Will Self - Grey Area

That’s the end of the photocopied extract from Sumner’s report. The A4 sheets were folded twice before being pasted into Busner’s notebook. When you unfolded the sheet a drift of grey powder was caught in the paper cranny. Some of it got on your fingertips, and idly, as one might taste anything, you dabbed your lips.

There’s also an old Worminghall Co-operative Dairy bill caught in the folds of the photocopy, which reads as follows:

30th December Milk (40 pints)£12.64 Yoghurt (30 pots, assorted)£15.84 Single cream (5 pots)£7.25 Total£35.73

Busner must have tucked the thing inside the photocopy and forgotten it. Either that, or he is/was an unusually anally retentive man — even for a psychiatrist.

You turn back to Busner’s log and glance at the next few entries. They are unilluminating. During his first few weeks at the Worminghall Facility Busner was preoccupied with the routine work of getting any institution going: arranging catering, interviewing auxiliary staff, ensuring the buildings and laboratory were fully equipped.

Although there is some of Busner in all of this, it is hardly self-revelatory stuff. On occasion he complains about the grind of having to commute from London on a weekly basis, the tediousness of the M40 motorway, and the lack of a decent service centre between Junction 1 (the M25) and Junction 5 (Stokenchurch). But for the most part he gives a flat account of events.

By the middle of December most of this work had been completed. Busner’s staff was in place (both those required to keep up the pretence that the Worminghall Facility was a rest home, and his own assistants), and the trial was ready to begin:17th DecemberI have made contact with a Dr Anthony Bohm at the Thame Health Centre. He’s a rather Chekhovian figure, white-haired, with a great pink bum of a chin. He’s been out to the Facility several times to play chess with me. He’s not a bad player, although I find his habit of neighing whenever he moves his knights intensely irritating.This evening I broached the question of Inclusion with him for the first time. I was highly circumspect, saying merely that I had been reading in an American journal about a new anti-depressant that seemed to be having phenomenal success with both exogenous and endogenous depressions.He rose to the bait effortlessly, saying that he would positively murder for such a drug — if it worked. The numbers of patients he saw with depressive symptoms have been steadily increasing over the last few years, and hardly any of them are responsive to treatment.Often these people appear psychologically blameless, but for all that they lapse into states of almost catatonic despair, neglecting themselves, their families, their jobs and careers. I put it to him that this was quite a reasonable response to living in the Thame area. We both laughed heartily at this.23rd DecemberAnthony Bohm was up again last night for chess. He’s added to his repertoire of irritation. He now says, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ every time he moves a bishop. I steered the subject back gradually to the issue of medical ethics and what a general practitioner should be allowed to prescribe to his patients. I wasn’t disappointed.Of course, I knew already that Bohm had susceptibilities in this area. The Cryborg people’s decision to locate the Facility here was partly due to their having positively vetted a number of GPs in the Oxfordshire region who might be prepared — for various reasons — to engage in the illegal Inclusion trial. I’m glad that I approached Bohm first, though; my other options included a doctor in Abingdon who Cryborg discovered was an illegal abortionist and one in High Wycombe, who has more than a passing affection for diamorphine. But Bohm’s motivation, if I can activate it, will be altogether purer.Bohm told me that he thought it was a physician’s prerogative and duty to cast his net as wide as possible for the right treatment. He is quite a libertarian. He even intimated that the whole notion of medical licensing seemed to him an infringement of personal rights. He then began to speak of what I knew already — namely his involvement in the use of MDMA as a ‘marital aid’ in the early seventies.Bohm was then a psychiatric intern at a hospital in the Midlands. He took to using MDMA with a vengeance — and achieved impressive results. The problem was he himself also took to using MDMA with a vengeance — and achieved an impressive number of patient seductions. He missed being struck off by a whisker. Only the fact that none of his patients would tesify against him saved his neck. He left psychiatry and retrained as a GP.Of course, he didn’t admit all of this to me. He gave a sanitised version. But the fact that he was prepared to own up to prescribing MDMA at all shows that he is beginning to trust me.9th JanuaryThe cyclotron is now fully installed at Worminghall and today some technicians came up with Gainsford to give me a demonstration.I cannot claim to understand much of the physical chemistry involved in isolating pure Inclusion from the cadaverous and faecal matter of the bee mites. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a cyclotron being used in any similar process before. Gainsford told me that it was a method he, together with the other research chemists at Cryborg, had hit upon by trial and error. Although the bee-mite powder is effective in its raw state, the quantities needed are large and the correct dosage difficult to determine. Gainsford also implied that they had had some problems with side-effects, but when I pressed him he wouldn’t elaborate.I watched as Gainsford used a micron scale to measure the correct quantity of mite powder to be placed in the cyclotron. Obviously, this was far too small to be seen by the naked eye. When the process was complete and Gainsford’s technicians were working with mine to make the fresh Inclusion up into a batch of pills, he told me that less than four hundred thousandths of a milligram was required to synthesise a thousand doses.11th JanuaryI can’t help being fascinated by the Inclusion. The pills Gainsford made are sitting in the lab looking utterly innocent. Looking, in fact, just like Amytriptaline, which is what most of the potential Inclusion guinea-pigs will be taking already.Every few hours I find myself drawn to the locked cabinet in the laboratory. I open it — and scrutinise the Inclusion — as if it could tell me something. The technical staff look at me curiously, but they know better than to ask me what I am doing.16th JanuaryWhat if Inclusion really does work? The results Gainsford has shown me from animal experimentation are remarkable. Rats learning to conga; gerbils apparently meditating after taking Inclusion; beagles that have been blinded with detergents as part of product testing completely rehabilitated by the drug, seemingly more engaged with the world than when they were sighted.The human data is equally impressive, but as yet Gainsford has only tested the drug on a few isolated individuals, catatonics and severe autistics at a London teaching hospital where Cryborg have some insidious pull. He hasn’t done a proper trial on either a non-depressive, or anyone with an orthodox clinical depression.I have a great inclination to take Inclusion myself. It’s not that I wish to claim some part in its discovery — should it prove to be an effective palliative. It’s more that I feel that the only way to justify the unethical character of the trial is for me to break down some of the traditional — and, I believe, artificial — distinctions between the scientist and the supposed objects of his study. Why not think of my brain as a sort of culture, and Inclusion as a bacterium growing within it. I would become another Alexander Fleming — but a Fleming of the psyche!20th JanuaryI have taken Inclusion. If I was expecting an experience like that of Hofmann, when he accidentally took LSD-25 and unleashed the psychedelic revolution, then I would have been disappointed. But, of course, I wasn’t, and was delighted.I took two Inclusion tablets at about five yesterday evening and then retired to my quarters to see what would happen. At first I sat, straining with all my mental apparatus to try and discern some effect. Nothing happened. After an hour I grew listless and distracted. I tidied up the place a bit — it was in a fearful mess. Another hour passed, still no effect.Eventually I grew tired, and quite frankly, bored. I turned on the television and slumped in front of it. For some reason there was nothing on but sport, which has never interested me. I found myself staring blankly at a Senior League Curling Championship, being broadcast from Peebles.If most sport leaves me cold — curling positively curdles my mind. I can see nothing more asinine than hefting the ‘stones’, which look like outsize doorstops, down an ice rink so that they get as close as possible to a fixed point. If bowls is boring, how much more boring can frozen bowls be! A bowls that tends towards absolute zero.Yet, after about ten minutes of staring sightlessly at the set, I found that I was actually beginning to become absorbed by the curling. I started noting the names of individual players and how well they were doing. I listened to what the commentator was saying about overall averages and positioning. My attention was focused on questions of technique: how much sweeping of the rink is necessary to ensure a good run for the stones; what the best wrist action is for releasing the stone cleanly; what the regulations are concerning equipment and appropriate clothing.When the programme eventually finished I was quite disconsolate. But my spirits rose when the announcer said that the next programme would be a film dramatisation of Betjeman’s ‘Summoned by Bells’. Then I pulled myself up short. Betjeman? It’s not that I exactly dislike his poetry, it’s just that I’m pretty well indifferent to it.It’s like that for so many things as far as I’m concerned. The idea of them interests me, and if my interest becomes positively engaged then I will take up with just about anything for a while, from car-boot sales to Kant. But I’m not one of these people who has ‘interests’, a real passion for model trains, or moutaineering. I have often thought that a suitable epitaph for me — given the gad-fly nature of my enthusiasms — would be ‘He had no interests but interest’. And yet here I was, looking forward to a film dramatisation of ‘Summoned by Bells’.It was the Inclusion. I realised this tremulously — if the drug was powerful enough to get me interested in curling and Betjeman, there was no telling what other properties it might have. I decided to run some simple psychodiagnostic tests on myself, perceptual, relational and conceptual, to check that I wasn’t becoming disoriented.I became so absorbed by the tests that I missed most of Summoned by Bells. But no matter — they told me what I already knew intuitively; that the only true effect of Inclusion was to make me feel more positively engaged with whatever I directed my attention to. I was experiencing no hallucinations, no distortions of space or time, no kinaesthesia or synaesthesia. My reality-testing was perfect and my intelligence quotient unaffected.Nor were there any perceptible toxic side-effects, or hangover. When I awoke the following morning I was quite clearly back to normal. When the alarm rang at 8 a.m. the thought of another working day was just as excruciatingly dull as ever.22nd JanuaryBohm was up this evening. We played a few speed games. It helps if we play speed chess, because he doesn’t feel he has time to neigh, or say, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’ However, when he check mates, he picks up the piece of his that has mated my king and simulates intercourse between the two of them. He really is a most juvenile individual — if indispensable.As I anticipated I had no difficulty in encouraging him to try some Inclusion. I told him the effect the drug had had on me, and how completely localised and harmless it appeared to be, with no contra-indications. He took two pills and we went on playing.After about an hour Bohm went to the toilet. When he hadn’t returned after twenty minutes or so, I grew concerned. I went out into the corridor and found him standing there, rapt. Apparently, what had happened was that when he was in the toilet he became fascinated by the particulate structure of the fire-resistant tiles on the ceiling. He told me there was nothing disturbing about this, he merely found that the whole subject of fire-resistant tiles began to interest him. He admitted that he was one of those people who are normally fairly oblivious of their immediate environment, and that Mrs Bohm often complains when he doesn’t register some alteration she has made to the decoration of their home.He wanted to get back to the chess game, but felt that he really ought to undertake some sort of comparative study of the fire-resistant tiles in the Facility. He had visited the other buildings and spent some time studying their fire-resistant tiles, and then begun to work his way back towards my rooms. When I found him he was nearly finished. However, it’s an indication of just how benign and localised the effects of Inclusion are that when I suggested he cut this exercise short, he happily acceded.30th JanuaryBohm has come up with the names of twenty of his patients who he anticipates having to prescribe anti-depressants to within the next month. In place of the tricyclics or SSRIs he will, of course, prescribe Inclusion. Another group of twenty patients who are currently on tricyclics or SSRIs will be put on to Inclusion; and a third group of ‘new depressives’ will be given a placebo.I will give the batches of prepared Inclusion to MacLachlan, the pharmacist. He will then make up the prescriptions in conformity with this schema. Bohm will, of course, have no idea which of his patients will be in receipt of Inclusion. His task is merely to record data as and when they present themselves to him. This is as reasonable a conformity to the principles of the double blind as we can manage under the circumstances.I did suggest to Gainsford that I introduce another level of blind to the trial, as Ford and I did for our now infamous double-double blind trial at my Concept House in the seventies. But Gainsford is too much of a plodder to recognise its brilliance and knocked me back.Gainsford is, needless to say, absolutely delighted with my progress on the trial. And he relayed a special message to me from the Cryborg Main Board, which said: ‘We are absolutely delighted.’ Gainsford hadn’t thought I would get to this stage for at least six months. In part this is fortuitous. If Bohm was an enthusiastic convert to the potential of Inclusion, MacLachlan is positively messianic about the stuff.He himself has been treated for depression on and off for a number of years. Although it’s a far from empirically sound assessment of the drug’s potential, its effect on MacLachlan was heartwarming. He came out to Worminghall with Bohm one night for a few hands of bridge. MacLachlan’s play was so diffident and unresponsive that he was hardly more proactive than the dummy.Bohm and I persuaded him to come out for two more sessions; and on the third we broached the issue of Inclusion. Initially, MacLachlan was sceptical — not suspicous, just sceptical. However, when Bohm and I reported our own experiences of the drug to him, he was eager to try it.When we resumed play an hour after MacLachlan had ingested some Inclusion, he was a different man. Witty, engaged, eloquent, both on the game in hand and the whole history and practice of bridge; there was little Bohm and I could do to contain him. His countenance — which is mousey in the extreme, hidden behind a water-rat beard of terrible lankness — brightened and brightened. His impressions of Omar Sharif became hard to deal with, but overall I can say that MacLachlan’s Inclusion-based rehabilitation was one of the most humane things I have witnessed in almost thirty years as a medical practitioner.Bohm and I have restricted MacLachlan to a nugatory dosage of Inclusion. He himself admits that if he takes too much he becomes overly absorbed in the little pictures that adorn the labels of the shampoo he sells at the pharmacy, or some such irrelevance. However, on a mild dose he just feels that loose sense of positive engagement that we are looking for.9th FebruaryThe trial has been underway for a week now and everything is going smoothly. There is actually remarkably little for me to do now, except wait for Bohm to begin relaying the data.I have been in the habit of commuting to Worminghall on a weekly basis. Really it is a tedious place. On a good day there is something affecting about the view from the Chiltern escarpment where the Facility is, down on to the rolling country of Oxfordshire. Walking along the Ridgeway path, where it dives under the M40, I am often reminded of early Renaissance paintings depicting enclosed landscapes like this; and can half imagine that the cooling towers of Didcot Power Station are some Tuscan fortification.On a good day, that is. On a bad day it’s dreary beyond belief. Often thick fogs roll in from the north, and the whole countryside is rendered both tatty and claustrophobic. On my walks I pass chicken-wired pheasant runs and abandoned piggeries. They give a disagreeable impression of urb in rus. The fog distorts my sense of scale, and I toy with the notion that I am wandering over a giant, derelict tennis court, or a still vaster cat’s litter tray that no one has bothered to empty for a while.It’s mordant fantasising such as this that has driven me to what might be termed ‘recreational’ use of Inclusion. I am very rigorous about this, though, I have no desire to experience an Inclusion dependency — if such a thing turns out to be possible. So I only take Inclusion when playing ping-pong with one or other of the auxiliary staff. I can’t say that the Inclusion makes my game any better, but it does make me considerably more interested. I now really appreciate ping-pong and am extremely glad that I’ve decided to make it a part of my life.4th MarchThe trial has now been going for over a month and the results are very encouraging. Bohm’s reports clearly demonstrate that the depressive patients treated with Inclusion are responding far better than those on tricyclics or SSRIs, and far, far better than the control group. If things carry on this way for another month I shall have to recommend that Cryborg find a way of legitimating the discovery and the trial findings. To allow things to go much further, would, I feel, cast into doubt the ethics of what we have been doing. I shall relay this conviction of mine to Gainsford in my next report.11th MarchI had a worrying phone call from Bohm this afternoon. What he had to tell me has unsettled me and cast into doubt some of my faith in Inclusion. One of Bohm’s patients, a painter called Simon Dykes who lives on the Tiddington side of Thame, has been saying some very strange things to him.I am fairly certain that Dykes must be on Inclusion. There is no other explanation for his behaviour, if Bohm’s report of it is to be believed.Bohm has been prescribing ‘anti-depressants’ to Dykes for almost six weeks now. Dykes came to see him complaining of a sense of futility, emotional alienation, impotence etc., etc. He made light of his depression, but his wife — who attended with him — told Bohm, in confidence, that he had been a nightmare since last year and had to be hospitalised, briefly, over Christmas.Initially the Inclusion seemed to be having a beneficial effect on Dykes. He reported to Bohm just the sense of positive engagement that we look for from the drug. Dykes said that he was sorting out his problems with his wife, he was enjoying the company of his children and had begun to paint again after a block lasting some six months.However, last week when Dykes went to see Bohm for his check-up, he told him that he was having doubts about his sanity again. He now felt that he was ‘going the other way’. When Bohm asked Dykes to elaborate, the painter said that he was having difficulty in controlling his capacity for being involved with things. That when he turned his attention to something — whether it be a person, an object, a whole area of knowledge, or merely some abstract notion — he couldn’t prevent himself from being sucked deep into its contemplation. Furthermore, the painter claimed that he began to feel as if he knew more about whatever it was than he possibly could.Bohm asked him for an example and Dykes came up with the Boxer Rising. He said he was looking through an old edition of the Britannica when he came across the entry on the Boxer Rising. Accompanying it was a picture of the Chinese Boxers attacking the British Embassy. Dykes swears he didn’t read the entry at first. Instead he merely stared at the old engraving (apparently he leafs through such old books looking for graphic material for his work), and found himself being ‘sucked into it’. While in this reverie he became acquainted with a vast amount of information on the Boxer Rising, including the names of the ring-leaders, and even elements of their motivation.When he was sufficiently recovered, he read the accompanying entry. All of the facts that had come to him in the reverie turned out to be true! He even knew some things that weren’t in the entry, but when he did some further research at the Bodleian in Oxford, they panned out as well!If all of this wasn’t bad enough, the horrific clincher came this week. Dykes arrived for his appointment as usual, at about eleven. Bohm said that the painter was haggard and unkempt. His eyes darted this way and that around Bohm’s consulting room, lighting on object after object, as if he were seeing not the things themselves, but looking deep into their anatomy.Bohm asked him how he was feeling and Dykes said that he knew he wasn’t taking an anti-depressant, but some experimental drug. When Bohm challenged him and asked how could he be so sure, Dykes replied that he knew the man who was behind it. His name was Busner and he was operating out of a compound in the Chilterns near Worminghall.Dykes had seen me — he claimed — in the Three Pigeons Inn by Junction 7 of the M40. He hadn’t paid any particular attention to me when he went into the pub, but after he grew tired of contemplating the history and evolution of the towelling bar mat, he turned his attention to the ‘froggy-looking man in the corner wearing the mohair tie’. He said that I wasn’t as easy to read as the bar mat, or the engraving of the Boxer Rising, but that merely by looking at me he could include elements of my mental terrain into his own. So it was that he discovered that I was doing some sort of drug trial, and that it involved anti-depressant medication.The bugger is that I do have a drink in the Three Pigeons from time to time, and there’s every possibility that Dykes has seen me in there. Although I cannot recall noticing anyone paying undue attention to me. On the contrary, it’s often extremely difficult to get served in there, despite a bar staff to drinker ratio of about 1:1.After this encounter Dykes formed the conviction that his current predicament had something to do with me. He then challenged Bohm with this information. Bohm told me that he was as circumspect as possible. He advised Dykes to stop taking the Inclusion immediately and switch to a tranquilliser. Dykes refused, and as he already has a repeat prescription for Inclusion, Bohm realised that he would be unable to force the issue. Especially as Dykes then said he wanted Bohm to arrange a meeting with me, and that if he didn’t, or if I refused to see him, he would get in touch with the press.Bohm displayed as much sang-froid as he could under the circumstances. He told Dykes to go home and try to relax, and that he would ‘see what he could do’. As soon as Dykes left the health centre he called me.I have been put into such a state by this news that I’ve been unable to come up with a definitive analysis of the situation. Can it be that this is some kind of Inclusion-induced psychosis? And if so, will it occur in all of the patients who have been prescribed the drug? I shudder to think. An alternative possibility is that Dykes is going into a psychotic or schizoid interlude despite, rather than because of, the Inclusion, and that the facts he has adduced about the Inclusion trial and myself are lurid supposition, hit upon by chance.Whatever the case, I cannot at this stage bear to inform Gainsford. I know that he would overreact and jeopardise what we have achieved so far. If we can contain the situation with Dykes then there is no reason to abort the trial. So, I told Bohm that he was to bring Dykes up to Worminghall as soon as possible. He called back an hour or so later and said that they would be coming up tomorrow night. Until then I will see if I can’t discover some more about the drug’s effects. Obviously, the best way to do this is for me to take an extra-large dose of Inclusion myself.This may appear foolhardy, but the whole thing intrigues me so much that I am determined to get to the bottom of it. I am passionately interested in Inclusion, and wish it at all costs to remain a large part of my life.