this. Standing in the July field, his cock in his hand, piss thick as soup hosing the earth between his boots until it liquefies, Stanley Death feels his way towards a future he already occupies, a future in which annihilation will be assembled piece by piece — a bayonet thrust here, a trench mortar going off there, a shell arcing way over there where the Eindeckers strafe the trenches, but all of it under the same roof and part of the same process: the bantams and the big ’uns, the puling varsity boys and the hobbledehoys fed in from the railheads, each one sheathed in buff, then fed on into the reserve trenches, then hand-cranked to the front line, then methodically taken apart. It was indeed as Bertie had said: they were of the third category, and so were to be subjected to the noise that went beyond noise, shaking bone in flesh and flesh in skin, until all that was left were maconochie in the mud and the rest in streamers hanging on the old barbed wire. Although my Lord Skull was wrong about the machine guns: their ceaseless hammering manufactured not turmoil but a perfect system, one that holds him in thrall, leaves him standing cock in hand. Many of the Tommies — half of Stanley’s section included — believe as an article of faith that the war will go on forever, that having reached this state of absolute stasis — the armies evenly matched, their offence and defence cancelling to nought — that it can never stop . .leastways until the last two men are poised, rifles parrying, bayonets pricking, and so topple forward into eviscerating extinction. Finally putting it away and strolling back to where the others lie, stunned by their feed and the barrage and a bottle of vino they pass from hand to hand, Stanley dissents: It is a matter of time, he thinks, of how you understand time: Nisi agit non est. The scientific adventurer pushes forward the crystal bar and the days zoetrope past and the housekeeper zips through the flickering laboratory again and again. He pulls up on the bar and she does it backwards, again and again. The drapes swish open and swish closed, the wind rises, falls, howls once more and the walls crumble away to leave him in his complicated cage of an apparatus, the weeds coiling up about its posts, struts and ribs. . still Stanley is there, it is now — now and forever Feldman lovingly oiling Vicky, poking the rag into the grooves of her water jacket and running it along them dexterously. The others — Lufty, Bobby, Corbett and the Sergeant — are playing crown and anchor, laying the mothsoft cards down tenderly on an ammo box. They behave towards one another with elaborate and superstitious care. Luff may have stage fright, being the newest member of the cast, but the others have seen many performances — they cannot believe they will all make it through the forthcoming big show. But why not? Now is forever, the jellyfish dances in the ocean of noise, the shocked officer lies in spasm on his side, his hands and feet sketching possible trajectories in the dirt that follow some map or plan long since encrypted in his otherwise jumbled mind, Marcus must’ve come in by the main gates, turned right off the roundabout and puttered along the preposterously named Western Avenue, passing Blythe House, Villa No. 3 and the Upholstery Workshop, then manoeuvred his way between the spur and the Occupational Therapy Annexe, before finding a place to park. Busner watches him from above as he unloads his scaffolding-pole arms and legs from the car — that it would be a Morris Traveller was predictable, although not in fact a prediction the younger psychiatrist had made. What could be foreseen, he thinks, was that these portable biers would soon enough be dumped in the cabbage patch, their olde worlde bodywork — half timber, half sheet metal — rotting into compost. Marcus, his feet splayed, bends over to carefully lock the car’s door before disappearing from view. He must know, Busner thinks, of some secret tunnel into the castle keep . .But surely, he says aloud, meeting Marcus at the ward’s entrance, it wasn’t still there after what, thirty years? The old man looks him up and down before replying — Marcus appears more intent and focused than Busner remembers him from the spring. He eyes Busner’s white coat. . he’d like it off my back. On the contrary, he says at last, change at the Hatch was always a drawn-out affair, Shabbat without end — maybe it’s why I remember the nights best. There was no requirement for me to be there, of course, but that awful. . inertia was more bearable in the darkness. Some nurses patrolled from ward to ward — perambulators they were called — others just sat there by their nightlights, no reading. . sitting there — another kind of catatonic, if you see what I mean. Walking with Marcus from the nurses’ station into the day-room, then into the dormitories, Busner is grateful for at least some bustle: a cleaner mopping a glossy-brown coat on to dun lino, Hephzibah Inglis clopping by on her hard heels deigning to smile, Vail coaxing senile Mister Hedges to eat none too gently . .Why, Busner puzzles, do I want the ghastly bloody place to look good? But he knows, it was always thus: each time he returned to Redington Road, his skinny legs bruised and his flabby tummy pinched, his trunk wadded with laundry often distempered by his own fearful piss, he’d soon enough be extolling the school’s virtues to Uncle Maurice — how they’d won so many rugger matches, not that Zack had been playing — or put on a splendid As You Like It, not that Zack had been acting, although acting was what he did: nothing could be allowed to tarnish the lustre of the Founder’s Trophy.And now— as then — Busner longs to run away and hide. .Enoch emerges prefectorial from a curtained-off cubicle and, introducing them, Busner expects racialismfrom Marcus — but far from it, he loves thy neighbour and shakes his hand warmly while Busner explains, Mboya is my right-hand man, then launches into a little speech: I honestly feel we’ve achieved an amazing breakthrough here, Doctor Marcus. You said when we met that when you were here in the thirties it wasn’t treatment you were engaged in but trench warfare against mental illness — just now you said that any change was a drawn-out business, well, I believe L-DOPA is our. . our. . tank — it’s enabled us to break out of the trenches, to end the war of attrition and to make a rapid advance! Busner cannot take back the note of stupid triumph, or ignore the shadow of doubt that passes across Marcus’s face. They have reached the first post-encephalitic patient, Reginald call me Reggie Voss. He came back to us, Busner says, last week — Monday, wasn’t it, Enoch? Yes, Mboya says, Monday and on a comparatively low dosage of the drug. Marcus stoops down in his three well-made pieces of suit despite the heat, and brings his duckbill in to Reggie’s soft and guileless face. They must be, Busner thinks, close contemporaries: the tall and short — yet what worlds separate them! Marcus ironised by his own imagined sufferings — and those of others — Voss just roused from slumbers innocent of napalm and Calley, spy planes and Apollo, what dreams must he have? May I ask you, Marcus says, what it is you’re doing? Reggie, outfitted by Oxfam, sits in the chair by his bed, a stack of some sort of certificates on a tray across his knees. Each of the thick cards is impressed, in green, with the stylised silhouette of a tree, and as he speaks he continues uninterrupted the task of taking one, signing it with a Parker flourish, wafting it to dry the ink, then adding it to the pile of the already authenticated. These, Voss explains, are trees in Israel — I mean, he laughs, not the trees themselves, obviously, but the p-p-p- desperate that his guinea pigs should perform well, Busner nearly intervenes, but Voss recovers licking spittle: shlupp-upp-p-paperwork for ’em. Y’see — he continues signing and speaking — I’m by way of being a Zionist, if you know what that is, and just about the time I was taken poorly there were grants and purchases of land being made. I’d plans to go out to Jaffa, y’know — yes, yes. . and now I’ve discovered that all we dreamed of has come to pass! Then. . he falters. . I found out that both my parents had passed away — a terrible loss, yes, but when Cyril — Busner whispers: His nephew — told me there was this sum of money that was mine in the Cooperative Society’s bank, well, I knew pronto what I oughta. . that is make for them — grow for them a memorial. . in our homeland. Cyril — a treasure he is — looked into it all. . the whole business, see. . Busner anxiously notes the flapping of Voss’s left hand, his breathing is rapid and shallow — the former, he hopes, is merely gestural, the latter not tachypnoea in the Parkinsonian sense but healthy excitement. . now they’ll have a forest of their own! Yes, the Charles and Hester Voss Forest! On the heights above Hebron, with cedars of Lebanon, yes, oaks and all sorts — yes! Voss’s slippers thrum on the lino, ink spots dash across the candlewick bedspread. Marcus covers the dumpling hand with his large and bony one, It is marvellous, he says — but then as they leave the forester he turns snide: From Burnham Wood to Golders Green, eh. . Busner ignores this — he’s struggling with the resurgence of his own