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 — 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 a little rubber bulb. . his fingers find the bulb of the sphygmomanometer. . an obscene tongue of rubber unrolls underneath the plastic amphibian, flipping it forward. All, he thinks, these agitations — some of which must be connected causally. The right-hand swing door pushes inwards, a face looms spectrallyin the small window, the amplitude of its pathology plotted by the wire graph — then is gone. All these agitations — the arrow on the fire escape sign is more mobile than this face confronting his, which has no eyebrows or lashes worthy of the name, two — no, three — hag hairs on the chin, that chin sharp, the cheekbones sharper, the skin a cracked glaze beneath which ancient freckles have run together into liver spots. He has leant down so far that the crystal of the gauge lies cold against her giblet neck. Paaa-ha! a shudder of the sunken chest. It’s not food — it’s faecal. The others are mostly one thing or the other . . — In the submarine hospital all is agitation, the fin-flip along corridor after corridor after corridor, flowing in and out of recesses and embrasures, swirling around buttresses and foaming down the salmon runs of the staircases, at the bottoms of which it dissolves in a spray of tics and jerks and grimaces. Even so, Busner has noticed these others, caught sight of them with the eternal evanescence with which the eyes capture a shape in water — and on finer days he has seen them outside, caught treading water in the airing courts between the first and second ranges of the hospital, or else thrashingfurther afield, in the grounds, where other patients merely sidle the tendency of the ornamental beds. And in the day-room of his other chronic ward, where the inmates are restrained in easy chairs by too-tightly-tucked rugs, pinioned in front of televisions that show capable hands shaping clay — in that drear row he has seen an other. Then again: passing by the doors of the main hall, where the cupola is obscured by a cantilevered mezzanine, Busner has been pulled up short by this halting exchange: Nothing, my lord. . Nothing! Nothing. . Nothing can come of nothing, speak again — and upon entering found a dim hurly-burly, a stage hung about with dusty swags of blackout cloth and scudding between them a fool in a black turtleneck pullover playing a play-within-a-play, his players a hyperactive Cordelia and a comatose Lear who droned to a pool of patients that had eddied in from the surrounding wards to lap against the stage. In all this agitation a single ripple stirred the psychiatrist’s attention — and, without knowing how to classify him, Busner still knew that this too was another of the others of whom Mboya now spoke.