The Treatment and the Cure (12 page)

You put the bundle under the bed and hop between the covers. You lie for a while, feeling how hard the mattress is and trying to sort out the smells in it. Then you decide you’d better keep your bundle closer so you take it into the bed. By turning your head upwards you can see out of the top of the window to where some trees are tossing in a wind. You can’t hear the wind so the tossing seems more to be in time with the sighing and snoring of the men in the dormitory.

A dark figure is moving between the beds. It’s Bimbo, naked, his long penis hanging down. He is shoved away from several beds before someone opens the blankets for him and he gets in. You see them moving under the blankets and hear the old iron bed squeak to the rhythm. You hug yourself, trying not to giggle too loud. You wish Ray Hoad and Bill Greene were here. What a joke they’d make of it!

Mornings are good in REFRACT, mainly because it’s so good to leave the stuffy smell of the dormitory. There’s always a lot of banging and bustle when the day-screws unlock the door and barge in shouting, “Hands off cocks! On socks!” the way they do. You wash your face and clean your teeth at a basin, shave with a locked razor, then go down into the yard.

It’s autumn weather. The mornings are cool and sunny and the yard looks fresh, the sun at a changed angle and the ground wet with dew. You can’t know a place until you’ve seen it at all times of the day and in all weathers and all seasons. It takes a year. The sun shines on the big pond at this time of morning. It shines on the water and on the trees and on the tin roof of Occupational Therapy. The tin roof looks like a sheet of flowing water all lit up, with the pond another sheet of water down lower behind it, as if the pond is being filled by the flow of the tin.

You are used to the fence now. You go down to it and look through at the few things you couldn’t see the first day. There isn’t much more—just a few extra trees and a curve of the dirt road where it goes up past a row of wards slightly raised on a ridge far off to the left. You watch the morning routine, fixing more details in your mind. Some men are doing chores. The dayroom chairs are carried out to the lawn so the dayroom can be swept and polished, then they are put back. You lend a hand, to show you aren’t a bludger.

Fred Henderson and a couple of screws are playing crib at a table outside the Charge’s office. Fred Henderson calls to you to join in and you have to say you don’t know crib. For a moment you wish you did. You could get in with the screws, be one of their card-playing circle. It would ease your way here. Then you realise it’s a silly idea. You need a personality like Fred Henderson’s to get in with screws. You’d need to be able to stay loud and hearty all the time and mock everything and go on endlessly about cars and football and sheilas. There’d be no time to think your own thoughts. In MAX you were able to mock and joke and be stupid with your mates because with them it was deliberate. It was like farting at the system, or like keeping a ball in the air. The screws don’t even know there’s a ball. They think they’re normal.

After breakfast men go off to work-places, clumping in boots. You sit around in the yard until lunch and see them all come back. It’s the same in the afternoon. You don’t seem expected to do anything so you just watch the others in the yard. The little bandy legged bloke has told you about Tuesday at least a hundred times and has abused you a lot more also. And there is an old bloke who sits gobbing stuff out of his throat all day long and yelling, “Burn me alive, damn you! Burn me alive!” And there’s a tall epileptic named Harris who is supposed to be a king-hit merchant. He will come over and start talking and you notice him edging a bit closer to you than he needs to, so you edge away. If he goes on talking to you for a while you find you’ve both edged halfway across the yard. And there is somebody called Silas Throgmorton sick in one of the rooms. The screws keep taking him cups of tea and medicine. They seem fond of him. Whenever screws go in the room you hear an old sick voice declaring something about being The Owner and The Maker and threatening to sack the whole bloody crew unless they smarten up. And there is Dunn, a thin lanky bloke with a ratty moustache. Dunn strides about sneering when he hears the sick old voice from the room.

“Bah, Frogmorton? I had my first fifty billion before that bastard was born!”

Small bands of patients go past on the dirt road, mostly retards of both sexes and usually with a female nurse. They wander along gradually getting all out of step and lagging like sheep until the group is strung out along the road. The nurse will stop and call for the stragglers, or will go back and shoo them forward, and then they all pass out of sight. A while later they come back in the opposite direction and you see the straggling and shepherding happen again. You still aren’t used to seeing female nurses.

There are female nurses in the wards alongside. Pretty girls in blue uniforms. And there are some in Occupational Therapy. One in particular often comes out to pick up or put down half-finished baskets near the door. You see her now. She’s slim and nice, with brown hair tied back. She takes a basket and turns to go in, then pauses and looks across towards you. She’s just having a stickybeak into the yard you suppose. You try to see her face clearly. Yes, she’s nice. You suddenly realise she might be looking at
you.
It makes you want to shrink away to nothing. You get a picture of what she’s seeing if she is looking at you. She’s seeing a dill in baggy rags and a rough haircut, someone she wouldn’t want to touch because he’s probably smelly and has dribble on him. You close your eyes, wishing she’d go inside, and when you open them after a moment she is gone. You feel like crying. You mutter, “Stuck-up bitch!” a few times and it helps the crying feeling go away. In a little while you are able to tell yourself that it was a good thing to have happened because there was a lesson in it. Lessons arm you if you learn them properly and early. The lesson this time is that female nurses can do something that male screws can’t. They can shame you.

Later in the afternoon you are strolling by the bottom fence. The grass is in the shadow of the ward and too cold now to sit on. You sense a tension around the Charge’s office. The Charge is on the phone. He comes out to confer with other screws, then talks again on the phone. You stay near the fence, keeping out of whatever it might be, but glancing at the screws to see if they are looking your way. If this tension concerns you they’d be looking. You don’t seem to be on their minds, which means you need not be really scared, just nervous in a general way. You can still suffer from the fallout of someone else’s trouble, if it’s bad, but you’ll survive.

Dennis Lane comes along the dirt road to the gate in the fence and stands in his brooding, self-controlled way, waiting to be let in. He’s early. You half-think to walk across and talk to him through the fence while he’s waiting, tip him off about the tension. Then a screw on the verandah notices Dennis and calls something to the Charge in the office. The screw walks down briskly with his key at the ready, but as though he wants to appear to be acting quite routinely until Dennis Lane is safely through the gate. You know who the tension is about.

Dennis Lane is taken into the Charge’s office and you glimpse him behind the glass. He’s sitting, with screws around him. The Charge gets on the phone again. The men arrive back from the work-places. Just before tea a screw brings a suitcase and puts it down outside the office. It’s Dennis Lane’s gear. He’s going back to MAX. Screws bring Dennis Lane out of the office. He looks just as he always did when you faced him along the ping-pong table and he patiently hit every ball back until you felt you were playing against a wall. He is put in a car and driven away.

Fred Henderson has the details.

“Silly bastard was doin’ his balls over some retard bitch from Ward 12. This afternoon he caught ’er at the canteen with a little boyfriend she ’ad on the side. Dennis did his block. Threatened to cut ’er throat. Anyway, that’s what our Charge was told, and ’e got it from the Charge of 12 who got it from the canteen manager who got it from the girl on the counter.”

Fred Henderson hasn’t much sympathy.

“Well fuck me dead! Dennis was ’ere in the first place for cuttin’ ’is missus’s throat! How many throats does ’e reckon ’e’s allowed?”

It’s true. Dennis Lane has been worse than stupid, worse than idiotic. You can’t think of a word to describe it, except maybe “mad”. and you learned long ago that that word doesn’t mean anything. It took Dennis Lane nine years to get his transfer. He might get another in nine more. He’ll have plenty of time to search for the appropriate word, and to polish his defensive game.

“You’re no longer a man of leisure,” the Charge tells you one morning. “You’re to start at OT today.”

“Righto!” you say, trying to sound keen. You aren’t sure whether you are keen or not. You’ve begun to be used to staying in the yard all day, watching the other men there and the activity along the dirt road, learning how the sun looks on the trees and grass, knowing the time by the shadows.

And there’s your reading …

You’ve been able to get your two most precious books from among your few bits of gear in the storeroom. You had to choose carefully because there are no lockers here, no place to keep private things safe, so you must carry them with you the whole time. And the screws get irritated if you ask them to unlock the storeroom too often. You chose your anthology of poems, the lovely green-covered book your mother got you and from which you first understood about poetry. The other choice was a novel you discovered a year ago. This novel had become part of your life, or maybe part of your life had entered the novel —it was hard to say which. Finding it was like an act of fate. A poet wrote to you after you’d had a piece of verse published in a little magazine. You wrote back and for a while the two of you became quite friends. The poet wrote very good letters, full of quotations from Shakespeare, and how his wounded spirit ached for sanctuary, things like that. He told you that you simply
must
read
The Survivor.
The poet was always telling you that you simply must do this or that—read Proust, take Vitamin B, learn chess. A lot of the suggestions didn’t seem to have much connection with your life in MAX, but when he said about
The Survivor,
and told you the outline, you really wanted to get hold of it. It was about a person called David Allison who has an unhappy childhood, then goes to the trenches in Flanders, and afterwards tries to become a writer so as to tell the truth of the war for the sake of all the dead men. The story seemed, from what the poet told you, to connect with a lot of your own thoughts and feelings. A few months later you were helping clean out the cell old Tom Hawksworth had had for forty years. You found some mouldy books and one of them was
The Survivor
! You could barely believe it. The copy was torn and the last few pages were missing but that didn’t matter. You hid it quickly under your jacket and kept it. Old Tom Hawksworth was dead, so he didn’t care.

The anthology and the wonderful novel are probably the only two books you’ll ever need in your life. Between them they seem able to tell you everything you’ll ever need to know or understand. But Occupational Therapy is a whole new situation and you’d rather not have to face a whole new situation just yet.

On the other hand you will be in REFRACT for several years and you can’t stay sitting in the yard for that long. You weigh the pros and cons of going to Occupational Therapy, then you remember that no-one’s asking your opinion anyway.

“This is the doctor’s brainwave, not mine,” grumbles the Charge as he unlocks the gate in the fence after breakfast. The Charge doesn’t like you being let out to work. He doesn’t like you staying idle in the yard either. His remark about being a man of leisure had an edge to it. All he’d like is for you to be back in MAX.

You step through the gate and wait for him. He just waves you irritably on. “Go along. I’ll sight you,” he says. “Sighting” is when a screw watches you go somewhere. You walk on, feeling strange. This is the first time in nearly five years that you’ve been outside walls and fences without a screw next to you. You walk in a very straight line so the Charge won’t think you are turning off to bolt. When you get to the door of OT you turn to wave, feeling grateful that you’ve been trusted a little bit, but the Charge is already going up the yard with his back turned. He probably doesn’t care if you escape now—it’d be the doctor’s fault.

Inside the door the noise of a power saw is very loud and the air’s thick with pine-smelling dust. A dozen or so men are handling tools and machines and lengths of wood. You stand wondering what to do. A couple of screws are working with the men and you can see the brown-haired nurse through another door. Nobody takes any notice of you. You ask a man where the boss is. He can’t hear you properly. You shout in his ear and he shrugs. One of the screws comes past with a long plank, forcing you out of the way.

The brown-haired nurse comes through the room carrying a basket.

“Did you want something?” she asks, leaning close so you’ll hear.

“I was sent from REFRACT.”

“Oh, are you Tarbutt?”

“Yes.”

She looks at you with wide blue eyes, as though being Tarbutt is the last thing she expected of you. You can’t bring yourself to return her gaze directly but you try not to seem too shifty, or too aware of her body.

“You’ll have to see Mr Trowbridge,” she tells you, and leads the way into a rough office littered with wood and paint pots and pieces of metal and other things. Mr Trowbridge is the Charge here, though his title is Therapy Supervisor or something. He’s a tall man about fifty. He has a stooped, moody look, and an air of being preoccupied with ten different problems so that you only have about a tenth of his attention.

“Your ward doctor recommends you highly,” says Mr Trowbridge. “I wouldn’t normally take someone so recently out of MAX.” The noise is still loud from the work room and you have to strain to hear. Mr Trowbridge abruptly goes out to help someone align a drill, then gets caught up with several other jobs, then comes back.

“Well, what d’you fancy doing?” he asks.

“I’m not sure,” you answer. You would like to say you won’t be able to bear the constant noise. The noise is like it was in the factory you worked in when you were free. When you were going mad. “We need someone for our vinyl bag section. Can you use a sewing machine?” he asks.

“No.”

“Come and have a look.”

You follow through the dust and noise to the rear of the building. There’s a big bank of windows that face across the vegetable gardens to the willow trees and the pond. At one end of a long room are patients doing basketwork with the brown-haired nurse. At the other end is a corner full of stacked rolls of vinyl, a table, a tool-rack, and a large, ancient sewing machine.

“This is the old girl,” Mr Trowbridge says, whipping a cover off the machine. “Manufactured 1922. Treadle type originally. As you see, we’ve electrified it.”