future to warn us of the Victory of the Machines , are rooted in Now. Their stagy delusions are well dressed with the technologies of the present: transistors, assembly lines and answer-phones – while their persecutors are just as frenziedly up to date: Black September infiltrating grey March, or the Irish social worker responsible for the Islington patients on Busner’s acute ward whom at least six of them believed to be an IRA gunwoman, devilish Bernadette . As for the brain-damaged, the spastic and the otherwise touched – their faces have no expression at all, but instead the features rise and then set as their bodies respond to circadian Rhythmaires . Then there are the leucotomised – for they are here as well, their hair crinkled or their scalps bare where clamp tightened, saw grated and drill bit. Busner has marked them, the pre-frontals – they are trapped in a very exact layer in the hospital’s stony strata, being all of an age – mid-forties – to have been interfered with twenty years earlier, when such things were the fashion. Be that as it may, their waywardness is constantly being updated, as witnessed by the anguish in their eyes, which are forced inwards by the raw mechanics of their loss of control: I can’t help it, Doctor, the one on Ward 20 said, I can’t help it, I can’t help it, Doctor, I can’t . . . Doctor, I can’t, I-I-I-I-I . . . But these others , they are both of this time and escaping from it, of now and then . . . And this particular old woman, who alternates between being one kind and the other, has alerted him to their existence as a group – a status that Mboya, with his vastly greater experience, has now confirmed.
Is she –? the psychiatrist asks. No, the nurse replies, there’s no need – except from time to time to help her sleep. For Busner, these past few weeks have been mostly this: a tallying of drug charts, the sounding of sunken chests, the winding on and the stripping off of the sphygmomanometer’s heavy cuff, the listening in the hush of the ward for the rush of arterial blood. Entering the damp pits of their beds he has gone potholing in the fistulous sores that extend inside these hollow patients. It is, he knows, impossible to write a prescription of this form: Constant and sympathetic assistance towards effective mobility is to be taken ALL DAY – and so he only tiredly scrawls tetracycline in a fixed cycle. Whitcomb has allocated Busner two chronic wards, 14 and 20, and as a sop to his clinical expertise he is also allowed a part in the decision-making on Ward 11, over in the separate Halliwick unit, where the acute admissions are held apart from the main body of the hospital for assessment. Hence all this promenading – a ward round that provides him with a mile-long constitutional . . . He wonders, a bit, if Whitcomb, the shit, has done this deliberately to exercise his tubby junior – then reflects as he collects his keys from the Admin Office that the organisation of rosters recently ceased – or so he has been told – to be a decision made by clinicians, because the bureaucrats have taken over the asylum , which is only fitting given that in the absence of anything resembling a cure the medical staff have for years – decades probably – operated as patient-pushers, stacking, hole-punching, binding and ultimately filing away their workload in this tray, that drawer or some other neglected pigeonhole. In the nether regions of the hospital, Busner supposes, there must be the analogues to all this: the histrionics , the kerfuffle , the seems agitated , the 150 mg Stelazine intra musc , all of it scrawled on preprinted forms churned out by the relevant department, then stuffed in buff and laid on metal shelves to gather the finest of dust. The Records . . . a map of a map that is in itself . . . a map , or at least a diagrammatic representation of the hospital, which is a self-sufficient realm – Shumacher would approve – what with its metal
Is she –? the psychiatrist asks. No, the nurse replies, there’s no need – except from time to time to help her sleep. For Busner, these past few weeks have been mostly this: a tallying of drug charts, the sounding of sunken chests, the winding on and the stripping off of the sphygmomanometer’s heavy cuff, the listening in the hush of the ward for the rush of arterial blood. Entering the damp pits of their beds he has gone potholing in the fistulous sores that extend inside these hollow patients. It is, he knows, impossible to write a prescription of this form: Constant and sympathetic assistance towards effective mobility is to be taken ALL DAY – and so he only tiredly scrawls tetracycline in a fixed cycle. Whitcomb has allocated Busner two chronic wards, 14 and 20, and as a sop to his clinical expertise he is also allowed a part in the decision-making on Ward 11, over in the separate Halliwick unit, where the acute admissions are held apart from the main body of the hospital for assessment. Hence all this promenading – a ward round that provides him with a mile-long constitutional . . . He wonders, a bit, if Whitcomb, the shit, has done this deliberately to exercise his tubby junior – then reflects as he collects his keys from the Admin Office that the organisation of rosters recently ceased – or so he has been told – to be a decision made by clinicians, because the bureaucrats have taken over the asylum , which is only fitting given that in the absence of anything resembling a cure the medical staff have for years – decades probably – operated as patient-pushers, stacking, hole-punching, binding and ultimately filing away their workload in this tray, that drawer or some other neglected pigeonhole. In the nether regions of the hospital, Busner supposes, there must be the analogues to all this: the histrionics , the kerfuffle , the seems agitated , the 150 mg Stelazine intra musc , all of it scrawled on preprinted forms churned out by the relevant department, then stuffed in buff and laid on metal shelves to gather the finest of dust. The Records . . . a map of a map that is in itself . . . a map , or at least a diagrammatic representation of the hospital, which is a self-sufficient realm – Shumacher would approve – what with its metal
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