by Will Self
They are on the ward, and Sir Albert is pushing open the double doors to the corridor. His own language? Busner says, You mean . . . Kikuyu? Sir Albert stops to beam contempt down at him, then answers: Good heavens, no, Dholuo – Mboya is a Luo, not a Kikuyu, which probably explains why he’s here and not in Kenya, eh? I’m not surprised your career is failing to advance beyond this institution, Busner, given your lack of interest in your colleagues. And with this parting knock-out blow, our professional association clearly being at an end, Sir Albert, for all his apparent solidity – dematerialised . . . — Can I help you? she says. The woman is in her late thirties, idiosyncratically plump in places – the undersides of her arms, the top of her hips and ribcage – that imply the wearing of restrictive undergarments beneath her stretchy black top and stretchy black slacks. Self-defeating . . . really. She has a handsome, hawkish face – Greek? – unloosed dark hair, and a prepossessing lack of make-up. Not what you expect from an estate agent. – I . . . ah, well . . . They are standing beside the large tabletop model of the hospital-turned-luxury development, and, feeling the beginnings of a swoon, Busner puts his old hand on to it to help myself . . . I – I used to work here! The statement comes out as a weird exultation – he had been fully intending to stick with his imposture of being a prospective buyer for one of these Last Few Remaining Apartments, right up until it popped out of his mouth. The woman seems altogether unfazed. Really, she says, and what was it you did here – her eye tracks over his grubby clothing, rests on the crumpled and sweat-rimmed hat – did you used to work in the Upholstery Workshop, or the Occupational Therapy Unit, possibly? He laughs. – No, no, I really did work here – I was a psychiatrist. Around them in the former Friends’ Shop her own colleagues are tap-tap-tappety-tapping at their keyboards, twitch-twitch-twitchety-twitching at their computer mice, their eyes ticcing back and forth across a few fractions of inches, and in these acts alone crossing continents, journeying to alien worlds, or penetrating the psyches of others . . . Shouldn’t be such a snob, he admonishes himself, after all, why’s it any different to poring over an atlas while listening to a radio – which I did plenty as a child? The woman has folded her arms to create more . . . novel lumps – shouldn’t be judgemental about that either, not at my age . . . and she says, I’m sorry, it’s just that we get a fair number of old patients coming back to look at the place. Busner starts to say: I’m surpri—, but then stops, realising that he isn’t surprised in the least. I suppose, he continues instead, that they are looking for some kind of . . . then trails off. The woman looks at him critically and vocalises his thought: Security? Yes, I know they are, because they often tell me it was here they felt most secure – many, of course, are not at all happy, some are terribly distressed. It’s Busner’s turn to look at her critically, he can detect no irony in her tone, her expression is open . . . sincere. She seems a most unaccountably therapeutic estate agent . . . He smiles, and says, Am I right in thinking that you too feel a sense of security here? The woman laughs, a pleasingly rich and chocolatey chuckle, Ha-ha, well, ha, yes . . . She puts out a hand, the maintenance of which, he imagines, costs her considerable effort, since each nail has been individually painted . . . with crescent moons, rainbows, a dove, ten little scenes of rather mawkish . . . security . . . I’m Athena Dukakis, she says as they shake – and Busner searches quickly through many silver bands including one on her thumb! for the gold one on her marriage finger: mere force of habit . . . Busner, he offers up, Doctor Zack Busner – I was here for a couple of years in the early seventies. Releasing his hand, Missus Dukakis turns to the model and gestures. – Well, as you see, there’ve been a lot of changes. I suppose I know the place as well as anyone – I almost grew up here: my father bought the buildings when the hospital was shut down in 1992. Busner again searches her handsome face and warm tone for any irony, any doubling or subterfuge . . . a trapdoor beneath which the oubliette yawns, full of pain and despair . . . He says judiciously, It must’ve been pretty strange for a young girl, I mean – it was a mental hospital. Dukakis makes things intelligible for me . . . by running her crescent-moon-tipped finger along the Plexiglas lid of the model while saying, As you can see, the first thing he did was to demolish the entire second range of the hospital, leaving the first-range frontage intact – which is really the finer, original architecture, together with the spurs built off it in the 1860s. But you’re right, it was strange – she flips from realtor to reminiscent – I was in my teens, and he’d bring me up here on site visits and let me wander about. The last handful of patients had left in a hurry – their toothbrushes were still in the bathroom recesses, a few rather pitiful belongings in their bedside cabinets. The medical staff had abandoned all sorts of . . . strange equipment – and there were the padded cells, of course, they pretty much freaked me out! Silently, their eyes travel over the simulacrum of the booby-hatch . . . and Busner remembers the strange atmosphere of the old asylums in the late 1980s and early 1990s, how, as they were wound down, with each patient discharged a bed would be removed and not replaced, until there were only these small mattress islands in the great echoing wards – islands squatted on by hairy geriatrics Barbary apes . . . It was, he thinks, akin to some process of decolonisation, with the far-flung possessions of the therapeutic empire being successively ceded, given up to the wrecker’s ball, and to . . . luxury flats.
There are a number of rigid paper bags standing on the desks, plan chests and the model’s table – regal purple bags decorated with the development’s logo: the elongated dome of the former hospital and its two flanking campaniles . . . fake, sucking the stench of madness into the suburban skies, what do they suck up now, potpourri, freshly ground coffee? Athena Dukakis says, We’ve got a sort of presentation-thingy on tomorrow, if you’re wondering about the bags – they’re goodie ones, give-aways, a CD-ROM with a virtual tour of the development, a scented candle, bath salts . . . that sort of thing . . . She falls silent, then, perking up again, says, Look, to be frank, it’s pretty quiet just now – what with the credit crunch and all that our sales aren’t exactly . . . booming. Would you like me to show you round? This is said impulsively, but with a decided warmth . . . As he follows her down the drive towards the roundabout with its ornamental flowerbed – which is far more refulgent than he remembers it, a blaze of pink, mauve and scarlet – Busner wonders why has she warmed to me? For he’s altogether conscious of his gracelessness, stumbling along, footsore in his training shoes Addenough . . . and topped off by his dosser’s hat, the very image of a returning patient in search of security – or an Unknown Pauper Lunatic, what happened to him? And, more to the point, Busner thinks, what happened to the old alienist, Marcus, whom I deceived – as if he needed protecting! – about the statue? If he were alive now, he’d be – what? over a hundred – still, it was quite possible to imagine him hanging on in his St John’s Wood flat, and persecuting the little wife who comes crackling across the plastic with her liverish offerings . . . They reach the main doors, and as Busner turns to trudge obediently past, he’s shocked to see that they have swung soundlessly open of their own accord, while behind them a further set of glass doors schuss apart: the magical entrance to Sleeping Beauty’s castle . . . The mountainside, the flower grows, The riverside where the water flows for-èver . . . Athena Dukakis laughs. – I see you’re confused by the doors – it was the second thing my dad did: open them up, after all, you could hardly have the keep-fit crew skulking round the side, now could you? Where the cantilevered landing once reared above the dead theatrical space – and he remembers now, a hyperactive Cordelia babbled, N-N-N-Nothing c-c-c-comes of n-n-nothing – there are instead lots of things, the high hall having been sliced in three, horizontally, these compartments to be viewed through a rood screen of blond wood and glassy panels. At their feet these windows disclose the sunken swimming pool, through the azure fluid of which a swimmer stretches photo-opportunistically – while at their chest-height a broad floor of quarry tiling supports seating are
as of round-backed armchairs, a zinc-fronted bar, and all the other silent clamour of a coffee bar in full afternoon swing: one or two muffin-heads eating sweetbreads the same shape. And up above this, a further platform hovers under the old beams and trusses of the original roof, a platform upon which, behind a glass balustrade, can be seen thronging the shiny racks of running machines. Busner sees several pairs of legs going back and forth, back and forth . . . but going nowhere. Festination . . . comes to him, and then he spots the shiny steer-horns of rowing machines, and of other lifting, stretching and yanking devices, some of which are being repetitively hauled up and down, up and down, to raise no other masses than . . . bigger triceps, biceps and deltoids . . . From the same mental recess comes . . . a mobile spasm of athetosis and myoclonic jerking . . . Busner looks up at the eyes of one of the runners-on-the-spot above his head, and notes that these are fixed unwaveringly on a mid-distance towards which her festinating feet will never carry her and he thinks: She’s having an oculogyric crisis. Next he concentrates hard and can separate from the gargling of the espresso machine and the wind-chiming of the Muzak the mounting chuffer-chuff-chuff of her breathing, and so diagnoses the onset of . . . a respiratory crisis! The young man in the photograph on the hoarding by the main gates, or his twin, brushes past the gawping Busner, who looks down at his sports bag and is gone from the fitness centre back into a hot hangover . . . which has to be the worst kind there is . . . — How long, he wonders despairingly, will I have to stand in this fucking queue? What makes it worse is that there’s nothing to look at but the stone floor scattered with the crumpled-up results of scores of tiny financial transactions, the window which hurts my eyes, or the thing he wishes to avoid: the man who’s at the counter in front of him, and who bends to address the cashier through the metal grille, speaking so croakily that it’s altogether impossible for Busner to decide what language he’s using. He is me . . . the fifty-peseta clipper-cut intended to impose respectability – this being a representative monarchy in which, should they choose to, the shaven-headed, shiny-origami-hat-wearing agents loyal to the Caudillo might well shear you in public . . . – the filthy-blue BOAC flight bag full of empty wine bottles, and that tremor, the insistent shaking of a nervous system habituated to regular sedation with ethyl alcohol . . . Busner has no doubt that the old remittance man is a Brit – even if he can’t tell what language he’s speaking, the loud mangling of it remains indisputably YouKay . . . There seems to be some sort of dispute going on concerning the dirty little scrap of paper the remittance man keeps thrusting under the grille, and with a sickening jolt Busner realises that this is a Thomas Cook traveller’s cheque exactly like the ones he needs to cash. The Spanish holiday, he thinks, has been broadly a success: they have looked, eaten, talked, driven, done it all over again. There has been no great intimacy between him and Miriam, but that’s only to be expected . . . it’s exhausting enough keeping the baby cool, making sure all the children are hydrated with expensive bottled water. No, the holiday has been a success, and there are only a few more days before they fly home – it’s not exactly been The jungle life of mystery . . . but, arguably, it’s been a perfectly acceptable chapter of . . . The wide and graceful history of life . . . He probably shouldn’t have drunk quite so much last night, but that too is only to be expected . . . If only it weren’t so hot in this pestilential bank – if only the restive queue behind him didn’t twitch so – each time Busner looks back at them, he sees an upsetting agitation of hands, flicking hair, brushing lips, licking tongues. And the old remittance man with his dreadful palsy! The confrontation has reached some sort of climax, because here into the bank comes a jack-booted Guardia Civil who must have been summoned by some ulterior buzzer . . . Despairingly, Busner watches as the old remittance man is hauled off by the strap of his bag, his empties clinking, his eyes blinking with tears . . . I ought to do something, help him . . . but all Busner does is to take his place at the grille, and begin the laborious signing once, twice, flicking to the next, signing once, twice, flicking to the next – a thumbah, or possibly a handango, that recalls to his mind the repetitive ticcing of Helene Yudkin — and all at once he knows what a foul and irretrievable mistake he has made: I should never have left them – never! For the last four days of the holiday Busner is present in body only, he can barely rouse himself to speak to my three waif-like kiddies and my poor drab of a wife. When the cab drops them at the Grove, he goes into the flat only to dig out the keys to the Austin, and then he pushes past Miriam, who’s struggling in with the suitcases. She says nothing: there is nothing to be said – nothing comes of nothing, but neglect is something – and divorce came of that . . . — When he reached Ward 20, it was late afternoon, and the sunbeams struck down through the lancet windows at precise forty-five degree angles, I thought of castles then – specifically their dungeons, the stone-flagged cells housing Medieval inmates, their matted and filthy hair poking from between the struts and ribs of complicated fetters and cages . . . something out of Grimmelshausen . . . He could see none of the medical staff in the day-room and the nurses’ station was empty but for . . . smoke, the acrid ghost of all our concern. When Busner had left for Spain, Audrey Death had still been the most stable of the post-encephalitics – her stuporous state when her older brother had made his once-in-a-century visit had been: Partly shock, Doctor Busner, she told him. It would, I think, have been courteous to’ve at least told me that you had been to see him, as it was I was quite severely shocked – and besides, I’ve nothing to say to Albert De’Ath, we don’t so much as share a given name – the only thing we have in common is the accident of our parentage. If you’ve spent any time with him you have, I daresay, been exposed to his formidable powers of reasoning – capabilities sadly unmatched by any real compassion, let alone warmth. He is the most fearful reactionary. Too much messery, Busner had muttered, and Audrey said: Speak up, young fellow, and Busner said again: I expect he’s had too much of his messery – whereupon the elderly lady laughed, she laughed – a delightful laugh: warm and seductive . . . This was the memory he took away with him: of a very thin, hunched and frail patient – that was true – but one in full possession of her senses, perfectly lucid . . . and engaged. I do so enjoy, she had said to him, going up to see the musical woman – Missus Down, is it? – she plays, quite coincidentally, an air I remember from girlhood, Brahms’s intermezzo, in A, d’you know it? Busner said, Not off the top of –. And she hummed she hummed, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo, triplets of notes lilting up and down, and he had left her there – a little twitchy, un peu rackety, true, but that was only to be expected . . . — He returned to find the most complete disharmony. In the first cell I came to, on the men’s dormitory . . . The three old men, Messrs Voss, Ostereich and McNeil, were as inert as when Busner had first seen them: they seemed no longer men at all but . . . derelict houses, burnt out and decaying . . . their faces rigidly masked, their heads lolling on their necks, their entire musculatures eroding from their frames, so that every part of them slid away. He had attempted, futilely, to arouse them – pulling up an eyelid, calling into the dark and sadly unwashed cavern of an ear. Nothing. Worse than nothing: a sense of a profound absence – not only that there was no sentience in any of the three, but there never had been . . . it’d been my dream, perhaps, as much as theirs . . . He went into the women’s dormitory and discovered the colossal frame of Leticia Gross still lumped on her reinforced catafalque – but whereas when he had left she had been a troubling presence, what with her bullying and commanding of the nursing staff, now she was a twenty-five-stone absence, a mound of inanition, her petite features seemingly in the process of being reabsorbed by her rolls and dewlaps of flesh . . . in a heavy and sluggish wave of rolling dystonia. There was no sign of her cheeky-chappie husband – none of the medical staff were in evidence at all. He went next to Helene Yudkin’s bed, and found there at least some signs of life, but only . . . signing once, twice, flicking to the next, signing o
nce, twice again, flicking to the next . . . the thumbah and handango of her compulsive traveller’s-cheque-ticcing . . . she could not speak, she couldn’t say anything was marvellous any more . . . she was lost to me . . . At last Busner had met with Hephzibah Inglis hurrying along. What has happened to my enkies? he had challenged her, without any other greeting or pleasantry . . . and she looked at me as simply another puffed-up doctor, engorged with my own professional status, rolling over the little people and so spared me nothing: – Your enkies, Doc-tor Busner? Why, all dat foolishness was done put a stop to second you skipped off a-broad. Doctor Whitcomb, he see de dread-ful state of dese poor folk so he took ’em off dat damn fool drug of yours – he took de drugs inall –. He had wrenched himself away from Inglis’s complacent smirk and headed at last for the little niche he had secured for her, with its scrap of view – headed at last towards Audrey Death, cursing himself . . . for having ever forgotten her for an instant, for having chosen to ignore my responsibilities as her physician . . . and arrived to find that it was all far, far worse than he had feared: she was not only wrenched halfway round in her chair, her eyes fixated on an invisible object above and behind her, but those eyes had flies clustered in them, while her arms and legs had been strapped to that chair. He went straight to the buckles of these straps and began unfastening them. I shouldn’t do dat if I was you, Doc-tor, said Inglis coming up behind him. You don’t know de half of it, when she be freed she go flat-out crazy –. Then he had lost his temper, and begun shouting at her: Don’t you know that the proud boast of this fucking miserable bloody place was that no hand or foot will be bound here . . . — Shall we go on, Doctor Busner? Athena Dukakis asks, and he says, Of course, of course, do forgive me, I was only struck by how . . . well, how strange this all is – I mean, you’ve kept the original foundation stone. They stand looking at the white plaque, scanning its incised lettering: THIS FOUNDATION STONE WAS LAIDBY FIELD MARSHAL HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE ALBERT . . . followed by the list of Commissioners for Lunacy and assorted beneficent dignitaries, at the bottom of which surrounded by scrollwork there is this motto: NO HAND OR FOOT WILL BE BOUND HERE. Some people, Busner says as they leave the fitness centre, might find it rather, well, rather disturbing to be living enclosed by these walls – which in their time have witnessed so much mental distress. Dukakis looks at him critically. Surely, she says, that’s a little hippy-dippy for a psychiatrist, I mean, don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks old buildings can have psychic auras. Anyway, they’re lovely buildings now – you can see that. They are strolling between a bushy hedge and the façade of the first range, the brickwork of which has been returned to its original honey colour. The windows are beautifully pristine, and every few yards a cast-iron lamp standard containing an electric bulb has been erected. This is meant to instil in the residents, Busner supposes, a pleasing sense of Victorian civic pride with none of the accompanying low wattage. Hippy-dippy we were, he thinks – and those of us who didn’t float off back to nature, or take to the barricades, took a sort of solace in our own nostalgic Victoriana. He smiles, thinking of the sartorial fripperies of the period – the long white silk scarves, and original tailcoats picked up at flea markets, and the bandsmen’s scarlet coats that could be spotted weaving their way through the crowds at the Isle of Wight festival, gold frogging leaping about in time to Hendrix’s axe-work. Miriam insisted on William Morris floral-patterned wallpaper – while Busner had his own brief flirtation with a handlebar moustache and a velvet smoking jacket . . . It must’ve been strange for them, the reawakened, to have swum back to consciousness in a world done up in a travesty of their own childhood, complete with a soundtrack of oompah psychedelia . . . As Inglis claimed, the restraints had been necessary, for, when the sixteen hours of Audrey Death’s oculogyric crisis drew to an end, she did not relapse into akinesia but became animated by the most extreme ticcing Busner had ever seen – a Saint Vitus Dance of every part of her: her fingers flicked, her hands spasmed, her arms, legs and neck jerked about wildly – if not prevented from standing she would leap to her feet unsteadily, then canter up and down the ward until she knocked into a wall or a piece of furniture and spun to the floor. It was with the entirely humane aim of preventing her from breaking her brittle bones that she had been restrained. Safely strapped down, she still came out with these . . . strange cries, spontaneous jactitations . . . Buy! Buy! she had cried, and: Sell! Sell! Disjointed numerical commands had also spilled from her mouth: Give me fourteen-eighty! I’ll take nine! Try seventy-one! Hold four thousand and twenty-two! Go to them for a hundred and nine – Now! And all of this frightening gibberish had been mixed in with a chaotic choreography of tics that, try as he might, the psychiatrist could subject to no analysis, nor perceive any congruence in. He and Mboya had pleaded with Whitcomb to allow them, in Audrey Death’s case at least, to restart the L-DOPA. Given the old woman’s state of extreme agrypnia – a sleeplessness that would not respond to any sedative dose short of a toxic one – the consultant relented. However, even back on the drug, she continued her erratic course, flipping between this extreme rapidity of thought and movement, and periods of increasingly deep catatonia. Over the course of a fortnight or so Busner battled to save his favourite patient, to somehow keep her balanced on this knife-edge of stability . . . The tiger’s free, the kangaroo, It’s up to me and up to you . . . A miserable and forlorn hope: it had been Mboya who finally insisted that they stop the treatment altogether . . . In mercy and justice he said – and he was right . . . The final words Audrey Death had spoken before relapsing into a merciful swoon were a string of nonsensical fractions – eighteen over four-point-two, ninety-four over thirteen-point-seven, sixty-six-point-three over thirty-three-point-three recurring – that, even as he accepted the futility of the exercise, Busner had tried to fit into some conceptual framework. Were they, perhaps, the numerical analogue of her brain chemistry’s intro-conversions between the discrete and the continuous, the quantifiable and the relativistic?