by Will Self
defective wishes to be of good report … Just as every psychiatric intern
looks forward to his day off: a Saturday on which he’s arranged to
borrow the Superintendent’s Javelin. He’ll meet Isobel off the train
at Lanark – he’d rather she didn’t come anywhere near Carstairs
Junction. She quietly regards his chosen career path as that of a failure,
on course as she is to become Scotland’s first woman thoracic
surgeon … unum contra Edina. It’s late in the year for fine weather
in the central belt, but after a dreek week – throughout which the
State Hospital’s buildings have been bombarded by hale and rain –
the day promises to be sunny. He has it in mind to drive her to
Tinto Hill – Isobel’s expressed a wish to ascend this conical eminence,
the highest prospect for miles around. She’s a red-cheeked,
high-hipped, long-striding young woman with cornflower-blue
eyes, spun-gold hair and decided views on the benefits of fresh air
and vigorous exercise – but it’s Bobby who’s planted this notion in
Zack’s hot head: that the carnal relation he seeks may be more easily
achieved en plein air – up on the brae which rises from the rushing
Clyde, where sheep safely graze and a daughter of the manse
might very well feel away from the flock. At Baldovan Institution for
Defective Children the inmates had in fact been old men, most of
them diagnosed decades before with dementia praecox. The wards
were high ceilinged, their narrow sash windows bare of curtains –
the floors highly polished. In between the government green walls
and below the government green ceilings, Izal disinfectant fought
a never-ending war against the odours of human dereliction. The
morning bell went at seven, and it was everyone out of bed and
to attention: Praise God from whom all blessings flow, Praise Him, all
creatures here below, Praise Him above, ye heavenly host, Praise Father,
Son and … the holy ghost of the nurses’ kindness, which had
long gone, to be replaced by the Incontinence Parade: We’d t’wear
white moleskins, so everyone could see if ye’d pissed or shat yersel’ – then
the older boys’d hold ye down and they’d gi’ ye a hammering wi’ a
sand shoe … The defective children would form up in two lines to
march into breakfast – old Mister McDougall, who’d been gassed
at Ypres, leapt about looking for cover from invisible shot and non-existent
shells, but the nurses in their starched white uniforms
ignored him … ‘cause he’d been a hero. Bobby, rendered iconic by
shelves stacked with catering packs of Jacobs Cream Crackers, boxes
of Angel Delight, one-pound tins of jam, and many wax-paper-wrapped
loaves, dispensed wisdom along with his life story – and,
as he’d talked, young Doctor Busner, his woolly head full of Raskolnikov,
Roquentin, Ravachol … had thought: At last … I’m getting
somewhere – getting closer to understanding the mind of the Outsider.
Homosexuality had been, Bobby told him, rife – his exact
words, and later, after the dreadful incident, when they returned to
Zack, he cursed his own naivety … a mental defective always wishes
to be of good report. Give a good report as well – a report carefully
tailored to fit his listener’s requirements: the evidence of long-term
abuse in the system was just what I needed. Bobby was kissed and
fondled by one of the older boys at Baldovan – Baldovan, where
they went out to work on a local farm, the boys in their blue-grey
parish tweeds riding the trailer behind the tractor, then, when they
reached the open fields: we were harnessed up, ye ken six ti’ the plough,
ye ken – like draught animals. Braw wee ponies, we were … ones
that needed a proper rub-down at the end of a hard day’s work.
Thursdays was tripe – Sundays pie – at Christmas there was a feast
of tatties and mince. The bogey-roll of pipe tobacco twisted around
his sinewy arm in a figure-eight, the charge nurse made his way
along the row of men and boys, who were bent over and gobbling.
The porridge fell – a disgusting grey slurry – from the old madmen’s
slobbering mouths. Bobby had been the youngest inmate, but the
nurse still tore off a plug for his pipe … if yi’ were canny yi’ got yersel’
a protector who’d gi’ you his sweet ration in return fer a rub-a-dub-dub
… three men in a tub, and who do you think they were?
He’s spoken aloud, he realises, because Ann looks up from her
copy of Escapes, the Virgin Trains magazine. And? she queries.
And? – And what? Busner counters testily. And what’s the rest of
the rhyme? Is that what you’re asking – ‘cause SURELY YOU
KNOW? He’s spoken too loudly, he realises, once more attracting
the attention of their fellow travellers, who, oblivious to the drama
unfolding outside the train’s windows – the long slopes of the
Lowther Hills, their heathery covering flaring blue-green in the
summer sun, the sudden flashes of tumbling burns – are determined
to get in on the act: The butcher, Ann, the baker, and the bloody
candlestick-maker! Satisfied, are you? She gives her narrow head an
Indian waggle of offended assent – and Simon, roused from uneasy
sleep … what does he watch in the cramped cinema of his mind – what
dusty, sweaty atrocities? What anguished transformation must he endure
each time he … wakes? reproves him as severely as any charge nurse:
Keep a lid on it, Doc – you’ll get us thrown off the fuckin’ train!
a telling-off itself interrupted by: This old man, he played two, he
played knick-knack on my shoe, with a knick-knack paddy-whack,
give a dog a … Busner, having fumbled the phone out of his pocket,
stares uncomprehendingly at NO CALLER ID, a phrase … or slogan
which has, he realises, been bothering him for a while, implying
as it does that whoever’s trying to reach him is the coldest of creatures
– some billion-dollar brain lacking the idiopathic substratum
from which all instincts – murderous, sexual – arise … Stares and
stares, while the ringtone reels in more and more opprobrium: Give
a dog a bone, This old man came rolling home, This old man, he
played three … Busner sees it on the faces of his fellow travellers,
their outraged expressions as they swivel away from … these ancient
yet manmade landscapes, to glower at this poor aged man struggling
to find REJECT CALL … He does, and, in the after-tone of the
ringtone, Complex Simon … it’s a soft diagnosis, really – either he’s
traumatised or he ain’t, says, Some other fucker’s trying to get hold of
you, Doc, and they aren’t giving up – have you got any idea who
it is? And Busner, speaking through the fog which blanketed
the chainlink fences of State Hospital on that Saturday morning in
October, nineteen hundred and black and white, says, Really, Simon,
I haven’t the foggiest. – Well, why don’t you answer it, then – put
us all out of this knick-knack misery? To which Busner rejoins,
The phone’s really only an aide memoire, Simon – you know that.
Ben set it up as a sort of auxiliary memory, because, I must confess,
I’m finding it a little difficult to remember things … aye, ye havenae
been rememberin’ yer auld pal Bobby at all these past, ooh … how long’s
it been, Doc? My past, Simon, nowadays it seems increasingly
tangled up in the present – and it’s the present that’s the loser.
All I need now in order for me to lose the plot entirely is for the
future to begin impinging … Simon, round head rolling as the
train heels into a curve … have they always done this, like … like …
motorcycles? says, I don’t suppose you can remember, then, why the
fuck you picked on that knick-knack shit for your ringtone? Busner
ponders this: I’m too long in the toenails to be startled by any
coincidence – after all, they keep growing when you’re dead, and if
you go round a second time everything’s bound to recur … and
yet … and yet … The decision to head for the mindfulness retreat
had, he thought, been Milla’s – it would, she’d implied, be a sort of
soft entry to the hard business of being a Sannyasa: I’ve volunteered
there a couple of times, Gramps, they’ve got a fantastic vegan cook,
and the island itself is really lovely – if you find the meditation
practice a drag you can chill out in the peace garden, get your
strength together before you strike out on your own. Have a look
here on their web site – see … lovely setting. I’ve printed off some
sheets which’ll tell you what happens on a retreat, why don’t you
have a read of them … It had looked for a while as if Daniel
and Pat were going to try to put a restraining order on him – have
Zack declared mentally unfit in some way … maybe even put me on
a section – such larks! Milla’s plan had mollified them – so once spring
had uncoiled, the cherry blossom leaping from hilltop Hampstead
brighter and gayer than … any previous year, and Simon and Ann
had been, he thought, halfway housed … he’d set off for Scotland,
with an overnight in Manchester, because Ben seemed to feel two
days’ travel would be rather too much for me … and since Ben, in
the weeks before his grandfather’s departure, had stepped forward
from the shadows of his own affliction to … take matters in hand –
most surprising, that … Zack hadn’t demurred, although it’d seemed
an … awful fag – I’m fagged right out … hung over, too … Christ
knows what happened last night … Night was the best time to
abscond from Baldovan as well – or so Bobby said. Moreover, given
the M’Naghten rules, once a mental defective had turned sixteen, if
he could survive on his own outside the institution for a month,
he’d be considered discharged. The rub-a-dub-dub didnae gi’ the
boak to Bobby … I realised I were homosexual me sel’, Doc – are ye
shocked? An’ honestly, if it weren’t fer those activities I’d’ve had no
human contact at all, year in, year-bloody-out … But the incontinence
parades remained a daily ordeal … ah couldnae control me sel’…
which made the nurses’ sanction doubly binding: … croton oil,
Doc – oh, jeezo, thass filthy pap, so it is … three long-stemmed, tulipshaped
glasses filled with the vicious purgative, then drunk down
under the watchful eye of the Sadist-in-Chief – and this on top of
the tin mugs of liquorice water she doled out to everyone each evening
… ye’d be on ti’ cludgie fer the best part of a day, no kiddin’ … No
kidding, because he’d had no childhood – and no education beyond
a general cert’ in institutionalisation. Bobby went further and
further each time – the flight from Perth to Glasgow had been a
failure, he’d ended up turning himself in to the police at the station
on Saint Vincent’s Road, but the next time he was determined to
win his freedom. He assembled his supplies in the gardener’s shed
… Pa Broon was a good sort – gave him me baccy ration … spare keks,
a doorstop ham sandwich wrapped in waxed paper, and an old
Winchester bottle full of water … which still honked of paraldehyde.
But the best-laid plans of men reduced to the status of mice are
always crummy: a couple of miles away from Baldovan, he’d met a
man on a country lane – a simple man, Bobby said, simpler than he
himself, who was walking along all alone, blond hair all wispy, eyes
full of sweet-smelling hay, the wide legs of his shiny-kneed black
suit flapping in the breeze: We lay down on the grassy brae and took
sexual satisfaction from each other – juss rabbin’, but jeezo, I shot aff fast.
Then I set about attackin’ him – and there wass an old branch lying there
to hand, so I let him have it wi’ tha’ an’ his heid began bleeding profusely.
Aye, we musta been a strange sight, right enough: me holding up this
person who’s still bleedin’ and tryin’ t’ flag down a car … No wonder no
one stopped…. Bobby’s account has, young Doctor Busner thinks,
the surrealistically inverted logic of a dream rewound: Why yes – of
course: no wonder nobody stopped, given his victim was bleeding
profusely, which in turn implies it’d been perfectly logical for Bobby
to’ve hit him with the branch – which in turn exposes the necessity
of their taking sexual satisfaction from one another. And really,
isn’t this what everyone – mentally defective or not – wishes for: to
be of good report – and that good report to be of a life well lived,
which means with hindsight: the clotted blood liquefies – flows
back into the Perthshire simpleton’s veins, he walks backwards up
the lane – Bobby trots backwards to Baldovan … His Mammy
arrives to take him home … My own umbilicus retracts … a tape-measure,
pulling Baby Busner bouncy-bouncy back into Mama
Busner’s sheltering womb. This, he thinks, is the Samsara we really
seek – not eternal recurrence, but a very provisional revision of our
own lives: the spin-cycle spun the other way until it … all comes
back out of the ging-gang goolie-goolie wash-wash! There’s a moment
of silent contemplation on the eleven twenty-four Virgin Pendolino
service from Manchester Piccadilly to Glasgow Central – the long
carriage rocking back and forth, the passengers seated in modular
pews telling their plastic beads – a mobile prayer session: he sees
rising from their bowed heads a plume of ones and noughts – their
digital being, refracting through the train’s tinted windows, scattering
into the sky, rising up and up into diaphanous curtains of
data … our Fata Morgana – our delusional … event-horizon. Yes, a
moment of silent contemplation, as the Virgin steward makes
his way along the carriage, dispensing Styrofoam beakers full of
hottish water with individual sachets containing single tea bags – a
moment in which to appreciate that this is happening to me – and me
alone … Yes, Busner thinks, it’s pretty much high-noon but I’m sundowning
– the sun is going down on my tired old mind. What
was it Bobby said they sang at Baldovan? Now I lay me down to
/>
sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep … Yes, and I pray to die as well,
because this mental disintegration isn’t funny any more: the past
showing through into the present … a ghostly image, which remains
on the screen … long after it’s been switched off! Off they go, bowling
along the lanes. He can tell she’s impressed by how well he handles
the Javelin – impressed also by the very fact he’s been able to borrow
it: This chap Hillier – he must think very highly of you, this is a
fancy motor. Zack explains: in the two months since arriving at
State Hospital he believes he’s begun to make great strides. There’s a
willingness, he tells her, to consider new approaches – after all,
State has been established to deal with all of Scotland’s criminal
lunatics – and what should you do with such patients when you have
them concentrated? Why, euthanise them! She laughs merrily – and
he grips the Javelin’s steering wheel a little tighter. He knows she’s
twitting him – knows she’s subtle enough to make this complex
allusion to his own origins, the matter of which is otherwise,
obviously, beyond the pale … wish I was. She’s clearly attracted to
him, and, while they aren’t exactly walking out together, they’ve
been mucking about now since their final year at Herriot-Watt –
mucking about in fleapit cinemas and train compartments. Mucking
about – his fingers advancing and retreating, circling, then advancing
some more. From his close readings of Sexual Behavior in the
Human Female, Zack believes Isobel may’ve achieved climax on
more than one occasion – he doesn’t trust his own inexperienced
senses to tell him. She won’t touch him in return, though – not, that
is, until it becomes necessary to restrain him. Tush-tush, she says,
and, Now-now … Och, no! she’s exclaimed on several occasions,
while Will you mind yourself! is a phrase he now uses to remonstrate
internally: Will you mind yourself! is what he thinks when Mister
Hillier or Doctor McClintock say something so crassly insensitive –
no! vicious! Zack worries he’ll … blow, ‘cause, after all, We’re all Jock
Tamson’s bairns … even the mental defectives amongst us … even
the Jews. Isobel, sitting in the Javelin’s passenger seat, the hedgerow
