by Susan Tarr
The nurse took the scissors from Esther and left.
Outside, the gardens were breaking into new growth now the cold wet winter had passed. More often the rain stayed away allowing the sun to warm the soil. Soon he would be back in a gardening gang with his cobber, Joe, pruning the dead wood from the new, sorting out the hedges and shrubs. He liked this time of year. He liked spring.
He liked Esther too. She didn’t jerk or constantly nod her head, or dribble, or shriek into the quiet of an afternoon. She was cheerful and always wanted to talk to him. Nor did it seem to matter that he rarely talked back when, in the puzzle of his life, he lost some of his spoken words.
Today was different. Today he wanted to listen and talk to Esther. She’d once told him she wasn’t always bright and cheerful. She understood how he sometimes felt, and that the highs and lows were always interchanging, and nothing stayed the same for long.
“You know,” she said, “each time I come in I have to be restrained. Straitjacket and all. And sometimes they stick me in the covered bath. It’s so cold. I think they freeze me. Then I have the – ah – you know. The Treatment.” She shuddered violently at the word. “They say we don’t remember it, at all, but we do, don’t we?”
Sudden tears wet her cheeks.
He nodded vigorously. He never ever forgot that stuff.
“The covered cold bath, the straitjacket, the cell,” he said. “Too right, we remember all that.”
“And the hand that pokes our food through, don’t forget that, either,” Esther prompted. “It’s always cold. That hand with no body, only a plate of cold food. How can they say we forget any part of it?”
“We don’t forget a thing, Esther. We don’t want to remember, is all.”
“I hate it. I dread it,” she cried vehemently. “Even though I know the cycle, I still go home to my husband and bubbas and take the new bubba with me. Even though…”
He wasn’t used to Esther in a state such as this. Normally she was bright and cheerful as she went about mixing or sorting her woollen strands.
“The knowing is worse,” she mumbled. Shoulders slumped forward, whispering, so low he had to lean closer to hear. “I don’t choose it, you know. The bubbas and all. They just come. The first one came early. So much blood and pain. Alone at home, I was, John not being due back from work until later. That wee baby came in the lavatory. He was nothing but a tiny wee mite, barely bigger than a puppy, and mewing too. I wrapped him in a towel, this tiny puppy of mine. I wrapped him in a towel and put him in a shoebox…”
When she paused, Malcolm asked quietly, “A shoebox, Esther? You put your new bubba in a shoebox?”
“Yes, a shoebox with white tissue paper. I buried him in the corner of my garden.”
Malcolm’s heart lurched, but still he asked, keeping his voice low, “Was he still mewing, this bubba of yours?”
“Yes, he was still mewing. I stayed with him, though. He deserved that. He was my first wee puppy.”
“I think he was a bubba, a boy baby, Esther. I think the wee boy should have had the chance to grow up. He could have had some fun.”
“Oh, no. I didn’t have a choice, you see? It was the pain, they said.”
Then all signs of distress abruptly left her. “This one’s name is Henry Walter Reid.” She smiled down at her newest baby, which the nurse had just placed in her arms. “That’s a nice name, isn’t it? A strong name to make him feel safe and loved. That’s very important.”
“Yes, that’s very important.”
He thought about his own name. Malcolm. Not enough to make him feel safe and loved. Not enough to hang a life on. He wondered what the shoebox baby would have been named, and he felt sad for him.
Esther told him this was her fourth admission.
“Each time I have a baby my brain goes wrong. The doctor says the pain of the delivery is too much for me, so they take my baby away from me as soon as it’s born. Just in case…you know, like I told you last time. I sort of want to punish it for the pain it caused, but not really, because I love my bubbas. I love all of my bubbas, I honestly do.”
Malcolm watched her face redden and screw up as she stroked the baby’s cheek, crooning. He waited for more tears, but they never came.
After a long while, she said, “We’ll be fine. It’s just the first few weeks until the memory goes.”
He wondered which was worse for Esther, the pain of the delivery or the pain of The Treatment afterward.
He often made sure he was around when the pink-uniformed nurse carried Esther’s baby in for her to hold. There were always two nurses until they were sure she wouldn’t harm it.
He gazed at the tiny hands and feet. Oh, how he ached to hold this little boy in his arms and blow kisses on his bare tummy like he’d seen Esther do. He ached to pass his hand over the soft downy head. Yet he did nothing. He watched from a distance, even turned his head a little away.
Henry Walter Reid was loved.
Sister Hodge was having another meeting in her office. A tall rangy woman, she pinned her long black hair tightly on top of her head. Malcolm wondered how many dozens of shiny hairclips she used to keep it in place. Sister Hodge had hands like a man’s; broad with fingers that were squared-off and flattened at the tips. Her nails were filed short. Some days her hands shook worse than others. Every six weeks without fail, Sister Hodge would go on holiday.
Esther told him this.
“Where are you off to this time, Sister Hodge?” she asked outright one morning while he was sitting in the dayroom. Over her floral frock, Esther wore a grey and pink cardigan with sleeves, which bulged at the wrists where she tucked handkerchiefs.
“Up north,” was the curt reply.
“She sure goes up north a lot,” Esther whispered to him, “Maybe even up as far as Hanmer Springs.”
“Where’s Hanmer Springs?” he also whispered, caught up in her mood.
“Top of the island. It’s a drying-out place for alcoholics. My brother-in-law goes there. Anyway, wherever she goes her hands have stopped shaking by the time she gets back. I reckon that’s where she goes, though. Or maybe she has a feller up north.”
It was often hard to tell who were patients and who were on staff. Malcolm recognised a man (a former attendant) who wore a uniform one-week, and the next he was shuffling about in pyjamas. Perhaps employment in mental hospitals afforded some camouflage for the likes of that man. Perhaps he was madder than those incarcerated for life.
There was another kind of meeting – hand-over, they called it – to ensure each patient in their ward was accounted for. Before she departed, Sister Hodge handed over her ward. All present and accounted for, like Buzz Bars, biscuits, toothpaste and bottles of fizzy raspberry drink. Mrs Green counted boxed Jaffas, nylon stockings, trinkets, expanding rings, envelopes and tobacco. She called it stocktaking. To him, it seemed that handover and stocktaking were pretty much the same thing.
Such a hot day for late spring, everyone said. Flies buzzed slowly around the pig slops in a tin outside the kitchen. Fat ponderous bumblebees beat themselves up against the locked windowpanes. Outside, heat rose off the bitumen, melting it, causing shuddering patterns in the air.
When the late afternoon sun dropped low enough to shimmer across the polished dayroom floor, tea rattled in on the trolley’s crooked wheels. Malcolm watched and listened as the new man slurped, Jimmy supped and Mr Desmond Markby, still in this ward even after the shit fight, sipped daintily with his pinkie finger stuck out like he’d broken it. A fly landed on his checked shirt. Just before, one male attendant had called Mr Markby a dirty faggot and had stuck his foot out to trip him. Mr Markby had gracefully risen to his feet, dusted off his clothes and touched his hair to make sure it was in place before returning to sit quietly in his chair. His cup rattled ever so slightly in the saucer.
Malcolm saw tears track the gentleman’s face. He moved his chair closer so as to impart some of his own physical strength. There were lots of flies in the dayroom.
He watched one climb the length of Mr Markby’s arm; Mr Markby had fallen asleep. He listened to the rise and fall of the man’s breathing. A particular arrangement of mucus in his nose caused a faint high-pitched sound like a blade being sharpened, and then it faded.
Malcolm drank in big mouthfuls, his tealeaves too. Patrick tipped his tea into the saucer and slurped at that, most of it going into his big lippy mouth but a fair amount slopping down his front. Patrick didn’t care about anything; he’d broken his teeth, those that hadn’t rotted out and they’d removed that lot anyway. He said false teeth hurt his gums. He refused to wear them. Asleep in his chair now, Patrick made soft chewing sounds with his tongue against his gums. Perhaps he dreamed of being hungry or thirsty.
Malcolm was alert to the compulsive movements of the others, the constant nodding and endless jerking, the wall-slapping and pounding, how one man wrung his hands constantly, nervously twisting them this way then that. In her ward, Cynthia was probably tidying and realigning the chairs, the curtains and the mats, sitting down and then getting up again, and then there was her nervous cough. He watched, listened and learned.
He noticed that Patrick, apart from slurping and slopping his tea, had this daft thing of blinking. Up down, open shut, up down, open shut. You’d think his eyelashes would wear out. Malcolm wondered if he did any of these things, like the wringing of his hands, head bobbing, the blinking and stuff. As far as he was aware he only scratched his head. Usually he removed his cap to do this but sometimes he did it from underneath his cap without taking it off. Now he sat and stared unblinking, long and hard, to see if he could, or if he was just like Patrick.
On days when he was not so sharp, his observations, like his memories, ran together like blood and water –gone down the drain. Vaguely, he wondered why he would describe it like that.
He liked best the peace in the dayroom when the coughing and hawking ceased, the rhythmic clicks of the heating pipes and the creak of floorboards when someone approached on rubber soles thinking they moved silently. Sometimes the hospital never slept. Sometimes it never woke.
Generally the long silences were broken only by the tea trolley. Playing cards: solitaire or patience or patients. No one knew which. There were few rules in this ward. If he wanted to, old Patrick could go outside the kitchen for a fag.
Myrtle came over from the women’s ward. She was very interested in men, and now she was bearing down on him, with her lips already puckered up. He furrowed his eyebrows and stood up quickly, straining to his full height of over six foot. With his head held backward he knew Myrtle couldn’t reach his mouth. The worst she could achieve would be a slurp on his Adam’s apple. He shut his eyes and held his breath, but she tore on past him to zoom in on the new man trapped in his wheelchair, whose face, all too late, registered shock, disgust and revulsion.
Soon enough everything became unpleasantly heavy with the heat of the sun’s rays pouring through the locked windows. With the curtains wide open, the patients all wilted like garden flowers deprived of shade.
Sister Hodge came in, causing the floorboards to creak. She sniffed the air like a rabbit, glanced at Patrick with the tell-tale stain of piss spreading in his tweeds and shot him a look of disapproval. She briskly snapped the curtains closed and left them to cook up a stench.
CHAPTER 24
Slut
Malcolm listened as Jack and Mr Antonio nattered to each other. He was allowed to listen; at least he’d never been told not to. They were on about the latest lobotomy patients, how at best they functioned at the level of a domestic pet, how they’d lost the usage and understanding of words. Then, as he stood by quietly shocked, they talked about other goings on around the hospital.
“Yep, that happened in the men’s lockup as well, so I’ve been told,” Mr Antonio said. “And Mouse, he nearly drowned himself in the lavatory. Said he was just off for a crap in private.”
“Ah, Mouse,” Jack said. “He’s tried that lark before.”
“They found him bare-arsed, feet waggling away, coming up for air and going down again.”
Mr Antonio knew all kinds of stuff. He was a popular guy and in charge of the food and meals. When Jack shook his head slowly from side to side, Malcolm thought he looked real sad.
“Stuffing his pyjamas down first and pulling the chain until it filled up? Not so crazy, eh, but that must be the hardest way to go.”
Malcolm had been in that ward with its atmosphere of desolation and helplessness, with the same unanswered question – Why am I here?
“I’ve known Mouse for a long time,” Jack continued.
Malcolm thought of that bitterly cold ward: no life, no colour, high up windows like in a compound, like in a cell, the scratchings on the walls like real words though he couldn’t read them and dates that went way back. Peeling paint, pools of rust and water in the yard… His thoughts trailed off into bleakness.
Mr Antonio said, “You can’t blame him, can you? That cell-like environment.”
“There’s no breeze or sunlight.” Jack shook his head again. “Only little slide-holes high up in the doors for the attendants to peer through.”
“Damned if I could survive in there.” Mr Antonio had a real family and home he went to each night.
Malcolm had wondered why Mouse should ever want to live. Yet when he’d been in there he’d still wanted to live. Now he wondered why Mouse should want to die. He remembered another time Mouse had tried to drown himself in the lavatory. The attendant got a towel, hauled the pathetic little man onto his feet.
“Enough of your shenanigans, Mouse,” he’d said, not unkindly. “Next time you try that you get the jacket. Got it?”
Mouse shuffled off bawling, his nose streaming, the towel dragging on the wet concrete floor.
“He’ll probably get The Treatment,” Jack said. “Hopefully it’ll fix him.” No one at the hospital wanted any patient to be like Mouse. “Or maybe they’ll shave his head and do The Lobotomy. Maybe then he’ll come right.”
For some patients, the days and seasons ran together. If it was sunny, some of them thought it was the height of summer. If it was raining, they thought it was winter. At the mention that tomorrow might be a cool-ish day, the working women queued to get a job in the steamy warmth of the laundry.
At the crack of dawn, with the weak sun rising to dispel the mist, the dirty linen from the wards started to come in, piled high on carts. Mountains of sheets, pillowslips, towels and nightwear, growing ever higher as each horse cart dumped a new load. The first job was sorting them into two piles, whites and non-whites, scraping and scouring. The patients bundled and lugged the piles, stuffing them into enormous coppers of boiling soapy water.
These same women wielded heavy wooden paddles, laboriously stirring, surrounded in warm steam whilst outside the temperature continued to drop. They’d guide and pull sheets through the mangles or wringers for hours before pressing endless pillowslips and tea towels.
The radio was always turned on.
The laundry was near the main kitchen. Sheltered from the chill blast in the doorway, Malcolm kept an eye out for Jack. He had another question to ask, but sometimes he lost it. He wanted to ask Jack before it got lost again because Jack would know the answer.
But Jack never came that way on that day.
With autumn gone, a new season of southerly winds howled and whipped around the naked stick-like trees. Thunder and lightning reverberated, flashing through the long empty night. Malcolm stood throughout one entire night with the lightning flashes right before his eyes. He waited patiently for the gentle rain that followed the storms. After many weeks of raging the storm calmed, but by the next week the chill winds were back.
Then it snowed for days.
Malcolm ventured up the hill toward the ward where the budgerigar used to live, where nobody was mad and everyone wore clothes. Through windswept snowdrifts, hard and crunchy, he laboured, just to go and see. He figured he’d follow his boot prints back down to his ward
afterward, but it got dark early and he couldn’t see them because it was snowing again.
Lost in the darkness, he groped about until he found a wall, and then a set of stairs. But the snowdrifts covered holes in the stairs. He made his way cautiously up on his hands and knees only to find they led nowhere, the door and room above having been carted away during the current demolition. He began to reverse slowly down. At the base lay a snowdrift higher than he was. When he fell through the rotting timber he was consumed by snow.
He was not afraid.
He thought he heard the voices of staff changing night shifts, too distant to pinpoint. What might have been hours later he heard another group of voices. He steadied himself, clambered upright and stumbled toward them. The light from The Building welcomed him home.
Another day. The ceiling above, the floor beneath and all in between achingly cold. Under the watchful eye of the pale moon, he stood quietly dispassionate to consider the freezing temperature. And he marvelled at the sight of the snow-covered trees barely dwarfed by Mount Charlotte.
Those patients who caught colds weren’t allowed in the quiet dayrooms, but remained in their squeaky iron beds on damp mattresses, hacking phlegm or blood into enamel bowls. Clawed hands clutched thin blankets to their chins. He was glad he didn’t catch colds or he’d have to lie there among the others, row upon row of them, mouths open, hacking and gasping for breath.
He liked the dayroom when it was peaceful, with no one there to make it otherwise.
One morning he went off to find Jack. He had remembered his question from months before.
“What’s a slut?”
Even as he asked, he knew a slut was not a good thing.
“What’s a what?” Jack peered into his face.
“A slut.”
“Oh, a slut, now, is it? Well, let me see. But – ah, tell old Jack where a nice young feller like you heard a word like that?”
