Lily Poole

by Jack O'Donnell

  Getting Joey ready for the hospital visit was in some ways worse than getting the kids ready for their absence. That part was easily sorted. Jo was eleven, almost twelve. Mary told her to keep an eye on Ally for a few hours. If she had any problems she was to run next door to old Mrs Bell’s. Jo had given her that squint-eyed look as if to say the world would end in a raging ball of fire before that happened.

  Mary wanted to take John something, a book perhaps, but telly-logic dictated – and she had heard all kinds of stories – in the psychy wards they were just as liable to froth at the mouth and eat the pages. Anyway, she reasoned, John had little interest in books or reading. He preferred sketching, but God knows what he would have done with a set of pencils. Joey had already warned her that he couldn’t take more time off work, which meant he wouldn’t, because he didn’t like hospitals, and he especially didn’t like psychiatric hospitals like Gartnavel.

  Before they left home she had settled on a set of ­crayons and picked up his sketch pad. Flicking through it, a picture of a beautiful little girl in school uniform made her shiver, partly because she had Ally’s eyes. But then she got distracted, noticed a scuff mark from work boots on the linoleum in the kitchen. She got a dish towel and ran it under the tap, scrubbing furiously at the grey smear, hating Joey for his carelessness and blindness. She wrung the rag out and hung it on the pipes under the sink.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ Joey had said, when she first told him where their son was. ‘He’s just gone a bit daft, like his Ma.’

  Mary and Joey stood on the platform at Dalmuir ­Station waiting for the Hyndland train that would take them to Gartnavel. The trip took about twenty minutes, but for Joey the wait was unpaid work. He was dressed in his best navy blue suit and a diamond-patterned tie in a tasteful lime, the knot loose so it hung lopsided and low at his chest like a lasso on the hitching post of his neck. The top three buttons of his shirt were undone and the winged collar spread wide as a dove in flight. His chest was tanned from working outside and he thrust it out, a gold crucifix on a chain glinting in the light. He paced up and down Platform Two, huffing and puffing in exasperation, eyeing Mary, blaming her, when the red light refused to turn green. She ignored him, smoked a cigarette and struck up a conversation about the changeable weather with a stout woman leaning on a stick.

  At Gartnavel Hospital, the nurse had a fixed grin on her face and held up a set of keys, signalling to them through reinforced glass that she was going to use them to open the door.

  ‘Wow,’ she said, pulling the door open, ‘you’re early.’ She had puffed out blonde hair that curled and stopped halfway down her face, and a body like an American fridge-freezer crammed into a cream trouser suit, and sporting brown Doc Marten boots.

  But their explanation that they were booked in to see the psychiatrist made it forgivable. She marched along the hall ahead of them and stopped to wait for them outside a closed door.

  ‘There now.’ The nurse padded off down the corridor and left them standing.

  ‘It’s in here,’ said Mary. There was a nameplate – Mr Tom Williams – slipped into a slot on the door. She wondered whether to knock.

  Joey pushed in ahead of her and flung open the door, an uncharacteristic jerky movement that showed his haste to get in and out as quickly as possible. Mary stood uncertain on the threshold, listening to the murmur that came from the day room, hoping to pick out Krinkly Crisp’s voice. Someone was picking discordant notes on a piano keyboard. The caustic institutional smell of disinfectant and fag smoke bled from dank green walls. The room they entered was not much bigger than an extended lobby with a desk and a few chairs.

  ‘Please sit down.’ The voice was Oxford or Cambridge, plum years of education in Received Pronunciation; the beard was a Che Guevara and his doctor’s coat a lived-in yellow. It was only apparent how Lilliputian John’s ­psychiatrist was when he stood up, his hand outstretched to offer them a seat.

  Sighing, Mr Tom Williams concentrated on the minutiae of John’s notes rather than looking either of them in the eye. The seizure, if it was that, was just an aberration, a freak of nature. It might happen again. It might not happen again. If a pattern emerged, he reassured them, he was just the man to chart its progress. There were medications that could control, but not cure, it. They could manage it together. He got up as quickly as he sat down, briefly shook Mary’s hand and nodded at Joey on his way out.

  ‘What about his psychiatric problems, his—?’ Mary asked.

  He batted away Mary’s concerns with thin pink lips that struggled out of his facial hair. ‘Psychosis, isn’t as bad as it sounds,’ he reassured her. ‘With the right help it’s manageable.’ He grabbed her hand again, cupping it in his own, his dark eyes looking into hers, showing he understood the shock she had been through.

  ‘Can we see him?’ Mary asked.

  ‘Of course. Of course. Feel free.’ He waved his hands about for emphasis. ‘We’re not a prison camp.’

  They followed him into the corridor. He pulled shut the door behind him and locked it. ‘Feel free,’ he said again, waving them away towards the day room.

  It was a large central space divided into two. A row of different shaped and coloured hairstyles were sitting in easy-to-wipe shiny chairs, their faces pointed at the telly. Mary supposed these were the dribblers and jerkers and criers.

  ‘Glad to meet you, glad you could come,’ said a man wearing a snazzy blue blazer with a squarish head. His hand was cupped and held out. ‘You got a fag for Eddie?’

  ‘Sorry, don’t smoke, pal,’ said Joey.

  A woman glided up from a chair behind a pillar. She wore a scratchy acrylic trouser suit with man-sized flares. ‘C’mon, Eddie,’ she said, leading him away. ‘Don’t bother the visitors.’

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Mary, waving after her.

  Joey shook his head. ‘Jesus. It’s harder catching the eye of the nurses in here than it is catching Blind Bobby’s eye behind the bar in Macintosh’s at closing time.’

  Mary saw John sitting at a low table silhouetted against the large windows of the room, the blinds partially shut to keep daylight from spoiling the entertainment on the telly. He was canoodling, a girl wrapped round him like a blood python. As they got closer he stood up, brushing her off, so that she almost fell to the floor.

  ‘What’s that she’s wearing?’ said Joey. ‘You can practically see her fanny through it.’

  ‘It’s a nightdress,’ said Mary. ‘Who’s your friend?’ Mary’s voice was tetchy.

  The girl’s hair was a botched dye-job, black, long and silky at the back and loose around her face in a feather-cut. Her nightdress, a corn-syrup colour, skimmed her body and died above the knee. She wasn’t wearing a bra, but the flouncy material round her chest barely hid what girlish bumps she had. Her eyes were her most absorbing feature. Blue shadows made her darting pupils piggy-eyed, as if they were hiding something. Gold hoops dangled from beneath her hair and gave her a little rock-star chic.

  ‘That’s Janine.’ John’s face was a starburst of embarrassment and his eyes darted away from his parents.

  Mary expected the girl to push off, or whatever the psychiatric lingo was for leaving them alone with her son. Instead, Janine arranged the chairs, pushing one over to Joey, dragging another across the floor to create a jagged star, suckering them in so they sat facing each other, hands clutched like they were holding rosary beads in their laps in their laps.

  ‘You look nice.’ Mary spoke pleasantly enough to the girl, scrutinizing the ton of make-up she was wearing.

  ‘Think so?’ Janine said. Her mouth, bloated with red clown lipstick, was off and running on a whine, telling them everything about her bad skin and how much foundation she put on and what kind of brush she used and how she had to get up earlier than everyone else to look that way. How she didn’t sleep much at all.

  ‘Sleep is for the dead or older folk.’ She twitched her nose as if sniffing out the difference. ‘After a while you don’t know wh
ether you’re sleeping or awake. But it doesn’t matter to older folk. Cause when you get to that age they all look like each other anyway. Made of papyrus, with their bad hair, droopy mouths and wrinkly, disgusting bodies.’

  Joey laughed. ‘You might have a point there.’ He sneaked a look at his wife.

  Mary lit a fag. The girl stared at her. ‘What exactly are you in for?’

  Mary found herself passing her lighter and fag packet across for Janine to take one, hoping that at least that would shut her up.

  ‘I’ve got issues.’ Janine spoke in a knowing way with a shake of the head that seemed to convey everything and nothing.

  ‘And that psychiatrist . . .’ Joey frowned and shifted about in his chair to give himself time to think of his name.

  ‘Dr Williams,’ Mary breathed his name out with a puff of smoke.

  ‘Aye, him,’ Joey’s voice was a low growl. ‘Whit exactly does he dae for you?’

  Janine slipped the cigarette lighter and packet back to Mary, her hand drifting across and settling on top of John’s. ‘He’s a bit like God, only smaller.’

  Joey chortled at that, his eyes crinkling up, catching Mary’s. His wife half-smiled in acknowledgement. John inched his hand away from Janine’s. Mary watched the girl’s thin white fingers spidering across the arm of the chair, closing the distance, reclaiming them as her own. He looked away into the dancing dust motes of the day room, not meeting his mum’s eyes.

  ‘I think what my husband means,’ Mary kept her tone level, ‘is what kind of medical treatment do you get?’

  ‘Oh, apart from the usual stuff, none. Mr Williams doesn’t believe in that. He believes in the laws of entropy and everybody finding their own fixed state.’ She flicked her hair away from her face. ‘Or not,’ she added.

  ‘Sounds like something McGinley would say.’ Joey snorted through his nose at the idea of two people in the world, one a workmate in the yards and another a medical doctor and consultant psychiatrist, talking the same bullshit. ‘Whit are they keeping you in for hen?’ he asked Janine.

  She licked her lips before leaning over, pulling the ashtray diagonally across the surface of the small table nearby, stubbing out her cigarette, the clear lacquer marred by fag burns. ‘I’m not in for anything. I’m a voluntary patient.’ Her voice rose and her eyes took flight. ‘I can leave at any time.’

  Joey nodded towards John. ‘Whit about him then?’

  ‘I’m sectioned.’ John shook his head as if he had trouble believing it himself. ‘There’s nothin’ wrang with me.’ His body bristled and he sprung his hand from Janine’s. ‘The bastards.’ The swear word was like an intake of breath. He had never sworn in front of his mother before.

  ‘Seven days initially,’ said Janine. ‘Then they can double it to fourteen, or twenty-eight, or fifty-six. The bastards can do what they want when they get you in here.’

  ‘What about you then?’ Mary’s voice was more forgiving, more muddled, a whisper. ‘How can we get him voluntary status so he can leave?’

  ‘Can’t,’ Janine said. The two women’s eyes met with some understanding. ‘If you want out you’re not well enough to get out.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such shite,’ said Joey.

  ‘Try livin’ it,’ replied John, slumping into his chair.

  Mary picked up her fags and shelled one across to Janine’s lap, lighting hers and passing the lighter across. She began foutering in the bag at her feet, pulled out the drawing pad, and put it on the table with the packet of loose crayons and a bottle of Lucozade. ‘I couldn’t find your pencils,’ she lied, guiding the conversation back to the tramlines of something she could understand.

  ‘I’ve probably dumped them somewhere in my room.’ He smiled at her. ‘Don’t worry, Mum. These are fine.’ He picked up the bottle of Lucozade as if weighing it, then put it back down on the table.

  Mary didn’t think it was a good time to ask about his drawing of the little girl. And Joey was already huffing and fidgeting at her side in a way that suggested that it was about time they were going. Any time soon would be good.

  Day 27

  John thought being locked up in the ward would be like being in the gaol at Hall Street. Pacing two-and-a-half steps one way, sharp turn, three the other, careful not to stand on your bed. He expected to be too psyched-up to nod off and sleep. But the staff had given him two little white tablets with a sip of tepid water, and it knocked him out as if he had been hit by an upper cut from Muhammad Ali. At first, in a woozy way, he thought he was back in his bedroom at home. Even when he tried focussing, a blinding flash of light pulsing from the middle of his head made his eyesight hazy, blurring the edges of the solitary chair near the window, remaking the square of a desk used for stubbing out fags and God knows what else. Wind beat rain against the windowpane. The radiator oozed a cosy heat, which delayed him getting out of bed; he imagined he could put it off forever.

  Sheets sticky and smelly as a shroud on a battlefield were wrapped around his ears, muffling sound. He must have nodded off, because he became someone with the rabbit-pink eyes and blurred sight of an albino. A door opened further down the hall, and, ‘See you later,’ was swallowed by it closing. Bare feet squelched a few steps on the newly mopped floor, pausing outside his room. A blink of light. She hopped over the threshold and squeezed inside through the thin gap. He knew who it was by the way she breathed. She had told him to wait for her. His whole life he had been waiting for her – a flashing of neurons and dendrites, flushing across tender skin, tricking his blood, thickening his heart, everything focussed on the here and now of touch. A gibbous moon hung low bringing the outside in.

  Pressing her bum cheeks against the sill, she lifted her nightie, flung her bare legs apart, skin gleaming like birch, she fingered the damp cloud of hair, making herself groan. Her fecundity filled the room like a bouquet of dying lilies. He needed to jump out of bed, move his legs, shift his arm, but the only movement was his cock pulsing and straining on the bag of bones that was his body. He watched her teasing and was caught in her playful delight. The phut, slip and slap of nimble fingers on oleaginous skin brought on the contralto crown of moaning, but when her hand brushed back the cowl of dark hair from her face, Lily grinned at him. ‘Fucked you good, didn’t I?’ Her voice was high and shrill, but the red lipstick coated round her mouth was Janine’s. He thought he was going mad.

  Breakfast was porridge, cornflakes, toast, or a fry-up, served from behind a hatch in the kitchen. Choosing a seat proved a more difficult choice than what to eat. Most patients were still in bed. Those who were ambulant took a table intended for two, or even four, to themselves. With the mess they made smoking and sloshing food into their gobs it was easy to see why. He nipped in beside an older patient who looked harmless. He was immaculately turned out, wearing a denim shirt and jeans with the legs rolled up and hemmed to expose pristine Nordock white trainers and white socks, the type nobody would wear outside a locked ward. His hair was a rockabilly wave across his brow, perfectly neat, and he foot-tapped a beat as he chewed and gummed toast. ‘Telegram Sam’ blared out of the old-fashioned radiogram in the day room across the passageway, but the older man’s body held its own tempo and tune. John dragged the sugar bowl across the table, which upset his breakfast mate. The old man made a break for it, knocking over a chair and leaving scattered cornflakes.

  ‘Don’t mind George,’ shouted the woman behind the counter. ‘He doesn’t like his things moved about.’

  ‘Sorry,’ John replied.

  Her snaggle of hair nodded in acknowledgement. She stirred a tray with a metal spatula. No-nonsense NHS glasses magnified her eyes as she scrutinised him picking at his cornflakes. She offered the only piece of advice he had received from staff since his arrival. ‘Janine doesn’t really do mornings. You got her on one of her good days. She’s a mopey little piece – best avoided most afternoons too.’ She scrunched up her nose and her mouth made a bridge for wrinkles. ‘I suppose she’s a night bug, swann
ing about till God knows what hour.’ She sniffed. ‘Never get her in her own bed,’ she added, raising an eyebrow, clattering off a pot lid and shaking her head as if the contents disappointed her.

  John showed no sign that he heard her. He stacked his bowl on top of a column of others at the hatch, and slopped food waste into a rectangular metal bin on wheels. Despite what the grumpy granny had said, he turned his head when he heard somebody coming into the dining room. It was a short man who limped as he walked. With a smug expression, and a twitch of her lower lip, grumpy granny lapped up his disappointment. Her plastic name tag said Nancy McMurty and the black font told him she was a SEN. He figured she had trained as a nurse with Florence Nightingale during the Crimean War. He sloped off to the safety of the day room to hate her in peace.

  Everybody had their own chair. He made himself comfortable, arms on the armrests, where Janine had sat next to him yesterday, with a good view of the corridor. The chatter and hubbub of other patients made him dozy. His head dropped onto his chest. Somebody kicked at his feet. He woke with a start, jerking upright. SEN McMurty handed him a glass of lukewarm water. She tapped two tablets from the bottle-lid into his hand. Swallowing them down with another gulp of water he asked her, ‘Whit are they anyway?’

  ‘Your meds.’ She turned, nipping away to catch another patient sitting across from him with the same trick.

  He must have missed lunch. When he opened his eyes, the opening or closing bars of Crown Court wailed from the telly, but he had no stomach for food. His mouth was like an ash pit. He needed to pee and get a drink. It was a good excuse to do a circuit of the ward, but he returned to his seat without seeing Janine.

  He brought back his drawing pad and crayons from his room. It was impossible drawing with them, but with nothing better to work with than green crayon, he started a rough sketch of the woman with the scary hair opposite him. He kept tilting his head to take another gander at her, which frightened her away.