Umbrella

by Will Self

  there’s nothing doing at Ally-Pally. Under the colossal biscuit-barrel vaulting of the roof the immense building is hollowed out, empty except for a café and roller-skating rink of varnished pine upon which leotarded teenage girls scour around and around. The excursion party from Friern wanders this way, then that, smelling the mustiness of a different kind of institution. They stop to marvel at the enormous organ, with its three-storey-high pipes – Busner doesn’t mind, he’s only concerned to point out to the doubting Marcus how very normal the enkies are – they do not tic or jerk, their footsteps are halting, true, yet only to the same degree as any others of the elderly who have been long confined. Marcus, unimpressed, turns away from him, devotes his attentions to Voss, Ostereich and McNeil, taking them by the arm in turns, gently guiding them through the echoing chambers, speaking to each of them of the great changes wrought upon the world since their immurement. Always he’s careful to relate these momentous external events to those smaller alterations in their own regime that may have trickled down to their buried awareness. Do they recall, he asks, some of their fellow inmates going out to work on London County Council farms? This, he tells McNeil, would’ve been in the late twenties, after the great convulsion of the General Strike, when it was believed – in the wider world as much as the restricted one of Colney Hatch – that energetic employment prevented the diseased mind from dwelling on its fantasies – lascivious or socialistic. Or how about the red and yellow cards that some of their fellows used to wear about their necks – did they remember this practice? Did they register its falling away? They might be pleased to learn that this was but the bureaucratic evidence of a revolution in hygiene, sanitation and the elimination of the diseases that had decimated their peers. — Observing Marcus, so doltish in his interactions with the fully socialised, yet capable of assisting these post-encephalitics with such delicacy and finesse, Busner reflects yet again that the psy professions are in and of themselves mental pathologies. He thinks of the neurotic psychoanalysts he knows, for whom anal-retention is the rule rather than the exception, of how they are scarcely able to function outside their consulting rooms – where all is static for year after year, and such human contact that they must have is conducted neutrally with the back of a head. Why did I offer up mine for this botched execution, les quatre cents coups of Mmm . . . How does that make you feel? and always – always! – Mummy. He ponders again the laboratory psychologists, with their clipboards and galvanometers, measuring the skin that they’ve set crawling with their own bloodless reduction of wayward contingency to the stifling, the statistical. As for psychiatrists such as Marcus, who’ve spent their entire working lives attempting – in many cases sincerely – to empathise with patients who’re so far out as to be otherworldly, surely what success they may’ve had can only be because they’re nothing but a stranger in this world, I’m nothing but a stranger in this world . . . — Rusting, pitted and eccentric ballbearings, the ageing patients wobble from one tarry ramp to the next as they debouche from this Babylonian bagatelle. Mboya and Inglis steer Audrey Death and Helene Yudkin to a bench that faces out from the Acropolis and has an unobstructed view of the city below, Busner and Marcus settle the male patients alongside, and Dunphy, with jobsworth’s reluctance, goes back to the café to fetch teas and sandwiches. State of emergency is a profound misnomer when it comes to describing the situation here – there’s no ambulance clangour or tinkle of broken glass, only orderly processions of houses that mount up the hillsides, while overhead sail flotillas of clouds, perfectly intact, and towards Eltham mares’ tails flick at the Kentish downs. No, no state of emergency – only the pathos of a closed children’s zoo, a drained boating lake, a crazy-golf course padlocked in chain restraints – there’s nothing for the Rip Van Winkles to do but survey this city as strange to them as Peking or Padua . . . Survey it, and, if it could be arranged, eat good old-fashioned fish and chips all wrapped up in the Pentagon Papers . . . Spotting the concrete ack-ack mounts mushrooming in the defunct boating lake, Helene Yudkin says, What on earth? undoing Marcus’s cat’s cradle of integrative gestalt. That . . . he says wearily, and Busner sees in the old psychiatrist’s eyes Chamberlain, with the useless rearmament of his umbrella. Panzer divisions bucket across Marcus’s high forehead, Pearl Harbor seethes in one hairy ear, Nagasaki in the other, the railway spurs end in the region of his pot-belly, and he pants asthmatically, unable to expel the good news of the Holocaust she’s slept through . . . Audrey, blown plastic shell warm with the tea of life, thinks only of Gilbert and his pinnacles of glass and steel – towers she sees rising from the centre of London, and which are surmounted by the comical silhouettes of oil lamps, coal scuttles and hatboxes! Gilbert had prophesised green fields and sylvan groves in between his phalansteries, but Audrey can make out only this: that the orderly city she remembers from her youth – its huckabuck woven from street, square and crescent – has rucked up and torn . . . worse, been put away damp, so that mildew spreads across it . . . And to spare her own distress at this neglect of civic good form, she lets her head fall back so the mighty drapes of sky-blue chiffon may sweep into her. Up there a white needle – sharp, unwavering – draws a fraying thread through the heavens, a godly thimble drill that culminates in an unholy boom! followed by the trickling down of earth dislodged from between trusses and falling against galvanised iron, a sound that more than any other Stanley has come to associate with his new Morlock’s existence. There is no longer fearful apprehension of the shells homing in, nor frenzied calculations to be made of their point of impact, for the final blow has already been struck: All are dead – all are buried. The party pauses in the tunnel, the lights – electrical in this section that passes below the German lines – have flickered and then died . . . Why don’t you feel fear? The question flaps around them all in the darkness – touches them, surely, with its leathery wings? At Stan’s side crouches Michael, who smells wholesomely of hay and horses – there is a frankness to his very sweat. The others Stan isn’t so sure about: before they left their burrow for this raid on the surface, these men all donned Adrian helmets – the modified sort, from Verdun, with attached masks of thin steel strips and noseguards. These they had still further adjusted, by gluing bits of fur to them and soldering on brass buttons, until they resembled the headdresses of tribal savages. Still more savage were the bandoliers worn about their naked shoulders, the entrenching tools and saw-toothed bayonets hung from the leather belts slung low on their bare hips. Up until this moment Stan had been growing – yes, that was it, growing – in the deep dugout, just as before that he must have been growing alone beneath the earth: a tuber . . . or a human in embryo? He had slept in the burrow and woken again – eaten and dozed off once more. How many times this had been repeated he could not have said: men came and went in this cavern hollowed out from the darkness, but there seemed no pattern to their movements, no sense of their having been ordered to do so. The shameless bookworm was joined by a young Prussian, equally nude, whose head was shaven apart from a suede divot on the very top – duelling scars barred his hollow cheeks, and on his bare arm he sported a death’s head armlet. Ja ja, danke, he said when passed a banger speared on a toasting fork. The only constant in this flickery hollow was the big nigger who did the cooking, Jack Johnson – now we know where e’s bin . . . His frame may have been as massive as a boxer’s, but his expression was studious, his lips quite thin. His hair had grown out into the woolly ball of his forefathers . . . He was always there – and, although the others came and went, they proved their own constancy through the touches they bestowed, for the underground men had no more propriety than they did modesty, rubbing skin on skin, groping, pinching and bussing one another – they even nipped, puppies inna sack . . . They–they bin all broke doon, Michael said of his comrades, so thissus is ’ow they poot themsel together again – wi this pantomime. But iss allus a pantomime, ain’t it, Stan – the brass wi’ their braid an swaggerin’ sticks, ministers wi’ shiny toppers – t’King i
nall . . . — Now, in the blacked-out tunnel, with the last blast still reverberating, Michael answers him: Fear, aye, fear’s a foony thing. I coom down through one of them big craters in the redoubt, durin’ t’second shindy at Wipers – whole boonch more coom down through Messines – thass ’ow it is: t’bigger t’charge, t’more as gets buried –. Another ferocious crump! and this time the electric bulbs swell back to life so that the party can resume its shuffle up the tunnel, towards the surface. Ewe might say, Michael continues, his words mixed up with the dust, that all that time we spent oop top was by way of bein’ trainin’ – trainin’ fer down ’ere. Oop there t’Lawd could see uz – t’brass could see uz, t’ daisy cutters cood cüt uz all about. Oop there t’toonels ’ave no roofs, an’ death, like, it rains down from t’sky. But down ’ere the lid’s poot back on, see – down ’ere there’s no orderin’ any soul over t’top. We voloonteer t’go oop, Stan – free men. The droom fire is oor thunder, an’ the gun smoke, why, that’s oor clouds – see, clouds . . . not men, mebbe angels, aye, angels, Stan – floatin’ oop . . . Stand to: the bugles nightjarring from the British lines. What was it Luftie the country boy had said: suck on your John Thomas if they couldn’t get a cow’s bubbies . . . The squad of Ally Slopers crouches twenty feet back from where the tunnel, unpropped, droops into a rheumy eyeful of evening sky . . . We cannot march, we cannot fight, What fucking good are we? What might Willis or his friend Bertie make of this, Stanley wonders, for it’s surely all they’ve ever dreamed of – men of all classes, hues, tongues, gathered together in free association, and brazen in their lack of shame . . . they rest, arms about each other’s shoulders, hand to hand, holy palmers of . . . a fag, quietly conversing in their odd lingo – a crowdie of tongues, full of bits . . . The barrage dies away, the night creeps from shell hole to shell hole, insinuates itself snakily through the wire . . . Tonight will be no Crystal Palace firework show – nein aschpotten: the 180s have fallen silent . . . and they squint at only the occasional Very light crazing up, then plunging down to burn its own tail . . . Above ground they set to: following the night from muddy slough to ditch, taking a field dressing from one dead man’s haversack and attaching it to the wounds of his comrade who still lives. Triage, or so it would seem, comes naturally to Stan – haven’t I already been making these judgements for months? Of Feldman, of the Welshman, of the officer who grovelled in the bier two nights before the offensive . . . back and back to Aldershot, where the epileptic lurched out of the makeshift ring blowin’ Palmolive bubbles, then dropped stone-dead at the RSM’s feet. Stan had had a half-sov’ on that bout – but here the most ardent weather-telegraphers got cured of the habit, for there was nothing to foretell, saving conflict without end. Cooling steel and drying blood – they orientate by these smells, not by the stars. They drag the seriously injured as close to the wire of either side as they dare, irrespective of which army paybook they carry – after all, the only allegiance worth bearing is to life . . . Others they dispatch below – they don’t know it yet, but at long last they’ve caught a Blighty one that will make them at home . . . in France. The troglodytes carry morphia with them, and when a man is too far gone they give him a dose sufficient unto the end. Michael – an archangel, and the last presence they see floating before them . . . Warmer, realer, than that of Mons: no churchy phantom, conjured out of hunger, pain, thirst and fear – but a live man whose warm hand grasps torn wrists, rolls back blood-soaked cuffs, lets the needle in . . . Once or twice as they go about their business in the short and moonless night, Stan thinks of his section, short two men – maybe more – withdrawn to a reserve trench, their umbrella neatly folded, there to lick their wounds, swollen tongues clammy on bully beef . . . No reflection – in this tortured realm of shadows and shades the underground men needs must be as alert as any raiding party – and some of these they do encounter, whispering: ’Re you the FANY? The topsiders are halting, insensible, hair-trigger alert, bruised, raw, all at once. Observing them, Stanley wonders, Was I like that, shifting in an eye-blink from petrified terror to furious agitation? He watches them go by, feeling their way over the broken ground while fixed on this one prospect: their own deaths, under cover of which they mend their wire and drag back one of their wounded: a junior officer, hung about with stale whisky breath, a grim whiff of things to come – gas gangrene at the dressing station, the stench of his necrotic flesh. The topsiders have only one language at their disposal: the infuriated muttering of the compelled – whereas the troglodytes twist whichever tongue may be required: reassuring whimpering Frontsoldaten that they will not be schaden, calming Tommies with cock-er-ney cheer and fucking oaths . . . From the Germans’ salients on the ridge to the British forward trenches down in the valley, the troglodytes slip back and forth – they recover side arms and rifles, pull potato-mashers from belts, unfired Stokes ones from the very mouths of the newfangled trench mortars: all are spirited down into the underworld and cached in its caverns. Long before dawn flushes the underside of the thick cloud to the east, they have withdrawn, none of the topsiders any the wiser. The tunnel descends from this chaos into an orderly innards of galvanised iron, pit props and efficiently wired lighting – as they are being swallowed up, Michael sticks in the earthen gullet: They muss not know of uz – not now, not ever. Think on’t, Stan, iffen they knew they’d turn their goons on uz, winkle uz aht, drag uz oop. And when they’d every lass wunnuvuz they’d begin again wi’ their slaughter. No . . . he turns and on they go, and they have regained the underground circus and dived inside their burrow before he resumes . . . No, there’s only wun way t’coom dahn: by sheer blüdy chance, like wot you did . . . There is the blackamoor waiting for them with hot tea, and most of the subterraneans cast off their motley kit: the drawling former-subaltern resumes the pomp of his nudity, the ottoman of his groundsheet and the solace of his Pater. I once met –. Stanley stops himself there, for the young man at his feet is looking down at him from below Schnauzkrampf. Up above the barrage resumes – one-eighty-league steel-toecaps tramping across the former fields. The electric surges, dims, surges again and goes out. It takes a while for the cook to find his matches and light a lamp – in the utter darkness the sandy trickles, the woody creaks, metallic ticks, all are amplified: the whisper and groan of premature burial. Stanley fears he may lose his sangfroid, but the others simply chatter away: Worked for a provision merchant ’fore I got the chuck . . . Si vous soulevez un jupon vous ne devez jamais exprimer la surprise à ce que vous trouverez sous ce . . . Went up from Saint-Denis to the Hotel de Ville and she was waiting for me . . . My oooold Dutch . . . Stanley’s eardrums, pummelled and stretched by blast after blast, have acquired a traumatised sensitivity, and as he turns his head this way, then that, these voices tickle across them, bristles on bare skin, mixed up with brass-band discordancies Ooo-eee oom-pah-pah! speech squeezing into and out of comprehensibility as the needle passes through its arc, sweeping over Luxembourg, Hilversum, Bremen, black bars in the sky that cut across the puce clouds bleeding mauve rain . . . The aesthete on the burrow’s floor has kept ahold of watch and seals. He positions them carelessly around his lower belly, dumpy alpinists chained together for the ascent of Mount Cock. The idle yet systematic play of his fingers is immensely appealing she thinks as her own twist the dial, her ear pressed against the mesh grille. Erhem! Busner clears his throat, releases Uncle Maurice’s red silk tie, which unfurls over the curve of his belly. Erhem – Heath as it is spoken – and he states again: Miss Death, would you like some help with the radio – I could . . . tune it for you? He wants to probe her relentlessly: What does she think of it? Had she been aware of Marconi’s experiments? Could she then – with her Arts & Crafts imagination – have conceived of this hence: the world woven into a tight basketry of voice and music? Desires to – but is wary of her scorn. Besides, she has spotted her visitor, who havers beside Busner, his desert boots and fawn corduroys surely an academic exercise in informality, given his Wilfrid Hyde-White top half: the black suit jacke
t and wedge of blacker – what? What’s that garment they wear, a vest . . . A singlet . . . a sleeveless pullover? It seems always to’ve been polyester, but that can’t’ve been true of the Warden-of-bloody-Barchester. Anyway, it isn’t this that matters, thinks Busner: it’s the dog collar, which, although a simple enough hoop of white celluloid, is yet linked to a leash we all strain against. The Hospital Chaplain is young enough to be a trendy vicar – and dishonest to God. He’s tall enough to have had extra meat off the ration, his long thin nose, mild brown eyes and still milky curls suggest the drinking of a lot of weak Nescafé and the leisurely patter-cake of Anglican platitudes – but his hands clutch spasmodically at the front flaps of his jacket to tug them down . . . while the flakes of dead white scalp on his shoulders imply awful things about his underwear –. Who’s this fellow? Audrey prompts, then countermands herself: Let him step forward and say. Busner admires her: Ooh, she’s fierce! as the Chaplain sidles in and, grasping the back of a chair, says, D’you mind? Audrey replies, Not at all. She has half risen from her own and juts out her hand – a strong gesture brutally undermined by the frailty of all the rest: the weedy hair and the cadaverous face, the insult to her ideals of Little Red Riding Hood’s cast-off cardigan. Still, frail as she may be, and with a fearful asymmetry, she’s managed to bring the old wireless across to this table – she’s interested in what lies beyond, if not above. Poised on the plastic laminate: a plastic water jug, a plastic beaker, an aluminium kettle. The radio whistles until Busner turns it off. Thank you, croaks an effaced figure hidden in one of the chairs facing the television, and now they can all hear the raucous singing inside the simulacrum of the Moulin Rouge, inside the Warner Brothers’ lot, inside the set – and this Busner finds obscurely cheering: Nostalgia, he thinks, more and more of it will be needed to tranquillise the collective psychosis of a steadily ageing population. And he would’ve reached for the appropriate Biro were he not having such a bad day. A cavity big enough to stuff my tongue inside has appeared magically overnight, together with its twingeing sequel: a note from Whitcomb stuffed in his pigeonhole requesting a meeting fairly urgently, to talk some matters over . . . matters – that’ll make martyrs . . . martyrs/schmatte which is what Busner wants of the Chaplain: just possibly he can discover more about Audrey’s family where all the other staff have failed? Busner thinks it unlikely she’s a believer, yet a woman of her era will, he suspects, retain a certain respect for a man of the nylon. Without funds Busner cannot get Miss Death anything better to wear than this rubbish bag of a dress, but where there are relatives there may be funds – or a nest egg, put aside by her and swelled by compounding interest into a Roc’s one: an Arabian fortune. Besides, Busner wonders, what are the clergy for if not the conjuring up of blood out of tepid institutional tea? Not that it was he who called for spiritual assistance, he’d scarcely been aware there was a hospital chaplain. A rabbi came alternate Saturdays: Grossman. Busner had seen the big pallid gingernut laying tefelin on some of the twitchers – binding their palsy with the leather bands – or muttering a prayer over a schizoid, the slushy regurgitation of Hebrew – chicken shoup with bitsh in it – mingling with the psychotic drone. No: the Chaplain had trumped himself – he had, he said, heard certain rumours of extraordinary awakenings among the catatonic patients in Busner’s care, and resurrection being – as it were – his business, he’d come to visit the Gethsemane of Ward 20. — So the psychiatrist leaves them together in the day-room with its soiled floral-pattern curtains, surrounded by its undergrowth of easy chairs and right next to a stony radiator that no christly superstar – however omnipotent – could roll away since it was locked inside a fucking cage! He abandons the odd couple sitting either side of the silenced radio news from nowhere, and, as he tacks his way chubby Chay Blyth through the reefs of tables and iron-pillar narrows, sees only this: the ashy smears left after bodies have been vaporised by a flash brighter than ten thousand suns . . . All my life . . . crouching under desks . . . only the klaxon’s wail cannot fail . . . He is bitterly aware that no matter how diligently he and his ilk peruse the New Left Review, they will never put a stop to it: no happening could ever prevent it from . . . happening. The hospital flattened – surrounding it, stretching away over the low Middlesex hills and down into the re-exposed valleys, a burnt tracery of closes, avenues and cul-de-sacs lined with neat, ashy plots, within each of which sits a semi-detached pile of rubble accessible via a cinder pathway. And what is left standing? Helene Yudkin with a hairdryer in one shaky hand, its flex scribbling up from a socket – he watches more than her I long for a simple past . . . as she toggles the switch and basks in its warm whirring, turning her shrunken girl’s head this way and that as it shoots over her ski-jump nose. Lovely, she says, and then, marvellous – isn’t it, Doctor, isn’t it marvellous – so lulling . . . snug as a . . . woolly hat – a tam, a tam that haint there, no, it haint, a phantom tam, a phantam . . . She giggles – Busner, intent on the nurses’ cigarettes where have they hidden them? and the view they’ll afford through prettifying swirls at the tangle of his emotional life – Mimi has dropped her own bombshell – stops: a phantam! Witty-ticcy Yudkin is three weeks into the new regime and receiving two grammes of L-DOPA a day – as he wishes it, she’s an exemplary picture of improved wellbeing and energy, her voice stronger, her movements fluid, and with only the occasional jamming, she walks stably and without assistance – and she feels marvellous. That she will stand for hour upon hour at light switch, kettle, hairdryer – any appliance she can lay her hot little hands on – is, he has decided, only a reasonable response to the electro-age she finds zapping around her. He chooses to ignore the forced reminiscences she reports – the past driving a coach and four through the present. According to Helene rag-and-bone men get onter the ward quite regular an’ gallop up and down whippin’ their nags up, stopping to water ’em in the lav-a-tory bowl . . . Drunk summat terrible they is on gin at fourpence-ha’penny . . . She retains the entire retail price index, circa 1919 – so what? Surely this is a corrective of sorts – her mind assimilating all that lost time by hanging on still more firmly to what she has? What he won’t confront is the renewed chewing, the dimple worming in her cheek as she eats herself up from within . . . What’s through the graph-paper window today? Same as yesterday: a plump shrink wrestling with a semi-clad blonde pharmacist who’s got a zone of erogeneity deep in her throat . . . he thrusts her aside into a puff of dopaminergic dust – he’ll force out his own short-term reminiscence: Mimi’s shaky announcement rattling beneath me that she has called off her engagement to her soldier – he’d have to be a fucking soldier! Busner anticipates this: bare-knuckled boxing in the airing court for the benefit of Mister Kike, the starveling patients in their donated clothing chanting in a ring, cheering and clapping the man on – Edwardianly moustachioed, he is, and in tight white breeches – as he beats me to mush and slush. Crowded together with the rest of the sports fans: Miriam and Mimi, waving their hands rhapsodically in the air, happy to attend this Concert for Busnerflesh . . . This too he thrusts aside: the hospital is a degenerate city, the jargon of the staff – our diagnoses, our pathological labels and bogus practices – all obscure this: the gossipy reality, the talk of the gutter . . . the purloined cigarette rests in the notch of the tin ashtray and from its cellulose stopper mustard gas leaks . . . — On Saturday he’d taken Mark to the ABC Muswell Hill. Zack had looked only cursorily at the airily contrived monumentalism of the zeppelin, the choking spume of the night-time gas attack, the erect posture of the goggle-sporting Hun with the Iron Cross stamped on his leather breast. No, what caught, then held the professional observer was the boy’s unblinking and grating fixation upon the screen that floated up above them, pinioned between long insets of brassy rods and stylised laurel leaves – the forlorn Deco interior of the cinema dragging along A . . . B . . . C . . . behind the streamlining of history. This, Zack had thought, is the whole of the twentieth century thus far: a white sheet thrown over our heady hopes, ou
r disturbed dreams, our fleshly desires – with no sense of smell we touch only plush skin, rub it in, gargle the mucal ice cream deep in our throats, but without pleasure . . . This is our crisis of fixed regard: the zeppelin crashes to the cold earth again and again, a cathedral of rumpled buttresses, flaming arches, burning beams. They returned blinking into the egregious daylight to discover kiddie karts circling the roundabout and dropping off the hill down towards Crouch End – his hand in Mark’s was strange to me. This, Zack had thought, is my awakening and it’s always been thus, when I was his age, coming out of the Everyman, I’d experience the same estrangement from my shoes cow, folded and sewn. And he’d had this intimation: it’ll only accelerate from here on in, I shall emerge from the darkness into the light faster and faster, a rollier and pollier silent comedian, double-, triple-, septuple-taking on doors, window screens, the cosmic fatuity of style –. Dad, Mark had said, Dad, you’re hurting me – because, of course, it was the child’s hand that had been clutched in his – and such a beautiful child, his skin ivoried by . . . neglect? The boy’s fixity had seemed to persist – he too was estranged from Wimpy Bar, 104A bus, all the rolling stones of old London town – a bad future was, Zack thought, tucked into the turn-ups of his dungarees and proclaimed its dominion across the Esso roundel of his promotional T-shirt.