by Susan Tarr
Someone slapped his hand.
Forever he drifted, sometimes hearing the whimpering and gurgling, sometimes being bathed and changed, only to be soaked in piss again. Water forced between his cracked lips into his bruised mouth. Tablets. Medicine poured down his throat. Ulcers formed, stinging. Glycerine on gauze sticks swabbed around his tongue and gums.
Pink nurse? Why was he at the foot of his bed? Why was the wall at his feet?
Pink nurse?
When is it?
Where is it?
He sat in an armchair in the dayroom, the smell of piss stronger, stinging his groin. Everything he saw through his aching eyes was blurred. Sometimes a stray thought. Occasionally the thought honed in acutely on one memory or another; the lucidity and clarity strangely frightening.
Other times nothing to prompt them. Just dull. Not totally dark. Just dead. He wondered if he had died.
Someone said, “There’s been another execution.”
A passing attendant wiped the drool that dripped into a sodden mess on the front of Malcolm’s pyjamas, tied a towelling feeder around his neck.
His mouth hung slack.
Execution?
Was it him?
Was he dead?
CHAPTER 8
The Green Budgie
Clarity: for today, and memories of Maeve Murphy and her green budgerigar. Malcolm attempted to recall every word she had ever spoken to him. His intention was to fill the dark void in his mind, fearful that his memories would become lost or spill out if he didn’t hold onto them. Today was Maeve’s day.
Sometimes she lived in isolation higher up the hill at the women’s ward. This ward overlooked the drab stone buildings and the little village nestled safely farther down in the valley, toward the open sea. Maeve was the one who’d called The Building a castle. Maybe from up there it was. From where he was it was more like a prison. She came from Quarantine Island off Port Chalmers up the Dunedin Harbour. They rowed her to the Seacliff rocks in a dinghy, across the Pacific Ocean.
Maeve said she’d seen the lighthouse. “Not many people have seen it, you know. Like when it’s daylight. I saw that lighthouse up real close.”
She’d been escorted over the slippery strands of black kelp and sharp mussel-clad rocks, past blue penguins and paua, up the steep climb to the road high above. He knew this part was true because he’d been down to the rocks, before he lived in Maclaggan Street. He knew the tang of salt spray on his face, the smell of seaweed and crabs, the joy at being totally free on the rocks. Alone except for seagulls.
She had walked up through the buttercup fields that joined into the rocks, she’d said, and up the uneven rocky pathway that was the high road, past the hall, past the primary school. Up, up the hill. Even beyond the main gates, higher than anyone else, to the women’s ward.
She was right proud to be up the hill.
“I survived tuberculosis. Not many did. It’s a regular hospital there. It’s better than being down in the loony bin. From up there in the hospital you can see right across the Pacific Ocean.” Or so she said.
One day she showed Malcolm her storybooks. Strangely enough, he knew the stories by heart, though he didn’t know how. Besides the books and her trip in the rowing boat, he thought she was daft. She’d kept her budgie on the end of a string. If that wasn’t mad, what was?
Maeve said, “Old Mrs Abbott cut the wings off her budgie so it couldn’t fly. That Damned Cat ate it. We had a terrible job settling. We cried all night.”
He pictured a ward full of crying women.
“It was horrible,” she said louder. “We were very upset.”
So she tied her green bird on a string. She’d thought by warning That Damned Cat about how she’d skin him alive if he moved a whisker in her budgie’s direction, she’d keep it safe. He knew the story by heart, how she and her budgie paraded up and down the long hall. In contempt of the cat.
“It was Christina who got hold of my budgie.” Maeve said this with a sob in her voice. “She dragged him around on his string, him half-flying or bouncing on his back. I tried to get him, but Christina ran into the domestic woman driving the electric polishing machine. Killed my green budgie.”
Maeve bawled loudly as she described how she beat up Christina, pulling out most of her hair. She wailed long and hard about how the domestic woman had finished off her budgie yet blamed the patients.
“She said if we were still using mops I’d still have my budgie and Christina would still have her hair. And there wouldn’t be all those bloody feathers to clean up. She was so nasty, Malcolm. Malcolm!”
He’d surprised himself by laughing loudly when she got to this part. She’d rounded on him smartly.
“You’ve got a mean streak. I wish I never told you. I hate you! I’ll hate you forever.”
He stopped laughing. He didn’t want to be hated by anyone. And he didn’t know why he’d laughed anyway.
His thoughts wandered away from her. He once wondered what it would be like to have a cat. Sometimes he’d deliberately left the rubbish bin lids open so kittens could climb inside for a feed. But Maeve – ah, yes, there she was again – blabbed to an attendant who dragged up all manner of health issues: mange, ringworm, fleas and worse. What could be worse than mange, ringworm and fleas?
He sat, unmoving, in the armchair in the dayroom.
It was time to eat: sausages, peas, mashed potato and gravy.
It was time to sleep. He rolled his clothes in a bundle and put it outside the door. In the early morning someone tossed it back inside.
It was time to get up. 6am.
Lining the hall outside the bathroom were wooden benches, back to back, where the patients sat, some still in pyjamas, some already naked, waiting to be bathed, others dripping wet, waiting to be dried. Donkey stood naked and still, his penis, much bigger than the other men’s, hanging down, flaccid, his balls like red oranges. There were three bathtubs and three wooden chairs in the bathroom. Everyone had to be bathed, dried and dressed by breakfast time. Two inches of hot water in each bath, emptied when it was cold and scummy from repeated use.
As he let his pyjamas drop, Malcolm felt the chill rise up from the soles of his feet. Waiting in front of the baths, the basins and the lavatories with no seats and no doors, he glanced at his awakening body. His shoulders were broad. The thick matted hair on his chest extended across them, down to his belly button. His eyes followed the rough curls below his hollow paunch. Flesh hung in a fold over his hips. It used to fit him – now it was too big.
Donkey was saying he didn’t need to piss. A nurse threatened Donkey with The Treatment for not standing in the open urinal and pissing when she said so, though he had nothing to piss. Malcolm tried sending him a message through his eyes. Just piss some. It’s easier that way. He understood why Donkey, like some of the others, preferred to piss in the bathwater where no one would see him do it. But, no, Donkey had to stand in the open and piss because he was told to. And that was how it was. He stood there, his hand holding his penis, pissing a little in the open.
Malcolm knew Donkey would finish it in his bath.
“Get over here, sissy. I haven’t got all day,” snapped a stout nurse as she leaned across to turn on a tap. Air bubbles gurgled and blurted through the tap, clanging in the pipes behind the walls.
The bath water was shallow.
Donkey pissed.
Nightly, the patients left their false teeth in labelled pottles on a bench in the bathroom. A junior nurse on night duty would collect them and gingerly place them on a tray. Sometimes she had to get them out from a patient’s mouth first. Once he saw her drop the tray onto the floor, her left standing in the midst of them. He imagined them snapping at her feet. She scooped them back onto the tray, mixed and mismatched, audibly dry-retching.
He grinned, glad he didn’t have false teeth.
Outside. “The sun will do you good after this long winter,” the bald attendant said. “You go for a wee walk. Off you go th
en. Don’t forget lunch, boy.”
Malcolm felt apathetic and vague as he wandered through the main entrance, down the uneven road to the tennis courts. Someone had pulled weeds from the edges, and the nets had been tightened and the lines re-painted white. Someone apparently had his old job. The tennis courts were for the use of patients like The Twins – Leonard and Margaret – and the staff. The Twins waved to him. Inseparable, they moved in complete harmony with each other. If one stood they both stood, if one sat down they both sat down. If one was scolded or got the belt they would stand together awkwardly, arms at their sides until the punishment was complete. Afterward, they comforted each other in a special language the staff didn’t understand, chirrups, mumbles, and vague hand movements.
Malcolm waved back, then lowered his head and limped on. This was his first time outside on his own since he’d come back to The Building nearly a year ago. The Building, as it was called by Malcolm and the others, had been born from The Castle ruins.
Glancing up at the red brick walls of Clifton House, he noticed the ivy had grown considerably since he’d last seen it, stretching out tentacles, steadily claiming the bricks in its path. He remembered some time in his recent past when he’d walked to Speight’s Brewery in Dunedin, but he couldn’t remember why he’d walked there. Wilson’s Distillery had bricks. Did it have ivy too?
He shook his head, removed his cap and scratched his forehead. His thoughts blurred. Why could he remember some things clearly and others not at all? A welling up of frustration swamped him, making him more determined to do his memory exercises even on those days when he didn’t want to.
As abruptly as he’d stopped, he moved on. His head was down; he didn’t know where he was going. Following some instinct not connected to thought, he doggedly traced the narrow path between the tennis courts and Clifton House, his boots splashing in shallow puddles. A startled rabbit sprinted away for a few yards, then stopped.
What would it be like to have a rabbit?
Sister Evans had taken his mouse when he came back to The Building last year, before they gave him the pills: one white and three pink. She smoothed its fur down before wrapping it in her handkerchief. She promised she’d find it a new home. She also took his nail, the one he used for writing his name, M.
He wandered on, barely noticing the cold. He considered the dreamtime after he’d had his shocks, how he was borne along on the wisps of memory.
On the winding driveway that lead down beyond the Medical Superintendent’s house, he stopped to view the huge trees that surrounded the house: magnolias, walnuts, kowhai, elms, the tall and stately yew, the rhododendron bushes tucked in at the bases to form an almost impenetrable force of foliage. The spindly cabbage trees. There were many more he didn’t know the names of. Some thorny, some so tightly packed with hard little branches and leaves a boy would have no joy in climbing them. Though such a tree would make an excellent hiding place.
He studied the differences between each tree; some were in full bloom, others not; the shape of the leaves, the flowers, the tree as a whole. With the rhododendrons he tried to memorise the different colours and the variation of each bush’s leaves.
Then there was the grand white wooden house secreted in the midst of this fine garden. Was Cynthia still there, making beds, shaking mats for the Medical Superintendent and his family? Cynthia spent all her days inside. It had upstairs verandas with rows of painted carved wood to support the railing on the top, like a capped picket fence. Did Cynthia still clean and cook, only returning to the ward at night?
He was surprised. So soon after thinking about Cynthia, he saw her approaching from the side of the house, wringing her hands in a most unhappy manner, tears dripping off the end of her thin nose and chin.
His throat tightened.
“Oh, Malcolm,” she said, as if he’d never been away, “I know it’s my problem and they keep telling me that but…” She clutched at his jacket, as nervy and worried as he’d ever remembered her to be. “…it’s just that I might do something wrong. I might chip the teapot or I might leave an eye in the potatoes…”
She gulped for air, her face contorted and strange.
He moved a step farther away but she tightened her grip with both hands.
“…or a crease in a pillowslip…” She rushed her speech, no hesitation, no pauses. “…and they say it’s part of my problem that I have to make it all perfect because I see myself as an imperfect person…”
She let his sleeve go. He stayed dead still.
Eventually she stopped talking, chewing her nails, the ends of her fingers bleeding and frayed.
“I’m so tired…it’s all this thing…”
He knew of her compulsion, her incessant tidying and neatening of the ward furniture, straightening the curtains, ensuring the cutlery was set perfectly for meals.
The women who shared her ward regularly reported her to Sister. “She whimpers and keeps us awake with her fidgeting and straightening her sheets. And she’s in and out of bed a dozen times or more. She’s worse than the bloody cockroaches, she is.”
As Cynthia’s hands continued to twist and wring, he saw how that might annoy.
“…and they moved me to a corner and said I could make my bed as often as I wanted and that the others were heartily sick of me, and Sister too…”
And so she continued to explain and apologise for the next fifteen minutes. Now he felt too sad. He didn’t know what to say or what to do. Eventually, he wandered off leaving Cynthia behind, wringing her hands, and sobbing still, with her face tear-wet.
CHAPTER 9
The Siren
Beyond the white house, Malcolm ventured farther, seeking the giant walnut trees, lofty and eternal. He walked on their kindly carpet of dead leaves while rays of sun fell through their crowns, and he held his breath. Safe and at peace, he stretched out a hand to re-introduce himself, overcome with a feeling of rediscovery, of renewed gratitude, and possession. This place was entirely his: the moss, the walnut trees and damp leaves, the sun motes, secrecy. He watched blackbirds take flight and waited for the wood pigeon, the woosh-woosh of its wings, but he neither saw nor heard it this day.
He remembered how, as a youth, he’d climbed the trees dragging a stick with him to whack off walnuts, and then he’d clambered down and gathered them into a pile before peeling off the rotted outer layer. Crunching two shells together in his strong hand, he’d expose the treasure within – either a juicy kernel or an equally tempting black dried-up kernel. Either were good grub. He kicked aimlessly at the leaves, inhaling the familiar smell of decay.
Soggy leaves stuck to the toe of his boots and the cuffs of his trousers. He knew these leaves. He stood before one particular tree, the branches beckoning him to hide within their leafy safety.
“No,” he said abruptly, making the branches stir and the leaves rustle in defiance. “I’m too big to hide. I’m a grownup now.”
He looked beyond the grove of trees, out to sea, across the dusty Coast Road, which wound above Seacliff village. With his eyes fixed on the horizon, he wondered how long it would take to row from the rocks below back to Port Chalmers, across the Pacific Ocean. How long would it take to visit Maeve’s lighthouse? He longed to go down to the cliffs where he could inhale the salty tang of the sea, perhaps see a little blue penguin scrabbling on the rocks. In the far distance, the lighthouse sat patiently, guarding the treachery of the open harbour entrance.
A dog howled.
A car tooted.
Cold now, he lay beneath the tree, comforted by the familiar smell of squashed onion flowers.
The hospital siren began to wail, rising and fading, setting his teeth on edge, and causing his muscles to tense. He covered his ears and pressed his shoulders deeper into the leaves. But it was not calling him.
He set to recalling all of the times he had heard the siren wail, what it meant. He numbered them off on his fingers as they came to mind. He vowed he would keep those memories close and often g
o over them so as not to lose any. Sometimes in the dark of night the sirens would sound. The hospital vans and cars would start off to be joined by cars from the village. Like some dark and secret order they would first unite and then disperse in well-planned teams. Always, they searched the cliffs first. Sometimes the searchers didn’t make it in time; there would be an empty bed in a ward and no one talked about anything.
Another visit to the morgue.
Another secret.
Teddy Hopkins was found without the sound of a siren. He had ridden away in the dim early morning on a bicycle in his pyjamas. Doug, a young farm employee from the village on his way to bring in the cows had cycled past Teddy whom he later described as ‘peddling at a leisurely pace in his pyjamas’ down the main road, near the railway station, past Reid’s farm. A hospital van and two attendants were dispatched to return Teddy to his ward. He was not escaping. He wanted to ride the bicycle he found leaning against the ward fence. He happened to be in his pyjamas. It was early in the morning.
Malcolm recalled the time the siren wailed for a youth missing from the village. The youth’s parents worked at the hospital. Malcolm knew this for he had learned to listen well. They found the youth’s motorbike on the top of the cliffs and for days they searched the cliffs and the caves, and the paddocks rolling down to the sea. And the surrounding dense native bush. The village women made stews and soup and delivered plates of buttered scones with homemade jam and cream to feed the searchers who apparently never found the youth. It might have been a rumour, but he’d heard how the same youth lived from then on at Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch.
Another secret.
Another shame.
Clouds gathered overhead, the temperature dropped, the weather breaking with gusty squalls ripping through the carpet of walnut leaves. He clambered to his feet and made his way back up the road that circled the hospital, his prison, her castle. The siren finally stopped, leaving the air bruised, the birds unsettled.
