Freedom Island (10 page)

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‘The gypsies welcomed me, called me ‘Didikai’—friend of the gypsies,’ Frank recalled—amid the intoxicating odour of liquid shit and burning plastic.
              ‘I thought I had nothing but they could see my value: I could read and write—and citizens would trust me. I worked hard—for the first time in my life I had the energy; the interest. They fed me, they gave me a bed,’ and he nodded toward a disused school on the edge of the site.
              The newcomer, sat before him, turned to look: a group of boys stood staring amid the abandoned fridges and salvaged furniture, expressionless faces, before continuing on their way leading a squealing dog.
              ‘With the mayor’s consent we roast stray mutts,’ Frank explained. ‘Else we trap squirrels. Or crows and cook them twice—first to remove the black, and then for eating. Always, we eat Bodag—flour mixed with baking soda.’ He looked at the astonished face: ‘You get used to it.’
              ‘But the stench
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‘The more established have cesspits,’ Frank explained, ‘a reluctant act of generosity by the local government—on Union insistence—but soon they were flooded so now the shit’s sprinkled over the ground instead, to avoid the cost of having it pumped up and out again.’
              The newcomer looked over to a group of mothers and grandmothers, squatted outside a shack feeding babies from their mouths and biting-down the babies’ nails. One tossed the ravaged remains of some quadruped head-over-heels into a bush. Old men stood around skinny and withered like the half-dead.
              ‘Where are all the men?’
              ‘In prison. It’s illegal to harvest the forest, just like everything else. Most are illiterate—the school’ and he nodded again, ‘was closed long ago, before the gypsies came.’
              The school building had huge patches of plaster peeling from the outside walls, window panes missing. ‘The children take it in turn to go to school in the village proper because there aren’t enough shoes—or else they’re not allowed at all because they’re below the minimum weight: that’s how the mayor prevents too many gypsies being in the school. They need me here, can’t you see?’
              ‘But what can you do?’
              ‘Lots of things. Anything. Farm work, strawberry picking—cash jobs. I steal pedigree dogs from shop-fronts, raid empty buildings for roof timbers or doors, window frames—anything that will burn. I learnt to take electricity from the power line. We put-up homeless outsiders in winter for a pittance: they live in the forest like dogs, dangerous as hell, hundreds of them. No, I don’t like them. You know, the gypsies used to have pigs here, but the floods killed them and so now they are poor. Anyway, how did you find me?’
              ‘Where else could you be? I spoke to Mary.’
              ‘Are you taking me back?’
              And with that the Governor laughed, and had to hold his breath to stop.
              ‘No, I came here to join you! Don’t worry, the Deputy will not pursue you—it would cost them more to find you than you are worth. It was never reported anyway: Bedlam gets a bonus for security!
’
and he laughed again. ‘And that appalling Deputy will now have to take my place!’
              The Governor had left behind an extensive handwritten letter for his honourable Brethren with an unconditional apology, of how he had proven unfit for the faith they had bestowed in him and that they need not fear being embarrassed by his presence again. But he left nothing for the Deputy.
The Deputy was horrified: elevated to the level of enemy number one within those walls he sought out his predecessor with growing desperation, hoping by some means—he had no idea what—to get him to come back, but the trail was cold. The old man had vanished, gone—dead on a rope beneath Freedom Bridge with his tongue cut out by his Lodge friends, perhaps? but he wasn’t there either. The old bastard had up and left him to it—to his inevitable promotion to Death Row!
              Mary, for her part, having come to realise that Frank wouldn’t be coming back, threw a fit that took even Doctor Zadir by surprise: I never saw such a state in my life—she squawked like a chicken! mourning as her love poured out tear by tear as difficult to understand to everyone else as when it had first arrived. ‘Gone!’ was all they could ever make out, until they so filled her with sedatives that she slumped bewildered dribbling in Zadir’s ward with no reaction at all to the pleas for mystic assistance that her former clientele still brought.
              Two whole years passed before anyone thought to alter her medication, whereupon the Head Orderly was planning to get engaged to a charming young thing and considered it merely prudent to consult Mary first. And as the sedation ebbed everyone was amazed: rather than the frightened chicken they had expected or the pensive Zen mistress they had hoped for, within hours they were faced with the most focussed, noteworthy, capable individual they had ever met: credible. Within weeks her clairvoyant qualities to foretell the next death with supernatural accuracy—far superior than the Prefects or Orderlies had ever achieved despite their inside knowledge, meant silence fell on her every word.
              Within the quarter she had assumed Olimpio Galasso’s old position of Head Prefect not so much on merit, than on the fact that everyone was afraid to oppose her. And, whenever she smiled her still innocent face magically lit up—and they felt good—but when she wasn’t smiling she seemed oddly unrecognisable. The new Governor—the former Deputy—shrewdly saw her value but at the same time surmised correctly that one word from her and anyone, Orderlies included, would kill him.
              ‘Deputy!’ she ordered. ‘We shall renovate Bedlam!’
              She had them all gathered in the Great Hall: two thousand of the legally mad hanging on her every word
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              ‘We will make this a place to be proud of!’
              Her red curls shaking with passion, she promised ping pong, square dancing and jazz ballet, needlework classes and karaoke, potpourri in the Great Hall and Klee and Miro in the canteen—and aloe vera for everyone!
              She had the Patients painting the walls, the Lunatics scrubbing the floors. The cells were repainted in holiday colours, the first floor windows glazed—all on her insistence—and the old buckets replaced with lavatories: a financial outlay which she extracted from the penny-pinching former Deputy in return for her wholesale relaunch of the asylum’s rubbish dump as Bedlam’s own cemetery—where the dead with relatives who still cared would be buried: those who cared had to pay, of course. And every year they had to pay again else the plot would be re-allocated and a newly-deceased lowered respectfully on top: a marvellous new profit centre from bodies previously turned to ash—‘a process itself not without cost.’
              On the Day of the Dead the bereaved would come, mixing their sorrow boredom and shame, and reach once more into those pockets to pay the former Deputy for the necessary maintenance—of the kitsch headstones the Orderlies routinely damaged; chipping-off a corner, rubbing-off the gold lettering—and then they would stand around sobbing, encircling the sweet-smelling flowers they’d paid through the nose for.
              Unchallenged, Mary enacted whatever developments she chose: Doctor Saif Zadir, his cross crescent star and stethoscope wrapped tightly about his neck, was despatched to an early retirement beneath the dark waves under the vague guise of a foreign assignment. The only explanation she offered to Odd and the former Deputy being: ‘the crabs can explore his orifices until there’s nothing left’.
              Soon, thanks to Mary’s ingenuity and the former Deputy’s attention to detail, Bedlam was bucking the trend: the Union economy was dire but Bedlam was experiencing a mini boom. Even the Lunatics were becoming productive, since the end of Radio, and Mary had them tending the gardens, washing the vegetables and performing cabaret for the other Residents every Saturday night: revitalising wellbeing whilst providing work, and all ‘within budget’—details faithfully reported by Rick Roulette in the ‘New Bedlam Newsletter’.
Frank spat. ‘We smoke these black cigarettes,’ he explained, limply kicking some dried shit. The two outsiders went back in and dressed. ‘These are honourable people’ he told the Governor intensely.
              Just as Frank’s manner and skeletal frame appealed to the gypsies sympathies, the Governor’s cultured nature and comfortable—wealthy—physique left the gypsies deeply suspicious: they were fearful of Union spies, and could think of no one more Union-like than the Governor. But finally the elders decreed:
              ‘Yes, perhaps he is a spy, but by the time we’re finished he’ll be one of us.’
              Frank and the Governor rose at the same time, shared the same grimy bed. Today was the funeral of the former oldest woman in the village, though no one had known her age—‘a joyous occasion—the gypsies cry when a baby is born, and celebrate a death.’
              A death by anthrax, from eating meat from the carcass of a dead farm animal. The shack she had shared with her daughter was ceremonially smashed by her sons, then burnt: the stove broken with a heavy hammer—the china and glass, various ornaments and her flamboyant jewellery too. Petrol was poured over the curtains, bed and other furnishings and set alight, reducing to a heap of ashes everything she had ever managed to gather; the only thing they retained was her wedding ring.
              Her family had also prepared the grave—a room beneath the ground with bed, whitewashed walls, bedside table, mirror, drawers, flowers lamps pictures and new shoes, TV, wall clock, perfumes, salon chair, whiskey and cigarettes—an aggregate value of possessions far beyond the means of the living. And for this mother grandmother and great grandmother who had so loved dancing, a HiFi playing dance music that could still be heard above the ground two days later.
              ‘They do this, whoever you are.’
              The Governor’s face turned pale: ‘What’s wrong with your neck?’
              Pus was oozing from Frank’s neck, soaking a half-clean collar.
              ‘It comes and goes,’ Frank replied, resigned, lowering himself down onto his back: his spine—and these last days his legs too, would ache appallingly in every position, his joints becoming swollen; like rheumatism on fast forward. The yellow he spat had turned red in the mornings, streaked with blood, and worst of all his heart hurt so, all life being squeezed from it such that he was sure Mary had placed a curse on him, taking him apart just to show that, like she’d said, ‘there’s no such thing as freedom, only comfort’. The Governor sat beside him.
              ‘My God!’ the Governor nodded across the funeral group. A girl no more than seventeen stared back. Frank knew her, her name was Dalma, but today, dressed-up like a woman, she had him spellbound: white teeth, dark eyes, caramel skin and a remarkable rear—he couldn’t take his eyes off her—but she stared at the Governor; his stout frame and years as beddable an asset here as a svelte physique and youth elsewhere. Thenceforth, she was to walk past the two of them daily, wherever they were, deliberately waving with her glance her double rows of eyelashes—the result of a favourable genetic mutation—and always moving too slowly for Frank to breathe: and always she looked at the Governor.
              His respiration shortening his perspiration ceaseless day-by-day Frank became ever more gaunt: gone finally that lure of suicide that had lurked within his darkest moments of good health, the contrary, he was now gripped by a raging desire to live! But he stood stooped, swaying as the Governor sat gently stroking his young love’s hair beneath a pear tree without pears, using one finger only—fully convinced he was young again too, as she giggled at his Lodge humour.
              In his youth—when his thick hair had reached his shoulders—the Governor had been a ladies’ man; amusing them in extrovert braces with magic tricks and a nonchalant manner: He could produce fire from a pocket, turn a ten euro note into a twenty and make rubber bands interlock, then detach again. Indeed, the very popularity of his demonstrations had as much as anything else been the basis of his subsequent rise to the respected position of Worshipful Master.
Mary sung her favourite song from the radio, ‘My Blue Heaven’, and cut in two the inaugural ribbon to the tennis court. She sported white plimsolls, socks, skirt and polo—ravishing. The former Deputy stood beside her nodding, and she kissed her new sexual partner. The others clapped and cheered, sincerely, and Blofeld sat painting Jennifer Jolly, smiling like he hadn’t smiled since the days of painting nude every member of his family: ‘reducing their value to the weight of the meat.’ Odd sat beside him, repulsed by the man but bestowed now the honorary title for life of ‘Resident Orderly’ with accommodation on the fourth, his leather shoes now black, his status assured.
              For Odd, Frank’s departure had been no less profound than it had been for Mary. Frank had always imagined Odd would be understanding, even supportive, of anything that was good for him—for Frank. Odd, in fact, measured their friendship in terms of the time they spent together, and the comfort their friendship gave him—gave Odd. So whilst Frank imagined Odd would be pleased that he had pursued his dream to leave Bedlam, Odd in fact felt betrayed: ‘I shall never again compromise my position’ he whispered in various forms with an uncharacteristically stern face to his reflection whenever he got the chance. And nor was he the same with anyone else either: he had become hard and demanding—rewarding results. He was the Bastard to compliment Mary’s inspirational genius and the former Deputy’s practical abilities: those who didn’t go along with their improvements would become the object of Odd’s cold bitterness; sent down to the first-floor cells on the rank North Wall and forced to eat dog, prepared to one of Mary’s twelve recipes.