eggs . . . She and Adeline are lodged together in the amber effervescence of the whisky and soda. Looking through steamy zephyrs at the imprint of green willow leaves upon the creamy drapes, Audrey quietly sing-songs, Is it girt or is it sere? Should you be thee and me be thy, or thy be you and me be thee? They had laughed, Gilbert and her, at the daft mummery of the guild socialists, with their shprat shuppers held to raishe fundsh for their minishcule editionsh of hand-printed booksh – they had been certain, Cook and Death, that the future belonged solely to those who could not only control the existing engines of production but make new ones. And here she was, utterly fagged out in a rich woman’s bathtub, looking up at the motto some floppy-tied aesthetical craftsman had chiselled into the wood panelling: When Adam Delved and Eve Span Who was then the Gentleman? In the adjoining dressing room she can hear Adeline playing at being my maid – and no doubt looking out something serviceable that had been obtained ready-made from Liberty’s, worn once for a country walk, mothballed, and is now hatching out again after its long hibernation . . . When, however, she is dressed in Adeline’s fine linen underthings and her own dried-out alpaca, when she is seated back down in Adeline’s tomb with another glass of her husband’s whisky and soda, and another of his cigarettes, when she hears the motor car being brought around from the stables, its engine snarling through the storm, Audrey can no longer maintain such disagreeableness in the face of Adeline’s overwhelming grief: she sobs, she laughs hysterically, she makes as if to tear her clothes – for wont of any other course, Audrey takes the other woman in her arms, strokes the hair that he did . . . — In the gale, under the crazed lamplight, Flossie stands with several parcels in a net. Please do not refuse me, Adeline says, they’re only a few comforts – some brandy and fruitcake, a box of cigarettes . . . My pride, Audrey tells her, runs still and cold and deeper than any patronage. She takes the net from Flossie, who says, Excuse me, miss, but ma’am says that you’re at the Arsenal – is it true, that you’re a munitionette? The girl’s frank face, yellowed only by the lamplight, slides away into that of her mistress, addled and blotched. They are not, Audrey says succinctly, hiring – then she allows the chauffeur to hand her up. Everything slides away: the peculiar old–young house, its chatelaine’s teary goodbyes, the sweet-smelling stillness of her flowery tomb. As soon as the motor car picks up speed, Audrey’s ticcing resurges, at first it is only a fidgeting at the stuff of her skirt, soon enough she is typing invisible orders in her lap, and by the time she is handed down on to the rainswept forecourt of the station it is all Audrey can manage not to circle the wheel, pull the lever and rotate the headstock . . . circle the wheel, pull the lever and rotate the headstock . . . She allows the chauffeur to hand her up and she settles in the seat immediately behind the one she supposes he will sit in – it’s the first vehicle of any description she has been in for half a century but she recognises most of the controls – gear and brake levers, the steering wheel. She wonders – if her recovery continues – whether she’ll be allowed to drive – or at least pretend to do so, a rusty old Enigmarelle, prompted by pokes in its back to do the trick for the cockney crowd . . . Not that there’s much of one, only the two shonk doctors, Long nose, ugly face, oughta be put under a glass case . . . their two favourite blackies, and four or five of my fellow sleepyheads. The fat one has been left upstairs, beached, her crabby little husband scuttling around her . . . Helene, who Audrey has always quite warmed to, is there, and also the three old monkey men, who have to be pushed and pulled up into the charabanc . . . Busner, standing beside Doctor Marcus, watches as Mboya and Inglis coax the enkies into the Ford Strachan, which is parked on the back road alongside the Upholstery Workshop. It’s good of you, he says, to come along. Marcus laughs: The sun has got his hat on, so I’ve come out to play! I mean, an outing – wouldn’t miss it for the world! Busner looks askance at his retired colleague. Marcus is sporting an unexpectedly snazzy short-sleeved shirt, which is vertically striped chocolate and ultramarine, Granddad takes a trip . . . his trendy appearance compromised, though, by soup stains? He wonders whether Marcus’s myopia precludes him from seeing the full extent of his ironic stain – irony that’s within irony, which in turn is stranded, this ironic citadel, rusting in a desert of dryness. It took, Busner tells him, an awful lot of pressuring on my part before Whitcomb would allow me to take them out of the hospital at all –. Marcus snorts, Ah, Whitcomb, your bête noire – the Professor Moriarty to your Sherlock Holmes. What d’you imagine, Busner, he’s going to do to frustrate your investigations, when you don’t really know what it is you’re investigating? Busner wants to say something about the micro- and macro-quantal character of the post-encephalitics’ ticcing, about his analyses of their metronomic states, about how he believes the dissolution – and now the reintegration – of their physical wholeness suggests an order within their chaos – wants to, but is leery of Marcus’s contempt – and besides, there’s plenty of time for that. For assertiveness, he calls over to Dunphy – the heavyset porter who’s approved to drive the minibus – Are they all aboard? Dunphy sweeps his cap from his Milo O’Shea head, gives a mock-bow and twirls his free hand, inviting them to roll up for the mystery tour . . . Bring me sunshine in your smile, Dunphy sing-songs in an undertone, Bring me laugh-ter, all the while . . . The minibus isn’t mini enough, the tiny congregation from Ward 20 is lost in its angled pews – Ostereich sits to attention in the middle row to the left, behind him cluster Voss and McNeil, scared bunnies. At the very back Mboya and Inglis are kept apart by a wall of sound: the irrepressible volubility of Helene Yudkin, who, as Busner oofs aboard, is saying, Look at these, what would you call ’em? Sort of nozzle thingies – but nozzles for what, they aren’t going to squirt us with water, are they –? Of all the awakened enkies she’s the least shocked by now – back up on the ward she’ll stand for hours flicking the light switches on and off, unremittingly delighted by the photons’ discharge. It’s magic! she crows, I do honest
ly believe it to be magic! Everywhere she goes novelty entrances her – now she runs her hands over the electrified checks of the seat cover, Lovely, she coos, such a beautiful fabric . . . Busner sits down beside Miss Death, who perches behind the driver’s seat, and they are joined by Marcus, who, awkwardly folding his drop-leaf body, slots it in behind them. Well, he hales her, good morning to you, madam, and how’re you feeling –. Perfectly all right, she chops him off, and remains with her face averted to the window. Busner thinks: What does she see there, up and to the left? Or is it the onset of an oculogyric crisis? It’s one-two-three . . . ten days since her reawakening, but – he counts on – sixteen since her last, so one is due! Then, as they rock over a pothole, it strikes him: We’re moving, and she sees a vista that’s utterly novel – the long façade of the hospital contracting, the brickwork beneath its dulled windows streaked by dried tears and going away from her . . . Busner requires of Audrey Death what any physician does of his star patient – that she should damn her former one by telling him calmly and coherently how excellently she’s doing on her daily two grammes of eldoughpa, still, there’s plenty of time for that as well . . . – So – Marcus pushes his pitted nose between their seatbacks – where’re we headed on this daytrip, the British Museum perhaps? Busner is flummoxed: I’m sorry? And Marcus brays, exposing big and ivoried tusks – He is the walrus – then comes out with the wheeze he’s probably been rehearsing since he left St John’s Wood: Busner, if you’ve disinterred some mummies, surely the proper thing to do is take ’em to see some of their own kind. Audrey murmurs, Howard Carter . . . Marcus is shocked by his own crassness at having spoken as if she weren’t there, Busner by this time bomb. – What did you say, Miss Death? He speaks loudly – Dunphy is riding the clutch, revving the minibus out from between the gatehouses and on to Friern Barnet Road. – I said Howard Carter, he was the fellow who dug up the supposedly accursed tomb – I remember that. All the orderlies were talking about it. Biggest flap since the Brides in the Bath, sold a packet of penny papers they did when he died – sheer superstition, of course . . . pouce à l’oreille . . . I wonder what happened to . . . who’s she speaking to? that nincompoop Feydeau – long dead, I s’pose . . . long gone . . . Ignoring the consternation she’s provoked, Audrey relapses into her seat and silence as the minibus prowls past the awnings of the Rosemount Guest House. Or Kew Gardens, Marcus bumbles on, Kew Gardens are always awfully jolly. Busner corrects him: No, Kew’d be too far for their first trip out, I’ve settled on somewhere local – the Alexandra Palace. Marcus bleats, Ally-Pally! What the hell is there to do or see there? Place is pretty much derelict nowadays, surely. Busner gets out his notebook and, selecting the red Biro from the row in his breast pocket, awkwardly jots down the insight which, although taking form in him for some time, only crystallizes now, in the telling of it. – Not do – see, it’s what they’ve been looking at for years – decades now. It’s – it’s the horizon of their world – the outer limit. By going there and looking back at Friern, we’ll be breaking the spell for them – setting them free. It’s these words he’s scrawled: setting them free, underlined twice, wonkily. Marcus receives them in silence, only the chopped-liverish air he emits from his tightened lips suggests that lodged inside him is a balloon full of bilious cynicism. When he does at length speak, his tone is confidential: You do understand, the functional integrity of the cerebral cortex is an absolute – mark me – absolute prerequisite for anything resembling homeostasis . . . Busner knows what he’s driving at . . . that none of this can last . . . because in my heart of hearts I know: there are no such things as miracle drugs. It’s a conclusion that Busner had arrived at three years before, when, peering horrified into the scrap of mirror above the sink in the poky downstairs lavatory of the Willesden Concept House, he had seen his nose detach from above his lip and commence a halting – but for all that, undeniably real – circuit of his face. Besides, Marcus bangs on, how much is this stuff costing? And when Busner admits that it’s in the region of four hundred pounds per pound, he laughs long before forcing out, Well, that’s hardly going to help the balance-of-bloody-payments! And yet . . . And yet . . . as Dunphy grinds the gears and the minibus hops-skips-jumps across the North Circular, Busner finds I’m not put out at all, because: Look, he says to Marcus, look at them – look at the joy they’re taking in each other. The old alienist turns to observe the three elderly men: Voss, Ostereich, McNeil, who for so many years have been bounded not simply by the man-made but the mad-made – chairs upholstered by maniacs, broom handles wonkily turned by hebephrenics – and whose first few minutes on board the bus were spent rearing away from the undulating asphalt tongue they feared would lash through the windscreen and slurp them from their seats, but who are now relaxing at the sight of summer gardens. The puce droop of a laden rosebush, the lofty and fierily crowned sunflowers, the blazing crenulations of potted germaniums – these, the jolly bastions of Englishness, they remember well enough. They’re lulled by the miniaturised farmland of allotments and sheds, then aroused by plants and flowers that are strange to them – the kinky shock of some pampas grass excites them, then a buddleia thrusting from the pier of a railway bridge really gets them going, and so they begin to natter away. — My old dad kept a whelk stall on Dover front, says McNeil, but he hated the things with a passion! Lumps of fishy rubber, he used to say, give me an ’andful of fresh spring onions any day, Alf – ’eads down in the earth, feet up in the fresh air, way your mother ought t’be! A clap of laughter is followed by Ostereich’s confession that, You know, when I was a boy in Vienna we lived in an apartment – but my uncle, he had a Schrebergarten – an allotment you would say – and he grew the most marvellous currants, I do so love the currants! Oh, he continues, why is it that I feel so bloody marvellous today! Whereupon Voss chimes in: I know just what you mean – the last time I felt this way was in a dentist’s parlour when he’d given me the funny stuff –! You were lucky, McNeil breaks in, we only ever? ’ad sixpence for the puller – so no gas! Once again the three old men laugh and Marcus says to Busner, You don’t think there’s a certain morbidity in such, ah, ebullience? Tightening the arm he’s thrown around the back of Audrey’s seat, Busner says, Can’t you manage to go with the flow just a little, Doctor Marcus? Don’t you get it: they’re on holiday – the holiday of a lifetime? — Which is what, he ruminates miserably, Miriam wants – not an ordinary seaside jaunt to some Cornish cove where the boys can make sandcastles and the baby eat them. Nor will a potter along Brittany lanes in the Austin do – they are to jet away from Heathrow in a fortnight’s time. I’ll make all the arrangements, she had said, pulling the rim of the Lazy Susan so that the sweet-and-sour pork balls were drawn towards her hardly kosher. Moodily he had listened to the muted sproing and yawp of the Chinese background music, murkily he considered the flakes of fish food that flip-flopped down into the tank from the same hand with which the waiter had just laid out their plates – although why this should matter he did not know. The boys in their green-and-gold barred ties and grey Aertex shirts had sat subdued by this: the strangeness of this meal out, en famille, the sole point of which was to arrange still more strangeness: a family holiday that, should he decide not to accompany them, would be the start of a permanent vacation – from me. Zack had read somewhere that white was the Chinese colour for mourning, why then were the tablecloths in the Jade Garden not pink, or purple – or black, yes, black would, he had thought, be best, for with his acquiescence to this perfectly reasonable request – I am dying . . . Yes, of course, he had said – and: The Alhambra, that’ll be sensational, I’ve always wanted to go. Honest? Miriam said. Honest, her duplicitous husband replied, taking her hand and rubbing his thumb over the fretwork of bone and tendon and artery . . . I have died. And he was buried in a grave the same shape as I am, right down to the extra half-whorl on his ears, the slight webbing between the third and fourth toes of his right foot, and the protuberance of his navel, which was all that remained of the linkage to th
e mother I cannot remember, – despite being certain that her eyes – wary, as those of the dead must be – were staring out at him through Miriam’s, the lids of which she had anointed for this special occasion with white mascara, making her look suitably close to extinction – like Chi Chi. Sitting there, putrefying, Zack had realised that the earth so densely packed around his body must be of a special sort, or how else could it fit him so well? Much of it was the translucent atmosphere of the Jade Garden, some was his own cotton, flannel and wool – but there was still more of this magic clay modelled into his wife’s living hand, and this pulsed, squeezing my cold dead one, while Miriam’s voice resounded still: Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year . . . He turns to Audrey Death and says, This year, this . . . usually . . . He hunkers round to face Mboya, who sits Byzantine at the back of the bus, the sun filigreeing his almost-Afro. – Enoch – she, you . . . What did you call the little structure Miss Death made under her bed? Mboya shakes puppyish to attention. Her shrine, he calls back, we called it her shrine . . . Hephzibah Inglis frowns sensing blasphemy? and Busner says, Yes, your shrine, Miss Death – every year, for as long as Mister Mboya has been caring for you, you’ve made an odd little shrine or grotto under your bed, can you remember this at all? Audrey smiles, her twiggy fingers go to her temples and scratch at the dried-out nest of white hair. Audrey’s grisly habit is a sore trial to Busner, these pathetic cast-offs of human vermin sent for fumigation – he wishes her clad in . . . What? A twin set – or a long tweed skirt, a blouse with a lacy collar clasped by a cameo? Anything – but not this brown velour bag of a dress, far too large for her, and over it a robin-red, zip-up cardigan that’s far too small. The nurses have found her caramel-coloured slip-on shoes of exceptional ugliness, and the darned heel of a thick wool sock bulges carbuncular on her emaciated calf . . . Yet a sneer fissures her top lip and slashes her battered cheek, and this, I love her for, because it’s proof that she remains above it all. She says, We called them grottoes, Doctor Busner – lots of children made ’em when I was a girl in Fulham. No one, as I recall, ever hazarded an explanation – it was just something we did, a folk custom . . . maybe t’do with the seasons, ’cause we’d dress ’em with spring flowers – dandelions, buttercups, pansies maybe, lifted from gardens a street or two away . . . She laughs, a dry rasp. – Respectable types hated grottoing for that reason, but they’d still give us coppers – out’ve superstition, I s’pose . . . The minibus has silenced her, its engine whining hysterically as they lurch up Muswell Hill Broadway in a queue of traffic. Her puritanical gaze falls on a gaggle of schoolboys with collar- and even shoulder-length hair outside a sweetshop . . . And when did you last see your father? And then rises over the parade to where tiled roofs pagoda up to the apex of the hill – she cannot believe this: that the skin prison within which she has been sewn for all these years or so they say . . . has turned out to be so flimsy. In the depths of her sopor she had dreamed this: the hospital growing out of her mortal shell, its whitewashed and bare walls stretching . . . creasing . . . folding into nacre. Always she remained on the inside . . . trapped, the heavy girders arched within her bent back, their rivets my vertebrae . . . Cut through the dimpled plasterwork of her skull, dirty skylights illuminated . . . nothing. The floors – woodblock, asphalt, flagged – rose and fell as she walked, so cemented were they to my feet, and, as she shambled the long galleries, staggered the longer corridors, wheeled about the airing courts again and again, howled in the improved padded rooms, then flung her own bony cage against the locked fireguards, so she spat in the faces of these phthistical fellows – her mutinous other selves, hundreds upon thousands of them, their rough ticken overalls of a piece with the hospital’s fabric, their unravelling forestalled – for now – by its vicious selvedge. Presently . . . there is this hand pressed on hot glass, this hand through which the sunlight glows, illuminating a schoolroom map of Imperial possessions – childhood freckles and oleum burns from the Arsenal have merged their territories into these liver-spotted protectorates and dominions. Now . . . there is this hand, swooping angelically past well-to-do house fronts – newly built yet already frighteningly aged – each with its unkempt garden and motor car garishly painted red, blue, or green. Audrey whispers to the forlorn fingers, We’ve got ’ere at last to Muswell Hill – we must visit Uncle Henry, discover if it’s true about the General. She whispers again: Move – and they do, feebly tracing the contours of a great monstrous absurd place that stands out on the skyline – a burlesque block with huge truncated pyramids at either corner . . . The minibus rounds the final bend from Duke’s Avenue and Dunphy responds to the shabby grandeur of the Alexandra Palace – or so it seems to Busner – by pulling up sharply in front of its bombastic portico. Too sharply: the patients and their carers rock and roll in their seats beneath the sunken stare of its cyclopean oculus, and the high-hat of its baseless pediment. Have a care! Busner cries, and Dunphy pulls parodically on his forelock. – Sorry, sorr . . . It’s always, Busner thinks, the fucking Irish. He doesn’t have time to bother with this – he’s up and assisting his prize enkies down from the vehicle, watching them emerge tottering into the daylight, living dead only recently risen from their graves, whose dentures couldn’t manage human flesh . . . unless it was puréed for them. Marcus was right