Umbrella (24 page)

pill-rolling
comes unbidden. Pill-rolling, while the boy’s fixation on his tablet computer – the eyes at once keenly focused and utterly vacant – is that not a form of
oculogyric crisis?
If so, it’s one Busner joins in: this is the world to wrap the world in that he’d sought, a palimpsest worked up out of nothing, sliding away from nothing, panels over- and underlying one another,
A crucial component of any incoming government’s policy will be to avert the industrial action that is widely expected, should public-sector cuts be as deep as anticipated
ousted in an eye-blink by a
smirking Osborne
, who in turn is annihilated by the
floret
of a single virion that floats in a space at once endless and measurable in microns.
The H
2
N
5
Virus has proved far less infectious that initially supposed, an inquiry by the WHO has established that transmission rates be –
Gone, supplanted by the
bullying concertina
of the bus’s door. The squire, having sheathed his shield, mounts ahead of Busner, who follows on behind,
swipeeping
his Freedom Pass under the indifferent ear of the driver: there is no jolly conductor, only this morose single-operator, his eyes fixed on the distant horizon of the terminus. The boy swings himself up on to the stairs and Busner follows stiffly after him. On the top deck there is the lobby Muzak of electric-blue seat covers and dulzure moulded plastic. The bus humps into the slow-moving traffic stream and the boy collapses oof! into one seat, the retired psychiatrist oof! into the one behind. Go slow, Busner thinks, that’s what they called it back then – and they were called council workers, dustbin men and hospital porters – or ancillary staff: he has the notion that public-sector workers was yet to be coined, besides, the public sector was still growing then and gobbling up shipbuilders, electronics companies – and there was
British-bloody-Leyland!
The
horse-lipped posh one with the lisp – a pipe-smoker
, some thought we’d all
end up
as
good little Soviets. Bit of a cunt, really, him and Wilson both. All pipe-smokers are cunts!
He barks and the boy’s fringe yanks his lashless eyes around
Baby Blue
. . .
The shield is fending off the world, its emblematic flu virion quests for
anywhere to bind
. . . Busner covers his mouth and heaves his bark into a simulated cough, the boy pill-rolls the virion into a Mercator projection with a rash of spots upon which numbers of infected and beneath these of fatalities are picked out twice: actual and predicted. It strikes Busner, who never fancied himself as any kind of epidemiologist, that there’s a noteworthy reversal going on here, namely: the communication of the statistics moving faster than the disease itself, whereas, how far would you need to go back in order to reach an epidemic that outstripped its own news? Not the Asian flu of the seventies, but possibly the post-First World War flu pandemic and its more peculiar prequel? He looks upon the map, its virions – and thinks of how the boy’s ticcing links macro- and micro-quanta . . . I – we – were interested in the way these tiny repetitive motions were abruptly magnified into operatic gestures
Co-mmend-a-tore!
A production where? Almost certainly Covent Garden – which wife? Whichever . . . she sat purse-lipped in the stalls as a Commendatore two storeys high, his back cloak indistinguishable from the backcloth, carried off the Don. She was unmoved by the stagecraft,
desirous only that I be
carried off with him
. He smirks: to take a libretto personally, that requires a formidable suspension of disbelief –! Then checks himself: yet I cannot remember which wife it was . . . and so admits: this goes beyond mere solecism towards
a fundamental lack of feeling
. The bus wrangles some cyclists across the intersection by Tufnell Park tube, then caroms on along Junction Road. To either side are convenience stores, estate agents, more estate agents: the city digesting its own substance and so adding more
shitty value
to what once must’ve been solidly middle-class homes, front gardens
full of hollyhocks tended by Pooters
, their stems swaying in the breeze of a passing
horse-drawn omnibus . . . fertiliser for ’em close to hand
. Now those gardens
all gone
, all dug up and replaced by a single storey of retail hutches tacked on to the terrace behind. What did they have then? Bicycle parades, Alexandra Day parades,
Jubilee parades
. . .
What did they bequeath us?
Shopping ones
. The bus has achieved Archway and the
scummy-black tower
stacked with social services that
sucks up
in swirls
the drunk, the deranged, the poor
. . .
Busner is not surprised to see the man from the bus stop alight here, Tsykie still in hand, and together with a tiny whirlwind of leaves and plastic bags down-draughted by the Tower, he waltzes north across the three lanes of tarmac towards the Whittington. It’s a direction Busner fervently wills the bus not to take – on this bright day, this day of early-spring freedom, the last thing he wishes to do is to revisit any of these secret compartments in which the insane
slosh about
. In those days, on short-term locums, or simply in pursuit of patients lost in the vortex of the system, he couldn’t afford the time necessary for the wonderment these scenes demanded: the
tiled pool
of the locked ward at the Whittington, the wall of psychosis that hit you in the face as the lift doors parted – the taste of it catching at the back of the throat,
urine
in carbolic
, the unremitting low susurrus of distress from out of which came the occasional yell of full-blown anguish.
Then . . . then
. . .
there was no gainsaying the necessity for categorisation, for generalisation – a diagnostic framework was . . .
a life-preserver
. He sees himself as he was: bobbing among the drowned and the saved, although distinguishing one from the other was
as futile as naming a wave
. . .
Now, though, one does break over him: a young man, his just-issued hospital gown split up past his hips,
exposing the
split of his buttocks
– not that Busner hadn’t seen thousands like him,
peak
after
trough
, running away nauseously under neon to the artificial horizon – it was only that this one had been so overdosed with Haloperidol that he flowed, dripping in mandrops, off his bucket seat and on to the scummy floor. Doshtor, he slushed, Doshtor, can you help me? And so this one recollection takes the place of all the forgotten ones,
all the others I couldn’t help either
. . .
Bitterly, Busner now prays that the bus won’t go up Highgate Hill, he bows down, pressing his head on to the top of the seat in front, and gravely he concedes: It was always the individual who should’ve mattered, never the category,
for was I not my brother’s keeper?
The boy with the haircut and the iPad has gone – he is alone on the top deck as the bus heels round the bend and on to the steep acclivity of the Archway Road. Through wide windows the sun
cooks up rubber and vinyl stew
– but still the flesh is cold and old and the mind that believes
without any evidence
that it’s inside a head gropes for warmth in the embraces of the past,
which’re all that remain to me now
. . .
doddery that I am
. Busner thinks first of teenage kisses – so momentous at the time,
a gastrocnemius swelling above a white ankle sock
– then of all the rest of it: the goose-pimply fumbling that had been separated by a handful of autumns from the mummy cuddles he couldn’t remember, and so – more for him than for most – was a substitute for them. He winces to think of his
penisumbilicus
, winces still more as he returns to his current crumpled condition,
cells popping like bubble wrap
. . . the slow withdrawal from touch and be-touched, now, a kiss would be truly momentous, the lips of another
drawing back and back and back – a skull’s rictus
. There had been – not five months since – a humiliatingly failed

coupling at a conference on affective disorders. Her packaging had been corrugated cardboard – although
that wasn’t it
. Conferences,
ah!
always his favoured arena of seduction: there was something undeniably arousing, was there not, in the juxtaposition of the rigid squaring of the carpet tiles in the conference suite of a former polytechnic and the rippling pliancy of flesh? Between the expansive tedium of the plenary session and the bolting down of Lambrusco minutes later? Between the buttoned-up formality of introductions and the she-be-lying across the blue-and-bluer-striped duvet of a student study-bedroom? Cheerily looking his limpness in the eye, she’d said, Why not try Viagra? And he, struggling to insert the
old yellow dog
into the noose of his underpants, said doomily, No, I rather think not. For what on earth would that be like: his chemically engorged rocket blasting off across Stevenage or Solihull, dragging behind it the payload of his sagging body? No. It would be better to accept things the way they were: impotence as
the rhythmic introjections of desire
: a steadily growing column of inadequacy working its way up inside him and sending out
little thrills of numbness
. No, better to accept gulls mobbing along the freshly painted white lines of a playing field, and when people remark,
Where’ve all the sparrows gone?
simply observe,
The gulls have eaten them
. Besides, it wasn’t only the bare facts recalled that had grown so vivid – nowadays there was also retouch, resmell and rehear – the whole sensorium geared up to revisit
all that fucking
, licit and otherwise, but now
shorn of guilt
. — When he had been at it, each disco dip had cancelled out the one before while violently enjoining the next –
sex was like that
. Moreover, when you were in its gooey clutches, repetitive actions sustained equally repetitive reveries: out of all those subtly different hip-thrusts, lip-slurps and neck-caresses only the one was seized upon and returned to again and again to serve for self-stimulus. The bus stops, leaning into the high kerb beyond the Jackson’s Lane Community Centre, engine-gasp smokes the window of a fried-chicken takeaway, Busner’s forehead vibrates against the toughened glass: he sees diamonds of mirror set in mirrored batons, he sees the
Mandelbrot set
of the Formica they reflect, he sees himself, trousers and pants
at half-mast
, shirt-tails flapping against tautened buttocks as he canters across North London from one site of special psychotherapeutic interest to the next – from Heath Hospital to the Whittington, from there to St Mungo’s, from that rundown pile to the Tavistock, and from there to the Bowlby Centre in the east, in the environs of which he trips and
falls headlong!
He regains consciousness to find he’s
digging into a soft plot of fertile ground
– a nutritionist or an occupational therapist, a nurse or a fellow doctor. These had not, he now thought, been affairs – with all the sophistication the term seems to imply – but rather coital sight-gags, complete with white-faced clowns, their mouths thickly smeared with lust’s greasepaint. Obviously, with such choreographed pratfalls,
nobody really got hurt
– or so he’d liked to imagine. But since his manumission he could examine his libidinous enslavement from every angle – physical, emotional . . .
gulp! moral
– and it had to be admitted
Last night I saw my mama singin’ a song
that as sex begets in the first instance more sex, so
Woke up this morning and my mama was gone
bad behaviour sets the gold standard for more of the same:
infidelity at fixed rates
. The bus lows pitifully as it passes by the Bald Faced Stag in East Finchley, and Busner, penitent, applies the lash: I always had an eye for those who were inclined to stray – but what is this? In a world so plagued by catchy tunes that it resembles
a burr
this was one of the catchiest:
Last night I heard my mama singin’ a song, Ooh
. . .
That first time they did it they had undoubtedly been
a little bit tipsy
despite its being the middle of the day. He had resolved not to go to the pub at lunchtime – what was it, a valedictory drink for a colleague? Anyway . . . she’d been there, and when he went back with her to see about the batch she’d locked the door decisively behind them.
I thought, what’s this? A few shandies for the lady, now a hand-shandy from her?
The pharmacy was hidden in the warren of rooms that surrounded the main stores – many of them long disused,
full of the queerest stuff
: old school desks, coat trees, the abandoned instrument cases of the disbanded asylum band. Matrons or shrinks came to pick up drugs from a hatch
like a canteen servery
that they reached along a dead-end corridor,
ooh-eee
,
but we’d already been doing
secret things
in her small lab in back of that,
ooh-eee chirpy-chirpy cheep-cheep –
. That was it! It was everywhere that summer, a cloud of dopaminergic dust that puffed up floury under the green bowl of the lampshade. He stands watching Mimi Hanson operate the device and thinks of Missus Fitz, his uncle’s cook, turning the mincer’s handle so that
meat worms squirmed
. Mimi finishes tipping the powder into the hopper, replaces the measuring beaker on the bench, and,
thro’ these faint smokes curling whitely
as she clips the empty capsule into its runnel and deftly depresses the lever to
marry
this tiny vessel with the funnel’s tip, he notes the diamond solitaire on her finger.
Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste, Pound at thy powder, – I am not in haste!
Some springloaded shuttle is released by her
chipped-red-varnished
nails, a paten revolves, the capped capsule comes on its little tray, Mimi picks it up and turns to face him, staggering ever so slightly under her neuropharmacological load. Two grammes, she says, her voice
kazooing prettily
through her cotton mask. I can adjust it to do one and three but halves are more diff –. He is on her, his angle so finely calculated that his pelvis pots her buttocks into the pockets of his hands, while his thigh is between hers and his mouth
partakes of the same filter
, their tongues nuzzling at either side of the mask, their teeth nipping it aside. She oofs a shandy burp as they cooperate poorly in the
three-legged race
to the floor. Busner’s hands yank apart her laboratory coat, pull up the hem of her dress, pull down her exasperating net of tights and panties – she smells sweetly acerbic –
sherbet lemons?
Her tightly curly hair is near white-blonde –
a fleece
. They must’ve knocked over a glass vessel on their way down, for, as she grapples with his belt buckle and zip, he can hear the gently grinding noise of this rocking to a rest. Futilely now – for she is
a bare and forked thing
before him and there’s no stopping this – he hopes this wasn’t the eighty ounces of L-dihidroxyphenylalanine, costing
two thousand pounds!
that arrived only this morning from Sandoz in Switzerland. The lino presses prosaically on the heels of hands, his knees – it catches at his toenails, while he contorts into the
sacred pomp
of entering her, and Mimi, with her head and her breast and her arms
should drop dead!
In these times allocated for abandonment Busner is at his most professional, haaaa-haaa-ha, she exhales as, at last, he unmasks her: a kidnap victim who it would seem wishes only to be ravished by her captor, for she pulls him into her with
those nails
and for a few seconds at least there is nothing present to him but
sherbet lemons
intensifying into a
high coital sweat
. . .
He frees her breast from its enclosure – the aureole is far larger and paler than he expects, the nipple is recessed and so he hunches to feed upon it. Ha’ha’hnnn! She bites his ear and he diagnoses her
mobile spasm
as
athetosis
, her
jerking
as
myoclonic
. To beat off these medical terms he looks at her face, only to find her bright blue eyes compelled by something behind and to the left of her –
an oculogyric crisis!
In Mimi’s open mouth he chances upon the
wet glint
of her fillings – her shivery curls sweep the precious dustfall. He feels the beginning of detumescence and to stiffen his resolve calls upon
Miriam’s face smeared sideways across the familiar pillows
: the image of conjugal right assists wonderfully in the committal of professional wrong, and, as the encephalitic on the floor
bends backwards clutching at my sides
, he wonders: Does she do the same, am I her fee-fee-fee-aaahn-say?! He pulls out suddenly and the spatter of his sperm on her skin, her clothes and the lino alerts them both to
the insanity of what we’ve done
. There will be more intimacy enforced, he thinks, by my mopping this up than there was in the cause of it – first times are necessarily social,
small genital talk
. . .
From hers in the pub, and before when he explained the highly experimental nature of what they would be doing, Busner gathered that for all the girlishness of her ribbed white tights and daisy-patterned summer minidress, Mimi was entirely serious.
An infanta, she was, returning from the pub
. . .
in the sedan chair of her transparent plastic umbrella. He had laughed at her in the spring squall, and she said:
I don’t want to get my hair wet
. . .
hobbled by his own garments he kneels awkwardly – there must be a cloth of some sort in the sink sunk into the lab bench. In esters of musk her face is blank – tendons are threaded through the dewlap below her chin – she shivers awake, her hands reach up and draw his
blockhead
back down to her belly. In the wooden trench far below the sheltering skylight,
the flushed bodies resume their battle
– by a thin loop the mask retains its hold on one of her lobeless ears, and from this there radiates out, along the dingy corridors, through the swing doors, across the stifling airing courts and down the wailing wards, a
widening whorl
of perturbation that courses through all the human flesh it encounters, amplifying hysterical misery into nerve-tingling pleasure – through flesh, and through walls that wobble and pulse. Through walls and in
electrostatic rings
that travel down all 1,884 feet and six inches of the hospital’s central corridor, constricting and dilating its cold old plasterwork. Cracks appear in the patients – they are
fragmented with joy
, doctors and charge nurses come running, their sedative-tipped