She never worked as she had to bring us up and do a lot of chores while my father Richard was a biology teacher at the university. Mother would sometimes drink too much and instead of a nice home-cooked meal we would then have to eat sandwiches prepared by father.
There were so many things I never knew about my parents, mostly due to the fact that I was too absorbed in books to be involved in conversation with anyone or even them. There were times I regretted not trying but I was seeking knowledge - I was motivated.
I would sit for hours hidden from all around in the hallway cupboard. There was old luggage surrounding me and the damp smell from the hundreds of books that adorned the shelves. Despite my claustrophobia I was always content being there. It was my space to fill my mind and I guess in a way ignore everyone else. I loved the imagery of surgical procedure manuals, so much so that at times it seemed as if they leapt off the pages and into my mind. How could my reality ever compete with the fantasy of myself preforming all these operations? It couldn’t. No one ever understood and so I was called strange and anti-social but after a while it became my comfort and people became irrelevant sociably anyway.
So many memories were triggered by the smells emanating from the kitchen! It has been truly overwhelming; distant memories of the life I used to possess. The only way I can feel free for a while is to awake a memory and reminisce until I am jerked back to the reality of this place. This place, where screams haunt the night and disorder rules the day. It was like a real-life sadistic cartoon played out by real people; people who may have had twisted thoughts but were constantly craving freedom.
I wondered how my little girl would look at me if I ever got released from this place. I’d been locked up for so many years already with the ‘crazy’ label tainting my name. I wasn’t the same man I was when I stepped into this black abyss and I knew in my mind and heart that the damage could never be healed. I was a shadow of my former self and the memories of the life I’d lived before were now projected illusions of my own mad reality.
From the day Sue was born she had always seen me as her daddy, her protector, her hero. She refused to go to bed at night without asking me to look inside the wardrobe and under her bed to make sure there weren’t any monsters. I couldn’t even begin to imagine what she thought of me now. An insane disappointment that was just a waste of space? I was someone who was supposed to protect her from the monsters and reality but I wasn’t there any more. I still couldn’t understand why Sally hadn’t brought her to see me. Maybe she was trying to hurt me the only way she could by taking my little girl from my world. She knew it would destroy me and now she had. Memories were all I could cling to, that’s all I had left.
The day Sue was born she stole my heart. Her tiny hands wrapped around my finger so tightly. She looked so innocently pure and so new to this world. From the first time I held her in my arms I knew instantly that I had created a lifelong bond of love with her. She was the only person that I knew I would love forever. Nothing in this world would have stopped me from protecting her, nothing but this. She was just perfect in my eyes and I’d never felt so proud of what I had in my life as I did that day.
Nothing had happened to her yet, she had no sad memories, no traumas. She hadn’t had anyone hurt her or let her down and had no scars on her perfect, pink skin. She is the most beautiful person in my life. Her smile would instantly light up the room and light up my world, even in the darkest of moments. She is my angel and I was her daddy, but all that had changed now. I used to read her stories at night while watching her fight her tired eyes slowly drifting her off to sleep. It broke my heart knowing that she was growing up without me by her side and I wondered if she would even remember me in ten years’ time. She and her mother had their new life now and I wasn’t part of it. It was obvious I wasn’t important any more. I was just a mad man in a crazy house and this, however sad, is my reality.
The harsh, bright lights in the recreation room jerked me back to my unwanted surroundings. I was happy rapid cycling from one thought to another that took me any place but here. The Doctors called it insanity and a flight of ideas but I called it my way of coping with my fractured life. Living it was harder than I could bare and if I stayed too long in this place I would end up hanging myself. It didn’t pay to think about the true nature of my existence, not if I wanted to survive the asylum that caged me.
“I’ll be back in a minute,” I told Jake as I started to roll the fossilized wheelchair away from the domino table.
“Do you need a hand?” Jake asked, giving me a concerned look. For God’s sake I thought, I can’t even take a piss in peace. Where was the dignity for patients or privacy for that matter? I would feel like a dog on a leash if I had to have someone watching me, no way.
“I’ll be just fine,” I snapped at him, trying to quicken my speed to get away from his worried face.
I wheeled myself into the bathroom and stood up by the urinal, stretching my aching leg. The air vent sounded different than before and I started to hear my name being whispered softly.
“Khedlar, Khedlar…,”
The fifth mirror on the right seemed to reflect a shadow and my eyes were instantly drawn to the movement it had displayed. I was the only one in the bathroom and yet I had a strong feeling that I wasn’t alone. I sat back down in the chair as the florescent lights started to flicker, something wasn’t right and I felt uneasy. It was the way they flickered on and off, it was almost like Morse code relaying an SOS in a constant loop.
I moved closer to the bizarre mirror and saw a reflection of my breath steaming it up with clouds of smoke as they escaped from my mouth. The room dropped in temperature and I zipped up my jumper to protect my icy cold skin. I wiped the mirror with my sleeve to clear it as it had misted up with my breath. I saw my face and noticed it was cracked in the centre just like the mirror was. This made me think about the day I’d tried to kill Jared in this bathroom. I had grabbed him tightly by the throat and smashed his head into this exact mirror making it crack under his head. He had insulted my little girl, what else was I supposed to do?
“Yes Khedlar, he deserved it,” a voice said over my left shoulder. I flinched and turned but no one was standing behind me. I returned my attention to the damaged mirror and saw my face distorting with the cracks. I looked deformed, abstract. My eyes started to burn and I could see my reflection manifest a different version of myself. I was haunted and stuck in a gaze seeing myself peel away my face sliver by sliver, uncovering the beast I knew all too well.
“Khedlar don’t,” something whispered over my right shoulder. I was getting a nervous twitch and kept looking behind me only to find an empty bathroom. No one was there! What is going on? The lights started to shine brighter and the silence in the room intensified.
“You’re not crazy Khedlar, you know that. You don’t belong here, you’re a good person,” the voice consoled me. It sounded different to the other one and the tone was light and relaxing. I looked into the mirror again to see myself looking back at me. I shimmered in white light and I looked almost angelic. My skin was smooth and radiant. What was happening? Am I an angel or a demon in this world?
The two images started to blend into half sided reflections of my soul. The image that displayed my inner beast was stronger and fascinated me. My left eye was as black as death and my right arm started to go numb. The whole room started to spin creating swirls of light and dark all around me and the only thing I could see clearly was my two sided reflection.
“Come closer Khedlar,” the beast beckoned. I found myself being pulled forward towards the mirror, incapable of self-control. His burnt, encrusted flesh seeped with pus as his hand was slowly coming towards me. It wormed and twisted his fingers as he drew closer. His hand was an inch away from my sweating face, outside the mirror as it pushed steadily towards me.
“Khedlar think about Sue,” the angel begged. My heart was aching from losing her.
“Yes think about your little girl Khedlar,”
the demon said mockingly.
“Why are you doing this to me?” I asked the demon that wished to kill me from the inside.
“This is all you, don’t deny what you are Khedlar, you know you have created us,” he replied. He clamped his bony hand around my neck and I started to choke, feeling the life slip from my lungs.
The angelic side of my reflection started to fight back using white light to burn the demon’s frail skin, causing it to blister and fester. I wanted to give up and allow the demon to take the last bit of life I had from me.
Sue’s face flooded my mind and I placed the angel and demon in a box. I buried it deep inside my dark subconscious playground. I am in control, no one else! I knew I was trying to convince myself that I had escaped the hell of my own mind and come out even stronger than before. I straightened up my jumper, smiled in the mirror and climbed back into the wheelchair to go find Jake. I wonder what the monkey man was doing.
Chapter 5
The Recreation Room
Ah, the recreation room! It was the place they bring you to ‘mix and mingle’ as they loved to put it. No matter how good the staff tries to make this room feel, the reality of the situation is that it’s a damp, smelly, hollow, cold draughty room and just plain boring. On one side of the room are a few tables which the patients use to play ‘exciting’ games of dominoes. On the other far corner is a large, bulky TV set with a video player so old it scratches and squeaks as it plays the film. Lastly, in the centre of this chilled desolate space stands a large mahogany desk usually occupied by two nurses.
As I was being wheeled in I noticed one of the nurses was ridiculously short. I didn’t realise exactly how short she was until she reluctantly got up from the desk to help a patient who was choking on a pen top. The nurses don’t like having to stop their exciting conversations to actually help anyone. In fact several times while they were so engrossed in conversation, patients had stolen the nail varnish remover from the desk to try to get drunk on. Needless to say they didn’t bat an eyelid. When Jared was having a laugh by sticking a piece of dry pasta up his nose, he laughed so hard at Mr Cosmos dancing with Brenda it got lodged. The nurses made him wait three days until the doctor came to do his rounds to remove it. The poor stupid man sounded as if he had a party whistle making noises every time he took a breath through his nose. This made him the pit of all jokes. Even the nurses found this amusing and only got upset when he approached the desk and his party sounds interfered with their conversations.
This vertically challenged nurse had peroxide-blond hair which was greasy and tied up in a ponytail. She wore the white protocol uniform with a tiny watch pinned to her left pocket. Her eyes were green and seemed positively evil. She would glare at me in the way you’d expect Satan to do during your first day in Hell.
Its’ almost as if they simply thought we should stay in a completely vegetated state so we would be less bothersome for them. I tended to think they would have more of a delightful time at a morgue than here; at least the corpses wouldn’t have to endure their patronising smiles.
The other nurse was probably in her thirties. She had a thick wool, flower-imprinted cardigan on top of her white uniform and both pockets were filled with bulging objects. Her red scruffy hair was held up by a white bow, oddly stained with a dark crimson smudge. She seemed to never really listen to her fellow nurse but rather be the one in charge of the never-ending conversations. She wore a wedding ring although I struggled to think who would want to marry such an annoying female. They both seemed to share the same perfume which was musky and had subtle undertones of cinnamon and pears, which in my opinion is one of the sickliest choices by far.
Jake slowed down his pace as we reached the dominoes table.
“So, what do you feel like doing today, Khedlar?” he asked in an anxious manner.
The thought of getting a machine gun and a machete came to mind. Going round this psycho hell and killing everyone seemed an enjoyable pastime. My mind slowly came back to Jake’s question.
“Tell me boy, what’s the difference? It’s all boring. Why don’t we have a little chat instead? I mean, I’d like to get to know the guy who is looking after me and all.”
I wanted to find out if he was what I had been waiting for all these years … a dumb-minded monkey who I could convince to do what I wanted and thinking about it, possibly control him into helping me to get out of this disinfected, white hell!
“Erm … okay. I mean, I am in charge of you today. They told me to keep an eye on you after your outburst. They said you had an incident in the men’s showers the other day.” He looked down at me shyly.
I could feel fear and respect build up in him. This is good, very good.
“Tell-me-why-did-you…”
I broke in just then and said with a satanic smile on my face. “What? Try to kill Jared?”
“Yes, why man? I mean he didn’t do anything to you did he?” the monkey man asked with a worried look on his bulging face. “Did he?” he repeated.
“Look boy, to tell you the truth he did do something and we are all animals at the end of the day. If I was in a ‘normal’ social situation I would have been craftier and used a more diligent plan but this is a crazy place you know, and crazy people preside these halls. But let me tell you a little secret; come closer so I can whisper it to you alone.”
Jake bent down with his eyebrows puzzled and trying to figure out what I was about to say.
“We are not all crazy you know. Some of us are sane but kept here against our will. Be careful that never happens to you because you might be sane when you come in, but soon enough you will, bit by bit, lose your mind.”
“That’s awful,” Jake whispered under his breath.
My God, he looked as if he was going to cry. For goodness sake bring out the violins!
“Is that true, Khedlar? Does that really happen? How many people here are really sane?” he asked suspiciously.
“One, me, that’s all. All the rest… are all just flipping lunatics,” I replied, feeling pleased at how easy it was to convince this stack of dense wood.
As he turned his head to one side I could have sworn I saw his brain trying to think by looking though his ear hole.
“But Khedlar, why don’t you just leave?” Jake looked concerned and a bit distraught at this point.
This was the moment to start pulling at his heart strings, seeking a bit of sympathy from this human barge. “There is no way lad, I have tried so many times but they have always caught me. Too bad I will just have to stay here and waste away in this hell-hole until I die. I think I am only forty-three although time tends to get a bit muddled in this place. The last thing I want is to live here forever, and only in my nightmares do I see myself trapped here indefinitely. The thought is soul destroying!”
I never enjoyed anyone’s company in this place. I sat back in a white plastic chair to once again observe the small-minded patients play their games of dominoes; it was truly pathetic. As time passed, Jake left the room. Poor guy, he was so lost within himself. He said he had to be getting on with his work; but I don’t even think he clearly knows what that is.
I moved about in the plastic chair attempting to get comfortable enough to have a nap. Those pills they gave me always made me sleepy, eventually, and those domino games can cure insomnia.
My mind turned into candyfloss as a scene emerged slowly out of the black. There she was, Sue, my daughter about the age I had last seen her. She looked so happy. As the cloudiness subsided I realised it wasn’t an unconscious creation of her but a distant memory. It was a sunny day. We were at the park; she loved going to the park. Her light brown hair was tied up into two ponytails and wrapped with matching purple bows. She loved purple, it was her favourite colour.
We were walking along the side of the swings; she ran quickly and jumped on one of them. Her smile made me instantly happy, she is my one and only child, I love her so much. All of a sudden I developed an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach an
d I could see, just in the distance, a man. I didn’t remember this ever happening but I somehow knew it was the past; maybe I had forgotten or had previously blanked it out for some reason?
“Come on Sue, let’s go to the lake for a while, okay?” I asked, feeling uncomfortable at being in the same place as this strange man who was too close and staring too obviously at Sue.
“Okay daddy, let’s go. Can I get some bread to throw at the ducks?” she asked, filled with excitement and life.
“Of course sweetie, anything you want.” I would have agreed to anything to persuade her to get away from this place.
The next bit was slightly blurred but when we arrived at the lake it all became clear again. She held my hand while we walked along the side of the lake, tossing bits of bread into the water for the ducks.
As I looked around there was that man again. He was about my height and wearing a black trench coat from neck to toe. I couldn’t even see his face as huge sunglasses covered his eyes.
He began to run straight at us, more towards me really. I looked for Sue but she had gone! I looked back at the man in the black coat and there she was holding his hand. She was walking with him, talking to him and even calling him daddy. My instinct felt protective of my little girl, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end as I tried to remain calm so Sue wouldn’t get panicked but the nagging feeling in my gut only seemed to get more intense, making me feel physically sick. I had to get her away from that man.
“Sue, I am here, can’t you see me?” I screamed but I couldn’t move!
A hard nudge on my side brought me back to reality. There stood Jake looking down at me.
“Are you okay, Khedlar?” he asked, almost sounding convincingly concerned.
“Yes, I am fine, I just dozed off, that’s all,” I replied, even though the dream hung solidly in my mind.
“It’s just that you were screaming Sue! Was that your wife’s name, Khedlar?” he asked, a bit too prying for my liking.
Psycho-Analysis: The Beginning Page 4
