by Patrick Gale
Ray often went missing in the evenings, especially at understaffed weekends, and was usually off on one of her illicit assignations with a kitchen porter or ward orderly. She was as horny as a mink. She didn’t simply do it for favours. She was, she claimed, very highly sexed. She blamed it on the unnaturally high concentration of oestrogen caused by cooping so many women together in an airless space. She said it sort of floated among them along with the food smells.
One time, however, she was gone for two whole hours on a weekday. It didn’t seem right to draw attention to it but as the day wore on Joanie started to wonder if perhaps Ray had escaped after all, and on her own. Like any boarding school, the Clarke was a vibrant rumour factory. Usually the rumour was along the lines of Southern Fried Chicken tonight or Princess Margaret’s changed her hair! Just occasionally the buzz would be to do with a disappearance and would rapidly escalate, fed by fear as much as rebellious excitement, because so often an apparent escape proved to be no more than a hushed-up suicide attempt and the patient would reappear, chemically manacled and, on one memorable occasion, with both legs in plaster.
But Ray was suddenly back among them, quite unharmed and certainly unsedated, in time for the afternoon pill line. The buzz abated as fast as it arose and, when Joanie tried to ask her where she’d been, she only got jabbering in reply about the patterns the starlings were making in the park nearby. So perhaps Ray had merely escaped for a walk in the snowy sunshine or a light-fingered visit to the public library or a department store.
When the first policeman arrived, it was nothing extraordinary. Policemen often accompanied new arrivals or called in to check on patients who had been admitted against their will. But then a second one showed up, with a woman in tow. They asked questions of the nurses then, with Bobby accompanying them to keep a watchful eye, began to move around the ward attempting to question patients. They were short-staffed that day – Marci had flu – and Bobby was plainly harassed at the unexpected extra duty and wanted them gone as soon as possible.
‘You’ve been here all morning, haven’t you?’ she asked.
‘Could be,’ Joanie started to say but then changed her mind. ‘Yes,’ she told her and realized the woman, who had on a dark suit and looked petrified, was examining her.
‘No. That’s not the one,’ she told the policemen and they moved on but with a backward glance from the woman who wasn’t as sure as she’d sounded.
When they reached Ray, Ray was painting her cheeks with blue poster paint and simply stared in answer to Bobby’s questions, so they spent little time on her.
The story emerged, as stories tended to, through the serving women at supper. There had been a hold-up at the bank a short way down the street. Using a toy revolver, afterwards dropped on the pavement, a young woman in white gloves and a headscarf patterned with poppies had persuaded a cashier to hand over the contents of her desk drawer. She left the bank at speed and appeared to jump into an uptown cab. However the headscarf was subsequently found on the handrail on the ramp into the Clarke.
The investigation descended into chaos as patient after patient now owned up to being the robber, excited by the sudden glare of attention. All closets and drawers were searched, mattresses lifted and many secret shames and irrational hoards were uncovered but no wad of banknotes. In the end it was decided that the thief had behaved eccentrically on purpose and laid a cunning false trail into the hospital before making her escape. The hawl had not been huge – a few hundred dollars – and did not warrant an expensive investigation.
The only after-effects were a brief tightening of ward security, with a nurse appearing from the nursing station the moment any patient lingered by the elevators and an even briefer surge in visiting families, as if parents and siblings wanted a share of the hospital’s mild and temporary notoriety.
Ray woke Joanie just before dawn on a Sunday morning. She put a finger to her lips then whispered, ‘Come on. Get dressed. Everything’s ready.’
‘How do you mean?’ Joanie asked.
Ray was dressed for outdoors and had a small, brand new tartan suitcase with a zipper. She handed Joanie an identical one.
‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you?’ Joanie said.
Ray nodded.
‘But I’ve got no money.’
‘I’ve got money,’ Ray whispered. ‘Enough to get us to Europe I figure.’ She unzipped her case and produced a brown-paper shopping bag stuffed with bills. ‘Maybe even Tangien,’ she added.
‘Where did you …?’
‘I sunk it in a pair of plastic bags in one of the John’s tanks. Come on. Hurry. We have to get out before six-thirty. Don’t forget your driver’s licence. I already packed your art stuff. And hey, look. I got us winter boots.’
Joanie dressed, shivering with excitement and faint with early-morning hunger. She stuffed the suitcase to bursting with her clothes. She took her driver’s licence from her dressing gown pocket and zipped it into the neat little compartment inside the lid. Then she joined her in the corridor. Ray made her take off her new boots so they wouldn’t squeak on the linoleum then they slipped around to the day room the long way, avoiding the elevators and the nurse’s station. One of Ray’s conquests had left a serving hatch unbolted for them so they were able to lift it gingerly, wincing at the risk of it clattering, then slip through to the servery bolting it behind them. They avoided the service elevator in case it was alarmed. Ray knew her way through the service staircases like a practised rat and they emerged through a fire door, among the dumpsters at the hospital’s rear.
Then they ran. There was no real need for this. It was a hospital, not a prison, and they weren’t on a forensic ward but months of conditioning – years in Ray’s case – made them react like fugitives. After two blocks Joanie started to laugh and had to stop running. She was slithering around in the snow in any case as Ray had bought her boots about three sizes too big. She couldn’t quite believe this was happening and half-assumed their plan would run out of steam soon and they’d head back to the ward after a cooked breakfast in some café.
But Ray, who wasn’t laughing, drew her on, still glancing about her for nurses and orderlies.
‘Hey look, Ray, starlings!’ Joanie said but got no response. ‘I can’t believe you held up a bank, Ray,’ she added because the bit about the starlings was mean.
‘I didn’t,’ Ray said, looking at her sideways the way she did. ‘I don’t know what you mean. New York,’ she added in an undertone. ‘There’s an early train to New York.’
And Joanie realized she was serious, that this wasn’t some crazy jaunt.
‘I checked it all out,’ Ray said. ‘I went to a travel agency. We can get a boat to England from there. Or South America. What do you think? South America’s warmer.’
‘I don’t speak Spanish. Let’s go to England. Then we can get the boat train to France and keep going south.’
Joanie had no idea what a boat train actually was but people talked of them in clipped tones in English movies and it sounded glamorous and foreign and a long way from Etobicoke.
They caught a bus along Queen’s Street then a car to Union Station. The station was already surprisingly crowded and, quite suddenly, Ray’s resolve began to drain away. She started to mutter under her breath, never a good sign. Joanie realized that in the outside world Ray was still pretty much a shy fourteen-year-old fond of her pinking scissors and wondered how long it would be before her medication wore off, assuming she had been taking it and was not, like Joanie, becoming sharper-sensed by dodging two doses in three while saving the rest for emergencies.
‘I’ll need to get our tickets, Ray,’ she said gently, taking care not to look at her directly. ‘Two one-way tickets to New York. Are you sure that’s what you want?’
Ray was muttering to invisible enemies, making small, violent gestures as though to brush away crumbs or ants from the front of her coat. However she held out her case to Joanie with her free hand.
‘Oh
. You’re sure?’ Joanie asked. ‘Thanks. You watch mine for me, OK?’
She left Ray with her suitcase, her mutters enough to scare away any thief, and sought out the ticket windows. She unzipped the case while she was still safely at the back of a line to slide a bill from the stash in the shopping bag. She tweaked a second one out and tucked it in her pocket for security. And another. If anyone caught her with all this loot, they’d never believe her story, not with Ray in her current state.
As first one then another passenger bought their tickets ahead of her, she asked herself the same thing she had asked Ray: was this really what she wanted?
‘Miss?’
She didn’t want her parents. After what they’d done they were as good as dead to her. Joanie certainly didn’t want Etobicoke or anything like it.
‘Miss?’
If she felt any pang it was unexpectedly for Winnie, for whom she found she still harboured an older sister’s wary love. Winnie couldn’t help being what she was.
‘Next please, Miss!’
What the Hell! She could do the ladylike, Havergal thing and write her a letter.
She stepped forward and thrust a bill at the ticket-seller and asked for two tickets to New York. Perhaps she would go no further than there? Perhaps that would be enough? Perhaps she could enrol in an American art school or just hang around in Greenwich Village and find herself a life class to go to or at least some reefer.
Ray had stopped muttering, thank God, and pulled herself together again but she was plainly scared of the noise and the swelling crowds and Joanie saw she would have to take charge.
‘Come on,’ she said. ‘We can get breakfast on board. There it is, see? Way over there on those last platforms.’
She led the way, pausing to buy them magazines because she felt in need of camouflage and it seemed like a normal thing to be seen to do. She found them a car that was still empty and would probably stay so as they had only a few minutes to spare. Ray refused to give up her case and sat hugging it to her as though there were something inside it she was scared of letting out.
Thinking to distract her, Joanie handed Ray a magazine and tried to read the other herself, hoping to settle Ray by example. Out of the corner of her eye, however, she could see Ray hunched awkwardly over her case, flicking the pages much too fast for normality. Oh well, she thought. At least Ray would keep their end of the car empty for them. Joanie had not yet readjusted to life in the real world and was worried normal people would think her odd.
She looked away, staring out of the window at the men and women in the train across the platform from them. As it pulled out she had that confused sensation of being the one moving while they were staying put. Which made her think of all the times she had caught trains from there with her family. To visit her cousins. To visit Niagara. To weddings and funerals of people she hardly knew.
Her stomach was turning over with nerves now as much as hunger and she wondered if she would soon be feeing sick. It had been a mistake not to grab something to eat as they crossed the concourse. The dining car might not open for hours. There might not even be one on Sundays.
To calm herself she imagined how all this would one day be a madcap bitter anecdote; how celebrated artist Joanie Ransome once escaped a Canadian lunatic asylum with a crazy bank robber girl with a bag of loot and none of the right clothes and hopped on a train for Manhattan. She knew her future listeners would picture something wild and rough-edged, a louring Victorian asylum, two ragged girls hurling themselves into the open boxcar of a freight train headed south. This easy, almost genteel escape, hardly felt like an escape at all. But it was and when the whistle blew she found she had been digging her nails into her palms in the fear that someone they knew, some authority figure, some policeman, would fling wide the carriage door and stop them. Or worse, her mother.
She became aware Ray was muttering again and shaking her head and hugging her suitcase tighter than ever.
‘Ray?’ she said, forgetting to look sideways at her. ‘What’s going on? Want me to put your case in the rack for you? Stay calm for me, Ray. Stay calm just till we cross the border.’
‘I’m oh! I just! I just can’t,’ Ray said and for once she actually met Joanie’s eye. ‘I can’t,’ she said again, quite gently now, apologetically almost, then opened the door beside her and jumped out as they started to move. The door swung loose in her wake.
‘Ray!’ Joanie shouted. She dropped her magazine and hurried over to look down but the door slammed back in her face as a train arrived from the other direction, blaring its horn.
Ray had jumped down on to the tracks and directly into its path.
Further back in the train a woman screamed. There was no screeching of emergency brakes, though. The other train was braking already, being only yards from its platform but Joanie’s train didn’t stop. She was too shocked to do anything. She simply sat there, staring out at the tracks. Then, when the guard came running through and said, ‘Someone jumped out as we were leaving the station. Was it from here?’ a kind of instinct made her lie.
‘I … I think she was sitting further up,’ she told him, not needing to fake her shock.
On his way back through the train he asked to see her ticket. After he punched it and handed it back to her, she unzipped her case to slide her ticket safely into the little pocket with her driver’s licence. She found herself staring not at her familiar, hated clothes and wash things but at several brushes, a bottle of turpentine, the useless wax crayons and a rather good box of oil paints Ray must have bought or stolen on one of her trips out. There was also a huge Hershey bar, the biggest money could buy, and a Gideon Bible, much of its text obliterated by Ray’s insane annotations. Beside them lay the shopping bag stuffed with twenty-dollar bills and a toothbrush so flattened and worn it would barely do for cleaning silver.
Feverishly she ransacked the case’s zippered compartments and found a book of Charlie Brown cartoons, bubble gum, two new sketchpads and there, just when she was abandoning hope and imagining turning back, Ray’s passport.
She grabbed it, zipping the case safely closed, and examined it greedily. Ray, it seemed, was short for Rachel. Rachel Kelly. There was only eight months’ difference in their ages. Acquired for the trip to Ireland, it pictured her in usefully full-faced early adolescence. If she wore her headscarf up and some lipstick and acquired some reading glasses she could travel all the way to England as a young woman mortified to be haunted by such an unflattering snapshot of herself in a larval stage.
When the dining car opened, she bought breakfast, although her appetite had vanished with poor Ray, and made herself eat nearly all of it. Her carriage filled up a little at the first stop. She read both magazines then locked herself in the washroom to count every bill in the shopping bag. Then she was sick, then she felt much better although she bitterly regretted the hoard of skipped medication she had lost along with her driver’s licence. In New York she would book a boat ticket – not steerage but not fancy either, this was money she would have to live off for a good while.
She could buy clothes and at the first opportunity she would see a doctor to get some Valium. Joanie Ransome was dead to her and her family now. She could face that with equanimity but Rachel Kelly would need a little something to keep her on an even keel.
UNTITLED (1986). Oil on marine ply.
Contrary to expectations, Kelly did not suffer a mental breakdown following her son’s death but some believe she produced this work instead. Setting aside the extraordinary Stones Sequence (2002) she was working on when she died, this is the last of her abstract works. It is monolithic and extravagantly large. She painted on what had been a barn door. She had to borrow Trescothick’s much bigger studio to accommodate the panel and abandoned the rest of her family to live there while she worked on it. Initially the painting presents the viewer with a vision of black so intense it seems to absorb all the light in the room. As with Rothko’s work for his Houston chapel, however, time spent befor
e the panel reveals gradations in the darkness. But is this work abstract? Art historian Madeleine Merluza recently claimed it as the first, magnificent gesture in Kelly’s late figurative phase; that it is, quite simply, ‘a painting of a Cornish night, complete with trees and cloud-muffled stars and, deep in the darkness, a lane running from the bottom left of the canvas away to the top right-hand corner.’ It is certainly impossible to stand before it for more than a minute and not feel one’s eyes begin instinctively to search for patterns and shapes. Trescothick’s theory was that Kelly ‘needed to recreate in the viewer the sensation of her mind’s desperate searching for meaning in the face of overwhelming loss’.
(Lent by the Dartington Hall Trust)
As Petroc began to come he saw stars: little, blue-white flashes. He shut his eyes, to black out the thin wash of light from the farmhouse, and found they were even brighter.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh my word. Fuck, Bettany. Oh fuck! Sorry. I think I’m …’ And then he came and it was a million times better than on his own with an old T-shirt and a head full of the busty girl from the chip shop. Actually he usually found himself thinking of a blonde woman who read the local news on television, who was sort of sweet but not a sex symbol or anything, not someone you could talk over with your mates. Now he wasn’t thinking about her or anyone. He should probably have been thinking about Bettany, who was still rocking away on top of him with her amazingly uptilted breasts swaying in the moonlight and her meaty thighs clamped about him. It probably wasn’t polite of him but he was thinking entirely of how good it felt and how long it was lasting and how he couldn’t wait to try it again.