No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  My diaries were lying open and scattered across the floor, polaroids of Rachel were thrown about and crumpled with other photos. Louie had also scrawled on some of the diary pages with eyeliner pencil in slanting, savage strokes: “Fuck off … suffer ... sick bastard.” I had underestimated her passion, her jealous rage, her desolation and was astonished and shamed by it, standing there in the ravaged flat with photos scattered at my feet, the phone began to ring again and the fish moved in their tank expecting food.

  Chapter Three

  Cutting the Worm

  Hunter entered the water at night having cut a wake through the nettle stalks along the river bank. There was no water in his lungs, the autopsy was quite clear — it was the cold that had killed him, stopping his heart, weakened as it was by decades of inactivity and by smoking all those roll-ups during the long hospital years. The late autumn weather had been mild, but the chilled water had taken him, killed him and sent him floating back to the hospital.

  He had lasted two years out, one of the few to be discharged from maximum security, a burned-out schizophrenic, whose offences were lost in time. He had been housed in a council maisonette on a large estate in the city. Too old, lonely and disconnected to start a new life, he had become frightened by the malevolent local children who had sensed his strangeness and scratched at his front door at night, shouting after him on the street. The weak thread of connection between him and care workers could not sustain him. And so he rolled with the river down Clifton Reach, southerly through the deep flood prevention channels and past the glittering, night-time city. Dawn found him bumping over misty Shelford Weir, then the river swept him seaward through the water meadows where cattle grazed, past the raw, new estates and disused bomber bases to tumble under Newark Bridge by the beet factory where the high-sided, white vans rumbled overhead, taking men to Ranby Prison, Lincoln and the hospital.

  He went with the river as it looped, slowed and began to meander, as it reached the fenny, flat lands where the wide bean fields opened out. Here Hunter, or what had been him, nudged the muddy banks and lodged in the intake grill of a power station on the west bank of the river, the hospital side. Nearby stood a country parish church, where could be found the graves for the hospital dead. Forty or fifty of them, each with similar grey headstones bearing a name and a date, sinking slowly into the thatch of rarely-mown grass. After autopsy and inquest and enquiry reports, Hunter joined them.

  We stood together for a moment by the graveside looking down at the pale wood of the coffin and the thick clods of red earth heaped up on a tarpaulin nearby. Bartram removed one black leather glove, stooped and tossed a fistful of earth to clump down on the lid with a thud. Bill Ponds did likewise. The committal over, we remained awkwardly together as the chaplain hurried away, her parka jacket flapping over her robes. Bartram said, “Well, it was difficult to get the Directorate committee to allow poor old Hunter here but it was the right thing. Well, hadn’t he floated his way back to us after all?”

  He paused, looked up at the sky and hitched up his cashmere scarf to the biting wind. “Blow, blow thou winter wind …Thy sting is not so sharp as friends remembered not … Eh Jack?”

  I smiled and nodded, well used to Bartram’s playful allusions although I knew that he hid a sharp dislike of the patients beneath that avuncular manner. We walked away from the grave, down the lines of head stones, back towards the flat-topped church tower as behind us two workmen began to fill in the grave. Bill Ponds followed, picking his way over the uneven path between the frozen mole hills. He was a tall, thickset Barbadian, popular among the patients, a calm, compassionate man. He had nursed Hunter for years and they had both served out their time in the villas. Flecks of snow began to fall, eddying around the dusty windows and the eroded, sandstone pillars of the old church. Faraway, against the wind, could be heard the growl of tractors working the land and the distant clamour of the rooks that inhabited the hospital poplars.

  Bartram offered Bill Ponds a lift but he gravely declined, “I likes to walk when I can,” he said in his deep voice.

  We passed him as we drove away, marching steadily down the hedged lane to the hospital, his pork pie hat tilted against the snow flurries. Bartram hunched over the wheel of his battered Volvo. My feet crackled on a heap of debris in the passenger foot well where I could see piles of old sandwich containers, promotional material from drug companies and oddly, a green plastic watering can sitting there among the litter.

  “It’s strange when we bury them like this,” said Bartram as we ground along slowly down the slippery road. “It’s as if their lives have been completely taken by the hospital and their ends only have the meaning that we give them.”

  “And hospital accounts pay the ferryman,” I said and Bartram laughed, glancing at me as I stared out onto the whitening fields.

  I had come on the early shift that morning, as I needed to complete some paperwork before attending the funeral as the departmental representative even though I had never met Hunter. I had walked through the empty, early morning car park that day, a little stiff after the hour-long drive from the city. A few rooks sidled across the tarmac, there was a frost shrouding the windows of the night staff cars and the hospital flag pole began to clank in the chilly breeze. A grey light showed through the corridor vents as dawn broke. I passed the block wards on the way to my office compound. I could hear the chinking of key belts and chains and the crack of doors unlocking as the handover took place after the night shift and night security reports were exchanged. I could hear medication trolleys on the move down the corridors and the squeaking, clatter of breakfast containers going down to the blocks from the kitchens. There was a low murmuring as the first patients assembled to be shaved by staff, as the fire lists were made up and the radio man on each shift made his voice check to security control.

  I went out into the cold air of another wired court and drew back the metal gate latch. Above me, in the misty light, a heron silently glided overhead. I entered my office building and paused on the second floor to look out of the barred window toward the red brick hulk of the assessment block. I imagined Kress stirring there, not far away. Perhaps he was rolling a cig, or queuing for hot water and the medicine round. I paused on the landing to look out at the triple barrier of the hospital, wall, ditch and wire, thinking how small the place seemed from this vantage even though, turning and turning upon themselves, the inner corridors unwound for miles. The early morning light gleamed on the pale coping of the rounded wall parapets and mist curled in the hollows of the ditch. In the field beyond the wire the rooks clambered steadily in twos and threes over the furrowed soil. In my mind I was determined, after this funeral was done, to start to close in on Kress.

  Having returned to the hospital with Bartram, I could see his junior doctors already waiting for him on the path by the staff entrance, he hurried on ahead of me. I watched him forge on past the lodge house, his staff grade medical juniors following him, briefing him before the mid-morning ward rounds. He was already undergoing the security searches at the staff carousel and metal detector as I entered. I showed the security reception my key chain, key card and ID. Although I had undergone this process many times since starting at the hospital two months previously, it continued to be a tense affair. Staff queued to enter past the signs reminding employees of what was forbidden and moved into the reception area one by one through a sliding transparent door. The place echoed to the sounds of rattling metal stiles, as if at a football ground’s entrance. At every tenth entry a buzzer sounded and a special search ensued for both incoming and outgoing staff. There was also the archway of a metal detector where a body search always took place, for the hospital was a place where not only the patients were invigilated. In the old days, staff were not searched but after a spate of enquiries, escapes and scandals, security had been tightened. Now all were searched for contraband: weapons, cameras, phones, chewing gum, newspapers, medication, items of glass, unauthorised keys of any sort, food — the list
was long.

  Everyone knew the procedure. We had been trained to administer it ourselves. I remember studying the searching procedures manual with its flow chart on how to rub down a male subject. I had to repeat it time after time under the dyspeptic eye of a senior security nurse who would sigh heavily as he observed my hesitant practice attempts on another member of the training course.

  “No, Mr Keyse,” he would bark, “you are not asking him for a dance. Approach the subject, stand facing him, give him clear instructions, ask him if he has anything he is not authorised to have, then start on the procedure, pockets, headgear, collar, tie. And so on, carry on, Mr Keyse.” I would fumble over my colleague once more and all the time that I was practising to be a jailer I would be thinking my own unauthorised thoughts and plans for which no guard could find evidence.

  On re-entering the place on this day, a member of security approached me with the usual ironic courtesy of “Do you mind, sir?” I remember his hands running lightly down my torso and my legs as he worked his way methodically over me. Pockets — emptying them, headgear — none, asking me to run my fingers through my hair; fingers moving down my tie, turning my collar out and feeling round it; working his way down; his hands touching me like a brisk, no-nonsense lover. There was little dignity in being searched; sometimes there was banter between the parties but more usually uneasy silence. I stood still with my hands raised and could faintly smell his sweat underneath the aftershave.

  “Twist, please,” he instructed and I twisted my belt buckle for him to inspect behind it. Looking over his stooping back, I could see Poynton, the chief ferret, staring back at me from an observation hatch by the glass fronted booths that held the key racks. The security man worked his way down, patting as he went, crouching to slide his hands down the back and sides of each leg, all the way to the ankles. As ever, the genitals remained unprobed, the only unregulated area for staff, although a hand-held lollipop metal detector was waved over that area. I recalled Bartram once laughing about it: “Heaven knows what squalid little room you would be taken to, with boxes of rubber gloves, if that thing went off when it was waved at you down there!”

  Once screened and searched, I advanced to the key cupboards. There were four keys needed: two heavy new magnetic ones with slab-sided shanks for the main doors and two older ones of polished brass for side rooms and offices. The key men waited impassively to receive you, giving out keys from large swivelling carousels in return for a key card with your name and department, which was then hooked up in place of your key. I received the heavy bunch through a slot in the screen, clipped them to my key loop and waited by a gridded gate to be allowed through into the body of the hospital. I imagined Poynton still watching me but I did not look round.

  The gate slid back and I entered the first corridor. Outgoing staff congregated here; there was the sound of banter and the constant jingling of keys as staff adjusted and unhooked their belts. On and through the first heavy main door, the lock going riprap as the magnets engaged, and then out into the first wired yards between the buildings, empty apart from a few starlings on the frozen grass. I entered the Edwardian blocks, the old heart of the hospital with its worn red brick and narrow windows masked by heavy, rustpocked, white painted bars. Here I passed through long, muffled corridors where the daylight filtered in through overhead, barred circular openings.

  Here, away from the vigilance of security staff, I could feel secure in my purpose and my step would quicken, my keys jingling in their pouch. Here, too, I would first encounter groups of patients. They would come, sometimes singly, corralled by staff, or six or seven at a time, herded, moving in single file on their way to gym sessions, workshops or the psychological therapies unit. When I had first walked these corridors they had seemed shadow-men, these inhabitants of the place, muffled; slow-paced figures beside the confident escorts, with their crackling two way radios and stentorian shouts of, “Keep to the right lads.” These patients would murmur to each other or sometimes call, “Hello, boss,” to staff they knew. My gaze would pass eagerly over their faces as they shuffled past but I did not see Kress among them.

  On this morning I had hurried to Eaton Ward, a treatment ward on the lower blocks. Patients passed through the hospital from admission wards to treatment wards, then out of the blocks to the villas which stood further off in the hospital compound. Sometimes a patient would become snagged on a ward for years and others would flow backwards and, at worst, they could be sent to the feared D3 or Dove intensive care ward. This was for the especially fractious or dangerous where time passed slowly in perspex-fronted cells. Each ward had its own regime and its own folklore. Eaton Ward was a ground floor ward which had held men for years since the hospital’s inception. I often imagined their accumulated pain, their loneliness and sweat settling like sediment in the shadowy, echoing corridors. Eaton was known as a dumping ground, a Sargasso for patients who were too intransigent or damaged to respond to the latest therapies. The staff were, in the main, good hearted time servers who ran a regime of benign neglect. Patients often lived there for years, serving out the years along with the staff.

  I turned off the main corridor, then entered the dark, fusty air lock — a sealed access chamber designed to prevent a sudden patient breakout from the ward. I pressed a buzzer and peered through the vision slot to check that no patient was lurking by the doors. We had been trained to look through these slots, through the fingers of an upraised, protective hand in case anyone on the other side poked an object back through at us. A buzzer sounded signalling that staff were aware of my presence on the other side and were observing the entry corridor. I opened the ward door using both hands, click as the key went home and clack as the turning handle shot the magnetic bolts.

  Lazaro usually haunted the entrance corridor to the ward, a paedophile with a whining, scouse accent and a doughy, half-formed face as if he had never fully matured. He would scurry beside incoming staff asking over-solicitously “How are you this fine morning, sir?” He was frightened of his fellow patients who hated him as a nonce and he was careful to stay next to staff at all times. He would often hold a rolled newspaper, pretending to do the crosswords while secretly tearing out pictures of children to carry off to his room. He would stick close to staff where they lounged to chat and watch the patients playing snooker, and he would invariably follow me down the ward, engaging me in ritual conversation.

  This morning I was surprised to see that his chair was empty and there was no sign of him. There was just one nursing auxiliary standing in the ward corridor, key belt dangling, watching my entry. As I entered he gave me an unfriendly nod and returned to the pages of the Mirror. The smell of cooking, of cigarette smoke and of polish reached me — the scent of dead time, dead hopes, the odour of futility on this forgotten ward.

  I went quickly down the central axis, greeting the staff and patients in the association area. I looked along the west room corridor to see a uniformed cleaner washing the floors and the murderer Heinrich Grau slumped in a worn leather chair. I raised my hand in greeting and Heinrich turned his sharp face like an old bird to give me a jerky gesture in return.

  Padraig was also there, leaning in a corner, in a worn grey suit, his bony skull gleaming under a clipped fuzz of hair. He beckoned me over, hissing out the words “What news fer me?” as he always did, his hands rubbing at the sores about his sharky, thin mouth with its wrecked teeth.

  “No news Padraig, I’m sorry,” I replied. He was always waiting for notification of a transfer back to Ireland which would never come. Scurrying after me down the corridor he whispered, “Hey mistorr, mistorr, it’s de blacks and de English dey arr poisoning me, help me please…”

  I kept walking towards the staff office, shrugging off Padraig and the other importuning patients. There was often a feeling of tension when specialist staff entered the nursing station offices. The nurses lived with the patients, served out their time with them and rubbed shoulders with them. They lived on terms of familiarity
with men who were once feared, loathed and now were largely forgotten by the outside world. They often regarded specialist staff as dilettantes and tourists who did not really understand the dangerousness or the humanity of their charges.

  Eaton Ward office this morning brimmed with special tension. I realised it at once and as if to signal this, the office phone rang constantly, the external bells echoing down the corridor outside. A staff nurse, whom I did not recognise, cradled a phone with a lit cigarette jutting from his fist in defiance of the regulations. He blew out a tusk of smoke and stared at me while continuing to bark instructions down the phone. Two auxiliary staff leaned over the patient movement board, making adjustments in red felt tip according to the day’s activities. I could see that Lazaro’s name had already been rubbed off the board. A security team member was also standing by the barred window, leafing through the patient files.

  More nursing staff arrived with a clatter of keys and the rustling hiss and static from their radios. The staff nurse banged his phone down and began to brief them about patients. Glancing at me suspiciously for a moment, as if in doubt whether to speak in front of me, he then went on to tell them that Lazaro had unexpectedly gone berserk at breakfast, jumped on patient Hobman and tried to stab him in the neck with a shiv made from a honed-down toothbrush stem melted onto a nail. Lazaro had been hauled off by staff, secluded and was now transferred to Dove ICU. This was to be my first conscious memory of the existence of Hobman.

  There was a sudden banging on the reinforced glass of an observation window next to my chair. I saw that I was being regarded by a patient called Andre. He was a fairly harmless, damaged man who had set fire to another patient’s trousers during a psychiatric ward squabble many years before and had got transferred to High Secure. He wore an old yachtsman’s cap at an angle, like Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen and he wagged his large forefinger at me in remonstrance. Above the battered brim of his cap he had stuck a yellow post-it label with HEAD OF SECURITY written on it in wobbly capitals. Andre continued to gesticulate, his eyes rolling behind thick glasses, and then he mouthed and bellowed through the reinforced glass, “Devil eyes! You have devil eyes, Dr Keyse!”