Umbrella (56 page)

but there never had been . . . it’d been my dream, perhaps, as much as theirs
. . .
He went into the women’s dormitory and discovered the colossal frame of Leticia Gross still lumped on her reinforced catafalque – but whereas when he had left she had been a troubling presence, what with her bullying and commanding of the nursing staff, now she was a twenty-five-stone absence, a mound of inanition, her petite features seemingly in the process of being reabsorbed by her rolls and dewlaps of flesh . . .
in a heavy and sluggish wave of rolling dystonia
. There was no sign of her cheeky-chappie husband – none of the medical staff were in evidence at all. He went next to Helene Yudkin’s bed, and found there at least some signs of life, but only . . .
signing once, twice, flicking to the next, signing once, twice again, flicking to the next
. . .
the thumbah and handango of her compulsive traveller’s-cheque-ticcing . . .
she could not speak, she couldn’t say anything was marvellous any more . . . she was lost to me
. . .
At last Busner had met with Hephzibah Inglis hurrying along. What has happened to my enkies? he had challenged her, without any other greeting or pleasantry . . .
and she looked at me as simply another puffed-up doctor, engorged with my own professional status, rolling over the little people and so spared me nothing
: – Your enkies, Doc-tor Busner? Why, all dat foolishness was done put a stop to second you skipped off a-broad. Doctor Whitcomb, he see de dread-ful state of dese poor folk so he took ’em off dat damn fool drug of yours – he took de drugs inall –. He had wrenched himself away from Inglis’s complacent smirk and headed at last for the little niche he had secured for her, with its scrap of view – headed at last towards Audrey Death, cursing himself . . .
for having ever forgotten her for an instant, for having chosen to ignore my responsibilities as her physician
. . .
and arrived to find that it was all far, far worse than he had feared: she was not only wrenched halfway round in her chair, her eyes fixated on an invisible object above and behind her, but those eyes had flies clustered in them, while her arms and legs had been strapped to that chair. He went straight to the buckles of these straps and began unfastening them. I shouldn’t do dat if I was you, Doc-tor, said Inglis coming up behind him. You don’t know de half of it, when she be freed she go flat-out crazy –. Then he had lost his temper, and begun shouting at her: Don’t you know that the proud boast of this fucking miserable bloody place was that
no hand or foot will be bound here
. . .
— Shall we go on, Doctor Busner? Athena Dukakis asks, and he says, Of course, of course, do forgive me, I was only struck by how . . . well, how strange this all is – I mean, you’ve kept the original foundation stone. They stand looking at the white plaque, scanning its incised lettering:
THIS FOUNDATION STONE WAS LAIDBY FIELD MARSHAL HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS PRINCE ALBERT
. . . followed by the list of Commissioners for Lunacy and assorted beneficent dignitaries, at the bottom of which surrounded by scrollwork there is this motto:
NO HAND OR FOOT WILL BE BOUND HERE
. Some people, Busner says as they leave the fitness centre, might find it rather, well, rather disturbing to be living enclosed by these walls – which in their time have witnessed so much mental distress. Dukakis looks at him critically. Surely, she says, that’s a little hippy-dippy for a psychiatrist, I mean, don’t tell me you’re one of those people who thinks old buildings can have psychic auras. Anyway, they’re lovely buildings now – you can see that. They are strolling between a bushy hedge and the façade of the first range, the brickwork of which has been returned to its original honey colour. The windows are beautifully pristine, and every few yards a cast-iron lamp standard containing an electric bulb has been erected. This is meant to instil in the residents, Busner supposes, a pleasing sense of Victorian civic pride with
none of the accompanying low wattage
. Hippy-dippy we were, he thinks – and those of us who didn’t float off back to nature, or take to the barricades, took a sort of solace in our own nostalgic Victoriana. He smiles, thinking of the sartorial fripperies of the period – the long white silk scarves, and original tailcoats picked up at flea markets, and the bandsmen’s scarlet coats that could be spotted weaving their way through the crowds at the Isle of Wight festival, gold frogging leaping about in time to Hendrix’s axe-work. Miriam insisted on William Morris floral-patterned wallpaper – while Busner had his own brief flirtation with a handlebar moustache and a velvet smoking jacket . . .
It must’ve been strange for them, the reawakened, to have swum back to consciousness in a world done up in a travesty of their own childhood, complete with a soundtrack of oompah psychedelia
. . .
As Inglis claimed, the restraints had been necessary, for, when the sixteen hours of Audrey Death’s oculogyric crisis drew to an end, she did not relapse into akinesia but became animated by the most extreme ticcing Busner had ever seen – a Saint Vitus Dance of every part of her: her fingers flicked, her hands spasmed, her arms, legs and neck jerked about wildly – if not prevented from standing she would leap to her feet unsteadily, then canter up and down the ward until she knocked into a wall or a piece of furniture and spun to the floor. It was with the entirely humane aim of preventing her from breaking her brittle bones that she had been restrained. Safely strapped down, she still came out with these . . .
strange cries, spontaneous jactitations
. . .
Buy! Buy! she had cried, and: Sell! Sell! Disjointed numerical commands had also spilled from her mouth: Give me fourteen-eighty! I’ll take nine! Try seventy-one! Hold four thousand and twenty-two! Go to them for a hundred and nine – Now! And all of this frightening gibberish had been mixed in with a chaotic choreography of tics that, try as he might, the psychiatrist could subject to no analysis, nor perceive any congruence in. He and Mboya had pleaded with Whitcomb to allow them, in Audrey Death’s case at least, to restart the L-DOPA. Given the old woman’s state of extreme agrypnia – a sleeplessness that would not respond to any sedative dose short of a toxic one – the consultant relented. However, even back on the drug, she continued her erratic course, flipping between this extreme rapidity of thought and movement, and periods of increasingly deep catatonia. Over the course of a fortnight or so Busner battled to save his favourite patient, to somehow keep her balanced on this knife-edge of stability . . .
The tiger’s free, the kangaroo, It’s up to me and up to you
. . .
A miserable and forlorn hope: it had been Mboya who finally insisted that they stop the treatment altogether . . .
In mercy and justice he said – and he was right
. . .
The final words Audrey Death had spoken before relapsing into a merciful swoon were a string of nonsensical fractions – eighteen over four-point-two, ninety-four over thirteen-point-seven, sixty-six-point-three over thirty-three-point-three recurring – that, even as he accepted the futility of the exercise, Busner had tried to fit into some conceptual framework. Were they, perhaps, the numerical analogue of her brain chemistry’s intro-conversions between the discrete and the continuous, the quantifiable and the relativistic?

Having reached the far end of the first range, they’re walking along the grassy strip where the second range used to be. Unbounded by its lowering bulk, the old airing courts between the spurs are jolly sunlit patches of
grassy sanity
. . .
What happened, Busner asks the developer’s daughter, to the long corridor in the sub-basement? She snorts: Well, amazing as it was, we could hardly preserve all 1,884 feet and six inches of it – it’s not really the sort of thing our potential residents are looking for . . . No, if you come over here . . . She trips down an incline towards the back of the building . . . you can see that it’s been chopped up into a series of vestibules that run along behind each residential block. If you look through the window here you can still get an idea of it. He looks as she tells him to, and gets no idea of that
human linear-particle accelerator
at all – is only dazzled by the reflections of the glass and underwhelmed by what he suspects are pegs on the white-painted wall hung with a couple of Barbour jackets and a woolly hat or two. Beyond these prosaic things: a second window, and beyond that another window, behind which, doubtless,
hangs more rainwear
. . .
A cartoonish and synthesised diddle-um-pom-quack! comes from somewhere about Dukakis’s person, and continues to diddle-um-pom-quack! as she pats herself down with her pictorial manicure until she locates her mobile phone. Busner backs off to give her the fifteen feet of mandated public privacy. Along comes Zachary, he thinks, and then:
I’m an ape man . . . I’m an ape-ape man
. . .
returns to him, complete with steel drums and jangling guitars. I’m afraid that was the Sales Centre, she says, tucking the phone away, it seems we do have a prospect after all – sorry, but I’ll have to go back and give ’em the spiel. She smiles
winningly
, and continues: Do feel free to carry on looking around – there’s a show flat at the other end of the main building if you want to get an idea of what it’s like inside, and if you’ve got any questions come and track me down. She’s backing away,
pantherish
in her Lycra . . .
I should’ve liked to press that flesh again
. . .
he voices his thanks, and then she is gone, leaving him in the former airing court, breathing too heavily – panting almost. He leans against the window of the chopped-up corridor, and the dark starship of the old hospital turns on this axis about his ageing head. I’m having, Busner realises, a panic attack – and he tries to laugh it off: Well, I suppose there has to be a first time for everything . . .
What we see is what we choose, What we keep or what we lose for-èver
. . .
Then he hauls himself upright, takes off his hat, massages his temples, shakes his head and thinks: So long as I’m plagued by these ancient ditties I can’t be dead yet! He takes a critical and evaluative look round at the airing court again, and finds to his surprise that he’s fully orientated within the shell of Friern Hospital as it was four decades before. With a mixture of shock and satisfaction Busner realises that he’s standing . . .
exactly at the point where I was when I first saw her, the saliva gathering on her fine cheekbone and then looping down to that floor unbroken, her small foot in its child’s slipper kicking against the lip of linoleum tile
. . .
He turns back to the window and leans his forehead against it. It has taken a very long while, but he’s arrived at last:
I forgot them
. . .
he concedes in weariness, in desolation . . .
I stayed on at Friern for a month or two after that, but then I walked away, as I’ve walked away from everything in my life: marriages, jobs, colleagues, commitments, patients – I forgot them all . . . The world is ours to tear apart, But what if it’s too late to start again? And it is too late
. . .
Because, thinking back to those last few weeks of the trial-that-never-was-a-trial, he understands:
it all had to do with time
. He recalls the films he made of the post-encephalitic patients, specifically the one of Audrey Death operating her invisible lathe . . .
I saw it! I saw that it was out of sequence . . . that through her ticcing she was travelling in time
. . .
But it had been too radical a hypothesis to entertain: that embodied in these poor sufferers’ shaking frames was the entire mechanical age – that just as the schizophrenics’ delusions partook of modish anxieties, so the post-encephalitics’ akinesia and festination had been the stop/start, the on/off, the 0/1, of a two-step with technology . . .
and she, Audrey, anticipated it!
In her last frenzied weeks before she finally collapsed, she had given him a preview of what was to come: the binary blizzard that would blow through humanity’s consciousness —
Perhaps if there had been the right scans available . . . Later, in the
1980
s, I could’ve looked inside her brain – seen it
. . .
But, even as he thinks this, Busner knows how impossible that would have been . . .
because I lacked the feeling . . . the artistry
. . .
The pop ditties that had infested his mind had been, he now understands, continuous reminders not only of this unfinished and abandoned travail, but of all the other crimes of forgetting he had committed:
Don’t let it die, Don’t let it die
. . .
Hurricane Smith had groaned these melodic truisms – but simply because they were truisms, it didn’t mean they weren’t . . .
true.
Busner presses his face to the cold glass, he cups his hands around his face to block out the sunlight. Colonel Blink sees clearly the vestibule fashioned from a mere fifteen feet of the old hospital corridor: those aren’t Barbour jackets hanging from the pegs but . . .
bodies
. . .
the corpse of his schizophrenic brother, Henry, who committed suicide at fifty-two, after thirty years as an inmate of psychiatric hospitals. He hangs there, looking much as he must have . . .
before they cut him down
. . .
the collar of his dirty lumberjack’s shirt caught on the varnished wooden prong, one of his polythene-and-coat hanger blooms poking from the pocket of his cruelly hiked-up jeans . . .
I visited him – but never enough, I was swayed by Ronnie’s madness about madness into believing that it was me that had caused his illness
. . .
And beside his dead brother twitches the still-living body of Busner’s eldest son, Mark . . .
his poor face!
who, although not doomed to the soul-aching gloom of the strip-lit wards, remains the unwilling, tempestuous and tortured recipient of . . .
care in the community
. . .
and who has to wait a very long time in his Stanmore bedsit for a visit from his psychiatrist father to . . .
check he’s taking his medication, so that Hey, Presto! no mental illness – all gone
. . .
And beyond these discards, what is it that Busner sees propped up in the corner, her thin metal ribs and struts all furled in the stained folds of her old silken skin? His very own . . .
Sleeping Beauty
. . .
her neck, gripped in the kyphotic vice of her extreme old age, curves up and over into a hook, so that levelled at him is its very blunt and accusatory end.