A ticcing baby, a drooling baby, a baby neutered and decerebrised . . It sits on the ward floor, its eyes fixated on nothing. The nurses aren’t interested in it, nor are they bothered by me, un farfelu — of which there are more than enough at Friern, remember: it isn’t only the lunatics who’re confined to the asylum. It — she — has lost control of everything, but specifically her bowels. She sits on her shit cushion and a cleaner has mopped around her a shiny disc of urine and bleach. This, he thinks not for the first time, must be what sewers smell like: a mélange of detergent and excreta, the sacred and profane confined together in airless tunnels. Akinesia, apathy, autonomic disturbances — she sweats, she salivates, Busner senses the acid churn in her engorged spleen, he envisions ulceration. To counteract these stark facts I have jargon — for he has been doing his reading. It is far easier to look upon her Unknown Pauper Lunatic face if he puts it in these terms: profound facial masking. It is far less uncanny to describe these half-shuttered and unseeing eyes as exhibiting lid clonus. Her face is a child’s one, the features clear, unblemished — but sunk deep within a pimpled wimple of flesh. It — she — is aphonic. — Missus Gross? Missus Gross? Missus Gross? He pressures her to no avail, for ve haff no vays of making her talk. Busner enlists a reluctant nurse and together they heave the woman-mountain upright. While she exhibits diminished flexion of her trunk in addition to dangerous obesity, once she has her legs gathered beneath her she does her bit willingly enough. The trouble is that she cannot retain her standing posture — even in her tarpaulin dress with its bold rectangular pattern she is
no Centre Point: she lists — and would topple over, were it not for this unprecedented two-to-one staff-to-patient ratio. The nurse sneers: I can’t stand ’ere all afternoon. In point of fact she’s been assisting Busner for five minutes at most. She whines: I’ve the meds to do, Doctor, there’s plenty of others as needs me. Which is a lie: No one needs you. So Busner cleans her up himself. In the shit-packed crannies of her Michelin thighs he discovers not professional detachment but a deeper engagement, for this is simply changing a nappy, something he has done — although not often — to bolster his feminist credentials. The patient lies beached across her specially reinforced catafalque of a bed, and as he sponges around her pudenda she groans a’herrra! and grinds her teeth while her bare feet patter on his shoulders — several flies settle close to her very bits, but none of this matters. She’s mine now, my Twiggy . . grown Redwood. A bed sore in the region of her hip dressed, that dressing sheathed in underwear chivvied from reluctant staff, Busner fetches his tripod and Bolex camera. He is operating intuitively — there is no clear idea. In Willesden and before, he used photography to present objective images to the deluded with which to counter their disordered ones. To the same end he employed a tape recorder after injecting them with sodium pentothal. Sometimes he guided them on LSD trips — all of it, as he now admits, had only variable results. This is different, however: Leticia Gross is wholly inert, holed up deep inside her voluminous fat, and moving images of her colossal inanition seem entirely besides the point. And yet . . And yet . .he has a hunch. As with Audrey Dearth, he senses singing within her a crazy polyphony of exaggerated tics, a pickingitupandpickingitupandpickingitup, a hairflickinghairflickinghair-flicking, a scratching and a reaching, and a perseverating. He sets up the camera and she fills the viewfinder: a Matterhorn, her eyes arêtes, her cheeks ice flows. The light is drab, yet he presses the button and waits. . and waits . . — Eventually, Busner tells Jonathan Lesley, I got one of the nurses to find me a bulldog clip and some rubber bands and I managed to jerry-rig it to film continuously. This reel is only twenty minutes but these other three are an hour apiece. Lesley wears a leather headband and leather wristbands and leather trousers and nothing else. He has pimples on his shoulders. . the spitting image ofhers. He sits over the Steenbeck twisting the heavy Bakelite knobs — it is hot in this hutch, the wooden superstructure of an old train shed alongside the mainline into Euston. A mote-filled beam of light infiltrates the blackout cloth pinned over the window, the spools whir faster and faster, while on the editing machine’s screen Leticia Gross’s inscrutability shivers