Umbrella

by Will Self

  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 Sun showing 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 light-hearted 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 in ve 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 in ve 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 lantern show 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 bac
ks 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 in 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?