by Weldon, Fay
‘If you were blind,’ he observed, ‘you could still write. You would dictate.’
Waiters began to carry trays of glasses through to the Gallery. Boxes of wine were already stacked by the white-sheeted tables. More staff arrived to clear the far part of the lounge-bar to create an extra annexe. It looked as if they expected a crush. They ran around with the tall palms in their ornate pots and the elaborate silk screens, and Aileen watched through and around them in the distance the shifting shapes of oranges and ochres of her husband’s paintings. They seemed to her, even seen like this, through change and confusion, to have a validity, a right to exist, more intense than anything else the world offered. Mira appeared, tiny and thin and smart and no longer young, to beckon them through. They followed her. The first guests were arriving: bangles clanked and tanned and handsome faces glowed.
‘I’m fine, I’m fine,’ they greeted one another. The high ceiling echoed to their fineness. Aileen and Rix paused together in the glass doorway.
‘Oh well,’ said Aileen, ‘I’m on your side really. This is going to be terrible. The only thing that really worries me, is that though how I am is how you are, how you are is nothing whatsoever to do with how I am.’
‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Me being a painter and you being a writer.’
She thought about this for a little, and observing how smart little Mira Kaplan came hurrying back to collect him, and how possessively the red fingernails were laid upon his arm, decided to leave her to it, and indeed him, and turned and went upstairs to pack. She would go and stay with Rowena Gersh for a long, long time.
Tales of the New Age
Down the Clinical Disco
You never know where you’ll meet your own true love. I met mine down the clinical disco. That’s him over there, the thin guy with the jeans, the navy jumper and the red woolly cap. He looks pretty much like anyone else, don’t you think? That’s hard work on his part, not to mention mine, but we got there in the end. Do you want a drink? Gin? Tonic? Fine. I’ll just have an orange juice. I don’t drink. Got to be careful. You never know who’s watching. They’re everywhere. Sorry, forget I said that. Even a joke can be paranoia. Do you like my hair? That’s a golden gloss rinse. Not my style really: I have this scar down my cheek: see, if I turn to the light? A good short crop is what suits me best, always has been: I suppose I’ve got what you’d call a strong face. Oops, sorry, dear, didn’t mean to spill your gin; it’s the heels. I do my best but I can never quite manage stilettos. But it’s an ill wind; anyone watching would think I’m ever so slightly tipsy, and that’s normal, isn’t it. It is not absolutely A-okay not to drink alcohol. On the obsessive side. Darling, of course there are people watching.
Let me tell you about the clinical disco while Eddie finishes his game of darts. He hates darts but darts are what men do in pubs, okay? The clinical disco is what they have once a month at Broadmoor. (Yes, that place. Broadmoor. The secure hospital for the criminally insane.) You didn’t know they had women there? They do. One woman to every nine men. They often don’t look all that like women when they go in but they sure as hell look like them when (and if, if, if, if, if, if) they go out.
How did I get to be in there? You really want to know? I’d been having this crummy time at home and this crummy time at work. I was pregnant and married to this guy I loved, God knows why, in retrospect, but I did, only he fancied my mother, and he got her pregnant too – while I was out at work – did you know women can get pregnant at fifty? He didn’t, she didn’t, I didn’t – but she was! My mum said he only married me to be near her anyway and I was the one who ought to have an abortion. So I did. It went wrong and messed me up inside, so I couldn’t have babies, and my mum said what did it matter, I was a lesbian anyway, just look at me. I got the scar in a road accident, in case you’re wondering. And I thought what the hell, who wants a man, who wants a mother, and walked out on them. And I was working at the Royal Opera House for this man who was a real pain, and you know how these places get: the dramas and the rows and the overwork and the underpay and the show must go on though you’re dropping dead. Dropping dead babies. No, I’m not crying. What do you think I am, a depressive? I’m as normal as the next person.
What I did was set fire to the office. Just an impulse. I was having these terrible pains and he made me work late. He said it was my fault Der Rosenkavalier’s wig didn’t fit: he said I’d made his opera house a laughing stock: the wig slipped and the New York Times noticed and jeered. But it wasn’t my fault about the wig: wardrobe had put the message through to props, not administration. And I sat in front of the VDU – the union is against them: they cause infertility in women but what employer’s going to worry about a thing like that – they’d prefer everyone childless any day – and thought about my husband and my mum, five months pregnant, and lit a cigarette. I’d given up smoking for a whole year but this business at home had made me start again. Have you ever had an abortion at five months? No? Not many have.
How’s your drink? How’s Eddie getting on with the darts? Started another game? That’s A-okay, that’s fine by me, that’s normal.
So what were we saying, Linda? Oh yes, arson. That’s what they called it. I just moved my cigarette lighter under the curtains and they went up, whoosh, and they caught some kind of soundproof ceiling infill they use these days instead of plaster. Up it all went. Whoosh again. Four hundred pounds’ worth of damage. Or so they said. If you ask me, they were glad of the excuse to redecorate.
Like a fool, instead of lying and just saying it was an accident, I said I’d done it on purpose, I was glad I had, opera was a waste of public funds, and working late a waste of my life. That was before I got to court. The solicitor laddie warned me off. He said arson was no laughing matter, they came down very hard on arson. I thought a fine, perhaps: he said no, prison. Years not months.
You know my mum didn’t even come to the hearing? She had a baby girl. I thought there might be something wrong with it, my mum being so old, but there wasn’t. Perhaps the father being so young made up for it.
There was a barrister chappie. He said look you’ve been upset, you are upset, all this business at home. The thing for you to do is plead insane; we’ll get you sent to Broadmoor, it’s the best place in the country for psychiatric care, they’ll have you right in the head in no time. Otherwise it’s Holloway, and that’s all strip cells and major tranquillizers, and not so much of a short sharp shock as a long sharp shock. Years, it could be, arson.
So that’s what I did, I pleaded insane, and got an indefinite sentence, which meant into Broadmoor until such time as I was cured and safe to be let out into the world again. I never was unsafe. You know what one of those famous opera singers said when she heard what I’d done? ‘Good for Philly,’ she said. ‘Best thing that could possibly happen: the whole place razed to the ground.’ Only of course it wasn’t razed to the ground, there was just one room already in need of redecoration slightly blackened. When did I realize I’d made a mistake? The minute I saw Broadmoor: a great black pile: the second I got into this reception room. There were three women nurses in there, standing around a bath of hot water; great hefty women, and male nurses too, and they were talking and laughing. Well, not exactly laughing, but an Inside equivalent; a sort of heavy grunting ha-ha-ha they manage, halfway between sex and hate. They didn’t even look at me as I came in. I was terrified, you can imagine. One of them said ‘strip’ over her shoulder and I just stood there not believing it. So she barked ‘strip’ again, so I took off a cardigan and my shoes, and then one of them just ripped everything off me and pushed my legs apart and yanked out a Tampax – sorry about this, Linda – and threw it in a bin and dunked me in the bath without even seeing me. Do you know what’s worse than being naked and seen by strangers, including men strangers? It’s being naked and unseen, because you don’t even count as a woman. Why men? In case the women patients are uncontrollable. The bath was dirty. So were the nurses. I asked for a sanitary towel but n
o one replied. I don’t know if they were being cruel: I don’t think they thought that what came out of my mouth were words. Well I was mad, wasn’t I? That’s why I was there. I was mad because I was a patient, I was wicked because I was a prisoner: they were sane because they were nurses and good because they could go home after work.
Linda, is that guy over there in the suit watching? No? You’re sure?
They didn’t go far, mind you, most of them. They lived, breathed, slept The Hospital. Whole families of nurses live in houses at the foot of the great Broadmoor wall. They intermarry. Complain about one and you find you’re talking to the cousin, aunt, lover or best friend of the complainee. You learn to shut up: you learn to smile. I was a tea bag for the whole of one day and I never stopped smiling from dawn to dusk. That’s right, I was a tea bag. Nurse Kelly put a wooden frame round my shoulders and hung a piece of gauze front and back and said ‘You be a tea bag all day’ so I was. How we all laughed. Why did he want me to be a tea bag? It was his little joke. They get bored, you see. They look to the patients for entertainment.
Treatment? Linda, I saw one psychiatrist six times and I was there three years. The men do better. They have rehabilitation programmes, ping-pong, carpentry and we all get videos. Only the men get to choose the video and they always choose blue films. They have to choose them to show they’re normal, and the women have to choose not to see them to show the same. You have to be normal to get out. Sister in the ward fills in the report cards. She’s the one who decides whether or not you’re sane enough to go before the Parole Committee. The trouble is, she’s not so sane herself. She’s more institutionalized than the patients.
Eddie, come and join us! How was your game? You won? Better not do that too often. You don’t want to be seen as an over-achiever. This is Linda, I’m telling her how we met. At the clinical disco. Shall we do a little dance, just the pair of us, in the middle of everything and everyone, just to celebrate being out? No, you’re right, that would be just plain mad. Eddie and I love each other, Linda, we met at the clinical disco, down Broadmoor way. Who knows, the doctor may have been wrong about me not having babies; stranger things happen. My mum ran out on my ex, leaving him to look after the baby: he came to visit me in Broadmoor once and asked me to go back to him, but I wouldn’t. Sister put me back for that: a proper woman wants to go back to her husband, even though he’s her little sister’s father. And after he’d gone I cried. You must never cry in Broadmoor. It means you’re depressed; and that’s the worst madness of all. The staff all love it in there, and think you’re really crazy if you don’t. I guess they get kind of offended if you cry. So it’s on with the lipstick and smile, smile, smile, though everyone around you is ballooning with largactyl and barking like the dogs they think they are.
I tell you something, Linda, these places are mad-houses. Never, never plead the balance of your mind is disturbed in court: get a prison sentence and relax, and wait for time to pass and one day you’ll be free. Once you’re in a secure hospital, you may never get out at all, and they fill the women up with so many tranquillizers, you may never be fit to. The drugs give you brain damage. But I reckon I’m all right; my hands tremble a bit, and my mouth twitches sometimes, but it’s not too bad. And I’m still me, aren’t I. Eddie’s fine – they don’t give men so much, sometimes none at all. Only you never know what’s in the tea. But you can’t be seen not drinking it, because that’s paranoia.
Eddie says I should sue the barrister, with his fine talk of therapy and treatment in Broadmoor, but I reckon I won’t. Once you’ve been in you’re never safe. They can pop you back inside if you cause any trouble at all, and they’re the ones who decide what trouble is. So we keep our mouths shut and our noses clean, we ex-inmates of Broadmoor.
Are you sure that man’s not watching? Is there something wrong with us? Eddie? You’re not wearing your earring, are you? Turn your head. No, that’s all right. We look just like everyone else. Don’t we? Is my lipstick smudged? Christ, I hate wearing it. It makes my eyes look small.
At the clinical disco! They hold them at Broadmoor every month. Lots of the men in there are sex offenders, rapists, mass murderers, torturers, child abusers, flashers. The staff like to see how they’re getting on, how they react to the opposite sex, and on the morning of the disco Sister turns up and says ‘you go’ and ‘you’ and ‘you’ and of course you can’t say no, no matter how scared you are. Because you’re supposed to want to dance. And the male staff gee up the men – hey, look at those titties! Wouldn’t you like to look up that skirt – and stand by looking forward to the trouble, a bit of living porno, better than a blue film any day. And they gee up the women too: wow, there’s a handsome hunk of male: and you have to act interested, because that’s normal: if they think you’re a lezzie you never get out. And the men have to act interested, but not too interested. Eddie and I met at the clinical disco, acting just gently interested. Eddie felt up my titties, and I rubbed myself against him and the staff watched and all of a sudden he said ‘Hey, I mean really,’ and I said ‘Hi,’ and he said ‘Sorry about this, keep smiling,’ and I said, ‘Ditto, what are you in for?’ and he said ‘I got a job as a woman teacher. Six little girls framed me. But I love teaching, not little girls. There was just no job for a man,’ and I believed him: nobody else ever had. And I told him about my mum and my ex, and he seemed to understand. Didn’t you, Eddie! That’s love, you see. Love at first sight. You’re just on the other person’s side, and if you can find someone else like that about you, everything falls into place. We were both out in three months. It didn’t matter for once if I wore lipstick, it didn’t matter to him if he had to watch blue films: you stop thinking that acting sane is driving you mad: you don’t have not to cry because you stop wanting to cry: the barking and howling and screeching stop worrying you; I guess when you’re in love you’re just happy so they have to turn you out; because your being happy shows them up. If you’re happy, what does sane or insane mean, what are their lives all about? They can’t bear to see it.
Linda, it’s been great meeting you. Eddie and I are off home now. I’ve talked too much. Sorry. When we’re our side of our front door I scrub off the make-up and get into jeans and he gets into drag, and we’re ourselves, and we just hope no one comes knocking on the door to say, hey that’s not normal, back to Broadmoor, but I reckon love’s a talisman. If we hold on to that we’ll be okay.
Pumpkin Pie
This is a story for Thanksgiving. Pay good attention or there won’t be many more – and I mean Thanksgivings, not stories. The rich have got to come to some accommodation with the poor – and by that I don’t mean provide housing (though I can see that might help) but ‘to accommodate’ in its old sense: that is to say recognize, come towards, incorporate, compromise.
Otherwise, I tell you, next year or the year after, there’ll be poison in the packet of mix for the pumpkin piecrust and not only that: some person will step out of the shadows and knife you as you stop your car for once outside, not inside, your high-security garage, the better to take the giant pumpkin for the filling out of the boot. That person will be your conscience. How much do you think they paid the man who grew the pumpkin? Enough to live on? Enough to pay a doctor to get the pesticide out of his lungs? Of course not. Are you still listening? Or have you turned the music up? One of the things you should never do in the presence of the rich, I know, is to mention the problems of the poor. It is in the worst possible taste. Almost as bad as suggesting to the rich that that is what they are – rich. Well, it’s understandable. The hearts of the rich bleed for the poor, of course they do, but what can they do about any of it? Bleed to death?
Look, I don’t want you to share your pumpkin pie. The poor make pumpkin pie just as well as the rich – given a sink, of course, an oven, some ingredients and a scrap of energy left over from survival – and probably make it better, usually belonging to some immigrant community in which the tradition of home-cooking still lives. This is no compensat
ion for being poor, mind you. I am not of Solzhenitsyn’s opinion, when he reckoned that the piece of dry bread saved against all the odds by Ivan Denisovitch in the labour camp tasted better than a rich man’s feast. No.
Take Antoinette for example. Antoinette was the maid up at the Marvin household. The Marvins were once of banker stock but now owned shopping malls and theme parks in the West. They weren’t particularly nouυeau riche or vulgar: they had books on the shelves, and a good painting or two on the walls, and the ballgames stayed silent on the giant screens all through Thanksgiving dinner. The house was on many levels, true, with an indoor swimming pool and a workout room full of wonderful metallic shapes, and thin elegant trees growing through glass tables as if indoors were the same as out; and it was built for the family by the family, custom-built with an eye for detail, and it had high steel fences and a barred steel gate which slid aside gracefully for known and named guests, and kept the poor, the hungry and the angry out. This year Thanksgiving dinner was to be buffet-style, that is to say eaten on the lap not around the table. Antoinette’s family – she had raised seven children without benefit of live-in or maintaining husband – would not have thanked her for requiring them to eat their food on their laps. But Honey Marvin, who liked everything just perfect, had decided that was how Thanksgiving would be – a buffet. Sit-down dinners were old-fashioned and clumsy, and her husband, John Junior, might take the opportunity to eat and drink too much, against the nutritionist’s advice. Antoinette and Claire, the Cordon Bleu girl, could surely manage a buffet; only eleven guests this year anyway, which with family meant thirteen – thirteen; that really got Honey going: it took both her familiar psychiatrist and her new fortune-teller to calm her down about thirteen. Sometimes Honey confessed to guests that she’d really rather not entertain at all: she couldn’t endure it: you either asked the wrong people, or you forgot one or other of the right people; and John Junior would sulk, and not say a word to anyone, or John Junior would not sulk, and say too much. She would make the cranberry sauce herself and everything else would be home-made by the staff.
