by Will Self
terrified that if he doesn’t accede she’ll keep him hanging on the
phone forever, he agrees … and she’s gone. So gone – the electromagnetic
squall of her dying down as if it’d never happened …
leaving him staring out over suburban London to where, in the
mid-distance, he can just about make out the long, low, spurious
structure of Friern Hospital, closed down now for, what? at least
a decade. From this vantage, Busner thinks, I can see all the way
back to the early seventies – and if I’d the right equipment, I could
film that past as well. It’s swimming up to him now, from the
emulsification of memory: the silvery summer when he and Enoch
Mboya awakened the post-encephalitic patients – Mboya had a sort
of photographic memory, but it’d been empathy, Busner thinks,
rather than some neurological quirk which made the charge nurse
able to recognise all of the poor passengers on that ship of fools …
Enoch had seen those ticcing, spasming, festinating human
machines for what they truly were: unique individuals, with hopes,
dreams and emotions all deformed by the decades they’d spent
buried deep in the system. Deep in there, first drenched in
paraldehyde, then slopping with Largactil. Deep in there – far, far
down that long, long lens of a corridor, the bare fact of their
existence transposed on to the buff cardboard of the state and filed
away … While as for their bodily reality … Ach! They’d stunk –
stunk of the drugs, the disinfectant, and all the shit and filth the
disinfectant was meant to mask. Busner remembers changing
one woman-mountain’s nappy – scraping the impacted excrement
from the crannies of her obese thighs, then filming her with a thirty-five-millimetre
Bolex – a lot of camera for an amateur at the time …
But he’d always had a thing about photography – and sees now …
again … Maurice, Henry and whichever Barbara was in harness at
the time – sees their dead faces floating in his viewfinder. Those
mass-produced Box Brownies and Kodak Instamatics – they’d been
the beginning of this massive privileging of the eye over the other
sense organs … the gateway drugs to the palace of retinal delights.
Before that – both at Kingsley Hall and his own Concept House in
Willesden – Zack had also made films of his distressed housemates:
presenting these objective images to them in the hope they’d
abandon their own distorted ones. But the Bolex – and the enkies,
that’d been different: it wasn’t they who’d required photographic
evidence of their condition’s objective reality … but me. Required
it, because, notwithstanding his own clinical experience, he’d been
unable to believe the testimony of my own senses … He remembers
setting up the egotistical giraffe of the Bolex’s tripod, then focusing
tightly on the woman-mountain’s waste of a face – remembers
squinting through the viewfinder at her frigid cheeks and cracked
eyes, then waiting for something – anything! – to happen. Eventually,
he’d gone to the recalcitrant nursing staff and got hold of thick
rubber bands and bulldog clips so he could rig the Bolex up to film
entire reels of this morbid catatonia in one continuous take. And
then, when the films had been developed and played back? Busner
writhes on his lofty bench: because these are discreditable memories
that slash at me: razor blades, attached with rubber bands and bulldog
clips to … the windmills of my mind. Lesley – that shit, Lesley!
He’d developed the films, then shown them to Zack on a Steenbeck
editing machine at the film cooperative in Camden Town. Sitting
in hash-honking semi-darkness, fixated by the pimples on the
hateful fellow’s bare and sweaty shoulders … Do you break a
butterfly on the wheel – or a psychiatrist for that matter? Lesley
belongs, Busner concedes, to a fairly discreditable period of his life:
when he was racketing around in Willesden wasting Maurice’s
money – and taking ill-advised acid trips with really rather doolally
people … Lesley – that man of the people – had styled himself the
Concept House’s multimedia coordinator, but where would he
be now? Up some Welsh valley, prob’ly – coughing his perished
lungs out in a wonkily pitched wigwam and walking a ten-mile
round-trip to pick up his Assistance, while continuing to extol
the self-sufficient philosophy of the Whole Earth-bloody-Catalog …
There’d been something to those films, though – if they were
speeded right up, it could be observed that, amazingly, the catatonic
post-encephalitics demonstrated the normal repertoire of human
responses – smiling, frowning, grimacing – but much, much slower.
A tiny flirtatious moue took, Busner recalls, about forty minutes to
pass across the north face of the woman-mountain. By contrast,
when he and Mboya made films of those patients caught up in an
akathistic whirr – ticcing, chewing, perseverating, jerking, jigging,
marching back and forth – then viewed the results slowed right
down … we saw still stranger things. He’d never written up his
notes – never completed his projected research paper on the
Friern post-encephalitics. In part, of course, because the trial he’d
organised to justify the purchase of the wonder drug had been
nothing of the sort: there’d been no control group, while Zack was
quite simply out of control … To begin with, these elderly men and
women, benighted for decades, had experienced a period of astonishing
remission – and were released from their fleshly imprisonment
to dance, sing, cavort … and love. But after a delirious few weeks
they’d all begun to fall apart again, and then it’d been worse – far
worse – for them: because Enoch and I had made them self-aware.
They’d tried adjusting the post-encephalitic patients’ dosage of
L-Dopa but to no avail: the ticcers grew more frenzied, while the
catatonics, acquiring a saturnine gravity … sank back into the black
hole of their own malady. All Zack had been left with were the cine
films – and another blot on my already maculate career … Apeneck.
Busner caresses it, seeking to ease all the tension that’s built up since
he sat down. Yes, he’d kept the cine films – in particular the ones
of that indomitable old lady, whose name was? Busner lets his arms
hang down – not to laugh, though: for a sob escapes him at the
thought of that Archaeopteryx, fossilised since the early twenties,
whom they’d disinterred and brought blinking into the era of disco
lights and dolly birds … Yes, he’d kept the films of her, and on
stoned seventies evenings he’d set up the projector in the main room
at Redington Road and screen them for the psychological carpetbaggers
who came in search of the latest marvels … Busner stands,
and begins the descent from the People’s Palace, lying on one of the
big leathery pouffes I brought back from Morocco that summer –
Tangier was full of Yanks, mostly poofs themselves … He’s lying on a
; pouffe puffing a joint of Moroccan hash, watching those hollowboned
and featherweight hands rotate invisible cranks and yank
immaterial levers – for the sad fact of the matter is I remember the
films rather better than their subjects … He’d tell his dopey doctoral
audience: This is a sequence I shot at Friern Mental Hospital a few
years ago. The subject is one of the long-term post-encephalitic
patients there – remarkable woman for her pathology alone! There’d
be general laughter at this point – yes! Laughter! while the silent
songbird, pinned to the screen by the projector’s smoking beam …
went through her motions. Busner has reached the foot of the hill and
begins plodding through a new-old development of Queen Anne-style
houses built from honeyed brick, each equipped with its own,
triply-anachronistic Regency garage. Yet who, when all’s said and
done, is really temporally out-of-joint? For the forty-year-old commentary
continues: We found out she’d been a munitions worker
during the First War, and so realised what she’s doing in this
sequence is operating a piece of equipment called a … turret lathe.
Yes! A turret lathe! Busner stands, peering at a bright yellow sign
bolted to the dark and oily wood of a telegraph pole. On it there’s
an electric-red triangle – and inside this there’s the outline of a man
flung back, arms outstretched and spasming as the energy streams
into him from a large and stylised … lightning bolt! Yes, a turret
lathe! They’d lain puffing on their pouffes and watched the old
woman’s hands twisting and turning at incredible speed – then he’d
rewind the spool and play it again, only this time much, much …
slower. A wondrous vision emerged from the blur: her movements
were no mindless reflex, but a precisely calibrated sequence of willed
actions. He’d wanted to film the enkies in the first place, to separate
out all these individual motions which constituted their incontinent
spraying … There’d also, Busner recalls, been a duplicated negative
of the sequence in which the old woman operated the turret lathe –
and when Lesley had developed it and screened the film, Zack
witnessed a still-stranger phenomenon. The stoned social scientists
and psy-professionals saw it as well: a vision so startling it hauled
them up from their floor cushions to stand and stare. Busner stands,
out of sync’, looking up at another egotistical giraffe – a seeseeteevee
camera which sneers over the precincts of Alexandra Park
Station from the top of its pole. If he were to somehow acquire an
athleticism … I’ve never had, shin up, remove the memory card
from the camera and take it to his grandson in Kilburn, what
might Ben discover? With the film of the old enkie the frames had
been out of sync’: in one her right hand pulled an invisible lever,
while her left turned a transparent flywheel – but in the next it’d
been the reverse: right hand on the wheel, left on the lever. When
viewed slowed down, the effect was uncanny – the stoned disciples
of Marcuse and Foucault would scratch their hairy heads and
exclaim wonderingly, Didja see that – iss like … like … time’s been
rearranged … Really, Busner thinks, likeness didn’t enter into this
bizarre representation – at a neuronal level, it was believable, p’raps,
that the elderly former munitions worker had simply jumped from
one fixed ticcing sequence to another, but at a cerebral one? At a
mental one? It was the stuff of science fiction: this old woman’s
brain, locked up in its bony cell for decades, had been fanatically
working out … building up the head-speed necessary to leap the
rails of causality and move outside of time … I will, Busner thinks,
go back to Friern and see what’s what with the miserable old gulag.
As for the films – what’d happened to them? Doubtless disappeared
into the attic at Redington Road – together with all the rest of his
experimental psychology detritus, the strange fruits of his half-century
spent combing the wilder shores of human experience. Such
as the clumsy prototypes for the Riddle – the enquire-within-game-cum-diagnostic-tool
he’d developed in the late seventies, and which
was such a commercial success … I was able to keep a roof over the
rest of the tat. Including his collection of outsider canvases, which
Charlie strenuously objected to having hung on the walls she’d had
repainted at great expense … After Maurice died, Zack went up
into the attic to have a grand clear-out – but the atmosphere had
stymied him: he’d slumped down on a perished steamer trunk and
shuffled through stacks of old scallop-edged photos … the Porter
Twins, Ramsgate, July, nineteen thirty-seven … but found himself
unable to discard … any. Then the outsider paintings had caught
his eye – they were under the eaves in the furthest corner of the
attic, a stack of unframed canvases: raw slices of mental distress,
the outermost of which was ill lit by a scummy skylight. He’d
hunched his way over and worked his way through them – so far as
he remembers, all the paintings … aspired to the condition of a
Géricault, although when Busner thinks of a portrait of a lunatic with
delusions of military command, it isn’t any of these which comes to
mind, but rather … my grandson. Slumping uncomfortably on a
ridged bench which has been designed against crime … Busner
considers the security cameras whose visual fields he’s been walking
into and out of all morning: there’s one bolted to the wall of
the motor insurance broker’s next to his flat – a second above the
entrance to the bookie’s on the other side of Fortress Road. There
must’ve been one on the bus as well – there was certainly a sign to
that effect. He stares at his old-man hands – which shake. He sees
all these clips of his day unrolled across the angled prow of Ben’s
three computer monitors. It’s an Edweirdian procession, given his
sweat-banded hat has been multiplied many times to form the peaks
and troughs of a sinuous wave … Back in the early seventies, he’d
drawn a distinction between the photographs the post-encephalitic
patients would themselves have taken before their headlong plunge
into the abyss of their affliction and the films he made of them a
half-century later. All photography was – when you sat stock-still
to consider it … chronophotography: the Victorians’ box-cameras
sopped up time as much as space – and then, when the plates
were developed, they showed the endurance of lifeless, material
things – between which wormed the trails left by merely ephemeral
life-forms. The films he’d made with the Bolex did something
different: capturing all the innumerable moments the enkies had
lost and imprisoning them in an enduring … now. It was the same,
surely, with the innumerable seeseeteevee cameras that in the years of
my dotage have sprouted from perished brickwork throughout the
city buddleia sightings … and drunk deep of its populace’s wa
tery
doings: millions of images of comings and goings, of stopping and
starting – all gulped down into a great slopping reservoir of …
simultaneity. A train comes snaking into the station … a train came
snaking into the station. It’s one of the new ones … it was one of
the old ones. He sees long carriages, snazzily painted – behind their
wide windows are yellow staves from which hang the dark musical
notation of … people. He sees green and gold paint and tarnished
brass – the Turneresque explosion when the engine clears the
canopy and lets off steam. He swipes his Freedom Pass on another
sensor and mounts confidently … You must take the ay train to go to
bee, there’s a seeseeteevee camera in the corner of this carriage as
well. Imagine … he imagines … not just today but your entire life
has been subject to this level of surveillance – that you were secretly
filmed on the slow stoppers bringing you back from your schools.
Ancient rolling stock without connecting corridors – stuck in compartments
with impenitent bullies who pulled up your shirt and
punched you to the accompaniment of jolly ditties … Hymie Kikey’s
gotta get on his bikey! Then … later, when you were studying
medicine at Heriot-Watt, the long journey north – sometimes
travelling on Mallard, lulled by the sound of its wheels on the
rails … Hurry up and get on Hurry up and get on Hurry I couldn’t care
less I couldn’t care less I couldn’t care less … Imagine there’d been a lens
concealed behind the sepia-tinted scene inset above the Brylcreemed
antimacassars opposite: bluebells and bucolical sheep a good cover
for the egotistical giraffes of another era. But what would they’ve
browsed on? Only little me, passing perfectly well in my Dave-Wax-tailored
suit – passing so well I’m insouciantly puffing on a …
Passing Cloud, and passing my finger into my big Jewish nostril so
I can remove smutty snot, ‘cause everything was shat on in those
days by … the Flying Duck. And imagine there’d been a camera in
Fergus’s hairy belly, whirring silently while your fingers wandered
into the nylon jaws of Isobel McKechnie’s … mantrap. Then, still
later, more cine-surveillance on the slow train to Carstairs Junction:
recently qualified doctor and soon-to-be-retired steam engine both