by Peter Kocan
The nurse comes back.
“I forgot. You aren’t allowed in here except at bedtime.”
Downstairs you find the ward is filling up. The corridors are crowded with patients, mostly retards by the look of them, and the screws and nurses who have brought them from all over the hospital. The Charge Sister is bustling with her clipboard and her own nurses are running about, following orders. Petticoat government seems efficient, at least. Most male screws treat nursing as a bit of a joke, unless “security” is involved. You suppose that’s because protecting society from maniacs has some masculine style about it. Wiping bums hasn’t much style.
You go outside and gaze at the lake. Then you move to the side of the building and look across the vast bushland. You can see MAX. It is small and far away, just red roofs and the red wall snaking around the ridge top and a glint of sun on the swimming pool. If you squint hard you can almost see men in the yard, but maybe you only think you see them. It is hard to believe you are here like this, seeing MAX so tiny. Those men who walked on the moon must have felt this way, looking back at the little earth.
It’s two-thirty. You wonder if you are supposed to go to OT this afternoon. You want to. All this has unsettled you and you’d like to counteract it with a spell in your familiar corner at work. You find the Charge Sister in a throng of people and get her attention for a moment. Yes, you may go to work. You assume she means by yourself, but you aren’t sure. Before you can clarify it she has turned away and you don’t dare bother her again. You spend half an hour trying to figure if she meant by yourself or not. If you don’t hurry up it won’t be worth going. With a sense of taking a great risk you set off.
The walk takes five minutes, down a steep hill, past the Administration block—which makes you very nervous—and then down between Ward 7 and REFRACT. You pass the window of your own cell in REFRACT and you see that someone else has it already. At the next window you see Throgmorton’s sick old face peering from the pillow.
“I’m The Owner and The Maker!” he croaks at you.
The little bandy-legged bloke hails you from the yard as you pass.
“Gettin’ out Tuesday!”
It makes you homesick.
You’ve just sat down at your sewing machine and are telling Con Pappas about Ward 24 when Cheryl and Janice come from the office with a cake on a tray. It has green icing and a spiral of whipped cream on top. They set it down on the sewing machine and stand back grinning.
“What’s this?” you ask.
“Your coming-out cake, of course!” says Janice.
“To celebrate going to an open ward,” says Cheryl.
“Cheryl baked it,” adds Janice. “So it’ll probably kill you!”
The dining room is low and gloomy despite the fresh paint and the flashing stainless steel of the servery and the sinks and dishwashers behind it. Sixty patients are locked in here for the evening meal. The stink of us almost covers the reek of newness. They aren’t all retards exactly. A lot are just chronics scraped from the back wards after twenty or so years. The ratio of sexes is about two-thirds male, one-third female. Many of them are still unsettled and they keep darting from their places and screws and nurses keep shoving them back in chairs. Already at this meal a table has been overturned and rissoles and gravy trodden to a mash on the floor. The rissoles are nice. You’ve eaten your first and are ready for the second when a bony hand snatches it. A screw grabs the wrist and bends it to make the hand let go. The rissole plops back into the plate and you get a splash of gravy. You don’t feel like eating it now.
Most of these patients have name tags pinned on. The three men at your table are Stark, Stern and Gilroy—like a legal firm, or a comedy act. Stark is a thin dark retard. Stern is craggy-faced and addresses all staff as “Mr Attendant Sir”. You don’t see much of Gilroy. He keeps running around the room and screws keep shoving him down in the nearest chair. Now he’s back—by accident, you think—in his own place.
The dining room has two doors. One leads on to the verandah and the other to the main corridor. Both lead to a version of The Gauntlet. After breakfast and lunch we are let out to the verandah where a file of screws and nurses waits to grab the worst of us and shove us into the lavatories to shit. After the evening meal we go into the corridor and another file waits at the stairs to shove the worst of us up to bed. The ones who aren’t grabbed go through into the dayroom until ten o’clock. You could bear the stink and disruption of the dining room. The worst thing is wondering whether you’ll get through The Gauntlet each time. You have only been grabbed once, so far. A young screw took hold of your collar at the stairs and began manhandling you up. The Charge Sister happened to notice and motioned him to let you go. You couldn’t say anything. The indignity of it took your breath away.
You are in the dayroom tonight, in a kind of alcove which is designed to hold a billiard table or something. Of course there’d be no point having a billiard table in this ward. Billiards is too complicated for the likes of us. You are sitting alone, trying to read The Survivor. You’re finding it hard to concentrate on anything any more except keeping yourself safe, and apart.
Deirdre sits near you. She’s one of the four or five in this ward who seem fairly okay. She’s about twenty-five, and works in the laundry. She worked at OT once but tried to break Mr Trowbridge’s skull with a mallet so he got rid of her. There is an argument in the dayroom. A girl named Robyn is getting in trouble again. Robyn has cropped hair and a muscular body. Not ugly, just mannish. You think Robyn is fairly okay too, though she keeps painfully to herself and won’t speak unless it’s to argue with the staff in a sullen way. Robyn reminds you of yourself a few years ago when you were free. She’s a “schizoid” type too. She thinks it’s just her against the whole world. Of course, she’s right.
“Robyn’s bellyaching again,” says Deirdre.
“She looks like a boy, doesn’t she?” you say, just to make conversation.
“I wish she was,” Deirdre says, giving you a look. “She’s in the bed next to mine.”
You sit thinking about that. Deirdre stretches, pushing her chest out.
“God, I feel like having sex!” she tells you. Then she asks, “Ever had sex?”
“Of course,” you say.
“Want to have it now?”
“Aw, better not,” you answer as casually as you can. Your heart is thumping. It’d be your first time. Maybe your only time ever. But you’d be crazy to get involved like that with Deirdre. And besides, you’d be scared of having it. You wouldn’t know quite what to do.
Deirdre acts disappointed and wanders away. You sit trying to decide whether you’ve just had a lucky escape or a terrible loss. It seems both.
At ten o’clock we are put to bed. The dormitory smells very bad from the men who have been in there since six and there is a pool of piss on the floor at the foot of your bed. The night-screw and his female nurse stand at the door watching while we undress. You don’t want to strip completely with the nurse watching so you go to put your pyjamas on over your underpants.
“Hey, take off yer bloody undies!” the screw snaps. “You don’t sleep in yer bloody undies!”
So you take them off, hurriedly, in front of the nurse. There’s no point saying anything.
You sleep only in brief snatches. The light-switches are inside the dormitory and some of the retards like to play with them. And men keep coming to the foot of your bed to piss against the wall. Stark even shits there. You hear him groaning and straining and then a stink rises. You decide to clean it up, to take the smell away, and because the screws might think it was you if they see it near your bed. You get paper from the lavatory and then turn the lights on so you can see what you’re doing. You start cleaning the shit up and someone turns the lights out. You turn them on again and someone else puts them off. The next time you switch them on somebody begins shouting abuse. It’s the savage-looking bloke who made the shit smear in the dayroom. He comes at you, his face twisted with
rage or madness or whatever it is that’s wrong with him. You don’t want trouble. You tell him you only want the lights for a moment, but he shapes to punch you, not because of the lights—he doesn’t care when the retards play with them—but because you personally have some effect on him. His brute stupidity suddenly seems too much to bear. You could belt him senseless! Wipe his imbecile snarl right off! But you must avoid trouble, so you turn the lights off and sneak back to your own end to pick the shit up as best you can in the dark. Your fingers are messy with it and your feet wet from the pool of piss. You go to the showers and scrub yourself until your skin is sore.
You get used to blokes pissing around your bed. It’s harder to get used to the man in the next bed who sits up smoking all night and tossing his butts across. You wonder whether these hard, grey institutional blankets are prone to catch fire. By the morning there are several small burn holes in them.
At six-thirty the Charge Sister and other screws and nurses bustle in and haul everyone from bed and herd the worst retards into the showers. They begin dressing some of the others and then remaking the beds. You jump up and dress quickly.
“Get in the shower!” a screw tells you.
“I had a shower during the night,” you say.
“Get in the shower!”
So you take your towel and head towards the showers.
“Take yer bloody clothes off!” the screw snaps.
“I intend to,” you say.
“Take ’em off now!”
So you return to your bed and undress and wrap the towel around yourself and go to the showers. There is a press of men in there and you wait naked and cold for your turn. When your turn comes you hang the towel on a rail outside the cubicle. When you reach for it it’s gone. You dry yourself a bit with paper hand-towels, but you’ve nothing to wrap round yourself to go back through the dormitory where the female nurses are now busily making beds. You are cold and damp and your skin is itching from not being dried properly. The screw in charge of the showering sees you hanging about and tells you to piss off. A retard drops his towel beside you and you grab it quick and hurry back to your clothes.
A young nurse is about to begin making your bed but she realises she’s stepping in piss and backs off, making a face. The screw comes over.
“You been pissin’ here?”
“No.”
“No, it don’t bloody look like it, does it!” he snarls. “Go get a mop and clean it up!”
So you go to find a mop, with just the towel around you, and another nurse tells you to get dressed quick and lively instead of fart-arsing about. You mop the piss and then dress and then make your own bed. You’re the only one in the dormitory who is able to make his own bed.
You hurry downstairs and count the minutes till breakfast is over and The Gauntlet is run and you can escape to OT. Of course every night in Ward 24 isn’t like this. Sometimes all that happens is that you get in trouble for smoking in bed and burning holes in your blankets.
8
When you aren’t at OT you sit at a spot at the side of the ward where you can be alone with the view of the sky and lake and bushland stretching away to MAX tiny in the distance. Years ago you invented something called the Principle of the Outward View. It was just the idea that, to minimise the mental effect of being locked up, you had to minimise the physical sense of it, so you’d try to keep open vistas in sight as much as possible. The sky is the biggest vista, and in MAX there was always the lake. The Principle of the Outward View was all about positioning: you’d sit outside rather than inside, near a window rather than away from it. If you could see great free spaces you could project your mind into them. It seems odd that you’ve never needed the Principle of the Outward View as much as you do now—in a ward without walls or fences.
The problem with this private spot is that you can’t hear the meals called, and a couple of times you’ve gone late into the dining room and been told by the Charge Sister that you’ll have to smarten yourself up. So now when you know mealtime is getting close you have to keep putting your head round the corner to check whether the other patients are still in the courtyard. The staff have noticed. It must look as if you are very anxious and irrational, bobbing back and forth around the corner like this. The staff have noticed a lot of things—like how you tried to take a shower with your clothes on and that you sleep in your undies and that you piss on the floor and burn your blankets and that you dry yourself with paper hand-towels. They are trained to notice significant details.
You’ve been here a couple of weeks. You are in your private spot at the side when a woman comes up a rough little path to the ward. She is middle-aged and sort of glamorous-looking. She’s watching you closely as she approaches. You don’t want to seem rude so you pretend not to notice her. She passes right by you and enters the ward. A minute later a nurse comes out.
“The doctor wants to see you,” she says.
You go to the office and the woman is there. She asks you to sit down. She has a German accent.
“How are you feelink?”
“Alright, thanks.”
She’s watching you intently. Once or twice you meet her eyes but mostly you look at the floor.
“You are heppy to be here vis us?”
“Yes,” you say. You can’t tell her that this is the worst place you’ve been in in your whole life.
“And vot do you do vis yourself?”
“I work at OT.”
“Ach, yes. Mr Trowbridge tells me you are good vorker. But vot else?”
“How do you mean?”
“You hev interests?”
“I read a fair bit.”
“Ach, reading. And vot more?”
“I sit and think,” you say, knowing immediately it’s a mistake. The doctor narrows her eyes and purses her lips.
“Zat is not so healthy, eh?”
“I find it okay,” you say. You must stick with it now or she’ll get you for contradicting yourself.
“Vot do you tink about?”
“Oh, things I’ve read.”
“Vot tinks you read?”
“Various books.”
She indicates the book you have with you.
“Show me zat book.”
You’d rather not. It’s The Survivor. You don’t want your holy book soiled by all this. You hand it over and she thumbs the pages. She’s stolen your strength.
“Vot is about?”
“The Great War.”
“Readink of vor is not so healthy, eh?”
“I suppose not,” you reply. You are too depressed now to defend yourself. And too tired. You need to be fresh for dangerous occasions like this, but you’ve not slept properly for two weeks.
The doctor hands the book back and you go out, knowing how badly it went. Specially the confession that you think. Zat is not so healthy, eh?
Next morning you are leaving for OT and the Charge Sister stops you. “Doctor wants you at Group Therapy.” This is something new. In MAX and REFRACT they didn’t bother with stuff like Group Therapy.
We are in the dayroom, our chairs in a semicircle around the doctor’s chair. All the worst retards and chronics are here, with nurses and screws to keep order. You are near the end of a row between Gilroy and Stern. The doctor is gazing at us. You think of her as “The German”.
“How is everyone zis mornink?”
Two or three mumble replies. The question is too hard for the rest. You keep silent.
“Who knows vot day is today?”
Nobody responds.
“Is it Monday?” she prompts.
“Yes, Attendant Sir,” says Stern.
“Who else tinks it is Monday?” asks “The German”.
A few mumble agreement.
“Zat is wrong,” she tells us. “It is maybe Tuesday?”
“Tuesday, Attendant Sir.”
Again a murmur of agreement.
“Zat is wrong.”
You realise the Group Therapy has begun. This is it.
“Who can guess vot day is today?” “The German” is gazing around the semicircle and now her eyes are on you. You can’t believe this is happening. Does she think you belong here? That this is your level? You sit hunched within yourself, trying to show that you have enough self-respect to resent this. That’s foolish. You aren’t supposed to have self-respect. And your stomach is churning because you have already grasped how perfect this trap is. If you answer the question it will put you on a level with these others. If you don’t answer it will put you on the level just the same.
“Vot does Len say?”
You try to look blank, as if you haven’t been paying attention, as if you need to make an effort to descend to such nonsense. Of course the trap is too good. Disinterest and vagueness will show you are out of touch with reality and therefore belong in Group Therapy. Interest and acuteness will show you are being stimulated and therefore belong here just the same. You decide you’ll have to answer.
“Thursday,” you say, hoping to God it is Thursday. You try to put the exact edge on your voice to let her know that you understand the game, the trap, and are playing along out of contempt for it. But you mustn’t really convey contempt. Contempt is a form of aggression and a symptom of paranoia and aggressive paranoiacs belong in Group Therapy. And you mustn’t actually show that you understand the trap either. A patient who thinks the system is a set of traps has a persecution complex and belongs in Group Therapy.
And so you mutter “Thursday” and “The German” gives you a sort of verbal pat on the head, the way you’d do for a five-year-old who’d got a sum right, and the Group Therapy goes on to other subjects—like what the Big Bad Wolf said before he blew down the Piggies’ house, or the name of the palace where the Queen lives. Whenever the others are stuck “The German” asks you and you have to answer.
We have Group Therapy twice a week.
Mr Trowbridge doesn’t like you being kept from OT two mornings each week. “Bloody stupidity!” he says when you tell him about being the star five-year-old. His theory of Work seems wonderfully sensible now. If the patient can do his job he’s alright, or fairly alright, and if he can’t, he isn’t. No traps in that. Mr Trowbridge isn’t popular in the hospital. They say he’s lost sight of psychiatric principles.
