‘I don’t see the point. I doubt he’d be interested.’
‘What do you tell him, as a matter of interest?’
‘As little as possible. Only that the thoughts upset me.’
‘You should tell him your thoughts concerning God and Satan.’
‘I’ve got an appointment next Wednesday. Would you like to come?’
‘If you’d find it helpful,’ said Mary.
The psychiatrist she was seeing at the time, another Senior House Officer of Dr Ransom’s, an Indian fellow whose name Matilda could never get right, had taken her off her current script and put her on Prozac. Matilda’s mood fell through the floor, with many a tear shed at mealtimes. She considered her thoughts very bad during this period. Satan was telling her Jesus cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub and all she could do was contradict him and tell him that Jesus cast out demons by the power of Beelzebub’s enemy, the Holy Spirit. It wasn’t much good contradicting the thoughts – they never went away or lessened – but doing something, even if it was useless, was better than doing nothing.
Matilda arranged to meet Mary outside the main entrance to the hospital. Mary came ten minutes early, while Matilda was enjoying a bottle of Pepsi Max and a couple of cigarettes. After she stubbed out her last cigarette, they went to sit in the waiting area. Then Dr Ransom called them in.
‘I hope you don’t mind but I brought a friend,’ said Matilda as they trooped in.
‘Not at all,’ said Dr Ransom.
They sat down. The Senior House Officer was there with them, sitting beside Dr Ransom, taking notes.
‘How are you feeling today?’ Dr Ransom asked.
‘Terrible. I think I’ve blasphemed the Holy Spirit.’
‘Is that the sin you’re so concerned about?’
Matilda nodded.
‘And how are your thoughts?’
‘Worse than ever,’ she reported. ‘I’m now getting thoughts telling me Jesus casts out demons by the power of Satan.’
All this was duly noted. Dr Ransom then turned his attention to Mary and asked for her input.
Mary said, ‘It’s the paranoia I find most difficult, the paranoia against God.’
‘How would you like to come into hospital for a few days?’ Dr Ransom asked Matilda.
‘I wouldn’t like that at all,’ she said.
‘If you feel safer at home, that’s fine with us,’ said Dr Ransom.
The consultation was soon concluded. Matilda walked Mary to the end of the corridor and out of the double oak doors at the entrance. They were bathed in bright sunlight.
‘That wasn’t too bad,’ said Matilda, almost brightly.
‘It wasn’t,’ agreed Mary.
‘I’ll see you when I get home from work this evening, then,’ Matilda said as she waved Mary off. ‘Thanks again for coming.’
22
Still the need for endless Words!
When she ran out of people to give her Words, she prayed that a prophet would come. A friend of a friend talked about a meeting in Hull, where Betty Boulder was due to speak. Through low cunning and high manipulation, Matilda found out the name of the church and booked a ticket. It didn’t cost her anything – the ticket was issued so the church would have an idea of the number of people who were attending. Mandy wanted to come, too, so Matilda ordered another ticket and started to fantasize about getting a soothing, healing Word. When she told Chrissie of the meeting, she said, ‘What makes you think you’ll believe her and not any of the other people you’ve asked for Words?’
‘Betty Boulder is a genuine prophet,’ Matilda said. ‘She only gives Words the Lord has given her to speak. She’s responsible for my prophecy.’
Finally, the Saturday in November came when Betty would be speaking at this church in Hull and Matilda set off with Mandy. They made egg sandwiches the night before and set the alarm for the morning, then got up at six and took the train to Selby, thence to Hull and found the church crowded with people anxious for a Word. Betty gave a long speech, during which Matilda’s stomach was gurning with anxiety. Would God warn her gently and soothe her brow or would he expose her as a blasphemer? Matilda didn’t know and, listening to Betty speak, wasn’t sure she wanted to know. But when Betty asked for a volunteer to demonstrate the use of pictures in prophecy, Matilda saw the chance of another Word and propelled herself onto the stage.
‘Yes, well, it seems we have a volunteer already,’ said Betty, clearly taken aback by the strength of Matilda’s enthusiasm.
Betty then picked three teenagers to give her pictures for Matilda. In turn, they spoke of rocks, a crown and sceptre and a tranquil beach setting.
Then Betty prophesised over Matilda, speaking of difficulty and of God giving her hind’s feet and a crown and sceptre to co-rule and reign with him and finally spoke of Matilda having holidayed too long at the beach. The whole prophecy took less than five minutes and Matilda felt her face glow. There. God had spoken without the need to expose her as a hopeless case.
During the interval, when everybody was biting into cheese and tomato sandwiches and swilling cups of oversweet builders’ tea, Matilda sought out Betty, who was relaxing at the back with a mug of coffee.
‘These past few months have been anything but a holiday,’ she said to Betty.
‘Perhaps,’ said Betty with a smile, ‘God meant it in another way.’
On the journey back to Fleet, Matilda still felt the wholesome glow emanate from her face. To think that the Lord had spoken to her! She was relieved and voluble, relaxed and happy, hardly noticing the thoughts now as she chatted away to Mandy.
The following morning, a sunny but cold Sunday, her good mood evaporated when she woke up and lay in her bed in her attic eyrie listening to the constant dripping of her mind – drip, drip, drip. Matilda sighed and stirred, wishing that God would give her a new Word; that he would somehow mark the windowpanes of her small attic flat with crosses or cleave the rock in the garden in two to show her specifically that she had not blasphemed, and was in no danger of blaspheming, the Holy Spirit.
23
From November 1998 until March the following year, Matilda was on a locked ward at Fairview. She couldn’t remember how she got there exactly, except that the intervening days had been very dark, involving innumerable pints and cans of Strongbow.
Now she was on Ward 1, in a room by herself and God, who had seemed so full of approbation before, now seemed far away. Matilda asked for a writing desk and the nurses gave her an old folding desk so she could write her messages from God, which took up most of the day. She had long since filled the notebook Avril had given her and had moved onto journalist’s notepads. She now had seventeen of them and kept them close at hand, though reading them frightened her.
I am a God who hates to punish, she wrote. Put this foolishness behind you, says the Lord your God Jehovah, and you will surely live. The foolishness was the blasphemy, she was sure, and she couldn’t stop that, not consciously, though somewhere within her lay the key to stopping it. She picked up her pen and began to write, I shall always love you, daughter. Not so the wicked. Cease your ways of wickedness and hearken unto the Straight and Narrow Path.
Oh dear, God was angry again. Secretly, Matilda thought he was being just a little unreasonable. It wasn’t as if she were purposely thinking these thoughts, so why did he insist on blaming her for them? She knew or rather suspected that these Words from God weren’t altogether trustworthy. When, for example, he spoke through Betty Boulder, the tapes of whose prophecies she kept in her drawer, he always seemed so kind and patient but when he spoke to her alone, he was Righteousness and Judgement personified. Was he fibbing, trying to trick her into believing the thoughts were her fault, when they clearly weren’t? It was too hard a call. Matilda shut her journalist’s notepad and put it in her drawer, then went to the l
ounge for a cigarette.
Nigel was there, rolling a cigarette in front of the telly. The walls of the lounge were stained a golden yellow colour from a couple of years’ worth of nicotine and the air was acrid with cigarette smoke. Matilda put her cup of coffee on the low table and sat down in a vacant chair next to Nigel.
‘How’s Mats, then?’ he asked.
‘Fed up with God,’ she grunted.
‘Oh dear – not a happy bunny, then?’
‘He’s a ____ of the worst order.’
‘I know he’s not,’ murmured Nigel.
The duty nurse gave Matilda a wounded look but didn’t say anything. Matilda had to watch what she said about the Lord as many of the nurses were Christians. She lowered her voice. ‘He’s been threatening me again.’
‘With the pit?’ asked Nigel.
‘The deepest pit in hell,’ said Matilda.
‘Oh dear,’ said Nigel. ‘I think you should leave this Evangelical God behind and worship mine at St Edmund’s.’
‘I once heard a good sermon on the Scarlet Stain of Romanism,’ said Matilda. ‘You should have heard it.’
‘I can imagine,’ said Nigel, pulling a wry face. ‘As the Pharisees once slagged off Jesus, so the Evangelicals slag off his true followers today.’
Nigel had once enticed her to Mass in the hospital chapel on a Sunday afternoon. The service had been plain and unadorned and it was dignified in its own way. Nigel went to Mass as often as he could. Once a day outside, once a week in hospital. There were no services for Evangelicals, though there was John, the Church of England chaplain, who left Matilda booklets entitled Schizophrenia and the God of Healing and Overcoming Depression, which Nigel borrowed, as he suffered from depression.
Now that she had resigned herself to being sectioned, the days passed gently and unremarkably. There was a small shop in the corridor on the ground floor where Matilda could buy her cans of Coke – alcohol was strictly verboten on the ward – and she had enough money to purchase sixty cigarettes a day or thereabouts. She got up at ten or eleven, in time for Occupational Therapy, pleasant diversion that it was, and ate lunch in the dining room. There was no OT in the afternoon, which meant she was free to watch television (though she avoided Satan’s Tabernacle these days) and smoke in the lounge. There was always Nigel to talk to or one of the others, though Matilda kept clear of nurses and doctors unless it was Ward Round, in which case it was impossible, as Ward Round was compulsory. There was supper to look forward to in the evening, then more cigarettes, and finally, at eleven o’clock, bed.
And thanks to this gentle regime, her mood began to lift. No longer did she think of drinking herself into a stupor but rather of surviving. The Sulperide tablets they gave her made her hungry and she often had two helpings of supper, which helped offset the weight loss and meant she was filling out these days – the sautéed potatoes were particularly welcome, as was the Irish stew.
Mary was a regular visitor. She would take Matilda fruit and packets of nuts for fibre. As the lounge was too smoky, Matilda would receive her in her room and they would talk of how things were going. Matilda’s mother came regularly, too, bringing gifts of packets of cigarettes and bottles of Coca-Cola, and ask her if she was still hearing voices, to which Matilda would say, with obvious embarrassment, ‘Sometimes.’
As for her father, he came only once, threw himself onto the chair in her room and exclaimed, ‘Well, it’s come to this – the lunatic asylum! I always say it skips a generation. My mother, your grandmother, was a grand lunatic.’
A picture came into Matilda’s mind of her late paternal grandmother, a wrinkled, white-haired old lady in formal coat and matching hat who often sat out on her front steps on a deck chair with a glass of sweet sherry. Unfortunately, her father’s judgement was only too true: by the time Matilda was old enough to know her, her father’s mother, herself a woman of considerable private means, was reduced to rooting around in rubbish bins for bottles of pop she could trade in for pennies and lived in one room of her substantial mansion, for she imagined herself to be a penniless widow.
24
While on the ward, Matilda entertained herself with reading the newspapers. These came every morning and there was always a queue to read them in the Smoke Room. It was these seemingly-innocuous papers that led to Matilda’s first altercation on the ward, which happened towards the end of Matilda’s stay in Ward 1.
One of the ward newspapers was that notorious piece of used toilet paper, The Daily Wail. Every day you could guarantee that there would be a diatribe against one section of society’s unfortunates. On the day of the altercation, it was single mothers on benefits and Matilda, whose gateposts had been compromised following the upping of her dose of Seroxat to 60 mg a day, read of how this last group were supposedly bleeding the country dry, both themselves and their degenerate children, when who should walk in but Georgina, a woman who had just given birth to a baby daughter and who was now resident in the Mother and Baby Unit.
Well! Matilda felt the hairs on the back of her neck bristle and promptly embarked on a diatribe of her own, worthy of anything gracing the pages of The Daily Wail. When she drew breath, it was only to ask how, with a history of unemployment and repeated hospital stays, Georgina would find the wherewithal to support said infant she had foisted on the parish.
The upshot of this was that the woman promptly burst into tears and fled to the safety of her room, whereupon two or three nurses turned their attentions to Matilda, reminding her that Georgina was no irresponsible gymslip mother. Deprived of her audience, Matilda turned on the two or three other smokers in the room and started to berate them for their fecklessness in being in receipt of Incapacity Benefit. It culminated in the exhortation, ‘And if you knew what was good for you, you’d all get off your backsides and look for jobs of work!’
A funny thing happened the next day. Matilda couldn’t find The Daily Wail anywhere, though she looked for it up and down. She went to Roy, the Shift Manager, and asked him if it had come in that day.
‘We’ve decided not to have it for a few days,’ said Roy. ‘It was having an unfortunate effect on some of our patients.’
‘Aw,’ Matilda whined, ‘I was so looking forward to it.’
The next Ward Round, her excitability was commented upon and her dose of Seroxat reduced to 50 mg a day on the grounds that it was lowering her inhibitions.
25
The first altercation led to the second, indirectly.
One of the patients on Ward 1 was a toker called Robyn, who used to roll cannabis cigarettes so thin they could pass for normal rollies. When Matilda asked her why, Robyn replied, ‘I can’t roll ‘em like I used to – the Social’s gone and cut my benefit.’
Robyn smoked these anorexic spliffs with Rob, the ward smackhead. Robyn’s room was just above Matilda’s and on a night, she could hear them laughing and giggling together. So irritating was their cannabis-induced hilarity that Matilda had to put her head under her pillow in order to get to sleep.
Someone else must have been disturbed by it, too, because Rob was suddenly moved to Ward 2 and Robyn was moved to the double room next to the Ward Manager’s office on the ground floor, sharing with Georgina. The move coincided with her running out of cannabis so she became aggressive and snappy, at least towards Matilda.
For some reason that Matilda never understood, Robyn blamed her for the move and relations between them deteriorated. Not too long after this, Matilda was in the kitchen making herself a cup of coffee when Robyn cornered her and clouted her on the side of the head. The normally-placid Matilda was provoked into responding by Robyn’s foul-mouthed invective and pummelled her in the kidneys. Robyn wriggled free and continued her scatological insults, so Matilda punched her in the gut. They were discovered rolling on the linoleum floor of the kitchen and separated.
‘She hit me,’ Robyn whin
ed.
‘Only because of your potty mouth!’ yelled Matilda.
‘You fat, slaggy dyke,’ Robyn snorted.
It was the cleanest thing she had said during the encounter.
Robyn went to call the police and two scuffers turned up at the door with radios and radio static blaring. They listened to what Robyn had to say, then spoke to the Ward Manager. They left without taking any further action.
The upshot of the fight was that Matilda was moved to Ward 5. A nurse escorted Matilda, clutching her bag, to her new ward. It was upstairs and along the corridor.
Ward 5 was much smaller than Ward 1. It had a dormitory of eight beds and strip lighting where Matilda was shown. She locked her purse into her bedside drawer and went in search of the Smoke Room, where one or two patients were sitting.
While rooting about in the drawers of this Smoke Room, Matilda came across part of psychiatric report on one of the patients that made interesting reading, so she took it out of the drawer and started to read it. What it revealed was fascinating. According to the reporting psychiatrist, the patient was a paranoid schizophrenic who believed he was being followed and photographed by the CIA.
Matilda had just lit a cigarette when a male nurse came up to her and took the report off her hands.
‘Where did you get this?’ he asked.
‘I found it in a drawer,’ she replied.
‘I’ll take it now, if you don’t mind. It’s private and confidential.’
Being on Ward 5 enabled her to contrast the different styles of ward management. The Sister on Ward 5 was a tough cookie, no messing about. The television was switched off at ten o’clock sharp and the patients were allowed the time to make one last drink before they were sent to bed at 10:30 pm.
Matilda did go to bed, if not on the first prompting, then on the second. The Night Shift Supervisor had the keys to the Smoke Room jangling in her hand. Matilda swallowed the last of her decaffeinated coffee, deposited the cup in the dishwasher as she was told and meekly went to bed.
Kingdom Come Page 8