The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August (3 page)

Mental health professionals are, by the 1990s, expected to themselves seek regular counselling and observation for emotional and mental well-being. I tried being a psychologist once, but found the problems I had to diagnose either overwhelming or too subjective as to bear consideration, and the tools at my command either childish or overblown. In short, I did not have the temperament for it, and when I was committed to St Margot’s Asylum for the second time in my existence, albeit the first time in this life, I felt a mixture of fury and pride that my sanity, cultivated despite severe provocation, could be so misunderstood by the ignorant mortals around me.

Mental health professionals of the 1960s make their 1990s counterparts look like Mozarts trampling upon Salieri’s lesser work. I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that some of the more experimental techniques of the 1960s had not yet made their way to cosmopolitan Northumbria. I was not tested on with LSD or Ecstasy nor invited to discuss my sexuality, as our one and only psychiatrist, Dr Abel, regarded Freud as unsanitary. The first to discover this was the Twitch, an unfortunate woman whose real name was Lucy, whose Tourette’s syndrome was
treated by a mixture of apathy and brutality. If our warders had a notion of habit-breaking therapy, they acted upon it by hitting Lucy across the side of her head with the palms of their hands whenever she twitched or grunted, and if she became louder as a consequence–as frequently happened when provoked–two of them would sit on top of her, one on her legs, one on her chest, until she nearly passed out beneath them. The one time I attempted to intervene, I received the same treatment and lay pinned beneath Ugly Bill, the head day-shift nurse and sometime jailbird, to the vociferous approval of Clara Watkins and Newbie, who’d worked there for six months and still hadn’t said his name. Newbie stood on my wrists, mostly to show willing, while Ugly Bill explained to me that I was being very naughty and disruptive, and just because I thought I was a doctor didn’t mean I knew anything. I cried with impotence and frustration, and he slapped me, which gave me cause to rage and through which rage I tried to control my tears, converting self-pity into fury, but I could not do it.

“Penis!” the Twitch shouted at our once-weekly group session. “Penis penis penis!”

Dr Abel, his tiny moustache quivering like a frightened mouse on his top lip, clicked his pen closed. “Now, Lucy…”

“Come on, give it to me, give it to me, come on, come on, come on!” she screamed.

I watched the progress of the flush through Dr Abel’s cheeks. It was a fascinating luminescence, almost visible on a capillary-by-capillary basis, and I briefly wondered if the spread of his blush was representative of the speed of his blood flow through the shallow dermis, in which case he should seriously consider more exercise and a good massage. His moustache had ceased being fashionable the day after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and the only thing I ever heard him say which made any sense was, “Dr August, there is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd. He may nod, and smile, and say the right thing, but even by this pretence his soul is pushed further away from the kinship of men.”

I asked him what fortune cookie he’d got that from, and he looked bewildered and asked me what fortune cookies were, and if you made them with ginger.

“Give it to me, give it to me!” screamed the Twitch.

“This is unproductive,” he quavered, at which point Lucy pulled up her overall to show us her oversized knickers and started to dance, causing Simon, who was at the low point of his bipolar mania, to weep, which set off Margaret rocking, which caused Ugly Bill to storm into the room, stick in hand and straitjacket already on the way, while Dr Abel, the tips of his ears burning like brake lights, scurried away.

Once a month we were permitted visitors, and no one came.

Simon said it was for the best, that he didn’t want to be seen like this, that he was ashamed.

Margaret screamed and tore at the walls until her nails were bloody, and had to be taken back to her room and sedated.

Lucy, the spittle rolling down her face, said it wasn’t us who should be ashamed but them. She didn’t say who they were, and nor did she need to, for she was simply right.

After two months I was ready to leave.

“I see now,” I explained calmly, sitting in front of Dr Abel’s desk, “that I suffered a mental breakdown. Obviously I need counselling, but I can only express my deep and personal gratitude to you for having helped me overcome this issue.”

“Dr August,” explained Dr Abel, lining up his pen with the top edge of his writing pad, “I think what you suffered was rather more than just a breakdown. You suffered a complete delusionary episode, indicative, I believe, of more complex psychological issues.”

I looked at Dr Abel as though for the first time and wondered just what his measure of success was. Not necessarily a cure, I decided, so long as the treatment was interesting. “What do you suggest?” I asked.

“I’d like to keep you here a while longer,” he replied. “There are some fascinating medications coming out which I believe would be exactly what you need…”

“Medications?”

“Some very promising developments have been made with the phenothiazines—”

“That’s an insect poison.”

“No–no, Dr August, no. I understand your concern as a physician but I assure you, when I say phenothiazines what I’m talking about are its derivatives…”

“I think I’d like a second opinion, Dr Abel.”

He hesitated, and I saw pride flare at the onset of possible conflict. “I am a fully qualified psychiatrist, Dr August.”

“Then as a fully qualified psychiatrist, you know how important it is to have a patient’s trust in any treatment process.”

“Yes,” he admitted grudgingly. “But I am the only qualified physician on this ward…”

“That’s not true. I’m qualified.”

“Dr August,” he said with a shimmering smile, “you’re ill. You are in no fit state to practise, least of all on yourself.”

“I want you to call my wife,” I replied firmly. “She has a legal say in what you do to me. I refuse to take phenothiazines, and if you are going to force me to take them, then you have to get permission from next of kin. She is my next of kin.”

“As I understand it, Dr August, she is partially responsible for suggesting your confinement and care.”

“She knows good medicine from bad,” I corrected. “Call her.”

“I’ll consider it.”

“Don’t consider it, Dr Abel,” I replied. “Just do it.”

To this day I don’t know if he called her.

Personally, I doubt it.

When they gave me the first dose of the drug, they tried to do it discreetly. They sent Clara Watkins, who looked so innocent and had such a malicious pleasure in her job, with a tray containing the usual pills–which I palmed–and a needle.

“Now now, Harry,” she chided when she saw my face. “This is good for you.”

“What is it?” I demanded, already suspecting.

“It’s medicine!” she sang out brightly. “You love to take your medicine, don’t you?”

Ugly Bill was at the back of the room, his eyes fixed on me. His presence confirmed my suspicions–he was already waiting to strike. I said, “I demand to see a legal consent form, signed by my next of kin.”

“You just do that,” she said, grabbing at my sleeve, which I pulled away.

“I demand a lawyer, fair representation.”

“This ain’t no prison, Harry!” she replied brightly, waggling her eyebrows at Ugly Bill. “There’s no lawyers here.”

“I have a right to a second opinion!”

“Dr Abel is just doing what’s best for you Why be difficult about that? Now, Harry…”

At these words Ugly Bill grabbed me in a bear hug from behind and, not for the first time, I wondered why in over two hundred years I’d never got round to learning some form of martial art. He was an ex-con who found being a nurse at an asylum just like prison but better. He worked out in the private garden of the house, an hour every day, and took steroids that caused his brow to perpetually glisten with sweat and, I suspected, a shrinking in his testicles that he compensated for by taking more exercise and of course, more steroids. Whatever the state of his gonads, his arms were thicker than my thighs, and wrapped themselves around me tight enough to pull me from my chair, feet kicking uselessly at nothing.

“No,” I begged. “Please don’t do this please please don’t…”

Clara slapped the skin on my elbow to bring a reddish flush to the surface and then managed to miss the vein entirely. I kicked and Ugly Bill squeezed harder so that heat rose to my eyes and wool filled my brain. I felt the needle go in, but not come out, and then they dropped me to the floor and told me to be,

“Not so silly, Harry! Why do you always have to be so silly about things what are good for you?”

They left me there, sat on my own sprawling knees, waiting for it to happen. My mind raced as I tried to think of an easily
available chemical antidote to the poison currently slipping through my system, but I had only been a doctor in one life and hadn’t yet had time to investigate these modern drugs. I crawled across the floor on my hands and knees to the water jug and drank the whole thing down, then lay on my back in the middle of the room and tried to slow my breathing, slow my pulse and respiration, in a futile attempt to limit the circulation of the drug. It occurred to me that I should make some attempt to monitor my own symptoms so I swivelled round on the floor to keep the clock in sight, noting the time. After ten minutes I felt a little light-headed, but that passed. After fifteen I realised that my feet were on the other side of the world, that someone had sawed me in half but left the nerves still attached, even though the bones were broken and now my feet belonged to someone else. I knew that this could not possibly be so, and yet processed the fact that it quite clearly was with a resignation that dared not fight the simple truth of my predicament.

The Twitch came and stood over me and said,

“Whatcha doing?”

I didn’t think she needed an answer, so didn’t give one.

There was saliva rolling down one side of my face. I rather enjoyed it, the coldness of the spit on the hotness of my skin.

“Whatcha doing whatcha doing whatcha doing?” she shrieked, and I wondered if they’d heard of adrenergic agonists in Northumbria, or if they were a thing that was yet to come.

She shook me and then went away but was clearly still leaving something behind because I kept on shaking, head banging against the floor, and I knew I had wetted myself but that was OK too, interesting and different like the saliva, the way it was all the same temperature as me until it dried and began to sting, and besides that was a long way away and then Ugly Bill was there and his face had been destroyed. It had been broken against the ceiling above my head like a ripe tomato, the skull smashed in and only a nose, two eyes and leering mouth left in the swimming remnants of blood and dripping brain that surrounded it, and as he leaned over me, bits of his cerebellum dripped round his cheek and rolled to
the corner of his mouth and formed a tear of grey-pink matter that hung off his bottom lip and then fell, like mashed apple from a baby’s spoon, straight on to my face, and I screamed and screamed and screamed until he strangled me and I didn’t scream any more.

Naturally, by this point I’d lost track of time, and thus the diagnostic purpose of the exercise was rather left behind.

Jenny visited.

They tied me to the bed and shot me through with a sedative when she came.

I tried to speak, to tell her what they were doing, but I couldn’t.

She wept.

She washed my face, and held my hand, and wept.

She was still wearing her wedding ring.

At the door she spoke with Dr Abel and he said he was concerned about my deterioration and was considering a new kind of drug.

I called out for her and made no sound.

She kept her back turned to me when they locked the door.

Then Dr Abel was sitting too close to me, the tip of his pen resting on his lower lip, and he said, “Tell it to me again, Harry?”

There was an urgency in his voice, more than just the fascination with his own treatments.

“End of the oil embargo,” I heard someone reply. “Carnation revolution in Portugal, government overthrown. Discovery of the
terracotta army. India gets the nuclear bomb. West Germany wins the World Cup.”

Ugly Bill was sitting in an orange haze. He said, “Not so smart now not so smart are you so smart so smart you think you’re so smart but you’re not so smart here you’re not so smart smart is nothing smart is shit I’m smart I’m smart I’m the smart one here…”

He leaned in close to dribble on my face. I bit his nose hard enough to hear the cartilage crack and found it very, very funny.

Then there was a voice, a stranger’s voice, cultured and mildly American.

“Oh no no no no no,” it said. “This won’t do at all.”

Jenny.

She has a Glaswegian accent that her mother tried to educate out of her and failed. Her mother believed in getting on, her father believed in staying behind, and as a result they both remained exactly where they’d always been until the day after Jenny’s eighteenth birthday, when they finally separated, never to see each other again.

I met her again, in my seventh life.

It was at a research conference in Edinburgh. My badge proclaimed, “Professor H. August, University College London” and hers, “Dr J. Munroe, Surgeon”. I sat three rows behind her through an incredibly tedious lecture on the interaction of calcium ions in the periphery nervous system and watched the back of her neck, fascinated. I hadn’t seen her face and couldn’t be sure, but I knew. In the evening there were drinks and a meal of overcooked chicken and mashed potatoes with soggy peas. There was a band playing medium misses of the 1950s. I waited until the two men she was with grew drunk enough to dance, leaving her alone with the unclean plates and ruffled tablecloth. I sat down next to her and held out my hand.

“Harry,” I explained.

“Professor August?” she corrected, reading my badge.

“Dr Munroe,” I replied. “We’ve met before.”

“Have we? I can’t quite…”

“You studied medicine at Edinburgh University, and lived for the first year of your time in a small house in Stockbridge with four boys who were all frightened of you. You babysat for your next-door neighbour’s twins to make a few more pennies, and decided that you had to be a surgeon after seeing a still-beating heart working away on the operating table.”

“That’s right,” she murmured, turning her body a little further in the chair to look at me. “But I’m sorry, I still don’t remember who you are.”

“That’s OK,” I replied. “I was another one of the boys too scared to talk to you. Will you dance?”

“What?”

“Will you dance with me?”

“I… Oh God, are you trying a line with me? Is that what this is?”

“I am a happily married man,” I lied, “with family in London and no ill intentions towards you. I admire your work and dislike seeing a woman left alone. If it will make you happier, as we dance we can discuss the latest developments in imaging technology and whether genetic predisposition or developmental sensory stimuli are more important in the growth of neuron pathways during childhood and pre-teens. Dance with me?”

She hesitated. Her fingers rolled the wedding ring round and round her finger, three diamonds on gold, gaudier than what I’d bought her in another life, a life that had died a long time ago. She looked towards the dance floor, saw safety in numbers and heard the band begin another tune designed to maintain strict social boundaries.

“All right,” she said and took my hand. “I hope you’ve got your biochemical credentials polished.”

We danced.

I asked if it was hard, being the first woman in her department.

She laughed and said that only idiots judged her for being a woman–and she judged them for being idiots. “The benefit being,” she explained, “that I can be both a woman and a fucking brilliant surgeon, but they’ll always only be idiots.”

I asked if she was lonely.

“No,” she said after a moment. She was not. She had peers she liked, colleagues she respected, family, friends.

She had two children.

Jenny had always wanted children.

I wondered if she’d like to have an affair with me.

She asked when I stopped being afraid of her, to get so lippy on the dance floor.

I said it was a lifetime ago, but she was still beautiful and I knew all her secrets.

“Did you not hear the part about my friends, colleagues, family, kids?”

Yes, I’d heard all of it, and all of it weighed with me when I spoke to her, cried out to walk away, leave her alone, for her life was complete and needed no more complexity. How much greater, I said, must the attraction I felt towards her be, that I could know all this and still whisper sweet allurements in her ear?

“Allurements? Is that what you call it?”

Run away with me, I said, just for a night. The world will turn, and all things will end, and people forget.

For a moment she looked tempted, and then her husband came along and took her hand, and he was loyal and loving and completely sane and what she wanted, and her temptation wasn’t so much about me, as about the adventure.

Would I have done things differently, had I known what was to befall Jenny Munroe?

Perhaps not.

Time, it transpires, is not so good at telling after all.