by Peter Kocan
Fred Henderson hasn’t much sympathy.
“Well fuck me dead! Dennis was ’ere in the first place for cuttin’ ’is missus’s throat! How many throats does ’e reckon ’e’s allowed?”
It’s true. Dennis Lane has been worse than stupid, worse than idiotic. You can’t think of a word to describe it, except maybe “mad”. and you learned long ago that that word doesn’t mean anything. It took Dennis Lane nine years to get his transfer. He might get another in nine more. He’ll have plenty of time to search for the appropriate word, and to polish his defensive game.
“You’re no longer a man of leisure,” the Charge tells you one morning. “You’re to start at OT today.”
“Righto!” you say, trying to sound keen. You aren’t sure whether you are keen or not. You’ve begun to be used to staying in the yard all day, watching the other men there and the activity along the dirt road, learning how the sun looks on the trees and grass, knowing the time by the shadows.
And there’s your reading …
You’ve been able to get your two most precious books from among your few bits of gear in the storeroom. You had to choose carefully because there are no lockers here, no place to keep private things safe, so you must carry them with you the whole time. And the screws get irritated if you ask them to unlock the storeroom too often. You chose your anthology of poems, the lovely green-covered book your mother got you and from which you first understood about poetry. The other choice was a novel you discovered a year ago. This novel had become part of your life, or maybe part of your life had entered the novel —it was hard to say which. Finding it was like an act of fate. A poet wrote to you after you’d had a piece of verse published in a little magazine. You wrote back and for a while the two of you became quite friends. The poet wrote very good letters, full of quotations from Shakespeare, and how his wounded spirit ached for sanctuary, things like that. He told you that you simply must read The Survivor. The poet was always telling you that you simply must do this or that—read Proust, take Vitamin B, learn chess. A lot of the suggestions didn’t seem to have much connection with your life in MAX, but when he said about The Survivor, and told you the outline, you really wanted to get hold of it. It was about a person called David Allison who has an unhappy childhood, then goes to the trenches in Flanders, and afterwards tries to become a writer so as to tell the truth of the war for the sake of all the dead men. The story seemed, from what the poet told you, to connect with a lot of your own thoughts and feelings. A few months later you were helping clean out the cell old Tom Hawksworth had had for forty years. You found some mouldy books and one of them was The Survivor! You could barely believe it. The copy was torn and the last few pages were missing but that didn’t matter. You hid it quickly under your jacket and kept it. Old Tom Hawksworth was dead, so he didn’t care.
The anthology and the wonderful novel are probably the only two books you’ll ever need in your life. Between them they seem able to tell you everything you’ll ever need to know or understand. But Occupational Therapy is a whole new situation and you’d rather not have to face a whole new situation just yet.
On the other hand you will be in REFRACT for several years and you can’t stay sitting in the yard for that long. You weigh the pros and cons of going to Occupational Therapy, then you remember that no-one’s asking your opinion anyway.
“This is the doctor’s brainwave, not mine,” grumbles the Charge as he unlocks the gate in the fence after breakfast. The Charge doesn’t like you being let out to work. He doesn’t like you staying idle in the yard either. His remark about being a man of leisure had an edge to it. All he’d like is for you to be back in MAX.
You step through the gate and wait for him. He just waves you irritably on. “Go along. I’ll sight you,” he says. “Sighting” is when a screw watches you go somewhere. You walk on, feeling strange. This is the first time in nearly five years that you’ve been outside walls and fences without a screw next to you. You walk in a very straight line so the Charge won’t think you are turning off to bolt. When you get to the door of OT you turn to wave, feeling grateful that you’ve been trusted a little bit, but the Charge is already going up the yard with his back turned. He probably doesn’t care if you escape now—it’d be the doctor’s fault.
Inside the door the noise of a power saw is very loud and the air’s thick with pine-smelling dust. A dozen or so men are handling tools and machines and lengths of wood. You stand wondering what to do. A couple of screws are working with the men and you can see the brown-haired nurse through another door. Nobody takes any notice of you. You ask a man where the boss is. He can’t hear you properly. You shout in his ear and he shrugs. One of the screws comes past with a long plank, forcing you out of the way.
The brown-haired nurse comes through the room carrying a basket.
“Did you want something?” she asks, leaning close so you’ll hear.
“I was sent from REFRACT.”
“Oh, are you Tarbutt?”
“Yes.”
She looks at you with wide blue eyes, as though being Tarbutt is the last thing she expected of you. You can’t bring yourself to return her gaze directly but you try not to seem too shifty, or too aware of her body.
“You’ll have to see Mr Trowbridge,” she tells you, and leads the way into a rough office littered with wood and paint pots and pieces of metal and other things. Mr Trowbridge is the Charge here, though his title is Therapy Supervisor or something. He’s a tall man about fifty. He has a stooped, moody look, and an air of being preoccupied with ten different problems so that you only have about a tenth of his attention.
“Your ward doctor recommends you highly,” says Mr Trowbridge. “I wouldn’t normally take someone so recently out of MAX.” The noise is still loud from the work room and you have to strain to hear. Mr Trowbridge abruptly goes out to help someone align a drill, then gets caught up with several other jobs, then comes back.
“Well, what d’you fancy doing?” he asks.
“I’m not sure,” you answer. You would like to say you won’t be able to bear the constant noise. The noise is like it was in the factory you worked in when you were free. When you were going mad. “We need someone for our vinyl bag section. Can you use a sewing machine?” he asks.
“No.”
“Come and have a look.”
You follow through the dust and noise to the rear of the building. There’s a big bank of windows that face across the vegetable gardens to the willow trees and the pond. At one end of a long room are patients doing basketwork with the brown-haired nurse. At the other end is a corner full of stacked rolls of vinyl, a table, a tool-rack, and a large, ancient sewing machine.
“This is the old girl,” Mr Trowbridge says, whipping a cover off the machine. “Manufactured 1922. Treadle type originally. As you see, we’ve electrified it.”
He shows you a vinyl bag.
“This is the finished item.”
It’s a proper ladies’ shopping bag with handles and a front pocket and metal clasps. It looks hard to make.
“This is how you thread and operate the machine.”
Mr Trowbridge sits down and quickly runs the thread from the top spool down through a series of hooks and loops into the needle, then he brings the thread up from a spool underneath. Then he takes a piece of scrap vinyl and sews across it very fast about twenty times. You can’t follow any of this.
“The cutting is done this way.”
He spreads a roll of vinyl on the table and begins marking it with a set of plywood patterns.
“The main thing’s to use the vinyl economically. It’s expensive.”
Mr Trowbridge has marked a full set of patterns when he is called away.
“Right. Cut out the pieces, then try to work out how they should be sewn together, using the finished bag as a model. I’ll check on your progress later.”
Mr Trowbridge goes.
You take a pair of heavy scissors from the rack and slowly cut the vinyl
. After you have looked at the cut pieces for a long time, comparing them with the parts of the finished bag, you think you see how they go. You wonder when Mr Trowbridge will return to teach you the sewing. But maybe he meant for you to just go ahead. Maybe he was teaching you the sewing when he zipped across the scrap vinyl twenty times. Maybe he assumes you now know all about it. You sit there, trying to think exactly what he said before he went, but the more you think about it the more confusing it seems. If you go ahead and try to sew you might get into trouble for doing something you weren’t told to do. If you don’t go ahead you may be in trouble for not doing what you were told.
You’re always like this. That’s partly how you know you aren’t the same as most people. Most people just see one meaning and go ahead and it turns out okay. The only other person you know of who thinks and thinks and worries and worries like you is David Allison in The Survivor. That’s why you often feel that David Allison is your only friend, almost the only real person you know.
After a long time you go to ask Mr Trowbridge what he meant. He’s pushing a length of timber through a planing machine which makes the worst noise you’ve ever heard. You shout to make him hear, then you get too close and nudge the timber so that it goes crooked in the machine. Mr Trowbridge yells at you to get back to the vinyl section and he’ll attend to you when he’s ready.
You decide you should try to sew. You put a scrap of vinyl under the needle and press the treadle. There is a burst of electricity, the vinyl whizzes through, and the machine stops in a big tangle of thread. You spend a minute recovering from the fright, then try to unpick the tangle. You can’t figure how to rethread through all the hooks and loops. You try a few different ways but the tangle happens again when you touch the treadle.
Mr Trowbridge returns and shows you the threading again and when he goes away you mess it up. You have to sit there as if you are really keen to understand how it works, as if you are thinking the problem out, but you know you can’t because you are too stupid.
You have sensed the brown-haired nurse glancing at you from time to time from the basket section. You haven’t dared glance back except a couple of times quickly. There is another nurse who is slightly older and more senior and who is Mr Trowbridge’s deputy. The noise isn’t as bad here, and there’s a lull sometimes, so the two nurses do a lot of talking and joking between themselves and with their patients. They even have a gramophone and play records during the lulls in the noise. You learn from the talk that the brown-haired nurse is Cheryl and the senior one is Janice.
“What music do you like?” Janice asks you.
“Oh, any,” you say, surprised at being spoken to.
“Ronnie & the Roundabouts?”
“They’re alright,” you say.
“We’re all crazy about Ronnie & the Roundabouts here,” Janice says. “Except her,” she adds, pointing at Cheryl. “And she doesn’t matter.”
“That’s no way to talk about a lady,” says an old bloke in a wheelchair. He seems to act as Janice’s straight man.
“That’s no lady! That’s Cheryl!”
Cheryl grins and pretends to hit Janice with a basket. There’s this constant banter about Cheryl being a bit of a fool who doesn’t matter. She doesn’t appear to mind and she occasionally gets her own back with a wisecrack. All the same, you wish you hadn’t said you liked Ronnie & the Roundabouts. You’re on Cheryl’s side.
It’s odd to have the rack of tools near you. It holds knives, awls, scissors—dangerous things. In MAX you were treated as a maniac who couldn’t be trusted with a knife and fork to eat with. Of course there were inconsistencies—no knives in the dining room but hoes and pitchforks in the garden. You don’t look at these tools much. You don’t want to seem too interested in them. You notice, though, that the pliers have had the wire-cutting parts filed out.
The day drags along to four o’clock. You’ve done nothing but sit glumly at a machine you can’t fathom. Mr Trowbridge has shown you how to thread several times now, getting moodier and more silent each time. He has probably decided you’re a dud. He might even think you are acting this way on purpose—a psychotic’s devious method of asking to go home to MAX. They say madmen often signal in behaviour what they can’t say in words.
Mr Trowbridge escorts you back to the ward, telling you on the way that you’ll need to pull your socks up. A quarter of an hour later the Charge calls you to the office.
“I’ve had a call from OT. An awl is missing.”
You don’t say anything.
“Have you got it?”
“No.”
“I’ll have to search you.”
“Alright.”
Later he tells you it’s been found at OT.
3
Silas Throgmorton has recovered slightly, perhaps because of all the cups of tea the screws have taken him. You are on the verandah one Sunday morning, reading a little, listening to your transistor radio which you keep tuned low so the classical music won’t offend anybody.
“I’M THE OWNER AND THE MAKER!”
You look up. An old man is standing there. He has a blanket round his shoulders like a robe and is wearing a tall hat with a ribbon of toilet paper tied to it and trailing down his back. He looks like a king.
“It’s all mine!” he shouts, staring at the ward and the yard and everything else within view.
Dunn is in the yard. He whirls round, tugging at his ratty moustache.
“Bah! Rubbish! It’s MINE!”
“Hand it over to me!” the king shouts, pointing a bony finger at Dunn.
“You?” says Dunn with a terrible contempt. He stands in the centre of the yard, hands on waist, glaring at the king. “I had my first billion before you was ever born!”
The king grips the rail. He’s enraged by this insolence.
“You never had two bob in yer bloody life! It belongs ter me! I’m Throgmorton!”
“My arse!” sneers Dunn. “I knew Frogmorton six million years ago, before you was ever heard of!”
“I’m The Owner and The Maker!”
“You’re bloody nothin’!”
Some of the men are beginning to take an interest. The Charge strolls from the office to listen and Fred Henderson and a couple of screws lay their cards down and turn in their chairs. Dunn is yelling that he could buy and sell Frogmorton a trillion times over.
“He’s right, Silas,” the Charge says.
“You’re sacked!” barks the king.
“Aw Jeez, Silas, don’t be hard on me,” pleads the Charge.
“I said you’re sacked! Pack yer bag and git orf the place!”
“Bah!” Dunn sneers. “You couldn’t sack a bloody dog! I’ve sacked more blokes than you’ve had hot dinners!”
They argue over who’s sacked more. Dunn has sacked forty-seven zillion, so he wins.
“What about them goldmines?” Fred Henderson chips in.
“They’re mine!”
“I own the lot! Nine grillion of ’em!”
“What about the sheep stations?”
“I’ve got ’em all!”
“Ahhh, don’t give me the bloody shits! I bought ’em all up six hundred centuries ago!”
“You’re a liar!”
It goes on all morning, with Fred Henderson and the screws helping. Two of the screws are discussing whether they could tape-record it and maybe sell the tape in the pub. They reckon they’d get fifty dollars.
Bimbo is squatting beside Fred Henderson’s chair. He’s a bit worried by all the shouting, specially from the king who is closest.
“Willee root me?” he asks Fred.
“Hah! He couldn’t root a fly!” says Dunn. “I’ve rooted nine thousand zillion …”
But it isn’t a fair contest because Silas has been ill.
Time can drag at weekends, though if the days are fine it’s not so bad and you can stay in the yard and watch whatever there is to watch. You’ve begun trying to write poems about some of the men. That’s a sign that
you are more settled now. You can only write when you feel fairly settled. There is a wolfish man who spends all his time lying on the grass with his penis out, masturbating. He does it slowly to a climax and starts again. He takes no notice of female nurses or patients who pass by: whatever pictures are in his mind must be more exciting, and it’d be interesting to know what they are—for the poem you’re trying to write. It seems almost, from the way he rubs his sperm into the soil, that he’s impregnating the earth. It’s as if the grass and trees and flowers of the world only happen because of this; as if all life and beauty flowed from him, the seed-giver. But everyone just calls him Wanker.
The wards alongside are familiar now. The wheelchairs in 7 stay parked on the lawn most of the time when it’s fine, the figures in them slumped and the strings of spit dangling from the mouths. Occasionally one has a fit, arching and gurgling in the chair, and a nurse comes to deal with it while some of the retards gallop around like monkeys when there is a disturbance in a cage.
There are disturbances sometimes among the old women on the other side. You hear screams and long shrill arguments, and the voices of particular nurses who seem to control the women by outscreaming them. Mostly, though, it is quiet. The women are showered each Saturday in the shower room at the end of their verandah. From the bottom of REFRACT’s yard you can see them milling naked at the door, waiting turns, being herded in. The first time you saw them you watched for a minute, slightly aroused by the shock of the nakedness. But they looked too helpless and broken. You felt you were gloating over the final sadness of their lives.
Outsiders often drive along the dirt road at weekends. They drive slowly and peer into the yards and laugh and point out the sights to one another.
“Struth, look at that one pullin’ himself!”
“Hey, wanker!”
“You’ll go mad doin’ that!”