Umbrella (49 page)

: Spare us the piety – pass me that kidney dish, Nurse . . . Thankee . . . a-ha. Have you see the plans for the new Underground station, Marcus?
MARCUS
: No, I haven’t as yet.
CUMMINS
: Queerest thing – shaped like a sort of hatbox, can’t say I care for it, I’m old enough to remember when, in the waiting rooms of London suburban stations, you’d get a couple of oils of some civic dignitaries or other hung up on the wall and a stuffed bird or two in a glass case!
He lies, the torturer, he is Albert’s creature
. . .
— They had been happy and sustained a functioning community. There had been – so far as she was aware – additional production, although this was by no means demanded of them after the suffering they had endured performing the Imperialists’ war work, and the stresses of the revolution. Some brushes, clothes pegs and baskets – simple artefacts they were happy to turn out. Stanley had said: You and your comrades take the old booby-hatch up in Friern Barnet – we’ve no use for it now the greater part of the inmates have been discharged to the care of their families or their local cooperatives. And there’ll be a form of justice, I believe, in free women and men of a rational cast ruling the roost where but lately the poor and deluded were confined against their will. (
CUMMINS
:
Some of this electrolytic cream spread on the temples will ensure closer contact and improve connectivity
. . .) They had retained their overalls from the munitions factories as a badge of pride – besides, what could be more supremely rational dress than these rough ticken clothes? Tunics, divided skirts and heavy jackets that protected them from the cold and damp of the old buildings, warding off an ague that seemed present in their very bricks and mortar. This was during the early days – later on, when things had been more organised, clothes were donated by the London fieldworkers, nothing too fancy but perfectly serviceable and freely given. A thousand female comrades took up their quarters on the western side of the former asylum, and a thousand male ones to the east. Mingling among both sexes and assigned to their living units were a proportion of malefactors and counter-revolutionists distinguishable by their dark and drab uniforms. These women and men were charged with the mundane and trivial tasks: the locking and unlocking of doors, the changing of soiled sheets and garments, the administration of medicines, and the assistance of those who requested peace and quiet to special reclusion units. The notion was that they were to be re-educated by their close association with these women of high ideals, whose long and arduous labours had dinned into them a mortal legacy of diseases: tuberculosis, typhoid, dysentery and venereal infections transmitted via sexual congress with males of the exploitative class. (
CUMMINS
:
If you’d all please ensure that you’re standing with both feet on the rubber matting
. . .) Theirs was not the only phalanstery to be established by the Central Cooperative under the chairmanship of Stanley Death. The communalists chose not to discuss such mundane matters, but over the years I learned – by earwigging on the resentful detainees – that there were others at Hanwell, Napsbury, Claybury, Sheffield, Banstead and Tooting Bec – a ring of them surrounding the site of the former metropolis, wherein the same experiments in communal living, and the same practices of the freest thought, were pursued. The wildest and the freest of thoughts – and speech! A’stutterin’ anna mutterin’ . . . she’s seen a fellow in a picture on the wall, and he’s stepped out of it and had her away, into the family way, she’s given birth! To an automaton! A little Enigmarelle of her own! (
CUMMINS
:
Interestingly, there is some evidence that menstruation may adversely effect the therapy – not an issue in this patient’s case, nor those of most of the other female inmates, whose menses are . . . How’d’you put it, Nurse?
GREENGAGE
:
Well, I don’t know, Doctor –.
CUMMINS
:
Disrupted? Suppressed?
GREENGAGE
:
Well, they doesn’t ’ave their monthlies, if that’s what you mean . . .
CUMMINS
:
Oh, indeed, si vous soulevez un jupon vous ne devez jamais exprimer la surprise
. . .) Spirit-rapping, table-turning – it was scarcely to be marvelled at that they would entertain such things – the communal areas crackled with talk of travelling to other worlds, humans vivisected into being from the bound forms of animals. Some were certain that death-rays were being beamed at them from the People’s Palace across the vale, and that these emissions caused them to hear the voices of their loved ones who had passed over – they spent hours, days, setting down these communiqués in the penny jotters obtainable from the commissary. Yet this was understandable, surely? Forgivable in the light of the percipient discussions that were also held regarding universal provision of family planning, infant welfare, education and social security – discussions I myself minuted, then presented in report form to the commissioners of Stanley’s Board of Control, who inspected the phalanstery on an annual basis. (
MARCUS
:
She seems completely inert now – marked hypotonia.
CUMMINS
:
That’s entirely as it should be, the curare means even if you boink ’em they don’t react – see?
) Not that they paid these much attention – but, then, that too was understandable . . . forgivable – didn’t they have their own work cut out for them: demolishing the centuries-old unsanitary housing and stony bombast that the foolish capitalists and warmongers had formerly believed the greatest city on earth? Then raising in its stead a few slim and tapering steel-and-glass towers, while establishing on its shattered remains the raised field systems determined by the new agriculture – fields for wheat, of course, but also orchards and water meadows, vineyards too – for why shouldn’t the ordinary folk also have Hock and seltzer? (
CUMMINS
:
And . . . on!
) — It was Gracie who first noticed the changes under way: the infiltration of BoC spies among those sent for re-education, the alteration of the regime from voluntary retreat, to one of . . . confinement. The introduction of electrification to the phalanstery, and other forms of mechanisation that were precisely the regimentations and oppressions of the human spirit and the human body that the revolution had been against! Next came the punishments – which were presented, derangingly, as . . . treatments, but which left these once-proud women and men . . . gibbering, wholly broken down . . . in pieces. I told her: This is Albert’s doing. He has won out finally.
Death-rays
of Stanley
,
death-rays of Albert
playing, each on the other brother’s
blank face
. . . and Albert the winner, as always, reimposing his own cruel regime on the but recently liberated land. Soon enough they came: the redbrick serpents snaking over Muswell Hill and coiling across the valley towards the phalanstery,
civilissssation
they hissed. Dear Gracie – she had never fully adjusted to life at Colney Hatch. She said . . . she said to me, that to look along the lower corridor, to allow your eyeball to shoot along its third-of-a-mile barrel was . . . to give in to . . . a sort of . . . madness: the blinding white flash
skronks
into the negative images of feathery weeds agitating along the trackside. The train sways away and he stands on the platform looking up at the steep sides of the cutting and thinking: For this, I am . . . not ready. And so, after stomping laboriously up the steel staircase he turns east along Friern Barnet Lane, intending . . .
what?
He checks his watch (a sixteen-year-old petrol station giveaway, the face of which I have looked upon thousands of times yet never seen): One thirty – the pubs will be serving
grapeshot peas, gassy lager, offensive chip weaponry, battering cod . . . I’m hungry . . . but not for THAT!
He plods on, intending, he thinks, simply to take a look at Arnos Grove tube station, the Modernist hatbox design of which he has strangely
fond memories
. . .
Take a look – or perhaps enter,
exercise my Freedom and board a train that will take me home
. Home. It has come to him unbidden: the notion that the flat on Fortess Road, with its tatty furnishings and ambient sound of insurance brokers . . .
Female, fifty-three, ten years no-claims – one for John at Aviva?
was his home, more than the Redington Road house had ever been – or any of his other habitations, which, now he came to think of it, were really
dens . . . and I, a fox
. . .
an interloper into the husbandry of fence, flowerbed and shed who scratched out his own smelly shelter for a year or ten, raised a few cubs who needed National Health glasses, then skulked away again –. What’s your dick like, homey, what’re you into –? is slung from the open window of car that spurts past, together with the cat’s-piss-smell of contemporary marijuana
– a hot hatch, isn’t that what they’re called?
Why fight it? Busner thinks, Why delay or drag my feet when the past is inexorably creeping up behind? Which is – he goes on at himself – the essence, surely, of all talking therapies, and something that Ronnie nailed perfectly adequately in that silly chapbook of his – what did he call them? The whirligogs and fankles that beset our emotions. — On he goes, reflecting ruefully on the vogue for such things in the seventies, including his own inquire-within tool:
The Riddle!
He barks with laughter, then chuckles more sincerely in acknowledgement of his own follies . . .
after all, perhaps at last I’m solving it?
The road grumbles between nondescript residential blocks and postwar houses, then beetles over the brow of the hill and smooths down to a
fistulous roundabout
from which spin off shopping parades.
It’s the same
sequencing of consumer DNA
that he had left behind not twenty minutes since: Y Beauty & Hair (
Why indeed?
), Monarch Dental Services (
The teeth of kings?
), a fried-chicken joint, a newsagent plastered with phonecard decals, a betting shop . . .
and again, once more – with feeling
. . .
His feet are aching and sodden in their age-inappropriate footwear, although, he considers: In an earlier era I’d’ve been crippled by now with lumbago or gout – maladies that have
an honestly Anglo-Saxon ring, Falstaffian almost
. . .
He pulls himself together with the steel bar surrounding a waist-high freestanding hoarding, upon the metal sheet of which a young woman enjoys herself with a Magnum ice cream. In through the half-open door of the bookie he sees the bruising after-images of horse races: roan threads spooling through Haydock Park, digital threads cantering beneath them, the
glabellar tap
that causes blinking cursors
. . .
The binary storm rages around him, a blizzard of ones and noughts –
why fight it?
I am, Busner thinks, no Falstaff, only a maddened Lear out on the toughened-glass heath, where
nothing comes of nothing.
And yet . . . and yet
. . .
there is something: the cursor blinking on and off,
one or nought, should or ought?
It strikes him that: It must’ve been at exactly that time – to the very year – that they were developing the first microprocessors, writing new programming languages and creating operating systems that pushed them together
soft into hard
. . .
Not that we – I – was aware of it, computers were Toltec pyramids, stepped down into the basements of corporate HQs, and ministered to by priestly Morlocks in white coats. I do remember an early computer game – Ping? Pong? – at any rate, two white bars either side of a blackened television screen, batting between them a white cursor which on impact made a synthesised tongue-popping noise. It was absurdly unimpressive – as a visualisation of table tennis cruder than a child’s stick drawing of a real live man,