The psychiatrist was disappointed. Could it be that his self-congratulation was misplaced (he had positively crowed to the nurses)? But after another hour, during which time he was full of self-doubt, he had another call from the police.
‘We’ve been to the house, doctor,’ said the policeman, ‘and a man has been missing from it for five days. It wasn’t reported to us, that’s why we didn’t have a record of it. His name is John Jones and Mrs Jones lives at the same address.’
‘Did you give her my number?’
‘Yes, but she says, can you ring her? She says it’s expensive for her to ring.’
The policeman gave him the number, which he called immediately. It rang for a long time and the psychiatrist was just about to conclude that there was no one in when a woman answered.
‘Yes,’ she said. Somehow she managed to convey deep mistrust and suspicion with a single syllable.
‘Mrs Jones?’ asked the psychiatrist.
‘Yes. Who’s that?’
‘It’s the hospital. We think we’ve got your husband here.’
‘Quite possibly.’
‘I understand he’s been missing for a few days.’
There was a pause.
‘Mrs Jones? Are you still there?’
‘He often goes missing. This is the third time this year. Last time it was Glasgow. He does it whenever he’s got something to tell me that I won’t like, like he’s lost his job because of his drinking. He was sacked a few days ago because he kept on being late for work.’
‘I see. Well, we’ll return him to you.’
‘There’s no rush,’ she said. And she put the receiver down.
The psychiatrist returned to the man – now Mr John Jones – who was lying, neither contented nor discontented, on the bed. The psychiatrist sat down in the chair facing him.
‘Does the name John Jones mean anything to you?’ he asked. He looked intently into the man’s face for the faintest change in expression, but there was none.
‘No,’ he said. Even the question itself did not interest him.
‘You see,’ said the psychiatrist, ‘we think that’s who you are. We’ve found your wife. You’ve been missing, apparently, for five days.’
‘I can’t say,’ said the man. ‘I don’t remember nowt.’
‘You don’t remember losing your job a few days ago?’
‘I don’t remember nowt.’
‘What work did you do?’
‘I told you, I don’t remember nowt.’
That was the nearest thing to an emotional response that the psychiatrist achieved.
‘We’ll take you back home,’ he said.
‘When?’ asked the man, as if the question were an abstract one, of no personal significance.
‘I can’t say exactly.’
The psychiatrist immediately regretted having told him at all. He should have kept it to himself and sprung it on the man at the last moment, so there was no possibility of escape or a suicide attempt. Because of his indiscretion, he would have to arrange now that the man be specially watched by the staff, and they would not thank him for it.
But the man did not escape or try suicide; he had not even got off his bed, except to relieve himself.
Next day, quite early in the morning, a nurse came into his room. She had a raincoat over her uniform.
‘Come on, John,’ she said, ‘we’re going home.’
He slipped off the bed obediently.
‘Where’s that?’ he asked.
‘Hindborough, of course,’ she said with a laugh.
He shook his head because it meant nothing to him.
‘We’ve got a car waiting to take us to the station,’ she said. ‘We’d better hurry.’
They drove through the streets of the city, which had become busier and busier earlier and earlier to prove how important its activity was. But the animation passed by the man, who looked neither to his right nor to his left, but straight on, blankly. Did anything register with him? Impossible to tell. The driver grumbled about the traffic: there used to be a rush hour, but now it lasted all day.
They arrived at the station. A tidal wave of people, as expressionless as the man, was emerging from it, several commuter trains having just arrived. But even this the man, theoretically Mr Jones, did not appear to notice. He was like a fish swimming through a reef.
They boarded the train to Hindborough. It was quite a long journey, four hours at least. When he looked out of the windows of the carriage, his eyes flickered back and forth, but this was a physiological reaction rather than a sign of interest. The nurse quickly concluded that he had no conversation and took a glossy magazine from her bag, and began to read about the divorce of two celebrities, Shaz and Ravanna, because the latter had had a love-child by Stevie, a man so famous that any other name was superfluous.
They sped through landscapes both flat and hilly, through town and field, suburb and moorland, until eventually they approached the reddish-black-grey environs of Hindborough. It was built on some low hills overlooking the mouth of a river. Rising from the midst of rows of little terraced houses, dwarfing everything else, was a large stadium, its white cantilevers gleaming and its floodlights sticking up like the legs of an upturned insect.
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ came a voice over the train’s public address system, ‘we are now approaching Hindborough, our final destination. Please remember to take all your belongings with you and watch your step as you alight on to the platform edge. We hope you had a pleasant journey and thank you for travelling with us today.’
‘We’re arriving,’ said the nurse. ‘Do you recognise it?’
The man made an effort to look out of the window.
‘No,’ he said, delivering an opinion as if it were the conclusion to a syllogism.
The train stopped in the station.
‘Let’s wait for everyone to get out,’ said the nurse.
When the carriage had emptied, she said, ‘Right, let’s get off.’
She led him out on to the platform.
‘Let’s wait here,’ she said. And they stood by the carriage from which they had just alighted.
The platform slowly cleared of people. After a few minutes, the only people left on it were themselves at one end and a woman with a children on either side of her at the other.
‘Come on, let’s go,’ said the nurse. ‘That must be your wife.’
They walked towards the woman and two children, who seemed rooted to the spot. But the immobility of the woman, thin as chain smokers are, was that of the coiled spring. As for the children, they were dressed in the gear of the local football team; their stillness was clearly momentary. Their anarchic activity was kept under control only by their mother’s ability to scream at them.
Eventually the two parties came fact to face. The platform had seemed as if it stretched for miles.
‘Mrs Jones?’ asked the nurse.
‘Yes,’ she said. In the presence of a third party, she was restraining herself. And for the sake of appearances, she had to say something at least half-affectionate.
‘Thank God you’re home safe,’ she said. ‘We’ve been worried about you.’
He said nothing and she stepped forward to put her thin arms round his neck. The man stepped back a bit and said, ‘Who are you.’
‘I...’
‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.’
The woman’s face tightened like a knot tied by pulling two ends of a string.
‘He can’t come home like that,’ she said to the nurse. ‘I’m not having it. Not until he knows who he is. He’ll have to go to Limetrees. They know him there.’
Limetrees was the local mental hospital built in what was once the countryside but was now in a suburb of Hindborough. Its grounds were the only open space for miles around.
‘They won’t know he’s coming,’ said the nurse. ‘We can’t just turn up like that.’
‘It’s all right,’ said Mrs Jones. ‘They know him
of old there. He does this regularly. Last time they did all kinds of tests in Glasgow though I told them it wasn’t necessary and that he would get better after a day or two in Limetrees. A right waste of time and money, I call it.’
‘So what do you suggest I do?’ aske the nurse.
‘Take him there – leave him on the doorstep if you like.’
‘Are you coming with?’
‘Coming with? What for? I’ve no money to waste on taxis and who’d look after the kids? No, lass, you’ll have to take him there yourself. Come on, kids.’
So saying, she grabbed the children by their hands, turned round and yanked them in the direction of the station exit.
‘Bye, dad,’ said the two children as they went, ‘see you in a bit.’
The man and his nurse were left on the station platform, like flotsam on a beach after the tide has receded. The man’s expression had not changed: it was still blank.
‘I suppose we’ll have to do as your wife suggests,’ said the nurse, leading him to the taxi rank. The man made no objection.
Limetrees, formerly the Hindborough Asylum for the Insane and Feebleminded, was a large Gothic-style building with a central tower and workhouse wings. In front of it was a cricket pitch on which the annual match between staff and patients used to be played. Just inside the main entrance was a glass-fronted booth that served as reception and telephone exchange. The man behind the counter was a man who had worked there for years – his whole life – and knew the patients better than any of the doctors. As soon as he saw the man his face lit up in recognition.
‘Hello, John, back again? Couldn’t keep away, huh? It must be the food. I’ll call Dr Bell to tell him you’ve come back.’ He turned to the nurse. ‘Why don’t you take a seat, my love. Would you like a cup of tea? Milk and sugar?’
Mr Jones was admitted to a ward under his own name, though he did not as yet not acknowledge it. The nurse left him.
He recovered his memory, all of a sudden, like a clearing reached in a forest, two days later, after a young lunatic under the influence of cannabis brought a fire extinguisher down on the shoulder of an old woman who was suicidal after the death of her husband from cancer. He had been aiming for her head.
As soon as he recovered his memory, Mr Jones went to the nurses, who were having their morning break. He knocked on their door: he could see them through the glass partition.
‘Wait a moment, John,’ said the head nurse. ‘We’re busy just at the moment.’
The nurses were always busy, as a matter of principle. But after a decent interval, one of them stepped out of the office.
‘Yes, John, what is it?’ she asked.
‘I’ve got my memory back,’ he said, smiling. ‘I can remember everything now, clear as anything. I’m ready for home.’
He couldn’t leave straight away because the doctor had to agree to it as well. And then, because he had no money, a bus-fare had to be found for him. He left Limetrees towards the end of the afternoon.
He walked up Willow Street, with its parallel row of identical small dwellings. He reached number twenty-three and knocked on its door.
The door opened with an angry clatter and Mrs Jones stood on the doorstep with her hands on her hips.
‘Hello, love,’ he said. ‘I’ve recovered. I’m better now.’
‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen you before.’
And the door slammed shut in his face.
7 - The Cure
When Mr Aziz had his heart attack he decided to retire not only from his shop but from all activity whatsoever: unless getting out of bed, sitting in his chair all day reading the paper, calling frequently to his wife for a sweet and milky cup of tea and eating the meals she placed before him be counted as activity.
Mr Aziz said that, try as he might, anything more strenuous was impossible for him and brought on a pain in his chest: the harbinger, if not the cause, of another, possibly fatal heart attack.
For the first few weeks after his return home from the hospital, Mrs Aziz, mother of his seven grown-up children, attended assiduously to his every wish. Of course she had always done so; it was not so much her job as her role in life, a destiny. Anything else would have been unthinkable for her, but before his heart attack Mr Aziz had spent more than fourteen hours a day in his shop, closing it only when there was not the faintest possibility of another customer, and therefore Mrs Aziz had had little to do for him. It was by working so hard that Mr Aziz, who had started from nothing, was able to buy a house for each of his children.
Then, six weeks after her husband’s heart attack, Mrs Aziz, who had always been too busy looking after the children ever to be ill, began to weaken. More exactly, her right leg began to refuse to obey her command. At first, this was only intermittent, but even so it caused a lot of trouble when Mr Aziz called for a cup of tea and she couldn’t bring it. Then she would call out to him from another room that she couldn’t move because of her leg; Mr Aziz, never a patient man, grew angry rather than solicitous and began to shout (which wasn’t good for his heart). But strangely enough this did not produce the required effect, as it always had done before; indeed, it seemed only to make Mrs Aziz’s leg all the weaker and less obedient to her command.
Mr Aziz, who believed that he had a right to his bad temper because of all his hard work, was so angry that he almost got out of his chair; but he started to worry when his meals, and not just his tea, failed to appear.
Yes, there really was something wrong with his wife. The most obvious explanation was sorcery or a djinn, but when he told his eldest son, Ahmed, a chartered accountant, he replied that Mrs Aziz needed a doctor more than the imam. His son admitted, of course, that the ultimate source of the weakness was probably a malign neighbour or djinn, but even they had to work through the body, about which doctors these days knew a great deal.
Nevertheless, Mr Aziz called the imam first. The latter, a middle-aged man with a sparse beard dyed with henna, prayed over her vigorously, took some money afterwards, but failed to cure her. Her leg was now so obdurate that his daughters had to come to look after their father, or he would have starved.
Eventually Mr Aziz asked the doctor to visit her; but Dr Akhtar said that if she wasn’t well enough to come to his surgery, she should go straight to the hospital. Mr Aziz got his son to call for an ambulance.
It was Ahmed who accompanied her to the hospital, Mr Aziz not being well enough to go. He walked beside the ambulance men who carried her on a stretcher into the vehicle, and he climbed in beside her.
By the time Mrs Aziz reached the hospital, she seemed to have shrunk, as if she had been desiccated en route. Her shawl seemed too large for what it had to cover; there were square yards of unused cloth. Her personality had shrunk along with her body; normally quite forceful with her children, and possessed of her own ideas when she was alone with them, she was now timid and frightened. She had become a little old lady in a matter of minutes.
Lifted on to a trolley, her right leg now quite useless, more a ball and chain than a limb, she was wheeled into a curtained cubicle in the emergency department, her son always beside her. And there they waited for three quarters of an hour, listening to, or at any rate hearing, the sounds of a child crying when told it needed stitches, or the shouts of an early drunk resisting what was proposed to him for his own good.
Eventually a young doctor burst through the curtains surrounding Mrs Aziz and her son. He was dressed in a thin green tunic and trousers.
‘You’re her son,’ he said to Ahmed without looking at Mrs Aziz.
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘She doesn’t speak English, I suppose,’ said the doctor.
‘No.’
A look of exasperation flitted across the doctor’s face. Forty years in the country and hardly a word learnt!
‘You’ll have to interpret for me. Our interpreter’s off on another case. Maternity. Twins.’
He looked at Mrs Aziz for the first
time.
‘What’s wrong?’ he asked.
‘My leg,’ said Mrs Aziz hesitantly, and with a strong accent.
‘It’s her leg,’ said Ahmed. ‘It’s gradually stopped working.’
‘When did she first notice it?’ asked the doctor.
The doctor took a lot of details from Ahmed, and then said, ‘Tell her I’m going to examine her.’
This simple message seemed to the doctor to take a very long time to convey. Perhaps there was no word for ‘examine’ in her language. She answered her son back as if they were arguing. She sounded querulous in a weak way.
‘I’ll call in a chaperone,’ said the doctor, and went out of the cubicle, returning with a fat and jolly black woman, who treated life as an extended joke.
‘Just step outside for a few moments,’ said the doctor to Ahmed.
When he had finished, he called Ahmed back in.
‘I haven’t found anything,’ said the doctor. ‘I’m going to call a neurologist. Can you explain that to her?’
‘Neurologist’ appeared to be another word for which there was no equivalent in her language. After several minutes of dialogue, Ahmed turned to the doctor.
‘She says thank you,’ he said.
‘You’re welcome,’ said the doctor, already halfway through the curtains; and a wait, this time more prolonged, ensued.
Another doctor entered, slightly older and differently attired. He wore a blue chalk-striped suit and a yellow bow tie, though he was not yet at the pinnacle of the profession.
‘Mrs Aziz?’ he asked.
‘Yes,’ she replied hesitantly.
‘I’ve come to the right place, then,’ he said, laughing slightly. He exuded charm, like a secretion.
In essence, however, he went through the same procedure, asked the same questions as the previous doctor, only a little more thoroughly. And at the end, he pronounced himself unsatisfied: Mrs Aziz would have to be admitted to the ward for further tests.
Ahmed agreed on her behalf and she was wheeled up to a ward. There were five other people in it, thankfully women, all of them older than she, four of whom had had strokes, one of whom flailed her arm and grunted like a bellows, and a fifth whose illness left her face blank and made it difficult for her to move. She, as it happened, spoke a language not dissimilar from that of Mrs Aziz, but unfortunately she was the adherent of a bad religion, hostile to that of Mrs Aziz, so there was no one for her to speak to, or to speak to her once Ahmed had to leave.
The Proper Procedure and Other Stories Page 12
