censored with the greasy black strands he’s drawn over it. My ex-per-i-ence is my psy-che, My psy-che is my ex-per-i-ence, Clive nasals in Brummie, as his ticcing fingers summon discords from its untuned strings. Then there’s the far wall of the room, upon which the same geometric blizzard as in the hall. . ever falls, and an unknown hand has scrawled shakily in biro: GOD IS WITHIN ME AND THEREFORE I AM MY OWN MASTER. This rushes towards Zack, as his visual field expands to include the smoke-stained nets haunting the bay window, the dusty swags of Indian cloth hanging from the back wall and the still furrier television screen that lurks beside them. He staggers, retches and, wondering if he might be having. . some dreadful sort of flashback, presses his hands to his eyes and waits, panting, while phosphenes chase each other’s paisley tails and Clive rondels on: My ex-per-i-ence is my psy-che, My psy-che is my ex-per-i-ence. . until it all thankfully subsides. Whereupon he thrusts the notepaper at Clive and asks, You aren’t expecting a letter from anyone called Lincoln by any chance, are you, Clive? — Flaky notes dandruff to the floor . . Clive sets the guitar down among them. Panting, he rises and takes the notepaper, his bloodshot and exophthalmic eyes blink as they teletype along the blacked-out lines, he nasals the while: Hmm, hm, yes, yes — stayed on a farm between Lincoln and Market Rasen once. . Mister Treadagar, the farmer-chappie, he’d some faith in me — sent me out after the gappers’d been down the rows with their hoes, said I’d a nose for the one beet shoot uz grows. . — Clive wears a sleeveless Fair Isle sweater and nothing else on his worryingly puce upper body. The paunches of his bare arms waggle. Thankfully, his legs are clad in the blue cotton legs of a regulation Gas Board boiler suit. Secured by a single button, its top half hangs down over his wide arse. . flayed skin. Busner notes that Clive’s speech, as ever, scans better than his singing — but it’s always the same elegy for a life less lived than endured: a hoe’s progress from farms to police cells or cottage hospitals, then prison or the long-stay wards of asylums, then back to the fields again, where he committed some piffling crime — pissing openly or pilfering sneakily — and the whole cycle started all over again. . digging for defeat. When he came to Willesden, he was carrying a green canvas release bag — inside it there was nothing but a tube of Palmolive shaving cream. Clearly, Busner remarked to Gourevitch, the only rehabilitation they think he needs is to be clean-shaven. — Although Clive, in common with most of the Concept House’s residents, attends an outpatient clinic where he receives depot injections of Chlorpromazine that keep him docile for most of the month, Busner tells former colleagues — who visit Willesden either out of curiosity or to gloat with Schadenfreude aforethought — that Clive’s medication is entirely unnecessary, and he’d be perfectly content without it if he could only live in a pre-industrial society, one decoupled from the relentless assembly line of work and consumption. Not that Zack has actually calculated the life-expectancy of a severely myopic middle-aged man with galloping blood pressure in an era when the only medical specialisation was in horse. Zack does believe Clive, Eileen and Irene hear the voices. . they say they do. . it’s only that he and Roger think these are the internalisation of hectoring conflicts imposed on them by their mummies and daddies — and by the Big Daddy and Mummy of the state admonishing them to work and be productive, even as it uses the results of their labour to stockpile the means of their destruction. Zack had once sent a postcard to the German philosopher Adorno: a view of a Polaris submarine. On the back he’d sloganised: You say, No poetry after Auschwitz — I say, No love after Hiroshima. Irritatingly, Adorno hadn’t replied. — He sent me a postcard once, Mister Treadagar. That were when I were in All Saints at Winson Green, the corner of that card, it were hard. I poked it right in the eye of this bloke what gerron me wick, the prick, an’ he starts up blartin’ —. Zack takes the corner of the censored letter — which is stiff but not hard — and tugs it gently away from Clive. For his maroon jowls and sparse black hair, for his jumbled teeth and the burn scar on his snub nose, for his Homeric attempts to convey in alliterative fits and starts the oddity of his odyssey through life — for all this Busner had loved Clive, loved also all the other Clives he’d encountered banging their heads against padded walls, or counting the raindrops on. . windows without views. He knew it was these Clives — and the tragedy of his brother Henry’s mental collapse — that had radicalised him, made him determined to see every patient not as a function of their disease. . but as a human being. And it was this striving for humanity. . and fundamental decency . . that had brought him to this. . pretty pass, where he cordially and unthinkingly despised the. . human refuse he’d wadded about himself. . as a tramp makes his bed. It might well be that at the Concept House residents received no encouragement to play the parts of either patients or psychiatrists, yet. . there’s still no end to the bloody histrionics! The living room is at last fully focused and properly configured: there’s a mid-ground now, occupied by a three-seater couch covered in fabric the shade and texture of dried porridge, beside it lies a grey-and-white ticking mattress, upon which are scattered several sweat-stained pillows without their cases. The ticklishness of escaping feathers, the fine filigree of sweat stains — Zack is chilled by the grimness of it all, and as he turns to flee his scrotum tightens up . . — The Creep has disappeared from the hall, instead there’s Oscar the dog: a black mass of fur and paws squirming and skittering. Inasmuch as he loves anything, Zack believes he may love Oscar — which is why the sight of the dog’s muzzle is so angering: one night a month or so ago, Roger Gourevitch, high on some brain-seasoning bouquet garni, decided to operate on Oscar’s muzzle — specifically on the warty excrescence above the right side of the Labrador’s worming lip. Zack returned from a meeting of the PA to find the dog supine on the kitchen table, with Gourevitch and Lesley bending over him, both wearing bloodied washing-up gloves. The scalpel in Gourevitch’s shaking hand. . flicked red peas. Zack slapped Roger. . hard, then sutured the wound. With antibiotics from the slightly suspicious vet — it was too early in the year for the claimed lawnmower accident — Oscar was making a full recovery, but he whined if the Nazi doctor tried to pet him, and Zack believes Roger’s behaviour may’ve been. . the last straw. Bending to stroke Oscar, he thinks: The RSPCA will come down on us, along with the Meehans’ furies. . Good boy, he says, there’s a good fellow! and: Walkies soon, w-w-w-walkies! The. . alarm bell of frying pan clashing with stove makes both man and dog salivate. Others of the residents are up, soon bacon will be frying. Since conditions have started to deteriorate, Zack has taken to rising earlier than the rest, heading downstairs and champing on a couple of rounds of toast while he chokes down that morning’s Guardian. Only in these periods of relative calm can he abstract himself from the psychic strangeness of the Concept House and project himself out into the still-stranger and more turbulent world: the world of Operation Prometheus, where nineteen-year-old marines cuddle puppies they’ve rescued from villages they’ve burnt to the ground. He can read all about it, then go back upstairs to bathe and shave, before being. .