At least, I think that’s what he said — it’s certainly the kind of thing he would, as is: ‘Look on the bright side — your strategies work, by and large; mine will too, and your psyche is… um, ebullient and productive. I’m not some potterer in the allotment of the mind, offering to weed out your hysterical misery and replace it with commonplace unhappiness — for you this is impossible; the best you can hope for is a rollercoaster of despair and euphoria. Still, I like rollercoasters — don’t you?’
But what was it in for him? I’ve no doubt that like the majority of shrinks he was a psycho-empathetic voyeur, who, to begin with, clutched the safety bar alongside me and screamed along for the ride. Could he also have foreseen the curious creative symbiosis that would grow up between us? For, just as I incorporated him — thinly veiled — into my novels and short stories, so he made use of me in the numerous articles and case studies he published.* Our collaboration — if that’s what it was — was a greater constant in my life than any other relationship, possibly for Busner as well; during it we were both married (in his case remarried), divorced and married again. Between us we added six more heads to the human herd: Busner had twin boys with his third wife, Caroline Byng, although he already had several grown-up children, one of whom, X, was a cabinet minister in the first Blair government.
Mythic skies, empurpled cloud ruptured above the cruising grounds of West Heath — a crumpled tissue snagged by a limp twig. The façade of the burnt-out Chinese restaurant at the junction of Belsize Lane and Haverstock Hill remained soot-stained for years — some people said the Tongs had done it, and the blackness under the gouged-out windows did suggest the agony of a tortured soul. Strange miasmas pooled in the hollow of Southend Green, where, when I first began visiting Busner, old Jewish émigrés still played chess at the Prompt Corner Café, slamming down the levers on their time clocks. Over it all loomed the vast hospital, its access ramps rearing up from the rooftops, while the Classic Cinema smarmed against its flank.
In there, one wet winter night, I saw Nic Roeg’s Bad Timing on its first run. My date was psychotic — something I was too wasted to realize until the feature had started, and she began burbling merrily decoction of dog-eared damp Penguin classics, as she ran her sweaty hands over my face, tweaking my nose, pinching my cheeks and poking her fingers into my dry mouth. It was by no means the last time that sort of thing happened to me.
What I’m trying to say is that I accepted all of this, not unthinkingly, or out of passivity — but joyfully. Busner remained for me the fixed point of a turning world, so that no matter how many times I walked the quarter-mile from Belsize Park tube, it was a homecoming: I may have wandered from city to city, but Laius remained right where he’d always been, playing with his fossilized shits while he dispensed Riddles, waiting to be killed afresh. I may have been in distant lands, yet in my mind’s eye I accompanied him on his ward round: a long dolly down one corridor, then through the core of the building, then back through the women’s ward on the far side. It was a technically demanding shot — especially before the perfection of the steadicam — but the absence of cutting meant that nothing diminished the impact, when, at the very end, the camera panned 180 degrees to reveaclass="underline" me, enormous, swathed in grey gabardine, moon face cratered with debauchery, lurching up from my uneasy chair and heading towards that always open door.
It was a Tuesday and hot in the tube. Cans of human stewed in their own farts. I used to observe the anonymity that crowded in on me and at least see its feeling face. Not any more. Now I saw the features ageing would impose on all these suburbonauts as they rumbled through the clayey void; they were wearing not space helmets — but time ones. It was hotter still above ground, and the plane trees in the triangular plot beside St Stephen’s were sticky with sap and fret-worked by caterpillars. I stood, pissing, hidden by a redbrick buttress of the derelict church, then climbed back gingerly over the railings and continued downhill to the hospital.
Busner must, I thought, be seventy by now — yet to me he appeared unchanged. For as long as I’d known him he’d been a little overweight, yet his fleshy face, with its suggestion of jowls, resisted wrinkling. It seemed I had been doing the deteriorating for both of us. He was standing with his back to me when I squeezed through the door — in his shirtsleeves, with a Vaseline sheen on his fat neck as he rearranged his coprolites.
‘How has the CBT with Shiva Mukti gone?’ he asked without preamble, or even turning.
‘OK, I s’pose.’ I looked about for a chair — they were all piled high with ring binders, loose papers, and even some dry cleaning still perving in its polythene. I began clearing one.
‘He’s a well-meaning fellow, Shiva,’ Busner said; ‘perhaps a little prosaic.’
‘He shot films of me while I was in my… obsessive phases; then played them back to me.’
‘Did it help?’
‘Um, help… well, with film maybe, and a little bit with reality as well.’
‘A little bit, eh — how about the survivor guilt?’
I didn’t want to talk about the events on Foula; I could still see the human stain on the rocks below the Kame, the wheeling gulls and the plastic trousers — a speck on the swell.
‘I don’t know about that,’ I said testily, ‘but the fact is I haven’t written anything serious since last September and I’ve got mouths to feed. I’ve an idea for an investigative piece and I’d like to pursue it.’
‘And this involves a trip?’
He was behind his desk and at the tie again, rolling and unrolling. I’d once asked him how long, on average, it took him to twirl one to shreds. He said nylon ones lasted the longest — but he hated the feel of them. Silk was pretty good — but too expensive. Wool he found most comforting — and mohair in particular. ‘It’s a sort of carding, really,’ he told me. ‘I’m straightening my own neurons and glia, smoothing out my cortex so that I can spin it into threads of thought.’ Frankly, it was a little rich that such a man believed he could help anyone else with their neuroses.
‘Yes, I want to walk to Hollywood.’
‘All the way?’
‘Don’t be facetious — you know my methodology: I’ll walk from my house to Heathrow — probably via Pinewood Studios where they’re shooting the new James Bond film — then I’ll fly to LAX, and walk from there on to Hollywood.’
‘Dangerous territory for you, I should’ve thought — given the events of last year.’
‘That was different, I, I was caught unawares — I didn’t have an objective.’
‘I see, and what’s your objective now, precisely?’
I didn’t like the way this was going; it wasn’t exactly that Busner was being hostile — it was more that his tone was off, his voice pitched a shade too low. And, now that I stopped to consider it, wasn’t there something sinister about the way he hadn’t aged over the years? He wasn’t merely familiar to me — I knew every hair that sprouted from the tragus of his annoyingly complicated ear — but overly familiar; his mannerisms were exaggerated, his coughs studiously rehearsed. It seemed he was an accomplished actor, called upon to play the part of Dr Zack Busner.
I swept this useless paranoia aside: I needed him to share my enthusiasm.
‘I want to find out who killed film — for film is definitely dead, toppled from its reign as the pre-eminent narrative medium of the age. I don’t know if film was murdered — but I suspect there’s a killer out there!’