Umbrella (19 page)

Mboya says, Zack, it would make sense if you’re going to photograph them to have them all in the one place – on the same ward. Busner nods. – Yes, yes, my thoughts exactly – and now there’s no reason why we shouldn’t do this . . . — For throughout the asylum system
a cultural revolution has taken place
: mixed wards, and together with these
soixante-neufards!
He had discovered
two
feisty young things
arranged exactly thus and in full view on his acute ward over at the Halliwick, and thought, Good luck to ’em, and would’ve discharged them right away purely on the basis of this healthy sexual function, were it not that once the head had withdrawn from the tight pocket of the covers its eyes were extremely dilated –
even by
psychotic standards
– while the ungummed mouth said: I put my ear innit annit toll me you wuz cumin wiv yer dyman eyes YOU KILLED THE COSMONAUTS!
Then the nurses came running and
that was that
. Already Busner suspected that the acute staff were aware of his diagnostic legerdemain, for, try as he might, the speciousness of it all overwhelmed him. So, confronted by hysterical misery, he simply imposed on it his own commonplace unhappiness: On mornings when he was low Busner diagnosed depression, on those when he was low but had also drunk too much coffee, manic depression. And on mornings when he gripped the sides of the sink and saw staring back at him from the mirror a tousle-haired Ancient Mariner whose eyes could not meet his own, and whose temples rang with the rhymes of myriad surrealistic voyages, he shaved, got dressed, drove the Austin to Friern Barnet and diagnosed the first patient he saw either as schizophrenic or as hypomanic, depending on the toss of a coin, confident that whichever one it is . . .
it’ll all come out in the wash
. — Mboya says, There’re a couple on 45, three on 34, one very poorly old fellow on 31 . . . He counts them off on his
teak
fingers. Despite his amazement at this cataloguing, Busner doesn’t want to interrupt his flow, so simply removes a Woolworth’s shilling jotter from his jacket pocket, notes these down with the red Biro, then adds the one he saw on 14, and four they had both seen who
ticced in time
to the noise of the injection-moulding machinery in the Industrial Therapy Workshop, which was clearly audible through the walls of 26. Mboya is well ahead of him, though, for not only has he ranged the entire escarpment of the hospital – from the Fellowship Resocialisation Unit in the east to the Medium Secure Unit in the west – but he also has
a hunter’s eye for the others
, picking them out unerringly from
the human morass. When he is done the whereabouts of twenty-two enkies have been established. – Twenty-two for definite, Zack, there’re another four or five I can’t be absolutely sure about . . . Busner bridles internally
prickly pride of the isolate
at how frequently Mboya is using the just-tendered first name,
his new toy
. . .
and so says doubtfully, How do you know, Enoch? How can you tell them apart? The nurse speaks forensically: Like people with Tourette’s, the post-encephalitic patients exhibit all sorts of hyperkinetic behaviour. You’ve seen it for yourself: they yawn, they sniff, they gasp and pant like worn-out dogs, then hold their breath ’til fit to burst . . . Busner holds his own breath as he stares at this
prodigy
, who remarks, Yes, staring, they do a lot of that too – I should’ve thought any psychiatrist worth his salt would’ve noticed that their fixation is so different to the way schizophrenics’ eyes wobble about. Then there’s their bellowing and their cursing – such cursing! Zack, I swear, I’ve heard gutter talk coming out of these little old ladies – your Miss Dearth too. Busner has an urge to interrupt – B-b-b- – that’s forestalled by Mboya’s
traffic policeman
hand, and – Yes, urges, that’s what they have: uncontrollable urges. Y’know, when I went to the Newspaper Library over in Colindale and looked up first-hand accounts of the epidemic
You did that?
I read how they were labelled as moral aments,
McConochie’s poor shades
,
even juvenile psychopaths. There was one ward right here that was dedicated to keeping these patients under lock and key – poor souls! Think of it, Zack, they didn’t know why they were coming out with such . . . such obscenities, or why they had to grab and to touch, but you can imagine how such behaviour was dealt with in the twenties . . . Busner feeling himself
enslaved
by this onrush of the factual, struggles to assert . . .
mastery.
Erethisms, he says, by which I mean an uncontrollable sexual arousal – and he hopes
I don’t sound patronising
. But Mboya only ducks his head to accede and continues: It’s astonishing, Zack, the more you look it into it, the more you discover that the post-encephalitics have borne the brunt of every successive wave of psychiatric opinion. To give only one example, you’ll’ve noticed how Mister Ostereich on 14 sticks out his tongue at anyone who comes near him – and it stays that way. In the literature this is called flycatcher tongue, but in the thirties, when Bleuler’s ideas gained purchase here, it was decided that this was consciously willed by the patient – and aimed at the psychiatrist! They are alone now in the canteen apart from a pimply girl in a snood who mops the tea puddle beneath the incontinent urn. Far off in the bowels of the hospital there are whistles and yelps fractured by the whooshclack of swing doors. Busner pinches the buttons on his
snazzy
digital watch – it isn’t that he has things to do, it’s more that he feels
overpowered:
in Leicester Square, where black bags are heaped, flies buzzing around them, and so I stick my tongue between sloppily tied rabbit’s ears to seek out the shape of the bits of my parents discorporated by the Luftwaffe, then discarded
. . .
–
I’m not keeping you, Zack, am I?
–
No, no, please . . . Enoch, it’s only that I’m overpowered by your – I don’t what to call it – your diligence? Enthusiasm? Mboya has been using a banana with which to indicate moral aments and their negativism, and now he tries to peel it, but the overripe skin buckles, so he slits it deftly with a thumbnail, saying, I’m not a prophet, Zack. Busner starts. – What?
Events are taking a sinister turn
. . .
but Mboya chews on. – I’m not a prophet, Zack – you said that we’re both prophets, but in the Bible Enoch wasn’t a prophet, he foretold no rivers of blood, nor did he circle the walls of this asylum blowing his trumpet to bring them down . . .
the banana skin
fingers his
. . . He was the son of Jared and the great-grandfather of Noah and Methuselah’s father – in Hebrew the name means initiated, disciplined . . . dedicated.
That you are, my friend, but why?
Mboya leans forward across the table and Busner twitches shamefacedly. — Miss Down does the music-therapy session on Tuesday afternoons in the room above the chapel – I’ve taken Mister Ostereich and Miss Yudkin, who’s on 20. She plays that Scott Joplin rag – the one in the film – the whole time, and our pair respond terribly to it, all their tics get much, much worse – the music jerks them about, da-da-da-dadda-da-dum-da-dum! If Miss Down plays a military march it’s even worse – but the other day she played this piece and it was very slow, stately, I’d call it, and they both began to dance, swaying this way and that so fluently – these patients who’re catatonic most of the time, dancing about . . . I was so struck by it when she’d finished I asked Miss Down what the piece was and she said it was by Brahms, one of his six pieces for piano, opus something-or-other, so I went and got an LP with it on, Doo-d’doo, doo d’doo, doo-d’-dooo, doo-d’-dooo . . . Busner is nonplussed by Mboya’s complete lack of self-consciousness, humming away in the staff canteen . . . Well, you get the picture – not my sort of thing, but I sort of got what it was they were responding to, the slowness, the gentle swing . . . If you wanted, I could make a cassette of it and bring it in – I bet it’d work on them if you played it to other post-encephalitics. — It was a long speech, and now it was done Mboya seemed a little embarrassed, which was, Busner thought, understandable, for while there was diligence here there was also a great deal of passion. Passion the
stately Kikuyu
takes away with him as he turns west out of the canteen doors and heads for Ward 14, his
almost-Afro spinning down the rifled corridor
— west, because it makes no sense to speak of left or right at Friern,
any more than it does in politics
, which is the sort of thing Whitcomb might say at a wine-and-cheese party in the Hampstead Garden Suburb, where he stands with a beaker
full of the wine merchant’s contempt
and perving some
peanuts
, while his partner in intercourse asks him above jerks and spasms of middle-class hilarity,
But what do you think, Doctor Whitcomb – do you believe Lord Longford may actually have a point?
An inquiry initiated not because he is a psychiatrist, and thus should be expected to have an opinion on the criminality or otherwise of the insane, but inspired solely by the close resemblance he bears
hairy topiary, skin lawn
to
Packenham, Frank that was
. That, Busner thinks contemptuously, is how it is with Whitcomb. They sit low and more or less opposite one another in their armless Danish Modern easy chairs: soft, oblong slabs joined in at obtuse angles. Over Whitcomb’s shoulder clambers an examination couch covered in black vinyl. There’s a
brown button
in the notch behind his carefully shaved jawbone, and when Busner looks away to suppress the urge to lean forward and press it, all at once he cannot remember what Whitcomb
so much as looks like
. The consultant says with uncharacteristic bluntness, Why? And Busner says, It seems to me there’s a genuine opportunity to be grasped here – both a therapeutic one, and possibly a research one as well. Whitcomb murmurs, A genuine opportunity . . .
He compulsively repeats your words – it’s a tic!
Nowadays, Busner notices these everywhere . . . well, I appreciate that, Busner, but I confess I’m surprised, it’s been – what? – only six months since you came to us and then you were definite about no longer wishing to pursue your research work after the, um, debacle of your, ah, therapeutic community. Whitcomb isn’t so hidebound that he doesn’t conduct his own therapy groups – Busner has sat in on one of these milieus, as the consultant calls them, and found it to be a miserable business, the patients pressured by him into confessing to relationships and other – in all likelihood – non-existent errors, then subjected to all sorts of criticism by their brow-beaten peers. Whitcomb sitting there,
Red-Guarding it over them, his collar getting rounder, and higher: the cadre responsible for this suburban Erewhon,
where the sick are punished and their criminal persecutors sympathised with
. . .
I’m not saying the Board’s offer of the position was conditional on your not doing research, but I think we both know it was assumed that you would . . .
need an aerial photograph for reconnaissance
. The one on Whitcomb’s wall shows the hospital from
around five thousand feet?
its façade picked out by the full glare of a summer day, the oaks, London plains and mulberries massy
along the front wall and main drive,
the lawns
striped
. . . Presumably it came with the office and was taken by some flyboy shrink, who, after the war, got his RAF pals to do a sortie from Hendon armed with a camera. But why, Busner muses, would anyone want such a thing? The only way to cope with Friern is to lose yourself in it so the hospital becomes a world entire – this comforting prospect of a vast country house, sited on the bluffs of North London, is not the real hospital at all. The truth demands no elevation – but a plan: the fuselage of the central block, the outstretched wings – the bomber droning over the city,