by Amy Cross
I smile. “We both know you're not unstable,” I say. “In fact, I think that's part of your problem. Everyone is a little unstable from time to time in their daily lives. But not you, Mr. Tarmey. You're absolutely the most stable person I've ever met”. I look over at the door. “Apart from when we try to take you out of this room, obviously”.
“Obviously,” he repeats.
I pick up another book from the desk. Dracula, by Bram Stoker. I thumb through the pages.
“Do you believe in vampires, Dr. Penfold?” he asks.
“No,” I say. “But I have a patient who does. She thinks she has made friends with such a creature”.
“Stupid kid,” says Tarmey.
“People believe what they want to believe,” I reply. I put the book down. “My job is to temper their fantasies with a little reality. Dracula is a fascinating book. The original, I mean. Back then, vampires were creatures of horror. These days, they tend to be featured in fantasy stories rather than true horror. But when you think about it, they really are a quite monstrous concept”.
“They certainly are,” says Tarmey.
I head to the door. “I have to get back to work,” I say. “Are you sure you wouldn't like to come up with me?”
“No thank you,” he says, watching as I head out.
I start pulling the door shut. “I'll get your out of this room one day, Mr. Tarmey,” I say. "Even if I have to dismantle the walls around you, I'll get you out."
“We'll all suffer if you do, Dr. Penfold,” he replies, as the door slams shut.
Sophie
“Why aren't you afraid of clocks?” asks Alex, the nice but clearly mentally unwell guy who has decided to sit next to me as I stare out the window. He seems to be about my age. Young, messed up. “Horrible things,” he continues. “Always ticking, always counting down toward the end”. I ignore him, but he keeps talking. “Do you know what it means when all the clocks stop?”
I turn to him. “What does it mean?”
He leans close to me. “It means you're dead”.
I smile and nod. “I'll remember that”.
He grins. “It's not important,” he says. “It's potatoes for dinner today. I saw them bringing in sacks of potatoes. What do you think it means?”
I open my mouth to say something, but instead my name is called out from across the room. “Sophie Hart!” shouts an orderly. “Visitor!”
I haul myself to my feet. “Sorry, Alex,” I say, heading over to the orderly, who escorts me the short distance to the visiting room. There, I'm not particularly surprised to find my mother waiting for me. She looks sombre and sad, and very tired. The room doesn't help: it's small, pretty bare, and has no furniture other than the table in the middle and a few chairs.
The orderly shuts the door, remaining in the room as I sit opposite my mother.
“How are you getting on?” she asks.
“Not bad,” I say, “considering you committed me to a loony bin”.
She's clearly unhappy with the term 'loony bin'. “It's a psychiatric hospital. And I didn't have you committed, I had you brought here for an extended evaluation”.
“I think you'll find,” I say carefully, “that forcing me to be here is kind of the same thing as committing me. Even if you don't want to say the words”.
My mother sighs. Over the years, I've become so accustomed to her just sitting on the sofa watching TV, it's actually something of a surprise to find her out and about in the real world. She always seemed to be increasingly disconnected, but now she has apparently reconnected in the most annoying way possible.
“Mom,” I say. “What happened on Monday? How did I end up here?”
She pauses, seemingly unsure of how to answer the question. “You don't remember?”
“No,” I say. “Pretty obviously not”. The truth is: I don't remember anything since I left Gothos with Patrick. We'd escaped from the old mansion of the vampires, just after Patrick and I made love. Well, we didn't so much 'make love' as he climbed on top of me and... well, it was still good.
“Things just got too much for you,” my mother says. “And you... acted out. The doctor thinks it's grief from your father's death. All this talk about vampires”.
“What's that got to do with Dad dying?” I ask.
She shakes her head. There are tears welling up in her eyes, but I don't really feel much sympathy for her. Years and years of us barely communicating can't be undone in a few minutes.
“Get me out of here,” I say. “You know I'm not crazy. I'll shut up about vampires, but get me out of here”.
“It's not about shutting up,” she says. “You can talk about them if you want. You just have to admit that it's all made up. It's all stories”.
I shake my head. “I'm not going to lie,” I say.
“Then you're going to have to stay here a little longer,” she replies. “They think they can cure you, honey. And it'll all seem better when it's over and done with”.
I put my head in my hands. No-one is listening to me.
“Sophie,” says my mother, reaching over and putting a hand on my shoulder. “We were terrified when you went missing. We thought... You could have been killed, honey”.
I look at her. “Missing?” I ask. “I never went missing!”
“Honey, you vanished for nearly a year!”
I stare at her. What's she talking about? I was at home this time last week, then I went to Gothos with Patrick, and then... well, then things get a bit fuzzy, but there's no way I was missing for a year. No way at all.
“And then with what happened on Monday -”
“What happened on Monday?” I ask, starting to get impatient. “Come on, Mom. You're scaring me. What happened? What are you talking about? I wasn't missing for a year! Just because you were too busy watching General fucking Hospital to notice me, doesn't mean I was missing!”
“Everyone was out looking for you, honey,” she says. “Even that trampy friend of yours was worried!”
Trampy friend? What the hell is she talking about? Oh, okay, she means Shelley. But... I saw Shelley last week. And everyone. I saw everyone. There's no way anyone could think I was missing. Hell, I don't think I've gone more than a couple of days without seeing Shelley since I was in fourth grade.
“I wasn't missing,” I say. “I was at home. I didn't go anywhere”.
“That's what we want to work out,” she says. “Where you really were”.
I stand up. “I want to go back to my room,” I say. “Do you mind if I go?”
She looks at me with a mix of desperation and sadness. She clearly doesn't know what to do. I kind of understand. After all, anyone would be worried if their daughter went missing for a year. Even my useless mother would have to spring into action. But the fact is: I didn't go missing for a year. I was away at Gothos for – at most – a couple of days. There's simply no way someone could go missing for an entire year and not remember it.
The door opens. I turn to see that the orderly has opened it up to let me out.
“Bye Mom,” I say, heading out of the room. I don't wait for her to say anything in return. I just want to go to my room, to try to work out what's going on. More than anything, I need to find a way to contact Patrick. Why hasn't he come to get me out of here?
Dr. Penfold
There's a knock at my door and Dr. Lucas pops his head into the room. “Got a minute?” he asks, in his usual happy and energetic manner. I swear, I can't deal with Dr. Lucas before I've had five or six cups of coffee in the morning. He reminds me of myself forty years ago when I first started out in this job: hopelessly enthusiastic and determined to help people. Part of me can't wait to see him in ten years' time, worn down by the job and unable to do much more than shuffle pieces of paper around. He'll have bags under his eyes, he'll be exhausted all the time, his marriage will be shot to pieces, his kids won't talk to him, he'll be teetering on the edge of a drinking problem... He'll be like me.
“What is it?” I a
sk, looking back down at my papers. Hopefully he'll see that I'm busy. This had better not be another attempt to get me to authorize the purchase of a pool table for the games room. If he thinks I want a group of mentally ill people wandering around with pool cues and balls, he must be insane himself.
“It's about John Tarmey,” he says.
Great. This tired old conversation. I'm more than aware that the other doctors here think I'm taking the wrong approach with John, but they haven't been here as long as I have. If they'd seen what we tried in the 70s and 80s, they'd understand that John is a very special patient who can't just be electro-shocked back to normality. He's a special case, and I'm the only one who really understands him. The slow approach is the only way to deal with him.
“I know you don't want to talk about it,” Lucas continues, “but the fact is, while we're debating what to do with him, he's cooped up in that little room with no windows and no company. It's inhumane”.
“It would be inhumane to release him prematurely,” I say, taking my glasses off and setting them down on the desk in front of me. “It would be inhumane to inflict his behavior on the other patients or on the general public”.
“It would be inhumane to stop trying to rehabilitate him,” Lucas says. He's so sure of himself, so cocky... so wrong.
“Some people can't be helped,” I say. “John Tarmey is a case in point. He's perfectly happy so long as we leave him in the lead room. I genuinely think he would prefer to spend the rest of his days in there, rather than being dragged out and forced to interact with the world. Damn it, sometimes I think I'd like to live in a lead room. He's fine down there for now”.
“I know, but -”
“Have you heard the way he screams?” I ask. “Every time we try to get him out of that room, he screams like some kind of wild animal. Have you heard that?”
“Yes, of course -”
“Do you really want to inflict that much pain on a man?” I ask. There's silence for a moment. “If he really wants to spend his life in a small lead room, and if we genuinely believe that to be the best solution for him right now, is there really a problem?”
“You can't just leave him in there and forget about him,” says Lucas. I admire his passion, but I do wish he'd grow out of it. He's supposed to be a doctor, not a social worker.
“I'm running out of orderlies,” I insist. “I send them in to haul him out, and he damn near kills them. Rumors are getting out, it's almost impossible to hire any new staff around here”.
“So your solution is to just leave him in his room?”
I'm tired of talking about this every few days. “If you want to get him out of that room,” I say firmly, “you may go down there right now and attempt to get him out yourself. Haul him out, or die trying. Otherwise, please leave me to make the key decisions because ultimately I'm the one who has to answer if something goes wrong”.
I can tell he's not convinced, but he shuts up and drops a bunch of files on my desk. “Moving on,” he says, sounding annoyed and clearly planning to return to the topic of John Tarmey at a later date, “I have Sophie Hart's medical exam reports. She's healthy, and there was no sign of drugs or alcohol in her system”.
I open the folder to take a look. “No sign at all?”
“Nothing,” says Lucas. “You were wrong. She's not on anything. Whatever's wrong with her is psychological, not pharmaceutical”.
I take a deep breath. I really expected to find that she'd been using something. Then again, it's possible to disguise your habit, if you know what you're doing. From my contact with her so far, I'd say she's more than smart enough to slip something past us. “This doesn't confirm anything,” I say. “Young girls don't just start behaving like that with no inciting incident”.
“I'm just telling you what the tests told us,” Lucas replies, somewhat coldly. He's clearly annoyed with me. “The tests show no kind of substance. From what I can tell, she doesn't even take painkillers when she gets a headache”.
“She drinks?” I ask.
“Not heavily. Her liver's healthy enough”.
I leaf through the pages of the report.
“And she's not pregnant,” I say.
He shakes his head. “No”. There's a pause. “But she has been”.
I look up at him. “What do you mean?”
“She's not pregnant now,” he says, "but according to the medical exam we did when she was admitted, she has been, in the past. She's carried a baby to term. She gave birth some time in the past month. And... I don't think she remembers”.
Sophie
“Two people are sitting in a room,” says Alex, who seems to have attached himself to me and now follows me around the recreation room whenever I decide to be social. “Do you understand?”
“Yeah,” I say, walking over to the window and looking out at the depressing little garden. It's early morning. I spent all of last night staring at the ceiling, trying to work out what's going on. I didn't get very far. I guess I was waiting for Patrick, hoping he'd turn up and save me. I don't understand why he's left me here to rot.
“Okay. Two people are sitting in a room, and one of them says to the other one: You're crazy. And the other one replies: No, you're crazy. And the first one replies, No, you're crazy. Do you see where this is going? It's a cycle of negativity and desperate attempts to use subjective viewpoints as facts. Do you see how fucked-up this whole place is?”
I nod. “It is,” I say, staring at the trees in the distance.
“It's seriously wrong. It's... bureaucratic and it's vicious. They put power in the hands of these assholes who get off on labeling other people as crazy. Then they wonder why nothing improves and why everything just turns to shit. Do you understand?”
“Why are you in here?” I ask.
"Doesn't matter."
"Why are you in here?" I ask again.
“I stabbed my best friend seventeen times,” he says, matter-of-factly. “During a three-legged race at school”.
I stare at him. “Was... No, I don't want to know. Did your friend survive?”
Alex shrugs. “I don't know. It's all propaganda, anyway. Like those pills they make us take. Do you take yours?”
“I do,” I say.
“I put them in my mouth,” he says. “But I get rid of them so they don't work”.
“How do you do that?” I ask.
“I swallow them”. He looks at me, clearly expecting to be called a genius. “That way, they don't stay in my mouth and start affecting my brain”.
“That's brilliant,” I say quietly.
“The only one here who's got it all sorted out is John Tarmey,” Alex says. “He makes them do what he wants them to do. He has them all under control. They'll never tell John Tarmey what to do. Do you understand?”
I look around the room. Half a dozen fellow patients are scattered about, all looking as if their souls have been ripped from them and burnt. “Which one's John Tarmey?” I ask. “The guy in the wheelchair? The guy on the sofa? The guy hiding behind the plant who thinks the rest of us can't see him?” I wave at that last guy; he kneels down behind the plant.
“Tarmey's underground,” says Alex.
“Explains why I haven't met him,” I say.
“He's in the box. He never comes up. And they're scared of him. He's broken all their noses, and that's just the lucky ones. Some of them end up in hospital because of what he does to them. But it's their own fault, because they shouldn't keep trying to make John Tarmey come out of his box. Do you understand?”
“Yes, Alex, I understand,” I say. “I understand everything you say, you don't need to keep asking”.
“Okay,” he says.
I hear my name called by the woman at the nurses' station. Without really saying anything, I head off across the room. I'm fully aware that Alex is following me, but I have no intention of stopping or acknowledging him. I figure I'll just wait it out, and eventually he'll get bored of me.
“Pills,” says the
nurse, handing me a small plastic cup containing three pills. They're little green-and-turquoise capsules. I don't even remember what they're called, but I swallow them anyway. “You want some water with those?” the nurse asks, after they've gone down the hatch.
“No thanks,” I say.
“You have to go and see Dr. Penfold,” she says. “He's waiting for you in his office”.
“I'm not seeing him until tomorrow,” I say, turning to leave.
“You have to go now,” says the nurse. “He has someone with him to see you”.
I turn back to her. “I'm tired. I just took my pills”.
“Orders are orders,” she says, and then she looks at something that's just behind me. “And Alex, you can't go with her. Go and sit down”.
I hear Alex shuffling away. “Thanks,” I say. “He was kind of getting on my nerves”.
As soon as I'm led into Dr. Penfold's room, I realize this is going to be uncomfortable. My mother is there, with her usual concerned face on, but sitting in the corner is an entirely unexpected person: Shelley, my best friend, the one person who has actually met Patrick and knows that my story is completely true.
“So you're here to apologize and let me out?” I ask, kind of knowing that this is unlikely.
“Sit down, Sophie,” says Dr. Penfold.
I take a seat, glancing over at Shelley. She smiles at me but looks away. She seems tense.
“Are you okay, honey?” my mother asks.
I nod. There's no point trying to explain anything to her.
“We thought you'd like another visitor,” says Dr. Penfold. “Your friend Shelley was kind enough to come up today with your mother”.
I look at them. “You two shared a car?”
Shelley smiles, my mother looks annoyed.
“Sophie, you said in one of our sessions that your friend Shelley experienced some of these... unusual happenings while she was with you. Is that correct?”
