The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self Read Free Book Online

make-up and hair which made them almost grotesque. Hilary and I sat sideways to each other. With her neck canted around so that she could face me, Hilary’s greaseproof-paper skin stretched, until I could see the twisted, knotted coils of tendon and artery that lay within.
    ‘They’re very good. Who are all these people?’
    ‘They’re my friends. I paint them from photographs.’
    ‘Your pictures are very detailed. How do you manage it?’
    ‘Oh, I have special pens and brushes. I’ll show you later.’
    I left Hilary and went over to where Busner was sitting at one of the tables in the central area of the dormitory.
    ‘Has Hilary been telling you about her friends?’
    ‘Yes …’
    ‘Hilary doesn’t have any friends, as such. She cuts pictures of models out of advertisements in magazines, then she paints over them. She’s been in and out of this ward for the past three years. Every time she comes in she looks like she does now. She’s so close to death we have to put her on a drip. She’s usually completely demented; the amino acids have been leeched out of her brain. After she’s been on the drip for a while we transfer her to a tight regime of supervised eating based on a punishment/reward system, and at the same time she undergoes an intensive course of psychotherapy with Jane Bowen. Jane is very much the expert on eating disorders. After six weeks to two months Hilary is back to a healthy weight and eating sensibly. She’ll leave and we can predict her return usually to within the day – some four months later.’
    ‘I thought a lot of anorexics and bulimics grew out of it?’
    ‘To some extent, but there’s always a hard core and at the moment it seems to be growing. These long-term anorexics are different, they’re placid, resigned and apparently unconscious of any motivation. The temporaries tend to be wilful, obstinate and obviously powerfully neurotic. These hard-cores, like Hilary, could almost be psychologically blameless. Some of them even have fairly stable relationships. They’re at a loss to explain what comes over them, it seems to be somehow external, imposed from elsewhere.’
    I should have been paying attention to what Busner wassaying, but I couldn’t concentrate. For a start there was the strangeness of the situation – I’d only ever spent isolated periods of a few minutes on psychiatric wards before. I had known what to expect in broad terms, but it was the relentlessness of the ambience that was beginning to get to me. There was something cloacal about the atmosphere in the women’s ward. None of the patients seemed to have bothered to dress, they sat here and there talking, wearing combinations of night and day clothes. There was a preponderance of brushed cotton. I sensed damp, and smelt oatmeal, porridge, canteen; indefinable, closed-in odours.
    I could walk away from the tonsured idiot on the Heath, but inside Ward 9 I was trapped. And these people weren’t pretending. They weren’t closet neurotics or posing eccentrics, Bohemians. They were the real thing. Real loss of equilibrium, real confusion, real sadness, that wells up from inside like an unstaunchable flow of blood from a severed artery. I felt my gorge rising. I felt my forehead, it was sandpaper-dry. Busner was neglecting me and talking to a pneumatic nurse. The nurses on Ward 9 didn’t wear a uniform as such, rather they affected various items of medical garb: tunics, coats and smocks, nameplates and watches pinned at the breast. This nurse had a man’s Ingersoll attached by a safety-pin to her jacket lapel. She had blonde baby curls, bee-stung lips and the creamy, slightly spongy complexion that invariably goes with acrid coital sweats. I forced myself to listen to what they were saying, and fought down nausea with concentration.
    ‘Take her out to the optician then, Mimi, if she has to go.’
    ‘Oh, she does, Zack, she can barely see a yard in front of herself. She can’t be expected to deal with