Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  1. Information to establish a persistent disorder or disability of mind. His father died young and abused him. He was abused at school and abused others. He is a long term drug user and thief.

  2. Information to establish that the disorder or disability of mind results in abnormally aggressive or seriously irresponsible conduct on the part of the patient.

  He killed a young woman and claims to have killed a youth. He may have killed another woman. He shows no remorse and does not understand the seriousness of his actions.

  3. Information to establish that the disorder or disability of mind requires or is susceptible to medical treatment.

  He is a loner and introvert, cannot establish relationships with females and has contempt for other males in an antisocial and rather dangerous way. There is a likelihood he may respond to therapy in a structured situation.

  4. Reasons for the conclusion that the disorder or disability of mind is of a nature or degree which warrants the detention of the patient in hospital for medical treatment.

  He suffers from personality disorder and does not express remorse about his offences. In my view he is a potentially dangerous man and I shall recommend a Restriction Order under the Mental Health Act be ordered by the court.

  That’s it! Exley told me that many of them are even shorter. As for the pathetic circularity of the argument – he’s mad because he sinned, he may get better because he’s mad – that too, Julian told me, is standard.

  Ah, what a piece of work is a Man . . . The glory that was Engleby, the incomparable complexity of the human mind in all its glittering and bewildering beauty reduced to half a dozen non sequiturs in blue Bic on an HMSO form . . .

  The trial itself, on the other hand, was entirely thrilling.

  Although the prosecution made much of the fact that I’d lived a ‘normal’ life and had managed to function in a well-paid job, Harvey called an embarrassing number of witnesses to attest to how weird I was. He also put me on the stand and made me go through what had happened. I didn’t try to appear deranged, but it was difficult to make the truth sound less than odd.

  When his turn came, Julian Exley fluently outlined his position under Harvey’s prompting, but didn’t take well to being bullied by the prosecution counsel, a nasty piece of work called Tindall. I sensed that what Tindall wanted to get over was that anything short of locking me up in Parkhurst sine die would show improper regard for the gravity of the crime and insufficient sympathy for Jennifer and her family. He made several references to something called ‘section 47’ – a sort of safety net that means the prisoner can later be transferred from prison to hospital if the shrinks so decide. He offered this as an ideal solution: show your revulsion for the crime by refusing the plea and get him sent to Parkhurst; don’t get bogged down in dodgy psychiatry, just let the experts sort it out later. This, I think, was what they did with Sutcliffe, and it looked like a worryingly attractive compromise.

  The technicality of the plea, however, meant that for the most part Tindall was obliged to attack Exley’s evidence, which he did on two flanks: both that the diagnosis itself was woolly nonsense (one saw his point) and, second, that even if – which was not admitted – there was something to it, then it still would not have substantially (he liked that word) diminished my responsibility.

  We all agreed that the key issue was the degree to which my judgement had been impaired by my mental condition. Tindall argued that the measure of this was as much moral as medical and that psychiatrists had no special expertise here – any more than his lordship or the jury. It was a matter of common sense and ‘gut’ feeling. Exley ceded some ground but maintained his profession had ‘a contribution’ to make.

  Harvey counter-attacked with a tremendous quote he’d dug up from the Court of Appeal where the senior judge had spoken of ‘a state of mind so different from that of ordinary human beings that the reasonable man would term it abnormal . . . [affecting] the ability to exercise willpower to control physical acts, in accordance with rational judgement’. He made great play of the jury being ‘reasonable men and women’; though of course this was essentially a completely non-technical point of the old circular variety: he must have been out of his mind to have done such a thing.

  But it went well for him. His style was collegiate and constructive; he enlisted the assistance of his lordship and the jury – and me – as though solving a tricky cryptic crossword, all help gratefully received.

  But Tindall was not finished. He returned to attack the whole ‘personality disorder’ category. Schizophrenics are mad all the time; but people not suffering from mental illness – e.g. me – only get into Special Hospitals if they do something terrible. The murder is the thing that allows admission to take place. Then he found his logic leading to something really terrifying: if psychopathy was really a mental abnormality, why were there no psychopaths being treated in normal NHS hospitals?

  There was a nasty silence while we all let this sink in. ‘Well, Dr Exley, I put it to you. How many psychopaths receive treatment before they commit a crime? Is psychopathy in effect no more than a fancy term for wickedness?’

  Exley didn’t have the figures, naturally enough, for non-criminal psychopaths in the civil NHS (bugger all, one suspected) and he floundered for a bit.

  The judge, however, seemed to be of the view that this line of questioning had come too late in the day; we had moved on from categories into degree of impairment. Harvey made some more commonsense appeals to the ‘reasonable’ man and recalled Exley, who had recovered sufficiently to marshal his arguments in such a way as to suggest that they were too subtle for Tindall to understand, but were well within the grasp of the jury and of his lordship. He was good; after a wobble, he was really good. So was Harvey, who was very alert – a bulky man fast on his feet – and quick to see which way the judge was leaning. Exley offered to go into the biochemistry of personality formation, including genetics, but the judge looked appalled at the idea. He’d had enough. And where he directed, the jury followed.

  I was shocked by how quickly I adapted to the institution. I learned to build my day round small highlights. The cup of tea at seven: strong, hot and fresh because my dormitory was near the kitchen block. If I drank it quickly and timed my call properly, the auxiliary would stop on her way out and refill my cup. The sense of triumph lasted most of the morning. Or the Nescafé at nine. I used to be fussy about espresso and filter and cappuccino and all that. But the single spoon of standard Nescaff from a catering tin dissolved in hot-ish water was something for which I began to salivate from eight-thirty onwards.

  The food, unfortunately, smelt of death and madness, that hospital reek I remembered from breakfast at Park Prewett. NHS hospitals are perhaps the last places in England where they think people eat boiled carrots, gravy and steamed pudding every day for lunch. Tinned pears with custard? Where do they even find this stuff? Perhaps the menu was set down by Mr Beveridge in 1948 and has yet to be reviewed. Luckily you can buy other things from the food shop; together with the pills, they made me put on weight. I gained almost two stone in my first year.

  I was under the charge of a bluff psychiatrist called Braithwaite, who’d been to visit me in prison to see whether I’d be ‘suitable’ for transfer to Longdale. He believed in active intervention in his patients’ lives. He didn’t want a legion of the lost – of pale, violent men adrift in time; he wanted to make them better and move them on, preferably back into the world in which they had transgressed.

  This was a laudable aim, I thought, consistent with the function of a hospital. In practice, what it meant was trying lots of different drugs – pink pills, blue pills, white pills – even for patients like me whose condition responded little to chemicals.

  It also meant, about once a week, talking to Braithwaite or one of his assistants, generally a woman called Turner, about how I felt.

  Not that great, usually: suffering from the side effects of the ‘medication’. I wish they wouldn’t rely on t
hat genteel term, incidentally; I wish they’d call them drugs or pills.

  Generally, I must say, they didn’t go in for euphemism. Dr Turner (first name Jennifer, alas) was typical. She didn’t blush or blink when she used the word ‘murder’ to me in our private consultations. There was something of the schoolmarm in her that made me feel as though I’d been caught for nothing more than smoking in the bushes; she was also quite pretty, though when I asked about her husband and/or home life I received a severely frosty response. She was going to treat me, but she didn’t want or have to like me, that was what she implied, and I thought that that was fair enough.

  I really did like her, though. She was an excellent person, so direct and practical. It’s just a pity that the instruments she had at her disposal – drugs and chat – were so blunt. What Dr Turner needed was a way of reshaping the geography of my mind. She needed to shift the tectonic plates, reform the rifts and flood the valley. To do this, she needed to master time so that she and I could move about in it, not be the slaves of the homo sap delusion that it runs in a straight line.

  She couldn’t do this, unfortunately, so we were left with pills and talk and occupational therapy – viz., gardening, ‘crafts’ and painting. There were other things to do, but I wasn’t ‘ready’ for them yet.

  I was also sent to see psychologists, and this was preferable because one wasn’t always being brought up against the evidence of how pointless it all was. Your psychologist likes nothing more than a ‘test’, and in the early days I was forever answering questions, ticking boxes, Y or N, or on a scale of one to . . .

  One day I was asked to sit in a chair with an electrode attached to me for a test called ‘penile plethysmography’. A nervous young woman in a white coat, possibly a student or trainee, then showed me photographs of women with no clothes on from various top-shelf magazines. The idea was to measure the degree of arousal and from that deduce . . . Deduce what? Whether I preferred blondes to brunettes, white girls to black, Men Only to Mayfair? They could have just asked.

  I was anxious not to give the wrong impression, not to feel a flicker for the wrong picture – a flicker maybe delayed from a previous one. I didn’t want to find myself paired up at some grim hospital social with Lizzie ‘The Hatchet’ Rockwell from the women’s wing because I’d inadvertently twitched at the picture that most resembled her.

  From what I know, it’s true to say that in real life people frequently desire and have vigorous affairs with someone who is not at all their usual type. And what does a psychologist deduce from that?

  In the event, the presence of the young woman in the white coat with the clipboard was so inhibiting that I pretty much flatlined.

  In those early days, sex was very far from my mind. I think that lust is to some extent an expression of optimism: breed because life’s good, let’s have more of it.

  That was really not my attitude when I first came inside Longdale. After seventeen years, I have regained a certain spark and pugnacity, I think. But it took me time, and I must admit that I felt pretty low for the first . . . Well, perhaps two or three years.

  To be confronted with what sane society made of me: it took some digesting. I dragged it off to my lair and tried to swallow it, slowly, over a long period. (My lair eventually became a private room, rather than a dormitory, a little like my cubicle at Chatfield. I also in due course acquired what was called a ‘parole card’, which allowed me to wander pretty much where I wanted in the grounds.)

  I was helped in the digestion process by a couple of the other patients. Gerry was about twenty years older than I was and came from a farming family in Somerset. He had cropped whiteish hair and a practical, muscular air to the way he went about his business. I didn’t in any way think of him as a ‘father’ figure, but I saw that he had managed to make a reasonable life for himself in this place (he’d been here for ten years already) by treating it as normal, something like school or national service – which he had in fact done, fighting briefly in Korea. Gerry was well informed about British history, albeit in a patchy, autodidactic way. Every morning he read the Daily Telegraph right through, smoothing each page out neatly on the table. He was good with his hands and made intricate though useless gadgets (pipe racks and so on) in the woodwork room. He sought me out quite early on and it was only after a bit that I understood, slightly to my embarrassment, that he was hoping to learn from me. He had been at the local grammar school, but he hadn’t been to university after national service because he was needed on the farm. We began each day by discussing what was in the papers over a cigarette in the day room, and I began to know what kind of thing made him laugh and to search it out.

  Mark was younger and not, on the surface, as well sorted out as Gerry. He wore clothes that were a little too smart, and his hair was always neat. His intelligence was tightly wound and his views were expressed in syntactically flawless sentences (which is not, whatever Enoch Powell may have thought, the same thing as being eloquent). Mark was handsome, I’d suppose you’d say, and his clear brown eyes seldom blinked. What I grew to like about him (and it took time) was that he viewed life as a colossal, cosmic joke. Although he had periods of depression which took him out of circulation for a while, he made me laugh more than anyone I’ve ever known, more than Stellings or Jen or Julie or Ralph Richardson or Jeffrey Archer. I pined for Mark when he was off the ward in a black-dog spell and I think I helped him when he came back.

  I knew what Mark had ‘done’ out there, why he was in Longdale, because he told me. It was serious and inexplicable, but not barbaric. I never knew what crime Gerry had committed and it didn’t seem to be important to our friendship. Does that sound pious? Maybe. I admit that I was not above a little frisson when I sat next to a celebrated disemboweller. I’m only human.

  People think that men like me can only be released by the Home Secretary. In fact, the power resides with a mental health tribunal, which reviews my case every three years, or every year if I ask it to. The politicians can’t legally overrule the tribunal.

  In spring 2001, with the backing of Dr Turner, I applied for a conditional discharge. It was thought that with some support, I could, without endangering others, live a reasonably normal life in what is termed ‘the community’ – i.e. non-community, or world at large.

  What windy joy, as Milton might have put it, had I that day conceived, hopeful of my delivery . . .

  The judge at the tribunal looked set to give me the green light until at the last minute the Home Office expert witness came up with some particularly compelling and ghoulish evidence in my case, backed by some general statistics about reoffending. The judge, visibly appalled, decided that discretion was the better part . . .

  Jennifer Turner had the difficult task of breaking the news to me.

  ‘They aren’t required to go into the detail behind the decision, Michael.’

  ‘But we know what the reasons are.’

  ‘Believe me, I find this as vexing – almost as vexing as you do.’

  ‘I’m a patient in a hospital who is better but can’t go home because the public wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Public opinion may well be a factor. It was a famous case.’

  ‘I know. I remember.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘But,’ I said, ‘it looks as though the Home Office is now arguing that a hospital shall be deemed a prison. Why did we go through all that diminished responsibility nonsense?’

  Dr Turner looked as though she might explode. Then she did. ‘Dear God, how do you think it makes me feel?’

  I ended up consoling her, like Carlyle with Mill. ‘It’s all right, Jennifer, I know it’s not your fault . . .’

  But the whole experience set me back a bit. They put me on a high dose of antidepressants and I gained a lot more weight. For the best part of two years I didn’t really get out of my room. I just sat there watching a small television that Stellings had sent me. Thank God for television, for Countdown and the regional news.
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  Julie came to see me once when I was in prison on remand. She told me how our mother had died of cancer.

  We were in the prison visiting room, either side of a table, under the eyes of the warders and a couple of social workers.

  ‘She said to send you her love, Mike.’

  ‘Thanks. Was it painful at the end?’

  ‘Not too bad. She had the drugs. She was in the Sunset Room in the end. In the hospital.’

  I nodded. ‘Do you feel all right, Jules? Do you feel lonely?’

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘It’s just you and me now. Of the old gang. And since they may never let me out, it’s really just you.’

  Julie looked down at her hands, which she was clenching on the table.

  ‘Did Mum know I was pleading guilty?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did she think?’

  ‘She said she didn’t know you any more. She said that once she felt you were a part of her. When you were a baby and that. That you were her own flesh and blood. Like you know, really, her own flesh, like—’

  ‘I know what she meant.’

  ‘But she said she thought that little boy had died, or got lost somewhere on the way.’

  I was holding the edge of the table.

  ‘She said if she was to meet you now she wouldn’t know you.’

  I swallowed. ‘I understand. She’s right, of course. She’s right in more ways than she could understand.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mike.’

  ‘You’re not to blame.’

  I thought for a bit. ‘Julie, I don’t think you should come and see me any more, wherever they send me. Send me a card on my birthday, that’s all. For the rest of the time, you should put me out of your mind.’

  I hoped she wouldn’t remember the card. A kitty in a basket every April from here to the crack of doom. God.