Umbrella (27 page)

rain-shot
– have delegated this task, for they have more pressing ones: lager beers to be poured away into the gutter of Charlottenstrasse, cuckoo clocks torn from the walls of cafés and unceremoniously unwound, the complicated filigree of a Beethoven sonata
somehow picked apart
. . .
Miss . . . Albert begins, he can feel the sharp corner of the Minister’s letter in his breast pocket and wonders whether he should withdraw it with a flourish. However, he who is typically so attentive is lost for now in the steam and the smutty smoke that lies in a bank above them,
ill omened
by the occasional gasolier
– up there rainwater cascades over the glass curves of the roof, alongside there is
the flesh-eating clank of buffers marrying
. Somehow a long white feather has flown into his hand. Propping the clubs against his belly, Albert takes his time examining it, running his fingertips along its
silkygrating
bars. Miss . . . he begins again, but seeing this: her wild-eyed expression of triumph. He ceases and turns on his heel, the mashie niblick and the spoon raised in a lofty salute. As he does so he laughs full-throatedly, because from the expression on the third woman’s face he believes she has deduced – it could be the influence of her coiffure – that it is Albert who is the Lord High Executioner. Missus Hedges will, he thinks, have ox tongue for supper,
lolling over the rim of the dish
, each papilla plainly visible from up here are the water tower and the campaniles of the first range of the hospital. He can’t make out the second range – which, if his recollection is correct, only had a single storey – but whether this is because it’s been demolished, or it is hidden by the first from this vantage, he cannot decide. — He got off the bus in Muswell Hill and stood for a long time looking in the window of an internet café, trying to make sense of it all: the plastic decals stuck on to the inside of the window advertised
LEBARA
with exaggeratedly joyous African faces, this being, he gathered from the listing of national flags and associated charges, a service that allowed you to call Swaziland, Rwanda and Gabon for mere pennies per minute. Who were these happy exiles, he wondered, yakking away for hour upon hour, their
verbigeration
wavering around the world?
I needn’t’ve
because at that moment one had emerged in a
spiffy
maroon leather jacket, from the zippered pockets of which he took first one, then a second, then a third mobile phone – instruments of communication that he swapped from hand to hand, and when he had two in one, over and over. It bothered Busner, to whom it seemed the greatest profligacy: treating these artfully designed
jewels of micro-circuitry
as
worry beads
, then pausing to
tell
their
nodules
, then resuming once more shk-shk, clack-clack, over and under, back and forth. Now, from his peak perspective, he can scan entire sectors of northern London – from the
Parnassus of Totteridge
right round to
the Elysian Fields of Epping Forest
– not, of course, that he can identify all the bits in between, although where three grim multistorey blocks
riotously assemble
might be Edmonton. It would be a cliché and a lie to say that his nose had led him there, any more than his feet had taken him – feet that, swollen and complaining, have bullied him into removing his training shoes. — No, sitting on the bench, gazing across the vale of the North Circular to what used to be Friern Hospital, Busner reflects with some small satisfaction on his first morning as a penitent. He had set off from Kentish Town with no plan or preconceived route, yet at each point where the way divided, memory, that ever-present helpmeet, had showed him the right one.
Truth to tell
no matter how random his transit, Busner’s
conscience could’ve reeled me in – my spore, my coprolites, my coiled mess, is scattered that widely
. All offences are compounded, he realises belatedly, by the perpetrator not cleaning up afterwards – by first walking away, and then staying away. Behind him he senses the cavernous interior of the building, its acreages of rotten flooring, the tiles flaking away from the underside of its
lofty ceilings
. . .
It is, Busner feels, an unloved and unlovely thing: Paris has Sacré-Cœur, Rio its cloud-cloaked Redeemer, but
what was on top of London – Ally Pally
. No doubt at its inception there had been boating, a switchback railway, the godly tootle of a record-breaking organ, massed brassy oompahing – all the busy relaxation of that Imperial era. Still, whenever he had ventured inside – no matter which decade – Busner had stumbled upon the same botched pantographs of municipality: a bamboo arras lost in a booming hall, freestanding screens of neon-indigo nylon ill-concealing gilded stacking chairs piled up to thrice head-height, grimly stained shafts tunnelling down into
kitchen mausoleums
. . .
Betja
—
, Betje
—
?
No, nobody could make out a case for the thing – yet here it still was.
It had
burned – when?
A couple of times at least and no doubt
caught a packet
in the war, yet was simply
too big to be destroyed
. Busner grimaced: fire was to it a form of agricultural technique, merely sweeping away the dead drifts of old catering trolleys so that
new shoots of the same old decrepitude could spring up.
You got troll feet, says a child who has arrived at his bench and stands sneering down at them. Busner smells salty breath and registers chewing that, despite its only this moment having claimed his attention, still seems incessant. The child –
a boy?
– wears some sort of smock with a cartoon face on it
that also gurns
. The child works its small jaws once, twice, three times, then
fly-catcher tongue: a tic-like flexion
. I am . . . Busner begins, and his fancy hardens into this conviction . . . a troll. The child’s eyes widen pleasingly – but then along comes its mother, a regatta-striped buggy zigzagging from the ends of her fleeing arms. Predictably she’s
anorexic – a common enough sequel to untreated post-partum depression
. He is delighted that she wrenches the child away and buckles it into the pushchair, yanking the strap up so that its smock bunches. Double bogies
skitterolving
on the smooth path, they are leaving nothing behind except this: the small face aimed back at him and still chewing, still
tongue-ticcing
, still
gobbling
up
the troll
. In seconds they are on the terrace below Busner
am I hungry?
then gone. Some epochal signal had been beamed from the roof of the Palace, this much he knew: a wooden puppet broken down into its constituent waveforms and then
reassembled a mile or two away by clever Scotsmen
. — With the mildly fungally infected big toenail of one foot Busner scratches the sole of the other – what was it he had said to Mimi? The Palace of Pain and the Palace of Pleasure facing one another across the slough of suburban despond. And what had she replied? Nothing. One, two, three . . . some years later, after he’d
walked away from the shit I’d done
, it occurred to Busner that she might have been paradoxically affected by all the hours she had spent encapsulating L-DOPA for him surrounded by those clouds of dopaminergic dust. By contrast with the sculpture court he had curated on Ward 20, she seemed with each successive encounter to be losing the power of voluntary movement more and more: standing forlorn by the bench, slight in her white coat, her hair-net bulging with her blonde curls, monkey-muzzled by her facemask, her forehead sweat-damp –
Carry on, Chemist!
He had joshed her – but there was no need to, her eyes were transfixed on her own hands as they
ticced about
the equipment, pouring, measuring, tapping, cranking and turning as she enacted the
very real pill-rolling necessary – or so I believed – to put a stop to its Parkinsonian mimicry
. Only when we touched did she unlock, did her synovial fluid flow, so that I felt her muscular rigidity liquefy into spasticity. We slow-danced around the lab, her face buried in my shoulder,
Bay-bee, bay-bee, sugar me
, she mumbling of this and that, an increasingly strident palilalia in which the names of colleagues, their malpractices and the leaden crassness of the administration became
tossed into a
word salad
. With my lips to her neck, I felt her pulse speed up: one-twenty, one-thirty, one-forty,
gotta get my candy free, w’hey-hey –!
A bouncy little jig, punctuated by the
whip-crack-into-rice-pudding
of the snare drum’s rim shot
. There was no talk ever of fiancé or wife – such is the dark mirror of adultery, in which both parties elect to see nothing, instead, her letting drop an appointment at the FPA licensed everything — so, as the weeks and then the months passed, our lovemaking became characterised by bizarre notions and their attendant motions: a wheelchair left in a corridor would be commandeered to mechanise our coitus, while on another occasion we purloined the mobile hoist used to lower paraplegic patients into their baths. We braced ourselves in corners and against the undersides of shelves.
Dyspnoea
. . .
She pants, this –
her thumb?
– thrust whole into my anus is capricious
. . .
her tongue, travelling
round and round
my ear . . . compulsive
. Leaning back astride me, she’s possessed by a mass of subhuman manias and still her pulse continues to accelerate: one-forty, one-fifty – if she were my patient
I’d administer a massive dose of parenteral barbiturates
. She blinks, she grinds her teeth, her shoulders shake with a dreadful palsy as her pubic hair scratches frantically in mine,
One for you and one for me, Pardon me – comes to three!
Balanced impossibly, as a pin could never be on its point, to one side the abyss of frenzy, to the other that of stupor – with no warning there is
the
inspiration of a leviathan!
she holds her breath for ten . . . twenty seconds . . . an agonising half-minute, during which he has to take in the Rembrandt lighting: her breasts heaving, flayed of their clothing, her dirty cherub’s face, her unloosed hair a gilt sphere. And more: the pong of excess bleach caught on fraying linoleum, the mid-distant dissent of a distressed inmate terminated by doorslam, the drug dust that tickles his own nose, before: Paaaaaaaaahhh! Peanut breath is violently expelled and he is blown into a salt globe full of floaters, motes, spiralling animalcules, fish oil, wallpaper paste, gentlemen’s – relish. Soon enough he will have to
relearn once more the complex sequence of actions required to stand up
. . .
What happened to Mary Quant? Max Factor. — It doesn’t work for me, Enoch Mboya says, I just don’t find it funny. Well, Busner chides, you’re being obtuse as well as prudish – what’re you, some sort of Mary Whitehouse? Mboya takes a pinch of oaken skin in thumb and forefinger, scrutinises it, then replies, Hardly. They laugh edgily – they are