Will Self - The Quantity Theory of Insanity - Reissued

Outside there is a scrap of land, room-sized, open to the air that voyages fifteen storeys down to find it and its tangled side-swipe of nameless shrubs. There, set lopsidedly on the irregular rubbled surface, stands one of the rectangular melamine-topped tables from the dining area on the ward. I can see a fold of belly, a dollop of jowl, a white hand fidgeting with an acrylic rectangle, the failing end of a mohair tie. Dr Busner is trying to solve The Riddle.

‘Ah, there you are, Misha. Come out, come out, don’t hover like that.’ Busner sits, flanked by Valuam and Bowen. On the table in front of them are ranged objects that clearly relate to me: a pot of green pills, Jim’s bas-relief which had so impressed me, a note I had sent to Mimi in an idle moment. I move across the little yard and sit by Valuam, who surprises me by smiling warmly. Flash of recognition: the slashed profile. If the features were un-drowned? Valuam and Tom are brothers.

‘We are all family here, Misha.’

‘What’s that?’

‘We are all family … I see that something is coming home to you, as you have come home to us. It hardly matters whether we are doctors or patients, does it, Misha? The important thing is to be at home.’ Busner rises and starts to pace the area. The massive walls of the hospital are joined irregularly to the squat citadel that houses the Mass Disaster Room. Busner describes a trapezoid on the uneven surface, sketching out with his feet the elevation of the hospital.

‘You see, what we have here is a situation that calls for mutual aid. My son, Jane and Anthony’s siblings, Simon, Jim, Clive, Harriet, indeed all of the patients on the ward, could be said to be casualties of a war that we ourselves have waged. That’s why we felt it was our duty to care for them in a special kind of environment. You, of course, noticed the curious involution of the pathology that they exhibit, Misha, and that was right — you passed the first step. They are not mad in any accepted sense, rather they are metamad. Their madness is a conscious parody of the relation in which the psyche stands to itself … but you know this. Unfortunately, you didn’t do so well on the other tests …’ Busner tipped out some of the Parstelin from the pot on to the table. ‘You took these, Misha, and you fucked Mimi in just about every available cupboard on the ward. This is not the behaviour of a responsible therapist. You had a choice, Misha. On Ward 9 you could have been therapist or patient; it seems that you have decided to become a patient.’

Busner stopped pacing and sat down again at the table. I sat, trapped in sweet gorge. What he said made sense. I did not resent it. Jane Bowen picked her nails with the edge of a Riddle counter. The same bird paged Nature. The four of us sat in the peculiar space, in silence. One thing confused me.

‘But Dr Busner … Zack, my parents, my father. They had nothing to do with any therapeutic application of psychology, they were both artists. Surely I don’t qualify for the ward?’

‘Later on, Misha, later on … Your father became a sculptor in his thirties. Before that he studied with Alkan. He would have made an excellent analyst, but perhaps he didn’t want you to pay the price.’

The doors behind me clacked in a down draught. The interview was clearly over.

‘Would you take Misha back up to the ward, Anthony. We can foregather and handle the paperwork after lunch.’

Yes, lunch, I felt quite hungry. But I didn’t like it down here. There was something moribund about this patch of ground, cemented with white splashes that streaked the high walls and starred the crusted earth. I wanted to get back upstairs — I want to get back upstairs — ha! Perhaps that’s the effect of the chloropromasine, a kind of continual time lag between thought and self-consciousness — I want to get back upstairs … and lie on my bed. I need a cigarette.

When I first met Janner at Reigate in the early Seventies, he’d been an unprepossessing character. He was a driven young man whose wimpy physical appearance all too accurately complemented his obsessive nature. His body looked as if it had been constructed out of pipecleaners dunked repeatedly in flesh-coloured wax. All his features were eroded and soft except for his nose, which was the droplet of wax that hardens as it runs down the shaft of the candle. There was also something fungoid about Janner, it was somehow indefinable, but I always suspected that underneath his clothes Janner had athlete’s foot — all over his entire body.

You mustn’t misunderstand me, in a manner of speaking Janner and I were best friends. Actually, that is a little strong, it was rather that it was us against the rest — Janner and I versus the entire faculty and the entire student body combined.

I suppose I now realise that my feelings are not Janner’s responsibility and they never were. He just had the misfortune to come along at that point in my life where I was open to the idea of mystery. Janner took the part of Prospero; I gnashed and yowled — and somewhere on the island lurked the beautiful, the tantalising, the Ur-Bororo.

Not everyone has the opportunity to experience a real mystery in their lives. I at least did, even if the disillusionment that has followed the resolution of my mystery sometimes seems worse than the shuttered ignorance I might otherwise have enjoyed. This then is the story of a rite of passage. A coming of age that took ten years to arrive. And although it was my maturity that was at issue, it is Janner who is the central character of this story.

I can believe that in a more stimulating environment, somewhere where intellectual qualities are admired and social peculiarities sought after, Janner would have been a tremendous success. He was an excellent conversationalist, witty and informed. And if there was something rather repulsive about the way catarrh gurgled and huffled up and down his windpipe when he was speaking, it was more than compensated for by his animation, his excitement, and his capacity for getting completely involved with ideas.

Janner and I weren’t appreciated by the rest of the student body at Reigate. We thought them immature and pathetic, with their passé , hippy hair and consuming passion for incredibly long guitar solos. I dare say they thought nothing of us at all. We were peripheral.

You guessed it; I was jealous. I didn’t want to be sectioned off with waxy Janner. I wanted to be mingling my honeyed locks with similar honeyed locks to the sound of those stringed bagpipes. I wanted to provide an ideal arterial road for crabs, but I wasn’t allowed to play. It was the students in the arts faculties who were at the centre of most of the cliques. If, like me, you were reading geography and physical education, you were ruled out of court — especially if you didn’t look right, or talk right. Without these essential qualifications I was marginalised. At school my ability to do the four hundred metres hurdles comfortably under fifty seconds had made me a hero; at Reigate it was derided.

Ostracised by the cliques that mattered I found Janner, and I’ve lived to regret it. If only I’d poached my brain with psychotropics! Today I could be living a peaceful life, haggling with a recalcitrant DHSS official in rural Wales, or beating a damp strip of carpet hung over a sagging clothesline outside some inner-city squat. Janner cheated me out of this, his extreme example bred my moderation. At nineteen I could have gone either way.

I cemented my friendship with Janner during long walks in what passed for countryside around Reigate. Even at that time this part of Surrey was just the odds and ends that had been forgotten in the clashes between adjacent municipalities. The irregular strips of grey and brown farmland, the purposeless concrete aprons stippled with weeds and the low, humped downs covered with sooty, stained scrub. We traversed them all and as we walked he talked.