by Susan Tarr
“Bloody inhumane. I don’t hold with it at all.”
Peas atop the mash. Parsnips. More gravy?
Other staff joined the conversation.
“Catherine’s father ran for mayor a few years back. Miserable bastard, abandoning his only child. Her arms look like they’ve been through an egg mandolin.”
Gravy, a thick brown pool.
What was an egg mandolin? He’d ask Jack.
“Doubt she’ll come back, though.”
Catherine apparently now flickered in life without any foothold in reality. Wherever she had gone, he determined he was not going to stop waiting at her fence until she came back again. He suspected she was one of the ones who were far worse off than him. One of those Father Teague prayed for.
As well as the other woman who got pregnant with only the male night nurse to blame. She was oblivious to everything and had to be spoon-fed her meals or she would not think to eat. Her baby was born (the father sacked) and was adopted out with the good matron signing her own name as the baby’s mother, listing the father as ‘unknown’. The staff talked about that for a while, and then forgot about it.
Malcolm remembered. He made mental notes and sorted each type of information into small categories. He vowed he would never forget his new facts. He wondered how the baby with the matron’s name was, if it was a happy baby, safe within a happy family.
Mostly he worried about Catherine as he waited in vain by her fence.
CHAPTER 35
The Real World – 1953
“It’s time for you to have another taste of the real world. Reality is what they call it. So get yourself tidied up.”
Malcolm wet his hair, ran his fingers through it, and then patted it down. He replaced his cap.
He was intrigued as to why Sister Evans spoke of the ‘real’ world. What was wrong with the ‘unreal’ world? It was real too – in its unreality. Why should he face reality? Reality stung. It hurt. It killed. He’d been to reality and he’d decided it was safer here in the unreal world. Yet it seemed that somewhere in his understated intention to remain constant, thereby attracting no attention and earning no favour, or The Treatment, depending on which way he was viewed and by whom, he had failed himself.
Years had passed peacefully since his last shock treatment. And he was happy with his life as it now was, especially since he appeared to have dropped out of sight. So was his latest punishment to be given another taste of reality, maybe even to be cast out again?
“What are your dreams, Malcolm?”
The current Medical Superintendent, Dr Blake-Palmer, often asked that of him gently whilst calmly stroking his enormous black moustache. His eyes always softened when he greeted Malcolm.
“What would you like to happen to you?”
In all his life Malcolm had no dreams or hopes. He peered in the dim light of the office, his eyes still squinting from the outside glare. Throughout these extended conversations he behaved the same with a silence before each response, not because he was collecting his thoughts but because he found such speech laborious. There was too much of it altogether.
Or Dr Blake-Palmer might say, “Let’s see now, what would you like to be? What might satisfy you?”
He felt his indecision melting toward fear. He did not know what his future might bring, or what he might like to be, or what might satisfy him, but perhaps this doctor thought he did. And he could not take the chance of pitting his certain ignorance against this man’s possible knowledge. He felt trapped in his ignorance, and would be until he was confident this doctor knew what was best for him.
Eventually he replied, “I like some things I do here. I like helping in the kitchen. I like the lawnmowers. The chickens.”
The good doctor smiled and made notes. But Malcolm was not finished. He took a deep breath.
“I have only fears of the real world. I’m afraid of going back to the outside.”
“And why is that?”
“It’s too big.”
“I see. Too big, you say?”
Malcolm still feared the boy who haunted him from the far corners of his memory, the boy from the big children’s ward, Tamariki, tufts of unruly hair gone, no eyelashes or eyebrows, beckoning Malcolm to come closer. If he went closer, would he see himself?
He tried to explain more clearly.
“I fear failing out there. Again.”
The doctor waited.
“I fear having to come back here again.”
If he were to fail and return to the hospital once more, surely the shock treatments would begin a new cycle. Could he take that chance? Was he truly ready?
But it was arranged.
One of the nurses would escort him to Dunedin for the day, his first special outing. The endless summer picnics and the whales didn’t count; they were for anyone. The nurse, wearing a starched white cap, sat in the front of the hospital van while Malcolm and Davey sat in the back. No one spoke for the duration of the trip. In Princes Street they stopped at the Dunedin Public Hospital. Davey, with the driver as his escort, went into the X-ray Department to get his arm sorted. Malcolm stayed with the nurse who was busily writing something.
His gut was in knots, his hands nervously twisting his cap. Were they going to set him loose right here in the hospital car park? Eventually he spoke.
“Why am I here? Am I just sick?” he asked hopefully. He was used to being ordered, controlled, marshalled and herded. Yet somehow, somewhere, the dynamics had altered.
“Gracious me, no,” said the nurse. “You’re as well as you’ve ever been. This is just your outing. Davey’s having his arm X-rayed. He had that fall way back on sports’ day. Remember he fell during the race? Maybe he broke it after all.”
This nurse spoke easily to him, as if he mattered.
“Come on, mister. Out we get. We’ll have lunch now, if you like. Are you hungry?”
He nodded, looking forward to some grub.
Yet his real question was about his Discharge. Discharge with a capital D. He was fearful of how his impending expulsion would actually take place. Others had talked around him and about him going back to Maclaggan Street. So would he even notice it happening, or would it creep up on him like sunshine or clouds? Just be there? Or would it all happen as smooth as clockwork and he’d suddenly find himself out there? Alone – the rest of his life lurking around a corner?
As they entered the tearooms opposite Knox Church. he marvelled at the sheer number of bricks it had taken to build it, including all the steps. One day there might be time to count them.
For now his stomach rumbled loudly.
“What would you like for lunch?” Nurse West asked, indicating the only vacant table, the used crockery stacked ready for the waitress to collect.
He was aware of how much space he took up in the cramped tearooms. He felt he dominated it, taking command due to his sheer size. Aware that most of the patrons stared, some commenting without any effort to be discreet, he tried to make himself smaller.
He said quietly, “A fancy cake, please.”
Another man had two hot cheese rolls on his plate.
“And those.”
Nurse West hesitated. Their table was next to the door, the serving counter at the far end of the room.
“I won’t do a runner,” he whispered.
“I know you won’t. Thank you, Malcolm.”
She’d thanked him. Deep within, his spirit soared. She trusted him. Just like his mate, Joe, with the hedge clippers, and Jack, with his crayfish pot twist. Sitting there smiling to himself, he fumbled his cap in his lap. With all those regular people walking up and down in the street a sense of exhilaration flowed through him like waves, rising and breaking to rise again. Had he started to become a regular person all ready?
Maybe reality wasn’t all that scary. With that hope his elation grew. Maybe he could blend in and become a safe obscurity on the outside. Without the walls of formal control maybe he could have a purpose. He could go back to Mac
laggan Street to live with Bob and the others. And this time he would go right back to his beginning. He would find the pine trees on the hill.
Over tea, cakes and hot cheese rolls, Nurse West chatted brightly, asked him questions, and told him it was her birthday.
“So when’s your birthday, then?”
He considered the size of the question before swallowing to clear his throat.
“To be truthful, I don’t actually have a birthday.”
“So how old were you when you first got admitted?”
“I was just little.”
“Let’s see if we can find your birthday for you.”
On the busy footpath, merging with the sea of people, Nurse West guided him toward large glass doors and shoved him into the pleasant odours of Arthur Barnett’s store. The merchandise was neatly arranged on shelves and behind glass counters. In the men’s department there was a vast array of clothes: rows of jackets and trousers, ties, pyjamas and shirts. He was amazed, thrilled even. He raised his hand to trace his mouth and found himself smiling broadly.
Nurse West bought him a set of handkerchiefs embroidered with M, and he chose a toilet bag. Then he was fitted with serviceable work pants and shirts, all of which she signed for on a clipboard chitty. He walked out onto Princes Street wearing his new clothes, carrying his old clothes wrapped in brown paper; his glide into outside smoothly in progress.
Inside a bookstore he was drawn to the children’s section. There were books the same as those Maeve had shown him with her name and the numbers inside.
“What do you think the numbers inside Maeve’s books mean?”
“Her birthday,” Nurse West said, “or Christmas.”
“I had numbers in my book when I was young.”
“Oh, so you do have a birthday? Then listen carefully to what I’m going to say.”
Over his lifetime, he’d learned well to listen.
“What were the numbers? Would you know them again?”
“If I think real hard. If I see them.”
So they walked farther along the main street until they reached The Octagon. At The Athenaeum Library, Nurse West read the inscription on the plaque.
“Built in 1870. Imagine that. It’s very old.”
He said quickly, “The Begonia House is older. 1863. Wilson’s is older still. It was built in 1862.”
“You’ve been there? To the Begonia House in the Botanical Gardens? And Wilson’s?”
“I surely have.” He beamed. He’d been places. He had memories. Inside The Athenaeum, in the children’s section, he recognised the pictures on the covers of the Lucie Attwell books. And the Hans Christian Andersen books he recognised too.
Suddenly it was everywhere; a strange feeling of wonderment: in him, about him, the rapture of recognition. He continued to probe every memory to do with the book he remembered from his past. A Lucie Attwell book about Mother Goose. A small boy’s finger tracing the inscription on the front page.
Nurse West was more interested in the date the Old Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme book was published. 1926.
To help jog his memory, she suggested she visit Maeve and ask if she might borrow her childhood books. She’d take a carbon imprint of the words inscribed in Maeve’s books, and then substitute Malcolm’s name for Maeve’s, and change a few dates. She’d show her work to him when it was done.
Inside the hospital van, waiting for Davey and the driver, he listened carefully as she developed her plan. He even offered some ideas of his own.
Davey arrived yelling and beaming from ear to ear, his plastered arm in a sling, “Two fractures, Mal! Two!”
On the long drive back over The Kilmog toward Seacliff, Davey examined his plaster and picked bits off. The driver chatted with Nurse West. Malcolm revisited his long talk with her. He didn’t pay attention to the conversation.
Until the driver said, “You remember Esther? The one with the bubbas?”
“Ah, yes,” Nurse West replied, “She’s got four now. She was discharged home last month.”
“I hear she’s done it this time.”
Malcolm was shocked rigid.
Davey was gabbling on about his two fractures.
“And her four bubbas. She made mugs of sugary cocoa and rat poison. On the rug all wrapped in a big blanket. She took all her bubbas with her.”
“Poor Esther,” Nurse West said sadly.
“Released too soon, you reckon?”
“Who knows? That poor husband. Throughout all of her troubles he loved her. However will he cope?”
Malcolm’s hand knew the place with absolute horror and authority and touched the collection of pills in the lining of his jacket pocket. His other hand felt his face. Wet. For poor Esther.
Davey frayed the edges of his plaster, whistling out of tune.
Nurse West worked Malcolm hard. True to her word she visited Maeve and came away with a selection of old children’s books. Just holding them excited him. With each, he first turned to the inside page where the inscriptions were written in ink. She indicated tracings she’d made, how she’d substituted his name and several different dates. One in particular he seized on. Happy 6th Birthday, Malcolm, 1926.
He traced his fingers over and over the writing until he felt he might burst with knowledge.
“November! My birthday. Month before Christmas.”
She reckoned he was thirty-two now. So they’d solved the first part of the jigsaw puzzle of his life.
She spent a lot of time with him. She said the main thing she’d noticed about him was that he didn’t turn his gaze from hers, but looked her straight in the eye. She’d long been struck by a strange incongruity between the man Malcolm and the child Malcolm. Surely The State was housing a gentle man. She’d more lately felt a deep compassion for him, and she described how, to her, he appeared reserved and selfless. Behind that reserve, she hazarded, were strength and endurance. Not mental illness.
Even on her off days she trekked up the steep hill from the village to work his memory some more. She was teaching him to read from Noddy and Big Ears, The Famous Five and Peter Rabbit.
“And a pair of glasses wouldn’t go amiss either.”
So there he was, fitted with glasses, one eye covered with a patch to encourage the other to grow stronger. He read slowly out loud. And when she brought him a pot of ink and a pen he learned to write the words he could read.
Many months on, she said, “By golly, I do believe you’ve done it, Malcolm.”
He beamed. “I think so too.”
“I’ve always doubted your official diagnosis.”
“I didn’t know I had one.”
“I’m no doctor, but I’ve passed my nursing exams. You simply don’t fit the criteria for schizophrenia or paranoia. And I’ve never seen anything to suggest you’re delusional or any of the other conditions you’ve been labelled with for the past two decades. I think you’ve been wrongly judged as unable to manage your own affairs. Perhaps it would be more correct to say you were never taught the skills required. But if you were taught, you’d probably do very well.”
He processed her words, and then said, “Can you tell me why I am still here and what I am supposed to have done to stay for so long?”
“Well – and this is a long shot – I think there was a wee boy with a gammy leg and a lazy eye. His mother died-” Malcolm had told her everything he could remember. “–and for whatever reason he got left behind at the railway station. His pain at losing his mother and then being abandoned was so profound he stopped talking. Then, living alongside the institutionalised children, he sank lower and lower until he was indistinguishable from them. And, sadly, fitting in like he did, he got lost again in the process.”
He began to appreciate how he’d been lost forever in some shape or form.
“This is your chance. We’ll start at the beginning and take it from there?”
He nodded.
“And you’d like to learn how to talk in longer sentences?”
> He nodded again. Still some of the questions put to him by others resurfaced, so he asked her – for the confidence between them was complete – how it had come to pass that he had lost contact with his past?
She couldn’t explain the facts of his life to him, but she furnished him with a possible explanation.
“It was by no means unheard of, neither in life nor in books, that even a child of the best most loving family vanished and was lost…”
She stopped short, perhaps feeling the theme was too tragic.
He accepted her explanation, and from that moment saw himself as that melancholy but not uncommon phenomenon of the day: a lost and vanished child.
At the Occupational Therapy room where he went daily to weave baskets, make sheepskin bears and learn how to waltz, he worried and fretted anew. Was he truly ready? Did he really want to go out there again? He was conscious of the world and of the life within it, but here on the inside he was settled and free to walk wherever he chose. The more he thought the more confused he became. He’d come a long way since the anonymity of the lockup and the long back ward where they housed the forgotten. Yet was he content to remain safe amongst them, each, according to some of the staff, the same as any other, no distinguishing markings, resigned to living in the hospital under a rule of obey or face the consequences? He’d long had a strategy for his survival: he was safer when he chose to obey, to conform, to fit in, though often he’d been punished anyway. Was release to be his ultimate punishment?
He spoke of his rising fears to Nurse West.
“Is there truly no middle place? Do I have to go out there? Completely?”
“It will take time to undo the years of institutionalised living. And there is a lot to learn before you’re ready to live outside. Your future is uncertain, yes, but to be honest your past was even more uncertain. Don’t you agree?”
He nodded, chewed his bottom lip.
“And your future looks exciting. You see, in the end it doesn’t matter what they did to you or said to you. That’s the past. It can’t be undone. But what you believe about yourself is what is true.”