by R. D Rhodes
Acid Rain
R.D Rhodes
PROLOGUE-
When a young girl is sentenced to a high security mental institution for a crime she has committed, she is thrown into a decaying building with staff struggling under tight budget cuts, and heavily sedated patients who spend most of their time in front of the giant-screen TV. On guard against the cruelty of some of the staff, she must survive while coming to terms with her own mental health problems and spiritual and existential crisis.
An exploration of spirituality and sense of self in an urbanising world, this story involves themes of nature, philosophy, and mental health through one girl’s journey and the people she meets.
PART 1
Chapter 1
I stood in the tiny bathroom and searched into the eyes of the face that stared back at me. They were heavy-lidded and red-raw from lack of sleep, and the bright, artificial light illuminated every scratch, freckle and spot on the worn-out, ghostly-pale skin.
I looked closer. Searching deep into the pupils I tried to find it. A similarity. A connection. Any little glimpse of who I was. But the face just stared back at me, perplexed and lost.
I wondered if it was normal not to recognize your own reflection.
The queasy feeling shot up my stomach and I spun around again to the toilet, throwing both hands around the rim and gripping hard, thick vile sounds propelling from my throat. But nothing came out. The water in the bowl was still. Hollow. Empty. Just like me.
I had felt like this for some time, that I was detached from all reality. Sometimes, when it was at its worst I could clearly watch myself- my soul, the real me, separated from my body and I looked on in alarm as the body waded its way through the shit. At other times it felt as if my skin had separated from my bones. Sometimes my arms and legs had the sensation that they were crawling with insects- but when I looked there was nothing there.
My hair scraped the floor as I clung onto the bowl. I could feel strands of it getting wet in the piss puddle of that bathroom. I thought if something came out of me I’d feel better, but I retched and choked and spat and nothing came. Eventually I gave up. I let myself sink down into the floor and curled into a ball. It was there again, the great blackness, pushing down on me with all its weight, its presence seeping into my brain and polluting my thoughts. I was hyper-conscious, paranoid. I was scared. I felt my hands clasp together, I was so used to this by now that it had become the standard thing to do in these situations. I raised my eyes up the beige walls to the white ceiling and I prayed. I prayed truly and hard with a solid, desperate conviction in the words…
BANG!BANG!BANG!
“Aisha? Are you okay in there?”
“…Thank you. Love you. Amen.”
“I’m fine.” I shouted back to the door. “Just a minute.”
The prayer had made me feel a bit better. I flushed the empty toilet, went back to the sink and ran the tap, cupped the cold water in my hands and splashed it to my face. My eyes returned to the mirror. Clear droplets ran down from the forehead to the chin and dripped off the face before me.
“Well?” I asked it. “Are you coming?”
I turned around, flicked the light off and went out.
My social worker, Mrs. Mack, stood back abruptly from behind the door.
“I heard you gagging. Were you sick?”
“Nuthin came up.” I said. “I feel better now though.”
She looked up at me with honest concern. She smiled that same reassuring smile that you get a thousand times from a thousand different people when you are like this. The smile that says it’s ok, all will be fine, cheer up cause brighter things are around the corner. I fixed a fake smile back to tell her I was alright.
“Thought you had done a runner there!” she said cheerfully, as we headed back down the stairs and through the corridor. I forced a meager laugh.
We came out the corridor and headed back through the dining area where the businessmen, tradesmen and locals sat at the tables with their greasy, heaped platefuls of fried food. It had gotten busier in the space of time I had been in the toilet. I followed Mack as she steered through the space between the tables towards the door, dodging past the waitress who was flying across the room and was now flurrying her arms with a pile of empty plates. “Thanks!” Mack smiled at her as she passed, but the waitress never responded. Mack reached the door and held it open for me, and I stepped out into the street.
The October chill bit me hard. I zipped my jacket right up and joined into the crowds along Regent Street and I held in front as Mrs. Mack kept right behind. I kept at a good pace, trying to get out of it as quick as I could. They were all at it in the street- scurrying about in and out of their shops- women clutching their beloved handbags and hordes of clothes, clacking about in high heels with their orange painted faces, and hot-shot men juggling cardboard coffee cups to their mouths and phones to their ears in their three-hundred-pound designer suits. The cars screeched and screamed and raced each other on the road while they all went in and out of the stores spending their sold time on those phones made by Chinese peasants and those diamond watches courtesy of African slave children. I dodged and squeezed my way in and out of the human traffic. The tourists were blocking half the pavement, standing there clicking away at the high-rise buildings above us. I looked up at those buildings, and at the miniature stretch of grey-clouded sky squashed in between them. The sky hardly seemed to even exist anymore.
I turned at the quieter Simsons Lane and fixed my eyes on the pavement because it was all making me sick. Mrs. Mack caught up and walked by my side.
“Do you want to get anything before you go?” she chirped.
“Like what?”
“A sandwhich? Juice, books, a magazine?”
“No thanks.” My eyes kept following the pavement. “How long does it take to get there?”
“Oh, not too long. About four or five hours.”
We emerged across the road from Windsor Park, the grass beyond the concrete paths was a mucky brown sludge. I remembered reading a book by Roald Dahl once, that described the way the businessmen walk in London- their noses up in the air, backs straight, arms swinging in exaggerated fashion, looking important with their briefcases at their side, walking with an urgent pace whilst their bodies screamed, “LOOK AT ME. THIS IS IMPORTANT. MY JOB IS IMPORTANT. DON’T YOU KNOW I HAVE SOMEWHERE TO BE?!”
And over the road at the park that was actually the way half of them were walking. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so depressing.
“Where you going?” Mrs. Mack called from behind me. I turned around and realized I had walked right past her Skoda. I went back and climbed into the passenger’s side and threw my backpack into the back.
She opened her own door and shuffled into the driver’s seat, slouching her stooped, frail body over the wheel.
She put her seatbelt on, then lingered a moment, just sitting there. Then she turned her head and smiled warmly at me. “Okay?” she said.
I smiled back nervously.
“Okay.”
She turned the key in the ignition and pulled out onto the road.
Chapter 2
W e kept stopping and starting every thirty seconds behind the other cars in the queues and at the traffic lights. Horns were blasting everywhere as people raced across the road and darted in front of the moving cars. More people stormed about the pavements in mass stampedes, they came seeping out from the side streets, pouring out of the alleys. It was chaos. I just couldn’t understand it. What the hell do they pack themselves together like this for? Is the world not big enough? Cramming themselves into congested masses. Scurrying about like rats. Nobody stopping to look around. To look at each other. What does it mean? What do they see in it?
I sat and watched m
y fellow species from the car, loathing every one of them. On their way back from lunch the office workers’ faces were like portraits of despair, their lifeless eyes fixed on their shoes, their strides monotonous and mechanical -it was like their boss had wound them up in the morning and unwound them back again at night. Did they even know where they were?
So this is it, then? You’re born, you go to school, you grow up, you get a job, somewhere like here where you’re someone’s clone and you do as you’re told, where you’re not even human, you save up, you buy a house and get a mortgage, you pay off that mortgage after twenty-five years, you retire once you’ve paid it off, and then you die. But before you die, you have kids, so that they can do it all over again.
The car drew up beside Piccadilly Circus and halted at the red lights. The tourists stood in droves outside the extravagant buildings, snapping at everything and anything in sight. It was the only difference I could establish between here and Glasgow- the tourists. The buildings all looked the same to me. Both cities stood like the imperial hubs they were, with their fancy grandiose architecture built on the backs of slaves and exploitation. They both had the same shit-colored rivers running through them, modern buildings and bright lights fraying the sides. I didn’t see any difference.
The light turned green and we drove past the glass office buildings that you could see right through to all the proletariats sat inside, all stooped over, staring blankly at the computer screens. We passed the rows and rows of brand-new four-storey flats in the immaculately clean streets, each one smart and shiny and looking exactly the same as the next. Past the orange brick buildings that hid little box rooms inside, filled with matchstick men living in their own personal chicken coup in the big city. Everything was organized and sanitized and doctored and running like clockwork. Individual men came and went out of the little doors. It was grotesque. Was this really it? Was this really life? It was a horror film playing before my eyes.
I turned my attention to the radio, twisted the dial to turn it on and flicked through the channels till it came to a half-decent rock station. The last notes of a song died away. They were playing more adverts, selling paint this time. I sat back in my chair, watching on as the modern world whizzed by in a blur. Suddenly a distinctive guitar riff alerted my senses. The drum pounded and the bass drove in, a voice roared-
“Restless Soooouuul!
Enjoy your youth!
Like Muhammad,
hits the truth.
Can’t escape from,
the common rule,
If you hate something,
Don’t you do it too!!”
I leaned back against the headrest and squeezed my eyes shut. It was like the singer was talking straight to my soul, -
“Small my table,
sits just two.
Got so crowded,
I can’t make room!!”
The warmth of empathy came all over me and I felt slightly better all of a sudden, that uplifting feeling when your thoughts are echoed by someone else and you know you’re not wrong- you’re not the only one. There are others who think the same. But where were they all?
I tried to fix my mind on the music as we drove on through the miles of endless suburbs. We passed an empty graveyard chock-full of headstones that stretched out for half an hour. Then we passed the leisure complexes with their McDonalds chains, cinemas and sprawling department stores. Past all the plastic billboard signs with dumb ass men and woman posing at me, and the new Paul Jones film advertised- release date 24th October 2010. Out of the whole dusty mass of concrete jungle. And then out into the leafy areas, past houses that were far too big, past the golf courses and their plantation trees and exclusive members’ club buildings, until we finally reached the motorway and were out into the country, where the robotic arms of the city were reaching out and chewing up land.
I glanced at the clock on the dashboard. It was four pm.
Chapter 3
M ack and I sat in silence. I kept a keen eye out for each road sign, and the name of Chemsford ominously cut down in miles. My stomach started to squirm again and I tried harder to concentrate on the radio. The rock station was being eaten up by adverts. I changed the channel, -Adverts-Adverts-Shocking News Report!-Posh people speaking pish, -Shitty Pop music- more Adverts. I turned it off and gazed out my window.
Along the border-lines of the dual carriageway, the remaining browning fibers of the wheat fields were being tossed about by the breeze. We passed by another field, then another, then another of the man-altered stretches of land, most of them black and bare and being picked at by the crows while the cars whizzed by in both directions. Here and there a thin, sparse hedgerow separated the road from the fields and sporadically an old cluster of woodland could be spotted cornered into a field side, tightly bound by a fence. I pictured the brilliant sight of a comet screaming down through the atmosphere and blowing up everything. I willed it to happen.
“You know if you want,” Mack spoke up for the first time since London, “we can keep in touch. You should be able to call me from the hospital. I’ll leave you my work-”
“Thanks, but it’s ok.” I interrupted. “I just want to get in there, get my head down, do what they want and get back out. Thanks, though.”
She nodded, and the silence in the car resumed. Then, following a sign for Chemsford-24 miles, she turned off the motorway and exited onto a single-track country road. Twenty minutes later that road came to a fork. Mack went left.
I tapped my foot and held my stomach.
From the corner of my eye I watched her- to divert my attention as much as anything- her stooped frame in her faded cardigan, slouched over the steering wheel, her greyed-out hair, the wrinkles that lined her stoic face, especially deep under those pale green eyes behind her wide-rimmed glasses. She had been my social worker for almost two months, and I didn’t know her that well but I knew she was a decent person, one of the few decent genuine people that I had met. She’d been a social worker since she was twenty-five. Almost forty years. And although she didn’t talk about it that much, I could tell by her mannerisms, by the way she on occasions burst forth on tirades that could not be stopped, by the way her eyes were- I could tell that she had seen a lot, and got involved in a lot of stuff too that she probably didn’t have to. It all showed in her face. She cared, Mrs. Mack, she really did. One thing that she never stopped talking about was how frustrating the system was-“There’s no common sense anymore,” was the recurring quote she gave out at least once a day. She often went on about the bureaucracy, legislations and laws, the health and safety and the human rights that had made her work so hard to do and had ruined the country. She knew I didn’t speak much, and she just tended to let me be. I liked her. I could almost trust her.
She kept those pale green eyes fixed on the windscreen as we drove through a few small commuter villages and came out of the other sides. The road continued to get windier, bending sharply as the car went up and down the hills. From the tops, we got a good view over the fields and villages that we had passed behind us, all lying silent in the shadow of the overcast sky.
We were coming down one of these hills when quickly and without warning a great wall of fog materialized in front of us. The car broke through and I could barely see fifty yards around. I guessed we were getting close to the sea. I guessed we were getting closer.
“How long till we’re there?” I asked quietly.
“About an hour yet.” Mack replied, nodding firmly, determinedly.
I glanced at the clock on the dashboard, and I suddenly went reeling back in time. My mind flashed and recoiled against my will, back to what had happened earlier that day. I still couldn’t believe the decision. Of all the things that could have happened, I never ever considered that.
“Eighteen months of psychiatric evaluation” the Judge’s voice had boomed.
“Sleepyhillock Hospital” the noise continued as if on a distant static radio. As if it wasn’t me it had happened to.
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“Eighteen months of psychiatric evaluation.”
I didn’t even do anything wrong.
I just couldn’t stop myself.
Oh fuck, what have I done?
Chapter 4
I tried to forget it, tried to tell myself that it would be okay. Maybe I’ll finally get the help I need, I told myself as I watched out the window. The road dipped down again and soon we were cutting through a spruce-clustered forest. The trees rose high above the car and were so close together that only the faintest chinks of light escaped to poke through. I peered out into the darkness as the road bent in and out between them all. The forest seemed to stretch back for miles, and everywhere I looked the jagged branches were shrouded in the fog that weaved its way ghostily through the air.
The sky too, was obscured behind it. Mack ascended the car up another steep hill and beyond it the road dipped yet again. The road wound and swung and the car snaked through the woodland for what felt like ten or fifteen miles. I kept expecting to see, as I glared out the windscreen, a bright pair of headlights coming the opposite way, but ten, fifteen, thirty minutes went by, and still we were alone on that road.
I could feel my stomach bunch into knots. “Is this road always this quiet?” I asked.
Mack was squinting through her specs, trying to concentrate, bent closer to the windscreen than ever.
“Yeah, I think so.” she replied, keeping her eyes fixed ahead. “I’ve only been here once before.” She paused and her arms gripped the wheel firmly as she took another corner. She went on, “There’s nothing else out here. There’s a quicker turn off to Chemsford ten miles up the motorway so most folk take that. Jesus! This fog is unreal!”
I know, I thought. I wanted to see where I was going, I wanted to know where I was going, especially for my first day. If I could’ve, I would’ve looked up this place, found out more, but I didn’t have any time. It was all so sudden, it had happened so fast, and now here I was, on my way to check-in. If checking-in was what you called it.