by David Nobbs
He was given a frugal supper for which he had no stomach. His growing fear held him in a clammy grip round the waist, and his throat was too dry for food. He knew that he was not mad, but he knew too that his knowing sprang from a knowledge of himself which nobody else could have. Without it they could call him mad, and probably would. There were always reasons enough.
He went to the window and tried to calm his fears. He looked up through that opening, barely more than a slit. Low clouds were scurrying above the rare shrubs and the tops of the giant firs were waving before a stormy wind. Between the clouds he could see an occasional star.
“I am Dr Mildweed,” said a voice, and he froze in a constricting vice of fright. “Sit down.”
Baker went to his chair and sat down.
“Stand up.”
Baker stood up.
“Sit down.”
Baker sat down.
“Stand up.”
Baker stood up.
“Sit down.”
Baker sat down.
“Stand up.”
Baker stood up.
“Sit down.”
Baker sat down.
“How many times would you go on doing that, before you disobeyed me?”
Baker was silent.
“I asked you a question.”
“I don’t know, sir.”
“We might find out, one of these days. You’re Baker, aren’t you?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You can be cured, Baker, but it’s entirely up to me. Don’t forget that, and you won’t go far wrong. Some of the things we make you do may seem rather odd to you, but everything’s in your best interests, so relax. We have a great tradition here. Mens sana in corpore sano. I believe you fellows can be cured and there are strings of sane men wandering around England to prove it. I’ve got hundreds of testimonials from people who are tasting sanity for the first time in their lives—and liking it. People who believed they were congenital misfits are pulling their weight in society just like anyone else. So there we are, Baker. We pay you the compliment of believing that we can cure you. If you’ve any decency left you’ll do the same. Now tomorrow Dr Grainger and I will have a chat with you and see if we can’t sort out what it is that’s wrong, and when we’ve decided that, you’ll be put in the hands of a specialist. You’ll see quite a lot of him. We’ve one doctor to every six patients here. We’re a kind of mental Millfield. I see you’ve refused your supper. Why?”
“I wasn’t hungry, sir.”
“I was ravenous this evening. Surely you could have been slightly hungry?”
“No, sir.”
“We’ll cure that death wish of yours. We’ll make you hungry, don’t you worry. Starvation rations. We’ll put you on starvation rations, Baker,” said Dr Mildweed, and he set off again on his post-brandial tour, taking the uneaten supper with him.
Left to himself, Baker began to develop a large stomach for which he had no supper. The very word ‘starvation’ was sufficient to make him hungry, for hunger was a thing of which he was terrified. There had always been people to nourish him. Mrs Bell, Mrs McManus of Newport (I.O.W.), Mrs Pollard, H.M. The Queen. Even in prison he had had food, but he sensed that here the rules no longer applied. They could do what they liked with him here.
Soon it was time for sleep, and he crawled into his narrow, squeaking, slightly damp bed. On either side of him other patients, separated from him by walls, were crawling into their narrow, squeaking, slightly damp beds. He lay wakeful, worrying about his hunger, afraid for his safety, stifled by the airless, centrally heated little room and the walls that seemed to slide in on him all night. Outside all was silent. Nothing stirred in the municipal park. Frightening fancies began to take hold of him. Perhaps there was nothing outside at all, nothing except a wide emptiness, as far as the pain could stretch. Or perhaps what seemed to be a room was the only open space that remained in the world, the busy, built-up world, and he was in the only bit of open air there was, outside a world of rooms. He tried to brush these fancies away as his sweat began to hang on the air. A pale red night-light was burning, shining through a grille above the door and casting a hellish glow, bathing the bare little room in the colour of weak medicine. Outside the room, in the little hall by the door of the wagon, a male nurse struggled with a paper-back by the light of a shielded torch. Baker could hear the rustle of the pages, as his hunger bit acid holes into his lining and the wounded night throbbed slowly on. The male nurse made cocoa. A spoon banged sharply against a tin cup. Six bells, and still the engines throbbed. On and on they sailed, sliding slowly downhill to the left, floating irrevocably across Oceanus towards the edge, until suddenly he was fully awake again, just as they tottered on the rim of the pit of emptiness. He screamed. The male nurse rushed in, saw that nothing was wrong, explained that it had all been a dream, and returned to his paper-back. Baker lay wakeful, all fancies gone, aching with hunger. And at last the dawn began, turning the vin rosé of the night to an angry grey. The night was over.
Breakfast, to his great relief, was normal, but lunch, he was told, would see the beginning of his starvation diet. After breakfast he was kept waiting in his little room until eleven, and then he was escorted to Dr Mildweed’s luxuriously appointed caravan. The doctor greeted him courteously, introduced him to Dr Grainger, and motioned him into the easiest chair in which he had ever sat. It would have been impossible for a chair to be any easier without becoming a complete walk-over. It grasped him softly and insidiously to its bosom, and its great springy cushions jerked him up and down as if he was a balloon being tossed on pockets of air.
“Well, and how are you feeling this morning, Baker?” inquired Dr Grainger with that unassertive affability that had endeared him to Free Foresters up and down the land.
“Hungry,” said Baker.
Dr Grainger wrote in his notebook: “A desire for affection.”
“Relax,” barked Dr Mildweed, and Baker shuddered, accentuating the movement of the chair. “Have a cigarette.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Stuff and nonsense.”
For a few minutes they chatted casually, those two doctors, yet all the time they were circling round him, waiting to pounce. Baker, immersed in clouds of cigarette smoke and coughing at the impact of the unfamiliar fumes, was acutely ill at ease. He was only too well aware that his bouncing upon the cushions had sent his socks scurrying to his ankles in search of seclusion, leaving two expanses of white leg bare to the elements. He wanted to hitch them up but dared not move for fear of setting the chair off again. It had settled now, and he felt, as he sank deeper and deeper into its folds, that it was sucking him up like an insect-eating plant. His nose was running, as it always did at interviews. An itch had developed in his left armpit—always the first to go under duress—but he dared not move. Dimly he could hear the two doctors talking away, trying to draw him out by discussing certain minor difficulties they experienced—giving up their seats to women under the age of thirty-eight, urinating under way on board ship, and so on—and hoping that he would tell them of similar difficulties that he experienced. Eventually they had to ask him, so silent did he remain, and he told them that he found everything difficult. “Yes, yes, yes, don’t we all, but there must be something you find the most difficult of all,” said Dr Mildweed, and Baker explained that the more difficult a thing was the more difficult he found it. The easy he found difficult and the difficult he found impossible. Dr Grainger explained that nothing was in itself more difficult than anything else. We just chose to find it so. Baker said that he didn’t choose to find anything difficult. Dr Grainger explained that we chose to find things difficult, without realising that we were doing so, because we didn’t want to do them. Baker said that he didn’t want to do them because he found them difficult.
The two doctors abandoned this impasse and began once more to chat to Baker. He began once more to gather up as much resistance to them as he could muster. It was tempting to feel relieved at t
he prospect of human contact, to speak intimately to them and feel the tensions melt around his mouth, but he knew that once that happened he would end by describing his childhood. He would tell them all about his mothers, and they would sit there, turning over the rich earth with their beaks, growing fat on the worms and grubs.
Once again he forced them to ask questions, and these he refused to answer. He pretended to have a bad memory, until they told him that you only lock the cupboard door if there are skeletons inside. He said that he did not wish to talk about the past, and the moment that he had said it he realized that they would take it as an admission of guilt. So he decided to keep silent, to ignore entirely the relentless questions from which all pretence of casualness had now been dropped.
“You know you’re not being very helpful, Baker,” said Dr Mildweed at length.
“We must find out something about you if we’re to help you,” said Dr Grainger.
Baker remained silent.
“Your silence is more revealing than any words could be,” said Dr Mildweed.
“Then I’ll go on helping. I’ll stay silent,” said Baker.
“Aren’t you pleased to be in my mental home?”
“No.”
“We can cure you.”
“There’s nothing wrong with me.”
“Then why are you here?”
“I don’t know. You tell me. I was brought here, that’s all I know. I don’t know why. Why must you question me?”
There was a silence. Then, very quietly, very calmly, very reassuringly, Dr Grainger spoke.
“You don’t know why you’re here. We don’t know why you’re here. Don’t you see how important it is that somebody should find out?” he said.
But Baker did not answer. He had been made to say more than he had intended, there could be no denying that. He had been put on the defensive, he felt nervous and very confused, and he had been forced to cry out. But from now on he would reveal nothing.
“You feel we’re getting at you, don’t you?” said Dr Mildweed.
Baker did not answer.
“You feel we’re prying into your private life.”
Baker said nothing.
“You’re on the defensive, aren’t you?”
Baker remained silent.
“Why are you on the defensive, Baker? What are you frightened of?”
Again there was no reply.
“Well, Grainger, he’s all yours. Take him away.”
There was an agonised moment in which Baker felt that the chair would not yield him easily. Then he was on his feet, being escorted by Dr Grainger to the Art Caravan, where he was introduced to Nurse Almond, a beautiful young brunette. Dr Grainger explained that he would see him every day from eleven to twelve, and that there would be a group session each day at four. The rest of the time he would be engaged in creative activities.
Nurse Almond gave him the basic utensils with a delightful smile and explained that he could paint a stone bust of Dr Mildweed, provided for the purpose, a vase of plastic daffodils, ditto, or the real snow that was filtering down outside the window. But he was not going to be caught as easily as that. He thought of the first colour that came into his head—it was green—and covered his canvas with a wishy-washy light blue.
For lunch he had a tiny rissole and three small pieces of potato, and afterwards he felt too hungry to paint. At four o’clock he had his first group therapy, but felt too hungry to concentrate. And then he waited in his room for a supper which was very similar to his lunch, except that the potatoes were slightly smaller. That night the acid emptiness that tore his stomach to shreds was far worse than on the previous night. A great weariness and weakness filled his head and legs, but he didn’t sleep a wink.
In the morning he was so overcome by hunger that he was incapable of painting or of responding to questioning. He no longer had the energy to be miserable, and Dr Mildweed, making his morning rounds, realised that by pandering to his death wish they had made him very happy, and virtually dead. He must be brought back to life and all its problems. During the rest of the day, therefore, he was given no treatment. He was allowed to rest, and was brought back by gradual stages to a normal diet. And that night the order went out: “Patient No. 220. Vast feasts.”
The next morning, after a breakfast of porridge, kedgeree, egg, bacon, sausage, kidney, tomatoes and fried bread, toast and marmalade and tea, Baker had a painting session, during which he produced two more light-blue canvasses. After his elevenses—three sticky buns and cocoa—he had another unprofitable talk with Dr Grainger. More painting followed, without issue, and then it was time for lunch.
Under strict supervision, he was forced to eat for his lunch Brown Windsor soup with roll, followed by enormous platefuls in swift succession of fried plaice, shepherd’s pie and two veg, rissoles and two more veg, treacle tart, apple pie, jam sponge, and cheese and biscuits. During the afternoon he was given another painting session, in the course of which Dr Grainger returned to find out how he was getting on.
“Well, nurse, how’s he getting on?” he asked.
“He’s been sick all over the canvas.”
“Good. He’s beginning to express himself. Now that he’s got that off his chest he should go on to something more subtle, some more positive way of expressing his self-disgust. This is where things become interesting. Don’t stop him, nurse, whatever he paints. Even if…” and here he began to speak in that fatherly, protective tone which Nurse Almond found that older men used to brunettes, as if it was only by leading sheltered lives that they had avoided being dyed blonde. “Even if it’s obscene. The filthier the better, in fact. It makes our job easier. And you needn’t look.”
Dr Grainger smiled at Nurse Almond, Nurse Almond wished that Dr Grainger would drop dead, and Baker, who was so swollen by food that he was almost unconscious, adorned his canvas with three dung-coloured stripes. Nurse Almond looked hard and long, but she had to admit that she was disappointed. Nothing really obscene ever happened to her. Of course it might be an excellent dirty joke if you were well up in abstract painting, but to Nurse Almond it was just three stripes.
The day dragged slowly to its bloated close. Baker was sick in the middle of the group therapy, and then, after a large tea, he lay moaning on his bed, revolted by the great weight of slow digestion that he carried wherever he went, until it was time for supper. He had to be forcibly fed.
That night he slept the uneasy sleep of the overfed and over-tired, a sickly sleep disturbed by heavy dreams of midnight orgies in hot, walled gardens, where fat nudes of the late Venetian school sat indolently on fronds, with the moon shining soft on their bosoms, while in the centre of the garden stood a great statue of Queen Victoria, stark naked, ploughing through a mound of cottage pie.
The dawn came, and he awoke. As consciousness returned he felt his soul struggling to keep its mouth above a sea of food, and once again he was sick. He longed to be free. He longed for sympathy, for love and understanding. He longed for a mother.
The nearest to a mother that he would get that day was Dr Grainger, and so he spoke to him. He knew that this was what they wanted, but never mind, he had suffered enough. He told it all. His hopes, his fears, his disappointments, the panacea, everything. He spoke of his youth, of his landladies, and of all the places where he’d lived. He told of his jobs, and he told too of Mrs Pollard, and of Miss Daisy Wilkinson, when he’d been Lewis, long ago. He told his story simply and concisely, with no dishonesty, and he enjoyed it so much that for a while his spirits rose. At first Dr Grainger was too busy congratulating himself on the tact and skill with which he was eliciting the information by remaining unobtrusive to catch more than the general trend, but such was the force of Baker’s honesty that by the end he was listening with interest.
When it was over, when the web of truth had been spun and Baker had fallen out of the end of his life with a bump and was back in the mental home, there was a silence. Dr Grainger was thinking of all the things that h
e had heard, and above all of the two things that had not yet been revealed—who was persecuting him and what he felt guilty about. Baker was waiting for love and understanding.
“Somebody’s been ruining your search, haven’t they?” said Dr Grainger in something suspiciously similar to baby talk.
“Who?”
“You tell me. I’m here to help you.”
Oh, if only that were true.
“Tell me who lost you those jobs. Tell me who’s getting at you.”
Baker looked puzzled.
“You won’t feel so bad if you tell me about it.”
“I’ve told you.”
“You must trust me.”
He did. He trusted this man.
“We can help you. We can help you to go about it the right way. We can help you find that panacea.”
He hardly dared to hope that it was true.
“You’ve led a pretty aimless life. Wandering from place to place. No home. No career. Heaven knows, Baker, I yield to no-one in my desire for a better world. No-one yields to anyone in that. But I do it through my work.”
“I’ve tried jobs.”
“Not jobs. A job. I was lucky. I admit it. It’s in the blood. We’re all psychoanalysts, in our family. Dad lost his life doing it. He was pinned to the floor by a couch in Budleigh Salterton. I was in the canteen when they broke the news. Do you know what I did? I went out and did a group therapy.”
A tear rolled down Baker’s cheek.
“It’s not always easy. I know that. Parents dead, unhappy childhood, poverty, bad breath. Problems of one kind and another. But you have to choose something. You can’t expect to find the panacea except through a career.”
Baker began to sob.
“You’ll be quite safe here. They can’t get you here. No-one can get at you here. We’ll make you strong again. You’re in good hands.”
Baker began to shake.
