by Rod Madocks
Summer ended. Dried wisps of mown grass blew about the compounds. The young swifts swooped round the blocks then abruptly disappeared. Time was doled out by shifts, reviews, admissions panels and tribunals. Families of patients came and went through the security filters. Sometimes at lunchtimes I would go to the hospital swimming pool, something I could never do in the years before. I would strip in the same changing rooms that the patients used, then I would walk over the wet floors, still marked with their damp footprints, and plunge into the empty pool. The water flowed over my blue-black tattoos and I felt free, swimming unguardedly within those walls.
I began to feel more comfortable with those locked up there. I remember walking up to the villas and watching a column of ants on the path thinking that those ants existed here before the walls were built and had simply adapted and continued to exist. I remember particularly Jim Popple, a villa resident, with a round pixie face, a greying scrub of beard and a tear drop tattoo on his right cheek. Incredibly, his own father had been locked up in the place for sex offences thirty years previously. Jim spoke to me in the villa interview room. His small, hairy hands with their long, dirty finger nails rubbed worriedly at his temples. He was in for raping and strangling elderly ladies.
“I’ll do it again, mister. I’ll do it again if you let me out. Won’t I?”
I murmured soothingly to him, “It’s OK, Jim. No one is letting you out.”
So often in those days I would hear Mattie singing on the C blocks where he had been shifted after Hobman’s escape, the sound drifting through the bars out onto the grass courts.
Mattie loved to sing. I had first seen him four years previously, a grinning pied piper, with the other patients following him as he chanted, We are on the road to nowhere … we’ll take that ride.
He was a cheerful patient and seemingly without malice.
“Jus call me Skitso. Dat’s my name here,” he had once introduced himself to me.
I recall him wandering into a review with that jerky, springy-kneed gait. He settled into the review room chair as if about to take a nap as we discussed his care plan and he seemed to pay little attention to us. He lay back in his chair, with half-closed eyes, and seemed to be watching the puffballs of cumulus drifting in the sky beyond the barred windows. After the various clinicians had finished describing Mattie’s progress we asked him if he had anything to say. He suddenly looked uncharacteristically serious and leaned forward, quickly plucked a pen from the hand of a medical student and snatched a sheet of medical notes. He crouched over the low table and began rapidly writing something then presented the piece of paper to Dr Bartram with a flourish saying, “Dis is my statement!”
It read, interested only in the Queen Cleopatra now reincarnate as the three gyres in one person with the brown sun Ra of the heavens awaiting the presence of one universal man to redeclare a law long since entombed with the pharaohs …
We passed the scrap of paper around us and read it in silence as Mattie watched us intently. Bartram’s eyebrows writhed in amusement and a staff nurse snorted derisively as he read it. Once we had all finished, Mattie announced, “An’ dat law is how to love and be loved in return.”
He then danced out of the review room.
Mattie was probably his given name but he may have adopted “Dread” due to some ward joke. Many of the High Secure patients changed their names in that way. He came from South London, a salad of racial genes; his speech was patois with a leavening of Bengali street slang. He was an arsonist, had set fire to some bins in a general psychiatric ward and progressed to high secure, and somehow got snagged up, kept there by his obstinate, gleeful madness.
He had changed little during his time in the hospital, some of his more florid symptoms had leached away to leave just his personality and an ingrained way of being that no therapeutic regime could change.
I waited for Mattie in an interview room in the upper blocks that first September of my return to the hospital. The escorts were taking their time and I stared out from the open window as a cool breeze blew in through the bars. I noticed a lone, stubby oak on its own in the plough land beyond the wire. It was still just alive, standing on a hummock where season after season the plough had ground down around it leaving it exposed with its stubborn roots writhing on the surface.
My reverie was interrupted by the sound of singing growing louder and louder accompanied by the key chink and heavy tread of the escorts.
Is dis love, is dis love, dat I’m feelin? I wanna love and treat you right, evarry day an’ evarry night.
It was Mattie come for the review. The escort staff appeared in the doorway and I told them to take a break for half an hour. Mattie sat across from me in the cramped interview room, his eyes flickering around the room as he rubbed his legs which trembled in an akathisic dance.
I asked him about his upcoming tribunal, a three yearly appeal against detention afforded to all patients. We spoke about his offending behaviour and the arson attempts.
He shrugged and said, “I used ta do things an’ not think what might happen. Used to smoke skunk, who knows what I was thinking at the time.”
I asked him what had changed for him.
He looked out to the sky beyond the window bars, his gaze softened and saddened a little.
“My head is in a different place now, boss.”
“What have you learned here, Mattie?” I asked.
“I have learned ta keep the sun shinin’ in my soul.”
“What would you do if you were let out?”
“Jus’ live, man, live.”
I asked him who was representing him. “Some lawyer guy innit.” He shrugged.
I inquired if anyone was supporting him, family perhaps.
He looked at me with surprised amusement, “Nah, I was in care, doan’ know who my fadda was, doan’ know where the others are, there’s nobody. That’s fer real boss.”
We sat in silence while I perused his notes and he went on rubbing his legs and gazing out the window.
Outside, footsteps went past in unison, keys clinked, doors boomed and shouted orders echoed down the corridor. My questions eventually dwindled and he shook his head when I asked if he had any questions.
He got up to leave and then I noticed that he seemed to be concealing something in one of his hands.
“What have you got there?” I asked.
He looked frightened for a moment then his face crinkled into a shy smile and he opened his smooth fist to show a dandelion flower glowing an intense fiery yellow in his palm. He must have plucked it from one of the cracks in the concrete in the exercise yards, held it through the rub down searches and had smuggled it onto the ward. His long nails dug into the green nub of it and he spun it in his fingers.
“Me flower, boss,” he said and as he stood up to leave he pressed the bright flower head to the skin of his cheek then inserted it behind his ear.
He smiled at me and said, “T’anks fa listnin’.”
We shook hands, his eyes on mine, peering out at me shyly through the dangling dreads.
I watched him go down the corridor calling to the guards who were waiting for him, “What up? Ya miss me?”
*
There remains my acquaintance with this city. Night walks with the moon at an angle above the roof lines when the wind sucks at my face; familiar houses yawning in the darkness; yellow lights in front rooms where TVs flicker; shadowed turnings onto streets, where I encounter a fox perhaps, scurrying along the pavement, intent on his business. Plane trees, their leaves in lamplight. Groups of giggling girls going out for the night. They fall silent as I go by, their scent trailing behind them in the night air. I watch lovers passing, grasping each other, trying to meld with each other. I almost envy them, thinking of other faces that once waited for me, smiling faces under lamplight that were once eager to see me. I hear voices, someone calling my name, a woman’s voice speaking to me, echoes, rustling of leaves, the flicker of sirens. I stop, listen, then drift on in th
e shadows, for I am freed from my lovers.
I sometimes see familiar people on my journeys in the city, people from the past. I have glimpsed Louie now and then, walking with a child who has grown up over the years. I would always be able to recognise Louie’s straight back and determined step although middle age has encased her. Once I stopped to talk to her as she stood at a bus stop by her workplace and I stared into those same amused, slightly mocking, hazel eyes. She was evidently still working as a nurse, her greying hair scraped back into a bun, an ID card dangled on a blue threaded ribbon and a blue uniform under a beige raincoat. I watched her spark up a Silk Cut and recognised that quick, characteristic whooshing sound she always made when blowing out smoke.
“Well, look who’s here,” she had said smiling and then she gestured to a pretty girl with a golden mass of hair standing nearby, talking to some friends.
“That’s Katie my daughter, had her with Neville. You remember him?”
Oh yes, I remembered him — that face above me in the night.
“We settled down together more or less.”
She laughed in an embarrassed sort of way and made a gesture, which I think meant that one surrenders to what one has.
She asked me what I’m doing. I talked a little about the job at the hospital and all the time that I spoke to her I was aware that I should be acknowledging those special things, those profound moments we had together, yet I chatted on, while our unspoken past hovered between us. Her gaze took in the slice over my eyebrow, Hobman’s mark.
“Still in the wars then aren’t you?”
“Yeah, I guess so,” I replied, then her bus arrived with a groan of brakes.
“Got to go,” she said and she leaned forward and in a remembered gesture held my forearm lightly and kissed my cheek, “Take care dear, won’t you?”
She gestured to her daughter who detached herself sulkily from her mates and cast me an incurious look before sauntering onto the bus behind her mother. I remained to watch them go. I could see Louie’s face through the dirt-smeared windows and our eyes met for a moment then the bus left in a cloud of diesel smoke.
Once, I visited a secure unit miles away. It was a bleak new place with landscaped grounds. I had finished seeing a prisoner for a consultation report and was being escorted out of the unit when I glimpsed a familiar, bent figure with a tuft of grey hair, bobbing between two staff in a corridor. It was Heinie, my old patient from my first days on Eaton Ward. I called to him and the escorts stopped and restively clinked their keys. Heinie stood between them, his beady eyes glittering.
“Hello, Heinie, do you remember me?” I asked.
He clutched at his tattered forelock. His great ears gleamed transparently in the light, the red scar on his temple was vivid. His gaze at first seemed completely blank.
“Yes, boss,” he replied mechanically, giving me a brief, cowed glance. “Tea’s up, goin’ fer me tea now, boss.” His feet shuffled. He looked perplexed and anxious.
“Glad to be out of the hospital are you, Heinie?”
“Mein herz ist froh boss.”
“Well goodbye.”
“Goodbye, boss.”
He skittered away, relieved not to be accosted any longer and the escorts tramped off with him.
Then I heard the clear, reedy voice come warbling to me above the sound of keys chinking and the receding footsteps of the staff.
“I’ll be seeing you, Father!”
The hospital holds me in its routines and I appreciate its discipline. I welcome the daily trudge along the drive, past the wind vane showing St George eternally spearing the dragon, up to the lodge house with its five worn steps. I set my feet gratefully there, following the trail of staff and patients, for we all go in by one gate and we endlessly tread the long, echoing corridors accompanied by the clank and boom of the great doors.
Many staff come and go but I remember particularly the retirement gathering for Bill Ponds. Nursing and medical staff grouped in the directorate rooms under the print of The Ship of Fools. Canapés and soft drinks were passed around and the younger staff gossiped in the corners while the old sweats reminisced together. Dr Bartram gave a little speech acknowledging Bill’s length of service with the concluding encomium, “First and foremost a solid clinician and a support to patients and staff alike”. There was a pause as Bill opened a small, wrapped package. It contained an antique, silver, hunter fob watch inscribed “To Bill from colleagues and friends”. Bill began a speech of thanks in his deep baritone but then he faltered. He placed his head in his hands and wept loudly in front of us all.
As Bartram and I walked away to a research meeting, after Bill had recovered his composure, Bartram said, “Freud famously pronounced that the measure of success in life lies in Liebe und Arbeit. Love and work. That is all there is. When you take a single man’s job away — what’s left?”
I nodded, thinking that I had spent most of my life rubbing shoulders with these men, spending far longer with them than with any lover and yet we part with just such a banal ceremony at the close of it all.
I only had my work. Irina was gone but she lived on in my heart. I used to see her name on staff lists and, of course, she continued to come to the hospital on the last Thursday in each month. I still felt a cord of connection existed between us and that somehow I was still waiting for her to summon me back once more when her husband had finally gone away. Sometimes, I rang her old number to hear her voice on the answer phone or drove past the old house in the night to gaze up at the roofline and the crooked cherry tree. I once even sneaked in to one of her lectures, on Dyadic Death, to sit discreetly at the back of the audience, watching her figure, listening to her voice. Hobman had drawn us together again and our nightmarish stumbling ordeal by the river seemed confirmation we would be together again somehow. That night, after Hobman had disappeared down the river, we had sat together hand-in-hand in a police car. Later, in the police station at Redford, I had brought her coffee in a disposable cup and our fingers had touched again as she took the cup from me. I tried to speak to her but she had said, “I’m so shattered now. We’ll talk later Jack, not now.”
The police pressed us, wanting statements. We were interviewed several times that night. A detective later told me that her husband had picked her up from the station.
I came back for questioning many times and was suspended from the hospital.
The police still had many unanswered questions, and they were also occupied dredging for Hobman. There was no inquest as there was no body.
A few weeks later I wrote Irina a letter and sent it to her work address in a psychology unit in another city. In it, I begged her to see me. There was no reply. Weeks passed and I drove cautiously past her house. It looked shuttered and empty. I checked the neuropsychology departmental corridors, based in a teaching hospital twenty miles away. I went to see if she was still there. I slipped past the vigilant secretaries, walking past them with an air of professional confidence and my heart gave a bump to see her name on an office door. But there was no sign of her actual presence nor could I see her car in the staff car park. Summer came, and I had settled to wait. When at last I received a note from her on a card which bore a picture of a kitten lolling next to some chrysanthemum blossoms. I took the meaning of the card to indicate hope and joy.
She gave me simply a time, a place and a date. Enclosed in the card was a map to a psychiatric complex in the city near to her departmental base.
When Irina and I were lovers, I used to prepare for our assignations by playing a recording from The Magic Flute, especially the duet between Pamina and the foolish Papageno about love and the hope of a joyful union, the music always filling me with the sense of erotic poignancy. I played it that morning in the steamy bathroom, preparing myself to meet her once more, singing again the chorus, Mann und Weib und Weib und Mann, Reichen an die Gottheit an.
Once, years before, I had played the duet to Irina as we lay in bed in my room, and she asked me what the words
meant. I told her “Man and wife, wife and man, reaching to divinity”. She drew away from me thinking I was mocking her about her marriage but I really did not mean that. I explained that the opera concerned itself with the transformative power of love and that, to me, the words had a tender, ironic yearning and our marriage was one of souls — we were soul mates. She said with a sigh, “You are very sweet sometimes, but you think too much and you draw too many conclusions … I want us just to be.”
We met at The Towers, a disused, midlands psychiatric hospital, a disestablished asylum, close to her new departmental base. Thickets of sycamore and buddleia now sprang up around the crumbling Victorian brick facades. She arrived in a new vehicle, a heavy 4 × 4, which had replaced that little Micra that had carried us so far. I could just make out her features through the tinted windows as she rolled into the weed-filled car park. I savoured the moment of our assignation and watched her from the shadows of a crumbling portico for a moment. She got out and stood by her shiny vehicle with folded arms. A straight, slender figure with her long hair and girlish fringe, sleek in the sunshine. I walked over to her babbling, “So good to see you darling, quite like old times meeting like this.”
She unfolded her arms and made a stopping gesture with her hands palm out, “Listen, Jack, I’m not here for a post mortem on our relationship or on what happened with that man by the river. I just wanted to say goodbye once and for all.”
The rest of our meeting became a blur. I unbuttoned my shirt at some stage and showed her that I still wore the Black Madonna medallion.
“Don’t Jack. Don’t do this to me,” she said.
Our meeting did not take long. I remember looking away from her to see pigeons flying in and out of the shattered asylum chapel windows.
“Aidan and I are going away for a while. We are leaving, and I have Anton to consider. I want to have an ending to it all. I don’t want to talk about that night by the river. I don’t know what there was between you and that man and I don’t want to know. The police have wanted to go through it again and again and I really can’t bear it. It has been awful.”