No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  Bored by his antics, I looked past him into the smoke room. In one corner a patient they called Dancing Tony jigged alone, headphones clamped to his head under a pulled down baseball cap. He moved with a graceful, restless motion. His eyes remained closed and his lashes were long, feminine and very dark against his greeny-white pallor. I did not know his offence and hence had not shaped my hatred for him. I stood up and leaned nearer the meshed glass, looking beyond the dancing figure, and beyond Andre who continued to mouth and point, to make out the figure of Hobman, hunched in a chair, seen in profile, outlined against the smoky light of the window vents. All I really knew of Hobman, at the time, was that he ruled the patients on the ward. He was feared among them and one glare from his tattooed face was enough to clear a room. He largely spent his days in the smoke room having refused therapeutic groups. He tolerated huge, bumbling, histrionic Andre whom he treated as a clown, court attendant and errand boy and he seemed rooted now in his preferred place. There was no outward sign of the attack on him by Lazaro.

  Dr Bartram bustled into the office followed at a distance by his junior staff grade Dr Rahnem and the other clinicians behind.

  “Good morrow dear colleagues, are you joining us? Chop, chop. Jack and I have already been busy this morning seeing poor Hunter off, haven’t we Jack?”

  He smiled at me and made sweeping gestures in an effort to chivvy the nursing staff into the review room; his starched white shirt front, topped by a magenta bow tie, gleamed in the yellow light of the ward room.

  The review room was usually locked, but now stood ajar as clinicians trooped in followed by the sullen group of ward staff who disliked Dr Bartram’s autocratic ways. It was a small room with high, unadorned walls and a window which appeared to be permanently open, summer and winter. I saw that a tendril of ivy had crept over the lintel from the outside wall and had begun to coil around one of the thick window bars. There were ten high backed chairs in a semicircle. Two months previously it had been discovered that some enterprising patients had slit the backs of the chairs and installed a hidden still made from plastic bottles in each chair with the intention of making alcohol from a concoction of dried fruit and yeast made from Marmite. The sulphurous bubbling from within the chairs had not been noticed in the weekly ward reviews but a cleaner had eventually discovered the workings. This room had been locked ever since and Bartram still joked about it, pretending to reach round the back of the chairs saying “Fancy a gin and tonic anyone?”

  Bartram took centre stage and gestured to incoming staff where they should sit. I watched his hands moving and his quick eyes measuring the responses to his eccentric, controlling behaviour. Junior medics sat closest to him, then psychologists and social workers, lastly ward staff and students. As a therapeutic specialist I occupied a middle ranking position in the hospital pecking order and I was pointed to a seat next to Irina Starsha, the ward psychologist. She had turned her sleek head as I entered, switching off her attention from poor Dr Rahnem the registrar, who continued to stammer out one of his halting anecdotes without an audience. Irina rarely contributed to clinical meetings, apart from occasional terse, peppery comments in her slightly accented voice. She sometimes mimicked Bartram to amused ward staff in the office after meetings. She caught my eye with an ironic lift of her arched brow and a flicker of amusement in her eyes. Her musky perfume reached me as I squeezed through the circle of chairs to take the seat next to her.

  The room was nearly full and the air was already close. A young student nurse leaned back in her chair yawning unselfconsciously and revealing a tanned abdomen adorned with a single silver stud in the belly button.

  “Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies,” declaimed Bartram looking challengingly at her, tugging at his greying side whiskers. “Do you know the Song of Solomon my dear?” The fair-haired student giggled, blushed and looked blank and I could see a folded anger in the tough features of the grizzled charge nurse. Bartram fed his vanity by scoring off low-ranking staff.

  The staff nurse requested that the meeting should firstly attend to patient Grimpen who had become disturbed after the incident on the ward and who needed attention.

  “If we must see him then wheel him in, but we really should try and focus on Hobman and make an effort to get to the bottom of this Lazaro business,” Bartram replied testily.

  “Take me to D3 doctor, take me up the blocks, take me to Dove, anywhere but here, I’ve had it here, can’t stand it no more!” Eddie Grimpen addressed Dr Bartram, ignoring the rest of the assembled professionals. A large man in his forties with a pear-shaped body, greasy blond hair and a fleshy, sallow face, he stood in the doorway, swaying slightly.

  “Come in, do,” said Bartram, indicating a chair set by the door.

  Grimpen reluctantly sat on the edge of the chair as if about to flee. Sweat beaded his forehead and he continued to speak jerkily through gritted teeth. His nicotine-stained hands twitched constantly over his face.

  “I have been here twenty years and this ward is the worst. Arsonists, rapists, child molesterers, not me. I didn’t even manage to kill anyone and I’m stuck here. And now there’s that nonce. Someone’s going to be knocked off, I’m telling you. I can’t stand it. Someone will get me next, and I’ve done nothing.”

  “Do calm yourself, Eddie, and tell us what you mean by ‘knocked off,’” said Bartram.

  A sly look crossed Grimpen’s face and he reached for a rollup from the pocket of his shirt and began to roll and squeeze and play with it in his fat fingers. All eyes in the room seemed to be on Grimpen’s hands as they palpated and manoeuvred the bulgy spill of tobacco. I noticed the sinews working on the white forearm with the prison tattoos, naively drawn, an anchor and an eagle with outstretched wings and his name “eddie” in faded lower case on a scroll. He had been in for twenty years, having tried to kidnap two teenage girls on a Cumbrian farm using a home-made firearm. His purpose had been to rape and kill them.

  “I’m saying nothing. Just get me out of here. Things happen here which aren’t meant to happen,” Grimpen said.

  His eyes darted around the room then seemed to fall on me for a moment.

  At this moment Poynton slipped into the meeting and moved behind us, keys chinking softly, to perch on a metal cabinet which stood in one corner. Grimpen’s eyes followed him and his voice trailed off. Patients feared security, and Poynton in particular. They called him “the ferret”. Grimpen would not respond to further questions from Dr Bartram and simply threw his arms up in jerky motions saying, “I’ve told yer, I’ve told yer, I’ve said it all.” There was a silence then Bartram said, “Alright Eddie, we will consider what you have to say and in the meantime you might be helped by a change in your medication.”

  “No more tablets doctor, just get me out,” Grimpen called from the doorway as the charge nurse ushered him away. As the door opened the noise of the corridors rolled in to the review room: insistent phone bells, slamming doors, keys rattling in locks and the distant shouting of a patient.

  “I think we could do with increasing his depot and his lithium dosage,” said Bartram once the door had closed. Dr Rahnem bent over the thick file scribbling notes and instructions for blood tests and medication changes. No one else in the room was asked for their opinion until Bartram turned to the slight figure of Poynton.

  “Eddie was talking about people being knocked off on the ward, Mr Poynton. Can you give us the benefit of your wisdom as to what is going on?”

  Poynton paused and swept the room with his pale gaze. A pack of Royals edged out of the chest pocket of his uniform white shirt.

  “Well let’s see what we have,” replied Poynton. “Hobman says he doesn’t know what it is all about. Lazaro was not popular. We have a security report from a month ago in which he reported a threat from an unknown patient.” Poynton handed round a single sheet photocopy of a drawing of a stick man suspended from a gallows. The initials TL were written below the hanging figure and a speech balloon drawn
by the head with the words “HELP!” written there.

  The paper shuffled from hand to hand in the room and I looked at it carefully before handing it to Irina. Poynton commented, “This looks like a joke, but is in fact an implied threat that Tony Lazaro is due for the chop. We also found this in Lazaro’s room this morning,” continued Poynton waving a tape cassette. “We found a written transcript of the contents of this tape made by Lazaro — we think. It contains a description of some of his offences against children either for the purpose of masturbatory gratification or for selling as porn to other patients. There were also pictures of children torn out of newspapers.” Poynton passed round another document. When I received it I just glanced at the first lines which read:

  “that nichole she was a real slut you knoe. I pulled her down. tony I love you shagging me she said. Ah and that little blue clip in her hair and her smooth thin licle legs and her mate in the doorway waiting her turn…”

  I gave the photocopy to Irina who made a slight moue of distaste when she received it. Poynton continued, “Lazaro himself is saying nothing. He is still presenting in a histrionic state on Dove. The odd thing is the ligature mark on his neck. There is no noose in his room and we know that it is unlikely to be an item of clothing as the skin is abraded and raw, as if it has been compressed by something thin and tight.”

  “Food for thought; perhaps we should do further snap searches on the ward looking for a ligature,” said Dr Bartram and the discussion eddied back and forth in the review room to which I only half-listened.

  “Well, let’s wheel Hobman in, see what he has to say,” I heard Bartram saying.

  “I’ll fetch him,” I offered, standing up. This surprised the meeting as the nurses usually went back and forth fetching patients. On a conscious level I wanted to show as a newcomer that I was comfortable and unafraid on the wards but now I think that I was also obeying some instinct, perhaps I was summoning up Hobman to begin to play his part in my story and that of my quarry: Kress.

  I went out of the review room into the ward corridor where patients milled, unsettled by the activity from security. I looked into the smoke room but could not see Hobman in his previous position and I went down the west corridor where the room cells were located. I passed the battered metal doors each with an observation shutter and identifying names written on erasable plates:

  Kirk ... Razaq … Field … Grau … Hobman.

  A hooded figure sat nodding and rocking in a chair at the quiet end of the corridor. It was JJ, a head-injured man with abnormal aggression, whom staff found easier to handle if his head was covered by a light towel during the daylight hours of patient movement. I ignored JJ and peered into Hobman’s neat cell. There were no pictures on the wall and just a line of paperback books carefully arrayed along one shelf. There was a chill breeze from an open vent and I could see snow falling past the window bars in the block yards outside.

  “Yes, doctor. Are you looking for me?” A quiet, pleasant voice sounded behind me, I jumped a little and turned to see Hobman calmly standing behind me. I thought that he must have moved very silently and swiftly. Up close, I could see that he had regular, aquiline features although the eyes were drawn to the markings on his face, its form and expression cancelled out by the images imprinted on it. The eyes were unreadable.

  My gaze skated over Hobman. I told him that he was required for review.

  “If I am called then who am I to refuse?” he said, still standing close to me.

  Suddenly a grating voice roared out, “I can see yer. I can see yer fuckin’ laughing!”

  The noise emitted from a dark, round, feral face with brown, stump teeth under a knobbed and welted shaven skull. It was JJ. His towel had slipped off his face and his squinty eyes had focused on us. He began to make convulsive jerks in his chair as if about to leap up and Hobman took my arm and pulled me back down the corridor with him. An auxiliary nurse deftly slipped behind JJ crooning to him, “Alright boyo, it’s alright, everything is fine now,” and adjusting the towel to fall over his face again, patting and rubbing the coiled arms until JJ subsided and slumped back like a toy with a dead battery.

  The auxiliary looked indignantly at us for disturbing his charge. I thanked Hobman for moving me away from JJ. His lips twitched into a slight smile as he walked beside me to the review room.

  Hobman sat for the review in the chair that Eddie had vacated. He looked calm and composed and thoughtful as if considering something. He seemed oblivious to our concerted gaze. I found something strangely compelling about him. I know now that he was probably listening to a woman’s voice in his head. She had accompanied him for many years, fading sometimes when he was loaded with medication, but since he had been started on an oral antipsychotic he would hold the white bitter tablet at the top of his throat, wriggle his tongue to show the staff it had gone, then spit the pill out later in his room.

  Sitting in that review room her voice was probably clear and strong again.

  “You will lobotomise them, scopolomise them, drag them to hell with ten mighty midgets,” she would say. He called her the White Lady or the White Sister of Utopia. She also told him to write to his estranged, older sister whom he had not seen for ten years since the murders. He wrote her long letters, elegiac and touching, calling her his lover, his butterfly, his mother, “I bless you, I bless you with my body, and I am soft for you but hard for others.” Postal security always found the letters and they were returned to him in ward review by Dr Bartram. The White Lady told him that his sister received them in spirit.

  The White Lady had been there from the beginning, or perhaps from when his mother left the family when Hobman was an infant. He believed that she moved the strings of his favourite toy — a puppet Pinocchio — and made it dance. She had whispered her calm instructions to him when his father had alternately cuddled then beaten him and called him “his little mate’; when he could hear his two older sisters whimpering in their rooms after their father returned from the pub at night. Sour-breathed and spit-laden he would rant to the children, “Let me tell you about your mother, that cow, that crow, that cunt!” After his mother had finally abandoned the family, just disappearing in the night, the child Hobman took to painting his face and sitting in an Indian tipi that his sisters had helped him make. He called himself Big Chief and spent all his time there where all would be well. Once his father played along, even painting his face as part of the game and they could be seen together in photos he had kept, now lodged in the hospital files. Perhaps it was in the tipi, decorated by sun and moon symbols, a masked face and a phoenix-like bird when the White Lady first started speaking to him.

  She had also guided him through his school absences and his removal to the learning disabilities classes. Her cool voice had comforted him when he saw his mother on market day in the small Norfolk town they shared as she walked past with a new family. The White Lady had also instructed him to take back from the world, to take what was due to him. And so he truanted and stole from local shops and the White Lady’s voice was ecstatic and singing when he hid under the old timbers of the staithe down by the silted harbour, watching the moonlight on the curving estuary out to the Wash, drinking cider and taking deep breaths from glue tins. The White Lady also told him he could walk on water, he could do many things but first there were tests, first he must go on a journey. So, as a teenager, Hobman travelled from home, drifting, stealing, holing up in bed and breakfasts and hostels, always pursued by the tinkling, insistent voice that said, “They are laughing at you, they are shining their lights on you.”

  When stealing would not provide him with enough keep, for he was an incompetent criminal — he tried to work. In the East Anglian market town where he had found himself, the labour exchange sent him to do day work in a chicken factory where he slammed the heads of birds with a stun gun before they were hoisted and had their throats cut. He spent some of his first week’s wages on a haircut which sheared off his long, straight, auburn hair and he stared
at his newly angled, ascetic features in the dim mirror of his lodgings.

  That night the voice said, “This haircut is no good, it is shit, your life is shit, they have done it to you, they have taken you from your true lover. You must kill this time. You must kill a priest to make it right.”

  Hobman went to a local church that night. A comely, Anglican church set around with thick-boled limes. St Barnabus, meaning “son of encouragement”. Hobman came to the church carrying two sheath knives and a wooden club as instructed by the White Sister. The church was unlocked, this was a quiet place with no thought then of men like him who come in the night and he waited through the hours of darkness thinking and preparing and chanting to himself as if in the sweat lodge rituals of the American Indians that he had read about.

  In the morning an elderly churchwarden came to ready the church for the day’s services and was surprised by the thin, tall, young man who had been hiding, watching him for some time and who had ordered him to, “get on the floor, on the fucking floor.” Hobman raised the club intending to stun the old man before cutting him, as had been done to the chickens, but the churchwarden had seen a murderous anger in his eyes and determined to escape. He parried the first blow with his dustpan and, though Hobman rained blows on his back and head, the plucky man staggered out of the vestry door crying for help. Hobman remained at the main doors of the church, club in hand, as if reluctant to move out into the daylight and the churchwarden crawled on all fours to a nearby road.

  The White Sister’s voice grew faint for a while after that as Hobman was arrested, assessed as mentally ill and medicated. The courts decided that he did not realise the nature and quality of his act and he was processed through the secure system until such a time as he was fit to be let out. Six years passed, and he moved to a day release unit not far from his childhood home. The years had blunted the severity of the crime, the attack became “common assault” in the clinicians’ reports, the presence of two knives was forgotten and no one ever spoke to the victim of the crime, the elderly churchwarden who had died a year after the attack. Hobman was not even a model patient. He was surly and uncooperative and downplayed the events that had led him to his detention. His consultant could see no evidence of schizophrenia and came to believe that Hobman’s crime was the result of drug-induced psychosis. His medication was withdrawn and no one noticed any evident ill effects although the White Sister of Utopia came back full force into his head. She told him to prepare again and he spent his benefit money on long-planned facial tattoos, his war paint: writhing serpents on each cheek, a skull on one temple and a sun cradled in a crescent moon on the other temple. These symbolised death and transformation and were a statement of intent that he was about to emerge into the world in a changed state.