The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  ‘Look, can you see?’ There was no sense of sky, or the outside, but light came from somewhere. Outlining a squat blockhouse, clapboarded with massive concrete slabs. It was like some defence installation. ‘That’s the Mass Disaster Room. If there’s ever a nuclear attack, or an earthquake, or something like that, that’s where all the equipment is kept to deal with it.’

  ‘Well, like what?’

  ‘I don’t know, no one will tell me. I only found out about it because I came across the door with the notice on it.’

  We stood at the window for a while. The conservatory-like room, the giant machine, the blockhouse. All thinly lit by an invisible day. There was something eerie about the atmosphere. The eeriness that washes over when you step obliquely out of a populous area – from a crowded park into a little grey copse – and look behind you at the life that still goes on, children and dogs.

  Back up in the ward Busner was hurrying about the place, gathering together all the staff members. A circle of chairs had been roughly arranged in the association area. Anthony Valuam and Jane Bowen were already seated and engaged in earnest discussion when we arrived. Valuam showed no curiosity about where we had been. Simon himself had reverted to sullen, disturbed type as soon as we arrived at the ninth floor. He disappeared into a shifting knot of movers and shakers and was gone from sight.

  ‘Sit down, Misha, do sit down.’ Busner flapped his poplin-bumped turkey-skin arms. I sat down next to Mimi, the voluptuous nurse, who had been and gone to the optician. The rest of the staff began to trickle into place, auxiliary as well as medical. There were canteen ladies here in nylon, elasticated hair covers, and psychiatric social workers with rolled-up newspaper supplements. They chatted to one another quite informally, swopping cigarettes and gesturing. The patients took no notice of this assembly – which to my mind more than anything else underlined their exclusion from the right-thinking world.

  Busner called the meeting to order.

  ‘Ahm! Hello everyone. We’ve a lot to get through today, so I’d like to get under way. We don’t want to run over, the way we did last month. Before we come to the first item on the agenda I’d like to introduce to you all a new member of staff, Misha Gurney. Some of you will, no doubt, have heard of his father,’ Busner’s face purpled at the edges with sentimentality, ‘who was a contemporary of mine and a dear friend. So it’s an especial pleasure for me that Misha should be joining us on the ward as the new art therapist …’

  ‘Wait till you hear what happened to the old art therapist …!’ Before I had had time to wheel round in my chair and see who had whispered in my ear, Tom was gone, soft-shoe shuffling down the corridor.

  From then on the meeting deteriorated into the usual trivial deliberations that – in my experience – seem to accompany all departmental meetings. There were discussions about the hours at which tea could be made, discussions about shift rostering, discussions about patients’ visitors. My attention began to falter and then died away altogether. I was staring fixedly over the shoulder of a middle-aged woman who liaised with the ward on behalf of the local social services department. Through the two swing-doors, between her and the entrance to the dormitories, I could see Clive. He was staring at me fixedly, or so it seemed; his great globular eyes were incapable of anything but staring. He was rocking from side to side like a human metronome. If I narrowed my eyes it appeared as if his bizarre messianic hair-do was rhythmically pulsing out of the cheek of the middle-aged social worker. This trick hypnotised me.

  Mimi jabbed me in the ribs. ‘Misha, pay attention!’

  Busner was saying something in my direction. ‘Well Misha?’ he said.

  Mimi whispered, ‘He’s asking what you intend to do in the art therapy session this afternoon.’

  I started guiltily. ‘Urn … well … err. I intend really to, ah, introduce myself to the patients with a series of demonstrations of different techniques and then invite them to show their own work so that we can discuss it.’

  This seemed to satisfy Busner. He turned to Jane Bowen and whispered something in her ear, she smiled and nodded, tapping a yellow biro stem on the edge of her clipboard.

  Soon after this the meeting broke up. I drew Mimi to one side.

  ‘Thanks for that, you saved my hide there. I was miles away.’

  ‘Yeah, absurd isn’t it. Zack’s like most benevolent dictators, he seems to think that by letting us all discuss a load of trivia we’ll feel that we have an important decision-making role in ward policy.’

  ‘How long have you been working here?’

  ‘Oh, quite a while. Ever since I qualified, in fact. There’s something about this ward. You might say that it and I were made for one another.’ The middle-aged social worker came over to where we were standing, Mimi introduced us and then they went off together to discuss a patient. The social worker was blushing furiously. It wasn’t until later that I realised she had thought I was staring at her throughout the ward meeting.

  I took my sandwiches up on to the Heath for lunch and sat on the bench with the idiot. He went on ranting and rocking in a muted way, inhibited no doubt by my presence. I offered him a sandwich, which he accepted and then did hideous things to.

  I looked over the city. The light pattern had been reversed as I was walking over from the hospital and now the vast ziggurat was bathed in bright light, while the bench where the idiot and I scrunged cheese through our teeth was in deep shadow. Tom had told me that he referred to the hospital, privately, as the Ministry of Love; and it was true that the sepulchral ship forging its way through the grid of streets had something of the future, the corporate about it, mixed in with the despotic past.

  The wind whipped across the flight deck entrance to the hospital as I re-entered by the main gates. Well-heeled patients and visitors were being landed by taxis and mini-cabs, while their poorer fellows struggled against the updraft that roared off the hospital’s oblique walls – air crewmen and women lacking enlarged ping-pong bats with which to semaphore.

  On the ninth floor I met Jane Bowen. She was right outside the lift. Her hands fidgeted at her mouth as the doors rolled open.

  ‘Well, Misha, where have you been?’

  ‘I took my sandwiches up on the Heath. I like to get a little fresh air during the day.’

  ‘Well don’t make a habit of it.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Zack prefers it if all the staff eat in the canteen on the ward …’

  ‘You can’t be serious …!’

  ‘Obviously it isn’t imposed on anyone. You’re free to do what you want. But Zack has good reasons for it and you need to witness lunch to understand them.’

  The association area was thronged with patients, they eddied round the counter in the eating area – more of an enlarged serving hatch really – and then gravitated from there to the medication queue. Busner stood in the centre of it all, like some Lord of Misrule. He’d donned a shortie white coat which rode up over his rounded hips. The coat pockets were stuffed to overflowing, and because of the way he was standing it looked as if he was wearing a codpiece. Busner waved his arms around his head and turned circles on his heels, his face contorted, with pain? With hilarity? It was impossible to say.

  I approached him through swirls of the committed.

  ‘Ah, Misha, I’ve tangled my spectacles cord up in my tie at the back. Can you see what’s going on?’ He turned his back on me and I fiddled with the two strands where they had become entwined. ‘Ah, that’s better.’ He clamped the spectacles on to the red grooved bridge of his nose. ‘Now I can see. We’d better sort out your materials for you.’ He led me over to a wall cupboard at the far end of the dining area from the serving hatch and opened the ceiling-high doors. Inside there was a mess of materials and half-finished attempts at something or other. ‘Gerry wasn’t great on ordering the materials,’ said Busner, stepping forward into the cupboard and crunching pieces of charcoal sticks beneath his heels, ‘but everything is here that you could ne
ed. I should take it easy, let them come to you and show you what they’re up to – try and build up some trust.’

  Busner put a cloyingly affectionate arm around my shoulders, he didn’t register my wince. We stood side by side, facing a shelf full of streaked tins of powder paint.

  ‘Your father would have been proud of you, Misha. He would have understood what you’re doing. You know, in a way I feel as if you’re coming home to us here on the ward, that it’s the right place for you, don’t you agree?’ I muttered something negative. ‘I’m glad you feel the same way, come and see me when the session is over, tell me how it went.’ He wheeled away from me and tracked a series of charcoal arcs across the lino. I was left alone – but not for long.

  Tom materialised. At his shoulder was a thirtyish man of medium height and build, unremarkable in lumberjack shirt and denims, remarkable for his arms and his countenance: arms which struggled to escape his body and pushed forward long, muscular, mechanical arms. His face was stretched tight away and zoomed towards his flaring brown hair. The whole impression was one of contained speed.

  ‘This is Jim,’ said Tom, ‘he can’t bear to wait, he wants to get started right away.’

  ‘Yeah. Hi. Jim.’ He thrust a tool at me, I shook it, he retracted it. ‘I really look forward to these sessions. I’d like to work on my thing all the time, but they won’t let me.’ I pulled the double doors open wider.

  ‘Which one is it?’

  ‘Here.’ He pulled down a sort of sculpture, made from clay, from one of the higher shelves, his long arms cradling the irregular shape protectively. He turned and set it down on one of the rectangular melamine tables.

  It was a large piece, perhaps some three and a half feet long and half that wide. Jim had used a base board and built on it with clay. The work had the kind of naive realism I associated with children’s television programmes featuring animated figures moving around model villages. The work depicted a descending curve of elevated roadway which I immediately recognised as the Marylebone Flyover. Jim had neatly sculpted the point at which the two flyover lanes remerged with the Marylebone Road, there were tiny clay cars coming down off the flyover and one of them had knocked into a small Japanese fruiterer’s van which was coming in from the Edgware Road. Two miniature clay figures were positioned in the road gesticulating. The whole thing cut off at the point where the Lisson Grove intersection would be to the east and where the flyover reaches its apex to the west.

  ‘It’s nearly finished,’ said Jim. ‘Today I’m going to paint and glaze it and then I’d like you to arrange for it to be fired.’

  ‘Well, I can’t see any problem with that. Tell me, what’s the story behind this sculpture?’

  ‘It’s not a sculpture.’ He sucked in air through teeth, the weary sigh of a child. ‘It’s an altarpiece.’ He picked up the model flyover and went over to a table by the window with it. Tom giggled.

  ‘Jim’s got a messianic complex. He thinks that the Apocalypse isn’t coming.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It’s a bit complicated. The Apocalypse will come when enough people have accepted that it isn’t coming.’

  ‘That just sounds stupid.’

  ‘Well it isn’t fucking stupid, it’s you who are fucking stupid, Mister Squeaky, get it!’ Tom’s voice switched from light mockery to the hair-trigger aggression of the subnormal thug. It was a startling transformation, as if he’d been possessed by a weird demon. He stalked away and joined his friend. I dismissed the insult. Busner had told me about him; it was clear that this was another act.

  Over the next half-hour or so, most of the other patients on the ward trickled into the association area and came over to where their peers were already at work, mixing powder paint, working clay with fingers, cutting and pasting pictures from magazines. I was astonished by their quiet industry as a group. There seemed hardly anyone on the ward who was genuinely disruptive. Two or three of the patients stood like metronomes around the working area, swaying and rocking, marking the beat of the others’ labour.

  Hilary sat at the window and worked on one of her tiny watercolours with hairline brushes. She had propped up the scrap of artboard on a little easel made from lolly sticks and she worked with deft strokes, each one pulling the mobile stand attached to the catheter in her arm, back and forth. The plastic bag that dangled from it contained a clear fluid and a particular sediment. As the stand moved back and forth this sediment puffed up in the bag, the motes occasionally catching and then gleaming in the afternoon sun that washed in through the huge windows.

  Simon came over and asked me for scissors, glue and stiff paper. He took a half-finished collage from one of the cupboard shelves and sat down near me. It depicted the machine he’d taken me to see that morning, but recreated out of pictures of domestic appliances cut from colour magazines. I went over and stood by him for a moment. He smiled up at me, cracking the pusy rime at the corners of his mouth.

  ‘Unfinished work, left it when I last went out …’ He bent his dirty carrot head to the task again.

  I confined myself to handing out materials. I sensed that now was not the time to comment on the work that the patients were doing. When they began to trust me they would volunteer their own comments. There was a still atmosphere of concentration over the bent heads. I went and stood by the window, listening to the faint sounds of the hospital as it worked on through the afternoon. The distant thrum of generators, clack of feet, shingled slam of gates and trolleys. On the balcony below, two chronics in blue shifts struggled clumsily with one another, one of them bent back by the other against the parapet. I stared at their ill-coordinated aggression for a while, blankly, sightlessly. The ‘O’ I was looking at resolved itself into the stretched mouth of a geriatric. At the point where I snapped out of my reverie and realised I ought to do something an orderly appeared on the balcony and separated them, dragging the younger one away, out of sight beneath my feet.

  Eventually I went and sat down at a table occupied only by a curly-haired man who had lain his head in the crook of his arm like a bored schoolboy. He was doing something with his other arm, but I couldn’t see what. We sat opposite one another for ten minutes or so. Nothing happened. Around us the workers relit cigarettes and built up the fug.

  ‘Psst …!’ It was Tom. ‘Come here.’ He gestured to me to join him and Jim. I went over. They were working diligently on the altarpiece. Jim was doing the painting, it was Tom’s job to wash the brushes and mix the colours. Jim had finished on the blue-brown surface of the road and was starting on the white lines. Tom was pirouetting lazily, a pathetic string lasso dangling in one hand, his voice modulated to a crazy Californian dude’s whine; he had the part down pat. But wrong.

  ‘That man there.’ He pointed at the curly-haired man.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s a real coup for Dr B.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Cocaine psychosis, authentic, full-blown. Used to be an accountant. Not just some scumball junkie. A real coup. Dr B diagnosed him, all the other units around here are real sore. Go and see what he’s doing, it’ll crack you up. And on your way back bring us another beaker of water, OK, fella.’

  I did as I was told. Passing by Lionel, the drug addict, I bent down to pick up an invisible object and looked back to see what it was he was hiding in the crook of his arm. It was nothing. He was deftly picking up and ranging his own collection of invisible objects on the tiny patch of table. As I bent and looked he turned his face to me and smiled conspiratorially. His eyes stayed too long on my hand which was half closed, fingers shaping the indents and projections of my own invisible object. I hurriedly straightened and walked off down the short corridor to the staff kitchenette.

  Halfway down on the left I noticed a door I hadn’t seen before. It had a square of glass set into it at eye level, which cried out to be looked through. I stepped up to it. The scene I witnessed was rendered graphical, exemplary, by the wire-thread grid imprisoned in the gl
ass. It was a silent scene played out in a brightly lit yellow room. A man in his early forties, who was somehow familiar, sat in one of the ubiquitous plastic chairs. He wore loose black clothes and his black hair was brushed back from high temples. He was sitting in profile. His legs were crossed and he was writing on a clipboard which he had balanced on his thigh. His lip and chin had the exposed, boiled look of a frequent shaver. The room was clearly given over to treatment. It had that unused corner-of-the-lobby feel of all such rooms. A reproduction of a reproduction hung on the wall, an empty wire magazine rack was adrift on the lino floor – the poor lino floor, its flesh scarified with cigarette burns. In the far corner of the room, diagonally opposite the man in black, a figure crouched, balled up face averted. I could tell by the lapel laden with badges, flapping in the emotional draft, that it was Jane Bowen.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in silence and concentration. At 5.40 I gathered in the art materials and stacked all the patients’ work in the cupboard in as orderly a fashion as I could manage. It took some time to tidy up the art materials properly. The patients for the most part stayed where they were, hunched over the tables, seemingly unwilling to leave. Tom and Jim muttered to one another by the window. They had the pantomime conspiratorial air of six year olds, still half convinced that if they didn’t look they couldn’t be seen.

  I found Busner in his office. He sat staring out of his window at the lack of scale. On the far corner of the hospital a steel chimney which I hadn’t noticed that morning belched out a solid column of white smoke. Busner noticed the direction of my gaze.

  ‘A train going nowhere, eh, Misha?’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Because it’s true. We’re a holding pen, a state-funded purgatory. People come in here and they wait. Nothing much else ever happens; they certainly don’t get appreciably better. It’s as if, once classified, they’re pinned to some giant card. The same could be said of us as well, eh?’ He shivered, as if he were witnessing a patient being pierced with a giant pin. ‘But I’m forgetting myself, don’t pay any attention, Misha, it’s the end of a long day.’