Umbrella (7 page)

The others, who were mostly
one thing or the other
: either like this old woman – whose humming arm he held – whirled into a twisted immobility, or else unwound
spastic, hypotonic
. . .
these others of the others he had seen considerate nurses prop against walls, only for the patient to drip down once their backs were turned. Both kinds, Busner has noticed, share this uncanny capability: that they render those around them either too sharply focused or too blurred. The somnolent and akinesic ones were so very still that they partook of the hospital’s very fabric – Busner stood, captivated, watching them standing, thin, rigid and bent beside the old lancet windows, while those passing them by smeared a photon trail across his retinas. By contrast the ticcy, antic ones were impelled forward – goaded by some neural whip, they skipped, taking hundreds upon thousands of tiny steps. They are, he thought, the ones who couldn’t keep still for the long seconds when the plate was exposed, and so they marked the present with a ghostly impression even as their bodies faded into the future. Time, he thought, it has to do with time. The psychotics, for all their extravagant claims of having been sent
sliding back down the shiny curve
from the future to warn us of the
Victory of the Machines
, are rooted in
Now. Their stagy delusions are well dressed with the technologies of the present: transistors, assembly lines and answer-phones – while their persecutors are just as frenziedly up to date: Black September infiltrating grey March, or the Irish social worker responsible for the Islington patients on Busner’s acute ward whom at least six of them believed to be an IRA gunwoman,
devilish Bernadette
. As for the brain-damaged, the spastic and the otherwise touched – their faces have no expression at all, but instead the features rise and then set as their bodies respond to
circadian Rhythmaires
. Then there are the leucotomised – for they are here as well, their hair crinkled or their scalps bare where clamp tightened, saw grated and drill bit. Busner has marked them, the pre-frontals – they are trapped in a very exact layer in the hospital’s stony strata, being all of an age – mid-forties – to have been interfered with twenty years earlier, when such things were the fashion. Be that as it may, their waywardness is constantly being updated, as witnessed by the anguish in their eyes, which are forced inwards by the raw mechanics of their loss of control: I
can’t help it, Doctor, the one on Ward 20 said, I can’t help it, I can’t help it, Doctor, I can’t . . . Doctor, I can’t, I-I-I-I-I . . . But
these others
, they are both of this time and escaping from it,
of now
and
then
. . .
And this particular old woman, who alternates between being one kind and the other, has alerted him to their existence
as a group
– a status that Mboya, with his vastly greater experience, has now confirmed.

Is she –? the psychiatrist asks. No, the nurse replies, there’s no need – except from time to time to help her sleep. For Busner, these past few weeks have been mostly this: a tallying of drug charts, the sounding of sunken chests, the winding on and the stripping off of the sphygmomanometer’s heavy cuff, the listening in the hush of the ward for the rush of arterial blood. Entering the damp pits of their beds he has gone potholing in the fistulous sores that extend inside these hollow patients. It is, he knows, impossible to write a prescription of this form: Constant and sympathetic assistance towards effective mobility is to be taken ALL DAY – and so he only tiredly scrawls tetracycline in a fixed cycle. Whitcomb has allocated Busner two chronic wards, 14 and 20, and as a sop to his clinical expertise he is also allowed a part in the decision-making on Ward 11, over in the separate Halliwick unit, where the acute admissions are held apart from the main body of the hospital for assessment. Hence all this
promenading
– a ward round that provides him with
a mile-long constitutional
. . .
He wonders, a bit, if Whitcomb, the shit, has done this deliberately to exercise his tubby junior – then reflects as he collects his keys from the Admin Office that the organisation of rosters recently ceased – or so he has been told – to be a decision made by clinicians, because
the bureaucrats have taken over the asylum
, which is only fitting given that in the absence of anything resembling a cure the medical staff have for years – decades probably
–
operated as patient-pushers, stacking, hole-punching, binding and ultimately filing away their workload in this tray, that drawer or some other neglected pigeonhole. In the nether regions of the hospital, Busner supposes, there must be the analogues to all this: the
histrionics
, the
kerfuffle
, the
seems agitated
, the
150
mg Stelazine intra musc
, all of it scrawled on preprinted forms churned out by the relevant department, then
stuffed in buff
and laid on metal shelves to gather the finest of dust. The Records . . .
a map of a map
that is in itself . . .
a map
, or at least a diagrammatic representation of the hospital, which is a self-sufficient realm –
Shumacher would approve –
what with its metal workshop, its pottery, its bakery and its kitchen garden where
bulb-headed inmates cultivated a few onions
. . .
While Friern Hospital is no panopticon – even an all-seeing eye could never squint along these telescopic corridors – nevertheless, to move about the sprawling buildings is to be incorporated into this mapping as a live element: a
blinking light
travelling through its
circuitry
. The endless reflexive states implied by these
maps of maps of maps
, in his more thoughtful black-Biro moments, recall to Busner’s mind Cantor’s infinite sets and transfinite ordinals – but mostly he experiences the insight as
dizzying
, the 1,884 feet and six inches of the lower corridor rearing up to become its own perpendicular axis, the entire gloomy institution
enacting its own axonometric projection
. . .
Hurrying now from Admin past the doors of Nursing Admin and Voluntary Services, he is out of breath, having already trotted the five hundred yards from Ward 14. There are a further three hundred to go —
and for what?
So he may be met at the doors by Perkins, who will unlock them with a show of efficiency before Busner has got his key in, an action that confirms his
control
, thus forestalling Busner’s inclination to say, There’s no need to keep these doors locked, it’s no longer hospital policy, now is it? Perkins, whose martial bearing tells the psychiatrist
I didn’t miss out on National Service after all
, and who is the perfect type of the NCO despite his white nylon tunic and brown suit trousers, Perkins, with his
shoe-shining-brush
moustache and
rain-dashed radiator-grille
mouth, Perkins, with his
iron hair
corroded
by its parting
, Perkins, who understands full well how to treat a junior officer, how to manipulate him, let him see only what he wants him to see. It is too soon yet for Busner to have found out the extent to which the other staff are complaisant or merely coerced by Perkins, but that one or other is the case he has no doubt, for they have been drilled into marching up and down the fractured parade ground of the ward, hauling the meds trolley into place, unlimbering its fake-wood-veneer lid, firing the gelatine shells, then moving on. On the ward rounds they do together Perkins is assiduous – making it seem that the subaltern has arrived at decisions alone, while prodding him towards them with rhetorical questions: Wouldn’t you think . . . Doesn’t it seem best if . . . Haven’t you found in cases such as this that . . . Not that any doctoral dispensation is needed to
funnel the tranks
into the patients – under the campanile all ’scrips are repeats and it is, quite simply,
more medicine
that helps the medicine go down . .
.
!
A patient’s medication card is only an aide-mémoire for these busy pushers to remind them of the dosage. In point of fact, these index cards are never filed, and if a qualified busybody wishes to discover who’s glugged what since mind out of time, he must visit Records and grope through the fuller notes deciphering his predecessors’ handwriting, which, Busner has often thought, is illegible not by accident but design.

Be still!
This is not why he has come to Friern –
yes, yes
, he will do his Hippocratic duty, neither doing any conscious harm nor allowing any to be done, but for now he is through with
boat-rocking
.
Leave it to the Grocer!
He is done too with elaborations of theory, the multiple threads of which, mind-spun, elaborate and then over-elaborate airy yet substantial models that
fools such as me took for the phenomena they only loosely represented
. . .
He will, in particular, resist the urge to ask Perkins why it is his
dee-lightful wa-ay!
to give higher doses of chlorpromazine to female patients – resist, because he knows. The charge nurse says of one who lies shaking in a barred cot, She’s ever so fractious, Doctor, aren’t you worried that she may harm herself? Of a second female patient, who, for the third day running has been confined to the quiet room – a deranging euphemism for a padded cell – the charge nurse contends: We really want her to be happy, Doctor, but when she’s allowed the run of the ward she pilfers from the others, then accuses them of taking her things, and before you know it there’s a right barney going on. I mean, you wouldn’t dream it to look at her . . . And indeed, you wouldn’t, because what sits on this
blancmange slab
is but a
shrivelled raisin
of humanity who shivers in a midi canvas tunic, a uniform, Busner thinks, appropriate only for a slave labourer . . . but she grabbed a fork an ’adda go at putting it in Bettany’s eye, and y’know, if I wasn’t on hand I think she would’ve – now that isn’t good, is it, Doctor? The whole purpose of this speech being – Busner realised hours later, after having administered the injection himself – to introduce subliminally the words good and doctor into his own mind. But surely, if he is a good doctor, Busner should do something about the bad nurse he has seen, together with his cronies, cackling over a spread in the Sun showing women’s libbers in Afghan coats holding aloft a dressmaker’s form lashed to a cross. I’d crucify those bitches, he thought he heard Perkins say – yet he couldn’t be certain, the ward office was so full of rattling tea mugs, cigarette smoke, smouldering tin ashtrays and clanking filing cabinets, so squeezed between the dirty panes of two permanently shut sash windows. — Perkins and Bettany, caught at it, gave him the approved glare for new boys – or recruits – who have been gazetted for bullying. Bettany had a chubby, kind countenance full of light-hearted dimples, yet Busner suspected him still more than Perkins – he knew the type, slow-witted, malleable and big. Bettany would be the one to administer the thump therapy, that’s what they called it, Busner knew – he’d been told all about it by a refugee from the asylums, Dave Catterall, who arrived at the Concept House in Willesden ranting about being beaten by psychiatric orderlies and having water-soaked towels held over his mouth – tales Busner, whose own asylum experience had been brief and circumscribed, had assumed were exaggerated until they were confirmed, to the letter, by other residents.
So what if we were?
the nurses’ adult faces lisped childishly and Busner burned with indignation.
Y
et
how could they know?
that he hadn’t been a new boy for decades – only a
left-behind one
watching the Rileys and Rovers crunch away down the drive, hearing the last call for the bus to the station.
Left behind
to wander the voided corridors and deserted classrooms, left behind for so long and so often, that on several terrifying occasions he had to spend the night alone in dormitories empty of everything but their
unwashed-boy-smell and the pitifully snivelling ghost of the twelve-year-old that was me – and, of course, the other left-behind one.