PHENOMENA: THE LOST AND FORGOTTEN CHILDREN

by Susan Tarr

  The women seemed unconcerned. Indeed, they barely mentioned the absent patient. And had he been present, would they have made an effort to communicate with him? And about what? Now, since the burden of their journey was lifted and since they had time to spend before their train was due to leave, they nattered about the gardens: how manicured the lawn was, the borders planted with primroses and pansies, the areas around the larger trees. The azaleas. They considered the lawns to be immaculate.

  He learned their names – Sylvia and Maretta.

  Sylvia commented to Maretta, “It used to be virgin bush, my dear. Imagine the weeks it must have taken to prepare the land for those immense gardens. It must be most beneficial for them to walk in such beautiful grounds. And the views. No matter where you stand, you’re always assured of the views.”

  He was interested in the sisters’ dialogue as long as he drew no attention to himself. The warmth was pleasant, the perfume from the vases of flowers peaceable.

  From these sisters, he’d gleaned a different fact – that the need for a new asylum in the Dunedin area was also because of the Otago gold rush. He’d not heard that reasoning before. He added this new fact to his store of other facts.

  Then he was nearly jolted off his chair when one sister said the original building contained four and a half million bricks made from local clay on the same site. He became lost in wonder at the magnitude of so many bricks. As the sisters discussed the length and breadth of The Building he mentally lined up the bricks and counted them off in lots of twelve.

  And so the sisters kept up their chatter until they felt inclined to stand up. Perhaps they walked outside to get away from the pervading stench of piss and sweat.

  He dawdled along behind them, not because he was interested in them as women, or even as sisters – which they might not have been – but because he was so taken with the voluble facts with which they regaled each other. Sylvia insisted the bright yellow glossy ranunculi were simply buttercups growing as opportunistic garden weeds. Maretta said she knew her plants, citing how these particular ones were more often white but still with the bright yellow centre, and how some were annuals and some biennials. And how a few had orange or red flowers. She said it was not uncommon to find them with six or more petals, or with none at all.

  Right then he decided he’d count the petals on each of them and make a mental note of which was a common opportunistic flower and which was not.

  CHAPTER 13

  The Fire

  The siren pierced the stillness, rehashing in Malcolm’s memory that dreadful time when he was about twenty-one. Those sirens started at 9.45pm on 8th December, 1942 and wailed all night. The women and children screamed briefly, those in their rooms or in the twenty-bed dormitory with locked shutters that could only be opened from the inside with a key. Though some of them didn’t make a sound, climbing under their iron beds or beneath their mattresses, hiding from the noise, the smoke, and the smell of burning people.

  The fire spread through East Wing, Second Block, Ward 5, rapidly devouring the wooden structure and those inside it. An attendant gave the alert and the firemen tried to fight it with water from a nearby hydrant. There were no sprinkler systems. That two-storey wooden structure, an afterthought added onto the original construction, was completely burned out, reduced to ashes, which smouldered for days. Thirty-seven of the thirty-nine Ward 5 inmates burned to death.

  One hour later it was all over, all gone.

  Except for the smell, the sickly cloying stench.

  And at the end of it all – the searing heat and flames and ashes, the screams and cries of staff and patients, the great silence that followed – only two women survived. One was saved from a room that did not have a locked shutter. An attendant pulled the window’s grating off. The other patient was rescued from the first floor.

  Malcolm heard that of the two survivors, Lil continued with her job of delivering the mail, but from then on Esther didn’t speak. When her family visited with new clothes for her, she sat and picked at them until they were in shreds. She picked at the healing flesh on the side of her face and head as well. She was allowed to go home for the weekend, to her family in Dunedin.

  She never returned to the hospital. Malcolm heard her family tell the staff that her hair remained curly on one side, but went straight on the other, and it all became forever snowy white, like her face. She mostly sat in her chair and plucked out her eyebrows, afraid of the fireplace.

  Everyone operated in a state of intense grieving after the fire. Nobody could answer the questions in the inquiry except to say there was a nursing shortage, and there might have been an electrical short circuit due to the shifting foundations. There was no fireplace in Ward 5. It was steam-heated.

  Dark-suited men asked more questions: Why were the patients locked into bedrooms and dormitories with no staff on duty? Why were the high-up barred windows fastened and shuttered with no access from outside? They suggested it was hard to believe those trying to get in to drag the patients out could not do so.

  Conclusion: Insufficient staff – a ratio of ten to one – and the source of the fire was never established.

  Who cared, really? The patients were the detritus of society, nothing more. That’s what Mr Antonio said, that the general consensus out there was that they were the detritus of society.

  CHAPTER 14

  Ned’s Secret

  Malcolm walked past the morgue, eyeing it with distrust before averting his gaze so as not to be held in the glassy stare of the high-up window. He passed through the main entrance and out onto the gravel road. Opposite was a cluster of trees: willow, larch, flowering cherry, and others unnamed, small and tangled.

  Studying trees and plants at the hospital was one of his greatest pleasures, along with remembering dates and facts, and counting bricks. He knew many plants by name, some by smell. But here, standing before the cluster of trees, he decided on the best way to Mount Charlotte. It would be in a straight line directly over the fence on the far side of the road by the boiler man’s house with the black barking dog.

  Once over the fence, he waded through the bog holding onto the lower branches of the willows, making sure the roots couldn’t hold him stuck there in the thick dark water. His boots filled with fetid water and muck. He remembered talk in general about the poor drainage and the unstable land on which The Building was established, causing cracks to appear in the ceilings and walls. For a moment he panicked, struggling to get his boots out from the bog, grasping hold of a spindly branch to pull himself toward the trunk.

  One foot in its woollen sock came free. Now he had one boot on and one wet sock. The other boot was stuck in the bog. He spent ages working out a plan to retrieve his boot. How long would it take? But what did time matter? On a tiny weed-woven island, he emptied the muck out of both boots, becoming in the process wet and filthy to his waist. With his boots back on, he pulled himself along a few yards by clinging to the lower branches. Closer to the trunks the water was shallower.

  Glancing down, he saw ahead of him another set of boot prints, each swirling with oily film and insect larvae.

  He began to take long slow breaths to calm his laboured breathing. When he was scared, dark things happened.

  From the tree that blocked his progress, a man’s trouser-clad leg hung down, nudging his head. Each nudge released myriad blowflies.

  He kept both eyes fastened on the bog water so he could stay upright. If he fell into the bog, he feared he might not get up again. His soaked clothes were heavy enough already. He would surely get into trouble back at the ward, probably get sent for The Treatment.

  Standing still now, his eyes fastened on the extra prints. He was kind of waiting for the man in the tree to move aside. The man who had been alive but who was now dead. Whose remains, incorrigibly lanky, derelict and terminal, were dangling, slowly turning.

  Shocked rigid, Malcolm waited, not knowing what to do. The man moved slowly away from him, then slowly back to press ag
ainst Malcolm’s down-turned head. Two men dancing in the willow trees in the miry bog.

  You poor, poor bugger, he thought as he stood where he was, his head bowed in respect for this man he once knew, who was no different from him.

  Ned The Polite Accountant swayed a little this way and a little that.

  After some time Malcolm returned to his ward. He decided not to tell anyone what he’d seen. He would let the man have his peace in the clustering trees. Soon enough someone else would find him.

  “Look at the state of your boots, boy. You’d better clean them up before dinner. And your trousers! Where the hell have you been?”

  He winced at the sharp blow to his head. Dinner? He didn’t want dinner. He wanted to go to bed and think about Ned The Polite Accountant, recall everything he knew about the quiet man. But he had to wait until 7.30pm.

  “Come on, off with them, you dirty bastard!” The attendant flicked Malcolm’s forehead with his belt. “You think I’ve nothing better to do than clean up after you mongrels?”

  The attendant watched him strip out of his dirty clothes outside, then turned the icy water hose on his nakedness.

  “You’re getting The Treatment for this!” he roared.

  When Malcolm was in bed, he thought more about Ned The Polite Accountant and his years at The Building, how he helped the staff in the administration office, and how he was often seen walking between the various wards with a clipboard of papers tucked beneath his arm. His clothes were always immaculate. He was just a regular guy. But Malcolm figured you maybe didn’t have to be smart to be a regular guy. Couldn’t anyone be regular?

  He felt his face, surprised to find it wet with tears.

  CHAPTER 15

  Smooth

  Early in the day Malcolm crossed the yard to the main kitchen. He scuffed the coal grits that had fallen from the lorries constantly going back and forth from the boiler room to the wards, or up and down from the railway station. He limped slowly and unevenly because his head ached, and his good eye was still closed from the belt buckle cut. Abruptly he stopped walking and raised his hand to his jaw. He flinched from the swollen bruise there. His tongue probed the place a tooth had been. But though several days had passed since his beating, he still had not been called for The Treatment.

  Inside the kitchen, the steamy warmth and the radioman reporting the world news were comforting. He had discovered there was another life beyond this, a life in which there was even more for him to learn. Though he lived under a rule of ‘fear and obey’ he was learning how best to get on with it.

  He sniffed at the beginnings of savoury smells, tried to guess what they might be. Mince with potatoes and onions? Shepherd’s pie was his favourite. Sometimes Mr Antonio piled the top with grated cheese. Shepherd’s pie and golden syrup pudding with ladles full of bright yellow custard – these two foods calmed and soothed him.

  For him this particular day could have passed like all the others – a retreat to the end of a narrow garden to sit on a mossy bench in the shade of a giant elm, keeping out of trouble. Clearly, he saw his mother’s face, like the touch of her hand on his back or on his shoulder. She was at a window, staring at him. He had more often seen her like this, but she never came out to speak to him. And he told no one.

  The new young doctor, Dr Burt, leaned in closer to ask Malcolm his questions. “How do you feel, Malcolm? Tell me how you feel, what you’re thinking. Take your time then.” And though he didn’t ask him about his visible bruises or black eye, he did ask, “Is there anything you would like to talk to me about? Is anything worrying you?”

  Malcolm sat opposite the doctor at his desk spread with papers and words written in black and red ink. This man used Brylcreem on his hair, making it seem set like plastic. He’d buy some of that Brylcreem with his next Comforts Allowance from the canteen.

  “Very well, then.” Dr Burt scribbled on a paper, and after a lengthy period of silence, said, “Why don’t you want to answer my questions, Malcolm? Why don’t you want to talk about things?”

  It wasn’t that Malcolm didn’t want to answer or didn’t want to talk. He simply had nothing to say.

  “What do you feel?” the doctor continued gently. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel-,” Malcolm felt obliged to provide the good doctor with some sort of answer, “–smooth.”

  And it seemed to excite the doctor greatly because he scribbled furiously on the fast filling up sheets of paper. Then he leaned forward again, smiling.

  Malcolm gave him a smile back and then looked down at his boots, which were dry now.

  Well, their little chat together certainly had the doctor nodding away as he scratched down some more notes. When he eventually stood up, he said, “Malcolm, I want you to remember you can talk to me any time. And you’re coming along just fine.”

  Malcolm considered the doctor’s words about how he was coming along fine. But how far had he come, exactly, and where had he come from? Those words indicated he’d come from somewhere, so if he had come along fine, from somewhere, where was he going to? Often these strange questions formed in his mind, so he set himself to figure out what the answers might be.

  He felt in the lining of his jacket pocket. The balls from Julie’s candlewick dressing gown along with a collection of tablets was growing steadily.

  It was Sunday. Some day. Some new day. It was always some new day. Today it was Sunday.

  It was the day before mutton pies, Pinky Bars and Pixie caramels.

  While sitting on a bench in the gardens, Malcolm thought suddenly of his parents. Surprised, he sat upright. His mother was right there again in his memory, only this time she was fading slowly in her bed, smelling of rose geranium talcum powder. She smiled at him with tears in her eyes, seemingly tired. He remembered how after school he’d crept down their passage to her room and found her sleeping. He sniffed her neck and slid his hand down under the sheet to find hers so he could pat it gently, maybe even squeeze it a little and tell her it would be all right soon.

  So did he have a father? And if he did, what was his father doing? He wondered these things more often now as his memories came back in starts. If he really concentrated and squeezed his eyes tight shut, he could just about see his father. His father was smoking a pipe. Suddenly he remembered the smell of the rum-flavoured Borkum Riff tobacco, but sometimes his father rolled his own cigarettes with Pocket Edition and Zig-Zag rolling papers. Mainly it was the pipe. He was with Bella. Smoking his pipe. There it faded.

  He wanted to know what his father was doing with Bella. Mr Green could tell him because he knew about things. And Mr Green had trusted him with his secret crayfish pot twist.

  But when Mr Antonio greeted him, “Hello, young man! What are you doing in here so early?” Malcolm awkwardly lowered his gaze and turned his head away.

  Mr Antonio was breaking eggs into a bowl. “Sponges,” he said. “The Medical Superintendent has a special luncheon on so if you stick around you can beat the cream.”

  Malcolm waited by the window for hours for Mr Green. As he beat bowls full of cream, Mr Green gave him a wave and walked on by. Not every day was the same. But later Mr Green did come into the kitchen. He came over with slices of freshly creamed and jammed sponge.

  “Pull up a chair if you want, son.”

  Malcolm shuffled his feet and shoved his hands deep in his pockets before taking them out to fiddle with his cap before he put it back on his head again.

  “Have some sponge. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

  Malcolm sat on the chair. “Mr Green?”

  “Call me Jack.”

  Maybe this one time, because it was important.

  “Got all day if truth be known so don’t rush.”

  Eventually Malcolm got down to the question. “Jack, what was Daddy doing with Bella?”

  Jack uttered some oath and scratched vigorously at his balding head. He rubbed his nose around on the front of his face as if it were made from India rubber. Then he nodde
d toward the teapot.

  “Grab us a cup, then.” He leaned on his elbows for a long while. “Ah, crikey dick, I dunno, son.”

  Malcolm stared incredulous. His mouth dropped open. He’d believed Jack would tell it and it would be so.

  Jack cursed under his breath some more, scratched his whisker stubble. “Best let me start again because truth be known, I don’t know. But – well, you never know, do you?” Jack’s eyes softened. “You tell me everything from the beginning, son.”

  Malcolm told Jack how he remembered the rose geranium talcum powder, how, when he was six, he’d saved his pennies for his mother’s birthday. One day he’d come home from school to find her crying over a bloodied sheet. Normally, he liked to watch her do washing, soap suds sliding down the wooden scrubbing board, her singing jingles. But he’d never seen her cry before so he didn’t know what to do.

  Then he remembered how, just the previous week when he tore past the dunny, down the concrete steps, and slammed into the coal shed door and howled loudly, his mother had run down the side of their house, calling, “Where does it hurt, little man? Show Mummy so I can kiss it better. There’s my brave boy.”

  He’d shown her his head with its bump forming and she kissed him three times, and it was all better. Then they went inside to find the biscuit tin.

  He knew what to do.

  “Tell me where it hurts, Mummy. I can kiss it better.”

  Well, she laughed and cried some more and hugged him tight. When she’d eaten some crispy biscuits and drunk the cup of milky tea he poured for her, with three spoons of sugar, her tears had gone.

  But from then on she cried often.

  At night his father wrapped her in a blanket and held her in his arms, rocked her back and forth. When Malcolm tried to cuddle his mother, his father pushed him away. “Off you go, boy. Mummy’s not well.”