Will Self
Umbrella
For Deborah
A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.
— James Joyce
Umbrella
I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man. . Along comes Zachary, along from the porter’s lodge, where there’s a trannie by the kettle and the window is cracked open so that Muswell Hill calypso warms the cold Friern Barnet morning, staying with him, wreathing his head with rapidly condensing pop breath. I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man, oh I’m an ape man . . The lawns and verges are soft with dew, his arms and his legs are stiff — a rigor he associates with last night’s tense posture, when I aborted the fumbled beginnings of a non-committal congress. While Miriam fed the baby in their bed hawsers and pipelines coiled away into milky, fartysteam — the enormous projectile retracted into the cradle of my belly and thighs. . I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . the Austin’s steering wheel plastic vertebrae bent double, kyphotic . . had pulled at his shoulders as he wrestledthe car down from Highgate, then yankedit through East Finchley — knees jammed uncomfortably under the dashboard — then across the North Circular and past the blocks of flats screening the Memorial Hospital before turning right along Woodhouse Road. Under the bonnet the pistons hammeredat his coccyx, the crankshaft turned his pelvis round and around, while each stop and start, each twist and turn — the very swivelof his eyeballs in their sockets — didn’t ease this stress but screwed it still further into his frame: bitindrill, chuckinlathe, poweron . . In his already heightened state he had looked upon the city as an inversion, seeing the parallelograms of dark woodland and dormant grass as man-made artefacts surrounded by growing brick, tarmac and concrete that ripples away to the horizon along the furrows of suburban streets . . While his domestic situation is by no means quiescent, nor is it settled, and the day ahead — Ach! A beige worm of antiseptic cream wriggles into the festering crack of a bed sore . . Bitterly he had considered: Is my dip’ psycheven relevant when it comes to this first-aiding, the sick parade of a shambling citizen militia?. . I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape man . . The drive into work is already automatic. — Still, it’s a shock that his destination is this folly with a Friends’ Shop. Along comes Zachary . . Hush Puppies snaffling the gravel path that leads from the staff car park — where cooling steel ticks beside floral clocks — towards the long repetition of arched windows and arched doorways, of raised porticoes and hip-roofed turrets. Along comes Zachary . . creeping noisily up on the high central dome with its flanking campaniles in which no bells have ever rung, as they are only disguised ventilation shafts designed to suck the rotten fetor from the asylum . . Along comes Zachary . . avoiding the unseeing eyes of the tarnished bronze statue that hides behind some forsythia — a young man clearly hebephrenic . . his face immobile forever in its suffering, the folds of his clothing plausibly heavy . . for he looks altogether weighed down by existence itself. Along comes Zachary . . chomping besidethe arched windows now, and the arched doorways, and then the arched windows again. He admits himself into this monumental piece of trompe l’œil not by the grand main doors — which are permanently bolted — but by an inconspicuous side one — and this is only right, as it begins the end of the delusion that he will encounter some Foscari or Pisani, whereas the reality is: a low banquette covered with dried-egg vinyl, and slumped upon this a malefactor, his face — like those of so many of the mentally ill — a paradoxical neoplasm, the agèd features just this second formed to quail behind a defensively raised shoulder. A hectoring voice says, You will be confined to your ward and receive no allowance this week, DO YOU UN-DER-STAND? Oh, yes, I understand well enough . . which is why he continues apace, not wishing to see any more of this routine meanness . . Along comes Zachary — and along a short corridor panelled with damp chipboard, then down some stairs into the lower corridor. Along comes Zachary — and along — he has clutched his briefcase to his chest, unfastened it, and now pulls his white coat out in stiff little billows.
You’ll be needing one, Busner, Whitcomb had said —
a jolly arsehole, his long face a fraction: eyes divided by moustache into mouth — else the patients’ll think. .
Think what? Think what?! But the consultant’s attention span was so short he had lost interest in his own phrase and fallen to reaming the charred socket of his briar with the end of a teaspoon, the fiddly task performed inefficiently on the knobbly tops of his knock-knees. — Why were the staffroom chairs all
too low or too high? Along comes Zachary — and along. . I’m an ape man, I’m an ape-ape-man, oh I’m an ape man, his splayed shoes crêping along the floor, sliding across patches of lino, slapping on stone-flagged sections, their toes scraping on the ancient bitumen — wherever that was exposed.
Scrrr-aping. He wonders: Who would dream of such a thing — to floor the corridors, even the wards, of a hospital with a road surface? Yet there is a rationale to it —
a hectoring, wheedling, savage rationale — that explains itself via the voices that resound
inside the patients’ bony-stony heads, their cerebral corridors and cortical dormitories . . becausethese are roadway distances — a hundred yards, a hundred feet, a hundred more,
a North Circular of the soul. No signs, though,
no Tally-Ho Corner — instead: lancet windows that peer out on to the airing courts from under lids of grime,
exercise yards, really, separated by the wings and spurs that partition the
long sunless trench between the first and second ranges of the hospital.
Spurs budding from wings — more spurs budding from them, the whole mad bacterium growing steadily larger and more complex in the hospitable suburban substrate. Along comes Zachary . . On the windowless side of the corridor there are doors with bossy signs on them: PORTERS, CANTEEN, MAINTENANCE DEPT CANTEEN, synagogue, boutique —
boutique! then BREAD ROOM —
a room full of bread . . and there are also ramps leading up to the wards above.
On he comes . . and still the
deep throat gapes in front of him, a gullet of light-stripes indented with bands of pockmarks — the original plasterers’ decorative scheme — or else scattered with medallions and stone-rustic quoins seeped-upon-brown.
On he comes . . tenderly touching the flaking veins of old gas pipes, to the bare copper of one of which has been Sellotaped a single flyer for POPULAR SWING BAND, The Rhythmaires — but, he thinks, can this be that dated, or is it that the air in here and everything else ages faster?This is at the corner where the western corridor intersects, a rounded corner
worn down by lurch-upon-lurch — No! It was designed that way to stop them killing themselves, which they will do. And get used to it, Whitcomb had said perkily from behind his
plastic comb moustache, because you’ll have to deal with a great many more. That’s just the way — how it is. A great shame — but how it is. Hanging may’ve been repealed by Parliament. . he puffed small and aromatic clouds of
cosmic faux pas. . but it remains the number one method of execution in here — this decade is proving quite as swinging as the last! Not that Whitcomb was being callous, it was just that that’s
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.
