Will Self - Umbrella

Having reached the far end of the first range, they’re walking along the grassy strip where the second range used to be. Unbounded by its lowering bulk, the old airing courts between the spurs are jolly sunlit patches of grassy sanity . . What happened, Busner asks the developer’s daughter, to the long corridor in the sub-basement? She snorts: Well, amazing as it was, we could hardly preserve all 1,884 feet and six inches of it — it’s not really the sort of thing our potential residents are looking for. . No, if you come over here. . She trips down an incline towards the back of the building. . you can see that it’s been chopped up into a series of vestibules that run along behind each residential block. If you look through the window here you can still get an idea of it. He looks as she tells him to, and gets no idea of that human linear-particle accelerator at all — is only dazzled by the reflections of the glass and underwhelmed by what he suspects are pegs on the white-painted wall hung with a couple of Barbour jackets and a woolly hat or two. Beyond these prosaic things: a second window, and beyond that another window, behind which, doubtless, hangs more rainwear . . A cartoonish and synthesised diddle-um-pom-quack! comes from somewhere about Dukakis’s person, and continues to diddle-um-pom-quack! as she pats herself down with her pictorial manicure until she locates her mobile phone. Busner backs off to give her the fifteen feet of mandated public privacy. Along comes Zachary, he thinks, and then: I’m an ape man. . I’m an ape-ape man . . returns to him, complete with steel drums and jangling guitars. I’m afraid that was the Sales Centre, she says, tucking the phone away, it seems we do have a prospect after all — sorry, but I’ll have to go back and give ’em the spiel. She smiles winningly , and continues: Do feel free to carry on looking around — there’s a show flat at the other end of the main building if you want to get an idea of what it’s like inside, and if you’ve got any questions come and track me down. She’s backing away, pantherish in her Lycra. . I should’ve liked to press that flesh again . . he voices his thanks, and then she is gone, leaving him in the former airing court, breathing too heavily — panting almost. He leans against the window of the chopped-up corridor, and the dark starship of the old hospital turns on this axis about his ageing head. I’m having, Busner realises, a panic attack — and he tries to laugh it off: Well, I suppose there has to be a first time for everything. . What we see is what we choose, What we keep or what we lose for-èver . . Then he hauls himself upright, takes off his hat, massages his temples, shakes his head and thinks: So long as I’m plagued by these ancient ditties I can’t be dead yet! He takes a critical and evaluative look round at the airing court again, and finds to his surprise that he’s fully orientated within the shell of Friern Hospital as it was four decades before. With a mixture of shock and satisfaction Busner realises that he’s standing. . exactly at the point where I was when I first saw her, the saliva gathering on her fine cheekbone and then looping down to that floor unbroken, her small foot in its child’s slipper kicking against the lip of linoleum tile . . He turns back to the window and leans his forehead against it. It has taken a very long while, but he’s arrived at last: I forgot them . . he concedes in weariness, in desolation. . I stayed on at Friern for a month or two after that, but then I walked away, as I’ve walked away from everything in my life: marriages, jobs, colleagues, commitments, patients — I forgot them all. . The world is ours to tear apart, But what if it’s too late to start again? And it is too late . . Because, thinking back to those last few weeks of the trial-that-never-was-a-trial, he understands: it all had to do with time . He recalls the films he made of the post-encephalitic patients, specifically the one of Audrey Death operating her invisible lathe. . I saw it! I saw that it was out of sequence. . that through her ticcing she was travelling in time . . But it had been too radical a hypothesis to entertain: that embodied in these poor sufferers’ shaking frames was the entire mechanical age — that just as the schizophrenics’ delusions partook of modish anxieties, so the post-encephalitics’ akinesia and festination had been the stop/start, the on/off, the 0/1, of a two-step with technology. . and she, Audrey, anticipated it! In her last frenzied weeks before she finally collapsed, she had given him a preview of what was to come: the binary blizzard that would blow through humanity’s consciousness — Perhaps if there had been the right scans available. . Later, in the 1980 s, I could’ve looked inside her brain — seen it . . But, even as he thinks this, Busner knows how impossible that would have been. . because I lacked the feeling. . the artistry . . The pop ditties that had infested his mind had been, he now understands, continuous reminders not only of this unfinished and abandoned travail, but of all the other crimes of forgetting he had committed: Don’t let it die, Don’t let it die . . Hurricane Smith had groaned these melodic truisms — but simply because they were truisms, it didn’t mean they weren’t. . true. Busner presses his face to the cold glass, he cups his hands around his face to block out the sunlight. Colonel Blink sees clearly the vestibule fashioned from a mere fifteen feet of the old hospital corridor: those aren’t Barbour jackets hanging from the pegs but. . bodies . . the corpse of his schizophrenic brother, Henry, who committed suicide at fifty-two, after thirty years as an inmate of psychiatric hospitals. He hangs there, looking much as he must have. . before they cut him down . . the collar of his dirty lumberjack’s shirt caught on the varnished wooden prong, one of his polythene-and-coat hanger blooms poking from the pocket of his cruelly hiked-up jeans. . I visited him — but never enough, I was swayed by Ronnie’s madness about madness into believing that it was me that had caused his illness . . And beside his dead brother twitches the still-living body of Busner’s eldest son, Mark. . his poor face! who, although not doomed to the soul-aching gloom of the strip-lit wards, remains the unwilling, tempestuous and tortured recipient of. . care in the community . . and who has to wait a very long time in his Stanmore bedsit for a visit from his psychiatrist father to. . check he’s taking his medication, so that Hey, Presto! no mental illness — all gone . . And beyond these discards, what is it that Busner sees propped up in the corner, her thin metal ribs and struts all furled in the stained folds of her old silken skin? His very own. . Sleeping Beauty . . her neck, gripped in the kyphotic vice of her extreme old age, curves up and over into a hook, so that levelled at him is its very blunt and accusatory end.

Will Self is the author of many novels and books of non-fiction, including How the Dead Live , which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel of the Year 2002, and The Butt , winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Price for Comic Fiction 2008.

He lives in South London.