. .He had believed then — what? He hoped he’d been more honest than his older colleagues, who thought their manipulations were surgical, excising mad thoughts and the mad bits of the brain that thought them — whereas Zack knew that mental illnesses were creations quite as much as inflictions — worlds starker and simpler than those of health, but totalities for all that. This would have been back in the seventies, a white-lined decade. . along roads. . around sports pitches, and white piping describing your ball sack in the blackout. . Sheepily thick sideburns that needed shearing — my own included. George Best. . the corrupt and booze-raddled face of Reggie. . Maudsley — Maudlin — Maudling. . Each era. . new and old blended. . the utterly familiar paintjob slapped on. . Then. . along the passage of the years, appears utterly alien and distempered once more. How could we have gone there/thought that/worn that/mouthed that/read those/taken part in such happenings, ma-an? Didn’t we get it: Nothing comes of nothing. Standing before a bow window crammed with tulle, behind it the ghosts of strangers’ domesticity, Busner can no longer ask of himself, Where am I going? He knows — and understands also that using net curtains to guard your privacy is as futile, surely, as employing tenses to divide time? He sees the tubular-steel-legged beast of burden, smells the carbolic and hears the pathetic imploring of the Cordelia who’s forgotten to learn her lines and so imagines — I’d like to go back to the ward now, please, I’d — please . . — that hers is a voluntary role: Nothing comes of nothing . .What was his name. . the black chap? Mugabe? No, Mboya, that’s it. He’d been far more pragmatic. It works, he’d said, we don’t know why it works but it does — and he always said the whole disgusting thing, electro-con-vul-sive the-ra-py, not the sanitised initials we all took refuge in, so conflating it with its harmless and diagnostic cousin. Enoch said, Zack, I’ve seen men and women who were lost to the world come back after it — It. April radiation on the back of his neck as he moves on along the road, Preposterous! It’s not meant to be this way, the sun should shine in the past and in midsummer only, illuminating the tow-headed kids, hands clasped and swinging dizzily in just-threshed hayfields, it beats down on the huge roundel of the ornamental bed which had been planted the previous year with rings of blue lobelias, white asylum and red begonias for the thirtieth anniversary of the Few. With this target plainly before him Busner can no longer pretend to aimlessness — from the ornamental bed on the roundabout swings out all the rest of it: the diverging roads, parked along them the odd Ford Anglia or Hillman Hunter. He sees the waxy banks of rhododendron screening off the Willow Shop, the Staff Club, Blythe House and Villa No. 3 — he sees the lawns, lush green where the gardeners’ watering cans have wavered from the beds, otherwise parched tawny, in places scraped to grey by the repetitive circling of patients let out to be exercised by their demons. He cannot deny where he’s going, only cavil that while he did tape on the electrodes on occasion, I did pull the lever, pull the lever, pull the lever. . but not at Friern, I never did it at Friern . .For there, in case meetings, he hung back and made myself small . .shrinking away from what he saw as simply another demonstration: electricity as spectacle, Humphry Davy at the Royal Academy, with admiring ladies looking on, pulls the lever and the nurses and doctors pointedly ignore the contortions on the couch, the bucking, biting and jerking, and the ozone smell and the singed-hair-smell . .The sun should shine down on childhood — on his own and those of his children. He can see them — all except Mark, who stands at the edge of the lawn in the shadowland, already wearing at the age of seven. . eight? his uncle’s life-mask —. The cars are tightly parked along Alexandra Park Road, with only an inch or two separating one rubber neoplasm from the next. So bulbous, the cars: vehicles in utero, in common with so much else in this timorous and ageing era, they’ve been shaped and smoothed so that their Thalidomide wing-mirrors and morbidly obese wheel arches can present no danger of death. Inside the steely cauls vestigial arms pull and push at levers, vestigial feet push pedals, the repetitive and compulsive motions damped down by an amniotic fluid of new car smell . .They bounced when the current took them — a detail he had never heard spoken of: that their bodies were for long seconds vulcanised. If he glanced about the treatment room at that precise moment — whichever hospital it was in, the ’Bec or Napsbury — Busner would see the same studiously vacant faces bent to this strap or that button, or perhaps laying a technically conciliatory hand on the bound limb of the black silhouette that sprawled before them, Aaaaah. . He’s reached a main road — beyond it electronic signboards on poles, beige-painted steel bafflers, waxed redbrick — all the gubbins of a newly renovated overground station. Or is it a hospital — because, now he ponders it, all the city appears implanted with hospitals: small cottage ones in detached villas and terraced rows, large concrete ones dating from the sixties, seventies and eighties that now house multi-generational tribes of the economically paralysed — then there are the glass- and wood-slatted ones, more recent these — that act as sun-traps for convalescent bourgeois. Not to mention . .the private ones, which are ranged around courtyards, their mock-Regency façades discreetly masking the moans of OxyContin addicts. He feels the talismanic shape of his Freedom Pass through the soft stuff of his tracksuit bottoms — Freedom in what sense? Only a monetary one, for, far from allowing him to do whatever the hell I want, it’s sharp corner spurs me on . .to train, tube or bus, where he must sit: conscious but completely powerless to influence the route taken by the vehicle — as powerless as. . its driver. Hot grease spots Busner’s throat as he marches across the road in time to the p’pop-pop-pop-p-p-p-p’popping. He shushes along the privet alley, mounts the bridge, bongs over the tracks and descends to the Station Road, where, beyond minicab madrasa and fret-worked Taj Mahal, he locates a kiosk-sized café, in its window entrance gap-toothed lettering P E & ASH, 2 GG, A ON, AUSAGE, HIPS & EANS. There’s a newsagent next to the café — he might sit, the Guardian folded to a single column and tucked underneath the lip of his plate, as men of my age in all ages do, the eggy vapours condensing on the inside of his glasses, making it quite impossible to read about the cardigans being worn on the campaign trail. He is hungry — and the antidote for famine is well known: white sacks stencilled UN F D AD P O AM. But what was the antidote for chlorpromazine? Kemadrin? Kema- Kema-droll. .? Chemodoll? It is as he exercises his liberty and the barrier opens that Busner realises: There can be no resistance any more — no gg or usage, no procyclidine or orphenadrine, let alone mere diazepam, can tranquillise the through train that blasts past, sending diesel shockwaves dirtying over him. . Along comes Zachary, trailing guilty streamers and wondering only this: If time, the March Hare, has got there first — time, lolloping along the gutters, yellow lines toothpasting from its rear end, so that on the streets where this spoor has been laid nothing can ever stop again: the traffic must course on, just as the National Grid sparks through rail and brain. . Along comes a slow stopper, from where he stands by a Plexiglas-fronted cabinet full of these curiosities: berry-flavoured water, Skittles, A Mars a day makes you work, rest and . .Busner can see a few passengers gathered by the doors, their bodies swaying, pathetic counterweights to the train’s mighty inertia. Gracie said this: that once, when she went see her people at Reading, she changed trains at Windsor and people were still speaking of it — how the Russian troops had come through in the night. One train must’ve stopped for a while, and they got out, walked up and down the platform, arm in arm, looking up at the Castle keep, their soft fur-lined boots soundless on the flags. Anyroad, the next morning all the slot machines had been jammed with rouble coins. Fancy that! Those daft Russkies trying to get out bars of Fry’s and what-not an’ juss loosin’ all their brass, they must’ve been browned off. Rouble’s probly a lot of money in Russiya. . Audrey had only wondered: Do they really have slot machines on Windsor Station? but now she laughs good-humouredly at