Republics of the Mind
Page 23
When the woman came back, I told her about the young man. I said I felt foolish because I had taken him for Dr Muir, but clearly it wasn’t Dr Muir but a patient.
‘Oh no,’ she said, ‘there’s nobody here but us. Dr Muir and myself, I mean. All the patients have gone. Out into the world,’ she added in a sing-songy kind of voice.
‘Well, he certainly knew his way around,’ I said. ‘He must have been a former patient. Perhaps he just came back to have a look at his old home while he still could.’
‘Oh no,’ the woman said. ‘We keep all the doors locked. You can’t just walk in and out, you know. It wouldn’t be safe. The building’s falling down around our ears.’
‘Really?’ I said. ‘It looks sound enough.’
‘Oh, it may look sound enough,’ she said, ‘but underneath the surface it’s very unsafe.’
I changed the subject back to the young man. ‘I wonder who he was then,’ I said. ‘He didn’t seem quite …’
‘Quite what?’ she said, with her head slightly tilted, as if she were listening for something other than my answer.
‘Never mind,’ I said.
‘No, never mind,’ she said. ‘I’m Mrs Jennings. You’re the gentleman who telephoned, aren’t you? We’ve been expecting you.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘You told me that before.’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you wait here, and I’ll see if I can find Dr Muir. He should be able to help you.’
It was a crumbling, mouldy room. I didn’t like it. It was cold, too. There was a big fireplace but no fire in it. All the chairs were thick with dust. I didn’t want to sit on any of them, but after a while my legs grew tired. Everything was silent, but sometimes, away in the distance, I thought I heard noises. A door being slammed, a window being pulled shut. Still nobody came. I found a chair near the fireplace that seemed slightly less dusty than the others, and I brushed its seat with my hand. From there I could look over to the window where the young man’s chair was. I was glad he had pointed it out, otherwise I might have sat in it and I wouldn’t have wanted to upset him. He seemed a friendly soul, even if a bit wanting.
After a while I woke up. I was very startled when this happened. I hadn’t even known I was falling asleep. There wasn’t any way of knowing how long I’d been dozing. I wasn’t wearing a watch, which was odd because I usually do, and there was no clock in the room. I could tell because there wasn’t one ticking. But it was a little gloomier, and much colder, and it was clear to me that nobody was coming.
‘This is ridiculous,’ I said. I said it aloud because I was angry and because I wanted to hear a human voice. I went to the door through which the woman had come and gone, which was also, I was pretty certain, the one we had used when she first brought me into the dayroom. It was locked. I shook it hard and turned the handle, but it wouldn’t budge.
‘Hello!’ I shouted. ‘Hello! Is there someone there?’
I tried some light switches by the door but there was no power. I went to the other door, the one that the young man had gone through. In the gloom it was quite difficult to find amongst all that oak panelling, but I think I did find it, although there wasn’t a handle. It too was locked. After I had shaken and pushed at it I tried running at it with my shoulder, but the edges of the panelling made this painful and I stopped after the third run. I tried to be calm. The woman would be back soon, I told myself. She was obviously having trouble finding Dr Muir.
But after another ten minutes I started shouting again. ‘Help!’ I called. ‘Somebody!’ The light was disappearing fast now. I negotiated my way through the chairs to the big windows, thinking that I could perhaps open or break one and call out from there. It would be too high to jump. But the blinds were somehow stuck into the window-frames, and there were no strings to pull them up with.
I looked at the chairs. It seemed to me that they had all moved slightly, all crept a little closer to the fireplace. I went to the other side of the room, to be as far from the chairs as I could possibly be.
‘Help!’ I shouted. I yelled it at the top of my voice. ‘Help!’ But nobody came, even though I kept shouting and shouting.
And then, between shouts, I heard an echo. Whenever I called ‘Help!’ I heard it repeated from somewhere else in the room. When I was silent the echo was silent. I said, rather than shouted, the word, ‘Help,’ and back it came to me, just as quietly, ‘Help.’ So I yelled it again, and the echo yelled it too. But it wasn’t quite an echo, it was an imitation, and I saw that I was no longer alone. The young man was back. He had come into the room with his black hair neatly parted and his shirt buttoned up to the neck, and he was standing by ‘his’ seat, and every time I spoke or shouted he spoke or shouted the same thing.
‘Help!’ I shouted.
‘Help!’ he shouted.
‘Is anybody there?’ I called.
‘Is anybody there?’ he called.
At first I thought he was mocking me, and this made me angry, but then I realised that he was not mocking me, he was trying to help. He looked at me after every shout with a silly, encouraging kind of smile as if pleased with his shouting, as if between us we could attract somebody’s attention. But then, after a few more shouts, he forgot about me, or perhaps he thought we were in competition, for he began to shout out of turn, and louder, and I shouted back, louder and more often than he. It would have been difficult for anyone else to tell who had started it. I’m not entirely sure myself.
Soon it was so dark that I could hardly see his face. ‘Help!’ we called, together and separately, our voices strangely intermingling. And then I saw that there were more people in that dark empty place, ten or perhaps even twenty of them, shadowy men and women shuffling around, and those that couldn’t walk were rocking violently in their chairs in front of the fireplace. I couldn’t see their faces either, and the room was as cold as ice, and ‘Help! Help!’ they were crying. We were all crying it. It felt as if we had been crying it for years and years, but that can’t be right, because I only got here this afternoon.
‘Help!’
‘Help!’
‘Help!’
The woman was there again, I don’t know how. She came towards me. ‘Thank God!’ I said, but I don’t think she heard me.
‘Goodness me,’ she said, ‘what’s all this noise? Come now,’ she said, ‘calm yourself. Goodness me.’
I felt very tired. She got me settled in my chair again, in front of the fire, and I thought to myself that I would just sit for a minute, to get my breath back, and then I would leave.
‘We were all at sixes and sevens, weren’t we?’ the woman said. ‘But we’re all right now. That’s it, relax.’
She held my hand and it was all right, in a way. I closed my eyes. I thought I would open them again soon, and have a look at the flames.
After another minute, or perhaps two, I heard her voice again.
‘You just wait here,’ she said, ‘and I’ll see if I can find Dr Muir. He should be able to help you.’
Also by James Robertson
The Fanatic
Joseph Knight
The Testament of Gideon Mack
And the Land Lay Still
Copyright
First published 2012
by Black & White Publishing Ltd
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Copyright © James Robertson 2012
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