by Susan Tarr
Sometimes the siren went off and it meant nothing to the patients.
To Mr Waldron, one of the staff from down in the village, it meant something. Malcolm knew his story by heart. He decided to retrieve every separate part he had ever heard, as part of his memory homework, and make it into one whole story. Starting at the beginning, he recalled when Mr Waldron brought his bride out from England to settle in the new country. He heard how later everyone was sorry for him; the young couple had only been married a few years. And everyone had their own ideas on how the unfortunate event took place.
That day the sirens had wailed and faded and the hospital wards buzzed with questions. Who’s escaped? Who’s scarpered? Who’s done a runner? Who’s gone over the fence? Who’s out of the booby hatch?
But the problem wasn’t up at The Building. It was down at the village.
According to Mrs Roger, the Station Master’s wife, Mrs Waldron said she had left the baby sleeping in his bassinette. She’d said the poor wee tyke was exhausted from his colic and it seemed a pity to wake him. But it was Mr Waldron’s birthday and she needed the icing sugar.
They said the sun was out, the washing on the village lines drying on that otherwise perfect day. An old goods’ train rumbled slowly from the station toward the level crossing. Malcolm recalled talk of newer, faster trains, those that sped along reducing the trip from Dunedin to Christchurch by hours.
So Mrs Waldron had paid the grocer a shilling for her icing sugar, then set off down the path toward the crossing, past the other shop set among trees and wild sweet peas, her long hair billowing behind her. Mrs Roger was by then at Seacliff Railway Station, where she stopped for a cup of bright brown tea. As she glanced back, Mrs Waldron had neared the level crossing. How exasperating it must be to find the goods’ train fully stopped, she told Mr Roger.
Malcolm recalled how it often shuddered into movement across the street when he occasionally went down to the village. Then it would blow out a cloud of steam, whistle loudly, shunt a few yards forward, then back again, and come to a complete stop. Often, he had to wait a long time for it to clear the track.
Everyone imagined the young woman becoming upset, her thoughts turned to her baby, and to the cake she’d left cooking in the range. Mr Waldron had said the little chap was plagued with colic and awake for most of the night. Mrs Waldron was fair exhausted. But her baby? Awake and crying? No doubt those thoughts hounded her as she made her final decision.
It was suggested she had held the bag of icing sugar between her teeth before touching the greasy coupling with both hands. It was gritty and grimy, often with not the slightest hint of a shudder for several minutes. Perhaps she’d taken her chance, swung herself up into the couplings, astride the huge shackles.
No one knew exactly how it went though various opinions supported the idea that the train had started with a lurch and Mrs Waldron slipped between the two units. Someone ventured that had she slipped right through she might have been able to lay flat on the ground, avoiding direct contact with the underside of the train, the heavy steel wheels and steam. She might well have survived.
It was further opined that her long hair became caught in the grease giving sufficient purchase for it to loop around the coupling. But, whatever, back and forth shunted the noisy train drowning out all sound barring its own.
The bag of icing sugar was found intact.
Though he hated that story, recalling all the details was a means of keeping his memory alive.
Without his memory he was no one.
CHAPTER 10
Mrs Green
Mrs Green ran the hospital canteen. To Malcolm, she smelled like fresh flowers, and being gentle she often provoked something in his distant memory, a hint of someone else. She understood more than some that he didn’t always feel the need to talk, not that he couldn’t. Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays she opened the canteen at 9am selling writing pads and envelopes, chocolate fish and Buzz Bars. She even sold the new Pinky Bars. He signed M in her journal for mixed lollies like Eskimo men and milk shakes, jubes and jellybeans, and a few aniseed balls for good luck. Mostly the men signed for Government Issue tobacco. He didn’t smoke. Mrs Green wore dirndls gathered at the waist with shirring elastic, buttoned from the collar right down the front to the hem. Mondays she sold mutton pies sent down from the Palmerston bakery. He liked those mutton pies, hot and peppery.
His best mate, Sandy, rode in the cab of the delivery lorry. He always called out, “How’s ya been, Mal?” when they were still some distance away.
Malcolm turned his head away, but he couldn’t contain a grin as he raised his hand.
Sometimes they were in the same ward together.
One day Malcolm asked him why he was there.
Sandy said cheerfully, “An infection got in my head, ya see. Did I tell ya I see ghosts? I see their shadows. I smell them.”
“I don’t smell them,” Malcolm said. Then, “Sandy, what’s your real name?”
“I dunno, cobber. Maybe Sandringham.”
They doubled up laughing, talked about some other weird names like Buck, Satan and Mouse. They weren’t real names. Just nicknames. Like Donkey and Snake.
Malcolm thought of Mouse whom he’d met at the men’s lockup – Mouse, a timorous, hesitant grey soul, cowering and all hunched over. Too afraid to die, more afraid to live. And he understood why Buck was called Buck – his sharp yellowed teeth, like a big old rat. But Satan he never understood.
The canteen was near the boys’ ward, Tamariki. While Mrs Green scooped tuppenny ice creams he asked her why some of the boys were so big.
“Some are as old as you, Malcolm,” she said. “They just never grew up. Some might grow big while others stay small. But their minds are still very young.”
Girls were kept in The Annex along with newly admitted patients. He’d heard there were nine nurses looking after them, and each nurse had a private room in The Annex. Staff and patients alike shared the big bathroom with its three baths. Once they commenced night duty, junior nurses moved into the Nurses’ Home. Though he never understood why they moved, he knew lots because he listened.
He wanted to know more about the big boys at Tamariki. Their playground had swings and a sandpit, and he watched them plod aimlessly around, vacant faces staring at the ground, at the fence, at the sky. Some had enormous heads, like the boy an attendant was carting around in a wheelbarrow.
Malcolm went back to the canteen to ask Mrs Green why some had big heads.
She explained about hydrocephalus, how they’d got sick when they were little kiddies. He went outside to stare at them.
The boys never spoke. Had they so little? Small glimpses into happiness, or nothing? One grinning boy beckoned, so he walked closer to the fence. This boy had tufts of hair pulled out, no eyelashes or eyebrows. The boy dribbled and grinned inanely.
Malcolm began to move away.
The boy beckoned again.
Malcolm left.
The farmer in the dell the farmer in the dell hey ho the derry oh the farmer in the dell the farmer takes a wife the farmer takes a wife hey ho the derry oh the farmer takes a wife
This fine spring day, a year on from when he last visited the walnut trees, and Mrs Waldron was killed by the train, Malcolm walked down to the bottom of the steep road and back up again toward the hospital’s main entrance. He viewed it all from a different angle: the library settled peacefully among gardens of neatly tended rhododendrons and yellow and purple bushes, azaleas, and the morgue with its little high-up window. What was it they were afraid of? That a corpse might try to escape – a dead body on the loose? He chuckled to himself and decided to tell Mr Antonio, the cook.
Mr Antonio laughed loudly, clapping his floury hands together, punching Malcolm’s arm.
“Once you’re in that morgue, you’re in to stay. So you’d better behave yourself then, eh.”
Mr Antonio cooked in the main kitchen, baking bread twice weekly. He fed Malcolm bread crusts with r
oast hogget dripping. The kitchen radio was always on.
It was good to know Mr Green too. Now he was retired from his job at the hospital, Mr Green often visited the kitchen and Mrs Green at the canteen. He called her his missus.
He said, “It’s time you called me Jack, son.”
Malcolm looked away, still called him Mr Green. He told good stories, calling them yarns, but Malcolm wondered if Mr Green was fibbing. Sometimes he found it hard to tell who was on staff and who weren’t at this place called The Building, nestled in the hills above the cliffs where the blue penguins bumbled around on the rocks and the black seaweed glistened.
At the hospital everything moved slowly, like fog. He tried to remember where he’d been heading when he first moved out, down to Dunedin, to Maclaggan Street. That was in 1946 when he was about twenty-five years old. But something had gone wrong because now he was back at The Building. He’d been back a couple of years, he’d been told, so he thought he must be at least twenty-eight. Maybe even older.
He cursed his foggy brain, half-recognising the nature of his own condition, dimly recalling a previous existence. Sometimes he felt he didn’t live anywhere any more. He just existed among the rotting remains of dead people. Sometimes he thought he might sift through those remains, might even read the remains. Sometimes he searched for signs of his passing, for the scent of his prey, his memory, so he could hunt it down. That was all there was left – the scent of his memory. The rest was the mess he left behind when he passed through.
Some things he knew for sure though. Mondays were Pinky Bars and mutton pie days. Thursdays were the days he visited the main kitchen.
“Routine is best for you,” he’d been told by Yorky, who pronounced his words funny, who always talked about the weather compared to back home. Wherever that might be. “Don’t vegetate. Get out and live, lad. You’re more fortunate than most. Look at that lovely sky. It’s not raining, is it? There’s no smog.” Yorky said all this. “And you could talk more. You used to talk the hind legs off a chair, before you came back. But, ah, laddie, I don’t know about these new-fangled schemes. We don’t have ’em back home so I just don’t know. Remember what you were like then?”
Remember…
Do you remember…
Do you remember?
“Do you?”
“Yes,” he said, though he didn’t.
He waited to feel the need to talk. He felt nothing. There was little he could remember and nothing to encourage him to take an interest in his life. If he used to be different, like they said – and sometimes he knew they were right – they must have taken his thoughts captive and left him with only fringes and tatters, not enough to live with. He wondered where they stored his stolen thoughts. Maybe they stored them in the morgue with the little high-up window. Hah! As if memories would try to escape.
Maybe that was the secret.
The delivery lorry pulled away from the parking bay alongside the boiler room. Malcolm scuffed his boots in the coal grits considering whether he could stand there until it ran over him, like Jock did. Jock had lost his reasoning since all his shock treatments. Malcolm wondered if it might hurt as much as The Treatment. The driver tooted. He stood still with his eyes clamped shut. The driver tooted again and yelled. Someone pulled him roughly to one side.
Sandy climbed down from the lorry and gently took his arm.
“Come on, Mal,” he said almost confidentially, which was a surprise as usually he yelled. “I’ve something to tell you.”
Once they were on the footpath, he said, “Ned The Accountant escaped.”
Malcolm knew Ned The Accountant. But escaped? He hadn’t seemed the type, and yet what was the type? There was always covert excitement when someone escaped. The word went around like a whispered breeze and the siren set up wailing. But a patient could be ‘at large’ for weeks before being found, or persuaded to return. Sometimes the alert would go out to the locals to lock their doors, but mostly with some food or a beer in their belly the patient would happily return to his ward alone or under escort.
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. “I heard the siren,” he said. “I didn’t hear the name.”
Sandy said, “He went over the lockup ward wall this morning before lunch.”
CHAPTER 11
Jack Green’s Yarn
Mr Antonio was in the main kitchen, his hands warming on the outside of the immense enamel stove doors, flour right up his hairy arms, laughing and joshing. Some got right on with the monotony of their task, peeling onions, scrubbing pots. But there was always someone who would join him in laughter. Today it was Malcolm.
“O solo mio,” Mr Antonio sang in his deep baritone from way down in his big fat belly. Though the radio words were in English, he often sang in Italian.
Malcolm stood quietly at the bench and considered the sacks of spuds. He would peel them, remove the eyes, wash them and put them in buckets of fresh water. Someone else would tip them into the steamer while he scrubbed the concrete floors. Mainly women worked in the kitchen, but he liked to spend time there. The kitchen was safe.
When Mr Antonio sang, Dorothea, who was once an opera singer, cast scowling glances at him through wet eyes, (she cried easily) muttering indistinctly. She disliked singing and would often stride over on her stiff or trembling legs to turn the radio off.
Mr Antonio said, once he’d finished making custard and come to sit at the large table, “You wanna tell me about that home plan down in the big smoke? You’ve been back a few years now, haven’t you?”
Malcolm tilted his chin. “Yep.”
Custard! Suddenly, he remembered last Christmas, the steamed puddings and ladles of yellow custard. Throughout The Building there were decorations and fancy trees with coloured lights. Christmas trees too – some over eight-feet tall. In his ward, theirs stood in a brightly decorated tin bucket. The soft fragrance of the pine permeated each corner of the dayroom, now decorated with tiny lights encased in square plastic lanterns, each with a dusting of European snow. Amongst all that winking brightness, miniature baubles frosted with crystals twinkled delicately.
From his chair at the table in the kitchen, if he squinted his eyes, he could clearly see that tree, brightly sparkling and winking. There was an angel on the topmost branch. Sister Hodge bought it to replace the fat Santa, which normally adorned the spot. That Christmas, the ward windows were draped in newly created paper streamers. He’d helped make those.
Young nurses retaped the paper-chains from the previous year, those that had come unstuck during the annual storage. Then they fixed them in draped garlands above the doors and windows. One nurse pressed little buds of Sellotape to the walls to secure the tinsel, and above the ceiling lights another draped lengths of shimmering foil string. Cottonwool was stuck on every available surface to represent snow, and cardboard stars coated in glitter hung from the ceiling.
Christmas cards were arranged on the sideboard so anyone might reach for one to read, and then another and another.
From the outside, the hospital grounds had looked like fairyland. The folk from the village joined the staff to walk through the grounds singing Christmas carols. He recalled how he joined in, wandering from ward to ward with the group growing larger by the minute. Some had great voices, booming out in the still clear night. Yes, those were good times: Christmas, sports day and the concerts. They were the best. He made a pledge to focus on those three occasions as part of his current memory exercises.
But today he’d come to listen to the radio, clean potatoes and scrub floors. Even though Dorothea had turned the radio off. She reminded him of Grey Lizzie back at Maclaggan Street.
“You were gone some time, weren’t you?” Mr Antonio continued. “What was it like out there for you?”
“It was too big.”
“Too big, huh?”
“Yep. Too big.”
Mr Antonio bustled about in his floury kingdom.
“Here, lad, try this mutton casserole.”
A bell announced morning teatime. Dorothea stopped scrubbing porridge pots to bring out crockery cups and enamel teapots, which she thumped down onto the tabletop next to a jug of milk. Mr Antonio produced a batch of scones with crusty cheese on top. This batch was baked in a slab, though it was creased with a knife before cooking. Just not separated first.
Dorothea sailed into her seat and clasped the handle of the first teapot. She started right in to pour tea. It had always been her job to pour. A new patient had attempted the job only to end up scalded as Dorothea asserted her claim over the boiling water. She was the longest serving person in the kitchen. So, with her constantly wet apron patch from leaning against the big sinks, she finished pouring then backed away to stand behind the others. To Malcolm she was like a dull ghost in a wet pinny.
Mr Green arrived with a cheery, “Gidday, everyone,” and seated himself beside Malcolm. Immediately, he started in on one of his yarns.
“Did you hear the one about the bikie gang that came to me house?”
“I d-don’t like these s-scones.” That was Dorothea. “They’re not p-proper s-scones.”
Those there when Mr Green first came in and spoke, gawped, scones halfway to open mouths, butter dripping down fingers or off their chin.
Mr Green said, “Just cut different is all.”
She repeated about them not being proper scones, her lower lip quivering, legs all a-tremble.
Mr Green leaned closer to her, grinning.
“Crickey dick, woman, don’t eat ’em then. There you go, if they’re not proper, don’t eat ’em. They’ll probably kill you if they’re not proper, eh.”