. . tasty. We considered pulmonary TB to be the twin of insanity, so closely were they associated. In my time there I had plenty of colleagues who, I knew for a fact, still believed that one caused the other, although not altogether certain — euch, euch! — which. Marcus makes a conductor’s gesture, the long fingers of both hands spatulate, duck-billed and raised up — if he could see himself, Busner thinks, he’d diagnose acute chorea — then brought down once, twice and a third time, so that cracker crumbs and pâté blobs are left in suspension, flickering in the bright light — a meteor shower the old alienist thrusts himself through to spit: I doubt you’ve ever seen a case of lupis vulgaris outside of a textbook. . and Busner, confronted by nostrils eaten away at by sharp shadows, thinks, I could be looking at one right now, but only confirms: You’re right there. Marcus next asks, More sherry? although this inquiry post-dates the unscrewing, the pouring and the re-sealing of the bottle. Last December, Marcus continues, when we had candles in here and got out the old Tilley lamp, it made me think of my first years at the Hatch — those endless bloody corridors, a gas-bracket only every thirty yards or so. D’you know, there was a neurologist who came up a few times from Queen Square to do some encephalograms with one of the first portable machines — and that was before they’d fully installed electrical light in that mausoleum, so he could scarcely see well enough to take the readings of the electrical activity in the patients’ brains! Marcus has fallen back once more, but now he comes once again unto the light: What I’m driving at here is that we’d patients with diphtheria, who’d had typhoid — with dia-bloody-betes, not forgetting. .a duckbill speared into the air. . ones poisoned by lead or arsenic or alcohol. All of ’em would exhibit peripheral neuropathy so all of ’em would be given the catch-alclass="underline" hysteric. Busner says nothing, Say nothing, for as it is to the patient, so it is to the physician: if you want them to talk say nothing . .Look — at what, your bill, those crumbs? — the enkies were merely another group of patients for whom there was neither the conceptual apparatus nor the resources to disentangle the physiological from the psychological. With the enkies one neurologist’s catalepsy was another psychiatrist’s catatonia — but, anyway, it’s progress that’s the real delusion. You, young man, might like to believe that there’s no turning back — the Wasserman test and so forth. . the replacement of diseased types by disease processes. . but really this is utter bosh, because, after all, what’ve you got now with your so-called personality disorders — it’s only types all over again, denigrating the poor bloody patient by saying he’s got a bad character. That reminds me of something. . Marcus pours himself another sherry to aid the process of recall, this time forgetting to impose a refill on his guest. . there used to be a statue in the grounds, ragged-arsed Victorian kid, the Hatch’s own Madness and Melancholy — y’know, the Bedlam statues — he had a plaque on his plinth that read, Monument to the Unknown Pauper Lunatic. Still there is he, in the shrubbery by the big villa off Eastern Avenue? Busner thinks for a moment, and for some reason decides to spare Marcus the ugly truth. No, he says, no, I believe he was, um, discharged a couple of years ago. I understand the feeling was at the Health Authority that he sent a rather negative message to the patients. . and Marcus crows, See, see! They got rid of him because he represented the truth: that the patients are poor, and they’re mad — and indeed that many of ’em are mad precisely because they’re poor. That’s the reality all their borderline-this and histrionic-that balderdash covers up! Busner, however, doesn’t wish to pursue this line, no matter the extent to which it speaks to my condition. Instead: Enkies? he queries. They had a nickname? Marcus snorts, Naturally! After all, they were simply another feature of the post-war scene — along with limbless ex-servicemen and economic stagnation. I remember as a young man going to the cinema and seeing newsreels of enkies — quite a lot was made of ’em in their hyperkinetic phase, and you could understand why because they had a strange sort of physical genius, able to make sudden moves that were deft — but zany and prankish, y’know, juggling lots of balls, chucking stuff, leaping and skipping. Marcus, in attempting to illustrate this physical genius, makes a wild sweep of his arm, knocking another table out of the nest and scattering the notes, he juggles none of them. He is dismayed by his own clumsiness: I don’t know. . I daresay you wouldn’t be able to spot it if you saw those films now — I mean, in films from that era everyone looks like a Chaplin or a Buster Keaton — even Lloyd George — something to do with way they hand-cranked the cameras, I s’pose. The liverish pucks are all gone — a lot of the sherry too. Busner says, And what of Miss Dearth — as she is now? Marcus spends a while surveying the room, squinting at the spreading behind of his young colleague, who, as he gathers the scattered sheets from the carpet, takes in the bookcases densely packed with decades-old professional journals and Roneographed papers that he’ll probably never pick up again, let alone read. Well. . he drawls at last. . what of her? Busner persists: I mean, you thought it worthwhile putting things in her notes, making your own tentative diagnosis. . Marcus shrugs. — It was a jape, I s’pose — I mean, it was clear to me that she was post-encephalitic, and I wrote it down partly to twit my colleagues, partly simply to show that I knew. . perhaps, pah! for posterity. . perhaps to fish you from the future — I hardly know any more, it was a long time ago. I can tell you one thing, though. . The notes are all reassembled on one of the red lacquered tables and Marcus cants forward to leaf through them, stopping from time to time to bring one up to his face so he may examine his younger self’s handwriting with lenses clawed down from his forehead. . It certainly wasn’t with any intention of helping her — there was no cure, she’d no one to look after her that we were aware of. It mattered not one jot which sort of institution she was confined to, given how profoundly ill she was — and you say still is? Busner assents, then outlines the condition of his patient: her long periods of catatonia interspersed by manic episodes and still stranger phases when — he screws his features into an approximation of Audrey Dearth’s crises of fixed regard — She has her attention, her gaze. . compelled by some invisible object up above her and to the left. Marcus is himself compelled. — Yes, yes. . His watery eyes fix on a threadbare pelmet, its flaking brocade indistinguishable from smears of cobweb. . this is entirely typical of post-encephalitics. Still — he snaps out of it — I’m surprised she’s still with us, she must be very elderly by now. You might’ve thought the enkies would’ve been altogether worn down by their illness, plenty died in all the usual ways, of course, but I also recognised that there were these others — like her — who were almost preserved by the sleepy-sickness, as if it were a kind of suspended animation. Sometimes. . but this is fanciful! Busner almost shouts: No, no! It’s not fanciful at all — how could anything connected with these astonishing patients be fanciful? So please — please give full rein to your thoughts! He has, he realises, succumbed to the old man’s very lack of charm, Marcus’s abruptness, a stop-and-start that recalls the paradoxical condition of those others with their veined, dry-leaf skin. . who blow in drifts along the endless corridor, for the end of time has come. . and the campanile has collapsed. . rain falls through the broken ceiling of the pharmacy. . blue-and-yellow capsules swirl in a clear glass bowl, schizophrenics bob for them — dipping birds. . —They must have reached some sort of conclusion, risen from their burled walnut caskets and got out from under that harsh white light, for here they are: the old man standing erect in the hallway, Busner already outside the heavy front door and embarrassed for the Marcuses, whose Jewfoody stench can still be detected a floor down from their flat, and which seems to him to sully the deep-piled purple carpets and smirch the brass nameplate of the mansion block. Busner cannot contain his thoughts — they fly to be with squatters sitting grouped on tea chests, one of whom licks a Rizla and attaches it to two others . .and in another place there are disco lights making thighs blood-red . . the horror, the horror is that this, of all the possible times and places, feels willed. His hand ivy on the doorjamb, his carpet slippers mossy on the mat, Marcus says: I enlisted as a general physician, but when they discovered I was a psychiatrist I was seconded at once to the field hospitals set up in the beachhead immediately after the landings. It was very abrupt — one week the dark corridors of Colney Hatch, the next these equally oppressive Normandy hedgerows, and pitched right beside them army canvas tents. . When I’d first been at the Hatch inmates who repeatedly soiled themselves, or those put in the padded cells, were forced into canvas tunics. . Every time there was a show more and more boys were brought into the tents, white as. . white as. . They’d never seen action before — their training had consisted only of robotic drills. They’d soiled themselves — plenty had thrown away their rifles. . by far the majority hadn’t fired a shot. They sat in their own mess ticcing, and we shrinks joked — gallows humour, d’you see — that it was a busman’s holiday. Chap I knew — before the war he’d been at Napsbury — he went over with the Yanks and they did some sort of a study, very hush-hush. Turned out only one in ten of their infantry ever shot with lethal intent and I can’t imagine it was any different with our boys. Where’s he going on his busman’s holiday? Odd, isn’t it, to think of all that mayhem, all that killing — now too in Pakistan — and yet the vast bulk of it is perpetrated by a mere handful of psychopathic personalities, the rest being there to, euch-euch, make up the numbers. They have been standing like this for so long that it would seem appropriate for Marcus to invite Busner back in, but instead he looks critically at the younger man’s fat knot of woolly tie and the plump hand that fidgets with it, and says, I’ve enjoyed talking at you — will you come again? Busner laughs, I’d like to — and I’d like to come with news of a. . positive nature. I mean to say, if this is Parkinsonian. . well, there’re terrific strides being made just now with chemical therapies, I’ve read an article in the Lancet —. The Lancet! the old man yelps, How very quaint!