Read Online Umbrella by Will Self - Free Book Online

confined to the quiet room – a deranging euphemism for a padded cell – the charge nurse contends: We really want her to be happy, Doctor, but when she’s allowed the run of the ward she pilfers from the others, then accuses them of taking her things, and before you know it there’s a right barney going on. I mean, you wouldn’t dream it to look at her . . . And indeed, you wouldn’t, because what sits on this blancmange slab is but a shrivelled raisin of humanity who shivers in a midi canvas tunic, a uniform, Busner thinks, appropriate only for a slave labourer . . . but she grabbed a fork an ’adda go at putting it in Bettany’s eye, and y’know, if I wasn’t on hand I think she would’ve – now that isn’t good, is it, Doctor? The whole purpose of this speech being – Busner realised hours later, after having administered the injection himself – to introduce subliminally the words good and doctor into his own mind. But surely, if he is a good doctor, Busner should do something about the bad nurse he has seen, together with his cronies, cackling over a spread in the Sun showing women’s libbers in Afghan coats holding aloft a dressmaker’s form lashed to a cross. I’d crucify those bitches, he thought he heard Perkins say – yet he couldn’t be certain, the ward office was so full of rattling tea mugs, cigarette smoke, smouldering tin ashtrays and clanking filing cabinets, so squeezed between the dirty panes of two permanently shut sash windows. — Perkins and Bettany, caught at it, gave him the approved glare for new boys – or recruits – who have been gazetted for bullying. Bettany had a chubby, kind countenance full of light-hearted dimples, yet Busner suspected him still more than Perkins – he knew the type, slow-witted, malleable and big. Bettany would be the one to administer the thump therapy, that’s what they called it, Busner knew – he’d been told all about it by a refugee from the asylums, Dave Catterall, who arrived at the Concept House in Willesden ranting about being beaten by psychiatric orderlies and having water-soaked towels held over his mouth – tales Busner, whose own asylum experience had been brief and circumscribed, had assumed were exaggerated until they were confirmed, to the letter, by other residents. So what if we were? the nurses’ adult faces lisped childishly and Busner burned with indignation. Y et how could they know? that he hadn’t been a new boy for decades – only a left-behind one watching the Rileys and Rovers crunch away down the drive, hearing the last call for the bus to the station. Left behind to wander the voided corridors and deserted classrooms, left behind for so long and so often, that on several terrifying occasions he had to spend the night alone in dormitories empty of everything but their unwashed-boy-smell and the pitifully snivelling ghost of the twelve-year-old that was me – and, of course, the other left-behind one.
    Is she able –? the psychiatrist asks, and Mboya waves the clipboard wearily. Obviously, he says, it’s impossible for us to get her up on the off-chance – there’s many more like this and we’re short-staffed as it is, but luckily Miss Dearth has her ways . . . Miss Dearth? Can I have heard him rightly? wears a bulky nappy held in place by plastic bloomers. It is these the two men have avoided looking at – nakedness would be less obscene. Mboya continues: I cannot be altogether sure, but I think she may be our longest-term patient – and she does indeed have her ways. The nurse, who is a head and a-half taller than his colleague, now does a wholly unexpected thing by squatting down neatly on his haunches. Busner goes more awkwardly after him, and then they are looking at a great oddity, a phenomenon so unaccountable that, until Mboya starts to explain it, he cannot properly see what it is that’s before him. She gets hold of all sorts of things, Mboya says. There’s old shoes she’s found on the bottom