Birmingham Friends

by Annie Murray

  ‘Medicine. White stuff. They don’t tell you.’

  ‘It’s probably to help you keep calm,’ I told her.

  ‘My tummy hurts. I think there’s something wrong with my insides.’

  ‘Did you tell the doctor?’

  ‘He said I was imagining it.’ She began rocking the upper half of her body quickly back and forth. I saw the nurse’s eyes swivel towards her.

  ‘Livy,’ I whispered. ‘Try and keep still or she’ll make you go back now.’

  To my shame I found myself half wishing the nurse would take her away from us, out of my sight. I felt utterly helpless. What could I say? It was impossible to talk about anything: the past, the future were meaningless here. Everything was foreshortened into these minutes, here between these walls.

  ‘What day is it?’ Olivia asked.

  ‘Sunday,’ Elizabeth told her gently. ‘It’ll always be Sunday when we come, darling.’

  ‘The thing is,’ she said, suddenly speaking calmly and firmly. ‘They say I’m not well.’ She directed a look of piercing malevolence at her mother. ‘Nurse Tucker says she thinks I have good reason.’

  Suddenly there were tears pouring down her face again. She had a terrible grip on my hands, and appealed to me, not her mother. ‘I don’t want people to see me like this. Help me, Katie. Help me – please.’

  I was filled with panic, choking with it. ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do.’ I pulled my hands away and took her tightly in my arms as she cried, making loud, jarring sounds which reached higher into shrieks. The nurse was upon us immediately.

  ‘Come on, now,’ she said ‘That’s enough. You come with me.’ With rough skill she seized Olivia and pinned her arms to her sides. She was more than a match for her in size and strength.

  ‘I can’t go back up there!’ Livy screamed. ‘Not through all those doors. Don’t take me back!’

  ‘We’ll come again,’ we told her, but she wasn’t hearing us.

  The last sounds I heard were her screams echoing along the dark corridor, and the sound of a large key being turned. My legs were shaking so I could barely stand.

  As our taxi moved down Arden’s curving drive, taking us back to the station, I said to Elizabeth, ‘What d’you think she meant – about having good reason? What is all this about?’

  There was a long silence. I could tell the woman next to me was struggling hard with herself, her eyes glassy with tears. But with an enormous effort she regained control. Wiping her eyes, she looked down and straightened the front of her blouse.

  Finally, turning her gaze to the half-open window she said, ‘I really don’t have any idea.’

  ‘Oh, so you’re back at last are you?’ Douglas burst out when I walked into the house. The train to Birmingham had been delayed and then I’d refused Alec’s offer of a lift and had a long wait for the bus. Douglas was seething with resentment, so much so that he had come downstairs to confront me. Seeing the advent of trouble between us, my mother, with the expression of a prophet whose words have come true, disappeared towards the other end of the house.

  In a peevish tone which I had been hearing from him more and more lately, he said, ‘I suppose it’s too much to expect that you might spend Sunday with your husband?’

  I was too tired and upset to point out that often when I did spend Sunday with Douglas, a good part of it consisted of hearing the sound of his typewriter coming from the small study next to our bedroom.

  ‘You know where I’ve been.’ I wanted him to hold me, for something to feel normal and right.

  ‘Do I?’ he hurled the words at me. His blue eyes were hard with fury. ‘Why should I believe you?’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake, stop being so melodramatic,’ I said. ‘D’you really think I’d be making up some story about carting all the way to a mental hospital half way across Warwickshire for my own entertainment?’

  ‘That depends.’ He limped badly towards me, accentuating his disability. He did this to goad me, had been doing so increasingly lately. At first it had made me feel guilty, as if I was failing him in some way. Now I was beginning to resent it. I’d certainly had enough of everything for one day.

  ‘It all depends who you were really going to see, doesn’t it?’

  I stared at him coldly. ‘What are you talking about?’

  He stood silently for a moment, looking hard into my eyes and I met his stare, angry now.

  ‘Oh, forget I spoke,’ he said in a disgusted voice. I wasn’t certain whether the emotion was directed towards me or himself.

  ‘I went with Elizabeth Kemp. You know that.’

  Ignoring this he moved towards the stairs. ‘I suppose there’ll be something to eat this evening.’

  ‘Yes,’ I agreed flatly. ‘I suppose there will.’

  When he’d gone upstairs, my mother came back in. She’d obviously been listening. She walked across the room with a vase of flowers, not looking at me.

  ‘It’s no good.’ Her tone was brisk and neutral. ‘You’ll have to put him first. He’s not going to be the sort to play second fiddle to anyone.’

  ‘But he’s not having to,’ I cried, tearful now. ‘I’m doing my best. I can’t help it if Olivia’s ill, can I?’

  Mopping a ring of water from the table, she said, ‘Perhaps you should think of giving up work.’

  ‘I’d have thought you’d be the last person to suggest that.’ But I wondered wearily whether if she wasn’t right. Douglas had been so demanding recently, expecting so much from me and never seeming satisfied with what I did. I kept wondering what had happened to the kind, charming man I had married. I felt tired and pulled in too many directions at once.

  I told my mother that Douglas and I would eat upstairs that night, given the bad atmosphere between us. We ate our meal in silence, but by bedtime he was repentant.

  ‘I don’t know what I said all that for, darling.’ He was lying with his head on my breast. ‘Don’t take any notice of me when I’m like that, will you? I’ve been alone so long I don’t know how to behave with someone. You know I’m only like this because I love you and I need you so much.’

  I need you. I need you. Douglas’s constant refrain nowadays. He looked round at me, his expression contrite, and I was filled with sudden tenderness for him.

  ‘Can we try it again. Please, darling?’

  I’d had to be very careful, very patient with him as a lover. One hint of my own, usually unsatisfied desires, and he built mountains of resentment and insecurity. Almost as soon as he was aroused he had to be in me. Sometimes he left it just too late, and came with agonized embarrassment almost at the first contact of our flesh. When he did manage to hold back until he was inside me it was over in seconds, but he was jubilant with himself.

  We did have times of great affection and tenderness, but the frustrations of the bedroom seeped out to affect everything else. It was a huge obstacle to him, something he felt he had to work at, be good at. It was equally frustrating to me, except that I learned this was something he must never be made aware of. I found I was learning to tread very carefully with his moods, tiptoeing round him fearfully.

  I turned to him, and we held one another. Half my mind was still occupied with Olivia and I tried to keep it that way. I still found Douglas attractive but I tried to avoid becoming aroused by him because he seemed so incapable of giving me anything sexually. I had begun to think of our love life very much as my wifely duty, more painful in its frustrated expectations than a complete absence of lovemaking would have been.

  Douglas began to take his pleasure, running his hands over my body as if testing himself. I was ready for him as he plunged into me, panting with anxiety. He thrust into me once and it was over. He laid his head next to mine as if with relief, then raised it to smile at me, searching my face with his eyes.

  ‘That was good, wasn’t it, Katie? I think it’s getting better.’

  * * *

  OLIVIA

  Things I remember about Arden
/>   Arden is deep in the countryside, ringed by stagnant fields and petrified trees. I thought when they took me there that I was going to my death. They would have absolute control over me. They proposed to bury me alive behind all those doors. Every ten yards along the corridors, doors and more doors, unlocking, slamming, relocking. When they visit me, Mummy and Kate, I come up to them as if from a well, hauled up, up, door after door. From where they sit they can never see the bottom of it nor understand that this is where I have come from. I don’t want them to see me like this. And I don’t know whether it’s yesterday that I saw them or last month because the days run into each other and never change.

  I can’t tell them. Since I’ve been here I learn that what we say here is twisted into nonsense to those outside and whatever words I use make them frown, further convinced of my instability. I don’t try to speak about the way the staff slam and shout, treating even the doors with hatred, how they edge round the room, their backs to the walls of the ward which are the colour of dead skin, their eyes never leaving us. They are afraid of us. In my opinion they are very odd.

  We have reason after all, for being here: that’s what I know. Bridget has reason; she’s perhaps sixty, gave birth to a dead baby all those years ago. Agnes won’t eat the food. She feeds only from the pig bin outside the kitchen. She is heavy and slow like a cow. She lived among cows because she is a farmer’s wife. I don’t know why she thinks real food is too good for her, but she does have a reason, I know. So many of the others sit and stare, or if they talk I can’t make it out; it comes in odd waves and jerks like a jumper unravelling. But I hold this tightly in my head: no one’s here without a reason. I know that. The staff, however, choose to be here. What sort of reason is that?

  Other things I never tell them

  How it feels to wear a shroud of canvas, layers thick, stitched across and re-stitched, and to sleep in sheets of layered and cross-sewn calico, made so strong to stop us hurting ourselves with them. It chafes my skin red. Our ward is twenty strong. Like animals we rise with the light and are in bed at four-thirty, laid out under the high, blistered ceiling, our beds crammed in only a few inches apart. We breathe each other’s sour air, smell all of each other’s most intimate smells. I sleep between Gladys, a skeleton who wears the sweat perfume of death, and Mary who soils her bed and flies somewhere every night with massive wings and a chatter in her throat. I have never known this class of women before. They don’t worry about such distinctions, each wrapped in her own cocoon. It’s only the nurses who can’t hear my voice and learn about my family without goading me. ‘Posh cow.’ ‘Your Highness.’ ‘Lady Muck.’

  It’s a farm here, inside and out. On Sunday mornings they make us bath, all three hundred women, eight at a time, our shrouds in a stinking heap on the floor. The bath nudges sharply against my bones. Women scream and whip the water with their hands. The outlet pipes are four inches thick and I wonder if I could fit down them and be sucked away into the black womb of the sewer. The nurses parade among us shouting and eyeing our bodies.

  At mealtimes they are forever counting. No knives are allowed in the place. The prongs of the forks are an eighth of an inch long. They count them out, count them in. When they shout ‘Tables!’ we fight for a place at the benches round the pine tables even though we are always, in the end, sitting in the same place. At first I am numb and don’t know how to survive. As the days pass I am too hungry and wrangle and cram my mouth with the rest, for one hesitation and the food is down another’s throat. Food is all our pleasure here: warmth, comfort, a loving touch.

  Am I a Certified Lunatic? I don’t even know. No one tells me what Daddy has said to them to make them seal me in. Every morning the man comes to take away the bodies on his covered trolley. The old ladies stay in bed and die, dropping like bugs from the walls. With half-obvious relish he says, ‘Any for me today?’ He gets 7/6d for each corpse and he gathers them like a bunch of flowers. Will I leave here like that? Perhaps this is the beginning of it, knowing this: that within these dark walls there is another behind which I stand. It is so close it fits my skin, and behind it I am too chilled to feel even despair. The doctor said I might be schizophrenic because I’m thin. I watch others and wonder if I am already as bad. I feel lost.

  Some things I don’t do

  I don’t stand for hours in impenetrable silence. The crust of my silence can still be broken.

  I don’t touch myself intimately when other people can see.

  I don’t relieve myself in my bed, except during treatment.

  When we are outside for our morning shuffle round and round the scabby paths of the airing court, I do not look for leaves, shreds of groundsel, human waste, sycamore seeds to eat, nor do I chew my shoes, the hardest of leather (no laces) which can eventually be devoured after hours of sucking.

  But nor do I – their mark of a degree of trustworthiness – get led out to work in the kitchen, garden or laundry.

  What I do

  When I am allowed near my bed, I find myself standing there for many minutes at a time, not knowing why I am there.

  I sit in the dayroom and time must be passing but I can’t tell how long, nor can I solve the problem of how to lift and move an arm or leg even when there are alarms and fights on all sides. I look at the shiny wood of the floor and find patterns.

  I can’t sleep at night. I listen to hours of coughing and muttering and Mary’s airborne chatter and women relieving themselves in the privy in the corner. I stretch my eyes open wide to see if there is any hint of light in the sky between the bars of the windows even though there is no reason to hope for tomorrow. I talk to myself as there is no one else. I summon Mozart and Brahms in my head but they refuse to be roused. I call on my Daddy dream.

  On first arriving here I am energetic with fright. I charge to the walls and hammer myself against them while high sounds come out of my mouth. ‘Up the stick,’ they say. ‘Side room for her – that’ll teach her.’

  I am in a room with thick Rexine walls and a curved floor so my mess slides to the gutters at the edges. I am covered by a hard canvas jacket, my arms strapped round me so that I can only buffet my sides and shoulders and head against the yielding wall until I fall. I find myself in here several times, hardly knowing how I got here. When they come to retrieve me I hear spring-loaded bolts snap back. The first time, they bring nurses from the men’s wing to help. They charge in clumsily together like fat beetles and there are blue sleeves with white chevroned cuffs round me and a stench of male sweat.

  ‘You could’ve managed this one, surely?’ they bellow. ‘She’s only a little tiddler!’

  After several afternoons in there and the stunning doses of peraldehyde, I sit quiet.

  Nurse Tucker knows why I’m here. I haven’t told her, but she knows.

  * * *

  Chapter 22

  ‘Darling, whatever’s the matter?’

  Douglas followed me, hovering anxiously at the bathroom door as I rushed from our bedroom, still holding the empty cup from my morning tea.

  ‘Are you ill?’ He stood at a loss, toes on the edge of the lino in his pale blue pyjamas, as I retched. The tea had brought on instant rebellion from my stomach. I felt better immediately and drank a glass of water, doing fast calculations in my head once more to make sure. I’d missed my last period, I must have conceived during the first half of August, which made me about five weeks pregnant now.

  ‘D’you think you’ve caught a chill?’ Douglas asked, still standing back from me as if I might explode. He rubbed his hand through his unbrushed hair. ‘What? What’re you laughing at?’

  I felt a strong sense of relief. Something I could do for him, and do right. I went and put my arms round him. ‘Definitely not a chill,’ I said happily, looking up into his perturbed face. ‘Darling – we’re going to have a baby.’

  ‘A what?’ He was so flabbergasted that I laughed even more.

  ‘You do know the facts of life don’t you? This has happened the
past couple of mornings except you didn’t notice. And my period’s very late.’

  A flush spread across Douglas’s face, and I watched his expression break into a bashful kind of wonder. I realized he had scarcely thought himself capable of producing a child.

  ‘Oh, my love.’ He sounded awed. His scarred cheek twitched slightly as it did when he felt strong emotion. He held me close. Then he turned brisk, deciding to take charge. ‘We must take very, very good care of you. You must give up your job straight away, of course.’

  ‘Nonsense.’ I went to the basin and splashed water over my face. ‘I’ve got heaps to do and I can’t just give it up now. Exercise in pregnancy is supposed to be good for you. Don’t fuss, Douglas.’

  But he did fuss. Fuss would be a gentle word for it. That Sunday I was due to visit Olivia. The hospital had agreed to me visiting on my own, and I was anxious to go as often as possible without Elizabeth. We were settling into a pattern of seeing her once a fortnight, on alternate weeks. Elizabeth was occasionally accompanied by Alec. Douglas already resented this. Now it became a symbol, an issue on which to focus his lack of trust and his need to control me in order to feel safe.

  ‘You’re not to go,’ he ordered on the Saturday afternoon. I was sitting with my feet up looking through a box of books. I realized, as I looked at the old, forgotten titles, that Angus had given me several of them.

  ‘Douglas,’ I said quietly. ‘Please don’t start giving me orders. I’m going to Arden tomorrow. I’m sorry it means not being with you all day, but you did say you had work to do, and I simply have to go.’

  ‘But you need to rest, not keep gallivanting about all over the place. Don’t you care about our child?’

  ‘Oh don’t be so ridiculous,’ I flared at him. I was really needled by him lecturing me on a subject about which I knew far more than he did. ‘I’ve been out shopping all morning carrying heavy baskets of food for your dinner, which is far more exhausting than sitting on a train to Leamington. But it doesn’t even cross your mind to stop me doing that, does it?’ I stood up, still holding one of the books, intending to leave the room, but Douglas seized my arm, gripping me tightly.