The Asylum (6 page)

7

‘THIS IS THE
timetable, Jan,’ says Marie-Louise, pointing to the fridge door. ‘We have to stick to these times every day. Sometimes we deliver a child to the hospital when we go to collect one of the others.’

He looks at the piece of paper. It shows a series of names, dates and times relating to handovers in the coming week.

At the top it says
Leo: Monday 11–12
. Then
Matilda: Monday 2–3
, and
Mira and Tobias: 3–4
.

It’s only quarter to nine at the moment.

‘We go with them,’ says Marie-Louise, ‘and we collect them. There are also special occasions when the other parent comes to visit, and in that case they go up together.’

Jan nods.
The other parent
. She is talking about the mother or father who is free. The one who isn’t locked up.

He has met several of them already; they have popped into the cloakroom to deliver the children who do not live at the Dell. But are they the children’s biological parents, or foster parents? Jan is not allowed to ask, of course. They are all neatly dressed men or women from the age of about thirty upwards. Some looked as if they might be pensioners.

He has stood in the cloakroom with Marie-Louise welcoming the children one by one. All the children who will be at the Dell today have arrived; there are eleven of them.

When children are dropped off there can sometimes be despair
and
lots of tears, as Jan well knows, while the parents can be exaggeratedly cheerful and talkative in order to hide their anxiety or embarrassment at having to leave their children. But here at the Dell the adults seem somehow subdued. Perhaps it is because of the concrete wall – the shadow of St Psycho’s falls over everyone at the pre-school.

And the children? They are quite shy, for the most part. They smile and whisper and stare at the new person standing next to their teacher, wondering who he is. During all the years he has spent in various pre-schools, Jan has encountered almost exclusively children who are curious and wide-eyed. Children are subdued only when they are really ill. Unlike adults, they can never hide how they are feeling.

‘Unfortunately you’ve missed our feelgood session today,’ says Marie-Louise when she has finished showing Jan around.

‘What’s that?’

‘It’s something we do together as a team on Mondays. We just sit down for fifteen minutes and talk about how we’re feeling.’ She smiles at him. ‘But you’ll get the chance to join in next Monday.’

Jan nods without saying anything. He doesn’t want to think about how he’s feeling.

‘So,’ says Marie-Louise, ‘are you ready to start work?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Good.’ She smiles again. ‘I was thinking we might have story time.’

Jan has the honour of choosing a book from the boxes in the playroom, and he pulls out a slender volume from somewhere in the middle:
Emil in the Soup Tureen
.

‘Story time!’

Jan sits down on a chair by the wall in the playroom, and the children stop playing and settle down on little stools in a higgledy-piggledy semi-circle. They are curious about him, but still quite wary. He understands them.

‘OK, do you remember my name?’

No one speaks.

‘Does anyone remember?’

The children stare at him in silence.

Eventually a little girl with only one front tooth whispers, ‘Jan.’

She is sitting slightly closer to him than the others. Matilda – that was her name, wasn’t it? She looks about five years old, with a centre parting and long, pale-blonde plaits.

‘That’s it – my name is Jan Hauger.’ He holds up the book. ‘And this is Emil – Emil from Lönneberga. Have you seen him before?’

Several of the children nod; he is starting to connect with them.

‘Have you heard the story about the time when Emil got his head stuck in the soup tureen?’

‘Yeees …’

‘Have you heard it lots of times?’

‘Yesss!’

‘Oh, so maybe you don’t want to hear it again?’

‘Yes we do!’ they shout.

Jan smiles at them. All your troubles disappear when you look into the eyes of a child. They absorb all the light in the world, and it shines out of them. He opens the book and begins to read.

The morning passes. Routines are important at the Dell. Marie-Louise seems to want as much order as possible, and the children feel the same. After story time everyone goes out to play. The children put on their coats and boots and go out into the playground, inside the metre-high fence. Almost half the group want to play tag, and Jan has to chase them. The last trace of shyness disappears, and they scream with fear and excitement as he chases them around the sandpit and the playhouse. The playground is not large, but it is very green; shrubs and grass are still growing in the mild autumn weather, and there is no tarmac and hardly any gravel in sight.

Jan can now see the hospital complex from a new angle. There is no wall at the back of St Patricia’s, just a five-metre chain-link fence with a network of electrified wires right at the top.

‘Chase me! Chase me!’

Jan carries on playing. He raises his arms like a real monster,
chasing
all the children who want to be chased. They hide behind the playhouse, and he creeps around pretending he can’t find them – until he suddenly rounds the corner and bellows like a troll, ‘Boo!’

It’s fun; he is just as happy out here as in the playroom, but suddenly he turns to look towards the hospital – and realizes that someone is standing there staring.

Jan stops dead, and his smile disappears.

A tall, thin old woman is standing behind St Patricia’s fence, dressed in a black coat. Skinny white legs are visible below the coat. She has a rake in one hand, and there is a pile of leaves at her feet. The other hand is clutching the mesh of the fence.

The woman is staring straight at Jan. Her face is pale, but her eyes are almost as dark as her clothes. Her expression is filled with sorrow, or perhaps hatred – it’s impossible to tell.

‘Jan?’

He gives a start and turns around; Marie-Louise is calling to him from an open window.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s almost time for Leo to go over to the hospital; I thought you could come with me so that you can see what we do. Would you like to do that?’

‘Yes, of course.’

Jan nods to her. Marie-Louise closes the window, and he glances over at the hospital again. But the woman behind the fence has disappeared. Only the pile of leaves remains.

The routines continue. The children come inside, take off their coats and boots and go straight to the playroom, where they sit down with a variety of games. Jan has always been fascinated by how disciplined small children can be when they know what they are supposed to do.

When everyone is settled, Marie-Louise looks at the clock. ‘Time to go.’

She takes a magnetic key card out of a cupboard in the kitchen and leads the way to the cloakroom.

‘Leo!’ she shouts. ‘Time to go!’

Beside the coat hooks there is a white door that Jan has not noticed up to now – or at least it hasn’t occurred to him to wonder what lies beyond it.

Marie-Louise swipes the card and keys in a four-digit code, three–one–zero–seven, and the white door opens. ‘My birthday,’ she says. ‘July thirty-first.’

Jan can see a steep stone staircase beyond the door. Marie-Louise switches on the light and turns around, holding out her hand and smiling. ‘Right then, Leo – shall we go and see Daddy?’

Leo hasn’t been playing outside. He is barely five years old; a slight child with skinny legs, dressed in little blue dungarees. He takes Marie-Louise’s hand and walks down the stairs with her, one step at a time. Jan follows in silence.

‘Could you close the door, Jan?’

The shouts and joyful laughter from the pre-school are cut off abruptly. The staircase is as silent as the grave. The walls seem to be made of the same material as the wall surrounding the hospital; any sound is muted down here.

Leo’s little legs plod on down the stairs. Marie-Louise doesn’t speak either; there is a palpable seriousness in the air.

After twenty steps they reach the basement level, and set off along an underground corridor with a concrete floor which is covered in a thin blue carpet. But someone has spent time trying to make the corridor look pleasant: the walls are painted a sunny yellow, and adorned with brightly coloured pictures.

Jan sees that they are pen and ink drawings. He couldn’t have drawn them – they are too cheerful. Laughing mice swimming in a pool, elephants smoking great big pipes, walruses playing tennis.

It feels as if the animals are in the wrong place down here.

‘Here we are,’ Marie-Louise says all of a sudden. ‘We’ve arrived, Leo!’

They have walked some fifty metres and are deep underground now, presumably beneath the hospital itself. To the right there is a white-painted lift door with a narrow pane of glass. But the
corridor
does not end here; it continues straight on for another eight or ten metres, then turns sharply to the right.

Marie-Louise opens the door of the lift for Leo, and he toddles inside.

Jan also takes a step forward, but she shakes her head. ‘Leo wants to go up on his own,’ she says. ‘The children are allowed to do that if they want to.’

Jan nods. He feels tense, but he had hoped to get as far as the visitors’ room. ‘But we do go up with the children sometimes?’

‘Oh yes,’ says Marie-Louise. ‘You and the child make that decision together.’

When the door is open Jan catches a brief glimpse of the lift. He sees a small metal chamber with two buttons marked UP and DOWN, next to another card reader and a red panic button. CCTV cameras? He can’t see any on the walls or ceiling.

Marie-Louise steps into the lift, swipes her magnetic card and presses the button marked UP. ‘Bye then, Leo!’ she shouts as she closes the door. ‘See you soon!’ Her voice sounds even more exuberant than usual, as if she is trying to chase away a sudden twinge of unease.

Jan catches sight of Leo’s little face looking out of the narrow window. Then the lift makes a clicking sound and begins to move upwards.

‘OK, that’s it, we can head back,’ says Marie-Louise. Her voice sounds calmer now, and she goes on: ‘Someone needs to collect Leo in an hour – perhaps you could do that on your own, Jan?’

‘No problem.’

‘Good.’ Marie-Louise smiles at him. ‘I’ll set the little alarm clock in the kitchen to remind you when it’s time. They send the children down from the visitors’ room on their own dead on the hour, so it’s important that we’re here.’

They go back up the staircase, open the door and they are in the cloakroom once more.

Marie-Louise cups her hand around her mouth and shouts, ‘Time for our fruit, everyone!’

Some of the children pull a face at the word
fruit
, but most
come
running, some of them pushing and shoving to get there first. Always a battle.

Everything is just the way it usually is in a pre-school.

But Jan looks at the moving hand on the wall clock several times. He can’t help thinking about little Leo, all alone with his locked-up daddy.

8

THERE ARE NO
CCTV cameras at the Dell, which is a good thing of course. But Jan can’t see a television either.

‘A TV? No, we only have a radio in here,’ Marie-Louise says seriously. ‘If we had a TV we’d soon end up with a whole pile of cartoons the children would want to watch, and a passive child is an unhappy child.’

The children are having great fun in the playroom; they have laid out the thick crash mats on the floor and are pretending to be shipwrecked sailors drifting along on rafts. Jan joins in the game; it feels good after his subterranean trip.

He spots a notice in Marie-Louise’s neat handwriting up on the wall. The children can’t read yet, of course, but it appears to be meant for them:

Here at the Dell

…
we always tell an adult where we’re going

…
everyone
is allowed to join in when we are talking or playing

…
we never say anything bad about anyone else

…
we never fight or quarrel

…
we never play with weapons
.

Lilian is also playing with the children; they leap from mat to mat in order to escape from the sharks swimming in the sea. Just
like
Jan she joins in the game wholeheartedly, but from time to time he sees a shadow of sorrow pass across her face when she looks at the children.

After a while they sit down on one of the crash mats to recover; he wants to ask her if something is wrong, but Lilian gets in first: ‘Are you settling in OK, Jan?’

It sounds as if she really cares.

‘In Valla, you mean?’ Jan needs to think about what he’s going to say. ‘Yes, although of course I’ve only just moved here. But it seems like a good place … Lovely surroundings.’

‘What do you do in the evenings?’

‘Not much … I listen to some music.’

‘Haven’t you got any friends here?’

‘No … not yet.’

‘Well, why don’t you come down to Bill’s Bar?’ says Lilian. ‘It’s by the harbour, there’s a good house band …’

‘Bill’s Bar?’

‘I hang out there all the time,’ says Lilian. ‘There are usually a few people from St Patricia’s there too. You’ll get to know plenty of new people at Bill’s.’

Should Jan start going to the pub and being sociable? He’s never done it before, but why not? ‘Maybe,’ he says.

They carry on playing with the shipwrecked children until Jan hears the shrill sound of the alarm clock in the kitchen. Good, he has been waiting for it.

He collects the magnetic card, opens the basement door and heads down the stairs and along the corridor alone.

Nothing is moving down there. The pictures on the wall are still there, hanging in straight lines.

It is five to twelve and the window in the door of the lift is still in darkness; Leo has not been sent down yet.

Jan stops.
Go up in the lift
, he thinks.
Go up and have a look around inside St Psycho’s
.