No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  In the end I got away from her even though she followed me down the ward corridor, still calling out, “You will help us sah, you have kind face.” She managed to get through the hospital switchboard a week later and harangued me on my office phone, asking for help with an appeal against the injustice of his imprisonment and help getting proper treatment for him. I gave anodyne replies but could not somehow bring myself to hurt the feelings of that woman, even though she had played such a large part in creating her son. I would not help her for in truth I hated her son, feared him and woke once sweating in the night after dreaming that I was holding a pillow over his face, and his hands came to life and thrashed blindly at me as I pressed the pillow down over him.

  I stayed late in the medical library looking in the anthropological sections, trying to find a model for Hosannah’s suspended animation. I found something of it in the hauka movement in West Africa, which flourished in the 1950s and 1960s. The hauka men expressed their hatred for their colonial masters, and for their own demeaned lives, by wild dance ceremonies where, through a process of possession, spirits visited them in a trance state, moving and shaking the possessed to caper in a parodic satire of their masters then to fall into a deep trance and sleep for hours and even days. The hauka dancers woke after their trance, strengthened to deal with the degradation of their lives. I wondered if Hosannah had peered out from his Auntie’s hut watching the hauka men dancing and then collapsing and had somehow learnt from that experience that you can eclipse any reality, deny anything, even from yourself. In that sense, I mused in the library that there were always hauka men in every culture. Hosannah, in that way, was likely to be a brother to the one who took my Rachel. And, at that time, I did not see that I was a hauka man too.

  Time seemed to pass slowly until I could next meet Irina. I found myself thinking about her, lying in bed at night wondering what she was doing, not wanting to imagine her other life, married and with a child, though I still lurched with feeling over Rachel and Louie also, who still rang me sometimes on raw, lonely nights, leaving slurred messages on the answer phone, “Where are you? We should be together …” Messages that I never returned.

  I rang Irina on the arranged day. She greeted me cheerfully, as if this was an everyday thing, and unexpectedly suggested that we meet outside the hospital car park, under the vigilant cameras. She drove quickly and I watched her hands on the wheel with that crescent scar near the wrist bone and felt a quiet joy, as well as a fear, as we raced out, driving fast past the power station where it sucked at the river, past the old church burying ground and out east to the wide bean fields by the glistening river.

  We found a little village called Little Raneham which had a raftered, low-ceilinged pub where a sycamore log fire sputtered. We ordered food that I was too excited to eat. I toyed with a salad, as I listened to her talk about Hosannah, looking at her face, the high cheekbones, finding something achingly familiar about her presence yet also feeling that I was there with a person so utterly other and unknown. There was something electric and active about Irina. Once she had focused on you, her wilful driving energy pulled you in.

  “God knows what it could be, a sleep disorder, possibly a form of narcolepsy? I have looked in neuropsychology books but nothing quite matches his current state.” She chattered on about our clinical work and then listened patiently to me talk of the willed trance states of Yoruba culture and the hauka men.

  “Yes, but where is the spell that will wake him?” she said, smiling a little mockingly at me as I earnestly described my anthropological angle on things.

  “Perhaps only freedom will wake him, the chance to find new victims,” I suggested.

  “That is very pessimistic of you,” she said.

  I looked into Irina’s eyes as she spoke, those dark eyes with their slanting, folded lids, signs of her Tartar ancestry. A constant animation seemed to light up her face as she spoke to me and I remember trying to pull back away from that current of energy. Irina continued talking to me however, sometimes tapping me lightly on the forearm to emphasise a point. We eventually walked out into the sunshine, scuffling side by side, through the blunt, late winter grasses in a lane behind the village. We talked in vivid bursts as we walked along, of cases, hospital business, yet all the while I was wondering what she was feeling and thinking about me. Was she also experiencing excitement and discomfort in my presence? I kept my eyes fixed on her face, trying to sense what was happening, watching as she turned at one point with a sigh and the return of a look that I had seen on her features before. She turned to gaze out at the wide, empty fields then said, “Well, Jack, we should go back now, our work is waiting …”

  Hosannah slept on through February and into March yet something had awoken between Irina and I. We met more frequently for lunch, or chatted in corridors and lingered together in the car park before setting off for home at the end of the working day. She seemed pleased to see me and I looked forward to going to work and encountering her. I also looked out for her car on the road as I pelted along towards the hospital each morning. In early spring I had been asked to attend a final review of a patient, in a low secure unit, who had been transferred from the hospital and we needed to sign him off. I suggested to Irina that we could go together. I had dropped this into our conversation as we were walking to ward reviews one morning. She stopped in the corridor with her arms folded over her narrow chest, meeting my gaze for a moment, then agreed, “OK, yes, why not?”

  Dr Colt noticed our travel request.

  “Two seniors going out for a review?” he rasped to me but I stood firm, gave him a line about how much we had worked on the case and he laxly acceded as I knew he would.

  We went to see Monty. He had a diagnosis of organic personality disorder, a tall man in his fifties, whose thin body was bent like a paper clip. Irina and I faced him in the plush review rooms of the private secure facility three hours drive away on the moorlands near Stockport.

  “What are they doing here?” he demanded, pointing at us with a bony finger, for he had recognised us as hospital personnel at once.

  “You don’t own me no longer, do you get ma drift? Do you understand?”

  The low secure clinical staff, his new minders in this more benign regime, tried to soothe him and told him that the meeting was about closure, a formal handing over after a probationary period, however he remained suspicious and angry, sitting on the edge of his chair as if about to charge at us. We were unmoved by Monty’s hostility. We remembered him lurching aggressively around the villa for invalid patients with a cycle helmet jammed on his head to protect him from his frequent falls, maliciously jabbing his elbow into the more infirm patients as he passed. Severe epilepsy, and other health problems, had eventually quelled his malignancy after twenty-eight years in the hospital.

  He had stabbed another patient in an epileptic colony in the sixties. Now his energies were doused, he had become muddled by medication, by his frequent fits and by renal failure. The extraordinary thing about him was that he had completed a circle in his life without knowing it. I experienced a strange moment when casting through his notes, looking at old letterheads when I realised that this expensive place built on a Victorian core was the same institution where he had started as an inpatient before his index offence nearly thirty years before. Now the “epileptics colony” was called “Ravens View Mental Health Facility” and the old Victorian blocks of the original place had undergone a corporate remodelling. Yet it was the very institution where he had stabbed another patient all that time ago. This transmigration was unrealised by Monty and by the new hospital, which had reabsorbed him. I did not point it out to Monty or the new staff, although Irina and I smiled at the irony of it afterwards as we walked back to the car. We both knew as therapists that line about how the end of all our exploring will be to come back to the place where you had started.

  Our smiles faded, however, when we looked through the perimeter fencing to see a lit window of some uncurtained slop ro
om shining out in the dusk of late afternoon. We could see a large, completely naked man with shiny, marbled skin and two staff standing on each side of him in plastic aprons and rubber gloves hosing him down and scraping matter off his hind parts while the naked man howled and bellowed like a beast. Irina turned to me with a shudder, “You never get used to it though we are supposed to treat them as if they are the same as us. But they are different aren’t they? When I see things like that I feel so lucky that we have minds, that we have control, yet we can so easily lose it all.”

  We travelled back in silence for the most part. Irina sitting next to me, looking thoughtful, staring out at the landscape as I drove through the bleak Pennine towns in the late afternoon light, past the stone walls coming down like black ribbons off the hills and the derelict, industrial chimneys signposting our way. Irina, absently smoothed back her hair sometimes as she gazed out, passing me sweets occasionally with her fingers just touching mine, at other times just smiling across at me, her face glowing in the instrument lights as evening came on. Once, we slowed in stalled traffic for a while, outside last season’s blackened teasel heads were illuminated in the headlamp’s glare. She turned to me then and said, “It’s good to have a home to go to in this world, no?”

  “Well, it depends what you have waiting for you there,” I replied.

  We arrived back late at her house. Would I have done anything differently knowing what was to happen? I guess I would not. She invited me in. I followed her as she walked up the path to her house, ducking my head under the leaning cherry. Her younger half-sister Gosia has been baby sitting and rose sleepily from the sitting room couch as our footsteps resounded on the polished parquet flooring. It was a feminine room with naïve paintings of rural life on the walls, a vase of early tulips on a polished coffee table and a lamp shade with Slavonic embroidered scrolls around the rims.

  There was a swift exchange in Polish between the sisters. I caught the words “Mój kollega jest,” and Gosia repeating the words, “Dlaczego? Dlaczego, Irina?” then she shrugged and went to fetch her coat. She seemed so unlike her sister with a lush figure that contrasted with Irina’s nervy slenderness, a fleeting similarity perhaps in the slanting, eyelids and something about the curve of the brow line. Anton, Irina’s child, sat in a high chair drumming with a spoon on the plastic tray in front of him. He was a yearling in a blue romper suit with a cat motif. Irina’s sister stood by the door putting on her coat giving me a nod and a studied look and saying simply “Good evening,” to me in an accented voice.

  “Proshe, Anton, give it to me, dzhenkooye,” said Irina tugging the spoon away from the child’s hand.

  “Gosia spoils him with sweet drinks and forbidden food,” she whispered to me while ushering her sister out.

  “Your husband, he isn’t here?” I asked when we were alone and her child squirmed and cooed in his chair.

  “No, he is away a lot,” she said and shrugged in a resigned, dismissive way.

  “He bought me these,” she said, pointing to two, iridescent, green love birds sitting silently in a cage in the corner. “I think they are both males, anyway they fight.”

  She gave a tight little smile. I noticed a picture postcard lying on the kitchen top of The Little Mermaid of Copenhagen, showing the bronze mermaid, in repose and passive with her apple breasts. She gestured towards the card and told me that that her husband was in Denmark on an academic conference. She made me coffee. We stood in her kitchen; our movements seemed uncertain; our fragile intimacy evaporating under this exposure in the marital home. We sat in silence drinking our coffee, sitting apart in large armchairs with the little boy positioned between us, battering on the resounding plastic of his tray with his fists.

  “Ba, Ba, Ba,... Da, Da Da,” he called.

  I felt foolish and uncertain as if I had built up a connection with Irina which had no substance.

  “Well, really I must be going,” I said, finishing my cup and standing up as if to leave, Irina got up, and standing close to me she held out her hand, clasping mine briefly.

  “No, stay will you Jack? I don’t want you to go. Come on… stay. I will cook something for us both.” So I stayed on until much later that night, and at the candlelit dining table with Anton bathed and put to bed by both of us, she had raised a glass to me over our meal, looking at me and saying, “Well, what shall we drink to?” and I gazed back at her.

  “To us of course,” I replied eventually and we looked at each other for a moment and she also raised her glass saying, “Yes, to our friendship.”

  Later, I wandered in to her kitchen to fetch more wine and noticed once more that postcard from her husband and turned it over to read the neat male writing on the reverse. The message ran “This reminds me of you in the bath. All my love, Aidan.” and I felt a thrill of pleasure as I stood there reading it.

  *

  There was a deserted building, a roofless, ruined place, standing in the barley fields within sight of the hospital perimeter. I had no idea when it was deserted. It could have been fifty or even a hundred years ago. It just stood, inexplicable and alone, in the middle of a field by the embankment carrying the rail line. Security had been on the alert and had reported movement by the old building. Someone had been seen there, a female figure, perhaps signalling to the hospital. Poynton set up watchers with binoculars and sure enough the next morning they saw a distant figure toiling across the thick soil of the field. She stood for a while near the shell of the building, then could be seen determinedly waving towards the hospital, before she slipped away back through the hedgerows. She returned on the next day just at the time when the villa patients were coming back from their day workshops. Again, you could make out a small figure waving and sheltering from the November drizzle in the crumbling doorway.

  Who was she? And why was she waving? Attention focused on the west side of the perimeter, particularly the two story Maple villa whose patients required to be kept in conditions of reduced security, and which stood close to the wire on that side. Perimeter cameras revealed the figure of a patient signalling back through the bars from a second story villa window. A squad was dispatched and the villa staff alerted. They found the patient to be Pinsent, the same Pinsent I had seen fourteen years previously soaked in his mother’s blood in city Central police station. They also caught the woman on the field margins as she clambered through a gap in the haw hedge to reclaim her bicycle.

  It turned out that she had passed through the staff entrance each working day for the previous five years, until she was sacked by the hospital some weeks before. She had been part of a cleaning team that serviced the villas and had got on quietly with her humble job until she attracted the attention of security staff. She had begun to linger overlong on Maple and nursing staff had reported that she had been seen whispering to Pinsent, spending periods in his bedroom. A snap search found that she was carrying letters from him and a booklet of love poems, signed by Pinsent and composed by him. She was a local, a divorcee, a plump, shy, middle-aged woman. She said that she and Pinsent had fallen in love and she had stuck by him, obviously communicating and by-passing security.

  This was not the same blood-scaled mother-killing Pinsent that I had seen in a paper boiler suit all that time ago. No, this was Pinsent redivivus, seemingly unbothered by the fuss about the cleaning lady, composed, calmly indignant about his privacy rights, his hair now neatly cropped, his skin smoothed by hospital antibiotics and improved nutrition. He had been rinsed of his psychosis by medication, his crab tattoo had been lasered off at health service expense but he had retained his stubbornness, his will and his endurance. He had concentrated on improving himself, taken secondary academic qualifications by mail, and then an Open University degree in psychology. He had edited the hospital journal Open Door, in which he also wrote execrable verse on themes of love and spirituality. He had joined the panel of the users committee which processed complaints about staff and agitated for better treatment. A handsome, confident, authoritativ
e Pinsent who had cultivated the cleaner with small attentions. He had divined her need, and “love” had grown in that unlikely setting.

  We are not sure how long it had all been going on, maybe for months. Poynton had been very concerned about a breach in security but not concerned enough as future events were to bear out. Her visits to the empty building were stopped after pressure from the local police and her contact with Pinsent seemed to dry up. Hospital management were relieved that the press had not got wind of it and were simply pleased that it had all seemed to blow over. There was a review about what she might have told him about locks and keys, the layout of the walls and fence, about the ID tags and the procedures that kept the place safe. She had sat tearfully in an interview room in Redford police station indignantly denying any indiscretions, “Our love was not like that … you don’t understand.”

  And it was plain that Poynton did not understand their love. He had made her go over and over what exactly she had told Pinsent and what he had wanted from her. I imagined him later, in his office, in a haze of smoke, going through the lists of the other patients on Maple, looking for significance: Mattie Dread, Jim Popple, Heinrich Grau, Nelson Bamangwato, Martin Hobman, and his finger stopping at Hobman. Yes, he also was there, a friend or let’s say a confidant of Pinsent, quiescent, waiting, watchful Hobman, who had not caused further problems since the Kress incident years before. Poynton took no action after the furore had died down. Perhaps he was losing his touch and, like most others, he was just grateful that the inappropriate relationship had been snuffed out.

  I did not at first see Hobman’s link with all this, and I did not know if Poynton had also noticed that Hobman managed to get himself placed in a west facing window looking over the fencing to the winter fields. Nor did I look too closely as to how Hobman managed to get the reduced security of the villa setting in the first place since his care had been taken over by other clinical teams over the years. I simply marvelled at this woman’s dogged love, coming each day to wave to her imprisoned lover. I did not begrudge love finding its way. Who knows, maybe Pinsent actually cared for her.