Free The Quantity Theory of Insanity by Will Self

the drug addict, I bent down to pick up an invisible object and looked back to see what it was he was hiding in the crook of his arm. It was nothing. He was deftly picking up and ranging his own collection of invisible objects on the tiny patch of table. As I bent and looked he turned his face to me and smiled conspiratorially. His eyes stayed too long on my hand which was half closed, fingers shaping the indents and projections of my own invisible object. I hurriedly straightened and walked off down the short corridor to the staff kitchenette.
    Halfway down on the left I noticed a door I hadn’t seen before. It had a square of glass set into it at eye level, which cried out to be looked through. I stepped up to it. The scene I witnessed was rendered graphical, exemplary, by the wire-thread grid imprisoned in the glass. It was a silent scene played out in a brightly lit yellow room. A man in his early forties, who was somehow familiar, sat in one of the ubiquitous plastic chairs. He wore loose black clothes and his black hair was brushed back from high temples. He was sitting in profile. His legs were crossed and he was writing on a clipboard which he had balanced on his thigh. His lip and chin had the exposed, boiled look of a frequent shaver. The room was clearly given over to treatment. It had that unused corner-of-the-lobby feel of all such rooms. A reproduction of a reproduction hung on the wall, an empty wire magazine rack was adrift on the lino floor – the poor lino floor, its flesh scarified with cigarette burns. In the far corner of the room, diagonally opposite the man in black, a figure crouched, balled up face averted. I could tell by the lapel laden with badges, flapping in the emotional draught, that it was Jane Bowen.
    The rest of the afternoon passed in silence and concentration. At 5.40 I gathered in the art materials and stacked all the patients’ work in the cupboard in as orderly a fashion as I could manage. It took some time to tidy up the art materials properly. The patients for the most part stayed where they were, hunched over the tables, seemingly unwilling to leave. Tom and Jim muttered to one another by the window. They had the pantomime conspiratorial air of six year olds, still half convinced that if they didn’t look they couldn’t be seen.
    I found Busner in his office. He sat staring out of his window at the lack of scale. On the far corner of the hospital a steel chimney which I hadn’t noticed that morning belched out a solid column of white smoke. Busner noticed the direction of my gaze.
    ‘A train going nowhere, eh, Misha?’
    ‘Why do you say that?’
    ‘Because it’s true. We’re a holding pen, a state-funded purgatory. People come in here and they wait. Nothing much else ever happens; they certainly don’t get appreciably better. It’s as if, once classified, they’re pinned to some giant card. The same could be said of us as well, eh?’ He shivered, as if he were witnessing a patient being pierced with a giant pin. ‘But I’m forgetting myself, don’t pay any attention, Misha, it’s the end of a long day.’
    ‘No, I’m interested in what you say. The patients here do seem to be different to those I’ve met at Halliwick or St Mary’s.’
    ‘Oh, you think so, do you? How’s that?’ Busner swivelled round to look at me over his glasses.
    ‘Well, the art work they do. It’s different … it’s … howshall I put it … rather contrived, as if they were acting out something. Like Tom’s behaviour.’
    ‘An involution?’
    ‘That’s it. It’s a secondary reference. Their condition is itself a form of comment and the art work that they do is a further exegesis.’
    ‘Interesting, interesting. I can’t pretend that it isn’t something we haven’t noticed before. Your predecessor had very strong views about it. He was a psychologist, you know, very gifted, took on the art therapy job in order to develop functional relationships with the patients, freed as