by Anne Peile
My mother had me committed. On the 14th November 1972 I swallowed the bottle full of sleeping tablets that the elderly GP on Clapham Common West Side had prescribed to stop me banging my head against the wall in the long nights. I took them with some of Ron’s whisky which was rather a cheap brand with a golden cap to serve as a measure. After that I opened up my left arm with the carving knife from the wrist to the elbow.
‘Ah, it’s the flowery scent,’ Jack used to say when I had newly applied Diorissimo on leaving work to go to him. ‘Come here, come here to me, Susie, and let me breathe it in, breathe you in.’ And he would bend his head like a courtier and put his face against each of my wrists in turn and then, lifting my long hair, seek the places behind my ears. Diorissimo is a young girl’s scent. I began the cut just at that point on my left wrist that I used to spray. I wonder if the flesh there had held a faint residue of fragrance, like some velvet treasure an old woman has put away in tissue paper. If so, the blood would have washed away all trace of it.
When my mother saw she said, ‘I’ll have you committed,’ and she did.
Unlike the others, Trevor has not had many absences. He works very hard and dedicates long hours to his case notes. Only for a fortnight in the summer does he absent himself, he takes his wife on holiday to Spain, he says it makes up for him not being around much otherwise. This year they both got food poisoning from shellfish. Trevor is plump and earnest and badger bearded. His appearance is generally crumpled and often in mid-afternoon he attempts to boost his flagging energy levels with a peanut Marathon bar. He makes weak jokes and to indicate the punchline he gives a snorting laugh within his badgery beard. He calls all us patients by our first names and he strives to be our friend but try as he might we know that at the day’s end he will go home and we will not.
I calculate that I am the only one here who does not want to leave. If anyone asks me where my home is I tell them that I do not have one anymore. Once someone persisted, a dark-haired woman named Sally who claimed to have been an air hostess with BEA. ‘Where did you used to live then?’ she asked.
‘By the river,’ I said and immediately regretted it in case she told the doctors and they used it as evidence of my having a memory after all. I thought she might have been an impostor, a spy planted to draw me out. Certainly her appearance was a lot smarter than the rest of us. As though abstracted I rose from the jigsaw of the bridge at Henley that we had been doing together. I went to sit on the floor, affecting the hugging and rocking movement which I had seen vacant-eyed others enact until staff bent down and spoke to them in exaggerated pronunciation, as they would have addressed themselves to foreigners with little grasp of English. I need not have worried, next day Sally was moved on to somewhere non-NHS.
I prefer Trevor to be present during the sessions with the pipe man but this is not always possible. On one of the interminable meetings the latter said to me, ‘You are a clever girl, Susanna. I want you to tell me what you have done wrong.’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘You did things which were very wrong, didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
One of the children on Alison’s estate was once challenged, on the pavement, by a shopkeeper who accused him of stealing. We bystanders could clearly see the item that the boy was holding behind his back. Escape seemed quite impossible, it was surely all up for him, the insouciant thief, whose name was Kevin. But Kevin stood his ground, literally, with planted legs in school uniform trousers which were grease marked and frayed above the hem.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he had said in round blue-eyed disbelief at such an allegation. He ran some of the words together as though there were a ‘ch’ sound at the end of what.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said to pipe man Mr Derrick.
‘Yes, you do.’
His office was on the ground floor, at the building’s corner so that there were two windows. He sat with his back to these.
‘We know and you know that the reason you are here, mainly, is that you had been doing something very wrong, hadn’t you?’
At the moment when it seemed most hopeless in the standoff with the shopkeeper, thieving Kevin had suddenly flung the stolen item into the air so that its crude coloured packaging soared heavenwards in an arc of blue and yellow. Then he ran like a hound, leaping and jumping and bounding high as the hero in a nursery rhyme.
‘You did something that’s not allowed by law, something that’s frowned upon by the medical profession, by the church, by society as a whole; it’s a taboo.’
‘My sister has a scent called that, but it’s spelt with a u at the end. Tabu by Dana. I don’t like it, personally, it’s awfully strong.’
‘What was it that brought you in here to us?’
‘An ambulance.’
‘Don’t be a silly girl, Susanna.’
I stared over at the mantelpiece where there was a pipe rack. I wondered if I really was still a girl, now that I was older and I had cut off all my hair. I used the tiny nail scissors which they had forgotten to remove from the back of my little pink manicure set. Bonnie Jean shook her head sorrowfully as she knelt to pick up all the long thick chestnut strands and put them into the paper rubbish bags which they hang on the side of hospital lockers. There was so much that she needed three bags.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘now why did you go and do a thing like that?’
‘… for heaven’s sake look at you,’ said love-at-first-sight Jack, ‘with your long, long hair… ’
What possible use was it to me now?
‘Admitting that what you did was wrong is the first step towards your recovery, Susanna.’
I concentrated on the carpet which was blue speckled with black.
‘You’ll have to tell us, sooner or later, it might as well be now.’
On the desk Derrick man had a shallow glass pen tray filled with paperclips. I opened one out and began prodding my hand with the end of its wire.
‘That is called stippling,’ Jack explained, showing me how he had filled in a space in a landscape. ‘You take a brush, quite a thick soft one, and you move it like this.’
The end of the paperclip was too blunt. I had only just started to bring up blood in the stipples when Trevor got up and came across to me. ‘Hey,’ he said and gently he took the paperclip away.
‘I think we should leave it there today,’ he said and he led me away though I knew that grease-headed Mr Derrick did not agree.
That, more or less, is how it goes with me. Periodically I am led to a consulting room, they keep on insisting that I must remember and that I must be contrite, I persist in obstructing their advances. Sooner or later they lead me away again, back to the room where I live all my days and all my nights.
The loveliest nights are the ones when Jack comes to me in dreams. ‘Susie,’ he whispers to me, ‘Susie, are you awake?… I want you all over again.’
I don’t have visitors. At first my mother was brought in to attend the psychotherapy sessions. Dr Derrick and a woman asked questions about sex. I said nothing. My mother was expected to go back to my room with me when the hour was over. On the first occasion she unpacked a brightly coloured shopping bag. There was some clothing, a packet of Maryland Cookies, a bottle of lemon squash and a book of crossword puzzles.
She put the squash on the top of my locker and said, ‘You needn’t tell them anything about what happened that night.’
I began to hum; I did not know what the tune was. Perhaps it wasn’t a tune, just a rhythm, like the sound of a train.
‘Do you hear me, Susanna?’
I made the humming louder.
‘You bloody well will listen to what I’m saying to you. They down there…’ she jerked her angry head in the direction of the consulting wing, ‘they know as much as they need to know about you and this sordid bloody business. Everyone thinks that he probably committed suicide. You dare to give them even an inkling, the slightest idea, that i
t wasn’t that and it will all come out in the papers and in court and everywhere else. You wouldn’t want the whole world knowing what a filthy pervert your precious father was, now would you?’
I altered the humming; I thought it was closest to ‘For All the Saints’.
‘Would you? I know damn well that you understand a lot more than you make out, don’t think you can fool me.’ She set down the pile of clothing which I knew would smell of cigarette smoke and fried cooking.
The next time she was brought in to a meeting some weeks had elapsed. I must have done something so that they sedated me again. She sat on the edge of a hard chair and when her skirt rode up her crossed legs in their tea coloured tights she hitched the hem down again on those thighs that she did not shave. They should ask her about that, I thought.
Derrick Hearn’s assistant in her crimplene pinafore dress questioned whether I had had any male teachers at school. I remembered Mr Cork for music; a girl with a double-barrelled surname had found a Durex wrapper in the street and placed it in his pigeonhole outside the staff room. I said nothing.
‘What about film stars, pop singers, who do you like?’
Who was the man in the film called Morgan A Suitable Case for Treatment I wondered. David Warner, that was right. I had liked David Warner and Terence Stamp. When I was twelve and plump I had sent anonymously a badge saying ‘I Love You’ in an envelope addressed to Terence Stamp, The Albany, London. When I was sixteen I met a young man in the Chelsea Potter with hair like a yellow lamb; he told me that he was a singer in the chorus of a musical and that he had had his heart broken by Terence Stamp.
‘Noggin the Nog was good,’ I said ‘… and the Pinky and Perky Show, when the puppets used to jig about to records, that was ever so clever.’
‘How many times did you have full intercourse with your father?’
How many indeed, I wondered. A hundred times, a hundred times a hundred times. On more than one of those uncounted, sweet and blissful times, Jack wept. Once it was when he was as high inside me as he could go and yet even so he despaired of his labours. Still he pushed harder and he said that he wished that he could reach my heart that way. Then I felt that there were tears on his face and I sipped them up as though they were spoonfuls and he, excusing or confessing his repeated efforts, said, ‘I don’t want to let there be any part of you that I have not touched.’
The woman in the sludge coloured pinafore dress said, ‘Well, I can see that you’re determined not to be helpful today,’ and she and my mother exchanged glances as though they were in the head-scarved huddle at the school gates, sharing anecdotes of maternal and spousal hardship.
Again they expected my mother to return to my room and sit with me a while. I could tell that she would rather not. My head ached from her resenting presence.
‘You needn’t stay,’ I said.
‘I’ll leave you to them then,’ she said, bridling a little. ‘There’s nothing I can do, obviously.’
After that she left it to two or three times in a year.
Because nobody ever comes to visit me it was unexpected, that windy autumn afternoon when Bonnie Jean, walking slowly because her new shoes pinched, came to tell me that I had a visitor, if I wanted one.
Some half an hour beforehand I had been looking down onto the visitors’ car park from my window. I liked watching the brown leaves of London plane and sycamore skittering and chasing after each other across the asphalt. I had noted a woman whose blonde and white hair was lifted at the back with a bar and pin slide. Although this person was unknown to me some quality about her made me feel that I ought to recognise her. Then she was lost to sight within the building and soon afterwards snatches of rain began, hitting the window panes as if thrown in handfuls and making patent shiny the blown and antic leaves.
My premonition about the woman persisted. I wondered if she were some agent of pipe man, another in his chess set of psychologists and analysts and social workers ranked to trick me into talking and to confessing what a deviant I was. I opened my door fractionally and heard the visitor talking in the corridor to Bonnie Jean, who should at that hour be taking her break in the small square airless staff room. ‘I’m not a relation as such, just a distant family connection, by marriage.’ There was a trace of the north in her voice and a matter-of-fact element; also, she seemed quickly out of breath.
‘Well, I’m sure that will be fine and I must say I’m glad to see you, she never has any visitors, this one.’
I heard them coming towards my room and I wanted to escape. I wished that the windows were not locked shut; I would have gone that way if needs be. ‘Well, here we are, here’s our Susanna,’ said Bonnie Jean brightly but looking as though she wished she had made me wash my face and comb my hair.
My visitor was the solid woman with hair of now whitening blonde. It was caught up in a bundle at the back and the pin slide was made of tooled leather. She wore a black coat and glasses with gold wire frames. ‘I hope you don’t mind if I first sit down,’ she said. She seemed noticeably breathless. She took the visitor’s chair; I sat on my bed and hugged my knees which were my paling fence.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘well, it’s led me a merry dance, finding you.’ She unwound from her neck a long hand-blocked silk scarf in green and purple which may have been the souvenir of somebody’s far eastern travels. On the collar of her blouse I saw that she wore a modern oval brooch in silver and coloured enamel-work but I already knew that she was Olive.
‘My name is Olive,’ she began, ‘Olive Owen.’
I knew that there was nothing I could do but sit and wait. Her eyes were pale blue grey and her nose tilted up a little, a feature which can be charming in youth and can even make an older woman’s face look younger, if she’s lucky. If she knows, I thought, if she knows at least I will be able to ask her why she has dropped the first part of his name. I would never do that. ‘If one of you had been a boy… ’ said my mother in her grievances. If I had been Jack’s son I could have used the ‘ap’ as well. I wondered if this visitor woman was going to shout at me. Breathing seemed to be intermittently difficult for her, her doll mouth went into a small straight line and she was silent, looking downwards. I thought she might be noticing the whorls of white fluff that rolled playfully in little billows under my high bed like cartoon mice. Some days I watched them for hours at a time.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said, after a while, ‘I’ve got this stupid heart thing and it can mean that I get a little out of breath. Do you like art?’
Instead of under the bed she had been regarding the pile of books on my locker shelf.
‘Sometimes, it depends.’
‘Well, that’s good, and perhaps it will make my task easier, in some ways. Do you mind if I call you Susanna?’
Own up now, you might as well, I said to myself. So many secrets and some of them so very beautiful. Jack’s hands.
‘I am Susie. My name is Susanna but people call me Susie.’
‘Well, Susie, there’s things I need to talk to you about, if that’s all right. I feel that it is important to me, I want to try and get to know you, if I may. I am Jack’s wife.’
‘Who is Jack?’
‘Your father, Susie.’
‘I haven’t got a father.’
‘Yes, Susie.’
‘No Susie, no know Susie, know nothing Susie, no things at all.’
I wanted something I could button across my chest. Bonnie Jean came in with cups of tea on a tray. ‘Please help me find my cardigan,’ I said.
‘I thought this might be welcome,’ she said to Olive as she set down her cup. I thought that she could not hear me.
‘Please help me,’ I said.
‘It’s here, darling, here it is,’ she brought it to me on the bed, ‘Remember, you can only wear one sleeve. Don’t try to put your bad arm in, honey, you know you’re not to have anything touching on that now.’
Olive picked up her teacup but her eyes were on the unclothed limb and its band
aging and splint. Bonnie Jean, to emphasise her point about the sleeve, had lifted my left arm gently and laid it down again on the cellular blanket cover. One humid summer night I had played a juvenile, foolery game with the husband of the woman who sat beside me. Unable to sleep due to the heat and to the insatiate lust which even to our own selves was a wonder and a delight, we had done that thing that children do, piling hand over hand, describing an ascending tower in the air. I recall that one of the sheets had been wrinkled and rumpled into a roll, as though someone in a laundry had been wringing it out. ‘You win,’ said Jack and collapsed himself on top of me.
‘Why don’t you try your tea, it’s very good,’ said my father’s wife and Bonnie Jean, at the edge of the room, nodded her approval.
‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I can’t do it.’
Simultaneously both women must have decided to interpret this as drinking my tea.
Olive said, ‘Shall I… ’ and Bonnie Jean said no, that she had better; to me she said, ‘Would you like a pink pill with it, Susie, would that be a good idea now?’
I nodded and some minutes were used up by her administering the tea and the pill during which Olive could not speak to me.
‘She’s not used to seeing people from outside. Have you come far?’ Bonnie Jean, smoothing my head, enquired of my father’s wife.
‘Quite far, Suffolk, actually, but I am used to the drive, at one time I did it two or three days a week, for work.’
When you were teaching, I thought, at Kingston School of Art.
‘Where were you working, then?’ Bonnie Jean makes conversation as she chafes my wrist and tells me there, there, now.
‘At an art school.’
‘Well, there’s a nice coincidence, isn’t it now, Susanna? This girl is so keen on art, you would not believe, isn’t that right, Susanna?’
‘I am very cold.’
‘All right, feet under the covers then, come on,’ Bonnie Jean is immensely patient; whenever she waits for me to complete tasks she stands impassive, with one hand on her chest and the other on her hip until I have done, as though she has all the time in the world.