Umbrella

by Will Self

  . . . 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 cuff 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 infiltrating 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.