Umbrella (28 page)

deep in
now, the pair of them,
conspirators, really
. Whitcomb’s authorisation was obtained for the purchase of the L-DOPA, but, beyond scanning the journal article Busner thrust before him, he has shown no interest in the trial – which is as well, because it’s not a trial at all,
there being no control!
He titters, and Mboya who’s sorting the latest batch of capsules into the compartments of a dispensary tray, looks at him reproachfully. Recently Busner has started to feel that his charge nurse is
reading my thoughts
, so engrafted have they become. Busner voices his next – What’d be the point of a control? – even though he’s only reiterating what they’ve both said many times in the weeks leading up to giving the selected group of patients the drug, and many more in the anxiety-distended week since. Indeed, Mboya says, there’d be no point to a placebo: they don’t know what we’re giving to them, and nor do we for that matter. Both boldly going psychonauts have qualms: next-of-kin consent has been obtained at best haphazardly: a form which was composed by Busner has been Cyclostyled by Admin. and in vague terms it outlines the experiment. Mboya, Inglis, Vail and others charged with the care of the post-encephalitic patients have pressed these on the few relatives who still visit, and when called upon Busner has made himself available to answer their questions. In these encounters he makes use of a doctorly gambit he despises: talking down unless they up their game. To a very few of the few – only one or two – he admits: We know nothing much, L-DOPA has had some therapeutic results with ordinary Parkinsonian patients, however, this is a different form of the disease – if, indeed, it’s the same disease at all. He forbore from adding: Besides, what’ve they – let alone you – got to lose? Nor did he point out that these
pecking
,
bobbing
and stuffed bodies were barely human
, being to all intents and purposes
lame ducks
whose government subsidy might – altogether reasonably – have been withdrawn years or even decades before.
Why let ’em go on, the shitbuilders?
The enkies’ children appeared to have suffered from the disease’s fallout – prematurely aged, they limped on to the ward. In his mind’s eye Busner always pictures them as wearing macs of pre-war neutrality, or else supporting themselves with duff umbrellas. Their bri-nylon shirts were damp through and mildewed – they were Harold Steptoes, orphaned children of parents who yet lived, biologically adult yet
balking at all the busyness of life – financial, emotional and sexual
. Of course, he understood that such children and spouses who still visited had to be self-selecting for exactly these characteristics, after all.
How little
would you have to have in your life in order to prioritise this thankless – and frankly useless –task?
Shall we? Mboya says,
the Coptic Bishop with his tray of wafers
– and so their round begins, since neither of them trusts anybody else to dole out the precious sacrament, especially now that they have chosen – Mboya being included in the clinical decision – to massively increase the dosage. One hundred, two hundred – up to five hundred milligrammes could be given by depot injection, but not entire grammes of the stuff. They had increased the dosage, and they had restricted its allocation to only six patients: four of the somnolent-opthalmoplegics, who were utterly extinct and sunk in the deepest catatonia –
Messers
Ostereich, Voss and McNeil, and the prodigious Leticia Gross – and two who, albeit stifled, still exhibited all the jerks, spasms and flurries of hyperkinesias – Helene Yudkin and Audrey Dearth.
Audrey Dearth
. . .
Busner feels no especial guilt about what is plainly favouritism, for her alternations between the dread entrancement of oculogyric crisis and the busy operation of her invisible lathe are peculiar, even for this most paradoxical of malaises. Seeing her now in the day-room, her tiny frail form enveloped in a chair, he feels she embodies a living past that forever eludes the most penetrating of thinkers – no veil of ignorance, or otherwise theoretically woven partition in the also theoretically woven fabric of the mind, but a real barrier, that he –
I!
–
will penetrate
, once, that is,
we actually touch
, for still it seems to him that they are forever approaching one another along all 1,884 feet and six inches of the lower corridor –
forever approaching, but yet to touch
. . .
Ready? Mboya asks. Busner nods – they have assumed their positions, Mboya opens her jaws, then Busner slings in the two capsules, each of which contains a gramme
Brighton Aquarium – fishy treats for performing dolphins
. Audrey remains impassive, taken up by the Saturnian gravity and alien surface of a loose polystyrene tile some way above her head. Busner follows the L-DOPA with a slosh of water from a beaker, then falls to stroking her neck
chicken skin don’t snag
as Mboya marries her gums. Audrey’s dentures sink back down in the remaining water
the toy diver at Mark’s bath time
. . .
the distortions in the Perspex
bugsbunnying
the incisors. Do they, Busner muses aloud, ever put them in for her? Mboya shrugs. There is silence in the day-room apart from her subtle gulp. Glancing towards west-facing windows, full of the risen sun, Busner is appalled by the alien white planet they all inhabit and the grossly etiolated forms that promenade its smooth surfaces,
oh, so slowly
. . .

Miss Dearth . . . Miss Dearth? She doesn’t respond
but she hears, oh yes, she does
. They go on and repeat the same procedure for the three male guinea pigs, who are to be found becalmed in their backwater of the men’s dormitory. Busner has charged Inglis with ensuring that all of them are got up every morning, cleaned, dressed and shaved. She was sarcasm itself: Ooh, par-don me, Doc-tor, but you want me to pre-tend dey goin’ onna journey? Her hands on her hips, her breasts proud, a reddy flush in her cheeks. Busner thought bitterly, Was her go-slow ever called off? but only repaid her with sincerity, saying, Yes, yes, I want you pretend that – because they are going on a very strange journey and they can’t very well do that smelling of urine – or with bed sores. This is, nurse, a hospital, not a concentration camp! Which is a conviction he simply doesn’t feel: coercive institutions, he knows, only aggravate their inmates’ sickness. What was it Marcus had said of his time at the Hatch? mere
trench warfare against mental disease
. . .
Inglis is, Busner reflects, the sort who
knows my type . . . it is pointless to try
. . .
And yet: sex begets more sex, and he is steeped in it, so it might be
worth a try
. . .
Her sex
gapes darkly ahead of me . . . a tunnel –
a corridor
–
. Are we done here? Mboya says, and they go on with Busner’s head aching with the effort of containing
the old
booby hatch
as it was in its heyday, with its six miles of corridors, and its rigid segregation of male and female, a notionally self-supporting community with its own farm and orchard, its water supply, sewage-treatment works, gasworks –
gas!
– burial ground, brewery, laundry, tailoring shop, cobbling workshop, upholsterer and –
most crucially for the solution – railway spur
. . .
He recovers his wits in the act of caressing Helene Yudkin’s plump neck
same as when we had the labrador in Willesden and it needed worming
. Despite Mboya’s skilled clamping of her jaws, Yudkin, who is at least seventy, has the vigour to grind her teeth in time with the flexing of her epiglottis. The noise drags him in its undertow
back to . . . Miriam
and her ridiculous machine for polishing beach-garnered pebbles that sits
slushscraping
by the back door. Busner marvels that she complains of there being no washing machine yet tends happily enough to this tumbling drum, the shiny products of which end up scattered all over the flat – on tables, down the back of seat cushions, a small shingle beach drifting across the kneehole desk Maurice gave him when they married. When Busner challenged her over the handicrafts avalanche, Miriam said, The boys love them, don’t you boys? And Mark and Daniel chorused obediently, Yes, Mum, which was fast becoming a ritual – the way she expressed that
One for me and another one for me, Pardon me – comes to three!
Miss Yudkin’s
foam rubber
is fleshy to the touch
, on the Formica side table sits a gelid dish of
ying
stewed rhubarb and
yang
custard that no one has troubled to feed her. On the arm of the chair her twisted hand dances
fingertrot
,
handango
,
thumba
, its digits
saucily entwining and scissoring, the nails high-flicking the worn nap
. It’s a choreography that he knows he could resolve into quite distinct movements, if he could find the time to analyse it, and that these could in turn be broken down into different sorts of action. But what were they? Did Helene Yudkin recapitulate her own workaday repetitions – those as seamstress, or bakery assistant? Both positions he’d found out that she once filled. Or were these domestic digitations: the turning on and the turning off, the sweeping up and the dusting down? Or, again, maybe she saw them – if at all, so sunk was she in her Parkinsonian netherworld – as simply divertimenti. It didn’t help him to hold this analogy at bay: that before the war the hospital received all the Jewish admissions in the London County Council region . . .
because?
Convenience, he supposed, keeping kosher, maintaining access to the
bearded weirdos
and the dubious spiritual benefit of their
legalistic mumbling
. . . Hergheraaaaghrrerrr, her nose – if it could only be abstracted from all the rest of her – was attractive, its wings dusted with powder, nostrils
porcelain fine
. . .
Moving them may also have been of a piece with the exodus from the East End to the north-western suburbs – a wilderness on the way. Whatever the reason, the end result was this: that over a thousand of them had been concentrated here when the Luftwaffe’s bombs fell on Poplar, Whitechapel, the Docks
and my own randomly selected people
. . .
But what might be said of the Jewish enkies in relation to the rest? Did they manifest the same divergence as the English Jews from the general population – being
exactly the same, only much, much more so?
Herrrerrrg’herrr –. For a moment Miss Yudkin hesitates, her throat bobs, the L-DOPA begins its hopefully fantastic journey, then she resumes Hergheraaaaghrrerrr, and Mboya says, Shall we? So they stalk with great trepidation into the next embayment of the female dormitory, where a
manatee with
a human
face
lies on her iron-framed catafalque. You’re worried, Mboya says as they stand regarding Leticia Gross, whose great flanks have quaked free of the covers. Naturally, Busner replies, look at her, she remains exactly the same: deafeningly inert. Mboya, as anxious as Busner and at least as exhausted – if not more – nevertheless gets it, understands the still greater mass that is packed into the woman-mountain, a violent compression – the stuff of her hammered mechanically into her casing – that necessarily implies its opposite: an equally violent explosion –
great blubbery chunks of her flung in our faces, our whites hosed down by blood spouts
, and this succeeded by
a tidal wave of noise louder than an H-bomb
. . .
We can’t go on like this, Busner goes on. It’s not that I think the L-DOPA is toxic even at these high doses – although he knows nothing of the sort, says it only for their mutual reassurance – rather, it’s that if Whitcomb does start poking his hooter in, without any results I’ll be unable to justify the expense. Mboya sighs and adds, Then there’s Inglis . . . The fall forward of Busner’s chin is
cushioned, I’m getting chubby
. . .
You can’t, he laughs, get the staff nowadays . . . but he knows the reverse is the case: the staff they have don’t get the patients – they resent the extra work involved in caring for the wholly incapacitated post-encephalitics, preferring more tractable neurotics, bullyable depressives and eager-to-please psychotics. The nurses also resent the reorganisation of the ward required by the increased number of male patients – and all the upset this brings. But most of all they resent Busner, who, unlike most of his predecessors, rather than being content to rely on their greater familiarity with the patients, insists on imposing his own rubric, one that involves regular feeding, grooming and toilet assistance. In fairness to them it is a tall order: their pay has been frozen, their children’s free milk has been taken away, the price of beer is rising so fast
they’re obliged to brew their own
. . .
and moreover there aren’t enough of them: heavy and recalcitrant patients cannot be levitated to the ward’s only WC, would that they could – he plunges into schoolboy reverie