No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  She said, “In my country we have a saying, ‘Beauty does not season soup.’ You understand? I do not have time to chase after clinical wonders like this.” But I persisted in my arguments and eventually she sighed and acceded. I enjoyed listening to her voice on the phone, noticing the way she dropped the definite article sometimes, and how she stressed the final syllables of words.

  We met in her office a few days later. I had felt anticipation in the days leading up to it. February daylight fell through the barred windows into her office with its neat piles of clinical journals, and a large framed poster on the wall showing a montane landscape.

  “That is Tatras mountains,” she said shortly when I asked where that was. A blue vase containing early, pale narcissi stood on her desk together with a postcard image of a virgin and child propped against the in-tray with Matka Boska Chestochowsksa written beneath it. I thought that the image looked like Irina.

  “Black Madonna of Czestochowa,” said Irina in response to my query. There was also a framed picture of a fair-haired infant in a romper suit being held up by the hands of an unseen person.

  “My son,” she answered tersely in a tone that did not encourage further exploration when I asked who the handsome little fellow was. She stood defensively behind her desk, a slim figure in a black Jaeger trouser suit, with a peach-coloured silk blouse and a single string of pearls just visible. I remember thinking that she wasn’t that attractive, and trying to pick flaws in her beauty, noticing the frieze of tiny moles on her throat above the gleaming pearls, the blue shadows under her eyes. Her hands fiddled with the reports on Hosannah that I had brought, her eyes were cast down, fixed on the papers on her desk, signalling that she wanted to get on with business. We sat down and talked over the case and about how the current clinical team had struggled over it.

  There had been much debate. First of all Hosannah had been seen as a case of schizophrenic catalepsy, an unusual but well-documented phenomenon in psychiatry, a state of lack of response in the patient with an element of muscular rigidity whereby the limbs stay in the position that they are placed in by a second person. Old texts books, in the medical library, showed white-coated doctors moving the limbs of inert patients, demonstrating the condition called “wavy flexibility” whereby the arms and legs move according to the shaping desire of the manipulator. Yet Hosannah did not improve with antipsychotic medication and one Registrar then claimed that this was really a neurological and movement disorder caused by the medication — a Parkinsonian rigidity induced by the doctors themselves. There was a switch round and Hosannah’s meds were tapered off and he was even tried on Ritalin, an amphetamine-like substance in an effort to reverse the effects of the antipsychotics. Yet still he slept on week by week, with little evidence of change.

  More ideas followed. Was this a willed mutism or some form of depressive stupor?

  Staff tried to creep up on him in the night hoping to catch him awake and once a video camera was set up and trained upon him for twenty-four hours yet it revealed no extraneous movement or clue that he was faking. He slept on, although it was true that there seemed to be an awareness somewhere there for he appeared to recognise familiar staff and allowed them to sponge him down and fix the catheters, yet his muscles grew more rigid when the doctors handled him. Concern and a sort of embarrassment grew. The hospital had to wake Hosannah up. ECT began to be mentioned as a radical treatment but the consultant in charge shrank from that option.

  And so, Irina and I agreed to go up to Calder the following week. We met in the corridor by the canteen where she stood waiting for me at the intersection, a thin, slight figure outlined against the barred window grating, with her arms folded and her hands inside the baggy sleeves of a loose, mauve cardigan. We proceeded to the C blocks and Calder Ward on the third floor. Outside it was a bitter February day, the hospital gardens were frost-crabbed and thickly bundled staff in long coats stamped along the paths in the wired compounds. Our footsteps sounded loudly on the block stairs, her keys jingled and I admired the deft, practiced flip of her keys into their pouch as she did the unlocking ahead of me. I hardly spoke, aware that I tended to chatter inanely in her company. I wondered what she thought of me, glimpsing her serious face in profile through the veil of hair, as she leaned forward to insert her keys in the ward door, thinking that she looked preoccupied, even a little sad. We entered the ward offices on Calder with its bleak, sea-green walls, the tea rota lists drooping on the walls and the patient movement boards gleaming under the neon strip lights. The bored staff sat around, unfurled tabloid papers scattered on the desks and cigs burning, against regulations, in aluminium ashtrays.

  “Come to see Hosannah, have you?” said the charge nurse. He seemed pleased that his ward was holding the hospital’s curiosity. He enjoyed airing his views to us about this odd ward pet that was drawing visitors and relieving the tedium of the long shifts.

  “Well the docs think it is this syndrome or that, but we think he is having us on in some way,” he said as he led us through the ward corridors. We followed him warily for it always paid to be careful on unfamiliar wards.

  We were ushered into Hosannah’s room. It was hard to make out anything at first as the window was curtained but we could just make out a dark shape. The nurse snapped on a side light to reveal a wheeled bed, laying on it was Hosannah with his felted, thick dreads hanging almost to the floor. Irina and I looked at each other unsure how to behave. It was oddly intimate, crammed in there with this sleeping man. He wore light, cotton pyjamas buttoned tightly over his chest and his neck jutted thickly from the neatly pressed collar. There were few decorations in the room, just heaps of neatly folded, bright clothing, a garish greetings card with a picture of a lion on it, and a few cassettes on a shelf, one of which showed Bob Marley’s African Herbsman showing a picture of the singer with a halo of afro-styled hair. A single battered photo with scrawled writing on it was also propped up there. I touched it with one finger.

  “That’s his older brother, also a con. Taken during his first prison stretch. He’s doing a ten year sentence now,” said the nurse. “Hosannah still hero-worships him. You can see the resemblance.”

  The nurse brought in two chairs and then left us with Hosannah. I gazed down on the handsome, calm face with that mass of stiff, tumbling hair, his hands lying there with their pale palms downward. I was aware of Irina as she sat on the edge of her chair, leaning right over Hosannah. Her cardigan rode up revealing pale skin against the top line of her cotton panties which had a daisy motif. I shifted my gaze guiltily as she looked back up at me, she then leaned forward again and pulled up Hosannah’s pyjama sleeve, exposing the silky brown skin. I could see that she held a pin and was jabbing it into Hosannah’s arm. He moved his hand away in a flexuous movement. She looked over at me and I grimaced. She then pricked the skin again, the skin seemed to flicker and something registered passing over that shadowed face and again the hand moved away restlessly, seeking to avoid the goad. I was struck by the sight of her pale, long-fingered hands resting on the patient’s forearm and by the oddly intent look in her eye. A rising wind moaned round the blocks. Irina looked at me again as we crouched together over Hosannah.

  “Strange isn’t it? I feel he is aware of us,” she said, almost whispering. I felt her breath on my cheek and I nodded, while looking at her, at the hollow of her ear, the corner of her mouth. She again moved forward, this time with her hands on his face, then she moved one of his eyelids upwards, exposing the glaring, fixed orbit, then let the lid fall closed again. She sat back on her chair and remained there, hand propped on chin, looking across at Hosannah. I remained standing a little behind her, also staring perplexedly down at him, when suddenly Hosannah gave out a low groan, a very deep and loud and terribly unexpected sound in that close room. He jerked into movement, bringing an arm up for a moment to touch his face. As he did that Irina jumped up, grabbing my arm in an instinctive movement and we both leaped in fright at this unwonted sign of life in the patie
nt. “You have gone and woken him up now,” I said. We both exploded into giggles and came out of the cell laughing like children, the ward staff looked suspiciously at us. I enjoyed our little scare for it was first time that she had touched me and also the first time I had seen her smile.

  “Well, what do you think?” I asked her as we traipsed back down the block steps.

  “I don’t know…,” she said, “I think it is hard to be scientific about it when it is almost emotional to see him lying like that. I will check and consult, read up in my neuropsych books — and there is his history to check.” We agreed to meet up at the end of the following week to discuss the case further. We bade each other farewell, and she gave me a warm smile as if we had shared something intimate. I watched her walk swiftly away down the block corridor until the first doors closed behind her.

  Like Irina, I also wanted to find out more about this enigma. I wanted to impress her with my clinical acumen I am sure, but for my own purposes I was always searching for the key to predators, even though I had now seen dozens of them.

  He had come to hospital by prison transfer after being convicted of his second rape at the age of twenty-six. Prison staff had become concerned about him quite soon into his sentence in Cat C prison. He did not socialise with the other prisoners, preferring to keep to his cell even in association time. At night, voices in his cell could be heard. These turned out to be him speaking to himself in different tones and even arguing with himself. When staff slid his viewing hatch back he would turn to the slit with froth-flecked lips saying, “No, nuttin’ is wrong.” Then later the voices would be heard starting up again. He became unpredictably aggressive, sometimes swinging at staff trying to bring him meals. He was segged off, then moved to the hospital wing where he began to laugh to himself booming laughter that echoed around the small block. Staff noted that there was always something willed and implacable about him. He would keep on exercising far into the night, under the glare of the single bulb in its wired cage, loping round and round his cell, his dreads bouncing on his shoulders. When he was taken to see the prison doctor, he stubbornly blocked out the session by closing his eyes and counting down, “Five, four, three, two, one … Five, four, three, two, one.” in a deep voice, repeating this every time the harassed doc attempted a new approach. After months of this behaviour he was transferred to the hospital for assessment.

  Hosannah had been born in coastal Nigeria and came to this country with his mother. The family had settled in Harlesden in the 1970s. He was seven years old. His elder brother had preceded him to live in London with an aunt, and had already become a violent offender. Hosannah looked set to follow his example. He was sent back to Nigeria to stay with family for a while, but he returned more obdurate, more evidently alien and now filled with a sexual anger. He was convicted of rape on a woman at the age of nineteen, sentenced to six years but did three and a half. Then he was back, drifting in the London streets. He failed vocational college, he smoked weed and grew his dreads under a Caribbean influence and began to see Babylon as oppressing him. His mother retained an unshakable belief in him and continued to push him to stay on in college, get qualified and be somebody.

  A year passed since his return from the first sentence and he had begun to hang around Kensal Green cemetery while he was supposed to be in college. What was he searching for among the monuments to Victorian notables, the catacombs and the laurels? A victim I guess. Eventually he spotted her, a teenage French au pair, newly arrived in the country, incautiously taking a short cut to her lodgings. Like so many predators, he had sensed that she was not tuned in to her surroundings and had marked her out and hunted her down. In the still light of a late summer afternoon, he had slipped from the dense evergreens and seized her, battered her, stripped her, cracked her head against a gravestone until she was unconscious, then raped her.

  When she came to and began to stir about, he tried to throttle her with her handbag strap, dragging her around the gravestones. Perhaps he didn’t want a witness like the girl in his first offence. The au pair passed out again, and at some point he stuffed dirt and twigs into her mouth and throat and up her other body passages. Then he left her. Surprisingly, she survived, got to her feet, half-choked, and staggered for help. Her assailant had been tall and black with dreads. With his history it didn’t take long for Hosannah to be picked up by the police and the victim identified him. His mother put up a barrage of defence; she said he was at home all the time, she could not believe he was capable of such a thing and she drummed up a campaign with the local black residents association. She also underplayed his first offence saying it was all to do with a vindictive ex-girlfriend. But no one else was very enthusiastic about his innocence and the heart went out of her public campaign. The courts had little doubt and convicted him without fuss. Undaunted, the doughty Mrs Njie still believed in her son’s innocence and campaigned for him when he was in prison and now harried the hospital, seeing her son fortnightly on a long trek up from London.

  She came in traditional Nigerian dress, treading majestically up the empty hospital drive heading for the lodge house steps the following Saturday afternoon after I had seen her son with Irina. She had come up on the London train, alighting at Redford and travelling on to the midday bus service to the hospital. She sat very upright in the half-empty bus with a few incoming staff as the other passengers. Security staff saw her substantial, swathed figure marching up towards them, the great head dress nodding like an Amazon’s plume, and they prepared themselves for trouble. Time hung heavily for staff on the quiet weekends but this they could do without. Just as on previous visits, she carried bulging carrier bags filled with blackened bushmeat delicacies, yellow mangos, sweet potatoes, and other vegetables. All of these were confiscated once she had arrived at reception in line with standing security regulations, while she protested loudly. Female staff who had drawn the short straw also had to pat her down over her wraps and they made her loosen everything down to her blue flowing buba under-dress, and then they made her unpin her headscarf. All the while she railed at them with abuse, curses and complaints. There were further ructions when all her gold jewellery set off the scanners and she refused to take her bangles off.

  Then came the long tramp down the corridors with the escorts, she was grimly silent now, rearranging her wrappings as she plodded between the key-jingling escorts. The ward staff had been warned by gatehouse security that she was on the way and were preparing for the storm.

  Mrs Njie wept to see Hosannah utterly unresponsive as usual — her kiss once more not awakening him despite her fervent prayers. One seamed old charge hand offered her a placatory cup of tea out of politeness but this was refused.

  “What you put in it? God knows, same as has poisoned my boy,” she said.

  I waited for her, in a side room out of sight, listened to her ranting on. I had come in on the weekend to see her and waited for the tide of upset to subside before introducing myself.

  Eventually she consented to see me. She was initially suspicious and wanted to see an ID badge.

  “Doctor? Not a doctor? What are you? I have not met you, what you want of me?”

  “No, not a doctor, a weary hunter, looking for the truth, Mrs Njie,” I should have said as I sat down to face her in the bleak, cramped, interviewing room.

  Surprisingly she was quite likeable. She kept a wary gaze fixed on me. Her magnificent, imposing, head scarf wagged at an angle as she went through her initial litany of complaints. She slowly warmed to her theme when invited to tell her side of things. She told me of coming from Ijebu in Nigeria. Her husband — shiftless, untrustworthy swine that he was, had worked for an oil company, sent money at first but that had dwindled to nothing after a while. She spoke of her older son, in prison, giving out a gusty sigh, “and my Hosannah, that’s not his given name you know, that is his second name. Yoruba name our children on the eighth day and I called him Hehinde, ‘the one who lagged behind’, for he was the second of twins. The first I na
med Taiwo meaning ‘he who pretasted the world’ but Taiwo died at seven years. Got meningitis. He was always stronger, brighter and Hehinde struggled and was weaker, needing special love. I send my older son ahead to relatives in London, to Englan’, this islan’.”

  She sighed again heavily, looking up at the vents to the harsh, percolating light, then continued, “Hosannah, is his second name, it means, Glory to the Lord. We jus’ used it in the family and it stuck. He went to school in London but did not do well, not helped much by the teachas. They used to complain to me that they find him sleepin’ unda benches in the school dining room, and then I could not get him to school, jus’ wanted to stay in bed and I had lot of trouble with the eldest also. We are not understood in this country, it is all so hard for us.”

  Her small, sharp eyes regarded me and I nodded sympathetically.

  “I tried to straighten Hosannah, sent him back to Ijebu, looked after by my sista, she was strict, too strict mebbe. Beat him, shut him in hut, work him and he came back worse but there was no harm in him. The harm comes from dis place.”

  She leaned forward and rummaged in her bag and took out a creased photo.

  “This is Hosannah at a birthday party, first birthday in Englan’, I keep it to remin’ me how things were when we first came here. You see sir, to us Yoruba, head is the essence of personality, in the head is character, it is from God, the quality of that head shows the quality of the life. We say amongst us, Iwa l’Ewa, truth is beauty,” she said tapping the old photo.

  “This little boy Hosannah — my boy, he cannot have done what they say, I brought him up and I know that.”

  She drew herself up and pressed the photo to her large, swathed bosom, then sighed again.

  “I can only be patient, patience shows respect for life, for we have a saying, the river it never rests; it is from looking at the Niger at home. All will change, it will come right, we shall see. The love that we put in cannot be wasted.”