by Peter Kocan
Dave Lamming has been getting shocks almost every day. He’s had ten now and is like a zombie. He can’t talk, or eat, or control his bowels, and the mess in his trousers stinks very much. His eyes are vacant and stare straight ahead, and if you try to talk to him, he’ll just stare at you and maybe smile in a strange way, as if he half understands what you’re saying, but he doesn’t really understand anything, not even his own name. About four or five days after the last shock he starts coming out of the zombie state and then he’s just very confused and can’t remember anything. He doesn’t know where he is.
“What’s this place?” he keeps asking. A hundred times a day. “What’s this place?”
“The railway station,” Ray Hoad tells him.
“Is the train coming?” Dave wants to know.
“Yeah, any minute now.”
So Dave sits patiently on the verandah, waiting for the train. Then he gets anxious.
“Why doesn’t it come?” he asks.
“Won’t be long,” says Ray Hoad. Ray even tries to sell him a ticket. After another few minutes Dave has forgotten that this is the railway station.
“What’s this place?”
“The surgical ward,” says Ray Hoad. “You’ve just had your appendix out. It was touch and go. Complications set in.” Dave feels his abdomen.
“You’ll have a whopping bill to pay, mate,” says Ray Hoad. Dave feels his pockets.
“I’m broke,” he confesses. “I can’t pay.”
He goes to the office to tell them he can’t pay the bill for his appendix. Electric Ned is there with Arthur. Through the glass partition we see Dave waving his hands and talking. We feel the joke’s gone too far. Electric Ned and Arthur are looking our way. They know someone’s been having fun with Dave. You drift into the background, away from Ray Hoad. Ray’s not worried though. Ray Hoad isn’t bothered by anything. He’s our best at sport too.
There’s a rough little field between the ward and the main gate, and at weekends the screws take us out to play cricket in the summer, or soccer if it’s winter. It’s lovely out there on a fine afternoon, the sky very clear with maybe just a few wisps of white cloud floating up high and the leaves of the trees touched with sunlight at their edges, so that if a breeze stirs them you get a beautiful, slow flash of golden light through the whole tree. The grass on the field is thin and tough and there are bare patches of brown dirt. When someone runs across and scuffs the bare patches it kicks up a small cloud of dust that catches the sun. If enough people are running about and scuffing the bare patches, you seem to be looking through a haze of dusty light across the whole field. The knock of the bat against the cricket ball makes a good sound, dry and solid, and makes you feel good somehow because that sound means that the bat has caught the ball cleanly in the centre and the ball is racing along the ground very fast. If the ball reaches the main wall it’s worth two runs, or if it goes down under the trees it’s worth two also. It’s best when it goes down to the trees when you’re fielding and you can run down after it and hurl it back with a big throw and then stay near the trees for a minute, looking up through the leaves with the brightness and shadow of them on your face. Sometimes the ball is hit right over the wall and a screw has to unlock the gate and go outside to find it in the scrub, and while you’re waiting you can lie down on the ground, or roll a smoke, or just stroll about and think your thoughts.
The ball’s over the wall now and we’re waiting for the screw. There’s Horse McCulloch sitting cross-legged in some long grass. He’s called Horse because he’s small and barrel-bellied like a Shetland pony and has a sandy coloured forelock. He’s talking to Geoffrey Cleary who got four years for being a peeping Tom. Geoffrey is talking about how it felt in court.
“Were the women in the court?” Horse wants to know.
“Yeah, they had to testify.”
“What sort of things did they say?”
“They told how they saw me sneaking outside the windows and stuff like that.”
“What else?”
“Whether I had a horn or not.”
“Fair dinkum?” Horse is excited.
“Yeah. The charge is more serious if you had a horn while you were looking in the window.”
“Did you have a horn?”
“Not every time. I had one in court though.”
The ball has come back. Clarrie Morton is batting. Clarrie used to be a boxer in the tent shows, and his nose and ears and eyes and mouth are all bruised out of shape. His mind’s out of shape too from so many punches. Sometimes he thinks he’s a cowboy film star called Dan Bunyip with a clever white stallion named Alligator. Or that he’s Tony Palomino, a famous crooner that girls faint over. But now he’s batting and doesn’t think he’s anyone. His reflexes are all wrong and he can’t hit the ball at all. He’s getting angry and very red with effort. After he’s missed the ball ten or twelve times he grabs the bat by its blade and stares at the writing on it.
“No wonder this bat’s no bloody good,” he yells. “It’s made of English willow!”
“Christ, no!” says Ray Hoad. He’s shocked at the news.
Everyone gathers around the bat to look at the writing.
“Clarrie’s right! It’s English willow!”
“I’ll be buggered!”
“Shockin’!”
“We can’t play with this!”
“We need a proper cement bat!”
The cry goes up for a replacement bat. A proper cement one. One of the screws pretends to run back to the ward. Everyone is shaking their heads and clicking their tongues over the worthless bat. The screw comes back to say there isn’t a cement bat to be had.
“Well, this is a fuckin’ nice how-do-you-do!”
“A bloody disgrace!”
“What’ll we do?”
“We’ll just have to use the willow bat.”
“Yeah, s’pose so.”
“Nothin’ else we can do.”
So the game goes on and Clarrie is bowled out. But he doesn’t feel so bad now because everyone knows it’s the bat’s fault.
3
“You’ve got a visitor,” a screw tells you.
You go into the dining room, which is also the visiting room, and your mother is there. She looks towards you with her face very pale. She’s looking you up and down, seeing if you’re all right, not hurt or anything.
“Hello mum.”
“Hullo dear,” she says. “How’s everything? Are you all right?”
“Yes mum.”
“You look thin. Are you getting enough to eat?”
“Yes mum.”
You sit down across the table from her. There’s a long silence. A screw comes in and sits down at a far table and pretends to read his newspaper. The newspaper is partly to show that he’s not really listening. You can’t read a newspaper if you’re listening. He sits half turned from your direction to let you know that he’s a good fellow and isn’t really going to watch you with your visitor, but he’s still got you in the line of sight from the corner of his eye.
“How was your trip?” you ask your mother.
“Oh, not too bad,” she says. “The train was a bit late getting away, that’s all.”
“Well, as long as the trip wasn’t too bad,” you say.
“No, it wasn’t too bad.”
“That’s good.”
Another long silence. For weeks you’ve been looking forward to a visit, now you can’t think of much to talk about.
“I’ve baked you a cake,” she says, suddenly fumbling in her bag. The screw is glancing across. Your mother brings out the cake. It’s wrapped in cellophane.
“It’s a fruit cake. You like fruit cake, don’t you?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“I’m afraid it didn’t rise as well as it should have.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Would you like a piece now?”
“Er, no thanks, I’ll have some later.”
“It’s got plenty of fr
uit in it. Dates, raisins and currants.”
“Beaut.”
More silence. You feel a tightness in your chest as though you’re starting to suffocate. You’re trying to think of something to talk about. The trouble is, you can only think about your life here, and you don’t want to talk to your mother about that. You don’t want to bring it out into the open about what this place is and why you’re here. You want to keep the madness thing in the background because you know it would embarrass you both.
Your mother looks miserable. She’s waiting for you to say something. To show you’re truly glad to see her. You feel a stab of pain and pity for her. Your little mother, sitting there miserable because she loves you. She made you a cake and came all this way in the train to see you, and now you’re sitting across the table like a stranger.
“What are the doctors like, dear? Do they seem nice?” she says. You both feel a little wince at the word “doctors”. because mentioning “doctors” brings the madness thing a little into the open.
“We’ve only got one doctor. They call him Electric Ned.”
“Why is that?”
“He likes giving shock treatment.”
There’s another wince at the words “shock treatment”. “Shock treatment” is bringing the madness thing too close. You’re both embarrassed now.
“Poor Auntie Janet had another stroke,” she says to steer the talk away.
“That’s a shame,” you say. You only met Auntie Janet once, when you were a little boy. Even then, she was about eighty and smelled funny and you didn’t like her. But now you want to talk about Auntie Janet.
“She must be pretty old now,” you say.
“Over ninety,” your mother says.
You try to think of something more to say about Auntie Janet. You can’t.
“How’s the weather been in the city?” you ask.
“Oh, reasonable. We had a light shower yesterday.”
“Oh.”
“How’s it been up here?”
“Not too bad.”
“That’s good.”
The silences are so awkward now you feel driven to ask a question it’s probably better you didn’t ask.
“Er, have you seen Stanislav lately?”
“I saw him about two weeks ago. He came into the bar while I was working. He was drunk of course.”
“What happened?”
“Oh, he made a scene. The publican told him to get out and threatened to call the police. You can imagine what it was like.”
Yes, you can imagine. In your memory stretches a dark series of scenes. Your stepfather drunk and violent, your mother crouched against the wall shielding her head with her hands and screaming for you to run for the police. You can’t even calculate the number of times you ran in your pyjamas to the police station, only to be left loitering in the lobby while the policemen drank another cup of tea before setting out to deal with another “domestic”. You remember the times you were brought home from the police station, trotting to keep pace with some tall silent constable who held your hand.
“What if mum’s dead?” you used to ask yourself, plucking the question out of a whirl of half formed terrors. You wondered if the policeman would take you back to the station, to remain in the lobby in pyjamas, an orphan, until you grew up. There was always the same scene when you got back to the house; the policeman standing calm and disinterested in the hallway, while angry man and distraught woman made long and involved accusations against each other. Then the policeman would say that he wasn’t going to take sides, but that there’d better not be any more disturbance.
Sometimes, when the policeman had gone, Stanislav gave your mother a few more hits around the face, but mostly he just called her some names that you didn’t exactly understand and then he stormed out of the house. It was then, when the house was quiet again and you were tucked up in bed, that you began sobbing and trembling and sometimes vomiting. Then your mother would come in and clutch you to her bruised face and tell you about the “fresh start” that the two of you would make someday.
There’s somebody swearing loudly outside on the verandah.
“Hey, cut the language,” you hear Bill Greene’s voice saying. “There’s a visitor inside.”
“Yeah, watch the faaarkin language,” you hear Eddie add.
Your mother pretends she hasn’t heard.
“What are the other … er, men, like?” She was going to say “patients” or “inmates”. but remembered about the madness thing.
“Most of them are all right,” you say. Just then, Zurka comes in to say something to the screw. You call him to meet your mother.
“Er, mum, this is Zurka. He’s one of the chaps I work with.”
“How are you?” she says to Zurka. She’s putting on a bright voice.
“Very well, thanks,” he says. “How are you?” Zurka’s Polish accent isn’t very noticeable. You invite him to sit down, hoping he’ll help keep the talk going and take some of the pressure off you. He sits down and talks to your mother about the weather and the gardening work and about her train trip. His manner is calm and easy, but you feel a faint worry when the talk is about the train trip. Zurka chopped those people up on a train and you’re afraid the subject of trains might be risky. You’re also feeling a vague sense of satisfaction to think that you can introduce your visitor to someone who’s chopped people up.
Zurka is pleased to be able to talk polite small talk with an outsider. It’s good practice for the future. He’s been a model patient here for eleven years and the rumour is that he’ll soon be transferred to the other section of the hospital where he’ll be in an unconfined ward. If you get sent to an unconfined ward, it means the authorities are planning to set you free after another four or five years maybe.
Your mother’s telling him about her work as a barmaid, and about how it’s hard on the feet, standing pulling beers all day.
“I worked as a cellar man once,” Zurka says.
“Oh, which hotel?” your mother asks.
“The White Crown.”
“I’ve worked there!” your mother says. “John Lewis is the publican.”
“I remember him!” cries Zurka.
So they talk about John Lewis, the publican of The White Crown. Your mother seems more relaxed now. You sit listening to them, feeling remorse that a Polish stranger who has chopped people up makes your mother feel more relaxed than her own son.
After a while, Zurka stands up and says he’d better not make a nuisance of himself and he says goodbye to your mother and goes out. You’re left, just the two of you together again, except for the screw reading his newspaper. The screw is relieved that Zurka has gone out. The men aren’t supposed to get involved with each other’s visitors.
“He seems quite nice,” your mother says of Zurka.
“Yes, a nice chap,” you say.
“A foreigner, isn’t he?”
“Polish.”
“Has he been here long?”
“Eleven years.”
You and your mother have an understanding that hardly anyone is kept in this place very long because, of course, you yourself will only be kept a short while, just until your “nerves” improve. So she doesn’t ask why Zurka is here, though she’s curious. Anyway, she’s clearly glad to have found there are men here as nice as Zurka seems to be.
It’s time for her to go.
“My train’s at four-fifty,” she says.
“Right-o,” you say, then you ask about something that’s been on your mind for the last few weeks, ever since the night in the television room when you heard the wind in the trees and the clank of the chain on the main gate.
“Er, mum, could you send me a book of poetry?” You feel awkward about using the word “poetry”. You don’t want her to think you’re becoming a poofter or anything like that.
“Poetry?” she says, looking at you.
“Yes, what they call an anthology.”
“All right dear, if you want me
to.”
“Thanks.”
You’re still feeling awkward about it when you give her a kiss on the cheek and she goes up the corridor with a screw to unlock the door for her. You wave to each other and she goes out the door. You’re very glad she came, now, though, and glad that Zurka helped so much. You go round to the window of the television room to see if you can watch her at the main gate. You try to wave to her from there, but she can’t see you inside the window with the bars in the way. Then you go back to the dining room and wait while the screw cuts your cake into eight portions to make sure there’s nothing concealed in it.
Arthur has a special project and has chosen you for it. He wants a brick-walled compost heap built at the bottom of the vegetable garden, hard against the main wall where the drainage is best.
“Done any bricklaying?” he wants to know.
“None,” you say.
“Doesn’t matter. You’ll pick it up as you go.”
So you’re given a trowel and a spirit-level and a few tips about mixing mortar and how to make use of string to keep the bricks in line. A load of sand and lime and cement is ordered and, after a week or so, is delivered and dumped near the site.
You’re even given a labourer. A bald, bony man of about fifty, named Bob Fleet. Bob Fleet is a homosexual and loves boys’ bums. At least, that’s what he keeps saying.
“Oh, God, I love a tender young bum!” he says as he mixes a wheelbarrow load of mortar. “Ever fucked a nice little boy?” he asks you.
“Not lately,” you say.
The hole for the compost heap has already been dug and you’re supposed to wall it on three sides to a height of about four feet. It’s good being down in the hole. The earth is damp and smells cold and fresh and there are big pink earthworms sticking out of it. It’s also private down there. Sometimes a screw comes to see how you’re doing, but mostly they don’t bother you. Your head and shoulders just come above the hole and there is long grass and the piles of bricks in front to screen you right off from the ward and from the high spots where the screws sit when they’re watching the other men in the garden.