Will Self - Grey Area

Turning back a page we discover why it is that this should be the case. See here: the same couple, but now his brown model face is crammed with agony against a rain-speckled windowpane. And her lighter-brown model hand, sketching a gesture of tenderness across his knotted back, will soon — it’s absolutely clear — be shrugged off. He may even belt her one. The neglected toddler sits on the floor at their feet, looking up at them with tiny, dull eyes.

This is a man who needs Inclusion, that’s the conclusion you have to draw. This man is crying out for Inclusion, or at any rate he would be if he knew what it was.

A flip-through the rest of the brochure is all that’s needed for you to clock the pastel, shaded drawings of dissected brains. If you tilt the brochure this way and that you will see that the portion of the brain that contains the receptors to which these benign Inclusion molecules attach themselves has been coated with a lozenge of varnish, so that it shines.

The accompanying text is, however, unilluminating — an unholy mish-mash of medicalese and promotional claptrap that combines together to produce repellent patois like the following: Inclusion has fewer contra-indications than the tri-cyclics and the SSRIs.* Better still, the attractive, easy-to-swallow spanules come in a variety of quality-enhanced patternings: paisley, Stuart tartan, heliotrope. . etc., etc.

If there is anything to be learnt from the Inclusion folder it isn’t contained in the brochure. The brochure is quite clearly not for the general reader. But what’s this? Poking out from among the order forms in the opposite pocket there is a thick wadge of typescript. Funny to think that it could be hiding there, in this folder which seemed so flimsy, so insubstantial, when first you hefted it. Pull it out now:

What is it? We-ell, it looks like a report of some sort. It’s word-processed rather than printed, but it’s been done on a good machine with an attractive typeface, a Palatino or Bodoni. It isn’t bound — the comers of the fifteen or so pages are mashed together with a single paper clip, yet somehow the report is instantly alluring. Right at the top is written: Ref. Inc/957 [and underneath] Report from R.P.H. to Main Board [and beneath that] Strictly for Board Eyes Only. Confidential.

God, how exciting! Not at all like the Inclusion brochure. You have a prickly little thrill, don’t you? You have the thrill of reading someone’s private correspondence in a silent house, on a Sunday afternoon. Somewhere in the mid-distance a dog barks. You read on: Report of the Incident at the Worminghall Research FacilityFrom: R.P. HawkeTo: All Main Board DirectorsAttached to this report are two relevant documents which I suggest are read and then destroyed. They are: Dr Zack Busner’s journal of the events surrounding the aborted Inclusion trial and a diary kept by one of his guinea-pigs (the painter Simon Dykes). I have appended them to my report because I feel they may be of some interest to Board members. However, little of what either Busner or Dykes has to say is of any significance when it comes to understanding, or even attempting to explain, the events at Worminghall over the past four months.That task is my responsibility. As the Company’s senior public relations manager I was asked to conduct the appropriate damage limitation exercise after the incident. The results of this are as follows:1. The Worminghall Facility itself has been cleared. All evidence of the cyclotron explosion has been disposed of. Our operatives have conducted an exhaustive cleansing operation using the most sophisticated reagents available. All stocks of Inclusion held at the Facility have been destroyed; and I am confident that any residual traces of Inclusion that may have permeated the facility following the explosion will be soon neutralised.2. As you are all no doubt aware, the explosion was reported by a local resident to the desk sergeant at Thame Police Station before anyone at Cryborg Head Office knew what had transpired. Fortunately, the fact of the explosion did not gain any wider currency. The police sergeant and the local resident (a Mrs Freeling) have been made extensive, ex gratia payments.3. As far as local and national bureacracy is concerned i.e., planning committees, health and safety committees, licensing bodies etc., as you all know, the Worminghall Facility was never licensed for pharmaceutical research of any kind. Indeed, as far as the local authorities were aware, the Facility was merely a ‘rest home’ in the Chilterns for Cryborg employees who had collapsed due to work-related stress disorders. No medical treatments were to be carried out there and Dr Busner himself was listed in the original planning application for the Facility as a non-medical director-cum-manager. All medical care for employees residing at the Facility was to be contracted out, on a private basis, to a GP at the local practice.4. This brings me to the issue of Dr Anthony Bohm. As Board members are aware, Bohm was Busner’s conduit for the secret testing of Inclusion. Bohm was paid to prescribe Inclusion to his patients, and to provide Busner with an adequate control. Unfortunately Busner did not confine himself to bribing Bohm. Indeed, despite the handsome sums paid to him, the threat of personal ruin and professional disgrace which that money represented does not seem to have been Bohm’s main motivation. Judging from Busner’s journal, Bohm was an ideological convert to Inclusion, as was MacLachlan, the local pharmacist who distributed the Inclusion prescriptions.Busner persuaded them all that the illegal prescription of an unlicensed, untested psychoactive drug was a positively humanitarian gesture. How he managed this I cannot say. The account of his relationship with these parties that his own journal gives is fantastic and almost certainly false.After arriving at Worminghall, assessing the damage and immediate potential for toxicological fall-out, my next thought was to secure Bohm. However, when I got to the health centre I found that he was away, allegedly on holiday in France for two weeks. At the pharmacy I got the same story. I need hardly emphasise to the Board how important it is for the containment of the Inclusion incident that Bohm — and Maclachlan — are apprehended on their return to the UK. Until we have interviewed them there can be no guarantee that the prescription of Inclusion to ordinary NHS patients in the Worminghall locality can be effectively covered up.5. Busner’s disappearance and Dykes’s ongoing condition are, of course, the most worrying aspects of the whole Inclusion débâcle. If we could be certain that Busner was dead it would be possible for us to abandon the complex subterfuge required to convince his family that he is still attending a neuro-pharmacological conference in the USA. On the other hand, were he to reappear it would open the way to attaching the culpability to Busner himself.The Dykes problem is bound up with Busner. Dykes has had a complete mental breakdown. Psychiatrists who owe no loyalty to the company are convinced that his ravings about having ‘included’ Dr Zack Busner into himself, are just that: ravings.Nevertheless, having spoken to both Dykes and his wife myself, I am now convinced that he is suffering from an Inclusion-induced psychosis of some kind. Should he recover and be discharged from the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, the company may have some awkward questions to answer. And if we wish to pronounce Busner dead, we will have to come up with a body.In conclusion: the Inclusion trials are far from over. If you examine Busner’s journal and Dykes’s diary I think you will gain some idea of just how potent and dangerous a drug Inclusion is.It does not come within my remit to criticise company policy. However — as some of you will no doubt recall — I joined Cryborg eight years ago, specifically to deal with the bad press the company was receiving in the wake of the Rutger breakout. Given that I was able to persuade an overwhelmingly hostile media that there were sound medical reasons for surgically bifurcating the feet of African tribesmen in order to provide them with two giant prehensile toes, any aspersions cast on my loyalty to Cryborg are unwarranted.Be that as it may — I am appalled by what transpired at Worminghall. On the day of the incident, arriving at the Facility after a breakneck drive from London, I found the buildings inside the compound deserted.I ran from one to the next. Their floors were scattered — not with the debris I expected — but with piles of things, objects of all kinds, and intact. There were antique victrolas and pharmacological reference works; laboratory equipment and cuddly toys; pill boxes and plastic pachyderms; fruit and electronic components; curling equipment and ancient votive statuary; stuffed animals and exercise equipment; sporting trophies and antiquarian books; model trains and silverware; samovars and sousaphones; clothes and carpet off-cuts.There was no obvious explanation. It was a remarkably diverse assemblage of stuff. There wasn’t even enough room in the Research Facility to house it all. The buildings were overflowing; things bulged from windows and spilled out through doors.I worked my way across the compound towards the farthest building, the one housing Busner’s laboratory, his office and the Inclusion cyclotron. As I drew closer I began to see a pattern in these drifts of impedimenta. The car batteries and Eskis; tin cans and slipper socks; VCRs and fondue forks, formed a series of concentric circles, covering the entire area of the Research Facility. Busner’s laboratory was the epicentre.Entering the building I found evidence that gave me a partial explanation. The cyclotron had exploded. Busner’s laboratory and office were wrecked. Equipment and papers had been hopelessly mangled together. The concentric rings of objects that covered the rest of the Facility were some kind of embroidery, an elaboration of the shock waves of the explosion.These waves or rings were present in the laboratory as well. As they diminished in size, so did the objects that composed them. At the outer edge of the laboratory the rings comprised Rotadexes and file holders; typewriter ribbons and plastic beakers; Bunsen burners and test-tube racks. Whilst the smaller rings were made up of paper clips and drawing pins; biros and match books; fragments of glass and fragments of mica. The smallest rings were just dust.The rings were disconcerting. Their utter regularity, the way they retained circularity by running up and over the buildings — or even traversing them altogether — implied both conscious agency and blind force. I was bewildered. Even more unsettling were the two bound notebooks that sat in the middle of the smallest ring. They were so at odds with the evidence of destruction that they must have been placed there after the explosion. .