Notes from an Exhibition

by Patrick Gale

  ‘Such a clever girl, but her nerves wear her down sometimes.’

  There was less shame attached to the Clarke than there had been. Quite smart people had been here. The Butterworth boy, the Claythornes’ eldest. Even Angela O’Hara, that social meteorite.

  She was relieved to be rid of it, monstrous thing. When it progressed from talking to her in her dreams to hissing its poisonous suggestions through her dress material and any number of layers in waking hours, she had become desperate. Pot didn’t help so she tried getting drunk on top of it. And look where that had landed her. But she needed them to be honest with her.

  As soon as they had stitched her and strapped her and given her a transfusion to replace what she had lost, but before they started her in the chemical straitjacket, they had let her talk to a shrink, a proper doctor. He was handsome and had one of those fantastic hero jaws, blue-black with five o’clock shadow, and a chin she wanted to brush with her fingertips. Married, of course, and too old for her but she could imagine her mother calling him, with that defiant innocence of hers, a fine, upstanding man.

  He was kind but firm. He ran a battery of tests on her. She had to name the Prime Minister, and give the date, which she got wrong, and her mother’s maiden name, which she got right, hooray. He made her look at ink blots and colour spots and tell her what she saw. He made her answer multiple choice questions like, ‘You see a boy squash a worm under his foot. Do you a) feel sick b) laugh or c) feel nothing’ or ‘The house is on fire and you can only carry one thing. Do you rescue a) your favourite book, b) your favourite dress or c) your sewing machine.’

  A social worker joined him. A woman. Sensible shoes. Not attractive. She asked her all sorts of questions about Havergal and her family and her parents and university plans and did she have a boyfriend and, oh well, did she have a best friend and, oh well, how about her sister. And so on.

  Finally she got a chance to ask some questions herself so she asked them.

  ‘You’re not pregnant,’ the shrink told her. ‘There was no baby.’

  So she knew at once what they had done. She tried to think back, through the throbbing at her wrists and her memory of the pain and blood, to work out when they had done it. Perhaps they had slipped an injection into her? Perhaps she had been out cold for hours and not known it?

  * * *

  At last they let her start getting out of bed for more than the bathroom. They loosened the chemical straitjacket so that she could walk on her own. Well, shuffle. Her steps, like her tongue, remained slurred and heavy. And they let her pull on a dressing gown and slippers to join the party of damaged girls and crazy ladies and women you’d change buses to avoid, all milling around. She wasn’t allowed off the ward yet. Keeping her in the nightgown was their way of doing that. Other patients, properly dressed, were at liberty to move around the building more, even catching the elevator down into the podium to visit the self-service cafeteria overlooking College Street or, in the case of patients nearly ready to be discharged, actually to leave the facility and walk around in the neighbouring streets.

  The floor she was on was high up, tenth or eleventh she’d have guessed though it was hard to count the floors of the nearby university buildings for comparison without the drugs making her dizzy. It didn’t feel like a ward, not like where she’d been to have her tonsils out, because they had their own rooms off a corridor. Once she got up a nurse showed her how her bed turned into a sofa for sitting on during the day.

  ‘Neat, huh?’ she said. And it was.

  There was a little closet, with hangers built-in so you couldn’t use them to cut yourself and a little dressing table thing and a window that didn’t open even a crack. (The windows didn’t even break. She knew because there was one woman who kept hurling herself at them, given the chance. Not a fire extinguisher or a chair or something sensibly hard. Just her head.) The school-food smell never seemed to be quite ventilated out but drifted around the hallways, blending with the sharper smells of disinfectant, shit and disgusting pink soap.

  She pulled on her dressing gown and her nurse, who was Marci with an I, showed her around. As well as the bedrooms – some of which were large and shared, she noticed, there were bathrooms and shower rooms, all kept locked, meeting rooms for group therapy and staff chats, Marci said, and on the other side of the tower, to the left of the elevators, a dauntingly large common room. Half the room was a cafeteria with a noisy metal screen that rolled up over the serving hatches.

  ‘That’s where you can do crafts and stuff when we’re not feeding you,’ Marci said. She was as cute as a kitten and had almost certainly dressed up as a nurse when she was little but never banked on ending up in a place like this with not a man in sight.

  The other half had fifty or so vomit-coloured Naugahyde chairs arranged in a big rectangle. A TV was suspended from the ceiling in one corner and patients had rearranged the chairs to form a kind of movie theatre. There were windows everywhere, narrow and unopening, but at least they were there.

  ‘So,’ said Marci. ‘You’ll probably forget all this but it’s on the back of your door in any case. Breakfast is seven-thirty, lunch is at a quarter to twelve and dinner’s real early at five so we can go home and you can go to bed before it all starts again. All right? Weekends you can sleep in until nine. TV goes off at nine p.m. Medications are dispensed by one of us from a cart right here. That’s three or four times a day. You’re down for ECT so that happens Mondays. Don’t get up on Mondays. Don’t have breakfast. Just stay right put, although you can go to the John, and we’ll give you a sedative and wheel you down. You’ll kinda lose a day but you’ll get used to it.’

  Sunday nights were thus blighted with the knowledge of what was to come. Some of the ECT patients, like the one with the obsession with tapping her knuckles on things and the one who wasn’t house-trained and kept laughing, used to start getting wound up about it at about ten on Sunday night and their nervousness spread like a virus and the whole floor would get jittery. If there were going to be fights or breakouts or those terrible moments when orderlies – hey! Men! Hello, boys! – had to be sent for to sit on people, they tended to be on Sunday nights. She learnt to go to bed early on Sunday and would lie there listening to the flare-ups and shouts spread around her like panic in a monkey house.

  And what people had always said about the deranged and full moons? It was all true.

  The dread of the shocks was worse than the thing itself. They made her pee then sedated her then wheeled her off. She ached afterwards, though, and felt horribly confused and disorienta-ta-ta-ted. It was as though every Monday night she had to start all over again on the personality she had been slowly building out of little soft bricks all week. She knew they were hoping the baby would go, the idea of the baby; be burnt out of her by the shocks. She thought it had but then she’d wake on the Tuesday and there it would be. Hello, bitch. (It was a girl.) At least she reached the point where she could see that the baby was just that, an idea, which was sort of like it still being there but under a glass dome so she couldn’t hear what it was hissing.

  She didn’t see the handsome shrink again, just the nurses, but they must have been told all about her because Marci with an I used to sit with her regularly and ask her questions that were caring but kind of searching too, like a mother going after your splinter with a sterilized needle. And she took notes, which wasn’t very friendly.

  ‘You know,’ Marci said. ‘You have a lot of unrealized creativity.’

  Well, no kidding.

  ‘I do?’ Joanie said. She could manage short sentences by now.

  ‘Did your parents stop you painting? Didn’t they like what you did?’

  ‘She didn’t like me going to life class.’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Nudes.’

  ‘Oh.’ Much note-taking here.

  ‘She wanted me to do nice paintings. Flowers and stuff.’

  ‘If you weren’t allowed to paint, I’d have thought all the need and the i
deas would sort of swell up inside you until you’d burst.’

  She didn’t grant that tired attempt the reward of a reply but she let Marci show her where the ‘craft stuff’ was kept and she began to paint and draw again, anything to avoid being dragged into making hideous Christmas cards that would never be sent and baskets that would later be unwoven.

  Drawing was a challenge here because pencils were too sharp to be safe so she was only allowed crudely coloured wax crayons. She experimented with using the crayons under water paint though and painted over and over again the views of the streets far below, the endlessly re-ordered coloured blocks the parked and moving cars made, the shocking flare of an occasional brightly coloured dress or scarf weaving through a grey sea of tweed and gabardine.

  After her initial horror of them, when venturing across to the day room felt like her first day at Havergal all over again, she learned that most of the patients could be ignored. They were a mixed bunch, from the very, very quiet to the off-the-wall loony but she soon detected a middle ground of wry, lost girls like herself, girls still young enough at eighteen or nineteen to be girdled in a family’s disappointment as well as their own despair.

  When they weren’t being cajoled into handicrafts or group therapy – which was like the world’s worst party with stilted conversation, no boys and no booze – they sought each other out to compare scars. She didn’t warm to any of them however. They seemed to be using their depression and theatrical negativity as substitutes for the talk of dates and clothes and makeup and crushes that had been so mind-numbing at Havergal and the competition was as thinly veiled. My parents are worse than yours. My mother is more destructive. My suicide wasn’t just an attempt! Huh, yeah but my outlook is so bleak it would kill you if I gave you even a tiny peak at it! They got the message after a while that she was a stuck-up bitch and they stopped tapping on her door with their blunted nails or seeking out her lunch table and started talking about her in corners instead.

  The one girl she did feel any kind of bond with was Ray. As tall and skinny as her and just as dark, Ray was eighteen but had been there for a staggering four years already. She was a schizophrenic, shut away for trying to kill her father with a pair of pinking scissors when he came after her in her room once too often. She only succeeded in taking his index finger off him, so he couldn’t wave it at her any more. No one had believed her account of him attacking her, because she was always saying stuff. He was a janitor at a salt factory on the lake and could still use a broom with one finger less and a daughter who was crazy, so hadn’t even lost his job which seemed unjust. But at least he could no longer get at her.

  Ray heard voices and was so bad at taking her medication sometimes that Marci and the girls had to hold her down and inject her. She muttered to whoever was haunting her when she thought you couldn’t hear her and she hated to meet your eyes straight on but that was fine. Joanie and Ray would sit side by side and, while Joanie painted or drew, Ray would tell her stuff she had learned.

  Ray had a wild side and had learned that some of the orderlies would do things for you if you let them get fresh, like bring you beer or magazines or smuggle you out for a tour of the building. She had the layout of the Clarke down pat like any lifer. She knew about the locked wards – the forensic ones – on floor four, where the killers and criminals went while they were assessed for their fitness to stand trial and left locked up if they were deemed too crazy for justice. She knew about the juvenile wards and the unspeakably exotic gender reassignment clinic in the podium. She was naturally clever, Ray. She had graduated from high school by correspondence course and had read every novel in the hospital library. She also knew whole tracts of the Bible by heart but seemed to like Jonah best. When Joanie joked that they should slip down to the gender reassignment clinic to escape as guys, Ray laughed so loud and long the nurses came running as they thought she was having a fit.

  Most of Ray’s family had disowned her. Once a week her tiny mother came on her way to Confession and sat there crying for half an hour before Ray led her back to the elevator.

  She shared with Ray her old dream of escaping Toronto, escaping stifling, backward Canada entirely and heading somewhere warm and southerly, like Marseille or Malaga, where they could be wild and mad and artistic. Somewhere out of Hemingway or Mavis Gallant where they would fit right in. She only meant it as a dream. A dimly outlined but not quite lost part of her was still a well-brought-up, rigidly schooled Havergal girl. She would escape Etobicoke eventually and her parents but only into marriage or maybe a job and another Etobicoke, another suburb, another Canada. All she had been through had not quite stifled the confident girlish assumption of a husband, some day, and a sweet little screwed-up family of her own. When she was feeling brutal, when Ray was jabbering to herself about starlings talking code and radio waves in the bedsteads she knew she would survive and pass beyond this and leave poor Ray behind to rot in Hell.

  The nice nurses, Marci, who was her nurse but also Bobby and Pat, were pleased with her progress. (Pat thought the art was helping and would take the pictures up, or was it down, to the shrink for assessing.) But on bad days it seemed as though she had landed herself in a world where the rules had changed for ever and where simple expressions of frustration or passing sorrow became great black marks against her name, prolonging the sentence she was under.

  They took her off close observation. They stopped coming to the bathroom with her. They let her mother bring in (the wrong) clothes so she could get dressed when it wasn’t a Monday. But whenever she talked of her dreams or the future, Marci or Bobby or Pat would say, ‘Now let’s not run before we can walk. How about doing me another nice painting. Paint me your house in Etobicoke or paint me your mom and dad.’

  Ray picked up on the dream of the warm south, however, and took it as some kind of promise. She was very sly about it. All she said was they had to have their passports or they’d never get free. Ray got her tiny mother to bring hers in. She was shameless, blinded her mother with science, said it was the law or something.

  She’d had a passport since the Kellys went back to Ireland for her grandmother’s funeral and a pilgrimage to Knock. Joanie didn’t have one, having travelled no further than America, but she figured a driver’s licence would be a start. So when it was her turn she made her sister get her that. Butter-wouldn’t-melt-Winnie, who looked so scared to be visiting such a place it seemed only kind to give her something else to worry about.

  ‘I’ve got nothing here that’s me,’ Joanie told her. ‘It’ll remind me who I am,’ which seemed to silence Winnie’s questions. ‘It’s in my dresser,’ she added. ‘In the little drawer on the right.’

  Winnie was obviously terrified of doing a bad thing but still sufficiently guilty and impressionable to do as she was told. She was such a Little Miss Perfect with her smooth blonde perfection and smooth, unambitious mind that she probably felt the Clarke wasn’t far enough from home for her to be rid of this terrible blot on her eligibility for the life she felt she deserved. If a driver’s licence got the two of them states apart, so much the better. Or was the poor child merely scared and guilty when it was proudly announced that she was now going steady with Josh MacArthur, who had just been made captain of the hockey team so wasn’t going to enter his father’s business just yet?

  ‘I guess I’ll be putting plans for secretarial school on hold,’ Winnie breathed proudly and Joanie wanted to shake her and forgive her and weep and cry out, ‘No! Run for the hills!’ but all she could think of was the cool square of precious cardboard Winnie had just slipped her and she responded so blankly her parents exchanged a look that said not yet awhile.

  Ray was convinced the licence was all the Canadian authorities in New York would need to issue Joanie with a passport. Joanie didn’t like to disillusion her but remained sharp enough to know having the thing back in her possession was just symbolic, a small but authoritative wedge between her and her tormentors. The fact was their consent would be needed
along with the handsome shrink’s opinion before she could go free and make use of it but she took to keeping it with her at all times. Unless it was a Monday. She learned from Ray. She, too, became sly. Apart from the moment when the television came on, the only galvanizing times of day were meals and medication. Even before the grilles were rattled up over the serving hatches they could hear food things being loaded into the dumb waiter floors below and would start lining up with their trays. The further gone among them even started dribbling, like Pavlov’s poor dogs. The food was boring and fattening but at least it carried the faint possibility of surprise; a different colour Jell-O or – sign of summer turning to fall – a plate of grey or brown meat instead of steam-limped egg salad.

  Medication also required a line to form but here there was no element of surprise, merely the rattling trundle of the meds trolley but it might have been an ice-cream truck in August for the eagerness with which most patients stopped whatever they were doing – even if this was merely staring at a patch of wall. Or perhaps the correct analogy was church, for many of them actually held their mouths obediently open as they approached and let whichever nurse was on candy duty place the pills directly on their tongue before handing them a paper cup of water to wash them down.

  Just as she had been raised in a church where sticking out your tongue at God showed a lack of reverence and the wafer was placed in a politely cupped (and gloved) palm, so, from her first day in the pill line, her reflex was to hold out a hand and pop the pills herself. Pat or Bobby or Marci would always watch to see the swallow but they never asked her to open her mouth again to let them be sure. She learned by accident, when a pill snagged on a tooth once and nearly choked her, that it was simplicity itself to throw them into her mouth in such a way that she could hide them in a cheek. All she had to do then was gulp the water down through her teeth. The taste was vile and bitter however and it wasn’t always easy to scoop the sodden pills out again. Instead she learnt to get her palm as hot and sweaty as possible first so that the pills would stick to it. She then pretended to put them in her mouth but, distracting the nurse with a rare, gracious thank you, would take the proffered paper cup with her right hand instead of left.