the bike sheds of Heriot-Watt, thrust deep down in the wynds of the old town . . — This reverie would have continued, had the doors not swung open on the spitting, biting, screeching chaos of a saloon-bar brawl between cadavers. Busner’s first thought is: Oh, shit! it’s Enoch’s day off — because no further explanation is necessary for why it should be that two elderly women patients are fighting right beside the glassed-in nurses’ station, one of whom has her teeth sunk in the thick fold of flesh beneath the other’s chin, and so worries her — already the parquet is blood-spotted. A black-bag-mountain of a slack-faced woman with hay hair that at first he only recognises as a newly corralled and precious enkie! Gnasher’s teeth sunk so deep that the other patient is able to jerk her pinhead back and forth —. Busner’s second thought is: My files! For he has involuntarily flapped his arms and so they have flown — jettisoning photographs, papers and the enlargements of single cine film frames. Bloody hell! This stuff represents months of work, the careful mapping of all the moves necessary to ease this patient from that ward to this after making a space for them by discarding another to the hospital’s own crematorium, to the outer world or, on some occasions, simply by swapping them over, but in all cases thereby advancing the game — which is how Busner conceives off it: a game of draughts played out on the eighty-yard-long squares of the hospital’s wards. Patients are draughts — staff as welclass="underline" Mboya has leapt over Perkins to join the enkies on 20. . if only Perkins could be sent to the crematorium. What’s this?! he bellows at a nurse called Inglis, who flings herself at the mêlée, What’s this?! she bellows right back. You can see what it is, Doctor! Reluctantly he hugs Leticia Gross’s Ally-Pally shoulders — reluctantly, because despite the flecks of blood and saliva, and the squealereaming of the two women, he grasps that it is impossible to free her without loosening the other’s jaws. Inglis gasps: Get the um-brella, Doctor! Get the umbrella! Which is a euphemism he knows to be widespread among the staff, and which he abhors. — Eeeerarrr’rrra’rrra —! — Doctor, please! Inglis, Busner intuits, is not much liked by Mboya, although he himself has found her to be competent enough — more importantly, she shows an interest in what he’s trying to achieve. He can only surmise that it’s some African-West Indian antipathy, the roots of which he can have no ken — but he wishes they wouldn’t, he needs allies. Slipping in the paper slew, he levers himself up too slow — another nurse has arrived, umbrella in hand, a sedative bead swelling at the end of its. . ferrule. This nurse, Vail, whose white face is flushed, says, Doctor — will you? And he cries: No, no! above the Rarrr’rrra’rrra —! You be my guest! then turns away from sad cracked heels stamping as needle jabs into scrawny thigh to gather up the images of the others, besides it’ll be me who stitches and dresses Leticia’s wound — apart from Mboya, he still doesn’t trust the nurses with my property. Later, Busner sees the attacker in a quiet room, through the Judas — she is pathetic in the extreme as she slumps, stuporous, meditating upon a plastic potty. She’s no bigger than a child, her cheeks caved in: they’ve taken her plate. In the stubble — lice? — covering her small head he sees the distinctive scars of a prefrontal lobotomy. Inglis had already told you so: What you ’spectin’, Doc-tor, if’n you bring new patients on to a ward? You know what dese folk’re like — dey can’t be doing wid change, dey hate it. Dis one, she be out of sorts ever since the fat woman come up from 24, she bin goadin’ her an’ ridin’ her an’ goadin’ her some more. . All of which is understandable, Leticia Gross’s very bulk inviting an assault simply because it’s there. Although there are others of the others who should prove more irritating to the common-or-garden inmates of Ward 20 — the scatty schizoids and once-rebellious girls, whose bastard babies have long since abandoned them to the madhouse so that they may go to seek a better life. It is, Busner thinks, like any other war zone, what with its higher attrition rates for men — twenty per cent of them dead every year in the mid-forties — while their womenfolk, their menstruation suppressed by the drugs, are left behind to become this swelling embolism of the geriatric . .Weaned off their useless — and indeed contra-indicated — medications, Busner’s emergent cohort has been spread the length of the ward, but, while amphetamine withdrawal has plunged the somnolent post-encephalitics — such as Leticia Gross — into still more extreme torpor, the hyperkinetics, now that they are no longer sheltered by the umbrella of chlorpromazine, have emerged into a downpour of tics, spasms and jerks, lightning-strike actions so forceful and precipitate as to appear virtually instantaneous. For the sleepy enkies their carers have devised certain strategies — simply to get them moving. There are musical sessions with Miss Down, and more mechanistic measures stilclass="underline" the holding and then the letting fall of ping-pong balls, or the wearing of loudly ticking watches to provide them with a tempo that can be used to recalibrate the complex series of motions they must relearn, every time, in order that they may. . stand up. But with the wakeful enkies — these dark starlets — it is only by giving them a screen test, then slowing down the resulting films, that Busner is able to resolve their akathistic whirr into its component parts, so identifying — in Helene Yudkin’s case, to take just one — no fewer than eighty-seven different tics, among them: hair-patting, nose-tweaking, neck-flexing, bra-strap-snapping, ankle-rotating, foot-tapping, knee-lapping, copper-bracelet-rotating, tongue-darting, earlobe-pulling, neckline-adjusting, leg-crossing-then-uncrossing, inside-of-cheek-chewing, saliva-swallowing, brow-furrowing, shoulder-hunching, breath-holding-then-expelling, finger-wiggling, skirt-hem-yanking, etcetera. Which is to say nothing of what cannot be captured by the lens, namely her verbig-verbig-verbig-verbig-verbigeration: the unending repetition of words of words of words, or of phrases of phrases of phrases, that often seems to operate in counterpoint to her ticcing, one conducting the other. Yudkin, a petite, dark, near-perfect Sephardic princess, whose planed face appears both time-locked in girlhood and supernaturally unaffected by the monsoon of movement that sweeps across it again and again and again, is Busner’s most compelling photographic subject. His films of her, when run through Lesley’s Steenbeck sixteen frames per second, are an incomprehensible whirl of movement, but slowed to eight, then four, then two frames, the Nouvelle Vague stares him in the face: it is only their orchestration that makes her actions appear outlandish, discretely they are all within the normal gestural repertoire — their orchestration and their syncopation — for, as Busner spends more and more of his time examining the films, he begins to discern a complex relationship between the tics involving phased alternations between the small and virtuosic cuticle-flicks and hair-end-splittings, and those sealion yawns and gorilla-chest-beatings that have an operatic grandeur. It has taken weeks for him to capture one of these transiliences with his camera, so abrupt are they, but, having witnessed one in slow-motion, he can now also see it from una corda to sostenuto during live performance, just as he can spot the gathering wildness and fracturing arrhythmia to Yudkin’s ticcing that is often — although by no means always — the prelude to an equally abrupt transition from hyper- to aki-, from up to way on dooown, from Jacques Tati slapstick to the one stuck frame, in which she will then remain with all that baroque musicality reduced once more to