Umbrella (37 page)

Chaplinesque festination
to form
a silent murmuration of people
. . .
On the third day Busner had given Leticia a Biro and a large stiff-backed exercise book that she could prop against her sugarloaf belly. He had done so – he now accepts – in expectation of some redemption: her purging herself through clarity of expression, eloquence –
all
the usual rot
. Now, opening the marbled covers, he’s overwhelmed to discover the impetuosity of her thought has been replicated in her script. The first few pages are patterned with a dense and incised cuneiform that presses
Brailleishly
into the verso, the next recto and several more besides – but from leaf-to-leaf
this convolvulus throws out suckers
, at first to the lines above and below, then further afield. Ten pages on an entry headed with yesterday’s date consists of only four and a half words, Imusthaveanene
m
— – the Latin absence of spacing corresponding to her
splutterance
– that take up an entire page, which, when he turns it expecting confirmation of her paranoia, is followed by a perfectly formed
a
stretching top to bottom and side to side,
Giotto’s circle
. . .
He isn’t altogether surprised, because the bizarre – and shameless – anal fixation that Leticia Gross’s journal reveals has already been relayed to him by the appalled nurses, and at that precise moment is echoed by her hoarsely bellowing, Imusthaveanenema! Imusthaveanenema! Imusthaveanenema! the imprecation following him – blushing, shamed – as he beats a hasty retreat from her nook, turns tail and speeds towards the nurses’ office. Wits are collected into two lots as Busner fiddles filter-tip from foiled sachet. 1. I could, he thinks, alter her dosage of L-DOPA and maybe try her out on some amantadine to see if this has any impact on these . . . these . . . side effects. 2. The perfection of that
a
is surely, he hypothesises, another facet of the symmetrising – it is diagrammatic of a smaller
a
– or a larger one. Mister Ostereich –
if he’d stayed in Vienna he could’ve been part of its School
. . .
had told Busner there were times when for him any symbols – words, numerals, pictorial – were experienced as a sort of map, one that if concentrated on became a map of a map that was itself a map of a further map. This strikes the psychiatrist – sucking in, holding, eyes pricking with teary relief – as possibly the phenomenological correlate of the post-encephalitic mind physically mapping the manifold under- and overlays of its own hellish pathology. Immured in glass, Paaaah! the substantial cloud of dun smoke releases him: a tubbyish genie in his early thirties wearing a wrinkled white coat who props on the corner of a steel desk painted institutional grey-green in the distant reaches of a North London mental hospital while Evonne Goolagong thrills the Centre Court crowd by
flashing her frilly knickers –.
Hephzibah Inglis snaps open the door and bustles inside in a flurry of annoyance. – ’Oo say you can take me fags like dat, Doc-tor – go buy yer own! I spec’ you earn what? Four mebbe five times my pay – you should feel shame with yersel’, and she snatches up the pack of cigarettes and tucks it away in his tunic pocket, For fuck’s sake d’you want a number-bloody-one? In the kissing pink of dawn Stanley sees a lipstick smear of privation bow across Bobby’s white face. To cheer him up as they make their way into the eerie woodland of splintered trunks and fractured boughs, Stanley puts on the toffee nose of Grahame-White and says, I say, old fellow, what a splendid show! But only Feldman, who’s hefting along Vicky, manages a laugh. Stanley knows why: laughter can be nothing but
a cackle around the Devil’s cauldron
– the smoke from lachrymatory shells clings to the shredded foliage, while at treetop height
woolly bears
detonate with flatly malevolent crumps, shedding shrapnel and
dirty black fur
. — The section had come up through Naours and Saint-Gratien, stopping from time to time to consult the field-issue maps that were, Stanley thought, maps of maps that were themselves only the maps of all this . . .
fucking confusion
. They’d swung along the chalky road to Albert, where they’d been issued with steel helmets and side arms. Now, as he stumbles over roots and tears himself from brambly embraces – dragged down by the deadweight of his pack, Vicky’s spare barrels and the Colt .45 – Stanley marvels at the sentimental feelings he harbours for the Redoubt – the almost leisurely stand-tos, with such homely noises as the cheeping of baby rats, the breezy rattle of tin cans caught on the wire, and the very occasional dull whiplash of a Jerry sniper’s bullet. At Crucifix Corner, where the bulk of the infantry were wheeled left towards Thiepval, the section had tended right in the direction of Fricourt, then slowed, picking its way between the
locust masses
of men
feeding
upon the land
. . .
The barrage is due to be lifted any minute now, and, although the machine gunners will hang back, the fear stirs in their guts, churning them, so that one after another Stanley’s comrades fall out to puke their burgoo and the
sweet ghost
of their rum ration. Stanley alone remains free from nausea – true, he feels its accompanist fingering his throat with great sensitivity, and so is able to scent the difference between the shells as they shriek overhead towards the German lines. He sniffs judiciously at the
pitch-pine vapours
that drift down from every second or third one, and which he identifies as . . .
eau de dud.
Not that it’ll make any difference –
we all know, they all know, even the fucking top brass know by now that artillery fire, no matter how accurate, can never breach wire.
The projectiles plunge down and the wiry embroidery hoicks up lazily to expose for long and salacious moments
earth-soiled bloomers
, then tumbles just as lazily back into place, only a little disordered by the violence of the assault. He feels fear –
I’m no Enigmarelle, no automaton
. He feels fear, and in the din that jumbles up his works – the cogs, gears and springs that keep him moving relentlessly forward – he rummages for the sureties of childhood:
If you ’ave any more, Missus Moore, I dunno what we’ll do, I’m sure! Our cemetery’s so small, There’ll be no room fer ’em all! Don’t ’ave any more, Missus Moore –!
The Long Toms and howitzers firing from miles back have stopped. The curved and delicate eggshell of light fractures with the reedy pee-eeet! of officers’ whistles. They drop down into a sunken lane, passing the heavy ammo boxes from hand to hand.
One we did earlier:
a staff officer lies back against the bank, his dead face quite composed, his ridiculous cockade embellished naturally by fronds of bracken. There’s nothing but
Tickler’s jam, Tickler’s jam!
where his bottom half
oughta be
– nearby lies his enormous Percheron horse, quite still but without a mark on it – which is some sort of relief, because now the barrage has lifted they can all hear the screaming of horses and mules hit by the premature bursts of . . .
those fucking duds
. Stanley feels fear as he quick-steps carefully between the cloddish hooves – he conjures up the Old Man taking the lead along the lane, the skirts of his rabbit-skin coat flapping, the friendly smoke from his seegar chucking jolly little clouds over his shoulder that sport in the steadily strengthening sunlight. Corbett, who has the mastery of map work, consults the small square of
where-we-are
and they mount the bank again, back up into the rotten-egg stench of the gassed wood. Stanley feels fear – he knows fear: the breathless terror of numbly pulling on the flannel bag, becoming enshrouded in chemical reek, the
where-we-were
reduced to a small square of mica that frames popping eyes and gaping mouths, while diaphragm heaves, chest shudders,
head spins with the . . . effort . . . not . . . to . . . breathe –! Paaaah!
and the world disappears into his own mist. Stanley feels fear – but he feels hunger more. The worst thing about this entire fucking war, he thinks as they skulk towards the light and the relentless chattering of the enemy Maxims, is the lousy fucking poverty – the eleven measly bob a week, the hard biscuit teeming with weevils, the piss-green tea, the chatting along the seams of shit-browned long johns, the bully beef – and the rats, cleverer than the men, crawling on their heads while they slept to get food bags hung from joists. Had it been a dream, or was it when he’d served briefly as a batman? The
piss-yellow champagne foaming in real glass goblets, bloody big bowls of rhubarb, cold meats fanned out on plates, or else quivering in aspic. A phonograph set up, triplets of piano notes d’doo-doo-dooing from its flaring muzzle. An entire salmon – naked, boned and laid out on cucumber petticoats –!
Ha! He laughs aloud at his own idiotic maundering – for no officer, no matter how well supplied with cigars from Fox’s, cocaine pep pills from Harrods and the latest Rudyard Kipling or G. C. Cook from Hatchard’s, could lay his lily-white hands on a whole salmon! No, they’d partaken of mutton chops, right enough, with new potatoes, peas and string-fucking-beans . . . – Some more, sir? As he manipulated a pair of spoons, in their eyes the least of individual minds . . .
a wop waiter at Simpson’s
, Stanley had prayed devoutly for a Jack Johnson to
KO them there and then, silence the scratching tune and their daft banter
. He had been born to soar aloft, yet here he was
dishing it up to these pink-faced shavers. – More beans, old bean? Ha-ha! – underground, in a tomb-in-waiting
. One side of Stanley’s pack drags heavier. Down at the bottom of it, stuffed under the shit-stained long johns and the scrounged bully, is a pair of Luger pistols wrapped in a German officer’s greyback and shoved in a pickelhaube. Pausing to catch his breath, his hand laid tenderly on a deep and
evilly jagged gash in thou, gentle hornbeam
, Stanley identifies the helmet’s blunt spike digging into his kidneys
thru’pence, frying in their own blood and piss
. . .
His comrades hang on to such things as souvenirs – but these aren’t: they’re
arms for a future rising
. He sees himself still in uniform but wearing the pickelhaube – he stands on the front steps while the parlour maid, distressed by this apparition, trips away to find the master of the house, who comes to the door with a sheaf of official papers in one hand and a horsehair flyswatter in the other. Well, what d’you want my man? asks Albert De’Ath, feigning not to recognise his brother. Stan raises the Luger and holds its barrel against Bert’s
raw oyster
. Four million rifles, Stan says matter-of-factly, two hundred and fifty thousand machine guns, fifty-two thousand aeroplanes, twenty-five thousand artillery pieces and one hundred and seventy million shells,
Am I right, sir?
Albert for once takes no umbrage, only bows meekly to the inevitable. Stepping over his surprisingly corpulent dead body, Stan strolls along the hallway to what he supposes is a breakfast room. Here a potted palm cascades on a stand, and rack of freshly made toast steams on an oval mahogany table. Stan takes a piece, butters it with an ivory-handled knife, then
pushes it whole into my dry mouth – the corners stabbin’ the insides of me cheeks
. . .
It tastes of boot blacking – and cordite, beyond any shadow of doubt he is scared – terror is the ground
vibrating beneath my feet
, ground that heaves a hundred yards in front of where the section has taken cover,
its piecrust buckles, earth-juice spurts flashing tastily