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gaol . . . in the spike – the booby-hatch, ha-ha-hooo – help me, helpme, hellellellellpme, Stan, Bert’s torturin’ me! Ashuwa-ashuwa . . . — The long rubberised strip of tension loops round her middle and stretches in either direction along the corridor, pulling from the past to the future, lashing her to the moment – her belly bulges so bad , she feels queer, like I might . . . I dunno . Before she came down to tea she took the piece of calico she had folded into an ’Arrington Square and put it down the front of her bloomers, although not really grasping why every lady should know the greatest invention of the age for women’s comfort . . . Stanley releases the semi-inflated tube and it snaps into the bicycle wheel and off I go! Leaping like a pea onna griddle . . . the pink ’un in Holywell Street . . . stuckinim – stuckinerr . . . We only start the generator for the electric from time to time, Miss De’Ath, wouldn’t you agree that candlelight is more aesthetically pleasing? Cables swagging the length of the workshop sheeee-ung-chung-chung-chung! Her lathe-bed ratchets back and Audrey loosens the chuck, switches the bit – a fuse rattles down on top of the others. Then they are streaming out from No. 1 Gate, Where are the girls of the Arsenal? Working night and day, Wearing the roses off our cheeks, For precious little pay . . . red-and-green flags come from nowhere and are waving on the tops of ’buses thronging Beresford Square. Shoulders back! Necks straight! Arms swing! We are the munitionettes, the suffragettes, the wild revolutionary girls!
    What can it mean, this sudden shift from paralysis to movement? Busner is left rooted, all the sour rot from the hospital’s miles of intestinal corridor blowing into his puzzled face. This must be, he intuits, something – some definable pathology . . . surely? The marked counterpoint between akinesia and festi-festi-na-shun, D-E-C-I-M-A-L-I-ZAYSHUN. DECIMALIZAYSHUN. Soon it’s gonna change the money round, Soon it’s gonna change the money rou-rou-round! Easier, Busner thinks, to conceive of the Friern corridor as an endless conveyor belt, running around and around, bringing towards him patient after patient pari passu, so that if he can maintain concentration he’ll have ample time to make the appropriate diagnosis of neurosis, dipsomania, dementia praecox, generalised paralysis of the insane, syphilis, addiction to socialism, schizophrenia, shell shock – the diseases historically synchronised and so entirely arbitrary, the moral ament becoming, on his next go-round, the mentally deficient, on his third, retarded, fourth, mentally handicapped. Rou-rou-round. Soon it’s gonna change the money round . . . The hospital’s fantasia on the theme of the Italianate belies, he thinks, its real purpose as a human museum within which have been preserved intact these specimens, crushed and mangled round-rou-round, I’m an ape-man, I’m an ape, ape – Enough! He must seize upon an action with which to fracture this reverie, exactly as the pressed-down tile allowed the elderly woman’s foot to scoot forward. He finds it in the automatism of consulting his watch, an involved process since his wife – overreacting to an interest in gadgets Busner once feigned – gave him a new quartz model, the first to be affordable, for his thirty-first birthday. So: he flips the heavy gold-plated bracelet from beneath his shirt and jacket cuffs, he brings the little black face up to his own, then pinches the small buttons either side of its casing so that the digits are illuminated redly, futuristically : 08.54 . . . late already for the ward rou-rou- he at once sees and feels himself to be a colossal white canister spinning slowly end over end and sharply illumined against the infinity of blackness . . . I am late . . . already, must pinch . . . harder, I can’t . . . see . . . the time!

He awakens to discover himself an old man who lies pinching the slack flesh on