Umbrella (46 page)

rag-and-bone men get onter the ward quite regular an’ gallop up and down whippin’ their nags up, stopping to water ’em in the lav-a-tory bowl . . . Drunk summat terrible they is on gin at fourpence-ha’penny
. . .
She retains the entire retail price index, circa 1919 – so what? Surely this is a corrective of sorts – her mind assimilating all that lost time by hanging on still more firmly to what she has? What he won’t confront is the renewed chewing, the dimple worming in her cheek as she
eats herself up from within
. . .
What’s through the graph-paper window today? Same as yesterday: a plump shrink wrestling with a semi-clad blonde pharmacist
who’s got a zone of erogeneity deep in her throat
. . .
he thrusts her aside into a puff of dopaminergic dust – he’ll force out his own short-term reminiscence: Mimi’s shaky announcement
rattling beneath me
that she has called off her engagement to her soldier –
he’d have to be a fucking soldier!
Busner anticipates this: bare-knuckled boxing in the airing court
for the benefit of Mister Kike
, the starveling patients in their donated clothing chanting in a ring, cheering and clapping the man on –
Edwardianly moustachioed, he is, and in tight white breeches – as he beats me to mush and slush.
Crowded together with the rest of the sports fans: Miriam and Mimi, waving their hands rhapsodically in the air, happy to attend this
Concert for Busnerflesh
. . .
This too he thrusts aside: the hospital is a degenerate city, the jargon of the staff – our diagnoses, our pathological labels and bogus practices – all obscure this: the gossipy reality,
the talk of the gutter
. . .
the purloined cigarette rests in the notch of the tin ashtray and from its cellulose stopper
mustard gas leaks
. . . —
On Saturday he’d taken Mark to the ABC Muswell Hill. Zack had looked only cursorily at the airily contrived monumentalism of the zeppelin, the choking spume of the night-time gas attack, the erect posture of the goggle-sporting Hun with the Iron Cross stamped on his leather breast. No, what caught, then held the professional observer was the boy’s unblinking and
grating
fixation upon the screen that floated up above them, pinioned between long insets of brassy rods and stylised laurel leaves – the forlorn Deco interior of the cinema
dragging along
A . . . B . . . C . . .
behind the streamlining of history. This, Zack had thought, is the whole of the twentieth century thus far: a white sheet thrown over our heady hopes, our disturbed dreams, our fleshly desires – with no sense of smell
we touch only plush skin, rub it in, gargle the mucal ice cream deep in our throats, but without pleasure
. . .
This is our crisis of fixed regard: the zeppelin crashes to the cold earth again and again, a cathedral of rumpled buttresses, flaming arches, burning beams. They returned blinking into the egregious daylight to discover kiddie karts circling the roundabout and dropping off the hill down towards Crouch End – his hand in Mark’s
was strange to me
. This, Zack had thought, is my awakening and it’s always been thus, when I was his age, coming out of the Everyman, I’d experience the same estrangement from my shoes
cow, folded and sewn
. And he’d had this intimation: it’ll only accelerate from here on in, I shall emerge from the darkness into the light faster and faster, a rollier and pollier silent comedian, double-, triple-, septuple-taking on doors, window screens, the cosmic fatuity of style –. Dad, Mark had said, Dad, you’re hurting me – because, of course, it was the child’s hand that had been clutched in his – and such a beautiful child,
his skin ivoried by . . . neglect?
The boy’s fixity had seemed to persist – he too was estranged from Wimpy Bar, 104A bus, all the rolling stones of old London town – a bad future was, Zack thought, tucked into the turn-ups of his dungarees and proclaimed its dominion across the Esso roundel of his promotional T-shirt.

Stubbing out the cigarette after a valedictory drag
the taste is flat
, Busner meets the Chaplain on his way out of the ward. What? he says. That was quick. And meanly persists: Y’know, Reverend, there’re plenty more in here in need of some, ah, Christian comfort. The man is not to be guyed, nor is he apologetic: I’ll be back, he says, but right now I have to take the Salvation Army visitors round – they come up weekly to check the acute wards for missing persons, but you probably knew that, Doctor?
Touché
. The Chaplain’s brown eyes may be mild – but they’re insistent and unblinking,
better to drown in their tepid tea than bite down on this fucking cavity full of poisonous smoke and die in my Nuremberg cell
. I thought you might like to know, the Chaplain continues, that Miss Death was really quite chatty – a remarkable lady, bears no resentment or rancour, one would say saintly if it weren’t such a damn cliché. Busner resurges: Family – did she mention any? The Chaplain resumes satisfiedly: She told me of two brothers, one she thinks will have kept the, um, unusual family name – the other, Albert, she says Frenchified it – her expression – to De’Ath. Busner, appalled by this conscientious – if waspish – pastoralism, aims a jibe: In point of fact, Reverend, Death is fairly common –. Patrick, please, the Chaplain says, and motors on: Miss Death told me Stanley was reported missing in action on the Somme in 1916, so there’s probably not much point in trying to track him down, or the other brother, Albert, who, if he were alive, would be in his mid-eighties by now . . . The cavity
big enough to fit the Chaplain inside, he could preach to the exposed nerve-ending, Rock of ages cleft for thee
. . . however, he was a prominent civil servant, and married with at least one child. It shouldn’t be difficult to find the family and who knows – the Chaplain smiles, steeples his fingers
an allusion to prayer?
– they may have Christian comfort to give and welcome the opportunity to help out their poor old auntie –. – Okay, good. Thank you. Busner hopes his abruptness conveys his own spiritual inclinations:
holy speed, in mens sano, shit off a shovel
. . .
–
Okay, good. Thank you, he says again, backing away towards the day-room. — At the hastily convened press conference Mimi and Miriam are placed centre stage in drag of dull suit with clip-on sideburns – Whitcomb with them,
the eggheaded Professor who wears an explosive string vest
. Phallic microphones probe at their unyielding mouths as they announce the mainland bombing campaign, but
the real supremo, the diabolic mastermind, sits to one side lost in a donkey jacket too large for him, his small head shrunken still more beneath that ice bag of a tweed cap.
Busner knows that look, has seen that wary look,
fears that look –
. He had a house in the Paragon, the Chaplain calls after Busner. D’you know it – at Blackheath? Frightfully pretty – of course, that would’ve been a very long time ago – before she fell ill. Busner calls back: Okay, good. Thank you – I’ll look into it and, wrenching round at last, succeeds in unbolting himself from the Chaplain’s
mild steel threads
. — Every Wednesday, together with the Guardian, a comic is delivered for Mark: The Beezer. Miriam beats up a soft-boiled egg in a teacup and feeds it to the baby – the egginess is unbearable to Zack:
all-in-one human and
chicken ovulation . . . Chicks eatin’ eggs
and this is what you get, Aaaargh! Whoopee! Cripes! P’yong! Antics the seven-year-old scans with tremendous seriousness, his eyes entrapped
in just the way they were when we left the ABC
. . .
Ho-ho! Phew! Tum-ti-tum!
LOOK AT THESE SUPER PRIZES! PEN AND PENCIL SET
– TENNIS RACKET – ROLLER SKATES – CRICKET SET – RECORD TOKEN – FLYING MODEL AEROPLANE
. The winner of the Star Prize – a Record Token and a 50p Postal Order – is Mark Busner, South Grove, Highgate N6, for this: Man (in psychiatrist’s office) – ‘Please help me – I think I’m a pair of curtains.’ Psychiatrist – ‘Now, now, pull yourself together!’ Shadowing the Ooh-err! bum, or Oi! bonce, there are invariably a few black strokes to provide a sense of movement – movement, and so time within which a small boy may be
alarmed, happy, fearful, overjoyed?
In the toasted atmosphere surrounding his eldest son’s small face there are no black strokes, beneath it there’s no inscription. Aren’t you pleased? his father asked him, but the boy only shrugged, and now Busner thinks bitterly, I am Colonel Blink the Short-Sighted Gink not to’ve grasped that there was something seriously wrong – I’m a buffoon in Barney’s Barmy Army with a hastily inked-in moustache who’s been fooled by Jerry’s equally ill-conceived disguise. Still, if I hurry I can turn the tables on them by rolling the barrel full of explosives into their camp, so: DER BOMB, DER BOMB, DER BARREL IS RIGHT BESIDE YOU! and BOOM! A sight to gladden Freddy Ayer’s hooded eyes: the block letters surrounded with a yellow flash and the tannish cedillas of flying staves. Poor, fat, badly drawn Jerry,
so much for his mainland bombing campaign
. . .
Maurice, his homburg looking as tall as Tom Mix’s Stetson, pulls back one curtain and then the other, the cold light surges into the empty room with its lumped-up dust sheets and stacks of pre-war newspapers –
the worms’ casts of the real family that hadn’t been cut in two
. . .
—
I stood there then, Busner thinks, as I stand here now on the twelve thirty-nine from Moorgate to Welwyn Garden City, on the eighth of April 2010: despite my closest living relative having been right beside me
I was still alone
. . .
a boy blown in half when the road was mined yet again at Le Sars had been taken down by some over-enthusiastic poilus up from the south, Michael happened to be there and heard his dying words –
the usual sad guff, sweetheart, mother, sarsap-a-fucking-rilla
– but also that he’d miss a concert party that evening at which – or so it had been rumoured – Miss Dorothy Ward would be singing. They went up into a curtain of drizzle some way behind Guedecourt: Michael, Stanley and five others in tankers’ uniforms that were clean enough to withstand scrutiny being
fresh out of a Mark
1
tin
that had ditched some way short of Le Transloy. It wasn’t so unusual for them to surface behind the reserve trenches – happened all the time, although mostly inadvertently when an unanticipated advance by one side or the other left the underground men marooned. With their German-improved Greathead shields, their powerful digging and boring machines, and their advanced Edisonian listening equipment – courtesy of the Byng boys – the troglodytes could outpace any topsiders’ tunnelling, achieving three times their velocity: chuffing through the earth as a train comes along a straight branch line, of an evening . . .
Jack the Ripper stole a kipper, Jack the Ripper stole a kipper
. . .
the chucking back of the till sounding, beneath the ground, uncannily like the rhythm of wheels-on-bogies . . .
ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’ ch-kunk ch-k’
–. Extensions had been dug deep into the combatants’ territories – east to intersect with the mines of the Sambre-et-Meuse Valley, west to infiltrate those of the Pas-de-Calais. With so much more coal now available, a turning circuit was under construction beneath Ypres, in anticipation of bringing rolling stock down. Surfacing behind the lines, one or two of the troglodytes might take their chances, hoping they would be seized by their former enemies and so suffer no worse fate than imprisonment. But if a man were suddenly to come amongst former comrades – well he would either to’ve assumed another man’s identity, or else explain how it was he had survived – prospered seemingly – during his prolonged absence from his unit. It was strongly rumoured that the returnees of all armies were summarily shot – but this was not what kept them in their amenable Hades, bent to their boring, a shadowy force creeping under an advance, nipping at the heels of a retreat, burrowing far down below the shell holes of the new no-man’s-land and so re-establishing their subterranean liberty. No, Stanley understood
the new law of threes
operating in the sod: esprit de corps, a sense of justness, and this strange dialectic: There was one group of men here, a second over there, antipathetic to them in every way – and in the middle there was this third and better part,
a combination of the two no longer trammelled by rank, king-emperor, kaiser or patrie in any shape – a hotchpotch, a linguistic stew, that, should a man partake of it, soon rose unbidden to his own lips: their happy argot
. Grecian love also. It was Phelps – the resplendently naked subaltern who instructed Stanley in the latest principles of political economy – who had introduced him to this gentle comfort – in the dark, the holding of hands and the rasping of a bearded cheek upon its brother’s. Stanley was shocked only by his own perfunctory acceptance:
This was the way you unfixed your bayonet in the eternal eventime
. . .
’
tho, thinking upon it, he realised what the conflict had done to him: rubbed away at all the corns of convention, so that once the abrasion of the barrage ceased to operate upon him
the dead hard skin sloughed off
, leaving behind pale naked forms entwined together in the bowels of the earth . . .
quite natural, tubers, mandrake roots
. . .
Whether it be Tommy and Frontschwein, poilu and pointu, or a mountainous Senegalese twinned with a tiny Chinese coolie. Stanley wished Feydeau could have seen it – they coupled so casually, the underground men, and no one – or so it seemed – thought anything much of it at all, it was merely the promiscuous instinct for life: the only distinctions that they made between the topsiders was whether they could be saved, the sole ones amongst themselves,
whether he could be loved –
. Where the blazes did you spring from? says the muffled-up shape of an officer stood pissing against
the
oiled cotton that stretches high over the twisted ribs and spars which used to be Mametz Wood
. The day is an elegant parasol tasselled with clouds, the night an umbrella with starry holes torn in its cover. Got ditched up by Le Sars two days since, Stanley says jollily, moving in closer so that the man can see the crowns on his purloined uniform and the crossed machine guns. – Oh, I say – the officer’s features are
teddy bear
in their woolly surroundings – you tank-wallahs’re bloody lucky to’ve come through that show, is that your whole crew? Stanley concedes that it is, concurs in their good fortune, asks of the officer if he knows where the heavy bunch are stationed. Oh no, he says, if’n I did I still wouldn’t flap my mouth . . . he picks at his mitts . . . best be gettin’ back to Division – they’ll set you arights. Down there’s Montauban, sunken lane from there goes back up the line – y’ll be happy in it . . .
as etappenschwein in shit
. . .
Slogging along, Stan chides himself for not making the best of it: the night sky and the crescent nailed up on this –
up there are moon-men holed up in its cheesy canyons, crash-landed balloonists prob’ly huntin’ ’em down with fowling pieces – the duffers! They should know their powder won’t ignite in a vacuum
. . .
Behind the party the Materialschlacht goes on:
dips, hooter, fusees, Very lights
–
the whole bang-shoot topped off by Jerry’s Big Berthas firing from below the horizon. Such illuminations! Gas-jets behind frosted glass – the world’s a pub, so set up the Dewar’s!
He ought to enjoy it – but he can’t, so accustomed is Stan to the embrace of Mother Earth that with each step they take towards the rear the red man
saws a little further around my scalp with his rusty bayonet
, and he feels the chill night air on bare bone – which is
the sky dome through which thoughts trail phosphorescent
. . .