At Balham, Stanley is awakened by the ragged fusillade of carriage doors slamming — sparrows’re the same as the crumbs they peck at on the platform: they’ve been brushed off by the sky. Willis is snoring fitfully — he is an engine with no traction on the present, no means of drawing it into the future. With a start the train pulls out, with a second start Stanley realises he has been clutching the card in Cameron’s trouser pocket all this time, and at last he withdraws it so he may read what is written there in the warm waves of sunset breaking against the grimy window. The very patterning of the inky droplets where Adeline’s nib caught against the engraving of her name and address suggests a wantonness confirmed by, Four thirty, Tuesday next — be sure not to forget your pills, this said again and again by some daughter-in-law or other with that patronising grimace that is the forte of the Janus-faced middle aged, who look down on old and young alike. Busner savours the slight pleasure of wilfully forgetting her name: at any rate it was the same daughter-in-law who got him the days-of-the-week compartmentalised pill box which lies — this, he can remember — beside the egg timer on the shelf above the bread bin. Winching up his tracksuit bottoms and snapping their elasticised waistband around his paunch, Busner meditates on pills and forgetting. Really, he could do with a still larger compartmentalised box, divided into four, within which to place his weekly boxes. Twelve of these might then be housed in an annual box, a certain number of which could reside in a small crate, optimistically provided with sections for the years 2011 until, say, 2025, and labelled:
The Rest of My Life. He remembers this — the scrag-end, the residuum — even as he recalls his own hands fumbling up the little lid and tipping out the white pill for his raised cholesterol, the speckled capsule for his elevated blood pressure and the big orange Smartie that remedies some deficiency or other about which he cannot be arsed to ask his GP, although he thinks it might be to do with his gall bladder. No, he is not insensible to ironies big and smalclass="underline" these are not the sweeties of the elderly, any more than pharmacies are our confectioners — we do not stand on the dark floorboards, thruppenny bits held so tightly in our hands that they stamp pink portcullises, and point to this jar or that, requesting a quarter of lemon bon-bons and then thrilling as she tips the big jar so they tumble into the scoop of the scales in a puff of sweet powder. No, the molecular structure of HMG-CoA reductase inhibitors is the scaffolding with which we build Our Father’s many mansions out over the void, well beyond our allotted plot of three score by ten — we need them to survive, but they could probably go on without us. . There! He has swallowed them together with a mouthful of tepid water slung back from a plastic beaker decorated with diagonal lines of other pills. He leans with a hand either side of the sink: fat old man’s hands spattered with melanomas and implanted with shocks of hairs. . What a peculiar thing to happen to a little boy . .Busner flicks the tiny lid of the compartment that is Thursday up and down. How many pills, he considers, did I actually prescribe in a working lifetime behind the sweetshop’s counter, tipping the jar so that barbiturates, tranquillisers, hypnotics, sedatives, anti-psychotics, antidepressants and all the rest of the harlequinade tumbled out? Certainly, he had prided himself on his sensitivity — and abhorred those colleagues not worthy of the name who were too free with the medication . .And there’d been years outside of the system when I rejected it altogether . .Yet, in the end, I tipped the jar. . I tipped the jar . .Would his old office up at Heath Hospital be big enough to contain this entire poisonous jumble? No! Not the ward either! There were times, he knew, when he’d got hold of lots of powder to be encapsulated, or mixed up in a lab beaker so it could be slung back, or else injected intramuscularly with very large syringes — It hurts. . it hurts, Doctor, it hurts . .He finds himself once more in the bedroom and discovers one leg slung across the knee of the other. He has a sock rolled up and the old yellow dog scratches to get in — but where to, where should he go? All my working life, Busner thinks, I’ve looked out on to woodland, or grassy meadows. It had always been economics as well as part of the cure to touchdown the dark starships of the asylums in the claustrophobic countryside of southern England. The final thirty years of my careering, these too had included long static periods spent staring through the fly-spattered windows of his office on to the Heath, which rose up, massy, oak upon oak — here the juicy splodge of a mulberry, there the Tuscan taunt of a Lombardy poplar