Umbrella

by Will Self

  But he did come. Standing on the pavement, looking up at the most insane thing I’ve seen all day, a hoarding upon which is inscribed the slogan LIVE YOUR LIFE IN LUXURY AT PRINCESS PARK MANOR, beside the further selling point: HEALTH CLUB OPEN TO NON-RESIDENTS, Busner recalls the afternoon in August 1971 when Sir Albert De’Ath walked unannounced on to Ward 20 of Friern Hospital. Busner didn’t think to ask the old man what had had changed his massive and inertial Mind, because at the time, with his own departure for Spain only days away, the psychiatrist was altogether preoccupied by the increasing instability of his small cohort of post-encephalitics. — The hoarding is separated by wavy lines into three sections, the right-hand one features a luridly blue-and-green photograph cropped so as to include only the tree-fringed central section of the façade: its disproportionately elongated dome, a single campanile, and the arched portico, make of the former lunatic asylum a plausible manor, if, that is you have no memory . . . In the second section a young man in a shiny black singlet stares determinedly ahead, his muscular arms cocked so that his clenched fists repose by his bulging pectorals. From his earphones and their bridle of cable, as much as the blurry young woman in the background in shorts and on an exercise machine, Busner deduces that this must be the health club open to non-residents – while the third section, which features, shot from above, the top half of a lunging swim-suited figure dappled by a leprosy of chlorinated water, must, he assumes, be an image of the fully equipped indoor swimming pool. He continues to stand, caught in a crisis of fixed regard by the hoarding, its marketing buzz-line, Award-winning individually designed quality apartments set in 30 acres of stunning parkland, sawing into his skull, along with: Live your life in luxury at Princess Park Manor . . . Princess Park! The Park bit, he concedes, has a blunt topographic plausibility, but Princess? What could possibly account for this renaming other than an impulse to mythologise of Hitlerian proportions – did they have no idea of what went on here! Princess evokes, he supposes, sleeping beauties, snuggled up in their quality apartments beneath clean duvets, awaiting only the kiss of a handsome prince in a shiny black singlet to awaken them to another day in the fitness suite, with its wide variety of studio classes and personal training – not forgetting the health and beauty spa! — There had been no beauty and precious little health that day. As Busner had led Sir Albert through the grotty day-room and into the female dormitory, Mboya, Inglis, Vail – the names came back to him now – had waylaid him one after another: Mister Ostereich was having another respiratory crisis, should they give him a further twenty milligrammes of intravenous Benadryl? Helene Yudkin’s opisthotonos had recurred – if she could stand at all, she bent back and back so far that she fell over, should they administer Symmetrel as a partial agonist to the L-DOPA? And Leticia Gross – they had whispered her name, although the bellowing of the woman-mountain resounded lustily through the ward – is terrified, would he give her an injection of some kind? Largactil – or Valium? Sir Albert had been altogether unaffected by the tumult: erect and severe in an unlikely suit of black-and-white houndstooth cheque, he was wearing just the one pair of spectacles and a single hearing aid. I have come to visit my sister, he had said to Busner when they encountered one another by the nurses’ station – and that was that. All Busner had hoped for was that his sister would be as unaffected by the trouble as he was – for that’s what Busner chose to think of it as: a little trouble, nothing to be concerned about – simply side-effects of the L-DOPA that could be managed with the right complementary drugs. They would titrate the doses differently, use phenothiazine and butyrophenone as buffers – put up the umbrella as much as the nurses required, but at all costs keep on with the trial that’s nothing of the sort . . . — Glancing back to make sure that the old man is still following him, Busner looks into first one embayment, then the next, worried at what he may see: the bluing face of a post-encephalitic holding his breath . . . ’til he bursts, or the tongue of another poking out uncontrollably to catch flies that for once aren’t there . . . the eyes of a third battened on to a corner of the ward, entranced by a cobweb . . . In his growling guts Busner knows that things are going badly wrong – has known it since shortly after the outing to Alexandra Palace: together with Mboya he has already tried cutting the enkies’ L-DOPA, increasing it, administering it in smaller doses – but whatever they do the ghastly symptoms of the malady re-emerge . . . bones ploughed up from a battlefield. And in his calmer, more analytic moments he understands this: that these are no side-effects at all, but simply the total refutation of what he has fervently wanted to believe: that far from orderly health being fundamental to the human condition, it is chaotic disease that howls through the enkies’ cellular caverns, and screeches between the manifold branches of their brainstems. He blames Whitcomb for this – if only the bloody man wasn’t so fixated on what he terms the Bottom Line – a penny-pinching and mercenary limitation that Busner envisions as a limbo-dancer’s pole, beneath which the consultant bends back . . . and back . . . the flaps of his white coat dragging in the . . . dirt of his own fucking making! Staff numbers have been cut throughout the hospital, the Occupational Therapy Department half closed – and the effects on all the patients are already evident, but especially on the chronic ones: they slump about the rundown wards with still more of nothing to do, their state-underfunded skins sagging into their donated clothing, their sad eyes filmed with two parts of chlorpromazine to one of . . . neglect.

  In his wake Sir Albert keeps on coming. Mind, Busner suspects, cannot possibly assimilate all this confusion – repels it in fact: a bow-wave of psychic distortion that moves ahead of Mind’s relentless cerebration, or, if it becomes too choppy, is cleaved by Mind’s prow of a nose. Halting, Busner asks Sir Albert to wait for a moment: It might be a little shocking for her if you were to arrive completely unannounced – and leaves Mind to meditate on the flat roof of the laid-off Occupational Therapy Annexe. Peeking into Audrey’s niche, Busner is delighted to find her her unusual self: tart, self-contained, and intent upon the Financial Times, items from which she insists on reading out to him: the dividends being paid to shareholders by Rio Tinto Zinc and Allied British Securities, fluctuations in the currency exchanges, the precise amount of the balance-of-payments deficit. Busner, putting on his Panglossian spectacles, chooses to see this as nothing more than a benign extension of her interest in the world and, squatting down in front of her chair, looks upon her love lies bleeding hair and the heroic cast of her long-suffering beauty . . . with a lover’s eyes. It’s at this moment he drops my own bombshell . . . saying: By the way, Miss Death, your brother is here to see you — and then, fearing that he might prejudice the encounter by letting slip some of his own banked-up antipathy, he rises abruptly and goes to fetch Sir Albert. He could not know . . . / How could I have known? — It’s the stately whoosh past of a bus with NOW YOU CAN CHANGE YOUR PACKET EVERY MONTH WITH FLEXIBLE BOOSTERS plastered across its side that determines him: I shall say, he thinks, that I want to have a look at one of these Last Few Remaining Apartments, with a view to my retirement – then they’ll show me round, and gladly! A security guard slumps in a yellow fluorescent tabard on a chair outside the gatehouse looking exactly like a long-stay mental patient . . . and beyond him Busner sees that the old Friend’s Shop has been converted into a sales office for the Princess Park, with an ecologically hopeful armature of . . . I once had a . . . Norwegian wood. Standing, looking through the wide windows at the dinky leaseholds dotted across a scale model of the development that’s spread along a vast tabletop, Busner is gripped by remorse and castigates himself: Isn’t this the way you’ve always regarded the world, you cold bastard, as a readily apprehensible – no reducible! – object that you could look down upon from your peak perspective? But then he gives himself succour too, for, inasmuch as the new inmates of Friern Hospital have the blurry features and disproportionate limbs of all diminutions, so I, the omniscient God, am always kept apart from them by a Plexiglas cover . . . And moreover: H
ow could I’ve known? — That Audrey sits, the Financial Times crumpled in her lap, waiting with calm, firm conviction for Stanley to come. He will be much aged – she accepts that: he is seventy-nine. She thinks he will probably be one of those men who put on a lot of weight in middle age, and so, in those few seconds before he arrives, she rubs at the outlines of her memory of him, smudging the neat pencil strokes of his youthful form into a believable corpulence . . . And he will be jolly, she thinks: a jolly man, who always remembers his deliverance from the hell of the battlefield . . . lifted up by the Archangel Michael, borne home with his cushy one . . . to Blighty. Of his life after the war she can form no picture except this: He will have had children – many children, he will have had all the children I never did, and they too will be beautiful . . . And she sees the children, with young Stan’s tall willowy form, and young Adeline’s strong, handsome features. This is as clear and present to her as the old liver-spotted hands that lie unwrapping themselves from the pink sheets . . . with their twitching – so much clearer than the tower covered with thousands upon thousands of tiny black windows that rears over her, a tower topped off with an ugly advertisement hoarding that bears her brother Albert’s agèd face, through the bulgy grey eyes of which beam down at her . . . deff-rays.

  A short time later Sir Albert De’Ath and Doctor Zachary Busner sit either side of the utilitarian desk in the nurses’ station of Ward 20. Busner smokes one of his own cigarettes – filterless Gauloises Caporal that none of the nurses can bear. Sir Albert has accepted a cup of tea, and now he adds demerara sugar from a rumpled cellophane packet with quick digging movements of a spoon that remind Busner of . . . someone hurriedly filling in a grave. I have been researching further on encephalitis lethargica, Sir Albert says. Oh, really . . . Busner isn’t exactly distracted, however he is quietly enjoying the way that Mind seems so much pettier when prised from its strange reef of impedimenta and set down in this workaday context, with a tatty staff roster framing its bald cranium. Ye-es, Sir Albert continues, as I said when we first met, I was aware of the epidemic at the time and had retained this data – the Lancet article, the HMSO report put out later in 1918, and a few other bits and pieces – but learning of my sister’s condition led me to investigate the matter more thoroughly and from a historical perspective. The old man, hunched up in his spiffy togs, sups his tea, and Busner mentally rubs at his outline, sees him smudged into senescence and so becoming eminently suitable for admission. – I wonder if you were aware that – insofar as these things can be established from fragmentary contemporary records and long after the fact – there seem to’ve been a number of other outbreaks. Really, Busner dreamily exhales. Sir Albert grows pettish: Yes, really, Doctor Busner: in London in the 1670s, in Manchester in the 1840s – in Vienna at the turn of the century, as we know, – and then quite possibly in the Nazi’s concentration camp at Theresienstadt during the Second War . . . This does get through the tabac brun to the psychiatrist, who leans forward and stubs out his cigarette. Sir Albert continues in his usual robotic tone: Of course, on the face of it, there are perfectly obvious reasons – common to any of the epidemiological studies – why a brain fever should’ve affected people in these cities at these times: density of population, insufficiency of diet, etcetera, etcetera . . . Yet something about the possible outbreak at Theresienstadt made me look at the question in a less analytical and more . . . in a more . . . It is strange indeed to see Mind lost for words . . . yes, a more symbolic way – perhaps that’s your influence, Busner, or at least the influence of your professional expertise. To wipe away the bad taste of his sarcasm, Sir Albert gets out a heavily wadded and stained handkerchief from his breast pocket and rubs it around his mouth, then he resumes: I’m not sure if you’re familiar with Theresienstadt . . . Where is this going? Does he want me put in there, long after the fact? but even by German standards it was a model of efficient administration and planning – albeit put to rather, ahem, inhumane ends. Perhaps as many twenty thousand Jews and other undesirables were crowded within the old town walls, which were not much more than half a mile square. Inside there were workshops of all sorts – upholstery, shoemaking, etcetera – a bakery, and a brewery, they even had a machine shop and an electricity-generating plant, and at one time, I believe, a small chamber orchestra and a theatre. Sir Albert takes a gulping tea break, then, with a sweet and tannic sigh, begins again: Ahhh, the aim, of course, was not to in any way improve the lot of the inmates, but rather to create a version of a Potemkin village that could be shown off to visiting Red Cross delegations – they made a rather grisly film of it, the Nazis, although unfortunately I’ve been unable to see a copy . . . It would’ve been interesting . . . he muses, long and disturbingly elegant fingers fondling his empty cup . . . because it might’ve helped me to confirm the outline of my theory –. Which is? Busner breaks in, fully expecting some anti-Semitic nastiness. Surely, Sir Albert continues unruffled, you see the similarities here: all these cities had the high populations needed to support the disease vector at the time the epidemics occurred – indeed, they had all recently undergone considerable population explosions – but Theresienstadt is a case apart. If we look for the factor it has in common with the others – London on the brink of the first Industrial Revolution, Manchester in the throes of the second, Vienna caught up in a frenzy of wartime armaments production – we might hypothesise that it is not the numbers or density of humans that was the decider, but the density of mechanisation, of . . . technology. Anyway . . . abruptly for such an elderly man, Sir Albert rises to his full, looming height . . . it is, as I say, merely the outline of a theory, I offer it to you by way of a valediction. And then Busner remembers: But, Sir Albert, I haven’t asked you . . . I mean . . . how did it go with your sister? Mind looks down on him with ill-concealed contempt, and says: Go? It didn’t go with my sister at all, Doctor Busner – she is, as I suspected, quite catatonic, altogether unreachable – didn’t register my presence at all so far as I could make out, and looked to be stricken by a terrible sadness, Melancholica attonica, I believe it’s called . . . You see, I hope, that I’m not entirely the brute you take me for, I’ve explained it to your assistant –. – Assistant? Busner is on his feet as well, and the two of them edge round the desk in their respective crannies. Ye-es, Sir Albert says, African gentleman – Mboya, is it? Seemed very capable, I told him I’d make all the arrangements necessary for an annuity to be paid to Audrey for the rest of her life – paid even in the event of my predeceasing her. I was able to tell him this – and here Mind is unable to repress a smirk of conceit – in his own language, with which I have a little familiarity.