Umbrella by Will Self Read Free Book Online Page B

– although this . . . this cage seems quite bad enough. Is she always . . . He has leant down far enough to look into the eyes, which are not eyes but rounded wedges neatly torn in her mask by – ring-pulls , which only last weekend he had experienced for the first time: two cans of Coca-Cola from the sweetshop on Holly Hill, snapped open and placed beside the boys on the bench, he leant down laughingly with them to peer into the holes that sweetly misted . . . By no means – Mboya speaks with colonially educated precision, answering the question Busner has forgotten he posed – these seizures . . . or episodes, they happen with great regularity, Doctor, once every sixteen days, and last for . . . oh, well, I should say at least five or six hours. And sometimes she will be in this state when I leave for the day, and still be like this when I come back on shift the following morning. Paaa-ha! A sudden expiration of gingivitis breath, then, a-h’h’herrrrrr, she draws it in again – but the mask remains fixed, the eyeholes showing only off-kilter sclera – no pupils. You see – Mboya has a clipboard sheaved with notes he refers to from habit, not necessity – mostly she can feed herself, get along to the day-room, but ve-ery slowly. Then, at other times, it’s as if all this time she has been being wound up, because some little thing – I don’t know what – will set her off, and man, how she goes, her little legs –. The nurse stops, but why? Has he perhaps stepped over an internal line of his own by revealing how he views them? Busner wonders: How does he cope? Does he see them as sprites, as possessed – or are they automata? Then again, there is a certain obscenity in referring to those little legs , which, arrested in the mid-writhe of torticollis and exhibiting marked hypertonia, cannot be covered up. Her Winceyette nightie is bunched up around her waist and neither man is prepared to risk his clinical detachment by yanking it down over those mutton shanks . — It is only as he grasps her arm, preparatory to applying the cuff that Busner remembers: I’ve seen her before. Mboya lifts his clipboard. Oh . . . yes? Busner says, No, no – not on the ward round, I’ve seen her in the lower corridor – she was catatonic, jammed up like this but standing with her foot caught by a loose floor tile. When I freed it she went off like a rocket on her, he laughs, little legs. Mboya grins. Ye-es, that’s typical of Miss Dearth, ve-ery typical. She’s unusual in that respect – the others are mostly one thing or the other, jammed up like this or all shaky, rushing . . . Busner has ceased to hear him . . . Do I somehow partake of her shakiness, when I touch her do I begin to blur? For in the extreme rigidity of her forearm, which she holds at a sharp angle in front of her chest, with the fingers seemingly curled about an immaterial lever, he can sense a terrible compression, thousands upon thousands of repetitive and involuntary actions that are struggling to get out . This is, he thinks, not a paralysis as it’s commonly understood but an extreme form of oscillation: her muscles are whirling around bony axles, her bones are shuttling back and forth on cartilaginous treadles, her cartilage is itself cogged . . . it appears still until you touch it, and then it goes haywire, the wire coiling around you, dragging you down . . . The old woman hasn’t gone haywire, though: her tragic mask confronts my comic one, I’ll never be taken seriously with these flabby cheeks and froggy lips . . . He looks away, flustered, and sees cold light dumped by a transom on to a writhing caterpillar that resolves into another old thing, who, presumably overdosed on Largactil , thrashes about in a bed beside the double doors that lead to the main area of the ward. He looks back to see an early bluebottle – the hospital is plagued by flies – orbit Mboya’s woolly globe , and pictures a toy frog one of the boys has, if you squeeze