The Undivided Self

by Will Self

  ‘Well Misha, I see you’ve found a friend already.’ Busner smiled at me quizzically and ushered me to the chair that faced his across the desk. We sat. His office was tiny, barely larger than a cubicle, and quite bare apart from a few textbooks and four artworks. Most psychiatrists try to humanise their offices with such pieces. They think that even the most awful rubbish somehow indicates that they have ‘the finer feelings’. Busner’s artworks were unusually dominant, four large clay bas-reliefs, one on each wall. These rectangular slabs of miniature upheaval, earth-coloured and unglazed, seemed to depict imaginary topographies.

  ‘Yes, he’s personable enough. What’s the matter with him?’

  ‘Actually, Tom’s quite interesting.’ Busner said this without a trace of irony and began fiddling around on the surface of his desk, as if looking for a tobacco pipe. ‘He’s subject to what I’d call a mimetic psychosis …’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning he literally mimics the symptoms of all sorts of other mental illnesses, at least those that have any kind of defined pathology: schizophrenia, chronic depression, hypermania, depressive psychosis. The thing about Tom’s impersonations, or should I say the impersonations of his disease, is that they’re bad performances. Tom carefully reiterates every recorded detail of aberrant behaviour, but with a singular lack of conviction; it’s wooden and unconvincing. Your father would have found it fascinating to watch.’

  ‘Well, I find it pretty fascinating myself, even if I don’t have quite the same professional involvement. What phase is Tom in now?’

  ‘You tell me.’

  ‘Well, he seems to be playing the “Knowing Patient Introduces Naive Art Therapist to Hell of Ward” role.’

  ‘And how well is he doing it?’

  ‘Well, now you mention it, not too convincingly.’

  Busner had abandoned his search for a pipe, if that’s what it had been. He now turned and presented me with his outline set against the window. In profile I could see that he was in reality rather eroded, and that the impression of barely contained energy which he seemed determined to project was an illusion as well. Busner sat talking to me, rolling and then unrolling the brown tongue of a knitted tie he wore yanked around his neck. Overall, he reminded me of nothing so much as a giant frog.

  Behind him light and then shadow moved across the face of the hospital at a jerky, unnatural speed. The clouds were whipping away overhead, out of sight. All I could see was their reflection on the hospital’s rough, grey, barnacle-pitted skin.

  The hospital was big. Truly big. With its winking lights, belching vents and tangled antennae, it slid away beneath the cloudscape. Its bulk was such that it suggested to the viewer the possibility of spaceships (or hospitals) larger still, which might engulf it, whole, through some docking port. The hospital was like this. I couldn’t judge whether the rectangles I saw outlined on the protruding corner opposite Dr Busner’s office were glass bricks or windows two storeys high. The street lay too far below to give me a sense of scale. I was left just with the hospital and the scudding shadows of the racing clouds.

  Busner had given up his tie-rolling and taken up with an ashtray on his desk. This was crudely fashioned out of a spiralled snake of clay, varnished and painted with a bilious yellow glaze. Busner ran his fleshy digit around and around the rim as he said, ‘I’d like you to stick close to me this morning, Misha. If you are to have any real impact on what we’re trying to do here you need to be properly acquainted with the whole process of the ward: how we assess patients, how we book them in, how we decide on treatment. If you shadow me this morning, you can then get to know some of the patients informally this afternoon.’

  ‘That sounds OK.’

  ‘We’ve also got a ward meeting at noon which will give you an opportunity to get to know all your fellow workers and appreciate how they fit into the scheme of things.’

  Busner set down the turd of clay on his desk with a clack and stood up. I stepped back to allow him to get round the desk and to the door. Despite being the senior consultant in the psychiatric department, Busner had about as much office space as a post-room boy. I followed him back down the short corridor to the association area. By now the sun had risen up behind the clouds and the bank of windows on the far side of the dining area shone brightly. Silhouetted against them was a slow line of patients, shuffling towards the nurses’ station where they were picking up their morning medication.

  The patients were like piles of empty clothes, held upright by some static charge. Behind the double sliding panes of glass which fronted the nurses’ station sat two young people. One consulted a chart, the other selected pills and capsules from compartments in a moulded plastic tray. They then handed these over to the patient at the head of the queue, together with a paper beaker of water, which had a pointed base, rendering it unputdownable, like a best seller.

  ‘Not ideal, but necessary.’ Busner cupped his right hand as if to encapsulate the queue. ‘We have to give medication. Why? Because without it we couldn’t calm down our patients enough to actually talk to them and find out what the matter is. However, once we’ve medicated them they’re often too displaced to be able to tell us anything useful. Catch-22.’

  Busner cut through the queue to the dining area, muttering a few good mornings as he gently pushed aside his flock. We sat down at a table where a young woman in a frayed white coat was sipping a muddy Nescafé. Busner introduced us.

  ‘Jane, this is Misha Gurney, Misha, Jane Bowen – Jane is the senior registrar here. Misha is joining us to manage art therapy – quite a coup, I think. His father, you know, was a friend of mine, a close contemporary.’

  Jane Bowen extended her hand with an overarm gesture that told me she couldn’t have cared less about me, or my antecedents, but because she thought of herself as an essentially open-minded and kind person she was going to show me a welcoming smile. I clasped her hand briefly and looked at her. She was slight, with one of those bodies that seemed to be all concavities – her cheeks were hollowed, her eyes scooped, her neck centrally cratered. Under her loose coat I sensed her body as an absence, her breasts as inversions. Her hair was tied back in one long plait, held by an ethnic leather clasp. Her top lip quested towards her styrofoam beaker. The unrolled, frayed ends of her stretchy pullover protruded beyond the frayed cuffs of her cotton coat. Her pockets were stuffed full. They overflowed with pens, thermometers, syringes, watches, stethoscopes, packets of tobacco and boxes of matches. The lapels of the coat were festooned with name badges, homemade badges, political badges and badges of cut-out cartoon characters: Roadrunner, Tweetypie, Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo.

  ‘Well, Misha, any ideas on how your participation in the ward’s creative life will help to break the mould?’ She gestured towards an adjacent table, where several misshapen clay vessels leant against one another like drunken Rotarians.

  ‘Well, if the patients want to make clay ashtrays, let them make clay ashtrays.’ I lit a cigarette and squinted at her through the smoke.

  ‘Of course they could always try and solve The Riddle.’

  I hadn’t noticed as I sat down, but now I saw that she was shifting the four pieces of a portable version of The Riddle around on the melamine surface in front of her. Her fingers were bitten to the quick and beyond. Busner flushed and shifted uneasily in his chair.

  ‘Erumph! Well … bankrupt stock and all that. We have rather a lot of The Riddle sets around the ward. I err … bought them up for a pittance, you know. At any rate, I still have some faith in them and the patients seem to like them.’

  Busner had been responsible for designing, or ‘posing’, The Riddle in the early Seventies. It was one of those pop psychological devices that had had a brief vogue. Busner himself had been forging a modest career as a kind of media psychologist with a neat line in attacking the mores of conventional society. The Riddle tied in with this and with the work that Busner was doing at his revolutionary Concept House in Willesden. His involvement with the ea
rly development of the Quantity Theory also dated from that period.

  Busner was a frequent trespasser on the telly screens of my childhood. Always interviewing, being interviewed, discussing an interview that had just been re-screened, or appearing in those discussion programmes where paunchy people sat on uncomfortable steel rack-type chairs in front of a woven backdrop. Busner’s media activities had dropped away as he grew paunchier. He was now remembered, if at all, as the poser of The Riddle – and that chiefly because the short-lived popularity of this ‘enquire-within tool’ had spawned millions of square acrylic slabs of just the right size to get lost and turn up in idiosyncratic places around the house, along with spillikins, Lego blocks and hairpins. In fact it had become something of a catch-phrase to cry as you dug a tile out from between the carpet and the underlay, or from behind a radiator, ‘I’m solving The Riddle!’ Eventually The Riddle itself – what you were actually meant to do with the four square slabs in bright pastel shades, which you got with The Riddle set – was entirely forgotten.

  ‘I’m sorry Zack, I didn’t mean to sound caustic.’ Jane Bowen placed a surprisingly tender hand on Busner’s poplin sleeve.

  ‘That’s all right, I think I still deserve it, even after all these years. The funny thing is that I did believe in The Riddle. I suppose a cynic would say that anyone would believe in something that brought in enough income to buy a four-bedroom house in Redington Road.’

  ‘Even shrinks have to have somewhere to live,’ said Jane Bowen. The two of them smiled wryly over this comment – a little more wryly than it strictly merited.

  ‘Well, we’re not helping anybody sitting here, are we?’ said Busner. Once again this was a key motif. It had been his catch-phrase on all those discussion and interview programmes – always delivered with falsetto emphasis on the ‘helping’. The catch-phrase, like The Riddle, outlived Busner’s own popularity. I remember seeing him towards the very end of his TV sojourn, when he was reduced to going on one of those ‘celebrity’ game-shows where the celebrities sit in a rack of cubicles. Zack trotted out his obligatory line and the contestant dutifully pushed the button on the tape machine – as I recall, she ended up winning a suite of patio furniture. It was really quite a long way from the spirit of radical psychology. Now Busner was using the phrase again, clearly with a sense of irony – but somehow not altogether; there was also something else there, a strange kind of pride almost.

  ‘I want you to shadow me while I do the ward round.’ Busner guided me by placing his palm on my shoulder. We both nodded to Jane Bowen, who had forgotten us already and fallen into conversation with a nurse. Busner stashed his bursting briefcase behind the nurses’ station, after extracting from it with difficulty a clipboard and some sheets of blank paper. We walked side by side down the short corridor that led to the entrance to the two wards. For some reason Busner and I were unwilling to precede one another, and as a result people coming in the other direction had to crush up against the walls to get around us. We were like a teenage couple – desperate to avoid any break in contact that might let in indifference.

  The dormitories were laid out in a series of bays, four beds in each bay and four bays to the dormitory. Each bay was about the size of an average room, the beds laid out so as to provide the maximum surrounding space for each occupant to turn into their own private space. Some of the patients had stuck photographs and posters up on the walls with masking tape, some had placed knick-knacks on the shelves, and others had done nothing and lay on their beds, motionless, like ascetics or prisoners.

  Busner kept up a commentary for my benefit as we stopped and consulted with each patient. The first one we came to was a pop-eyed man in his mid-thirties. He was wearing a decrepit Burton suit which was worn to a shine at knee and elbow. He was sitting on the easy chair by his bed and staring straight ahead. His shoulder-length hair was scraped down from a severe central parting. His eyes weren’t just popping, they were half out of their sockets, resembling ping-pong balls with the pupils painted on to them like black spots.

  ‘Clive is prone to bouts of mania, aren’t you, Clive?’

  ‘Good morning, Dr Busner.’

  ‘How are you feeling, Clive?’

  ‘Fine, thank you, Doctor.’

  ‘Any problems with your medication? You’ll be leaving us soon, won’t you?’

  ‘In answer to your first question, no. In answer to your second, yes.’

  ‘Clive likes everything to be stated clearly, don’t you, Clive?’

  At the time I thought Busner was being sarcastic. In fact – as I realised later – this wasn’t the case. If anything, Busner was being solicitous. He knew that Clive liked to expatiate on his attitudes and methods; Busner was providing him with the opportunity.

  ‘You’re staring very fixedly at the opposite wall, Clive, would you like to tell Misha why this is?’

  I followed his line of sight; he was looking at a poster which showed two furry little kittens both dangling by their paws from the handle of a straw basket. The slogan underneath in curly script proclaimed, ‘Faith isn’t Faith until it’s all you’re hanging on to.’

  ‘The kitten is powerful.’ Clive smiled enigmatically and pointed with a dirt-rimmed nail, ‘That kitten holds in its paws the balance, the egg of creation and more.’ Having pronounced he lapsed back into a rigid silence. Busner and I left him.

  Although there were only thirty or so patients on the ward they soon resolved themselves, not into names or individuals, but into distinct groups. Busner’s catchment area for his ward was an L-shaped zone that extended from the hospital in one dog-leg into the very centre of the city. The hospital pulled in its sustenance from every conceivable level of society. But on Ward 9 insanity had proved a great leveller. A refugee sometimes seems to have no class. The English depend on class, to the extent that whenever two English people meet, they spend nanoseconds in high-speed calculation. Every nuance of accent, every detail of apparel, every implication of vocabulary, is analysed to produce the final formula. This in turn provides the coordinates that will locate the individual and determine the Attitude. The patients on Ward 9 had distanced themselves from this. They could not be gauged in such a fashion. Instead, I divided them up mentally into the following groups: thinniepukies, junkies, sads, schizes and maniacs. The first four groups were all represented about equally, whilst the fifth group was definitely in the ascendant; there were lots of maniacs on Ward 9 and by maniacs I mean not the culturally popular homicidal maniac, but his distant herbivorous cousin, hyper, rather than homicidal, and manic, rather than maniacal.

  As Tom had already characterised himself earlier that morning, hypermanic types are lecturers; extramural, al fresco professors, who, like increasingly undulant or syncopated Wittgensteins, address the world at large on a patchwork syllabus made up of Kabbalah, astrology, tarot, numerology and Bible (specifically Revelations) study. They are sad-mad, they know they are ill, they have periods of conformity, but they are always somehow out of joint.

  ‘Art therapy is very popular here, Misha.’ Busner detained me in the vestibule between the two wards. ‘We can’t keep the patients sufficiently occupied, they have treatment sessions of various kinds in the mornings, but in the afternoons you’ll be all they have to look forward to. Sometimes we can arrange an outing of some kind, or a friend or relative will be allowed to take them out on the Heath, but otherwise they’re cooped up here in a fuddled daze.’

  We went on into the women’s dormitory. Here things seemed, at first, different. On the men’s dormitory Busner and I had spoken with a few isolated individuals, backed off into their individual bays. But here the patients seemed to be associating with one another. They reclined on beds chatting, or sat round the formica-topped tables which formed a central reservation.

  A skeleton with long, lush hair rocked on a bed in the bay to our right, an obscenely large catheter protruding out of her lolly-stick arm. Busner took me in under tow and introduced us.

  ‘Hi
lary isn’t that keen on eating – or at least she is sometimes, but she doesn’t really like the nutritional side-effects of food. Hilary, this is Misha Gurney, he’s our new art therapist.’ Hilary stopped rocking and gave me a level smile from underneath neatly coiffed chestnut bangs.

  ‘Hello. I’ll look forward to this afternoon. I like to paint, I like watercolours. These are some of mine.’ She gestured towards the wall at the head of the bed, where an area about a foot square was tiled with tiny watercolours, terribly painfully precise little paintings – all portraits, apparently of young women. Busner wandered off, but I remained and walked to the head of the bed, so that I could examine the pictures thoroughly. They had been executed with a fanatical attention to the detail of make-up and hair which made them almost grotesque. Hilary and I sat sideways to each other. With her neck canted around so that she could face me, Hilary’s greaseproof-paper skin stretched, until I could see the twisted, knotted coils of tendon and artery that lay within.

  ‘They’re very good. Who are all these people?’

  ‘They’re my friends. I paint them from photographs.’

  ‘Your pictures are very detailed. How do you manage it?’

  ‘Oh, I have special pens and brushes. I’ll show you later.’

  I left Hilary and went over to where Busner was sitting at one of the tables in the central area of the dormitory.

  ‘Has Hilary been telling you about her friends?’

  ‘Yes …’

  ‘Hilary doesn’t have any friends, as such. She cuts pictures of models out of advertisements in magazines, then she paints over them. She’s been in and out of this ward for the past three years. Every time she comes in she looks like she does now. She’s so close to death we have to put her on a drip. She’s usually completely demented; the amino acids have been leeched out of her brain. After she’s been on the drip for a while we transfer her to a tight regime of supervised eating based on a punishment/reward system, and at the same time she undergoes an intensive course of psychotherapy with Jane Bowen. Jane is very much the expert on eating disorders. After six weeks to two months Hilary is back to a healthy weight and eating sensibly. She’ll leave and we can predict her return usually to within the day – some four months later.’