by Paul Meloy
“Have fun? Dad asked. I nodded. I looked down at my shoes. “That’s great,” he said. “We’re all going for tea on the pier. Come on.”
The four adults started walking off down the path. The old boy held the bag with the flask stowed away in it. The old girl took his arm. Dad looked at mum and reached out to hold her hand, but she didn’t take it. Dad looked sad for a moment, but he put his hands in his pockets and carried on down the path to the gate. He started whistling, which was always a sign he was feeling a bit self-conscious. I wanted to tell him not to do it. I guess it embarrassed me a bit. It drew attention to him and I don’t think that was what he wanted. Look at me, I’m being unobtrusive. A bit of a contradiction there, I think.
He was so gentle, my dad. And I loved him so much. And if it hadn’t been for him I’d have never met Elizabeth and we wouldn’t have had that last, funny, happy holiday, just being together in easy company, hanging out every day doing silly, fun things.
It’s my best memory, and it saved my life. I just wish it had saved his.
THE OLD COUPLE were Elizabeth’s grandparents. Their names were Dolly and Gordon. To me, Dolly was just a big, soft, unremarkable grandmother, sweet and fretful and vague. Gordon, however, was a fascination. With his long, weathered face and large features, bright, restless hazel eyes, his compact wiry frame and short bandy legs, Gordon was constantly on the look-out for things to do to entertain us that were borderline dangerous, or at the very least distasteful. One afternoon he came springing down the slope that led from the promenade to the beach with a handful of tiny coloured flags, the type used to decorate the tops of sandcastles. He thrust a couple in our hands and bounded back up the slope. He stood framed by a row of beach huts, beckoning us. We got up off our towels and crunched up the pebbles. The slope was gritty and hot beneath our feet.
“I’ve put flags in all the piles of dog’s muck along the promenade all the way up to the pier,” he said. He spoke with the air of a commanding officer briefing his men on the deployment of tanks.
We looked at each other, and then looked along the prom. Indeed, at intervals, against the walls, in the shadows between kiosks selling gifts and renting deckchairs, crouched on verges and curled like sleeping rodents beneath the beach huts, turds lay, each impaled with a cheerful little pennant.
Another time he found a dead seagull on the shoreline and insisted that it would be fun to tie it to a length of twine and run up the beach dragging it behind us. I’m not sure why. At this point, at the height of Gordon’s schoolboy ravings, Dolly would say, “That’s enough, Gordon!” and it would quiet him and we could go back to doing normal things like skimming or digging holes and filling them with buckets of seawater. But he was always atwitch, those bright little eyes darting about for iffy things to do.
Many years later I recall reading an article about culled animals left to rot by rubbish bins in a safari park in Merseyside. The article came with photos and they were pretty bad. Piles of deer and antelope in crates and sprawled by bins, carcasses rotting and maggoty. But the most dreadful thing was the last picture. It was labelled Baboon’s head explodes out of bin bag, like some callous display at a modern art exhibition. It was a picture of a baboon’s head and shoulders which had slid stiff from a black bin bag, as per the title, but what made it so horrible—or more than just horrible—was the expression on its face. It had its mouth slightly open and its eyes shut and it looked like it had realised with a dawning yet amused certainty (doh!) that it had just been made the butt of some inoffensive joke. So expressive, that face. Except there were gouts of blood on its face and the side of its head, and it was dead and those heavy blue-lidded eyes were never going to open again.
I imagined Gordon finding a dead baboon in a bin bag.
The fun he’d have had with that.
ON OUR LAST day we met in the café on the pier. It was raining again and the planks underfoot were shiny and slippery and the rainwater dripped and hung in wobbling, wind-blown beads from the underside of the blue iron railings. A herring gull perched on one of the posts glared at us with its incensed spiv’s eyes. Dolly and Gordon were sitting at a window seat looking out along the pier and they waved as we battled towards the entrance to the café.
“Nice end to the week,” dad said as we sat down at the table with them.
“Where’s Elizabeth?” I asked.
Gordon looked up and nodded towards the counter. There was a one-armed bandit standing on a table next to the hatch. Elizabeth was plugging pennies into it and watching the cylinders rumble round each time she pulled the handle.
I went over. There was a tall glass containing the remains of a of banana milkshake on the Formica-topped table. Elizabeth scooped it up and sucked a last mouthful of yellow suds from the bottom of the glass through a straw with a wet clattering sound.
“Hello, Bert,” she said. She’d taken to calling everybody Bert. It was something she had picked up from her grandfather. “Granddad had some winkles earlier,” she added before I could say anything. “And there was a hermit crab in one of them. He’s kept it to show you.”
“Right,” I said, and before I could add to that, Elizabeth squealed with delight as the cylinders plunked down three lemons in a row and the bandit evacuated itself of a slew of dark brown pennies into a small brass cup at the bottom of the machine. Elizabeth scooped them out then turned and ran back to the table where our folks were sitting.
“I won, granddad,” she said, holding out two cupped palmfuls of coins.
“Drinks are on you, then, Bert,” Gordon said.
“That’s where you’re wrong, Bert,” Elizabeth said to Gordon.
Gordon laughed. Dolly said, “Don’t talk to your grandpa like that, Elizabeth,” in a resigned tone.
“Sorry grandma-Bert!” Elizabeth blurted, spluttering laughter, and turned and legged it out onto the pier clutching her winnings. “I’m going to the arcade!” she shouted back at us. Her red wellies clumped on the long boards and the wind dashed a spatter of rain against the window.
“We’re having tea,” dad said, “but you go if you want.”
I made to run after Elizabeth, but Gordon said, “Hang on, little Bert.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a handkerchief folded into a tight white lozenge.
Dolly narrowed her small bright blue eyes.
“Here you go,” he said. He unwrapped the handkerchief and held its contents out to me. I had a look.
Nestling in the middle of the fabric was a small conical shell, darkly banded with a pointed tip. Retracted into the aperture was a tiny orange crab. It was only about the size of my little fingernail. It was dead. I looked up at Gordon. His expression was sage. “In with my winkles,” he said. “Thought you’d be interested.”
I peered closer. It had tiny eyes like full stops and a ragged little mouth surrounded by pale pin-thin stalks. Two delicate, bright orange claws no bigger than beetle’s feet but clearly sharp, and articulated like pieces of fine clockwork. Peering back at me as it seemed to lean in a neighbourly fashion upon the shell’s curved lip.
I looked up at Gordon. He nodded. “Go on, Dan. Take him. He’s yours if you want him.”
“Don’t give him that, Gordon,” Dolly protested, looking with some anxiety at my folks. Mum seemed to be with Dolly on this. “It’ll stink,” she said.
“Nah,” Gordon said. “Might be a bit fishy for a day or two but it’ll dry out. Leave it on the windowsill in the sun and he’ll last forever.”
I looked up at dad for the approval I wanted. There it was, shining in his eyes. He nodded and winked at me. “What’ll you call him?” asked Gordon.
I held the shell on my palm and said, “Bert.”
What else?
BEFORE MY DAD died, he made sure I kept up my correspondences with Elizabeth. He was tireless. Elizabeth would write me long, rambling letters framed with dense borders of doodles and sketches; they’d arrive folded into tight squares in bulging pink envelopes. Sometimes s
he’d send me pages cut out of magazines, or photos, or postcards. Dad didn’t ask to read the letters, but he’d know when they arrived and would keep on at me until I replied—with my own notelets of limited interests. In comparison they seemed measly, childish, boyish, especially considering the detail and baroque generosity of Elizabeth’s letters. But it didn’t seem to put her off. She had clearly taken our solemn end-of-holiday pact to keep in touch to heart. She’d just write back again almost by return of post and another wad of burbling fairyland would thud onto the doormat.
“Very important to keep up your friendships,” dad would say. And then he’d put pens and paper in front of me and keep bugging me until I’d knocked out another grudging minimalist reply.
The week before dad died I got a letter from Elizabeth containing a homemade birthday card. It was a bit early. I wasn’t seven for another month. The picture she’d drawn on the front of the card was strange. It looked like a pylon standing on a hill against a starless black sky, and at the top of the structure was a clock face with hands at twenty past three—and there was something so bleak about the isolated skeletal structure that it made me turn my mouth down in a shudder. I opened the card and it read:
Happy Birthday Dan. Seven’s a magic number!! This is the Night Clock. Time’s ticking. Love Elizabeth. Xxxxxxxxxxx
Xxxx
To be honest I was probably more disconcerted by all those kisses, but nevertheless showed dad (hoping he wouldn’t mention them) and he said:
“Dear God!” And then he started crying.
It was just a few tears, but they shocked me. I must have looked shaken, because dad threw his arms round me and hugged me and told me he loved me; he told me he was very proud of me and that whatever life threw at me I mustn’t be frightened. Then he straightened up, coughed and handed me back my card. He smiled. It was a sweet smile, and his eyes were clear again. “Look after that one,” he said, and winked. I assumed he meant Elizabeth.
I know he was right to say that. They were the wisest words he ever said to me. They were also among the last.
Four days later, dad killed himself.
IN 1961, IRVING Goffman wrote a book called Asylums, which was a seminal educational book describing the effects of what he called ‘the total institution’ on patients in mental hospitals, how institutionalisation leads to the mortification of self. But my experience was different; to me these places were citadels; their walled perimeters contained a discrete sanctuary from the predatory undead roaming the world outside They were self-sufficient places of safety. There were farms and allotments, fields, meadows and sports grounds, stores, great engine rooms, laundries, ball rooms, shoe menders, carpenters, hospital wings, and huge voluminous wards like hangers where we could froth and convulse and scream and slope and creep and lurch and pester; where nurses really did wear white coats and consultants had mystifying, unpronounceable Mauritian names which were by necessity abbreviated to their first syllable: Dr Widge, Dr Sat, Dr Kun. It was uncertain what they were treating as the inmates had such a range of bizarre and monstrous syndromes that all they could modify with any kind of success was their complex and often gruesome behaviour. Shrieking, befouling, masturbating, buggering. Cretins drooling, steeple-skull monstrosities whooping and whistling with their bulging eyes, twisted spines and fused yet unfathomably dextrous fingers. Idiots wandering the grounds with their wirelesses and Bunty annuals, vacant and sated from a transgression in the bushes or behind the pavilion. Imbeciles supple as yogis cross-legged and rocking in their shit-wadded pads in the dirt outside their wards. We were all given drugs. Huge, thick draughts of them, which made us shamble and sleep.
I offer no apologies for the language; these were the names—the diagnoses— by which we were known. Less than thirty years ago, I was a certified lunatic. Admissions to the bins were often for life. You were forgotten. My stay was only curtailed by their sudden and brutal closures. I was propelled from a timeless, shuffling routine into a world of community care. I had a flat and a fortnightly visit from a nurse to keep me going. That was my treatment.
Once, when I was suffering a particularly florid episode of psychosis, I imagined that the dead that walked the ruined world outside the walls of the asylum had turned their attention to the hospital and were gathering in sopping ranks beyond the high, red-bricked walls. I spent an evening working my way around the perimeter tying all the gates together with rolls of rusty wire I had found amongst the ashes of a bonfire. They were probably bedsprings from a burnt mattress but the heat of the fire had rendered them brittle and soft. They kept snapping in my hands as I twisted them around the latches on the gates, stabbing my palms and the backs of my hands. I stood back and watched the faces of the dead push against the bars, smelling the blood that dripped from my fingers. I remember the sun setting behind me; it was autumn and the grounds were exposed and damp. But the sky was a clear blue above, darkening in an arc beyond the bulk of the wards at my back and the setting sun threw the buildings into hellish relief against that sky as it sank away from my ruined world.
I saw the face of my father, there in that throng. He struggled to the front and reached arms through the bars.
Sometimes I thought of death as a slot through which all things were removed, all time and space, as it sucked you away. If time and matter and energy could come from nothing then was each individual slot a reclamation of that previous state? Was death a fuel for other universes? Were we just a by-product of an alien fatality in some cosmos beyond our own? Was creation elsewhere nothing more than an unremitting sucking away of our memories and personalities, a steady state of bereavements and loss?
You see, my father’s suicide had left a profound impression on me. I loved him with all of a child’s broken heart, and I hated him with an adult’s entire broken mind.
I rushed towards the gate, to take my father in an embrace, to hold him, to choke him; to kiss him and bite him.
Much later, nurses found me curled into a ball at the foot of the gates and took me, without a great deal of tenderness, back home to my ward. It was time for a more invasive treatment.
THROUGHOUT MY TIME in the asylum the only constant link to the outside world was Elizabeth.
She wrote to me every month. Her letters were more cautious, gentler than the girlish stuff of her youth, but no less full of love and concern. I rarely wrote back. When I was experiencing moments of lucidity I hid myself beneath the covers of my bed and wished the world would blacken and die; I longed for my slot to appear and drag me away to form a universe of my own. Would I be its God, or just one of many? Would I create paradise or would I be barren and expand forever through unformed darkness?
If I wrote to Elizabeth it was usually when I was starting to lose my grip again, when the drugs stopped working or some unusually bad combination of events triggered a relapse. That grey area when hallucinations and delusions began to colour reality like drops of blood spreading in a lake of disturbed water; angry, crimson-tipped waves rippling at the edges of the mind heralding the incoming storm.
And as my delusional system became more complex I incorporated more and more of my memories, experiences and ideas into them. It was my mind’s way of keeping me out of reality for as much time as possible. I was harmless, although often disturbed enough to be restrained for my own physical safety. I wished no harm to others and my delusions were not particularly persecutory; in fact as they grew in scope I became more amenable, more at peace in a world I was creating. I had decided, somewhere in the fissures of my unconscious, to become something new, someone of stature. If the slot would not manifest, then I would dig it out of the air in handfuls. But it wasn’t a slot to Heaven I opened. It was to somewhere else entirely. And I found a use for myself there.
As the asylum wound down towards its closure, wards and wings and blocks of offices became untenanted and derelict. The corridors between the wards, which were little more than draughty, elongated conservatories roofed with corrugated tin, lined with o
ld, locked doors leading off into rooms and compartments and areas of the hospital unexplored for years, were passage to fewer and fewer people as patients died off or were displaced to other, smaller units outside the hospital and staff left or were laid off.
It was easy to find and break into a small, cold room at the end of one of these corridors and use it for my purposes. It contained an old wooden desk and a couple of chairs. A metal filing cabinet stood in a corner beside a window that looked out across the overgrown cricket field. It was perfect for my needs. It became my office.
And it was there that I met my best friend and started taking him back in time.
TREVENA SAT ON a stool next to the breakfast bar in Elizabeth’s tiny kitchen and listened to the man named Daniel as he told his story. He sipped at a hot mug of tea that Elizabeth had replenished twice already.
He had taken the call from Daniel an hour and a half ago and despite his initial bewilderment—he had awakened from a deep dream-lashed sleep fuelled by alcohol and wrath—he had listened with care and a mind open to all possibilities following the events of the last few days. He recalled the last conversation he had had with Les, how he should find this Daniel because he had very important things to do. When Daniel told him that he knew why his patients were dying, Trevena had agreed to meet, and had driven to the address on the estate he had been given in less than fifteen minutes.
A small, attractive woman in her forties had opened the door to him. Trevena immediately noticed that she had a glass eye. It was a good one and detracted nothing from her prettiness. She smiled and shook his hand and ushered him into her kitchen where Trevena was introduced to a handsome man of medium build wearing a long coat who appraised him with the most care-worn eyes Trevena had ever seen.