slave relationship, in the Lacanian sense. I shall, Busner thinks, suggest he consider analytic training — introduce him to some people at the Tavistock, enough is. . enough. Which is what Miriam says: Enough is enough. She’s no Missus Marcus and has drawn for him a final line to cross: Either we all go away on a proper holiday, together, or I’ll take the children, with the firm expectation very Miriam, that that you will not be here in this flat when we return. Not there. . with the fired-clay tiles and the thrownness of pottery lamps, not there. . with the straw placemats. . and the book with the headless, legless woman-suit on the cover. . handles at its hips . . An image it would doubtless be. . outrageous to admit — even to himself — that he finds. . arousing. His post-encephalitic patients, he knows, experience a strange sleeeeeewwooooowing down of thought. . the turntable dragging treble back to bass. . a stickiness as oneinsightstrugglestodetachfrom. . the next. A life in the day — also its exact opposite: a pell-mell — onrush of the mind’s stream that makes it impossible to grasp the shape of thoughts before they are. . torn apart. Standing there with Marcus, he cannot tell which it is that afflicts him. Have they been like this for seconds. . or hours? I’m com-plete-ly craz-eee — The thing I find most remarkable, Busner, Marcus remarks conversationally, is not the coming back to life of your enkies, but the mixed ward — I’d heard about ’em, of course, but it’s still quite a revelation to see male and female patients together. Seems to me this is the thing that’ll combat institutionalisation — at least until Mister Powell does away with the asylums altogether. Marcus strokes and pets his pot-belly in its tailored papoose — his expression as he looms over his younger colleague is kindly, at odds with what he says next: It’ll all end badly, Busner, mark my words — what goes up. . Well, I detect in you a need to make a big splash, be the big I-am. I’ve asked about and heard you were mixed up with that buffoon Laing — I daresay this L-DOPA represents another cure-all for you, that having failed to do away with schizophrenia, you’re now set on abolishing another disease. . One of G. C. Cook’s aphorisms, isn’t it: A universe comes to life when you shiver the mirror of the least of minds — but by the same token there’s the mirror cracked, the mirror shattered. . Well, ahem, possibly I express myself a little forcibly —. No, Busner says, no, it’s fair enough, you must say what you think. .
And crush me. . but please reserve your judgement until you’ve met some more of the patients, spoken with them. Marcus clears his throat, her-herg-h’herm, a lengthy and complacent gurgle. I came, he says glutinously, specifically to see my Miss Deerth, may we do that now? For what we see is what we choose, What we keep or what we lose for-èver . .Sometimes, Busner thinks, the pop singers put it best, and to Marcus he is caustic: Death — she prefers her given name, now she’s come back to life. . Don’t — let — it — die, Don’t let it die-ie-ie . .Why, Busner wonders, am I quite so plagued by these tapeworms spooling through my mind? Is it my unconscious ventriloquising through Hurricane Smith? And there’s no thunder without lightning. . — Is the figure dead? It’s a male — for certain — and lies on its back, arms and legs flung up and apart, neck and head also elevated. Perhaps, he thinks, such violent deaths can only be visited — graphically at least — on the formerly stronger sex. Is there a suggestion of neckwear? He fondles his own unnoosed throat sympathetically. The black silhouette sprawls at the base of an orange triangle outlined in black, above it — and presumably to blame for its violent spasm — there is a single bold lightning strike. It reads danger of death along the base of the triangle — which strikes Busner as not commanding, rather laconic: Were you, old chap, to shin up the pitted concrete stanchion and, by poising on that bolt and swinging your other foot wide, circumvent the bunch of razor-wire, you’d be able to caress the porcelain, grasp the crackling hum. . Would you, he wonders, in the last jolt of time before your heart short-circuited, and you were left dangling and jerking, with rotten smoke drifting from your ears, be able to feel, with fingertips questing for life, the steely filaments plaited into this hank of high tension? Busner pants, breathless from his rapid descent down from Alexandra Palace through the green nullity of the park, and, although there’s no one about to witness his frailty, he disguises it as a sigh, Aaaaaah. . Anyway, he decides, whatever my age, my weight. . my training shoes would probably earth me. Between them on the stale cake of the path lies a single thick-cut chip — how awful to have this menu description readily to hand! Busner interrogates it with his gaze, tracking over the subtle tans of its fried glaze. Anything — fugue, or trance, or otherwise blind enslavement to the force of the subcortex, is better than this: the walk-in wardrobe labelled treatment room, the tight huddle of white coats and grey nylon tunics observing the niceties, Excuse me, d’you mind? While buckling restraints, checking the pulse, injecting the five mils of intravenous curare, and wiping the dried saliva of the last victim from the rubber mouth-guard. Aaaaaah. . No one, he believes, would know me: a slope-shouldered and knock-kneed moseyer through a dusty São Paolo square, no evidence in my string shopping bag of the Nazi doctor I once was . .Mid-afternoon and there isn’t a soul to see him as he makes his way through the Queen Anne wheelie-bin sheds and landscaped parking spaces of a, quote,prestigious housing development, unquote, We were only obeying orders. . It was a sort of group-think . .These Busner finds to be pathetic justifications, when the truth was: We were making it up, improvising. . using whatever there was to hand . .Before ECT they had put patients into comas with insulin, then resurrected them with glucose sweet life ebbing in and out of them . .Or infected them with malaria, believing that the high fevers and hallucinations would drive out psychoses, a scorched-earth policy that was dignified: pyrotheraphy. Maybe these bizarre — and wholly unscientific — procedures had had some benefit, but only because of the fuss that was made over patients who otherwise were locked up on the ward and imprisoned in their own screaming heads . .But really, the fuss was for the psychiatrists and the nurses, who dug holes in brain tissue and then filled them in — it was part job creation and part The Good Old Days: shticky plaster on the wounds, everyone involved a quick-change artist, rushing from unit to treatment room so they could do their turn