Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  ‘Aren’t they men?’ said Adam. ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Are we eating here or getting a takeaway and taking it back to my place?’

  ‘Where is your place? Anna asked.

  ‘It’s a twenty-minute walk or five-minute minicab. I have gin.’

  ‘Cab it is,’ said Anna. Grace shrugged. Tim blushed.

  Adam’s flat was surprisingly clean. Anna had expected chaos but instead found a Spartan living room, almost square, with grey walls and a darker grey carpet and pink woodwork. There was no television: instead a sleek black record deck and amplifier formed a centrepiece. The walls were lined with records and books. Mostly records. ‘Have you not heard of the CD?’ asked Anna.

  ‘They don’t crackle,’ said Adam. ‘Gin?’

  Grace and Anna spread the tin foil boxes of food on a coffee table while Adam got glasses and ice.

  ‘What are you drinking Tim?’

  Tim was looking at the books: philosophy, American fiction, a collection of books by Bruce Lee. ‘Who’s Montgomery Clift?’

  ‘Actor. 1950s. Very good.’

  ‘Never heard of him.’

  ‘The Clash wrote a song about him.’

  ‘The who?’

  ‘What do you want to drink, Tim?

  ‘Whose guitar is this?’

  ‘Must be mine.’

  ‘Do you play?’

  ‘Sometimes. Tim: drink?’

  ‘Oh, sorry, gin please.’

  They sat on the floor around the coffee table and began spooning bits of sag aloo and chana masala on to their plates.

  ‘We need music,’ said Adam.

  ‘Nothing too miserable,’ Grace said. Adam got up and put on Sinatra: Sunday Every Day. Anna nodded her approval.

  ‘So, Grace, do you still sing now?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘She does,’ Adam said. ‘Not as often as she should, but she does a set at a wine bar over in Fulham once a month and she did something in Islington not long ago.’

  ‘Last year actually,’ chided Grace. ‘They didn’t ask me back.’

  ‘Their loss,’ Adam smiled.

  ‘Hold on, hold on, so you perform, on a stage. What sort of songs do you sing?’

  ‘Old standards really,’ Grace shrugged.

  ‘She does a lovely Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered,’ offered Adam.

  ‘Do you still dance?’ asked Grace, uncomfortable with the attention.

  ‘No,’ said Anna without looking up.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Long story. Anyway it was an unfashionable sort of dancing I was good at: Ballroom. I mean I could do other stuff but I was good at Ballroom and most people think of that as being a bit Terry Wogan. Anyway, not much money in twirling around in a frilly frock. I wish I could sing. Must be lovely to sing.’

  They stopped talking for the first time since they had arrived in the pub nearly three and a half hours before. They were as far from the hospital and whatever it was that bound them as they could be, and comfortable enough with the silence to just sit in it chewing chapattis and drinking cheap cocktails. Sinatra stopped singing and Adam got up and quietly turned the LP over, gently placing the stylus on the record and the dust cover down over the deck. ‘Good curry,’ said Tim. ‘Anyone want any of my chicken?’

  ‘So, this psychologist bloke, what’s his angle?’ Adam was looking at Tim.

  ‘Adam, not now please,’ Grace said.

  ‘Sorry. But there is something about him, and I don’t just mean the perma-pleat trousers. He watches…’

  ‘That’s a good thing, isn’t it?’ said Anna.

  ‘No, he is looking out for weaknesses, not strengths.’

  ‘I think he is interested in the effectiveness of Community Care,’ Tim said grandly.

  ‘We haven’t really done it yet, how can we know if it is effective?’ Anna said.

  ‘From what little I gleaned when he talked incessantly over lunch at Peach and me, he is charged with exploring ways in which discharge into the community can be done in such a way as to show care in the community is a roaring success. He says that he will get a research grant that will enable him to prove that community care is good for everyone and saves money too. Very good career move if he can pull it off.’

  Adam had got up and was flicking through his albums as Tim spoke. ‘Billie Holiday?’

  ‘How very late night,’ said Grace.

  ‘Yep, and it’s only nine o’clock.’

  ‘Well I’m on an early tomorrow, so sadly I shall miss out on Billie,’ said Grace. ‘And I’m drunk, so I better be heading home.’ She glanced at Tim who looked crestfallen. ‘That is assuming you are going to escort me, Dr Leith?’

  ‘Yes of course, where are we going? Are we walking?’

  ‘No, we’re getting a cab to Hackney.’

  ‘I’ve never been to Hackney,’ Tim said excitedly.

  ‘Of course you haven’t,’ smiled Grace. ‘Adam, I need a cab,’ she said loudly and Adam wandered off to the hallway to the phone.

  While he was on the phone Grace grinned and whispered to Anna: ‘Do you want a lift or are you going to stay a little longer?’

  Anna smiled and said ‘I can walk from here, and I will… probably.’

  Grace put up her hands. ‘It would have been rude not to offer.’

  Adam came back into the room. ‘Cab’s on its way, which could mean it’s on its way or it could mean they forgot me as soon as I put the phone down. Do you want another drink?’ The second part aimed at Anna.

  ‘Are you having another?’

  ‘God, yes.’

  ‘OK, do you have any chocolate? I always want chocolate after a curry.’

  The cab came within ten minutes and Tim bumbled his way out of the door in a heady mix of self-consciousness and gin. Grace hugged Anna and kissed Adam on the cheek. After they had gone Anna asked Adam if he thought Grace was going to sleep with Tim.

  ‘I do hope so, but it’s possible they may just get a bit angsty for a few hours and sleep near each other wearing vests and fear. I have Maltesers, Fruit and Nut and Fry’s Chocolate Cream.’

  ‘Ohh, the last one please! A man with chocolate in the house? Are you sure you live alone?’

  They drank more and let the atmosphere change. Quieter now, comfortable but uncertain; sated but alert. They were sitting on the floor leaning against the sofa.

  ‘Tell me about dancing.’

  ‘It made me make sense of myself. I was doing it from the age of about eight. I did it with my brother. I was pretty good, he was better. Then things went a bit wrong and I ended up leaving and moving down here.’

  ‘Wrong?’

  ‘Are you key wording me? Because really it is a bit rude to use basic counselling techniques on another nurse.’

  Adam smiled. ‘Basic? OK sorry, what sort of wrong?’

  Anna shuffled over toward him and sat close enough to be slightly leaning on his shoulder. ‘Tell you what…’ She spoke more quietly now. ‘I’ll tell you all about it if you tell me why you go to Libby.’

  Adam let his body relax ever so slightly into hers and whispered: ‘This is a slightly different counselling technique, right?’ And he stared at his record player. The music had stopped but the record was still going round, as it would until he got up and took the stylus off, but he didn’t feel like moving and he didn’t feel like being evasive. There were dozens of stories that he knew he would never tell for fear of filling the heads of other people with the ghosts that haunted his, but this one?

  ‘OK. Are you sitting comfortably? When I was a student nurse I had every intention of changing the world. For about the first twenty minutes or so it seemed I even thought I could. Believe it or not, I was actually considered to be rather good then. Something of a star student. Mind you, in those days it
looked to me as though all you had to do was be able to stand up and chew at the same time and the nursing schools loved you. Anyway, about a year and a half into the course I was stuck on to a rehabilitation unit. You know it quite well. Christ, I hated it. There was I fighting the good fight and there was sod all I could do on this ward. No one wanted saving, the selfish bastards. The place was full of burnt-out schizos, the odd dire poet, a few psychopaths and a handful of old women. Sad and charmless. I had all the energy in the world, the best of intentions, and nowhere to put any of it.

  Anyway, in the middle of the placement I had to do a month of nights. I had just moved in here with Catherine, my girlfriend at the time, and I didn’t much fancy being away at nightime but it was only for a month. I got to work with one other nurse, he was called Terry and had been working nights on the same ward for about a thousand years. He was like part of the furniture but uglier. At the time, however, I thought he was all right. He’d come out with these crass little soundbites about psychiatry and human suffering and I’d think ‘Shit, you can’t buy that kind of experience,’ which of course you can, quite cheaply, but I was easily impressed.

  So I worked nights with Terry and he was really charming. I told him all about Catherine and the new flat. I told him she was nervous about being there on her own and about the amount of work we had to do on the place and he was really sympathetic. He told me I should make sure that I took proper breaks. What he meant was that I could have about a four hour break every night to go off into a sideroom and sleep. He always took a two hour break himself but he always insisted, really insisted, that I take as long as I wanted, even if I didn’t want it, if you know what I mean. I never said much, it was my third ward, what the fuck did I know? Anyway, I got the impression that he was trying to be kind but at the same time he was quite happy to have the place to himself.

  But one night I’m taking my break, which meant I was reading in the office. I couldn’t sleep for some reason. It may have been guilt, I don’t know, but it was the office you use now to write up notes and watch me being ridiculous. I looked through the window you look through and saw Terry shining his torch into Libby’s face. Libby, like a lot of patients, is a bit closer to sane when she’s half asleep and didn’t like the torch light in her eyes so she said “Get away, you prat.” I heard her. I was impressed: it was an appropriate response. But Terry, quick as a flash, said “Steady Libby, you know what happens to girls who talk like that.” And she looked terrified. Lay straight back down and curled up, like a chastised puppy. Terry grinned, he actually grinned and moved on along the line doing his patient checks, which amounted to shining his torch in their faces. I waited until he was back in the office and I went up and sat down and said something about hearing Libby. I thought, and it was a long time ago and I might be wrong, but I thought that he blushed for a moment but he didn’t say anything so I asked him outright. I said I heard what you said and I asked him what he meant. At first he said he was making reference to a behavioural programme she used to be on in the Seventies, that she wouldn’t be allowed mid-morning tea if she was rude to staff. But Libby didn’t have the initiative to be rude. I couldn’t imagine that that was ever part of her treatment plan, cutting back on the attitude, so I was pushy. Not in an aggressive way, in a collusive way really: “I bet you have seen some things.” I didn’t give him the impression I cared, just that I was curious.

  Turns out that in the late Fifties and early Sixties the nurses had a card school, and from that they developed their own little therapeutic regime. Patients from the four wards along that corridor, the wards that the nurses came from, were punished for any misbehaviour by having to act as, well, he said helpers and when I said servants he said not exactly. Sometimes it seems they didn’t have to help, sometimes they just had to stand there for two or three hours depending on how ‘bad’ they had been. He said that the threat of that punishment, which was at no point violent, he insisted, improved the behaviour of patients right across the hospital.

  So I asked him what he thought about that and he said well it didn’t do any harm but I felt he was holding back a bit and I said well I suppose all it amounts to is depriving people of a bit of sleep and getting them to help out a bit and he smiled and said well there was a bit more to it than that and I said what and he said every patient was made to wear an incontinence pad, one of those big yellow ones. And then he smiled and added: “and nothing else…”’ Adam paused for a moment and looked at Anna.

  ‘That’s sick,’ she said quietly.

  He nodded. ‘Yeah, but you know what? I don’t think that was the end of it. Rightly or wrongly I couldn’t really stay in the room much beyond that. I had this image in my head, this vile image, and it’s still there. I didn’t want to hear any more. I didn’t want to take the risk that their reality was worse than my imagination. It’s like now, I don’t want to put that image in your head, nor the idea that people can do that…’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘Nothing. Not really. I talked to Libby, when I was back on nights, I told her that I had been told about some things that happened a long time ago and that they may have happened to her and that it was wrong and I was sorry that she had had to tolerate that and that it would never ever happen again but she didn’t appear to understand. Although a year later she said what she said.’

  ‘And Terry?’

  ‘He retired a couple of years later. Died within eight months of giving up work. He needed that place more than it needed him.’

  They sat quietly, not drinking or speaking until Anna said: ‘It’s the stories isn’t it?’

  Adam knew what she meant. Some tales are told and they poison you, others you keep to yourself for fear of poisoning other people. The human decay is contagious, and if we are not careful we can spread it with a reckless self-loathing.

  ‘So why do you go and sit beside her at night?’

  Adam turned his head slightly and smelt her hair: he expected it to be clean but it smelt of smoke and long days. ‘I don’t really know. I think… I think I’m still saying sorry. Not just to Libby. I think it makes me feel closer to human.’

  Later, much later, she said to him: ‘My mother has a saying, she says people only confess to the sins they can live with or profit from.’

  He laughed. ‘What a stupid saying. Anyway, you owe me a story.’

  ‘Yes, yes I do and I’ll tell you later.’

  Anna stayed there that night. As she had planned. They did not discuss it: they kissed over the whisky, they undressed in the living room and had sex on the floor. Later they went to bed. There they made love. They flailed around all night, daring one another to lose themselves in different skin. It wasn’t love. It was desperate and generous; it was recurrent and sometimes tender. But it wasn’t love. Love was a few floors above them. Adam and Anna were reminding themselves they existed and by a coincidence of nature they both did that by offering service to another. It was, when everything else was stripped away, all that stopped them from spinning off into the Universe.

  7. Pour A Little Poison

  Tim and Adam were sitting in the office discussing the hellish and unhelped existence being lived out by Michael Wells. It had been three weeks since they had got drunk together with Anna and Grace and, while they had never referred to that evening explicitly, they were more relaxed with each other and probably more able to speak freely, which in this case meant with a more open despair.

  ‘He’s not sleeping.’ Adam had been saying this to Tim for a week.

  ‘He’s on enough major tranquillizers to knock out a bull elephant.’

  ‘Not working.’

  ‘Do you want me to prescribe more?’

  ‘If you prescribe more the nation will run out of drugs. They aren’t working.’

  Tim looked worried. ‘Might it be his therapy? Maybe that’s throwing things up which are troubling him, keeping him awake.’


  Adam scowled. ‘The only thing Ms Tandy throws up is her dinner. No, Michael is immune to the drugs. If anything, they seem to make him worse.’

  Grace came in with Anna. Tim blushed. So did Grace, a little bit. Anna ignored them both and said to Adam: ‘Michael isn’t sleeping.’

  ‘I know, that is what we were just discussing.’

  Adam nodded at Tim who said: ‘I can’t give him more drugs, he’s on enough to—’

  ‘Yes, I know he’s on too many drugs. Maybe that’s the problem?’

  Tim looked worried. ‘I’ll call Peach.’

  ‘He’ll tell you to give him more drugs,’ said Adam.

  ‘Well, he is the consultant,’ said Tim primly.

  ‘Yes, he is,’ said Adam. ‘But if you were the consultant what would you be doing?’

  ‘I thought you didn’t do hypothetical questions?’

  ‘Tim!’ said Grace sharply. ‘What would you be doing?’

  Tim blushed. ‘My worry is that we have damaged the sleep centres in the brain. There are reports that excessive use of anti-psychotic medication, particularly in high doses, alters the bit of the brain that enables us to go to sleep. It is irreversible. It is torture really: no matter how tired you become you can’t sleep, ever, not properly.’

  ‘OK, so how do we help? How do we find out if that is the case?’ asked Anna.

  ‘I suppose we need to wean him off the drugs. It’s not like they are helping.’

  ‘So do that,’ said Grace.

  Tim didn’t blush, his shoulders slumped and he shook his head.

  ‘What?’

  ‘He can’t do that, Grace,’ said Adam quietly. ‘He can’t go to his boss and tell him that one of his patients isn’t sleeping and so in order to help him he is reducing the medication that should help him sleep, without seemingly accusing him of excessive prescribing, way over the limit recommended by the drug company, that has led to the prospect of permanent brain damage.’

  ‘No,’ murmured Tim. ‘But I must.’

  A couple of hours later Libby and Anna came to the office. Libby had that ‘going to church’ look about her. Her thin hair was brushed, and arranged in such a way as to shade if not hide her pink flaking scalp. She had a light brown coat on, which Adam hadn’t seen for over a year, and underneath she wore a clean pink cardigan.