by Susan Tarr
Dick settled in to tell him what he knew.
“Well, Pete had been going to Dunedin, see, Friday afternoons for ages. He was a voluntary patient – not committed like the old Chinaman; he’s in for good. He can’t speak a word of English to save himself so he’d be dead within a day if he got out. And they now say that unless we get discharged within six months of coming here, we’re here for life. Guess that’s why they started turfing the fellers out a bit back.”
His stories were like old Jack’s, as rambling as the ivy clinging to the red bricks of this building.
“Anyway, old Pete, they discharged him. Just like that. Said he was finally allowed – no,” he corrected himself, “free to go for good. So off he went taking his belongings in a paper bag. Only he came back because there was nowhere for him to go to. So he was back to living with the rest of us at the house again. His problem was with the bottle, eh. Try as he might he couldn’t beat it. Last Friday, when he said he might try leaving for good again, he didn’t come back from Dunedin.”
Anyone on leave who didn’t return had their leave cancelled and were listed as escapee.
“But he wasn’t supposed to not come back that time, like. He was just on ordinary leave. So the attendants were sent out to scour the city. They found him in the gutter by the Leviathan pub, drunk as a coot. Some blokes from the paper printers’ early shift sat with him a couple of hours because he’d been done over proper. Waste of time though because Pete didn’t have no money. He’d spent every last penny of his Comforts Allowance in the boozer.”
The two men reflected quietly on Pete Durham.
Dick spoke again. “Well, they brung him back, sobered him up and started again, but Pete – he said he was too old for this kinda lark and his guts was giving him gripe. It was killing him to be alive and he wanted to go home. Sad thing is he was home. So he talked to the attendants, they talked to the doctors. Yesterday, it were done. Death by request. Gone now, anyway. Home somewhere. Poor Pete. Poor bugger.”
Dick fell silent. He might have wanted to continue talking. Malcolm neither encouraged nor discouraged him. He just sat there quiet and receptive until Dick burst into boisterous tears. Malcolm waited while the noisy torrent was spent. He wasn’t new to crying. He’d seen it most of his life in one form or another.
Dick drew a grubby hanky from his pocket and rubbed it all over his face.
“He were me best mate, Mal. Him and you are all I got. I didn’t get to say goodbye.”
He was thinking Pete was probably better off dead what with the gripe and all. Better than being sent home when he had no home to go to.
The Welshman died, Idris Llewellyn Lloyd from Malcolm’s current ward. As he saw it, there was nothing dramatic about his dying. No death by request. Idris died in his sleep, that’s what the word on the ward was. A doctor was needed to say if he was properly dead, though; an attendant or nurse wasn’t allowed to make that call. So the staff stood around the bed, jawing on about the grey-faced man with the sunken eyes, until the doctor came. Idris was pronounced dead. The doctor said he’d been dead for hours. Or at least he hadn’t breathed for hours.
Malcolm was well aware that people died. All of his life people had died. Some years more died at The Building than others, especially during the coldest winters. He did wonder whether or not all the deaths were necessary. He decided from now on to take a particular interest in who died and how.
He’d heard tell the Welshman’s family thought him a wee bit peculiar, best put the odd feller into the mental hospital. He could, just maybe, be suffering from some gradually deteriorating degree of dementia.
“We’re a close family, but this – it’s incurable, you know. It could even turn out to be dangerous,” said the Welshman’s sister one day, when she’d come to visit. “Imagine waking up dead one morning, shaken to death by a madman.”
That same close family went so far as to have Idris committed; a ward of the state needing two independent doctors to sign him out. Just in case. So the Welshman, Idris Llewellyn Lloyd was committed to sleep among creaking iron beds beneath high-up barred windows for the rest of his natural life, amidst hacking and coughing and the incessant screaming, pacing and wall slapping.
He’d once told Malcolm, “It seems I’m mad for sometimes choosing to sleep in the bush to get away from my family’s squabbles. Just sleeping outside. Watching for shooting stars and comets in the southern skies. Is that wrong? Is that really mad?”
Malcolm said, “I’d like to sleep outside sometime.”
Stars – had he ever really looked at them without bars cutting right across the night skies?
“I’ve been jinxed all right,” Idris said. “On account of being a bachelor. They think that’s weird, that I oughta be avoided, might be dangerous. My sister got them all scared over nothing. Ah, well…”
“I think you’re fine, Idris.”
At least he had been when he first arrived; not bad enough to be committed. Like, he didn’t have fits or run around naked and screaming, or shake his head and drool or bang his head on the concrete until it bled. Idris only sat by the window staring at the sky through the bars. Smiling.
After a time he did go a bit loony – like some of the others did. So maybe he had been mad all the time. Maybe he was even dangerous. Maybe his family were right and he was suffering from some gradually deteriorating degree of dementia.
Or maybe he would still be alive if his family had let him sleep beneath the stars.
People die here, Malcolm thought, and this made him remember his mother when she was dying, how shrunken and grey she was, like a living ghost. He wasn’t scared of impending death, or frightened to touch the dying.
More recently Father Teague talked about immortality, but Malcolm had no sense of that. Was he going to die here in Seacliff Mental Hospital, and how might that be?
So Idris died in a squeaky iron bed, one over from him, and Ned died in the willow tree in the bog. Bryce died (he imagined they said that, though he knew the wee boy had faded away) as was expected of him. And why that sudden long-distant memory of Bryce when he couldn’t remember the rest of long ago?
Some died on the rocks at the bottom of the cliffs. Some were whisked away in the night to a far away mental hospital to forestall any local family embarrassment.
Or because they were proving to be tiresome, like the Italian, Mario. He didn’t stay long enough for anyone to decide if he was insane or unable to manage his personal affairs, though some did say he was thoroughly unhinged.
Initially they said Mario was an excellent vocalist, with a superb voice of great volume. Daily he walked the grounds and sang out melodies in his mother-tongue to the pleasure of visitors, who were not treated to his continuous rehearsing of his repertoire, day and night. On and on and on. Often as not, Mario sang hymns. Even such noises as Malcolm thought should be acceptable were recorded as symptomatic of madness.
Some said the thirty-year-old shipping clerk had suffered from a hereditary adolescent insanity for many years. Finally he’d pushed his family over the edge and into dealing with it, and him. If he were at the beach, on a stage or in church, his singing might be deemed appropriate, if not beneficial, or at the very least outstanding talent. Here, because Mario sang in an unspecified place, at an unspecified time, he was ‘acting in a deviant manner’.
Both Mario and the woman named Monica had violated the constraints by singing out of accordance with the correct style, time and place. Mario was whisked off to Sunnyside Mental Hospital in Christchurch.
Malcolm had no clue as to why they were all dealt with differently. Few of the patients knew why the staff did what the staff did. He shrugged it off; it was just how it was.
But death? He found that intriguing. Joseph Merchants discovered a sneaky cave tucked into the ocean cliff, dense with black popping seaweed and inhabited by little blue penguins. When the searchers came, he covered himself with seaweed. As the tide changed the little blue penguins waddled out f
rom the cave. The water closed the entrance and filled the cave.
Pete Durham died by request.
Esther’s mewing boy baby was buried in a shoebox.
Malcolm had secrets about death.
He had many secrets.
CHAPTER 31
Geoffrey Humphrey Bennett
Once upon a time there was a small white box on a sitting room table.
The father was not looking at the mother and she wasn’t looking at him. The father blamed the mother who blamed herself. Both of them were crying. Malcolm was six years old. He was bawling the loudest of all.
Their baby’s name was Geoffrey Humphrey Bennett. He was sleeping soundly in the small white box.
Malcolm’s father repeatedly yelled at him.
“You’re a bloody big boy. Help with more things. Be less clumsy, if you can. For goodness sake, don’t slam that door! Idiot! See what you’ve done?”
Whack!
Yes, Daddy.
“Surely you can fill the coalscuttle without spilling it all over the path. Just once? Oh, leave it on the steps. I’ll bring it up myself. Leave it!”
Yes, Daddy.
“And make sure you help your mother. Got that? You’re the eldest now. You help her with the baby.”
Yes, Daddy.
“Sit over there. Go away, boy. Just – go away.”
Yes, Daddy.
He sat where he was ordered to sit, or went where he was ordered to go. Sulking and fearful, his eyes fixed on the leather strop, poised to leap to his feet the moment his father’s hand reached for it. Why had his father changed? He used to let him sit on his big knees. He used to teach him nursery rhymes and tell him stories about rabbits that wore real clothes and had real families, and other stories about cargo ships, clippers and steamships that sailed from one side of the world to the other. Back in the olden days. Now his father barely spoke to him.
…come here boy do this boy do that boy get over there boy be quiet boy go away boy go away boy…
On a Friday night his father came home from the pub, stumbled up the pathway, knocked over the rubbish tin, lost his door key, hammered and hollered, woke Malcolm who lay quietly in his bed listening to his parents fight.
“…retard! That’s what they call him at the local! A bloody retard!”
His mother’s voice was shrill. “Don’t you dare call him that, Colin! Don’t you dare!”
“Bloody bumbling idiot! He’s no son of mine!” His big fist hammered on the adjoining wall. It vibrated through the boards.
Malcolm dove under his bed. He didn’t like his father drunk. He smashed things. Like him.
“He’s your son and he loves you very much!”
“Sometimes I wish-”
“No! No, you don’t. We’re a family and we don’t wish anything different, do you understand? Now go to bed. Sleep in the sitting room. It’s late and you’ve woken half the street…”
Malcolm loved his parents and he loved their new baby. His baby’s name was Geoffrey Humphrey Bennett. Geoffrey chuckled when Malcolm tickled him under his chin. He gurgled like bath water going down the plughole. After his mother put him on her breast, she draped him over her shoulder and patted his back to make him burp. Mostly he burped up his feed.
His mother changed Geoffrey’s nappies. That was the pattern: cry, nappies, feed, burp, nappies.
Malcolm stood on a chair at the end of the table and watched her fasten the safety pins in the border of her cardie. Then she peeled the wet nappy back and washed the chubby boy-body with warm soapy suds. He watched as she rubbed her face in Geoffrey’s tummy and made his podgy feet and hands dance. Geoffrey chortled and screamed and grabbed at her hair. Her smile was always soft and sometimes she had tears in her eyes. When he asked her why she cried, she said it was because she loved her boys so much. They were happy tears.
He kicked his boots off and crawled nimbly along the tabletop to play with his brother.
“What more could I ask for? You’re such a great help, Malcolm. What on earth would I do without you?” She scrunched up his hair. “Now look after Geoffrey and see he doesn’t roll over while I get the talcum powder.”
He was trusted. She often said so.
She returned to dust Geoffrey’s pink bottom with powder. More often than not, she let Malcolm do it.
Geoffrey, with his big smile or fat angry tears, was then tucked tightly into his cane pram, his white shawl almost covering his face. Only his eyes and the top of his head poked out. He wore a little knitted helmet with a button at one side.
“Daddy, will you read to me?”
Malcolm carried an armful of his favourite Lucie Attwell storybooks to his father and began to clamber onto his big knees. When his father abruptly stood up, he fell backward, spilling the books across the floor. Though his face screwed up, he didn’t cry. He was the eldest now.
“Get off,” his father barked. “Your boot digs into my legs. And you’re far too big for that lark, anyway.”
His father stepped over to stand close to the hearth. He pulled a tin box from his pocket and lit a smoke. Then he leaned with his back on the mantelpiece, his head tilted upwards as he breathed in the smoke. He expelled it in bursts through his mouth and his nose, ignoring the boy on the ground. He inhaled sharply, before saying a bit gentler, without looking down, “Those books are too old for you. Put them away until you grow up, there’s a good lad.”
Malcolm hunched over, making himself smaller, quietly turning the thick pages of the book about a white goose, his fingers tracing the inscription on the first page. Happy 6th birthday, Malcolm, 1926.
He said this over and over in his head.
His mother ironing in the passage.
“He’ll grow into them, dear,” she murmured. “It’s all right for him to look at the pictures.”
He could also read some of the words.
But best not make his father angry again. He sighed loudly, like the grownups did, and piled his books together to take to his room. When he returned, he flumped down on the carpet square in front of the fireplace, catching a stern look from his father. When he smoked his pipe he was far nicer. Hand-rolled meant he was cross. He was rolling another now.
Malcolm fidgeted a bit. He spied a loose piece of paper sticking out from the unlit fireplace, the start of a Jiggs cartoon strip. He reached for it.
Whack!
By now the boy was feeling wretched. He got up and wandered outside into the dreary street. He thought he might collect round pebbles from the verge to roll down the gutter. This time some might roll as far as the stormwater grate. Instead, he hunkered down to count tiny red spiders on the concrete, pretending they were miniature soldiers marching back and forth, left and right.
“Look, there’s loony! He’s counting spiders again!”
“Loony! Loony! Counting spiders!” chanted the bigger boys. “Bet you a tiger’s eye he can’t count.”
But he could count. He could! He was the best counter in his class. Teacher said that last week. Oh, how he hated his boot. He hated how he was labelled ‘loony’ because he was born with a weak leg and a weak hand.
He knew the names of many spiders including the red ones that raced across the hot concrete, and the bigger hairy spiders that hid in the coal shed. And red admirals and white cabbage butterflies, and some moths. And the flowers growing in their garden and along the fences in their street: onion plants, nasturtiums, gladioli, buttercups, pansies, bluebells and crocuses. He concealed this information, but to him it proved he was not loony.
He stomped back inside his gate and searched out his mother, who never teased or scolded him. She loved him. She was on her knees busily scrubbing the washhouse floor. She smiled, and she stopped what she was doing.
“Goodness me, dearie. Where does the time go? Fill the kettle will you, luv. I’ll soon be done here.”
He climbed on the kitchen stool and held the kettle under the sink tap. He knew how high to fill it. Not too high. He put it ready
on the bench and climbed back down off the stool. He fetched the milk jug and the biscuit tin. Soon they would have a nice hot drink together. She would have a refreshing cuppa and he would have cocoa made just right, with two teaspoons of white sugar.
His father had gone to the RSA to talk with some blokes about a dog.
Geoffrey’s face was ruddy with rage at being ignored whilst his mother scrubbed the floor. Malcolm carefully lifted him from his pram, flicking the pompoms that jiggled across the front of the hood. The baby stopped crying.
Since his mother was now hanging nappies on the outside line, Malcolm put Geoffrey on the blanket, which was folded over the table, like he’d watched her do. Carefully, he removed the two big safety pins from the nappy, pinning them onto his jersey front.
“You’re a big boy.” His father’s words echoed inside his head. “You can help more around here. Don’t wait to be told. Use your brain, boy. That’s what it’s for. You’re so bloody clumsy!”
Clumsy…clumsy…clumsy…
“Stinky baby, stinky baby,” he sang into Geoffrey’s happy gurgling face.
And Geoffrey kicked his legs so hard he got poo all over his feet.
Malcolm decided to bathe him. His mother was still hanging nappies so he raced down the passage to run the bath. Geoffrey was too small to roll over, his mother said that. He filled the bath to the same level she always did, and then headed back to the kitchen to collect him.
“Stinky baby,” he crooned happily.
He hugged him close, ignoring the poo on his jersey.
But lowering the baby into the water, as he had so often seen his mother do, was far harder than he’d anticipated. Geoffrey was strong and he thrust his arms in any direction and kicked his feet all over the show. Then, as soon as his feet touched the water, he gurgled in ecstasy and arched his body high, wildly, legs and arms thrashing out non-stop.
Malcolm grappled with the frolicking baby, naked and noisy, leaning right over the bath to tighten his hold.
His weakened hand let go.