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Inclusion®

You are holding in your hands a folder. The hands cannot be described by me, because they are yours, but the folder can. A shiny, white thing, the standard A4 size, it has sparse, expensively embossed, blue lettering on the cover, together with a corporate logo. The first line of the lettering reads: ‘Cryborg Pharmaceutical Industries’ and underneath it says: ‘Inclusion, a Revolutionary Approach to Anti-Depressant Medication’. Beneath that there is the corporate logo, an odd thing that looks somewhat like a pineapple with wavy lines radiating all around it. Whether or not it expresses some attribute of Cryborg Pharmaceutical Industries is moot, or merely obscure, depending on how interested you are. Depending on how far you are prepared to include the marketing brochures of pharmaceutical companies in your life. Give them head-room.

If you open the Inclusion folder you’ll find what you expect to find. Namely, that the marketing budget didn’t quite reach to laminating overleaf, and further, that the two sides of the folder are equipped with diagonal pockets — pockets that house on the right the Inclusion marketing brochure and on the left a miscellany of order forms, sheets covered with corporate information, information on other Cryborg products etc., etc.

So, you ease out the marketing brochure from its pocket and start to flip through. The paper is creamy and textured, the type is artful and elegant, the photographs and illustrations are composed, if a little arid. Of course, initially, it’s amusing to see that anti-depressant drugs are marketed in exactly the same way as lingerie, or cars. But it’s an amusement that soon fades to a faint wryness and then winks out altogether.

On page two a photo shows a young couple with a toddler. The man is laughing and holding the child — who’s also laughing — up in the air. The woman is looking at him with milch cow eyes, slopping over with admiration — there will be no crying over this spillage. The photo caption reads: ‘Once a patient is being treated with Inclusion, he can be maintained indefinitely at a constant, regular dosage. A lifetime of positive engagement lies ahead.’

Turning back a page we discover why it is that this should be the case. See here: the same couple, but now his brown model face is crammed with agony against a rain-speckled windowpane. And her lighter-brown model hand, sketching a gesture of tenderness across his knotted back, will soon — it’s absolutely clear — be shrugged off. He may even belt her one. The neglected toddler sits on the floor at their feet, looking up at them with tiny, dull eyes.

This is a man who needs Inclusion, that’s the conclusion you have to draw. This man is crying out for Inclusion, or at any rate he would be if he knew what it was.

A flip-through the rest of the brochure is all that’s needed for you to clock the pastel, shaded drawings of dissected brains. If you tilt the brochure this way and that you will see that the portion of the brain that contains the receptors to which these benign Inclusion molecules attach themselves has been coated with a lozenge of varnish, so that it shines.

The accompanying text is, however, unilluminating — an unholy mish-mash of medicalese and promotional claptrap that combines together to produce repellent patois like the following: Inclusion has fewer contra-indications than the tri-cyclics and the SSRIs.* Better still, the attractive, easy-to-swallow spanules come in a variety of quality-enhanced patternings: paisley, Stuart tartan, heliotrope. . etc., etc.

If there is anything to be learnt from the Inclusion folder it isn’t contained in the brochure. The brochure is quite clearly not for the general reader. But what’s this? Poking out from among the order forms in the opposite pocket there is a thick wadge of typescript. Funny to think that it could be hiding there, in this folder which seemed so flimsy, so insubstantial, when first you hefted it. Pull it out now:

What is it? We-ell, it looks like a report of some sort. It’s word-processed rather than printed, but it’s been done on a good machine with an attractive typeface, a Palatino or Bodoni. It isn’t bound — the comers of the fifteen or so pages are mashed together with a single paper clip, yet somehow the report is instantly alluring. Right at the top is written: Ref. Inc/957 [and underneath] Report from R.P.H. to Main Board [and beneath that] Strictly for Board Eyes Only. Confidential.

God, how exciting! Not at all like the Inclusion brochure. You have a prickly little thrill, don’t you? You have the thrill of reading someone’s private correspondence in a silent house, on a Sunday afternoon. Somewhere in the mid-distance a dog barks. You read on: Report of the Incident at the Worminghall Research FacilityFrom: R.P. HawkeTo: All Main Board DirectorsAttached to this report are two relevant documents which I suggest are read and then destroyed. They are: Dr Zack Busner’s journal of the events surrounding the aborted Inclusion trial and a diary kept by one of his guinea-pigs (the painter Simon Dykes). I have appended them to my report because I feel they may be of some interest to Board members. However, little of what either Busner or Dykes has to say is of any significance when it comes to understanding, or even attempting to explain, the events at Worminghall over the past four months.That task is my responsibility. As the Company’s senior public relations manager I was asked to conduct the appropriate damage limitation exercise after the incident. The results of this are as follows:1. The Worminghall Facility itself has been cleared. All evidence of the cyclotron explosion has been disposed of. Our operatives have conducted an exhaustive cleansing operation using the most sophisticated reagents available. All stocks of Inclusion held at the Facility have been destroyed; and I am confident that any residual traces of Inclusion that may have permeated the facility following the explosion will be soon neutralised.2. As you are all no doubt aware, the explosion was reported by a local resident to the desk sergeant at Thame Police Station before anyone at Cryborg Head Office knew what had transpired. Fortunately, the fact of the explosion did not gain any wider currency. The police sergeant and the local resident (a Mrs Freeling) have been made extensive, ex gratia payments.3. As far as local and national bureacracy is concerned i.e., planning committees, health and safety committees, licensing bodies etc., as you all know, the Worminghall Facility was never licensed for pharmaceutical research of any kind. Indeed, as far as the local authorities were aware, the Facility was merely a ‘rest home’ in the Chilterns for Cryborg employees who had collapsed due to work-related stress disorders. No medical treatments were to be carried out there and Dr Busner himself was listed in the original planning application for the Facility as a non-medical director-cum-manager. All medical care for employees residing at the Facility was to be contracted out, on a private basis, to a GP at the local practice.4. This brings me to the issue of Dr Anthony Bohm. As Board members are aware, Bohm was Busner’s conduit for the secret testing of Inclusion. Bohm was paid to prescribe Inclusion to his patients, and to provide Busner with an adequate control. Unfortunately Busner did not confine himself to bribing Bohm. Indeed, despite the handsome sums paid to him, the threat of personal ruin and professional disgrace which that money represented does not seem to have been Bohm’s main motivation. Judging from Busner’s journal, Bohm was an ideological convert to Inclusion, as was MacLachlan, the local pharmacist who distributed the Inclusion prescriptions.Busner persuaded them all that the illegal prescription of an unlicensed, untested psychoactive drug was a positively humanitarian gesture. How he managed this I cannot say. The account of his relationship with these parties that his own journal gives is fantastic and almost certainly false.After arriving at Worminghall, assessing the damage and immediate potential for toxicological fall-out, my next thought was to secure Bohm. However, when I got to the health centre I found that he was away, allegedly on holiday in France for two weeks. At the pharmacy I got the same story. I need hardly emphasise to the Board how important it is for the containment of the Inclusion incident that Bohm — and Maclachlan — are apprehended on their return to the UK. Until we have interviewed them there can be no guarantee that the prescription of Inclusion to ordinary NHS patients in the Worminghall locality can be effectively covered up.5. Busner’s disappearance and Dykes’s ongoing condition are, of course, the most worrying aspects of the whole Inclusion débâcle. If we could be certain that Busner was dead it would be possible for us to abandon the complex subterfuge required to convince his family that he is still attending a neuro-pharmacological conference in the USA. On the other hand, were he to reappear it would open the way to attaching the culpability to Busner himself.The Dykes problem is bound up with Busner. Dykes has had a complete mental breakdown. Psychiatrists who owe no loyalty to the company are convinced that his ravings about having ‘included’ Dr Zack Busner into himself, are just that: ravings.Nevertheless, having spoken to both Dykes and his wife myself, I am now convinced that he is suffering from an Inclusion-induced psychosis of some kind. Should he recover and be discharged from the Warneford Hospital in Oxford, the company may have some awkward questions to answer. And if we wish to pronounce Busner dead, we will have to come up with a body.In conclusion: the Inclusion trials are far from over. If you examine Busner’s journal and Dykes’s diary I think you will gain some idea of just how potent and dangerous a drug Inclusion is.It does not come within my remit to criticise company policy. However — as some of you will no doubt recall — I joined Cryborg eight years ago, specifically to deal with the bad press the company was receiving in the wake of the Rutger breakout. Given that I was able to persuade an overwhelmingly hostile media that there were sound medical reasons for surgically bifurcating the feet of African tribesmen in order to provide them with two giant prehensile toes, any aspersions cast on my loyalty to Cryborg are unwarranted.Be that as it may — I am appalled by what transpired at Worminghall. On the day of the incident, arriving at the Facility after a breakneck drive from London, I found the buildings inside the compound deserted.I ran from one to the next. Their floors were scattered — not with the debris I expected — but with piles of things, objects of all kinds, and intact. There were antique victrolas and pharmacological reference works; laboratory equipment and cuddly toys; pill boxes and plastic pachyderms; fruit and electronic components; curling equipment and ancient votive statuary; stuffed animals and exercise equipment; sporting trophies and antiquarian books; model trains and silverware; samovars and sousaphones; clothes and carpet off-cuts.There was no obvious explanation. It was a remarkably diverse assemblage of stuff. There wasn’t even enough room in the Research Facility to house it all. The buildings were overflowing; things bulged from windows and spilled out through doors.I worked my way across the compound towards the farthest building, the one housing Busner’s laboratory, his office and the Inclusion cyclotron. As I drew closer I began to see a pattern in these drifts of impedimenta. The car batteries and Eskis; tin cans and slipper socks; VCRs and fondue forks, formed a series of concentric circles, covering the entire area of the Research Facility. Busner’s laboratory was the epicentre.Entering the building I found evidence that gave me a partial explanation. The cyclotron had exploded. Busner’s laboratory and office were wrecked. Equipment and papers had been hopelessly mangled together. The concentric rings of objects that covered the rest of the Facility were some kind of embroidery, an elaboration of the shock waves of the explosion.These waves or rings were present in the laboratory as well. As they diminished in size, so did the objects that composed them. At the outer edge of the laboratory the rings comprised Rotadexes and file holders; typewriter ribbons and plastic beakers; Bunsen burners and test-tube racks. Whilst the smaller rings were made up of paper clips and drawing pins; biros and match books; fragments of glass and fragments of mica. The smallest rings were just dust.The rings were disconcerting. Their utter regularity, the way they retained circularity by running up and over the buildings — or even traversing them altogether — implied both conscious agency and blind force. I was bewildered. Even more unsettling were the two bound notebooks that sat in the middle of the smallest ring. They were so at odds with the evidence of destruction that they must have been placed there after the explosion. .

You look once more into the pocket of the shiny folder — purely out of idle curiosity. You certainly don’t expect to find either of these mysterious notebooks — how could their bulk be contained within its two shiny dimensions? When you hefted the folder earlier on it just wasn’t sufficiently weighty — yet there they both are, wedged down tight, behind a sheaf of order forms. Hawke had included both of them — as he said he would. He also wrote a further rider, on a Post-It Note attached to the first notebook: Please note: the term ‘log’ is slightly misleading. For while what follows does present some calibrated information on the course of the Inclusion trial, the document by no means displays the dispassionate, observational approach one would expect from a psychiatrist and a clinician of Busner’s standing. It is more accurate to describe the notebook as Busner’s personal journal.R.P.H.First Extract from Dr Zack Busner’s Log5th OctoberAnthony Valuam waylaid me in the corridor this morning and suggested that I lunch with him and one of the research directors of Cryborg Pharmaceuticals next week. I surprised myself by agreeing. On balance I think that, whatever they propose, it can hardly be less ethical than the work I am currently doing at Heath Hospital.12th OctoberLunch was far better than I expected. Gainsford, the research director, took us to Grindley’s Upstairs. I enjoyed my rack of lamb, but perhaps disgraced myself by setting fire to rolled-up Amaretti papers and watching them float up to the ceiling.Gainsford wants me to resign my consultancy and come and work for him at Cryborg. He was rather coy about the project he has in mind. He made a big pitch, saying Cryborg would pay me four times what I’m currently earning. If this is really the case I will be making far more than I ever have — even during my heyday as a TV pundit in the early seventies.I told Gainsford that nothing could be more antithetical — even now — to my concept of mental health treatment, than working for a multinational drug company. He simply laughed. He’s a little man, his round face decorated with one of those mini goatee-and-moustache combinations. While he spoke it twitched, registering his circumspection.22nd OctoberThrough Valuam I have intimated to Gainsford that I might be interested in leaving Heath Hospital to work for Cryborg. Gainsford phoned me today and told me that he could only fill me in on the project if I was prepared to sign some sort of corporate secrets waiver. I agreed to this readily enough — I love secrets. We arranged to meet at the Cryborg head office in Victoria next Thursday.30th OctoberIt’s a drug trial, how droll. But what a drug. I understand now why Gainsford was so insistent on secrecy. The range of applications and the potential market for the drug is absolutely staggering. From the evidence Gainsford presented to me it is clear that Cryborg are on the verge of a really major advance in neuro-pharmacology.The drug has been tentatively given the name ‘Inclusion’. It is relatively easy to produce, being derived entirely from the cadaverous and faecal matter of an obscure insect parasite. Once the psychoactive ingredient is isolated it can be stabilised using a specially devised cyclotron. Gainsford demonstrated the whole procedure for me in a laboratory adjoining the main Cryborg boardroom.Gainsford wants me to test the drug for him. The catch is that the trial has to be conducted in secret — and on the general population. This is obviously why Cryborg approached me. Even though my conduct as a professional has been impeccable over the past fifteen years I am still known as an unorthodox practitioner; a whacko shrink who is prepared to undertake courses of research well outside the mainstream.Nevertheless, were money the sole consideration I would have given Gainsford short shrift. However, my curiosity had been awakened — and once that’s happened there is little that can stop me. The evidence that Gainsford presented on Inclusion was remarkable. This clearly showed that astonishing results had already been achieved using Inclusion for the following broad range of reactive depressive symptoms: anxiety, insomnia, stress, impotence etc. There is no known toxic dose for the drug either.Could this be the panacea we have been searching for for so long? I no longer have any faith in the talking cures, nor do I find it easy to prescribe drugs like the tricyclics, which I know will only help a very small number of the patients who are referred to me. That the refined crap of a bee mite might prove to be the salvation of our growing legions of misery is fantastic enough and ironic enough to be believable!5th NovemberA sad day for me. I handed in my notice to Archer, the senior administrator at the Health Authority. He insisted on having a long chat with me about my future — I was evasive. Under instructions from Gainsford I have not admitted to anyone — even my family — what the precise nature of my employment at Cryborg will be. Archer wouldn’t let it lie. He kept on bleating about what a loss it was, how he’d thought I would stay at Heath until my retirement, how they needed me to fight the depredations of the Government. Whenever the conversation flagged, he would crank it up again like some Klaxon, until he was wailing away again, saying we should keep in touch, how he thought of me as family etc. He’s the sort of person who gives gregariousness a bad name.13th NovemberI’m winding down my work on the wards. My replacement is yet to be decided on, in the meantime Jane Bowen will cover Ward 8 and Anthony Valuam Ward 9. I feel far more emotional about leaving Heath Hospital than I thought I would. Particularly as Misha Gurney — one of my patients and the son of my old friend Simon Gurney, the sculptor — committed suicide last night. They found him early this morning in one of the abandoned radiography suites in the hospital basement. He had hung himself. Poor, sad boy. Perhaps Inclusion might have helped him. Now we’ll never know.24th NovemberGainsford drove me up to Worminghall in the Chilterns today, and we toured the new Research Facility. He had been given a very large Toyota saloon by the Cryborg car pool, which was unfortunate as he is almost too small to reach the pedals. Driving out of London we had a number of near misses, but once we got on to the M40 Gainsford put on the cruise control and knelt on the driving seat. We both relaxed and he began telling me about Inclusion in far greater detail.Apparently Cryborg have for a number of years employed a young research chemist called Sumner, to explore the Amazonian rainforest. Sumner’s job is to get as close as possible to the various Amerindian tribes and discover the secrets of their medicinal plants. Naturally Cryborg are not alone in this — the drug rush has been going on for at least a decade now. Apparently, in some remote parts of South America, the research chemists outnumber the tribespeople.Of course, most pharmacologists have treated the toughened roots, waxy leaves and gungy pastes brought back from these expeditions with the utmost scepticism. And really, most of the ‘discoveries’ have proved to be nothing but the chemical equivalent of the raffia tat and facial mud sold by pseudo-ecological shops.But Sumner had more luck. He was far more adventurous and determined than his rivals, and journeyed long into the rainforest on trips that lasted for months. Trips during which he moved entirely within the ambit of tribal groups of hunter-gatherers that had never seen a European before.According to Gainsford, on one such trip Sumner encountered the most bizarre group of indigenes imaginable. These people — who called themselves the Maeterlincki — had a life-cycle (metaphysic, socio-cultural form, collective psychopathology) entirely bound up with the harvesting of honey. Honey produced by terrifying swarms of cliff-dwelling bees.The Maeterlincki’s knowledge of these valuable domestic animals is comprehensive, pragmatic and highly sophisticated. Despite the fact that they maintain a view of the cosmos that is entirely apiacentric. For, according to the Maeterlincki, each of their individual consciousnesses is merely the slumbering reverie of a single bee. A death in the tribe coincides with a bee awakening.Needless to say, this rather baroque belief system gave rise to incredibly complicated explanations by the tribal elders, when they were asked by Sumner how it was that they presided over the establishment and then decay of entire bee colonies, whilst their own life-spans were no longer than a few hours.Sumner became intrigued by the Maeterlincki’s skill as apiarists and went with them to witness the honey harvest. He watched, while they climbed up the granite outcrops where the bees built their hives, and extracted the vast, dripping golden combs. The comb-extraction teams were made up of three tribesmen. (The actual harvesting of the honey is taboo for women.) One of the men would perform a mime of a bee — intended to distract the swarm; the second would remove the combs from the hive; the third would stand by as a decoy and allow himself to be stung — usually to death. Sumner said he had never witnessed such indifference to pain as that displayed by the sacrificial member of the team.Sumner stayed with the Maeterlincki for six months. Long enough for him to gain their trust, and for the tribal elders to allow him to become an initiate. The initiation involved the ingestion — in its raw form — of the substance that Gainsford has since named ‘Inclusion’.I am able to include here some of Sumner’s own description of the initiation rite. When we reached Beaconsfield (Junction 2), Gainsford suddenly announced that he had a friend he wanted to visit who lives in the precincts of the Bekonscot Model Village. He left me in the Toyota, together with a copy of Sumner’s field report to Cryborg. I popped out of the car a few minutes later and ran across the road to Pronta-Print, where I photocopied the following: Extract from Dr Clive Sumner’s Field Report to the Cryborg Research DivisionOn the morning appointed for my initiation I went, together with Colin and Paul, the other two members of my cell (marginal note: Remember, the Maeterlincki’s social organisation is entirely apian. Z.B.), to the base of the granite outcrop.Colin cut and trimmed a long, hollow bamboo tube, whilst Paul prepared the sacred dust for ingestion. He broke open one of the desiccated hives, which had been abandoned by its colony.The hive was a great, tattered bundle of dried and flaking material with the texture of papyrus. It was roughly ovoid, but with a flat back, where the bees’ mucilage had cemented it to the rock. Paul split it open and invited me to examine the hive’s internal structure. This was unusual — to say the least — and it was at this point that I began to suspect that I was on the verge of an exciting and unusual discovery.The interior of the hive had the familiar structure of serried ranks of hexiform chambers, connected by minute passageways radiating from the central chamber of the hive, where the queen once resided. But within the hive a secondary structure had been constructed: a hive inside a hive.This subsidiary hive had the same hexiform chambers and minute passageways, but they were far smaller. These chambers were delicately positioned in the very interstices of the apian chambers. I asked Paul what had caused this. He directed me to look closely at one of these small chambers, which was no bigger than a quarter of a pinhead. Entombed within it was the perfectly preserved cadaver of a mite.Wringing the explanation for this phenomenon out of Paul and Colin was a tiresome business. As I have written above, the Maeterlincki lack much of the conceptual equipment that we take for granted and their language is devoid of certain key terms necessary for the description of social forms. But here is a paraphrase of my cell-fellows’ ‘Song of the Bee Mite’:These parasitic mites are quite unlike ordinary bee mites. Rather than infesting the actual body of the bee, they attack the structure of the hive, creating, as I had observed, a secondary hive. The Maeterlincki explained that this invasion was accompanied by a gradual shift in the hive’s social organisation. The normal and successful ratio between workers (sexually undeveloped females) and drones (sexually productive males) was reversed, so as to favour the development of more drones and fewer workers.Very gradually the hive began to succumb to parasitically induced decadence. Unless the queen and her remaining workers managed to summon the energy to abandon the hive and swarm, the hive’s economy became moribund. Eventually, all that was left was a dying queen surrounded by starving drones. It was as if the collective consciousness of the hive — if such an entity can be posited — had given in to a form of apian anomie.The Maeterlincki regard this process as a necessary part of their relationship with the bees. They couldn’t tell me for how long they had been harvesting the defunct hives, nor how they discovered the psychoactive properties of the dust made from the mites’ crushed corpses and sub-hives. Legend had it that in some previous dark age, the Maeterlincki had been beset by an abiding and terrible collective depression, a truly pathological boredom and lack of interest. Remnants of this pre-bee mite era remained embedded in their language (they have, for example, over twenty different words to express the concept of eyes ‘glazing over’).My cell-mates then made much of my own frequent bouts of apathy and tedium vitae. They urged me to cast aside my reservations and embrace the great spirit of the beehive.The bamboo tube was primed with the dust. One end was rammed into my nostril and Colin blew hard from the other. My other nostril received the same treatment, with Paul as the blower this time. We then did the same for Colin and Paul, rotating roles and nostrils. When we were done we returned to the Maeterlincki’s longhouse and life went on as before. Thereafter, for the duration of my stay, I was expected to ingest more of the mite powder on a daily basis.And what was the effect of this peculiar dust? To begin with I noticed nothing at all. Perhaps this was because I had been expecting something really radical, like the psychotropic drugs used by other Amerindian tribes: ayahuasca, yopo, yage and datura. But the bee-mite powder wasn’t painful as it was absorbed into the mucous membranes, nor did it produce nausea. There were no hallucinations, no sensations of a paradigm shift in either body, or ego-awareness.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:

30th December Milk (40 pints)£12.64 Yoghurt (30 pots, assorted)£15.84 Single cream (5 pots)£7.25 Total£35.73

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 DecemberI 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 DecemberAnthony 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 JanuaryThe 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 JanuaryI 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 JanuaryWhat 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 JanuaryI 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 JanuaryBohm 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.He wanted to get back to the chess game, but felt that he really ought to undertake some sort of comparative study of the fire-resistant tiles in the Facility. He had visited the other buildings and spent some time studying their fire-resistant tiles, and then begun to work his way back towards my rooms. When I found him he was nearly finished. However, it’s an indication of just how benign and localised the effects of Inclusion are that when I suggested he cut this exercise short, he happily acceded.30th JanuaryBohm has come up with the names of twenty of his patients who he anticipates having to prescribe anti-depressants to within the next month. In place of the tricyclics or SSRIs he will, of course, prescribe Inclusion. Another group of twenty patients who are currently on tricyclics or SSRIs will be put on to Inclusion; and a third group of ‘new depressives’ will be given a placebo.I will give the batches of prepared Inclusion to MacLachlan, the pharmacist. He will then make up the prescriptions in conformity with this schema. Bohm will, of course, have no idea which of his patients will be in receipt of Inclusion. His task is merely to record data as and when they present themselves to him. This is as reasonable a conformity to the principles of the double blind as we can manage under the circumstances.I did suggest to Gainsford that I introduce another level of blind to the trial, as Ford and I did for our now infamous double-double blind trial at my Concept House in the seventies. But Gainsford is too much of a plodder to recognise its brilliance and knocked me back.Gainsford is, needless to say, absolutely delighted with my progress on the trial. And he relayed a special message to me from the Cryborg Main Board, which said: ‘We are absolutely delighted.’ Gainsford hadn’t thought I would get to this stage for at least six months. In part this is fortuitous. If Bohm was an enthusiastic convert to the potential of Inclusion, MacLachlan is positively messianic about the stuff.He himself has been treated for depression on and off for a number of years. Although it’s a far from empirically sound assessment of the drug’s potential, its effect on MacLachlan was heartwarming. He came out to Worminghall with Bohm one night for a few hands of bridge. MacLachlan’s play was so diffident and unresponsive that he was hardly more proactive than the dummy.Bohm and I persuaded him to come out for two more sessions; and on the third we broached the issue of Inclusion. Initially, MacLachlan was sceptical — not suspicous, just sceptical. However, when Bohm and I reported our own experiences of the drug to him, he was eager to try it.When we resumed play an hour after MacLachlan had ingested some Inclusion, he was a different man. Witty, engaged, eloquent, both on the game in hand and the whole history and practice of bridge; there was little Bohm and I could do to contain him. His countenance — which is mousey in the extreme, hidden behind a water-rat beard of terrible lankness — brightened and brightened. His impressions of Omar Sharif became hard to deal with, but overall I can say that MacLachlan’s Inclusion-based rehabilitation was one of the most humane things I have witnessed in almost thirty years as a medical practitioner.Bohm and I have restricted MacLachlan to a nugatory dosage of Inclusion. He himself admits that if he takes too much he becomes overly absorbed in the little pictures that adorn the labels of the shampoo he sells at the pharmacy, or some such irrelevance. However, on a mild dose he just feels that loose sense of positive engagement that we are looking for.9th FebruaryThe trial has been underway for a week now and everything is going smoothly. There is actually remarkably little for me to do now, except wait for Bohm to begin relaying the data.I have been in the habit of commuting to Worminghall on a weekly basis. Really it is a tedious place. On a good day there is something affecting about the view from the Chiltern escarpment where the Facility is, down on to the rolling country of Oxfordshire. Walking along the Ridgeway path, where it dives under the M40, I am often reminded of early Renaissance paintings depicting enclosed landscapes like this; and can half imagine that the cooling towers of Didcot Power Station are some Tuscan fortification.On a good day, that is. On a bad day it’s dreary beyond belief. Often thick fogs roll in from the north, and the whole countryside is rendered both tatty and claustrophobic. On my walks I pass chicken-wired pheasant runs and abandoned piggeries. They give a disagreeable impression of urb in rus. The fog distorts my sense of scale, and I toy with the notion that I am wandering over a giant, derelict tennis court, or a still vaster cat’s litter tray that no one has bothered to empty for a while.It’s mordant fantasising such as this that has driven me to what might be termed ‘recreational’ use of Inclusion. I am very rigorous about this, though, I have no desire to experience an Inclusion dependency — if such a thing turns out to be possible. So I only take Inclusion when playing ping-pong with one or other of the auxiliary staff. I can’t say that the Inclusion makes my game any better, but it does make me considerably more interested. I now really appreciate ping-pong and am extremely glad that I’ve decided to make it a part of my life.4th MarchThe trial has now been going for over a month and the results are very encouraging. Bohm’s reports clearly demonstrate that the depressive patients treated with Inclusion are responding far better than those on tricyclics or SSRIs, and far, far better than the control group. If things carry on this way for another month I shall have to recommend that Cryborg find a way of legitimating the discovery and the trial findings. To allow things to go much further, would, I feel, cast into doubt the ethics of what we have been doing. I shall relay this conviction of mine to Gainsford in my next report.11th MarchI had a worrying phone call from Bohm this afternoon. What he had to tell me has unsettled me and cast into doubt some of my faith in Inclusion. One of Bohm’s patients, a painter called Simon Dykes who lives on the Tiddington side of Thame, has been saying some very strange things to him.I am fairly certain that Dykes must be on Inclusion. There is no other explanation for his behaviour, if Bohm’s report of it is to be believed.Bohm has been prescribing ‘anti-depressants’ to Dykes for almost six weeks now. Dykes came to see him complaining of a sense of futility, emotional alienation, impotence etc., etc. He made light of his depression, but his wife — who attended with him — told Bohm, in confidence, that he had been a nightmare since last year and had to be hospitalised, briefly, over Christmas.Initially the Inclusion seemed to be having a beneficial effect on Dykes. He reported to Bohm just the sense of positive engagement that we look for from the drug. Dykes said that he was sorting out his problems with his wife, he was enjoying the company of his children and had begun to paint again after a block lasting some six months.However, last week when Dykes went to see Bohm for his check-up, he told him that he was having doubts about his sanity again. He now felt that he was ‘going the other way’. When Bohm asked Dykes to elaborate, the painter said that he was having difficulty in controlling his capacity for being involved with things. That when he turned his attention to something — whether it be a person, an object, a whole area of knowledge, or merely some abstract notion — he couldn’t prevent himself from being sucked deep into its contemplation. Furthermore, the painter claimed that he began to feel as if he knew more about whatever it was than he possibly could.Bohm asked him for an example and Dykes came up with the Boxer Rising. He said he was looking through an old edition of the Britannica when he came across the entry on the Boxer Rising. Accompanying it was a picture of the Chinese Boxers attacking the British Embassy. Dykes swears he didn’t read the entry at first. Instead he merely stared at the old engraving (apparently he leafs through such old books looking for graphic material for his work), and found himself being ‘sucked into it’. While in this reverie he became acquainted with a vast amount of information on the Boxer Rising, including the names of the ring-leaders, and even elements of their motivation.When he was sufficiently recovered, he read the accompanying entry. All of the facts that had come to him in the reverie turned out to be true! He even knew some things that weren’t in the entry, but when he did some further research at the Bodleian in Oxford, they panned out as well!If all of this wasn’t bad enough, the horrific clincher came this week. Dykes arrived for his appointment as usual, at about eleven. Bohm said that the painter was haggard and unkempt. His eyes darted this way and that around Bohm’s consulting room, lighting on object after object, as if he were seeing not the things themselves, but looking deep into their anatomy.Bohm asked him how he was feeling and Dykes said that he knew he wasn’t taking an anti-depressant, but some experimental drug. When Bohm challenged him and asked how could he be so sure, Dykes replied that he knew the man who was behind it. His name was Busner and he was operating out of a compound in the Chilterns near Worminghall.Dykes had seen me — he claimed — in the Three Pigeons Inn by Junction 7 of the M40. He hadn’t paid any particular attention to me when he went into the pub, but after he grew tired of contemplating the history and evolution of the towelling bar mat, he turned his attention to the ‘froggy-looking man in the corner wearing the mohair tie’. He said that I wasn’t as easy to read as the bar mat, or the engraving of the Boxer Rising, but that merely by looking at me he could include elements of my mental terrain into his own. So it was that he discovered that I was doing some sort of drug trial, and that it involved anti-depressant medication.The bugger is that I do have a drink in the Three Pigeons from time to time, and there’s every possibility that Dykes has seen me in there. Although I cannot recall noticing anyone paying undue attention to me. On the contrary, it’s often extremely difficult to get served in there, despite a bar staff to drinker ratio of about 1:1.After this encounter Dykes formed the conviction that his current predicament had something to do with me. He then challenged Bohm with this information. Bohm told me that he was as circumspect as possible. He advised Dykes to stop taking the Inclusion immediately and switch to a tranquilliser. Dykes refused, and as he already has a repeat prescription for Inclusion, Bohm realised that he would be unable to force the issue. Especially as Dykes then said he wanted Bohm to arrange a meeting with me, and that if he didn’t, or if I refused to see him, he would get in touch with the press.Bohm displayed as much sang-froid as he could under the circumstances. He told Dykes to go home and try to relax, and that he would ‘see what he could do’. As soon as Dykes left the health centre he called me.I have been put into such a state by this news that I’ve been unable to come up with a definitive analysis of the situation. Can it be that this is some kind of Inclusion-induced psychosis? And if so, will it occur in all of the patients who have been prescribed the drug? I shudder to think. An alternative possibility is that Dykes is going into a psychotic or schizoid interlude despite, rather than because of, the Inclusion, and that the facts he has adduced about the Inclusion trial and myself are lurid supposition, hit upon by chance.Whatever the case, I cannot at this stage bear to inform Gainsford. I know that he would overreact and jeopardise what we have achieved so far. If we can contain the situation with Dykes then there is no reason to abort the trial. So, I told Bohm that he was to bring Dykes up to Worminghall as soon as possible. He called back an hour or so later and said that they would be coming up tomorrow night. Until then I will see if I can’t discover some more about the drug’s effects. Obviously, the best way to do this is for me to take an extra-large dose of Inclusion myself.This may appear foolhardy, but the whole thing intrigues me so much that I am determined to get to the bottom of it. I am passionately interested in Inclusion, and wish it at all costs to remain a large part of my life.

And that’s it. That’s the last entry in Busner’s journal. Or at any rate the last that you’re able to read. There are a few pages after this entry that have obviously been torn out by someone — just a ragged fringe of paper remains, close to the binding; the rest of the notebook is empty.

That doesn’t immediately concern you. What’s far more intriguing is the other notebook, the one you know already is Simon Dykes’s own diary. How did it come to be at the Worminghall Facility? Did Dykes take it up there himself on the climactic night of the 12th of March? And is the fact that it’s exactly the same kind of notebook as Busner’s purely coincidental? Or is it yet another ramification of the Inclusion trial?

You don’t hesitate. You pick it up and give it a heft. Well, that won’t tell you anything. Open it up and have a read:12th OctoberWhy fucking bother? Why fucking bother at all? Why fuck and why bother? I would be angry — if I had the energy. I would hate myself more, if I didn’t feel dead already. I hate doing this. I hate writing these things. Write down your feelings. It’s the sort of shit that that dickhead psychotherapist at the Warneford told me to do, when I made the profound mistake of going to see him on Tony Bohm’s recommendation.If I find myself writing this stuff down, it’s only because I have to make something external, something that’s tangible, just to keep alive in me the idea that I’m alive at all.I haven’t painted now for over four months. I feel as remote from my art as I do from Tierra del Fuego. You might as well ask a man to stretch his cock to the moon, as ask me to pick up a brush again, or even prime a canvas.I can’t see things the way I used to. I used to see form spontaneously. Just looking at a miscellany of objects would intrude the idea of a composition. A quality of light, or a particular texture, would impinge on me with amazing force. Colour, chiaroscuro, the very sense of the volume of an object, a portion of the sky, or the geometry of a human face — all came to me unbidden. I never knew how fucking lucky I was, how blessed really, blessed with a gift. A gift that’s gone as if it was never there to begin with.Of course, as my charming wife sees fit to remind me, I have had these ‘episodes’ before. That’s nice, isn’t it — ‘episode’, like an episode of some tawdry soap. ‘Here it is, folks,’ the announcer says cheerily, ‘this week’s episode of Simon Dykes’s chronic fucking depression. Sit back and enjoy.’I can’t stand the anger I feel towards Jean — she really isn’t to blame for all this. But all right, I’ve always been a bit unstable, had my ups and downs. I don’t subscribe to the notion that the depressive and the creative mentality go hand in hand — only a fucking shrink would — but I can admit that about myself.But I’ve never felt as bad as this, as futile, as purposeless. I experience the love I thought I had for Jean as an irritation, a niggling under my skin. And as for the kids, when I look at them, particularly Henry, a sharp pain comes into me. A pain that’s a sort of probing finger coming into my grey area of depression and titillating it with the possibility of feeling love once more. It’s disgusting, almost as if I don’t want it. It’s like Jean reaching for my flaccid cock — which she does nowadays as if she were a weary bell-ringer — and giving it an uncalled-for tug.22nd OctoberI didn’t think things could get worse — but they have. Even Magnus and Henry are a burden to me now. I look at them from the studio window, playing on the lawn, wrapped up in autumnal scarves and mittens, and it occurs to me that they aren’t the right size for children of their age. Rather, that they’re like some fucking emotional decoys. Decoy ducks are made twice the size of ordinary ducks, so that the poor fuckers flying over will misjudge the distance to the ground and crash into it when they dive down to join what they imagine are their fellows.That’s what’s happening to me with those kids. My love for them is a suicidal plunge. It isn’t until I get close to them that I see how chronically I have misjudged everything in my life, exaggerated my own precious obsession with my art, at the cost of everything else.Jean says I should go and see Tony Bohm, and of course, like another member of the plainting chorus, Christabel says the same. But I won’t go. What would he do anyway, save for put me on some fucking drug, that would act like a governor on my brain? I hate that. I’ve been on those anti-depressants before, and they make me feel madder than I feel now. The sensation of those drugs coming on is just as I imagine the feel of a surgeon’s knife, probing into your grey matter, seeking out the right place to sever your fucking hemispheres.30th OctoberThe longer I’m sunk in this mire, the worse things get. Shrinks divide up depressions, don’t they? They say this one’s ‘chemical’, or somesuch; and that one’s down to all the crap you’ve got in your life. But with me the crap inside and the crap outside merge into one great ocean of shit, flowing into and of me.No work means no money. No money means I can’t face the idea of work because I’ve got so far to go just to pay off the bills this lay-off has ranked up. George called today and I couldn’t even speak to him. I just told Jean to say to him, ‘You haven’t got a client any more, you’ve just got a piece of shit. And unless you want to put on an exhibition of turds, there’s little point in calling me.’I wonder if she relayed this message? She hardly talks to me at all now. I guess she’s worried. No, actually she’s past being worried — or concerned, she’s just fed up. I only sit in the studio now — the rest of the house seems threatening to me. I don’t want to go there.Even sitting up here for hours on end, I’m hardly comfortable in my depression. There’s nothing cosy in this unremitting greyness, this corporate gothic, with its grinding, emotional bureaucracy.5th NovemberMy mind is like a fly, it buzzes around in a fucking febrile fashion, and when it alights on some crumb, or fragment of an idea, it’s off again before I can apprehend it.I’m getting paranoid. I look out over the garden and across the fence and across the farm track, and I’m convinced that I can see figures moving there. I joke about it to Jean, I suppose to stop her from becoming frightened. I say, I think our creditors have built a hide over there, in the shape of a giant dunning letter. They’ve elected one of their number to sit in it and observe the Brown House all day, in case I try and leave.Jean doesn’t think it’s funny. I hear her praying a lot nowadays. She wanders around the house muttering under her breath. She knows I despise religion as a fucking opiate.I wish I had some fucking opiate myself. Something that would take away this pain that is indifference to everything. I hate it when I’m reminded of the pain of others. If I see some item on the television, showing kids starving, or women raped in the war, I hate them. I hate them because the reality, the fucking substantial nature of their pain, seems to mock the nebulousness of my own. It says, you think you’re in pain, you’re not in pain, you’re faking it. And then I think of killing myself, believe me, I really do.Oh Jesus! (Ha-fucking-ha!) the effort of staying interested in anything. It’s like trying to clench a paralysed fist. If I try and take a drink to numb the awful sensation out, I just feel sick and woozy. I can’t get drunk anymore, no matter how much I pour down my fucking neck.13th NovemberImages of suicide all the time now. Every day. I’ve got them now as I write: Simon dead in a bath, blood flowing from his slashed wrists in gentle, billowing clouds; Simon dead from a shotgun blast in the mouth, the mess of grey, white and red on the wall behind his deflated head at last forming an interesting composition; Simon dead from a drug overdose, the blue tones of his skin reminiscent of a Renoir. The thoughts are scampering across my shoulders. I can feel their wing-beats around my ears.24th NovemberI’ve had what I believe is called ‘an intervention’. This afternoon I was sitting in my studio, as usual, mulling over the Hiroshima of my life, the razed buildings of my hopes, the charred corpses of my former loves, when they all fucking came down on me, the whole bunch of the wankers. There was Jean, of course, and Christabel. George had driven up from the gallery. They’d even dug my brother up from somewhere. They all stood around me and told me how my being so unhappy was upsetting the children (Jean was in tears by this point), and that it would be better for everyone if I considered going into hospital for a while.I tried to remain calm — although I felt like screaming — because I knew that if I let on just how bad things were they’d send for the men in the white coats, and then they’d take me away and put a hot wire through my brain; and then I’d be gone, there’d just be this shell left behind, with Simon’s head painted on it.So I stayed calm, but told them in no uncertain terms that I’d rather be dead than go into one of those grotesque NHS bedlams, where the ‘patients’ wander around making Hogarth look understated. This raised a bit of a laugh from George — but the rest of them stayed grim, stony-jawed.George then said that he was prepared to put up the dosh for me to go to some private place that he knows about in Wiltshire. He claims that it’s OK there and they won’t necessarily put me on drugs. They won’t even make me talk about things if I don’t want to. They’ll also let me have as many visitors as and when I want.I said I was very grateful to George (even though I know he’s only doing it to protect his fucking asset, the mercenary cunt). And I said I would go — if that’s what they wanted. But that if I did George had to promise to come and see me every week, and if I wasn’t happy he had to get me discharged. He agreed to this. So, I’m off tomorrow. I suppose I have to admit that I’m a bit relieved, the suicide shit is beginning to get to me badly. I wouldn’t want the kids to find Daddy strung up from the light socket.

There’s then a gap of about two months until the next entry.22nd JanuaryDear Fuck-wit DiaryWell, I managed to get myself out of that joint at long last. What a pile of wank! To think that people get paid for administering that so-called therapy, and other people are prepared to pay for it. The blind pissing on the blind — that’s what it is. The best thing I can say about my stay at the funny farm is that it cut the costs at home — thanks to George’s largesse. And I managed to miss out on Christmas, which has to be the most depressing time of the year.George was right about one thing, though, the cunts didn’t make me talk about myself, or take anything I didn’t want to. They did however insist on my sitting in on group therapy sessions. What an absurd idea! As if forcing a lot of unhappy people to sit in a circle, prating on about their private miseries, could possibly make any of us feel any better.30th JanuaryIt’s not as if I ever really felt any better — so I suppose I can’t be feeling substantially worse. The house has been wreathed in thick fog for the past week or so. Every morning when I get up, I look out of the window and see it hanging like a cloud of gas at the end of the garden. I can almost imagine that soldiers are about to emerge from it wearing puttees and carrying Lee Enfields with bayonets fixed. They are advancing towards me, determined to capture the trench of my mind.I like to move very carefully now. To cross a room, or even pick up some small object, I affect an undulant motion, like someone with Parkinson’s disease who’s just taken some L-Dopa. I have to get the right rhythm into my actions in order for them to happen at all. Often I’ll be halfway towards doing something when I’ll realise that I don’t have the correct rhythm, and then I’ll just collapse back into despair.9th FebruaryI went to see Tony Bohm yesterday. Not because of my mental health, but because of a cyst in one of my nipples. I joked with him, saying perhaps he should inject a little collagen into the other nipple, to even things up.He gave me a peculiar look, and said in that nannyish way that doctors have, ‘You’re not at all well, Simon, are you?’ I confessed that I didn’t feel my stay with the other sads had done me a great deal of good, but so what? He suggested — in a roundabout sort of a way — that I try going on anti-depressants again. According to him, these drugs are far better designed than they used to be. They can now target exactly the receptors in the brain responsible for depression, like some smart misery-seeking bomb, dropped down the ventilation shaft of the mind.I started waving my hands about when he began this eulogy, saying All right, all right, I’ll take the bloody pills! I don’t know why. Perhaps I’m just exhausted, tired of fighting this thing day in and day out. I want some respite from my head, and I dread the suicidal urges coming back. I read last week in the Bulletin of Suicidology that the suicide rate for male painters in their early forties is 700 per cent higher than the national average. No wonder I want to do a Rothko.I left Bohm’s surgery with a prescription and went across to get it at MacLachlan’s. For some reason the pharmacist in there — a drowned rat of a man, who is normally sulky and silent — gave me a broad grin, together with my pot of head-governors.I came home and took a couple. I’m waiting for the mushy feeling that comes before I’ve adjusted to the dosage. Waiting for it with something that could be anticipation — but isn’t. Rather it’s something that stands in the same relation to anticipation as a whore does to a lover.11th FebruaryNo mushy feeling yesterday, and none today either. Instead a peculiar lightening in my mood. It’s not that I exactly want to do anything, or that I don’t feel the depression still gnawing at me, it’s just that I can almost — almost, mind — imagine what it might be like to feel interested in something again, to want to include some of its essence within myself.Sat in my studio all day and listened to the sounds of the house around and below me. Jean’s shoes clacking across the wooden floors; the children’s crashing entries and slamming exits; the occasional waft of music; the chirrup and trill of the phone. I smiled, thinking about how I constantly complain that this rumpus upsets my work, when the truth is I haven’t done any work now for so long.12th FebruaryOn some odd impulse I bought an antique victrola today. It was sitting in the window of the noncey little antique shop in Thame, together with the usual cataract of tat. I had noticed the thing a number of times before, but on this occasion I found myself intrigued by it. With primitive music machines like this, the analog of the sound they make is so visible, so tangible. I only had to touch the thing to imagine that Chaliapin was creaking and groaning the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’. It will make a great object to place at the centre of a canvas.13th FebruaryStarted work on the victrola painting today. I thought I’d do some charcoal sketches of it just to get my hand in, and then it struck me: I was working! I had the yen to work for the first time in months. I had the impulse to shout, hoot, do a little jig, rush down and tell Jean and Christabel. . but I restrained myself. What if it was just an illusion, some function of the happy pills Bohm has given me?So, this afternoon I drove into Oxford and went to the Science Library. I had intended to look up all the anti-depressants commonly prescribed, and see if I could account for my creative rebirth. But when I got down among the stacks and was leafing through the pharmacological reference works, I lost interest in this mundane task. The juxtapositions of carpet tiling, strip lighting and blond wood in the library fired my imagination. The library — and the way it acts as an analog of the information contained in its rank upon rank of volumes — struck me as a counterpart to the victrola I bought yesterday in Thame.Why not amalgamate the two into one canvas? I could see exactly what it should look like: the victrola, hunched and black, with chunks of pharmacological gobbledygook radiating from its flaring horn. It will look Dadaist, and be a suitable memento of my voyage back across the psychic Styx.14th FebruaryI stayed up late last night and drew Jean a Valentine’s card. She seemed shocked when she saw it among the breakfast things — and then burst into tears and ran out of the room. I ran after her and caught her in the drawing room, where she hugged me and sobbed for a while. She said she had despaired of my ever improving and had made arrangements to take the children away, if I wouldn’t agree to go back into hospital.I was shaken by this. It’s peculiar how from the vantage point of even a partial recovery the idea of my former negativity, my rejection of the world and all its works, seems so remote.Worked on the victrola painting all morning. I’ve got hold of some second-hand pharmacological reference works back from Oxford, and I spent the morning cutting them up into the appropriately sized chunks. I’ve given up on doing the charcoal sketches and have decided to work directly on to canvas. I feel that confident.16th FebruaryI went into the health centre this morning to see Bohm. I told him, with some humility, that he was right and the new anti-depressants did seem to be having a remarkable effect on me. I now find that more or less anything I direct my attention to appears interesting to me, and worthy of some place in my life. Bohm asked me if I would describe this as ‘positive engagement’. I replied that this was a bit technical, but that I did feel a general enthusiasm for life and all it offers.The truth is that the posters Bohm has put up in his consulting room, which show cuddly toys — teddies and suchlike — inhabiting their own parallel realm, had begun to intrigue me, and I wasn’t directing much of my attention to him. He’s obviously put them up for the children, but perhaps, in away, they represent an idea of a better world that adults also find seductive. It would be interesting to do a series of paintings, in a photoreal style and employing the same colour scheme, but showing the cuddly toys working in laboratories, or industrial plants.20th FebruaryJean is a bit concerned about the way the house is filling up with laboratory equipment and cuddly toys. I’ve explained that they’re essential for the new painting World of Bears; and that I simply haven’t room for them all in the studio, where I am busily posing a scene that comprises four near life’ size stuffed bears in white coats, working at a chemical experiment.It isn’t that I’ve lost interest in the victrola painting, but right now this project grabs me more. Possibly it needs to be a triptych?22nd FebruaryI went for a walk with Jean and the boys today. What a joy it is to see one’s children growing up and taking an interest in the world they inhabit. I think Magnus will be the more scientifically minded of the two. Even at the age of six he looks at everything in structural and normative terms; while the older Henry is so plainly responding to the imagistic and the emotional in everything he does.We walked all the way to the golf course and back, the four of us chattering away. I felt nothing but interested in everything that they said; none of my former sense of irritation with the family seems to remain. On the way back Jean and I walked arm in arm, and last night she came to me.26th FebruaryPerhaps a falling out always comes after a reunification. I don’t know. But yesterday Jean and I had a bit of a spat. It started like this: she was telling me about some work she was doing for the local church, collecting for a famine relief charity, when I conceived an overpowering interest in everything she was saying. I wanted to know all about the charity: everything that it did; where its projects were sited, what they hoped to achieve; how they stood in relation to the rest of the charitable sector; the relationship between that sector and the foreign aid budget; the history of foreign aid.All of these questions came surging up in me, together with the realisation that Jean didn’t know enough to satisfy me. It was rude and peremptory of me, but I couldn’t help it. I threw up my hands and said, ‘There’s no point in your going any further with this, you haven’t got enough information,’ and turned away from her.I don’t blame her for being upset, but she must appreciate the overwhelming need I have to incorporate and assimilate things at the moment. I feel that this faculty has been in abeyance for so long now that I must give it as free a rein as I can.28th FebruaryI’ve started on a ‘found object’ sculpture, using pill boxes and plastic pachyderms. The pill boxes are glued to the elephants’ backs like miniature howdahs.29th FebruarySat in my studio all morning experiencing a surge of motiveless and directionless interest in everything. I found this quite disturbing. Any line of thought that I tried to pursue came up against some thing, idea, or individual, and all infinitely worthy of a lifetime’s devotion.For hours my thoughts were like aeroplanes, stacked over-head for landings on my consciousness that were always being aborted. Not that dissimilar to states of mind I remember from my depression days.In the afternoon I rallied a bit. All the surfaces of the studio appeared unnecessarily bare to me, so I began to decorate them with a pattern loosely based on The Marriage of the Arnolfini.3rd MarchIt has to be those pills. I don’t think it can reasonably be anything else. What little objectivity I still retain tells me that it isn’t normal to feel this way, so tirelessly interested. I can’t sleep because I have to count all the little black and red diamonds that constitute my retinal after-image. I can sense that the barrier between my consciousness and the world is becoming fuzzy and indeterminate — so much of it have I become prepared to include within myself.If I sit in the studio I can no longer differentiate between the many Post-It Notes I have stuck up on the walls to remind me of errands, ideas, images and facts, and the thoughts that gave rise to them in the first place. Perhaps the studio is an extension of my own mind? And if I start to combine and recombine these original thoughts, I will witness the telekinesis of their representation?I must remember to phone Ivor Saluki, the engraver. About ten years ago he borrowed a biography of Cézanne from me, and I really do need it back.Jean is furious about the boxes of fruit that have been turning up at the house. I need that fruit! I need it for my work. I have in mind a great mound of rotting fruit studded with electronic components. Such an installation will present a fantastic satirical vision of mind, as the fruit rots and the components rust! Despite my anxieties over the medication, I know that I’m still coming up with creative solutions of the first order.5th MarchWalking up to the Three Pigeons at lunchtime today I found myself absorbing the very topography of the land surrounding the Brown House. The fields were as much in me as I was in them. The landscape seethed as I allowed myself to think through it and annex it to the territory of my own psyche.Then in the pub I became transfixed by the towelling bar mat. It was the same as with the print of the Boxer Revolt I looked at the other day. Through the individual bar mat, I felt myself being sucked into a durable history of other bar mats. I romped down the evolutionary pathways of this mundane object, turned into temporal byways, and then returned to the present.There was a man sitting in the corner. An ageing hippy dressed in a crumpled poplin jacket and a yanked-tight snake of woollen tie. I knew he had a connection with the pills Bohm has been prescribing me the minute I saw him. I can’t explain this in a commonsensical way; such things are not like a species of prescience, or any kind of ESP, they’re rather like remembering that you already knew something that you’d forgotten for a while. It’s a reacquaintance with the facts of the matter.I knew this man was called Busner. I knew that he was involved in secretly (and illegally) testing a new psychoactive drug in the Thame area. I knew that he knew Anthony Bohm. I knew that he thought Glen Gould a vulgar pianist. I knew that he once caught his foreskin in the fly of his trousers, whilst holidaying in Positano in Italy, and had to be hospitalised for a day. I knew that he was interested in curling.I was intrigued and frightened in equal measure by the revelation of Busner and his impact on my life. I didn’t announce myself to him, because I couldn’t think of any way of doing it that wouldn’t be melodramatic.7th MarchBusner is the Hierophant. He oversees the auguries, decocts potions, presides over rituals that piddle the everyday into a tea-strainer reality. I can sense him moving around there up in Worminghall, his shit-kicker shoes squeaking on the linoleum floor as he struggles to return that loop shot from one of his technicians. The way he has surreptitiously tinkered with the architecture of my mind is an obscenity. I must confront him with it, but at the moment I am too taken with the idea of some art work that expresses his attributes to be seriously bothered.I’ve ordered some curling equipment through a sports mail-order catalogue. It’s only a tentative idea so far (although I feel strong enthusiasm for it), but some melding together of both curling equipment and ancient votive statuary into a purely figurative sculpture of Busner would do the man justice.8th MarchMore stuffed animals and exercise equipment arrived at the Brown House today. Jean is beside herself. She says there isn’t enough room for all this in the house. I shouted at her. After all, if I can include it in my mind, why can’t she have it in the house? People are so lazy nowadays. They confine themselves to some one role or other, and with it comes a narrowing and specialisation of what their minds allow.Take sporting trophies, for example. I think they’ve been unjustifiably ignored. Sure, there are a few pocket guides to them, but no truly informative and exhaustive history. I intend to remedy this situation as soon as I can find the time off from cataloguing my antiquarian library; electroplating my model trains; completing the construction of my combination sousaphone-and-samovar: and launching my collection of designer clothing made entirely from carpet off-cuts.9th MarchI will see Bohm tomorrow and arrange to meet with the Magus of Worminghall. I have no idea what will transpire, but it may prove illuminating. I can sense a growing concentricity in my manner of thinking, a desire to circle back on my own thoughts, to tergiversate, to animadvert, to extemporise. When I am too distracted even to formulate this in language, I am driven to express it in an odd kind of dance or jig.I choreograph these spontaneously, hopping from one leg to another in a symmetrical pattern, which seems to have a semiotics of its own. The dances are saying, ‘Here are interesting ideas, over there are more things worthy of inclusion in your life.’What to do with the car batteries and Eskis that were delivered today? A sculpture is out of the question. I may just leave them as they are, boxed up and so splendidly replete.10th MarchA tedious encounter with Bohm today. I told him what I knew and he had the temerity to look shocked, like a little boy who’s been caught cheating. I know that he himself has taken Inclusion, so why was he nonplussed by my gift of some tin cans, a pair of slipper socks, and a transcript of a lecture delivered by I.A. Braithwaite to the British Ephemeral Society on ‘In-Flight Magazines for People in Temporarily Grounded Aircraft’?The fool tried to persuade me to come off Inclusion. I told him I would blow the whole incident wide open if he didn’t arrange for me to meet Busner. I spoke to him later in the afternoon and Busner has acceded to my demand. I would feel some trepidation about going to Worminghall tomorrow evening, but I don’t find it nearly as interesting as trying to divine how many fondue forks I can shove into a VCR before it stops working.

This is the final entry in Simon Dykes’s increasingly spikey and manic scrawl. You turn a few pages on and there is nothing. You turn a few pages more and you find two final entries, dated 11th March and 19th March. They aren’t in Dykes’s hand, but Busner’s:11th MarchI have been included within the psyche of Simon Dykes in a most perverse fashion. I would be horrified by this eruption in the very skin of reality, were it not so very interesting.He and Bohm arrived at the Facility some hours ago. It may have been foolish of me to take some Inclusion shortly before they turned up, but I did it in a spirit of scientific enquiry.Under the influence of the Inclusion, Dykes appeared to me as an ever-mutating thing. The very composition of his head and body was of found objects, and constantly transmogrifying.The Rotadexes and file holders; typewriter ribbons and plastic beakers; Bunsen burners and test-tube racks that fill my office and laboratory were snaffled up by this protean being. When our eyes met there was a great humming and crackling in the atmosphere. Bohm, and MacLachlan, who had come with him, turned tail and fled. Paper clips and drawing pins bulged from the surface of his eyeballs. Biros and match books ruckled beneath his skin.The cyclotron in the corner began to hum and pulse, even though I knew it wasn’t activated. Then there was an appalling explosion, but instead of feeling myself blown apart, expanded, I had the sensation of being sucked in: a plume of genie being drawn into a bottle. Fragments of glass and fragments of mica, bigger than boulders, plummeted past the screen of my vision like some cheap special effect.19th MarchI am still in here. Dykes’s mind is a cluttered place, as you have no doubt gathered. He leaves me pretty much to myself. During one of his rare lapses in physical activity, he allows me the indulgence of employing his motor abilities to jot down notes such as these. For the rest of the time I am free to roam the museum of grotesque ideas, images and objects that the drug has driven him to acquire willy-nilly. I am pure intention, a secondary and immaterial will operating inside the Dykes psyche.Dykes naturally thinks he is psychotic — and in a way I suppose he is. But it’s comfortable enough here in the Warneford: a choice of meals, and at least one chat a day with a jejune shrink.It has occurred to me that the only way to understand the Inclusion incident is to view it at a metaphoric level. The drug was originally made from the corpses of the bee mites that infested the hives, much in the way that I now infest Dykes’s mind. I have become — as it were — Inclusion.Mind you — it’s just a thought.

And that is that. Or at least it would be if the Inclusion folder wasn’t bulging and flexing in a sinister way between your hands. Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to read things that don’t belong to you, not to interfere with private correspondence? The thoughts are scampering across your shoulders now; now, as the first of the leaflets on Blaenau Ffestiniog Slate Quarry falls out of the Inclusion brochure, followed by the. 1984-5 Eastbourne and District Phone Directory, followed by the Atlas of Cancer Incidence in England and Wales 1968–1985.

There’s more to this Inclusion brochure than first met your eye. You should stay interested in it and not allow your thoughts to stray to unanswered letters, unreturned phone calls, unpaid bills, unfulfilled ambitions, wasted opportunities and people unloved and unmissed.

* Selective Seratonin Re-Uptake Inhibitors, i.e. Prozac^®, and other brand-name anti-depressants such as Sustral^®, Faverin^® and Sebcocat^®. Author’s note.