Читать книгу Umbrella - Уилл Селф - Страница 9

I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . . Along comes Zachary, along from the porter’s lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill calypso warms the cold Friern Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath. I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man, oh I’m an ape man . . . The lawns and verges are soft with dew, his arms and his legs are stiff – a rigor he associates with last night’s tense posture, when I aborted the fumbled beginnings of a non-committal congress. While Miriam fed the baby in their bed hawsers and pipelines coiled away into milky, fartysteam – the enormous projectile retracted into the cradle of my belly and thighs . . . I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . . the Austin’s steering wheel plastic vertebrae bent double, kyphotic . . . had pulled at his shoulders as he wrestled the car down from Highgate, then yanked it through East Finchley – knees jammed uncomfortably under the dashboard – then across the North Circular and past the blocks of flats screening the Memorial Hospital before turning right along Woodhouse Road. Under the bonnet the pistons hammered at his coccyx, the crankshaft turned his pelvis round and around, while each stop and start, each twist and turn – the very swivel of his eyeballs in their sockets – didn’t ease this stress but screwed it still further into his frame: bitindrill, chuckinlathe, poweron . . . In his already heightened state he had looked upon the city as an inversion, seeing the parallelograms of dark woodland and dormant grass as man-made artefacts surrounded by growing brick, tarmac and concrete that ripples away to the horizon along the furrows of suburban streets . . . While his domestic situation is by no means quiescent, nor is it settled, and the day ahead – Ach! A beige worm of antiseptic cream wriggles into the festering crack of a bed sore . . . Bitterly he had considered: Is my dip’ psych even relevant when it comes to this first-aiding, the sick parade of a shambling citizen militia? . . . I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . . The drive into work is already automatic. — Still, it’s a shock that his destination is this folly with a Friends’ Shop. Along comes Zachary . . . Hush Puppies snaffling the gravel path that leads from the staff car park – where cooling steel ticks beside floral clocks – towards the long repetition of arched windows and arched doorways, of raised porticoes and hip-roofed turrets. Along comes Zachary . . . creeping noisily up on the high central dome with its flanking campaniles in which no bells have ever rung, as they are only disguised ventilation shafts designed to suck the rotten fetor from the asylum . . . Along comes Zachary . . . avoiding the unseeing eyes of the tarnished bronze statue that hides behind some forsythia – a young man clearly hebephrenic . . . his face immobile forever in its suffering, the folds of his clothing plausibly heavy . . . for he looks altogether weighed down by existence itself. Along comes Zachary . . . chomping beside the arched windows now, and the arched doorways, and then the arched windows again. He admits himself into this monumental piece of trompe l’œil not by the grand main doors – which are permanently bolted – but by an inconspicuous side one – and this is only right, as it begins the end of the delusion that he will encounter some Foscari or Pisani, whereas the reality is: a low banquette covered with dried-egg vinyl, and slumped upon this a malefactor, his face – like those of so many of the mentally ill – a paradoxical neoplasm, the aged features just this second formed to quail behind a defensively raised shoulder. A hectoring voice says, You will be confined to your ward and receive no allowance this week, DO YOU UN-DER-STAND? Oh, yes, I understand well enough . . . which is why he continues apace, not wishing to see any more of this routine meanness . . . Along comes Zachary – and along a short corridor panelled with damp chipboard, then down some stairs into the lower corridor. Along comes Zachary – and along – he has clutched his briefcase to his chest, unfastened it, and now pulls his white coat out stiff little billows. You’ll be needing one, Busner, Whitcomb had said – a jolly arsehole, his long face a fraction: eyes divided by moustache into mouth – else the patients’ll think . . . Think what? Think what?! But the consultant’s attention span was so short he had lost interest in his own phrase and fallen to reaming the charred socket of his briar with the end of a teaspoon, the fiddly task performed inefficiently on the knobbly tops of his knock-knees. – Why were the staff room chairs all too low or too high? Along comes Zachary – and along . . . I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape-man, oh I’m an ape man, his splayed shoes crêping along the floor, sliding across patches of lino, slapping on stone-flagged sections, their toes scraping on the ancient bitumen – wherever that was exposed. Scrrr-aping. He wonders: Who would dream of such a thing – to floor the corridors, even the wards, of a hospital with a road surface? Yet there is a rationale to it – a hectoring, wheedling, savage rationale – that explains itself via the voices that resound inside the patients’ bony-stony heads, their cerebral corridors and cortical dormitories . . . because these are roadway distances – a hundred yards, a hundred feet, a hundred more, a North Circular of the soul. No signs, though, no Tally-Ho Corner – instead: lancet windows that peer out on to the airing courts from under lids of grime, exercise yards, really, separated by the wings and spurs that partition the long sunless trench between the first and second ranges of the hospital. Spurs budding from wings – more spurs budding from them, the whole mad bacterium growing steadily larger and more complex in the hospitable suburban substrate. Along comes Zachary . . . On the windowless side of the corridor there are doors with bossy signs on them: PORTERS, CANTEEN, MAINTENANCE DEPT CANTEEN, SYNAGOGUE, BOUTIQUE – boutique! then BREAD ROOM – a room full of bread . . . and there are also ramps leading up to the wards above. On he comes . . . and still the deep throat gapes in front of him, a gullet of light-stripes indented with bands of pockmarks – the original plasterers’ decorative scheme – or else scattered with medallions and stone-rustic quoins seeped-upon-brown. On he comes . . . tenderly touching the flaking veins of old gas pipes, to the bare copper of one of which has been Sellotaped a single flyer for POPULAR SWING BAND, The Rhythmaires – but, he thinks, can this be that dated, or is it that the air in here and everything else ages faster? This is at the corner where the western corridor intersects, a rounded corner worn down by lurch-upon-lurch – No! It was designed that way to stop them killing themselves, which they will do. And get used to it, Whitcomb had said perkily from behind his plastic comb moustache, because you’ll have to deal with a great many more. That’s just the way – how it is. A great shame – but how it is. Hanging may’ve been repealed by Parliament . . . he puffed small and aromatic clouds of cosmic faux pas . . . but it remains the number one method of execution in here – this decade is proving quite as swinging as the last! Not that Whitcomb was being callous, it was just that that’s how he is – like so many psychiatrists of passable competence, so accustomed had he become to speaking to the distressed and the deranged in tones bridled by concerned neutrality, and employing vocabulary purged of any upsetting words, that when set free he became laughably inappropriate – or would be if there was anything to laugh about. Nor had he expected his new junior to deal with the amusing suicides himself – certainly not by swabbing, or even so much as looking – that’s what nurses were for, surely! – only that he should be prepared for how the more feisty ones, with sprightliness fizzing in their melancholy, would smuggle a sheet to the lavatory, tear, twine and then knot it to the crook of the pipe where it entered the cistern. The blessing as well as the curse of this Victorian plumbing, Busner had felt Whitcomb might well have said – it was his sort of remark – but instead he was obliged to furnish his own homily, for any death, no matter how meagre, demanded at least this consideration: The blessing as well as the curse of this Victorian plumbing is its robustness. Kick and thrash as they might, the most ardent suicide was unable to break the pipe . . . They sometimes manage – this from Perkins, the nastier of the charge nurses on 14, one of the two chronic wards to which Busner had been assigned – to hang themselves from the bloody chain, would you believe it! We find ’em with their bare tootsies in the kharzi . . . Busner believed it. He saw rivulets of urine and faeces running down the gutters between metatarsals, plip-plopping into the commode while up above the cistern splutters unceasing . . . That first suicide, which he had not only looked upon but also helped Mboya – the nice nurse – to cut down, had suspended herself from the completely reliable pipe – and so in death she was wedged in the awkward gap between it and a white-painted window that had been halved lengthwise when this cubicle was partitioned into existence – yet more evidence – if any were needed – of how the hospital altered its own cellular structure to create new morphologies for new pathologies to be diagnosed by psychiatrists accredited by new professional associations . . . while the inmates remained the same, patient only in the way she now was: inert, with no sign of her bowels having been emptied apart from . . . that smell. Instead, her papery skin, oh so fine, crinkled into the flannelette of a too-big nightie. She was, Busner had thought, a dead dry moth, its cellular structure decaying inside of this far larger one.

. . . Apart from that smell: faecal, certainly – but antiseptically chemical too, with a sharp tang of floor polish — a still more intense blending of the odour that emanated from the pores, mouths and hidden vents of the inmates confined to the first psychiatric ward Busner had ever visited, more than a decade before, where he had student-foolishly inquired, What’s that smell? And been told it was paraldehyde, a liquid sedative as limpidly brown as the state it was intended to induce . . . in Henry, in Napsbury . . . where he still is . . . my brother lest I forget. Paraldehyde – how much of it had been poured down throats in asylums throughout the past half-century? Gallons . . . demijohns . . . barrels? Hosed into them, really, to put out the fire. And now what was left – this rain inside the building, this rusty old rain falling down from the saturated plaster to the asphalt floor.

All this had jetted Busner forward sea-sluggishly through the greeny-briny, the sounds of crying, sobbing and cackling amplified by the third-of-a-mile corridor, distorted by its scores of alcoves, then spun by its rifling so that, with unerring accuracy, they strike him in one ear and revolve around his head to the other . . . Axoid: Bold as Love. Along comes Zachary, my tremolo arm vibrating as I sing to my own don’t-step-on-the-cracks-self . . . past the hairdresser and the sculpture room, then out from the main block of the hospital towards ART THERAPY and the REMINISCENCE ROOM – the last Whitcomb’s own humane innovation. In this section of the corridor the light from the south-facing windows gives him the sensation of trundling lousily along a trench, paraldehyde . . . paral- . . . parados! that was the word for it – the side of the trench where they stood to fire their machine gun, its traverse . . . the airing court, its ticcing picking of the enemy that comes bellowing across the dormant grass: madness – a banshee. Along comes Zachary . . . Not that he has had the corridor to himself – there’s been a steady stream of staff and a few purposeful patients on their way to buy pathetic sundries or attend therapy sessions. A few purposeful – but many more let out from their wards simply to wander the sprawling building. There was one platoon – or so he’d been told – who marched from the Camden Social Services office in the north-west to the Haringey Social Services office in the north-east, then headed south to the lower corridor, and tramped the entire length of it before heading north once more, and so completing a mile-long circuit of the hospital’s insides which they would make again and again, until ordered to halt for food by their bellies, or for rest by their feet, or for medication . . . by their keepers. Yes, there have been these patients in their charity cardigans soiled at the hem, thick socks sloughing from thin ankles, their eyes cartooned by the wonky frames of their National Health glasses – for whom a corridor is a destination. None of them is real – nor remotely credible, not compared to this: Along comes Zachary . . . the me-voice, the voice about me, in me, that’s me-ier than me . . . so real, ab-so-lute-ly, that might not self-consciousness itself be only a withering away of full-blown psychosis? This must, Busner thinks, occur to everyone, every day, many times, whether or not they are walking along a corridor so long that it would challenge the sanity of a once-born, a cheery Whitman. Still . . . that way madness about madness lies . . . a madness that has already diverted his career from the mainline before it got started, sending him rolling into the siding that connects to this laager, with its buttoned-up soul-doctors and Musselmen, all of them compelled to serve under the campanile, the water tower, and the chimney from the stained brickwork of which a smooch of yellow smoke licks the grey sky over North London. Along comes Zachary . . . the corridor is narrow – ten feet at most – yet none of the human traffic thus far has detained him until now — when he is fixated by one transfixed. It is a patient – a woman, an old woman . . . a very old woman, so bent – so kyphotic, that upside down she faces the sagging acrylic belly of her own cardigan and vigorously assents to it. This is all that Busner can see: the back of her nodding-dog head, the whitish hair draggling away from two bald patches – one at the crown, the second a band across the rear of her cranium. At once, he thinks of twitchers he has seen on his chronic ward, screwing their heads into the angle between the headrest and the back of their allotted armchair – twitchers, wearing themselves away as opportunity hammers away at the inside of the television screen and applause comes in monotonous waves. She is at once a long way off and close enough for him to manhandle. After the eruptions – and there are many lifetimes of afterwards – it settled down on him, an understanding soft and ashy, that all the important relationships in his life – with his uncle Maurice, with Alkan, with Sikorski and the other Quantity Theorists, with his wives – definitely with his children – were like this: fondling familiar, their breath in my nostrils caries-sweet, sugar-sour – yet also radiophonically remote, their voices bleeping and blooping across the lightyears.

They take a long time to reach one another – the psychiatrist and the old woman patient. To see her, to see her properly, Busner has to wade through a Brown Windsor of assumptions about the elderly insane. — Moral aments, McConochie had called them in the subdued and amphitheatral lecture room at Heriot-Watt, neither knowing nor caring – so far as the young Zack could see – whether this malaise was born of heredity, anoxia, syphilitic spirochetes, shell shock – or some other malfunction in the meaty mechanism altogether. The dopamine hypothesis was beyond hypothetical to McConochie, the dope, whose favoured expository method was to get a chronic patient in from the back wards and put them through their hobbling paces on the podium. This, a dour travesty of Charcot’s mesmerism, for it was his students who became hypnotised by their professor’s monotonous description of the schizophrenic to hand, whose own illness rendered her altogether incapable of evoking the harrowing timbre of her own monotonous voices. McConochie, the worn-out pile of whose fustian mind would be bared – as he wandered from lectern to steamy radiator and back – by his inadvertent references to general paralysis of the insane, or even dementia praecox, obsolete terms that meant far less than the vernacular: loony – yet which served their purpose, inculcating his students – Busner too – with the obstinate conviction that any long-stay inpatient above a certain age was afflicted not with a defined pathology but a wholly amorphous condition. — It is this loonystuff, at once fluid and dense, that Busner wades through, and that, besides clogging up the interminable corridor, also lies in viscous puddles throughout the extensive building and its annexes. The old woman’s head vibrates beyond my reach: a component on an assembly line just this second halted by the cries of shop stewards . . . She tics, and her crooked little feet, shod in a child’s fluffy bedroom slippers, kick and kick at a lip of linoleum tile that has curled away from the asphalt. Kick and kick: micro-ambulation that yet takes her nowhere. Busner thinks, inevitably, of a clockwork toy ratcheting on the spot, a plastic womanikin doomed to topple over . . . but she doesn’t, and so he comes on, his thighs heavy, aching as he forces his way through his own clinical indifference.

Right beside her now, bent down like her so that he can peer round her palsied shoulder and into her face, which is . . . profoundly masked: rough-bark skin within which frighteningly mobile eyes have been bored. – Shocked, he withdraws, and the old woman is at once far away again, shaking and ticcing, her fingers scrabbling, her arms flexing I’m an ape man I’m an ape-ape . . . Perceptible flames of movement ignite on her left-hand side, in the middle of the densest thickets of akinesia, a paralysis not only of the muscles . . . but of the will itself – abulia? then flare up one arm, across the shoulders, before exploding into ticcy sparks and so dying away . . . Torticollis comes to Busner uselessly – and such is the parasympathetic drama he has just witnessed that he is amazed when two auxiliary staff, their black curly hair aerated cream in white nylon snoods, casually part to circumvent them – . . . I tellim mek a gurl an offer she’ll ’preciate, their remarks volleying between him and the old woman . . . See, ’e cummup ’ere mos days . . . – before they reunite and carry on, oblivious. — Electric woman waits for you and me . . . with Nescafé and a marijuana cigarette burning rubber after the International Times event at the Roundhouse. Somewhere in the bedsit grot of Chalk Farm . . . Busner had taken the wrinkled fang trailing venom, his eye caught by Ronnie Laing and Jean-Paul Sartre paperbacks stacked in the brick-and-board bookcase . . . nauseating. Her boyfriend’s hair hung down lanker than the bead curtain she clicked through with the mugs. She was in velvet – the boyfriend in a sort of hessian sack. Was it Busner who had been time-travelled here from a past as jarringly austere as his test-card-patterned sports jacket and drip-dry tie, or, to the contrary, they who had been op-art-spiralled from a pre-industrial opium dream of foppery and squalor? Later . . . she frigidly anointed him with tiger balm and then they coupled on a floor cushion covered with an Indian fabric that had tiny mirrors sewn into its brocade. The boyfriend hadn’t minded gotta split, man and Busner was split . . . a forked thing digging its way inside her robe. She fiddled with bone buttons at her velvety throat. His skin and hairs snagged on the mirrors, his fingers did their best with her nipples. She looked down on me from below . . . one of his calves lay cold on the floorboards. There was the faint applause of pigeons from outside the window. — His strong inclination is to touch the old woman, his touch, he thinks, might free her from this entrancement – but first: Are you all right? Can I help you? Nothing. The upside-down face faces me down, the eyes slide back and away again, but their focal point is either behind or in front of his face, never upon it. – Can you tell me which your ward . . . is? He grasps her arm – more firmly than he had intended acute hypertonia wasted old muscles yet taut, the bones beneath acrylic sleeve, nylon sleeve, canvas skin . . . thin metal struts. The fancy new quartz watch on his own plump wrist turns its shiny black face to his as her malaise resonates through him . . . Along comes Zachary . . . he wonders: Am I blurring? Ashwushushwa, she slurs. What’s that? Ashuwa-ashuwa. One of her bright eyes leers at the floor. He says: Is it my shoes – my Hush Puppies? Her eye films with disappointment – then clears and leers pointedly at the floor again. She is drooling, spit pools at the point of her cheekbone and stretches unbroken to where it doodles on the tile with a snail’s silvering. At long last . . . slow, stupid Zachary bends down and presses down the lip of the tile so that the toe of the kicking slipper scoots over it. Then . . . she’s off! Not doddering but pacing with smoothness and fluidity, her shoulders unhunching, her neck unbending and pivoting aloft her head as her arms swing free of all rigidity. – It took so long for Busner to reach her, so long for him to decide to touch her, that he’s agog: she should be right in front of him not twenty yards off and falling down the long shaft of the corridor. Except . . . already her gait is becoming hurried then too fast . . . festination, another uncalled for Latinism, pops into his mind as the old woman is swept away from me on the brown tide . . . Is this, he wonders, a contradictory side-effect of her medication? The lizardish scuttle that counterpoints Largactil’s leaden tread? Because, of course, it is unthinkable that she shouldn’t be dosed with some form of chlorpromazine – everyone is. The drug saturates the hospital in the same way that paraldehyde formerly soaked the asylum, although a few isolated voices – Busner’s muted one among them – have, while not doubting its efficacy, its . . . humanity . . . questioned its necessity. For all the good this does, because there’s no damning its sepia-sweet flow, a single wave that nonetheless drowns out many, many voices. Not having seen quite so many chronic mental patients in one place for some years, Busner has been struck, since arriving at Friern, by the chloreography, the slow-shoe-shuffle of the chorus from which an occasional principal choric breaks free into a high-kicking and wind-milling of legs and arms. Noticed this tranquillising – but also become aware of a steady background pulse of involuntary movement: tardive dyskinesia that deforms the inmates’ bodies, flapping hands, twitching facial muscles, jerking heads . . . They are possessed, he thinks, by ancient subpersonalities, the neural building-blocks of the psyche . . . She is gone – or, at least, too far down the corridor to be seen any more a human particle. Busner, who is interested in most things, has read about linear accelerators, and so he takes a green-capped Biro from the row ranged across his breast pocket – green for his more imagistic aperçus, red for clinical observations, blue for memories, black for ideas – then writes in the notebook he has taken out and flipped open: What will she smash into? What will happen then? All the subhuman parts of her – can they be observed? in the long dark corridor where they play all sorts: skippin’ and boats and hoopla-for-chokkolits. Mary Jane comes to smackem, Lookit the skirtin’! she cries. In the passage it’s allus dark – so dark inna coalhole. Illumination comes only from a fanlight above the door, comes on sunny days in a single oblique beam a Jacob’s ladder that picks out a burnin’ bush on the floorboards that Stan and Audrey jump into and out of – Yer put yer left hand in, yer put yer left arm out, Shake it a little, a little, then turn yersel about, the little ones, they are, going Loobeloo, loobeloo, but Bert just laughs at them: You’re rag-arses, you aynt got no proper cloves, juss smocks, and he swings open the front door and goes out on the step to play with his marbles . . . his wunner . . . his fiver an’ sixer inall. He has them all neatly wrapped up in one of their father’s noserags, wrapped up and tied in a little bindle. He sits on the front step and gets them out and places them in a row. Audrey peeks from behind the door and sees claybrown, marblewhirl, glasstripe with sunrays shining through it so pretty she cannot resist it when he goes down the four steps to sit at the kerb and twist fallen straw – but grabs it and darts back inside. Stan’s eyes are wide, Yul catchit, he says, yul catchit. They stand in the burnin’ bush looking at the striped marble glowing in Audrey’s palm and neither of them can move – Yer put yer left leg in, yer put yer left leg out, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out . . . but it won’t go no ferver, it is stuck there kicking and kicking against an invisible barrier, while, terrorised by the imagining of what Bert will do to me, Audrey’s head shakes, Yer put yer noddle in, yer put yer noddle out . . . The door crashes back on its hinges and there he is: Where’s me stripey! He howls, then charges for her, Yer put yer whole self in, yer put yer whole self out . . . He grabs her wrist so hard she feels the bones grating together inside it, then twists it so that the fist opens helplessly. A’wah-wa-wa! A’wah-wa-wa! she blubs. Audrey’s big brother’s starting eyes are fixed on his beloved marble – but hers, hers, are equally held by the peculiar bracelet he wears, its golden segments fiery in the burnin’ bush, and on the back of it a huge black jewel Mother’s jet beads. Audrey staggers, almost falls, bends double to escape the hurt and is caught there feeling the long Vulcanised strip of tension that loops round her middle and stretches in either direction the length of the passage an inner tube pulled tight round the rim of a bicycle wheel.

Stuck in the present’s flesh are the looking-glass fragments of a devastating explosion: a time bomb was primed in the future and planted in the past. The debris includes the row of houses along Novello Street towards Eel Brook Common, their top two storeys weatherboarded and bowing over the roadway under widows’ peaks of rumpled tiling. There’s the fat-bellied kiln of the pottery in the crook of the King’s Road and the ragged patterning of the yews in the misty grounds of Carnwath House. Old Father Thames sucking on weedy-greasy piles stuck in the mud all along the riverside from the bridge to the station. Her own father sucking on a hazel twig he’s cut and whittled with his pocket knife to slide in and out of his muddy mouth, in between his remaining weedy-greasy teeth. — Audrey’s father, Sam Death: not De’Ath, not lar-de-dar, not like some uz thinks they’re better than they should be. Namely, Sam’s brother Henry, who styles himself like that and resides in a new villa somewhere called Muswell Hill. They have their own general, the De’Aths. Audrey has heard this said so many times that even now, a big girl of ten, she cannot forestall this vision: a rotund man in a scarlet jacket hung all over with gold braid, and sitting on a kitchen chair in a scullery. His white mutton chops creamy on the rim of his high collar, his red cheek pressed against the limewashed wall. Not that Audrey’s mother speaks of the De’Aths’ general enviously – there has always been a niceness to this understanding: while the Deaths are not the sort to have servants, neither are they those what serve. And while the Deaths are no better than they should be, neither are they worse than they might. Whispering in the parlour before the new bracket was put in, before the cottage piano arrived – whisperings when Mary Jane put a solar lamp on the table at dusk and it rounded off the corners of the room with its golden globe of light. Guttersnipes, they hissed, urchins, street arabs – different ones came on several occasions to say, If it please you, sir, ma’am, I bin by the line-up fer the Lambeth spike, anna bloke wot wuz innit said if ’n I wuz to cummover west an’ tell iz people there’d be a tanner innit. But Sam Death is not the whispering sort: A tanner! A tanner for a windy nag stuffed with skilly! You’ll count yerself bloody lucky t’cummaway frummeer wiv a thru’pence – now fuck off, or I’ll call fer the blue boys! The arabs aren’t down – thru’pence is a good dip, so they skip from the avenue into the Fulham Road, tossing their caps up as Audrey’s father buttons the long skirts of his rabbit-skin coat, saying, There’s one as won’t be dining wiv Duke ’Umphrey t’night. Audrey never sees ve windy nag, knows only of her father’s other brother from these evening sallies – Sam heading off to head him off, muttering that: It’s a crying shame Honest John Phelps the ferryman is no more, so cannot take him across to the Surrey side. So, James Death the pauper uncle becomes all paupers for Audrey – when she’s sent to fetch her father from the Rose & Crown for his tea Jim’s is the shadow that capers beside the trapdoor dancers. In the flare of a naptha lamp, she sees him, grovelling beneath one of the coster’s stalls in Monmouth Street market – cowering there, picking up orange peel and pressin’ its smile to ’is ol’ man’s mouf . . . Then there’s the screever kneeling on the pavement outside the ironmonger’s on King Street, where Audrey waits while her mother goes in to buy a tin of Zebra grate polish. This rat-man scratches a gibbet on the granite with charcoal, not chalk – a fraying hank of marks from which hangs Uncle Jim, who sings: Je-sus’ blood ne-ver failed me ye-et . . . his cap in hand.

Stanley, his blazer hung from the privy’s latch, feeds the chalky inner tubing into the steel groove – Gilbert, Gilbert Cook . . . does something similar so that Audrey bites my lip –. But not yet – before then, when Albert sits at the kitchen table, his shirtsleeves cinched by fascinating bands, their parents are already styling themselves Deeth, to rhyme with teeth Sam picks, his face swellin’ beet-red. You’ll have an apoplexy, guv’nor, says Albert, dipping his nib and filling in Olive’s line of the census form with quick, clever, cursive, clerkish writing. Don’t guv’nor me, you jack-gentleman, Sam growls, what matter if we change an a to an e? Whose business but our own? Albert has his father’s hand-me-down face, which would be handsome enough onna a fat man, although it appears queer on their tapered heads – the smooth flesh bunching up at their brows and along their jawlines. It’d be the Ministry’s business, I’d say, t’would be better if you left off – and as he speaks Albert continues to write, Death, Violet May, daughter, —, — — — —, — —, Secondary, his pen morsing from box to box, the dashes indicating further shared characteristics – ’til at least I’ve gone into rooms, I’ve no wish to speak for the others . . . who, despite having grown up with Albert always before them, are still agog when he does two things at once, both perfectly: piano playing and reading the evening paper, timing an egg while totting up the household accounts – no alternation between hand and foot, or coordination between eye and hand faults him, no variability of scales confounds him. ’E’s twins inna single skin, said a local wag, seeing Bert unerringly volley a football even as he was marking possibles for the guv’nor in the Pink ’Un with a stub of pencil – this when father and son were still close, down at Craven Cottage, the playing field all round kicked and stamped into a happily tortured morass. Audrey thought: if we’re Death, then Uncle James must be dearth – this a word gleaned from Bible and Bunyan at school, for the Deaths are not regular attendees, let alone communicants.

When four out of the five Death children had left the house on Waldemar Avenue, Death, Samuel A. Theodore, 51, married, 31 years, Night Garage Inspector, Omnibus Coy, Worker, was still known, familiarly, as Rothschild Death, on account of the flutters and the rabbit-skin coat, and the arf and arfs he downed in pubs and penny gaffs from King Street to Parsons Green and Mortlake beyond, ales that imparted a jovial gloss to his coating of bombast. Familiarly, yes, for those sort won’t be told, but formally it was Deeth, and when the three Deeths transplanted themselves from the London clay to the red Devon loam, with Albert’s assistance taking up residence in a cottage at Cheriton Bishop – where Mary Jane had been raised – they became known locally as the Deers. — Sam Deer totters around the small garden, Olive Deer watches him. She has seen pictures in the illustrated weekly and read the accompanying text. The pictures are obscure – the words surpassing allusive. Olive, who knows nothing of adult bodies besides her own, still wonders how it is that they get food into the women in Holloway Prison who won’t eat . . . who keep their jaws clamped shut. She wonders what it might be like to tell someone that a twisting rivulet of ants has leaked into the cottage from the rain-washed garden. Got in, flowed up the stairs, sopped up the grooves of the candlewick and, not unpleasantly, are infesting me merry bit . . .

Stanley mends the inner tube, feeding it through the water in the wooden pail, the kinked eel sends a piddle of bubbles to the surface. He pulls it out, mops it, marks its gills with the chalk. Caught in the kink, the corridor stretching away in front of her . . . longer than time, Audrey burns with covetousness for that safety bicycle, convinced she can ride it better than him – fix it quicker. Neat as a pin in the tailor-made she’s bought with her first week’s wages from Ince’s, she covets it – and resents him. It was one thing to be still soaping Bert’s collars – from when they were nippers his primacy was taken so much for granted that there was no more need to speak of it than what you got upter in the privy. But Stanley – her baby, her bumps-a-daisy, that he should have this and not her, well, she was reft, the suspicion creeping into her that he’s never given a fig for her. Playing out, playing Queenie – and I was Queenie, and the Wiggins boys all mocking me . . . and that lousy boy, who come up from Sands End – the one Mother said az the stink of gas onnis togs – picks up the ball and dips it inna puddle, then rolls it in some horse shit, and when I turn round he throws it at me so ’ard the string busts and all the soggy, shitty paper wraps round my face and spatters my pinny, an’ Stan leaps on ’im, thumpinim proper, defendin’ his big sis, and the Sands End kid ad vese big obnail boots, no stockings, juss vese boots . . . coming down on Stan’s face . . . a yelp! The Wiggins boys screamin’, turnin’ tail. There mustabin a nail come loose – there was that much blood. When Bert come out of the house and dragimoff, the Sands End kid was spittin’, Garn! Piss up yer leg an play wiv ve steam! Still . . . maybe . . . maybe even then it was all a bloody show . . .

Cold meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . . November in Foulham, the streets greasily damp – the colour of rotten logs. Bad air from the river, bad air from the Works, rotten malt gusting from the Lamb brewery over Chiswick way. In the back bedroom Audrey rubs the soot-stained muslin curtain against her cheek and peers down in the near-darkness at the backyards of their terrace and those of the terraces behind, fret-worked by walls and fences into separate territories, each with its own upright hut . . . a command post – Ladysmith relieved. Come inter the ga-arden, Maude! And see the raspberry canes scattered spilikins, the humpback of an abandoned cask, a pile of bricks, a birdcage shaped like the Crystal Palace that them two doors down adfer a myna, which had croaked back at the cat’s-meat-man: Ca-a-at’s me-eat! Until p’raps a cat gotit. Audrey! Or-dree! Cummun get yer tea! Cat meat, mutton pies, Tell me when your mother dies . . . She should have been down there with her sisters, fetching yesterday’s leg of mutton down from the meat safe, peeling and boiling potatoes, scraping dripping from the pale blue enamel basin. Or-dree! She can’t be doin’ wivvit. Time enough for tasks later – her soda-scraped hands bloaters floating in the scummy water. Besides, she cannot abide her mother just now – Mary Jane who stinks of chlorodyne, and slumps narcotised on the horsehair chaise her sons dragged in from the parlour when it split. Her Ladysmith, a bell tent of grey woollen shawl and black bombazine, her tired auburn hair down rusting on her big shoulders. I can’t be bovvered wiv me stays, she says, not when me mulleygrubs comes upon me. Audrey is repelled by her – disgusted that her mother vouchsafes her women’s ailment to her alone – the sly thing, Or-dree! – where they jumble together in the sewn-in pockets of time swung apart from the general shindy of Death family life.

She comes clattering down the bare stairs – the runner in the hall has yet to reach them, it trails behind the Death’s measured tread as they mount from floor to floor of No. 18 Waldemar Avenue. When they had arrived, the house – barely twenty years old – had just suffered its first demotion: sold on by the family who had bought it from its spec’ builder to one Emmanuel Silver, who had sliced it into three residences. The Deaths – Samuel, Mary Jane and the three older children, who were then very small – had the ground floor, a proper kitchen range and a spankin’ new geyser, although they and the other families still had to share the old bucket privy in the backyard. The Poultneys had the rooms on the first floor for a while, until Abraham Poultney was laid off from his job as a fitter with Ellis Tramways, a happenstance that coincided – or may have been caused by – the death of their younger daughter, Rose, from diphtheria. She wuz not the right sort, Mary Jane said of Missus Poultney. Not that she wuzzn respectable – but she ’ad no backbone, poor soul. I didn’t see little Rose for, ooh, on toppuv a week – you remarked onnit, Ordree – so I goes up there and finds they’d put her on toppuv the wardrobe in the back bedroom. The whiffuvit – terrible, it wuz. The merciful Deaths had paid for the funeral – including the toy casket, knocked up from deal, cheap but decent. At about the same time, Samuel had secured his own position as Deputy General Manager of the London General’s Fulham garage – this, after long service as a driver, and latterly a conductor. ’E was a blackleg in the strikes, said Stanley, years later, so they give iz nibs iz dibs. Audrey never thought this the whole story – she had seen how her father was with horses bussing and petting ’em . . . She had been with him one time when he stooped down in the road after another hearse had passed by and said, See ’ere, girl, ’ere’s shit an’ straw both. What they eats an’ what they lets fall at the far end. Straw’s ’ere to muffle it up when they carts us away. When they’ve planted us in the ground, we’ll turn inter ’urf – which is only by wayuv sayin’ another sorta droppin’. It was an uncharacteristically lengthy speech for her father to have made – at least, in the presence of a member of his own family. — Parked outside the Cock & Magpie with a jujube to suck – or not, Audrey heard not Father, Samuel or Sam, but Rothschild Death holding forth in the public bar: on the follies of the turf, the moonstruck fancies of the new women and the socialistic madness of the Progressives. An occasional late hansom or growler might bowl along King Street – straw bristles plaited in its horses’ tails, followed by a ’bus rattle-chinking towards her father’s garage. A swell got up in Ulster and homburg might elbow a tinker woman away from the pub door, bloody jade, giving a keyhole warbler the chance to slide in to the goldensmoky mirrored cacophony on his coat-tails. Once ensconced she might yowl out, Well if you fink my dress is a littulbit, juss a littulbit – not too muchuvit! While hiking up her petticoats, such as they were, until overwhelmed by cries of outrage: Flip ’er a tinker, Rothschild! Gerriduv ve drab! Her father’s face hanging mottled from the shiny platter of his topper’s brim, the hiss of the jets in the outsized glass lamp that hung above the double doors. Up there, in the elemental radiance, floated a softly moulded figure in a dainty print gown. Up there, where speechless Thought abides, Still her sweet spirit dwells, That knew no world besides . . .

Audrey had seen her father with horses – and she had seen him with men, a stallion among them, his commerce easy enough – yet fraught with sufficient danger to give him authority, Gentlemen, I have dived into Romano’s, and now . . . his sausage seegar sizzles innis face . . . my tissues are refreshed! He’s a study, Rothschild, a quick turn, who hooks his thick neck in the crook of his bamboo cane and hoiks himself off stage. He had so they said once thrashed a navvy to wivvi-naninch, not that you would divine these fistic manoeuvres from the way he plotted his course home down the Fulham Palace Road, his flame-haired slippuv a dorter clipping along in front of him, lighting the way through the particular to anuvver meat tea . . .

Albert and Stanley sit, both with books held open by the lips of their plates, both with collars unbuttoned, their tea cups cradled in their hands for warmth as much as refreshment. Vi and Olive gawp, pasty faces pinched by pointed shoulders, each with a slice of bread and dripping in their hand as they behold this virile spectacle: the man and the boys taking turns to hack at the leg of mutton, then put meat in their too-similar faces. Albert’s glassy paperweight eyes, Welsh-slate blue, scan up and then down the narrow columns of Rous’s Trigonometric Tables – not consigning cosines, sines and tangents to memory, only confirming the tight joins of the granite setts already laid out along the rule-straight roadways of his metropolitan mind. And Stanley – his complexion cooler, his brows finer than those of his older brother – he sighs, ahuh, shuffling fingertips from one page to the next of a Free Library book. His eyelids flicker and his fringe bobs, the whirring mechanism of Bakelite and crystal rods, propelled by scores of flywheels, squeezes his very atoms into the kinetomic beam in a number of abrupt spasms that, while they bend him back so far his just-stropped neck touches his rear, are not in the slightest discomforting – and all the essence of Stanley is then discharged from the elevated muzzle of the contraption, shooting a streak of light between the spokes of the Great Wheel at Earls Court. Up and up above the city it goes – dolorous hoots from the steamers anchored at Tilbury, gas-mantle-ssssh! in the upper atmosphere – and higher still, the clouds flickering far below. In one aperture pickelhaube-helmeted Junkers slash each other’s cheeks to ribbons, in another the Tsarina kisses an egg set with rubies and garnets. The beam is so high now that Stanley’s atoms sweep into orbit, girdling the earth once, twice, thrice! Before tending down and down into the viridian heart of Africa, where, in a jungle clearing, awaits Fortescue, my mechanic, cranking the handle of an apparatus that sucks the beam into its celluloid funnel. Stanley is an apparition that swiftly solidifies, panting in a patented woollen Jaeger bicycling suit. He and Fortescue shake hands vigorously. Capital shot, old bean! the mechanic says, as a nigger chief steps forward from the trees, his honour guard of naked warriors dropping their tribute of tusks at the feet of the scientific adventurer . . .

. . . Olive, Olive! Oh, I dunno, there’s summat wrong wiv you, girlie, carncher see yer father’s wantin’ izale? Olive turns back to the scullery, limping on the toes of her too-tight boots – she almost lays a hand on the ruddy range to steady herself. Audrey agrees there’s summat wrong wiv that girlie, and moreover: They’re in cahoots, they want her to be like this, lost, confused, a top spinnin’ round ’em. Sam plucks the beaded cloth from the jug and pours a draught into his moustache cup, and there are beads of sweat on Mary Jane Death’s forehead. Above her in the cabbage-steam-fug hangs a sampler Audrey sewed at school. — One, two, three, four, girrrls. One: needle in the right hand. Two: thread in the left. Three: Through the eye. Then four: loop and knot. Now, thimble drill . . . Audrey’s hands, not suited to this fine work, twitched and shook in an ague that she felt incapable of mastering, or even to be a part of her at all, but something that snowed down poisonously from the arsenical-green ceiling . . . Thimbles on yer thumbs, one-two, thim-thumbs, thimthums, tee-to-tum . . . — Out of the eater, she says, came forth meat and out of the strong came forth – Burrrurp! Really, Samuel, Mary Jane says, laughing, mussyer? They’re in cahoots, together they’ve made five now an’ loss none. Stanley laughs at his father’s eructation and says, Judges, Chapter 14, Verse 14 – thass evens, guv’nor. Albert, without looking up, grimaces and Audrey can hear what he hears: the echo of one brother inside the other’s bony cave. I’m inbertween ’em – I’m a prism or a lens. Beams of Stanley, beams of Albert, playing, each on the other brother’s blank face . . .

The curious round-’ousing of a big man pulling himself together with his braces – his moustache is wet wiv beer and tobacco-stained above his hidden lip. Hard to imagine that there is a lip beneath it, because Samuel Death’s hair is so fleshy in tone, and, if it weren’t for the reddening of his cheeks, you would think the tache wuzziz lip, while there are waxy skin strands plastered at the back of his bare domed head: Bedlam engraved in the Illustrated London News. — A large worthy-looking body walking along the quayside of a Mediterranean port, a basket of laundry dumped on her head. Four sailors dice in front of a tangle of ropes and spars while gazing at her behind. None of the Deaths know where this racy print has come from – it simply cropped up on the wall, hiding the wallpaper with its criss-cross pattern of violets and pansies, wallpaper that is steam-slackened, torn into strips, and certainly antedates the Deaths, for, when Audrey was a littler girl, she was convinced her baby sister had been named after it. — Violet now clambers on to the chair her father has risen from, and, smuts on her cheeks, reaches up to fasten his collar stud. All of them have been dragooned into his toilet: Stanley sent to fetch the showy coat from the hook in the passage, Olive buckles his gaiters, Audrey and her mother mix tea and gin into his flask. Only Albert remains at table, his eyes triangulating a realm of purer forms, his fork negligently sccccrrrraping gravy shapes. Samuel cries, Get the Coniston’s! A hair tonic he madly applies to the front and back of his dome, as he places first one profile, then the other, before the oval of looking-glass chained up by the door – this, a motion that shows off to its fullest effect the sharp isosceles that, together with his love of swank, has earned him his moniker. Not, Audrey muses, that he’s like the landlord, Silver, who comes attired soberly in bowler, wing collar, impeccably shined and elastic-sided boots – but whose face is sallow, handsome, the features somehow exaggerated, outlined wiv charcoal. The Deaths are plaster mouldings, Romish swags and vine trails pressed into their whiteness. They are pink and blond, brown and blonder, all save Audrey, whose flaming glory and cake-crumb-scattered cheeks betoken . . . wot? Or-dree, Or-dree, Ordree’s mammy gorrersel knocked up by a navvy! Howsoever the taint was acquired, these are no distinguishing marks – leastways not up towards the Munster Road, where the houses are all knocked abaht and there’s a family of Irish – or two – in every room, and the ginger nuts are everywhere in the streets. Still, Comes the Jew-boy, Comes the Yid, Comes the Jew-boy for iz gelt . . . is sung with gusto on Thursday evening, with whichever of the two little girls is to hand, grabbed and bounced on his knee. Samuel breaks off only when he hears the sccccrrrreeeching of the front gate, then he goes to the door to watch, derisively, as Silver undoes his trouser clips, pulls off his gloves and courteously doffs his hat. From the Horeb heights of the doorstep Audrey’s father hands down a tosheroon, then a second, which is followed – after an insulting interval – by a sixpence. He places the coins in the dapper man’s palm, paying t’be fucking crucified, before, sucking on his own gall, he retreats to the Golgotha of the parlour so that Silver may trot upstairs and do the same to the other tenants.

The odd panting and heaving that accompanies a tall and corpulent man working his way into a full-length overcoat. Oof-oof. The rabbit fur lies slick and rough in the gaslight, the Coniston is sweating offuvim stink up the privyole. Over her father’s shoulder Audrey sees Stanley’s impish expression: a valet, preparing to cuttim dahn t’size, by saying, I say, Pater, that’s a wewwy extwavagant costume for an hexplorer-chappie who ain’t heggzackerly headin’ up the Wivver Congo, only dahn to the ’bus garage by Putney Bridge – say it, that is, if’e wuz mad. Samuel Death takes a further dekko around the room, then makes a final imposition of paternal discipline: Wozzat?! He snatches the flick-book Violet has just that moment snatched from dozy Olive – Audrey knows which one, it was given away with the Daily Mail on the occasion of the old Queen’s final birthday parade, stiff cards sewn so they could be riffled and By Jingo! The horsemen fresh back from bashin’ the Boer soundlessly jingle across Horse Guards Parade, their mounts breasting the staccato dust-puffs. Samuel peers at it, lets it fall to the painted floor, extwavagantly unbuttons the just-buttoned skirts of his coat. Parts them and reaches in his waistcoat pocket for his watch. Well, pshaw! – the skin curtain billows – You’re welcome to vese guttersnipes, Mary, me old Dutch – she simpers on the chaise – if ’en I don’t look lively . . . All eyes are on his fumbling fingers, all except Albert’s. Samuel Death holds the timepiece up by its gold-plated bracelet, its face a lozenge of jet eclipsing the present that flows behind and in front of it. He pinches the tiny buttons either side of the casing and peers at the red illumined figures, 08.54, each digit composed with straight bars, bevelled at their ends. Gaol numbers . . . I’m in gaol . . . in the spike – the booby-hatch, ha-ha-hooo – help me, helpme, hellellellellpme, Stan, Bert’s torturin’ me! Ashuwa-ashuwa . . . — The long rubberised strip of tension loops round her middle and stretches in either direction along the corridor, pulling from the past to the future, lashing her to the moment – her belly bulges so bad, she feels queer, like I might . . . I dunno. Before she came down to tea she took the piece of calico she had folded into an ’Arrington Square and put it down the front of her bloomers, although not really grasping why every lady should know the greatest invention of the age for women’s comfort . . . Stanley releases the semi-inflated tube and it snaps into the bicycle wheel and off I go! Leaping like a pea onna griddle . . . the pink ’un in Holywell Street . . . stuckinim – stuckinerr . . . We only start the generator for the electric from time to time, Miss De’Ath, wouldn’t you agree that candlelight is more aesthetically pleasing? Cables swagging the length of the workshop sheeee-ung-chung-chung-chung! Her lathe-bed ratchets back and Audrey loosens the chuck, switches the bit – a fuse rattles down on top of the others. Then they are streaming out from No. 1 Gate, Where are the girls of the Arsenal? Working night and day, Wearing the roses off our cheeks, For precious little pay . . . red-and-green flags come from nowhere and are waving on the tops of ’buses thronging Beresford Square. Shoulders back! Necks straight! Arms swing! We are the munitionettes, the suffragettes, the wild revolutionary girls!

What can it mean, this sudden shift from paralysis to movement? Busner is left rooted, all the sour rot from the hospital’s miles of intestinal corridor blowing into his puzzled face. This must be, he intuits, something – some definable pathology . . . surely? The marked counterpoint between akinesia and festi-festi-na-shun, D-E-C-I-M-A-L-I-ZAYSHUN. DECIMALIZAYSHUN. Soon it’s gonna change the money round, Soon it’s gonna change the money rou-rou-round! Easier, Busner thinks, to conceive of the Friern corridor as an endless conveyor belt, running around and around, bringing towards him patient after patient pari passu, so that if he can maintain concentration he’ll have ample time to make the appropriate diagnosis of neurosis, dipsomania, dementia praecox, generalised paralysis of the insane, syphilis, addiction to socialism, schizophrenia, shell shock – the diseases historically synchronised and so entirely arbitrary, the moral ament becoming, on his next go-round, the mentally deficient, on his third, retarded, fourth, mentally handicapped. Rou-rou-round. Soon it’s gonna change the money round . . . The hospital’s fantasia on the theme of the Italianate belies, he thinks, its real purpose as a human museum within which have been preserved intact these specimens, crushed and mangled round-rou-round, I’m an ape-man, I’m an ape, ape – Enough! He must seize upon an action with which to fracture this reverie, exactly as the pressed-down tile allowed the elderly woman’s foot to scoot forward. He finds it in the automatism of consulting his watch, an involved process since his wife – overreacting to an interest in gadgets Busner once feigned – gave him a new quartz model, the first to be affordable, for his thirty-first birthday. So: he flips the heavy gold-plated bracelet from beneath his shirt and jacket cuffs, he brings the little black face up to his own, then pinches the small buttons either side of its casing so that the digits are illuminated redly, futuristically: 08.54 . . . late already for the ward rou-rou- he at once sees and feels himself to be a colossal white canister spinning slowly end over end and sharply illumined against the infinity of blackness . . . I am late . . . already, must pinch . . . harder, I can’t . . . see . . . the time!

He awakens to discover himself an old man who lies pinching the slack flesh on the back of his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand, fingers that prickle with arthritis. He awakens to the pity of it all, for I was up only . . . he struggles on to his other side so he can check the clock radio on the bedside table . . . three quarters of an hour ago, when he stood in the musty toilet, his sweaty forehead pressed against the mildewed wall, dropsical – late-onset hydrocephalus? and stared stupidly at the splutters unceasing, a plip here, a plash there . . . then at the ecclesiastical window with its opacity of wormy smears – out there breaks the blank day – then at a toilet roll once dampened, now dried, its lumpy multi-ply reminiscent of epidermal corruption not seen since student days – keratitis, rhagades, the stigmata of congenital syphilis – and then only as plates in textbooks. On the lino, by the El Greco of his old feet, there was a pile of old proceedings, peedewed, to be read at stool, and so the memory’s overlay peels back to reveal the exact same vignettes – wall, toilet roll, medical journals – and Busner realises that I have returned! A triumphalism he acknowledges to be inappropriate for a sleepy walk even as he looks to the window and vermiculated quoins comes from somewhere – but where? Then, as he turns, not bothering to flush, and shuffles back towards bed, it occurs to him that he troubled to ask someone he knew then, someone who had specialist knowledge, because they were so ugly, those worm-riddled blocks set into the gateposts of the hospital – but which hospital? There had been so many – Twenty? Thirty? – up until his retirement the year before, after hanging on at Heath far longer than I should’ve . . . and why? Almost certainly to postpone this present mode of life, one his children viewed as pathological, a senile depression – possibly the forerunner of dementia – that had been kept at bay by his pottering, his peculiar job-reductivism, consulted as he had been mostly by other consultants. Busner knows better: this is the re-emergence of an essential self, long since buried and worm-eaten . . . The passage from the toilet to his bedroom is narrow and angles around a portion of the adjoining and more modern office building, an insurance company which, in the process of construction, somehow managed to exact a few cubic feet from this end-terrace Victorian property of no distinction, a brick and masonry cell like all the rest — A burst of clickety-clack from the keyboards of the brokers who factor risk within inches of his sloped shoulder almost derails him. John! he hears one call, quite distinctly: John! Female, fifty-three, ten years no-claims – one for John at Aviva? They’re all called John, while here am I, a prophet in the wilderness . . . There is no soft Persian runner beneath his feet, as there would be at Redington Road, only coarse and colourless carpet off cuts that he himself had pulled from a wheelie-bin in back of the discount furniture store in Cricklewood, Slumberland!, where he had picked up the few sticks needed to prop up this domestic scene, this granddad flat. Granddad! Granddad! You’re lov-ley, Granddad! Granddad! We lo-ove you! It’s a curse and a blessing, this, as he shuffles through the doorway and spies, clasped by April morning sunshine, the bars of his bedstead, with clumps of his damp straitjacket wadded between them. To incontinently recall these, the lyrical leftovers and junked jingles of seven decades, would be an affliction . . . timeitus, he smirks . . . had Busner not come to appreciate, since his retreat here to the first-floor flat on Fortess Road, that within the patterns made by their effervescing in the pool of his consciousness are encoded wider meanings – he balks at truths – ones not surveyed or even guessed at by the mental mapmakers with whom he has spent his working life, notwithstanding the elegance of their modelling – theoretical, neurological – or the crassness of their professionalism. The unyielding mattress calls forth only this: a tired acknowledgement of his own flabbiness. Walks have been resolved upon and not taken, meals are spooned from tins and forked from plastic containers, or else spread on bread – lots of it. This particular Busner kneads soft stuff into a pillow-shape and puts his swollen head on to it while cavorting with all the svelte fugitive selves that have spun away from him in this . . . dizzy dance, Granddad, Granddad, we love you! And he loves them too, but after he and Caroline parted it seemed superfluous to do it all again, acquire a fourth wife who would demand the application of yet another decorative scheme to the walls that had contained him, on and off, since he was . . . what, ten or eleven? He remembers his uncle, Maurice, leading him by the hand through the wintry chambers of the house on Redington Road, his tight-fitting overcoat so long and black that when he stooped he . . . was a drainpipe . . . stiffness . . . rigidity . . . hypertonia –. It would be superfluous and besides the point – if he wished to go that way . . . Well, he had considered getting back together with Miriam – whom he viewed with genuine affection when they met at grand-children-centred events, and with whom, of course, he still had to deal when it came to Mark. If not with her – and, after all, he had no idea of how Miriam felt about him – there might be the possibility of tying up the loose ends of relationships still more unravelled . . . But no: the real point being that in some place or other one of me and one of them are already united in the bicker of minor ailments, cemented by the mucus of passion spent . . . So, whatever the anxieties of his children – two of whom are mental health professionals with all that this implies – Busner had thought it better to simply walk away, will the house to them while he was living and walk away, not quite a sannya-sin . . . gingerly he rasps the underside of a jowl – although at long last committed, after decades of dependency, to once more caring for myself. 09.01. – When he had stopped wearing ties that was when I stopped fidgeting with them, obviously . . . the pill-rolling tremor we called it: tremor at rest, the patient’s gaze forced upwards, the hands held out in front, the index fingers rubbing the pads of the thumbs – and the shrink? He sat there watching them, rolling the end of his tie up and down: tremor at rest. Nothing, Busner thinks, comes of nothing – although, LCD digits come of pinching. He had been dreaming of a hospital and got up to pee, then gone back to bed and returned to another hospital – or was it the first again, only in a different era? The plaster strings around the cornices torn away, and the plaster laurels dressing the windows and doors pulverised, the gaps concreted in, then pebble-dashed. Was this the same hospital – or a smaller one? One equipped with a few acute wards, some offices, and a workshop for occupational therapy – which he had liked . . . Busner had visited them all as he careered through his professional life – Hanwell, Napsbury, Claybury, Shenfield, the ’Bec. Visited them all while organising trials or conducting studies or working as a clinician. He thought now, wistfully, of the long minutes spent watching the cutlass shadows slashed by a pot plant on geometrically patterned wallpaper during an interminable group therapy session . . . No! It had been a visit – it was a visit that he dreamed of. A visit – and the smell was on him . . . the smell of sweat, Largactil sweat. There were greeny linctus beads on his spotty forehead and a filthy mark on the inside of his lumberjack-shirt collar. He liked to look at the redwood, he said, which he could see from the window of his ward. Surely, Busner had thought, it isn’t beyond their ability simply to keep him clean – although he, far better than most, knew that it was. Surely, he had almost screamed into the mustiness of the day-room, they can stop his legs from kicking! For if this wasn’t pathetic enough, Henry Busner – my brother – had whimpered: I – I can’t con-con-control them, I can’t . . .

. . . control mine, now. Sleep is an impossibility – and there’s no hospital for him to be admitted to any longer. He has retired: there beneath the breeze-billowed brown curtain, probed by the April morning sunlight, are stacked orange boxes printed with the name La Cadenga and filled with the coprolites he has cleared from his office at Heath Hospital, transferred briefly to Redington Road, then carted on to here. I – I can’t con-con-control them – the fossilised shits. Propped against the boxes is a brolly he has no recollection of having bought, borrowed or taken up. But that, he thinks, is the way of it: umbrellas are never contracted for, only mysteriously acquired, to be fleetingly useful, then annoying and cumbersome before eventually being lost. And this losing is itself unrecalled, so that what usually impinges is only the umbrella-shaped hole where one used to be. 09.10. Ten again. As he pinches the slack flesh on the back of his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand, it comes in an old mannish drizzle: D — E– C- I-M-A-L-I-ZAYSHUN, then a gush: DECIMALIZAYSHUN! Soon it’s gonna change the money round, Soon it’s gonna change the money rou-rou-round! — Old age is, it occurs to Busner as he lies stranded on his side staring at the clock radio, a form of institutionalisation – it deprives you of your identity and supplies another, simpler one, it takes away your clothing and issues you with a uniform of slack-waisted trousers, threadbare jackets and moth-eaten cardigans, togs that are either coming from or going to charity shops. This done, it commits you to a realm at once confined and unbounded, an atrophying circuit of corridors that connect strip-lit and overheated rooms where you fade away your days reading day-old newspapers and specialist magazines – albeit not ones relating to the specialty that awaits you. Old age takes your food and purées it, takes your drink and reverses its distillation, takes – No! changes the money rou-rou-round! He knows that this is all too soon, that he is a mere freshman when it comes to such higher forgetting – that when he was first at the Royal Infirmary he had still been fleet, so that, lunging for the ovoid ball, he grasped a teammate’s shoulder to grope my way into a lowering sky . . . — anywhere, so long as it wasn’t the shambles of the ground, any leather so long as it wasn’t the ruptured buckler of a corpse’s thorax I’d cackhandedly dissected . . . Later, he had been compelled, he felt, to serve beneath the chimney . . . or the campanile, not that any bells ever rang there, for it was only a disguised ventilation shaft through which the noisome stenches of the hospital rose up to the heavens . . .

The staff bore had told him upon his arrival that formerly new patients had been brought in by special trains that halted at New Southgate under cover of darkness. The platform was at the bottom of a steep cutting and could be accessed by zeds of cast-iron stairway – although the patients were taken along a foot-tunnel that angled up through the chalky earth to the easternmost tip of the hospital. This meant that they didn’t surface at all – in their committal was their interment – but instead found themselves being marched dazedly down the long, semi-subterranean corridor to the different stages of their induction: deloused in a tiled trough, subjected to a questionnaire and an intrusive medical examination, shaved, cropped, then issued with rough ticken tunics before being allocated to a ward and given their supper: a tin mug of beef tea and an arrowroot biscuit. The clickety-clack of the brokers’ keyboards drills through the wall — the bubbles are popping now, each one leaving behind a few dribs of recall . . . the vermiculated quoins were, Busner remembers, only on the gateposts of that eastern wing – which was a later addition to the building. 09.15. He wonders: What rumours would those new patients have heard about the booby-hatch? In a way it hardly mattered, when there was so much worse inside their own heads. He feels the weight of his ageing face, its exhausted eyelids collapsing into their sockets glow orange, and through a slit he sees the white bars at the end of the bed and thinks, I once looked through bars like those and pinched time – that Casio. He is, he senses, almost there, but first a necessary interlude: Moog music, the Mekon revolving on his Tungsten dinner plate through the open French windows of the dining room and ricocheting off the sideboard, the grandfather clock, the teak drinks cabinet . . . rou-rou-round. Did we, he muses, really measure drugs in grammes – surely decimalisation went in waves? Wouldn’t it’ve been in grains, and fractions of grains? He peers through the white bars and sees his thinner, younger self peering back – smooth-cheeked and with a full head of reddish-brown hair. He has an old-fashioned sphygmomanometer looped around his neck, the thick rubberised cuff dangles at his breast, the heavy steel casing of the gauge knocks against the bedstead ting-tong, ting-tong. His stubby, nimble fingers roll and unroll the frayed end of his dun woollen tie, then idly pump the black rubber bulb of the sphygmomanometer, back to the tie, back to the bulb. A face looms at Young Busner’s shoulder, Mboya? I don’t wanna die in a nuclear war, I wanna sail away to a distant shore and make like an ape man, La-la-la-la-la-la-la! La-la-la-la-la-la-la! Steel drumming, wood-on-steel, steel-on-steel, ting-tong . . . Mboya’s face is a teak whorl with deep, yellowy creases spreading out from full pink lips. The whites of his eyes are yellowy, his anthracite hair is shaped in an almost-Afro, and he generates calm, which Busner somehow associates with the cross he wears on a chain around his neck, a cross the psychiatrist cannot actually see, but which he senses poking between the buttons of Mboya’s pale-blue nylon tunic. The cross, Busner knows, is one with a circle around the join of crossbar and upright . . . Coptic? Celtic? He would like to ask Mboya for . . . help? What stops him is not professional pride, only the shameful awareness that the charge nurse has given him so much help already. Her eyes? Busner begins by way of an observation. Mboya is judicious: Ye-es . . . So Busner asks, Rolled up like that – are they always? Following this sally, and for want of anything more constructive to do, he moves to the side of the bed, removes the pins and lets down the sidebars so that he can lean in over the old woman. Her posture is . . . bizarre, the spine curved and rigid – give her a push and she’d rock. Her pinched face is not a face but a mask of greasy seborrhoeic skin, her lips are stretched rubber bands that pull away from crumbled gums set with two or three stray teeth. Busner looks around for a bedside table or locker upon which there might be a beaker with her dentures in it, but there’s no such thing — her bed stands in the centre of the dormitory together with ten or twelve others guano-dashed rocks in a sea of speckled-tan linoleum that have been arranged head to toe, a leftover measure from the time when they might have coughed TB in each other’s faces . . . Not all of these beds are barred, but it’s clear that those who’ve been allocated them lack the status needed to earn them one with its head against a wall and a locker beside it. No one on Ward 14 has anything as homely as a lamp – but at least these beds partake of the wall-mounted disc, a moon that slips through the long, dark nights. Mboya, who has been at the hospital since the late fifties, has spoken to Busner of trough beds and water beds, and other kinds of medieval restraint – although this . . . this cage seems quite bad enough. Is she always . . . He has leant down far enough to look into the eyes, which are not eyes but rounded wedges neatly torn in her mask by – ring-pulls, which only last weekend he had experienced for the first time: two cans of Coca-Cola from the sweetshop on Holly Hill, snapped open and placed beside the boys on the bench, he leant down laughingly with them to peer into the holes that sweetly misted . . . By no means – Mboya speaks with colonially educated precision, answering the question Busner has forgotten he posed –these seizures . . . or episodes, they happen with great regularity, Doctor, once every sixteen days, and last for . . . oh, well, I should say at least five or six hours. And sometimes she will be in this state when I leave for the day, and still be like this when I come back on shift the following morning. Paaa-ha! A sudden expiration of gingivitis breath, then, a-h’h’herrrrrr, she draws it in again – but the mask remains fixed, the eyeholes showing only off-kilter sclera – no pupils. You see – Mboya has a clipboard sheaved with notes he refers to from habit, not necessity – mostly she can feed herself, get along to the day-room, but ve-ery slowly. Then, at other times, it’s as if all this time she has been being wound up, because some little thing – I don’t know what – will set her off, and man, how she goes, her little legs –. The nurse stops, but why? Has he perhaps stepped over an internal line of his own by revealing how he views them? Busner wonders: How does he cope? Does he see them as sprites, as possessed – or are they automata? Then again, there is a certain obscenity in referring to those little legs, which, arrested in the mid-writhe of torticollis and exhibiting marked hypertonia, cannot be covered up. Her Winceyette nightie is bunched up around her waist and neither man is prepared to risk his clinical detachment by yanking it down over those mutton shanks. — It is only as he grasps her arm, preparatory to applying the cu[ that Busner remembers: I’ve seen her before. Mboya lifts his clipboard. Oh . . . yes? Busner says, No, no – not on the ward round, I’ve seen her in the lower corridor – she was catatonic, jammed up like this but standing with her foot caught by a loose floor tile. When I freed it she went off like a rocket on her, he laughs, little legs. Mboya grins. Ye-es, that’s typical of Miss Dearth, ve-ery typical. She’s unusual in that respect – the others are mostly one thing or the other, jammed up like this or all shaky, rushing . . . Busner has ceased to hear him . . . Do I somehow partake of her shakiness, when I touch her do I begin to blur? For in the extreme rigidity of her forearm, which she holds at a sharp angle in front of her chest, with the fingers seemingly curled about an immaterial lever, he can sense a terrible compression, thousands upon thousands of repetitive and involuntary actions that are struggling to get out. This is, he thinks, not a paralysis as it’s commonly understood but an extreme form of oscillation: her muscles are whirling around bony axles, her bones are shuttling back and forth on cartilaginous treadles, her cartilage is itself cogged . . . it appears still until you touch it, and then it goes haywire, the wire coiling around you, dragging you down . . . The old woman hasn’t gone haywire, though: her tragic mask confronts my comic one, I’ll never be taken seriously with these flabby cheeks and froggy lips . . . He looks away, flustered, and sees cold light dumped by a transom on to a writhing caterpillar that resolves into another old thing, who, presumably overdosed on Largactil, thrashes about in a bed beside the double doors that lead to the main area of the ward. He looks back to see an early bluebottle – the hospital is plagued by flies – orbit Mboya’s woolly globe, and pictures a toy frog one of the boys has, if you squeeze a little rubber bulb . . . his fingers find the bulb of the sphygmomanometer . . . an obscene tongue of rubber unrolls underneath the plastic amphibian, flipping it forward. All, he thinks, these agitations – some of which must be connected causally. The right-hand swing door pushes inwards, a face looms spectrally in the small window, the amplitude of its pathology plotted by the wire graph – then is gone. All these agitations – the arrow on the FIRE ESCAPE sign is more mobile than this face confronting his, which has no eyebrows or lashes worthy of the name, two – no, three – hag hairs on the chin, that chin sharp, the cheekbones sharper, the skin a cracked glaze beneath which ancient freckles have run together into liver spots. He has leant down so far that the crystal of the gauge lies cold against her giblet neck. Paaa-ha! a shudder of the sunken chest. It’s not food – it’s faecal. The others are mostly one thing or the other . . . — In the submarine hospital all is agitation, the fin-flip along corridor after corridor after corridor, flowing in and out of recesses and embrasures, swirling around buttresses and foaming down the salmon runs of the staircases, at the bottoms of which it dissolves in a spray of tics and jerks and grimaces. Even so, Busner has noticed these others, caught sight of them with the eternal evanescence with which the eyes capture a shape in water – and on finer days he has seen them outside, caught treading water in the airing courts between the first and second ranges of the hospital, or else thrashing further afield, in the grounds, where other patients merely sidle the tendency of the ornamental beds. And in the day-room of his other chronic ward, where the inmates are restrained in easy chairs by too-tightly-tucked rugs, pinioned in front of televisions that show capable hands shaping clay – in that drear row he has seen an other. Then again: passing by the doors of the main hall, where the cupola is obscured by a cantilevered mezzanine, Busner has been pulled up short by this halting exchange: Nothing, my lord . . . Nothing! Nothing . . . Nothing can come of nothing, speak again – and upon entering found a dim hurly-burly, a stage hung about with dusty swags of blackout cloth and scudding between them a fool in a black turtleneck pullover playing a play-within-a-play, his players a hyperactive Cordelia and a comatose Lear who droned to a pool of patients that had eddied in from the surrounding wards to lap against the stage. In all this agitation a single ripple stirred the psychiatrist’s attention – and, without knowing how to classify him, Busner still knew that this too was another of the others of whom Mboya now spoke.

The others, who were mostly one thing or the other: either like this old woman – whose humming arm he held – whirled into a twisted immobility, or else unwound spastic, hypotonic . . . these others of the others he had seen considerate nurses prop against walls, only for the patient to drip down once their backs were turned. Both kinds, Busner has noticed, share this uncanny capability: that they render those around them either too sharply focused or too blurred. The somnolent and akinesic ones were so very still that they partook of the hospital’s very fabric – Busner stood, captivated, watching them standing, thin, rigid and bent beside the old lancet windows, while those passing them by smeared a photon trail across his retinas. By contrast the ticcy, antic ones were impelled forward – goaded by some neural whip, they skipped, taking hundreds upon thousands of tiny steps. They are, he thought, the ones who couldn’t keep still for the long seconds when the plate was exposed, and so they marked the present with a ghostly impression even as their bodies faded into the future. Time, he thought, it has to do with time. The psychotics, for all their extravagant claims of having been sent sliding back down the shiny curve from the future to warn us of the Victory of the Machines, are rooted in Now. Their stagy delusions are well dressed with the technologies of the present: transistors, assembly lines and answer phones – while their persecutors are just as frenziedly up to date: Black September inn ltrating grey March, or the Irish social worker responsible for the Islington patients on Busner’s acute ward whom at least six of them believed to be an IRA gunwoman, devilish Bernadette. As for the brain-damaged, the spastic and the otherwise touched – their faces have no expression at all, but instead the features rise and then set as their bodies respond to circadian Rhythmaires. Then there are the leucotomised – for they are here as well, their hair crinkled or their scalps bare where clamp tightened, saw grated and drill bit. Busner has marked them, the pre-frontals – they are trapped in a very exact layer in the hospital’s stony strata, being all of an age – mid-forties – to have been interfered with twenty years earlier, when such things were the fashion. Be that as it may, their waywardness is constantly being updated, as witnessed by the anguish in their eyes, which are forced inwards by the raw mechanics of their loss of control: I can’t help it, Doctor, the one on Ward 20 said, I can’t help it, I can’t help it, Doctor, I can’t . . . Doctor, I can’t, I-I-I-I-I . . . But these others, they are both of this time and escaping from it, of now and then . . . And this particular old woman, who alternates between being one kind and the other, has alerted him to their existence as a group – a status that Mboya, with his vastly greater experience, has now confirmed.

Is she –? the psychiatrist asks. No, the nurse replies, there’s no need – except from time to time to help her sleep. For Busner, these past few weeks have been mostly this: a tallying of drug charts, the sounding of sunken chests, the winding on and the stripping off of the sphygmomanometer’s heavy cuff, the listening in the hush of the ward for the rush of arterial blood. Entering the damp pits of their beds he has gone potholing in the fistulous sores that extend inside these hollow patients. It is, he knows, impossible to write a prescription of this form: Constant and sympathetic assistance towards effective mobility is to be taken ALL DAY – and so he only tiredly scrawls tetracycline in a fixed cycle. Whitcomb has allocated Busner two chronic wards, 14 and 20, and as a sop to his clinical expertise he is also allowed a part in the decision-making on Ward 11, over in the separate Halliwick unit, where the acute admissions are held apart from the main body of the hospital for assessment. Hence all this promenading – a ward round that provides him with a mile-long constitutional . . . He wonders, a bit, if Whitcomb, the shit, has done this deliberately to exercise his tubby junior – then reflects as he collects his keys from the Admin Office that the organisation of rosters recently ceased – or so he has been told – to be a decision made by clinicians, because the bureaucrats have taken over the asylum, which is only fitting given that in the absence of anything resembling a cure the medical staff have for years – decades probably – operated as patient-pushers, stacking, hole-punching, binding and ultimately filing away their workload in this tray, that drawer or some other neglected pigeonhole. In the nether regions of the hospital, Busner supposes, there must be the analogues to all this: the histrionics, the kerfuffle, the seems agitated, the 150mg Stelazine intra musc, all of it scrawled on preprinted forms churned out by the relevant department, then stuffed in buff and laid on metal shelves to gather the finest of dust. The Records . . . a map of a map that is in itself . . . a map, or at least a diagrammatic representation of the hospital, which is a self-sufficient realm – Shumacher would approve – what with its metal workshop, its pottery, its bakery and its kitchen garden where bulb-headed inmates cultivated a few onions . . . While Friern Hospital is no panopticon – even an all-seeing eye could never squint along these telescopic corridors – nevertheless, to move about the sprawling buildings is to be incorporated into this mapping as a live element: a blinking light travelling through its circuitry. The endless reflexive states implied by these maps of maps of maps, in his more thoughtful black-Biro moments, recall to Busner’s mind Cantor’s infinite sets and transfinite ordinals – but mostly he experiences the insight as dizzying, the 1,884 feet and six inches of the lower corridor rearing up to become its own perpendicular axis, the entire gloomy institution enacting its own axonometric projection . . . Hurrying now from Admin past the doors of Nursing Admin and Voluntary Services, he is out of breath, having already trotted the five hundred yards from Ward 14. There are a further three hundred to go — and for what? So he may be met at the doors by Perkins, who will unlock them with a show of efficiency before Busner has got his key in, an action that confirms his control, thus forestalling Busner’s inclination to say, There’s no need to keep these doors locked, it’s no longer hospital policy, now is it? Perkins, whose martial bearing tells the psychiatrist I didn’t miss out on National Service after all, and who is the perfect type of the NCO despite his white nylon tunic and brown suit trousers, Perkins, with his shoe-shining-brush moustache and rain-dashed radiator-grille mouth, Perkins, with his iron hair corroded by its parting, Perkins, who understands full well how to treat a junior officer, how to manipulate him, let him see only what he wants him to see. It is too soon yet for Busner to have found out the extent to which the other staff are complaisant or merely coerced by Perkins, but that one or other is the case he has no doubt, for they have been drilled into marching up and down the fractured parade ground of the ward, hauling the meds trolley into place, unlimbering its fake-wood-veneer lid, firing the gelatine shells, then moving on. On the ward rounds they do together Perkins is assiduous – making it seem that the subaltern has arrived at decisions alone, while prodding him towards them with rhetorical questions: Wouldn’t you think . . . Doesn’t it seem best if . . . Haven’t you found in cases such as this that . . . Not that any doctoral dispensation is needed to funnel the tranks into the patients – under the campanile all ’scrips are repeats and it is, quite simply, more medicine that helps the medicine go down . . . ! A patient’s medication card is only an aide-mémoire for these busy pushers to remind them of the dosage. In point of fact, these index cards are never filed, and if a qualified busybody wishes to discover who’s glugged what since mind out of time, he must visit Records and grope through the fuller notes deciphering his predecessors’ handwriting, which, Busner has often thought, is illegible not by accident but design.

Be still! This is not why he has come to Friern – yes, yes, he will do his Hippocratic duty, neither doing any conscious harm nor allowing any to be done, but for now he is through with boat-rocking. Leave it to the Grocer! He is done too with elaborations of theory, the multiple threads of which, mind-spun, elaborate and then over-elaborate airy yet substantial models that fools such as me took for the phenomena they only loosely represented . . . He will, in particular, resist the urge to ask Perkins why it is his dee-lightful wa-ay! to give higher doses of chlorpromazine to female patients – resist, because he knows. The charge nurse says of one who lies shaking in a barred cot, She’s ever so fractious, Doctor, aren’t you worried that she may harm herself ? Of a second female patient, who, for the third day running has been confined to the quiet room – a deranging euphemism for a padded cell – the charge nurse contends: We really want her to be happy, Doctor, but when she’s allowed the run of the ward she pilfers from the others, then accuses them of taking her things, and before you know it there’s a right barney going on. I mean, you wouldn’t dream it to look at her . . . And indeed, you wouldn’t, because what sits on this blancmange slab is but a shrivelled raisin of humanity who shivers in a midi canvas tunic, a uniform, Busner thinks, appropriate only for a slave labourer . . . but she grabbed a fork an ’adda go at putting it in Bettany’s eye, and y’know, if I wasn’t on hand I think she would’ve – now that isn’t good, is it, Doctor? The whole purpose of this speech being – Busner realised hours later, after having administered the injection himself – to introduce subliminally the words good and doctor into his own mind. But surely, if he is a good doctor, Busner should do something about the bad nurse he has seen, together with his cronies, cackling over a spread in the Sufishowing women’s libbers in Afghan coats holding aloft a dressmaker’s form lashed to a cross. I’d crucify those bitches, he thought he heard Perkins say – yet he couldn’t be certain, the ward office was so full of rattling tea mugs, cigarette smoke, smouldering tin ashtrays and clanking filing cabinets, so squeezed between the dirty panes of two permanently shut sash windows. — Perkins and Bettany, caught at it, gave him the approved glare for new boys – or recruits – who have been gazetted for bullying. Bettany had a chubby, kind countenance full of lighthearted dimples, yet Busner suspected him still more than Perkins – he knew the type, slow-witted, malleable and big. Bettany would be the one to administer the thump therapy, that’s what they called it, Busner knew – he’d been told all about it by a refugee from the asylums, Dave Catterall, who arrived at the Concept House in Willesden ranting about being beaten by psychiatric orderlies and having water-soaked towels held over his mouth – tales Busner, whose own asylum experience had been brief and circumscribed, had assumed were exaggerated until they were confirmed, to the letter, by other residents. So what if we were? the nurses’ adult faces lisped childishly and Busner burned with indignation. Yet how could they know? that he hadn’t been a new boy for decades – only a left-behind one watching the Rileys and Rovers crunch away down the drive, hearing the last call for the bus to the station. Left behind to wander the voided corridors and deserted classrooms, left behind for so long and so often, that on several terrifying occasions he had to spend the night alone in dormitories empty of everything but their unwashed-boy-smell and the pitifully snivelling ghost of the twelve-year-old that was me – and, of course, the other left-behind one.

Is she able –? the psychiatrist asks, and Mboya waves the clipboard wearily. Obviously, he says, it’s impossible for us to get her up on the off -chance – there’s many more like this and we’re short-staffed as it is, but luckily Miss Dearth has her ways . . . Miss Dearth? Can I have heard him rightly? wears a bulky nappy held in place by plastic bloomers. It is these the two men have avoided looking at – nakedness would be less obscene. Mboya continues: I cannot be altogether sure, but I think she may be our longest-term patient – and she does indeed have her ways. The nurse, who is a head and a-half taller than his colleague, now does a wholly unexpected thing by squatting down neatly on his haunches. Busner goes more awkwardly after him, and then they are looking at a great oddity, a phenomenon so unaccountable that, until Mboya starts to explain it, he cannot properly see what it is that’s before him. She gets hold of all sorts of things, Mboya says. There’s old shoes she’s found on the bottom layer, on top of them maybe some soap dishes she takes from the bathroom recess – yes, and on top of those saucers . . . I think she has a special liking for the saucers, some years – if she can get enough she’ll use just them. But this year you can see she’s brought some stones in from the grounds – flat stones, and there’s bits of roof slate she’s put on top of those . . . The result was roughly conical and about two feet high, its apex almost meeting the coiled springs of the bed. The two men peer – one from the foot, the other from the side – at this what? Shrine – or grotto? Beside Busner’s splayed fingers sandy soil scatter-trails to where the roots, stems and heads of two or three shredded daffodils lie in an opening neatly contrived in the structure. There is also a nightlight, the tiny flame of which kindles a homely glow on a pile of crumpled paper inside the arch. Oh, he says, is that –? I mean . . . Mboya is conciliatory: It does no harm, Doctor, we make sure of that, and, like I say, Miss Dearth – Audrey – she’s been here . . . well, when I started she’d already been here many, many years . . . Mistaking Busner’s silence for disapproval, when it’s only that he finds the scene surpassing strange, Mboya hurries on: She’s a sort of institution, you see, and her little spring shrine is, well, other patients – staff as well – they like to . . . He points and Busner now notices coins lying among the quick green fuses, shiny new nickel-alloy five- and ten-pence pieces, together with a few tarnished tanners and chunky thruppenny bits, how soon they’ve come to seem of another age . . . He reaches for one of little dodecahedrons and presses it hard between his fingers, so hard that when he parts them it sticks to his forefinger and he sees the portcullis impressed in the pad of his thumb. He lifts it to his nostrils and smells its cold taint of old blood. For quite a while Busner takes the little voice Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year for thought – a colleague? recalled droning on in a case meeting. Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce – next he thinks it comes from the over-tranquillised patient on the far side of the ward – a year, Farver’s gonter sea, Muvver’s gonter bringim back . . . finally he realises it is right in his ear, but micro-phonic, and, straightening up, he leans back in to hear this: the utterances of some still smaller and more warped old woman vibrating in the larynx of this one. He tunes in to the friction of the parched lips: A penny won’t urtyer, a ha’penny won’t brayk yer, A farving won’t putyer five work’uss . . . Now the cold dial of his sphygmomanometer lies cold against her neck and smells still fishy – she had found it together with plenty of others underneath the fishmonger’s cart and there were more in the gutter in front of the Leg of Lamb, a mean little gaff , her father said of it, a grog shop for the navvies and shonks, but Audrey thought the low weatherboard building – little more than a shack – had a romantic air, not that she altogether understood what this was, saving that sometimes when Mother left her and her sisters with Missus Worth she would put the three small girls in a row, admonish them to be still and, opening the lid of her cottage piano, send silvery sound bubbles floating up in the stuffy parlour to kiss their reflections in the mirror, then die. When Missus Worth shut the lid, she said, Girls, that is a very romantic air what I have played you. – Then is it that same romantic air that hovers around the Leg of Lamb, or is it the carolling blue tit come down for a milk churn? Audrey is a little feart of the dark outline left on the old boards by a mulberry tree that her mother said used to grow there – maybe that too has a romantic air? The oyster shells smell fishy and they’ve got weedy beards, but there’s a horse trough by the pub and Audrey scrubs them until vey cummup luvlee and Bert comes by with Mother, who cuffs her while Bert laughs: You don’t do no grottoing ’til July, Or-dree, an you does it wiv fresh shells, not manky ones. Alluv ve uvver girls is doin’ spring gardens now, you ain’t gotta be different. She does have to be different, though, so she bundles the shells up in her pinny and Mary Jane drags her back to Waldemar Avenue, where Audrey makes her grotto by the front railings, ordering Vi and Olive to get pebbles like vese – not vose, and boxing their ears in turn. Three or four Sally Army oafs come by, just loafing, not marching, one lugging a big bass drum, the others larkin’ abaht with their horns, squelching and parping. They’re pulled up short by the unseasonable grotto – and by Vi, who’s cried so much she has smutty rings round her eyes. They give the little girls a penny and Audrey sends Vi to get a candle from Curtis’s on the corner, then she sneaks it alight from the range and afterwards is content to sit at the kerbside holding the toes of her boots warm puppies, what with it being a fine evening and the sunset catching the swags ’n’ roses so sharp, the swags and roses Mary Jane pointed to proudly, See, proper stukko . . . and the balustrades that ran along the first floor of the terrace, their pillars plump and squared off. In the gathering darkness Audrey croons the rhyme: Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year, or possibly only thinks she does in the hope that it will ward off Strewel Peter, whose cloud of orange hair rises above the chimblies opposite. How could her mother say that? When all the swags ’n’ roses were the same, all the houses were the same? How can anything be beautiful or noble or romantic when it’s the same? Farver’s gonter sea, Muvver’s gonter bringim back — She’s beef to the heels, that one! cries Arnold Collins, who works on the ’buses with Audrey’s father – eez iz conductah – and who comes along the road fulfilling the same role after hours, because Sam Death looks quite tight. The two men are carrying their work satchels and Rothschild still has his gauntlets on – he tousles her hair with his sweated-leather-and-horse smell, then cups her cheek to pull her other one up to his wet scrubbing brush. As her father bends over, his waistcoat bunches up, and his watch flops from its pocket, so that for an instant it lies cold against her clenched face. Collins stands a few feet away, thumbs in his own waistcoat pockets, cap at a jaunty angle. ’E finks isself a reg’lar masher, ’e duzz, Audrey has heard her father tell her mother, the two of them taking their ease over a glass of port wine. – There’s a marshyuness over ’Ammersmiff, a shop girl up five Bush. He belches, laughs, wipes his moustache. I dunno, some chap is gonna givim a pasting one of vese days – all of this said with indulgence bordering on respect. But Audrey never likes the way that Arnold Collins looks at her, his hard black eyes rolling over her hair, her chest, her ankles. Getting ready for bed in the front bedroom with the little girls, Audrey still feels those black marbles upon her – and, as the boys join them and all five Death children kneel to murmur perfunctorily, Godless Muvver, Godless Farver, Collins’s eyes are on her yet. In bed, she huddles up against Violet to avoid them while concentrating on the lanterfishow behind her own eyelids: dark processional shapes moving through riverside mist that are at once the marshyuness, the shop girl and also stately ladies with extravagant bonnets, bustles and parasols that transform into Just So elephants, how-dee-how-dahs waggling on their backs to a brass-band accompaniment, Oo-rum-pum-pah! Oo-rum-pum-pah! magically transmitted from the bandstand in South Park, goldschein, the world sucked gurgling into the fiery trumpet, then blown out again, when all it was, when all it was . . . was a line of cows being herded by a farmer’s boy across the scrublands of Barnes Common on that ripping day when Bert played truant and took her with him over to the Surrey Side – ’Ow we caught it! – Singaht, girl, singaht! His watch is cold against her cheek, his leather fingers twist her chin. – Singaht! Singaht! She quavers . . . A penny won’t urtyer, A ha’penny won’t braykyer, A farving won’t putyer ve work’uss . . . and Sam Death exults: Ahh, gerron! She’s a precious little goose, ain’t she, Arnold? She must avvit. He pulls the other man to him by the lip of his satchel, then sifts through the pouch, selecting, then tossing one coin after the other into the opening of Audrey’s grotto. – There’s a penny anna ha’penny anna farving – an yer know what, girlie, it won’t break me never, coz I’m the fellow az once divvied up a shilling – a whole shilling, mind – to set wiv the Tichborne claimant over at Leadenhall Market. Did I ever tellya that, Arnold . . . Did I not? And the two men are up the front steps and into the house, from where Audrey hears her father calling mockingly, Mary Jane, you’ll av some fine gal-an-tine for Mister Collins, willyer not?

Scant light from Waldemar Avenue’s newly planted lamps casts the shadow of the balustrade into iron Bedlam bars that fall across the two beds and clash with the bars of Olive’s cot. Violet has kicked the coverlet away – her skinny legs lash about beef to the heels. Spring-heeled Arnold is poised on the window ledge and Audrey thinks: I’ll never ever sleep, I’ll never ever sleep . . . that she’ll go mad with not sleeping, mad with the pissmist from the potty in her nostrils, mad from the counting up of her two pennies, her ha’penny and her farthing, then dividing this sum into eleven farthings, then adding them together again. Coins on the blackboard, coins on the slates, fingers in the inkwells, Two-times-six-is-twelve, three-times-six-is-ay-teen, four-times-six-is-twenny-four, an entire classroom of Audreys and Stans in their drab clothes and their cracked boots, their plaintive treble voices plaiting, then unravelling into two sound-streams that flow out through girls and boys into afternoon streets to twine once more – dirty boys’ hands grabbing pigtails to straitjacket the girls in the booby-hatch, until someone comes to release them, D’you wanter claht ve jaw! Coz you never did touch my ed, so there . . . the Wiggins boys dancing round her – then little Stan caught as well and flung in there with her, howling, his shirt torn. — No wonder we called the game Bedlam, thinks Audrey, a big girl of fourteen now, walking back from Shorrold’s Road Baths on a Saturday afternoon and seeing a load of kids mafficking. We called it that – not that we knew what Bedlam was. It had been mixed up in Audrey’s six-year-old mind with the Cyprian Orphanage and the Gunnersbury Isolation Hospital – places to which children were removed, leaving a hurting gap behind for days or weeks that soon enough their siblings grew into. She turns the corner into the Fulham Road thinking that cherry blossom is frogspawn in the pond-green sky, and looking forward to the slow stroll past Anderson’s Tea Rooms, savouring the cakes surrounded by fancies, until she sees her father with his foot up on a shoeblack’s box and wishes she hadn’t — because nowadays Audrey believes that if she sees him he can spy her at once. He has become a stage magician, the smoke from the seegar stuck in ’is face lime-lit green an’ fleein’ to reveal . . . Arnold Collins. Go which way you will, you will run up against them, and it makes it worse that, as her father swaps feet, Collins doffs his hat and says: She’s gainin’ flesh, guv’nor, an’ it ain’t all rare meat neevah. Sam grunts, Well, why shouldn’t she? She’s not some bantin’ flapper! Now, Or-dree, I’ve a co-mission that Mister Collins ’ere az hentrusted me wiv –. He breaks off to snap at the boots: Givvit some elbow-grease, boy! Then resumes, We’ll be headin’ up West, you and I, time a farver showed iz dotter ve runuv ve place, ain’t it so, Arnold? Collins only twitches his tight lips, fiddles with the brim of his boater, pats the lush brown wings of his pomaded hair. Audrey feels the dampness of her shift at the backs of her thighs and sighs. – But, Father, Mother’ll be wantin’ –. A chop of the smoky hand: Yer mother’s always wantin’, Audrey – allus will be. He fiddles out a coin and drops it on the paving stone – anticipating this, the boots is there, grubby face ruffed with white-blond curls pushing up from beneath his corduroy cap, a single tooth questing from his bottom lip. Givovah, yer worship, he says scrabbling for his penny. Dob uss two more like vat an I can make me passage fer Noo Yawk. Death’s sardonic smile snips him a pair of jowls he wags at the boots. They ain’t letting your sort in juss now, he says, you’re best off sticking it out ’ere on ha’pence a boot! Uneasily, Audrey takes in piece by piece how Collins dresses much snappier than he did when he was with London General: a swallow collar clips his plump neck, his boater has a blue-and-purple-striped ribbon, his patent-leather boots have cunning suede darting, his tongue darts from side to side in his mouth each time he opens it to speak: And, ah, the, ah, goods, guv’nor? Death slowly transfers his contempt from the boy to the man: Whatever you say, Arnold – shall I cable to you at your a-part-ments to arrange our ren-dez-vous, or have they by any chance a telephone appliance at that sixpenny dingdong of yours over Marylebone way? After all, this is a new century now, ain’t it – no need to wait any more is there? Time, distance . . . our wizard mechanical contrivances have them altogether ee-lim-eenated. Collins is throttled, his cheeks flush. Ah, he says, ah-ah, his tongue darting until Death relieves him: Givovah, Fred, I’ll see you at the Magpie like always, and now – good-byee! Taking Audrey by the arm, he propels her ahead of him off along the road at such a lick that for the first hundred paces she has the disturbing image of herself hooping-the-hoop, her skirts flaring, then falling to expose her bloomers. She looks back just the once to see Arnold Collins arranging his boater on his springy hair, the boots still supplicant at his feet.

Manners got yer tongue, Missus Ward? Since when has her father’s every second utterance become a puzzle she feels it may be dangerous to solve? For how long has she been this tremulous in his presence? And, liking the fluttery sensation of the word in her mind, Audrey rolls it around, trem-u-lous, trrr-em-u-lous, this, surely, is one of the finer feelings felt by advanced young ladies as they stroll among the hollyhocks –. I said, manners got yer tongue? His cleaver nose, glanced side-on, slashes through bricks and hedge and shop awnings. They turn into Parsons Green Road – There goes Roffschild an’ iz dotter, says a white-aproned butcher with a calligraphic moustache, the words in their wake, but surely . . . mennabe heard? Audrey teeters between shame and pride while her father – the personage – seems oblivious, ramrod-straight he promenades, the ferrule of his umbrella striking hard every fourth paving stone. Rotten egg, he mutters, exuding not malice but Coniston’s hair tonic, which, blown from his shiny face, whitewashes the walls of the dingy courts and alleyways around the railway bridge. When they reach the New King’s Road there is a cream-and-brown ’bus clopping in towards the kerb, a lodestone drawing people to it, and Audrey too feels the static thrill, as once when stan rubbed a celluloid dickey on a scrap of velveteen and held it to her neck and the hairs at her nape prickled. – Hi! Fentiman. Her father raises his umbrella and, thrusting her in front of him, they cut through the gaggle. Mister Death, the conductor says, tipping his hat, and they squeeze up the stairs and make their way to the front seat. Finest penny to be spent on the London stage, her father has said often enough, and he also says, A wide window on a widening world. Sitting, Audrey is aware of the hard slats pushing her sweat-damp petticoat between her thighs, while her hands lie useless and freckled on top of them – she thinks of the Westray’s Whitening Powder she covets above all things and how it would give her the porcelain complexion of Miss Gabrielle Ray . . . Father is speaking of Bert’s benefactor as whip-smack and harness-jingle the ’bus mingles with carts, hansoms and the occasional fly. – Why, Audrey, d’you imagine that Mister Phillips takes such a generous interest in our Albert? Some might think it a little queer, paying for one not your own . . . At least this remark is straightforward enough – besides, Audrey senses she isn’t expected to answer, only bear witness to. – There’s some as might rebuff’im out of pride alone. The ’bus swings wide to avoid a young lady, her weighted skirts caught up in the chain of her safety bicycle, her leg-o’-mutton sleeves frisking. Oh! Audrey cries, then flushes. Her Oh! hangs in the sudden soundlessness, for the ’bus’s wheels have been shushed by wood paving. A well-set-up woman of pedigree in an old-fashioned coal-scuttle bonnet sits on the other side of the aisle, staring and staring and staring like she ain’t never seen a girl before. Audrey wishes her navy dress weren’t so shabby, wishes her red hair didn’t flare from her head, wishes the cables strung from the multiple crosstrees of the rooftop electrical conductor were the rigging of a fleet clipper slipping anchor and sliding on the ebb tide down t’wards Gravesend and freedom . . . And yet . . . this unexpected excursion is . . . a treat. Formerly, Rothschild would often take one or other of his children for a ride, but since he became the deputy manager she cannot have been on the ’bus more than a handful of times – the trip to Windsor Park last summer, that was by brake, but apart from this she has walked from home to school to market to Sunday school to the baths, and very occasionally to watch Bert and Stan play footer, while their Sunday afternoon entertainment is itself a promenade in the park they walk to. Now, the animalistic swing of the ’bus, the bell-ring of spring, the syringas in the front gardens and the flap of the shop awnings – all of it fills Audrey wiv soda bubbles. The tangy pitch from the navvies’ crucible in front of St Mark’s College is blended with the soot-fall from the Lots Road Power Station – and still the pair down below strain on, their broad backs rising glossy, their hoofs cleaving the chestnuts of their own droppings. Fentiman has come up fer a natter with Rothschild, who’s addenuff of fresh air, struck a match on his boot and is puffing benignant cigar smoke, while studiedly ignoring the boring of the coal-scuttle woman’s eyes. — They speak of Sir David Barbour and wily John Pound and blinkin’ Balfour, of whom only the last is known to Audrey. From time to time Fentiman pivots away along the seatbacks to issue more tickets, then returns to bemoan the tramlines’ encroachment. Sam Death is sanguine. Those white-livered nabobs’ll never have the front, he says, to sweep awlviss away. ’Lectric trams wiv all their cabling and their track’ll awluss be too cumbersome for the middle of town. Fentiman listens respectfully, donkey-faced and sweaty in his black work suit as the guv’nor expatiates: No-no, change ass t’come – no gainsaying that – and change is always a friend to some and an enemy to others. Now, see, there’s the tuppenny tube an’ the padded cell, an’ now they’ve their shield appa-ra-tus there’ll be no stopping ’em from nibblin’ froo the underbits like mites in cheese. No, change is upon us – but it ain’t the ’bus’ll be sluiced down the gutter, mark my words . . . It ain’t us should worry – it’s them.

The slow thrumming of a player-piano eases in – the one Audrey had heard in the Aeoliafishowroom the last time she had been up West, with Mary Jane, who, in a capricious mood, had said: Juss coz we ain’t quality don’t mean we ain’t allowed to avva gander. Then, when the counter-jumper parted his coat-tails to sit at the instrument, she couldn’t ’old ’er tongue an’ warbled on, a portly nightingale who forced her accent through some imagined mangle of respectability. – Ooh, yairs, isn’t it luvverly, such fine mahoggerny – while the fellow’s knees rose and fell as he trod in the melody, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo, triplets of notes going up and down. Audrey straightened up, lost her hoydenish hunch – seeing that she took a genuine interest, as he continued to march on the spot, the demonstrator spoke of Brarms, ’is intermetso, and how this was a very high-class roll for the conny-sewer. Listening closely to the trills and coos, her stiff fingers freed themselves from the back of her dress, her chin stilled. The easy motion of the young man’s thighs, the invisible digits pressuring the ivory skin, the so-fa-la! rising up to the ceiling, the exposed roll revolving while around it the world turned – this was beauty, this was what Miss Conway at school meant by harmon-ee –. A bang, followed by a whip-like crack, the shock of it seizes every passenger on the top deck of the ’bus as the pair shy and a trap horse coming from Sloane Square rears in its shafts. Through a curtain of blue smoke that rumples up into almond blossom, the spectators see this freak: the wheels and chassis of a new-fangled motor car with the upright black body of a hansom fixed on top. A-ha! Ha-ha! Sam Death chortles as the ’bus driver wrestles his horses past the vehicle, which rests at an uncomfortable angle with one set of wheels up on the kerb. – Oh-ho my, what a sainted palaver! The motorist and his mechanic are flapping their tweedy wings over the open engine compartment, which still belches, and Sam says: Must’ve come from the other side – meanin’ Vauxhall, not ’Ades – and, while it may seem unlikely, Fentiman, that ’Arry Tate an ’is pals’ll do away with our equine friends . . . The conductor regards Audrey’s father respectfully as he speaks, as do the other passengers, surmising that the big man has a professional bent – but Audrey recoils from his portmanteau eyes and the Stilton veins that marble his fine pro-bo-siss. While the ’bus continues past the gardens of Eaton Square and the Fulham garage manager speaks of machines, she dreams of terrible chimeras, men with wheels in place of legs, their bellies a dreadful contrivance of rods, gears and flywheels, smoke venting from their iron buttocks. She envisions horses whose hindquarters are ’Oxton whizzers, while steering columns have been speared between their shoulders so that their riders, sat astride their red-hot withers, may twist them this way and that, neighing, screaming . . . A horse’s scream is a fearful thing that Audrey didn’t know she knew, coming as it does from a part of her mind that she didn’t know she had. It comes from underneath the mattress where things fester and cog-buttons are bug-toothed. Stan’s stories came from that place – the leopard man and the dog man, their screams in the night when their flesh was sliced and stretched. The beasts howled beyond the stockade, while Vi and Olive pulled at Audrey’s nightdress, hiding their faces, baring her shoulders. The three of them gaoled by the bedstead as their brother’s dark mouth swallers the nightlight . . . The vehicle, madam, says Sam Death, has been engineered by taking the body of yer normal ’orse ’bus and securing it to the chassis and wheels of a Daimler petrol motor ’bus . . . Her father believes he has won over the coal-scuttle with his informed disquisition. From their elevated position, as the ’bus rumbles from Buckingham Palace Road and on to the forecourt of the station, they are well placed to make a survey: Over there, madam, you may espy a Thornycroft ’bus, the motivation for which is supplied by steam from a coke-fired boiler, heggzackerly the same as a locomotive. Yonder, by the portico of the Apollo, that there is the Fischer ’bus, an innovation of the Americans, it employs both electrical and petrol engines in furtherance of increased reliability. Be that as it may wery well be . . . he continues as they inch their way down the curved stairway behind her heavy silk train . . . I doubt wery much its utility, indeed, I foresee the futility –. However, she has no wish to be lectured further, and so cuts Death off with a tilt of her bonnet and a twist of her parasol’s handle. And a good day to you too, madam! he says with the utmost repugnance and, raising his umbrella to salute Fentiman, he allows its ferrule to travel on, tracing the pilasters and wrought-iron balconies that cover the station’s façade. We ’ave reached the terminus, he says, and, taking her arm, guides her between vehicles jockeying for passengers, then past an advertisement for Germolene so large its letters loop across the end wall of an entire four-storey block, the l encircling an open window from which a slavey in a mob-cap stares frowsily down on the crowded street. Urchins scamper into the road to grab harnesses, then pirouette for a flung copper, as the stand-pipes of toppers somehow join in Audrey’s mind with the droppings underfoot and the gulley-slops in the gutters. Here, more than in Foulham, the city is beset by its own contrariety: the smooth and stony Portland faces of the buildings along Victoria Street are streaked with smutty tears, the alleys that crack the mirroring windows of the smart shops are choked with costers’ carts piled with fruit an’ veg’ already on the turn. Flies dash damp in her face – faces all round are pastier than those on my manor . . . They are deeper dahn an’ ahtuv ve light . . . He points out to her the yellow-brick bulk of Queen Anne’s Mansions rising above the rooftops in the direction of St James’s, its mansard roof festooned with cabling. He speaks of the hydraulic lifts that raise the well-to-do tenants up fourteen storeys, and of the piping that supplies the pumps burrowing beneath the streets. — He conjures in Audrey’s mind a vision of the city as all connected up by streams of invisible power: the telegraph cables coursing with letters and figures, the electricity zipping through gutta-percha sleeves – her own vision skronks so that the beaver skin of a passing homburg conceals . . . an eye, a girl’s pretty face splits lengthwise, sideways . . . She wishes she could turn aside to enjoy the steamer trunks, fishing rods and pith helmets carefully arranged in the window of the Army & Navy Stores, she wishes she could get in there wiv ’em . . . but her father will not slacken his pace. For the first time on this peculiar excursion Audrey feels the frigid probing fingers of anxiety: he is so intent, his moustache spit-damp, his high forehead shiny with perspiration . . . on they go, his umbrella marking the time for their marching feet, tap-tap, tap-tap, tap-tap . . . Her uncovered head falls back, my crownin’ glory swishes between her shoulder blades. A great purple-grey quilt is falling over it all, cloudy clumps trapping the scurrying bedbugs in their own poisonous fumigation. The air darkens and darkens: a smutstorm in lurid yellow suspension from out of which swim the castellated battlements of the Westminster Hospital, supported by VOLUNTARY CONTRIBUTIONS – beyond this the rigid skirts of the Abbey fall perpendicular from its stony stays.

An impression of the bashed boiled-egg face of the big clock, and of the gentlemen petrified on their plinths – Audrey sees the pipe organ of Parliament, hearkens to its maddening fugue . . . She looks down at her freckled hands, lying once more in the lap of her shabby dress, ’ow they shake with palsy. Her father tenderly places a bag between them, the rumpled paper, cloth-soft. She withdraws a bonbon reeking of acetone and presses it to her bloodless lips – then tastes the pear essence as it bashes her teeth. – You ’ad a little turn there, m’dear. His solicitude is more troubling than his contempt. They are on a motor ’bus that shudders up Whitehall – a leather hanging strap tap-taps against his bowler, he pats her hands, the action as involuntary as hers. He speaks of the ’bus and its route from Victoria to the Bank, but Audrey cannot hear him that well for her hands have twisted into claws that scrabble on the mounds of her thighs, back and forth, over and over, in a pattern that cannot really be a pattern – since it is never repeated. The unstoppable movement towards the city’s central lodestone is affecting, Audrey notices, her father’s elocution: aligning the wayward consonants, repelling the colloquialisms. – As I was saying before, Audrey, Mister Phillips is now making a fuller commitment to Albert – he’s to board at Woodford. Mister Phillips has arranged it all with the Drapers, while he himself will pay for his books . . . his sporting equipment and suchlike. Well –? This is not, she realises, a question – it’s more akin to a chairman’s patter between turns, and so begs the question, What’s coming next? She sees Albert as Mister Phillips must have, spottin’ ’im in Anderson’s, the tall youth’s bulging grey eyes running down the column of figures scrawled on a bill – tu’pence for this, ha’pence for that, thru’pence for the Eccles cake – his severe mouth pronouncing the total instantly. His family are, of necessity, familiar with Albert’s prodigious calculating ability, his pals too: they call him Datas, after the music-hall mental prestidigitator. Just as his father has his moniker shouted after him in the street, so Datas Death has his own salute, Am I right, sir? Although unlike the genial Datas on stage, there’s no jocularity to Albert’s correctitude. He is rigid in all things, disdaining brawling, yet looks fit to kill if he’s accused of having funked it by failing to answer a question or complete a computation. Now the days are balmier he strips to the waist in the hugger-mugger of the backyard – having obtained a copy of Sandow’s Magazine, he performs the exercises it describes using Indian clubs he has made by sawing up old railway sleepers. — Datas is not Stanley’s hero, but Enigmarelle, the Man of Steel – he desires to be a mechanical man with an engine hammerin’ in his belly and smoke spurtin’ from ’is mouf an’ nose . . . I’ve never been up on a motor before! is Audrey’s answer, shouted over the rattle-bash that reverberates through the saloon. Her eyes skitter to the back platform, fall from it to the pattern of crushed droppings-on-tarmac that unrolls there. Try as she might, she cannot will the grunting ’bus aloft, up from the congeries of cabs that mesh into a millipede inching its way from Whitehall into Trafalgar Square. Audrey cannot – yet Stan flies whenever he wants: he positions her beside him in front of their mother’s new cheval glass and tips it back to fling them suddenly, silver, skywards . . . Stan says: In twenty years’ time everyone will be an aeronaut, Colonel Cody will perfect his war kite and there’ll be gazetted aeroplane services connectin’ all the cities of the Empire. Airships’ll carry the heavy freight that goes now by sea: pig iron, coal, Canadian wheat. They’ll anchor up above the Pool of London and the air will be fick with their hawsers – the stevedores’ll operate movin’ beltways high as cranes. See! Up we go, Aud! And again he tips the glass so the flame-haired girl and the bat-eared boy lift off, suddenly, silver, skywards . . .

Getting down at Charing Cross, still sucking her pear drop, Audrey turns from the sooty black drainpipe of Nelson’s Column to be put upon by PHOSPHERINE THE REMEDY OF KINGS and PLAYER’S NAVY CUT, momentarily sandwiched between two sandwich men, and once freed engulfed by the hubbub of the afternoon crowds – clerks and shop-walkers released for their half-day dodge and jig across the road. One snappy chappie pops under the very shafts of a growler – the cabbie flicks his whip, but the three ladies behind chandeliers wrapped in muslin disdain to notice. Bloody oaf ! Her father’s oath rises above the charivari as he upbraids a ragamuffin the worse for drink who cavorts about an organ-grinder. A few paces on Audrey looks back at this man’s pillbox hat, his torn and filthy scarlet tunic – he is an old soldier, who hops on an ashplant, the empty leg of his trousers flapping — but Sam Death won’t be caught napping, he weaves through the throng along the Strand, then wheels Audrey round to join a queue who are taking their turn to peer in the eyepiece of a kinetosocope plunked down beside the foyer doors of the Old Tivoli. Her head ducked into this commedia, she sees a pretty Colombine pirouette around a capering ape – Might I escape? – her gyration not smooth but jerking forward, then back, the double-exposure of the film depicting a meeting with her transparent double. The title card slots in: Miss Lottie Farquhar, Appearing Nightly in ‘Darker Delights’, Stalls Seats for a Limited Period, 5/6d., Fully Electrified, fssschk-chk-fssschk-chk . . . His paw on her again. P’raps it’d be agreeable to you if we were to take the back way? Audrey wonders what errand can it be that her father runs for Arnold Collins, his inferior – one he has always treated with amused contempt? The tip of his umbrella fingers the joins between the cobbles as they cross the corner of Covent Garden, ignoring the leather-aproned porters lounging against the empty crates, ignoring the rotten fruit underfoot and the arabs scrabbling for it – the dusk is massing in the corners of the square, lyin’ in wait. Little Dublin, he remarks casually as they cross Drury Lane. Every third store-front is boarded up with heavy planks, some scrawled with crim’ sigils, although why? There’s nuffink ’ere to avaway. The narrow entries to the godforsaken courts are blocked off with timber bulwarks, and through a gap in one Audrey sees the limewashed ghost of a dwelling, some of the condemned tenants standing in front of it, their faces and clothing creased with dirt – they are, she understands, too weak wivunger to be dangerous. One boy her own age who lolls in a doorway wears no trousers – no pockets . . . no pockets t’pick – his man-sized shirt torn up past his hips, an idiot grin slitting his potato head. The final shard of the boiled sweet snaps between Audrey’s teeth. They simper, the three little maids . . . Women of the unfortunate class, Death chews this phrase over before spitting it out more coarsely: Wimminuv ve un-for-tun-ate class, they’ll sell their selves for thru’pence, tu’pence or a loaf of stale bread . . . One makes as if adjusting something in her bodice: a corsage that’s invisible. Audrey feels her bubbies prickle and the sweat-damp shift still wadded between her thighs. I don’t need no Snowdrop Bands, I need the double-you-see – there are no words to say this, a year or so ago, yes, but not now. Beyond the pub hatch where the whores have gathered the street ends in another timber bulwark – this one two storeys high and plastered with the pink cheeks, golden curls and frothing white suds of HUDSON’S SOAP. To the right of the hoarding a cranny leads into a long, narrow lane, the carriageway barely wide enough for a cart, the shop-fronts to either side antiquated, their many-paned and thick-mullioned windows plastered wiv ’udson’s dirt, as are their horizontal shutters, some of which have been let down to form the basis of stalls. Up above are more wooden bafflers tilting out obliquely from the buildings — Audrey breaks step. – Those? Death is amused by what’s pricked her curiosity. Those’re mirrors, Audrey, t’catch a slice of the ’eavens and chuck it in the winder. ’Course, anyone peeping down from on top could see a body steppin’ inter ’er smalls . . . Who is he, my father? As they go on, the hush she had not been aware of deepens, the never-ending snarl of the city streets tails away into a single bark tossed from jaws to jaws: a solo motor horn yelping.

The alleyway scores deeper into the damp clay. Halting, her father takes a small leather-bound volume from the stack of books on a stall – and, as he lifts it to his face, the cover falls open to expose marbled endpapers, then drops off altogether, along with several leaves that swipe their way to the ground. At once a white head pops up from behind the stall, the Mad Mullah! turns out to be a mousy man, his turban wound out of an Indiafishawl, and when he’s hauled up his pince-nez from the length of its black ribbon and clipped his nubbin innit he sees Death clearly. Oh, it’s you, Rothschild, he wheezes wordy notes – he has swallowed the consumptive’s harmonium. Audrey’s father gestures with the broken book. – I shall, of course, recompense you for any loss, Mister Fellowes. The mousy man plays a mournful chord: Why bother, eh? This’n – he gestures in turn – all done for now an’ gone, done up proper, done up prop— and there’s another pump on the pedals, he oughtn’t to run on so, ’e ain’t got the breff . Mister Fellowes is tieless, his collar unfastened, his Turkey throat gobbles, in the dark recesses of the shop a caged bird fluttercheeps. — Death utters this: As the papers have it, there’s substantial com-pen-say-shun available along the way for those who’ve longer leasehold . . . and freehold, naturally. For the first time Audrey notices her father’s ponderousness when he speaks proper. She blushes – and to hide her confusion takes a book from the pile on the stall, Sermons of the late Reverend Simon Le Coeur, D.D. A little friend o’yourn, is she –? She has attracted the bookseller’s leer. Samuel barks, Yes, a special little friend! He grabs her shoulder and twists her upright, pulling everything tight. Tell me – his grip tightens – has Mister Beauregard ceased trading yet? The mousy man runs his fever-pink eyes the length of Audrey, from top to toe, before answering disdainfully: Beauregard won’t cease ’til the wreckers’ ball drops on that fucking garret – not that ’e ain’t made his ’rangements, fixed up premises with some shonks on the Mile End Road. Death lifts the beetle carapace of his bowler, runs a hand over his damp pate. In that case, he says, I will ascend – he has some, ah, merchandise for Brother Collins –. Mister Fellowes coughs, retches, spits derision: While you’ve some fer ’im inall! This is a statement of fact, accompanied by the retrieval of a waxed paper, its unfolding, the savage poking of a pinch of snu[ into his nostril. Hm . . . Death mutters . . . mebbe. He hooks his umbrella over his left arm and gropes deep in his trouser pocket. Audrey stands wrung out and abandoned. ’Ere – he presses a thru’pence into her palm, hard – you’ll find a coffee shop along aways. Sit tight wiv a cuppa anna slice, I’ll come after yer inna bit. The mousy man’s sneeze follows her down the road, heff -heff -heff -p’shawww! – she turns back once but her father has already disappeared.

A cake sits on a tin stand in the window of the coffee shop, which otherwise is indistinguishable from the rundown book dealers flanking it. Audrey looks at the cake black as coke on its dirty paper doily. A sign beside it contends TEN OUNCE CHOPS 6d., CUTLET 5d., FRIED ONION Id. That’s all. A man comes from within to stand in the doorway – wound tightly into his apron, he’s the same shape as the milk churn he sets down. He has thick black curly side-whiskers and below his red cheek a redder goitre rests on his Gladstone collar. A barefoot piker boy comes limping along the lane, his cap pulled right down, the sleeves of his man’s jacket rolled right up – his arms are all striped lining. In one hand he holds a skinned rabbit by its ears and, stopping by the coffee shop man, he raises it bloody socket where its guts were but says nothing. The mafishakes his head: Inna pig’s arse. The boy limps on. Cummin an’ eat befaw we boaf starve . . . It’s a while before Audrey realises he’s addressing her, and then she complies. There’s nothing much to the coffee shop – four pew seats, two rickety tables – everything is coated with the brownish patina of tobacco smoke, grease and ingrained dirt. The gaslight and the geyser are confused in one another’s piping – both are lit. The man asks Audrey what she wishes for, and while he is absent in the back the geyser heats up and begins to steam – droplets condense on the ceiling, then fall, one hissing on the gas-mantle. It’s raining inside . . . She opens her hand: the thru’pence has impressed a portcullis on her palm. The man comes back with a mug of tea and two slices of bread and marge, sliced diagonally. I dunno why I does vat, he says, looking at the droplets swell and fall, but I allus do. He turns the key in the pipe and the geyser pops off. Could I –? Is there –? There can be no mistaking surely the reason for her discomfort . . . He points off handedly and says: Jakes is out back. She goes and finds a lean-to against the kitchen wall, beyond it another section of the two-storey-high timber bulwark, and beyond this the wreckers’ ball hangs in the foggy dusk, a black moon. When she returns, he’s lit the geyser again, and, as she nibbles the slices and sips the tea, he stands erect by the matchboard counter, head up, massaging the goitre while doggily listening to its rising notes . . . there’s no ’arm innim. All that’s left are crumbs, smears, dregs . . . still her father does not come. Abruptly, Audrey rises from the pew – the man gives her a penny and two farthings change, which she holds so tightly as she walks back up the road that the metal discs replace her knuckles, Enigmarelle, the Man of Steel. There’s no one about except a tall gent inna topper who reminds her of an illustration she’s seen of Bransby Williams the ’personator, so cross-hatched is he by shadow. Fellowes’s shop is shuttered — tapping fearfully on the door, she is relieved when it swings open, so scurries in to the smell of mouse droppings, cat’s piss and the ammoniacal residue of birds. Inside there is no illumination at all – only different strengths of darkness, the black bat night brushing against her. She mounts the stairs to the accompaniment of a concerto of creaks – one flight, a second, a third and a fourth – then peeks along a landing at eye-level, to where bright white light leaks from beneath a closed door. She hears – in there – a sharp intake of breath, h’heurgh! and a piggish grunt. Her belly seethes with glow worms — last month Mary Jane fixed me up with cotton pads and an itchy belt sewn from hemming tape. When Audrey pointed out to her the advertisement in the back of a Free Library book – Sanitary, Absorbent, Antiseptic, Available from All Drapers – her mother snapped: What d’you fink we are? but not unkindly. A cord that stretches taut from her tummy-button along the landing and under the door draws her in with each h’heurgh! every piggish grunt. She barges the door with her shoulder and collapses into a room lit brilliantly by clear bulbs under shades of frosted glass. In front of a floor-length nankeen drapes an aspidistra in a hammered-bronze pot, beside this a chaise-longue covered in green velvet, on this the skinned rabbit what the piker ’ad its glistening dead legs sticking up from a mess of petticoats. Standing with his back to Audrey, a bare-arsed man does something to the rabbit’s belly, guttin’ it –?

– No, no, no! That won’t do! A florid man with pomaded hair, in his shirtsleeves and a fancy embroidered waistcoat, comes out from behind a kinematographic apparatus set up in the tapering corner of the attic. No, no, no! he cries again – his expression is mad and guileless – this ’ere girlie’s torn it –! Mister Beauregard? Audrey ventures, but the red-faced man ignores her, his regard is fixed. — When Audrey turns back there’s no coney, only a girl a little older than her who sits on the chaise buttoning her bubbies into her bodice. The girl’s hair is up apart from a few stray locks, and atop its nondescript mass sits a lady’s toque complete with magenta-dyed ostrich feathers. There’s no bare-arsed man either, only Audrey’s father, who’s standing there in his long rabbit-skin coat and buttoning up gloves I’ve never see before. He doesn’t acknowledge his daughter but raises his bowler to Mister Beauregard, says, O-vwar, m’dear, to the girl and, retrieving his umbrella and a brown paper parcel from behind the drapes, conducts Audrey unceremoniously from the room. They are borne down the stairs on the wave of electric light – its crest breaks on the blank street. There is no sign of Fellowes – only his name fading across the tops of the shutters. – All this – Samuel Death strikes with his umbrella at the complicated dinginess of the Jacobean frontage – will be gone wivvin weeks . . . He sounds neither regretful nor cheered by the prospect. I do not know ’im who leads her on through streets shuttered by the massive timber bulwarks, working their way through the condemned rookery to the purlieu of Waterloo Bridge, where, through a gap, they can see the workings: navvies’ picks thrust handle-first in grave-fill, beside this Calvary a slough of despond wellin’ over with night-time and the drowned-corpse smell of the river. Why, Audrey longs to ask him, have they stuck bills on the insides of the hoardings? For surely navvies aren’t likely customers for Beecham’s Powders or a GUARANTEED 7 HOUR PASSAGE from Tilbury to Cherbourg. There will be, Samuel says, a grand booleyvard runnin’ norf t’Olborn, the newest street in Lunnun town, with the nobs pacin’ up an’ pacin’ down . . . an’ there’ll be a tunnel connectin’ to the bridge for the trams runnin’ under a twenny-storey buildin’ that’ll ’ave business premises, an arcade of posh shops, theatres . . . This, Audrey realises as they go through the Saturday evening drowse of Lincoln’s Inn, is his gift: this tour of the city about to be swept away, and this portrait of an orderly city of the future. – At Chancery Lane the boys are crying Bulgarian Massacre! and there’s a feverishness to the tipsy clerks gathered round a sandwich stall. Finally, it is night. The wreckers’ ball has turned and dropped, the air fills with dust, fog, smuts . . . thickening with dark droplets, I dunno why I does vat – but I allus do . . . as the passengers rise up from the Underground station dewy mushrooms sprout alongside the old timber house fronts of High Holborn. — This, I recall, Audrey says: the glacé silk and the oiled cotton of the covers, so many of them – and t’were only a little drizzle . . . It ish, Gilbert Cook says sententiously, to the petitourgeoishie of London what a fetisssh is to an African primitive – he manipulatessh it, speaksh to it, forgetsh it at hish peril, for, should the shky godsh choosh to show their dishpleasure, he will be losht without hish portable shelter. Conshider thish, Audrey, when Crushoe – that quinteshenshial petit-bourgeois – is cashtaway, the firsht implement that he makesh for himshelf ish an umbrella! This speech would be hard to tolerate were Gilbert not bare-arsed – he has no shame, and this is more satisfying to Audrey than anything they do to each other: his insouciance, standing there rinsing out the prophylactic device in the rose-patterned bowl, pulling it between the mangle rollers of his chubby little fingers so that the water spurts. It reminds her that it was instruction that formed the greater part of his seduction: he described how she should insert the pessary beforehand – and then after use the syringe to sluice herself out while squatting above a different bowl. Audrey had admired Gilbert Cook for this commitment to the technical aspects of free love, far more than his written advocacy thereupon. – Admired him for this – and for his abjuration of all jealous sentiments. I tell you, m’dear – he said on that first occasion, as he curled his hand to simulate her vagina and spoke of how to exterminate the troubleshome spermatozoa – not sholely sho that I may enjoy your delightsh without, um, complicationsh – although I do fervently wish to enjoy them, and on thoshe termsh preshishely – but in order that you may enjoy shimilar, or in all probability far greater onesh, with whomshoever you choose. His teacherly approach to the exercise of dej owering her had been what I needed, the hot suffusions of shame and guilt coming first, and then, response to his instruction, she found herself left free to enjoy – that first time as well – his demonstration. Yet, despite the vigour with which he impressed upon her his vision – that the shex relashion ish all about ush, if diffushed, and that we do not do it, either like pershonsh or animalsh, but attract it, like lightning-conductorsh – Audrey was appalled to discover herself after their second liaison exhibiting all the symptoms of a love-struck moon calf, some diaphanous Daphne or vapid Venetia, who cared nothing for the New Dawn of womankind, but only the old and poetical ones. Now, setting the slug down, he comes to sit beside her and says, Tell me, why d’you shpeak of thish inshident now – of your father’sh conshorting with proshtitutes and their pornographersh – ish it becaushe we have jusht . . . fucked? Audrey strokes the green damask of Venetia Stanley’s chaise-longue and runs a finger around one button, then a second. No, she says eventually, no, Gilbert, it’s not that . . . it’s . . . How she loathes Venetia Stanley without ever so much as having clapped eyes on her. Try as she might to prevent herself, Audrey has asked him whether their relation is physical – although he disdains the idea: Venetia? M’dear, she’s a baby, she’s shwaddled in the eternal childishnessh of wealth, shponged and pampered by her nurshing maids and wet nurshed at houshe parties . . . That may be so, yet for Audrey the closeness between the society lady and the socialist is insupportable, especially here, where a portrait photograph of her attired as Diana the Huntress stares down from a nearby whatnot . . . it’s the umbrellas. Aha, the umbrellash, the fruitsh of your laboursh. He mussav a way of fixin’ ’em – his dentures – because holding forth in drawing rooms or public meetings his tone is full and loud as sounding brass, while at such times as these, at his ease, divested of his clothing, his hair dishevelled, comes this endearing lishp. She counters: I don’t make umbrellas, Gilbert, or brollies, or garden tents, or portable pavilions for the bloomin’ beach – I’m a typewriter, I make words. Such words: Dear Sir, respect of your order of the 15^th instant, I regret to inform you that we are unable to supply the precise numbers of the Peerless and the Paragon models that you requested due to Fox’s tardiness in fulfilling our own order for their patented Aegis frames. As I know you appreciate, all Ince & Coy umbrellas are finished to the highest standards and employ the Aegis frame as a matter of course due to their superior quality and efficiency. We are consigning by carrier a gross of the Peerless pro tempore, together with an hundred of the Paragon, and will endeavour to complete your order at Fox’s earliest convenience. I remain your obedient servant, A. De’Ath, Expediting Clerk, on behalf of Thos. Ince. An initial will suffice, Miss De’Ath – so said Appleby, the crabbed and querulous senior clerk – some of our customers may not be so tolerant when it comes to the matter of female employment . . . More tolerant than you, I’d wager! Appleby is senior only to Audrey, the two occupying the garret above the Bishopsgate premises, he seated on his stool at an old-fashioned high desk under the dormer, while she is thrust under the attic’s slope, up against the mouse-gnawed wainscot. Her Sholes is mounted on its small table, and each time she returns its carriage with the inbuilt treadle mechanism she is forcibly kerchunggg! reminded that this is women’s work: sweated, menial, repetitive. Although the truth is that her actual responsibilities exceed his – Appleby, in his grisly old suit and soured linen collar, is a makeweight, kept on by Ince’s out of gratitude for service tendered long since. He scratches at the accounts, wages and inventory books. Each Friday he totters to the bank accompanied by a sturdy boy armed with a cudgel — and he conveys to Audrey only the faintest outline of the matters to hand, leaving her to endow them with the necessary materiality. All the letters, all the memoranda, all the advertisement copy – such words her hands make, inverted into claws that scrabble about on the keys of the Sholes, over and over, in a pattern that cannot really be a pattern since it is never repeated.

– No, I didn’t mean thoshe wordsh either, Audrey . . . For a man who supposes himself in thrall to the progress of the labouring classes, Gilbert has a most extreme aversion to work itself, in all its forms, except for the production of his own words . . . I meant the wordsh you have sent forth in that frail barque, the Ardent, on to the world’sh watersh. In the shadows of his shirt his penis hunches ringed by rolled skin-folds bamboo stuck in you. At the Ince workshop, in back of Old Commercial Street, the piece workers, Jews and Jewesses mostly, cut the silk and gingham, oil it, stretch it, sew the finicky loops and sleeves, then feed in the ribs and attach the handle – Vwar-la! another Peerless or Paragon or elegant ladies’ walking umbrella. Over and over they do it, their strange and sallow faces also oiled and stretching – hands chapped and chafed, covered with bunions in winter – summer brings the stench from the fish stalls in Black Lion Yard, but always there is the high reek of poultry.

It is a paltry thing, Gilbert, she says, rising to pull up her petticoats and roll up her stockings. Snap! goes one garter. A paltry thing, and taken only by those that assent to its contents already, read, I believe, not even by them. Snap! There is a silver tray with cut-glass decanter nd soda siphon. Audrey lightly touches the fluted neck, the cool grooves – she picks up a pin and begins to fold strand upon strand of her red raF a-work. The window is masked by a heavy drape, but beyond it she knows stand the high-gabled houses with their triplets of artistic windows, while beyond them lie the embankment and the river sweating its noxious vapours – she pictures the lurid swirl of tannery waste caught in its sluggish flow. – I shall have to go. – Musht you? – Yes, yes – back to Missus Phelps in De Beauvoir Town, back to tinned Gong soup heated up on the oil stove, back to the airy sensation of falling to sleep without the deadweight of Father, Mary Jane, and the rest . . . She steps into the respectable embrace of her shirtwaist, buttons it, moves to the drapes, parts them. Down below a motor-taxi rattles by the kerb, Venetia Stanley – it can be no other – stands withdrawing coins from the beady security of her purse. She has come from tea at the Dorchester, Audrey imagines, or a piano recital at the Bechstein Hall – and she has no cares beyond the troublesome proliferation of her purple plumes upon the hats of her inferiors . . . Turning, Audrey says decisively, I should like to hurl a brickbat through her dear friend’s window – through all his bloody windows! Gilbert has taken upon himself flannel underwear none too clean. She will not venture, he says, to dishturb us, but jusht in case . . . He uncrooks the arm of the Victrola with one hand, while expertly winding it with the other. His face swells monstrous in the beaten tin horn as the melody sings though the hiss. Thought is a melody, Audrey thinks, while the body is an inert mechanism of cogs, springs, chains and ratchets . . . His hands are on her neck, her fingers are hooked in her bootlaces . . . – No, really, Gilbert, I must go. He claps his hands to his thighs. Ha! Well! Sho may it be, he says, and looks about for the exasperation of his trousers. Shall I shee you on Thurshday at the meeting? I believe Shtanley will alsho be attending . . . He knows of their disagreement – a word too flimsy to contain the violence of their falling-out. Didddle-di-diddle-di-diddle-didi-di! The pretty trills from the phonograph scatter before her rage, resurrected: Stanley, who, despite his waywardness, will, she knows, be martyred. Stanley, his lissom arms outstretched, his palms pierced by the tips of the steel ribs, his ankles bound to the umbrella post by an India-rubber ring. So to Cook, Audrey is emphatic: Stanley comes not for George Lansbury, or the car-men, or any principle ’soever. He is in thrall to that fine lady and her pimp – my brother has no position, he’s all but disowned by our father –. She stops, hearing the shh-ching of the drapes being drawn in the drawing room below – the Victrola, which went off half cocked, has diddled to a halt. Her lover views Audrey appraisingly throughout the awkward business of buttoning himself up. He completes his costume with a cigarette – he smokes a brand called Logic, one shilling for a box of twenty-five! You love him, Cook says amazed. You love him more than any other – more than your shu[ aragette friensh, more than our schocialisht comradesh, more than –. He is a shapeless tweed bag with a smoky drawstring . . . Suddenly, she grabs him and pushes him backwards, thrusting her hot face against his bare neck. She feels the cold trickle of her love between her clenched thighs. I love you, Gilbert, she pants, I love you. Audrey knows this is no romantic felicity, or brazen fortitude, but revolutionary: And all around the slaves do dwell, Who are called to labour by a bell . . . – And you love me, Gilbert, don’t you – she shakes him – you love me too! His shoulder has snagged the copper teat of the light switch and they look up at the electrolier curling over their heads, look up and are smitten by the incandescing clapper in its frosted bell. Beyond this lamp there is another, and beyond that one a third – and so on, a great proj igacy of illumination that draws Audrey’s eye along the curved roof. Sam Death explains how the electricity is jenny-rated way over west in Wood Lane, and how there are substayshuns all along the route of the railway, where this strange fluid is subjected to still more mysterious ren nement before being piped down into the tunnels to feed the lamps and the middle rail at their feet, which, unlike the evilly gleaming sisters that flank it, is dull and neglected. Audrey cannot stay wivvim – she knows this doesn’t matter. — Her father speaks of the Greathead shield not on her behalf but on behalf of an absent other . . . Am I right, sir? The air crackles ozone a celluloid dickey rubbed on velveteen . . . at her feet are others’ feet: spattered spats and high-heeled boots dainty as cake decorations. Audrey tries hard not to stare at the lady and gentleman: she with her hands lost in her muff and a fever spot on each painted cheek, he, lifting his watch by its chain, tapping the platform with his cane, pushing up the brim of his topper. Then the same again: mechanical, unthinking. Stan only ’ad the one lead soldier, a pith-helmeted bugler in scarlet tunic and tartan trews, he lifted up his battered bugle to his chipped lips, tootled, lifted ’is battered bugle to ’is chipped lips an’ tootled. There was a big bolt through each of his shoulders and there was Stan’s little big finger makin’ ’im do it. The train is coming, straining up the incline shaped by the underside of the Fleet’s irrelevant banks. Rothschild Death raises his voice to shout about planned extensions and a turning circuit buried beneath the Uxbridge Road. He sounds proprietary enough to be an investor in – A southern extension, ’owsabout that, Or-dree, then we’d be tunnelin’ our ’ole way ’ome, snug as –. The engine explodes from its ’ole, a shell fired by a dreadnought that cruises far below in the brown earthsea. Its lamps send deff rays lancing along the tiles, while Audrey hears the paddin’ between her own ears as she listens to the roar of its trajectory. Although she knows it cannot hit them, she grabs the arm from which the parcel destined for Arnold Collins hangs by its loop of twine. – Fine companion you are! Her father exults in her fear, draws her near – from under his furry arm Audrey watches, appalled, as the platform with its cargo of buckram and boaters and nodding plumes slides away behind the row of yellow-lit windows. Seated beside her father, she sees not the advertisement card rEDFERN’S RUBBER MATS FOR THE OFFICE, above the rushing darkness into which the carriage sinks, then rises to another crest at British Museum Station, then sinks once more. Her hands are back in her lap and they tap-tap-tap with the clack of wheel on steel – but Audrey remains detached, bobbing in her seat as the train surfaces at Tottenham Court Road, at Bond Street, at Marble Arch, where, her head clamped in the eyepiece of the window, she is compelled to see through her own diaphanous self to the electrin ed fssschk-chk-fssschk-chk as the platform pulls away again, this time its display more various: tailors’ dummies hung about with Ulsters and macintoshes shared by two, the full skirts hiding Little Titch on a pantomime horse . . . in between are arranged in no particular order an oil stove, a steamer trunk, pearl-handled Colt revolvers in an open display case, a selection of travelling rugs, a hat stand hung about with moabs, a writing desk with a stuffed raven set upon it, a toy train set that is this very underground railway made awfully small, a hassock embroidered with the Prince of Wales’s crest, a pianola, an indicator board ringing for service in every room, a probang, an electroplated punch bowl, Malacca canes fanned out on a Mackinaw, a regimental table piece in the shape of a sepoy shooting a tiger, a toaster, an electric lamp, a fondue set, a patented ‘Galvanic’ weightreduction belt, an electric blanket, a stereo cassette deck – whatever that may be. Audrey can hear the disembodied voice – sweetly covetous – naming these things as they are shur ed before her, but the kinetoscope is diu cult to focus on when she is so constrained . . . a barbecue! His and hers dressing gowns and a cuddly toy! The voice finishes on a triumphant note, synthetic sounds swell to make the shape of music, and an invisible audience shapes its hands to make applause . . . this fiendishness will be Albert’s doing: a brace adjusted so as to force her to stare up at the ceiling, its screws threaded in the bone to either side of her eyes. This . . . kinema film his doing as well: a means of torture. The brace presses Audrey’s face into a muzzle that smells of old sweat – her legs are bound in a single leg of some tartan trews, her hands must loosen the chuck, switch the bit and turn the wheel by touch alone – she feels the fuse cap drop into my lap . . . the lines in between the ceiling tiles converge sickeningly but it’s not so bad . . . she isn’t like Gracie, who’s been in the Danger Buildings too long – poor Gracie, who shared a cubicle with her in the Plumstead hostel and who also received Cristobel’s message to join in the war e9 ort and once the workers were with them to rise in the reddy dawn. Poor Gracie, who doesn’t know me, who’s demented, whose skin is still canary-yellow – are they putting Trotyl in her food? In the early years Audrey had been happy to assist – to coo, bill and generally calm them before their psychoetheric reordering, before they were made to desire the images, if not the Ding an sich: atoasterafonduesetanelectricblanket – the words chew together now in avaricious haste, astereocassettedeckabarbecue!’isnerrsdressin’ gownsannacuddlytoy –! Off. Clicked off . The aerial sits alien antennae on the old set, which is warm and smells of singed dust. Busner straightens up, turns – the silence in the day-room of Ward 14 is slowly infiltrated by moans, mutterings, then: Wotcher do that for? Mister Garvey – mid-sixties, hypomanic, recent transfer – protests: That’s my favourite bloody programme, that is. Busner lifts an emollient hand and strokes the air. Please, he says, please . . . it’ll only be for a few minutes, I just want to ask Miss Dearth a couple of things . . . He waves the clipboard he holds in his other hand, and the papers stir up powdered milk, dried urine. The high-backed and upright armchairs face him in two shallow crescents, and are far more accusatory than the bundles dumped in them. Awkwardly, Busner manoeuvres between the rows, jostling past knees covered up with rugs and others frighteningly exposed: Oof, look at that contusion . . . a Waterloo sunset. The day-room’s ill-fitting sash windows are buffeted by the wind, strafed by raindrops, and so he is reminded It’s April, as he drops himself into the seat beside her. Her poor old face is crammed into the angle of the headrest, her scrawny legs are rigid and the torsion of her upper body is painful to behold – yet, despite this, her hands move methodically, deftly, pulling upon an invisible lever, twirling an immaterial flywheel with such assurance that the psychiatrist does see steel basted with oil, the fireside glow of bronze. Miss Dearth, he begins, I have your original admission form from . . . together with the notes made by medical officers during your first few years here. — It has taken him over a month to beg, cajole and wheedle these from Records, they see no point to it any more than Whitcomb does. – There’re plenty of fancies floating around this place, Busner, that’s why you’re better off confining yourself to facts, to routines . . . It is pointless to observe to his nominal superior, or to Missus Jarvis, the hideous old dragon who crouches on the nest of paper and card breathing bureaucratic fire at him, that these records are precisely that: facts, and facts about routines. De’Ath, Audrey, Admitted 26th September 1922, Born Fulham, 1890 (age 32), Spinst. 5'2'’, 7st. 8lbs., Address Flat G, 309 Clapham Road, Stockwell, London SW, had been subjected to a medical examination, so it was noted that: she showed no signs of tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, smallpox, being postpartum or having had any conn nements. De’Ath, Audrey, had been admitted – it was cramped into the preprinted boxes of the form – as a rate-aided person, exhibiting symptoms of catatonia that led Doctor M. H. Hood, Medical Superintendent, unhesitatingly to diagnose Primary Dementia whatever that was. A year later Doctor Ventor concurred respect of one Death, Audrey, but a note written by a Doctor Hayman, dated a scant three years later, just as den nitively – the Latin tag underlined thrice in purple ink – characterised one Deeth, Audrey, same other details, as suffering from Dementia Praecox. As he had laid out the ancient sheets and file cards on a sticky-ringed coffee table in the staff room, Busner found himself moved to consider the evolution in symbiosis of these names. For, as the Mental Health Act of 1930 modified Colney Hatch Asylum to Colney Hatch Mental Hospital, so Deeth, Audrey, mutated into Deerth, Audrey, who was given – courtesy, he imagined, of the slow absorption of Bleuler’s terminology into the fabric of English psychiatry – an equally authoritative diagnosis of schizophrenia. It would have been next to impossible to have tracked this pseudonymous patient down through the decades within an institution that remained in a continuing identity crisis, were it not that Miss De’Ath, AKA Miss Death, AKA Miss Deeth, AKA Miss Deerth, remained in exactly the same place, a moth – not dead but hibernating and growing more and more desiccated with the years – despite the subsidence of entire spurs, the constant renovations called for by the shoddy workmanship of its original contractors, the fires and the wartime bomb damage, the admission and departure, by death or discharge, of thousands of the mentally distressed. In the late 1930s, when the hospital saw fit to reinvent itself as Friern Mental Hospital, relegating – or so they hoped – the echo of the booby-hatch to the chants of children, Miss Deerth, Busner assumed through yet another error of transcription, became Miss Dearth. And so she stopped on Ward 14, an incurable schizophrenic whose profound catatonia was her most enduringly remarked upon characteristic, now that the decades had worn away all contingencies of sex, age, class and name. Her catatonia . . . and her dyskinesias and dystonias of all kinds, her muscles crimped, then cramped, her hands vamping and vibrating in the vice of her malady – so that, come the 1960s, when the hospital adopted the modishly informal nickname Friern, and the surf of chlorpromazine was up, old Miss Dearth’s symptomatic consistency was noticed by a not-yet-jaded junior neurologist temporarily attached to the staff — a certain Doctor Mohan Ramachandra, who must, like Busner after him, have bothered to read at least some of her notes and seen that, while she had been subjected to one round of insulin coma therapy in the late thirties and a single experimental jolt of ECT a decade later, she had mostly stepped over the high-tension cabling that snaked through brains for the next twenty years. He so concluded that, far from her twisting, ticcing and transfixed gazing being the consequence of too liberal dosage with major tranquillisers – since as yet she had been prescribed none – there might – just might – be a physiological explanation for her forty-odd years of torpor, a hypothesis that led to his jotting down very tentatively, in pencil, a single word, Parkinsonian, on the final page of those notes, followed by a ? that absolutely guaranteed there would be no follow-up

until now. Well, she’s never in the way, Always something nice to say, Oh what a blessing. I can leave her on her own, Knowing she’s okay alone, and there’s no messing. She’s a lady, Whoa, whoa, she’s a lady! I presume that you and, um, these others – Miss Deerth, Miss Deeth, Miss Death and, er, Miss De’Ath – that you are . . . one and the same? Busner leans into the headrest as far as he dare, entangling his hair with hers – there’s nothing to hear beyond the pigeon burble of fluid respiration. He tries another tack: On your notes . . . Miss Dearth . . . You were seen by various doctors over the years . . . Do you recall Doctor Hood? Nothing. Or maybe Doctor Hayman? Nothing again. A trolley comes wheedling along stacked with aluminium-lidded plates, the sulphurous stench of overcooked Brussels sprouts rolls over the trench where he hunches – other patients rise to fetch trays and there is a modest cacophony. Frustrated, Busner rears up. Mboya has gone – there are only orderlies in blue-and-green-cheque nylon housecoats passing out the featherweight cutlery, handing over the scratched-opaque plastic beakers. Oh what a blessing – there’s no messing . . . He tries again: How about Doctor Cummins – or Doctor Marcus? This last name is his trump card, surely it will elicit a response, surely? Sjoo-shjoob. I’m sorry? He tucks his ear still further – her cheek is deeply creased, she has been sleeping on sheets of disordered time. Sjhoo-shoob. Or is it jujube? His ear brushes her purse lips, Please, he says, please Miss Dearth or whatever your fucking name is, please try again . . . the wishbone jaw articulates, releasing foul breath and two pellets of sense: Jew-boy. For a moment Busner imagines she has roused only to insult him, then two more pellets follow: he . . . was, before she falls silent. Of course! It is not in Busner’s nature or deportment to become a whirl of activity, yet this, he thinks, is what I am. His springing up releases her flywheel – and so her hands go to it again: the right rotating, the left adjusting, while he grips his clipboard and plunges straight through the row of chairs. Oi! Garvey leers at him dying Pakistani a cuspid of mash in his otherwise toothless mouth – Busner sheds sorries as he sees that someone has switched the television back on, although it like me lacks vertical hold: jagged compartments going up and up, a Brucie in every one. He slaps the set’s wood veneer cheek once, twice, hard and Fanks, Doc, follows him and his stinging palm – but he doesn’t look back. It’s the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday, he should be at home with my wife and kids, with Miriam, Mark, Daniel and the baby – not here, where in the intensifying gloom the Austin’s headlights sweep across the trompe-l’oeil façade of the hospital, It’s a fake, because, while it looks like a hospital on this holiday weekend, there won’t be a single doctor in the entire asylum, the three thousand or so lunatics prevented from taking it over only by their own institutionalised inertia. — The vulnerable prey of his own soaring enthusiasm, Busner wrestles the car around the ornamental flowerbed, past the lodge and turns left on to Friern Barnet Road. Settling down into the cold, damp vinyl odour of the car, merging my own foam rubber with its, he sets course for St John’s Wood through another spring squall. He had telephoned again from the nurses’ station to conn rm that he was coming and Marcus’s voice – clipped, bored and nasal – said: I thought I made it clear to you when we spoke yesterday evening, Doctor Busner, come whenever you like – there’s nothing else to do. And to Busner, despite Miriam’s censure, it also feels that there’s nothing else to do . . . An ultimatum had been set when they quit the Concept House the previous year: No more enthusiasm – enthusiasm almost got you bloody struck off ! Now it has him in its talons again, gripping him as tightly as he grips the kyphotic steering wheel and directs the Austin’s blunt nose to part the rainy spangles that trail across the carriageway. Last night Miriam had taken the children to Seder at her parents’ without him – it was the first time this had happened since she laid down the law. He remained poring over Audrey Dearth’s notes at the kneehole desk he had installed in the corner of their bedroom, having failed in his attempt to enthuse her too by showing Miriam the entries made by Doctor A. Marcus that began in 1931 with him effectively dissenting from his colleague’s diagnosis of schizophrenia, and ended in 1941 when, Busner assumed, he had been called up. You see – he had grasped her elbow – here he’s written Enc. Leth. And here he expands on this: I consider it likely this patient may in fact be suffering from the somnolent-ophthalmologic form of encephalitis lethargica. Then here . . . he riffled . . . here, here, here and here! Every time he sees her over the next decade he’s moved to write something – he scrawls across her drug card when she’s been given paraldehyde Not Required. He writes next to another doctor’s observation that her oculogyric crises – whatever they may be – are functional: Nonsense. See, see! Miriam, who has a dip’ psych. of her own, wouldn’t see, she only echoed the baby’s full-throated protest from the next-door room: See what? She pulled away from him and said, What is this encephalitis lethargica anyway? Believing he had her hooked, Busner had begun hauling on the cu[ of her cardigan, dragging her towards the entry in the musty Britannica he had inherited from Maurice: There – he’d glossed it – end of the First War . . . Came before the Spanish Flu epidemic – maybe a precursor? Thing is, onset Parkinsonian – fevers, night sweats, swoons – but then paradoxical: some lapse into comas, others the reverse, suffering sleeplessness to the point of agrypnia! Maybe a third of ’em died, another third recovered completely, and a further third seemed to get better, but then a year, three – perhaps as many as five later they relap—. She took back her arm, saying, Zack, the baby is crying, she can’t sleep right now. Miriam’s freshly sculpted bob was polished ebony in the sharp light of the Anglepoise, Mary Cunt, he thought, then said: Don’t you see? This patient of mine at Friern, she’s just one of scores in the hospital I’ve identin ed – there must be hundreds more still scattered throughout the big asylums, possibly thousands. Don’t you see, there’s nothing at all wrong with them psychologically – or at least there wasn’t to begin with, now . . . who knows – this was a virus that attacked the brain stem. Miriam had been arrested in the open doorway, her fingers rubbing her own shaven nape in sympathy? her hip still boyish nudging the wicker laundry basket from which dripped a pair of his own underpants piping hot. I tell you what I see, she said. I see the same sort of pathetic reductionism at work here that was operating when you fell under your pal Ronnie’s influence . . . that voice banishes my concentration . . . Then there was no mental illness to speak of, only different ways of looking at the world. Different – she spat individual syllabic seeds – ex-i-sten-tial phe-nom-en-olo-gies. And now, again, there’s no mental illness – hey presto! All gone! All better! And in its place this encepho-thing. I wonder, Zack – really, I wonder when it’ll occur to you . . . this had been her parting shot, and he the dumb dog sat there obediently waiting for it . . . that simply wishing madness away won’t make anyone regain their sanity – nobody at all. Soon enough the baby’s crying shuddered to a halt, stoppered by a bottle. He could hear Miriam calling to the boys to get their coats – then car keys jangled, the front door slammed, the starter motor of the Austin coughed and whined, coughed and whined again. He sat there worried she would return to upbraid him some more until, eventually, he heard the car accelerate away – then he began to worry she would never return at all. Now, the same engine fulminating by the lights at Henley’s Corner, Busner sits waiting in the clammy day that Henry carefully removed all the polythene from their uncle’s dry-cleaned suits, then, taking the wire coat hangers, bent them to form the framework upon which the filmy stu[ could be stretched. These strange blooms of the future were finished off with large amounts of Sellotape before being planted in between the delphiniums in the – at that time – sterile and ordered front garden of the Redington Road house. He was always good with his hands – still is. Zack already knew better than to interfere, although it can only have been a few weeks since Henry had returned unexpectedly, mid-term, from Cambridge, filthy, unshaven, his knuckles scabbed, and told his younger brother that the Authorities had concealed an intercontinental ballistic missile silo beneath the quadrangle of his college. His plastic flowers planted, Henry got out the hose and stood there drenching the same spot for an hour, then a second, then a third. He drenched it until the earth liquefied and flowed down the path, out the gate and down the road, bearing privet leaves, twigs and blades of cut grass on its thick and sinuous back. He drenched it until their uncle returned home to find him standing there, his kaleidoscope eyes on the marmalade sky, his trousers soaked and mud-spotted. Then Henry began to water Maurice. Soon enough there was a clangorous police Rover – soon after that an ambulance. Uncle Maurice, with his interest in the Elstree Studios and his brittle-coiffed friends, had had a flare for dramatics — although to be fair he had tried persuasion before, many times.

Marcus’s address in 1941 had been given up grudgingly by Missus Jarvis of Records. There was still a Doctor A. Marcus listed in St John’s Wood, yet Busner hadn’t been convinced he had the right man until, upon apologising for calling on the evening of Good Friday, the pre-war voice on the end of the line said: We Jews also celebrate the death of Christ y’know – an outrageous statement, presumably intended to drive away callers, but which in this instance had the opposite effect. Busner had the unnerving sensation – so clearly did he hear the other man’s voice inside his head – that they were only two hemispheres of the same brain, yoked together by the citywide stretching of the corpus callosum phone line. He’s the one, Busner had thought, and now, having been buzzed in to the mansion block on Abbey Road, he climbs the wide and shallow treads of the stairs to see a Jew with a military bearing – he’s definitely the one. Of course I remember Miss Deerth, Marcus says before anything else. He stands: a tall, stooped figure Stravinsky ugly with a pot-belly and a large nose with a broad, flat tip duck-billed, his bifocals pushed up high on a balding cranium. I saw her at least monthly, if not more often, for getting on for ten years, why shouldn’t I remember her? There’re members of my immediate family I’ve seen less of – and found less, ah, congenial. In the twitch of the bill towards a mousy wife who stands in the tenebrous corridor, there is a nasty implication, one confirmed when Marcus ushers Busner on without making an introduction and she withdraws, presumably to a kitchen. They breast smelly vapours of chopped liver and frying potatoes, their feet crackling on a plastic strip laid over the carpet, before entering a weird chamber. Can I offer you a sherry? Marcus asks, as he points to one of a pair of club chairs of thirties vintage with burled walnut sides like the dashboard of the Austin that face one another over a nest of red lacquered tables. The sherry is Cypriot – incredibly sweet. Marcus un-nests one table, a second and then a third to accommodate all of the case notes Busner withdraws from his briefcase. A frosted bulb of high wattage is exposed in a perverted way by the scalloped edge of its paper shade and the mean white light strikes Marcus’s face – a face that, as is so often the case with the ageing male, has been ineu ciently shaved, leaving bristly crests on either cheekbone and along the line of the resolute jaw. You have to understand, he says, that it was all too common in the first wave of the epidemic to have one patient correctly diagnosed with encephalitis lethargica and sent to a fever hospital, but for his as it were twin in every symptomatic respect to be diagnosed with dementia praecox and sent to a mental one. This . . . he dips for his sherry . . . happened all the time – and it went on into the twenties, when the second wave of the epidemic felled many more of those who it’d been thought had fully recovered. Still, to be fair to the doctors of that era –. Marcus interrupts himself: But why? Why be fair to ’em! Sherry spittles on my precious notes! Some of ’em were outright bloody pervs – it’s a fact. Marcus shudders. Feelin’ up the patients – having intercourse with ’em if they were biddable, or sedated with opium, hyoscine – henbane even. They gave sex hormones to schizophrenics – I expect they were swallowing them as well! There were sadists too – but then I daresay there still are. Those who take sheer bloody delight in applying restraints – or ordering it done –. The outburst suddenly stops: Is he guilty himself – or sly? Of course, Marcus runs on dismissively: these were the exceptions, the bad apples . . . Or simply touched? . . . the vast majority of the staff were as responsible as they could be in the circumstances – if a trifle, um, unempathetic –. She creeps in from the soundlessly opened door, one shoulder raised, To ward off his blows? with an oblong blue Tupperware platter upon which are lined up shield bosses Ritz crackers, each meticulously coated with chopped liver. She un-nests a still littler red lacquered table, sets down the platter and retreats under the cover of her rigid perm’ is it a wig? At once there is an avalanche of crumbs that scatters between the cableknit ridges of the old man’s cardigan as his lips purse about a cracker, his dentures fiddling in their skin bag. Help yourself, he says a little grudgingly – then: You cannot be so wet behind the ears that you don’t know that diagnostics were in their infancy. Besides, you can have no idea of the caseload and what a bloody caseload! Even in the early thirties there were still plenty of inmates at the Hatch with TB – and fresh cases coming in every week. They all had to wear a caution card on a ribbon round their necks – yellow for TB, red for diphtheria, green for . . . something else, I forget. I said help yourself. Busner does mm . . . crunchy, creamy, salty – surprisingly . . . tasty. We considered pulmonary TB to be the twin of insanity, so closely were they associated. In my time there I had plenty of colleagues who, I knew for a fact, still believed that one caused the other, although not altogether certain – euch, euch! – which. Marcus makes a conductor’s gesture, the long fingers of both hands spatulate, duck-billed and raised up – if he could see himself, Busner thinks, he’d diagnose acute chorea – then brought down once, twice and a third time, so that cracker crumbs and pâté blobs are left in suspension, flickering in the bright light – a meteor shower the old alienist thrusts himself through to spit: I doubt you’ve ever seen a case of lupis vulgaris outside of a textbook . . . and Busner, confronted by nostrils eaten away at by sharp shadows, thinks, I could be looking at one right now, but only conn rms: You’re right there. Marcus next asks, More sherry? although this inquiry post-dates the unscrewing, the pouring and the re-sealing of the bottle. Last December, Marcus continues, when we had candles in here and got out the old Tilley lamp, it made me think of my first years at the Hatch – those endless bloody corridors, a gasbracket only every thirty yards or so. D’you know, there was a neurologist who came up a few times from Queen Square to do some encephalograms with one of the first portable machines – and that was before they’d fully installed electrical light in that mausoleum, so he could scarcely see well enough to take the readings of the electrical activity in the patients’ brains! Marcus has fallen back once more, but now he comes once again unto the light: What I’m driving at here is that we’d patients with diphtheria, who’d had typhoid – with diabloody-betes, not forgetting . . . a duckbill speared into the air . . . ones poisoned by lead or arsenic or alcohol. All of ’em would exhibit peripheral neuropathy so all of ’em would be given the catch-all: hysteric. Busner says nothing, Say nothing, for as it is to the patient, so it is to the physician: if you want them to talk say nothing . . . Look – at what, your bill, those crumbs? – the enkies were merely another group of patients for whom there was neither the conceptual apparatus nor the resources to disentangle the physiological from the psychological. With the enkies one neurologist’s catalepsy was another psychiatrist’s catatonia – but, anyway, it’s progress that’s the real delusion. You, young man, might like to believe that there’s no turning back – the Wasserman test and so forth . . . the replacement of diseased types by disease processes . . . but really this is utter bosh, because, after all, what’ve you got now with your so-called personality disorders – it’s only types all over again, denigrating the poor bloody patient by saying he’s got a bad character. That reminds me of something . . . Marcus pours himself another sherry to aid the process of recall, this time forgetting to impose a refill on his guest . . . there used to be a statue in the grounds, ragged-arsed Victorian kid, the Hatch’s own Madness and Melancholy – y’know, the Bedlam statues – he had a plaque on his plinth that read, Monument to the Unknown Pauper Lunatic. Still there is he, in the shrubbery by the big villa off Eastern Avenue? Busner thinks for a moment, and for some reason decides to spare Marcus the ugly truth. No, he says, no, I believe he was, um, discharged a couple of years ago. I understand the feeling was at the Health Authority that he sent a rather negative message to the patients . . . and Marcus crows, See, see! They got rid of him because he represented the truth: that the patients are poor, and they’re mad – and indeed that many of ’em are mad precisely because they’re poor. That’s the reality all their borderline-this and histrionicthat balderdash covers up! Busner, however, doesn’t wish to pursue this line, no matter the extent to which it speaks to my condition. Instead: Enkies? he queries. They had a nickname? Marcus snorts, Naturally! After all, they were simply another feature of the post-war scene – along with limbless ex-servicemen and economic stagnation. I remember as a young man going to the cinema and seeing newsreels of enkies – quite a lot was made of ’em in their hyperkinetic phase, and you could understand why because they had a strange sort of physical genius, able to make sudden moves that were deft – but zany and prankish, y’know, juggling lots of balls, chucking stuff, leaping and skipping. Marcus, in attempting to illustrate this physical genius, makes a wild sweep of his arm, knocking another table out of the nest and scattering the notes, he juggles none of them. He is dismayed by his own clumsiness: I don’t know . . . I daresay you wouldn’t be able to spot it if you saw those films now – I mean, in films from that era everyone looks like a Chaplin or a Buster Keaton – even Lloyd George – something to do with way they hand-cranked the cameras, I s’pose. The liverish pucks are all gone – a lot of the sherry too. Busner says, And what of Miss Dearth – as she is now? Marcus spends a while surveying the room, squinting at the spreading behind of his young colleague, who, as he gathers the scattered sheets from the carpet, takes in the bookcases densely packed with decades-old professional journals and Roneographed papers that he’ll probably never pick up again, let alone read. Well . . . he drawls at last . . . what of her? Busner persists: I mean, you thought it worthwhile putting things in her notes, making your own tentative diagnosis . . . Marcus shrugs. – It was a jape, I s’pose – I mean, it was clear to me that she was post-encephalitic, and I wrote it down partly to twit my colleagues, partly simply to show that I knew . . . perhaps, pah! for posterity . . . perhaps to fish you from the future – I hardly know any more, it was a long time ago. I can tell you one thing, though . . . The notes are all reassembled on one of the red lacquered tables and Marcus cants forward to leaf through them, stopping from time to time to bring one up to his face so he may examine his younger self ’s handwriting with lenses clawed down from his forehead . . . It certainly wasn’t with any intention of helping her – there was no cure, she’d no one to look after her that we were aware of. It mattered not one jot which sort of institution she was conn ned to, given how profoundly ill she was – and you say still is? Busner assents, then outlines the condition of his patient: her long periods of catatonia interspersed by manic episodes and still stranger phases when – he screws his features into an approximation of Audrey Dearth’s crises of fixed regard – She has her attention, her gaze . . . compelled by some invisible object up above her and to the left. Marcus is himself compelled. – Yes, yes . . . His watery eyes fix on a threadbare pelmet, its flaking brocade indistinguishable from smears of cobweb . . . this is entirely typical of post-encephalitics. Still – he snaps out of it – I’m surprised she’s still with us, she must be very elderly by now. You might’ve thought the enkies would’ve been altogether worn down by their illness, plenty died in all the usual ways, of course, but I also recognised that there were these others – like her – who were almost preserved by the sleepy-sickness, as if it were a kind of suspended animation. Sometimes . . . but this is fanciful! Busner almost shouts: No, no! It’s not fanciful at all – how could anything connected with these astonishing patients be fanciful? So please – please give full rein to your thoughts! He has, he realises, succumbed to the old man’s very lack of charm, Marcus’s abruptness, a stop-and-start that recalls the paradoxical condition of those others with their veined, dry-leaf skin . . . who blow in drifts along the endless corridor, for the end of time has come . . . and the campanile has collapsed . . . rain falls through the broken ceiling of the pharmacy . . . blue-and-yellow capsules swirl in a clear glass bowl, schizophrenics bob for them – dipping birds . . . — They must have reached some sort of conclusion, risen from their burled walnut caskets and got out from under that harsh white light, for here they are: the old mafistanding erect in the hallway, Busner already outside the heavy front door and embarrassed for the Marcuses, whose Jewfoody stench cafistill be detected a floor down from their flat, and which seems to him to sully the deep-piled purple carpets and smirch the brass nameplate of the mansion block. Busner cannot contain his thoughts — they fly to be with squatters sitting grouped on tea chests, one of whom licks a Rizla and attaches it to two others . . . and in another place there are disco lights making thighs blood-red . . . the horror, the horror is that this, of all the possible times and places, feels willed. His hand ivy on the doorjamb, his carpet slippers mossy on the mat, Marcus says: I enlisted as a general physician, but when they discovered I was a psychiatrist I was seconded at once to the field hospitals set up in the beachhead immediately after the landings. It was very abrupt – one week the dark corridors of Colney Hatch, the next these equally oppressive Normandy hedgerows, and pitched right beside them army canvas tents . . . When I’d first been at the Hatch inmates who repeatedly soiled themselves, or those put in the padded cells, were forced into canvas tunics . . . Every time there was a show more and more boys were brought into the tents, white as . . . white as . . . They’d never seen action before – their training had consisted only of robotic drills. They’d soiled themselves – plenty had thrown away their rifles . . . by far the majority hadn’t fired a shot. They sat in their own mess ticcing, and we shrinks joked – gallows humour, d’you see – that it was a busman’s holiday. Chap I knew – before the war he’d been at Napsbury – he went over with the Yanks and they did some sort of a study, very hush-hush. Turned out only one in ten of their infantry ever shot with lethal intent and I can’t imagine it was any different with our boys. Where’s he going on his busman’s holiday? Odd, isn’t it, to think of all that mayhem, all that killing – now too in Pakistan – and yet the vast bulk of it is perpetrated by a mere handful of psychopathic personalities, the rest being there to, euch-euch, make up the numbers. They have been standing like this for so long that it would seem appropriate for Marcus to invite Busner back in, but instead he looks critically at the younger man’s fat knot of woolly tie and the plump hand that fidgets with it, and says, I’ve enjoyed talking at you – will you come again? Busner laughs, I’d like to – and I’d like to come with news of a . . . positive nature. I mean to say, if this is Parkinsonian . . . well, there’re terrific strides being made just now with chemical therapies, I’ve read an article in the Lancet –. The Lancet! the old man yelps, How very quaint!