The Vanishing Princess

by Jenny Diski

  “We took you on as a trainee. There’s a lot to learn about this business. I’m afraid you haven’t been quite honest with us, I don’t think you intend to make a career in the shoe trade.”

  Hannah confessed.

  “Then I’m afraid you’ll have to go, and give someone else the opportunity.”

  Having been ejected from three places in even fewer months, Hannah decided to take a more positive approach to life. She went home at lunchtime and packed her suitcase while they were downstairs in the shop. Time, she thought, to be somewhere else. She was in trouble again, and she couldn’t begin to imagine what more trouble would be like; or how many sackings there would have to be until she came to that black, unfathomable place that was designated by everyone (her father, stepmother, Nicholas, her mother and herself) as “where Hannah would end up.” She decided to short-circuit the whole process. She sat on the train heading for Bournemouth and her mother without any strong sense that she was making a final move. But sometimes it’s easier to leave before being asked.

  I’d sacrifice anything come what might

  For the sake of having you near

  In spite of the warning voice that comes in the night

  And repeats and repeats in my ear

  Don’t you know little fool

  You never can win

  Use your mentality

  Wake up to reality

  But each time I do just the thought of you

  Makes me stop before I begin

  ’Cos I’ve got you under my skin

  The staff watched the dancing, although not merely with approval. They kept a careful eye on Terry during the Social. And while his movements were smooth and assured as he partnered Hannah around the room to Frank’s crooning, he was careful always to keep a good six inches between them. Terry, she had been told, in confidential whispers, was there by Order of the Court. He had a history of sexually assaulting minors, but the judge had given him the chance to have treatment instead of putting him in prison.

  “But they watch him all the time. One false move, and he’s behind bars,” Pat, a fellow patient, told Hannah with a proper sense of drama. “Don’t tell anyone about it because it’s a secret. No one’s supposed to know, to give him a chance to have normalised relationships.”

  Hannah had become used to the peculiar mix of psychosocial jargon and colloquial speech in which most of the longer-term patients spoke. They prided themselves on having a technical knowledge of their own and other patients’ conditions.

  In fact, Hannah heard about Terry from half a dozen patients, all of them insisting that she must never mention it to anyone else. Only Terry, and his current girlfriend, Sally, another patient, never spoke about why he was there, which was in itself suspicious, because there was nothing the inmates liked more than describing their illnesses to each other.

  Hannah had never come across a sex offender before, and Terry didn’t fit her picture of how people who did that kind of thing should look. Deep down, she didn’t really believe it. He was a handsome, well-dressed man in his late twenties, who spoke with a public-school accent. He was always polite and well mannered, and was very attentive to Sally, who seemed flattered to have such an elegant boyfriend. But it was a fact that he wasn’t allowed to go out of the hospital grounds, and Hannah noticed whenever she was alone with him in the dayroom, within seconds a nurse would appear from nowhere, and stand or sit nearby until someone else arrived.

  Hannah had learned a great deal about people during her four months at the hospital: strange things, the kind of things you don’t learn anywhere else. But, surprisingly quickly, even the oddest details of people’s lives and problems came to seem almost normal and everyday.

  There was Pam, so tall and thin she could have been a model. Pam was twenty-three, and hadn’t been outside, except in an ambulance, for five years. She was agoraphobic, Hannah learned. But that wasn’t all. She was also claustrophobic and frightened of new people, though no one seemed to know the name of that particular ailment, and she was given to fits of panic for no apparent reason at all. Once, when Pam tried on Hannah’s drainpipes, she had a claustrophobic attack because of the tightness of the jeans around her waist and legs, and they’d had to hold her down, writhing and screaming blue murder on the floor, while a nurse cut them off her with a pair of scissors. By then, this was no more than part of an ordinary day for Hannah, and it hadn’t really been necessary for the nurse to ask if she was upset by the commotion.

  Sally, Terry’s girlfriend, had a chronic inferiority complex, according to Pat, who had been in the hospital for two years and was the most adept at jargon. Sally was one of a pair of identical twins: the very twins who a few years before had been on television every night for months advertising home perms. She was the “twin who didn’t have the Terri.” Or maybe she was the one who did. Pat couldn’t remember. But she was certain it was very significant that Sally was going out with Terry.

  “Terri, you see?” Pat explained with a knowing nod. Hannah nodded back. She thought she could see that it was significant, but she was not experienced enough yet in these things to know how, exactly. Every Saturday Sally’s twin, Jackie, would come to visit. They really did have the same hairstyle, short and waved, and astonishingly, Jackie always arrived wearing exactly the same clothes Sally had on that day. Sally insisted it was because they were psychic with each other, but Hannah noticed after a few weeks that Sally was called to the phone regularly every Friday night. One week, she crept down the stairs to listen and overheard Sally whispering into the mouthpiece.

  “. . . the pink shirtwaister and black winklepickers.”

  Hannah was sorry because she liked the idea of telepathic twins. But the harmony between Sally and Jackie didn’t go beyond the sartorial.

  In the dayroom, Jackie would begin each visit by recounting her week for Sally. There were dances and films and an unending rollcall of boyfriends. Sally sat listening to all this with an increasingly grim face until Jackie had finished and asked, “So what have you been up to?”

  Sally, of course, being a patient in a mental hospital, hadn’t been up to much. She would offer whatever hospital drama had occurred and talk about Terry and how well they were getting on, and their plans for marriage, later, when he’d finished . . . that is, when they were discharged. Jackie’s look of smug satisfaction at the course of her own life turned to distaste as Sally told her about the life of the hospital. It was, her downturned mouth silently said, not nice; not a nice thing to talk about. And when Sally got on to Terry, Jackie contrived to look very superior and knowing: a look which clearly had a history in their lifelong relationship and which elicited an automatic response from Sally. Three visits out of four, Sally would stop talking, take a long look at Jackie’s expression, and, without any further warning, fly at her twin sister, grabbing handfuls of Terri-waved hair and slapping her carefully made-up face. Usually a nurse was nearby, ready to pull them apart, and Jackie would straighten her clothes with a prissy, self-righteous movement, and leave, telling the nurse that her sister was never going to get better, she had always been like that, mean and envious, and always would be.

  Hannah decided it must have been Sally, after all, who didn’t have the Terri.

  The visits were allowed to continue because the doctors apparently felt Sally had to work through her identity problems. But eventually they were stopped when, one Saturday afternoon, Jackie was found smooching in a dark corner of the entrance hall with Terry, after she’d said goodbye to Sally in the dayroom. Terry swore Jackie had pretended to be Sally, and eventually Sally accepted his version, but she refused to see her sister after that, and it was agreed by her doctor that the visits had better be suspended for the time being.

  Douglas never danced. He was as quiet as Danny the MC was boisterous, but he attended all the Socials and watched from his chair with a benign, myopic smile. He was a Scot of indeterminate age, but it was certain that he was younger than he looked. Mild was the essence o
f Douglas, who was shy to the point of anguish, but eventually managed to have a quiet courteous relationship with most of the patients. People were inclined to tell him their troubles, because he was capable of sitting still for ages and never interrupted beyond a murmured “Oh, dear,” or “That’s a shame.” He wore a tweed jacket that might have belonged to his father and cavalry twill trousers with heavy patterned brown brogues, and walked slowly, which Pat said was as much to do with the heavy tranquillisers he was on, as his natural slowness of temperament.

  Pat also related the story about Douglas’ only attempt to join the occupational therapy group. He did a painting of a sporran, very carefully, extremely detailed, a bit of a work of art. He was proud enough of it to show it to Pat, and then to his doctor at his weekly session. The reason why Douglas had never returned to occupational therapy was because Dr. Watt (something of a laughable figure among the patients, and, as it happened, a Scot himself) had taken a long moment to consider the painting, and then asked, “And what exactly is this, Douglas?”

  “A sporran, Dr. Watt,” Douglas explained politely, a little hurt that it wasn’t obvious.

  “Yes, Douglas, a sporran,” the doctor mused, rolling his r’s. “And what is behind a sporran?”

  Douglas flushed bright red, as he was inclined to do when anything biological was mentioned. He was, Pat confided, almost certainly a virgin.

  “A kilt,” Douglas said, somewhat resourcefully for him.

  “That is true,” Dr. Watt conceded, a little tetchily. “And what is concealed by the part of the kilt—a skirt, mind you—that is hidden by the sporran, Douglas?” he asked, and went on without waiting for his patient to come up with a further obfuscation. “A weapon! Am I not right?” He made use of the subliminal pause before answering his own question. “A weapon, Douglas, that is what. A weapon is concealed behind this object you have drawn. You are very angry, aren’t you?”

  “No,” Douglas muttered deep into his chest, and became thereafter, according to Pat, an even milder version of himself, and an ex-artist.

  Hannah never quite worked out what, exactly, was wrong with Pat. She was a skinny, shapeless and spinsterish young woman who wore glasses with lenses half an inch thick, and spoke in a high-pitched, whining voice. Pat gave as full an account of her troubles as she did of others’. She was a depressive, she said, and her problem stemmed from having a neurotic invalid mother whom she had had to look after for most of her thirty odd years. She had never married, hardly had any boyfriends, because her life revolved around the demands of the sick woman. One day, for no particular reason she could recall, after two decades of uncomplaining service, Pat started screaming in the middle of preparing a poultice for her mother’s troubled chest. She flung the boiling muddy muck at the old woman, who managed to duck so that the nasty stuff made an unpleasant mess on the wall. After that Pat went very quiet and sat in the corner of the bedroom she had inhabited since childhood, waiting, it seemed, for something to happen. When they came to take her away, she was as relieved as her ailing mother, who was fixed up with a home help, which, frankly, turned out to be a much more satisfactory arrangement for all concerned. Pat had been in the small psychiatric hospital in Bournemouth ever since. On the whole she seemed happy enough, but from time to time she was subject to terrible depressions, when she turned her face to the wall and stared at a fixed point for several days on end. Luckily, some patient-drama always came along that was interesting enough to pull Pat back from her dark place and allow her to take up her role as hospital reporter.

  Hannah understood very well when Pat told her about sitting in her room waiting for something to happen. It was what Hannah had been doing for the past four months. She might, currently, be moving around the dayroom, propelled by the pressure from Terry’s body, but her life, and consequently her mind, were static.

  She was marking time, and during her first few weeks at the hospital she had learned that there was nothing to be thought about the future. Just as being pushed backwards around the dayroom had no implication for travelling, so the daily activities of sleeping, eating and talking to people were without meaning beyond the moment.

  It was a curious condition for a fifteen-year-old to be in. All young children live with part of their minds constantly busy rehearsing the future. The “what happens next” of stories becomes a pattern for their own lives. “When I’m five, I’ll be going to school.” “When I’m grown up, I’m going to be . . .” “When I get married . . .” And the curiosity about what will be becomes a propellant. At fifteen, a person might be confused by the many but invisible possibilities ahead of her, but very few live without possibilities at all. It would be alien to the restless energy of young human creatures.

  But Hannah had run out of possibilities. It was as if the door to the dayroom had vanished and there was nothing beyond circling in strict tempo. She might have panicked, but it seemed she had used up all her panic when she swallowed the sleeping pills her mother kept in the drawer, so she held still, marking time in strictempo, as if waiting for something to happen. But she had not the slightest notion of what it might be. Or rather, she knew there was nothing that could happen. So, at fifteen, in the year the Beatles recorded “Love Me Do,” she danced her old-fashioned dance and closed down the part of her mind that wrestled with the future.

  This was not the reason why she was in hospital. It was not a sign of Hannah’s neurosis. Her sense of the absence of any possible future was fully endorsed by her doctor, the same Dr. Watt who had stifled Douglas’ creative impulse. But, in Hannah’s case, Dr. Watt was being no more than realistic. And so was Hannah.

  There was nothing that could happen. Hannah’s life was on hold. Dr. Watt, to give him credit, had tried to push it in a direction, to get her father to understand that, in spite of her expulsion, she had to be allowed to go back to school; but having failed, there was little he could do but wait and see. It was generally agreed by the staff that this was the best thing to do, but it was also recognised that it was not possible to keep a child in hospital forever. Eventually, something had to be done, though no one, so far, had come up with any practical solution.

  The staff at the Lady Mary Hospital did not consider Hannah to be in need of hospitalisation. That is to say, they did not feel she needed treatment because, although she had arrived after a small overdose and clearly had depressive tendencies, both her act of swallowing the handful of pills, and her depression, were perfectly rational responses to her circumstances. She was not technically mentally ill, but very troubled, and with cause.

  She had been admitted to Lady Mary’s not on the recommendation of any doctor, but at the insistence of her mother, after Bournemouth General had assured her that Hannah was all right and could be sent home the morning following the pill-swallowing episode. She had demanded her daughter be sent to a psychiatric institution with such vehemence, not to say hysteria, that the admission doctor thought it a good idea to do it to keep Hannah out of her way for a bit, and to give them a chance to find out why the girl had tried to kill herself only two days after leaving her father and moving in with her mother.

  They contacted Hannah’s father, and the following day he arrived, unhappily at the same time as her mother came to visit. The nurse on duty heard screams in the admission ward and found father and mother standing on either side of Hannah’s bed, each turned towards her, their heads almost touching over Hannah’s body like the apex of a triangle, shouting at her in unison.

  “How dare you do this to me!”

  “. . . do this to me! You’ve never been anything but trouble! I’m sick to death of you . . .”

  “. . . sick to death of you . . . and the trouble you’ve caused me . . .”

  “. . . you’ve caused me . . .”

  It was Hannah, in the bed with the covers over her head, who was screaming.

  The nurse hustled both adults out of the ward before the rest of the patients began screaming, too. In the office, deprived of the focu
s of their rage, they began yelling accusations at each other. She blamed him, he blamed her, for this turn of events, their voices rising until their present situation was left behind and pure hatred rang around the corridors of the hospital. Several male nurses and a couple of doctors came running at the commotion, tranquillising injections at the ready, only to discover it was visitors, not patients, they had to separate.

  Later, Hannah told Pat that it was the first time in five years her parents had been in the same room, and certainly, when they were standing over her bed, the first time in a great deal longer that they’d agreed about anything.

  It was decided that Hannah had better not go back to her father either, for the time being, and since there were no other relatives, the hospital was the only place she could be.

  They didn’t give her any treatment, apart from a couple of tranquillisers after her parents’ visit. She was not on any drugs, and her weekly sessions with Dr. Watt were brief enough.

  “How have things been this week?” he’d ask her.

  “Fine, thank you,” Hannah would reply.

  “Is there anything you want to talk to me about?”

  “No, not really.”

  Then, after a long pause, while they both listened to the silence, Dr. Watt would make ready to get up from his chair.

  “Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing . . .”

  Hannah would get up and say goodbye.

  Every session was the same. At first, Dr. Watt’s “Is there anything you want to talk to me about?” sounded more meaningful to Hannah than was intended. He was a doctor, after all, and all the other patients had their problems aired in their therapeutic sessions. Hannah felt his words were probing for something that he had knowledge of. She started to feel he knew something and was inviting her to tell him about it. But she couldn’t think what it might be. Nothing was happening in her life, and she didn’t mind that, and therefore there was nothing she wanted to say. Yet, perhaps, there was something she couldn’t think of, or needed to discuss. She pondered the problem and finally came up with the notion that she was pregnant, and Dr. Watt knew it, but she didn’t. She got increasingly alarmed by this phantom pregnancy, in spite of the fact that she had only had one sexual experience, and that two years before, and penetration hadn’t occurred. But it is remarkably easy for a troubled young girl to imagine impossible things, particularly when the life of the mind is blank. Eventually, she summoned up courage and responded to Dr. Watt’s invariable question, which was, in reality, no more than a concealed way of saying he hadn’t come up with any solution to her situation.