Umbrella (20 page)

ready to release its psychotic payload
. . .
—
The war had been, Marcus had told him,
a nadir among low points
– the patients weren’t on the ration, they got only job lots of whatever was available. There had been a cargo of corn flour, so that’s what they were given: cornbread, three times a day, until ulcers appeared on stick legs, hair fell from swollen heads and some bright spark realised they had pellagra! A deficiency disease illustrated in the literature by
pictures of
poor Negroes in the Deep South
. The doctors and nurses went to the war – and the only ones left to
serve beneath the campanile
were the patients, who were mostly Jews, for the Hatch had become the laager for any Jew in the LCC area who showed symptoms of mental illness – a thousand of them, who clustered there and waited, as the Victorian buildings, so cheery from the air, sopped up mould from the damp ground. The lavatories blocked up with their dysenteric diarrhoea, the bacon-curing plant fell doubly redundant, the shoe and upholstery workshops lay idle, the brewery and the bakery too – the entire Samuel Smiles pride of the place declined into self-helplessness as the war came to it, stray bombs obliterating three of the villas used to isolate tubercular patients, and another rogue one shattering all the windows at the back of the second range on the women’s side. The war came to the hospital and eventually the patients fled. Busner doubted the existence of spontaneous remission in wartime – it was more likely, he thinks, that the scream of ordnance became
louder than the voices
, so they fled for the safety of the deep-level tube platforms where their miserable faces were indistinguishable from those of the other humped figures. They fled – yet there were always more to take their place: the shattered, the traumatised and the abandoned, vulnerable enough to be preyed upon by the building itself, sucked down into its century-old swamp, where their mouths filled with barbiturates and paraldehyde – for these weren’t rationed either. Outside in the mizzle stood the Unknown Pauper Lunatic,
verdigris in his eyes, so what could he see?
Surely not the world-in-a-droplet at the end of a needle that, plunging down from above, injected glucose into the hospital’s grey hide and so awakened it to the daymare of now – from which it is
impossible to
. . .
desist
. Busner maintains
my cool.
— Well, as I say, the research aspect is only a possibility – and I absolutely appreciate the Board’s position. It’s much more that I think I can do something for these post-encephalitic patients if I can get them in one place. Just now, he smiles, I spend quite a lot of my day running from one end of the hospital to the other –. As soon as the words are out he wishes he could
snaffle ’em
back up
. Whitcomb smells . . .
Brutal – he must be sporty
,
so
slaps it all over to mask the
sweat
acquired behind the chain links
. . .
thwock!
Oh, well played –!
The consultant says tersely: Others of our colleagues seem to manage perfectly well, this is a very, ah, extensive hospital – you knew this when you joined us . . . Busner waits to be certain this is all Whitcomb has to say,
he’s loopy enough to believe in insubordination
, then makes a cleverer gambit: There are costs to consider. I mean, I can’t guarantee anything, but I think that concentrating the post-encephalitics will both make caring for them easier – and therefore cheaper – and also allow us to look into the possibility of discharging some of them –. – Discharging some! Whitcomb flings up his hands and says, Well, good luck to you there! Busner presses what he hopes is his
Advantage Busner
: We’ve had one death on 20 this week already and there’s a second patient who isn’t thriving. I’m not expecting to do this all at once, just piecemeal . . . Up go the hands again, it is, Busner realises, Whitcomb’s
minstrelsy –
Lordy-lordy! You’ve worn me down, man, but one thing, don’t expect me to deal with Admin over this, let alone the medical staff – this is your baby, Busner, you deal with it.

A ticcing baby, a drooling baby, a baby neutered and decerebrised
. . .
It sits on the ward floor, its eyes
fixated on nothing
. The nurses aren’t interested in it,
nor are they
bothered by me, un farfelu
– of which there are
more than enough
at Friern, remember: it isn’t only the lunatics who’re confined to the asylum. It – she – has lost control of everything, but specifically her bowels. She sits on her shit cushion and a cleaner has mopped around her a shiny disc of urine and bleach. This, he thinks not for the first time, must be what sewers smell like: a mélange of detergent and excreta, the sacred and profane confined together in airless tunnels.
Akinesia, apathy, autonomic disturbances
– she sweats, she salivates, Busner senses the
acid churn
in her engorged spleen, he envisions
ulceration
. To counteract these stark facts
I have jargon
– for he has been doing his reading. It is far easier to look upon her
Unknown Pauper Lunatic face
if he puts it in these terms:
profound facial masking
. It is far less uncanny to describe these half-shuttered and unseeing eyes as exhibiting
lid clonus
. Her face is a child’s one, the features clear, unblemished – but sunk deep within a
pimpled wimple
of flesh. It – she –
is
aphonic. –
Missus Gross? Missus Gross? Missus Gross? He pressures her to no avail, for
ve haff no vays of making her talk
. Busner enlists a reluctant nurse and together they heave the woman-mountain upright. While she exhibits diminished flexion of her trunk in addition to dangerous obesity, once she has her legs gathered beneath her she does her bit willingly enough. The trouble is that she cannot retain her standing posture – even in her tarpaulin dress with its bold rectangular pattern she is
no Centre Point
: she lists – and would topple over, were it not for this unprecedented two-to-one staff-to-patient ratio. The nurse sneers: I can’t stand ’ere all afternoon. In point of fact she’s been assisting Busner for five minutes at most. She whines: I’ve the meds to do, Doctor, there’s plenty of others as needs me. Which is a lie:
No one needs you
. So Busner cleans her up himself. In the shit-packed crannies of her
Michelin
thighs he discovers not professional detachment but a deeper engagement, for this is simply
changing a nappy
, something he has done – although not often – to bolster his feminist credentials. The patient lies beached across her specially reinforced catafalque of a bed, and as he sponges around her pudenda she groans a’herrra! and grinds her teeth while her bare feet patter on his shoulders – several flies settle close to her
very bits
, but none of this matters.
She’s mine now, my Twiggy
. . .
grown Redwood
. A bed sore in the region of her hip dressed, that dressing sheathed in underwear chivvied from reluctant staff, Busner fetches his tripod and Bolex camera. He is operating intuitively – there is no clear idea. In Willesden and before, he used photography to present objective images to the deluded with which to counter their disordered ones. To the same end he employed a tape recorder after injecting them with sodium pentothal. Sometimes he guided them on LSD trips – all of it, as he now admits, had only variable results. This is different, however: Leticia Gross is wholly inert, holed up deep inside her voluminous fat, and moving images of her colossal inanition seem entirely besides the point.
And yet
. . .
And yet
. . .
he has a hunch. As with Audrey Dearth, he senses singing within her a crazy polyphony of exaggerated tics, a pickingitupandpickingitupandpickingitup, a hairflickinghairflickinghair-flicking, a scratching and a reaching, and a perseverating. He sets up the camera and she fills the viewfinder: a Matterhorn, her eyes arêtes, her cheeks ice flows. The light is drab, yet he presses the button
and waits . . . and waits
. . .
— Eventually, Busner tells Jonathan Lesley, I got one of the nurses to find me a bulldog clip and some rubber bands and I managed to jerry-rig it to film continuously. This reel is only twenty minutes but these other three are an hour apiece. Lesley wears a leather headband and leather wristbands and leather trousers and nothing else. He has pimples on his shoulders . . .
the spitting image o
f
hers. He sits over the Steenbeck twisting the heavy Bakelite knobs – it is hot in this hutch, the wooden superstructure of an old train shed alongside the mainline into Euston. A mote-filled beam of light infiltrates the blackout cloth pinned over the window, the spools whir faster and faster, while on the editing machine’s screen Leticia Gross’s inscrutability shivers
wind over a pool of flesh
, the very edge of her babyish lip smirks infinitesimally as some whitish thing swells in the bottom-left-hand corner – Ratatatatatat! flaps the film’s tail. La Gio-fuckin’-conda, Lesley says, and that’s twenty minutes of her screen test. Expertly he feeds the next reel on to the spools – it is, Busner thinks, his only expertise. At the Concept House in Willesden, where Lesley flaunted the grand title of Multimedia Coordinator, he expertly
fed himself
into the patients, who weren’t called that. It was this abuse, quite as much as the shit-daubed walls, the broken window panes and the ambulance calls, that led Busner to tire of the whole botched experiment in community therapeutics. Whirrrrr! Leticia’s lip resumes smirking as the whitish thing blooms into a hand that travels halfway to her face before ratatatatatat! That’s the fastest forward this thing’ll go with 16-mil, says Lesley, and Busner, who is leaning with hands on the back of the swivel chair the self-styled guerrilla filmmaker hunches in, wonders if it is because Lesley sweats sexual incontinence
through every pore
that he is experiencing an impulse to
stroke down
from his shoulder to his nipple while
kissing behind
his filthy ear?
Things at home aren’t good – tense,
Miriam eyeing me more and more coldly even as the summer builds
– whirrrrr, the hand continues its
moon shot
, the mouth crinkles, shadows move across the
cratered face
, shadows Busner now realises must be those of staff and other patients passing between Leticia Gross and the window. If, he thinks, if . . . old photographs were so slowly exposed that they captured entire minutes of the past, imprisoning the purely contingent smears of passers-by, and the grimaces of sitters bitten by whalebone and pinched by celluloid on glassy cells coated with silver nitrate, then what can be said of these films? Surely this: that they take the hours we so lackadaisically lose and gather them back up into a permanent and enduring Now. Ratatatatatat! But before this a vision that both men saw: a simpering moue appearing on Leticia Gross’s face while her fingers play with stray hair. Blimey, says Lesley, I think she was flirting with you, Zack. Yes, Busner thinks, a flirtatious gesture that it took her two hours and twenty minutes to make, while moreover – this he speaks aloud – I wasn’t there. Lesley pays no attention and Busner thinks: he will always be in cooperatives, and that’s profoundly wrong because there isn’t a particle of cooperativeness in him, all is savage barter. These sessions on the Steenbeck have had to be traded off against a repeat prescription for Valium . . .
which
is
ill advised
. Lesley’s current cooperative is the London Film one, but Busner can imagine him pushing Maccabees to suicide, or Communards to the barricades –
Enoch would know
which one of the disciples he’d be
. . .
— The
tinfoil
new currency makes a muffled jingle in Busner’s pocket as he strides along. Up here there is neither the abrasive bitumen and pretentious plasterwork of the lower corridor, nor the tacky refurbishment, which, beginning in the central block, is spreading throughout the first range of the hospital,
a plywood virus
self-replicating in the form of strip-lights, painted partitions inset with wire-gridded glass, boxed-in seating units and aggressively neutral linoleum. On one of these padded benches, outside the Patients Affairs Office, Busner sees, as he passes, three middle-aged men who, without their hectoring internal voices, would probably be
chronic complainers
. In their shiny old Burton suits – blue, brown and browner – they appear to have been recently discharged from one army, only to find themselves in this: one that shambles rather than marches, arms permanently sloped. With their cruelly knotted nylon ties and waistcoats of many buttons . . .
they are already
out of joint
– the future is arriving
open-collared
and with a
zzzzip!
Not that it can be seen coming from up here: the first-floor corridor Busner walks along would be considered painfully long in any other establishment, but here it is a mere connective . . .
linking madness to melancholy
. Past the doors to wards 24, 25, 26 and – confusingly – 54 he strides. At the far end the corridor he turns right and from here Busner has a view down on to a cylindrical aviary in which a clutch of budgies and parakeets strum at the wire.
Such cruel constraint!
the bridling of all instinct into
peck-peck-peck,
flightless wing-beats
and a head-down clawing across the
roof of their world
. . .
He must go on, conscious that only now that he has internalised the hospital’s layout can he properly apprehend its fabric: the metrical repetition of lancet window, buttress and embrasure, covered uniformly by a cracked salt-pan of off-white paint. Which is worse? he wonders. The lavish boredom of applying it or the ennui of its neglect? On he goes with a steady slap-slap-slap
along this sap
towards the Medium Secure Unit at the far end. Behind its steel door he can hear faint cries and raucous singing: Je-sus blood ne-ver failed me yet! And he wonders if in there are boys
with spirit
, or if it is only the usual gurning and head-banging –
the
bottom of the pops
. Still, better perhaps than the chronic wards, which have
a totalitarian lack of imagination
, being as they are
rectangles within rectangles within rectangles
, whose inmates are subjected to the rectilinear punishment of having their cigarette packets and matchboxes taken from them. Pausing by another window as he turns the final corner into the forty-yard stretch leading to Ward 20, Busner glances across the
cane-stitching
and the tarpaper roofs of the Gardening Department. Beyond this there’s an orchard of stunted apple trees – a month previously he had gone to walk in their shade, only to discover that none was higher than his shoulder. A truck parked on the road alongside the orchard is being disburdened of crates full of Corona, and after this there are only a few more annexes and auxiliary buildings before the wall that separates the hospital’s grounds from its sloping