Umbrella by Will Self Page B

workshop, its pottery, its bakery and its kitchen garden where bulb-headed inmates cultivated a few onions . . . While Friern Hospital is no panopticon – even an all-seeing eye could never squint along these telescopic corridors – nevertheless, to move about the sprawling buildings is to be incorporated into this mapping as a live element: a blinking light travelling through its circuitry . The endless reflexive states implied by these maps of maps of maps , in his more thoughtful black-Biro moments, recall to Busner’s mind Cantor’s infinite sets and transfinite ordinals – but mostly he experiences the insight as dizzying , the 1,884 feet and six inches of the lower corridor rearing up to become its own perpendicular axis, the entire gloomy institution enacting its own axonometric projection . . . Hurrying now from Admin past the doors of Nursing Admin and Voluntary Services, he is out of breath, having already trotted the five hundred yards from Ward 14. There are a further three hundred to go — and for what? So he may be met at the doors by Perkins, who will unlock them with a show of efficiency before Busner has got his key in, an action that confirms his control , thus forestalling Busner’s inclination to say, There’s no need to keep these doors locked, it’s no longer hospital policy, now is it? Perkins, whose martial bearing tells the psychiatrist I didn’t miss out on National Service after all , and who is the perfect type of the NCO despite his white nylon tunic and brown suit trousers, Perkins, with his shoe-shining-brush moustache and rain-dashed radiator-grille mouth, Perkins, with his iron hair corroded by its parting , Perkins, who understands full well how to treat a junior officer, how to manipulate him, let him see only what he wants him to see. It is too soon yet for Busner to have found out the extent to which the other staff are complaisant or merely coerced by Perkins, but that one or other is the case he has no doubt, for they have been drilled into marching up and down the fractured parade ground of the ward, hauling the meds trolley into place, unlimbering its fake-wood-veneer lid, firing the gelatine shells, then moving on. On the ward rounds they do together Perkins is assiduous – making it seem that the subaltern has arrived at decisions alone, while prodding him towards them with rhetorical questions: Wouldn’t you think . . . Doesn’t it seem best if . . . Haven’t you found in cases such as this that . . . Not that any doctoral dispensation is needed to funnel the tranks into the patients – under the campanile all ’scrips are repeats and it is, quite simply, more medicine that helps the medicine go down . . . ! A patient’s medication card is only an aide-mémoire for these busy pushers to remind them of the dosage. In point of fact, these index cards are never filed, and if a qualified busybody wishes to discover who’s glugged what since mind out of time, he must visit Records and grope through the fuller notes deciphering his predecessors’ handwriting, which, Busner has often thought, is illegible not by accident but design.
    Be still! This is not why he has come to Friern – yes, yes , he will do his Hippocratic duty, neither doing any conscious harm nor allowing any to be done, but for now he is through with boat-rocking . Leave it to the Grocer! He is done too with elaborations of theory, the multiple threads of which, mind-spun, elaborate and then over-elaborate airy yet substantial models that fools such as me took for the phenomena they only loosely represented . . . He will, in particular, resist the urge to ask Perkins why it is his dee-lightful wa-ay! to give higher doses of chlorpromazine to female patients – resist, because he knows. The charge nurse says of one who lies shaking in a barred cot, She’s ever so fractious, Doctor, aren’t you worried that she may harm herself? Of a second female patient, who, for the third day running has been