Umbrella by Will Self

a little rubber bulb . . . his fingers find the bulb of the sphygmomanometer . . . an obscene tongue of rubber unrolls underneath the plastic amphibian, flipping it forward. All, he thinks, these agitations – some of which must be connected causally. The right-hand swing door pushes inwards, a face looms spectrally in the small window, the amplitude of its pathology plotted by the wire graph – then is gone. All these agitations – the arrow on the fire escape sign is more mobile than this face confronting his, which has no eyebrows or lashes worthy of the name, two – no, three – hag hairs on the chin, that chin sharp, the cheekbones sharper, the skin a cracked glaze beneath which ancient freckles have run together into liver spots. He has leant down so far that the crystal of the gauge lies cold against her giblet neck. Paaa-ha! a shudder of the sunken chest. It’s not food – it’s faecal. The others are mostly one thing or the other . . . — In the submarine hospital all is agitation, the fin-flip along corridor after corridor after corridor, flowing in and out of recesses and embrasures, swirling around buttresses and foaming down the salmon runs of the staircases, at the bottoms of which it dissolves in a spray of tics and jerks and grimaces. Even so, Busner has noticed these others, caught sight of them with the eternal evanescence with which the eyes capture a shape in water – and on finer days he has seen them outside, caught treading water in the airing courts between the first and second ranges of the hospital, or else thrashing further afield, in the grounds, where other patients merely sidle the tendency of the ornamental beds. And in the day-room of his other chronic ward, where the inmates are restrained in easy chairs by too-tightly-tucked rugs, pinioned in front of televisions that show capable hands shaping clay – in that drear row he has seen an other . Then again: passing by the doors of the main hall, where the cupola is obscured by a cantilevered mezzanine, Busner has been pulled up short by this halting exchange: Nothing, my lord . . . Nothing! Nothing . . . Nothing can come of nothing, speak again – and upon entering found a dim hurly-burly , a stage hung about with dusty swags of blackout cloth and scudding between them a fool in a black turtleneck pullover playing a play-within-a-play, his players a hyperactive Cordelia and a comatose Lear who droned to a pool of patients that had eddied in from the surrounding wards to lap against the stage. In all this agitation a single ripple stirred the psychiatrist’s attention – and, without knowing how to classify him, Busner still knew that this too was another of the others of whom Mboya now spoke.
    The others, who were mostly one thing or the other : either like this old woman – whose humming arm he held – whirled into a twisted immobility, or else unwound spastic, hypotonic . . . these others of the others he had seen considerate nurses prop against walls, only for the patient to drip down once their backs were turned. Both kinds, Busner has noticed, share this uncanny capability: that they render those around them either too sharply focused or too blurred. The somnolent and akinesic ones were so very still that they partook of the hospital’s very fabric – Busner stood, captivated, watching them standing, thin, rigid and bent beside the old lancet windows, while those passing them by smeared a photon trail across his retinas. By contrast the ticcy, antic ones were impelled forward – goaded by some neural whip, they skipped, taking hundreds upon thousands of tiny steps. They are, he thought, the ones who couldn’t keep still for the long seconds when the plate was exposed, and so they marked the present with a ghostly impression even as their bodies faded into the future. Time, he thought, it has to do with time. The psychotics, for all their extravagant claims of having been sent sliding back down the shiny curve from the