The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  ‘Yeah, it is kind of weird, isn’t it. I think death must have mellowed me.’

  We chewed the fat for a while longer. Mother asked me about my sex life and whether or not I had an overdraft. She also asked about the rest of the family and expressed the opinion that both my brothers were insane and that some gay people we knew were ‘nice boys’. All this was characteristic and reassuring. She let me take a closer look at the North London Book of the Dead. It was genuinely uninspiring, based entirely on fact with no prophecies or commandments. The introductory pages were given over to flat statements such as: ‘Your (dead) identity should hold up to most official enquiries. Dead people work in most major civil service departments ensuring that full records of dead people are kept up to date. Should you in any instance run into difficulties, call one of the Dead Citizens’ Advice Bureaux listed in the directory.’ And so on.

  Somehow, reading the book calmed me down and I stopped harassing Mother with my questions. After an hour or so she said that she was going out to a party a friend of hers was throwing. Would I like to come? I said, ‘I think I can probably do better than socialising with dead people,’ and instantly regretted it. ‘Sorry Mother.’

  ‘No offence taken, son,’ she smiled. This was completely uncharacteristic and her failure to get violently angry filled me with dismay. She let me out of the flat just as a small wan moon was lifting off over the shoulder of Ally Pally. I set off towards Stroud Green Road buzzing with weird thoughts and apprehensions.

  That night I thrashed around in bed like a porpoise. My duvet became saturated with sweat. I felt as if I were enfolded in the damp palm of a giant … Mother! I awoke with a start, the alarm clock blinked 3.22 a.m., redly. I sat on the edge of my bed cradling my dripping brow. It came to me why I should be having such a nightmare. I wanted to betray Mother. It wasn’t out of any desire to change once and for all the metaphysical status quo, or because I wanted to open people’s eyes to the reality of their lives, or even in order to try and blow a whistle on the Supreme Being. It was a far more selfish thing – wounded pride. Mother could have kept in touch, she let me go through all that grief while she, she was pottering around the shops in Crouch End. She could have fixed up some sort of gig with a séance or a medium, or even just written a letter or phoned. I would have understood. Well she wasn’t going to push my buttons from beyond the grave. I was determined to blow the whistle on the whole set-up.

  But the next day came and, standing on a tube platform contemplating the rim of a crushed styrofoam cup as if it contained some further relevation, I began to waver. I sat at my desk all morning in a daze, not that that matters. Then, at lunch time, I went and sat in a café in a daze.

  When I got back to my desk after lunch the phone rang. It was Mother.

  ‘I just called to see how you are.’

  ‘I’m fine, Mother.’

  ‘I called while you were out and spoke to some girl. Did she give you the message?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  ‘I told her specifically to give you the message, to write it down. What’s the matter with the people in your office?’

  ‘Nothing, Mother. She probably forgot.’

  Mother sighed. For her, neglected phone messages had always represented the very acme of Babylonian decadence. ‘So what are you doing?’

  ‘Working, Mother.’

  ‘You’re a little sulky today. What’s the matter, didn’t you sleep?’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I found yesterday all a bit much.’

  ‘You’ll adjust, kid. Come over tonight and meet Christos, he’s a friend of mine – a Greek Cypriot – he runs a wholesale fruit business, but he writes in his spare time. You’ll like him.’

  ‘Yeah, I think I saw his photo at your place yesterday. Is he dead, Mother?’

  ‘Of course he’s dead. Be here by 8.00. I’m cooking. And bring some of your shirts, you can iron them here.’ She hung up on me.

  Ray, who works at the desk opposite, was looking at me strangely when I put down the receiver.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he said. ‘It sounded like you were saying “Mother” on the phone just now.’

  I felt tongue-tied and incoherent. How could I explain this away? ‘No … no, ah … I wasn’t saying “Mother”, it was “Mudder”, a guy called Mudder, he’s an old friend of mine.’

  Ray didn’t look convinced. We’d worked with each other for quite a while and he knew most of what went on with me, but what could I say? I couldn’t tell him who it really was. I’d never live down the ignominy of having a mother who phoned me at the office.

  Ward 9

  ‘Ha ha ha, ha-ha … Hoo, h’, hoo, far, far and away, a mermaid sings in the silky sunlight.’ An idiot cooed to himself on the park bench that stood at the crest of the hill. Below him the greensward stretched down to the running track. In the middle distance the hospital squatted among the houses, a living ziggurat, thrusting out of a crumbling plain.

  The idiot’s hair had been chopped into a ragged tonsure. He wore a blue hooded anorak and bell-bottomed corduroy trousers, and rocked as he sang. As I passed by I looked into his face; it was a face like the bench he sat on, a sad, forlorn piece of municipal furniture – although the morning sun shone bright, this face was steadily being drizzled on.

  This particular idiot lay outside my jurisdiction. He was, as it were, un-gazetted. I knew that by ignoring the opportunity to indulge in the sickly bellyburn of self-piteous caring, I was facing up to an occupational challenge. If I was to have any success in my new job I would need to keep myself emotionally inviolate, walled off. For, this morning, I was to begin an indefinite appointment as art therapist, attached to Ward 9. My destination was the squat fifteen-storey building that rose up ahead of me, out of the tangled confluence of Camden Town.

  I bounced down the hill, the decrease in altitude matched pace for pace by the mounting density of the air. The freshness of the atmosphere on Parliament Hill gave way to the contaminated cotton wool of ground-floor, summer London. Already, at 8.45 a.m., the roads around Gospel Oak were solidly coagulated with metal while shirtsleeved drivers sat and blatted out fumes.

  As I picked my way through the streets the hospital appeared and then disappeared. Its very vastness made its sight seem problematic. In one street the horizon would flukily exclude it in such a convincing way that it might never have existed, but when I rounded the corner there was its flank rearing up – the grey-blue haunch of some massive whale – turning away from me, sending up a terrace of concrete flats with a lazy flip of its giant tail.

  I walked and walked and the hospital never seemed to get any closer. Its sloping sides were banded with mighty balconies, jutting concrete shelves the size of aircraft carrier flight decks. The front of the building was hidden behind a series of zigzagging walkways and ramps that rose in crisscross patterns from the lower ground to the third floor. At the hospital’s feet and cuddled in the crook of its great wings-for-arms, were tumbles of auxiliary buildings: nurses’ flatlets; parking fortlets; generator units two storeys high, housed in giant, venetian-blind-slatted boxes; and ghostly incinerators, their concrete walls and chimneys blackened with some awful stain.

  I rounded the end of the street and found myself, quite suddenly, at the bottom of a ramp that led straight up to the main entrance. The two previous times I had been to the hospital it was a working wasps’ nest in full diurnal swing. But now, their photoelectric cells disconnected, the main doors to the hospital were wedged open with orange milk crates. I picked my way through the long, low foyer, past the shop, at this hour still clad in its roll-over steel door, and in between miscellaneous islands of freestanding chairs, bolted together in multiples of two, seemingly at random. They were thinly upholstered in the same blue fabric as the floor covering. The room was lit by flickering strips of overhead neon, so that the whole effect was ghostly; the overwhelming impression was that this was a place of transit, an air terminal for the dying. It was impossible to differentiate the ill from
the dossers who had leaked in from the streets and piled their old-clothes forms into the plastic chairs. All were reduced and diminished by the hospital’s sterile bulk into untidy parasites. The occasional nurse, doctor or auxiliary walked by briskly. They were uniformed and correct, clearly members of some other, genetically distinct, grouping.

  In the glassed-in corridor that led to the lifts there was an exhibition of paintings – not by the patients, but by some pale disciple of a forgotten landscape school. The etiolated blues and greens chosen to take the place of hills and plains were flattened to sheens behind glass, which reflected the dead architectural centre of the hospital: an atrium where a scree of cobblestones supported uncomfortable concrete tubs, which in turn sprouted spindly, spastic trees.

  I shared the lift to the ninth floor with a silent young man in green, laced at hip and throat. His sandy, indented temples with their gently pulsing veins aroused in me an attack of itchy squeamishness – I had to touch what repelled me. I scratched the palms of my hands and longed to take off my shoes and scratch the soles of my feet. The itch spread over my body like a hive and still I couldn’t take my eyes off that pulsing tube of blood, so close to both surface and bone.

  At the ninth floor the sandy man straightened up, sighed, and disappeared off down a corridor with an entirely human shrug.

  I’d been on to the ward before, albeit briefly, when Dr Busner had shown me round after the interview. What had struck me then and what struck me again now was the difference in smell between Ward 9 and the rest of the hospital. Elsewhere the air was a flat filtered brew; superficially odourless and machined, but latent with a remembered compound of dynasties of tea bags – squeezed between thumb and plastic spoon – merging into extended families of bleaching, disinfecting froths and great vanished tribes of plastic bags. But in Ward 9 the air had a real quality, it clamped itself over your face like a pad of cotton wool, soaked through with the sweet chloroform of utter sadness.

  A short corridor led from the mouth of the lift to the central association area of the ward. This was a roughly oblong space with the glassed-off cabinet of the nurses’ station on the short lift side; a dining area to the right looking out through a long strip of windows over the city; to the left were the doors to various offices and one-to-one treatment rooms; and straight ahead another short corridor led to the two dormitories.

  Every attempt had been made to present Ward 9 as an ordinary sort of place where people were treated for mental illnesses. There were bulletin boards positioned around the association area festooned with notices, small ads, flyers for theatrical performances by groups of hospital staff, clippings from newspapers, drawings and cartoons by the patients. Over in the dining area a few of the tables had rough clay sculptures blobbed on them, left there like psychotic turds. I assumed that they were the products of my predecessor’s last art therapy session. Around the open part of the area there were scattered chairs, the short-legged, upholstered kind you only find in institutions. And everywhere the eye alighted – the dining area, the nurses’ station, dotted in the open area – were ashtrays. Ashtrays on stands, cut-glass ashtrays, lopsided spiral clay ashtrays, ashtrays bearing the names of famous beers; all of them overflowing with butts.

  There are two kinds of institution that stand alone on the issue of smoking. Whereas everywhere else you go you encounter barrages of signs enjoining you to desist, slashing your cigarette through with imperious red lines, in psychiatric wards and police stations the whole atmosphere positively cries out to you, ‘Smoke! Smoke! We don’t mind, we understand, we like smoking!’ Ward 9 was no exception to this rule. Empty at this hour (the patients had no reason to get up, they didn’t roll over in their beds at 8.00 sharp and think to themselves, ‘Ooh! I must get up quickly and have my shot of thorazine …’), the whole ward still whirled and eddied with last night’s acrid work.

  I walked down the short corridor to the nurses’ station. A young man sat behind the desk completely absorbed in a dog-eared paperback. He wore a black sweat shirt and black Levis; his sneakered feet, propped on the cluttered shelf of clipboards and Biros, pushed the rest of him back and up on two wheels of his swivel chair. As I stood and observed him, he rocked gently from side to side, his body unconsciously mirroring the short, tight arcs that his eyes made across the page.

  I shuffled my feet a little on the linoleum to warn him that he was no longer alone. ‘Good morning.’

  He looked up from his book with a smile. ‘Hi. What can I do you for?’

  ‘I’m Misha Gurney, the new art therapist, I start on the ward today and Dr Busner asked me to come in early to get a feel for things.’

  ‘Well, hello Misha Gurney, I’m Tom.’ Tom swung his feet off the ledge and proffered a hand. It was a slim, white hand, prominently bony at the wrist with long, tapering fingers. His handshake was light and dry but firm. His voice had the contrived mellowness of some Hollywood pilgrim paterfamilias. There was something unsettling in the contrast between this and his beautiful face: sandalwood skin and violet eyes. The body, under the stretchy black clothes, moved in an epicene, undulant way. ‘Well, there’s not a lot to see at this time. Zack isn’t even in yet. He’s probably just getting out of bed.’ Tom rolled his lovely eyes back in their soft, scented sockets as if picturing the psychiatrist’s matitudinal routine. ‘How about some tea?’

  ‘Yeah, great.’

  ‘How do you take it?’

  ‘Brown – no sugar.’

  I followed Tom down the corridor that led to the staff offices and the consultation rooms. There was a small kitchenette off to one side. Tom hit the lights, which flickered once and then sprang into a hard, flat, neon glare. He squeaked around the lino in his sneakers. I examined the handwritten notices carefully taped to the kitchen cabinets. After a while I said, ‘What do you do here, Tom?’

  ‘Oh, I’m a patient.’

  ‘I assume you’re not on a section?’

  He laughed. ‘Oh, no. No, of course not, I’m a voluntary committal. A first-class volunteer, exemplary courage, first in line to be called for the mental health wars.’ Again the light mocking irony, but not mad in any way, without the fateful snicker-snack of true schizo-talk.

  ‘You don’t seem too disturbed.’

  ‘No, I’m not, that’s why they let me go pretty much where I please and do pretty much what I want, as long as I live on the ward. You see, I’m a rare bird.’ A downward twist of the corner of a sculpted mouth, ‘The medication actually works for me. Zack doesn’t really like it, but it’s true. As long as I take it consistently I’m fine, but every time they’ve discharged me in the past, somehow I’ve managed to forget and then all hell breaks loose.’

  ‘Meaning …?’

  ‘Oh, fits, delusions, hypermania, the usual sorts of things. I carry the Bible around with me and try and arrange spontaneous exegetical seminars in the street. You know, you’ve seen plenty of crazies, I’ll bet.’

  ‘But … but, you’ll forgive me, but I’m not altogether convinced. If you’re on any quantity of medication …’

  ‘I know, I should be a little more slowed down, a little fuzzier around the edges, un peu absent. Like I say, I’m an exception, a one-off, an abiding proof of the efficacy of Hoffman La Roche’s products. Zack doesn’t like it at all.’

  The kettle whistled and Tom poured the water into two styrofoam cups. We mucked around with plastic dipsticks and extracted the distended bags of tea, then wandered back to the association area. Tom led me over to the windows. The lower decks of the hospital poked out below us. Up here on the ninth floor, more than ever, one could appreciate the total shape of the building – a steeply sloping bullion bar, each ascending storey slightly smaller than the one below it. On the wide balcony beneath us figures were wafting about, clad in hospital clothing, green smocks and blue striped nightdresses, all bound on with tapes. The figures moved with infinite diffidence, as if wishing to offer no offence to the atmosphere. They trundled in slow eddies towards the edge
of the balcony and stood rocking from heel to toe, or from side to side, and then moved back below us and out of sight again.

  ‘Chronics,’ said Tom, savouring the word as he slurped his tea. ‘There’s at least sixty of them down there. Quite a different ball game. Not a lot of use for your clay and sticky-backed paper down there. There’s a fat ham of a man down there who went mad one day and drank some bleach. They replaced his oesophagus with a section cut from his intestine. On a quiet night you can hear him farting through his mouth. That’s a strange sound, Misha.’

  I remained silent, there was nothing to say. Behind me I could hear the ward beginning to wake up and start the day. There were footsteps and brisk salutations. An auxiliary came into the association area from the lift and began to mop the floor with studious inefficiency, pushing the zinc bucket around with a rubber foot. We stood and drank tea and looked out over the chronics’ balcony to the Heath beyond, which rose up, mounded and green, with the sun shining on it, while the hospital remained in shadow. It was like some separate arcadia glimpsed down a long corridor. I fancied I could see the park bench I’d passed some forty minutes earlier and on it a blue speck: the tonsured idiot, still rocking, still free.

  Zack Busner came hurrying in from the lift. He was a plump, fiftyish sort of man, with iron-grey hair brushed back in a widow’s peak. He carried a bulging briefcase, the soft kind fastened with two straps. The straps were undone, because the case contained too many files, too many instruments, too many journals, too many books and a couple of unwrapped, fresh, cream-cheese bagels. Busner affected striped linen or poplin suits and open-necked shirts; his shoes were anomalous – black, steel-capped, policeman’s shit kickers. He spotted me over by the window with Tom and, turning towards his office, gestured to me to follow him, with a quick, flicking kind of movement. I dropped my foam beaker into a bin, smiled at Tom and walked after the consultant.