They take a long time to reach one another — the psychiatrist and the old woman patient. To see her, to see her properly, Busner has to wade through a Brown Windsor of assumptions about the elderly insane. — Moral aments, McConochie had called them in the subdued and amphitheatral lecture room at Heriot-Watt, neither knowing nor caring — so far as the young Zack could see — whether this malaise was born of heredity, anoxia, syphilitic spirochetes, shell shock — or some other malfunction in the meaty mechanism altogether. The dopamine hypothesis was beyond hypothetical to McConochie, the dope, whose favoured expository method was to get a chronic patient in from the back wards and put them through their hobbling paces on the podium. This, a dour travesty of Charcot’s mesmerism, for it was his students who became hypnotised by their professor’s monotonous description of the schizophrenic to hand, whose own illness rendered her altogether incapable of evoking the harrowing timbre of her own monotonous voices. McConochie, the worn-out pile of whose fustian mind would be bared — as he wandered from lectern to steamy radiator and back — by his inadvertent references to general paralysis of the insane, or even dementia praecox, obsolete terms that meant far less than the vernacular: loony — yet which served their purpose, inculcating his students — Busner too — with the obstinate conviction that any long-stay inpatient above a certain age was afflicted not with a defined pathology but a wholly amorphous condition. — It is this loonystuff, at once fluid and dense, that Busner wades through, and that, besides clogging up the interminable corridor, also lies in viscous puddles throughout the extensive building and its annexes. The old woman’s head vibrates beyond my reach: a component on an assembly line just this second halted by the cries of shop stewards . . She tics, and her crooked little feet, shod in a child’s fluffy bedroom slippers, kick and kick at a lip of linoleum tile that has curled away from the asphalt. Kick and kick: micro-ambulation that yet takes her nowhere. Busner thinks, inevitably, of a clockwork toy ratcheting on the spot, a plastic womanikin doomed to topple over . . but she doesn’t, and so he comes on, his thighs heavy, aching as he forces his way through his own clinical indifference.
Right beside her now, bent down like her so that he can peer round her palsied shoulder and into her face, which is. . profoundly masked: rough-bark skin within which frighteningly mobile eyes have been bored. — Shocked, he withdraws, and the old woman is at once far away again, shaking and ticcing, her fingers scrabbling, her arms flexing I’m an ape man I’m an ape-ape . . Perceptible flames of movement ignite on her left-hand side, in the middle of the densest thickets of akinesia, a paralysis not only of the muscles. . but of the will itself — abulia? then flare up one arm, across the shoulders, before exploding into ticcy sparks and so dying away. . Torticollis comes to Busner uselessly — and such is the parasympathetic drama he has just witnessed that he is amazed when two auxiliary staff, their black curly hair aerated cream in white nylon snoods, casually part to circumvent them —. . I tellim mek a gurl an offer she’ll ’preciate, their remarks volleying between him and the old woman. . See, ’e cummup ’ere mos days. . — before they reunite and carry on, oblivious. — Electric woman waits for you and me . . with Nescafé and a marijuana cigarette burning rubber after the International Times event at the Roundhouse. Somewhere in the bedsit grot of Chalk Farm. . Busner had taken the wrinkled fang trailing venom, his eye caught by Ronnie Laing and Jean-Paul Sartre paperbacks stacked in the brick-and-board bookcase. . nauseating. Her boyfriend’s hair hung down lanker than the bead curtain she clicked through with the mugs. She was in velvet — the boyfriend in a sort of hessian sack. Was it Busner who had been time-travelled here from a past as jarringly austere as his test-card-patterned sports jacket and drip-dry tie, or, to the contrary, they who had been op-art-spiralled from a pre-industrial opium dream of foppery and squalor? Later . .she frigidly anointed him with tiger balm and then they coupled on a floor cushion covered with an Indian fabric that had tiny mirrors sewn into its brocade. The boyfriend hadn’t minded gotta split, man and Busner was split. . a forked thing digging its way inside her robe. She fiddledwith bone buttons at her velvety throat. His skin and hairs snaggedon the mirrors, his fingers did their best with her nipples. She looked down on me from below . .one of his calves lay cold on the floorboards. There was the faint applause of pigeons from outside the window. — His strong inclination is to touch the old woman, his touch, he thinks, might free her from this entrancement — but first: Are you all right? Can I help you? Nothing. The upside-down face faces me down, the eyes slide back and away again, but their focal point is either behind or in front of his face, never upon it. — Can you tell me which your ward. . is? He grasps her arm — more firmly than he had intended acute hypertonia wasted old muscles yet taut, the bones beneath acrylic sleeve, nylon sleeve, canvas skin. . thin metal struts. The fancy new quartz watch on his own plump wrist turns its shiny black face to his as her malaise resonates through him. . Along comes Zachary . .he wonders: Am I blurring?Ashwushushwa, she slurs. What’s that? Ashuwa-ashuwa. One of her bright eyes leers at the floor. He says: Is it my shoes — my Hush Puppies? Her eye films with disappointment — then clears and leers pointedly at the floor again. She is drooling, spit pools at the point of her cheekbone and stretches unbroken to where it doodles on the tile with a snail’s silvering. At long last. . slow, stupid Zachary bends down and presses down the lip of the tile so that the toe of the kicking slipper scoots over it. Then. . she’s off! Not doddering but pacing with smoothness and fluidity, her shoulders unhunching, her neck unbending and pivoting aloft her head as her arms swing free of all rigidity. — It took so long for Busner to reach her, so long for him to decide to touch her, that he’s agog: she should be right in front of him not twenty yards off and falling down the long shaft of the corridor. Except . .already her gait is becoming hurried then too fast. . festination, another uncalled for Latinism, pops into his mind as the old woman is swept away from me on the brown tide . .Is this, he wonders, a contradictory side-effect of her medication? The lizardish scuttle that counterpoints Largactil’s leaden tread? Because, of course, it is unthinkable that she shouldn’t be dosed with some form of chlorpromazine — everyone is. The drug saturates the hospital in the same way that paraldehyde formerly soaked the asylum, although a few isolated voices — Busner’s muted one among them — have, while not doubting its efficacy, its. . humanity. . questioned its necessity. For all the good this does, because there’s no damning its sepia-sweet flow, a single wave that nonetheless drowns out many, many voices. Not having seen quite so many chronic mental patients in one place for some years, Busner has been struck, since arriving at Friern, by the chloreography, theslow-shoe-shuffle of the chorus from which an occasional principal choric breaks free into a high-kicking and windmilling of legs and arms. Noticed this tranquillising — but also become aware of a steady background pulse of involuntary movement: tardive dyskinesia that deforms the inmates’ bodies, flapping hands, twitching facial muscles, jerking heads . .They are possessed, he thinks, by ancient subpersonalities, the neural building-blocks of the psyche. . She is gone — or, at least, too far down the corridor to be seen any more a human particle. Busner, who is interested in most things, has read about linear accelerators, and so he takes a green-capped Biro from the row ranged across his breast pocket — green for his more imagistic aperçus, red for clinical observations, blue for memories, black for ideas — then writes in the notebook he has taken out and flipped open: What will she smash into? What will happen then? All the subhuman parts of her — can they be observed? in the long dark corridor where they play all sorts: skippin’ and boats and hoopla-for-chokkolits. Mary Jane comes to smackem, Lookit the skirtin’! she cries. In the passage it’s allus dark — so dark inna coalhole. Illumination comes only from a fanlight above the door, comes on sunny days in a single oblique beam a Jacob’s ladder that picks out a burnin’ bush on the floorboards that Stan and Audrey jump into and out of — Yer put yer leff hand in, yer put yer leff arm out, Shake it a little, a little, then turn yersel about, the little ones, they are, going Loobeloo, loobeloo, but Bert just laughs at them: You’re rag-arses, you aynt got no proper cloves, juss smocks, and he swings open the front door and goes out on the step to play with his marbles. . his wunner. . his fiver an’ sixer inall. He has them all neatly wrapped up in one of their father’s noserags, wrapped up and tied in a little bindle. He sits on the front step and gets them out and places them in a row. Audrey peeks from behind the door and sees claybrown, marblewhirl, glasstripe with sunrays shining through it so pretty she cannot resist it when he goes down the four steps to sit at the kerb and twist fallen straw — but grabs it and darts back inside. Stan’s eyes are wide, Yul catchit, he says, yul catchit. They stand in the burnin’ bush looking at the striped marble glowing in Audrey’s palm and neither of them can move — Yer put yer leff leg in, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out, yer put yer leff leg out . .but it won’t go no ferver, it is stuck there kicking and kicking against an invisible barrier, while, terrorised by the imagining of what Bert will do to me, Audrey’s head shakes, Yer put yer noddle in, yer put yer noddle out . .The door crashes back on its hinges and there he is: Where’s me stripey! He howls, then charges for her, Yer put yer whole self in, yer put yer whole self out . .He grabs her wrist so hard she feels the bones grating together inside it, then twists it so that the fist opens helplessly. A’wah-wa-wa! A’wah-wa-wa! she blubs. Audrey’s big brother’s starting eyes are fixed on his beloved marble — but hers, hers, are equally held by the peculiar bracelet he wears, its golden segments fiery in the burnin’ bush, and on the back of it a huge black jewel Mother’s jet beads. Audrey staggers, almost falls, bends double to escape the hurt and is caught there feeling the long Vulcanised strip of tension that loops round her middle and stretches in either direction the length of the passage an inner tube pulled tight round the rim of a bicycle wheel.