Birmingham Friends (31 page)

I saw a look of panic flash across Elizabeth’s face. She actually shook Olivia slightly. ‘What are you talking about? This isn’t a punishment. Don’t be so stupid. You’re here because you’re ill and you need help.’

‘She died,’ Livy said suddenly, her eyes still stretched wide. She perched on the edge of the chair, kneading the fingers of one hand with the other ceaselessly as she talked.

‘Who died?’ Elizabeth asked sharply.

‘Eileen.’ She spoke very fast, her voice like that of a little girl. ‘They put her in the side room next to the ward when she went off. They call it going up the stick, the nurses. Eileen went up the stick. Right up – up to the top and she fell off. She shouted and shouted. All day for hours and hours. They went in and tried to stop her – men as well. Crowds of them. But they couldn’t and she carried on. Then she went quiet suddenly. They tried to stop us seeing, but we saw anyway when they carried her out. They’re always dying. The man comes round every day and asks if they’ve got any for him. His thinks we don’t know what he means, but we do. And Mary says she’ll be next because it’s waiting for her, always there waiting for her because of what she did years and years ago. Like me . . .’

Elizabeth made a convulsive gesture towards Livy as if to silence her, but she stopped abruptly of her own accord.

‘Livy?’ I took her hands. Trying to speak calmly, I said, ‘You do know who I am, don’t you?’

She nodded, and in a tiny voice said, ‘Katie.’

‘Are all the nurses like her?’ I asked, inclining my head a fraction towards the woman who had planted herself over by the door.

Olivia followed my glance, fearfully. ‘She’s not a nurse,’ she whispered. ‘She’s a miner’s wife. Her husband works in the men’s side. He couldn’t get a job. They’re from Cannock.’ She added as if incidentally, ‘Everybody shouts here.’

Then the little girl voice came back. ‘I think I’ve had some sort of breakdown. That’s what Daddy says, and the doctor says so. I can’t seem to – manage any more. And they give me things. I don’t know what they give me.’

‘Give you things?’

‘Medicine. White stuff. They don’t tell you.’

‘It’s probably to help you keep calm,’ I told her.

‘My tummy hurts. I think there’s something wrong with my insides.’

‘Did you tell the doctor?’

‘He said I was imagining it.’ She began rocking the upper half of her body quickly back and forth. I saw the nurse’s eyes swivel towards her.

‘Livy,’ I whispered. ‘Try and keep still or she’ll make you go back now.’

To my shame I found myself half wishing the nurse would take her away from us, out of my sight. I felt utterly helpless. What could I say? It was impossible to talk about anything: the past, the future were meaningless here. Everything was foreshortened into these minutes, here between these walls.

‘What day is it?’ Olivia asked.

‘Sunday,’ Elizabeth told her gently. ‘It’ll always be Sunday when we come, darling.’

‘The thing is,’ she said, suddenly speaking calmly and firmly. ‘They say I’m not well.’ She directed a look of piercing malevolence at her mother. ‘Nurse Tucker says she thinks I have good reason.’

Suddenly there were tears pouring down her face again. She had a terrible grip on my hands, and appealed to me, not her mother. ‘I don’t want people to see me like this. Help me, Katie. Help me – please.’

I was filled with panic, choking with it. ‘What can I do? I don’t know what to do.’ I pulled my hands away and took her tightly in my arms as she cried, making loud, jarring sounds which reached higher into shrieks. The nurse was upon us immediately.

‘Come on, now,’ she said ‘That’s enough. You come with me.’ With rough skill she seized Olivia and pinned her arms to her sides. She was more than a match for her in size and strength.

‘I can’t go back up there!’ Livy screamed. ‘Not through all those doors. Don’t take me back!’

‘We’ll come again,’ we told her, but she wasn’t hearing us.

The last sounds I heard were her screams echoing along the dark corridor, and the sound of a large key being turned. My legs were shaking so I could barely stand.

As our taxi moved down Arden’s curving drive, taking us back to the station, I said to Elizabeth, ‘What d’you think she meant – about having good reason? What is all this about?’

There was a long silence. I could tell the woman next to me was struggling hard with herself, her eyes glassy with tears. But with an enormous effort she regained control. Wiping her eyes, she looked down and straightened the front of her blouse.

Finally, turning her gaze to the half-open window she said, ‘I really don’t have any idea.’

‘Oh, so you’re back at last are you?’ Douglas burst out when I walked into the house. The train to Birmingham had been delayed and then I’d refused Alec’s offer of a lift and had a long wait for the bus. Douglas was seething with resentment, so much so that he had come downstairs to confront me. Seeing the advent of trouble between us, my mother, with the expression of a prophet whose words have come true, disappeared towards the other end of the house.

In a peevish tone which I had been hearing from him more and more lately, he said, ‘I suppose it’s too much to expect that you might spend Sunday with your husband?’

I was too tired and upset to point out that often when I did spend Sunday with Douglas, a good part of it consisted of hearing the sound of his typewriter coming from the small study next to our bedroom.

‘You know where I’ve been.’ I wanted him to hold me, for something to feel normal and right.

‘Do I?’ he hurled the words at me. His blue eyes were hard with fury. ‘Why should I believe you?’

‘Oh for goodness’ sake, stop being so melodramatic,’ I said. ‘D’you really think I’d be making up some story about carting all the way to a mental hospital half way across Warwickshire for my own entertainment?’

‘That depends.’ He limped badly towards me, accentuating his disability. He did this to goad me, had been doing so increasingly lately. At first it had made me feel guilty, as if I was failing him in some way. Now I was beginning to resent it. I’d certainly had enough of everything for one day.

‘It all depends who you were really going to see, doesn’t it?’

I stared at him coldly. ‘What are you talking about?’

He stood silently for a moment, looking hard into my eyes and I met his stare, angry now.

‘Oh, forget I spoke,’ he said in a disgusted voice. I wasn’t certain whether the emotion was directed towards me or himself.

‘I went with Elizabeth Kemp. You know that.’

Ignoring this he moved towards the stairs. ‘I suppose there’ll be something to eat this evening.’

‘Yes,’ I agreed flatly. ‘I suppose there will.’

When he’d gone upstairs, my mother came back in. She’d obviously been listening. She walked across the room with a vase of flowers, not looking at me.

‘It’s no good.’ Her tone was brisk and neutral. ‘You’ll have to put him first. He’s not going to be the sort to play second fiddle to anyone.’

‘But he’s not having to,’ I cried, tearful now. ‘I’m doing my best. I can’t help it if Olivia’s ill, can I?’

Mopping a ring of water from the table, she said, ‘Perhaps you should think of giving up work.’

‘I’d have thought you’d be the last person to suggest that.’ But I wondered wearily whether if she wasn’t right. Douglas had been so demanding recently, expecting so much from me and never seeming satisfied with what I did. I kept wondering what had happened to the kind, charming man I had married. I felt tired and pulled in too many directions at once.

I told my mother that Douglas and I would eat upstairs that night, given the bad atmosphere between us. We ate our meal in silence, but by bedtime he was repentant.

‘I don’t know what I said all that for, darling.’ He was lying with his head on my breast. ‘Don’t take any notice of me when I’m like that, will you? I’ve been alone so long I don’t know how to behave with someone. You know I’m only like this because I love you and I need you so much.’

I need you. I need you. Douglas’s constant refrain nowadays. He looked round at me, his expression contrite, and I was filled with sudden tenderness for him.

‘Can we try it again. Please, darling?’

I’d had to be very careful, very patient with him as a lover. One hint of my own, usually unsatisfied desires, and he built mountains of resentment and insecurity. Almost as soon as he was aroused he had to be in me. Sometimes he left it just too late, and came with agonized embarrassment almost at the first contact of our flesh. When he did manage to hold back until he was inside me it was over in seconds, but he was jubilant with himself.

We did have times of great affection and tenderness, but the frustrations of the bedroom seeped out to affect everything else. It was a huge obstacle to him, something he felt he had to work at, be good at. It was equally frustrating to me, except that I learned this was something he must never be made aware of. I found I was learning to tread very carefully with his moods, tiptoeing round him fearfully.

I turned to him, and we held one another. Half my mind was still occupied with Olivia and I tried to keep it that way. I still found Douglas attractive but I tried to avoid becoming aroused by him because he seemed so incapable of giving me anything sexually. I had begun to think of our love life very much as my wifely duty, more painful in its frustrated expectations than a complete absence of lovemaking would have been.

Douglas began to take his pleasure, running his hands over my body as if testing himself. I was ready for him as he plunged into me, panting with anxiety. He thrust into me once and it was over. He laid his head next to mine as if with relief, then raised it to smile at me, searching my face with his eyes.

‘That was good, wasn’t it, Katie? I think it’s getting better.’

*   *   *

OLIVIA

Things I remember about Arden

Arden is deep in the countryside, ringed by stagnant fields and petrified trees. I thought when they took me there that I was going to my death. They would have absolute control over me. They proposed to bury me alive behind all those doors. Every ten yards along the corridors, doors and more doors, unlocking, slamming, relocking. When they visit me, Mummy and Kate, I come up to them as if from a well, hauled up, up, door after door. From where they sit they can never see the bottom of it nor understand that this is where I have come from. I don’t want them to see me like this. And I don’t know whether it’s yesterday that I saw them or last month because the days run into each other and never change.

I can’t tell them. Since I’ve been here I learn that what we say here is twisted into nonsense to those outside and whatever words I use make them frown, further convinced of my instability. I don’t try to speak about the way the staff slam and shout, treating even the doors with hatred, how they edge round the room, their backs to the walls of the ward which are the colour of dead skin, their eyes never leaving us. They are afraid of us. In my opinion they are very odd.

We have reason after all, for being here: that’s what I know. Bridget has reason; she’s perhaps sixty, gave birth to a dead baby all those years ago. Agnes won’t eat the food. She feeds only from the pig bin outside the kitchen. She is heavy and slow like a cow. She lived among cows because she is a farmer’s wife. I don’t know why she thinks real food is too good for her, but she does have a reason, I know. So many of the others sit and stare, or if they talk I can’t make it out; it comes in odd waves and jerks like a jumper unravelling. But I hold this tightly in my head: no one’s here without a reason. I know that. The staff, however, choose to be here. What sort of reason is that?

Other things I never tell them

How it feels to wear a shroud of canvas, layers thick, stitched across and re-stitched, and to sleep in sheets of layered and cross-sewn calico, made so strong to stop us hurting ourselves with them. It chafes my skin red. Our ward is twenty strong. Like animals we rise with the light and are in bed at four-thirty, laid out under the high, blistered ceiling, our beds crammed in only a few inches apart. We breathe each other’s sour air, smell all of each other’s most intimate smells. I sleep between Gladys, a skeleton who wears the sweat perfume of death, and Mary who soils her bed and flies somewhere every night with massive wings and a chatter in her throat. I have never known this class of women before. They don’t worry about such distinctions, each wrapped in her own cocoon. It’s only the nurses who can’t hear my voice and learn about my family without goading me. ‘Posh cow.’ ‘Your Highness.’ ‘Lady Muck.’

It’s a farm here, inside and out. On Sunday mornings they make us bath, all three hundred women, eight at a time, our shrouds in a stinking heap on the floor. The bath nudges sharply against my bones. Women scream and whip the water with their hands. The outlet pipes are four inches thick and I wonder if I could fit down them and be sucked away into the black womb of the sewer. The nurses parade among us shouting and eyeing our bodies.

At mealtimes they are forever counting. No knives are allowed in the place. The prongs of the forks are an eighth of an inch long. They count them out, count them in. When they shout ‘Tables!’ we fight for a place at the benches round the pine tables even though we are always, in the end, sitting in the same place. At first I am numb and don’t know how to survive. As the days pass I am too hungry and wrangle and cram my mouth with the rest, for one hesitation and the food is down another’s throat. Food is all our pleasure here: warmth, comfort, a loving touch.

Am I a Certified Lunatic? I don’t even know. No one tells me what Daddy has said to them to make them seal me in. Every morning the man comes to take away the bodies on his covered trolley. The old ladies stay in bed and die, dropping like bugs from the walls. With half-obvious relish he says, ‘Any for me today?’ He gets 7/6d for each corpse and he gathers them like a bunch of flowers. Will I leave here like that? Perhaps this is the beginning of it, knowing this: that within these dark walls there is another behind which I stand. It is so close it fits my skin, and behind it I am too chilled to feel even despair. The doctor said I might be schizophrenic because I’m thin. I watch others and wonder if I am already as bad. I feel lost.