STRANGER THAN KINDNESS
STRANGER THAN KINDNESS
Mark A Radcliffe
For Maia and Katie
PART 1
23rd September 1989
1. The Damage Is Done
‘I’d love to sit down dear, but I haven’t got a body.’
Libby Hoffman was serious, if inaccurate. Of course she had a body. It wasn’t a very big one, but it was a body nonetheless: old and thin, she looked like she was made from wire and tissue paper. Still, it was there and it was quite strong given her age: 85, and her occupation: lunatic. On top of this skinny, slightly stooped body sat a crinkled face with an expression set between surprise and contempt. She only smiled at Christmas and that was probably because everyone wore stupid hats, although it is possible that it was also because Christmas reminded her of something funny from before she had become a lunatic, which was a very very long time ago. Or it might have been the sherry.
Adam Sands, who was the nurse in charge, glanced up from his newspaper. The problem with raising his head was that there was more chance of the light getting him. Sure enough here it came, stabbing him through the eyes and scratching around the inside of his skull. Libby had a tea stain on her white cardigan; a student nurse looked primed to talk at her. A patient called Michael Wells was standing in front of the television with a handful of biscuits watching the news. He was wearing a filthy anorak and jeans that were misshapen enough to almost certainly belong to someone else. He was talking to the newsreader—a dour man with a posh accent—comfortable in the knowledge that the newsreader was talking right back.
A Nursing Assistant with hips the size of Belgium was standing over a dazed woman with no hair called Mary Peacock. Belgium was telling her loudly that she needed to open her bowels, preferably into or at least near a toilet. A tiny Irish cleaner was singing show tunes as she mopped the floor outside the nurse’s office. Beyond that there wasn’t much to see. Adam returned to his paper. He liked to think that by sitting in the day room, by being seen, he lent a sense of safety to the ward. He also thought that his presence would serve to filter out any acts of unkindness or cruelty. The Nursing Assistant, for example, was less likely to lift the confused and obese Mary Peacock up and drop her on to a commode if the charge nurse was sitting nearby. He was not oblivious to the fact that his being there did not stop her from shouting about bowels while the breakfast trolley was still being put away, but Adam believed that if you ask too much of people they will rush to disappoint you.
Adam still read newspapers from the back, starting with the football and leaving the real world until last. Today’s outrage was another bomb. This one in Kent on an army barracks, killing eleven people. Adam never looked at the pictures or read beyond the first few lines. A decade of tabloid jingoism and bile about distant colonial wars and ‘enemies within’ had rendered him immune to the fact that outside of the hospital everyone seemed to hate everyone else. Anyway, he was skim-reading because his head hurt. He was dehydrated from the cheap whisky the night before, and the half-life of last night’s diazepam probably didn’t help either and if that in itself wasn’t enough to numb the brain, Dire bloody Straits were playing on the radio in the background.
This sort of music still made Adam think of Live Aid. He had hated it; thousands of people with bad hair coming together to do some self-congratulatory clapping. When they showed the images of dying, pot-bellied babies overlaid with the carefully chosen soundtrack he cried, of course he did, but unlike his soon-to-depart live-in girlfriend Catherine, who cried very loudly for bloody ages, he wasn’t reassured by his tears. He didn’t feel they made him a better human being: rather, he just feared he was being manipulated.
He told someone he was in bed with a few weeks later that he was perhaps the only person who didn’t give any money to Live Aid.
‘I don’t know anyone who gave money to it,’ she said. ‘You can’t buy your own conscience.’ Which he didn’t understand but they had sex anyway.
‘There are only two emotions available to us nowadays,’ she whispered later. ‘You can be either smug or angry. We live in a time where music is for people who don’t like music and politics is for people who don’t like people’.
That was all he remembered of that night, that and the fact that her soft dark skin had smelled of sweetened coconut. He wished he could remember more; he rather thought he’d like to listen to other things she said.
‘Libby, if you haven’t got a body how did you get here?’ The student was doing some nursing and he was doing it near Adam.
Libby Hoffman ignored the boy. She stood completely still, staring at the blank yellow wall of the day room and hooking her bony thin finger through a hole in her cardigan. Adam had come to know this as her brace position.
‘Libby, I am talking to you: how did you get here if you haven’t got a body?’ He spoke with a see-saw rhythm, too shrill to be warm, too loud to be kind.
‘I walked, you silly bugger,’ Libby said. Her mouth continued moving after the words as though she was still speaking, or chewing.
Adam almost smiled. He glanced over at the student: he had the thickest hair he had ever seen on a man, a great big bush of mousy brown fleece which stood upright on his head. It had to, there was nowhere for it to settle on the crowded and ungentle head.
‘Please don’t use that sort of language,’ said the boy. ‘Come and sit by me,’ he instructed, but Libby hadn’t wanted to sit beside anyone since the early 1960s. ‘Libby. Libby.’ The student was getting even louder and Libby Hoffman was moving her weight from one foot to another, like a child who needed the toilet.
The radio was playing Careless Whisper by George Michael. ‘The bastards,’ thought Adam. He looked at Libby and his chest burned a little. He looked beyond her to the office, where he could see one of the new Community Psychiatric Nurses charged with emptying the hospital into the real world, standing at the door, watching. She was unfamiliar and pretty, a slight frame in a long purple skirt and black shirt, jet black hair, bit of a Goth but not so much that you wouldn’t take her seriously if she said something about a patient. He closed his eyes, took a deep breath and said surprisingly clearly: ‘Libby, you might want to change your cardigan. Student nurse person, please put the kettle on. And will somebody please do something about the radio? Do the people who live on this ward look like George Michael’s target audience?’ He added more quietly: ‘Does George Michael have a target audience? He may be like napalm in that regard. No, I think he probably does and it’s not quite the same as ours, so stop it with George Michael someone, thank you.’ He felt quite exhausted.
Libby stopped hopping, turned instantly round and walked to her bed area to change her cardigan. Adam heard the Community Nurse say something to Grace in the office. He heard a laugh; the radio station was changed to something less current. Sandie Shaw maybe, or was it Petula Clarke? The student nurse didn’t move.
Adam sighed. ‘Are you above putting the kettle on?’
‘It’s not really why I am here.’ The student nurse was practicing defiance or assertiveness or belligerence or contempt. Adam thought he appeared to be better at it than he was at talking to patients.
‘No, of course, but then why are any of us here? Don’t answer that. Have you had any tea today?’
‘Yes.’ It was definitely contempt.
‘Who made it?’ Adam was aware of the fact that he sounded patronizing. He knew that probably wouldn’t help. He couldn’t bring himself to care.
‘Pardon?’
‘Who made the tea you drank this morning?’ Now Adam looked directly at him: he saw a pale face, a jutt
ing jaw, the barrow-load of hair.
‘Grace.’ The student saw a man in his mid to late twenties wearing a stupid Hawaiian shirt and what was clearly a hangover.
‘Well why don’t you make her one now? She’d like that.’
‘I don’t really want any tea,’ the student said.
Adam put his paper down and looked at the young man. He tried to read his name badge. He spoke very quietly. He stopped sounding patronizing and he nearly sounded warm. ‘Look, William, it is William isn’t it?’ The student nodded. ‘It seems to me that I can take one of three approaches here. The first, not sophisticated, not educational, but emotionally congruent for me at least, involves me telling you that if you ever speak to Libby Hoffman like that again I will remove one of your arms and beat you around your ridiculously hairy head with it until you learn some bloody manners. The second is to spend an inordinate amount of time helping you begin to notice when you sound like an arse. The third involves telling you to make tea. I’m told the first is unprofessional, the second is too tiring, so we are going for number three, OK?’
William’s mouth moved but nothing came out. He wasn’t sure he had heard right. Was that like a threat, the arm and head thing? Or is that the way these people talk? These ignorant, burnt-out, badly dressed, newspaper-wielding people. He imagined making a complaint to the head of the School of Nursing. ‘He said he was going to hit me with my own arm,’ he would say and she would look at him with the sort of pitying disdain she tended to wear whenever she noticed him. Two of a kind, he thought. Let it pass but don’t look intimidated. He swallowed hard. ‘I don’t want any tea, thanks.’
‘No. No, but you need it. You need tea.’ Adam was looking into the young man’s eyes and speaking even more softly, so that William found himself leaning forward even though his body wanted to step back.
‘I don’t.’
‘You do. Tea is one of our punctuation marks. Cigarettes are another, writing in the notes another. Let’s just work with the tea today, OK? Think of it as a damp comma, actually a full stop and an opportunity to begin a new paragraph. After the nonsense you were just offering you need at least a full stop. It will slow you down, maybe make you think. Stop you from baiting Libby…’ William went to speak but Adam raised his finger and continued: ‘We act, we stop. When we stop, sometimes we need to think about what we have done and what we may do next and one of the ways of doing that, of pausing between bouts of silliness, is tea. Otherwise you run the risk of not really stopping or thinking, and acting without thinking is what monkeys do and we aren’t monkeys are we? That is a rhetorical question. So take a moment to pause and reflect, otherwise you may just carry on in the same vein as your last action and in your case the last one wasn’t very good, in fact it was really poor, so tea, don’t knock it. No sugar for me, thank you.’
The student paused a moment. He went to speak, then chose instead to use his pause as a sign that he was going to speak but just not immediately. He knew what he needed to say. He needed to say the tea thing was bollocks, not in those words of course, but it was. And that he wasn’t baiting Libby, he was doing some nursing: look it up, it’s what nurses are meant to do, you badly-dressed drunk. Who the hell wears Hawaiian shirts to an asylum anyway? The patients, maybe, but hell, that’s almost a symptom. And who are you to say the patients don’t like George Michael? Or tell me to make tea. Everything that is wrong with the world is summed up by you, your stupid shirt and that rubbish about tea. Now how do I say that without getting into trouble? Or hit with my own arm. And the words were coming, slowly, something about trying to build a relationship with the nutty old dear and not really believing the tea thing, when a Community Psychiatric Nurse appeared behind him. Pretty woman, mid twenties, nice breasts.
She smiled a forced smile that didn’t reach her eyes, looked straight at him and said:
‘He’s right about the tea. No sugar for me either, thanks. And hello, my name is Anna.’ The last part was directed mainly at Adam.
Anna Newton had spent the best part of the preceding hour in a small room with a lonely, smelly man who had been very heavily sedated for eighteen years and had a swastika tattooed on his forehead. The same man, Michael Wells, who was currently chatting amiably to the television newsreader. She was helping him to prepare for discharge into the community. Twice a week counselling, a new social worker, a new psychiatrist, extra medication and lots of crossed fingers: all pointless, she thought. Mostly he needed a bath and a really big bandanna. She had another patient to see in thirty minutes, a woman who had lived in this hollow old asylum for forty-five years. She hadn’t worn shoes since 1954 and her preferred way of showing her displeasure to a world that didn’t always do what she required was to take off all her clothes and try to wee on whoever was denying her whatever small pleasure she was pursuing. Anna had a place lined up for her in a nice converted house near Hampstead Heath. She would share the home with five other long-term patients. God help the first shop that doesn’t hand over her cigarettes quickly enough. Anna was OK preparing the patients; she sometimes wondered who was preparing the community.
She waited until the student nurse entered the kitchen before turning to Adam and saying: ‘I think that probably counts as a teaching session. Have you considered going into education?’
Adam looked down the empty corridor and said distractedly: ‘Hasn’t he got a lot of hair?’
He looked up and saw a lithe body and sarcastic eyes. She stared at him. He wondered why, before remembering that she had told him her name. ‘I’m Adam,’ he said. ‘So will I get a certificate or something?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘For the teaching.’
‘I think you’ll be lucky to get away without him spitting in your tea.’
‘Is he the sort?’
Anna shrugged.
‘Yeah,’ he said, standing up. ‘I’ll go and see, just in case.’ He wandered down the ward, rolling his head and stretching his arms out behind him as he went. He was taller than he had looked when he was sitting down, Anna thought, and when he moved he looked more human.
Adam was reflecting on the good-looking stranger. She had too many bracelets, and bright red lipstick which he liked and she had lovely hair, very straight, very shiny. As he walked to the kitchen he wondered how often she washed it, and then he wondered why he was so preoccupied with the top of other people’s heads. By the time he got to the kitchen he had forgotten why he had come, but the kettle hadn’t even boiled so he said to the student, just to confuse him, ‘Do you want a hand with that at all?’
A few days later there was a house party and Adam had taken two thioridazine—a minor tranquilizer that relaxed him without making him dribble—from the drug trolley before leaving work, and then downed half a bottle of cheap sherry. There were many ‘parties’ spilling from the hospital. They were not designed to celebrate anything in particular but to provide a gathering point for drinking, gossiping and flirting. This ‘party’ was hosted by Stephen Moss, the charge nurse of the acute ward where Adam had worked until the previous year.
Temperamentally Stephen and Adam could not be more different: Stephen was flamboyant and camp; he hated being on his own only marginally more than he hated other people. He wore an excessive amount of eye makeup, but only round the house, and he drank cheap champagne and cocktails without ever appearing any more drunk than he did usually, which was actually quite drunk. Adam and Stephen had trained together as very young men a little over five years earlier. They had seen each other shrink in the face of their workplace and slowly change shape as the asylum became the most normal place on earth. And while they grew they shared drink, drugs and an exaggerated disdain for everything from careerists to voyeurs, and from hope to volition.
Stephen had been on duty the day Graham Cochrane, a twenty-eight year old depressed man, had beaten Adam at chess, nodded to him, walked to his room and drunk a litre of industri
al bleach. Graham had died spewing his disintegrating throat into Adam’s lap and all Adam could do as others turned their heads or pretended to go for help was cradle Graham’s head, staring into dying, popping eyes. There were tiny spittle-sized lumps of bloodied Graham soaking through Adam’s trousers, leaving baby scars on his thighs, unseen weals that still remained. It had been a while since Adam transferred from that acute ward to the slow rehabilitation ward he managed now. It had been a while since Adam had slept through the night.
When Adam arrived Stephen greeted him with three yellow pills. ‘No thanks, I’ve already eaten,’ Adam said. Stephen shrugged, swallowed two of the tablets, looked at the third, shrugged again and swallowed that too.
‘Anna’s here,’ he said, exaggerating a leer.
‘Anna who?’ Adam deadpanned.
‘Anna who indeed.’
Stephen lived in a basement flat about two miles from the hospital. It had a large rectangular living room and a dark blue carpet that somehow absorbed the light. It was true that Anna was cute, but mostly Adam wandered over to speak to her because she was the only person in the house he didn’t know. There were about fifteen people milling around the living room, all of whom he knew from the hospital.
Anna was dressed in black jeans and shirt. She was standing beside a table that was full of drinks, spirits mostly, with mixers, some wine, a few cans of beer and some cheap sherry. Anna was pouring herself a whisky and coke. She was slightly built, around five foot four; she looked like a gothic, not quite as pretty, Audrey Hepburn. Adam was nearly a foot taller and looking at the world through a chemical fog. When he tried to talk to her the height difference made him self-conscious. He poured himself a drink, the same as hers, leaned on the wall, felt ridiculous and said: ‘I’m not a natural leaner.’
She laughed and pointed at two empty chairs pushed up against the blue wall. They sat down in silence for almost a minute, staring forward. Eventually Adam said ‘This is like being on a bus.’
Stranger Than Kindness Page 1