Umbrella (34 page)

palilalic verbigeration
as he tries to impress on Marcus the miraculous character of these . . . – Renaissances, rebirths – that’s what they are. Really, you must understand, Reggie Voss there – he was manifesting the most extreme opisthotonos – bent back, right back – and ticcing all the time. He could barely speak – only grunt, barely feed himself let alone go to the lavatory – and now you see him, Marcus, d’you see him –. – Yes, yes. Marcus puts the same
dread hand
on Busner’s arm. I do see it, Busner, and I’m of course familiar with the condition of post-encephalitic patients . . . their insensibility, their agitation . . .
Does he really remember, though?
Tormented by the idea that Marcus
takes me for a charlatan
, Busner bridles his enthusiasm, and, as the unusual ward round progresses, he attempts to give a calm clinical picture of the reborn. It’s hard, though – what to say of Andrew McNeil, who, before being started on L-DOPA, was so hypotonic he couldn’t be propped up in bed let alone maintain a seated posture, whose voice was a faint whisper, whose
face
was twisted into a grimace now anguished, now terrified, whose troubled sleep was indistinguishable from his waking nightmare, and who, upon resurfacing from the stagnant pond where he had floated face up for more than forty years, told the psychiatrist he had experienced it as a continuous present,
an awful and unchanging Now?
It occurs to me, Busner proposes as they stand watching McNeil – red-nosed and ruddy-cheeked,
a garden gnome
, happily engaged with a crossword – that it’s movement that’s essential for the formation of memories – that memory is a somatic phenomenon, and so if a mind can no longer manipulate its body in space, it loses the capacity to orientate within time . . . He tics with his tie, and would reach for a Biro to note this insight down were Marcus’s expression not
so
hopelessly sceptical
. . .
The ward is hot, the angled casements seem not to vent the sodium hypochlorite vapours and urinous eddies, but only draw in the far-off shushing of traffic on the North Circular. — Busner is gripped by terrible doubts. Is it all a dream, my dream? Is it me who needs awakening? The elderly patients stirring for the first time in decades . . . turning to one another and speaking with such animation, not of their ordeal but of a universe of trivia regained: ballpoint pens and Nimble bread . . . might they be better off –? He can only press on: I’d like you to meet Mister Ostereich here . . .
De Gaulle standing tall
, back turned to his visitors, he does something to a photograph frame with a flannel . . . He’s the most, ah, eloquent of the patients who’ve been given L-DOPA. Ostereich carries on wiping – so Busner persists with his own flannelling: He has described for me vividly what it’s like to think of nothing – yes, thinking of nothing, he says, is not the same as thinking nothing, so, no Zen state of enlightenment at all but . . . but a dreadful copybook sort of arithmetic, two-equals-two-equals-two, like that, over and over again. Or else, I am what I am what I am – like that, but this isn’t an ex-is-tential question, it’s only . . . only an iter-iter- . . . iteration of identity, its fact, nothing more, two-equals-two, I-am, d’you see? Marcus withers at him – Mboya appears anxious, Busner is saved by
Peter Cushing
,
re-emerging from the
laboratory
of his
past
and including them all in a stare both accusatory and baleful. He says, For all this time I now realise that I was a sort of picture frame, you best believe it – quite like this one . . . He fumbles with the clips, Mboya moves to assist him, but Ostereich wards him off . . . No, no, no need for you – I have it, like this, see, tip-top . . . Ostereich has freed the photograph, which shows uniformed bandsmen stiffly posed around the brassily silent cacophony of their instrumentation . . . This is me . . . he holds the frame in front of his face . . . the framing of nothing, I had lost the general idea of what it was to have . . . a general idea! His tongue comes out to moisten his lips and Busner wills it
back in! no fly-catching today, thank you very much
. . .
Ostereich’s nose was broken, Busner imagines, in a Vienna playground in the early nineteen hundreds – he couldn’t have served with that name, at least not in the British Army. Gratifyingly, Marcus is disposed to engage with Ostereich: And now, he asks, how do you feel now? The reborn one’s Adam’s apple bobs, his milky eyes well. – It is . . . It is . . . he chooses words from a child’s lexicon . . . altogether fab-u-lous, quite gorrrgeous! Germanic
r
’s are ironed in to his locutions . . . I feel that Doctor Busner here must have transfused me . . . He waves the flannel and the photograph . . . taken my diseased blood and replaced it with champagne! As they leave the Viennese behind, Marcus says, You think yourself, what, a Christian Barnard of the mind, is it? That it’s as that confused old man says: you’ve transplanted their brains – or that it’s as simple as apheresis? No, no, man, no drug could do this – no matter how revolutionary. You’ve seen results from pathology, I assume, you understand the histopathology, yes? You’ve seen the full extent of the lesions in these patients’ brain stems, hmm? This is real observable organic damage, Busner, scrambled eggs – you get that, yes? What Busner appreciates is the
pecking
Missus Marcus must’ve been subjected to as for aeons she lay flayed on the plastic runners of the St John’s Wood flat, together with cold cushions, the bony elements of old gas-fires, chopped liver . . .
going off
. He can
taste
the despair. Marcus is, he reflects, the sort of man who, tiring of civilisation and all its discontents, wants to be alone – yet insists on someone else being alone with him: a hostage, the Geoffrey Jackson to his Tupamaros guerrillas. Still, there’s no real harm in him – he cares. More than anything Busner desires the approval of this near-homonym of his uncle, so he holds his breath and counts
one, two, three
. . .
now that five of the post-encephalitic patients have begun to care for themselves the staff’s workload has lightened –
their tigerish bitterness poured back into its tank
. I think . . . he at last exhales, that you may be underestimating the brain’s capacity for functional reorganisation, Doctor Marcus. It seems to me that science is not well advanced enough for us to assess the impact of a global dopamine deficit – you see . . . these patients, living statues they were, and now see them: doing crosswords, signing certificates – speaking, like Mister Ostereich, with great insight about their condition, surely this proves that health goes deeper than any disease? Mboya continues to hang about nearby – Busner senses his mind churning down below, keeping him hovering on this wide smooth apron of the moment, while beyond there is
sea spray, the crude shapes of Channel freighters
. . .
Where does he live? Tooting – and alone: a used tea mug set down on an
old laminated wireless
. . .
a carpet cleaner, its brushes
furred with lint
. . .
The long journey to Arnos Grove every day, his black hair brush drawn through the smutty flue – he says he doesn’t mind – he reads. Busner knows this because his charge nurse is
more up to date than I am
, and talks over lunch in the canteen of the veil, and the master–

slave relationship, in the Lacanian sense. I shall, Busner thinks, suggest he consider analytic training – introduce him to some people at the Tavistock,
enough is . . . enough
. Which is what Miriam says: Enough is enough. She’s no Missus Marcus and has drawn for him a final line to cross: Either we all go away on a proper holiday, together, or I’ll take the children, with the firm expectation
very Miriam, that
that you will not be here in this flat when we return. Not there . . . with the fired-clay tiles and the thrownness of pottery lamps, not there . . . with the straw placemats . . . and the book with the headless,
legless woman-suit on the cover . . . handles at its hips
. . .
An image it would doubtless be . . .
outrageous
to admit
– even to himself – that he
finds . . . arousing
. His post-encephalitic patients, he knows, experience a strange
sleeeeeewwooooowing
down of thought . . . the turntable dragging treble back to bass . . . a stickiness as oneinsightstrugglestodetachfrom . . . the next. A life in the day
– also its exact opposite: a pell-mell—onrush of the mind’s stream that makes it impossible to grasp the shape of thoughts before they are . . .
torn apart
. Standing there with Marcus, he cannot tell which it is that afflicts him. Have they been like this for seconds . . . or hours?
I’m com-plete-ly craz-eee
–
The thing I find most remarkable, Busner, Marcus remarks conversationally, is not the coming back to life of your enkies, but the mixed ward – I’d heard about ’em, of course, but it’s still quite a revelation to see male and female patients together. Seems to me this is the thing that’ll combat institutionalisation – at least until Mister Powell does away with the asylums altogether. Marcus strokes and pets his pot-belly in its tailored papoose – his expression as he looms over his younger colleague is kindly, at odds with what he says next: It’ll all end badly, Busner, mark my words – what goes up . . . Well, I detect in you a need to make a big splash, be the big I-am. I’ve asked about and heard you were mixed up with that buffoon Laing – I daresay this L-DOPA represents another cure-all for you, that having failed to do away with schizophrenia, you’re now set on abolishing another disease . . . One of G. C. Cook’s aphorisms, isn’t it: A universe comes to life when you shiver the mirror of the least of minds – but by the same token there’s the mirror cracked, the mirror shattered . . . Well, ahem, possibly I express myself a little forcibly –. No, Busner says, no, it’s fair enough, you must say what you think . . .
And crush me
. . . but please reserve your judgement until you’ve met some more of the patients, spoken with them. Marcus clears his throat, her-herg-h’herm, a lengthy and complacent gurgle. I came, he says glutinously, specifically to see my Miss Deerth, may we do that now?
For what we see is what we choose, What we keep or what we lose for-èver
. . .
Sometimes, Busner thinks, the pop singers put it best, and to Marcus he is caustic: Death – she prefers her given name, now she’s come back to life . . .
Don’t – let – it – die, Don’t let it die-ie-ie
. . .
Why, Busner wonders, am I quite so plagued by these tapeworms spooling through my mind? Is it my unconscious ventriloquising through Hurricane Smith? And there’s no thunder without lightning . . . — Is the figure dead? It’s a male – for certain – and lies on its back, arms and legs flung up and apart, neck and head also elevated. Perhaps, he thinks, such violent deaths can only be visited – graphically at least – on the formerly stronger sex. Is there a suggestion of neckwear? He fondles his own unnoosed throat sympathetically. The black silhouette sprawls at the base of an orange triangle outlined in black, above it – and presumably to blame for its violent spasm – there is a single bold lightning strike. It reads danger of death along the base of the triangle – which strikes Busner as not commanding, rather laconic: Were you, old chap, to shin up the pitted concrete stanchion and, by poising on that bolt and swinging your other foot wide, circumvent the bunch of razor-wire, you’d be able to caress the porcelain, grasp the crackling hum . . . Would you, he wonders, in the last jolt of time before your heart short-circuited, and you were left dangling and jerking, with rotten smoke drifting from your ears, be able to feel, with fingertips questing for life, the steely filaments plaited into this hank of high tension? Busner pants, breathless from his rapid descent down from Alexandra Palace through the green nullity of the park, and, although there’s no one about to witness his frailty, he disguises it as a sigh, Aaaaaah . . . Anyway, he decides, whatever my age, my weight . . . my training shoes would probably earth me. Between them on the
stale cake
of the path lies a single thick-cut chip
– how awful to have this menu description readily to hand!
Busner interrogates it with his gaze, tracking over the subtle tans of its fried glaze. Anything – fugue, or trance, or otherwise blind enslavement to the force of the subcortex, is better than this: the walk-in wardrobe labelled treatment room, the tight huddle of white coats and grey nylon tunics observing the niceties, Excuse me, d’you mind? While buckling restraints, checking the pulse, injecting the five mils of intravenous curare, and wiping the dried saliva of the last victim from the rubber mouth-guard. Aaaaaah . . . No one, he believes, would know me: a slope-shouldered and knock-kneed moseyer through a dusty São Paolo square,
no evidence in my string shopping bag of the Nazi doctor I once was
. . .
Mid-afternoon and there isn’t a soul to see him as he makes his way through the Queen Anne wheelie-bin sheds and landscaped parking spaces of a, quote,
prestigious housing development, unquote,
We were only obeying orders . . . It was a sort of group-think
. . .
These Busner finds to be pathetic justifications, when the truth was:
We were making it up, improvising . . . using
whatever there was to hand
. . .
Before ECT they had put patients into comas with insulin, then resurrected them with glucose
sweet life ebbing in and out of them
. . .
Or infected them with malaria, believing that the high fevers and hallucinations would drive out psychoses, a scorched-earth policy that was dignified: pyrotheraphy. Maybe these bizarre – and wholly unscientific – procedures had had some benefit, but only because of the fuss that was made over patients who otherwise were locked up on the ward and
imprisoned in their own screaming heads
. . .
But really, the fuss was for the psychiatrists and the nurses, who dug holes in brain tissue and then filled them in – it was part job creation and part The Good Old Days: shticky plaster on the wounds, everyone involved a quick-change artist, rushing from unit to treatment room so they could
do their turn
. . .
He had believed then – what? He hoped he’d been more honest than his older colleagues, who thought their manipulations were surgical, excising mad thoughts and the mad bits of the brain that thought them – whereas Zack knew that mental illnesses were creations quite as much as inflictions – worlds starker and simpler than those of health, but totalities for all that. This would have been back in
the seventies, a white-lined decade . . . along roads . . . around sports pitches, and white piping describing your ball sack in the blackout . . . Sheepily thick sideburns that needed shearing – my own included. George Best . . . the corrupt and booze-raddled face of Reggie . . . Maudsley – Maudlin – Maudling . . . Each era . . . new and old blended . . . the utterly familiar paintjob slapped on . . . Then . . . along the passage of the years, appears utterly alien and distempered once more. How could we have gone there/thought that/worn that/mouthed that/read those/taken part in such happenings, ma-an? Didn’t we get it: Nothing comes of nothing
. Standing before a bow window crammed with tulle, behind it the ghosts of strangers’ domesticity, Busner can no longer ask of himself, Where am I going? He knows – and understands also that using net curtains to guard your privacy is as futile, surely, as employing tenses to divide time? He sees the tubular-steel-legged beast of burden, smells the carbolic and hears the pathetic imploring of the Cordelia who’s forgotten to learn her lines and so imagines –
I’d like to go back to the ward now, please, I’d – please
. . .
– that hers is a voluntary role:
Nothing comes of nothing
. . .
What was his name . . . the black chap? Mugabe? No, Mboya, that’s it. He’d been far more pragmatic. It works, he’d said, we don’t know why it works but it does – and he always said the whole disgusting thing, electro-con-vul-sive the-ra-py, not the sanitised initials we all took refuge in, so conflating it with its harmless and diagnostic cousin. Enoch said, Zack, I’ve seen men and women who were lost to the world come back after it –
It
. April radiation on the back of his neck as he moves on along the road,
Preposterous!
It’s not meant to be this way, the sun should shine in the past and in midsummer only, illuminating the tow-headed kids,
hands clasped and swinging dizzily
in just-threshed hayfields
, it beats down on the huge roundel of the ornamental bed which had been planted the previous year with rings of blue lobelias, white asylum and red begonias for the thirtieth anniversary of the Few. With this target plainly before him Busner can no longer pretend to aimlessness – from the ornamental bed on the roundabout
swings out all the rest of it:
the diverging roads, parked along them the odd Ford Anglia or Hillman Hunter. He sees the waxy banks of rhododendron screening off the Willow Shop, the Staff Club, Blythe House and Villa No. 3 – he sees the lawns, lush green where the gardeners’ watering cans have wavered from the beds, otherwise parched tawny, in places scraped to grey by the repetitive circling of patients let out to be exercised by their demons. He cannot deny where he’s going, only cavil that while he did tape on the electrodes on occasion,
I did pull the lever, pull the lever, pull the lever . . . but not at Friern, I never did it at Friern
. . .
For there, in case meetings, he hung back and
made myself small
. . .
shrinking away from what he saw as simply another demonstration: electricity as spectacle, Humphry Davy at the Royal Academy, with admiring ladies looking on, pulls the lever and the nurses and doctors pointedly ignore the contortions on the couch, the bucking, biting and jerking, and
the ozone smell and the singed-hair-smell
. . .
The sun should shine down on childhood – on his own and those of his children. He can see them – all except Mark, who stands at the edge of the lawn in the shadowland,
already wearing at the age of seven . . . eight? his uncle’s life-mask –
. The cars are tightly parked along Alexandra Park Road, with only an inch or two separating one rubber neoplasm from the next. So bulbous, the cars: vehicles in utero, in common with so much else in this timorous and ageing era, they’ve been shaped and smoothed so that their Thalidomide wing-mirrors and morbidly obese wheel arches can present no danger of death. Inside the steely cauls vestigial arms pull and push at levers, vestigial feet push pedals, the repetitive and compulsive motions damped down by
an amniotic fluid of
new car smell
. . .
They bounced when the current took them – a detail he had never heard spoken of: that their bodies were for long seconds vulcanised. If he glanced about the treatment room at that precise moment – whichever hospital it was in, the ’Bec or Napsbury – Busner would see the same studiously vacant faces bent to this strap or that button, or perhaps laying a
technically conciliatory
hand on the bound limb of the black silhouette that sprawled before them, Aaaaah . . . He’s reached a main road – beyond it electronic signboards on poles, beige-painted steel bafflers, waxed redbrick – all the