Will Self's Collected Fiction, Vol. 2 (2014), page 171
part #2 of Will Self's Collected Fiction Series
Adeline sops up Audrey’s face – her eyes swell, cheeks plump up, lips thicken, as she absorbs pert nose, trowel chin, flaming auburn hair. An Ophelia, she thinks, of a Pre-Raph’ sort, lying on her back not in water – but in the effluvium of manufacture, her madness – a sort of palsy – obscured by this murk. She says, I confess, I cannot see much of Stanley in you, my dear – nor of your elder brother. Audrey is dismayed – a reagent that converts most of her ire to raging curiosity, and she effervesces: Have you met him? Adeline smiles and says, No, though I’ve read enough about the phenomenon that is Albert De’Ath in the newspapers to feel as if I have –. The girl returns with a trestle that she kicks open beside them, then goes out and comes back again with a laden tray of tea things that she sets down on it, Chinese or Indian, Miss? she asks, but Adeline says: That won’t be necessary, Flossie, we can manage for ourselves. Once the girl has gone, Audrey, rubbing freed hand with gloved one, says caustically, It’d be no affectation at all, Missus Cameron, if you were to ask Flossie to take some tea with us – I hardly think she’s any more socially inferior than I. Adeline laughs unaffectedly – nor does she commit the crime of saying anything at all. Settling back in the settee, Audrey feels her wet petticoat chafe against her calves. Adeline inquires after preferences: Milk, lemon, sugar? – The tea has a perfumed aroma and a mildly brackish taste: Oolong, Audrey observes, Gilbert used to have it all the time before the war. Now he blames the Kaiser’s submariners for upsetting his beverage habits. Adeline raises one perfectly plucked eyebrow. Is that all he blames them for? she says, and this is evidence of a sympathy that has flared up between them, here, beside a tall vase of late-flowering hydrangeas, here, where a volume is laid casually on a window seat, The Forsyte Saga on its spine, here, next to diamond panes rattled by the October storm. — Night has arrived expectedly, and Adeline rises to draw the curtains – which are cambric and decorated with diamond patterns of tiny yellow flowers to match the yellow-grained wallpaper. I might roll my dampness across them, Audrey thinks, impress myself upon them – repeat the pattern of me: I-am, I-am, I-am. Adeline says, I thought that I’d enjoy the house far more than I have. I take the blame for all the wood panelling, the shutters and the frankly rather . . . asinine furnishings. I’d thought – well, what? I suppose that by allowing the medieval inclinations of our celebrated architect full reign he’d create for us a paradisical setting within which the old ways might be re-established . . . old honesties . . . the barriers between man and woman, mistress and servant, might . . . dissolve –. She interrupts herself with more laughter: Utter bosh, naturally – worse than bosh, a species of cant. Two years ago I had a local joiner come and cover the panelling in here, then I had it papered as you see. It’s here that I spend almost all my time – it’s a pleasant enough room, gay and bright, yet no sooner did your brother go to France that it became . . . well, a sort of tomb for me. Oh, a flowery enough bower round it – she stabs with her teacake to the right, the left – I’ll grant you, but still a tomb and moreover one that’s inside of this tomb of a house, which in turn is lodged inside another sort of grave altogether. Please – please don’t think I ask for your sympathy, M-Miss D-Death – Audrey? Still, she has it: the squirming of her on the settee, the grabbing and twisting of a small cushion in her strong hands, is far from refined – not pretty at all. The pine cones spit a resinous scent that should be pleasing – especially when mingled with the fresh flowers and the butter liquefying on Audrey’s teacake. It matters, Audrey sees, that as Adeline manipulates so is she manipulated by those vast and impersonal forces that hold all small beings in thrall. She has not only Audrey’s sympathy but her pity as well – which would surely push her further down into the bloody mud. Poor, poor privilege that availeth you nought . . . Such good causes . . . the clamour of which presumably once filled your echoing time, are now those that augment the power that has robbed you of your lover – a loss that has, if it is possible, parted you still further from your kowtowing husband, who sits in the echoing House, raising his topper when instinct moves him to baaa more platitudes – while you . . . you are like Gilman, with time enough on your soft hands to be tormented by your wallpaper . . . Adeline is convulsed by the giant’s fingers pressing into her breasts, her sides, the softly vulnerable pit of her – they poke her unfeelingly – she is nothing, Audrey thinks, but an instrument with which to communicate the trivial nature of human sentiment, a telegraph key repetitively jabbed dot-dot-dot, dash-dash-dash, or a Hello Girl’s switchboard into which are thrust the hard points of connection, when all the giant wishes to convey is goodbye-goodbye-goodbye . . . You must, Adeline sobs, forgive me, I do miss him so awfully badly . . . She takes a handkerchief from her sleeve, presses it to one coon eye, then the other, staunching her uselessness, her passivity. Audrey, whose own hands fret with the myriad shocks following on from her work, has at least this consolation: that she is a part of the giant – an infinitesimally small part, perhaps a hair twisting on the muscled expanse of his back, but, for all that, a part – whereas this fine lady is nothing at all. Audrey bites into her teacake, savours its warmth and delicacy – bread is at tenpence a loaf, and its price rises more and more, leavened by the blockade of Canadian wheat. Her hostess should be out there in the wind and the rain and the darkness withal, sowing the winter seed and clad in travesty: a kirtle gathered at the waist by a plaited cord of sisal. There – not in here, in her gay tomb, bemoaning the days when the goings on of the SPR or the anti-vivisectionists were enough to fill her empty life with meaning . . . Did you, Adeline asks plaintively, have much news from him – any letters? Audrey is angrily piteous – not dishonest. No, she says, Stan was never a writer – a reader, yes, when we were kids we all read, but before we little ones could he went to the library, read the latest scientific romances, then told ’em to us – that’s me and our sisters –. She stops, then resumes: But not writing, not even when he fell under the sway of your friend Willis, no . . . especially not then. And you, Adeline, did he write to you?
They sit there watching the fresh batch of pine cones Adeline has thrown on the fire go up in smoke, and Audrey muses, Are we parties to the same eldritch vision? A Zeppelin downed by the guns that subsides, all its fiery cathedral of buttresses, arches and beams burning in the night sky – then: the dull ashy corpse of it scattered across the furrows of an Essex field, the ruination of flight – Icarus, raped and defiled for the readers of the much attenuated pages of the picture papers . . . I have, Adeline says, one or two of the models that he made – of flying machines. Willie wants very desperately to play with them but I shan’t allow it. I have these too. She rises abruptly, crosses her candlelit tomb. Opening the lid of a writing case, she withdraws a package of postcards tied up with black ribbons like her hair that he loosed. Audrey knows what they are – she does not bother to feign interest when Adeline unties the bundle and passes them across, only flips through them as she might a novelty flicker book, engineering not movement but this stasis: I-am, I-am, I-am, I-am — for what Stanley Death had done with these Field Service postcards was the same as he had with those sent to his sister, and doubtless to Samuel and Mary Jane Deer as well. Whereas the authorities had enjoined the writer to cross out one phrase or the other to create the semblance of a missive, Stanley had scored them all through except for this essential declaration: I am quite well, I have been admitted to the hospital sick/wounded, and am going on well/and hope to be discharged soon, I am being sent down to the base, I have received your letter dated/telegram/parcel, Letter follows at first opportunity, I have received no letter from you lately/for a long time. The command Signature Only had been deleted as well, as had the stentorian If You Make Any Other Mark on this Card it will be Destroyed. When Audrey received the first of many such as these, she had wondered at the response of the military censor to her brother’s furious effacements of all but the fact of his existence. Packet after packet full of men dispatched across the Channel, wave upon wave of them sent over the top, bag after bag of these pathetic cards posted back to Blighty, it was all, surely, a product of the same narrow-mindedness: no order had been disobeyed, so Stanley’s cards might be passed. Or perhaps the censor – who Audrey envisaged sat in a safe bureau, miles from the Front, beside a warm stove, a glass of something to hand and a Froggy doxy too – was amused by initialling these crazy ragtime communiqués, so scrawled PFL – it was always the same man – laughingly. I-am, I-am, I-am, – two I-ams per card, scores of them sent to her, to Adeline – and no other words from him in the ten interminably lengthening months since he had returned to France. I-am, I-am, I-am – a magic spell, chanted by a terrified child in the drained-out nothingness before dawn, I-am, I-am, I-am – Audrey sighs dispiritedly, aware suddenly of her own flickering existence and deathly fatigue. They both know that only one product derives from these formulae: that . . . he is not. – You don’t imagine –. Adeline cannot continue. She tries again: They say missing and presumed . . . so you don’t think –. And once more fails. Neither of them is a believer – in Jesus or Pan. All hope is abandoned – all vitality drained away . . . the rain that drives against the window is no more than . . . evaporation, condensation, caused by fluctuations in temperature, air pressure . . . all eminently, tediously discoverable . . . no mystery: he is not. Adeline binds the wound, returns it to the writing case. She pulls the plaited cord of sisal and, when Flossie enters, asks for whisky, soda and the cigarette box. When they have come Audrey sips fire and smoke, then rises from the settee to flick brimstone on to the fire and lifts her skirt to dry her petticoat. Adeline says, Forgive me, I should’ve proposed a hot bath and a change of clothes when you arrived, most remiss –. – Thass orlright, Addyline – she slurs and cockneyfies deliberately – you ’as made the hoffer now, an’ I ’umbly accepts. — The bath is over six feet long, with sides so high that as she lies in the puddle of hot water at the bottom of it the enamelled rim gravemouths above her I fell inter a box of eggs, All the yeller run down me legs, All the white run up me shirt, I fell inter a box of eggs . . . She and Adeline are lodged together in the amber effervescence of the whisky and soda. Looking through steamy zephyrs at the imprint of green willow leaves upon the creamy drapes, Audrey quietly sing-songs, Is it girt or is it sere? Should you be thee and me be thy, or thy be you and me be thee? They had laughed, Gilbert and her, at the daft mummery of the guild socialists, with their shprat shuppers held to raishe fundsh for their minishcule editionsh of hand-printed booksh – they had been certain, Cook and Death, that the future belonged solely to those who could not only control the existing engines of production but make new ones. And here she was, utterly fagged out in a rich woman’s bathtub, looking up at the motto some floppy-tied aesthetical craftsman had chiselled into the wood panelling: When Adam Delved and Eve Span Who was then the Gentleman? In the adjoining dressing room she can hear Adeline playing at being my maid – and no doubt looking out something serviceable that had been obtained ready-made from Liberty’s, worn once for a country walk, mothballed, and is now hatching out again after its long hibernation . . . When, however, she is dressed in Adeline’s fine linen underthings and her own dried-out alpaca, when she is seated back down in Adeline’s tomb with another glass of her husband’s whisky and soda, and another of his cigarettes, when she hears the motor car being brought around from the stables, its engine snarling through the storm, Audrey can no longer maintain such disagreeableness in the face of Adeline’s overwhelming grief: she sobs, she laughs hysterically, she makes as if to tear her clothes – for want of any other course, Audrey takes the other woman in her arms, strokes the hair that he did . . . — In the gale, under the crazed lamplight, Flossie stands with several parcels in a net. Please do not refuse me, Adeline says, they’re only a few comforts – some brandy and fruitcake, a box of cigarettes . . . My pride, Audrey tells her, runs still and cold and deeper than any patronage. She takes the net from Flossie, who says, Excuse me, miss, but ma’am says that you’re at the Arsenal – is it true, that you’re a munitionette? The girl’s frank face, yellowed only by the lamplight, slides away into that of her mistress, addled and blotched. They are not, Audrey says succinctly, hiring – then she allows the chauffeur to hand her up. Everything slides away: the peculiar old–young house, its chatelaine’s teary goodbyes, the sweet-smelling stillness of her flowery tomb. As soon as the motor car picks up speed, Audrey’s ticcing resurges, at first it is only a fidgeting at the stuff of her skirt, soon enough she is typing invisible orders in her lap, and by the time she is handed down on to the rainswept forecourt of the station it is all Audrey can manage not to circle the wheel, pull the lever and rotate the headstock . . . circle the wheel, pull the lever and rotate the headstock . . . She allows the chauffeur to hand her up and she settles in the seat immediately behind the one she supposes he will sit in – it’s the first vehicle of any description she has been in for half a century but she recognises most of the controls – gear and brake levers, the steering wheel. She wonders – if her recovery continues – whether she’ll be allowed to drive – or at least pretend to do so, a rusty old Enigmarelle, prompted by pokes in its back to do the trick for the cockney crowd . . . Not that there’s much of one, only the two shonk doctors, Long nose, ugly face, oughta be put under a glass case . . . their two favourite blackies, and four or five of my fellow sleepyheads. The fat one has been left upstairs, beached, her crabby little husband scuttling around her . . . Helene, who Audrey has always quite warmed to, is there, and also the three old monkey men, who have to be pushed and pulled up into the charabanc . . . Busner, standing beside Doctor Marcus, watches as Mboya and Inglis coax the enkies into the Ford Strachan, which is parked on the back road alongside the Upholstery Workshop. It’s good of you, he says, to come along. Marcus laughs: The sun has got his hat on, so I’ve come out to play! I mean, an outing – wouldn’t miss it for the world! Busner looks askance at his retired colleague. Marcus is sporting an unexpectedly snazzy short-sleeved shirt, which is vertically striped chocolate and ultramarine, Granddad takes a trip . . . his trendy appearance compromised, though, by soup stains? He wonders whether Marcus’s myopia precludes him from seeing the full extent of his ironic stain – irony that’s within irony, which in turn is stranded, this ironic citadel, rusting in a desert of dryness. It took, Busner tells him, an awful lot of pressuring on my part before Whitcomb would allow me to take them out of the hospital at all –. Marcus snorts, Ah, Whitcomb, your bête noire – the Professor Moriarty to your Sherlock Holmes. What d’you imagine, Busner, he’s going to do to frustrate your investigations, when you don’t really know what it is you’re investigating? Busner wants to say something about the micro-and macro-quantal character of the post-encephalitics’ ticcing, about his analyses of their metronomic states, about how he believes the dissolution – and now the reintegration – of their physical wholeness suggests an order within their chaos – wants to, but is leery of Marcus’s contempt – and besides, there’s plenty of time for that. For assertiveness, he calls over to Dunphy – the heavyset porter who’s approved to drive the minibus – Are they all aboard? Dunphy sweeps his cap from his Milo O’Shea head, gives a mock-bow and twirls his free hand, inviting them to roll up for the mystery tour . . . Bring me sunshine in your smile, Dunphy sing-songs in an undertone, Bring me laughter, all the while . . . The minibus isn’t mini enough, the tiny congregation from Ward 20 is lost in its angled pews – Ostereich sits to attention in the middle row to the left, behind him cluster Voss and McNeil, scared bunnies. At the very back Mboya and Inglis are kept apart by a wall of sound: the irrepressible volubility of Helene Yudkin, who, as Busner oofs aboard, is saying, Look at these, what would you call ’em? Sort of nozzle thingies – but nozzles for what, they aren’t going to squirt us with water, are they –? Of all the awakened enkies she’s the least shocked by now – back up on the ward she’ll stand for hours flicking the light switches on and off, unremittingly delighted by the photons’ discharge. It’s magic! she crows, I do honestly believe it to be magic! Everywhere she goes novelty entrances her – now she runs her hands over the electrified checks of the seat cover, Lovely, she coos, such a beautiful fabric . . . Busner sits down beside Miss Death, who perches behind the driver’s seat, and they are joined by Marcus, who, awkwardly folding his drop-leaf body, slots it in behind them. Well, he hails her, good morning to you, madam, and how’re you feeling –. Perfectly all right, she chops him off, and remains with her face averted to the window. Busner thinks: What does she see there, up and to the left? Or is it the onset of an oculogyric crisis? It’s one-two-three . . . ten days since her reawakening, but – he counts on – sixteen since her last, so one is due! Then, as they rock over a pothole, it strikes him: We’re moving, and she sees a vista that’s utterly novel – the long façade of the hospital contracting, the brickwork beneath its dulled windows streaked by dried tears and going away from her . . . Busner requires of Audrey Death what any physician does of his star patient – that she should damn her former one by telling him calmly and coherently how excellently she’s doing on her daily two grammes of eldoughpa, still, there’s plenty of time for that as well . . . – So – Marcus pushes his pitted nose between their seatbacks – where’re we headed on this daytrip, the British Museum perhaps? Busner is flummoxed: I’m sorry? And Marcus brays, exposing big and ivoried tusks – He is the walrus – then comes out with the wheeze he’s probably been rehearsing since he left St John’s Wood: Busner, if you’ve disinterred some mummies, surely the proper thing to do is take ’em to see some of their own kind. Audrey murmurs, Howard Carter . . . Marcus is shocked by his own crassness at having spoken as if she weren’t there, Busner by this time bomb. – What did you say, Miss Death? He speaks loudly – Dunphy is riding the clutch, revving the minibus out from between the gatehouses and on to Friern Barnet Road. – I said Howard Carter, he was the fellow who dug up the supposedly accursed tomb – I remember that. All the orderlies were talking about it. Biggest flap since the Brides in the Bath, sold a packet of penny papers they did when he died – sheer superstition, of course . . . pouce à l’oreille . . . I wonder what happened to . . . who’s she speaking to? that nincompoop Feydeau – long dead, I s’pose . . . long gone . . . Ignoring the consternation she’s provoked, Audrey relapses into her seat and silence as the minibus prowls past the awnings of the Rosemount Guest House. Or Kew Gardens, Marcus bumbles on, Kew Gardens are always awfully jolly. Busner corrects him: No, Kew’d be too far for their first trip out, I’ve settled on somewhere local – the Alexandra Palace. Marcus bleats, Ally-Pally! What the hell is there to do or see there? Place is pretty much derelict nowadays, surely. Busner gets out his notebook and, selecting the red Biro from the row in his breast pocket, awkwardly jots down the insight which, although taking form in him for some time, only crystallizes now, in the telling of it. – Not do – see, it’s what they’ve been looking at for years – decades now. It’s – it’s the horizon of their world – the outer limit. By going there and looking back at Friern, we’ll be breaking the spell for them – setting them free. It’s these words he’s scrawled: setting them free, underlined twice, wonkily. Marcus receives them in silence, only the chopped-liverish air he emits from his tightened lips suggests that lodged inside him is a balloon full of bilious cynicism. When he does at length speak, his tone is confidential: You do understand, the functional integrity of the cerebral cortex is an absolute – mark me – absolute prerequisite for anything resembling homeostasis . . . Busner knows what he’s driving at . . . that none of this can last . . . because in my heart of hearts I know: there are no such things as miracle drugs. It’s a conclusion that Busner had arrived at three years before, when, peering horrified into the scrap of mirror above the sink in the poky downstairs lavatory of the Willesden Concept House, he had seen his nose detach from above his lip and commence a halting – but for all that, undeniably real – circuit of his face. Besides, Marcus bangs on, how much is this stuff costing? And when Busner admits that it’s in the region of four hundred pounds per pound, he laughs long before forcing out, Well, that’s hardly going to help the balance-of-bloody-payments! And yet . . . And yet . . . as Dunphy grinds the gears and the minibus hops-skips-jumps across the North Circular, Busner finds I’m not put out at all, because: Look, he says to Marcus, look at them – look at the joy they’re taking in each other. The old alienist turns to observe the three elderly men: Voss, Ostereich, McNeil, who for so many years have been bounded not simply by the man-made but the mad-made – chairs upholstered by maniacs, broom handles wonkily turned by hebephrenics – and whose first few minutes on board the bus were spent rearing away from the undulating asphalt tongue they feared would lash through the windscreen and slurp them from their seats, but who are now relaxing at the sight of summer gardens. The puce droop of a laden rosebush, the lofty and fierily crowned sunflowers, the blazing crenulations of potted geraniums – these, the jolly bastions of Englishness, they remember well enough. They’re lulled by the miniaturised farmland of allotments and sheds, then aroused by plants and flowers that are strange to them – the kinky shock of some pampas grass excites them, then a buddleia thrusting from the pier of a railway bridge really gets them going, and so they begin to natter away. — My old dad kept a whelk stall on Dover front, says McNeil, but he hated the things with a passion! Lumps of fishy rubber, he used to say, give me an ’andful of fresh spring onions any day, Alf – ’eads down in the earth, feet up in the fresh air, way your mother ought t’be! A clap of laughter is followed by Ostereich’s confession that, You know, when I was a boy in Vienna we lived in an apartment – but my uncle, he had a Schrebergarten – an allotment you would say – and he grew the most marvellous currants, I do so love the currants! Oh, he continues, why is it that I feel so bloody marvellous today! Whereupon Voss chimes in: I know just what you mean – the last time I felt this way was in a dentist’s parlour when he’d given me the funny stuff –! You were lucky, McNeil breaks in, we only ever? ’ad sixpence for the puller – so no gas! Once again the three old men laugh and Marcus says to Busner, You don’t think there’s a certain morbidity in such, ah, ebullience? Tightening the arm he’s thrown around the back of Audrey’s seat, Busner says, Can’t you manage to go with the flow just a little, Doctor Marcus? Don’t you get it: they’re on holiday – the holiday of a lifetime? — Which is what, he ruminates miserably, Miriam wants – not an ordinary seaside jaunt to some Cornish cove where the boys can make sandcastles and the baby eat them. Nor will a potter along Brittany lanes in the Austin do – they are to jet away from Heathrow in a fortnight’s time. I’ll make all the arrangements, she had said, pulling the rim of the Lazy Susan so that the sweet-and-sour pork balls were drawn towards her hardly kosher. Moodily he had listened to the muted sproing and yawp of the Chinese background music, murkily he considered the flakes of fish food that flip-flopped down into the tank from the same hand with which the waiter had just laid out their plates – although why this should matter he did not know. The boys in their green-and-gold barred ties and grey Aertex shirts had sat subdued by this: the strangeness of this meal out, en famille, the sole point of which was to arrange still more strangeness: a family holiday that, should he decide not to accompany them, would be the start of a permanent vacation – from me. Zack had read somewhere that white was the Chinese colour for mourning, why then were the tablecloths in the Jade Garden not pink, or purple – or black, yes, black would, he had thought, be best, for with his acquiescence to this perfectly reasonable request – I am dying . . . Yes, of course, he had said – and: The Alhambra, that’ll be sensational, I’ve always wanted to go. Honest? Miriam said. Honest, her duplicitous husband replied, taking her hand and rubbing his thumb over the fretwork of bone and tendon and artery . . . I have died. And he was buried in a grave the same shape as I am, right down to the extra half-whorl on his ears, the slight webbing between the third and fourth toes of his right foot, and the protuberance of his navel, which was all that remained of the linkage to the mother I cannot remember, – despite being certain that her eyes – wary, as those of the dead must be – were staring out at him through Miriam’s, the lids of which she had anointed for this special occasion with white mascara, making her look suitably close to extinction – like Chi Chi. Sitting there, putrefying, Zack had realised that the earth so densely packed around his body must be of a special sort, or how else could it fit him so well? Much of it was the translucent atmosphere of the Jade Garden, some was his own cotton, flannel and wool – but there was still more of this magic clay modelled into his wife’s living hand, and this pulsed, squeezing my cold dead one, while Miriam’s voice resounded still: Pliz remembah ve gro’o, onlee wunce a year . . . He turns to Audrey Death and says, This year, this . . . usually . . . He hunkers round to face Mboya, who sits Byzantine at the back of the bus, the sun filigreeing his almost-Afro. – Enoch – she, you . . . What did you call the little structure Miss Death made under her bed? Mboya shakes puppyish to attention. Her shrine, he calls back, we called it her shrine . . . Hephzibah Inglis frowns sensing blasphemy? and Busner says, Yes, your shrine, Miss Death – every year, for as long as Mister Mboya has been caring for you, you’ve made an odd little shrine or grotto under your bed, can you remember this at all? Audrey smiles, her twiggy fingers go to her temples and scratch at the dried-out nest of white hair. Audrey’s grisly habit is a sore trial to Busner, these pathetic cast-offs of human vermin sent for fumigation – he wishes her clad in . . . What? A twin set – or a long tweed skirt, a blouse with a lacy collar clasped by a cameo? Anything – but not this brown velour bag of a dress, far too large for her, and over it a robin-red, zip-up cardigan that’s far too small. The nurses have found her caramel-coloured slip-on shoes of exceptional ugliness, and the darned heel of a thick wool sock bulges carbuncular on her emaciated calf . . . Yet a sneer fissures her top lip and slashes her battered cheek, and this, I love her for, because it’s proof that she remains above it all. She says, We called them grottoes, Doctor Busner – lots of children made ’em when I was a girl in Fulham. No one, as I recall, ever hazarded an explanation – it was just something we did, a folk custom . . . maybe t’do with the seasons, ’cause we’d dress ’em with spring flowers – dandelions, buttercups, pansies maybe, lifted from gardens a street or two away . . . She laughs, a dry rasp. – Respectable types hated grottoing for that reason, but they’d still give us coppers – out’ve superstition, I s’pose . . . The minibus has silenced her, its engine whining hysterically as they lurch up Muswell Hill Broadway in a queue of traffic. Her puritanical gaze falls on a gaggle of schoolboys with collar-and even shoulder-length hair outside a sweetshop . . . And when did you last see your father? And then rises over the parade to where tiled roofs pagoda up to the apex of the hill – she cannot believe this: that the skin prison within which she has been sewn for all these years or so they say . . . has turned out to be so flimsy. In the depths of her sopor she had dreamed this: the hospital growing out of her mortal shell, its whitewashed and bare walls stretching . . . creasing . . . folding into nacre. Always she remained on the inside . . . trapped, the heavy girders arched within her bent back, their rivets my vertebrae . . . Cut through the dimpled plasterwork of her skull, dirty skylights illuminated . . . nothing. The floors – woodblock, asphalt, flagged – rose and fell as she walked, so cemented were they to my feet, and, as she shambled the long galleries, staggered the longer corridors, wheeled about the airing courts again and again, howled in the improved padded rooms, then flung her own bony cage against the locked fireguards, so she spat in the faces of these phthistical fellows – her mutinous other selves, hundreds upon thousands of them, their rough ticken overalls of a piece with the hospital’s fabric, their unravelling forestalled – for now – by its vicious selvedge. Presently . . . there is this hand pressed on hot glass, this hand through which the sunlight glows, illuminating a schoolroom map of Imperial possessions – childhood freckles and oleum burns from the Arsenal have merged their territories into these liver-spotted protectorates and dominions. Now . . . there is this hand, swooping angelically past well-to-do house fronts – newly built yet already frighteningly aged – each with its unkempt garden and motor car garishly painted red, blue, or green. Audrey whispers to the forlorn fingers, We’ve got ’ere at last to Muswell Hill – we must visit Uncle Henry, discover if it’s true about the General. She whispers again: Move – and they do, feebly tracing the contours of a great monstrous absurd place that stands out on the skyline – a burlesque block with huge truncated pyramids at either corner . . . The minibus rounds the final bend from Duke’s Avenue and Dunphy responds to the shabby grandeur of the Alexandra Palace – or so it seems to Busner – by pulling up sharply in front of its bombastic portico. Too sharply: the patients and their carers rock and roll in their seats beneath the sunken stare of its cyclopean oculus, and the high-hat of its baseless pediment. Have a care! Busner cries, and Dunphy pulls parodically on his forelock. – Sorry, sorr . . . It’s always, Busner thinks, the fucking Irish. He doesn’t have time to bother with this – he’s up and assisting his prize enkies down from the vehicle, watching them emerge tottering into the daylight, living dead only recently risen from their graves, whose dentures couldn’t manage human flesh . . . unless it was puréed for them. Marcus was right there’s nothing doing at Ally-Pally. Under the colossal biscuit-barrel vaulting of the roof the immense building is hollowed out, empty except for a café and roller-skating rink of varnished pine upon which leotarded teenage girls scour around and around. The excursion party from Friern wanders this way, then that, smelling the mustiness of a different kind of institution. They stop to marvel at the enormous organ, with its three-storey-high pipes – Busner doesn’t mind, he’s only concerned to point out to the doubting Marcus how very normal the enkies are – they do not tic or jerk, their footsteps are halting, true, yet only to the same degree as any others of the elderly who have been long confined. Marcus, unimpressed, turns away from him, devotes his attentions to Voss, Ostereich and McNeil, taking them by the arm in turns, gently guiding them through the echoing chambers, speaking to each of them of the great changes wrought upon the world since their immurement. Always he’s careful to relate these momentous external events to those smaller alterations in their own regime that may have trickled down to their buried awareness. Do they recall, he asks, some of their fellow inmates going out to work on London County Council farms? This, he tells McNeil, would’ve been in the late twenties, after the great convulsion of the General Strike, when it was believed – in the wider world as much as the restricted one of Colney Hatch – that energetic employment prevented the diseased mind from dwelling on its fantasies – lascivious or socialistic. Or how about the red and yellow cards that some of their fellows used to wear about their necks – did they remember this practice? Did they register its falling away? They might be pleased to learn that this was but the bureaucratic evidence of a revolution in hygiene, sanitation and the elimination of the diseases that had decimated their peers. — Observing Marcus, so doltish in his interactions with the fully socialised, yet capable of assisting these post-encephalitics with such delicacy and finesse, Busner reflects yet again that the psy professions are in and of themselves mental pathologies. He thinks of the neurotic psychoanalysts he knows, for whom anal-retention is the rule rather than the exception, of how they are scarcely able to function outside their consulting rooms – where all is static for year after year, and such human contact that they must have is conducted neutrally with the back of a head. Why did I offer up mine for this botched execution, les quatre cents coups of Mmm . . . How does that make you feel? and always – always! – Mummy. He ponders again the laboratory psychologists, with their clipboards and galvanometers, measuring the skin that they’ve set crawling with their own bloodless reduction of wayward contingency to the stifling, the statistical. As for psychiatrists such as Marcus, who’ve spent their entire working lives attempting – in many cases sincerely – to empathise with patients who’re so far out as to be otherworldly, surely what success they may’ve had can only be because they’re nothing but a stranger in this world, I’m nothing but a stranger in this world . . . — Rusting, pitted and eccentric ballbearings, the ageing patients wobble from one tarry ramp to the next as they debouche from this Babylonian bagatelle. Mboya and Inglis steer Audrey Death and Helene Yudkin to a bench that faces out from the Acropolis and has an unobstructed view of the city below, Busner and Marcus settle the male patients alongside, and Dunphy, with jobsworth’s reluctance, goes back to the café to fetch teas and sandwiches. State of emergency is a profound misnomer when it comes to describing the situation here – there’s no ambulance clangour or tinkle of broken glass, only orderly processions of houses that mount up the hillsides, while overhead sail flotillas of clouds, perfectly intact, and towards Eltham mares’ tails flick at the Kentish downs. No, no state of emergency – only the pathos of a closed children’s zoo, a drained boating lake, a crazy-golf course padlocked in chain restraints – there’s nothing for the Rip Van Winkles to do but survey this city as strange to them as Peking or Padua . . . Survey it, and, if it could be arranged, eat good old-fashioned fish and chips all wrapped up in the Pentagon Papers . . . Spotting the concrete ack-ack mounts mushrooming in the defunct boating lake, Helene Yudkin says, What on earth? undoing Marcus’s cat’s cradle of integrative gestalt. That . . . he says wearily, and Busner sees in the old psychiatrist’s eyes Chamberlain, with the useless rearmament of his umbrella. Panzer divisions bucket across Marcus’s high forehead, Pearl Harbor seethes in one hairy ear, Nagasaki in the other, the railway spurs end in the region of his pot-belly, and he pants asthmatically, unable to expel the good news of the Holocaust she’s slept through . . . Audrey, blown plastic shell warm with the tea of life, thinks only of Gilbert and his pinnacles of glass and steel – towers she sees rising from the centre of London, and which are surmounted by the comical silhouettes of oil lamps, coal scuttles and hatboxes! Gilbert had prophesised green fields and sylvan groves in between his phalansteries, but Audrey can make out only this: that the orderly city she remembers from her youth – its huckabuck woven from street, square and crescent – has rucked up and torn . . . worse, been put away damp, so that mildew spreads across it . . . And to spare her own distress at this neglect of civic good form, she lets her head fall back so the mighty drapes of sky-blue chiffon may sweep into her. Up there a white needle – sharp, unwavering – draws a fraying thread through the heavens, a godly thimble drill that culminates in an unholy boom! followed by the trickling down of earth dislodged from between trusses and falling against galvanised iron, a sound that more than any other Stanley has come to associate with his new Morlock’s existence. There is no longer fearful apprehension of the shells homing in, nor frenzied calculations to be made of their point of impact, for the final blow has already been struck: All are dead – all are buried. The party pauses in the tunnel, the lights – electrical in this section that passes below the German lines – have flickered and then died . . . Why don’t you feel fear? The question flaps around them all in the darkness – touches them, surely, with its leathery wings? At Stan’s side crouches Michael, who smells wholesomely of hay and horses – there is a frankness to his very sweat. The others Stan isn’t so sure about: before they left their burrow for this raid on the surface, these men all donned Adrian helmets – the modified sort, from Verdun, with attached masks of thin steel strips and noseguards. These they had still further adjusted, by gluing bits of fur to them and soldering on brass buttons, until they resembled the headdresses of tribal savages. Still more savage were the bandoliers worn about their naked shoulders, the entrenching tools and saw-toothed bayonets hung from the leather belts slung low on their bare hips. Up until this moment Stan had been growing – yes, that was it, growing – in the deep dugout, just as before that he must have been growing alone beneath the earth: a tuber . . . or a human in embryo? He had slept in the burrow and woken again – eaten and dozed off once more. How many times this had been repeated he could not have said: men came and went in this cavern hollowed out from the darkness, but there seemed no pattern to their movements, no sense of their having been ordered to do so. The shameless bookworm was joined by a young Prussian, equally nude, whose head was shaven apart from a suede divot on the very top – duelling scars barred his hollow cheeks, and on his bare arm he sported a death’s head armlet. Ja ja, danke, he said when passed a banger speared on a toasting fork. The only constant in this flickery hollow was the big nigger who did the cooking, Jack Johnson – now we know where e’s bin . . . His frame may have been as massive as a boxer’s, but his expression was studious, his lips quite thin. His hair had grown out into the woolly ball of his forefathers . . . He was always there – and, although the others came and went, they proved their own constancy through the touches they bestowed, for the underground men had no more propriety than they did modesty, rubbing skin on skin, groping, pinching and bussing one another – they even nipped, puppies inna sack . . . They–they bin all broke doon, Michael said of his comrades, so thissus is ’ow they poot themsel together again – wi this pantomime. But iss allus a pantomime, ain’t it, Stan – the brass wi’ their braid an swaggerin’ sticks, ministers wi’ shiny toppers – t’King inall . . . — Now, in the blacked-out tunnel, with the last blast still reverberating, Michael answers him: Fear, aye, fear’s a foony thing. I coom down through one of them big craters in the redoubt, durin’ t’second shindy at Wipers – whole boonch more coom down through Messines – thass ’ow it is: t’bigger t’charge, t’more as gets buried –. Another ferocious crump! and this time the electric bulbs swell back to life so that the party can resume its shuffle up the tunnel, towards the surface. Ewe might say, Michael continues, his words mixed up with the dust, that all that time we spent oop top was by way of bein’ trainin’ – trainin’ fer down ’ere. Oop there t’Lawd could see uz – t’brass could see uz, t’ daisy cutters cood cüt uz all about. Oop there t’toonels ’ave no roofs, an’ death, like, it rains down from t’sky. But down ’ere the lid’s poot back on, see – down ’ere there’s no orderin’ any soul over t’top. We voloonteer t’go oop, Stan – free men. The droom fire is oor thunder, an’ the gun smoke, why, that’s oor clouds – see, clouds . . . not men, mebbe angels, aye, angels, Stan – floatin’ oop . . . Stand to: the bugles nightjarring from the British lines. What was it Luftie the country boy had said: suck on your John Thomas if they couldn’t get a cow’s bubbies . . . The squad of Ally Slopers crouches twenty feet back from where the tunnel, unpropped, droops into a rheumy eyeful of evening sky . . . We cannot march, we cannot fight, What fucking good are we? What might Willis or his friend Bertie make of this, Stanley wonders, for it’s surely all they’ve ever dreamed of – men of all classes, hues, tongues, gathered together in free association, and brazen in their lack of shame . . . they rest, arms about each other’s shoulders, hand to hand, holy palmers of . . . a fag, quietly conversing in their odd lingo – a crowdie of tongues, full of bits . . . The barrage dies away, the night creeps from shell hole to shell hole, insinuates itself snakily through the wire . . . Tonight will be no Crystal Palace firework show – nein aschpotten: the 180s have fallen silent . . . and they squint at only the occasional Very light crazing up, then plunging down to burn its own tail . . . Above ground they set to: following the night from muddy slough to ditch, taking a field dressing from one dead man’s haversack and attaching it to the wounds of his comrade who still lives. Triage, or so it would seem, comes naturally to Stan – haven’t I already been making these judgements for months? Of Feldman, of the Welshman, of the officer who grovelled in the bier two nights before the offensive . . . back and back to Aldershot, where the epileptic lurched out of the makeshift ring blowin’ Palmolive bubbles, then dropped stone-dead at the RSM’s feet. Stan had had a half-sov’ on that bout – but here the most ardent weather-telegraphers got cured of the habit, for there was nothing to foretell, saving conflict without end. Cooling steel and drying blood – they orientate by these smells, not by the stars. They drag the seriously injured as close to the wire of either side as they dare, irrespective of which army paybook they carry – after all, the only allegiance worth bearing is to life . . . Others they dispatch below – they don’t know it yet, but at long last they’ve caught a Blighty one that will make them at home . . . in France. The troglodytes carry morphia with them, and when a man is too far gone they give him a dose sufficient unto the end. Michael – an archangel, and the last presence they see floating before them . . . Warmer, realer, than that of Mons: no churchy phantom, conjured out of hunger, pain, thirst and fear – but a live man whose warm hand grasps torn wrists, rolls back blood-soaked cuffs, lets the needle in . . . Once or twice as they go about their business in the short and moonless night, Stan thinks of his section, short two men – maybe more – withdrawn to a reserve trench, their umbrella neatly folded, there to lick their wounds, swollen tongues clammy on bully beef . . . No reflection – in this tortured realm of shadows and shades the underground men needs must be as alert as any raiding party – and some of these they do encounter, whispering: ’Re you the FANY? The topsiders are halting, insensible, hair-trigger alert, bruised, raw, all at once. Observing them, Stanley wonders, Was I like that, shifting in an eye-blink from petrified terror to furious agitation? He watches them go by, feeling their way over the broken ground while fixed on this one prospect: their own deaths, under cover of which they mend their wire and drag back one of their wounded: a junior officer, hung about with stale whisky breath, a grim whiff of things to come – gas gangrene at the dressing station, the stench of his necrotic flesh. The topsiders have only one language at their disposal: the infuriated muttering of the compelled – whereas the troglodytes twist whichever tongue may be required: reassuring whimpering Frontsoldaten that they will not be schaden, calming Tommies with cock-er-ney cheer and fucking oaths . . . From the Germans’ salients on the ridge to the British forward trenches down in the valley, the troglodytes slip back and forth – they recover side arms and rifles, pull potato-mashers from belts, unfired Stokes ones from the very mouths of the newfangled trench mortars: all are spirited down into the underworld and cached in its caverns. Long before dawn flushes the underside of the thick cloud to the east, they have withdrawn, none of the topsiders any the wiser. The tunnel descends from this chaos into an orderly innards of galvanised iron, pit props and efficiently wired lighting – as they are being swallowed up, Michael sticks in the earthen gullet: They muss not know of uz – not now, not ever. Think on’t, Stan, iffen they knew they’d turn their goons on uz, winkle uz aht, drag uz oop. And when they’d every lass wunnuvuz they’d begin again wi’ their slaughter. No . . . he turns and on they go, and they have regained the underground circus and dived inside their burrow before he resumes . . . No, there’s only wun way t’coom dahn: by sheer blüdy chance, like wot you did . . . There is the blackamoor waiting for them with hot tea, and most of the subterraneans cast off their motley kit: the drawling former-subaltern resumes the pomp of his nudity, the ottoman of his groundsheet and the solace of his Pater. I once met –. Stanley stops himself there, for the young man at his feet is looking down at him from below Schnauzkrampf. Up above the barrage resumes – one-eighty-league steel-toecaps tramping across the former fields. The electric surges, dims, surges again and goes out. It takes a while for the cook to find his matches and light a lamp – in the utter darkness the sandy trickles, the woody creaks, metallic ticks, all are amplified: the whisper and groan of premature burial. Stanley fears he may lose his sangfroid, but the others simply chatter away: Worked for a provision merchant ’fore I got the chuck . . . Si vous soulevez un jupon vous ne devez jamais exprimer la surprise à ce que vous trouverez sous ce . . . Went up from Saint-Denis to the Hotel de Ville and she was waiting for me . . . My oooold Dutch . . . Stanley’s eardrums, pummelled and stretched by blast after blast, have acquired a traumatised sensitivity, and as he turns his head this way, then that, these voices tickle across them, bristles on bare skin, mixed up with brass-band discordancies Ooo-eee oom-pah-pah! speech squeezing into and out of comprehensibility as the needle passes through its arc, sweeping over Luxembourg, Hilversum, Bremen, black bars in the sky that cut across the puce clouds bleeding mauve rain . . . The aesthete on the burrow’s floor has kept ahold of watch and seals. He positions them carelessly around his lower belly, dumpy alpinists chained together for the ascent of Mount Cock. The idle yet systematic play of his fingers is immensely appealing she thinks as her own twist the dial, her ear pressed against the mesh grille. Erhem! Busner clears his throat, releases Uncle Maurice’s red silk tie, which unfurls over the curve of his belly. Erhem – Heath as it is spoken – and he states again: Miss Death, would you like some help with the radio – I could . . . tune it for you? He wants to probe her relentlessly: What does she think of it? Had she been aware of Marconi’s experiments? Could she then – with her Arts & Crafts imagination – have conceived of this hence: the world woven into a tight basketry of voice and music? Desires to – but is wary of her scorn. Besides, she has spotted her visitor, who havers beside Busner, his desert boots and fawn corduroys surely an academic exercise in informality, given his Wilfrid Hyde-White top half: the black suit jacket and wedge of blacker – what? What’s that garment they wear, a vest . . . A singlet . . . a sleeveless pullover? It seems always to’ve been polyester, but that can’t’ve been true of the Warden-of-bloody-Barchester. Anyway, it isn’t this that matters, thinks Busner: it’s the dog collar, which, although a simple enough hoop of white celluloid, is yet linked to a leash we all strain against. The Hospital Chaplain is young enough to be a trendy vicar – and dishonest to God. He’s tall enough to have had extra meat off the ration, his long thin nose, mild brown eyes and still milky curls suggest the drinking of a lot of weak Nescafé and the leisurely patter-cake of Anglican platitudes – but his hands clutch spasmodically at the front flaps of his jacket to tug them down . . . while the flakes of dead white scalp on his shoulders imply awful things about his underwear –. Who’s this fellow? Audrey prompts, then countermands herself: Let him step forward and say. Busner admires her: Ooh, she’s fierce! as the Chaplain sidles in and, grasping the back of a chair, says, D’you mind? Audrey replies, Not at all. She has half risen from her own and juts out her hand – a strong gesture brutally undermined by the frailty of all the rest: the weedy hair and the cadaverous face, the insult to her ideals of Little Red Riding Hood’s cast-off cardigan. Still, frail as she may be, and with a fearful asymmetry, she’s managed to bring the old wireless across to this table – she’s interested in what lies beyond, if not above. Poised on the plastic laminate: a plastic water jug, a plastic beaker, an aluminium kettle. The radio whistles until Busner turns it off. Thank you, croaks an effaced figure hidden in one of the chairs facing the television, and now they can all hear the raucous singing inside the simulacrum of the Moulin Rouge, inside the Warner Brothers’ lot, inside the set – and this Busner finds obscurely cheering: Nostalgia, he thinks, more and more of it will be needed to tranquillise the collective psychosis of a steadily ageing population. And he would’ve reached for the appropriate Biro were he not having such a bad day. A cavity big enough to stuff my tongue inside has appeared magically overnight, together with its twingeing sequel: a note from Whitcomb stuffed in his pigeonhole requesting a meeting fairly urgently, to talk some matters over . . . matters – that’ll make martyrs . . . martyrs/schmatte which is what Busner wants of the Chaplain: just possibly he can discover more about Audrey’s family where all the other staff have failed? Busner thinks it unlikely she’s a believer, yet a woman of her era will, he suspects, retain a certain respect for a man of the nylon. Without funds Busner cannot get Miss Death anything better to wear than this rubbish bag of a dress, but where there are relatives there may be funds – or a nest egg, put aside by her and swelled by compounding interest into a Roc’s one: an Arabian fortune. Besides, Busner wonders, what are the clergy for if not the conjuring up of blood out of tepid institutional tea? Not that it was he who called for spiritual assistance, he’d scarcely been aware there was a hospital chaplain. A rabbi came alternate Saturdays: Grossman. Busner had seen the big pallid gingernut laying tefelin on some of the twitchers – binding their palsy with the leather bands – or muttering a prayer over a schizoid, the slushy regurgitation of Hebrew – chicken shoup with bitsh in it – mingling with the psychotic drone. No: the Chaplain had trumped himself – he had, he said, heard certain rumours of extraordinary awakenings among the catatonic patients in Busner’s care, and resurrection being – as it were – his business, he’d come to visit the Gethsemane of Ward 20. — So the psychiatrist leaves them together in the day-room with its soiled floral-pattern curtains, surrounded by its undergrowth of easy chairs and right next to a stony radiator that no christly superstar – however omnipotent – could roll away since it was locked inside a fucking cage! He abandons the odd couple sitting either side of the silenced radio news from nowhere, and, as he tacks his way chubby Chay Blyth through the reefs of tables and iron-pillar narrows, sees only this: the ashy smears left after bodies have been vaporised by a flash brighter than ten thousand suns . . . All my life . . . crouching under desks . . . only the klaxon’s wail cannot fail . . . He is bitterly aware that no matter how diligently he and his ilk peruse the New Left Review, they will never put a stop to it: no happening could ever prevent it from . . . happening. The hospital flattened – surrounding it, stretching away over the low Middlesex hills and down into the re-exposed valleys, a burnt tracery of closes, avenues and cul-de-sacs lined with neat, ashy plots, within each of which sits a semi-detached pile of rubble accessible via a cinder pathway. And what is left standing? Helene Yudkin with a hairdryer in one shaky hand, its flex scribbling up from a socket – he watches more than her I long for a simple past . . . as she toggles the switch and basks in its warm whirring, turning her shrunken girl’s head this way and that as it shoots over her ski-jump nose. Lovely, she says, and then, marvellous – isn’t it, Doctor, isn’t it marvellous – so lulling . . . snug as a . . . woolly hat – a tam, a tam that haint there, no, it haint, a phantom tam, a phantam . . . She giggles – Busner, intent on the nurses’ cigarettes where have they hidden them? and the view they’ll afford through prettifying swirls at the tangle of his emotional life – Mimi has dropped her own bombshell – stops: a phantam! Witty-ticcy Yudkin is three weeks into the new regime and receiving two grammes of L-DOPA a day – as he wishes it, she’s an exemplary picture of improved wellbeing and energy, her voice stronger, her movements fluid, and with only the occasional jamming, she walks stably and without assistance – and she feels marvellous. That she will stand for hour upon hour at light switch, kettle, hairdryer – any appliance she can lay her hot little hands on – is, he has decided, only a reasonable response to the electro-age she finds zapping around her. He chooses to ignore the forced reminiscences she reports – the past driving a coach and four through the present. According to Helene rag-and-bone men get onter the ward quite regular an’ gallop up and down whippin’ their nags up, stopping to water ’em in the lav-a-tory bowl . . . Drunk summat terrible they is on gin at fourpence-ha’penny . . . She retains the entire retail price index, circa 1919 – so what? Surely this is a corrective of sorts – her mind assimilating all that lost time by hanging on still more firmly to what she has? What he won’t confront is the renewed chewing, the dimple worming in her cheek as she eats herself up from within . . . What’s through the graph-paper window today? Same as yesterday: a plump shrink wrestling with a semi-clad blonde pharmacist who’s got a zone of erogeneity deep in her throat . . . he thrusts her aside into a puff of dopaminergic dust – he’ll force out his own short-term reminiscence: Mimi’s shaky announcement rattling beneath me that she has called off her engagement to her soldier – he’d have to be a fucking soldier! Busner anticipates this: bare-knuckled boxing in the airing court for the benefit of Mister Kike, the starveling patients in their donated clothing chanting in a ring, cheering and clapping the man on – Edwardianly moustachioed, he is, and in tight white breeches – as he beats me to mush and slush. Crowded together with the rest of the sports fans: Miriam and Mimi, waving their hands rhapsodically in the air, happy to attend this Concert for Busnerflesh . . . This too he thrusts aside: the hospital is a degenerate city, the jargon of the staff – our diagnoses, our pathological labels and bogus practices – all obscure this: the gossipy reality, the talk of the gutter . . . the purloined cigarette rests in the notch of the tin ashtray and from its cellulose stopper mustard gas leaks . . . — On Saturday he’d taken Mark to the ABC Muswell Hill. Zack had looked only cursorily at the airily contrived monumentalism of the zeppelin, the choking spume of the night-time gas attack, the erect posture of the goggle-sporting Hun with the Iron Cross stamped on his leather breast. No, what caught, then held the professional observer was the boy’s unblinking and grating fixation upon the screen that floated up above them, pinioned between long insets of brassy rods and stylised laurel leaves – the forlorn Deco interior of the cinema dragging along A . . . B . . . C . . . behind the streamlining of history. This, Zack had thought, is the whole of the twentieth century thus far: a white sheet thrown over our heady hopes, our disturbed dreams, our fleshly desires – with no sense of smell we touch only plush skin, rub it in, gargle the mucal ice cream deep in our throats, but without pleasure . . . This is our crisis of fixed regard: the zeppelin crashes to the cold earth again and again, a cathedral of rumpled buttresses, flaming arches, burning beams. They returned blinking into the egregious daylight to discover kiddie karts circling the roundabout and dropping off the hill down towards Crouch End – his hand in Mark’s was strange to me. This, Zack had thought, is my awakening and it’s always been thus, when I was his age, coming out of the Everyman, I’d experience the same estrangement from my shoes cow, folded and sewn. And he’d had this intimation: it’ll only accelerate from here on in, I shall emerge from the darkness into the light faster and faster, a rollier and pollier silent comedian, double-, triple-, septuple-taking on doors, window screens, the cosmic fatuity of style –. Dad, Mark had said, Dad, you’re hurting me – because, of course, it was the child’s hand that had been clutched in his – and such a beautiful child, his skin ivoried by . . . neglect? The boy’s fixity had seemed to persist – he too was estranged from Wimpy Bar, 104A bus, all the rolling stones of old London town – a bad future was, Zack thought, tucked into the turn-ups of his dungarees and proclaimed its dominion across the Esso roundel of his promotional T-shirt.
