Maddie

by Claire Rayner

  What she saw was the girl again. She had been here every day now for several days, and the thing about her that was wrong was that she wasn’t a patient, and she wasn’t a nurse either. That made it difficult for Maddie to understand, but she knew all she had to do was sit tight and she would find out. She always did, eventually. It had always been like that. She had always got what she wanted eventually – and suddenly it was there again, the bad feeling, the one she had managed to escape for a long time now, the empty screaming desolation that warned her she was getting too close to the bad memories, the things that must never be thought about. And she rocked a little faster and a little more vigorously, struggling again to get the good memories back so that she could escape and see her Jay once again.

  Annie registered the change in the rocking rhythm at once and watched covertly, not making any sign that she was aware, but slowly and almost imperceptibly the rhythm relaxed and returned to its usual steadiness, and she wondered what had caused it all, and lifted her head and looked round the ward.

  She had spent five days here now and was beginning to know not just the pattern of the ward’s day, and the personalities as well as the identities of all the people who lived and worked on it, but the nuances of feeling too, the unspoken and unmarked currents that flowed and eddied between patients and nurses and patients and patients. And today there was an electricity of excitement in the air, an unhappy excitement, and it made the back of her neck tingle a little.

  She knew what it was. Eleven of the patients were to leave today, among them Cynthia, Maddie’s self-appointed servant, and they weren’t happy about it. They were to be transferred with all their belongings – and between them that added up to several cardboard boxes of books and magazines and mementoes and assorted detritus, quite apart from cases containing clothes – by bus to the hostel on the Larcombe Estate. They had had lessons in the Occupational Therapy Department in making their own meals and in dealing with their own care, but they were all frightened, even though they knew there was to be one nurse there to keep an eye on them to start with.

  Six of the women who were going had been on the ward for over three years and had taken it for granted they would always be here. To be thrown out into some horrible hostel to look after themselves, they had wailed and wept, to be sent away when they weren’t well! The whole ward had seemed to tremble with their fear and pain. But they were going all the same and today was the day, and Annie was unhappy for them. They should be left in peace to be where they wanted; bad enough they had been sent here in the first place and had had to learn its intricacies. Now they were here, why couldn’t they be allowed to stay and feel safe and comfortable? It mattered dreadfully to feel safe and comfortable, Annie thought, and refused to remember the way Jen had looked at her when she had been lifted in her wheelchair from the ambulance and carried into the East Pavilion. She had been safe and comfortable at home in the old house. She hadn’t wanted to be brought here, just so that her daughter could have her first holiday in almost ten years. What did it matter to Jen that Annie had been screaming inside her head with the hell of it, the day in, day out hell of it all? All Jen had known was that she had to move, just as the keening women here knew they had to move. And they didn’t want to any more than Jen had wanted to.

  Determinedly Annie bent her head over the thick pile of papers in the folder on her knee. She had a job to do; that was why she was here, not to think about Jen or these other women for whom arrangements had been made, good arrangements, accepted by the committee of which she was a member, the only possible ones under the circumstances, which were that their hospital had been sold under them. And do it she would.

  ‘Surname Kincaid,’ she read for the umpteenth time. ‘Forenames Madeleine Braham, date of birth 1–1–30, admitted ex Cunard Shipping Company’s SS Carenia via St Mary’s Hospital Southampton, address on papers Larches Lodge, Stanmore Hill, Middlesex, within Greenhill’s catchment area. Date of admission 17 November 1953.

  ‘Condition on admission: well nourished female, eyes dark brown, hair dark brown, some striae on anterior abdominal wall, probably sequelae pregnancy, otherwise no blemishes. Physical examination all systems N.A.D. multip. 2? 3. Uterus bulky, relevant breast changes.

  ‘Psychological state: totally withdrawn, not responsive to superficial pain stimuli, but clearly conscious and aware. Control considerable; muscle rigidity of voluntary muscles ++. Not catatonic. Diagnosis? Depression? Severe psychoneurotic state. Prognosis doubtful. Treatment: observation.’

  The notes, for all their thickness, were deeply boring, Annie decided. They had tried some remedies in the early days; there had been electric shock therapy given three times and then abandoned, because there was no response at all, and they had tried to start psychotherapy, but found it impossible with a patient who never talked and never seemed to listen either, and once the new anti-depressive drugs had arrived they had tried those too, one after another, and she had never once responded to anything. Doctor after doctor had arrived at Greenhill, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and convinced they had new ideas, new ways with psychiatric patients that would work in the most resistant of cases, and all had been defeated by Maddie.

  Annie could tell that from the way the notes were. Each time the handwriting changed and the signature in the notes altered, there had been frequent examinations and copious comments, but as the weeks of each doctor’s residency had passed, clearly they had lost heart and interest. Then in time the notes had become scrappy and laconic in the extreme, and several times stopped altogether; there were months on end when, it seemed, no doctor had come anywhere near Maddie. The nurses’ notes were just as casual, with even longer gaps of silence. Until Joe Labosky had arrived.

  Annie read his comments on Maddie with unwilling approval. He had examined her very carefully, it was clear, and his findings were listed in concise elegant English. He had been obviously concerned with her inactivity and some eight years ago had instituted regular physiotherapy, so that she got some exercise instead of sitting interminably in her chair; thus there had been a time when Maddie had been taken out of doors, and even to the hospital swimming pool and made to get into the water, and had actually moved her own muscles a little. But that had stopped when the NHS cuts had really started to bite three or four years ago and the number of physiotherapists had been cut so drastically that there was no one available any more to make Maddie walk in the garden or swim. So here she had sat in her chair for the long months doing nothing.

  It was remarkable, Annie thought, that she wasn’t just a lump, a blob of a woman. But she wasn’t. Even beneath that shapeless cotton dress and cardigan which were hospital issue she had a neat body, soft, rather than well muscled, lax and drooping, but not totally lost, and she could, Annie found herself thinking, look quite good with a little care.

  But who was to give it? It was not the hospital’s job to titivate a patient. They had to provide some sort of haven, a cure if possible for whatever ailed the minds of the people who were washed up on Greenhill’s shores, but pretty clothes and haircutting and suchlike fripperies? A mad idea – and anyway, why do I care? It’s not as though I’ve bothered that much about my own appearance lately. And she smoothed her hand over her untidy head and was suddenly aware, as she had not been for a very long time, of the dismal reflection of herself she could see in the ward window.

  There must be someone who belongs to her, she told herself then, determinedly keeping her head down so that the reflection couldn’t be seen, and she went back to the other wadge of notes that were in the folder, labelled ‘Social’.

  Someone with an indecipherable signature – a young doctor? A social worker? (Did they have them in 1956? Or were they called almoners then?) Perhaps a nurse? – had gone to the house referred to in the private papers Maddie had had with her (what they were was unspecified, and they weren’t in the notes) to find out more about her and, the report read, had done very poorly in his or her searches.

  ‘Hou
se occupied by Japanese, speaking poor English, claims no knowledge of patient. House purchased by Japanese embassy last year via estate agent, no knowledge of previous owner. Neighbours deny all knowledge of previous occupants. Several say that awareness of neighbours not a feature of the district.’

  And Annie grinned suddenly, a wide grin of real amusement. She knew Stanmore Hill, well, with its big self-satisfied houses set back from the road, lofty and aloof in their obvious expensiveness. No, she was quite sure that neighbourliness had never been a feature of life in that cushioned corner of London. She returned to the notes.

  Other searches had been made, trawling the phone books and voters’ lists for people named either Kincaid or Braham, which was assumed to be a family name of some kind by the searcher since it was patently not a female forename of choice, and both searches had ended in dead scents. No one seemed to know anything about Madeleine Braham Kincaid. So the searcher – and, Annie thought, he/she was a trier, not one to give up easily at all – had gone to Cunard to study their passenger lists.

  No luck there either. Mrs Madeleine Braham Kincaid had joined the ship at New York – at least we know she is married, the searcher had noted laconically – and at that point had made no special mark on the crew, not even her stewardess. But on the first day at sea the passenger in cabin twenty-three, deck C, had been found by said stewardess sitting in the corner of her bathroom curled up in a tight ball, her eyes wide open and refusing to respond to questions or to move. The stewardess had called the ship’s doctor, who had suspected some sort of drug overdose and removed the passenger to his sick bay, where she had remained in the same apparently catatonic state for the remainder of the voyage. She had been transferred on docking to the nearest Southampton hospital which would accept her, and from there had been transferred to the mental hospital which served the area in which she had appeared to live. The Southampton mental hospitals would certainly not accept her, and Annie smiled again, wryly this time, almost hearing the self-satisfied pompous voice of whoever had refused the patient echoing at her through the years since he had handed down his edict. Almost thirty-five years ago he had said it, and here Maddie still sat, with no one any the wiser about the where, the who and above all the why of her situation.

  Annie closed the notes and set them on the low table beside her. Every time she read them, and that had been several times now, she hoped she would find something new, something she had overlooked, a clue to the mystery that was Maddie, but it never happened and it wasn’t going to now. Reading the dusty yellowing pages was a waste of time.

  ‘So what do I do now with you?’ she said softly to the woman sitting there rocking in front of her. ‘Walk away like everyone else? I might-as well. You’re not going to help, are you?’

  The rocking went on, rhythmic, unaltered, silent.

  ‘I shouldn’t have agreed in the first place.’ It was odd how easy it was to talk to her, Annie thought then. All these months of being alone in that flat – she couldn’t call it home – and never talking to anyone had seemed peaceful and easy. Not happy, but easy. Talking when she had to, to shopkeepers or the milkman or the garage man, or worst of all the people on Joe Labosky’s bloody committee, had been an agonising business. So why was it so easy to talk now? And she said it aloud. ‘Why is it easy to talk to you?’

  The rocking went on and the dark eyes stared ahead, unmoving.

  ‘Because it’s like being alone,’ Annie decided. ‘That’s what it is. I like talking to you because you won’t be a pest and talk back. How does that make you feel, hmm? I’ll bet you’re listening in there somewhere, so think about it. I know why you don’t talk to people. You hate them as much as I do. But here am I talking to you because I hate everyone and don’t want an answer, so your refusal to talk which is meant to be an insult, I think, isn’t to me. It’s a pleasure. I’m talking nonsense, aren’t I? Never mind, I’m only talking to you, and you don’t matter because you just sit there and give nothing back and ask for nothing. I like that. I like that a lot. I don’t like you, but I like that.’

  And then she laughed softly. ‘I hate you, you know that? I hate you the way I hated –’ her voice died in her throat then and she pushed her chair back irritably and stood up. Just being in this place was enough to make a person mad. Here I am talking rubbish to a dummy. Christ, I really must be as mad as everyone else here. I need disposal as much as they do –

  There was a little flurry then as the big ward doors opened and two of the hospital porters came in, scrawny men in brown overalls pushing a long trolley, and at once several of the women, sitting miserably waiting for their bus, burst into noisy tears and others came clustering round to comfort them, and Annie sat down again. To walk out in the middle of all this hubbub would attract attention and that was the last thing she could cope with right now. She’d wait, let them all go, then leave in her own time. And on the way out tell that bloody man Labosky she’d done her best, and couldn’t do more, and that would be an end of her visits here –

  The women began to make their doleful way to the door, clutching their parcels as the nurses chivvied them along cheerfully, making soothing noises that Annie for one found deeply irritating rather than comforting, and there was an eddy of activity round the door as the few remaining patients waved goodbye and wept in sympathy as the men with the trolley loaded it with much banging about of boxes and warning cries from the owners of them. Annie watched and then jumped as someone tapped her shoulder.

  ‘Is it you what’s going to look after her dinners and that, then?’ Cynthia was standing staring at her owlishly. She was wearing a small fox collar over her suit and lacy blouse now, a mean attenuated and limp thing which carried its tail in its narrow mouth to fasten itself across Cynthia’s meagre bosom, and bulging brown glass eyes that Annie couldn’t bear to look at.

  ‘What?’ she said stupidly.

  ‘Her!’ Cynthia said almost irritably and jerked her head at the rocking figure in the chair. ‘Are you doing her food and that? Someone has to.’

  ‘No – I don’t think so –’ Annie stammered and then stopped and blinked as Cynthia shook her head even more irritably and said loudly, ‘You should be ashamed!’

  ‘Ashamed? Why, what –’

  ‘If you wasn’t going to take on the job you should have said sooner so I could show someone else. But I showed you like I was showed. So I thought it was all set. I got to tell her, of course, like I was told, but once you knows how, it’s easy. And you knows how, now.’ And the small woman stared at her accusingly.

  ‘How do you mean, as you were told?’ Annie said, her curiosity lifting a cautious head again.

  ‘Why, when I come here to this ward, and began to get a bit better and the other one what had looked after her left – she was a nice woman, Sally was – she said I could do it. And she showed me how and then she told Maddie so it was all right. After that Maddie wouldn’t let no one else do it but me.’ She smiled then, a pleased self-congratulatory little smile, and looked over her shoulder at the silent Maddie. ‘She’s very choosy, you see. She’ll only eat for the one what she knows is right, that she’s been introduced to properly, you see. Like I was by Sally and Sally told me like she was by the one before.’

  She frowned then. ‘She was called Mary, I think. Back in – oh, must ha’ been a good ten years ago. Sally, she was here over five years before she took that cancer and had to go to the other hospital, and me –’ She made a face then and almost shook herself. ‘Anyway, I got to go now to the hostel and sort things out there, so you see I can’t muck about, can I? You been shown what to do, and I got no time to show no one else, so all I got to do is tell Maddie, introduce you like. And you can’t say you won’t, really. What else you got to do, after all?’

  ‘What else,’ Annie murmured and then as the woman nodded briskly and turned away to Maddie reached out a hand to stop her. But she was too late.

  ‘This here one, she’s new, and she’ll look after you now, Maddie.
Me, I’m going away. What’s your name, dear?’ And she looked over her shoulder at Annie, bright-eyed and enquiring and then, as Annie didn’t answer at once, almost snarled, ‘Eh? What’re you called?’

  ‘Annie,’ Annie said before stopping to think, she was so taken aback by the firm way this little woman, hitherto so meek and quiet, had taken charge, and at once Cynthia nodded and said to Maddie, ‘She’s called Annie, dear, and she’ll look after you –’ And she turned away and made her way back to the door, busily pulling on a pair of pale blue transparent nylon gloves with frills at the wrists. They looked very odd with the fox round her neck and her neat suit.

  ‘That’ll be all right now,’ she said with great satisfaction. ‘She’ll be all right. And so will you. It’s nice to have something to do, something you got to be relied on for. It makes it all right being here. It did a lot for me, that did. I dare say it’ll do it for you too. Goodbye, dear. Hope you get your health back soon. It’s not a bad place to fetch up, one way and another. Even if they do go and dump you in hostels –’ And she bustled away to the door and was gone before Annie could stop her and tell her first that she wasn’t a patient, and second that she didn’t want the job of looking after Maddie, no matter what Joe Labosky said and anyway –

  And then she stopped because behind her there had been a sound and she whirled and stared at Maddie and felt a sense of shock so great it was as though a light bulb had exploded in her head.

  Because Maddie was staring at her. She had shifted the level of her gaze and was looking sideways. She was still rocking and her hands were still locked in her lap, but she was looking directly at Annie and there was awareness in her eyes and not a blank stare at all.