whip-crack-into-rice-pudding of the snare drum’s rim shot. There was no talk ever of fiancé or wife — such is the dark mirror of adultery, in which both parties elect to see nothing, instead, her letting drop an appointment at the FPA licensed everything — so, as the weeks and then the months passed, our lovemaking became characterised by bizarre notions and their attendant motions: a wheelchair left in a corridor would be commandeered to mechanise our coitus, while on another occasion we purloined the mobile hoist used to lower paraplegic patients into their baths. We braced ourselves in corners and against the undersides of shelves. Dyspnoea . .She pants, this — her thumb? — thrust whole into my anus is capricious . .her tongue, travelling round and round my ear. . compulsive. Leaning back astride me, she’s possessed by a mass of subhuman manias and still her pulse continues to accelerate: one-forty, one-fifty — if she were my patient I’d administer a massive dose of parenteral barbiturates. She blinks, she grinds her teeth, her shoulders shake with a dreadful palsy as her pubic hair scratches frantically in mine, One for you and one for me, Pardon me — comes to three! Balanced impossibly, as a pin could never be on its point, to one side the abyss of frenzy, to the other that of stupor — with no warning there is the inspiration of a leviathan! she holds her breath for ten. . twenty seconds. . an agonising half-minute, during which he has to take in the Rembrandt lighting: her breasts heaving, flayed of their clothing, her dirty cherub’s face, her unloosed hair a gilt sphere. And more: the pong of excess bleach caught on fraying linoleum, the mid-distant dissent of a distressed inmate terminated by doorslam, the drug dust that tickles his own nose, before: Paaaaaaaaahhh! Peanut breath is violently expelled and he is blown into a salt globe full of floaters, motes, spiralling animalcules, fish oil, wallpaper paste, gentlemen’s — relish. Soon enough he will have to relearn once more the complex sequence of actions required to stand up . .What happened to Mary Quant? Max Factor. — It doesn’t work for me, Enoch Mboya says, I just don’t find it funny. Well, Busner chides, you’re being obtuse as well as prudish — what’re you, some sort of Mary Whitehouse? Mboya takes a pinch of oaken skin in thumb and forefinger, scrutinises it, then replies, Hardly. They laugh edgily — they are deep in now, the pair of them, conspirators, really. Whitcomb’s authorisation was obtained for the purchase of the L-DOPA, but, beyond scanning the journal article Busner thrust before him, he has shown no interest in the trial — which is as well, because it’s not a trial at all, there being no control! He titters, and Mboya who’s sorting the latest batch of capsules into the compartments of a dispensary tray, looks at him reproachfully. Recently Busner has started to feel that his charge nurse is reading my thoughts, so engrafted have they become. Busner voices his next — What’d be the point of a control? — even though he’s only reiterating what they’ve both said many times in the weeks leading up to giving the selected group of patients the drug, and many more in the anxiety-distended week since. Indeed, Mboya says, there’d be no point to a placebo: they don’t know what we’re giving to them, and nor do we for that matter. Both boldly going psychonauts have qualms: next-of-kin consent has been obtained at best haphazardly: a form which was composed by Busner has been Cyclostyled by Admin. and in vague terms it outlines the experiment. Mboya, Inglis, Vail and others charged with the care of the post-encephalitic patients have pressed these on the few relatives who still visit, and when called upon Busner has made himself available to answer their questions. In these encounters he makes use of a doctorly gambit he despises: talking down unless they up their game. To a very few of the few — only one or two — he admits: We know nothing much, L-DOPA has had some therapeutic results with ordinary Parkinsonian patients, however, this is a different form of the disease — if, indeed, it’s the same disease at all. He forbore from adding: Besides, what’ve they — let alone you — got to lose? Nor did he point out that these pecking, bobbing and stuffed bodies were barely human, being to all intents and purposes lame ducks whose government subsidy might — altogether reasonably — have been withdrawn years or even decades before. Why let ’em go on, the shitbuilders? The enkies’ children appeared to have suffered from the disease’s fallout — prematurely aged, they limped on to the ward. In his mind’s eye Busner always pictures them as wearing macs of pre-war neutrality, or else supporting themselves with duff umbrellas. Their bri-nylon shirts were damp through and mildewed — they were Harold Steptoes, orphaned children of parents who yet lived, biologically adult yet balking at all the busyness of life — financial, emotional and sexual. Of course, he understood that such children and spouses who still visited had to be self-selecting for exactly these characteristics, after all. How little would you have to have in your life in order to prioritise this thankless — and frankly useless — task? Shall we? Mboya says, the Coptic Bishop with his tray of wafers — and so their round begins, since neither of them trusts anybody else to dole out the precious sacrament, especially now that they have chosen — Mboya being included in the clinical decision — to massively increase the dosage. One hundred, two hundred — up to five hundred milligrammes could be given by depot injection, but not entire grammes of the stuff. They had increased the dosage, and they had restricted its allocation to only six patients: four of the somnolent-opthalmoplegics, who were utterly extinct and sunk in the deepest catatonia — Messers Ostereich, Voss and McNeil, and the prodigious Leticia Gross — and two who, albeit stifled, still exhibited all the jerks, spasms and flurries of hyperkinesias — Helene Yudkin and Audrey Dearth. Audrey Dearth . .Busner feels no especial guilt about what is plainly favouritism, for her alternations between the dread entrancement of oculogyric crisis and the busy operation of her invisible lathe are peculiar, even for this most paradoxical of malaises. Seeing her now in the day-room, her tiny frail form enveloped in a chair, he feels she embodies a living past that forever eludes the most penetrating of thinkers — no veil of ignorance, or otherwise theoretically woven partition in the also theoretically woven fabric of the mind, but a real barrier, that he — I! — will penetrate, once, that is, we actually touch, for still it seems to him that they are forever approaching one another along all 1,884 feet and six inches of the lower corridor — forever approaching, but yet to touch . .Ready? Mboya asks. Busner nods — they have assumed their positions, Mboya opens her jaws, then Busner slings in the two capsules, each of which contains a gramme Brighton Aquarium — fishy treats for performing dolphins. Audrey remains impassive, taken up by the Saturnian gravity and alien surface of a loose polystyrene tile some way above her head. Busner follows the L-DOPA with a slosh of water from a beaker, then falls to stroking her neck chicken skin don’t snag as Mboya marries her gums. Audrey’s dentures sink back down in the remaining water the toy diver at Mark’s bath time . .the distortions in the Perspex bugsbunnying the incisors. Do they, Busner muses aloud, ever put them in for her? Mboya shrugs. There is silence in the day-room apart from her subtle gulp. Glancing towards west-facing windows, full of the risen sun, Busner is appalled by the alien white planet they all inhabit and the grossly etiolated forms that promenade its smooth surfaces, oh, so slowly . .