Umbrella (2 page)

plip-plopping
into the commode
while up above the cistern
splutters unceasing
. . .
That first suicide, which he had not only looked upon but also helped Mboya – the nice nurse – to cut down, had suspended herself from the completely reliable pipe – and so in death she was wedged in the awkward gap between it and a white-painted window that had been halved lengthwise when this cubicle was partitioned into existence –
yet more evidence – if any were needed – of how the hospital altered its own cellular structure to create new morphologies for new pathologies to be diagnosed by psychiatrists accredited by new professional associations
. . .
while the inmates remained the same,
patient only in the way she now was: inert, with no sign of her bowels having been emptied apart from . . .
that smell
. Instead, her papery skin,
oh so fine
, crinkled into the flannelette of a too-big nightie. She was, Busner had thought,
a dead dry moth, its cellular structure decaying inside of this far larger one.

.
. .
Apart from that smell:
faecal
,
certainly – but
antiseptically chemical too, with a sharp tang of floor polish
— a still more intense blending of the odour that emanated from the pores, mouths and hidden vents of the inmates confined to the first psychiatric ward Busner had ever visited, more than a decade before, where he had
student-foolishly
inquired, What’s that smell? And been told it was paraldehyde,
a liquid sedative as limpidly brown as the state it was intended to induce . . .
in Henry
,
in
Napsbury
. . .
where he still is . . . my brother lest I forget
. Paraldehyde – how much of it had been poured down throats in asylums throughout the past half-century?
Gallons . . . demijohns . . . barrels? Hosed
into them, really, to
put out the fire
. And now what was left –
this rain inside the building, this rusty old rain falling down from the saturated plaster to the asphalt floor
.

All this had jetted Busner forward
sea-sluggishly through the greenybriny
,
the sounds of crying, sobbing and cackling amplified by the third-of-a-mile corridor, distorted by its scores of alcoves, then spun by its rifling so that, with unerring accuracy, they strike him in one ear and revolve around his head to the other . . .
Axoid: Bold as Love
.
Along comes Zachary, my tremolo arm vibrating as I sing to my own don’t-step-on-the-cracks-self
. . .
past the
HAIRDRESSER AND THE SCULPTURE ROOM
, then out from the main block of the hospital towards
ART THERAPY
and the
REMINISCENCE ROOM
– the last Whitcomb’s own humane
innovation. In this section of the corridor the light from the south-facing windows gives him the sensation of trundling lousily along a trench,
paraldehyde . . . paral- . . . parados!
that was the word for it – the side of the trench where they stood to
fire their machine gun, its traverse . . . the airing court, its ticcing picking off the enemy that comes bellowing across the dormant grass: madness – a banshee. Along comes Zachary
. . .
Not that he has had the corridor to himself – there’s been a steady stream of staff and a few purposeful patients on their way to buy pathetic sundries or attend therapy sessions. A few purposeful – but many more let out from their wards simply to wander the sprawling building. There was one platoon
– or so he’d been told – who marched from the Camden Social Services office in the north-west to the Haringey Social Services office in the north-east, then headed south to the lower corridor, and tramped the entire length of it before heading north once more, and so completing a mile-long circuit of the hospital’s insides which they would make again and again, until ordered to halt for food by their bellies, or for rest by their feet, or for medication . . .
by
their keepers
. Yes, there have been these patients in their charity cardigans soiled at the hem, thick socks sloughing from thin ankles, their eyes cartooned by the wonky frames of their National Health glasses – for whom
a corridor is a destination
. None of them is real – nor remotely credible, not compared to this:
Along comes Zachary . . . the me-voice, the voice about me, in me, that’s me-ier than me . . . so real, ab-so-lute-ly, that might not self-consciousness itself be only a withering away of full-blown psychosis?
This must, Busner thinks, occur to everyone, every day, many times, whether or not they are walking along a corridor so long that it would challenge the sanity of
a once-born, a cheery Whitman
.
Still . . . that way madness about madness lies
. . .
a madness that has already diverted his career from the mainline before it got started, sending him
rolling into the siding that connects to this laager
, with its
buttoned-up soul-doctors
and Musselmen, all of them compelled to serve under the campanile, the water tower, and the chimney from the stained brickwork of which a smooch of yellow smoke licks the grey sky over North London
.
Along comes Zachary
. . .
the corridor is narrow – ten feet at most – yet none of the human traffic thus far has detained him until now — when he is fixated by one transfixed. It is a patient – a woman, an old woman . . .
a very old woman, so bent – so kyphotic
, that upside down she faces the sagging acrylic belly of her own cardigan and
vigorously assents
to it
. This is all that Busner can see: the back of her
nodding-dog
head, the whitish hair draggling away from two bald patches – one at the crown, the second a band across the rear of her cranium. At once, he thinks of twitchers he has seen on his chronic ward, screwing
their heads into the angle between the headrest and the back of their allotted armchair – twitchers, wearing themselves away as opportunity
hammers
away at the inside of the television screen and applause comes in monotonous waves. She is at once a long way off and close enough for him to manhandle. After the eruptions – and there are many lifetimes of afterwards – it settled down on him, an understanding soft and ashy, that all the important relationships in his life – with his uncle Maurice, with Alkan, with Sikorski and the other Quantity Theorists, with his wives – definitely with his children – were like this:
fondling familiar, their breath in my nostrils caries-sweet, sugar-sour – yet also radiophonically remote, their voices bleeping and blooping across the lightyears
.

They take a long time to reach one another – the psychiatrist and the old woman patient. To see her, to
see her
properly, Busner has to wade through a Brown Windsor of assumptions about the elderly insane. — Moral aments, McConochie had called them in the subdued and amphitheatral lecture room at Heriot-Watt, neither knowing nor caring – so far as the young Zack could see – whether this malaise was born of heredity, anoxia, syphilitic spirochetes, shell shock – or some other malfunction in the meaty mechanism
altogether. The dopamine hypothesis was beyond hypothetical to McConochie,
the dope
, whose favoured expository method was to get a chronic patient in from the back wards and
put them through their hobbling paces on the podium
. This, a dour travesty of Charcot’s mesmerism, for it was his students who became hypnotised by their professor’s monotonous description of the schizophrenic to hand, whose own illness rendered her altogether incapable of evoking the harrowing timbre
of her own monotonous voices. McConochie, the worn-out pile
of whose
fustian mind
would be bared – as he wandered from lectern to steamy radiator and back – by his inadvertent references to general paralysis of the insane, or even dementia praecox, obsolete terms that meant far less than the vernacular: loony – yet which served their purpose, inculcating his students – Busner too – with the obstinate conviction that any long-stay inpatient above a certain age was afflicted not with a defined pathology but a wholly amorphous condition. — It is this loonystuff, at once fluid
and dense, that Busner wades through, and that, besides clogging up the interminable corridor, also lies in viscous puddles
throughout the extensive building and its annexes. The old woman’s head
vibrates beyond my reach: a component on an assembly line just this second halted by the cries of shop stewards
. . .
She tics, and her
crooked little feet, shod in a child’s fluffy
bedroom slippers, kick and kick at a lip of linoleum tile that has curled away from the asphalt.
Kick and kick: micro-ambulation
that yet takes her nowhere. Busner thinks, inevitably, of a clockwork toy ratcheting on the spot,
a plastic womanikin doomed to topple over
. . .
but she doesn’t, and so he comes on, his thighs
heavy, aching
as he forces his way through his own clinical indifference.

Right beside her now, bent down like her
so that he can peer round her palsied shoulder and into her face, which is . . .
profoundly masked: rough-bark skin within which frighteningly mobile eyes have been bored
. – Shocked, he withdraws, and the old woman is at once
far away again, shaking and ticcing, her fingers scrabbling, her arms flexing I’m an ape man I’m an ape-ape
. . .
Perceptible flames of movement ignite on her left-hand side, in the middle of the densest thickets
of akinesia, a paralysis not only of the muscles . . .
but of the will itself – abulia?
then flare up one arm, across the shoulders, before
exploding into ticcy sparks and so dying away . . . Torticollis
comes to Busner
uselessly
– and such is the parasympathetic drama he has just witnessed that he is amazed when two auxiliary staff, their black curly hair
aerated cream
in white nylon snoods, casually part to circumvent them – . . . I tellim mek a gurl an offer she’ll ’preciate, their remarks volleying between him and the old woman . . . See, ’e cummup ’ere mos days . . . – before they reunite and carry on, oblivious. —
Electric woman waits for you and me
. . .
with Nescafé and a marijuana cigarette
burning rubber
after the International Times event at the Roundhouse. Somewhere in the bedsit grot of Chalk Farm . . . Busner had taken the
wrinkled fang trailing venom
, his eye caught by Ronnie Laing and Jean-Paul Sartre paperbacks stacked in the brick-and-board bookcase . . .
nauseating
. Her boyfriend’s hair hung down lanker than the bead curtain she clicked through with the mugs. She was in velvet – the boyfriend
in
a sort of hessian sack
. Was it Busner who had been time-travelled here from a past as jarringly austere as his test-card-patterned sports jacket and drip-dry tie, or, to the contrary, they who had been op-art-spiralled from a pre-industrial opium dream of foppery and squalor?
Later
. . .
she frigidly anointed him with tiger balm and then they coupled on a floor cushion covered with an Indian fabric that had tiny mirrors sewn into its brocade. The boyfriend hadn’t minded
gotta split, man
and Busner was split . . .
a forked thing
digging
its way inside her robe
. She fiddled
with bone buttons at her velvety throat. His skin and hairs snagged
on the mirrors, his fingers
did their best
with her nipples. She looked down on me from below
. . .
one of his calves lay cold on the floorboards. There was
the faint applause of pigeons
from outside the window. — His strong inclination is to touch the old woman, his touch, he thinks, might free her from this entrancement – but first: Are you all right? Can I help you?
Nothing
. The upside-down face
faces me down
, the eyes slide back and away again, but their focal point is either behind or in front of his face, never upon it. – Can you tell me which your ward . . . is? He grasps her arm – more firmly than he had intended
acute hypertonia wasted old muscles yet taut, the bones beneath acrylic sleeve, nylon sleeve, canvas skin . . . thin metal struts
. The fancy new quartz watch on his own plump wrist turns its shiny black face to his as her malaise resonates through him . . .
Along comes Zachary
. . .
he wonders: Am I blurring?
Ashwushushwa, she slurs. What’s that? Ashuwa-ashuwa. One of her bright eyes leers at the floor. He says: Is it my shoes – my Hush Puppies? Her eye films with disappointment – then clears and leers pointedly at the floor again. She is drooling, spit pools at the point of her cheekbone and stretches unbroken to where it doodles on the tile with a
snail’s silvering
. At long last . . .
slow, stupid Zachary
bends down and presses down the lip of the tile so that the toe of the kicking slipper scoots over it. Then . . .
she’s off!
Not doddering but pacing with smoothness and fluidity, her shoulders unhunching, her neck unbending and pivoting aloft her head as her arms swing free of all rigidity. – It took so long for Busner to reach her, so long for him to decide to touch her, that he’s agog: she should be right in front of him not twenty yards off and
falling down the long shaft of the corridor. Except
. . .
already her gait is becoming hurried then
too fast
. . .
festination
, another uncalled for Latinism, pops into his mind as the old woman is
swept away
from me on the brown tide
. . .
Is this, he wonders, a contradictory side-effect of her medication? The lizardish scuttle that counterpoints Largactil’s leaden tread? Because, of course, it is unthinkable that she shouldn’t be dosed with some form of chlorpromazine – everyone is. The drug saturates the hospital in the same way that paraldehyde formerly soaked the asylum, although a few isolated voices – Busner’s muted one among them – have, while not doubting its efficacy, its . . . humanity . . . questioned its necessity. For all the good this does, because there’s no damning its sepia-sweet flow, a single wave that nonetheless drowns out many, many voices. Not having seen quite so many chronic mental patients in one place for some years, Busner has been struck, since arriving at Friern, by
the chloreography
, the
slow-shoe-shuffle of the chorus from which an occasional principal choric breaks free into a high-kicking and windmilling of legs and arms. Noticed this tranquillising – but also become aware of a steady background pulse of involuntary movement: tardive dyskinesia that deforms the inmates’ bodies, flapping hands, twitching facial muscles,
jerking
heads
. . .
They are possessed, he thinks, by ancient subpersonalities, the neural building-blocks of the psyche . . .
She is gone
– or, at least, too far down the corridor to be seen any more
a human particle
. Busner, who is interested in most things, has read about linear accelerators, and so he takes a green-capped Biro from the row ranged across his breast pocket – green for his more imagistic aperçus, red for clinical observations, blue for memories, black for ideas – then writes in the notebook he has taken out and flipped open:
What will she smash into? What will happen then? All the subhuman parts of her – can they be observed?
in the long dark corridor where they play all sorts:
skippin’
and boats and
hoopla-for-chokkolits
. Mary Jane comes to
smackem
, Lookit the skirtin’! she cries. In the passage it’s
allus
dark – so
dark inna coalhole
. Illumination comes only from a fanlight above the door, comes on sunny days in a single oblique beam a
Jacob’s ladder
that picks out a
burnin’ bush
on the floorboards that Stan and Audrey jump into and out of – Yer put yer leff hand in, yer put yer leff arm out, Shake it a little, a little, then turn yersel about, the little ones, they are, going
Loobeloo, loobeloo
, but Bert just laughs at them: You’re rag-arses, you aynt got no proper cloves, juss smocks, and he swings open the front door and goes out on the step to play with his marbles . . . his
wunner . . . his fiver an’ sixer inall
. He has them all neatly wrapped up in one of their father’s noserags, wrapped up and tied in a little bindle. He sits on the front step and gets them out and places them in a row. Audrey peeks from behind the door and sees
claybrown, marblewhirl
,
glasstripe
with
sunrays
shining through it
so pretty
she cannot resist it when he goes down the four steps to sit at the kerb and twist fallen straw – but
grabs it
and darts back inside. Stan’s eyes are wide, Yul catchit, he says, yul catchit. They stand in the
burnin’ bush
looking at the striped marble glowing in Audrey’s palm and neither of them can move – Yer put yer leff leg in, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out,
yer put yer leff leg out
. . .
but it won’t go
no ferver
, it is stuck there kicking and kicking against an invisible barrier, while, terrorised by the imagining of what Bert
will do to me
, Audrey’s head shakes,
Yer put yer noddle in, yer put yer noddle out
. . .
The door crashes back on its hinges and there he is: Where’s me stripey! He howls, then charges for her,
Yer put yer whole self in, yer put yer whole self out
. . .
He grabs her wrist so hard she feels the bones grating together inside it, then twists it so that the fist opens helplessly. A’wah-wa-wa! A’wah-wa-wa! she blubs. Audrey’s big brother’s starting eyes are fixed on his beloved marble – but hers, hers, are equally held by the peculiar bracelet he wears, its golden segments
fiery
in the
burnin’ bush
, and on the back of it a huge black jewel
Mother’s jet beads
. Audrey staggers, almost falls, bends double to escape the
hurt
and is caught there feeling the long
Vulcanised
strip of tension that loops round her middle and stretches in either direction the length of the passage
an inner tube pulled tight round the rim of a bicycle wheel
.