immensely appealing she thinks as her own twist the dial, her ear pressed against the mesh grille. Erhem! Busner clears his throat, releases Uncle Maurice’s red silk tie, which unfurls over the curve of his belly. Erhem — Heath as it is spoken — and he states again: Miss Death, would you like some help with the radio — I could. . tune it for you? He wants to probe her relentlessly: What does she think of it? Had she been aware of Marconi’s experiments? Could she then — with her Arts & Crafts imagination — have conceived of this hence: the world woven into a tight basketry of voice and music? Desires to — but is wary of her scorn. Besides, she has spotted her visitor, who havers beside Busner, his desert boots and fawn corduroys surely an academic exercise in informality, given his Wilfrid Hyde-White top half: the black suit jacket and wedge of blacker — what? What’s that garment they wear, a vest. . A singlet. . a sleeveless pullover? It seems always to’ve been polyester, but that can’t’ve been true of the Warden-of-bloody-Barchester. Anyway, it isn’t this that matters, thinks Busner: it’s the dog collar, which, although a simple enough hoop of white celluloid, is yet linked to a leash we all strain against. The Hospital Chaplain is young enough to be a trendy vicar — and dishonest to God. He’s tall enough to have had extra meat off the ration, his long thin nose, mild brown eyes and still milky curls suggest the drinking of a lot of weak Nescafé and the leisurely patter-cake of Anglican platitudes — but his hands clutch spasmodically at the front flaps of his jacket to tug them down . .while the flakes of dead white scalp on his shoulders imply awful things about his underwear —. Who’s this fellow? Audrey prompts, then countermands herself: Let him step forward and say. Busner admires her: Ooh, she’s fierce! as the Chaplain sidles in and, grasping the back of a chair, says, D’you mind? Audrey replies, Not at all. She has half risen from her own and juts out her hand — a strong gesture brutally undermined by the frailty of all the rest: the weedy hair and the cadaverous face, the insult to her ideals of Little Red Riding Hood’s cast-off cardigan. Still, frail as she may be, and with a fearful asymmetry, she’s managed to bring the old wireless across to this table — she’s interested in what lies beyond, if not above. Poised on the plastic laminate: a plastic water jug, a plastic beaker, an aluminium kettle. The radio whistles until Busner turns it off. Thank you, croaks an effaced figure hidden in one of the chairs facing the television, and now they can all hear the raucous singing inside the simulacrum of the Moulin Rouge, inside the Warner Brothers’ lot, inside the set — and this Busner finds obscurely cheering: Nostalgia, he thinks, more and more of it will be needed to tranquillise the collective psychosis of a steadily ageing population. And he would’ve reached for the appropriate Biro were he not having such a bad day. A cavity big enough to stuff my tongue inside has appeared magically overnight, together with its twingeing sequeclass="underline" a note from Whitcomb stuffed in his pigeonhole requesting a meeting fairly urgently, to talk some matters over. . matters — that’ll make martyrs. . martyrs/schmatte which is what Busner wants of the Chaplain: just possibly he can discover more about Audrey’s family where all the other staff have failed? Busner thinks it unlikely she’s a believer, yet a woman of her era will, he suspects, retain a certain respect for a man of the nylon. Without funds Busner cannot get Miss Death anything better to wear than this rubbish bag of a dress, but where there are relatives there may be funds — or a nest egg, put aside by her and swelled by compounding interest into a Roc’s one: an Arabian fortune. Besides, Busner wonders, what are the clergy for if not the conjuring up of blood out of tepid institutional tea? Not that it was he who called for spiritual assistance, he’d scarcely been aware there was a hospital chaplain. A rabbi came alternate Saturdays: Grossman. Busner had seen the big pallid gingernut laying tefelin on some of the twitchers — binding their palsy with the leather bands — or muttering a prayer over a schizoid, the slushy regurgitation of Hebrew — chicken shoup with bitsh in it — mingling with the psychotic drone. No: the Chaplain had trumped himself — he had, he said, heard certain rumours of extraordinary awakenings among the catatonic patients in Busner’s care, and resurrection being — as it were — his business, he’d come to visit the Gethsemane of Ward 20. — So the psychiatrist leaves them together in the day-room with its soiled floral-pattern curtains, surrounded by its undergrowth of easy chairs and right next to a stony radiator that no christly superstar — however omnipotent — could roll away since it was locked inside a fucking cage! He abandons the odd couple sitting either side of the silenced radio news from nowhere, and, as he tacks his way chubby Chay Blyth through the reefs of tables and iron-pillar narrows, sees only this: the ashy smears left after bodies have been vaporised by a flash brighter than ten thousand suns. . All my life. . crouching under desks. . only the klaxon’s wail cannot fail . .He is bitterly aware that no matter how diligently he and his ilk peruse the New Left Review, they will never put a stop to it: no happening could ever prevent it from. . happening. The hospital flattened — surrounding it, stretching away over the low Middlesex hills and down into the re-exposed valleys, a burnt tracery of closes, avenues and cul-de-sacs lined with neat, ashy plots, within each of which sits a semi-detached pile of rubble accessible via a cinder pathway. And what is left standing? Helene Yudkin with a hairdryer in one shaky hand, its flex scribbling up from a socket — he watches more than her I long for a simple past . .as she toggles the switch and basks in its warm whirring, turning her shrunken girl’s head this way and that as it shoots over her ski-jump nose. Lovely, she says, and then, marvellous — isn’t it, Doctor, isn’t it marvellous — so lulling. . snug as a. . woolly hat — a tam, a tam that haint there, no, it haint, a phantom tam, a phantam. . She giggles — Busner, intent on the nurses’ cigarettes where have they hidden them? and the view they’ll afford through prettifying swirls at the tangle of his emotional life — Mimi has dropped her own bombshell — stops: a phantam! Witty-ticcy Yudkin is three weeks into the new regime and receiving two grammes of L-DOPA a day — as he wishes it, she’s an exemplary picture of improved wellbeing and energy, her voice stronger, her movements fluid, and with only the occasional jamming, she walks stably and without assistance — and she feels marvellous. That she will stand for hour upon hour at light switch, kettle, hairdryer — any appliance she can lay her hot little hands on — is, he has decided, only a reasonable response to the electro-age she finds zapping around her. He chooses to ignore the forced reminiscences she reports — the past driving a coach and four through the present. According to Helene rag-and-bone men get onter the ward quite regular an’ gallop up and down whippin’ their nags up, stopping to water ’em in the lav-a-tory bowl. . Drunk summat terrible they is on gin at fourpence-ha’penny . .She retains the entire retail price index, circa 1919 — so what? Surely this is a corrective of sorts — her mind assimilating all that lost time by hanging on still more firmly to what she has? What he won’t confront is the renewed chewing, the dimple worming in her cheek as she eats herself up from within . .What’s through the graph-paper window today? Same as yesterday: a plump shrink wrestling with a semi-clad blonde pharmacist who’s got a zone of erogeneity deep in her throat . .he thrusts her aside into a puff of dopaminergic dust — he’ll force out his own short-term reminiscence: Mimi’s shaky announcement rattling beneath me that she has called off her engagement to her soldier — he’d have to be a fucking soldier! Busner anticipates this: bare-knuckled boxing in the airing court for the benefit of Mister Kike, the starveling patients in their donated clothing chanting in a ring, cheering and clapping the man on — Edwardianly moustachioed, he is, and in tight white breeches — as he beats me to mush and slush. Crowded together with the rest of the sports fans: Miriam and Mimi, waving their hands rhapsodically in the air, happy to attend this Concert for Busnerflesh . .This too he thrusts aside: the hospital is a degenerate city, the jargon of the staff — our diagnoses, our pathological labels and bogus practices — all obscure this: the gossipy reality, the talk of the gutter . .the purloined cigarette rests in the notch of the tin ashtray and from its cellulose stopper mustard gas leaks . . — On Saturday he’d taken Mark to the ABC Muswell Hill. Zack had looked only cursorily at the airily contrived monumentalism of the zeppelin, the choking spume of the night-time gas attack, the erect posture of the goggle-sporting Hun with the Iron Cross stamped on his leather breast. No, what caught, then held the professional observer was the boy’s unblinking and grating fixation upon the screen that floated up above them, pinioned between long insets of brassy rods and stylised laurel leaves — the forlorn Deco interior of the cinema dragging along A. . B. . C. . behind the streamlining of history. This, Zack had thought, is the whole of the twentieth century thus far: a white sheet thrown over our heady hopes, our disturbed dreams, our fleshly desires — with no sense of smell we touch only plush skin, rub it in, gargle the mucal ice cream deep in our throats, but without pleasure . .This is our crisis of fixed regard: the zeppelin crashes to the cold earth again and again, a cathedral of rumpled buttresses, flaming arches, burning beams. They returned blinking into the egregious daylight to discover kiddie karts circling the roundabout and dropping off the hill down towards Crouch End — his hand in Mark’s was strange to me. This, Zack had thought, is my awakening and it’s always been thus, when I was his age, coming out of the Everyman, I’d experience the same estrangement from my shoes cow, folded and sewn. And he’d had this intimation: it’ll only accelerate from here on in, I shall emerge from the darkness into the light faster and faster, a rollier and pollier silent comedian, double-, triple-, septuple-taking on doors, window screens, the cosmic fatuity of style —. Dad, Mark had said, Dad, you’re hurting me — because, of course, it was the child’s hand that had been clutched in his — and such a beautiful child, his skin ivoried by. . neglect? The boy’s fixity had seemed to persist — he too was estranged from Wimpy Bar, 104A bus, all the rolling stones of old London town — a bad future was, Zack thought, tucked into the turn-ups of his dungarees and proclaimed its dominion across the Esso roundel of his promotional T-shirt.