Interestingly, there is some evidence that menstruation may adversely effect the therapy — not an issue in this patient’s case, nor those of most of the other female inmates, whose menses are. . How’d’you put it, Nurse? GREENGAGE: Well, I don’t know, Doctor —. CUMMINS: Disrupted? Suppressed? GREENGAGE: Well, they doesn’t ’ave their monthlies, if that’s what you mean. . CUMMINS: Oh, indeed, si vous soulevez un jupon vous ne devez jamais exprimer la surprise . .) Spirit-rapping, table-turning — it was scarcely to be marvelled at that they would entertain such things — the communal areas crackled with talk of travelling to other worlds, humans vivisected into being from the bound forms of animals. Some were certain that death-rays were being beamed at them from the People’s Palace across the vale, and that these emissions caused them to hear the voices of their loved ones who had passed over — they spent hours, days, setting down these communiqués in the penny jotters obtainable from the commissary. Yet this was understandable, surely? Forgivable in the light of the percipient discussions that were also held regarding universal provision of family planning, infant welfare, education and social security — discussions I myself minuted, then presented in report form to the commissioners of Stanley’s Board of Control, who inspected the phalanstery on an annual basis. (MARCUS: She seems completely inert now — marked hypotonia. CUMMINS: That’s entirely as it should be, the curare means even if you boink ’em they don’t react — see?) Not that they paid these much attention — but, then, that too was understandable. . forgivable — didn’t they have their own work cut out for them: demolishing the centuries-old unsanitary housing and stony bombast that the foolish capitalists and warmongers had formerly believed the greatest city on earth? Then raising in its stead a few slim and tapering steel-and-glass towers, while establishing on its shattered remains the raised field systems determined by the new agriculture — fields for wheat, of course, but also orchards and water meadows, vineyards too — for why shouldn’t the ordinary folk also have Hock and seltzer? (CUMMINS: And. . on!) — It was Gracie who first noticed the changes under way: the infiltration of BoC spies among those sent for re-education, the alteration of the regime from voluntary retreat, to one of. . confinement. The introduction of electrification to the phalanstery, and other forms of mechanisation that were precisely the regimentations and oppressions of the human spirit and the human body that the revolution had been against! Next came the punishments — which were presented, derangingly, as. . treatments, but which left these once-proud women and men. . gibbering, wholly broken down. . in pieces. I told her: This is Albert’s doing. He has won out finally. Death-rays of Stanley, death-rays of Albert playing, each on the other brother’s blank face. . and Albert the winner, as always, reimposing his own cruel regime on the but recently liberated land. Soon enough they came: the redbrick serpents snaking over Muswell Hill and coiling across the valley towards the phalanstery, civilissssation they hissed. Dear Gracie — she had never fully adjusted to life at Colney Hatch. She said. . she said to me, that to look along the lower corridor, to allow your eyeball to shoot along its third-of-a-mile barrel was. . to give in to. . a sort of. . madness: the blinding white flash skronks into the negative images of feathery weeds agitating along the trackside. The train sways away and he stands on the platform looking up at the steep sides of the cutting and thinking: For this, I am. . not ready. And so, after stomping laboriously up the steel staircase he turns east along Friern Barnet Lane, intending. . what? He checks his watch (a sixteen-year-old petrol station giveaway, the face of which I have looked upon thousands of times yet never seen): One thirty — the pubs will be serving grapeshot peas, gassy lager, offensive chip weaponry, battering cod. . I’m hungry. . but not for THAT! He plods on, intending, he thinks, simply to take a look at Arnos Grove tube station, the Modernist hatbox design of which he has strangely fond memories . .Take a look — or perhaps enter, exercise my Freedom and board a train that will take me home. Home. It has come to him unbidden: the notion that the flat on Fortess Road, with its tatty furnishings and ambient sound of insurance brokers. . Female, fifty-three, ten years no-claims — one for John at Aviva? was his home, more than the Redington Road house had ever been — or any of his other habitations, which, now he came to think of it, were really dens. . and I, a fox . .an interloper into the husbandry of fence, flowerbed and shed who scratched out his own smelly shelter for a year or ten, raised a few cubs who needed National Health glasses, then skulked away again —. What’s your dick like, homey, what’re you into —? is slung from the open window of car that spurts past, together with the cat’s-piss-smell of contemporary marijuana — a hot hatch, isn’t that what they’re called? Why fight it? Busner thinks, Why delay or drag my feet when the past is inexorably creeping up behind? Which is — he goes on at himself — the essence, surely, of all talking therapies, and something that Ronnie nailed perfectly adequately in that silly chapbook of his — what did he call them? The whirligogs and fankles that beset our emotions. — On he goes, reflecting ruefully on the vogue for such things in the seventies, including his own inquire-within tooclass="underline" The Riddle! He barks with laughter, then chuckles more sincerely in acknowledgement of his own follies. . after all, perhaps at last I’m solving it? The road grumbles between nondescript residential blocks and postwar houses, then beetles over the brow of the hill and smooths down to a fistulous roundabout from which spin off shopping parades. It’s the same sequencing of consumer DNA that he had left behind not twenty minutes since: Y Beauty & Hair (Why indeed?), Monarch Dental Services (The teeth of kings?), a fried-chicken joint, a newsagent plastered with phonecard decals, a betting shop. . and again, once more — with feeling . .His feet are aching and sodden in their age-inappropriate footwear, although, he considers: In an earlier era I’d’ve been crippled by now with lumbago or gout — maladies that have an honestly Anglo-Saxon ring, Falstaffian almost . .He pulls himself together with the steel bar surrounding a waist-high freestanding hoarding, upon the metal sheet of which a young woman enjoys herself with a Magnum ice cream. In through the half-open door of the bookie he sees the bruising after-images of horse races: roan threads spooling through Haydock Park, digital threads cantering beneath them, the glabellar tap that causes blinking cursors . .The binary storm rages around him, a blizzard of ones and noughts — why fight it? I am, Busner thinks, no Falstaff, only a maddened Lear out on the toughened-glass heath, where