PHENOMENA: THE LOST AND FORGOTTEN CHILDREN

by Susan Tarr

  Malcolm slurped his cup, his mouth moist and grinning, and his eyes darted from Mr Green to Dorothea and back again. She poured more cups of tea, slopping them deliberately as others continued to arrive. Mr Green’s head cocked from one side to the next like a rooster, watching their varied reactions. Some didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Malcolm burst out laughing and then the rest followed. Dorothea stomped back to her bench in a sulk.

  Then Mr Green said, “All right, so I can get on with me story?” He set his eyes on Mr Antonio who’d gone to thicken his stew, and he yelled, “Toni, you hear the one about me bikie gang?”

  “Not that one. Dorothea, pour me another cuppa, lovie.”

  Mr Antonio ambled back to the table, wiping his mitts on the front of his apron, scraping up a chair to sit on. He slurped long and hard at his teacup. But, after he’d swallowed, he said to them all solemnly, “Just so you know, young Ned The Accountant made it as far as Christchurch. Did you all hear about it?” No one responded. Some looked away. “He must’ve been feeling right proud of his efforts because he went to the Police Station to get directions to his sister’s place.”

  “Ned, poor bugger.” Mr Green took up the tale. “He told me missus his sister had stopped writing to him and hadn’t sent him any Pocket Edition or Sante bars since last Christmas. He wanted to know if she was all right, her and her kiddies. Nothing else. Just wanted to see with his own eyes they were all right, is all.” He shrugged his shoulders, his big hands open and empty. His voice choked up. “Guess after he’d seen ’em he’d have come back here. Back home.”

  Mr Antonio coughed.

  “The policeman gave him the address, and seems he thanked him. He was like that. Being an accountant it stands to reason he’d have good manners. You wouldn’t have rude accountants, eh. He says thank you as he’s leaving the station. But he pulls out his Government Issue tobacco. That’s what done it. Dumb bastard. He was cuffed and taken straight to Sunnyside Hospital while they arranged escorts to get him back here.”

  A few boot scuffs, but nothing more.

  Malcolm drained his cup and swallowed the tealeaves before setting it down on the saucer. Mr Antonio reached over and refilled it from the teapot – Dorothea didn’t do refills.

  He said, “I hear they got a new treatment in Sunnyside, Jack. They operate right into the brain now. Call it a leucotomy. Ah, what with the insulin treatment and electrical-convulsive therapy it makes me wonder what they’ll come up with next.”

  Some of the others quietly stood up and walked outside into the brisk fresh air.

  Malcolm stayed. He wanted to learn more. He’d heard staff talk about Sunnyside Mental Hospital, about the new treatment trials. Or when someone died there. Of the other mental hospital nearby, Orokonui, he heard little, just that the same staff worked between both hospitals – Orokonui and Seacliff.

  Mr Green started on again about the bikies, how they looked downright menacing in the tranquil village, how he was wary of gangs.

  “I wasn’t scared, like,” he insisted. “But all me neighbours were out gawking. Then bugger me if the bikies didn’t stop right in the middle of me bloody drive.” He shook his head a few times for emphasis. “Seven of ’em noisy contraptions.”

  He grinned a kind of quirky grin that started with his rheumy eyes and then spread out from there. With age he was getting rangier and a bit more crooked, kind of like one of the farm scarecrows or the gnarly roosters who pecked around the pigsties. Those pigs were lucky pigs, Malcolm thought, fed big buckets of slops daily. But, like the roosters, Mr Green had strange rolls of red flesh around his neck. Maybe his skin was too big for him now. He recalled an earlier Mr Green in a bushman’s shirt and corduroy pants bundled together with a brown leather strap. A memory formed in his mind. He’d been in Mr Green’s backyard near the concrete copper.

  He said loudly, “Copper.”

  “Right on, son. Me old copper used to be a good ’un for boiling up crayfish back in the day.” He chortled some more. “So me and me missus are a bit narked to see our Barb race out to these thugs. Couldn’t tell one from the other. All looked the same, black and shiny, silver studs all over their get-up, buckles on their boots and strides. Anyways, I says hello.”

  Mr Antonio said, “You can’t be too careful, Jack. At your age.”

  “You’re dead right, cobber. Anyways, I just grinned at the lot of ’em. Barb was clinging on the arm of one and me missus was taking cover behind her ironing table.”

  As Mr Green told it, he got out a box of spirit bottles full of his home-brewed apricot wine. He was that proud of his brew.

  “I tell you what, though,” he said, “I was fair crapping meself.”

  Dorothea collected the cups and saucers to wash in the sink. Her next job was to rub grease on the shells of several dozen trays of fresh eggs for preserving for winter baking. Mr Antonio gave his stew another stir, and Mr Green was off on a whole new bent. Malcolm waited for him to refocus but Mr Green’s memory wandered around to when he played the piano accordion in his band. At last he got back to the bikies.

  “So they were swigging away and calling me bad names too. But I’m not as daft as they think.” He absent-mindedly scratched his bulbous nose. No chance that nose was ever handsome, Malcolm thought. “They forget I used to be a youngster.”

  The late morning cooled. Mid-day mist crept down over the hills and covered the buildings.

  “Having swigged all me wine the gang were fair gurgling and rolling about on me back lawn. One of ’em cracked his head a beaut on the copper so I nipped inside, left ’em to it.”

  Malcolm saw how Mr Green hobbled around, tiring from his great age. And he somehow knew how this story ended.

  “You know what, Toni? One of ’em had the cheek to call out Hey, old codger, ya got any more? Cheeky young sod. Well, I gave ’em some fig wine,” cracking a smile a mile wide, “and sent ’em on their way.”

  Dorothea stalled greasing eggs to rejoin the group around the table. She who was normally as sullen and silent as the dough worked by Mr Antonio now piped up.

  W-what happened?”

  She stared, unblinking through her pale weak eyes, lost within the convolutions of Mr Green’s story.

  He smiled angelically, and his eyes became moist and vague.

  “I used to be a fine cook in this kitchen. Before the Italian arrived. In my days a stew was just a stew. I used to bake Lamingtons and cream brandy snaps for the patients. And butterfly cakes. Ah, but I got too old, ya see.”

  He once told Malcolm he used to tramp above Blueskin Bay, just past Warrington but before Orokonui, high into the manuka lines, collecting supplejack to weave into crayfish pots. He had a special twist he used to keep any ornery cray from reversing out the entrance, but it was also so he would know if Tanner or Carson meddled with any of his pots. They were all mates yet they still didn’t know about the special twist.

  He trusted Malcolm with his secret and that made Malcolm feel smooth.

  “Ya know why I hate casseroles? All because one night I cooked dinner for me missus. I got a tin from the cupboard. Casserole, it said. Damned company making casserole for cats. I added salt and pepper and it made a good meal. She ate it, said it was nice. When she did the dishes she saw the tin with the cat on it.”

  Everyone liked Mrs Green and it seemed wrong to laugh over her eating cat food. So no one did.

  Meanwhile, Dorothea was getting upset.

  “W-what about the g-gang?” she whined, wringing her hands together beneath her apron.

  “The gang? They got on their bikes and rode off.”

  Dorothea huffed her disappointment.

  “Well, me missus gave me a right telling off for what I did with her Syrup of Califigs and Senokot granules. I cleaned out the bathroom cabinet to make that little brew. I reckon they’d have been crapping in their leathers before too many miles.”

  Dorothea blanched – she knew first hand the rigours of that mixture. Mr Antonio shrieked as
best a baritone could, tears streaming down his cheeks. Mr Green sat with a happy grin slapped across his face. Malcolm let rip with a bellowing laugh – one spoonful moved him quite smartly. And it was later, when he was thinking about that story, he thought maybe Mr Green’s one purpose in being on this earth was to bring laughter to those who couldn’t find their own.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Gardens

  On a Saturday morning in December, 1950, a warm still summer’s day, Malcolm saw Lionel Terry making his way outside The Building’s grounds up to his private garden on the slopes of nearby Mount Charlotte. Trusted patients could walk the roads outside the main gates, walk pretty much anywhere they wanted, and since Lionel was trusted he would often bring back flowers or strawberries he’d grown in his garden. With his white flowing hair and neatly trimmed beard, he was indeed the most well known patient around.

  Farther along the road, Malcolm, who was also trusted to walk outside the main gates, saw a group of junior nurses carry bedding giggling among themselves. They were also headed for the grassy slopes. This wasn’t the first sunny day he’d encountered these young women. He’d often considered the reason for their expedition, and decided they’d be part of the night staff that needed to sleep during the daytime away from the unavoidable noises around and inside the Nurses Home. He had fully planned on climbing Mount Charlotte this morning, only not when Lionel Terry was around, or the nurses. He figured it would take him closer to heaven. He might see Julie, so he wanted to be alone.

  His memory had started coming back properly – he remembered Julie – but he told no one and no one asked him Malcolm, is your memory coming back yet? He remembered from way back some of the things Mr Green talked about, like the special crayfish pot twist and the copper in his backyard. But he acted no different from any other day. He knew what happened if you acted different. You got The Treatment. He determined not to lose any more memory and he intended to recognise his friends. That part had been particularly hard for him, not wanting to ask Who are you? And for some sectors of his brain there was only a gradual return.

  So he remained the same, whatever that might be, all day and every day.

  He now recognised some of the attendants from a long time ago. The female nurses seemed to move on but not the attendants; they stayed for years. The younger generations followed in their footsteps. They looked like their fathers used to look.

  Each school holiday, youngsters from down in the village or the nearby farms would traipse up the hill to their holiday jobs. Some helped in the laundry folding clean linen, some in the kitchen peeling vegetables or helping Mr Antonio with his baking. Even the Occupational Therapy Department benefited from these youngsters who revelled in making sheepskin teddy bears with huge glass eyes and joints that moved, and learning basketry, or dancing a waltz with the older patients. Others would toil in the gardens or the boiler room while some even worked alongside trained staff as junior nursing aides. These ones often stayed on at the hospital when their schooling was complete.

  During the school holidays there was a lot of laughter from both the young people and the older staff members. The days were somehow brighter and everyone somehow more light-hearted. Malcolm and most of the others looked forward to these times. They were some of the happiest times he could remember at The Building.

  As scheduled, and on time, he obediently took his medication from the eggcup. There was no choice or the pills would be forced through his closed lips and into his mouth. Some of the patients still put up a battle three times each day. He couldn’t see the point – your mouth bruised and bleeding, the staff exasperated. He opened his hand to receive the pills, different colours with no explanation, and closed his fingers over them.

  The water went down but more often than not the pills stayed between his fingers. If the others did the same they wouldn’t have to suffer the bruising. Later he would tuck them into the lining of his jacket pocket along with Julie’s candlewick balls. No one noticed.

  Sometimes days passed during which he became increasingly agitated, with his memory flitting in and out. He asked the faceless moon to help him, to save him from…something. But the moon over Seacliff ignored him, no longer listening to his thoughts. In Maclaggan Street it had turned its face to him. Now he only saw the dark back of the moon’s head, its face gone.

  Do you remember?

  Do you?

  He surely remembered the preparations for his last shock treatment and lived in perpetual fear of repeating whatever it was he had done to get it. He knew some of the others got many treatments. Some said fifty, one said one hundred. Was that more? How many was fifty? These were numbers he could not fathom. And once a day or several a week?

  He did know that each session was progressively stronger than the last, some taking place in their own ward and some in the long wooden building like a prison barracks beyond the engineer’s rooms. He couldn’t remember where he’d had his treatments. Or why. He’d lie wherever he was, terrified, waiting for the agonies, then the nothings, then confusions when he woke.

  And he listened, silent, when the attendants talked of the death rate within the hospital.

  He could smell death, a sour tang like earth and mildew. He often considered the others’ damaged brains – those patients the attendants spoke of as surely enjoying a better life once they’d had The Treatment. Were their brains already damaged, or had they become damaged after they were shocked? The attendants said The Treatment was to stimulate the brain, but who could be stimulated or feel like himself any more after so many sessions?

  He remembered vividly the agony of the skin tearing on his ankles from his last session. Some of the others lost control of their bladder or bowel, or from then on had seizures, like Davey McPherson, or became feeble-minded. And there were those who emerged with fractures and broken teeth.

  No one talked about them.

  Some who had The Treatment were still children. Some had transgressed in that they would not eat all of their dinner and that made the attendants angry. Sometimes they hadn’t obeyed the rules about making their bed. Or, worse, they wet their pyjamas. In Malcolm’s thoughts he whispered those horrible truths. In the dark of night he cried silent salty tears. Those were the ones he sorrowed for the most, the kiddies.

  What could they have done so wrong as to warrant The Treatment? Surely they were the innocents. And then he’d seen others sink deeper into their melancholy until darkness claimed them. He remembered how Jock stood rigid in front of the coal lorry. Jock died. Willis stopped eating and drinking and no one made him. He died too.

  Malcolm knew what he knew. And his growing collection of memories would one day set him free. But sometimes he sat alone with his face in his hands, silently grieving the enormity of what he knew. Other times he existed in daytime dreaming, full of vivid colour, confusion and clamorous noise. During those times he didn’t remember anything new; he didn’t even contemplate remembering. And on other days his memories were as fleeting as the shooting stars in the fair night sky.

  For some inmates, he knew, there was no comfort and nothing left for them to remember with after they’d been dragged screaming, or docile as cattle, for personalised electroconvulsive therapy. Their minds had died though their bodies lived on. Those he empathised with and grieved hard for. Some never came back to the wards. Those he grieved less for.

  That was another secret.

  And they needed bodies to satisfy the morgue’s great appetite, and for student nurses to learn how best to take care of the mentally ill, for the post-mortems, the tutorials. But what did they do with the bodies that went through those doors? Chopped them up, buried them there where they once lived?

  All of this he wanted to know if he only knew how to find the answers?

  Seated tidily in the visitors’ chairs in the dayroom, one woman leaned toward another so alike as to be her sister, and said huskily, “They may never have wanted their lunatics in the city, but I must say, my dear, they have hous
ed them rather poshly. All through our taxes, I might add.” Nodding her head, her veiled hat stabbed through with a bulbous pin.

  To escape the chill wind, Malcolm had taken refuge in this sunny dayroom. He carefully noted her smart shoes fastened with four button straps. Oddly enough, he suddenly recalled an elderly woman from many years ago who wore a dark woollen coat complete with fox fur. This woman he remembered had stood beside his father in their front room with its vases of white lilies placed on the various furniture. He wondered what else that day might have meant to him.

  As he pondered the similarity of the elderly woman from so long ago to these sisters seated opposite, he became increasingly intrigued.

  Like many visitors, these women appeared to assume the patients were deaf or incapable of comprehension. They directed their conversation to each other with only the occasional gesture of inclusion toward the other patients sitting nearby and keenly listening.

  Malcolm decided the specific patient they had come so far to visit hadn’t yet arrived. So he listened, pretending they had come to visit him. To see what that was like.

  The sister, if sister she was, replied, “I heard it was a considered move to the country for the benefit of the inmates’ health rather than a sop to concerns about social stigma. Despite the flash exterior I hear the interior in the main building is quite plain.”

  Both sisters clutched handbags in gloved hands. Both wore stockings. Just like that long-ago elderly woman in his past.

  On another visiting day, weeks later, as he sat soaking up the warmth of the dayroom, the same sisters arrived. The patient they had travelled so far to visit was not well; he was confined to his bed with a cough. Malcolm noted that this was the second time he’d been present when the women had made this same journey in vain. The previous time the man was confined to his bed with dysentery. Perhaps he didn’t want to meet with them. Some didn’t like visitors – their forced concern, their protracted goodbyes that came hot on the heels of hello.