Grey Area (19 page)

But over the next few days I began to feel more firmly bound into the culture of the Maeterlincki than before. Little things that they did, such as basket weaving, pottery decoration and cicratisation, began to interest me in a way that they hadn’t formerly. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I became like the Maeterlincki, but the idea that my mind was the dream of an individual bee did acquire a comforting sort of plausibility, in so far as spiritual beliefs go.

During this period I conducted a number of tests on the mite powder, but I was unable, using my field-test kit, to analyse the active ingredient. It belonged to none of the major classes of psychoactive drug: narcotic, analgesic, hypnotic, sedative, stimulant or hallucinogen.

That’s the end of the photocopied extract from Sumner’s report. The A4 sheets were folded twice before being pasted into Busner’s notebook. When you unfolded the sheet a drift of grey powder was caught in the paper cranny. Some of it got on your fingertips, and idly, as one might taste anything, you dabbed your lips.

There’s also an old Worminghall Co-operative Dairy bill caught in the folds of the photocopy, which reads as follows:

Busner must have tucked the thing inside the photocopy and forgotten it. Either that, or he is/was an unusually anally retentive man – even for a psychiatrist.

You turn back to Busner’s log and glance at the next few entries. They are unilluminating. During his first few weeks at the Worminghall Facility Busner was preoccupied with the routine work of getting any institution going: arranging catering, interviewing auxiliary staff, ensuring the buildings and laboratory were fully equipped.

Although there is some of Busner in all of this, it is hardly self-revelatory stuff. On occasion he complains about the grind of having to commute from London on a weekly basis, the tediousness of the M40 motorway, and the lack of a decent service centre between Junction 1 (the M25) and Junction 5 (Stokenchurch). But for the most part he gives a flat account of events.

By the middle of December most of this work had been completed. Busner’s staff was in place (both those required to keep up the pretence that the Worminghall Facility was a rest home, and his own assistants), and the trial was ready to begin:

17th December

I have made contact with a Dr Anthony Bohm at the Thame Health Centre. He’s a rather Chekhovian figure, white-haired, with a great pink bum of a chin. He’s been out to the Facility several times to play chess with me. He’s not a bad player, although I find his habit of neighing whenever he moves his knights intensely irritating.

This evening I broached the question of Inclusion with him for the first time. I was highly circumspect, saying merely that I had been reading in an American journal about a new anti-depressant that seemed to be having phenomenal success with both exogenous and endogenous depressions.

He rose to the bait effortlessly, saying that he would positively murder for such a drug – if it worked. The numbers of patients he saw with depressive symptoms have been steadily increasing over the last few years, and hardly any of them are responsive to treatment.

Often these people appear psychologically blameless, but for all that they lapse into states of almost catatonic despair, neglecting themselves, their families, their jobs and careers. I put it to him that this was quite a reasonable response to living in the Thame area. We both laughed heartily at this.

23rd December

Anthony Bohm was up again last night for chess. He’s added to his repertoire of irritation. He now says, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ every time he moves a bishop. I steered the subject back gradually to the issue of medical ethics and what a general practitioner should be allowed to prescribe to his patients. I wasn’t disappointed.

Of course, I knew already that Bohm had susceptibilities in this area. The Cryborg people’s decision to locate the Facility here was partly due to their having positively vetted a number of GPs in the Oxfordshire region who might be prepared – for various reasons – to engage in the illegal Inclusion trial. I’m glad that I approached Bohm first, though; my other options included a doctor in Abingdon who Cryborg discovered was an illegal abortionist and one in High Wycombe, who has more than a passing affection for diamorphine. But Bohm’s motivation, if I can activate it, will be altogether purer.

Bohm told me that he thought it was a physician’s prerogative and duty to cast his net as wide as possible for the right treatment. He is quite a libertarian. He even intimated that the whole notion of medical licensing seemed to him an infringement of personal rights. He then began to speak of what I knew already – namely his involvement in the use of MDMA as a ‘marital aid’ in the early seventies.

Bohm was then a psychiatric intern at a hospital in the Midlands. He took to using MDMA with a vengeance – and achieved impressive results. The problem was he himself also took to using MDMA with a vengeance – and achieved an impressive number of patient seductions. He missed being struck off by a whisker. Only the fact that none of his patients would tesify against him saved his neck. He left psychiatry and retrained as a GP.

Of course, he didn’t admit all of this to me. He gave a sanitised version. But the fact that he was prepared to own up to prescribing MDMA at all shows that he is beginning to trust me.

9th January

The cyclotron is now fully installed at Worminghall and today some technicians came up with Gainsford to give me a demonstration.

I cannot claim to understand much of the physical chemistry involved in isolating pure Inclusion from the cadaverous and faecal matter of the bee mites. Indeed, I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a cyclotron being used in any similar process before. Gainsford told me that it was a method he, together with the other research chemists at Cryborg, had hit upon by trial and error. Although the bee-mite powder is effective in its raw state, the quantities needed are large and the correct dosage difficult to determine. Gainsford also implied that they had had some problems with side-effects, but when I pressed him he wouldn’t elaborate.

I watched as Gainsford used a micron scale to measure the correct quantity of mite powder to be placed in the cyclotron. Obviously, this was far too small to be seen by the naked eye. When the process was complete and Gainsford’s technicians were working with mine to make the fresh Inclusion up into a batch of pills, he told me that less than four hundred thousandths of a milligram was required to synthesise a thousand doses.

11th January

I can’t help being fascinated by the Inclusion. The pills Gainsford made are sitting in the lab looking utterly innocent. Looking, in fact, just like Amytriptaline, which is what most of the potential Inclusion guinea-pigs will be taking already.

Every few hours I find myself drawn to the locked cabinet in the laboratory. I open it – and scrutinise the Inclusion – as if it could tell me something. The technical staff look at me curiously, but they know better than to ask me what I am doing.

16th January

What if Inclusion really does work? The results Gainsford has shown me from animal experimentation are remarkable. Rats learning to conga; gerbils apparently meditating after taking Inclusion; beagles that have been blinded with detergents as part of product testing completely rehabilitated by the drug, seemingly more engaged with the world than when they were sighted.

The human data is equally impressive, but as yet Gainsford has only tested the drug on a few isolated individuals, catatonics and severe autistics at a London teaching hospital where Cryborg have some insidious pull. He hasn’t done a proper trial on either a non-depressive, or anyone with an orthodox clinical depression.

I have a great inclination to take Inclusion myself. It’s not that I wish to claim some part in its discovery – should it prove to be an effective palliative. It’s more that I feel that the only way to justify the unethical character of the trial is for me to break down some of the traditional – and, I believe, artificial – distinctions between the scientist and the supposed objects of his study. Why not think of my brain as a sort of culture, and Inclusion as a bacterium growing within it. I would become another Alexander Fleming – but a Fleming of the psyche!

20th January

I have taken Inclusion. If I was expecting an experience like that of Hofmann, when he accidentally took LSD-25 and unleashed the psychedelic revolution, then I would have been disappointed. But, of course, I wasn’t, and was delighted.

I took two Inclusion tablets at about five yesterday evening and then retired to my quarters to see what would happen. At first I sat, straining with all my mental apparatus to try and discern some effect. Nothing happened. After an hour I grew listless and distracted. I tidied up the place a bit – it was in a fearful mess. Another hour passed, still no effect.

Eventually I grew tired, and quite frankly, bored. I turned on the television and slumped in front of it. For some reason there was nothing on but sport, which has never interested me. I found myself staring blankly at a Senior League Curling Championship, being broadcast from Peebles.

If most sport leaves me cold – curling positively curdles my mind. I can see nothing more asinine than hefting the ‘stones’, which look like outsize doorstops, down an ice rink so that they get as close as possible to a fixed point. If bowls is boring, how much more boring can frozen bowls be! A bowls that tends towards absolute zero.

Yet, after about ten minutes of staring sightlessly at the set, I found that I was actually beginning to become absorbed by the curling. I started noting the names of individual players and how well they were doing. I listened to what the commentator was saying about overall averages and positioning. My attention was focused on questions of technique: how much sweeping of the rink is necessary to ensure a good run for the stones; what the best wrist action is for releasing the stone cleanly; what the regulations are concerning equipment and appropriate clothing.

When the programme eventually finished I was quite disconsolate. But my spirits rose when the announcer said that the next programme would be a film dramatisation of Betjeman’s ‘Summoned by Bells’. Then I pulled myself up short. Betjeman? It’s not that I exactly dislike his poetry, it’s just that I’m pretty well indifferent to it.

It’s like that for so many things as far as I’m concerned. The idea of them interests me, and if my interest becomes positively engaged then I will take up with just about anything for a while, from car-boot sales to Kant. But I’m not one of these people who has ‘interests’, a real passion for model trains, or moutaineering. I have often thought that a suitable epitaph for me – given the gad-fly nature of my enthusiasms – would be ‘He had no interests but interest’. And yet here I was, looking forward to a film dramatisation of ‘Summoned by Bells’.

It was the Inclusion. I realised this tremulously – if the drug was powerful enough to get me interested in curling and Betjeman, there was no telling what other properties it might have. I decided to run some simple psychodiagnostic tests on myself, perceptual, relational and conceptual, to check that I wasn’t becoming disoriented.

I became so absorbed by the tests that I missed most of
Summoned
by Bells.
But no matter – they told me what I already knew intuitively; that the only true effect of Inclusion was to make me feel more positively engaged with whatever I directed my attention to. I was experiencing no hallucinations, no distortions of space or time, no kinaesthesia or synaesthesia. My reality-testing was perfect and my intelligence quotient unaffected.

Nor were there any perceptible toxic side-effects, or hangover. When I awoke the following morning I was quite clearly back to normal. When the alarm rang at 8 a.m. the thought of another working day was just as excruciatingly dull as ever.

22nd January

Bohm was up this evening. We played a few speed games. It helps if we play speed chess, because he doesn’t feel he has time to neigh, or say, ‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.’ However, when he check mates, he picks up the piece of his that has mated my king and simulates intercourse between the two of them. He really is a most juvenile individual – if indispensable.

As I anticipated I had no difficulty in encouraging him to try some Inclusion. I told him the effect the drug had had on me, and how completely localised and harmless it appeared to be, with no contra-indications. He took two pills and we went on playing.

After about an hour Bohm went to the toilet. When he hadn’t returned after twenty minutes or so, I grew concerned. I went out into the corridor and found him standing there, rapt. Apparently, what had happened was that when he was in the toilet he became fascinated by the particulate structure of the fire-resistant tiles on the ceiling. He told me there was nothing disturbing about this, he merely found that the whole subject of fire-resistant tiles began to interest him. He admitted that he was one of those people who are normally fairly oblivious of their immediate environment, and that Mrs Bohm often complains when he doesn’t register some alteration she has made to the decoration of their home.