Umbrella Read Free Page A

Indian fabric that had tiny mirrors sewn into its brocade. The boyfriend hadn’t minded gotta split, man and Busner was split . . . a forked thing digging its way inside her robe . She fiddled with bone buttons at her velvety throat. His skin and hairs snagged on the mirrors, his fingers did their best with her nipples. She looked down on me from below . . . one of his calves lay cold on the floorboards. There was the faint applause of pigeons from outside the window. — His strong inclination is to touch the old woman, his touch, he thinks, might free her from this entrancement – but first: Are you all right? Can I help you? Nothing . The upside-down face faces me down , the eyes slide back and away again, but their focal point is either behind or in front of his face, never upon it. – Can you tell me which your ward . . . is? He grasps her arm – more firmly than he had intended acute hypertonia wasted old muscles yet taut, the bones beneath acrylic sleeve, nylon sleeve, canvas skin . . . thin metal struts . The fancy new quartz watch on his own plump wrist turns its shiny black face to his as her malaise resonates through him . . . Along comes Zachary . . . he wonders: Am I blurring? Ashwushushwa, she slurs. What’s that? Ashuwa-ashuwa. One of her bright eyes leers at the floor. He says: Is it my shoes – my Hush Puppies? Her eye films with disappointment – then clears and leers pointedly at the floor again. She is drooling, spit pools at the point of her cheekbone and stretches unbroken to where it doodles on the tile with a snail’s silvering . At long last . . . slow, stupid Zachary bends down and presses down the lip of the tile so that the toe of the kicking slipper scoots over it. Then . . . she’s off! Not doddering but pacing with smoothness and fluidity, her shoulders unhunching, her neck unbending and pivoting aloft her head as her arms swing free of all rigidity. – It took so long for Busner to reach her, so long for him to decide to touch her, that he’s agog: she should be right in front of him not twenty yards off and falling down the long shaft of the corridor. Except . . . already her gait is becoming hurried then too fast . . . festination , another uncalled for Latinism, pops into his mind as the old woman is swept away from me on the brown tide . . . Is this, he wonders, a contradictory side-effect of her medication? The lizardish scuttle that counterpoints Largactil’s leaden tread? Because, of course, it is unthinkable that she shouldn’t be dosed with some form of chlorpromazine – everyone is. The drug saturates the hospital in the same way that paraldehyde formerly soaked the asylum, although a few isolated voices – Busner’s muted one among them – have, while not doubting its efficacy, its . . . humanity . . . questioned its necessity. For all the good this does, because there’s no damning its sepia-sweet flow, a single wave that nonetheless drowns out many, many voices. Not having seen quite so many chronic mental patients in one place for some years, Busner has been struck, since arriving at Friern, by the chloreography , the slow-shoe-shuffle of the chorus from which an occasional principal choric breaks free into a high-kicking and windmilling of legs and arms. Noticed this tranquillising – but also become aware of a steady background pulse of involuntary movement: tardive dyskinesia that deforms the inmates’ bodies, flapping hands, twitching facial muscles, jerking heads . . . They are possessed, he thinks, by ancient subpersonalities, the neural building-blocks of the psyche . . . She is gone – or, at least, too far down the corridor to be seen any more a human particle . Busner, who is interested in most things, has read about linear accelerators, and so he takes a green-capped Biro from the row ranged across his breast pocket – green for his more imagistic aperçus, red for clinical observations, blue for memories, black for ideas – then writes in the