Umbrella (44 page)

.
Presently
. . .
there is this hand pressed on hot glass, this hand through which the sunlight glows, illuminating
a schoolroom map of Imperial possessions
– childhood freckles and oleum burns from the Arsenal have merged their territories into these liver-spotted
protectorates
and
dominions.
Now
. . .
there is this hand, swooping angelically past well-to-do house fronts –
newly built yet already
frighteningly aged
– each with its unkempt garden and motor car garishly painted red, blue, or green. Audrey whispers to the forlorn fingers, We’ve got ’ere at last to Muswell Hill – we must visit Uncle Henry, discover if it’s true about the General. She whispers again: Move – and they do, feebly tracing the contours of
a great monstrous absurd place
that stands out on the skyline –
a burlesque block with
huge truncated pyramids at either corner
. . .
The minibus rounds the final bend from Duke’s Avenue and Dunphy responds to the shabby grandeur of the Alexandra Palace – or so it seems to Busner – by pulling up sharply in front of its bombastic portico. Too sharply: the patients and their carers rock and roll in their seats beneath the sunken stare of its cyclopean oculus, and the high-hat of its baseless pediment. Have a care! Busner cries, and Dunphy pulls parodically on his forelock. – Sorry, sorr . . . It’s always, Busner thinks, the fucking Irish. He doesn’t have time to bother with this – he’s up and assisting his prize enkies down from the vehicle, watching them emerge tottering into the daylight, living dead only recently risen from their graves, whose dentures couldn’t manage human flesh . . .
unless it was puréed for them
. Marcus was right

there’s nothing doing at Ally-Pally. Under the colossal biscuit-barrel vaulting of the roof the immense building is hollowed out, empty except for a café and roller-skating rink of varnished pine upon which leotarded teenage girls scour around and around. The excursion party from Friern wanders this way, then that, smelling the mustiness of a different kind of institution. They stop to marvel at the enormous organ, with its three-storey-high pipes – Busner doesn’t mind, he’s only concerned to point out to the doubting Marcus how very normal the enkies are – they do not tic or jerk, their footsteps are halting, true, yet only to the same degree as any others of the elderly who have been long confined. Marcus, unimpressed, turns away from him, devotes his attentions to Voss, Ostereich and McNeil, taking them by the arm in turns, gently guiding them through the echoing chambers, speaking to each of them of the great changes wrought upon the world since their immurement. Always he’s careful to relate these momentous external events to those smaller alterations in their own regime that may have trickled down to their buried awareness. Do they recall, he asks, some of their fellow inmates going out to work on London County Council farms? This, he tells McNeil, would’ve been in the late twenties, after the great convulsion of the General Strike, when it was believed – in the wider world as much as the restricted one of Colney Hatch – that energetic employment prevented the diseased mind from dwelling on its fantasies – lascivious or socialistic. Or how about the red and yellow cards that some of their fellows used to wear about their necks – did they remember this practice? Did they register its falling away? They might be pleased to learn that this was but the bureaucratic evidence of a revolution in hygiene, sanitation and the elimination of the diseases that had decimated their peers. — Observing Marcus, so doltish in his interactions with the fully socialised, yet capable of assisting these post-encephalitics with such delicacy and finesse, Busner reflects yet again that the psy professions are
in and of themselves mental pathologies
. He thinks of the neurotic psychoanalysts he knows, for whom anal-retention is the rule rather than the exception, of how they are scarcely able to function outside their consulting rooms – where all is static for year after year, and such human contact that they must have is conducted neutrally with the back of a head.
Why did I offer up mine for this botched execution, les quatre cents coups of Mmm . . . How does that make you feel? and always – always! – Mummy.
He ponders again the laboratory psychologists, with their clipboards and galvanometers, measuring the skin that
they’ve set crawling
with their own bloodless reduction of wayward contingency to the stifling, the statistical. As for psychiatrists such as Marcus, who’ve spent their entire working lives attempting – in many cases sincerely – to empathise with patients who’re
so far out as to be otherworldly
, surely what success they may’ve had can only be because they’re
nothing but a stranger in this world, I’m nothing but a stranger in this world
. . .
—
Rusting, pitted and eccentric ballbearings, the ageing patients wobble from one tarry ramp to the next as they debouche from this Babylonian bagatelle. Mboya and Inglis steer Audrey Death and Helene Yudkin to a bench that faces out from the Acropolis and has an unobstructed view of the city below, Busner and Marcus settle the male patients alongside, and Dunphy, with jobsworth’s reluctance, goes back to the café to fetch teas and sandwiches.
State of emergency is a profound misnomer when it comes to describing the situation here
– there’s no ambulance clangour or tinkle of broken glass, only orderly processions of houses that mount up the hillsides, while overhead sail flotillas of clouds, perfectly intact, and towards Eltham mares’ tails flick at the Kentish downs. No, no state of emergency – only the pathos of a closed children’s zoo, a drained boating lake, a crazy-golf course padlocked in chain restraints –
there’s nothing for the Rip Van Winkles to do but survey this city as strange to them as Peking or Padua
. . .
Survey it, and, if it could be arranged,
eat good old-fashioned fish and chips all wrapped up in the Pentagon Papers
. . .
Spotting the concrete ack-ack mounts mushrooming in the defunct boating lake, Helene Yudkin says, What on earth? undoing Marcus’s cat’s cradle of integrative gestalt. That . . . he says wearily, and Busner sees in the old psychiatrist’s eyes Chamberlain, with the useless rearmament of his umbrella. Panzer divisions bucket across Marcus’s high forehead, Pearl Harbor seethes in one hairy ear, Nagasaki in the other, the railway spurs end in the region of his pot-belly, and he pants asthmatically, unable to expel
the good news of the Holocaust she’s slept through
. . .
Audrey,
blown plastic shell warm
with the tea of life, thinks only of Gilbert and his pinnacles of glass and steel – towers she sees rising from the centre of London, and which are surmounted by the comical silhouettes of
oil lamps, coal scuttles and hatboxes!
Gilbert had prophesised green fields and sylvan groves in between his phalansteries, but Audrey can make out only this: that the orderly city she remembers from her youth – its huckabuck woven from street, square and crescent – has rucked up and torn . . .
worse, been put away damp, so that mildew spreads across it
. . .
And to spare her own distress at this neglect of civic good form, she lets her head fall back so the mighty drapes of sky-blue chiffon may sweep into her. Up there a white needle – sharp, unwavering – draws a fraying thread through the heavens,
a godly thimble drill
that culminates in
an unholy boom!
followed by the trickling down of earth dislodged from between trusses and falling against galvanised iron, a sound that more than any other Stanley has come to associate with his new Morlock’s existence. There is no longer fearful apprehension of the shells homing in, nor frenzied calculations to be made of their point of impact, for the final blow has already been struck:
All are dead – all are buried
. The party pauses in the tunnel, the lights – electrical in this section that passes below the German lines – have flickered and then died . . .
Why don’t you feel fear?
The question flaps around them all in the darkness –
touches them, surely, with
its leathery wings?
At Stan’s side crouches Michael, who smells wholesomely of hay and horses – there is a frankness to his very sweat. The others Stan isn’t so sure about: before they left their burrow for this raid on the surface, these men all donned Adrian helmets – the modified sort, from Verdun, with attached masks of thin steel strips and noseguards. These they had still further adjusted, by gluing bits of fur to them and soldering on brass buttons, until they resembled the headdresses of tribal savages. Still more savage were the bandoliers worn about their naked shoulders, the entrenching tools and saw-toothed bayonets hung from the leather belts slung low on their bare hips. Up until this moment Stan had been growing – yes, that was it, growing – in the deep dugout, just as before that he must have been growing alone beneath the earth:
a tuber . . . or a human in embryo?
He had slept in the burrow and woken again – eaten and dozed off once more. How many times this had been repeated he could not have said: men came and went in this cavern hollowed out from the darkness, but there seemed no pattern to their movements, no sense of their having been ordered to do so. The shameless bookworm was joined by a young Prussian, equally nude, whose head was shaven apart from a suede divot on the very top – duelling scars barred his hollow cheeks, and on his bare arm he sported a death’s head armlet. Ja ja, danke, he said when passed a banger speared on a toasting fork. The only constant in this flickery hollow was
the big nigger who did the cooking, Jack Johnson – now we know where e’s bin
. . .
His frame may have been as massive as a boxer’s, but his expression was studious, his lips quite thin. His hair had grown out into
the woolly ball of his forefathers
. . .
He was always there – and, although the others came and went, they proved their own constancy through the touches they bestowed, for the underground men had no more propriety than they did modesty, rubbing skin on skin, groping, pinching and bussing one another – they even nipped,
puppies inna sack
. . .
They–they bin all broke doon, Michael said of his comrades, so thissus is ’ow they poot themsel together again – wi this pantomime. But iss allus a pantomime, ain’t it, Stan – the brass wi’ their braid an swaggerin’ sticks, ministers wi’ shiny toppers – t’King inall . . . — Now, in the blacked-out tunnel, with the last blast still reverberating, Michael answers him: Fear, aye, fear’s a foony thing. I coom down through one of them big craters in the redoubt, durin’ t’second shindy at Wipers – whole boonch more coom down through Messines – thass ’ow it is: t’bigger t’charge, t’more as gets buried –. Another ferocious crump! and this time the electric bulbs swell back to life so that the party can resume its shuffle up the tunnel, towards the surface. Ewe might say, Michael continues, his words mixed up with the dust, that all that time we spent oop top was by way of bein’ trainin’ – trainin’ fer down ’ere. Oop there t’Lawd could see uz – t’brass could see uz, t’ daisy cutters cood cüt uz all about. Oop there t’toonels ’ave no roofs, an’ death, like, it rains down from t’sky. But down ’ere the lid’s poot back on, see – down ’ere there’s no orderin’ any soul over t’top. We voloonteer t’go oop, Stan – free men. The droom fire is oor thunder, an’ the gun smoke, why, that’s oor clouds – see, clouds . . . not men, mebbe angels, aye, angels, Stan – floatin’ oop . . . Stand to: the
bugles nightjarring from the British lines
. What was it Luftie the country boy had said:
suck on your John Thomas if they couldn’t get a cow’s bubbies
. . .
The squad of Ally Slopers crouches twenty feet back from where the tunnel, unpropped, droops into
a rheumy eyeful of evening sky
. . .
We cannot march, we cannot fight, What fucking good are we?
What might Willis or his friend Bertie make of this, Stanley wonders, for it’s surely all they’ve ever dreamed of – men of all classes, hues, tongues, gathered together in free association, and
brazen in their lack of shame . . . they rest
, arms about each other’s shoulders, hand to hand,
holy palmers of . . . a fag
, quietly conversing in their odd lingo –
a crowdie of tongues, full of bits
. . .
The barrage dies away, the night creeps from shell hole to shell hole, insinuates itself snakily through the wire . . . Tonight will be no Crystal Palace firework show – nein aschpotten:
the
180
s have fallen silent
. . .
and they squint at only the occasional Very light crazing up, then plunging down to
burn its own tail
. . .
Above ground they set to: following the night from muddy slough to ditch, taking a field dressing from one dead man’s haversack and attaching it to the wounds of his comrade who still lives. Triage, or so it would seem, comes naturally to Stan –
haven’t I already been making these judgements for months?
Of Feldman, of the Welshman, of the officer who grovelled in the bier two nights before the offensive . . . back and back to Aldershot, where the epileptic lurched out of the makeshift ring
blowin’ Palmolive bubbles
, then dropped stone-dead at the RSM’s feet. Stan had had a half-sov’ on that bout – but here the most ardent weather-telegraphers got cured of the habit, for there was nothing to foretell, saving conflict without end. Cooling steel and drying blood – they orientate by these smells, not by the stars. They drag the seriously injured as close to the wire of either side as they dare, irrespective of which army paybook they carry – after all,
the only allegiance worth bearing is to life
. . .