a single, monotonously sustained note . .Helene Yudkin may confront Busner with the most extreme form of this syndrome, yet he remains more strongly attached to Audrey Dearth — her primacy will, he thinks, always ensure her primacy. And at times such as these, as he walks by a bay of three beds in the men’s dormitory, occupied by three studies for figures at the base of a crucifixion Messrs Ostereich, Voss and McNeil, each different in physique yet contorted by the same hypotonic lack of posture, he wonders: Am I surrounding her by quaffers of nepenthe, while she remains in constant psychic pain? The bed she sits on is tightly made but at least unbarred, and she has her own locker. Her posture reminds him of the prefrontal in the quiet room: her tiny bent body is on strike, her cerebral cortex has withdrawn its labour, her facial masking is beyond profound — it is a tragic rictus, so inert that a fly alights and takes a leisurely stroll along her top lip. What can she be thinking? For he is sure that she is: from small hints — snatches of vocalised thought — heard fumbling from the enkies’ mouths, Busner has become convinced that whatever the damage to their diencephalons, their hypothalamuses and their substantia nigras, these derelict brains are still inhabited. In the upper storeys of these rundown minds true sentience remains — although surely ferociously disturbed by its decades of imprisonment in a jail within a jail. He places his reconstituted files on Audrey’s bed and from one of them removes a sheaf of photographs that he fans out, black and white on the grey institutional blanket. See, he says pointlessly, when I filmed you the other day, Miss Dearth — Audrey — I was, um, struck by something. . She makes no acknowledgement of his presence — why would she? You do not acknowledge a ghost that goes on: Same as before, you were making these motions that I’ve seen you make many times. . His soft hands patty-cake the air, rotating invisible wheels, pulling upon immaterial levers. It is, he knows, a poor imitation. When she does it, she is both precise and consistent, and the actions — so obviously the operation of machinery — partake of its solidity, its power, the rhythm of its engine without its being there! Eighty-one years old and still beavering away — but at what?. . exactly like this, and I wonder, can you tell me what it is you’re working at? Busner’s question leads leaden-footedly, because already he believes he knows. At the Film Coop, when they were snipping up the 16-millimetre negatives and developing them, some smarty-pants drifted through the dark room to scrounge a pellet of hash off Lesley, and, seeing the prints pegged up to dry in the hellish light, he said, Freaky, that old biddy’s working an invisible turret lathe — then expatiated: See, she’s turning a flywheel with that hand, plain as — it’s the one that moves the lathe bed — and that’s gotta be her yanking on the lever that shifts the turret up and down. . and see here, here she’s pulling on another lever, the one that opens the chuck up to release the finished piece. Yeah. . the smarty-pants was inordinately pleased with himself. . it’s a turret lathe, deffo. Busner asked: But what is it she’s making? And the hash-head reverted to truculent type: How the fuck should I know? I mean, I juss did a summer job in a metal basher’s up in Wolverhampton — those lathes’re used for any bit of metal needs turning. Besides, he snorted smug wraith in rotten cheesecloth, it’s invisible, ain’t it. Now Busner leans in to that Bovril mouth to hear, We’re’erebecausewe’re’ere because e’re’ere because we’re’ere, the same palilalia he gets from many others of the others. One by one he brings the enlargements up to her face — but whatever it is that so transfixes her, it isn’t what’s immediately before her eyes. She drones on, becausewe’re’erebecausewe’re’ere, and he’s enraged — for an instant he is prepared to strike her. She is Miriam and all other recalcitrant women to him. . Then a slippery strip detaches itself from the last print and spins to the floor, What’s this? a second negative of the film Lesley must’ve done two that he unthinkingly holds up between thumb and forefinger to the window. . I wonder what the hot dish’ll be in the canteen today —? Two of the frames are out of synch’: in one her right hand pulls the invisible lever, her left turns the transparent flywheel, but in the next her left hand operates the lever the chuck? while her right remains idle. Busner looks to the third frame and finds that it is sequential with the first! The front wheels of the shitty and shit-coloured Austin hit the edge of a massive pothole on Winnington Road and the entire car lifts off its axle Fosbury-flopping inside the chassis: I’m driving on the moon, what can it mean? When the enkies tic they do it at great speed — hence the filming, hence the frame-by-frame analysis: he wants to see individual tics siphoned off from the seemingly incontinent spray of movements — but this. . this is incomprehensible, this intercutting of time. He runs his laser gaze along the rest of the strip, Am I transcriptase? And discovers five frames at the beginning of the sequence to which this errant frame belongs, but: what can this mean? He has no difficulty in finding it credible that, at a neuronal level, she has succeeded in jumping from one sequence to the other and then back — it’s at a cerebral one that he experiences bamboozlement: her brain. . is outside of time. . so far away. . in another place. . in another phase of development, Willis said when they all pitched up that morning — the varsity men, one or two others from the discussion club, and Stanley, whom they all regarded with a queer sort of respect, especially after Cod Drummond arrived with a handcart piled high with picks, shovels and all else necessary for the undertaking. And Stanley, while in nowise wishing to swank, did take up a pick and give it a few experimental swings with a view to conveying that he was altogether at his ease with such work, just as he was at his ease with another phase of development, a phrase he liked and that kept running through his head as the work progressed and the sun rose above their hot heads. Another phase of development sounded like one of Willis’s pamphlets on political economy — which Stanley had done his level best to get through, though he feared he must be frightfully dense, for, try as he might, pretty soon after he began reading sleep would be the next phase of development. The varsity men were bloomin’ daft to look at — they’d all come in bags, sporting collars and cricketing pullovers. Their notion of navvying meant buckling on the gaiters they probably wore for a little rough shootin’ in the country. For the first hour or two, while they hammered away at the cobbled roadway that ran up from the High Street, their spirits continued to rise — then their lack of experience began to tell. In truth, Stanley had no more familiarity with manual labour than these beefy chaps — some of whose faces were aflame — yet what he did understand was that all work has a rhythm appropriate to its duration, one that should be nicely judged to preserve vim. The varsity men nattered on — clearly, whatever their belief in Willis’s brand of socialism, this was still a tremendous jape for them: and, since they had never, ever worked, work was their day trip. They took cobblestones and, using picks for mallets, tried out croquet shots. Drummond did his best to keep ’em in line, strutting this way and that in the roadway, telling one chap to pound down the earth, a second to cart off the debris, a third to go to the Coach & Horses and fetch some ginger beer. — Ginger, mind. He was an ape of a man, Drummond, his head big as two rugger balls, but, for all his stamping around and bellowing, the varsity men only laughed, then, if he persisted, ragged him, which was easy enough to do. — Oh, I say, Cod ol’ man, have you been to visit the ape in the zoo? No — why not? She’s been bally well fetched all the way from darkest Africa to visit with you, you ought to show her some courtesy — some fellow feeling! Tha-at’s right, Cod, show some fellow feeling — they’ve dolled her all up for you, or is it that you aren’t partial to African ladies of your — sorry, I mean the species? This way and that Drummond stamped, the white dust covering his moleskin trousers — his face was purple, the handkerchief he’d tucked under the rim of his hat a transparent veil through which the folds of his fat neck could be seen quite clearly one-two-three, he is me: not at ease, never will be, with these types, despite my. . conjunction with Adeline, a liaison that made of Stanley a man in the fullest sense, quite unlike these inexperienced. . virgins the lot of ’em, unless, that is, you entered on their account the sort of beastliness she had told him went on at their schools and colleges, and which Stan could well believe, not being an innocent and having seen exquisites strolling about the ’Dilly and certain seedy sorts who favoured Guardsmen and who frequented the pubs by Scots Gate. . hands, backs. . necks — a martial bearing down. . beastliness. The work proceeded throughout the long, hot August morning — they would dig up the old cobblestones and level the roadway, although Willis had arranged for proper contractors to come and lay the new macadam surface, because this was patently no work for raggle-taggle boys playing at being working men. The cricket pullovers lay in a mound on the verge. The varsity men joshed Drummond, whose misfortune it was to have a fish tail too big for his mouth, it flapped about on his lower lip, foam-flecked — hence, Stanley supposed, Cod. The men from the discussion group — Addison, Poole — travailed with greater diligence, yet equally ineffectually, while Willis, whose show this was, took it upon himself to explain matters to passers-by, at first city-bound gentlemen on their way to Hampstead Underground Station, then grocers’ and butchers’ boys, and eventually a van of ladies who came promenading under parasols, followed by nursemaids pushing perambulators, each distinct echelon equipped with rugs and hampers and all the other impedimenta required for a constitutional and a sit-down on the grass at somewhere called the Vale of Health, which Stanley had never heard of before — although Willis told him, portentously, that it had been the haunt of poetical types, that Johnnie Keats and ’is ilk. To his credit, Willis demonstrated his own socialistic convictions by making no distinction — he would waylay anyone, regardless of whether they were respectable or not. He would treat an insolent telegram boy to a lecture on the dignity of labour and a bemused carter — who clearly wished he had one — to a sermon on the ugliness of the machine. He would placate irate householders, explaining that the small curve of roadway and its embankment were, in the letter of the law, private property — his own — and that, while no permission was needed from the Borough, he had in point of fact signalled his intent with comprehensive plans posted for all to see at the town hall in Belsize Park. — Willis stands now, his beard hooking to his breast, his specially tailored Jaeger cycling suit very close-fitting, his stockings equally so — a Spy cartoon, altogether a brilliant man, Adeline said, what with his pamphleteering and his lecturing for the extramural departments of the University. — You haven’t an idea in your head. . she coiled on top of Stanley, hissing, one leg between his, the other athwart them, her face on his belly, her breath on my John Thomas. . They swapped their roles all the time, she-be-me, me-be-her, no other he believed, devoutly, could ever understand Adeline, sobbing in green chenille for the loss of him. . My little Pierrot! And Stanley tripping quite as tearfully along the rutted track from Norr to Carshalton, passing Rose and Grace and Tully the footman, coming from the station, back from their afternoon off, who went on up the hill without a backward glance at the fair young man — they recognised him not, while he had spied on them all from their lady’s boudoir, and from the lane hidden by lime hedging — inside and out, spying on these others. . another kind of servant, maybe? Certainly, in service and moving along concealed passages and back stairs of his and his mistress’s devising. Cod Drummond would, Stan considers as he drops a cobblestone with a dull chink, always be in service as welclass="underline" Omdurman, Krugersdorp, Lhasa. . Hampstead High Street. . a soapy tang rises on the hot air from down there, where a laundry must be. . in the sultry noonday heat Stanley throws back his head, a single cloudy bolster lies on the divan of the sky — he thinks of standing, awed, inside the belly of a Zeppelin, and looking down its bellying nave. He thinks of Colonel Cody’s sycamore seed plunge — Adeline had promised him a combined ticket, he would fly the figure-eight course at Hendon, then she would join him to see the War in the Air at the Hippodrome in Golders Green: the spidery models of aircraft creeping above the audience’s heads on invisible wires. He would not speak of this to Willis, despite his being a strange sort of confidant: he knew of their relation, yet was blinded to its carnal essence by his own peculiarities — a bachelor rising fortywho brought bouquets to the West End stage doors not with any motive, unless it be to discover leading ladies unchaperoned in their dressing rooms and lead them unto the kindly light of a socialism, which implies no loss for anyone, only gains all round . .It is my pyorrhoea, he had explained to Stanley with the frankness he believed exemplary of the New Man. Stanley laughed: Pardon? My pyorrhoea, Willis said again, baring his inflamed gums in their reddish and hairy net. It makes it next to impossible for me to. . ahem, become intimate with a woman. . Stanley did not altogether believe this, thinking it more likely that, while a bicycle saddle between female thighs might kindle passion, the brutal leather would only bear down still more on what little manhood the apostle of free love possessed.