Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  ‘Rubbish bus,’ Anna said. ‘Not going anywhere.’ A longer silence, comfortable and easy. ‘You were not very kind to that student today,’ she said tentatively.

  He shrugged. ‘I was kinder than I might have been. He was being an oaf.’

  ‘Who uses the word oaf anymore? And anyway he is a student, he is here to learn.’

  He couldn’t tell if she was being sarcastic. ‘Righto.’

  She sipped her drink. ‘Mind you, he does seem to be a bit of a tosser.’

  Adam didn’t look at her. He was watching Stephen being garish and sweaty near three female staff nurses, one of whom was Grace from his ward. The women were laughing hysterically and Stephen was loving the validation. The more they laughed the more flamboyant, and damp, he became.

  ‘I don’t mind him being unskilled,’ said Adam impassively. ‘I mind him being unkind.’ He was a little fuzzy headed: the alcohol was mixing with the tranquilizers he had taken. His voice sounded slightly muffled. It occurred to him that he sounded faintly absurd. Before he could say anything else, Anna turned her head to look at him and said with a gloriously flirtatious smile: ‘Poof.’

  Adam grinned and stared straight ahead. Stephen had moved into the kitchen and the three women were left surfing on the hysteria he had swamped them with. They were smiling, chatting, pointing at different people in the room. Grace was not conventionally attractive. She was plump, with wide hips and mousy-coloured hair, but she had the prettiest skin and brightest eyes Adam had ever seen, and she always dressed in bold printed skirts that swirled around when she moved. Adam liked her, mostly because he believed she could see the truth but never made a big deal about it. She waved at Adam and said something that made the other two women look over and laugh briefly. Adam nodded and smiled back. Anna sipped her drink again. ‘Do you think the student was particularly annoying to you because he was talking to Libby Hoffman, or are you like that all the time?’

  ‘I have known Libby a long time,’ Adam said as neutrally as he could.

  They had turned their attention to two people dancing in the middle of the room to a Cure song. A young woman—a final year student on the cusp of qualifying who Adam had nearly accidentally slept with the previous Christmas—was shaking her breasts self-mockingly at an even younger man, who was wearing cords and therefore probably a Social Worker. He hopped uncertainly from one foot to another, hoping that either the music would stop soon or other people would start dancing and stop watching him and the breast-shaking woman, who was drunk and looked like she might hurt him.

  ‘I use the office on your ward to do paperwork some evenings,’ Anna said without looking at Adam.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  ‘Why do you go there?’ she asked softly, as if she was interested in the answer. ‘I’ve seen you.’

  ‘It’s my job.’ Adam felt his chest tighten just a little.

  ‘Why do you go there when you’re not working, then? Why do you go to the ward at night?’

  Adam looked at her impassively, raised his glass, smiled a half smile, stood up and said: ‘Excuse me.’

  He found Stephen in the kitchen being exaggeratedly camp and just a little bored. ‘Do you have any more of those sweets?’ he asked.

  ‘That bad, huh?’ Stephen handed him a bottle from the top pocket of his shirt. Adam took two, then a third, nodded and wandered off as Stephen was telling his audience about the time he was mistaken for Princess Grace of Monaco.

  Anna and Adam did not speak again for a couple of hours. Adam watched the party from as close to the outside as he could get. He flirted idly with the soon-to-be-qualified dancing woman. He listened to Stephen mock all social workers as if they were Satan’s soldiers while desperately trying to get the dancing social worker to like him. And he asked Grace about her mother, who had emphysema, and her boyfriend, who was twenty years older than Grace, married to someone else and extraordinarily dull. Anna meanwhile circumnavigated the room in the opposite direction. Talking to the two staff nurses who had been with Grace earlier, letting herself be chatted up by a chubby, over-confident Occupational Therapist who was wearing a tie and exchanging a raft of double entendres with Stephen. Eventually they found themselves back beside each other.

  ‘You look hot,’ she said.

  ‘Thank you,’ he smiled.

  ‘Not that kind of hot.’

  Adam’s head felt as if it was shrinking. His arms were numb, like when he needed them in a dream and they wouldn’t work; he looked at his hands to make sure they were still there. Anna’s mouth was moving but she wasn’t saying anything, or if she was he couldn’t hear her. The dancing social worker had begun bobbing up and down next to the breast-wiggling nurse again. The man stopped for a moment, stepped over to the mantelpiece, picked up a bottle and drank from it. As he put the bottle to his lips Adam felt himself fill with a toxic dread. His breathing quickened; his chest was tight now. He tried to speak but nothing came out. He stepped forward towards the man but his legs felt unsure, untrusting of the floor. He felt a hand on his arm. He instinctively went to move his arm away but the hand was soft and it followed him. It wrapped itself around his forearm and gently guided him away from the dancing drinking man. Adam followed his arm out of the living room door.

  He was in the hallway, standing against the wall. He was sweating and cold and Anna was standing in front of him. Adam looked down at his body: his shirt was damp and patchily transparent. She let go of his arm and rested her hand on his chest for a moment. His breathing slowed a little, his chest became less tight. ‘I need some air,’ he said quietly. He walked the few steps down the pale hallway to the front door. It was cool outside and it had been raining lightly. He breathed in deeply and shivered. Anna had followed him. He sat on the front doorstep and she crouched beside him.

  ‘Did you bring a jacket or something?’

  He nodded. She paused for a moment before standing up and going back indoors. The moon was quite bright; there were a few thin grey clouds spinning across the sky. Adam pulled himself to his feet and let his head settle. He began to walk. Out of the gate and along the road.

  The hospital at night would have been macabre if it weren’t for the strip lighting and the echo from the laundry rooms. In the daytime it was a graceless monument to madness; in the dark it visited its past. Emptied of the scuffling patients and the preoccupied workers. The smell of its history lingered always. Stale urine and damp: it would be here for another hundred years. If the hospital became luxury flats or a supermarket or a car park it would be haunted by the stench of urine. When Adam first started here he worked on an elderly ward. He was always the first to do the dirty jobs, always maintaining that he would not be taken seriously unless he was seen by the cynical staff to take the ugliest of tasks and come back for more. That smell used to follow him home. He would bathe every evening and constantly ask Catherine if she could smell anything. She would laugh and say he was deluded and he would smile, but it was there, in his nostrils. After a while he stopped noticing it, but occasionally when he was out in a restaurant or at a gig it would creep into him again, linger a while, invade his senses and his sensibilities. His mood would change slightly. That smell would settle just beneath his skin, draw him back to the hospital and leave him with the feeling that there was something he had left undone.

  Adam was walking down the longest corridor in Europe. Some of the lights flickered but you could still see the paint peeling from the ceiling and walls all the way along it. He imagined it was because the paint was either too thin or simply embarrassed by all it had seen. The walls had seen Adam a hundred times, maybe a thousand times, often at night and lately often when he was not on duty. He came here more now, since he had changed wards, since Graham had died. He rarely saw anyone—patients were asleep, wards were locked, the laundry carts wouldn’t start until after 5am—but tonight, up ahead, he saw a young man crouching beside one of the w
indows that looked out onto the grounds. As Adam got closer he thought he would recognize the boy, but he couldn’t place him. He expected him to look up but he didn’t, although he must have sensed Adam approaching. When Adam drew alongside, the boy spoke with a soothing soft lilt. ‘I love this time of morning.’ He was a thin, good-looking young man with darkish curly hair and olive skin. Adam could not decide if he was patient or staff.

  ‘Are you supposed to be here?’ Adam tried to ask gently but the words still made him sound like a policeman and he closed his eyes in frustration at that.

  The boy didn’t look up but smiled slightly and said ‘Are you?’

  Adam laughed. ‘Probably not.’ He stopped himself from asking what ward he should be on and liked himself a tiny bit more for that. He noticed that the young man was not dressed like a patient. His clothes fitted and matched. They were clean. They looked chosen.

  ‘Sometimes I sit and watch the night and wait for the sun to come up. At this time of year there is a beautiful mist that forms and covers the ground. As it clears you can see the dew glisten through the last bands of haze until all you can see is dampness lightly washing the ground.’ He turned to face Adam for the first time and smiled. He had beautiful blue eyes. ‘It just looks lovely, and it’s hard to see it and not feel hope, you know?’

  Adam nodded. ‘Have a nice day.’

  The boy nodded slightly and turned back to the window ‘You could do worse than notice the sunrise, you know, and a lot worse than see the dew on the grass.’

  Adam smiled to himself and thought ‘hippie’ as he walked on.

  The ward door was locked. Adam’s head felt cleaner now but his body was cold. It was late September; he was wearing a white cotton shirt and thin black trousers. He didn’t have any socks on, just plimsolls. And he was just remembering that he had not eaten anything since a banana that morning. He unlocked the ward door and walked straight to the dayroom. In the office, the night nurse rested between two chairs which were draped with a clean sheet. All the night staff sat on clean sheets, just in case they caught madness. The sound of the ward door obviously woke him. On seeing it was Adam he raised his arm. The night nurse was not particularly surprised to see him. It was two forty-five in the morning; the clock on the wall told him so.

  Adam didn’t bother to exchange pleasantries with the nurse. In the beginning he used to offer excuses for his visits, but it soon became clear that they weren’t necessary once the nurse realized that Adam was not there to check up on him. He was the charge nurse, after all: there was little to be gained in interfering with the things that he did.

  Adam walked to the female end of the ward. There he found six beds all in a line. If it were less of a hallway it could almost be a dormitory. In each bed slept a woman, old but still functioning enough to be on a rehabilitation ward instead of the slow death of the overfull elderly units. At the end slept Freda, her head perfectly still in the air, floating six inches above her pillow. Freda never talked, never ever. Except when some new student, zealous and concerned, doing their first set of nights, approached her in the night and suggested she rest her head. Freda slept on a psychological pillow: an invisible imagined head rest that only she could feel. If, and this happened at least once a year, a well meaning student roused her to tell her to rest her head, the presumed mute Freda would bellow: ‘Get out of it, you little toe rag.’ She said that to Adam once. Maybe a hundred years before. In the bed next to her was Libby. Adam was the only visitor she had ever had, apart from the occasional Christian in December. Adam came often these days. He pulled up a chair and sat beside her. Relief washed over him.

  He stared at the old woman. She lay on her back and breathed evenly. Libby remembered how to sleep, as she remembered many things. She was covered by a rough orange bedspread and white sheets, crisp and clean. To Adam’s left was a window. Across from there lay the other end of the ward. Offices mainly. Empty now, as most nights, but that would be where Anna worked.

  Adam began to rock gently in the chair. He was still cold but he had stopped shivering. ‘I thought I saw him again tonight. Looked like him… except he had a throat, the bastard.’

  Libby didn’t stir, she never did. Adam talked softly. Once it had crossed his mind to climb on to the bed and try to sleep the way she did, but of course he didn’t. No matter how screamingly desperate he was for sleep, he was still a professional after all.

  Adam leaned forward, resting his head on the bed. ‘I’m tired’ he murmured, talking into the bedspread now. The cheap fabric was coarse but warm; his eyes were thick, closing. A puddle of saliva gathered at the corner of his mouth. Adam lifted his heavy head and looked at the sleeping old woman. ‘I’ll just rest here a minute if that’s OK.’ And then: ‘I’m sorry about that student earlier, pet. I hope he didn’t upset you…’

  2. This Woman’s Work

  The day after the party Anna was doing her job, although increasingly it felt as though she came to work and watched as her job did her.

  Maureen Marley was a forty-three year old mother of three who believed herself—with complete and unchallengeable conviction—to be a thirty-eight year old man called George Wimimundu. She did not believe she had children and she certainly did not she believe she had a vagina. The obvious advice brought by students both medical and nursing was to show her the space where her penis should be and ask her to explain where it had gone, but if you are a man and a stranger asks you to prove it by showing them your penis, you will not normally greet that with acquiescence. Whatever Maureen Marley saw when she looked between her legs was her business and she certainly wasn’t going to discuss it with anyone else.

  Maureen Marley had been in the hospital for nine years. She had been George Wimimundu for nine years and four months. Her children did not visit or write any more. They had been pushed away by the blank looks and low dog-like growl that had greeted the word ‘mummy’. The kids were bigger now; they had learnt to dislike her, be ashamed of her, and ultimately to not speak of her. Here in this walled Victorian asylum she was hidden away, and that suited them. It also suited her husband, Benjamin, who now shared his life with a large Jamaican woman called Rita who had five kids of her own and no problems whatsoever in accepting Benjamin’s and Maureen’s three to her ample bosom, even though the oldest of them was twenty-four now and didn’t want to go anywhere near Rita’s bosom.

  There were two ways of thinking about Maureen Marley and those two ways illustrated the duality of psychiatric care that Anna was employed to bridge. On the one hand Maureen was deluded. She dressed like a saxophone player in a 1950s jazz band: sharp two-piece suit, open necked shirt with a loose tie. She wore black Doc Martens even in the summer and was clean-shaven not because she was a woman but because she shaved every morning. She flirted with the women patients, rolled cigarettes with one hand and joined in with the half-hearted leers that accompanied the Benny Hill show when it wandered on to the television on a Wednesday night.

  On the other hand she was, apart from one single and admittedly unusual idea about herself, completely healthy. She was able to help out around the ward and particularly enjoyed the ‘proper’ work that involved lifting things up and putting them down somewhere else. When the mini tractor that pulled the laundry cart came to pick up the big white sacks of soiled linen, the plump Greek porter didn’t even have to get up from his seat at the front. He would exchange betting tips and light a cigarette as Maureen Marley grinned affably and loaded the cart for him. One of the social workers once commented that this seemed wrong, that it somehow exploited her psychosis and that the nurses, in ignoring it, were exposing her vulnerability. Everyone ignored the social worker. They knew how rarely Maureen grinned.

  Maureen enjoyed a fulfilling if limited social life, leaving the ward every day to go to the bookies and maybe nip into the pub for a pint. She could talk about football, television and Margaret Thatcher with the same levels of loudness, flippan
cy and derision as everybody else. She was effectively a pretty ordinary bloke, for a woman.

  She was not a lesbian. That would, by definition, involve being a woman. As far as anyone could tell, she had had no sexual relationships with women and nor had she enjoyed any emotionally binding relationships with anyone since she decided she was a man. Ironically, if she had, for example, checked her genitalia, registered that they were female, noted that this made her unhappy and sustained and articulated that unhappiness for a period of time, aligning it with some sort of argument that conceded that she was in fact a woman but really felt like a man, she might have received affirmative support, counselling or even surgery that would enable her to change her gender. However, she did not mount a case for manhood so much as simply assume it, despite the evidence, and that was an offence against reason. Wanting to be something you are not is aspirational; assuming you are something everyone says you are not is insane.

  The hospital was emptying. Community Care was the way forward: radical, modern, liberating. It was going to free the incarcerated and return them to a normal life. It was also going to save lots of money. Progressive and economically advantageous, as an idea it couldn’t have been more Eighties if it had dressed like Simon Le Bon and sung in a really whiny voice. Maureen Marley had quite frankly done very well to hold on as long as she had. There were plenty of patients less able to adapt to living in the community—which mostly meant moving to a house with five other alleged lunatics and some low-paid nursing assistants and staying indoors a lot—than Maureen, and there were an awful lot of people still left in the hospital who were going to be much harder to shift. Not least most of the staff.

  So Maureen Marley was on the list, which meant seeing Anna every week to discuss and prepare for the transition. Maureen Marley, who gave the impression of being sanguine and self-contained, didn’t seem remotely bothered by it. She was a small black woman of medium build; her short-cropped hair augmented her sexlessness. If she didn’t speak, most casual observers might consider her male and perhaps this was why she rarely spoke. She almost smiled sometimes though, an Elvis Presley half-smile half-sneer that looked at once shy and sarcastic. When Anna talked to her about the new house Maureen would be living in, its bathroom facilities, its garden, its proximity to the bookies, Maureen would do her smile and sometimes nod, not in an encouraging way but more in a ‘who are you kidding’ sort of way. After nine years of living on an alleged rehabilitation ward in a crumbling asylum—a ward that she shared with twenty-three other patients, who ranged from a former bus conductor with an Obsessive Compulsive Disorder that demanded he take an hour to choose and put on his socks every morning, to Libby Hoffman who was 85 years old, had been an inpatient for 58 years and had lost her body sometime before they invented Rock and Roll—she really wasn’t going to take anyone seriously.