In the Middle of the Wood

by Iain Crichton Smith

  “Now, listen,” she said to Ronny. “You have to get up.” And she pulled the bedclothes to the floor leaving him cowering against his sheets in his striped pyjamas. Ronny rubbed his eyes and stared around him.

  “You shouldn’t be watching the tv till all hours,” she said. Ronny got up and made his way to the bathroom.

  “That boy,” she said, shaking her head and going out again.

  All this appeared to Ralph like a scene from a play. Around him were four actors. What organization it all required, what attention to detail.

  “Listen,” he said to Hugh. “I can’t read. Are you like that?”

  “Yes. I tried to read but I can’t. My wife brought me a lot of history books. I should be making notes on them but I can’t do it.” He put out his cigarette and lit another, offering Ralph one from his packet. Ralph took it.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Hugh, “you weren’t supposed to take that cigarette. You’re not supposed to lend or borrow money either. Did you not read the rules?”

  “No,” said Ralph. He picked up the sheet with the rules: there were a number of misspellings and errors in punctuation. This too bothered him quite a lot. He was sure that they were fake, hastily put together for his benefit. He wondered whether Hugh had deliberately made him break the rules. He stubbed his cigarette in a blue scarred ashtray.

  Ronny came back from the bathroom, tall and strutting. Ralph saw that his face was pale and spotty. It was really astonishing how an actor as young as this could be hired.

  “I hope you washed yourself,” said Hugh. “You needed a wash.” He walked over to Ronny on his slippered feet.

  “Listen to him,” said Ronny in a high almost hysterical voice. “He never washes himself. Do you, old man? You never wash do you, old man?” Hugh turned away, the cigarette between his lips, smiling.

  “He just washes his moustache,” said Ronny in the same high voice, and went off into a paroxysm of laughter. “He takes it off at night and leaves it beside his bed, don’t you, old man?” He seemed very noisy and aggressive. Hugh smiled patiently and then went out of the room and along the corridor. He seemed constitutionally unable to sit still.

  “Old man,” Ronny shouted after him. He made up his bed quickly and noisily drank some orangeade. Hugh came back and went over to him and punched him lightly in the chest.

  “You know what’s going to happen to you,” he said. “You’ll end up in another ward, one of the really bad ones, if you don’t take your pills and if you don’t get up in time in the morning. And if you don’t wash.”

  “Listen to him. He snores,” said Ronny and went off into another paroxysm of laughter. “Did you hear him snoring? He snores like a horse. You’re a horse, old man, a horse, a horse.”

  “That’s right, I’m a horse,” said Hugh calmly. He put out his cigarette and lit another one. “You’ve taken my ashtray,” he said to Ronny. “You don’t smoke and you take my ashtray all the time. You’re a thief, aren’t you? Aren’t you?”

  “I’m a thief, I’m a thief, I’m a thief,” Ronny chanted.

  What actors they are, thought Ralph. They have rehearsed this very carefully. What looks spontaneous is really planned and scripted. They’re really very good.

  Hugh walked over to Ronny again and said, “I’m serious. If you don’t watch out you’ll end up in another ward.”

  “I don’t care,” said Ronny. “I’ve been in one before. I don’t mind. There’s more action there. There’s no action here, is there, old man?”

  “Action?”

  “And I’ll tell you another thing. These pills you’re taking make you impotent. That’s why your wife doesn’t visit you. His wife never comes to see him,” he said to Ralph. “ ‘Cos he’s impotent and he smells. Don’t you, old man?” Hugh smiled tolerantly. “It’s true though she never comes to see you. And you smoke too much. You’ll die of smoking, old man.”

  “Ronny watched the television till midnight,” said Hugh. “What was it last night, Ronny? Was it Frankenstein? Ronny here never got his O levels, did you, Ronny? He wasn’t in school long enough. You were jinking, weren’t you, Ronny? You wait till that sister comes. She’s got it in for you.”

  “I did,” chanted Ronny. “I did get my O levels. You don’t even know what O levels are. They weren’t invented when you were in school, old man.” And he doubled up with laughter.

  “Run away and polish your head,” said Hugh calmly.

  “Polish your head, polish your head,” Ronny chanted, laughing again with a high nervous noisy sound. Everything he did was tense and nervous and jerky as if he were a twanging wire, while all the time the psychologist smiled in the corner, now and again getting up to tidy his bed compulsively.

  “Breakfast,” said Hugh, glancing at his watch.

  “What kind of watch is that?” said Ronny. “That’s a Russian watch. The old man is a Communist. What Communist gave you that watch, old man?”

  “I’m going for my breakfast,” said Hugh and padded out of the room. After a while, Ralph and the psychologist followed him.

  “I don’t want any breakfast,” shouted Ronny. Ralph and the psychologist walked along side by side past the office. Ralph wanted to speak to his companion: his silence bothered him. He hated being judged by that silence; and yet when he was writing there was nothing he liked better. He hadn’t talked much to Linda thinking that in comparison with his own, her concerns were trivial. He would have liked to have been self-sufficient as a stone. Yet here he wished to speak.

  “I wonder what they’ll have for breakfast,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” said the psychologist, but didn’t add to his statement. What a clever fellow he is, thought Ralph, he is doing this deliberately. And he was ashamed of himself for having spoken first as if it had been a culpable weakness.

  They queued for their food and then sat at the same table. By now Ralph could recognize one or two people, including Lady Macbeth and the tall thin man whom he had seen pacing up and down in the ward the day before, and who had clearly been shifted. People stared morosely down at their plates. Opposite him sat an old man whose mouth moved continually, as if he were in the process of having a stroke. Now and again he would find someone staring at him and then he would remind himself that after all this was a drama group which had been hired to drive him mad.

  “You must take your food,” said a nurse to a young girl who was standing at the door.

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You must take it. The doctor said you had to take it.” The young girl sat sulkily at a table near the door but made no attempt to eat.

  When they had finished their food the handicapped girl, who had told him about the phone call, cleaned all the tables and cleared the plates away. She looked white-faced and angry, as if the diners offended her by their slovenly manners. After breakfast was over, Ralph followed the others into the lounge.

  When he had had his pills in the lounge carefully dispensed from a trolley, he walked back to his room. Ronny was sitting on his bed staring down at the floor.

  “Should you not be taking some pills?” said Ralph.

  “I’m not taking them.”

  After a while he added, “I’ll get the bastard yet.”

  “What bastard?”

  “My stepfather.”

  “Your stepfather?”

  “That’s right. He’s a naval officer.”

  Stepfather, thought Ralph. So they’re at it again. And a picture of his own stepfather returned to him, silent and bookish, always disapproving. Perhaps that was why he himself had become a novelist, creating new worlds for himself to escape that terrible silence. If only his stepfather had once shouted at him but, no, whenever he did anything wrong or was too noisy, then that awful silence had descended: he had felt himself less important than one of his stepfather’s books. What was the secret of those books, their calming cold secret mystery? He must try and find out. And so he had tried to read them, to placate his stepfather, a
s if by reading he might enter that world and, little by little, he had done so. Had he done the same with Linda, repeated the silences which he himself had endured? Had he cast his disapproval on her too? But, no, that did not excuse her, unless she had grown to hate him as much as he himself had hated his stepfather. And now he in turn had entered the kingdom of silence. It was his weapon as it had been his stepfather’s. The sins of the stepfathers are visited on the children.

  “He beat me up, the bastard,” said Ronny. “But he won’t do it again. I’m bigger than him now.”

  “What did he beat you for?” said Ralph.

  “For nothing. He took it into his head. Because of school sports. Report cards. Anything.”

  “And what about your mother?”

  Ronny snorted but didn’t answer. Ralph thought of the mother as suave, svelte, ambitious, dressed in fine clothes, standing beside her husband at parties. He said, “You should take your pills, you know, or they’ll put you in a worse ward.”

  “I don’t care. I’ve been in one already. I like the nut cases.”

  “As if you are not one yourself,” thought Ralph. But the cunning of the scheme almost overwhelmed him. Imagine putting him in with a stepson, just as he had been himself. Was there nothing that they hadn’t thought of? The labyrinthine plot attracted him, repelled him. It was so huge, so luminous in its ramifications. It was almost beyond the scope of the human mind. How much he had underestimated Linda. It was she who was the novelist, not him.

  “So one day I left the house and I swallowed a lot of aspirins,” Ronny was saying. “I couldn’t stand the bastard any longer.”

  “I tried everything,” Ralph thought, “I abased myself. I read his books even though I didn’t understand them. I wanted to know his secret, to enter his world, to make him notice me. But he didn’t notice me. There was nothing I could do that would make him notice me. There was only that terrible silence as cold as crystal. It was as if he hated me for existing, for being an interruption to his books.”

  His head spun: he couldn’t understand what was happening to him. It was as if, even while he was growing up, this plot was being woven about him: everything that had happened to him, everything that he was, contributed to this story which was torturing him.

  And a kind of tenderness for Ronny overwhelmed him. “Please,” he said. “Please. Take your pills.”

  Ronny raised his head as if the tone of Ralph’s voice had attracted him: he hearkened like a dog that is listening to a sound that no human ear can hear.

  “I might,” he said. “I might at that.”

  And suddenly Ralph began to tell him his own story. He told him of the hotel, of the black doctor, of the tapes, the taxi driver, he told him of his journey into the wood, and Ronny listened seriously.

  But he did not really appear interested till Ralph told him about his own stepfather, of his silences, of his disapproval. Nevertheless while he was talking to him Ralph was thinking, This boy is an actor, he has been planted here. There can be no other explanation, there have been too many coincidences. Why should I be confiding in an actor, whose profession is being used to destroy me. Yet some impulse had made him break his silence, speak endlessly as if he were talking to himself.

  “I’ll tell you something, he makes me feel like shit,” said Ronny. “I’ll strangle the bastard.” And his face became ugly and angry so that Ralph felt frightened that the boy might attack him. And then it occurred to him, That is what they are gambling on, that this boy might confuse me with his stepfather, that in the middle of the night he might attack me with a banned razor. And he was frightened again and wanted to leave the ward, but he stayed. Sometimes now he didn’t care whether he was killed or not. It might not last very long anyway, the fact of death, it might last only a moment, the stab in the stomach, the strangling, the throttling. And in any case what did he have to look forward to? This boy would be doing him a favour.

  Should he not simply say to him, “I am your stepfather,” and let events take their course? Should he not tender himself as a sacrifice to that desperate rage?

  He remembered the night he had shouted at his stepfather, “I’ll burn the house down. Send for the police. I don’t care.” And his father standing by the phone saying, “I will. Don’t think I won’t.”

  And himself, “Do it then.” And at that moment if he had had a match he would have burnt the house down. His stepfather trembled and shook, his face was twisted with hatred and helplessness, and his mother had come between them and said, “If you send for the police you’ll ruin his life, don’t you understand?” And he hated his mother then and always. How had she married this iceberg? Could she not see what he was like? That he had no love in his bones? And sometimes in the night he had heard them whispering together and thought that they were talking about him.

  Ronny was looking at him with a hostile gaze now. He was saying, “I’ve changed my mind. I won’t take the pills. They can do what they like.” And he stalked out of the ward with the careless stride of youth that does not think of consequences. And Ralph was left alone again.

  He walked to the window. The leaves were stirring in a breeze and the two men were gathering them in their wheelbarrow. It was to a ward such as they inhabited that Ronny might be sent if he continued with his disobedience. Ralph glanced up at the hat which hung above the lamp but realized that this was not the ward it was in.

  He took a pad from his locker and tried to write but he could write nothing. Then very seriously in the silence of the room he began to note down reasons why he believed there was a plot against him. He headed his notes THE PLOT and numbered his reasons as if he were a bureaucrat.

  1.

  Why did the lawyer say, “This is like a scene from a play”?

  2.

  Why did the trolleys in the previous hospital have only two wheels instead of four?

  3.

  Why was there a Mexican hat on the light?

  4.

  Why have I been put in here with a boy who has a stepfather?

  5.

  Why did the surgeon drop the match on my pillow?

  6.

  Why is the psychologist always watching me?

  7.

  Why did that nurse say, “I could make a scene if I liked”?

  8.

  Why did Linda pretend that she was tired? Why didn’t she answer the phone?

  9.

  Why is it that everyone I meet has taken an overdose?

  10.

  How could a black doctor be called Emmanuel?

  He studied what he had written and tried to think of other items to record but he seemed for the moment to have exhausted his questions. He would present his list to that lady psychologist when he had his first meeting with her. He would show her that he was not to be trifled with, that he had a clear cool brain, that he had read psychology and knew what he was talking about.

  Finally he thought of another question, Why was there a procession of men carrying coffee cups in the corridor?

  “Oh, that,” said Hugh. “There’s a coffee machine along there. Do you want to come along for a coffee?”

  Ralph and Hugh and the psychologist walked along the corridor together, Hugh scuttling along very fast as was usual with him. They passed Lady Macbeth who was pacing up and down in her endless circles. A woman in a nightgown came out of a room and said, “Why is my room full of tourists? They came on a bus and they are lying in the beds. Where did they come from? You tell me that.”

  “Tourists?” said Hugh.

  “Tourists. I can’t understand their language. They came off the bus and into my room. Why did they choose my room? They didn’t come for Bed and Breakfast, I can tell you.” She thrust her haunted face towards them. “I’ve had Americans and I should know. There was a woman came to my house one day and she examined the sheets, and she said, ‘I think they will do’. ‘Well,’ I said to her, and I grabbed her skirt and looked at her underskirt and I said to her, ‘Do you think t
hat is clean enough for my sheets?’ She didn’t like it.”

  “You’ll be all right,” said Hugh. “They’re not tourists. What nationality do you think they are?”

  “I think they’re Germans.”

  “They’re not Germans anyway,” said Hugh. “I was in the war.”

  “Well then they might be Dutch. They’re not so bad. I had a Dutch boy in my house and he took pictures all the time. Even when I was at the sink he was taking pictures. But then he began to steal my things. He stole my ornaments and then he stole my dog.”

  “They’re all right if they’re Dutch,” said Hugh.

  And the three of them walked along to the coffee machine.

  “There was no one there,” said Hugh. “No one at all.”

  When they got back to their room Hugh lit another cigarette. “I don’t know if my wife will come today. I gave my sons my business, you know, after I came out of the hospital last time.”

  The other two waited for him to continue.

  “I have two sons and I divided the business between them. I wanted to get on with my writing.”

  “Writing?” said Ralph.

  “I’m writing a history of the world from a Communist point of view. I make notes all the time. I have a typewriter but I know a professional typist who will put a finish on the book for me.”

  “How long will it take?” said Ralph.

  “I don’t know yet. It’ll take a long time. It hasn’t been done before. Wells wrote a history of the world but it wasn’t from a Communist point of view. I’m a Communist. My sons aren’t Communist though. I have a paper business.”

  “Where is it?”

  “In Bowling.” He paused and then said, “Who built the pyramids? I ask you that. It was the ordinary people. It’s always the rich who are written about, the kings and so on. But it’s the poor who did the work. I’ve got hundreds of cards on which I’ve written notes. My wife threw some of them out; she said she couldn’t move in her own house. She might come today, I don’t know. My sons are too busy to come.”