Umbrella by Will Self Read Free Book Online

screamed into the mustiness of the day-room, they can stop his legs from kicking! For if this wasn’t pathetic enough, Henry Busner – my brother – had whimpered: I – I can’t con-con-control them, I can’t . . .
    . . . control mine, now . Sleep is an impossibility – and there’s no hospital for him to be admitted to any longer. He has retired: there beneath the breeze-billowed brown curtain, probed by the April morning sunlight, are stacked orange boxes printed with the name La Cadenga and filled with the coprolites he has cleared from his office at Heath Hospital, transferred briefly to Redington Road, then carted on to here. I – I can’t con-con-control them – the fossilised shits . Propped against the boxes is a brolly he has no recollection of having bought, borrowed or taken up. But that, he thinks, is the way of it: umbrellas are never contracted for, only mysteriously acquired, to be fleetingly useful, then annoying and cumbersome before eventually being lost. And this losing is itself unrecalled, so that what usually impinges is only the umbrella-shaped hole where one used to be. 09.10. Ten again . As he pinches the slack flesh on the back of his left wrist with the fingers of his right hand, it comes in an old mannish drizzle : D? — E– C- I-M-A-L-I-ZAYSHUN , then a gush : DECIMALIZAYSHUN! Soon it’s gonna change the money round, Soon it’s gonna change the money rou-rou-round! — Old age is, it occurs to Busner as he lies stranded on his side staring at the clock radio, a form of institutionalisation – it deprives you of your identity and supplies another, simpler one, it takes away your clothing and issues you with a uniform of slack-waisted trousers, threadbare jackets and moth-eaten cardigans, togs that are either coming from or going to charity shops. This done, it commits you to a realm at once confined and unbounded, an atrophying circuit of corridors that connect strip-lit and overheated rooms where you fade away your days reading day-old newspapers and specialist magazines – albeit not ones relating to the specialty that awaits you. Old age takes your food and purées it, takes your drink and reverses its distillation, takes – No! changes the money rou-rou-round! He knows that this is all too soon, that he is a mere freshman when it comes to such higher forgetting – that when he was first at the Royal Infirmary he had still been fleet, so that, lunging for the ovoid ball, he grasped a teammate’s shoulder to grope my way into a lowering sky . . . — anywhere, so long as it wasn’t the shambles of the ground, any leather so long as it wasn’t the ruptured buckler of a corpse’s thorax I’d cackhandedly dissected . . . Later, he had been compelled, he felt, to serve beneath the chimney . . . or the campanile, not that any bells ever rang there, for it was only a disguised ventilation shaft through which the noisome stenches of the hospital rose up to the heavens . . .
    The staff bore had told him upon his arrival that formerly new patients had been brought in by special trains that halted at New Southgate under cover of darkness. The platform was at the bottom of a steep cutting and could be accessed by zeds of cast-iron stairway – although the patients were taken along a foot-tunnel that angled up through the chalky earth to the easternmost tip of the hospital. This meant that they didn’t surface at all – in their committal was their interment – but instead found themselves being marched dazedly down the long, semi-subterranean corridor to the different stages of their induction: deloused in a tiled trough, subjected to a questionnaire and an intrusive medical examination, shaved, cropped, then issued with rough ticken tunics before being allocated to a ward and given their supper: a tin mug of beef tea and an arrowroot biscuit. The clickety-clack of the brokers’ keyboards drills through the wall — the bubbles are popping now , each one leaving behind a few