Acid Rain

by R. D Rhodes

  It reassured me a little. “And should I be worried about Benzodiazepine?”

  “Why?” Somewhat of a smile came back, “You’re not taking them anyway!”

  That was true. I smirked. “Do they ever let us get out on the grounds? On my first day Sanders said we had to earn privileges.”

  “Ha!” His lips curled into the same rueful smile he’d had when Kev was teasing him, “Not likely. I’ve been outside twice in the past six months, and both those times were down at the smoking area.” He turned away, looking back out the window as he massaged his temples with his fingers. His knees were bouncing up and down.

  “So when will the next inspection be?”

  “Not till next year now. That was the first one in over a year. Only the second since I’ve been here.”

  “How long you been here?”

  “Year and a half.”

  I couldn’t see me lasting a year and a half.

  “So... what do you think so far?” he said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Well, they pinned me down and drugged me the other day, is that normal here?”

  “Oh yeah,” he nodded, “Any backchat, or raucous behavior and that’s you- injection or time-out in your room. It wasn’t this bad last year, but it’s gotten a lot worse. The staff all got cut and some walked away, and they weren’t replaced. The ones they have left either aren’t up to the job or are too pushed for time to do anything. Last year there was fourteen or something, I think there’s only eight full-time now.”

  “Yeah, I overheard the nurses saying something like that.”

  “So.. apart from that, how are you finding everyone? What do you think of the patients?”

  “Well,” I said, “I’ve not really spoken to anyone. They all seem off their faces.”

  He nodded. “It’s true. It’s their only way of keeping control.”

  “And most of the patients seem okay. Sandy’s alright. Nina worries me though.”

  Harry looked as if it was something he had given a lot of thought about already. “Yeah, she’s been fucked up pretty bad. Do you know what happened?”

  “No…I can guess.”

  He shook his head- he was always nodding or shaking his head. “Fucking mankind!” he grimaced. “Do you want to know?”

  I didn’t. I just knew it was sick.

  His black eyes noticed my reservations and went on, “Most of the people here have been fucked up in some way or another. At least ninety percent of the time it’s family or social problems. Fucked up homes, shitty parents, shitty upbringings, shitty role models, ridiculous social expectations to live up to. Don’t get me wrong, some are genuinely ill, some probably need the medication, but most of it is due to society. Apart from the fact it’s practically impossible not to go crazy in all this shit, they start some of these people on downers and hard drugs when they are five. It’s crazy. Instead of helping kids, spending time with them, loving them, harnessing them, it’s just easier to get them all on drugs. If a kid’s got ADHD they have to drug him, or her, to go to their society’s school. But they should be helped around that, maybe it’s the school’s fault for not being stimulating enough, for being so fucking boring. Never mind the cunts in here, half the country’s on anti-depressants. I don’t know. R.D Laing said that all forms of transcendence are crushed by society, and I think he’s got a point there.”

  “What? So you think some of these people are, what, geniuses and poets?”

  “No, no, no, but most people in here, and outside, generally don’t have the option to think of anything else, abstract thought is just not encouraged. Thinking for yourself, it’s just not acceptable.” He stood up and paced across the room with his hands in his tracksuit pockets. If you could think of how a stereotype chav would dress, that was him. He got to the wall and walked back. “But, yeah, I think he, R.D Laing, kind of believed that some of these people were prophets or shamans or had some psychic power or extrasensory perception or something, and do you know what, I think some of them do. Course it’s always about how you can relate it to your own experience, and if it makes sense to you from what you have encountered yourself. And I’ve seen things once or twice, and I definitely believe some of the others here have.”

  I think I involuntarily showed my skepticism. “Like who?”

  “Well, I dunno. Have you ever seen any of John’s drawings? Sometimes Dave will just stop in the middle of the hall and stare at something that I can’t see. Either he is hallucinating or there really is something there. There’s a fine line between being mad and being a visionary. What’s madness today is common sense tomorrow. Nietzsche or Schopenhauer said something like that too.”

  One of the nurses walked past the door, noticed us, and came in. “What yous two gossiping about?” she smiled.

  We both smiled innocently back.

  “Twenty minutes till lock-up time, okay guys?”

  “Alright.” I said.

  She disappeared back up the corridor.

  I looked back at Harry. “Is there anything I should know, or be worried about here. Sanders? The patients?”

  Harry sat back down. “Your main worry should be getting out. No. Like I said, the worst patients aren’t here.”

  He caught me looking, yet again, at his neck. Looking at it was like having a scab on your arm you couldn’t help but pick. It looked so bad it still looked sore.

  “It’s alright.” he said. “Everyone looks at it.”

  “What really happened?”

  “I told you.” he smiled. But when he saw the joke had died, he said, “I hung myself.”

  Chapter 22

  I waited for him to expand.

  “And.. it didn’t work?…”

  “No. Well it probably would have done, but a bunch of kids saw me. It’s a long story.”

  I waited.

  H e drew a breath. “Well, basically I just had enough of it all. I couldn’t eat. Couldn’t sleep. Had crippling depression, usually long bouts of it that came and went. But then it came and didn’t go away. It was like a black cloud hung permanently over my head. I couldn’t see the point in anything anymore. Suicide was on my mind all the time. I used to think about it just once a day, but I became obsessed. Everywhere I went I pictured nooses for me to swing from- above swings in parks, dangling from the crossbars of football goals, and especially from trees. Almost every tree I passed I seen a rope around one of the boughs and a noose dangling from it. A lovely, enticing little hoop, just waiting for my neck. It was like it was goading me, inviting me into it.” He coughed and covered his mouth and looked at me then back out the window.

  “So I had had a really shitty day, one of the worst, and there didn’t seem like any other way out. So I went to these woods near the town I was living in. I had bungled up a couple of years before, so I wanted to make sure I did it right. I went to the most remote place I could find. It was half a mile, at least half a mile, from the nearest track where people walked their dogs, and I cut off and went way out through the weeds and bushes and right in amongst the trees with my rope in my bag. I found a tree. One with a big thick branch high enough off the ground. A beech tree. And I climbed up. Looped the rope round, made a noose on the bottom, got my neck in, and jumped.”

  “It’s sore,” he continued, “especially when you drop down and the rope yanks back on your neck. It tears your breath away, and it hurts. Sometimes it breaks your neck. But not with me! But I was out in about twenty seconds. Next thing I know I’m lying on the ground and these kids are looking down at me. They’d come out there to build a fucking den!”

  “Bloody hell!” was all I could say. “What happened?”

  “The branch snapped.”

  I laughed.

  He looked at me, then chuckled too. But his face immediately went grave with recognition of something. “Those kids. Apparently they’d seen me walking in and followed me. For half a mile. In the middle of nowhere. I think they were pretending I was part of a game or something. I was
homeless at the time, so they were maybe just wondering where homeless guys slept. I don’t know. But they were hiding in the bushes watching me and saw the whole thing. They said it snapped about ten seconds after I had jumped.”

  How stupid could you be, I thought. He couldn’t really have meant to do it.

  “But it was a big branch.” he said, almost reading my thought. “It was thick. Wider than my waist. Proper sturdy.”

  “So, did the kids phone the police?”

  “Yeah.” he said. “And you don’t get a choice about it either when they take you in to commit you. If they think you’re a danger to yourself or others, they’re allowed by law to put you in here. Suicide is taboo in this fucking society. There’s discrimination against it.” He stared at the ground. The rat-like narrow face, with that pointed chin and pointed nose, didn’t appear so rat-like as it distorted in pain. His sly, black, pondering eyes became wrought with worry under his arched brows. His hands went to his head, and he clawed and gouged at his hair then rubbed his fingers into his forehead. “The kids’ faces though, when I was lying there looking up at them. They were so scared. Their eyes were wide and... I could see the confusion in them, thinking why would he do that? They couldn’t understand. They were only about eight or nine, they shouldn’t have witnessed that. It wasn’t fair.” He bit his lip and shook his head.

  “But there’s nothing you could have done.” I said reassuringly. “You couldn’t have predicted they would turn up.”

  He clasped his hands in front of him. “When I was lying unconscious one of them ran off to get help. It didn’t take long for the police to get there after that. I broke my ankle when I fell so I couldn’t go anywhere.”

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. Do you want to talk about this?”

  He was lost in thought though. He went over it as if I wasn’t even in the room, as if he was just telling it to himself, “I saw their faces and I did think about trying to make them feel better. I thought about telling them a load of crap. That I was testing the weight of the tree, that it was an accident. But kids aren’t stupid. In that moment I thought, I can’t lie to them. I had to tell them the truth. So I did. I told them I wanted to die, and I was trying to kill myself. And they got all worried. Like lost little lambs, asking why? Why? Why? Why? That’s all kids say. And I just told them the truth, the worlds a bad place and I wanted to get away from it.” He got up from his seat again and paced the thin carpet, full of nervous, wired energy. He couldn’t look me in the eye, he was looking everywhere but at me.

  “You’ve got to be diplomatic sometimes though.” I said. “Some lies are okay, to protect their innocence. Fuck, they were kids. Eight years old.” I tried to hide some of the anger in my voice.

  He shook his head. “I was going to. I could’ve said I was feeling better and everything was okay. It would’ve made them feel better. It might have made me feel better. But what truth is bad to tell and what truth is good? Is the truth not the fucking truth? That’s what I felt in that moment, that’s what I was thinking. And sooner or later you have to tell them like it is anyway. They will find that stuff out for themselves when they’re teenagers or adults, so what difference does it make? You can’t lie to them their whole life.” He glanced at my eyes and looked away again. “We all live in a lie. The world is a fucked-up place. And if you don’t find that out sooner or later you end up joining in with the lie. Either you find out for yourself and try to do something about it, the sooner the better, which hardly anyone does, or you ignore it, you don’t get told the truth about it and you end up becoming one of the people fucking it over. And that’s the easiest thing to do, just ignore it all. Ignorance is fucking bliss.”

  I composed myself. “Well, that is what Jesus preached.” I said. “The truth, the truth, the truth.”

  He let out a sarcastic laugh, and pulled at his hair again then let it go. “Nobody fucking listens to what Jesus said. That’s one of the problems now, people have lost God, have lost religion. Like Solzhenitsyn said, lost God. And because of that, they’ve lost their morals. There is no moral code anymore, people have nothing to measure themselves by. There’s no punishment for sins, no reward for good deeds, and it scares me, but I think that’s what the masses need. They seem to fucking need rules and laws, to be ruled over. Just look at how they worship the queen!”

  I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. He was ranting, wild, pacing the room vigorously, throwing his hands in the air. “People have no conscience.” He raced on. “The world’s full of greedy, selfish pricks and-,” he stopped in his path as if coming to a sudden realization, “And if I’ve managed to teach those kids anything about injustice or truth, about how people really are, then maybe I’ve did something good.”

  “You still have to protect children though,” I butted in, “Childhood is the most precious, important stage in your whole life, that’s when you grow, that’s when your brains growing, when you develop, it’s the foundation for everything that comes after. You have to hide them from some of the truth; the truth’d fuck them up!”

  “Well, you can’t hide it from them forever! Fuck, that’s why teenage years are so bad.”

  “I had a fucked-up childhood,” I said, “and I’m fucked up now because of it. You need to be protected from bad at that age, and loved and-,”

  “Yeah but that’s different! Love has nothing to do with it! Parents should always shower their kids in love. A kid should be the fucking center of their parents’ universe, their whole reason for living, or else why would they have them in the first place? And if you show kids love and explain the truth, which is the way the world is, properly to them, then that’s fine.” He stopped pacing. His eyes were solemn as he sat back down. “I don’t know, maybe it’s cause I never got a good childhood either. People always seem to cherish their childhoods. But if it ends and you just get fucked up later on instead then what difference does it make? If you get fucked up at eight or eighteen when you get your reality check does it really make a difference which it is? People should be living their childhood every day. That’s what Jesus said, just live like a child.”

  What does a child represent? I thought. Naivety. Truth. Kindness. Simplicity. He had a point. And I didn’t want to argue anymore. I stayed quiet. Harry chewed his lower lip with his yellow teeth, lips so thin they were basically just a line at the bottom of his pale face. “Do you think I fucked them up? I know that stuff can live with you a long time.”

  “I don’t know, Harry.” I said. “I don’t know.”

  He scratched his head and looked out into the darkness.

  “Are you going to do anything, about the bullying? We can both do something?”

  He sighed. “No. It’s not so bad. I just don’t react to it anymore. There were talks of shutting this place down. I hope soon but, I don’t know. Where will everyone go?” He rubbed his face and forehead with his hand. “God help us all.”

  Chapter 23

  I stared up at the faintly lit ceiling from my bed. What good did it do anyone to be locked up like this? Why, in two thousand and ten were they still putting people in eight by eight boxes to teach them a lesson, or make them better, depending on their need or crime? Was it to keep society safe, keep the people who weren’t like everyone else off the street? What about the bankers and politicians? They were the most dangerous people around. Why hadn’t my dad ended up in one of these places?

  I was worried I would go crazy in that room. I didn’t know if I was crazy before but staring at those same four walls under that same tiny ceiling was inevitably going to make anyone deteriorate. What the fuck is this really meant to do? I thought. I’m a human being. An animal. This isn’t a fit environment for anything to be in. You learn respect by being shown respect and you learn love by being shown love. But the nurses here are so,.. I could blackmail Sanders? Tell her exactly what I saw in that room upstairs. And that if she doesn’t take action against Liz and Kev, I’ll find a way to report them all. W
ill that work though? Oh, I want to punch that guy so much! Just to see that smirk wiped off his face... But the only way you’re going to stay sane is by pushing all your future dreams away. Discard all visions of beaches and seas, forests and rivers. Numb your brain and think of nothing. Ah, this is hell.

  I looked at the window. It was hours past lights-out time and pitch black out there. The only light came from the small shaft that squeezed in from the corridor. I twisted in my bed and turned my face against the pillow.

  Rain drummed against the window. It was still dark, and I couldn’t tell how long I had slept. I guessed it was about one am but there was never any way of knowing. I got up and tiptoed to the window in my socks. The rain was driving in sideways through the bars against the glass. A thick shadowy mass of cloud covered the sky, and a wind was picking up. Everything was black. I could just and no more make out the silhouette of that abandoned building across from me.

  I stood there, watching and listening for a while. The rain hit the glass with big splashes and ran down in strokes from the top to the bottom. I didn’t feel tired, only restless. It was cold too, in my shirt and jammy bottoms. I got back into bed.

  My head felt itchy. I had gotten into the habit of scratching it more and more and now every time I went to prop up the pillow, I could see the faint glimmers of another few strands of red hair. I pulled the covers over me and rolled about. About half an hour later I gave up. I reached down to the floor and picked up Confucius. The shaft of light was just enough to read in if you put the page directly in it. I got comfy in my cocoon and opened it up.