by Susan Tarr
His boot came in contact with the splashes of water on the linoleum.
He slipped.
Geoffrey disappeared beneath the water.
Stunned, Malcolm stared, amazed, for a split second. But as soon as he struggled to his feet, he slipped again, cracking his head against the hard rim of the bath. Blinded by the blood, he struggled upright, dizzy now.
And Geoffrey…
Geoffrey looked up at him through a film of water, his round eyes full of wonder and trust, still laughing as a trail of bubbles rose from his mouth…
It was an accident.
Malcolm stood rigid with shock. He’d dropped Geoffrey head first into the bath water. Geoffrey had spun onto his back like a wet baby seal. He’d tried to grab hold of the little arms, but Geoffrey kept turning and rolling around and around. He was so slippery. And the edge of the bath was high and sharp. In vain, Malcolm clutched at the empty spaces within his reach, struggling to grasp the wet baby boy.
It was a dreadful accident.
“Mummy!” he shrieked. “Geoffrey!”
And his mother came running and raced up the stairs two at a time.
CHAPTER 32
Women
From many years of living at the mental hospital, the loony bin or booby hatch, Malcolm had learned to listen to other people’s conversations. He neither commented nor added to the discussions, but paid careful attention to what was said.
On this particular day one attendant commented, “The conditions, especially in the men’s building up the top, have definitely improved.”
Sister Daly said lightly, “I say it’s got worse.”
Malcolm had no opinion on the conditions; it was as it was.
This fine day he chose to wander up past Women’s Ward 5 Reception. He hadn’t walked there for a while, but he’d heard colourful talk about two girls newly admitted from the borstal. He wanted to see for himself what all the fuss was about.
Dumbfounded, he stared at the girls, haughty, fearless and fearful, disruptive and uncaring.
“There’s no hope for the likes of them in here,” Sister Daly had said to the attendant. “They’re living right among the horrors of insanity, either factual or judged. I believe that pair would have a better chance if they were still on the outside.”
He gathered that the borstal girls, Lindy and Genna, always together and laughing raucously and punching each other, would strip naked in a jiffy whenever it took their fancy. Just for the thrill of it. They were always in trouble. Their hair, bleached or dyed, bristled with metal curlers every morning. By lunchtime, their faces were painted and their hair teased and frizzed, first one style and then another.
Davey, who’d finished the men’s race even after his fit, called them harlots.
Eric Coombs, the bloke announced as the winner of the race, said, “They be hookers, Mal, that’s what they be. Straight off the wharf, the pair o’ them.”
So he went to have a look for himself. He’d never seen borstal girls, or hookers, so he didn’t know what to expect. While he stood and carefully observed them they kept their clothes on.
He’d always been intrigued with the variety of people labelled ‘mad’, like these borstal girls. Over the next week, he studied their colourful ways, always on the move, changing and laughing, so very happy with their antics. It was said they more often than not behaved ‘hideously’ even ‘abominably’. Scolding had no impact on them, or being threatened with The Treatment. Apparently they’d behaved the same for weeks now and would probably continue to do so.
Malcolm did wonder why they had not been separated, though. It seemed logical for them to be housed apart because clearly the two girls, cavorting about the yard in their tropical plumage, egged each other on.
There was a woman in the ward with them called Alva. Malcolm had seen her on numerous occasions. She grunted and groaned, but never spoke. Her thin face was painted thickly with makeup like the women on a chocolate box.
And he’d long been intrigued with another woman from that same ward. She was not a hooker, not according to Eric anyway. She was particularly pale and fat, bloated like a fresh white maggot. Her arms bulged below her dress sleeves and where her elbows should have been were huge folds of white flesh. More flesh lapped over the top of her black unlaced shoes, like white socks rolled down. Her name was Catherine.
He stared openly at her through the high wire fence, as he did each time he visited, and that was frequently now.
She stared back.
He left to continue his walk.
It was time to say goodbye to Esther, the shoebox baby’s mother, who’d been readmitted with her fourth baby a while back. She was going home again to her husband who loved her so well, and her other bubbas.
“Bye then,” she called, waving cheerfully from their car window. “I’ve enjoyed our talks.” She clutched James Allen Reid against her breast. Another good strong name to live by. “Maybe I’ll see you again. We are Catholic!”
He knew about Catholics, Anglicans and Presbyterians. It appeared to him that most on staff at The Building were Roman Catholic and those who weren’t Catholic were of the Freemason Order.
He waved goodbye to Esther. In his heart he prayed he would never see her inside again.
The following day he strolled in the warm sunshine back up to the women’s ward where Lindy and Genna, Alva and the fat woman named Catherine lived. He stood outside the bottom fence. He intended to watch them for a fair while to see if the borstal girls would take their clothes off.
This time Catherine approached to stand near him. They said nothing to each other, he on the outside and she inside. He studied the fatty jowls hanging down, the layers that made up her chin spreading out in rolls and folds. Her shoes had been adapted to fit her swollen feet. Rough holes were cut in the front and outer sides for her fat toes to stick through, and the laces had been removed. She moved closer, leaning on her walking sticks. The pair of them, the fresh air, communicating.
And so an almost daily pattern formed over the next months (depending on the weather) with him on the outside and her inside, just looking at each other.
One day she said, “Hello, mm-mmh.” And she giggled.
He nearly jumped clear out of his skin.
“I – I always thought you were dumb,” he finally managed. “All this time.”
“I thought you were deaf. All this time.”
They both laughed at that.
“Some of us are. Some of us aren’t.”
“I wasn’t always fat, you know,” she murmured, almost confidentially. “Once I was slim. Mm-mmh.”
He stared at the pad of flesh stretched and full about her cheeks, her pale lips, pink and meaty. Her eyes squinted through the flesh that formed her eyelids. And she had no discernible eyebrows.
She said, dreamily, “I don’t like visiting hours. They only come to gawp at us, especially on Sundays. Do they visit you? Do they tell you lies?”
He was surprised at the volumes of words she directed at him.
“N-no.”
“You have no visitors?”
“No.”
No visitors ever came to annoy him with anonymous courtesies, or plague him with the discomfort of ghastly, prolonged silences, frantically filled up with platitudes.
“So you’ve got no family either, mm-mmh?”
She was taking him somewhere he didn’t want to go.
“No.” Then he added, fast and loud, “I’ll see you again sometime. Goodbye.”
He headed off to consider what she’d said. He’d never had visitors. He could clearly read how different they considered themselves to be, how they almost had to force themselves to communicate with those inside. Like him and the fat woman, Catherine.
“However do you pass your time?” they’d ask, amidst enigmatic inquiries about health or wellbeing.
“What do you do all day?”
“We think about you often. We wonder how you occupy yourself.”
“It isn’t as grim as we thought. We thought it would be grim inside as well as outside. It’s not grim at all. It’s a beautiful place.”
“The gardens are well tended. And all those trees. You’re fortunate to be here. I hope you’re grateful.”
The following day he walked back up the rise to visit the fat woman through the wire fence.
She repeated her same question about visitors. But there were no visitors for him, ever. No one cared enough to tell him lies and no one came to gawp at him. Not like her, this woman behind the wire fence. She cared enough to gawp at him. She smiled at him and brought her mouth closer to the wires.
Low and husky, she said, “You’ve been here a long time, haven’t you? I’ve watched you for some time.”
“I’ve watched you too.”
He took a step back from the fence so he could see the whole of her more easily.
“Are you loony?” she asked. “Are you a lunatic? Or are you just mad?”
He laughed easily. “Quite possibly I am. Both. All of them.”
“What’s your surname then? Malcolm who? Have you got any more?” She waited politely, and then coaxed him. “Maybe? Perhaps?”
He didn’t answer. Then, with an unmistakable change of personality, she tilted her head with a genteel, flowing sort of graciousness, as if re-enacting some part of her once-life, her once-past.
A rose flushed in each cheek. And she continued to talk as if he were no longer there. He was used to that. Then she turned and floated off, her enormous white arms and hands gesturing elaborately.
He left the fence.
He recalled he story, how her parents had intended putting her through university, that once upon a time she was considered bright. With that thought he headed toward the library. Although he couldn’t read well, the writing in the newspapers was familiar and comforting. He spent hours tracing his finger over the words. Often he studied the pictures and tried to guess what the words beneath them meant. Some words were more familiar than others. He liked pictures and the Jiggs cartoon strips.
He joined the others as they shuffled back to his ward.
It was smoko time and visitors sat stiffly in the clean dayroom. He studied them as he waited for his cuppa. Above them a wall clock ticked noisily. This particular day, for no reason he could discern, he was disturbed by the visitors’ laboured exercises in tact or curiosity. Both visitors and patients seemed to wonder How long have I been here? How much longer must I stay? They’d run out of things to say, to ask, to comment on. They were strangers, apprehensive and unsure. The visitors began to resemble the patients, all blank stares and startled looks, seizing on, or grasping at fleeting thoughts – anything to pin a conversation on.
And some of the others, desperate to escape unscathed from this hellhole of insanity, seemed anxious to appear ‘completely normal’ in front of the other ‘completely normal’ visitors lest it be thought there was a family deficiency.
Malcolm sat quietly on his chair, measuring them up with a telling accuracy. The patients would all, he knew, be treated to a pitiful kindness, a stealthy condescension that was almost vengeful. After all, they were the certified crazies.
The visitors saying, “You poor thing, it must be terrible for you.”
“It’s such a dreadful lonely place, and smelly, yes, indeed smelly.”
“Do they treat you well? Are they kind, the nurses and attendants?”
“Is there anything you need?”
You could try to see that we’re people too. But he didn’t say that. It seemed too much to ask.
“We’ll visit you again. After we’ve been abroad. England, you know, to avoid the inclement winter, most of the year. My sister… But, yes, we’ll be thinking of you.”
Such false niceties battered mind and soul. The patients clutched gratefully at this outside contact, this one remaining person who could offer up a taste of the outside, seizing onto, “We think of you often. We must leave now. Bye bye, then.”
“Here, take this,” a woman would say, finding a wrapped barley sugar in one pocket, or a folded handkerchief in another. “It’s for you.”
The more organised would, to ease their leaving, produce a shiny apple or a paper bag of aniseed balls from their handbag.
“From Uncle Laurie” – or Aunty Norma – “who says hello and wishes you well.” They’d rise up and put on an expression of warm and loving farewell. Visitors with less forward planning were constrained to sit there for hours, fascinated and yet repelled.
Was lunacy contagious? He saw the question written on some of their faces. (He would hide a smirk.) Another question: how many endless minutes until they could politely leave? The elaborate search for motionless jackets and coats, a rummage in a handbag for another handkerchief, notepaper, lolly… Anything to make departure viable.
Then, “Must make a dash for it. Before the rain sets in. The cows, you know… Picking Patricia up from school… Oh, well then. Goodbye.”
Followed by the usual scraping back of chairs and senseless false sighs. Who cared? He wanted to know this. Who really cared? And again he smiled at the awkwardness of the departures.
An older woman stood up, scrabbling for a long lost train ticket. She shook her head as if to suggest this was not the first time her handbag had swallowed up an important document.
Leave-takings were never unduly prolonged. As soon as one visitor made the first move, the rest thankfully followed.
CHAPTER 33
Catherine’s Story
“I was slender once, you know.” Catherine, pale and ghostly, was speaking with Malcolm through the wire fence. “When I was nineteen.”
Abruptly she leaned on her sticks and propelled her bulk in the direction of her ward.
Over time she told him about herself and the boy she fell in love with when they were both twenty. She told him how her father had taken her down to the cellar and thrashed her with his braces.
“For falling in love?”
She had told the story lightly, and he tried to hide how much it disturbed him.
“For falling in love with the wrong boy. Oh, I suppose I was a bit of a handful. I’d brought the whole family into disrepute, you see. They said I had no moral compass, and that no decent man would want to marry me.” She laughed without humour. “The fact that my father had a mistress for years was quite a different matter, of course.”
As Catherine matured, though she was not a regular beauty she’d had the slimmest waist in Dunedin society. She was a well-bred young woman with good manners. As to her moral being, she was once considered, or at least expected, to be the irreproachable impeccable daughter of a long line of capable legal dignitaries.
So the fence meetings continued over time, always ending abruptly. He would watch expressionless as she powered her ungainly body away on her sticks. Surprisingly fast for such an enormous body.
He gleaned as much as he could of her previous existence, putting it all together in a mind-book to try and understand why she was as she was. Before her untimely pregnancy her mother had engaged in charitable work, distinguishing between the deserving and the undeserving poor. She’d entertained frequently, strictly within her own milieu. A fallen daughter and a bastard grandchild had no place in their family social structure.
As usual, he didn’t want to reciprocate with any of his few family secrets though Catherine was more than happy to share hers, which came to him in disjointed bits and bobs.
Her father had planned to run for Mayor of Dunedin. Her mental unravelling began when he decreed her unfortunate pregnancy must be immediately terminated.
For the second time in her recent life he bellowed at his cosseted child. “I can’t possibly run for Mayor with my daughter up the duff!”
She imitated his enraged tone of voice.
“Do you any idea of the ramifications of your disgraceful behaviour? Did you consider the family firm for even one instant?”
If it had not been for gender, and then her pregna
ncy, she told Malcolm, sourly, she could have become head of that same prestigious firm.
“Well,” she said, “I learned pretty smartly what ramifications meant, but my father was not on my mind when I indulged in my disgraceful behaviour.”
Yet it was her mother who insisted Catherine jump up and down their internal staircase for three hours, until she was so exhausted she fell from the top to the bottom. And her mother who forced her to sit in near-boiling bath water until it cooled down. And drink half a bottle of neat gin while stewing there.
Her skin blistered and she couldn’t sit or lie comfortably, but remained obstinately pregnant.
Again, it was her mother who arranged for a woman to perform the abortion. She insisted it was a safe procedure, that thousands of abortions took place in New Zealand each year.
Malcolm learned how the abortion was performed; how Catherine lay there studying the dandruff in the woman’s hair parting, the blackheads on her nose, how to avoid her fetid breath.
He grimaced when she described her pain, her powerlessness. She was old enough to be pregnant, yet her body was being poked into by some dirty harridan, and at her parents’ behest. He understood her pain, her powerlessness.
Apparently, all went according to plan until Catherine saw ‘it’. There was blood on her bedspread, her thighs, arms and hands. And then she saw ‘it’.
Whenever she came to this part in her story her face screwed up and he waited for her to cry. She never did. If she had cried, he would probably have cried with her.
Her voice became dreamy…
She said his name was Roger and together they’d found a swimming hole up the back of North East Valley where the sun filtered through the willows. Malcolm watched her hold her latticed fingers over her up-turned eyes, eyes that were the lightest shade of grey, speckled with brown and gold. She described the shifting reflections and the shadows on the water.
Oh, they were so young.
She nodded continuously to Malcolm. He nodded back.
When she spoke again, she sounded older and warned herself about the sun’s rays. She switched voices over and over.