No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  “Are you shy of me?” came the reedy voice. “Are you shy of me, Father? If you have come to help me then hold my hand.” He stretched out his hand, I looked down at it, that thin, trembly hand and for some reason I held his dry claw, then pulled away and agreed to see him weekly. “Yes, I will be seeing you, Father,” said Heinie, smiling and backing away, making saluting gestures as he retreated.

  As the ensuing weeks passed Heinie stayed with me, clung to me. I grew used to seeing his ruffled hair and stooped shape bobbing down the corridors after me, hearing that insistent shuffling and the high voice calling, “Father, Father!”

  The ward staff saw Heinie as a comic figure with his flapping, baggy trousers, always at half mast; his coming to the nurse station door on every hour — wheedling until a staff member would roll a cigarette for him from his allowance — he was not trusted to possess tobacco himself in case he smoked it all at one go, or was bullied out of it by a personality disorder patient. His dependence on staff brought forth scorn, as did his terror of other patients.

  “Plankton,” one nurse described Heinie to me, alluding to the idea that the hospital was a place where creatures fed on each other. Staff were amused when Heinie was once found in the latrine naked, standing with arms spread out as if crucified while Padraig’s stubbly head moved over his chest and loins. What pact had been made between them? None could tell, the intensely paranoid Padraig spitting venom and unease and Heinie, that puppet man, a ventriloquist’s dummy with a heart of menace. In the notes the staff nurse on duty carefully wrote : “21.19 hrs. Patient Field found sucking on Patient Grau’s nips in main corridor latrine. Both patients advised against such activity.”

  Heinie drank vast amounts of water as many of the long term ones did. They crouched at the taps, in wash rooms and latrines, gulping down load upon load of water, until the salts began to leach from the body, and brain, and the mind spiralled more crazily than ever. The clinical term was polydipsia and it sent the mad ones madder till they had to be banned from going to the wash rooms unattended, but they always got at water somehow as even the hospital could not deny them that. They could be recognised as water drinkers from the way that they reeled, wheezing and gasping with fused eyes, spinning down the ward corridors in a delirium.

  It was chiefly in the treatment rooms, away from the ward, that I saw Heinie as that year passed into summer. He would be taken down with two escorts, turning right down the great central corridor of the blocks, past the workshops. Then pausing at each unlock at the large wooden doors that guarded the corridor, illuminated by the light falling from ceiling port holes. Heinie would stand during the unlock procedure, a slight figure, murmuring to himself or pressing his face to the small barred windows to look into the neatly grassed enclosures, which occasionally sprang to view along the corridor. On they would go, with the escorts’ keys clinking in their pouches, on and past the giant kitchens where the rattling trolleys were being loaded for lunch. I would imagine Heinie and the escorts progressing nearer and nearer as I sat waiting in the treatment room. The perspex entrance door was partially covered by a blind but was clear at the bottom so that one could see the boots of the escort arriving with Heinie’s shuffling feet between them, wearing trainers without laces. The escorts would sit in the waiting room on easy chairs, their radios squawking from time to time. The walls were covered by patients’ art work taken from occupational therapy classes. One picture would often engage Heinie’s attention and he would gaze up at it as he sat waiting. It was a poster-sized naïve painting, unsigned, in water colours, representing Christ’s face in outline, crowned with thorns, looking up to a dove shape in the sky, with sketched puffball clouds and the wobbly words “the abode of the heavenly spirit” written at the top. Christ’s face was covered with blue fingerprinted blobs representing tears streaming down and gathering into a blue puddle at the bottom of the picture.

  Heinie would drag his eyes from it when I emerged from the treatment room announcing, “It’s time for your session,” then he would meekly shuffle in and the escorts would reach for the magazines heaped on the low table in front of them.

  Those sessions! Initially Heinie would face me alertly and would greet me, “Hello, Father,” or sometimes “Hello, Father O’Shaunessey,” perhaps after some long forgotten hospital padre.

  Sometimes I would insist on Heinie calling me by my correct name. He would repeat it slowly and thickly like a foreign word but it would usually slip from him. I had become ineluctably, “Father”, vater, priest and confessor who came robed in darkness with unknown purpose to Heinie. What had he to offer his therapist in return? Only his pathos, his body, his antics, or his silence. What in turn did I want of him? The hospital wanted a psychological program for even the most institutionalised. I recalled Dr Colt, on the podium in the forensic psychotherapy lectures, speaking of, “the pathogenic secret”. Its power to hold the patient in its thrall. The secret that must be worked through, brought to consciousness and by that means draw the sting and dangerousness of the aggression that has arisen in defence of that secret. At that early time in the hospital I had not entirely brought to mind what I wanted from Heinie. Perhaps I was practising for my encounters with Kress. It was enough to be there with him in front of me and, initially, I was strangely thrilled to have my first patient there. A man who had preyed on women and tried to take them. I wanted to follow the secret route that had led Heinie to abduct, hurt and kill, to understand his phantasy, the unconscious idea that led him to atrocity.

  Week by week Heinie sat there, often turning and twisting his head, his ears translucent in the light through the barred window, turning to examine a paint blob on the wall by his chair, wordlessly pointing at it or looking at me with a grotesque flirtatiousness. I plodded on the surface of speech. It was hard to determine what Heinie was conveying to me. He had found his own language, sometimes speaking in the dialect of his County Durham childhood, sometimes in mangled German, or in neologisms of his own devising.

  “Mein uncle Heinrich,” he would repeat, “says ‘der ist’.”

  When asked, “what do you mean by ‘der ist’?” Heinie would look perplexed, shaking his head and repeating “der ist”, “the is”, again and again to himself in a scratchy murmur. Sometimes when pressed by me to explain something he would stiffen in his chair and wave a shaky finger at me saying, “Der Man den ich gesehen habe”, “that man that I saw”, as if pointing out to me that I was committing the sin of trying to be objective. For in Heinie’s world there was no objectivity, only process, a perception of the world through the medium of his sadistic consciousness. Heinie was also comfortable in the long silences, where we would sit, unmoving, unspeaking. His gaze would be turned inwards, veiled, while the sounds of hospital mowers reached us, distant calls, booming doors from the upper blocks or a collared dove chirring its song from outside. It used to sound to me as if it was insistently calling “Who? Who are you?”

  Hours and weeks passed, the sessions dragged and began to turn on a spindle of pain where Heinie unwound his slow, stumbling syntax of halting, barbed words interspersed by long silences. During these interminable sessions, unbidden images of my past life, of Rachel and of Louie, and all my losses flared and beckoned in my head.

  Heinie seemed to enjoy the weekly trip through the blocks to the therapy sessions until the fifth week, when young swifts went shrieking around the blocks, and, in the July heat, patients dangled their arms through the window bars of the upper blocks. Heinie might have felt comfortable coming along to see me, but I had begun to stoke a rage against him. In one summer session, feeling a little vengeful at sitting there so painfully with this man, I pressed Heinie, preventing him from lapsing into silence. I made overt interpretations about his silence — suggesting that Heinie was angry with me and still angry with women after he had begun to whine that he was “not a sex case, not a sex man.” In therapeutic terms it could be seen as a helpful challenge, prompting an arousal in the patient so that he could ena
ct his central conflicts, but in reality it was prompted by a desire to provoke and punish him. I think now Heinie realised this at some level. He started to sigh to himself, great gusty sighs and I said, “I think you are sighing because you want me to feel sorry for you.” Heinie looked at me for a moment, then pointed to a distinct scar on his temple. I asked him what that was and he replied speaking clearly for once, “Staff in Dove washrooms years ago, they held me head with wet towels squeezing it by twisting them towels then rammed me head agin the door handle.” His face squirmed with self pity, his fingers rubbing at the star-shaped scar and tears glinted on his lined cheek. I felt unmoved by the pathos. It made me feel even angrier with him and I continued to press him, “You have been treated badly, but you have also wanted to hurt others to make yourself feel better. That is why you killed Margaret Maywood isn’t it?”

  Heinie looked shocked and uncharacteristically intent. His eyes flickered briefly with menace, but they clouded over again. He whimpered again, “Mir ist kald,” “I’m cold”, while rocking in his chair his arms crossed over his thin chest.

  “That is correct, isn’t it Heinrich? You have wanted to hurt and kill to get your own back for all the bad feelings that you have had, that is why you killed Margaret and attacked those others. And you still feel like that, don’t you?” Heinie did not answer, but sat looking down, breathing heavily. After a long pause his breathing stilled and the pathos dropped away. He stood up and said, “Why did I kill that Margaret? Ask me ma.” He then turned and rapped on the door for the escorts to take him down the blocks.

  In July sunshine, I drove a hundred miles north east on roads not built when Heinie had come to the hospital, to County Durham and the valley of the Wear. Moon daisies flared on the banks of the motorway and kestrels hovered above the seeding grasses of the verges as I drove mechanically, turning over Heinie’s story and thinking of the live past coiling below the surface of the present. I came to the place mid morning in hazy sunshine. The traffic bunched on the broad motorway behind a white prison van, probably a transport going to Durham gaol. I cruised behind it before taking the turn-off.

  The Wear glittered in its stony bed as I approached the town through a litter of estates built around the modest Victorian core. I thought of Heinie’s victim, Margaret Maywood, aged twenty-three, returning home in 1973, back from the West Country where she had kicked over the traces with a man, back home but heavily pregnant and alone. I stopped the car and got out. It was a quiet place with half-empty, rain-washed car parks waiting for market day. I walked up the high street past the red-liveried frontage of a pub called The Lambton Worm towards my place of rendezvous.

  The flat-toned clock of St Mary Cuthbert tolled out midday as I sat in the Washington Tea Rooms, looking out on the high street, hemmed in by stripped pine tables with their paper doilies and folded paper napkins. I had looked distractedly at brochures, articles on folklore and flyers about local walks and activities of interest while waiting for Mrs Grau, who had consented to meet me here not wanting to see me at home for fear of neighbours and of the elders at Kingdom Hall.

  She came exactly on time and gravely shook my hand. She was slightly bowed, but still a stately woman with newly permed, grey hair. Seventy-eight years old, in a tan pleated skirt and cashmere cardigan. She wore a large pearl-bordered intaglio broach and a wedding ring held on a gold chain around her neck. I looked into her bewildered English face, seeing Heinie’s domed forehead and prominent eyes there as she stared back at me. She had spoken to me on the phone a week before, following receipt of a delicately worded letter requesting information. She had not had contact with the hospital for many years. She had tried to see Heinrich ten years previously but he had said such terrible things to her when she had tried to visit, so upsetting. Her voice wavered on the phone and she spoke of that scar on his temple and the humiliation of the searches. She had consented to see me, to talk about the past and I had felt guilty, not wanting to open wounds. But she had sounded grateful to talk to someone about it all.

  Thus, Mrs Grau sat down with me at the tearooms and I rose to buy her a hot drink, clumsily moving among the clutter of chairs. We then huddled over the small table, as if conspiratorial, our drinks untasted. Mrs Grau told her story simply and steadily with few interjections from me. At the end she departed with a cool handshake. I watched her through the café window as she threaded her way through the straggle of shoppers.

  Walking back to my car as the day darkened, I retraced Heinie’s story. First, as in every human story there were the parents: Ada Hinchcliffe as she once was, from Houghton a few miles upstream on the Wear. She became a land army girl in 1945, very pretty in brown britches and a wide-brimmed felt hat, working on local farms while the men were away. Then the denazified Germans began to appear. One was a personable, handsome former Oberleutnant Grau of the Luftwaffe, a co-pilot on a Heinkel bomber shot down over England early in the war: Oskar Grau, his last name meaning “grey”, but with a root word tokening “dread” in German, sich grauen vor, to have a horror of. She fell in love with him, the clever, quiet German, an engineer and good at mending the old Massey Ferguson tractor that pulled the harrow and the trailer. Heinie had few possessions on arrival at the hospital apart from two worn photos which were kept in a side docket of his ward file. I removed them as I thought that no one else would appreciate them. The pictures were of his parents in wartime showing his mother smiling, unaware of the future, and of his father in uniform reminding me of Heinie in the neurotic sideways tilt of his body and the thin, clenched hands by his sides.

  Mrs Grau showed great independence of mind when faced with the collective disapproval of her family and community. The couple got engaged, married in 1947, and settled locally while his former comrades were repatriated. Oskar was happy to build a new life since his Rhineland hometown was bombed out. He found work in a garage as a motor engineer, retaining his accent although with a Wearside inflection in the vowels. Mrs Grau spoke of his love of good manners and of correct conduct.

  “Yes we were happy,” she said in response to my questioning. “Well,” she hesitated, “we were happy at first.”

  Heinrich was born in 1950, an only son, with a German name in a close-knit town with the men just back from the war and everyone still plunged in austerity. They lived in a newly built terrace house in the town and at first all was well. “He was a quiet boy,” commented Mrs Grau, and devoted to his father, conscientiously trying to learn German from him early on and asking to go with him to work at the garage.

  I could see on the reverse of his father’s photo that Heinie had proudly written “Mein Papa” in childish script. Mrs Grau then described a gradual darkening in their lives: the first difficulties at school, the bullying, the taunting by other pupils about his German father and the war, how one night someone daubed “Heil Hitler” in white letters on their garden shed. Mr Grau was strict at home and insisted on Heinie speaking German but Heinie was a poor pupil, there were tears and punishments and a growing sense of separateness in the boy.

  His parents became increasingly involved with the Jehovah’s Witnesses when Heinie entered his teenage years. I was not sure how they were recruited, only that Oskar was the first to join. I asked Mrs Grau, but she was uncomfortable with the questions as it was against the rules of the church to discuss its business with non-Witnesses. Oskar Grau the outsider, the foreigner, had sought the fellowship of the Witnesses in the early 1960s. The first duty of those joining is to the church and not to his non-Witness spouse and so Ada soon joined her husband in the windowless Kingdom Hall not far from the High Road where I now walked.

  The Witnesses were a community of perhaps sixty souls in the local area and the Graus worshipped with them, socialised with them, and were regulated by them. They joined a world where feast days and holidays and birthdays were not celebrated, a world toiling in the “time of the end”, where Satan is the invisible ruler and where God is not omnipresent but served by his faithful and discreet se
rvants, the Witnesses.

  Oskar Grau grew troubled by his gawky, friendless son and when Heinie finally slipped away from school without qualifications, he arranged for him to work at his garage sweeping up, washing cars and making tea for the mechanics. Heinie proved inattentive and unreliable at work. His mother would beg him to get up in the mornings as his father fumed in the car outside. The apprentices at the garage attempted to chaff with him and play their accustomed pranks, but Heinie would not be drawn.

  The garage had to let him go in the end because of his poor work performance. His father did not oppose it, relieved perhaps that his son would no longer contradict his own meticulous approach to work. Thereafter Heinie drifted, taking on odd jobs, the occasional decorating or gardening work for other Witness families, or just spending his days absent from home. “Just walkin’ aboot toon,” he would tell his parents when they inquired about his disappearances. Despite this failure and in spite of the social revolution of the early 1970s that swept the community around him, Heinie remained externally dutiful and attended Kingdom Hall, especially the Theocratic Ministry School where members practised witnessing to each other. His mother recalled him speaking in particular to the text Ecclesiastes xii 1, dressed in a new suit bought for the occasion; “Remember now thy creator in the days of thy youth while the evil days come not.”

  At some stage Heinie’s wandering about the small country town took on a sinister pattern of staring at and stalking girls and young women. We do not know when he began to think obsessively about girls, or how often he rehearsed fantasies of abduction and possession. There were three offences in the year before the killing; they seem to occur suddenly, out of the blue and in close succession. The police at the time could find no preceding evidence of any stalking or Peeping Tom behaviour. I was sure though that Heinie had hunted and wandered and struggled with his rage and desire throughout his miserable adolescence. It is as if, in the early summer of 1973, Heinie suddenly exploded into acting out his desires. What happened in detail is described in the yellowing witness statements and probation reports appended to one of Heinie’s bulky hospital files. The first victim was a schoolgirl of sixteen, coming home from school on the bus. She reported a stranger with flap ears who suddenly emerged out of thick shrubbery close to the bus stop. A shiny-faced man who yanked at her arm and tried to drag her into the bushes while the other hand clawed at her pleated school skirt. She screamed and struggled and, as suddenly he was gone, leaving her shocked and flustered.