Phone

by Will Self

  terrified that if he doesn’t accede she’ll keep him hanging on the

  phone forever, he agrees … and she’s gone. So gone – the electromagnetic

  squall of her dying down as if it’d never happened …

  leaving him staring out over suburban London to where, in the

  mid-distance, he can just about make out the long, low, spurious

  structure of Friern Hospital, closed down now for, what? at least

  a decade. From this vantage, Busner thinks, I can see all the way

  back to the early seventies – and if I’d the right equipment, I could

  film that past as well. It’s swimming up to him now, from the

  emulsification of memory: the silvery summer when he and Enoch

  Mboya awakened the post-encephalitic patients – Mboya had a sort

  of photographic memory, but it’d been empathy, Busner thinks,

  rather than some neurological quirk which made the charge nurse

  able to recognise all of the poor passengers on that ship of fools …

  Enoch had seen those ticcing, spasming, festinating human

  machines for what they truly were: unique individuals, with hopes,

  dreams and emotions all deformed by the decades they’d spent

  buried deep in the system. Deep in there, first drenched in

  paraldehyde, then slopping with Largactil. Deep in there – far, far

  down that long, long lens of a corridor, the bare fact of their

  existence transposed on to the buff cardboard of the state and filed

  away … While as for their bodily reality … Ach! They’d stunk –

  stunk of the drugs, the disinfectant, and all the shit and filth the

  disinfectant was meant to mask. Busner remembers changing

  one woman-mountain’s nappy – scraping the impacted excrement

  from the crannies of her obese thighs, then filming her with a thirty-five-millimetre

  Bolex – a lot of camera for an amateur at the time …

  But he’d always had a thing about photography – and sees now …

  again … Maurice, Henry and whichever Barbara was in harness at

  the time – sees their dead faces floating in his viewfinder. Those

  mass-produced Box Brownies and Kodak Instamatics – they’d been

  the beginning of this massive privileging of the eye over the other

  sense organs … the gateway drugs to the palace of retinal delights.

  Before that – both at Kingsley Hall and his own Concept House in

  Willesden – Zack had also made films of his distressed housemates:

  presenting these objective images to them in the hope they’d

  abandon their own distorted ones. But the Bolex – and the enkies,

  that’d been different: it wasn’t they who’d required photographic

  evidence of their condition’s objective reality … but me. Required

  it, because, notwithstanding his own clinical experience, he’d been

  unable to believe the testimony of my own senses … He remembers

  setting up the egotistical giraffe of the Bolex’s tripod, then focusing

  tightly on the woman-mountain’s waste of a face – remembers

  squinting through the viewfinder at her frigid cheeks and cracked

  eyes, then waiting for something – anything! – to happen. Eventually,

  he’d gone to the recalcitrant nursing staff and got hold of thick

  rubber bands and bulldog clips so he could rig the Bolex up to film

  entire reels of this morbid catatonia in one continuous take. And

  then, when the films had been developed and played back? Busner

  writhes on his lofty bench: because these are discreditable memories

  that slash at me: razor blades, attached with rubber bands and bulldog

  clips to … the windmills of my mind. Lesley – that shit, Lesley!

  He’d developed the films, then shown them to Zack on a Steenbeck

  editing machine at the film cooperative in Camden Town. Sitting

  in hash-honking semi-darkness, fixated by the pimples on the

  hateful fellow’s bare and sweaty shoulders … Do you break a

  butterfly on the wheel – or a psychiatrist for that matter? Lesley

  belongs, Busner concedes, to a fairly discreditable period of his life:

  when he was racketing around in Willesden wasting Maurice’s

  money – and taking ill-advised acid trips with really rather doolally

  people … Lesley – that man of the people – had styled himself the

  Concept House’s multimedia coordinator, but where would he

  be now? Up some Welsh valley, prob’ly – coughing his perished

  lungs out in a wonkily pitched wigwam and walking a ten-mile

  round-trip to pick up his Assistance, while continuing to extol

  the self-sufficient philosophy of the Whole Earth-bloody-Catalog …

  There’d been something to those films, though – if they were

  speeded right up, it could be observed that, amazingly, the catatonic

  post-encephalitics demonstrated the normal repertoire of human

  responses – smiling, frowning, grimacing – but much, much slower.

  A tiny flirtatious moue took, Busner recalls, about forty minutes to

  pass across the north face of the woman-mountain. By contrast,

  when he and Mboya made films of those patients caught up in an

  akathistic whirr – ticcing, chewing, perseverating, jerking, jigging,

  marching back and forth – then viewed the results slowed right

  down … we saw still stranger things. He’d never written up his

  notes – never completed his projected research paper on the

  Friern post-encephalitics. In part, of course, because the trial he’d

  organised to justify the purchase of the wonder drug had been

  nothing of the sort: there’d been no control group, while Zack was

  quite simply out of control … To begin with, these elderly men and

  women, benighted for decades, had experienced a period of astonishing

  remission – and were released from their fleshly imprisonment

  to dance, sing, cavort … and love. But after a delirious few weeks

  they’d all begun to fall apart again, and then it’d been worse – far

  worse – for them: because Enoch and I had made them self-aware.

  They’d tried adjusting the post-encephalitic patients’ dosage of

  L-Dopa but to no avail: the ticcers grew more frenzied, while the

  catatonics, acquiring a saturnine gravity … sank back into the black

  hole of their own malady. All Zack had been left with were the cine

  films – and another blot on my already maculate career … Apeneck.

  Busner caresses it, seeking to ease all the tension that’s built up since

  he sat down. Yes, he’d kept the cine films – in particular the ones

  of that indomitable old lady, whose name was? Busner lets his arms

  hang down – not to laugh, though: for a sob escapes him at the

  thought of that Archaeopteryx, fossilised since the early twenties,

  whom they’d disinterred and brought blinking into the era of disco

  lights and dolly birds … Yes, he’d kept the films of her, and on

  stoned seventies evenings he’d set up the projector in the main room

  at Redington Road and screen them for the psychological carpetbaggers

  who came in search of the latest marvels … Busner stands,

  and begins the descent from the People’s Palace, lying on one of the

  big leathery pouffes I brought back from Morocco that summer –

  Tangier was full of Yanks, mostly poofs themselves … He’s lying on a

 
; pouffe puffing a joint of Moroccan hash, watching those hollowboned

  and featherweight hands rotate invisible cranks and yank

  immaterial levers – for the sad fact of the matter is I remember the

  films rather better than their subjects … He’d tell his dopey doctoral

  audience: This is a sequence I shot at Friern Mental Hospital a few

  years ago. The subject is one of the long-term post-encephalitic

  patients there – remarkable woman for her pathology alone! There’d

  be general laughter at this point – yes! Laughter! while the silent

  songbird, pinned to the screen by the projector’s smoking beam …

  went through her motions. Busner has reached the foot of the hill and

  begins plodding through a new-old development of Queen Anne-style

  houses built from honeyed brick, each equipped with its own,

  triply-anachronistic Regency garage. Yet who, when all’s said and

  done, is really temporally out-of-joint? For the forty-year-old commentary

  continues: We found out she’d been a munitions worker

  during the First War, and so realised what she’s doing in this

  sequence is operating a piece of equipment called a … turret lathe.

  Yes! A turret lathe! Busner stands, peering at a bright yellow sign

  bolted to the dark and oily wood of a telegraph pole. On it there’s

  an electric-red triangle – and inside this there’s the outline of a man

  flung back, arms outstretched and spasming as the energy streams

  into him from a large and stylised … lightning bolt! Yes, a turret

  lathe! They’d lain puffing on their pouffes and watched the old

  woman’s hands twisting and turning at incredible speed – then he’d

  rewind the spool and play it again, only this time much, much …

  slower. A wondrous vision emerged from the blur: her movements

  were no mindless reflex, but a precisely calibrated sequence of willed

  actions. He’d wanted to film the enkies in the first place, to separate

  out all these individual motions which constituted their incontinent

  spraying … There’d also, Busner recalls, been a duplicated negative

  of the sequence in which the old woman operated the turret lathe –

  and when Lesley had developed it and screened the film, Zack

  witnessed a still-stranger phenomenon. The stoned social scientists

  and psy-professionals saw it as well: a vision so startling it hauled

  them up from their floor cushions to stand and stare. Busner stands,

  out of sync’, looking up at another egotistical giraffe – a seeseeteevee

  camera which sneers over the precincts of Alexandra Park

  Station from the top of its pole. If he were to somehow acquire an

  athleticism … I’ve never had, shin up, remove the memory card

  from the camera and take it to his grandson in Kilburn, what

  might Ben discover? With the film of the old enkie the frames had

  been out of sync’: in one her right hand pulled an invisible lever,

  while her left turned a transparent flywheel – but in the next it’d

  been the reverse: right hand on the wheel, left on the lever. When

  viewed slowed down, the effect was uncanny – the stoned disciples

  of Marcuse and Foucault would scratch their hairy heads and

  exclaim wonderingly, Didja see that – iss like … like … time’s been

  rearranged … Really, Busner thinks, likeness didn’t enter into this

  bizarre representation – at a neuronal level, it was believable, p’raps,

  that the elderly former munitions worker had simply jumped from

  one fixed ticcing sequence to another, but at a cerebral one? At a

  mental one? It was the stuff of science fiction: this old woman’s

  brain, locked up in its bony cell for decades, had been fanatically

  working out … building up the head-speed necessary to leap the

  rails of causality and move outside of time … I will, Busner thinks,

  go back to Friern and see what’s what with the miserable old gulag.

  As for the films – what’d happened to them? Doubtless disappeared

  into the attic at Redington Road – together with all the rest of his

  experimental psychology detritus, the strange fruits of his half-century

  spent combing the wilder shores of human experience. Such

  as the clumsy prototypes for the Riddle – the enquire-within-game-cum-diagnostic-tool

  he’d developed in the late seventies, and which

  was such a commercial success … I was able to keep a roof over the

  rest of the tat. Including his collection of outsider canvases, which

  Charlie strenuously objected to having hung on the walls she’d had

  repainted at great expense … After Maurice died, Zack went up

  into the attic to have a grand clear-out – but the atmosphere had

  stymied him: he’d slumped down on a perished steamer trunk and

  shuffled through stacks of old scallop-edged photos … the Porter

  Twins, Ramsgate, July, nineteen thirty-seven … but found himself

  unable to discard … any. Then the outsider paintings had caught

  his eye – they were under the eaves in the furthest corner of the

  attic, a stack of unframed canvases: raw slices of mental distress,

  the outermost of which was ill lit by a scummy skylight. He’d

  hunched his way over and worked his way through them – so far as

  he remembers, all the paintings … aspired to the condition of a

  Géricault, although when Busner thinks of a portrait of a lunatic with

  delusions of military command, it isn’t any of these which comes to

  mind, but rather … my grandson. Slumping uncomfortably on a

  ridged bench which has been designed against crime … Busner

  considers the security cameras whose visual fields he’s been walking

  into and out of all morning: there’s one bolted to the wall of

  the motor insurance broker’s next to his flat – a second above the

  entrance to the bookie’s on the other side of Fortress Road. There

  must’ve been one on the bus as well – there was certainly a sign to

  that effect. He stares at his old-man hands – which shake. He sees

  all these clips of his day unrolled across the angled prow of Ben’s

  three computer monitors. It’s an Edweirdian procession, given his

  sweat-banded hat has been multiplied many times to form the peaks

  and troughs of a sinuous wave … Back in the early seventies, he’d

  drawn a distinction between the photographs the post-encephalitic

  patients would themselves have taken before their headlong plunge

  into the abyss of their affliction and the films he made of them a

  half-century later. All photography was – when you sat stock-still

  to consider it … chronophotography: the Victorians’ box-cameras

  sopped up time as much as space – and then, when the plates

  were developed, they showed the endurance of lifeless, material

  things – between which wormed the trails left by merely ephemeral

  life-forms. The films he’d made with the Bolex did something

  different: capturing all the innumerable moments the enkies had

  lost and imprisoning them in an enduring … now. It was the same,

  surely, with the innumerable seeseeteevee cameras that in the years of

  my dotage have sprouted from perished brickwork throughout the

  city buddleia sightings … and drunk deep of its populace’s wa
tery

  doings: millions of images of comings and goings, of stopping and

  starting – all gulped down into a great slopping reservoir of …

  simultaneity. A train comes snaking into the station … a train came

  snaking into the station. It’s one of the new ones … it was one of

  the old ones. He sees long carriages, snazzily painted – behind their

  wide windows are yellow staves from which hang the dark musical

  notation of … people. He sees green and gold paint and tarnished

  brass – the Turneresque explosion when the engine clears the

  canopy and lets off steam. He swipes his Freedom Pass on another

  sensor and mounts confidently … You must take the ay train to go to

  bee, there’s a seeseeteevee camera in the corner of this carriage as

  well. Imagine … he imagines … not just today but your entire life

  has been subject to this level of surveillance – that you were secretly

  filmed on the slow stoppers bringing you back from your schools.

  Ancient rolling stock without connecting corridors – stuck in compartments

  with impenitent bullies who pulled up your shirt and

  punched you to the accompaniment of jolly ditties … Hymie Kikey’s

  gotta get on his bikey! Then … later, when you were studying

  medicine at Heriot-Watt, the long journey north – sometimes

  travelling on Mallard, lulled by the sound of its wheels on the

  rails … Hurry up and get on Hurry up and get on Hurry I couldn’t care

  less I couldn’t care less I couldn’t care less … Imagine there’d been a lens

  concealed behind the sepia-tinted scene inset above the Brylcreemed

  antimacassars opposite: bluebells and bucolical sheep a good cover

  for the egotistical giraffes of another era. But what would they’ve

  browsed on? Only little me, passing perfectly well in my Dave-Wax-tailored

  suit – passing so well I’m insouciantly puffing on a …

  Passing Cloud, and passing my finger into my big Jewish nostril so

  I can remove smutty snot, ‘cause everything was shat on in those

  days by … the Flying Duck. And imagine there’d been a camera in

  Fergus’s hairy belly, whirring silently while your fingers wandered

  into the nylon jaws of Isobel McKechnie’s … mantrap. Then, still

  later, more cine-surveillance on the slow train to Carstairs Junction:

  recently qualified doctor and soon-to-be-retired steam engine both