Will Self: Umbrella

how he is — like so many psychiatrists of passable competence, so accustomed had he become to speaking to the distressed and the deranged in tones bridled by concerned neutrality, and employing vocabulary purged of any upsetting words, that when set free he became laughably inappropriate — or would be if there was anything to laugh about . Nor had he expected his new junior to deal with the amusing suicides himself — certainly not by swabbing, or even so much as looking — that’s what nurses were for, surely! — only that he should be prepared for how the more feisty ones, with sprightliness fizzing in their melancholy , would smuggle a sheet to the lavatory, tear, twine and then knot it to the crook of the pipe where it entered the cistern. The blessing as well as the curse of this Victorian plumbing ,Busner had felt Whitcomb might well have said — it was his sort of remark — but instead he was obliged to furnish his own homily, for any death, no matter how meagre, demanded at least this consideration: The blessing as well as the curse of this Victorian plumbing is its robustness. Kick and thrash as they might, the most ardent suicide was unable to break the pipe . .They sometimes manage — this from Perkins, the nastier of the charge nurses on 14, one of the two chronic wards to which Busner had been assigned — to hang themselves from the bloody chain, would you believe it! We find ’em with their bare tootsies in the kharzi. . Busner believed it. He saw rivulets of urine and faeces running down the gutters between metatarsals, plip-plopping into the commode while up above the cistern splutters unceasing . .That first suicide, which he had not only looked upon but also helped Mboya — the nice nurse — to cut down, had suspended herself from the completely reliable pipe — and so in death she was wedged in the awkward gap between it and a white-painted window that had been halved lengthwise when this cubicle was partitioned into existence — yet more evidence — if any were needed — of how the hospital altered its own cellular structure to create new morphologies for new pathologies to be diagnosed by psychiatrists accredited by new professional associations . .while the inmates remained the same,patient only in the way she now was: inert, with no sign of her bowels having been emptied apart from. . that smell . Instead, her papery skin, oh so fine , crinkled into the flannelette of a too-big nightie. She was, Busner had thought,a dead dry moth, its cellular structure decaying inside of this far larger one.

. . Apart from that smell: faecal, certainly — but antiseptically chemical too, with a sharp tang of floor polish — a still more intense blending of the odour that emanated from the pores, mouths and hidden vents of the inmates confined to the first psychiatric ward Busner had ever visited, more than a decade before, where he had student-foolishly inquired, What’s that smell? And been told it was paraldehyde,a liquid sedative as limpidly brown as the state it was intended to induce. . in Henry, in Napsbury . . where he still is. . my brother lest I forget . Paraldehyde — how much of it had been poured down throats in asylums throughout the past half-century? Gallons. . demijohns. . barrels? Hosed into them, really, to put out the fire . And now what was left — this rain inside the building, this rusty old rain falling down from the saturated plaster to the asphalt floor .

All this had jetted Busner forward sea-sluggishly through the greenybriny , the sounds of crying, sobbing and cackling amplified by the third-of-a-mile corridor, distorted by its scores of alcoves, then spun by its rifling so that, with unerring accuracy, they strike him in one ear and revolve around his head to the other. . Axoid: Bold as Love. Along comes Zachary, my tremolo arm vibrating as I sing to my own don’t-step-on-the-cracks-self . . past the HAIRDRESSER AND THE SCULPTURE ROOM, then out from the main block of the hospital towards ART THERAPY and the REMINISCENCE ROOM — the last Whitcomb’s own humane innovation. In this section of the corridor the light from the south-facing windows gives him the sensation of trundling lousily along a trench, paraldehyde. . paral-. . parados! that was the word for it — the side of the trench where they stood to fire their machine gun, its traverse. . the airing court, its ticcing picking off the enemy that comes bellowing across the dormant grass: madness — a banshee. Along comes Zachary . . Not that he has had the corridor to himself — there’s been a steady stream of staff and a few purposeful patients on their way to buy pathetic sundries or attend therapy sessions. A few purposeful — but many more let out from their wards simply to wander the sprawling building. There was one platoon — or so he’d been told — who marched from the Camden Social Services office in the north-west to the Haringey Social Services office in the north-east, then headed south to the lower corridor, and tramped the entire length of it before heading north once more, and so completing a mile-long circuit of the hospital’s insides which they would make again and again, until ordered to halt for food by their bellies, or for rest by their feet, or for medication. . by their keepers . Yes, there have been these patients in their charity cardigans soiled at the hem, thick socks sloughing from thin ankles, their eyes cartooned by the wonky frames of their National Health glasses — for whom a corridor is a destination . None of them is real — nor remotely credible, not compared to this: Along comes Zachary. . the me-voice, the voice about me, in me, that’s me-ier than me. . so real, ab-so-lute-ly, that might not self-consciousness itself be only a withering away of full-blown psychosis? This must, Busner thinks, occur to everyone, every day, many times, whether or not they are walking along a corridor so long that it would challenge the sanity of a once-born, a cheery Whitman. Still. . that way madness about madness lies . .a madness that has already diverted his career from the mainline before it got started, sending him rolling into the siding that connects to this laager , with its buttoned-up soul-doctors and Musselmen, all of them compelled to serve under the campanile, the water tower, and the chimney from the stained brickwork of which a smooch of yellow smoke licks the grey sky over North London. Along comes Zachary . .the corridor is narrow — ten feet at most — yet none of the human traffic thus far has detained him until now — when he is fixated by one transfixed. It is a patient — a woman, an old woman. . a very old woman, so bent — so kyphotic , that upside down she faces the sagging acrylic belly of her own cardigan and vigorously assents to it . This is all that Busner can see: the back of her nodding-dog head, the whitish hair draggling away from two bald patches — one at the crown, the second a band across the rear of her cranium. At once, he thinks of twitchers he has seen on his chronic ward, screwingtheir heads into the angle between the headrest and the back of their allotted armchair — twitchers, wearing themselves away as opportunityhammersaway at the inside of the television screen and applause comes in monotonous waves. She is at once a long way off and close enough for him to manhandle. After the eruptions — and there are many lifetimes of afterwards — it settled down on him, an understanding soft and ashy, that all the important relationships in his life — with his uncle Maurice, with Alkan, with Sikorski and the other Quantity Theorists, with his wives — definitely with his children — were like this: fondling familiar, their breath in my nostrils caries-sweet, sugar-sour — yet also radiophonically remote, their voices bleeping and blooping across the lightyears .

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