Will Self - Umbrella

. . is that with Churchill at the War Office it may be the opportune time for you to consider a transfer, not that I’m in a position to know whether such a move can be readily effected. . I do know Sir Clemens, man-of-the-hour. . all that. He, I believe, has tremendous sway at the Admiralty. . Albert swallows heavily and feels his Adam’s apple rasp against his collar, So , and, in Euclidean terms: exactly so . Now he can see the precise parabolas , and he can call down the speaking tube and order them to train the big guns on Phillips’s commercial target. To ask for a more precise identification — details of ensigns flown, manning, etc. — would’ve been crass as well as impertinent. Still, Albert knows this much: that Phillips’s dabbling with the Mercers’ Company is pretty much that: a blind . He had had a wholesaler from his own pater — but more or less run it down . There are investments here and others there — he alludes to visits to Armstrong at Jesmond Dene, and to his role — in a purely non-executive capacity — as one to be relied on to make up the numbers for foreign buyers. There is a special lodge, set apart in the woods. . a delightful situation, with its wide windows facing out across a leafy ravine. . Lohengrin’s horn sounds wistful in the gloaming: too-too-tooraa-boom-de-ay! Risqué young ladies in merveilleuse dresses kick their legs, showing the boys much more than they’ve ever seen before. . Cliquot! Cliquot! cries Sir William, his gull-wing moustaches soaring about above the upturned bowl of the electrolier, for this is a showroom for his products. The foreign wallahs admire the table decoration wrought from the casing of a 22-pounder, and the rifle-cartridge cruets — an experimental machine gun fires bread pills, while from the dumb waiter the silent ones decant soup . .Y’know, Phillips says, and Albert finds such pathetic awkwardness in the right-angling of their chairs as he struggles up towards asking about his benefactor’s lumbago — but Phillips trumps him: I am most gratified by your rapid advance, you have more than justified my faith in you. . His hand sets down his ruby of port, then ascends in arithmetical gestures. . ten times more — twenty! Albert, unused to drinking this much, wonders if Rutherford’s elementary particles of light have slowed, because he sees ten or twenty distinct hands — or are they ghosts of hands no longer existent? He raises his knee to where it would need to be were the leading hand to descend upon it — if, that is, there were the remotest possibility of them ever, ever touching , instead of circling and circling and circling. . whirligogs , which isn’t tactful, he thinks, besides what is it, Scots dialect? Golliwogs, on the other hand, must be just as offensive and yet they’re commonplace — there’s one on Daniel’s bed, its woolly black face stifled by the white pillow . . — I say. I say?!! — Mboya. . I can’t go on. I mean, we’re working together so closely, we — I. He stops, the noise about them in the canteen is terrific, the clashing of scores of knives on plates, forks on knives, the grinding of so many robotic mandibles all linked to the same chain that loops down from the low ceiling driving them on through sausage, chips and beans. From the slim paperback tucked in the pocket of Busner’s white coat floats this conundrum: I respect Jack because he does not respect me . .and he sighs, ahhh, and thinks, What kind of idiocy is this? Ronnie. . Ronnie — you’ve gone to bloody pieces! From a gaping serving hatch the dinner ladies labour hard to supply this industry of mouths , but why, why must they bash-bash-bash with their ladles so? Why — why’re we all so ravenous, the patients too? Whitcomb told me he’d an obsessive who wouldn’t say boo. Looked in his hamster cheeks, found paperclips, screws, bulldog clips. . Sent him down to Gower Street, they X-rayed him, then cut him open, found thruppenny bits, syringes — with needles! — several teaspoons, fondue forks, a yard of garden hose — with the squirty thing. . Why? A comforter, without doubt — also a schizophrenic incorporation that betokened an inability to see the object as. . the other. And us? Busner looks around him at the ravening mouths. . We would like to eat the hospital. Take the Hatch from the serving hatch and put it down the hatch . .He grimaces and Mboya cannot tell if this is directed at him or at Busner’s forkful of mash with its pebble-dashing of beans. He says, Doctor Busner? And Busner cries, That’s it! That’s what I wanted to say. Mboya, can’t we call each other by our first names? Mine is. . He sets down his cutlery. . Zachary, but mostly I’m Zack. Mboya takes the hand, his own is dry, amazingly dry in contrast with his face, which today looks pulpy, that’s a truly dreadful shaving rash . Feeling the hardwood of Mboya’s hand, Busner thinks, Surely this is the wrong way round? We should’ve been introduced with surnames and handshakes, this further intimacy demands. . what, a kiss? Mboya smiles. Enoch, he says, and Busner laughs. Yes, Mboya says, shaking his head ruefully, like Enoch Powell. No, Busner counters, I was thinking that we’re both biblical prophets. Mboya ends the clasp and begins to intone: In those days it shall come to pass that ten men shall take hold of all the languages of the nations, even shall take hold of the skirt of him that is a Jew, saying, We will go with you: for we have heard that God is with you. The psychiatric nurse and the psychiatrist sit in silent contemplation for a moment, then: Zechariah, Chapter 8, Verse 23. Busner is appalled by it all, and cannot take his eyes off the cross Coptic? that hangs around Mboya’s neck, but Mboya laughs a laugh I haven’t heard before , one that’s warm, companionable , and says, Don’t worry, Zack, the churchgoing is pretty much done with now, I got the cross because Hendrix was wearing one on the cover of one of his albums. Still, you can take the boy out of the mission school. He stuffs the cliché with a mouthful of sandwich, and Busner is momentarily silenced by egg and cress being tumbled in the pink cement mixer , before expostulating, You don’t mean to say you know the entire bloody thing off by heart? Mboya shrugs, No, ’course not — but a good portion, I’m blessed with a pretty near photographic memory. Busner would like to ask Mboya all about himself , there’s much that’s intriguing: his almost accentless English, his air of containment , which is familiar because I share it . Also, he has been at Friern for over a decade, he must know a lot . .Instead Busner says: I want to photograph the post-encephalitic patients, will you help me? And Mboya drops one heavy eyelid over a bloodshot white. He’s tired, Busner thinks, we’re all tired — like we’re all ravenous. Mboya sucks his cheek, chk-chk, shutter clucks. — D’you want me to use my memory, Zack, because I do remember most of them —. No, no, Busner begins in all seriousness. I have a 35-millimetre and a Bolex for cine films. . then he realises: You’re teasing me! And this is the most pleasingly intimate thing that has happened to him in a long time, to be teased. Teasing him is what Miriam did when they were first together, and this gentle ridicule somehow annulled all the grosser abuse he had suffered at boarding school — the anti-Semitic taunts, his underpants torn from him in the changing room, Henry quite powerless to intervene . .She doesn’t tease him any more, though — she has modulated her critique into humiliation . Busner pushes his plate to one side, he begins to roll and then unroll the end of his tie once Maurice’s , which is heavy, knitted silk, one of the few left.