Umbrella (21 page)

netherworld of sewage farms and shitty little fields
that patchwork down to the North Circular. After that an
excremental trudge
across a golf course and up streets lined with semis to the next escarpment, where stands
Ally-Pally: a gothic
pile of shit twinned with Schloss Weltschmerz
. . .
Perhaps, he thinks, the patients should be taken there for an outing? He can see his new cohort
ticcing in time
as they circle a drained boating pond studded with the crumbling concrete daises that once supported ack-ack. What would they find inside the cavernous Palace itself? Nothing: teetering stacks of gilt-painted chairs piled up after wedding receptions and the ghost of the first television signal howling in its barrel vaulting. Tucked under Busner’s arm are buff cardboard folders stuffed with the photographs he has taken of the post-encephalitics – the wheedling of them into place is well under way, with Audrey Dearth the first to be moved. All those boarding schools at least taught him this much: how to wheedle, how to cut the totalising corners, and, as he turns the last one into the ward, he sees them all arrayed, a multitution, the redbrick gymnasium of St Cuthbert’s mortared to the concrete science block at Highdown, which in turn is cemented to the pink granite of the chapel at Clermont, the eaves of whose roof project over the fives courts of Charterhouse, a series of open-topped boxes that decline in height until they become
the bike sheds of Heriot-Watt, thrust deep down
in the wynds of the old town
. . .
—
This reverie would have continued, had the doors not swung open on the spitting, biting, screeching
chaos
of a saloon-bar brawl between
cadavers
. Busner’s first thought is: Oh, shit! it’s Enoch’s day off – because no further explanation is necessary for why it should be that two elderly women patients are fighting right beside the glassed-in nurses’ station, one of whom has her teeth sunk in the thick fold of flesh beneath the other’s chin, and so
worries
her
– already the parquet is blood-spotted. A
black-bag-mountain
of a slack-faced woman with hay hair that at first he only recognises as a newly corralled and precious
enkie! Gnasher’s teeth
sunk so deep that the other patient is able to jerk her pinhead back and forth –. Busner’s second thought is: My files! For he has involuntarily flapped his arms and so they have flown – jettisoning photographs, papers and the enlargements of single cine film frames.
Bloody hell!
This stuff represents months of work, the careful mapping of all the moves necessary to ease this patient from that ward to this after making a space for them by discarding another to the hospital’s own crematorium, to the outer world or, on some occasions, simply by swapping them over, but in all cases thereby
advancing
the game
– which is how Busner conceives off it: a game of draughts played out on the eighty-yard-long squares of the hospital’s wards. Patients are draughts – staff as well: Mboya has leapt over Perkins to join the enkies on 20 . . .
if only Perkins could be sent to the crematorium
. What’s this?! he bellows at a nurse called Inglis, who flings herself at the mêlée, What’s this?! she bellows right back. You can see what it is, Doctor! Reluctantly he hugs Leticia Gross’s
Ally-Pally
shoulders – reluctantly, because despite the flecks of blood and saliva, and the
squealereaming
of the two women, he grasps that it is impossible to free her without loosening the other’s jaws. Inglis gasps: Get the um-brella, Doctor! Get the umbrella! Which is a euphemism he knows to be widespread among the staff, and which he abhors. – Eeeerarrr’rrra’rrra –! – Doctor, please! Inglis, Busner intuits, is not much liked by Mboya, although he himself has found her to be competent enough – more importantly, she shows an interest in what he’s trying to achieve. He can only surmise that it’s some African-West Indian antipathy, the roots of which he can have no ken – but he wishes they wouldn’t, he needs allies. Slipping in the paper slew, he levers himself up
too slow
– another nurse has arrived, umbrella in hand, a sedative bead swelling at the end of its . . .
ferrule
. This nurse, Vail, whose white face is flushed, says, Doctor – will you? And he cries: No, no! above the Rarrr’rrra’rrra –! You be my guest! then turns away from
sad cracked heels stamping
as
needle jabs
into scrawny thigh
to gather up the images of the others,
besides
it’ll be me
who stitches and dresses Leticia’s wound – apart from Mboya, he still doesn’t trust the nurses with
my property
. Later, Busner sees the attacker in a quiet room, through the Judas – she is pathetic in the extreme as she slumps, stuporous, meditating upon a plastic potty. She’s no bigger than a child, her cheeks caved in:
they’ve taken her plate
. In the stubble –
lice? –
covering her small head he sees the distinctive scars of a prefrontal lobotomy. Inglis had already
told you so
: What you ’spectin’, Doc-tor, if’n you bring new patients on to a ward? You know what dese folk’re like – dey can’t be doing wid change, dey hate it. Dis one, she be out of sorts ever since the fat woman come up from 24, she bin goadin’ her an’ ridin’ her an’ goadin’ her some more . . . All of which is understandable, Leticia Gross’s very bulk inviting an assault
simply because it’s there.
Although there are others of the others who should prove more irritating to the common-or-garden inmates of Ward 20 – the scatty schizoids and once-rebellious girls, whose bastard babies have long since abandoned them to the madhouse so that they may go to seek a better life. It is, Busner thinks, like any other war zone, what with its higher attrition rates for men – twenty per cent of them dead every year in the mid-forties – while their womenfolk, their menstruation suppressed by the drugs, are left behind to become this
swelling embolism of the geriatric
. . .
Weaned off their useless – and indeed contra-indicated – medications, Busner’s emergent cohort has been spread the length of the ward, but, while amphetamine withdrawal has plunged the somnolent post-encephalitics – such as Leticia Gross – into still more extreme torpor, the hyperkinetics, now that they are no longer sheltered by the umbrella of chlorpromazine, have emerged into a downpour of tics, spasms and jerks, lightning-strike actions so forceful and precipitate as to appear virtually instantaneous. For the sleepy enkies their carers have devised certain strategies – simply to
get them moving
. There are musical sessions with Miss Down, and more mechanistic measures still: the holding and then the letting fall of ping-pong balls, or the wearing of loudly ticking watches to provide them with a tempo that can be used to recalibrate the complex series of motions they must relearn, every time, in order that they may . . .
stand up
. But with the wakeful enkies – these
dark starlets
– it is only by giving them a screen test, then slowing down the resulting films, that Busner is able to resolve their akathistic whirr into its component parts, so identifying – in Helene Yudkin’s case, to take just one – no fewer than eighty-seven different tics, among them: hair-patting, nose-tweaking, neck-flexing, bra-strap-snapping, ankle-rotating, foot-tapping, knee-lapping, copper-bracelet-rotating, tongue-darting, earlobe-pulling, neckline-adjusting, leg-crossing-then-uncrossing, inside-of-cheek-chewing, saliva-swallowing, brow-furrowing, shoulder-hunching, breath-holding-then-expelling, finger-wiggling, skirt-hem-yanking, etcetera. Which is to say nothing of what cannot be captured by the lens, namely her verbig-verbig-verbig-verbig-verbigeration: the unending repetition of words of words of words, or of phrases of phrases of phrases, that often seems to operate in counterpoint to her ticcing,
one conducting the other
. Yudkin, a petite, dark, near-perfect Sephardic princess, whose planed face appears both time-locked in girlhood and supernaturally unaffected by the monsoon of movement that sweeps across it again and again and again, is Busner’s most compelling photographic subject. His films of her, when run through Lesley’s Steenbeck sixteen frames per second, are an incomprehensible whirl of movement, but slowed to eight, then four, then two frames, the Nouvelle Vague stares him in the face: it is only their orchestration that makes her actions appear outlandish, discretely they are all within the normal gestural repertoire – their orchestration and their syncopation — for, as Busner spends more and more of his time examining the films, he begins to discern a complex relationship between the tics involving phased alternations between the small and virtuosic cuticle-flicks and hair-end-splittings, and those sealion yawns and gorilla-chest-beatings that have
an operatic grandeur
. It has taken weeks for him to capture one of these transiliences with his camera, so abrupt are they, but, having witnessed one in slow-motion, he can now also see it
from una corda to sostenuto
during live performance, just as he can spot the gathering wildness and fracturing arrhythmia to Yudkin’s ticcing that is often – although by no means always – the prelude to an equally abrupt transition from hyper- to aki-, from up to way on dooown, from Jacques Tati slapstick to the one stuck frame, in which she will then remain with all that baroque musicality reduced once more to
a single, monotonously sustained note
. . .
Helene Yudkin may confront Busner with the most extreme form of this syndrome, yet he remains more strongly attached to Audrey Dearth – her primacy will, he thinks, always ensure her primacy. And at times such as these, as he walks by a bay of three beds in the men’s dormitory, occupied by
three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion
Messrs Ostereich, Voss and McNeil, each different in physique yet contorted by the same hypotonic lack of posture, he wonders: Am I surrounding her by quaffers of nepenthe, while she remains in constant psychic pain? The bed she sits on is tightly made but at least unbarred, and
she has her own locker
. Her posture reminds him of the prefrontal in the quiet room: her tiny bent body is
on strike
, her cerebral cortex has
withdrawn its labour
, her facial masking is
beyond profound
– it is
a tragic rictus
, so inert that a fly alights and takes
a leisurely stroll
along her top lip.
What can she be thinking?
For he is sure that she is: from small hints – snatches of vocalised thought – heard fumbling from the enkies’ mouths, Busner has become convinced that whatever the damage to their diencephalons, their hypothalamuses and their substantia nigras, these derelict brains are still inhabited. In the upper storeys of these rundown minds true sentience remains – although surely ferociously disturbed by its decades of imprisonment in
a jail within a jail
. He places his reconstituted files on Audrey’s bed and from one of them removes a sheaf of photographs that he fans out, black and white on the grey institutional blanket. See, he says pointlessly, when I filmed you the other day, Miss Dearth – Audrey – I was, um, struck by something . . . She makes no acknowledgement of his presence – why would she? You do not acknowledge
a ghost
that goes on: Same as before, you were making these motions that I’ve seen you make many times . . . His soft hands patty-cake the air, rotating invisible wheels, pulling upon immaterial levers. It is, he knows, a poor imitation. When she does it, she is both precise and consistent, and the actions – so obviously the operation of machinery – partake of its solidity, its power, the rhythm of its engine without its being there! Eighty-one years old and still beavering away – but at what? . . . exactly like this, and I wonder, can you tell me what it is you’re working at? Busner’s question leads leaden-footedly, because already he believes he knows. At the Film Coop, when they were snipping up the 16-millimetre negatives and developing them, some smarty-pants drifted through the dark room to scrounge a pellet of hash off Lesley, and, seeing the prints pegged up to dry in the hellish light, he said, Freaky, that old biddy’s working an invisible turret lathe – then expatiated: See, she’s turning a flywheel with that hand, plain as – it’s the one that moves the lathe bed – and that’s gotta be her yanking on the lever that shifts the turret up and down . . . and see here, here she’s pulling on another lever, the one that opens the chuck up to release the finished piece. Yeah . . . the smarty-pants was inordinately pleased with himself . . . it’s a turret lathe, deffo. Busner asked: But what is it she’s making? And the hash-head reverted to truculent type: How the fuck should I know? I mean, I juss did a summer job in a metal basher’s up in Wolverhampton – those lathes’re used for any bit of metal needs turning. Besides, he snorted