Will Self: The Quantity Theory of Insanity: Reissued

I shuffled my feet a little on the linoleum to warn him that he was no longer alone. ‘Good morning.’

He looked up from his book with a smile. ‘Hi. What can I do you for?’

‘I’m Misha Gurney, the new art therapist, I start on the ward today and Dr Busner asked me to come in early to get a feel for things.’

‘Well, hello Misha Gurney, I’m Tom.’ Tom swung his feet off the ledge and proffered a hand. It was a slim, white hand, prominently bony at the wrist with long, tapering fingers. His handshake was light and dry but firm. His voice had the contrived mellowness of some Hollywood pilgrim paterfamilias. There was something unsettling in the contrast between this and his beautiful face: sandalwood skin and violet eyes. The body, under the stretchy black clothes, moved in an epicene, undulant way. ‘Well, there’s not a lot to see at this time. Zack isn’t even in yet. He’s probably just getting out of bed.’ Tom rolled his lovely eyes back in their soft, scented sockets as if picturing the psychiatrist’s matitudinal routine. ‘How about some tea?’

‘Yeah, great.’

‘How do you take it?’

‘Brown — no sugar.’

I followed Tom down the corridor that led to the staff offices and the consultation rooms. There was a small kitchenette off to one side. Tom hit the lights, which flickered once and then sprang into a hard, flat, neon glare. He squeaked around the lino in his sneakers. I examined the handwritten notices carefully taped to the kitchen cabinets. After a while I said, ‘What do you do here, Tom?’

‘Oh, I’m a patient.’

‘I assume you’re not on a section?’

He laughed. ‘Oh, no. No, of course not, I’m a voluntary committal. A first-class volunteer, exemplary courage, first in line to be called for the mental health wars.’ Again the light mocking irony, but not mad in any way, without the fateful snicker-snack of true schizo-talk.

‘You don’t seem too disturbed.’

‘No, I’m not, that’s why they let me go pretty much where I please and do pretty much what I want, as long as I live on the ward. You see, I’m a rare bird.’ A downward twist of the corner of a sculpted mouth, ‘The medication actually works for me. Zack doesn’t really like it, but it’s true. As long as I take it consistently I’m fine, but every time they’ve discharged me in the past, somehow I’ve managed to forget and then all hell breaks loose.’

‘Meaning …?’

‘Oh, fits, delusions, hypermania, the usual sorts of things. I carry the Bible around with me and try and arrange spontaneous exegetical seminars in the street. You know, you’ve seen plenty of crazies, I’ll bet.’

‘But … but, you’ll forgive me, but I’m not altogether convinced. If you’re on any quantity of medication …’

‘I know, I should be a little more slowed down, a little fuzzier around the edges, un peu absent . Like I say, I’m an exception, a one-off, an abiding proof of the efficacy of Hoffman La Roche’s products. Zack doesn’t like it at all.’

The kettle whistled and Tom poured the water into two styrofoam cups. We mucked around with plastic dipsticks and extracted the distended bags of tea, then wandered back to the association area. Tom led me over to the windows. The lower decks of the hospital poked out below us. Up here on the ninth floor, more than ever, one could appreciate the total shape of the building — a steeply sloping bullion bar, each ascending storey slightly smaller than the one below it. On the wide balcony beneath us figures were wafting about, clad in hospital clothing, green smocks and blue striped nightdresses, all bound on with tapes. The figures moved with infinite diffidence, as if wishing to offer no offence to the atmosphere. They trundled in slow eddies towards the edge of the balcony and stood rocking from heel to toe, or from side to side, and then moved back below us and out of sight again.

‘Chronics,’ said Tom, savouring the word as he slurped his tea. ‘There’s at least sixty of them down there. Quite a different ball game. Not a lot of use for your clay and sticky-backed paper down there. There’s a fat ham of a man down there who went mad one day and drank some bleach. They replaced his oesophagus with a section cut from his intestine. On a quiet night you can hear him farting through his mouth. That’s a strange sound, Misha.’

I remained silent, there was nothing to say. Behind me I could hear the ward beginning to wake up and start the day. There were footsteps and brisk salutations. An auxiliary came into the association area from the lift and began to mop the floor with studious inefficiency, pushing the zinc bucket around with a rubber foot. We stood and drank tea and looked out over the chronics’ balcony to the Heath beyond, which rose up, mounded and green, with the sun shining on it, while the hospital remained in shadow. It was like some separate arcadia glimpsed down a long corridor. I fancied I could see the park bench I’d passed some forty minutes earlier and on it a blue speck: the tonsured idiot, still rocking, still free.

Zack Busner came hurrying in from the lift. He was a plump, fiftyish sort of man, with iron-grey hair brushed back in a widow’s peak. He carried a bulging briefcase, the soft kind fastened with two straps. The straps were undone, because the case contained too many files, too many instruments, too many journals, too many books and a couple of unwrapped, fresh, cream-cheese bagels. Busner affected striped linen or poplin suits and open-necked shirts; his shoes were anomalous — black, steel-capped, policeman’s shit kickers. He spotted me over by the window with Tom and, turning towards his office, gestured to me to follow him, with a quick, flicking kind of movement. I dropped my foam beaker into a bin, smiled at Tom and walked after the consultant.

‘Well Misha, I see you’ve found a friend already.’ Busner smiled at me quizzically and ushered me to the chair that faced his across the desk. We sat. His office was tiny, barely larger than a cubicle, and quite bare apart from a few textbooks and four artworks. Most psychiatrists try to humanise their offices with such pieces. They think that even the most awful rubbish somehow indicates that they have ‘the finer feelings’. Busner’s artworks were unusually dominant, four large clay bas-reliefs, one on each wall. These rectangular slabs of miniature upheaval, earth-coloured and unglazed, seemed to depict imaginary topographies.

‘Yes, he’s personable enough. What’s the matter with him?’

‘Actually, Tom’s quite interesting.’ Busner said this without a trace of irony and began fiddling around on the surface of his desk, as if looking for a tobacco pipe. ‘He’s subject to what I’d call a mimetic psychosis …’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning he literally mimics the symptoms of all sorts of other mental illnesses, at least those that have any kind of defined pathology: schizophrenia, chronic depression, hypermania, depressive psychosis. The thing about Tom’s impersonations, or should I say the impersonations of his disease, is that they’re bad performances. Tom carefully reiterates every recorded detail of aberrant behaviour, but with a singular lack of conviction; it’s wooden and unconvincing. Your father would have found it fascinating to watch.’

‘Well, I find it pretty fascinating myself, even if I don’t have quite the same professional involvement. What phase is Tom in now?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Well, he seems to be playing the “Knowing Patient Introduces Naive Art Therapist to Hell of Ward” role.’

‘And how well is he doing it?’

‘Well, now you mention it, not too convincingly.’

Busner had abandoned his search for a pipe, if that’s what it had been. He now turned and presented me with his outline set against the window. In profile I could see that he was in reality rather eroded, and that the impression of barely contained energy which he seemed determined to project was an illusion as well. Busner sat talking to me, rolling and then unrolling the brown tongue of a knitted tie he wore yanked around his neck. Overall, he reminded me of nothing so much as a giant frog.