wind over a pool of flesh, the very edge of her babyish lip smirks infinitesimally as some whitish thing swells in the bottom-left-hand corner — Ratatatatatat! flaps the film’s tail. La Gio-fuckin’-conda, Lesley says, and that’s twenty minutes of her screen test. Expertly he feeds the next reel on to the spools — it is, Busner thinks, his only expertise. At the Concept House in Willesden, where Lesley flaunted the grand title of Multimedia Coordinator, he expertly fed himself into the patients, who weren’t called that. It was this abuse, quite as much as the shit-daubed walls, the broken window panes and the ambulance calls, that led Busner to tire of the whole botched experiment in community therapeutics. Whirrrrr! Leticia’s lip resumes smirking as the whitish thing blooms into a hand that travels halfway to her face before ratatatatatat! That’s the fastest forward this thing’ll go with 16-mil, says Lesley, and Busner, who is leaning with hands on the back of the swivel chair the self-styled guerrilla filmmaker hunches in, wonders if it is because Lesley sweats sexual incontinence through every pore that he is experiencing an impulse to stroke down from his shoulder to his nipple while kissing behind his filthy ear? Things at home aren’t good — tense, Miriam eyeing me more and more coldly even as the summer builds — whirrrrr, the hand continues its moon shot, the mouth crinkles, shadows move across the cratered face, shadows Busner now realises must be those of staff and other patients passing between Leticia Gross and the window. If, he thinks, if. . old photographs were so slowly exposed that they captured entire minutes of the past, imprisoning the purely contingent smears of passers-by, and the grimaces of sitters bitten by whalebone and pinched by celluloid on glassy cells coated with silver nitrate, then what can be said of these films? Surely this: that they take the hours we so lackadaisically lose and gather them back up into a permanent and enduring Now. Ratatatatatat! But before this a vision that both men saw: a simpering moue appearing on Leticia Gross’s face while her fingers play with stray hair. Blimey, says Lesley, I think she was flirting with you, Zack. Yes, Busner thinks, a flirtatious gesture that it took her two hours and twenty minutes to make, while moreover — this he speaks aloud — I wasn’t there. Lesley pays no attention and Busner thinks: he will always be in cooperatives, and that’s profoundly wrong because there isn’t a particle of cooperativeness in him, all is savage barter. These sessions on the Steenbeck have had to be traded off against a repeat prescription for Valium. . which is ill advised. Lesley’s current cooperative is the London Film one, but Busner can imagine him pushing Maccabees to suicide, or Communards to the barricades — Enoch would know which one of the disciples he’d be . . — The tinfoil new currency makes a muffled jingle in Busner’s pocket as he strides along. Up here there is neither the abrasive bitumen and pretentious plasterwork of the lower corridor, nor the tacky refurbishment, which, beginning in the central block, is spreading throughout the first range of the hospital, a plywood virus self-replicating in the form of strip-lights, painted partitions inset with wire-gridded glass, boxed-in seating units and aggressively neutral linoleum. On one of these padded benches, outside the Patients Affairs Office, Busner sees, as he passes, three middle-aged men who, without their hectoring internal voices, would probably be chronic complainers. In their shiny old Burton suits — blue, brown and browner — they appear to have been recently discharged from one army, only to find themselves in this: one that shambles rather than marches, arms permanently sloped. With their cruelly knotted nylon ties and waistcoats of many buttons. . they are already out of joint — the future is arriving open-collared and with a zzzzip! Not that it can be seen coming from up here: the first-floor corridor Busner walks along would be considered painfully long in any other establishment, but here it is a mere connective. . linking madness to melancholy. Past the doors to wards 24, 25, 26 and — confusingly — 54 he strides. At the far end the corridor he turns right and from here Busner has a view down on to a cylindrical aviary in which a clutch of budgies and parakeets strum at the wire. Such cruel constraint! the bridling of all instinct into peck-peck-peck, flightless wing-beats and a head-down clawing across the roof of their world . .He must go on, conscious that only now that he has internalised the hospital’s layout can he properly apprehend its fabric: the metrical repetition of lancet window, buttress and embrasure, covered uniformly by a cracked salt-pan of off-white paint. Which is worse? he wonders. The lavish boredom of applying it or the ennui of its neglect? On he goes with a steady slap-slap-slap along this sap towards the Medium Secure Unit at the far end. Behind its steel door he can hear faint cries and raucous singing: Je-sus blood ne-ver failed me yet! And he wonders if in there are boys with spirit, or if it is only the usual gurning and head-banging — the bottom of the pops. Still, better perhaps than the chronic wards, which have a totalitarian lack of imagination, being as they are rectangles within rectangles within rectangles, whose inmates are subjected to the rectilinear punishment of having their cigarette packets and matchboxes taken from them. Pausing by another window as he turns the final corner into the forty-yard stretch leading to Ward 20, Busner glances across the cane-stitching and the tarpaper roofs of the Gardening Department. Beyond this there’s an orchard of stunted apple trees — a month previously he had gone to walk in their shade, only to discover that none was higher than his shoulder. A truck parked on the road alongside the orchard is being disburdened of crates full of Corona, and after this there are only a few more annexes and auxiliary buildings before the wall that separates the hospital’s grounds from its sloping netherworld of sewage farms and shitty little fields that patchwork down to the North Circular. After that an excremental trudge across a golf course and up streets lined with semis to the next escarpment, where stands Ally-Pally: a gothic pile of shit twinned with Schloss Weltschmerz . .Perhaps, he thinks, the patients should be taken there for an outing? He can see his new cohort ticcing in time as they circle a drained boating pond studded with the crumbling concrete daises that once supported ack-ack. What would they find inside the cavernous Palace itself? Nothing: teetering stacks of gilt-painted chairs piled up after wedding receptions and the ghost of the first television signal howling in its barrel vaulting. Tucked under Busner’s arm are buff cardboard folders stuffed with the photographs he has taken of the post-encephalitics — the wheedling of them into place is well under way, with Audrey Dearth the first to be moved. All those boarding schools at least taught him this much: how to wheedle, how to cut the totalising corners, and, as he turns the last one into the ward, he sees them all arrayed, a multitution, the redbrick gymnasium of St Cuthbert’s mortared to the concrete science block at Highdown, which in turn is cemented to the pink granite of the chapel at Clermont, the eaves of whose roof project over the fives courts of Charterhouse, a series of open-topped boxes that decline in height until they become