“But not your father’s mistress? She was left inside?”
“I tried to get her to follow me. She thought it was a trap.”
“Was it not a trap? Do you think he would have let her go—as he let you go?”
“Yes.”
There is a pause.
“So you believe, Miss Fullsmith, that he was trying to help you?”
“Yes.”
“To what end?”
I do not answer immediately. Why did Michael help me? “Because he loves me.”
“And your father does not.”
I say nothing. It was a statement not a question.
“There is nothing wrong with me.” I say it now, but my voice is not quite steady.
He closes his book and smiles at me again. “Please, Miss Fullsmith, do not upset yourself. You have been through a great deal.” I feel exposed, weak. He has taken my life apart in this little whitewashed room, noted it down in his book and will pick over the contents, piecing it back together like a jigsaw puzzle as he sees fit. I am utterly in his hands and it frightens me. Whatever version of me that he decides is the right one will become the one I will be forced to read back to myself.
“How long do I have to stay here?”
“There is a ten-day period of observation. After that I will make a formal diagnosis.”
“Am I allowed visitors?”
“We have advised against it for the moment. What you need is complete rest. We will keep you under observation. I am going to prescribe a course of ECT and some pills to help you.”
“What is ECT?” I do not like the sound of it. I don’t want them to do anything to me.
“Electric therapy. It is quite safe and has wonderful results in restoring a brain to equilibrium.”
“What if I don’t want it?”
“You haven’t tried it, Miss Fullsmith. But ultimately, it isn’t for you to decide. The first treatment will be tomorrow.”
He stands up, goes to the door and opens it. The same nurse is waiting for me outside.
—
WHEN I RETURN to my cell, there is an envelope on my bed.
Dear Rachel,
I hope this letter finds you well. You are in good hands with Dr. Measden. He was recommended to Steven as being the very best psychiatric doctor in East Africa. He has advised against visiting or discussing with you what has unfolded in the months since you returned to Kisima, but he has reassured Steven that with the right treatment, he expects, over a period of time, a full recovery. That it is not unusual for a girl of your age, exposed to the trauma that you have been exposed to, to break down as you did. I want you to know that I am here for you and will look forward to hearing of your progress.
Your father is not yet out of danger, but yesterday he said a few words, and the doctors are hopeful that he will make a good recovery. I have—for reasons you will understand—avoided talking about what passed that night. In good time, when his condition improves, I will explain everything.
With hopes for his recovery, and yours,
Sara
What has Sara told my father? Does he even know that I am here? I can guess the lies that Steven has spoken to them, to serve his own self-interest; to have me stowed away here; to keep me quiet. I remember his warning in the yard: If you tell your father I will make your life a living hell. Mathari is both his protection and his revenge. I tell the nurse that I want to write a letter, and she returns with a pen and some paper. I am surprised—I hadn’t thought it would be so easy. I sit down and begin writing to the only person who can help me.
Papa—
Are you reading this? If you are it means you are recovering and I am overwhelmingly happy if it is true.
I need to know—did you agree to have me sent here? I do not think you would have done. Not if you had known what really happened at Kisima.
I put down my pen. What did happen? I think of Steven Lockhart chasing me, straddling me. His hands beneath my trousers. His words whispered in my ear. You bitch. I cannot write these things.
Dr. Measden has been told that I conspired with Michael. That I knew about the attack before it happened. You need to know that this is not true. I had no knowledge that there would be an attack or that he was involved with Mau Mau, until the very end. Even then Michael helped me at great personal risk to escape the fire. I tried to get Sara out, but she would not come.
Will he believe my word over Sara’s? I decide that I will send the letter to Lillian Markham and ask her to give him the letter directly, so that Sara cannot intercept it. The idea is a good one. I feel a glimmer of hope.
I want to see you, Papa. Please do not leave me here. Dr. Measden is going to give me something they call electric therapy. I am scared. Please send for me. I will not cause trouble with Sara. Send for me and bring me home.
“You are writing a letter?”
A face at the door. An older woman with shorn gray hair. My eyes are drawn to her hands—they are moving. Her forefingers sliding against her thumbs as though she is rolling something between them.
“Yes.”
“And what are you saying?” Her chin jerks up, every few seconds, so that she looks as though she is at the whim of a careless puppeteer.
“I want my father to take me away from here.”
“He won’t receive the letter.”
I put down my pen. “Why not?”
“Because they read all the letters before they are sent and decide which ones should go.”
“So what can I do?” Desperation is tugging at the edges of me. I am struggling to breathe.
She sits on the step just outside the door of my room, her pale legs poking like bones out of her white smock.
“There is nothing you can do.”
“The doctor said he is going to give me electric therapy.” I breathe in heavily. “What is it?”
“Electric therapy.” Her fingers go over and over against her thumbs in a motion that seems in time with the beating of my heart. “There is a cloud afterward. It is difficult to remember everything. But it comes back, eventually. If they don’t administer it too often.”
The restless movement of her hands works on my anxiety, sharpens it.
“How long have you been here?”
“Five years. Longer than some. Shorter than others.”
I hear other patients talking about shock therapy. That they restrain you. That it breaks bones. That you cannot eat afterward. Or remember your own name. That it was invented by a doctor who visited a slaughterhouse which used electric shocks on pigs to stun them before they were killed. He saw that if you use enough electricity to bring the pig to the very brink of death—then you could induce a fit. I am filled with dread.
The woman next to me wakes in the night and begins to scream. I go to her bedside, but she throws me off. After a long while a nurse comes and injects her and she is quiet.
—
I RECEIVE another letter. There is no post stamp. It has been hand-delivered. I look straight at the signature: Nate Logan. It is like sucking in a breath full of cold, fresh air. Is he in Nairobi?
Rachel—
Keep your chin up. We are working on a solution. Your father is increasingly well.
Nate Logan
There is a world outside of this nightmare. Someone has found me. A solution.
—
MORNING the following day. The nurse leads me into a small tiled room. There is a bed in the middle on wheels, a trolley full of electrical equipment, wires snaking out of a machine. Dr. Measden is writing notes in the corner. I begin to moan. I will not lie down there. I try to step backward, but they propel me forward. I shout. Tell them to stop. To take their hands off me. Dr. Measden doesn’t look up from his writing. His posture is one of complete indifference. Is he deliberately ignoring me? I am like a ghost; my protests are not heard; my
voice is merely gabbling. It increases my anxiety, my sense of futility.
And yet my body is here. I can feel the tiles cold beneath my feet. They force me down onto the bed. Straps are slipped over me. They winch them tight, so that I cannot lift my chest off the bed. There is one over my forehead.
Dr. Measden looms over me. His face is impenetrable, his voice jolly. “How are you feeling today, Miss Fullsmith?”
“Please, don’t do this to me. Please.” But he is giving instructions to the nurse.
She puts dabs of Vaseline on my scalp, cold and sticky against my skin. I cannot lift my hands. I shout. My body tightens in panic.
“Just a small electric current.” Dr. Measden’s voice is unaffected by my shouting, as though he has seen my fear so many times and it is meaningless. I am nothing more than a child having a tantrum. My defiance is irrelevant. I scream louder, but he appears not to hear me. “It will be over very shortly.”
He fiddles with the equipment. I crane my head. See a steel wire. It is curved to the shape of my head. I cannot move away.
“What is your name?” he asks me.
The clarity of the question means I answer it. As I open my mouth the nurse slips something large and rubber into it and holds it there, so that I cannot speak.
“Bite down on it,” she says.
I feel my eyes widen. I press myself into the bed, but I cannot get away. And the metal is over my head. The current comes. A searing pain, a tightening of my body and a blackness.
I am in a tunnel. I am weightless. There is no emotional substance to me. My mind is empty. A sickening, lurching vertigo. Nothing to hold on to. A being made up of nothing. Panic brings it back; pieces of me; difficult to assemble. Words that carry a weight but mean nothing. When I open my eyes the room is too bright. I will be weak after this. I will not be able to tell myself who I am. He will know better than me. My grip on myself is slipping. What exactly am I?
The nurse is over my bed. I am back in my cell. I grasp at her. “Will they give it to me again? When? When?”
She smiles at me and does not answer. There are two pills in her hand. I let her slide them into my mouth. I swallow and I sleep.
“You’re not helping yourself.” The patient with the gray hair and the moving hands is leaning over me. I am in my cell. In my bed. Relief floods through me. “The quieter you are, the more effective the treatment. The happier the doctors, the quicker they will discharge you.”
And I think they must know that I screamed, and screamed and screamed.
—
HOW LONG WILL they keep me here? What does my father know of my treatment? Has he been told? Another day passes. The doctor had said a course of ECT. The old woman with the moving hands tells me that is once every three days, though the nurse will not tell me anything. I dread it. Will I be the same after another? And another after that? What of Nate Logan’s letter? I keep it in the Bible by my bedside.
—
“AH, MISS FULLSMITH.” Dr. Measden folds his hands and smiles at me. “How are you feeling today?”
I sit down opposite him. It is two days later. My head buzzes. It is hard for me to hold my thoughts.
“The nurse. She gives me pills.”
“Y-e-s,” he draws out the word, as though he knows my question before I ask it. My dissent is to be expected. I feel the withdrawal of his approval and it is unpleasant—I want him to like me, to protect me, to assess me and tell me that I am normal. Yet—I do not trust him, and something in me insists on fighting him. I do not know if this thing that fights him is a symptom of the sickness of which he accuses me.
“What are they?”
“Largactil.”
“I think they make me dizzy. I don’t feel myself.”
“That can be a common side effect.” He smiles at me. I feel my certainty drain away. I sense that I am boring him, and this is somehow a failure, yet I persist.
“What are they?”
“They are an antipsychotic.”
I look at him, summoning up the vestige of authority and self-respect that remains within me. “I do not think I am psychotic.”
He sighs. “Miss Fullsmith, if I had a penny for every patient who told me that, I would be a very wealthy man.”
“When will you release me?”
“When I believe you have made a full recovery.”
“Does my father know that I am here?”
“Ah—your father.” He lights a cigarette, leans back in his chair and studies me. “That’s good.” He licks tobacco off his teeth. I feel him settling in. “What difference do you feel it would make if he did?”
“I need to know . . . whether he approves of the decision—”
“And if he does?”
I watch the smoke spiral to the ceiling. I do not know what to say. I sense that he has trapped me, but I do not quite know how he will get at me.
“It is not unusual for a girl to have feelings for her father, Miss Fullsmith. To want more from him than he ought to give.” He inhales again. The smoke is making me feel nauseous. “Have you heard of Freud?”
I nod slightly. I have heard of the name, but cannot remember in what context I have heard it.
“He is perhaps the greatest thinker of the twentieth century. He believes”—Dr. Measden inhales his cigarette, knocks off the ash and exhales slowly—“that girls suffer from penis envy. Do you know what a penis is, Miss Fullsmith?”
I nod, feeling my face redden underneath the steadiness of his gaze.
“He believes that when girls discover, as infants, that they do not have a penis, they sublimate their desire for a penis into a desire for their father.” He breaths out a cloud of smoke. “Did you feel guilt when you heard that your mother was dead?”
“No,” I say quietly. His question disturbs me. It carries with it an accusation. And in his hands an accusation can be all-consuming, like a viral contamination. It might take hold of me.
He looks at me steadily. “The death of the mother is very often associated with guilt in girls, since it is the fulfillment of a wish—the desire to have the mother removed so that they can be closer to the father.”
“There was no guilt.” I shake my head. “I was—” but there are no words to describe what I felt that day.
“Of course. It was very upsetting. But I am talking about what you felt deep down—what was taking place in your unconscious mind.”
I swallow heavily. There is one thing I can tell him which might vindicate me. Which might get his attention. I have resisted talking about Steven Lockhart. There is shame in it, and I do not want him to use it against me. But I cannot hold it back anymore. “The day my mother died, I saw the District Officer, Steven Lockhart, kill a man.”
“And what is it that you think he did afterward?” I realize he already knows the accusation. That Steven has told him everything.
“He forced me onto his lap.” I am crying again now. “He touched me.”
“Did you solicit it?”
“No.” I remember his grip on my arm, the terror, his hand sliding my own down my chest.
“Do you not think it a coincidence that on the day your mother dies, you imagine your first sexual experience? Consider the possibility that your desire for your father—both suddenly available to you and yet not present—was transferred onto Steven Lockhart?”
I shake my head, but his logic inexorably continues.
“You witnessed Steven Lockhart roughing up an African. And you later believed, stricken by guilt for the feelings you had on your mother’s death, that you had a sexual encounter with this man. That this man—not your father, but in place of your father—had committed the crime which you had so desired; eliciting in you a fantasy of sexual fulfillment. That you and Steven Lockhart, your father substitute, had colluded in the symbolic murder of your mother.”
> “No—” I shout, standing up and shaking my head. “He has done things to me at the farm.”
“But you didn’t tell your father?”
I stare at him.
“Why not? Because you felt ashamed? Because you were complicit in what took place between you?”
Why could I not tell my father about the subtle sliding of hands? The things Steven said to me when he had me on my own? He is right—I feel tainted, humiliated.
“There is no shame in it, Miss Fullsmith. It is possible that you solicited his attention. In the same way that you solicited the African’s attention. Because you were unable to have the attentions of your father. Your father who was so obviously engaged with another woman.” He sits back in his chair, looking up at me.
A nurse opens the door and stands looking at the doctor. “It’s all right,” he says. “Miss Fullsmith will be fine.” He closes his book and stands up. “I think that’s enough talking for today. I can see how difficult it is for you. We’ll have to go more slowly in future.” I feel the awful implacable pull of his power, setting out my timetable, my meals, my pills. Telling me when I have behaved well and when I have not. The terrible battle between falling under his approval and wanting to hold on to my old self.
I turn toward the door.
“Miss Fullsmith?”
I glance back at him.
He gestures to the bed. “We haven’t finished yet. Would you lie down?”
I stare at him.
“Come along now. Or I’ll ask the nurse in to help.”
I get up onto the bed. I have no choice. He has turned over the hidden places of my soul. Now he will feel out the hidden places of my body.
He smiles down at me. “We’ve had the results in of your tests.” He slides his hand under my smock, and I feel his fingers on my lower belly, cold against my skin. I shudder, but he does not show that he has noticed. He feels along my abdomen. “They show that you are pregnant.”
I stare up at him. My heart is thudding in my chest. His hands press against me.
“Pregnant?”
“Yes, Miss Fullsmith. Pregnant.”
I do not know what to say. I lie there looking up at him. There is no room for me to hide. I feel shock. And a terrible sadness. And beneath these things a glimmer of something else. Something worth protecting.
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