by Paul Sayer
Her voice seemed softer than it had in the office. ‘You’, she said, ‘may not be used to people addressing you directly. It’s not your fault. Just put it down to the inadequacies of the institution. Then forget all about the place. Forget how you were manhandled without a word, talked about as if you were some dumb animal. I know your type, Peter, and I know you’re in there somewhere, listening to me, wondering, naturally, what you have been let in for. Where you are going you’ll be treated with respect, and we expect that you will respond accordingly. Your case is not unique, though you may have been led to believe that it is. At One World you will not be a “case”, no, you will be, first and absolutely foremost, a human being, a living, feeling, thinking man capable of all the sweetness and essence that is given to mankind. You will act for yourself, be able to shrug off the nightmare of your past. You need only have the simplest of faith in us and you will be rewarded. We can make you well again, but you must be prepared to make the greatest effort yourself. Work, Peter, work hard, and you will be whole once more.’
It was all too much for me. I fell asleep.
Across a wall, over a fast river children were juggling with black and white cones. My mouth was open and I was sure I had called to them, but they seemed to take no notice, carrying on with their game, silently and intently performing its mysterious moves. Somewhere in the wall was a glass door with a big silver lock. From some part of my body I conjured a key, but its metal was weak and it bent as I tried it in the lock. Then the keyhole was so large I found I could get what I took to be my fingers inside to flick over the tumblers. With a will I forced open the door to find the scene changed: where there had been a river and children playing I saw only a black ditch skirting a grassy expanse. I had the sensation of running over great areas of hillside but, in my dreaming eye, I saw only the image of my head, chest, shoulders and arms, floating, going nowhere. I contrived that the children should somehow reappear, but the figures which ghosted up before me were not children; indeed, I had become the child in their midst. They were resting, dark shapes, fatigued as if by the rigours of battle. All about them were severed limbs and other pieces of human matter. In a piece of madness I believed this offal to be the parts needed for an adult version of the game I had seen the children playing. I tried juggling the meat, but the various bits and pieces would not behave in my hands, sticking to my fingers, soiling my own apparently healthy skin. I wanted to go back, but there was nowhere to go back to. The earth fell from beneath me and I woke with a powerful headache.
We were turning from a main road on to a black side road which snaked its way before us through white fields. Anna leaned forward again to look at me, but this time she did not smile. I got the impression that she had gone on talking to me for some time before she realized I was asleep. She seemed uncomfortable; perhaps we had been travelling too long, I had no idea. The sun was no longer so apparent, being shaded by ivory clouds which diffused its light and made its whereabouts vague. Anna remained silent as she turned the car into an area of woodland. Then I was struck by an amusing thought: Was all this simply an elaborate charade? Were we to meet accomplices of hers who would drag me from the car, cover me with leaves and soil that I might be claimed by the earth, weathered and eaten by insects, acids, moonlight? Was I about to die? No one on this planet would know, certainly no one could be that bothered. If there had been muscles in my face I might have smiled at that thought. I wondered if I really cared myself.
‘Nearly there,’ she said from somewhere remote, way outside my field of concentration, her words turning and waking something in my mind. On the right of the gravel track we were travelling along a white house appeared, truly white, though its roof was covered with snow and seemed to be made of some kind of thatch. A sign informing no conceivable traffic stated, in gold on black, “One World Intensive Rehabilitation Centre”. Snow had formed crescents in the upstairs windows making the house look like a many-eyed startled face glaring beyond us at some distant, unseeable horror as we passed up the short drive to the front door. A man stepped out, a tubby, short man, bespectacled, untidy brown hair swept back from his forehead. He nodded at Anna. ‘Excuse me, Peter,’ she said forcedly. ‘I shall just be a few minutes. You had better wait here.’
By now they would be happy, the staff back at the hospital, flying in their happiness over their momentary, genuine regret at my being taken out of their care. And to add to their happiness no guilt could be attached to them, since it had not been their decision that I should go. They would be free, feeling free of me, the stiffy, the one who stuck out amongst the moving ones, those amenable to the treatment they offered, those who could at least hold some kind of a conversation or take themselves off to the toilet. I, the clayboots, the old rock that littered the ward, was no longer among them, frustrating them in their work; and now they would appear an iota more modern, my place available for a more hopeful case. But it wouldn’t have done for me to have been angry with them. I could not afford anger; it might have made me do something I would regret, if that were at all possible. I had my moments though, I admit, late at night perhaps, when I would lie in my wet bed, screaming in my skull for the darkness to come and make a mess of me, have done with me, turn me to water, to powder, to spirit me away into nothing, finish me for good. Then this fiery sentiment would die and I would be left, days later perhaps, clinging to life in the same pathetic way I had craved my own demise.
Anna exchanged words with the man, he nodding expressionlessly, she occasionally opening her hands as if going through some process of self-justification. The two fell silent and he looked at me, staring through the glass of the windscreen, absorbed in his quiet thoughts; then he disappeared back inside the house. Anna shuddered, hugged herself, and her breath was a white flame on the cold air.
FIVE
Presently an old man in a grubby cream apron appeared, trundling a wheelchair from the back of the house. Anna moved smartly to the side of the car and opened the door. ‘Right Tom,’ she said, ‘if you take him at the top and I grab his legs, OK?’ Their hands reached into the car, tangling with each other, fumbling with the seat-belt, feeling for their quarry. ‘Come on, Peter,’ said the old man, his nose sharp and capillaried. ‘Into this chair,’ he said. ‘But don’t get too used to it, mind.’ He grinned, his lips thin and pink, as he took my weight, hoisting me into the wheelchair before bending back into the car for the black polythene bag containing my “belongings”. He put the bag in my lap and curled my hand over it. Then he reached back into the car for my history which he handed to Anna. The bag slid from under my moist palm, creased shirts and odd socks spilling on to the slushy gravel. A shadow of irritation passed over his face before he bent down to pick up my things. ‘Never mind, Peter,’ he said. ‘Never you mind.’
As they wheeled me round to the back of the house I felt a curious sensation: the building had jerked, slipped somehow, bounced a little in its foundations. But the other two seemed to have noticed nothing and I readily attributed it to my considerable fatigue. Tom negotiated a troublesome step with the chair, pushing me into a big warm kitchen dominated by two yellow-topped tables pushed together in the centre. The place was alive with the smell of freshly-baked food and my stomach stirred unpleasantly. ‘Has he eaten?’ asked Tom. Anna silently and tartly indicated that he should direct his question to me. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said to her, compounding his error. ‘Have you had anything to eat Peter?’ he bawled, unnecessarily. The two looked down at me in silence. Anna pursed her lips. ‘They’ve been using a syringe to feed him,’ she said. ‘Too long-term for a naso-gastric tube, we must presume. We shall have to adopt their method for the moment. Can you fix something up? A funnel and a piece of tubing, perhaps?’ ‘I should be able to manage,’ said Tom. Anna left, clutching her bag and my history.
The old man went quietly about his business, pausing to smile at me occasionally, opening and closing cupboard doors, holding various tins of food inches from my eyes. ‘You’ll soon get
used to us here,’ he said. ‘Us and our little ways. Have you back on your feet in no time. I’m guessing that you like baked beans. Never met anyone who doesn’t. Soon find out what you like and what you don’t, eh?’ he said as he opened the tin. ‘All your likes, ah, and all your little dislikes.’
He never tired of this chatter all through the preparation of the meal he mashed and watered and poured into a clear plastic bottle from which he fed a piece of red tubing. He poked a finger into my mouth, cleverly finding the side where there were no teeth. Then he inserted the tube and began squeezing, very gently at first, I noticed, as the salty mixture dripped into my mouth and burnt my tongue. Then he became too ambitious and squeezed the inverted bottle harder, too hard for my complex swallowing mechanism to cope with. I gagged and spewed the mixture back through my nose. He stood back looking briefly disappointed and at the same time concerned as he glanced at the door through which Anna had left, then back to me. After a few awkward seconds in which he seemed at a loss as to what he should do, he looked down at my chest and put his nose in front of my mouth to satisfy himself I was not asphyxiating. He mopped the sick from my face and clothes with a towel he left to soak in a bucket of hot water. ‘So,’ he said, ‘you’re not keen on old Tom’s cooking? Never mind. Not to worry, not to worry at all. We’ll soon sort something out, won’t we? Tell you what, let’s go and find your room. They should have decided where you’ll be sleeping by now. I’ll bet you’re dying to see it. Yes?’
He pushed me into a dark, carpeted hall, the floorboards creaking under the wheels of the chair, past a staircase to a room I guessed served as some kind of reception or office. From inside the room came a garbled discussion between Anna and, I assumed, the man who had come out to meet her on our arrival. Tom was at my side, listening, dropping all pretence of paying me direct attention. He leaned towards the door, cocking his head, thin daylight lightening the dark hollows beneath his eyes. Was this old man worried that the two inside were talking about him? A chair scraped the floor in the room, footsteps came near and Tom snapped out of his trance and knocked.
The old man, an ex-patient employed by the Centre, need not have worried. He wheeled me into the office. My history lay open on a desk. The atmosphere was hot, dense, and I could almost taste the antagonism between Anna and the man who stared out of the window, his back to us, refusing to acknowledge our entrance. ‘My name’, he said, addressing the snow on the drive beneath the window, ‘is John. I am the Director of the One World Rehabilitation Centre.’ He snorted, turned and came over to me. He leant forward, lifting his glasses to take a closer look, then stepped back a pace perturbed, no doubt, by the redolence of vomit on my clothes and faint breath. He seemed to cool a little at this, as if obscurely impressed. He then went through a seemingly practised speech explaining the function of the house, its policy of taking unusual and difficult cases which ordinary mental hospitals had neither the time, will, nor specialist techniques to tackle effectively. He went on to explain that they were about to formulate a contract to which I would be obliged to adhere and which gave a structure to my ‘treatment’, such, he said, as it might be. He was trying his hardest to be professional, even convivial, but I had the strong impression that I was not the kind of material he wanted in ‘his house’. Anna was to blame. She had chosen badly and his record would suffer, though he would not be able to return me to the hospital without some token effort: that would have made a dreadful smear on his record, his accountability to, well, whoever.
Tom, as if the recipient of some reprieve, was cheerful, light-hearted as we left the office. He dragged the chair up the two half-flights of stairs and along a dark, creaking landing to the room which I had been allotted. Inside was a single bed, carpet and curtains, a washbasin, a wardrobe and two chests of drawers, into each drawer of which he deposited items of my luggage. The wind rapped on the roof of the house. When he had finished he said he was leaving me for a while to let me get accustomed to my new surroundings. Anyway, he had to make tea for everyone.
I began to wonder at the space which seemed to be suddenly and irretrievably unfolding around me, pouring out of me into a void, my faint horizons broken by this day nagging at me, threatening to suck me out of myself, innards drawn through a circle of my own flesh till I was gone. Harrowing, sinister moments, real, too real to bear thinking about.
The daylight failed quickly and soon I was in complete darkness save for a narrow strip of light at the foot of the door. I listened to the strange footsteps on the landing and running along the hall downstairs. Lights were switched on and off, a television was booming somewhere, voices called, and I was remembered.
Tom appeared, or rather his hand did, snaking through the gap in the door, feeling for the light which he clicked on, only for the bulb to ping above my head putting everything back into darkness. He shuffled off and brought a replacement. ‘Bloody things,’ he said. ‘Don’t last two minutes.’ He brought a chair from outside the room and stood on it to replace the bulb. He gasped as if wearied by the effort of stretching, set the chair aside, then stood and smiled at me.
‘Well, Peter my boy,’ he said. ‘Getting used to us now are you? Us and our funny little ways? You’ll like it here, certain of it,’ he said as he drew the curtains behind me.
‘Now,’ he went on, ‘I’m meant to take you downstairs to meet the rest of the residents.’ He looked at his watch and shook his head. ‘I don’t know, though, it’s getting late you’ve probably had enough excitement for one day. What do you say? Yes? No? Am I right? Plenty of time for all that tomorrow. We don’t want to rush things, now, do we? Shouldn’t expect too much of you on your first day, though I can tell you’ve made quite an impression already, yes my boy, quite an impression indeed. Anyway, time you were thinking about sleep, you’ve another day ahead of you tomorrow.’
From outside the room he brought a newly procured syringe filled with warm milk which he allowed to trickle, too slowly this time, down my throat. I spluttered and he laid the syringe aside. Then he tried to get a toothbrush between my clenched teeth, but this too was unsuccessful and in a moment of pique he threw the brush across the room into the sink. He sighed and looked to the ceiling then, without comment, began undressing me, heaving at my shirt, dragging my trousers down to reveal a stain of dark urine on the pad and my leg, the only output I could recall since leaving the hospital that morning, that eternity ago.
When I was naked and he had wiped away my mess, he heaved me on to the bed and covered me with a cold sheet and heavy blankets. He turned out the light and closed the door.
It was early in the evening, I guessed, but he had been right in suggesting that the exertions of this day might have taken their toll on me. I lay in the darkness, tense and perplexed. He had left my shoulder exposed to the cold and tomorrow it would cause me pain.
There you have it, then, this day I have described, confessed out of sight, the bauble broken, though it will always remain, hidden, its cusps and its brilliance embedded somewhere, above, below, in my liver maybe, nicking and scorching some secret part of me till I bleed, and am once more obliged to recognize its presence in my memory. And would that this was the only day I might seek to forget.
SIX
I was cracking up. Certain of it. Why couldn’t they just leave me alone? Renegades. Cunts. I was not coming apart in the mental sense: that much I felt reasonably sure about. No, this was different. You see, bits of me were breaking loose, shaking free inside, kidneys, heart, spleen, even my intestines, were all freeing themselves from their moorings, lifting their roots from the brittle shell of my body which seemed to want nothing to do with keeping its respective components in place. That business of removing me from the hospital had taken its toll. They should have known better than to fool around with someone like me. What right had they? But then, what were my rights?
I had a recurrent dream which began to impose itself on my conscious thoughts, an image of John bending over me as I lay on a mortuary slab
. He lifted his glasses, straining to recognize me, knowing he should be able to put a name to this thin corpse, but he shook his head and walked away. I, in my turn, was viewing the scene from a corner of the cold room, maybe I was an attendant or something, and I too came and looked at the body, shook my head and walked away.
The day after my arrival at One World John came in search of me, full of warmth and pleasantries, perhaps in atonement for his gruff manner of the previous day. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’ll go outside. We have much to discuss.’
A thaw had set in during the night and much of the drive and rear courtyard were wet and clear of snow. He wheeled me out beyond some outbuildings from which there came the sound of men tending light machines. I heard the squirt of a motorbike passing along some distant road beyond the woods surrounding us. He stopped in a small garden, an enclosed area of small tufted lawns, a greenhouse, bare flower-beds still speckled with white where the sun had not yet reached, and a pond. He took a stick and prodded at the ice floating on the top of the water. ‘Did you ever keep fish, Peter?’ he asked. ‘No? I should make more time. A man in my line of work can only profit from the relaxation afforded by such a simple pastime.’ He smiled, his teeth nicotined and uneven. ‘I put four carp in here. They didn’t last a week. I wonder often about the quality of the water. I have a weakness for handsome fish, but I’m afraid the science of keeping them in perfect health baffles me.’
I wished he would get to the point. He threw the stick to the opposite side of the pond then knelt down in front of me. He took my hand and warmed it between his.