by Peter Kocan
Except for some of the screws there isn’t a single face you know. A few men are lying on the grass. A few more are sitting on the verandah or pacing along the fence. They mostly wear baggy grey hospital-issue and look like dills. A dill is a patient who’s too mad or stupid to know what’s going on and you can never be mates with a dill because you can’t rely on him. These are scrapings from other chronic or retard wards, put here for being especially difficult or disturbed. Refractory types, which is why this ward is called REFRACT. They’re here as a punishment and that alone sets them apart from someone like you who had to sweat years to get here. Two or three men are going in and out of the pantry door, wearing aprons and banging dixies and fooling about. You don’t know them or what routines they are following. In MAX you’d know everything. Knowing everything kept you safe.
A very small bandy-legged bloke is circling the yard. He has a thin sharp face. On one of his rounds he veers across to you.
“Gettin’ out Tuesday!” he declares.
“That’s good,” you say.
“Yep, Tuesday’s the day!”
“Terrific.”
He stands grinning at you and rubbing his hands with glee. He does another round of the yard. As he passes you again you give him a friendly look.
“What are you giggin’ at, ya fuckin’ mongrel-eyed hoon?” he yells, shoving his sharp face at you.
“Nothing,” you say quickly.
“Ya slimy cunt!” he screams. “I’ll fuckinwell knock ya rotten!”
“Sorry mate,” you say. He’s too small to be afraid of, but you don’t want any trouble. And you don’t know what game this bloke’s playing, if he is playing. He glares savagely for another moment and stalks off. When he comes by you again you stare in the opposite direction. He stops in a friendly way and tells you about Tuesday. His mind is gone.
You think you’ve got this little dill measured. There are sixty men in REFRACT. Fifty-nine measures to get.
The afternoon is turning colder and the shadow of the ward is beginning to go across the dirt road. Some men come up from the vegetable garden and stand at the gate in the fence. A couple more come from Occupational Therapy, and a few more from other directions. A screw unlocks and they troop in. You see Fred Henderson. He was in MAX and got his transfer a year ago. He’s about fifty, red-faced, and wheezes a lot. You were never real friends with him because he was out of your age group. Besides, Fred Henderson was always a bit chummy with the screws, playing cards with them and helping them take the mickey out of patients. You and Bill Greene and Ray Hoad made fun of patients too, but only amongst yourselves.
“I heard you was comin’ over,” says Fred Henderson.
It’s just like him to have “heard”.
He wants to hear the latest from MAX, mainly about blokes he made fun of. You tell him how so-and-so was caught sucking-off in the shower and he has a good wheeze at that. You laugh with him. Fred Henderson lowers his voice.
“Some of the screws aren’t too happy with your transfer,” he says.
“Why not?” you ask. You never know with Fred Henderson whether he’s giving you a helpful tip or taking a rise out of you or fishing for something to tell his pals.
“They reckon you’re still psychotic,” he says.
“Yeah?” you say. You mustn’t make the mistake of denying it. By the time the story got back to the screws it may sound as though you are denying there’s anything wrong with you at all, and that’s the mark of a troublemaker.
You start changing the subject, asking about the routine here.
You see Dennis Lane come to the gate and then inside. Dennis Lane was the best ping-pong player in MAX. Ping-pong was the only thing you ever associated him with. He was very quiet, with a brooding self-control. He hadn’t many brilliant shots, just a perfect defensive game. You wave to Dennis Lane and he glances back and walks up inside the ward. If it was anyone else you’d think something was wrong, but this is just Dennis Lane’s manner.
Suddenly there’s a commotion and a black man bounds down the yard, blubbering around Fred Henderson, pawing him like a big silly dog.
“Bimbo, you black bastard!” Fred Henderson shouts, and slaps the man’s head. “Shake hands with Len,” he orders. Bimbo stares wide-eyed at you. He seems to have a fixed idea.
“Willee root me?” he keeps asking. “Willee root me, eh? Willee, eh? Willee root me?”
“Bloody oath he will!” Fred Henderson tells him, winking at you. You put your hand out to Bimbo and Fred Henderson punches him in the ribs to make him shake.
“Show Len the war dance!” Fred Henderson orders. Bimbo capers for you and does a chant with his big lips spitting and flapping until another punch stops him. Bimbo squats at Fred Henderson’s feet. He points to other men in the yard and babbles.
“Dat one root me? Willee, eh? Wot ’bout dat one? Willee root me, eh?” Fred Henderson kicks him to shut him up.
“I’m the black bugger’s best friend,” says Fred Henderson.
The Charge shouts from the verandah for us to come inside. Screws are locking the outer doors of the ward. Some of the grey figures on the grass have to be prodded. The little bandy-legged man is hurling abuse at a screw trying to shepherd him.
“I’ll knock you into the middle of next week!” the screw threatens.
Make it Tuesday, you mutter.
The dining room is long and shabby and lit by bare lights that give a lurid effect. Ten large tables are set in two rows. A screw motions you to a place near Dennis Lane. The tables are graded. The end ones in the other row are for the worst dills. Bimbo is there with a monstrous hunchback and a whole bunch of others who are gibbering, or twisting about, or lolling vacantly. A servery rolls open at the end of the room and plates are pushed through. The men rise from the tables by turns, bumping and stumbling, to collect the food. Those at the worst tables are snuffling the meal down, or mashing it on the table, or treading it into the floor. The scene is unsettling after the orderliness of MAX. You glance at the screws but they don’t seem bothered. Then seconds are called. This too is strange. They almost never allowed seconds in MAX. They kept you hungry on principle. Bimbo goes for seconds and a screw piles the plate high and when that’s finished insists on giving him another lot. A dessert of jelly is next and seconds are called again. Bimbo is plied with three helpings, then four. After the sixth he’s had enough, but the screw swears to skin his hide unless he eats more. Bimbo’s half-laughing and half-choking. Finally he vomits on the table and a cheer goes up.
“He’s finished,” says the screw and heaves the rest into a bin.
After tea some of the men go upstairs to bed. The others crowd into the dayroom to watch TV or play cards or snooker or just sprawl in chairs. The dayroom quickly fills with smoke and the smells of so many men. You walk out on the wired-in side section of the verandah where the Charge’s office is. The screws are gathered in there, waiting to go home. They notice you and say something among themselves. You wish you hadn’t wandered out here. You’d rather not attract attention. Past the office is a row of rooms for a few of the better patients, the silvertails. Fred Henderson has one. They’re really cells, with the heavy doors that cells have, but these are called rooms and aren’t locked. You stroll along near the rooms and stand in shadow. It’s quieter here, and cool. The moon is coming up over the tiled roof opposite, making the tiles gleam silver.
The day-screws begin to go and the night-screws arrive. You get tense when you see the senior night-screw is Smiler, an old enemy. You think you should go back and lose yourself a bit among the other men, but it wouldn’t help. Smiler knows you’re here. That’s the first thing they’d tell him.
Smiler comes from the office. He’s smiling of course. He always smiles. He says how glad he is that you got this transfer. He says he always would’ve bet money on you getting it sooner or later. He starts telling you that the essence of this ward is trust, and he even spells it for you: T-R-U-S-T. The security here is a sham, he sa
ys, and any bloke can piss off if he wants to. Smiler describes a few methods of escape and how a bloke could hitch a lift on the highway and be in the city in two hours.
“I’m a sportsman,” he says. “I’ll give anyone a head start. I’ll even unlock the door.”
All the while you are giving him a steady man-to-man look, as though you’re full of quiet respect for a straight-talking fellow. Smiler strolls off and you return to the smoke and smell of the dayroom. You’d rather stay in the cool shadows and watch the moon, but it seems spoiled.
At ten o’clock we are herded upstairs. You enter a huge dormitory that looks like a flophouse, with rickety iron beds packed close together. The junior screw consults a bed plan and tells you 43 is yours, then he and Smiler go out and you hear keys in the lock. The big room is draughty and cold. You sit on your bed and examine an old pair of pyjamas that are there. They’ve been washed but the pants have the remains of a shit stain and a faint smell of it. The dormitory lights are switched off from somewhere outside. Your bed is against the wall near a window. You are very pleased about that. Half the knack of survival is getting near windows.
You undress to your singlet and roll the clothes into a tight bundle, then put your valuables inside the bundle. There’s your comb, your toothbrush, your two-dollar note which you can’t spend but which is nice to have, your pad with scribbled bits of poems, your biro, and your transistor radio. The radio is your prized possession. It’s so small it can go in your shirt pocket and it has given you some wonderful times. You learned to like classical music from this little radio. Some of the best times in MAX were when you were working in the vegetable garden or taking care of the swimming pool and the sun and wind and birdsong all around made you feel really happy; then you could tune your shirt pocket to some classical music and the happiness was complete. You got fresh batteries on the weekly buy-up when they let you order a dollar’s worth of stuff from the canteen. Most blokes ordered tobacco, but you spent your buy-up on biros and note-pads and Sao biscuits and batteries. You wonder how you’ll get those things now. You suppose they have weekly buy-ups here too.
You put the bundle under the bed and hop between the covers. You lie for a while, feeling how hard the mattress is and trying to sort out the smells in it. Then you decide you’d better keep your bundle closer so you take it into the bed. By turning your head upwards you can see out of the top of the window to where some trees are tossing in a wind. You can’t hear the wind so the tossing seems more to be in time with the sighing and snoring of the men in the dormitory.
A dark figure is moving between the beds. It’s Bimbo, naked, his long penis hanging down. He is shoved away from several beds before someone opens the blankets for him and he gets in. You see them moving under the blankets and hear the old iron bed squeak to the rhythm. You hug yourself, trying not to giggle too loud. You wish Ray Hoad and Bill Greene were here. What a joke they’d make of it!
2
Mornings are good in REFRACT, mainly because it’s so good to leave the stuffy smell of the dormitory. There’s always a lot of banging and bustle when the day-screws unlock the door and barge in shouting, “Hands off cocks! On socks!” the way they do. You wash your face and clean your teeth at a basin, shave with a locked razor, then go down into the yard.
It’s autumn weather. The mornings are cool and sunny and the yard looks fresh, the sun at a changed angle and the ground wet with dew. You can’t know a place until you’ve seen it at all times of the day and in all weathers and all seasons. It takes a year. The sun shines on the big pond at this time of morning. It shines on the water and on the trees and on the tin roof of Occupational Therapy. The tin roof looks like a sheet of flowing water all lit up, with the pond another sheet of water down lower behind it, as if the pond is being filled by the flow of the tin.
You are used to the fence now. You go down to it and look through at the few things you couldn’t see the first day. There isn’t much more—just a few extra trees and a curve of the dirt road where it goes up past a row of wards slightly raised on a ridge far off to the left. You watch the morning routine, fixing more details in your mind. Some men are doing chores. The dayroom chairs are carried out to the lawn so the dayroom can be swept and polished, then they are put back. You lend a hand, to show you aren’t a bludger.
Fred Henderson and a couple of screws are playing crib at a table outside the Charge’s office. Fred Henderson calls to you to join in and you have to say you don’t know crib. For a moment you wish you did. You could get in with the screws, be one of their card-playing circle. It would ease your way here. Then you realise it’s a silly idea. You need a personality like Fred Henderson’s to get in with screws. You’d need to be able to stay loud and hearty all the time and mock everything and go on endlessly about cars and football and sheilas. There’d be no time to think your own thoughts. In MAX you were able to mock and joke and be stupid with your mates because with them it was deliberate. It was like farting at the system, or like keeping a ball in the air. The screws don’t even know there’s a ball. They think they’re normal.
After breakfast men go off to work-places, clumping in boots. You sit around in the yard until lunch and see them all come back. It’s the same in the afternoon. You don’t seem expected to do anything so you just watch the others in the yard. The little bandy legged bloke has told you about Tuesday at least a hundred times and has abused you a lot more also. And there is an old bloke who sits gobbing stuff out of his throat all day long and yelling, “Burn me alive, damn you! Burn me alive!” And there’s a tall epileptic named Harris who is supposed to be a king-hit merchant. He will come over and start talking and you notice him edging a bit closer to you than he needs to, so you edge away. If he goes on talking to you for a while you find you’ve both edged halfway across the yard. And there is somebody called Silas Throgmorton sick in one of the rooms. The screws keep taking him cups of tea and medicine. They seem fond of him. Whenever screws go in the room you hear an old sick voice declaring something about being The Owner and The Maker and threatening to sack the whole bloody crew unless they smarten up. And there is Dunn, a thin lanky bloke with a ratty moustache. Dunn strides about sneering when he hears the sick old voice from the room.
“Bah, Frogmorton? I had my first fifty billion before that bastard was born!”
Small bands of patients go past on the dirt road, mostly retards of both sexes and usually with a female nurse. They wander along gradually getting all out of step and lagging like sheep until the group is strung out along the road. The nurse will stop and call for the stragglers, or will go back and shoo them forward, and then they all pass out of sight. A while later they come back in the opposite direction and you see the straggling and shepherding happen again. You still aren’t used to seeing female nurses.
There are female nurses in the wards alongside. Pretty girls in blue uniforms. And there are some in Occupational Therapy. One in particular often comes out to pick up or put down half-finished baskets near the door. You see her now. She’s slim and nice, with brown hair tied back. She takes a basket and turns to go in, then pauses and looks across towards you. She’s just having a stickybeak into the yard you suppose. You try to see her face clearly. Yes, she’s nice. You suddenly realise she might be looking at you. It makes you want to shrink away to nothing. You get a picture of what she’s seeing if she is looking at you. She’s seeing a dill in baggy rags and a rough haircut, someone she wouldn’t want to touch because he’s probably smelly and has dribble on him. You close your eyes, wishing she’d go inside, and when you open them after a moment she is gone. You feel like crying. You mutter, “Stuck-up bitch!” a few times and it helps the crying feeling go away. In a little while you are able to tell yourself that it was a good thing to have happened because there was a lesson in it. Lessons arm you if you learn them properly and early. The lesson this time is that female nurses can do something that male screws can’t. They can shame you.
Later in the afternoon y
ou are strolling by the bottom fence. The grass is in the shadow of the ward and too cold now to sit on. You sense a tension around the Charge’s office. The Charge is on the phone. He comes out to confer with other screws, then talks again on the phone. You stay near the fence, keeping out of whatever it might be, but glancing at the screws to see if they are looking your way. If this tension concerns you they’d be looking. You don’t seem to be on their minds, which means you need not be really scared, just nervous in a general way. You can still suffer from the fallout of someone else’s trouble, if it’s bad, but you’ll survive.
Dennis Lane comes along the dirt road to the gate in the fence and stands in his brooding, self-controlled way, waiting to be let in. He’s early. You half-think to walk across and talk to him through the fence while he’s waiting, tip him off about the tension. Then a screw on the verandah notices Dennis and calls something to the Charge in the office. The screw walks down briskly with his key at the ready, but as though he wants to appear to be acting quite routinely until Dennis Lane is safely through the gate. You know who the tension is about.
Dennis Lane is taken into the Charge’s office and you glimpse him behind the glass. He’s sitting, with screws around him. The Charge gets on the phone again. The men arrive back from the work-places. Just before tea a screw brings a suitcase and puts it down outside the office. It’s Dennis Lane’s gear. He’s going back to MAX. Screws bring Dennis Lane out of the office. He looks just as he always did when you faced him along the ping-pong table and he patiently hit every ball back until you felt you were playing against a wall. He is put in a car and driven away.
Fred Henderson has the details.
“Silly bastard was doin’ his balls over some retard bitch from Ward 12. This afternoon he caught ’er at the canteen with a little boyfriend she ’ad on the side. Dennis did his block. Threatened to cut ’er throat. Anyway, that’s what our Charge was told, and ’e got it from the Charge of 12 who got it from the canteen manager who got it from the girl on the counter.”