The Treatment and the Cure (19 page)

What the Charge Sister said about you being too withdrawn must mean they didn’t even know about Julie. You are getting Stelazine not because they know you had sex with a girl but because they didn’t know. It doesn’t really matter why you’re getting it. You just are. If it wasn’t for one reason it’d be for the exact opposite reason. That’s how the system works.

Thinking about all that takes too much energy. You go back to counting seconds. Cars often pass you on the road while you’re hobbling to or from OT and you begin to dwell on how easy it would be to step in front of one of them. You even begin to brace yourself when a car is approaching. But you might only be injured, or crippled. That wouldn’t solve anything. You’d need to be sure of being killed outright. And something else stops you: the knowledge that the system would have an easy explanation of your suicide. Poor deranged Tarbutt! If only he’d responded to treatment!

You are at OT, a month after the Stelazine began. Mr Trowbridge notices you are on the verge of breaking down. Your work has gone to pot.

“How d’you feel within yourself, Len?”

“I can’t stand it any more!”

“You don’t appear to be stabilising, that’s for sure.”

“I can’t stand it any more!”

“Have you spoken to your ward doctor?”

“Yes, she asked me how many fucking dwarfs Snow White had and I told her the answer and she was very fucking pleased with me!”

“Mmmmm … I can see you’re under a bit of strain.”

“Oh we mustn’t overstate the fucking matter! I just have a strong urge to kill my fucking self, that’s all!”

“Come with me,” says Mr Trowbridge.

We go out past Cheryl and Janice, who are both looking at you very seriously from their end of the room, up past REFRACT to the Administration block. You have to hobble fast to keep up.

“I’ll speak to the Medical Superintendent,” Mr Trowbridge says.

“What’s he got to do with it?”

“He ordered the Stelazine for you. Didn’t you know?”

We go into the Administration block and Mr Trowbridge goes in past a secretary to the Superintendent’s office. After a minute he calls you in. The Superintendent is peering across a desk. He has very bad breath. It fills up the room. This bad breath is famous. Everyone knows about it but him.

“I gather you aren’t very happy,” he says.

“The medication is unsuitable.”

“Len isn’t stabilising,” says Mr Trowbridge.

“We could try him on Melleril perhaps.”

“And I’d suggest a change of ward also,” says Mr Trowbridge.

“Ward 24’s awful,” you say, trying not to whine. “They’re turning me into a retard!”

The Superintendent stares at you. He has glasses on and the lenses are blank and bright. He looks inhuman.

“Let’s say a transfer to REHAB, as well as the change to Melleril,” Mr Trowbridge prompts.

“Alright,” murmurs the Superintendent. “We’ll agree to that then, shall we, Len?”

“Yes,” you say, as though your agreement matters, as though nobody here would dream of forcing anything on you. On the way back to OT you thank Mr Trowbridge. You want to tell him he can count on your help if he ever needs it. That’s just an emotional impulse. If inmates were able to help anyone, even themselves, they wouldn’t be inmates.

At lunchtime you are given a brown tablet instead of the blue ones, and after lunch the Charge Sister tells you to get your gear from the storeroom. A nurse will take you to REHAB. As you go along the corridor you sniff the stink of newness for the last time. The stink is mingled now, after three months, with a permanent reek of shit and piss.

The nurse walks down the slope from the courtyard and towards the area where the Admission wards are. REHAB is near there, on a sort of plateau that overlooks the lake from a different angle and lower down than the high hill of Ward 24. You follow the nurse. She doesn’t speak, and you’ve nothing to say. A car approaches along the road. The nurse turns and takes you by the sleeve and draws you to the side until the car is past. You let yourself be pulled. She’s just doing her job, keeping a retard from getting run over. You don’t want to be run over either. Not now.

REHAB’s full name is Rehabilitation & Resocialisation Unit. That’s painted in big letters over the entrance. Most wards are called Units now and have big words over the entrances. It doesn’t matter what the words are, so long as they look good.

The nurse takes you into the office and leaves you with a screw on duty there. He sends you into the dayroom. After a while a bloke comes and says his name is Cecil and he’s on the Patients’ Committee and will show you where to put your gear and where your bed is and stuff like that. Cecil is scrawny and has asthma or something and gasps after the exertion of walking up a corridor to the storeroom.

“Which space?” you ask him. The storeroom has shelves with numbered spaces.

“Er, 17, I think.”

You find 17 and put your gear there.

“Is that 17?” Cecil asks.

“Yep.”

The spaces have numbers taped on the front but 17’s tape has come off. Cecil looks confused. You point out that your space has sixteen on one side and eighteen on the other. Cecil looks very worried.

“I’d better go and ask about it,” he says.

“Why bother?”

“I don’t want any trouble,” he says.

“Why would there be trouble?”

“Blue’s on tomorrow,” he says, as if that explained it all.

“Who is Blue?”

But Cecil has a coughing fit and begins choking. He drools a pool of spit on the floor. He hurries for a mop. Later he shows you your bed. The dormitory is like the one in Ward 24 but tidier and without the new smell.

“Listen,” you say, “what’s this Patients’ Committee?”

“A sort of committee of patients.”

“I thought it might be,” you say. “But what does it do?”

“We sort of help organise things, like ward duties and that.”

“And who’s this Blue that you mentioned?”

Cecil begins coughing again. His eyes go wide, like those of a scared rabbit.

It’s too late to go to OT so you wander around the ward. There are three little groups in the dayroom, each with half a dozen patients seated with a nurse. The nurses have newspapers and are reading items out aloud and trying to get the patients to comment. A group of patients is outside raking the lawn, with screws and nurses watching. None of these inmates are obvious retards, just run-of-the-mill types, men and women, shabby, submissive. The screw in charge of the raking barks orders. You try not to make yourself too visible. You still feel pretty bad from the last dose of Stelazine. It’ll be twenty-four hours or so before the effects really begin to wane. And you don’t know, yet, what the brown Melleril pill has in store for you. Mr Trowbridge said Melleril is quite mild. That’s just his opinion. You’d bet your boots he’s never swallowed one.

The group comes inside from the lawn and other patients come back from work-places and by evening the dayroom is full. Most are watching TV. There is a card game happening in a corner. One of the card players is the fattest person, for her size, that you’ve ever seen. She is very short and her feet don’t quite touch the floor, but the fat of her backside hangs in folds over the sides of her chair and the fat of her arms spreads in rolls on the table. She holds the cards close to her eyes with little sausage fingers. She has a little prim, self-important voice.

“What’s trumps?” she asks.

“Spades is trumps. Wake up and listen!”

“You needn’t be unpleasant.”

“You’d give anyone the shits, Christine!”

“I’ll report you in the Ward Meeting if you aren’t careful. I don’t want to but I have a duty.”

“Stick it!”

“I’m on the Committee, you know.”

“Stick it!”

The annoyed player leaves the table.

“I’m glad he’s gone,” the fat girl tells the remaining two. “I’d have to report him otherwise. That’s the worst of Committee work—the responsibility.” She sighs deeply, then seems to doze, her chin on the edge of the table and the cards still in her hand.

The meal is called and we enter the dining room. There are three green-uniformed pantrymaids on duty, dishing food out of dixies and pushing plates across the servery. Each row of tables is called up in turn. There’s a lot of noise, mostly from the two younger pantrymaids who keep shrieking at us. When a row is called up and we respond a moment too soon a pantrymaid screams for us to wait till we’re bloodywell called. If we respond a moment late she screams for us to get off our bloody arses. The screw in charge of the dining room strides among the tables and snarls, as though we are giving the pantrymaids a hard time and had better cut it out.

A nurse brings the medication tray and you are given your Melleril tablet. You put it under your tongue and pretend to swallow. We have been in the dining room for nine and a half minutes, according to the clock on the wall, and the meal is over. Only the fat girl Christine is still eating, pushing the last bits of food into her mouth with fat little fingers. She’s eaten no more than the rest, it’s just that her fat little mouth and hands can’t work fast enough.

The loudest pantrymaid comes and stands with hands on hips.

“Get a bloody move on! We’re not stayin’ here all friggin’ night for
you
!”

Christine looks up, chewing like a little cow.

“Bugger you then!” snaps the pantrymaid, and whips the plate away.

As we file out the door a nurse taps you on the arm.

“Mrs Fibbitson wants to know if you’ll help wash up.”

You look back at the servery and see the senior pantrymaid has her eye on you.

“Alright,” you say. You haven’t much choice. And it’s a bit awkward because you want to hurry to the lavatory and get rid of the tablet. It’s starting to disintegrate in your mouth.

Mrs Fibbitson points you to a big sink with a pile of dirty dixies. You go to it and are able to spit the tablet down the plughole before you begin washing up. When you’ve finished and have wiped the sink and counter Mrs Fibbitson asks if you’ll be a regular pantry helper. The job’s main perk is extra food, but you’re more interested in the fact that pantry helpers have their meal a few minutes before the others, so you’d be able to eat when the dining room is empty and quiet. And afterwards you’ll have your head over the sink with the banging dixies and won’t have to hear the abuse so much. That plughole will be handy too.

The dayroom has a snooker table in an alcove on one side and an area on the other side with a sliding partition to close it off from the rest of the room. You sit behind the partition.

“Got any skins?” says a voice beside you. There’s a gaunt bloke in the next chair.

“Pardon?”

“Skins. Got any?”

“What kind of skins?”

“Sheepskins.”

“No.”

“Cowhides?”

“No.”

“Goatskins? Horseskins?”

“No.”

“I’ll pay.”

“I haven’t any.”

“What about dogskins?”

“No.”

The gaunt man is leaning over, gazing at you intently.

“You’re keeping them for yourself, aren’t you?”

“I haven’t any.”

“I understand. You won’t part with them. I expected as much. But I need new patches urgently, you see. For my arm and also just here on the thigh.” He shows you his arm and pulls his shirt up to let you see his upper thigh. “The bones are almost through in both places. The left shoulderblade will be through any day as well.”

“You look okay to me,” you say.

“Oh, I appreciate your position. You’ve your own needs to consider. But if you do find you have some extra skins I hope you’ll let me know. Remember, I’ll pay.”

The gaunt man is being so reasonable about it all you half-think to give him a skin or two. You stay sitting with your back to the partition, watching other patients, listening to the talk, thinking what a change, after Ward 24, to be in a place where there’s at least one reasonable person.

The night is okay, with only the normal smells and noises of a dormitory. Cecil has an asthma attack in the night, but nothing else happens. Coming downstairs in the morning you hear loud voices in the corridor. A frowsy woman patient runs into sight at the foot of the stairs. She’s looking over her shoulder and shouting something about her children. She seems to be crying but she has a bad smoker’s cough and it’s hard to tell if she’s really crying or merely trying to shout and cough at the same time. You pause on the stairs. A nurse runs into sight and grabs the woman and shoves her against the wall and yells into her ear that her children are better off without her because she’s a mad old bitch and not a fit mother for a cat. The patient is twisting her head away and screwing her face up as though she doesn’t want to hear. The nurse says very coolly into the woman’s ear that it doesn’t matter anyway because she’s been booked for shock treatment and soon won’t remember her children or anyone else. The nurse has very red hair and a ruddy, healthy complexion like a farmer’s wife. She wears the starched veil of a senior Sister. She looks up and notices you on the stairs. You walk down casually as if you haven’t noticed anything and pass by them to the courtyard. You know this Sister must be Blue.

Calisthenics are held every morning on the courtyard and all patients must do them. Nurses and screws go through the ward prodding patients out to the centre where they must line up and do bends and jerks and stuff like that. You don’t mind calisthenics. It’s good to stretch in the fresh morning with the lake and sky so vast and clean around you. The exercises are led by Syd Hicks, a loudmouth who’s on the Patients’ Committee with Cecil. Christine can’t bend or jerk because of her fat, so she does vague hand movements to show she’s in the spirit of it. After the first couple of minutes you decide you don’t like these calisthenics. All the young screws and nurses are lounging along the verandah, watching us and joking about Christine’s fat or Cecil’s wheezing. Cecil tries to drop out of the line to rest but a nurse called Wanda tells him it’s no use bunging on an act and orders him back. The Skin Man finds the exercises distressing too. He’s afraid the exertion will make his bones poke through his skin. You think how grotesque we must look—fat girls and asthmatics and broken-down inmates all trying to bend and jerk in a row.

As soon as it’s over you slip away to your early breakfast and then go gladly to the sink with the banging dixies which drown out some of the shouted abuse in the dining room. Then you escape to OT.