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of heredity, anoxia, syphilitic spirochetes, shell shock – or some other malfunction in the meaty mechanism altogether. The dopamine hypothesis was beyond hypothetical to McConochie, the dope , whose favoured expository method was to get a chronic patient in from the back wards and put them through their hobbling paces on the podium . This, a dour travesty of Charcot’s mesmerism, for it was his students who became hypnotised by their professor’s monotonous description of the schizophrenic to hand, whose own illness rendered her altogether incapable of evoking the harrowing timbre of her own monotonous voices. McConochie, the worn-out pile of whose fustian mind would be bared – as he wandered from lectern to steamy radiator and back – by his inadvertent references to general paralysis of the insane, or even dementia praecox, obsolete terms that meant far less than the vernacular: loony – yet which served their purpose, inculcating his students – Busner too – with the obstinate conviction that any long-stay inpatient above a certain age was afflicted not with a defined pathology but a wholly amorphous condition. — It is this loonystuff, at once fluid and dense, that Busner wades through, and that, besides clogging up the interminable corridor, also lies in viscous puddles throughout the extensive building and its annexes. The old woman’s head vibrates beyond my reach: a component on an assembly line just this second halted by the cries of shop stewards . . . She tics, and her crooked little feet, shod in a child’s fluffy bedroom slippers, kick and kick at a lip of linoleum tile that has curled away from the asphalt. Kick and kick: micro-ambulation that yet takes her nowhere. Busner thinks, inevitably, of a clockwork toy ratcheting on the spot, a plastic womanikin doomed to topple over . . . but she doesn’t, and so he comes on, his thighs heavy, aching as he forces his way through his own clinical indifference.
    Right beside her now, bent down like her so that he can peer round her palsied shoulder and into her face, which is . . . profoundly masked: rough-bark skin within which frighteningly mobile eyes have been bored . – Shocked, he withdraws, and the old woman is at once far away again, shaking and ticcing, her fingers scrabbling, her arms flexing I’m an ape man I’m an ape-ape . . . Perceptible flames of movement ignite on her left-hand side, in the middle of the densest thickets of akinesia, a paralysis not only of the muscles . . . but of the will itself – abulia? then flare up one arm, across the shoulders, before exploding into ticcy sparks and so dying away . . . Torticollis comes to Busner uselessly – and such is the parasympathetic drama he has just witnessed that he is amazed when two auxiliary staff, their black curly hair aerated cream in white nylon snoods, casually part to circumvent them – . . . I tellim mek a gurl an offer she’ll ’preciate, their remarks volleying between him and the old woman . . . See, ’e cummup ’ere mos days . . . – before they reunite and carry on, oblivious. — Electric woman waits for you and me . . . with Nescafé and a marijuana cigarette burning rubber after the International Times event at the Roundhouse. Somewhere in the bedsit grot of Chalk Farm . . . Busner had taken the wrinkled fang trailing venom , his eye caught by Ronnie Laing and Jean-Paul Sartre paperbacks stacked in the brick-and-board bookcase . . . nauseating . Her boyfriend’s hair hung down lanker than the bead curtain she clicked through with the mugs. She was in velvet – the boyfriend in a sort of hessian sack . Was it Busner who had been time-travelled here from a past as jarringly austere as his test-card-patterned sports jacket and drip-dry tie, or, to the contrary, they who had been op-art-spiralled from a pre-industrial opium dream of foppery and squalor? Later . . . she frigidly anointed him with tiger balm and then they coupled on a floor cushion covered with an