No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  Some of the rooms were grubbed out of the sandstone bedrock of the city and we crouched in one snug corner where we sniffed white powder from a wrap that Louie had produced. It left a bitter taste at the back of the throat. At first this gave a numbness and a feeling that it had no effect, yet gradually I noticed that Louie’s eyes had seemingly grown larger and deeper in their gaze, and were somehow full of life and sparkling. I tried to speak to her, conscious of my lips moving, finding it hard to get the words out, my thoughts whizzing and the words stumbling slowly after them. I felt terrifically better as if the ice had left my heart and I experienced a burst of love, gratitude and closeness to Louie. I took in the air in the room. It was laden with sweet tobacco and drink fumes. It smelt glorious. I thought I could sample each individual swirling molecule in that air. I concentrated so much on breathing that suddenly, when moving, I found that my leg muscles were stiff and cramped as if I had forgotten how to use them. Louie and I gazed at each other with a look of infinite understanding and confidence in each other and, for a moment, I felt a wonderful sense of protective grace. I was suddenly struck by a momentous idea that we are all thought, not body at all, that we are shadows moving in a dreamscape of ideas and that we could do anything that we chose and we had only to imagine something in order to create it. These ideas quickly evaporated to be eclipsed by the forgetfulness of the body. We then concentrated on dancing together for hours it seemed, hemmed in by a tranced swaying mass of people at a late night disco, held in a cavern at the back of the pub, facing the DJ who was nodding and crouching at the turntables above us until, at last, the music ended and we headed back home.

  We hailed a passing cab for the last mile and rode in silence. Louie lolled against me, one hand kneading my thighs and we tumbled out, close to the hospital staff residence. There, in the car park out by the dew-shrouded parked cars, she backed onto a car bonnet and pulled me to her, her breath sharp with booze in the night air. She hooked her legs around my hips and I put out a hand to steady myself on the chill metal of the car.

  “Come on, let’s do it here,” she whispered, tongue waggling, rustling, in my ear, fingers pulling at my belt. But I was fearful and reluctant as the drug oozed out of me, somewhere nearby a door opened, there were voices and footfalls and I jerked away from her. She pushed past me with a sigh and we clattered into the light and warmth of the nurses’ block, her coat swinging as she stomped ahead of me down the hushed corridors.

  Once in her room Louie slumped sulkily in an easy chair amid the usual clutter. She was evidently angry with me and my refusal and put on deliberately loud music. I stood in the yellow light of her bathroom splashing my face with water, I felt flushed and unsteady, something still pounding, making the sound of the sea in my ears. I found a yellow plastic razor on the edge of her bath and came into her room clowning, pretending to shave her legs as she sat smoking, legs over the arm of the chair, ankle chain glittering. She shifted her legs apart a little.

  “You can shave me all over if you want,” she said and looked at me challengingly with her eyes still drug-darkened, like black pools rimmed with silver. And so, I fetched a little bowl of warm water and some soap. I knelt before her as she slipped off her pants and I pushed a towel under her as she continued to sit with each leg hooked over the arms of the chair. I soaped her there, the water droplets hanging on each hair then began cautiously to strip away with the blade, at first safely high on her mound, then circling inward. I was lost in ferocious concentration, the music had stopped, there was just the sound of faint rasping and the occasional twirl of the razor in the bowl. One of my hands resting on the cradle of her pelvic bone, the other cramped around the slippery stem of the razor. As I shaved her, I looked intensely at the stipple and whorl of hair, the secret fissures emerging while she lay back smoking, gazing at the ceiling, sometimes speaking to me, her belly pulsing as she spoke. As her genitals emerged, she shifted and sometimes my wet hand pulled at the skin of her inner thighs to reveal the tender slope of the underside of her buttocks, the towel clung to the damp skin. I worked on like a penitent until the job was done, I dabbed at the faintly reddened areas and at last stood back from my handiwork. Louie yawned and looked down. She seemed bored now and the effect of the sulphate was ebbing. I felt exhausted too, my jaws aching from the speed-induced clench of the facial muscles. Louie picked up a make up mirror and angled it to examine herself and said, “That looks like a good job. Well, do you want to try it out now?”

  She spread the towel onto the carpet after sliding away the litter of other damp towels, clothing, overflowing ash trays and make-up bags with the flick of one bare foot, pulled her print dress over her head, lay back on the towel and yanked me onto her.

  Later that night, lying cramped on her narrow single bed in the overheated room, with the background thrum of the pipes somewhere, I woke to find Louie deeply asleep on her back, one leg lying heavily across me. I had been woken by a dream of Rachel rising, shimmering from the sea. I lay awake until dawn, Louie’s head on the pillow beside me, thinking of Mrs Durrand’s room and the message Aufheben, remembering Rachel once proffering me a crocus flower after a spring shower and saying “look — Aufheben”.

  * * *

  The pale fire of the low winter sun just cleared the walls of the remand block and sent wheeling shadows across his cell as he hunched there through January and into February. After his return from yet another court hearing, Kress threw scalding water over another prisoner on the landings and was sent to the “seg” — segregation on a lower level of cells with no prisoner association. Once there he began to deteriorate further. The whole wing knew he was unravelling, his hoarse voice sounding loudly from his cell calling to the screws, throwing food trays against the cell wall, shouting to the pigeons as they fluttered near the window ledges despite the sharp wires to prevent them landing. He lay all day on blue rubber matting on the floor, his room lit by a bare bulb guarded by a mesh screen, only occasionally getting up to look at himself and bare his brown root teeth at his reflection in a metal mirror screwed to the wall. As the weeks passed he shed his clothes, preferring to huddle naked under a blanket. He smeared shit streaks on his wall, into which he would read grimacing faces while he muttered a mantra, which would occasionally explode into a scream:

  “I hate all slags … I hate all slags … I HATE ALL SLAGS!”

  On and on he went for hours until the other prisoners battered on their walls and doors, yelling at him to shut it.

  Spring moved, clouds drifted past his high window, rain fell, feeding the wired gutters burbling out to the courtyards far below. He continued to shout to himself and to huddle in his blanket and he was moved to the hospital block, a thronging narrow space with cells down each side of an inner courtyard, occupied by the sick prisoners who moved about the central area during the day: a few amputees, some on detox from heroin, and the “ravers” like Kress, “nutted off ” in prison parlance. Kress was seen by the red-faced prison doctor who referred him to a forensic consultant who didn’t think he was dangerous enough for High Secure. Kress helped things along when a routine cell search revealed regurgitated chlorpromazine tabs in a window crevice and a biro stem, ground down to a point with a tape handle, hidden in his bedding. His notes on toilet paper in a childish, rounded hand detailed his plans to grab a depot nurse on her regular morning round to treat the psychotic patients; notes about holding her hostage, making her pay. He was again referred to high secure hospital under Section 48 of the 1983 Mental Health Act. Transfer of a remanded prisoner. This time he was accepted and he was soon decanted into the prison transport, this time moving forty miles north.

  Thus, Kress came to be caught up in the hospital, the secure psychiatric system from which he could never leave, guilty or innocent, unless pronounced sane. I knew this because I had cultivated a secretary who had an access password to the computer records for prison psychiatric reports and records of court appearances. I had plied the secretary with chocolates, listened
to her worries about her children’s difficulties at school and passed flirty jokes with her. After prompting her to boot up the system I would urge her to take a break and would sit in her swivel chair, among the kitsch clutter of her desk, looking at the screen which listed clinical activity: who had been asked to assess whom, what was the outcome. Some of this was recorded in basic numeric codes which I read from a code book also held by the obliging secretary who did not question my glib explanations for wanting this information. I would flick through the diagnostic shorthand notes and the details of places and dates. This allowed me to track where Kress was in the system and what his likely future movements were. When logging off, the green characters would gradually fade then disappear with a pop, the trace evaporating as information on Kress also stopped once he entered the hospital. They had their own systems, and there were no insecure links for other eyes.

  The Beekeeper enquiry had begun to lose interest in Kress at this time, as a new lead had emerged. During a case review, held in an attempt to find new progress, someone had again looked through the video tracks from the Paradise Stores and noticed pictures of a lone male on the two successive nights prior to the Thursday night that Rachel disappeared. They linked these pictures to the description of the driver in a van who also wore a white top, according to the witness who saw him when he was walking home from a local chip shop on the night. The image quality was poor but the CID agreed that the man pictured could not be Kress. He had a thickset build, he seemed younger, had a distinctive heavy face and cropped head, whereas Kress’s hair appeared longer even allowing for the three month elapse between the September picture and his arrest. So confident were they that this was a significant lead, the police released the image to the local press and it appeared in the city’s Evening Post.

  I stared at the image when I first noticed it and clipped it out to study. I was disappointed because I had at first seen Kress as the certain agent involved in Rachel’s disappearance and my vengeance had fixed on him. Now it seemed to me that she could have fallen victim to any from an unknown male tribe out there that inhabited the shadows of the city.

  There were so many like Kress. This was one more of them with his stocky build and bull neck striding in the fuzzy Betamax frame. I studied the image carefully noting the left forearm where there was the shadow of a tattoo with some lettering above it. This was the last and most distinct image taken forty minutes before Rachel’s picture was captured for the final time on Mr Dhaliwal’s camera. I studied it, remembered it and put it aside, still wanting to follow the trail of Kress into the hospital.

  My colleagues definitely thought I was crazy to be interested in forensic High Secure for it was a blighted, discredited branch of the system. My puzzled clinical director commented, “Are you sure about this Jack?” as he signed off my secondment request to be transferred. I had driven out there in late summer, nine months after beginning my search for Rachel, following Kress’s track, wanting to take a first look at where I was heading.

  Louie came along as she was happy to do something different on the weekend. The wind ruffled her hair through the open car window in the late spring warmth. She placed her bare feet up on the car dashboard, the fine blonde hairs on her legs transparent in the sunshine. We drove north on the Roman road to Newark then swung off into a nest of country roads. The hospital was shown on no map. We finally stumbled on the place among the sloping fields of uncut wind-rippled young barley. It was a shadow, a masked line, settled in a knap in the wolds and folded away from the prying world. We stopped by the gates with their pineapple-topped finials above high brick columns.

  I cut the engine and got out. There was the sound of hot metal ticking, a wood pigeon calling somewhere, and the soughing of the wind through avenues of Lombardy poplars. In front of me was a line of dark fencing, some neo-Georgian blocks with coppery-green roofs and further off, a huddle of red buildings which I guessed must be the five-stepped entrance lodge that discharged patients had mentioned to me. Two men cycled past, bulky figures in long blue coats despite the warm day. They wore chains hanging from their belts by a loop at their sides. They nodded cautiously in greeting while looking carefully at me and at Louie in the car. She had swung her door open, stretching her legs out into the sun. I could see her looking at herself in the driving mirror then rustling in her bag for a cig. I stood for a while by the car, thinking of Kress and trying to sense him there somewhere behind the blur of dark fencing. The place was not as I expected, not a portentous place like Broadmoor — the other great High Secure asylum — with its great walls and towers. No, this was hushed and discreet, like a provincial agricultural college, half-forgotten out in the fields. Afterwards, all I could remember about the hospital was a sense of isolation and of absence, a place where time passes slowly and where the wind sighs in the restless poplars.

  This glimpse of the hospital posed a challenge to our relationship. Louie drifted in the continuum of her social life in the bars and clubs and I was tied to the city for different reasons, forever searching, registering the pulse of the city and scanning for some clue to what happened on that September night. It seemed strange to consider working long hours far away in this rural place. Perhaps I already sensed that I was losing Louie anyway. We always had a cool alliance. And in a way I had chosen her for her matter of fact ways, her hostility to introspection and for her instinctive recognition of the deeps and losses in life. But recently I had begun to sense that Louie had begun to slip further away from me. There was something too smooth in her explanations about nights out with friends. Her diminishing phone calls to me spoke of other interests. A few weeks later she rang me after work asking me to drop round and see her. There was something unusual in her tone which I somehow connected to other small recent signs of distraction and worry: the way I sometimes caught her looking away, lips pursed and lost in her thoughts, or turning from me in the night when I reached for her, saying oddly and passively, “May I sleep now?”

  The TV news that night showed the same footage repeatedly. A mob clawing at a desperate man at bay on a car roof in Northern Ireland, soon to be overwhelmed and killed. The scene playing again and again of the victim, his handsome face and well-cut floppy hair still intact for a moment before the hands of his destroyers pulled him down. This image kept running in my head as I went round to Louie’s that evening. She met me without an embrace and sat in an oddly formal manner then handed me a little folded card. The card was headed “Department of Genito-Urinary Medicine” and contained instructions to report to the unit because of being in contact with a venereal disease. I stared at her while she looked back at me with an expression that I couldn’t quite catch; some fear yes, but also a strangely triumphant, even excited air.

  “You are going to kill me aren’t you?” she said evenly.

  I shrugged; in truth I felt little right then. It is always some relief to a betrayer to find he has been betrayed in turn. I pocketed the card and quietly asked her what it was about and she spoke of meeting someone else, telling me in a matter of fact tone as if it was an illness she had contracted, something beyond her control. Her new mate was apparently called Neville, a gangster, a bouncer. She even showed me a Polaroid picture in washed-out colours of a large, pin-eyed man in a black coat with stiff, thick hair and a big lop-sided jaw line. Louie told me that it had ended, although I didn’t believe her. He had gone down with VD and had been told to inform her and she in turn was telling me. The GU clinic apparently called it “the chain of contact”.

  I returned home and lay awake imagining his bacilli running through my system and took myself next day to the clinic in the annexe of the old city general hospital. There I sat in a high-walled waiting room among other gloomy males desultorily looking at motoring magazines. I heard one man shouting in a complaining manner to reception staff in the background, “I have been coming here for ten years…,” and I shared thin smiles with my fellow sufferers. There was a brief interview with a medic, his shadowed eyes made n
o expression as he listened to my sorry tale. He read me a list of prepared questions from a sheet :

  “Mucal discharge?

  Pain in the urethra?

  Pain on peeing?

  Proctal pain?”

  No, I had no pain, just numbness as I sat in a curtained cubicle and peed into a tube. A male nurse swept into the cubicle, grasped my cock in a plastic-gloved hand and briskly shook it and squeezed it to gain a further sample then dismissed me.

  “There you go matey … we will let you know.”

  I went back out into the streets to confront a chill breeze and the sound of insensate traffic.

  I received a small blue card from the clinic a few days later letting me know that I was clear of infection. Louie and I continued to go out and even sleep together although she would often turn away from me at night and I would look down at her while she slept, my hand brushing the cool skin on her back and finding myself wanting her more than ever. As we walked between bars, she still sought my arm and rested her hand on my knee, although now she seemed jumpy and distracted and we avoided some parts of the city. She told me she was “sorting it all out” and we avoided overt discussion about it. She did evening shifts and sometimes we would not see each other for a few days. Once, when I called for her at the nurses’ residence, I saw her speaking on a pay phone. Her eyes briefly meet mine through the glass of the phone booth, not really engaging, her face looking frozen and shuttered in some way.