Sin City

by Wendy Perriam

  “Lil! Wakey-wakey, dear. Your coffee’s getting cold.”

  I jump as well as Lil. Those Friends have piercing voices and I was miles away. Lil is the headmistress. She used to run a private school in Hampshire for over a thousand girls. Now she dribbles both ends, asleep and awake. They ought to let her sleep. That’s what I dislike about the Friends. They’re so busy being bountiful, they can’t see that oblivion is more precious than their coffee, especially for patients in pain. Lil has emphysema and osteoarthritis, as well as being senile. She frightens me the most, in fact. All that education couldn’t help her, not even two degrees. You always think it won’t be you. She thought that, no doubt, when she was taking Assembly in her cap and gown, or sipping Tio Pepe with the Mayor on Founder’s Day. She’s broken up her biscuits into a rubble of fine crumbs, dropped them in her shoes.

  “Now be a good girl, Lil.”

  That volunteer could have been her pupil once, carrying her books, cowering at her door. “Yes, Miss Evans. No, Miss Evans”, certainly not Lil. Lilian E. Evans (MA Oxon, FRCM) is dressed in a pink flowered cotton dress in mid-November, with thick lisle stockings wrinkling round her knees. Half of them wear summer frocks, with cardigans. Maybe it was summer when they entered, a hundred years ago. Winter ever since.

  I think I’ll go to Art. I can’t take too much of Florence Ward, not without a break. The smell of lavatories, that woman who keeps chewing when there’s nothing in her mouth, the one who pulls her hair out and has bald patches on her scalp. It’s not that I’m superior – not like those damn Friends. That’s the trouble, really. I know it could be me. It is me, isn’t it? Six weeks, six years, six aeons. Or Norah. There’s nothing wrong with Norah, not that wrong. Her mother was Irish, Catholic, pregnant and unmarried – a fatal combination. She ran away to England, had the baby (Norah – the name was pinned onto her shawl, with a tiny silver shamrock), left her on an English convent doorstep, and went back to another part of Ireland where she took a different name. They caught her in the end, but she cheated them by dying. It’s like a fairy story without the happy ending. Nurse MacDonald told me the whole saga. She’s been here almost as long as Norah has herself.

  “Norah …” She’s helping with the coffee, holding the cup for Lil, mopping up the dribble and the spills. She pauses, turns to face me. She may be slow, but she never says “Not now”, or “Wait, I’m busy”.

  “Fancy Art this morning?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  Norah never minds. She’s far too good for here. I want to weep sometimes the way she just accepts. I mean, even things like shoes. Those black and broken-down things belonged to another patient who conveniently died. I expect Staff Nurse cut the legs off as well as nicked the shoes. They might have come in handy for an amputee. “You should have refused to wear them,” I’ve told her twice already. “They’re not even your size, Norah”.

  “I don’t mind.”

  She’d even look quite pretty if someone bothered with her, paid for her to have a perm or something, or newer glasses. Straight hair in your fifties looks wrong on anyone, but it’s lovely silky hair and she’s got that pale bone-china Irish skin which seems to last. I wonder what her mother was like – pale and mousy, or black hair and blue eyes? I wonder if she wonders.

  “Come on, Norah. If you wait for Lil to finish, there won’t be any decent brushes left.”

  I quite like Art now. The girl who takes it is very nice and normal, married with two children and a golden labrador. She told me I had talent which made me cry again because that’s my father’s talent, a present like his nose. I’ve never really used it. I did French at school, not Art. He was always painting, tiny fiddly things which wouldn’t upset my mother or take up too much room. My mother hates hobbies, especially large or messy ones which can’t be put away.

  Norah takes my arm and we set off down the corridor. The corridors at Beechgrove are so dark and tall and narrow, you feel as if they’re closing over your head. And at night-time it’s like walking through a tunnel. They’re damp and sort of clammy, and if you shout, your voice reverberates. But at least I don’t get lost now, and the porters always grin and call me “love”.

  The Art Room’s in the annexe, which is newer than the main part of the hospital. Beechgrove proper is late Victorian with grim stone walls, built really high and thick so no one could escape. The annexe is prefabricated concrete, also grey, but lower, with a flat and damp-stained roof. It still looks makeshift, as if the workmen buggered off before they finished.

  I hold the door for Norah and we enter to a smell of fug and feet. Coffee time again, though the coffee here is different – Maxwell House with sugar separately. I snitch a few more biscuits, slip them in my bag. Jan’s visiting this evening, coming straight on after work, so she’s bound to need a snack. Jan’s a true friend, doesn’t need it pinned on her lapel. Okay, so she chickened out the day she brought me here, but she waited two whole hours outside the hospital, even braved the gates, at last, but she got lost (like everyone) and landed up in Jude Ward, saw the stumps and junkies. She was so upset, she kept away for over two weeks, just phoned my ward and left pathetic messages, then a month ago, she suddenly appeared, loaded down with guilt and flowers and Lucozade. She’s been coming ever since, though I know she loathes the place still. The least I can do is feed her custard creams.

  Jan and I grew up in Portishead, just four short streets apart. We met at kindergarten, moved schools together, twice, both went on to grammar school at Bristol. We even lost our virginity together – well, not in the same room, but within a week. (She hated it. I didn’t.) She left school a year before me, moved to London. I’d stayed with her a few times, when I had the time and fare, was secretly appalled that one cramped and gloomy room should cost so much. I never realised then that I might actually be sharing it, fatherless and futureless.

  Cut the drama, Carole. You’re better off than most here, as Nurse Taylor’s always saying. She’s right, in fact – just look around. Anne-Marie, wearing bovver boots with what looks like her nightie; Lady Macbeth Colin who sits hour after hour washing his hands in air; Dot screaming for more biscuits in a pre-school temper-tantrum – except she’s forty-five. Someone gives her one. Might as well have chucked it in the bin. Dot vomits half she eats, deliberately. We all know each other’s secrets through the Group. Dr Bates runs it, and another younger doctor, and all the nursing staff sit in, and the social workers sometimes. Norah never says a word. They let her off, I don’t know why. But everyone else has to speak each time. Vomiting or stealing, nothing’s sacred. Fathers, mothers – mothers in particular. There’s always someone’s mother being mauled to death.

  Art is safer. We draw our mothers then, with horns and tails. Or fathers. I drew mine in a coffin with Rothman’s Kingsize in a golden candelabra at his feet. I smoke Rothman’s now myself, as a tiny tribute to him.

  “Finished, Norah?”

  Norah nods. Actually, I think she poured her coffee into Dot’s cup. Dot would suck out Norah’s innards with a straw if she thought they tasted good, sick them back again.

  “Let’s go, then. Bag some seats.”

  It’s funny how Art Rooms are always much the same – messy and untidy and sort of ripe and rancid. Even in a nuthouse they can’t institutionalise them. The colours are too bright and the smells too interesting and the people who teach Art refuse to go grey or fit a mould. The Art Room at Beechgrove is almost identical to the one we had at school. I breathe in the scent of turps and linseed oil and blessed chalk-and-charcoal sanity. Dot’s already there, deep in clay, modelling what looks like faeces, though perhaps they’re rissoles which are on the dinner menu for today. She likes to sit next to Teacher (Lynette Craig), hog the limelight. Teacher’s working, too – painting something abstract in shades of jungle-green. That’s why I admire Lynette. Art for her is not just occupational therapy for the loonies, but something vital which is worth her time and effort as well as ours.

  “Hallo, Ca
role, love. Hallo, Norah.”

  Lynette has orange hair and magenta nails. She’s only in her twenties and could have been a chum had I not been labelled Patient and she Staff. That chasm is unbridgeable.

  “I thought we’d paint our dreams today – not the ones we have at night, but the ones we build in the daytime.”

  “How d’you mean?”

  “What we want. What we hope to be or do. Where we want to go.”

  I slump down at the table next to Brian who is mixing paint with coffee. I feel suddenly depressed. I haven’t won. I stare out of the window. A grey and crosspatch sky, one skinny tree with two leaves clinging on to it. I hate November. It’s the most hopeless of the months, especially this tail-end of it when the days are dark both ends, and everything is bare and raw and dying. It’s summer on the radio which is squalling on as usual – some phoney lyric about June and moons and honeymoons. They’re terrified of silence here, have to fill it endlessly with ward-to-ward disc jockeys, vacuous love songs. I’ve never been in love. I was getting close with Jon, but he dropped me after the court case.

  “And now we’ve got a request for Susan Andrews with love and kisses from her boyfriend, John. Are you listening, Susan, in Canbury Gardens, Hove, because John says he loves you more than …”

  “Can’t we turn that off?”

  Lynette turns it down, but I can still hear John and Susan swapping hearts. They’re always John. Except mine was Jon without the h. Funny, really, Jon and Jan. I suppose I’m lucky to have Jan left. A lot of other friends were distinctly cool, and their mothers downright hostile.

  I glance at Brian’s dreams. They look more like nightmares, black with choking smoke. Last week, he painted his brain – at least that’s what he said it was, though it was also black and seemed to be unravelling. There was a little Nazi figure at the bottom of the painting (well, just a head shaped like a swastika, and boots), pointing a gun at it. Brian often paints guns, or even guillotines. Anne-Marie is ruling lines, but then she always does. Her dream is to draw a line without a ruler, or even dare a curve. She hasn’t made it yet, not in eighteen months.

  “Come on, Carole, aren’t you going to start, love?”

  “What’s the point? I haven’t any dreams.”

  “Everyone has dreams.”

  “Are those yours, then, the green ones?”

  “Yup. It helps to choose a colour, hot and red, or cool and green.”

  “All right, grey,” I say. Norah’s painting a mountain, a very tall and thin one. Hers is grey as well.

  I squeeze the tube of Payne’s grey, pick up a balding brush. My mind is still on coffins. People’s ashes must be grey, presumably, although I never saw my father’s. They came in a brown pot with the lid cemented on.

  I swap the grey for Van Dyke brown, try to paint a pot. It comes out like a crock of gold. I’ve seen that somewhere, haven’t I? On the competition form, spilling out gold coins.

  “Any gold?” I ask.

  “Gold?”

  “You know, really glittery, like they put on Christmas cards.”

  “We’re doing Christmas cards next week.”

  “I know. I need some now, though.”

  Lynette always finds you what you want. I pick out a much fatter brush which looks vitamin-enriched, dip it in the gold. I meant to paint gold coins, but they turn into a palace, and the palace into two and four, and six, and twelve, until there’s a whole metropolis of glittering golden palaces and a golden sky and shining golden people strolling down the golden streets.

  Everyone stops working – even Brian – to stare.

  “That’s beautiful,” Lynette says.

  I strike a match. Lynette fumbles for her Embassy. She always smokes when I do. Actually, I’ve left my ciggies in the coffee room.

  I touch the match to the topmost of my castles. It flares gold on gold a moment, gorges a tower or two, then burns sulky-black across the golden street. Lynette says nothing, just fetches a wet rag and lays it on the paper. They’re obsessional about fire here. If patients burn to death it gives the place a bad name. No risk of that in this case. My Shining Land of Dreams is just smudged and blackened dross. I’m terrified I’ll cry. I can feel my face crumpling up, try desperately to hold it stiff, keep swallowing and blinking. (I’m too far gone to whistle.) Norah notices. Her mountain is so high now, she’s had to use a separate piece of paper to fit its pointed summit in. She puts her crayons down, clambers off her stool, takes my arm. She doesn’t speak – I can’t – and Lynette never says stupid things like “Why did you do that?” She lets us go, in fact. If it had been the Group we’d have had to stay, control ourselves, or at least explain ourselves. It’s funny, really, how they insist on explanations here, when nothing’s explained at all in the outside world, not even what it’s doing there whirling round in cold black space, or what we’re doing on it.

  We walk back along the corridors. There are seven miles of corridor at Beechgrove, counting all four floors. I’m shivering so much I make Norah shake as well. I like the way she holds my arm, rather like a courteous old gentleman who is walking out his sweetheart. We step round a patient lying on the floor. My first week here, I used to try and pick them up, but you soon stop bothering. Even the nurses tend to leave them there. They’ve enough to do for the upright ones, I suppose. We cross the courtyard into the second lap of corridor, pass the usual doors marked STORES, TOILET, BURSAR, BANK. I wonder what I should be marked – failure, loser, drop-out, thief? Ex-daughter?

  I’m almost relieved to see the ward again. I’m beginning to understand how you could cower here all your life, refuse to venture out. It’s not that long till dinner and I can smell liver now, drowning out the worse smells. Half the patients have their paper bibs on and two are banging their forks against the metal of their wheelchairs. We have a choice of menu. Minced-up pap for patients missing teeth, or things with lumps and grit in for those who like a challenge. Sometimes I have both.

  “Norah! Over here!”

  Sergeant-Major Sanders. She uses Norah as a workhorse – probably wants her to feed another patient or put the semolina pudding through a liquidiser.

  “You’ve got a letter, dear.”

  Norah looks frightened, backs away, folds her arms across her chest, hands lost under armpits. It’s my turn to be the strong one. “It’s probably just a circular,” I soothe, trying to sound more sure. Would people waste their money circularising mental patients? Perhaps they’re selling straitjackets, or padded cells with all mod cons. I take the letter myself, hold it out to Norah who shakes her head, quickly slips her hands behind her back. It slithers to the floor. I pounce, stare at the golden letters bragging on the envelope. My whole stomach turns a sudden somersault. I glance behind me. Sanders is distracted – acting referee in a brawl between two over-eighty-fives.

  “Norah,” I say. I try to keep my voice low, stop it leapfrogging. After all, it might still be a circular, selling plastic pants or bunion shields. “Mind if I open this?”

  “Yes, take it, take it, please. I don’t want it. I never have letters. No one knows me. I … I haven’t an address.”

  “I’ll bring it back. It’s just that I’d like to read it on my own, somewhere quiet and private. You see, I think it may … concern me.”

  I hold it white and heavy in my hand. Golden letters embossed across the stamp. That signifies. Gold towers, gold shining city. The whole thing must be meant. Lynette has been an agent, setting free my dreams. A sudden shaft of sunlight strikes the window, lasers through the glass. Even Florence Ward is gold now.

  I stride towards the door, dodge the dinner trolley. Pig’s liver smells of roses, Lynette’s hot reds whooping from the ketchup.

  “Back in just a sec,” I shout, slam the door behind me; run, dance, waltz along the golden corridor.

  Chapter Four

  “You’ve won, Norah, you’ve won, you’ve won, you’ve won!”

  “Won what?” I ask. I never go to Bingo and they haven�
��t had a raffle for six months.

  “I used your name. For a competition. A holiday for two. You’ve won it. You’ve won the holiday. We’ve won it between the two of us. I filled the answers in and wrote the slogan.”

  I try to find my voice. Carole’s really shouting, whirling me round and round. I feel dizzy and confused.

  “It was a crappy slogan, really, but they must have liked it. You had to send three empty cigarette packs – Players No. 6 – well, just the fronts; three for each try. I sent sixty-three – all under different names. Your name won.”

  “But I … don’t smoke.”

  “Look, we’ve won, chickenhead. What the hell does it matter whether you smoke or not? I only hope you drink, though. It’s a champagne holiday with a champagne party every day. That’s what it says here.”

  “I’ve never had champagne.”

  “Well, you’ll have it now, even for breakfast, if you want. We leave just after Christmas – ten whole days including a New Year Party with more champagne and something called a Show Spectacular and …”

  “They won’t let us go.” I sink onto a pew. We’re in the chapel. That’s not right. It isn’t Sunday and you shouldn’t shout in chapels.

  Carole missed her dinner. I haven’t finished mine yet, but I expect it’s thrown away now. It was semolina with jam and I always eat it slowly, make colours with my spoon – red, pink, pinky-white. The pink was still quite deep when Carole burst back in, said she had to speak to me in private. There isn’t any private.

  “Have a cup of tea,” I said. Sister always says that when anyone’s disturbed. I tried to look for Sister, but she’d gone to tea herself and even Nurse Sanders had taken Martha to the toilet.