Be still! This is not why he has come to Friern — yes, yes, he will do his Hippocratic duty, neither doing any conscious harm nor allowing any to be done, but for now he is through with boat-rocking. Leave it to the Grocer! He is done too with elaborations of theory, the multiple threads of which, mind-spun, elaborate and then over-elaborate airy yet substantial models that fools such as me took for the phenomena they only loosely represented . . He will, in particular, resist the urge to ask Perkins why it is his dee-lightful wa-ay! to give higher doses of chlorpromazine to female patients — resist, because he knows. The charge nurse says of one who lies shaking in a barred cot, She’s ever so fractious, Doctor, aren’t you worried that she may harm herself? Of a second female patient, who, for the third day running has been confined to the quiet room — a deranging euphemism for a padded cell — the charge nurse contends: We really want her to be happy, Doctor, but when she’s allowed the run of the ward she pilfers from the others, then accuses them of taking her things, and before you know it there’s a right barney going on. I mean, you wouldn’t dream it to look at her. . And indeed, you wouldn’t, because what sits on this blancmange slab is but a shrivelled raisin of humanity who shivers in a midi canvas tunic, a uniform, Busner thinks, appropriate only for a slave labourer. . but she grabbed a fork an ’adda go at putting it in Bettany’s eye, and y’know, if I wasn’t on hand I think she would’ve — now that isn’t good, is it, Doctor? The whole purpose of this speech being — Busner realised hours later, after having administered the injection himself — to introduce subliminally the words good and doctor into his own mind. But surely, if he is a good doctor, Busner should do something about the bad nurse he has seen, together with his cronies, cackling over a spread in the Sun showing women’s libbers in Afghan coats holding aloft a dressmaker’s form lashed to a cross. I’d crucify those bitches, he thought he heard Perkins say — yet he couldn’t be certain, the ward office was so full of rattling tea mugs, cigarette smoke, smouldering tin ashtrays and clanking filing cabinets, so squeezed between the dirty panes of two permanently shut sash windows. — Perkins and Bettany, caught at it, gave him the approved glare for new boys — or recruits — who have been gazetted for bullying. Bettany had a chubby, kind countenance full of light-hearted dimples, yet Busner suspected him still more than Perkins — he knew the type, slow-witted, malleable and big. Bettany would be the one to administer the thump therapy, that’s what they called it, Busner knew — he’d been told all about it by a refugee from the asylums, Dave Catterall, who arrived at the Concept House in Willesden ranting about being beaten by psychiatric orderlies and having water-soaked towels held over his mouth — tales Busner, whose own asylum experience had been brief and circumscribed, had assumed were exaggerated until they were confirmed, to the letter, by other residents. So what if we were? the nurses’ adult faces lisped childishly and Busner burned with indignation. Yet how could they know? that he hadn’t been a new boy for decades — only a left-behind one watching the Rileys and Rovers crunch away down the drive, hearing the last call for the bus to the station. Left behind to wander the voided corridors and deserted classrooms, left behind for so long and so often, that on several terrifying occasions he had to spend the night alone in dormitories empty of everything but their unwashed-boy-smell and the pitifully snivelling ghost of the twelve-year-old that was me — and, of course, the other left-behind one.
Is she able —? the psychiatrist asks, and Mboya waves the clipboard wearily. Obviously, he says, it’s impossible for us to get her up on the off-chance — there’s many more like this and we’re short-staffed as it is, but luckily Miss Dearth has her ways. . Miss Dearth? Can I have heard him rightly? wears a bulky nappy held in place by plastic bloomers. It is these the two men have avoided looking at — nakedness would be less obscene. Mboya continues: I cannot be altogether sure, but I think she may be our longest-term patient — and she does indeed have her ways. The nurse, who is a head and a-half taller than his colleague, now does a wholly unexpected thing by squatting down neatly on his haunches. Busner goes more awkwardly after him, and then they are looking at a great oddity, a phenomenon so unaccountable that, until Mboya starts to explain it, he cannot properly see what it is that’s before him. She gets hold of all sorts of things, Mboya says. There’s old shoes she’s found on the bottom layer, on top of them maybe some soap dishes she takes from the bathroom recess — yes, and on top of those saucers. . I think she has a special liking for the saucers, some years — if she can get enough she’ll use just them. But this year you can see she’s brought some stones in from the grounds — flat stones, and there’s bits of roof slate she’s put on top of those. . The result was roughly conical and about two feet high, its apex almost meeting the coiled springs of the bed. The two men peer — one from the foot, the other from the side — at this what? Shrine — or grotto? Beside Busner’s splayed fingers sandy soil scatter-trails to where the roots, stems and heads of two or three shredded daffodils lie in an opening neatly contrived in the structure. There is also a nightlight, the tiny flame of which kindles a homely glow on a pile of crumpled paper inside the arch. Oh, he says, is that —? I mean. . Mboya is conciliatory: It does no harm, Doctor, we make sure of that, and, like I say, Miss Dearth — Audrey — she’s been here. . well, when I started she’d already been here many, many years. . Mistaking Busner’s silence for disapproval, when it’s only that he finds the scene surpassing strange, Mboya hurries on: She’s a sort of institution, you see, and her little spring shrine is, well, other patients — staff as well — they like to. . He points and Busner now notices coins lying among the