Umbrella (13 page)

, before they were made to
desire the images
, if not the
Ding an sich
: atoasterafonduesetanelectricblanket – the words chew together now in avaricious haste, astereocassettedeckabarbecue!’isnerrsdressin’ gownsannacuddlytoy –! Off. Clicked
off
. The aerial sits
alien antennae
on the old set, which is warm and smells of
singed dust
. Busner straightens up, turns – the silence in the day-room of Ward 14 is slowly infiltrated by moans, mutterings, then: Wotcher do that for? Mister Garvey – mid-sixties, hypomanic, recent transfer – protests: That’s my favourite bloody programme, that is. Busner lifts an emollient hand and
strokes
the air. Please, he says, please . . . it’ll only be for a few minutes, I just want to ask Miss Dearth a couple of things . . . He waves the clipboard he holds in his other hand, and the papers stir up
powdered milk, dried urine
. The high-backed and upright armchairs face him in two shallow crescents, and are far more accusatory than the bundles dumped in them. Awkwardly, Busner manoeuvres between the rows, jostling past knees covered up with rugs and others frighteningly exposed:
Oof, look at that contusion
. . .
a Waterloo sunset
. The day-room’s ill-fitting sash windows are buffeted by the wind, strafed by raindrops, and so he is reminded
It’s April
, as he drops himself into the seat beside her. Her poor old face is crammed into the angle of the headrest, her scrawny legs are rigid and the torsion of her upper body is painful to behold – yet, despite this, her hands move methodically, deftly, pulling upon an invisible lever, twirling an immaterial flywheel with such assurance that the psychiatrist does see
steel basted with oil, the fireside glow of bronze
. Miss Dearth, he begins, I have your original admission form from . . . together with the notes made by medical officers during your first few years here. — It has taken him over a month to beg, cajole and wheedle these from Records, they see no point to it any more than Whitcomb does. – There’re plenty of fancies floating around this place, Busner, that’s why you’re better off confining yourself to facts, to routines . . . It is pointless to observe to his nominal superior, or to Missus Jarvis, the
hideous old dragon
who crouches on the
nest
of paper and card
breathing bureaucratic fire
at him, that these records are precisely that: facts, and facts about routines. De’Ath, Audrey, Admitted 26th September 1922, Born Fulham, 1890 (age 32), Spinst. 5'2'', 7st. 8lbs., Address Flat G, 309 Clapham Road, Stockwell, London SW, had been subjected to a medical examination, so it was noted that: she showed no signs of tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, smallpox, being postpartum or having had any confinements. De’Ath, Audrey, had been admitted – it was cramped into the preprinted boxes of the form – as a rate-aided person, exhibiting symptoms of catatonia that led Doctor M. H. Hood, Medical Superintendent, unhesitatingly to diagnose Primary Dementia
whatever that was
. A year later Doctor Ventor concurred in respect of one Death, Audrey, but a note written by a Doctor Hayman, dated a scant three years later, just as definitively – the Latin tag underlined thrice in purple ink – characterised one Deeth, Audrey, same other details, as suffering from Dementia Praecox. As he had laid out the ancient sheets and file cards on a sticky-ringed coffee table in the staff room, Busner found himself moved to consider the evolution
in symbiosis
of these names. For, as the Mental Health Act of 1930 modified Colney Hatch Asylum to Colney Hatch Mental Hospital, so Deeth, Audrey, mutated into Deerth, Audrey, who was given – courtesy, he imagined, of the slow absorption of Bleuler’s terminology into the fabric of English psychiatry – an equally authoritative diagnosis of schizophrenia. It would have been next to impossible to have tracked this pseudonymous patient down through the decades within an institution that remained in a continuing identity crisis, were it not that Miss De’Ath, AKA Miss Death, AKA Miss Deeth, AKA Miss Deerth, remained in
exactly the same place, a moth
– not dead but hibernating and growing more and more desiccated with the years –
despite the subsidence of entire spurs, the constant renovations called for by the shoddy workmanship of its original contractors, the fires and the wartime bomb damage, the admission and departure, by death or discharge, of thousands of the mentally distressed. In the late 1930s, when the hospital saw fit to reinvent itself as Friern Mental Hospital, relegating –
or
so they hoped
– the echo of the booby-hatch to the chants of children, Miss Deerth, Busner assumed through yet another error of transcription, became Miss Dearth. And so she stopped on Ward 14, an incurable schizophrenic whose profound catatonia was her most enduringly remarked upon characteristic, now that the decades had worn away all contingencies of sex, age, class and name. Her catatonia . . . and her dyskinesias and dystonias of all kinds, her muscles crimped, then cramped, her hands vamping and vibrating in the vice of her malady – so that, come the 1960s, when the hospital adopted the modishly informal nickname Friern, and the surf of chlorpromazine was up, old Miss Dearth’s symptomatic consistency was noticed by a not-yet-jaded junior neurologist temporarily attached to the staff — a certain Doctor Mohan Ramachandra, who must, like Busner after him, have bothered to read at least some of her notes and seen that, while she had been subjected to one round of insulin coma therapy in the late thirties and a single
experimental jolt
of ECT a decade later, she had mostly
stepped over the high-tension cabling that snaked through brains for the next twenty years.
He so concluded that, far from her twisting, ticcing and transfixed gazing being the consequence of too liberal dosage with major tranquillisers – since as yet she had been prescribed none – there might –
just might
– be a physiological explanation for her forty-odd years of torpor, a hypothesis that led to his jotting down
very tentatively, in pencil
, a single word, Parkinsonian, on the final page of those notes, followed by a ? that absolutely guaranteed there would be no follow-up

until now.
Well, she’s never in the way, Always something nice to say, Oh what a blessing. I can leave her on her own, Knowing she’s okay alone, and there’s no messing. She’s a lady, Whoa, whoa, she’s a lady!
I presume that you and, um, these others – Miss Deerth, Miss Deeth, Miss Death and, er, Miss De’Ath – that you are . . . one and the same? Busner leans into the headrest as far as he dare, entangling his hair with hers – there’s nothing to hear beyond the
pigeon burble
of fluid respiration. He tries another tack: On your notes . . . Miss Dearth . . . You were seen by various doctors over the years . . . Do you recall Doctor Hood?
Nothing
. Or maybe Doctor Hayman?
Nothing again
. A trolley comes wheedling along stacked with aluminium-lidded plates, the sulphurous stench of overcooked Brussels sprouts rolls over the trench where he hunches – other patients rise to fetch trays and there is a modest cacophony. Frustrated, Busner rears up. Mboya has gone – there are only orderlies in blue-and-green-cheque nylon housecoats passing out the featherweight cutlery, handing over the scratched-opaque plastic beakers.
Oh what a blessing – there’s no messing
. . .
He tries again: How about Doctor Cummins – or Doctor Marcus? This last name is his trump card, surely it will elicit a response,
surely?
Sjoo-shjoob. I’m sorry? He tucks his ear in still further – her cheek is deeply creased, she has been sleeping
on sheets of disordered time
. Sjhoo-shoob.
Or is it jujube?
His ear brushes her purse lips, Please, he says, please Miss Dearth
or whatever your fucking name is
, please try again . . . the wishbone jaw articulates, releasing foul breath and two pellets of sense: Jew-boy. For a moment Busner imagines she has roused only to insult him, then two more pellets follow: he . . . was, before she falls silent.
Of course!
It is not in Busner’s nature or deportment to become a whirl of activity, yet this, he thinks,
is what I am
.
His springing up releases her flywheel – and so her hands
go to it
again: the right rotating, the left adjusting, while he grips his clipboard and plunges straight through the row of chairs. Oi! Garvey leers at him
dying Pakistani
a cuspid of mash in his otherwise toothless mouth – Busner sheds sorries as he sees that someone has switched the television back on, although
it like me lacks vertical hold
: jagged compartments going up and up, a Brucie in every one. He slaps the set’s wood veneer cheek once, twice,
hard
and Fanks, Doc, follows him and his stinging palm – but he doesn’t look back. It’s the Saturday evening before Easter Sunday, he should be
at home
with my wife and kids
, with Miriam, Mark, Daniel and the baby – not here, where in the intensifying gloom the Austin’s headlights sweep across the trompe-l’œil façade of the hospital,
It’s a fake
, because, while it looks like a hospital on this holiday weekend, there won’t be a single doctor in the entire asylum, the three thousand or so lunatics prevented from taking it over only by their own institutionalised inertia. — The vulnerable prey of his own soaring enthusiasm, Busner wrestles the car around the ornamental flowerbed, past the lodge and turns left on to Friern Barnet Road. Settling down into the cold, damp vinyl odour of the car, merging
my own
foam rubber with its
, he sets course for St John’s Wood through another spring squall. He had telephoned again from the nurses’ station to confirm that he was coming and Marcus’s voice – clipped, bored and nasal – said: I thought I made it clear to you when we spoke yesterday evening, Doctor Busner, come whenever you like – there’s nothing else to do. And to Busner, despite Miriam’s censure, it also feels that
there’s nothing else to do . . .
An ultimatum had been set when they quit the Concept House the previous year: No more enthusiasm –
enthusiasm almost got you bloody struck off!
Now it has him in its talons again, gripping him as tightly as he grips the
kyphotic
steering wheel and directs the Austin’s blunt nose to part the rainy spangles that trail across the carriageway. Last night Miriam had taken the children to Seder at her parents’ without him – it was the first time this had happened since she
laid down the law
. He remained poring over Audrey Dearth’s notes at the kneehole desk he had installed in the corner of their bedroom, having failed in his attempt to enthuse her too by showing Miriam the entries made by Doctor A. Marcus that began in 1931 with him effectively dissenting from his colleague’s diagnosis of schizophrenia, and ended in 1941 when, Busner assumed, he had been called up. You see – he had grasped her elbow – here he’s written Enc. Leth. And here he expands on this: I consider it likely this patient may in fact be suffering from the somnolent-ophthalmologic form of encephalitis lethargica. Then here . . . he riffled . . . here, here, here and here! Every time he sees her over the next decade he’s moved to write something – he scrawls across her drug card when she’s been given paraldehyde Not Required. He writes next to another doctor’s observation that her oculogyric crises – whatever they may be – are functional: Nonsense. See, see! Miriam, who has a dip’ psych. of her own,
wouldn’t see
, she only echoed the baby’s full-throated protest from the next-door room: See what? She pulled away from him and said, What is this encephalitis lethargica anyway? Believing he had her hooked, Busner had begun hauling on the cuff of her cardigan, dragging her towards the entry in the musty Britannica he had inherited from Maurice: There – he’d glossed it – end of the First War . . . Came before the Spanish Flu epidemic – maybe a precursor? Thing is, onset Parkinsonian – fevers, night sweats, swoons – but then paradoxical: some lapse into comas, others the reverse, suffering sleeplessness to the point of agrypnia! Maybe a third of ’em died, another third recovered completely, and a further third seemed to get better, but then a year, three – perhaps as many as five later they relap—. She took back her arm, saying, Zack, the baby is crying, she can’t sleep right now. Miriam’s freshly sculpted bob was
polished ebony
in the sharp light of the Anglepoise, Mary Cunt, he thought, then said: Don’t you see? This patient of mine at Friern, she’s just one of scores in the hospital I’ve identified – there must be hundreds more still scattered throughout the big asylums, possibly thousands. Don’t you see, there’s nothing at all wrong with them psychologically – or at least there wasn’t to begin with, now . . . who knows – this was a virus that attacked the brain stem. Miriam had been arrested in the open doorway, her fingers rubbing her own shaven nape
in sympathy?
her hip
still boyish
nudging the wicker laundry basket from which
dripped
a pair of his own underpants
piping hot
. I tell you what I see, she said. I see the same sort of pathetic reductionism at work here that was operating when you fell under your pal Ronnie’s influence . . .
that voice
banishes
my
concentration
. . . Then there was no mental illness to speak of, only different ways of looking at the world. Different – she spat individual syllabic seeds – ex-i-sten-tial phe-nom-en-olo-gies. And now, again, there’s no mental illness – hey presto! All gone! All better! And in its place this encepho-thing. I wonder, Zack – really, I wonder when it’ll occur to you . . . this had been her parting shot, and he
the dumb dog
sat there obediently
waiting for it
. . . that simply wishing madness away won’t make anyone regain their sanity – nobody at all. Soon enough the baby’s crying shuddered to a halt, stoppered by a bottle. He could hear Miriam calling to the boys to get their coats – then car keys jangled, the front door slammed, the starter motor of the Austin coughed and whined, coughed and whined again. He sat there worried she would return to upbraid him some more until, eventually, he heard the car accelerate away – then he began to worry she would never return at all. Now, the same engine fulminating by the lights at Henley’s Corner, Busner sits waiting in the clammy day that Henry carefully removed all the polythene from their uncle’s dry-cleaned suits, then, taking the wire coat hangers, bent them to form the framework upon which the filmy stuff could be stretched. These strange
blooms of the future
were finished off with large amounts of Sellotape before being planted in between the delphiniums in the – at that time – sterile and ordered front garden of the Redington Road house.
He was always good with his hands – still is
. Zack already knew better than to interfere, although it can only have been a few weeks since Henry had returned unexpectedly, mid-term, from Cambridge, filthy, unshaven, his knuckles scabbed, and told his younger brother that the Authorities had concealed an intercontinental ballistic missile silo beneath the quadrangle of his college. His plastic flowers planted, Henry got out the hose and stood there drenching the same spot for an hour, then a second, then a third. He drenched it until the earth liquefied and flowed down the path, out the gate and down the road, bearing privet leaves, twigs and blades of cut grass on its thick and sinuous back. He drenched it until their uncle returned home to find him standing there, his
kaleidoscope eyes on the marmalade sky
, his trousers soaked and mud-spotted. Then Henry began to water Maurice. Soon enough there was a clangorous police Rover – soon after that an ambulance. Uncle Maurice, with his interest in the Elstree Studios and his brittle-coiffed friends, had
had a flare for dramatics
—
although to be fair
he had tried persuasion before, many times.