Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  Anna did try to edge toward the idea that one other, perhaps long-term, possibility might involve Maureen Marley maybe seeing her kids too, but Maureen Marley appeared to greet the suggestion that she had kids in the same way that the Pope might.

  ‘Can I ask you: do you have a family?’ Anna said once, trying for a different approach.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Maureen. ‘I have two sisters.’

  ‘No kids?’

  Maureen just stared at her as if the question made no sense, or perhaps as if the answer was unutterable.

  So Anna had decided to focus on the practical. What did Maureen need to be able to do in order to survive and hopefully thrive? Cooking: that was a problem. For one thing, having lived in the hospital for nine years Maureen had had her food presented to her from a trolley every mealtime. On the odd occasion, when a care plan that sought to extend her capacity to live outside an institution had demanded she re-learn how to prepare her own food, she had mostly stirred whatever pot was put in front of her and laughed to herself before retreating first to her bed and then, on finding that someone would come and get her, out to the bookies. Cooking was women’s work; it may even have been one of the reasons that Maureen Marley had resigned from womanhood in the first place.

  And there was also grocery shopping to consider. In preparation for discharge Maureen had to buy and prepare her own tea at least twice a week. In her former life Maureen had shopped and cooked for a family of five. Now her rehabilitation programme involved persuading her to prepare to live more independently. And her shopping was the shopping of a single man. It mostly consisted of bread, beans and rolling tobacco. Sometimes a newspaper was involved; gradually, crispy

  snacks and brightly coloured pot noodles were creeping into the basket. And it was a hand-held basket. Trolleys were also for women.

  With three weeks to go until Maureen was to be moved, Anna was trying to arrange a morning when she could visit the house she would be living in and maybe see her room, meet some of the staff and generally get a sense that her proposed discharge wasn’t a really bad joke. In Anna’s view, seeing the room and meeting the staff were less important than actually reinforcing to Maureen that change was going to happen, the house was real and the hospital was going to close down.

  ‘We could go together Maureen,’ she had said. Maureen Marley had shrugged. Impassive, mildly uncomfortable, sitting in a large orange chair in a high-ceilinged yellow interview room that had only one window, which was small and too high to see out of.

  ‘We can have a look round, have a coffee,’ Anna had said. ‘You can see your room; maybe think about any furniture you might like.’

  And so they had. Maureen Marley sat quietly on the bus looking out of the window and walked passively up the garden path to the suburban front door in the suburban well-to-do street near Hampstead Heath. The house smelled of furniture polish and the absence of people. A show home built from pine and scatter cushions.

  The ‘House Manager,’ a tall African woman called Maizie, moved with an elegance that toppled into aloofness. When they arrived she shook hands with Anna and nodded to Maureen Marley; when she led them to the living room she held her hands in front of her, which made Anna feel she was in a religious procession. Maizie offered to show them round the kitchen and managed to get to it before she started reciting the house rules that she had already decided upon. All the residents would eat together at dinnertime and breakfast but lunch would be a free for all. They could have televisions in their rooms, but if they wanted to watch the one in the living room the channel would be decided by consensus. Residents, for that is what they were rather than patients, were expected to help with housework. Maureen looked momentarily confused by that. And then they all went upstairs to look at her room: it smelt of lavender and flat pack furniture. A soft yellow on the walls, plush carpet and a bed with a continental quilt on it that made the bed appear taller than it should be. Everything was new and what it lacked in character it made up for in feminine comfort. It had net curtains, and the quilt cover perfectly matched the pink and yellow floral drapes. It was wholly inappropriate for George Wimimumdu. Maureen Marley laughed her sneery laugh. Maizie ignored her but Anna watched and, after the laugh had passed, she thought she saw something akin to dread. Or humiliation.

  After the tour Maureen Marley sat sipping coffee in the kitchen and Anna asked if she could see the garden. ‘Maizie, what do you know about Maureen?’

  ‘I know she is a woman who believes she is a man.’ Maizie spoke with economy. Her tone was clipped, her accent heavy and her eyes were half closed.

  ‘Right, and that belief is very fixed.’ Anna spoke softly, aligning the rhythm of her words to Maizie’s, looking for the place where they might meet.

  ‘That is what I have read’

  ‘I think she may find her room a little feminine.’

  “Is she not a woman?’ Maizie raised her voice on the last word, making it sound like woe-man.

  ‘She is a woman who considers herself not to be a woman. That single belief forms the foundation of the way she chooses to live.’

  ‘Do you think we should collude with her false belief? Do you think we should agree with her that she is a man and in effect lie to her? Do you think that is a way to gain her trust?” Maizie lifted her eyes. They shone with certainty.

  ‘I think if we respect her she will trust us,’ Anna said as quietly as she could.

  ‘It is her room,’ Maizie said with a dismissive wave of her hand. She has pianist’s fingers, thought Anna. ‘She can do with it as she wishes. She can put up posters of motorcars or women; she can make it smell of socks and sweat. She can sit up there and watch horse racing if she wants.’

  ‘What if she wants it redecorated?’

  ‘Now you are being silly,’ said Maizie, turning away and walking back to the house. ‘She will be fine. Indeed, perhaps here she will be better than fine.’

  Back in the house Maureen Marley had found some bourbon biscuits, was on her fourth or fifth and had the packet open on the table. Maizie picked the packet up and put them away as she swept by. ‘When you live here,’ she said without looking at Maureen, ‘You will buy your own biscuits and you will be able to eat them as much as you wish.’

  On the bus home Anna asked Maureen what she had thought of the house. She just shrugged. She did not speak until the bus drew up at the hospital gates. It was beginning to rain lightly and she had spent the journey watching the raindrops race down the window, placing silent personal bets on which drop would make it to the bottom first. As she walked down the driveway to the main entrance of the hospital, with nothing interesting to distract her, her thoughts turned to her future. ‘How many people will be in the house?

  ‘Five, I think,’ Anna said.

  ‘All men?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ A pause as they passed the flagpole and walked up the steps to the large wooden door. And then: ‘Would you like me to find out’?

  Maureen Marley just nodded. No sneer. No smile.

  Later that evening Anna made herself a coffee and two slices of toast in the ward kitchen and retired to a rarely-used doctors’ office to write notes, read patient profiles and fill out funding forms to ensure that someone somewhere would pay the rent for Maureen and the others. She preferred doing this at night when the place was quieter. It gave her a different sense of the hospital, a hospital she had never worked in, and a clearer sense of why moving the patients to places with carpets and walls between the beds was a better thing than it sometimes felt. It also meant she could come in late when she wanted. It was a habit she liked. Since she had been working more closely with the asylum she had found herself touched and then almost infected by its routines. Everything here was about entrenched habit. So she took comfort from constructing a little flexibility in her working life.

  This evening there were two things she noticed that troubled her s
lightly. The first was the appearance of Adam Sands after 10.30pm. This was the seventh or eighth time she had worked late in this office and the fourth time she had seen him—and that didn’t include the night before, when she was convinced he had come to the hospital when she had gone looking for his non-existent jacket. He wandered down the ward, past the dimly lit but occupied goldfish bowl office and past the small annexed office where she worked under a desk light. He walked straight down to Libby’s bed and sat down. Anna could see him from where she sat and she watched, curious and nervous. She saw him sitting there muttering. He stayed for nearly an hour. When he left he patted the side of Libby’s bed. Not her hand, not any part of her that lay still and sleeping under the coarse orange bedspread: he patted the side of the bed for fear of waking her. He got up and walked slowly off the ward.

  The second thing she discovered that troubled her was the list of patients being assigned to 12 Wade Avenue, Maureen Marley’s new home. They were all women. Indeed, as far as Anna could tell, so were the staff.

  Anna’s lover was called Black. She didn’t believe that was his real name. When they first met, five months previously, she had assumed that he was really called Roger or Bernard but wanted to make himself appear more interesting than he probably was. He worked in advertising and therefore needed all the help he could get.

  However, as he plied her with drink and asked her lots of big questions—Why do you do what you do? Do you do what you do because you think it is meaningful or because you need to be needed? What is your favourite TV advert?—he also told her that his parents had been hippies and that they named him Black because when he was born he had a mass of black lanugo hair on his head, shoulders and back that made him look like a shy monkey. ‘It could have been worse,’ he said in what seemed a pretty rehearsed manner. ‘They could have called me Cheetah.’

  Anna tended toward relationships that lasted about six months, followed by a period of singleness and the odd one-night stand, followed by another six-month relationship. She felt this allowed her just the right degree of intimacy without any of the associated assumptions, compromise or expectations. Black was ostensibly a standard-issue boyfriend. Sexually pleasing, occasionally charming, well dressed and working in a field that was so removed from hers that it became a helpful distraction. He was also, and this had counted for more than it might have when they first met, quite a good dancer.

  For his part he liked the idea of dating a nurse, it being assumed by the people in his office that nurse training contained at least two years study of advanced sexual practice. And anyway, in a bizarre way it made him feel a little closer to righteousness, not that righteousness had ever struck him as a particularly worthwhile place to go.

  It would be fair to say there was no love on either part. Some desire, and some pretty vigorous sex—often fuelled by flavoured vodka or cider with a touch of blackcurrant—which was sometimes interspersed with some good-mannered conversation: ‘What did you do today?’

  ‘Oh, I counselled a man with a swastika tattooed on his head, who told me he wanted to cut off his fingers because he had used them to touch himself and God had told him, via Angela Rippon on the Nine O’Clock News, that this was dirty and he mustn’t do it again. He doubted his ability to avoid his own genitalia in the future so concluded a lack of fingers would please his God.’

  ‘What did you say?’ Black noticed that the word genitalia, when spoken by his nurse girlfriend, felt like flirting.

  ‘I asked him how he would roll and light his cigarettes without fingers. Not a conventional counselling intervention, but it’s all I had.’

  If Anna had asked herself if she liked Black more or less than she had liked any of the other men she had dated over the previous five years she would have shrugged. In fact they sort of blended into one, none more moving than another, none more engaging, some maybe more irritating, although to be fair Anna’s abiding memory of all her lovers was of the point where she left, and then she was by definition sick of them. She thought vaguely about this on her way home. Anna knew herself to be easily bored. She had known other nurses who had tended toward emotional recklessness, dating wholly inappropriate men with violent pasts, drug habits or two or three wives, and she was grateful for the fact that she was not moved by such melodrama. She was in fact not moved by very much at all as a rule. Except perhaps, and this idea had crept up on her over the last year or so, the possibility of a baby. Just her and a child. That idea had popped into her head with the last boyfriend but one. His name was Stefan; he was tall, Swedish and a scientist by trade: good genes. It had hung around while she was with Winston, who was a tall black reggae guitarist: also good genes. And she held it still with Black who was not tall, not as discernibly talented as the last two, but pretty and still quite funny and wouldn’t be around much longer. The child idea seemed quite constant. Everything and everyone else was transitory. The thought made her smile. When she got home from work she drank hot chocolate and ate breakfast cereal. She went to bed with a book that she didn’t open. She listened to comedy on the radio that wasn’t funny. She didn’t think about work. She didn’t think about Black. When she fell asleep she was still smiling.

  When she woke up she felt as if a decision had been made. She didn’t articulate it, didn’t question it. She showered and dressed and ate some more breakfast cereal. Today she would have a word with the doctor about Maureen Marley. She would look in on Michael Wells and count his fingers. She would maybe have a word with Grace about Adam, she would arrange two new assessments and prepare for Friday’s ward round and later she would arrange to have sex. Indeed, given the fact that she knew she was ovulating, she would have as much of that as she could fit in from Friday through to Tuesday.

  3. Stranger Than Kindness

  When Adam had begun training to be a nurse nearly seven years earlier, on a whim and with the simple and quite ridiculous idea that he’d like to do something useful, the thing he found most striking, after the smell of piss, was the lack of curiosity. Having spent the previous three years studying philosophy—a degree that had mostly comprised of watching bands and playing guitar, trying to get to know and maybe sleep with as many women from different countries as he could and talking bollocks about consciousness—he had expected this new institution to be full of a less, for him, indulgent enquiry. Polytechnic was a wonderful place to wonder but he had learnt that no matter how earnest the discussion, how intense the search for truth and how seductive the process of meeting people was he had come to feel it didn’t really matter. He had reasoned—he was still a young man at the time, so reason remained important to him—that he needed something tangible, something human and authentic and what could be more human and authentic than an asylum? This monument to oddity and difference where enquiry had a purpose. If you are going to ask questions, make them helpful questions: Why did this madness choose you? How do you cope? What might we do?

  But in the hospital the enquiry faded quickly. Answers came before questions, usually in the form of a diagnosis. It was an exercise in knowing. It was safer that way. He understood that but he never trusted it.

  He had learnt to nurse in the same large Victorian asylum that he worked in still and which stood like a decaying museum in a North London suburb. Surrounded as it was by tidy terraced housing, Indian restaurants and local shops, the asylum hid its incongruity behind high walls and big trees. Throughout the Sixties and Seventies it had doubled as a film set for Hammer Horror, and it still rented out the odd unused corner to TV companies who wanted a backdrop of gothic dread without having to decorate anything. Inside were high curved ceilings with peeling paint, a central corridor that ran for a third of a mile from one end to the other and an intersecting corridor which ran from the main door down into the bowels of the building where the kitchens and other facilities were, a fading mini-industry for laundry and powdered egg.

  And the people: lunacy doesn’t simply change the minds of p
eople. It changes their physical shape as well, although Adam came to discover it wasn’t the lunacy that shaped them so much as the treatment the lunacy was greeted with. Some of the men had eyes that had retreated so far back into their head it was as if their face had turned itself inside out. Thin wiry men, slightly bent in the middle, wearing trousers that never fitted and shoes that had no laces. Men with tongues that rolled around the mouth and flopped out from behind wet loose lips like drunken slugs.

  Adam had been a popular nurse. Always calm, usually able to smile. He looked thoughtful when he talked to mad people—thoughtfulness amounting to speaking quietly and listening to whatever was said back—and he thought about what might make things better, within the obvious confines of the large walls, unending collection of drugs and the abandonment of hope that characterized psychiatry. He didn’t come up with too much but he wondered nonetheless. Adam Sands was attentive and engaged, and thus he was a charge nurse within two years of qualifying and stealing tranquilizers from the drug trolley twelve months later.