Eloquent Silence (48 page)

The doctor and my daughters came to my place the other day. They said I had to go to the Psychiatric Unit for assessment. They muttered things about schizophrenia or psychosis and Bipolar. Huh! Buy a polar bear, you mean, I said. Or bats in the belfry, I said. At first I refused point blank to go with them but the doctor’s mouth was set and his eyes were angry. He said the authorities would take me.

In the end I gave in simply so that at the end of the time they would all realize I’m as sane as they are, or saner. How can you see into another person’s mind? How can they make assumptions about whether my head is addled or reasonable? I’m the only one with the answer to that and my answer is that if I were any saner I would be in control of the world, no sweat. Shouldn’t say ‘sweat.’ Not seemly for a well-bred lady from a high falutin’ boarding school. No perspiration, rather.

I’d like to be like the Muslim women and wear a headdress which they think makes them invisible. That would be excellent for me. A way to be around but not be seen by the hoi poloi. Sometimes I think it’s a very bad error of judgment that we Australian women have to get around with our bare faces hanging out. Makes us vulnerable to whoever wants to read our thoughts and intentions.

I have had to learn how to be sly and not to take offense at the psychobabble of the aliens and their endless chatter. The voices speak to me and tell me what to say to get out of every jam I get into, sooner or later. They try to medicate me when I have to go to those hospital Units but I’m way smarter than the nurses. I know how to dispose of my tablets so they won’t block the voices, as it’s totally necessary for me to hear their orders.

I hold the tablets in the side of my mouth up against my teeth and when no one is looking I spit them into my glasses case for future use. But they mess with my head so I probably won’t be inclined to take them. Rather have a clear head so I know what’s going on.

For a while I worked for the Defense Department, starting by working in the Officers’ Mess. Pretty soon I was an officer myself, plain clothes style, of course, but I had my uniform at home for formal occasions.

That’s when I met Saint Andrew. I recognized him immediately, even in his disguise as a soldier. He didn’t seem to know me, though. He was present in my house when the doctor came to interview me. He was standing by the door, his eyes open but unfocused, staring right past me with his pale, somber, blank-eyed face, but giving the doctor a peculiar, swift sidelong look when he walked past Saint Andrew to leave. He had stood there for ages, I think, to protect me. 

When the doctor had gone Saint Andrew smiled at me with his square, shining white teeth, pursed his lips, nodded dumbly and slipped cautiously away, just disappearing one piece at a time like a melting Popsicle. Off into the ether, maybe to the Mothership? Who knows where he goes when he isn’t here by my front door.

The doctor wanted to know what date it was when he came last time, smirking as he was with impatient contempt. The sole time when I let him in, that is. How weird was that, to ask the date when he’s supposed to be a professional man out doing his rounds or whatever he does when he’s not operating on people. Not taking bits and pieces out and frying them, eating them with a glass of the best Chianti like Hannibal Lecter? I asked him to show me a newspaper but he wouldn’t so I said I thought it was November something.

For the longest time we faced each other in uncomfortable silence and he didn’t seem to know what to say to that. But then I remembered Christmas had recently passed but I didn’t say any more about that. He probably didn’t know the date, anyway, and was asking so he could find out for himself.

‘Buy yourself a calendar,’ I said. That ended that. He just smiled that supercilious grin he has and wrote something on his clipboard. He left with his face puckered up in a picture of prim dislike and distaste. Too bad, I said to the cat. She looked at me in peaceful contemplation, innocent as you please, but didn’t reply. She can send me thoughts telepathetically, though, so I know what she’s thinking just as plainly as if she had spoken right out.

Members of the medical profession are tricky like that. But when it’s all boiled down, they don’t even know what month it is. They just look at you with an air of aloof disdain on their faces, as if they had been carved out of marble and ask you stupid questions that they can’t even answer themselves even if they tried. To me it seems that they are simply people who are interested in making judgments about the lives of others and then shoveling pills down their throats.

I have such amazing charisma that I can cause all and sundry to come knocking upon my door and yet I don’t have to tell them anything I don’t want to. Now that’s power.

It’s hard to distinguish day from night so I often have to show my physical prowess by staying up for days on end. Then I sleep, yes, I sleep, but when I get up it might be seven o’clock in the morning and it will be growing dark and for a while I’ll be a bit confused but it doesn’t last.

By eight o’clock in the morning it will be totally dark and I won’t know what to do with myself for the day, sitting there in the dark. I don’t ever switch any lights on as that will make me visible to evil forces. Not my own aliens but others from the planet Orson, which is slightly to the right of my aliens planet.

Then I tell myself that God has got it all wrong and I’ll simply stay awake until I fade into sleep. But I remind myself that I’m not the one who is permanently confused. It’s the medical fraternity in this one horse town who has got the horse by the tail so to speak. Mixing metaphors here, or whatever sin I am committing.

That’s some of the reason why I can’t have the television or radio or stereo or even the lights on because the voices come in via the electricity as well as the phone line. I have to I sit on the lounge chair and look at Jesus through the window as He strolls out in the garden with His halo of light showing Him where to go so He doesn’t trip over the hose. He talks to me all day until the sunlight begins to come and I know it’s time to go to bed. Or whatever. Who knows?

Jesus can’t tell the time. They didn’t have clocks where He came from. Not even sundials, I don’t think. I just continue my life as if by rote, trying to give every sign of being well brought up and finished at a superior boarding school, a fact which has given me the edge on all around me who only had state school educations.

Oh, you talk about the battles that go on inside and around me. Words fail me when I try to describe them. There was a huge one with Colonel Gadaffi and Saddam Hussein. That was a doozy and it’s still not settled. Probably never will be, people tell me. Saddam Hussein’s growing really old or even dead and the Colonel’s in jail or somewhere. If that’s so, how come they turn up here whenever they feel like it, looking like the kiss of spring? Somebody’s got their lines crossed, if you ask me. And it’s not me, I can tell you that for sure.

I simply don’t have enough energy left in me to wrap my answers up in tact, as is required by the establishment so I belt out the replies and to hell with the whole process. I don’t even really understand what the process is, let alone how to get with it.

My mission is the only thing really fixed in my head and it’s for the betterment of Mankind. No single revelation brought me this parcel of knowledge. It has arrived in my head over long years of learning how the world should be conducted.

But Winston Churchill is my friend and sees me regularly which is just as well as Saddam Hussein is often here so I need some back up. Winston often gives me confidence-inspiring smiles so that I can get through these interviews with Saddam. How quickly the world would cave in if Winston didn’t come and give Saddam a bit of schtick now and then.

Ultimately, there would be devastating results for all Mankind if I wasn’t conducting these sessions in my living room at regular intervals and keeping a modicum of peace in the universe.

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M
eanwhile I’m here in the Psychiatric Unit and I have no idea what’s going on at home. I’ve been here some 48 hours, but I’ll have to get back in order to complete my assignment as no one else has any idea how to do it. They’re using words like ‘delusional’ and ‘psychotic.’ And ‘bi-bloody-polar’, yet. Still with the ‘polar’. I’m not a bear. Nor do I even resemble a polar bear.

Tossing around times like ‘six months.’ That’s not a possibility, I’m afraid. I have to get home and flush the rest of this medication down the toilet as quickly as possibly so that I can be in control of myself and my life and my specific task.

You know I can’t tell you what it is. I really need you to cease asking.

There’s a system going on here in this unit and I have to learn what it is so I can get on top of it and get out ASAP. Back home I must go where things are normal and not filled with people who are imagining all sorts of peculiar and sensational things such as that I have gone bonkers and that I am a danger to myself and perhaps others.

Sweet Jesus, there’s some queer ones in here! Have they lost the plot! One thinks she’s the Virgin Mary and gets around wrapped in a sheet. Even got a doll perched on her hip, calls it ‘Jesus baby’. Another one thinks she’s Queen Victoria and spends all her days looking for Bertie. I tell her he’s gone back to Saxe-Coburg and she cries as if her heart will break. Talk about laugh! I’m really having a barrel of fun most of the time.

But then there are times I have to shout my outrage, then I suddenly become unaccountably tired after the nurse has given me an asprin for my headache. The quack says I’m still showing signs of instability. Huh!

But I have the knowledge to be able to get myself out of here as quick as a flash because I know they test you and watch you to see how you react to situations at all times, looking at you through those glass walls where you can’t see out but they can see in. Creeps. I’ll react the way I know I should even if it kills me, and I’ll be home in a week.  Back to normal.

Supercilious meat-heads. Smarmy nurses trying to persuade me to interact in bloody group therapy. I have my own group and they are not of this earth. Not of this little blue planet out in the middle of the heavens where the Mother ship comes to bring me up to date on my assignment.

Nobody knows what it’s like to be inside my skin filled with me and the others.

Nobody knows what it’s like to be inside my head, wired up to the forces of evil whose voices are resonant, harsh or persuasive, or unbearably cute, or caterwauling, or ominous, telling me to do harmful things to myself.

I am locked in with them and we shall be each others’ doom.

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H
ow the years have changed them.

In the Autumn of her life she recalls how it was to love, to need, to yearn. But now the edges are blurred, rounded and soft where they were sharp and painful, perhaps just the day before yesterday. Sharply painful. But that was in the Spring and early Summer of her life.

She never forgot the first time she saw him striding along the road in the opposite direction, facing her as she drove towards him through the city traffic. She was sure she had never seen such a handsome man. His image stayed with her, followed her, haunted her, and beguiled her. Beth was spellbound by a man she had never met, nor did she have any prospect of so doing.

She had seen him with his astoundingly good looks only briefly, a face to face encounter, just another vehicle-driver and a pedestrian exchanging impersonal glances as they went about their day.

His hair was short, black and crisply curly, tight, springy curls that matched the coloring of his dark eyes. Later she was to realize just how alert and discerning these midnight eyes could be and to learn of the sheer force of his interesting and compassionate personality.

He was tall and very straight, carrying himself with all the dignity of his army training, she was to discover in time to come. But that was many years ago, long, busy years for both of them.

When she saw him it was a late autumn day where everything seemed transfixed, waiting for the next change to take place in the small city, the trees all standing still with brightly colored leaves gently falling to the pavements in anticipation of the winter which would soon follow. The pine trees stood darkly and majestically around the edges of the park at the center of the city, tall and prepossessing in the still air.

Beth was in her mid-twenties, a woman of moderation who had gone from a bright, breezy young girl to having a certain restraint about her. Her hair was auburn with brighter red touches in it when the light hit it from different angles. Her blue eyes looked out from a face that had a fair skin with a dusting of freckles across the bridge of her nose.

She had been married to a man who preferred the company of other men to hers.  Not that he was homosexual, (not that there’s anything wrong with that). He was just blokey and sporty and anybody’s drinking mate, loath to go home when commonsense prevailed amongst the rest of the group, taking them home to their families.

Eric seemed to find going home to Beth to be as dull as dishwater, thus he lingered whenever or wherever he could, maybe in the hope that she would be asleep by the time he reached the house, consumed his dinner from the oven and slipped noisily into bed beside her. He often knew she was awake by the pattern of her breathing, but neither said a word to the other and Eric was soon snoring fit to wake the dead. Beth, alone all day and hardly tired enough to fall to sleep easily, stared into the darkness, watching the flicker of car headlights as they drove by in the little street where their house was situated, surrounded by wattle trees with citrus trees in the back yard and a few fowls up in the far corner, six hens and a rooster of monstrous self-importance and inflated ego.

Eric was blocky and muscular with a tawny, crewcut hair style and darting gray eyes, forever glancing around to see what was going on and what advantage could be taken of it. Perhaps because of this trait in his nature his eyebrows seemed arched in perpetual inquiry as if there were matters happening within his world that he wished to participate in if he could find out what they were.