awfully small, a hassock embroidered with the Prince of Wales’s crest, a pianola, an indicator board ringing for service in every room, a probang, an electroplated punch bowl, Malacca canes fanned out on a Mackinaw, a regimental table piece in the shape of a sepoy shooting a tiger, a toaster, an electric lamp, a fondue set, a patented ‘Galvanic’ weight-reduction belt, an electric blanket, a stereo cassette deck — whatever that may be. Audrey can hear the disembodied voice — sweetly covetous — naming these things as they are shuffled before her, but the kinetoscope is difficult to focus on when she is so constrained. . a barbecue! His and hers dressing gowns and a cuddly toy! The voice finishes on a triumphant note, synthetic sounds swell to make the shape of music, and an invisible audience shapes its hands to make applause. .this fiendishness will be Albert’s doing: a brace adjusted so as to force her to stare up at the ceiling, its screws threaded in the bone to either side of her eyes. This . .kinema film his doing as welclass="underline" a means of torture. The brace presses Audrey’s face into a muzzle that smells of old sweat — her legs are bound in a single leg of some tartan trews, her hands must loosen the chuck, switch the bit and turn the wheel by touch alone — she feels the fuse cap drop into my lap . .the lines in between the ceiling tiles converge sickeningly but it’s not so bad . .she isn’t like Gracie, who’s been in the Danger Buildings too long — poor Gracie, who shared a cubicle with her in the Plumstead hostel and who also received Cristobel’s message to join in the war effort and once the workers were with them to rise in the reddy dawn. Poor Gracie, who doesn’t know me, who’s demented, whose skin is still canary-yellow — are they putting Trotyl in her food? In the early years Audrey had been happy to assist — to coo, bill and generally calm them before their psychoetheric reordering, before they were made to desire the images, if not the Ding an sich: atoasterafonduesetanelectricblanket — the words chew together now in avaricious haste, astereocassettedeckabarbecue!’isnerrsdressin’ gownsannacuddlytoy —! Off. Clicked off. The aerial sits alien antennae on the old set, which is warm and smells of singed dust. Busner straightens up, turns — the silence in the day-room of Ward 14 is slowly infiltrated by moans, mutterings, then: Wotcher do that for? Mister Garvey — mid-sixties, hypomanic, recent transfer — protests: That’s my favourite bloody programme, that is. Busner lifts an emollient hand and strokes the air. Please, he says, please. . it’ll only be for a few minutes, I just want to ask Miss Dearth a couple of things. . He waves the clipboard he holds in his other hand, and the papers stir up powdered milk, dried urine. The high-backed and upright armchairs face him in two shallow crescents, and are far more accusatory than the bundles dumped in them. Awkwardly, Busner manoeuvres between the rows, jostling past knees covered up with rugs and others frighteningly exposed: Oof, look at that contusion. . a Waterloo sunset. The day-room’s ill-fitting sash windows are buffeted by the wind, strafed by raindrops, and so he is reminded It’s April, as he drops himself into the seat beside her. Her poor old face is crammed into the angle of the headrest, her scrawny legs are rigid and the torsion of her upper body is painful to behold — yet, despite this, her hands move methodically, deftly, pulling upon an invisible lever, twirling an immaterial flywheel with such assurance that the psychiatrist does see steel basted with oil, the fireside glow of bronze. Miss Dearth, he begins, I have your original admission form from. . together with the notes made by medical officers during your first few years here. — It has taken him over a month to beg, cajole and wheedle these from Records, they see no point to it any more than Whitcomb does. — There’re plenty of fancies floating around this place, Busner, that’s why you’re better off confining yourself to facts, to routines. . It is pointless to observe to his nominal superior, or to Missus Jarvis, the hideous old dragon who crouches on the nest of paper and card breathing bureaucratic fire at him, that these records are precisely that: facts, and facts about routines. De’Ath, Audrey, Admitted 26th September 1922, Born Fulham, 1890 (age 32), Spinst. 5'2'', 7st. 8lbs., Address Flat G, 309 Clapham Road, Stockwell, London SW, had been subjected to a medical examination, so it was noted that: she showed no signs of tuberculosis, rheumatic fever, smallpox, being postpartum or having had any confinements. De’Ath, Audrey, had been admitted — it was cramped into the preprinted boxes of the form — as a rate-aided person, exhibiting symptoms of catatonia that led Doctor M. H. Hood, Medical Superintendent, unhesitatingly to diagnose Primary Dementia whatever that was. A year later Doctor Ventor concurred in respect of one Death, Audrey, but a note written by a Doctor Hayman, dated a scant three years later, just as definitively — the Latin tag underlined thrice in purple ink — characterised one Deeth, Audrey, same other details, as suffering from Dementia Praecox. As he had laid out the ancient sheets and file cards on a sticky-ringed coffee table in the staff room, Busner found himself moved to consider the evolution in symbiosis of these names. For, as the Mental Health Act of 1930 modified Colney Hatch Asylum to Colney Hatch Mental Hospital, so Deeth, Audrey, mutated into Deerth, Audrey, who was given — courtesy, he imagined, of the slow absorption of Bleuler’s terminology into the fabric of English psychiatry — an equally authoritative diagnosis of schizophrenia. It would have been next to impossible to have tracked this pseudonymous patient down through the decades within an institution that remained in a continuing identity crisis, were it not that Miss De’Ath, AKA Miss Death, AKA Miss Deeth, AKA Miss Deerth, remained in exactly the same place, a moth — not dead but hibernating and growing more and more desiccated with the years — despite the subsidence of entire spurs, the constant renovations called for by the shoddy workmanship of its original contractors, the fires and the wartime bomb damage, the admission and departure, by death or discharge, of thousands of the mentally distressed. In the late 1930s, when the hospital saw fit to reinvent itself as Friern Mental Hospital, relegating — or so they hoped — the echo of the booby-hatch to the chants of children, Miss Deerth, Busner assumed through yet another error of transcription, became Miss Dearth. And so she stopped on Ward 14, an incurable schizophrenic whose profound catatonia was her most enduringly remarked upon characteristic, now that the decades had worn away all contingencies of sex, age, class and name. Her catatonia. . and her dyskinesias and dystonias of all kinds, her muscles crimped, then cramped, her hands vamping and vibrating in the vice of her malady — so that, come the 1960s, when the hospital adopted the modishly informal nickname Friern, and the surf of chlorpromazine was up, old Miss Dearth’s symptomatic consistency was noticed by a not-yet-jaded junior neurologist temporarily attached to the staff — a certain Doctor Mohan Ramachandra, who must, like Busner after him, have bothered to read at least some of her notes and seen that, while she had been subjected to one round of insulin coma therapy in the late thirties and a single experimental jolt of ECT a decade later, she had mostly stepped over the high-tension cabling that snaked through brains for the next twenty years. He so concluded that, far from her twisting, ticcing and transfixed gazing being the consequence of too liberal dosage with major tranquillisers — since as yet she had been prescribed none — there might — just might — be a physiological explanation for her forty-odd years of torpor, a hypothesis that led to his jotting down very tentatively, in pencil, a single word, Parkinsonian, on the final page of those notes, followed by a? that absolutely guaranteed there would be no follow-up