by Janet Frame
He watched the men playing tennis. He had been watching all the time from the very first when the superintendent gave his speech and walked on the court and bounced the tennis ball, and everybody had clapped and waited for something to happen; and the whole procedure had seemed something wonderful and dazzling, and people had stared at the tennis court as if it were alive and belonged to them, and would make them rich, and tell them what they wanted to know, and talk to them and be kind to them. And yet it was just this grey slab. And everybody had clapped for it and waited and waited for something to happen; but they had got angry and changed their minds and gone home, and only the two men in white stayed, leaping and dancing.
‘Love,’ they called out. ‘Love fifteen.’
Roly listened and smiled. He shuffled his boots on the ground, rubbing his ankles together.
‘Forty love. Game.’
Roly’s head turned from side to side as he followed the shots. Sometimes he thought he would go back up to the farm and sluice out the cow yard and feed the new chickens, or watch them, as he had been told to. Yes, Mrs Skeat, the farm manager’s wife, had told him to be sure to stay and keep watch over the chickens, or else. She was going out, she said, after the tennis affair was over, down to the village shopping, and Roly was not to go wandering about, but to keep watch. But Roly’s head moved from side to side, and he clapped his hands at the beautiful players in the beautiful white shoes, and he forgot about the farm and keeping watch over the chickens.
But now the players were crossing to the pavilion for a rest, and suddenly there was Mrs Skeat carrying her shopping basket, and coming through the gate to the court, making a shortcut to the farm. And Roly remembered the chickens and keeping watch, and she saw him at the same time that he remembered. She hurried up to him, calling in a harsh voice,
‘Roly. What are you doing here? Didn’t I tell you?’
Oh, it was terrible, the new chickens worth pounds and pounds, and no one watching them. ‘Roly, didn’t I tell you? What about the chickens?’
She raised her voice. ‘What about the chickens?’
Roly didn’t answer her. There were no people in sight, and they had all waited for something to happen, and now it was happening. He felt proud but afraid.
Mrs Skeat advanced.
‘You great big lout. You great big lout,’ she repeated, ‘come on home this instant. You wait till Mr Skeat hears of this, and then you know what will happen.’
Roly knew. It was called a privilege to work for the farm manager, and it was, and if you didn’t work for the farm manager you just sat about all day, or carted coal and rubbish, or tipped disinfectant down drains while someone guarded you.
‘Come home this instant.’
Mrs Skeat was amazed that Roly had dared to leave the new chickens. He had seemed like a mechanical toy that you wound up the way you wanted it to go, and it went, it went all the time.
Roly moved his tongue round and round in his mouth. He was sorry he hadn’t done what he had been told to do. They were good people to him, and gave him cream at dinnertime, outside in the shed. He smiled at Mrs Skeat, but his eyes showed fear. He got up from his seat and walked towards her.
Ah, the mechanical toy had moved! Relieved, Mrs Skeat stepped onto the tennis court, her high-heeled shoes going tick-tack-tuck, tick-tack-tuck. Roly followed her, his heavy boots clattering harshly on the surface.
Mrs Skeat turned round, letting out a small scream. ‘How dare you, how dare you cross the court in those boots. Don’t you see the notice? No one, no one is allowed on here in anything but soft shoes. You’ll ruin it, you oaf.’
She looked lovingly at the drab, prison-grey surface. She had bought five tickets in the raffle, even bought one for Roly, but neither of them had won anything, not a thing, and all for this tennis court, and she didn’t even play tennis, but still, she had a share in it and had to protect it, there had to be someone to protect it.
‘Get off at once,’ she flung. ‘Get off at once.’
She clittered on over the court. Tack, her shoes said. Tack, attack. Soon she disappeared behind the hedge, knowing that Roly would follow her. Her anger with him had died down. He was a poor soul, but the rain should have not been so sudden and rained all over her best dress.
Roly stood a moment looking at the court. He saw the players getting ready to come out for a new game, and he knew he would have to walk across the court: even if he took his boots off, he would have to walk across it. So he stooped down and removed his boots, the left one, the right one, and tied the laces together, and hung the boots around his neck in the way he had seen it done. Then he approached the court and stepped on it. His bare feet were narrow and sunless and his big toes curled back like the prow of a canoe. The surface was hot and pricked his feet, but he walked across, smiling, smiling to himself and thinking, Why did they all go away? Why did they suppose that nothing would happen? But there seemed to be no one to look at him. He left the court and disappeared behind the hedge.
Then the two players emerged from the pavilion and resumed their game. They volleyed and shouted. Their whiteness made them seem like tall sticks of chalk, but they made no mark on the court, and their feet moved softly, as on grey blotting paper. And the sun, lower in the sky now, shone out of a clear darkening blue, and there was no more rain that day.
A Night at the Opera
We acted the cliché. We melted with laughter. Not the prickly melt that comes from sitting on a hot stove but the cool relaxing melt, in defiance of chemistry, like dropping deep into a liquid feather bed. We did not know or remember the reason for laughing. There was a film, yes; a dumb sad man with hair like wheat and round eyes like paddling pools; another man with a moustache like a toy hearth-brush; and many other people and things — blondes, irate managers, stepladders, whitewash, all the stuff of farce. And there was a darkened opera house growing cardboard trees and shining wooden moons.
I shall never know why we laughed so much. Perhaps other films had been as funny, but this one seemed to contain for us a total laughter, a storehouse of laughter, like a hive where we children, spindly-legged as bees, would forever bring our foragings of fun to mellow and replenish this almost unbelievably collapsing mirth.
Nor was it the kind of laughter that cheats by turning in the end to tears, or needing reinforcement with imagery. It was, simply, like being thrown on a swing into the sky, and the swing staying there, as in one of those trick pictures we had seen so often and marvelled at — divers leaping back to the springboard, horses racing back to the starting barrier. It was like stepping off the swing and promenading the sky.
After the film we managed somehow to walk home. The afternoon was ragged with leaves and the dreary, hungry untidiness of a child’s half-past four. Faces and streets seemed wet and serious. The hem of sky, undone, hung down dirty and grey.
But the laughter stayed with us, crippling, floating, rolling, aching, dissolving.
‘It must have been a comic picture,’ our mother said, not knowing, not knowing, when she saw our faces.
The refractory, or disturbed, part of the hospital, known as Park House, was built a safe distance from the bright admission ward whose pastel walls were hung with soothing seascapes and sunset-occupied skies, where two-toned autumnal rugs matched the golden bedspreads, and where floral curtains bunched themselves across wide-opening unbarred windows. The door of the admission ward stood unlocked, in the modern way, and the path led to a lawn, bright green like a lawn in a shop window where a wax man is mowing. In the centre, a marooned willow wept, with no pool. Birds flipped themselves, dry and hot, in the empty birdbath. Circling the lawn was a high red brick wall, dressed in a seemly way with slowly burning ivy. A country retreat? Yes, a country retreat. Gentle patients, exclaiming at the beauty and calm of it all, wandered in and out of the ward, or sat, at meals, in the light airy dining room, with napkins matching the tablecloths spread in front of them. They said grace. They pursued civilised conversation.
The patients of Park House could not, of course, be taken to the Hospital Hall. The way there led through winding, urine-scented passages, past dormitories where ghostly, wildly staring men exposed themselves, standing in rows by the windows, or pressed their faces up to the glass, like people trying to climb in or out of mirrors. Sometimes we learned weeks afterward that a dance had been held at Hospital Hall, or a concert to which members of the public came, and where the superintendent had got up and given a talk about the New Attitude; or that the patients had performed a play there, under the supervision of an enthusiastic young doctor, and local drama clubs had been invited, along with newspaper critics, who had used the words ‘promising’, ‘talented’, ‘therapeutic’. One day, when a wildly struggling woman was dragged into the ward, we learned that she had been the lion’s back legs and tail in Androcles and the Lion.
Ah, well, perhaps we were our own drama. There were two Christs, one Queen of Norway, no female Napoleons; there was Millie, as round as the full moon, who had dressed up as a man, taken an axe, and murdered three people on a lonely farm; there was Elna, who had held her child under the water in the washing tub, holding it there till it no longer struggled; there were those whose arms were folded close in cloth or canvas straitjackets; and there were the many who suffered from having no interesting delusions, who were not known as characters, and were not pointed out with pride because they had murdered or would murder or lay claim to European thrones. They were the self-centred, irritating epileptics, the paranoiacs, proud and persecuted. And the huddled quiet ones with sun-stained faces — in their quietness, a different kind of violence, an assault on everything that we imagined human. There was no place for them but Park House. They sat in the sun and rain alike, wearing no shoes or pants, their world or no-world contained in their minds, and other people might as well have been planets or stones or anything, as long as they were not identified. The violence of these patients lay in their refusal to name or be named. They sat in their straitjackets for meals at one of the long tables, and their throats were massaged to make them swallow, as if touch could provide some clue to the name and nature of their bodies. Then they would lumber out again into the sun or rain, with their hands and feet disowned by their minds, and their blood heavy and blue and swollen; in the yard, unaccustomed to walking, they moved stiffly, like blue snowmen.
So days passed, and weeks and perhaps years. Sausage days came and went; rice days snowed on us. We had honey one day, thickly peopled with ants, but honey; and apple pie made of little burned apples, topped with pastry that tasted like damp cottonwool layered with scorched brown paper. But we liked it, and we asked for more. Doctors visited, and went away shaking their heads; new doctors fled timidly through the screams and cries of the park and the yard. Heads were shaved, and head operations performed, and the strange people with bandaged heads and damp faces and ink-filled eyes lay in the small rooms along the corridor, stared at with fear by patients and nurses alike. One heard the conversation after a few days: ‘Hasn’t Molly changed? You wouldn’t know Marion. Cristina’s so docile. She spoke today. I’ve never heard her speak before.’ Yet, as more days and weeks passed, there was Molly sitting nameless and dead in a corner of the dayroom, and Cristina with the blank eyes, giggling and saying nothing, and Marion in a canvas jacket, being taken to solitary confinement. Once someone was allowed to go home, and was returned by terrified parents, unable to face the estrangement of her simple cooing and rocking in all-day masturbation. And once someone else, Leila or Doris or Nora, was promoted to another ward, and went with envious farewells; not to the admission ward — that would have been too much to hope for — but to a place where they had rugs on the floor and a tablecloth on the table, but no contemporary furniture. The seats in that dayroom were like seats taken from old-fashioned motorcars or railway carriages. Sitting on the buttoned and worn splitting leather, one had the absurd sensation of travelling, so that if one sat close enough to the windows, which opened six inches only, and looked out at the unattainable sky and not at the animal-filled park, one could quite easily imagine oneself out for a Sunday afternoon run in the country.
Then suddenly, one day in early summer, the superintendent became determined about the New Attitude, and the need for Park House to have a share in it. He was a kindly man who liked pastel shades and pictures of lakes and bright bedspreads; he was also realistic enough to imagine that a few films of murders and barroom brawls and lovely ladies kissing handsome men would help the patients of Park House to face what was called the ‘real world’. And he was sensible enough to know that Park House people could never be taken to see films in the Hospital Hall, mingling there with the gentle convalescents who carried handbags and wore their own clothes and used handkerchiefs.
So it was decided to show films in Park House itself, in the dayroom, after the more violently uncontrollable patients had been put to bed. There would be no screen. The walls, though gravy- and sausage-stained, and stuck with bits of apple pie, were of a light colour, but unfortunately there were no blinds, and the daylight at that time of year was not of a secretive nature but outspoken and honest, and preferred the company of the sky to being tucked down between hills. Our bedtime was half past six. How could we see a film in that light? ‘Your bedtime can be extended, an hour perhaps,’ the matron said graciously. The first film, it was decided, would be shown in a week’s time, on a Tuesday.
Oh, it did not seem possible, such bliss. For Tuesday was sausage day — of very real and symbolic value in a ward of women. It was also canteen day, when the sister of the ward went with a large clothes basket to the canteen and returned with tins of biscuits, which were not for us, and tins of sweets, which were thrown in handfuls into the middle of the dayroom, prompting a lively scramble and a few black eyes and bleeding noses. They were paper sweets, with mint intestines, and words written on the outside of the wrapper, ‘The Sweet for All Times and All Places’, so that, eating them, one felt a delicious sense of inclusiveness.
There was not really much excitement in the week of waiting for our first film to be shown. Each day had its small pleasures: food; fights; the appearance of the doctor, perhaps a smile from him; the occasional escapes. (Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made the mistake of paying the taxi-driver with a check made of toilet paper.) For me, there was a visit to the kitchen to collect a tray of stew. There I saw what looked like the activity of a whaling station: huge vats of meat boiling; a man with long hairy
arms using one of them to stir a copper pot full of semolina; trays of white failed scones. It was also in that week that I managed to get hold of a book to read, by finding a small locked shelf where three volumes rather drunkenly held each other up: A Girl of the Limberlost, Moths of the Limberlost (I remembered my mother saying what lovely books these were), and another book, which I read, about a sheepdog who gets his university degree and becomes a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. It was also in that week that we spent a whole day downstairs in the yard, in the sun; climbing on the verandah rail, we could look out over the harbour and see the tide drawing slowly in towards the streaked grey mudflats, and the lines of warmth dancing up and up into the sky. From somewhere in the city we heard a tramcar and a three o’clock factory whistle, and then we knew that the world was still there, and people still went out shopping, and worked in factories, making biscuits and blue bags and plastic raincoats.
Tuesday came. The impossibly violent people, like naughty children, were whisked off to bed. A timid-looking new attendant entered the dayroom and built a fence of benches around himself and set up a projector. Then he announced the name of the film.
‘It is,’ he said, ‘the Marx Brothers in A Night at the Opera.’
And then I remembered the laughter, the stifling, collapsing laughter, the pails of whitewash, and the banana skins, and the step-ladders and garden rakes, all the beautiful paraphernalia of accepted nonsense, without any strangeness or fear in it, no monstrous ballooning faces phosphorescent in the dark, just something obviously and happily mad. ‘A Night at the Opera.’ I waited. The attendant, still looking timidly about him, began to show the film.
