Umbrella by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page A

dribs of recall . . . the vermiculated quoins were, Busner remembers, only on the gateposts of that eastern wing – which was a later addition to the building. 09.15. He wonders: What rumours would those new patients have heard about the booby-hatch? In a way it hardly mattered, when there was so much worse inside their own heads. He feels the weight of his ageing face, its exhausted eyelids collapsing into their sockets glow orange , and through a slit he sees the white bars at the end of the bed and thinks, I once looked through bars like those and pinched time – that Casio. He is, he senses, almost there , but first a necessary interlude: Moog music, the Mekon revolving on his Tungsten dinner plate through the open French windows of the dining room and ricocheting off the sideboard, the grandfather clock, the teak drinks cabinet . . . rou-rou-round . Did we, he muses, really measure drugs in grammes – surely decimalisation went in waves? Wouldn’t it’ve been in grains, and fractions of grains? He peers through the white bars and sees his thinner, younger self peering back – smooth-cheeked and with a full head of reddish-brown hair. He has an old-fashioned sphygmomanometer looped around his neck, the thick rubberised cuff dangles at his breast, the heavy steel casing of the gauge knocks against the bedstead ting-tong, ting-tong. His stubby, nimble fingers roll and unroll the frayed end of his dun woollen tie, then idly pump the black rubber bulb of the sphygmomanometer, back to the tie, back to the bulb. A face looms at Young Busner’s shoulder, Mboya? I don’t wanna die in a nuclear war, I wanna sail away to a distant shore and make like an ape man, La-la-la-la-la-la-la! La-la-la-la-la-la-la! Steel drumming, wood-on-steel, steel-on-steel, ting-tong . . . Mboya’s face is a teak whorl with deep, yellowy creases spreading out from full pink lips. The whites of his eyes are yellowy, his anthracite hair is shaped in an almost-Afro, and he generates calm, which Busner somehow associates with the cross he wears on a chain around his neck, a cross the psychiatrist cannot actually see, but which he senses poking between the buttons of Mboya’s pale-blue nylon tunic. The cross, Busner knows, is one with a circle around the join of crossbar and upright . . . Coptic? Celtic? He would like to ask Mboya for . . . help? What stops him is not professional pride, only the shameful awareness that the charge nurse has given him so much help already. Her eyes? Busner begins by way of an observation. Mboya is judicious: Ye-es . . . So Busner asks, Rolled up like that – are they always? Following this sally, and for want of anything more constructive to do, he moves to the side of the bed, removes the pins and lets down the sidebars so that he can lean in over the old woman. Her posture is . . . bizarre , the spine curved and rigid – give her a push and she’d rock . Her pinched face is not a face but a mask of greasy seborrhoeic skin, her lips are stretched rubber bands that pull away from crumbled gums set with two or three stray teeth. Busner looks around for a bedside table or locker upon which there might be a beaker with her dentures in it, but there’s no such thing — her bed stands in the centre of the dormitory together with ten or twelve others guano-dashed rocks in a sea of speckled-tan linoleum that have been arranged head to toe, a leftover measure from the time when they might have coughed TB in each other’s faces . . . Not all of these beds are barred, but it’s clear that those who’ve been allocated them lack the status needed to earn them one with its head against a wall and a locker beside it. No one on Ward 14 has anything as homely as a lamp – but at least these beds partake of the wall-mounted disc, a moon that slips through the long, dark nights. Mboya, who has been at the hospital since the late fifties, has spoken to Busner of trough beds and water beds, and other kinds of medieval restraint