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their professionalism. The unyielding mattress calls forth only this: a tired acknowledgement of his own flabbiness. Walks have been resolved upon and not taken, meals are spooned from tins and forked from plastic containers, or else spread on bread – lots of it. This particular Busner kneads soft stuff into a pillow-shape and puts his swollen head on to it while cavorting with all the svelte fugitive selves that have spun away from him in this . . . dizzy dance, Granddad, Granddad, we love you! And he loves them too, but after he and Caroline parted it seemed superfluous to do it all again, acquire a fourth wife who would demand the application of yet another decorative scheme to the walls that had contained him, on and off, since he was . . . what, ten or eleven? He remembers his uncle, Maurice, leading him by the hand through the wintry chambers of the house on Redington Road, his tight-fitting overcoat so long and black that when he stooped he . . . was a drainpipe . . . stiffness . . . rigidity . . . hypertonia – . It would be superfluous and besides the point – if he wished to go that way . . . Well , he had considered getting back together with Miriam – whom he viewed with genuine affection when they met at grandchildren-centred events, and with whom, of course, he still had to deal when it came to Mark. If not with her – and, after all, he had no idea of how Miriam felt about him – there might be the possibility of tying up the loose ends of relationships still more unravelled . . . But no: the real point being that in some place or other one of me and one of them are already united in the bicker of minor ailments, cemented by the mucus of passion spent . . . So, whatever the anxieties of his children – two of whom are mental health professionals with all that this implies – Busner had thought it better to simply walk away , will the house to them while he was living and walk away , not quite a sannyasin . . . gingerly he rasps the underside of a jowl – although at long last committed, after decades of dependency, to once more caring for myself . 09.01. – When he had stopped wearing ties that was when I stopped fidgeting with them , obviously . . . the pill-rolling tremor we called it: tremor at rest, the patient’s gaze forced upwards, the hands held out in front, the index fingers rubbing the pads of the thumbs – and the shrink? He sat there watching them, rolling the end of his tie up and down: tremor at rest . Nothing, Busner thinks, comes of nothing – although, LCD digits come of pinching. He had been dreaming of a hospital and got up to pee, then gone back to bed and returned to another hospital – or was it the first again, only in a different era? The plaster strings around the cornices torn away, and the plaster laurels dressing the windows and doors pulverised, the gaps concreted in, then pebble-dashed. Was this the same hospital – or a smaller one? One equipped with a few acute wards, some offices, and a workshop for occupational therapy – which he had liked . . . Busner had visited them all as he careered through his professional life – Hanwell, Napsbury, Claybury, Shenfield, the ’Bec. Visited them all while organising trials or conducting studies or working as a clinician. He thought now, wistfully, of the long minutes spent watching the cutlass shadows slashed by a pot plant on geometrically patterned wallpaper during an interminable group therapy session . . . No! It had been a visit – it was a visit that he dreamed of. A visit – and the smell was on him . . . the smell of sweat, Largactil sweat. There were greeny linctus beads on his spotty forehead and a filthy mark on the inside of his lumberjack-shirt collar. He liked to look at the redwood, he said, which he could see from the window of his ward. Surely, Busner had thought, it isn’t beyond their ability simply to keep him clean – although he, far better than most, knew that it was. Surely, he had almost