‘Nearly there,’ says Zack, as if he’s read my thoughts, and flashing me a salesman’s smile, which displays his white and well-crowned teeth, but fails to reach his eyes. ‘Amanda told me you don’t drive. I suppose you get a taxi when you go to see him, do you?’
‘Yes,’ I lie, still queasy. The guy must think I’m loaded if he imagines I take taxis from my own south London pad to Seton’s foreign north one. I’m cramped up really close to him in his sporty sprat-sized car, breathing the same ounce of gasping air, yet we’re still complete and utter strangers to each other. He knows nothing about me except lies – I’m Seton’s current girlfriend, I’m rich, I’m into art.
‘And how about your camel?’ the interviewer asks. ‘Did you develop a real bond with him?’
‘Her,’ the girl says, in her strident sun-parched voice.
I try to keep my thoughts on camels’ gender. I suppose they all seem female in a way, with those great humps sticking up from them. Perhaps Seton left me because he didn’t like my breasts. Cressida’s are larger – impressive camel-breasts.
Zack signals left, draws up in a waste of concrete, flanked by Portakabins. Has Seton moved to half a Portakabin, instead of half a boat? No, we’re walking the other way, towards a huge and faceless building which seems to scream ‘Keep Out’. I wish I could obey it, race back to my bedsit. I don’t like what I see; not just the brute stone walls and rows of glaring windows, but all the bossy notices, the waiting panting ambulance. One wing is lost in scaffolding and a stretch of roof is covered with tarpaulin, as if the building’s had an accident and is still convalescent, shaky. They’ve cut out any frills or softening touches – no curtains at the window or welcome at the door. This is not a home; it’s a Dickensian institution where you expect the smell of poverty and soup. It smells of nothing, actually – just heat. The fug slaps us in the face as we enter the grim foyer with its stern and scowling portraits of sadistic-looking benefactors. The ancient parquet floor has been overlaid with squiggle-patterned lino, which doesn’t fit the corners, reveals odd-shaped strips of polished wood, like fossils from a former (gracious) age. The lino seems to tremble as we tread it – I have to hug the wall to keep from falling.
‘Are you all right, Nial?’
‘Fine.’
‘You don’t look fine to me.’ The salesman’s smile again. I suppose he hopes I won’t peg out until I’ve bought up his next show.
I keep grinning twinkling cheerful as we drag on down a corridor with a different patterned lino and shiny turquoise walls. Of course I’m fine, and not at all surprised that Seton’s in a hospital. Of course he told me he was ill. Sudden, was it? Serious? Appendicitis? Heart attack? Yes, sure I know the way. I’ve been visiting each evening, sitting by his bed with grapes and Lucozade. I’m his girlfriend, aren’t I, his mistress and his shipmate? ‘Sorry, darling, I forgot the grapes this evening; had a little accident en route – no, nothing serious, just a bit of trouble with my head. Yes, it is still rather painful, spreading to my chest now, difficult to breathe, fierce pain in my ribs …’ My steps are faltering. Can I face a ward the way I feel – tubes and drips and bedpans, the smell of disinfectant, Seton scarred or cut about, Seton in pyjamas when he always wore his clothes to bed? I pause a moment, pretend to ease my shoe. You’re not allowed to flag here. Everyone looks busy: nurses striding past us with trays or notes or folders; harsh fluorescent striplights glaring overhead; a porter disturbing the whole corridor with his rattling clanking trolley.
‘Okay?’ Zack asks again.
I nod, brace myself as we turn a corner, enter a green door, not the green of living things – grass or leaves or glossy Granny Smiths, but the green of mould and verdigris. I stare. It’s not a ward at all, and no one’s in pyjamas. The dozen odd bods in the room don’t have a scar between them; shabby men and women in jeans or baggy skirts, slumped on a variety of scuffed and ill-matched chairs; some jabbering, some knitting, most staring into space; at least three-quarters smoking. Two radios are playing two rival brands of music, one soppy, one hard rock, and a woman in fur boots and a floral summer frock is making her own music, thumping on a sweet-tin with her fist.
I light a cigarette myself, need courage, instant calm. Seton can’t be here. He’s a loner, an outsider, a maverick, a nomad; would never fit this tasteless room with its balding haircord carpet, its dreary khaki walls; nor spare a word for these gormless shambling people – that wide-hipped coarse-faced woman leering with her legs apart, that straggle-haired old gaffer playing Ludo with himself, moving first his own red counters, then the yellow, then the green, chiding his two invisible opponents. Perhaps we’re visiting someone else – Zack’s assistant or his tea-girl – or perhaps his girlfriend is a nurse here.
He’s certainly talking to a nurse, though I didn’t twig she was one when he first went up to her. He called her simply ‘Sally’, and she isn’t wearing uniform, just a shapeless denim dress with a beige cardigan on top, and greasy hair dripping down her neck – no hygienic chignon or starched white frilly cap. Once I hear her mention Seton, I duck out of the way. I’m probably meant to know her, know all Seton’s history, if I’ve been visiting each night and I’m the Girlfriend with a capital. In fact, I’m totally bewildered. Did Seton get ill suddenly, receive some dreadful news or shock which dragged him to this place? Or was he always sick?
I feel sick myself as I scrutinise the notice board. This is not just any hospital – it’s a lunatic asylum – or a psychiatric hospital if you want to be polite, yet he never said a word, not even when I admitted my own symptoms, or discussed John-Paul with him; always played the tough guy who despised the whole soft business of running to a doctor with one’s illnesses or problems; loathed the word ‘patient’ with all its connotations of suffering and passivity. Yet now he’s labelled ‘in-patient’, which is surely much more serious, means he suffers full time and is locked into their system of programming and rules. I scan the loonies’ timetable – an exciting daily round of table tennis, basket weaving, slide shows (‘Dutch Elm Disease’, ‘Big Cats’ and ‘Adventure In The Holy Land’ – tea and biscuits afterwards), and a whole variety of therapies, including group therapy, dance therapy, art therapy, music therapy, and something called just ‘Therapy. Dr B. Patel’. I try to imagine Seton dancing (Scottish? Ballroom? Jive?), singing Ten Green Bottles, or perhaps telling Dr B. Patel about his preference for buggery, or the way he bites both mouths and cunts instead of merely kissing them.
I jerk my head violently, shift the vivid image of Seton’s mouth clamped against my cunt. I loved him because he wasn’t like most people, didn’t need jobs and games and hobbies to fill his day, make him feel important. Sex was his main sport and he took it very seriously, gave it an intensity which more selfish and conventional men reserve for their careers. He’s far too wild and headstrong to be confined and tethered down, far too tall to fit this narrow cage. All the other patients look drugged and somehow shrunken, as if they’re subjects in some medical experiment which is slowly leeching life out of their cells, lopping inches off their height. Even the woman with the sweet-tin has slipped sideways in her chair, eyes closed, toffees scattered, once-thrustful arm now trailing like a dead branch from a tree.
‘Hey, Seton!’ Zack calls. ‘Over here.’ I glance up at the door, can hardly bear to look at the sluggish apathetic man shuffling slowly through it. That can’t be Seton, surely, not the one I knew, who stampeded through his life, picked up the world and shook it, if it didn’t go his way, kicked and thrashed his problems like he bit and thrashed my body. He’s faltered to a swaying halt and is just standing, looking dazed. He was always rather sallow, but his face is dingy-pale now, as if the skin from a dead body has been wrapped around a living one, left slack and loosely fitting. Is he living, though, I wonder, as he slumps against the wall, saying doing nothing as Zack goes brightly up to him with a gesture and a smile. He’s gesturing to me, in fact, so I walk slowly slowly over, trying out absurdly normal greetings li
ke ‘How are you?’ or ‘Hallo, darling’, as I traverse the endless carpet.
‘Hallo,’ I say, at last – real thing. No ‘darling’. I never said it anyway, just imagined Seton murmuring it to me: ‘I love you, darling,’ ‘I’ll never leave you, darling,’ ‘Darling, you’re quite beautiful.’ No one’s ever called me beautiful, or darling – except clients, who don’t count. My father called me ‘dear’ when he was angry.
Seton doesn’t answer, doesn’t seem to see me, let alone know who I am. His eyes are looking through me, absorbed in something else, something terrifying, unspeakable, which no one else can see. I clear my throat. Perhaps it’s just the hair. It was my only decent feature, so I’m probably quite anonymous without it.
‘Nial,’ I say. ‘Remember? The one with the fantastic hair?’ He doesn’t laugh. I try to, though it comes out like a howl. He suddenly beckons Zack into a corner, elbows him into a chair, drags his own chair right up close, so their heads are almost touching. I follow, feeling spare, pull a third chair up, make a few inane remarks about the weather and the traffic while conducting a different conversation in my head. ‘Yes, it’s great to see you, too, Seton. Of course I’ve missed you – terribly. I always loved the way we shared things, shared illnesses and breakdowns, told each other everything, swapped doctors, symptoms, lives.’ I never knew him, did I, never even helped him? If only he’d confided, trusted me enough, I could at least have sympathised, offered some support.
‘It’s the Pope,’ he whispers suddenly. His eyes are looking through me still, as if there’s something just beyond my body he has to keep a check on, something unpredictable and dangerous. But he’s addressing Zack, not me. I’m not really there for Seton, except as just a window. ‘The Pope,’ he says again.
‘Yes,’ says Zack. ‘You said.’
‘Have you got him yet?’
Zack shakes his head, looks painfully embarrassed. A few patients have come up to us and are staring with that unselfconscious deadpan curiosity you see in cows or children. Seton totally ignores them, grabs Zack’s wrist, keeps gripping.
‘You know he killed my mother?’
‘Yes – you told me.’
‘He was here last night.’
‘Really?’
‘They weren’t supposed to say, but I found out.’
At this point, I escape, though Seton doesn’t notice. I find a gents’ toilet, which I use because I’m desperate, and there isn’t any ladies’; sick up half my milk. A patient barges in, a tall man with protruding eyes which look as if they’re bolting from their sockets, perhaps keen to move to more congenial ones. He’s wearing a navy nylon anorak over stripey blue pyjamas, the old-fashioned sort which do up with a cord. ‘You here again?’ he asks me.
‘Again?’ I’m beginning to feel disorientated. Am I the mental patient and only imagined Seton? Or am I sitting on that step still, back outside the gallery, hallucinating quietly?
‘They all come back,’ he says, and proceeds to pee in front of me, in a sort of shallow metal trough thing, flanked by cracked white tiles. I suppose he assumes I’m a fellow male, broad-shouldered and crop-haired.
I hide in a cubicle, remain there half an hour or so, head resting on my knees; listen to excretions, bits of conversations, try not to remember the toilet in the College of Technology where I always spent the final minutes before my appointments with John-Paul. Everything seems ‘final’ at the moment. ‘Final,’ I say softly. It’s not that far from ‘fine’ – just a matter of a consonant, a vowel. Last time I saw John-Paul (which seems months ago, millennia), I took him a pink rabbit made of marzipan, with chocolate buttons down its front and a pink-striped chocolate muffler. He gave it back – yes, honestly – said he rarely accepted gifts from any patient and he’d only taken all my previous ones because he felt they were part of me, a good and generous part which I needed him to share. But now he feared they were becoming just a substitute for any real progress in my therapy, and he’d rather be presented with some dynamic change or breakthrough, instead of sweets or biscuits as a ‘payment’ for resistance, or even as ‘reparation’ for the harm I felt I’d done him. What about the harm to me, for heaven’s sake? I felt totally rejected, rushed blindly down the steps and flung the rabbit in the road, watched a lorry squash it into pulp.
The memory makes me retch again, so I stay put where I am, read all the graffiti scribbled on the walls – all those hopeless hoping strangers lusting in a lavatory, entrusting their hot fantasies to cold white sterile tiles. At last, I’m well enough to venture out and try to find that room again, which according to the notice was apparently the Day Room. After two wrong turnings, I locate it by its sick-green door, but it’s empty now, abandoned – no Zack, no tragic Seton, no Sally and her patients; only fag ends, crumpled cushions and the smell of smoke and feet. I suppose they’ve gone to supper, or the slide show on dead elms, or been tucked up in the Night Room – at seven twenty-five. I trail up and down the corridors, glancing into wards, proper ones with bed and chairs, and relatives with flowers (those expensive ones in cellophane which are really floral guilt: ‘I loathe this place, didn’t want to see you, can’t wait to get back home – yes, beautiful chrysanthemums, to prove how much I care.’)
Zack and I eventually collide. He’s also stalking corridors, searching not for Seton, but for me. I’m beginning to wonder (guiltily) if I’ve judged the man too harshly. Why should he visit Seton in a depressing dump like this, if he’s only out for his own ends? Seton’s skint, can’t do any favours, can’t even talk coherently. And why should he keep bothering with me) Okay, he thinks I’m rich, but he must have loads of other clients far wealthier than I am, and I’m sure he doesn’t steer them all to hospital canteens because they’re feeling weak and faint again and can’t quite make the exit without a cup of tea.
‘You sit over there, Nial. I’ll get the tea. Anything to eat?’
I don’t think he hears my ‘No’. The canteen is very noisy, with another strident radio, this one playing reggae, which sounds tragic and bouncy both at once. Various machines explode or buzz or hum behind the counter, and the serving girls shout above the racket. All the colours fight – orange nylon overalls, scarlet plastic chairs, walls the colour of dead celandines, floor blue and yellow squiggles. Hospitals are very rarely quiet. I suppose they keep them brash and bright to try to deny tragedy or sickness, insist the world is in the pink, and whooping.
Zack looks out of place, as if he’s strayed on to the film set of a kitchen-sink drama, when he actually belongs in a drawing-room comedy, the slick and stylish kind. No one else is smart or coiffed or lacquered, or wears calfskin shoes and a Mondrian-style tie. It’s mostly jeans and trainers, with a few droopy Oxfam dresses under army surplus coats. Does he visit Seton often, brave that frightful Day Room several times a week? He seems to know his way around; knew Sally, knew the porter. I suppose nice guys can be rich and plump and have rotten taste in ties. I don’t exactly like the man, but I can’t deny he does seem quite concerned; says I look so pale he’s worried, and will I promise to see my doctor in the morning? I haven’t got a doctor. I lost John-Paul with Seton, blame one loss for the other.
I somehow force my tea down, and even two dry biscuits (the ones they call ‘Rich Tea’, which are anything but rich, and prove – again – how often most words lie). I have to keep pretending I knew all about my lover being ill, and am not shocked or stunned or shaken to find him drugged and crazy and shut up in this madhouse; nor bitter and resentful that he totally ignored me as if I don’t exist. I limit my inquiries to the Pope, ask why the hell Seton should have mentioned him and what he meant by …
‘You mean he hasn’t told you, Nial?’
Zack sounds quite incredulous, as if I didn’t know the world was round, or the earth went round the sun; simply can’t believe I haven’t heard about Seton’s chief obsession; says the crazy fellow brings it up continually, talks of nothing else.
I shake my head. He’s talked of other th
ings to me – marshes, herons, art, a trip he made five years ago to the source of the Euphrates; all sane substantial things.
Zack shakes his head as well, though more in incredulity, I suspect. ‘You must know he was brought up ultra-Catholic, with a really devout religious mother, the sort who buys her kid a crucifix rather than a teddy?’
‘Oh, yes,’ I say convincingly, fumbling for my Capstans. I know absolutely nothing about Seton’s mother or his background, and we never talked religion. I know him in a deeper way, know another side to him, which I suspect Zack’s never seen; a private, hidden, secret side, which he entrusted only to me.
‘Well, she almost died having him. I’ll spare you the grim details, but she refused to risk another child, and being a rigid Holy Roman, that meant no more sex. His father wasn’t all that thrilled, but he was Catholic too, so instead of pushing off, as most men would, I suppose, he stuck around, but really took it out of them.’
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Well, he was violent, to begin with, what they call a batterer.’
‘He battered Seton?’
‘Yup – and the wife. It was pretty horrendous, as far as I can gather. Seton never said a lot about it, until he was in hospital last time. Then he started turning on the Church, blaming its whole system, rather than his father. You know what this present Pope’s like – completely sold on the strict, old-fashioned line – no divorce, no contraception, Catholic couples tied together till death do them part, even if the marriage is a domestic Armageddon. Well, Seton seemed to hold him personally responsible for all his own neuroses, his father’s violence, his mother’s three-day labour …’ Zack breaks off to drink his tea, sipping it disdainfully, as if plastic cups demean him and he expected rose-sprigged Meissen in a hospital canteen. ‘Then, in 1981, that young Turkish revolutionary tried to shoot the Pope, and poor Seton went quite potty – thought the Turk was him and …’ Zack holds his head, breaks off. ‘Christ! The whole thing was so complicated. You see, Seton was in therapy with a doctor called John-Paul – the same name as the Pope – so.
Fifty-Minute Hour Page 23