by R. D Rhodes
What? What is this shit? I thought. None of this is relevant anymore, if it ever was. Philosophers don’t half talk some crap sometimes.
No much wonder the Chinese controlled their masses so well with bullocks like this, no wonder it hadn’t been burned with the rest of their good books. My God, what a load of crap.
I kept reading every tenth page. “Life is simple, it’s us humans that insist on making it complicated.” Well, I agreed with that.
I took Confucius and another book, The Origins of Species. Dale was standing with his arms folded looking bored and sleepy, his eyes fixed on the sunny day outside. He noticed me coming and some life sprang back into him.
“Just stay behind me.” he said.
We went down the hall. His thick hamstrings in his jeans bulged with each step.
We had only gone ten meters, when I heard a noise. A continuous noise, coming from one of the rooms. We kept walking and it got louder- a moaning, like someone was in pain. It sounded like a woman.
Dale noticed it too. He seemed confused. He slowed down and stepped close to the room it came from, putting his left arm out as a blockade. “Don’t you dare run.” he said.
He leaned close to the door and peered in through the glass panel, and I rose up on my tiptoes and watched over his shoulder. At the back of the room, the naked spine of a man was exposed to us, his trousers down at his ankles. He was being straddled by a pair of long, pale legs wrapped around his waist. The woman remained hidden in his chest, beyond that muscular back- all I caught of her was the long blonde hair that bounced energetically about as he thrust his ass back and forward. But that peroxide blonde was unmistakable. As the man leaned back, she threw her toned arms around his shoulders. It was Sanders.
The huge, ripped body and dark hair originally made me think the guy was Doctor Dickson. But then he glanced to the side and his hand came up to wipe sweat from his brow. He had a flat nose and chiseled cheeks, I had never seen him before, but in that moment, I knew exactly who he was.
He grunted loudly with each penetration, and she moaned and screeched and smiled. She slid her arms further around his neck and rolled her head all over the place, throwing and flicking her hair about.
I noticed Dale’s neck begin to twist and I sprang back to the window and looked out in boredom. He stared at me, shell-shocked. For a second, I thought he was going to confide in me, then he said, “C’mon. Back to the ward”.
At ward four Dale unlocked my door and let me put my books inside, then ordered me to join the rest of the group. He marched straight into the nurse’s station and I went into the common room, where everyone was still performing the charade of the card game.
“Where have you been, Aisha?” one of the nurses grinned.
I took an empty seat and watched.
Soon enough the clack clack clack of heels pierced the air, and Sanders came in with one of the nurses, whispering to each other as they neared the table. Her tousled hair was bunched in a rushed ponytail, her cheeks were flushed, but apart from that she was as impeccable as ever. I pushed my chair out and walked quickly past her-
“Hey, Aisha! Get back here!” someone shouted.
I stepped out into the corridor, quickening to the window, and waited.
There he was. He emerged in the car park, wafting his collar and shifting his tie as he walked towards a black Mercedes. He gave a last fleeting look towards the hospital, and got inside the car.
“Snap!” I heard someone shout from the common room. Kev grabbed my arm and led me back in.
Chapter 20
The blue sky was replaced by black. Only three days in and I didn’t know how much longer I could stand it.
I got up when the door clicked open and headed down to dinner. Jean gave me my pills and I tucked them under my tongue, showed her my mouth, and sat down. The tables had been moved back to their original positions, the tablecloths gone, Celebrities on Ice on full blast, and the people in front of the screen were as zombified as ever. Kev and Liz seemed to be the only ones happy; laughing and sniggering as they served out the food.
When my name was called I collected my tray from Liz, looked towards Sandy, then headed over to Nina, in her usual seat by the window, her back to the room. I brought a chair over and plumped myself down next to her.
“Hi.” I said.
Her broken, anxious brown eyes turned to me for a second, then went back to the window as if I wasn’t there. Her tray was in her lap, and her small hand trembled as she picked up little pieces of scrambled egg on her spoon and levered them into her mouth. She closed her lips and swallowed. She blinked a lot. I wondered what she was thinking, or replaying. Tears wedged in her eyes which started to dew.
“Hey. Nina. Are you okay?”
She turned her head again, but didn’t look so much at me as right through me. Those tortured eyes tore at my heart. It was like that vision of my dad all over again. Then the tears dropped, and she squeezed her eyes shut as the streams ran down her cheeks.
“Hey, it’s alright.”
I closed my arms around her tiny shoulders and hugged her tightly. As I rubbed my hand up and down her skeletal back, her spine jutted out so much it felt like it was poking through her skin. Her arms closed around my waist as she wept silently into my breast.
I felt another presence close to me. “What’s the matter, Nina?” Sanders voice said. “Do you want to go and lie down?”
She ducked out of my embrace and shook her head and sat back up. Sanders and I looked at each other. Her face was full of genuine sympathy, but all I could see in my mind was- her fucking that inspector. Did she do it for us? I wondered, or for herself?
Sanders looked from me to Nina then to me again and she smiled warmly, as if to say that Nina was in good hands, and she walked away out into the hall.
The tears dripped off Nina’s face onto her plate.
“Watch your food.” I joked, “It’ll go all soggy.”
She laughed- a small cute little laugh, just like the child she basically was. Her lashes were soft and glistening from the tears, and she looked beautiful. It was the first time I’d seen her smile. I wondered where her mum was, where her dad was, where the animals who had done it to her were now. She resumed eating and looking out the window. I got the impression she liked me being there.
“Way-hay! Hanging Harry’s back!”
Kev laughed mockingly, and Liz joined in at his side, as they watched a boy coming into the room. The guy looked about my age, his skin young and pale and without the slightest bit of stubble. His long black hair appeared to have never seen a brush and was sticking up here there and everywhere. He looked like a rat, with his long face and a sharp nose wedged narrowly between burning black eyes, and he was so emaciated and small that I thought I could easily have snapped him in half. But it was his neck that drew my attention- inflamed pink, dark red and violent-purple as it raised and dropped in gruesome crater ridges that circled his throat. Bony arms poked through a plain white t-shirt. Tracksuit bottoms on his stick-thin legs. He walked proudly past the trolley, his black eyes staring stoically ahead. When Kev repeated it again, “Eh! Hanging Harry!” he didn’t look back as he sat down at the table.
Kev’s eyes flashed. Liz guffawed next to him.
“How did your complaint go?” Kev goaded. Liz’s chins jiggled as she looked at Kev. The guy they had called Harry kept his back to them, and from where I was, I saw the left side of his face curl into a contemptuous sneer.
“Hey!” Kev called again with greater menace. “Do you want to know how the inspection went?”
“Ee don’t know ow’ it went. Arry down’t even know what day it iz.” Liz sniggered.
Harry still didn’t respond. They had given up by the time Sanders came back into the room.
Nina finished her food. She was still crying silently. She didn’t seem to notice or be aware of the bullying, and neither did anyone else. All eyes on the TV screen.
“Was the food good?” I ask
ed her.
She nodded. Still she was trembling. But the pain in her eyes had softened a little. She stood up.
“Listen,” I said, “If you ever want to talk, I’m here, okay?”
She nodded. “Thanks very much.” Her mousy voice replied. “I’m just going to my room now.”
“Alright. Will you be okay?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Her eyes were downcast on the floor. I could relate to her so well. As she carried her tray to the stacking rack, there was something I thought of saying to her. I had an urge to call her back. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it. I let it slide as I watched her disappear around the corridor.
I had taken a few more spoons of porridge, and was looking out the window, when I sensed something, and turned to see Harry’s black eyes staring at me from the other side of the table that he’d moved to.
I glanced away, but when I looked back his ratty eyes were still surveying me. I got up and went to join his table, sitting on his opposite side a few chairs down. He flashed me a yellow-toothed grin, nodded once, and looked back at his food. Then he looked to the nurses, stood up, and took his tray, sliding along the wall into the spare seat opposite me.
“Allright?” he said, in such a broad accent that I knew he was Scottish straight away. “I’m Harry.”
Above his crazy, wide yellow grin, his eyes seemed almost like a demon-possessed child’s from a horror film. I couldn’t remember seeing black eyes before, had just read that many Russian people had them, and his were blacker than black. Below those eyes, and that narrow face and pointy chin, that scar was so terrible. I glanced away and tried not to look, but my mind kept being drawn back to it. It was the worst I’d ever seen, the crater ridges glistening in their purples and reds almost like they were an organism of themselves. There wasn’t a healthy bit of flesh there. It was brutal.
“I’m Aisha.” I said.
The black eyes burned with intensity. They looked at me strangely. “Where you from?”
“Irvine.” I said.
He laughed, a kind of joyful shriek. I turned round to see if anyone was looking, but no. “Irvine, eh? Unlucky you, haha! You don’t have much of an accent.”
“No,” I said. “I’ve been around. It’s watered down a lot. But neither do you.”
“Yeah, I’m from Inverness. There is no accent there really.” He shuffled around on his chair. His upper body was prepped like he was ready to pounce on prey, and he couldn’t seem to sit still. His eyes darted from side to side; taking in all of the room behind my head. He looked back at me then stretched across the table and leaned in, “Not taking your pills, are you?”
Alarm shot through my system. I glanced around, “Course I am. What makes you think that?”
He leaned back in his seat. “I’m not gonna tell anyone. I’m not either.” He shrugged and smiled.
“Oh, look, Arry’s got new a friend,- ginger-nut over there!” I heard Liz cry. Harry kept his eyes on me, but I turned to look at her smiling at Kev.
I turned back to Harry. “That’s out of order. Why are they picking on you?”
He picked up a piece of toast and chomped it in half. He kept his eyes on the table and me. “Ach,” he waved his hand, “It’s alright, I don’t mind it. I told them I was gonna put in a complaint to the inspector when he came, so they put me in solitary instead.”
“Hanging Harry, and Aisha alien-face.” I overheard Kev say, during a quieter part of Celebs on Ice.
Harry caught me looking at his neck. His black eyes and wide yellow smile beckoned me to ask him about it, but I never did. “I was pretending to be Spiderman.” he explained. “When I was seven. Got my neck caught and twisted in the rope though. My spidey senses weren’t going off that day.”
He stared at me, then burst out laughing. His eyes darted around the room. He bounced his bum on the seat. I wondered if he had ADHD.
“Why are you in here?” I asked.
His fleeting eyes returned. He smiled childishly, “If I knew I would tell you, mate. But I’ve been diagnosed bipolar.” He placed special emphasis on the word diagnosed.
“You don’t think you have it then?”
“Have it? No. No more than anyone else.” His fingers drummed the table. “What about you?”
I hadn’t thought of a lie to tell yet, which seemed stupid of me…
“Clinical depression.” I said.
He laughed again, a hard, full-belly laugh you could hear even above the TV. “As opposed to imaginable depression?” he smiled. “What you on?”
“Benzodiazepine.”
“For depression?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
He nodded then shook his head in the same movement. “Ooh. Those things will really take the edge off.”
“Really?”
“Nah, they’re not that bad. Some of the stuff they try to give me would knock out a horse. Och, it’s alright,” he said. He lowered his voice, “They’re all drugged up to the eyeballs. They won’t say anything, eh Bill?” He turned to his right and gave his neighbour a light punch in the shoulder. Spittle fell from Bill’s mouth and he glared at Harry in annoyance for a few seconds, then looked back at his dinner.
“Have you had the spiel yet?” Harry asked. “That you’ve got low serotonin levels and a chemical imbalance. Just like some people get SAD in the winter because the lack of sunlight makes them depressed. Have you ever heard of anybody who doesn’t get depressed in seventeen hours of darkness a day?”
I tried to change the subject, “So you’ve been in solitary the last few days?”
“Uh huh.” He crammed the other half of the toast into his mouth.
“Why?” He struggled to chew it all and I waited for him to finish, “What were you gonna say exactly?”
“I was just gonna tell the inspector what they treat us like. And that this place is stuck in the nineteenth century. That we can’t use the phone. That there’s no books. That we are always locked up bored out of our minds. That it’s not a proper rehabilitation institution, and it’s doing more harm than good.”
I glanced back, Sanders was now talking to Kev and Liz. Kev was eyeing her like he wanted her to be his next conquest.
I looked at Harry. I lowered my voice, “Well, just to tell you, it would have been pointless saying anything anyway.”
His smile diminished. His eyebrows narrowed in confusion. “What? What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you later.” I said.
His second slice of buttered toast was the last thing on his plate. He mopped up the leftover bean sauce with it and swallowed it down.
He straightened up in his seat. “Do you want to go to the quiet room?” he asked.
“Okay.” I said, “C’mon then.”
Chapter 21
W e put away our trays and headed down the corridor, past Sanders office, the nurses’ station and the toilets, and into the quiet room, and turned on the light. The quiet room was only called the quiet room because it was eight rooms down from the noise of the common room, and it had nothing in it but a few plastic chairs and two large barred windows. It wasn’t far up the corridor from my room, and from the windows you could see the same disused building opposite the road. I’d never seen anyone else in there, and we were the only ones there now.
I picked up one of the chairs and carried it over to the window in the corner and Harry did the same. “What did you mean by that?” he asked.
I debated for a second whether to tell him or not, but didn’t see what difference it would make. “I saw Sanders and the inspector together. Fucking.”
His eyes widened. “Where?”
“Upstairs, just after art therapy. I was on my way back from the library.”
He glanced at the door and back at me. All his former abundant energy had manifested into nervousness, “Are you sure it was her?”
I nodded. “Positive.”
“Fuck!” He looked out the window. He shook his head, “I can’t fucking believe it.”
“What?”
“There was no way this place was going to pass any inspection. There’s just no way.” He kept shaking his head, wide-eyed, “She’s fucked em’ to keep em’ quiet.”
Something told me that Harry was alright. I thought I could trust him. Maybe I was just desperate to confide in someone.
“Is there not any other way you can get the word out?” I said.
“No. I’ve tried. Even when we get visits downstairs, they make sure that we are monitored. One guy tried to tell his aunt what it’s like, they put him in ward eight. Others have probably mentioned something too, but who would actually believe them? Most of their families don’t even listen to them.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What did you say about ward eight?”
“Oh, that’s the worst ward, for all the real crazy folks. That’s where they put me for solitary, out of the way. It’s the next ward along the corridor at the other side of the building, if you keep going past the therapy rooms. That’s where all the most violent patients are. This ward is nothing, and they’re all out of their faces anyway, but on ward eight even forty grams of lithium doesn’t calm some of them.”
He looked up through the window at the stars shining brightly. A moment's quiet passed. A shriek of laughter rang out from down the hall and one of the patients went skipping past our door. She didn’t look in.
“I’m worried about Kev.” I confessed. “What’s the deal with him?”
“Kev?” Harry had gone very quiet and was staring morosely at the carpet. “He’s not so bad. I’ve heard rumours but,- Why? What has he done?”
“Nothing, yet. Just..some things he’s said to me, and he seems, kind of like a sadist. He hasn’t ever hurt a patient here?”
Harry shook his head. “Not that I’ve seen, apart from the usual restriction violence. There was a rumour he, um, touched a girl last year. One of the patients said something, one of the girls. But she’s gone now, and she was prone to making up lies and exaggerating a lot. She also said her mum was Mother Theresa.” He looked at me. “I think he’s just a bully to be honest, and sex-mad. He reminds me of the bad stories the media used to put out about footballers or something. But no, I wouldn’t worry.”