The Treatment and the Cure (20 page)

You take a longer route back from OT each evening now. Instead of cutting across the paddock where the kangaroos browse you walk along another loop of road by the lake shore and then up a very long hill past Admission and so to REHAB. Usually the setting sun is poised at the top of the hill and seems to be resting on the bitumen. You get a blaze of light in your eyes and the road ahead is fiery with it. You’ve christened that long hill Glory Road.

You wander freely at weekends and have discovered lovely places. There is a field near the main kitchen where cows from the hospital dairy graze. There’s a peacefulness about cows. At weekends you take a book and sit under a tree near the field and read a little and listen to music on your transistor and watch the cows. Sometimes you lean on the fence and click your tongue at the cows and they will wander close and sniff at you and examine you with big peaceful eyes but with a dubious look also, as if they’re wondering what your game is. You don’t stay leaning on the fence too long. It’s a bit too visible there. It might look odd. Other people don’t spend their time looking at cattle. Looking at cattle is probably a symptom of something. It’s safer under the tree where you are shielded.

The pond below OT is another good place. Often you find hundreds of ducks on the water, and some swans, and herons stalking about the mudflats on their stilty legs, and shags holding their wings open in the sun. The hospital is full of birds. The cows even have their own detachment of cattle egrets, white birds which fuss about amongst the herd like junior assistants who are cleverer than their bosses and take care of details in the grass which the big slow-thinkers overlook.

There is a row of beautiful willows near the pond. You read somewhere that willows were anciently associated with magic and with poetry, so every time you pass them you say a little charm that you’ve devised:

Willow, Willow, poets’ tree,

Shed thy willow grace on me.

You take to carrying a willow twig in your pocket. You fancy its magic will protect you and its poetry rub off on you. The urge to poetry has been coming back lately. The beauty and eternity of birds and animals and trees have revived it.

Instead of Group Therapy sessions REHAB has a Ward Meeting twice a week. Everyone attends, patients, staff, and usually the doctor. The doctor’s name is Muckerjee and he wears a turban. You don’t see much of him except at Ward Meetings where he sits listening and nodding his head whenever the staff say anything. He nods especially hard when Blue speaks.

The Ward Meeting has a set pattern. First the Patients’ Committee reports on the ward chores. Cecil invariably just says that everything’s okay on the male side. He’s too nervous to report anyone for slacking. Christine always has a list of complaints about the females: how Beryl Wrigley forgot to sweep the stairs or how Elsie Haggart didn’t mop the bathroom properly. Elsie Haggart is the frowsy one with the children she soon won’t remember because of shock treatment, and Christine knows that Blue likes hearing complaints about Elsie Haggart. It disgusts you the way these patients dob each other in. In MAX it was almost unheard of. In MAX the blokes had a code, and if you felt the force of the code slipping and felt tempted to dob your mates in there was always the possibility of getting a knife in your belly to reinforce your conscience. Christine keeps a notebook of the faults and failures of patients and when her turn comes at the Ward Meeting she reads her notebook out in her prim little voice, sighing repeatedly to show how sorry she is to have to do it. Of course she must be woken first. Waking Christine is a ritual joke. When the moment comes all eyes go to the dozing fat girl, then Blue says quietly: “And now we will have the privilege of hearing from…” and then she screams “CHRISTINE!” The fat girl wobbles awake, blinks, and reaches for the notebook.

The next stage is for Blue to give her own views on the ward chores. Reprisals are threatened if things don’t improve. Then

Blue and other staff go on to more general matters of discipline. Lack of enthusiasm for calisthenics is a regular issue. Reprisals are threatened. Blue asks Christine what the reprisal ought to be this time. Christine screws up her fat face and thinks hard and suggests stopping all inmates’ TV viewing for a week. Blue approves. It adds a nice touch if the punishment is devised by one of the victims. Christine basks in her moment of importance. Our harassment of the pantrymaids is a standard issue also. Reprisals are threatened.

After this we are invited to voice any problems we may have. Someone says his medication is having bad side effects and describes the nausea and giddiness. Blue tells him that nausea and giddiness are not, and never were, side effects of that particular medication. The patient is either lying or grossly disturbed. Shock may be required. Dr Muckerjee nods solemnly. Blue asks if anyone else wants to complain about medication. Nobody does. The meeting ends.

Elsie Haggart has had her withdrawal stopped for two weeks. Each Friday patients are allowed to draw a couple of dollars from their accounts to spend at the canteen, and having this money stopped is called Negative Reinforcement. Elsie Haggart is a heavy smoker and can’t buy her week’s tobacco. We are forbidden to give her a smoke. You are in the dayroom, in a spot where you can see along the corridor. Blue is there, whispering with the nurse Wanda who is her closest henchman. Wanda comes into the dayroom and sits beside Elsie Haggart and lights a cigarette. Wanda leans back, drawing deeply on the fag and blowing the smoke at Elsie Haggart. Elsie is gripping the arms of the chair, her frowsy face tight and white. The nurse keeps blowing the smoke until the cigarette is finished.

Elsie Haggart makes it ridiculously easy, especially by harping all the time about her children. She lives only for a visit or a message from them. You are near Elsie on the courtyard one day when Wanda comes and tells her very gently that the children are on the phone. Elsie Haggart is too distraught and probably too stupid to be on her guard. She runs to the office. You are standing near the window of a spare office across the corridor. You hear Elsie Haggart shrieking “My darlings! Are you there?” into the phone. Then Blue’s voice, silken, into the phone in the other office: “Yes, I’m here, Elsie. I’m always here.”

Elsie Haggart is locked up until her hysteria has passed and next morning gets electroshock.

Electroshock is given in the male dormitory, on one of the beds after a rubber sheet has been laid down and other equipment assembled around it. Patients booked for shock wait in a small room nearby. They are taken in turn and those still left can hear the moans and pleadings and the buzz of the machine.

You get on fairly well with Blue. You’ve studied her. You’ve seen that she is provoked by vulnerability, like some wild animal which isn’t very dangerous unless you stumble and expose your throat. If she sees you aren’t afraid and aren’t liable to stumble she becomes almost pleasant. You must be careful though. You never know how you might stumble, or when. Being Mrs Fibbitson’s main pantry helper is a safeguard. Mrs Fibbitson is a dour old stick but she appreciates an inmate who’ll wash dixies efficiently day in and day out, and her opinion carries weight in REHAB.

Since Ward 24 you have grasped something important. If you make yourself useful it will suit the staff’s convenience to leave you alone. Electroshock or severe medication interfere with an inmate’s usefulness. In Ward 24 you thought they should leave you alone just because you were a person with rights and feelings. That was foolish. Your other big mistake was retreating into silence. You thought they’d see it as your protest against being insulted to the very core. But naturally they took it as proof of illness. They were offering psychiatric care and you were flinching from it, the way a possessed man would flinch from holy water. It’s safer to speak up, providing you are careful. So now you make a point of talking to a few screws and nurses each day — about football or the weather, it doesn’t matter what—to show you are in touch with reality. Their reality at least. And you speak up in Ward Meetings. You make at least one comment in each meeting. Mostly it’s about ward chores, like how you noticed the dormitory broom is worn out and could we have a new one. That sort of comment is good. It shows you are taking an interest, playing your part as a member of this Therapeutic Community.

Sometimes you even help other inmates to speak up: “I think what Stan is trying to say…” You mustn’t sound like a barracks lawyer though.

Elsie Haggart is finished the course of shock and is back to normal. She’s making a fuss in the Ward Meeting, complaining that she’s lost contact with her children. Blue tells her to be quiet. Elsie gets more excited. She’s babbling something about Blue persecuting her. She’s on thin ice. Blue doesn’t really care what Elsie Haggart says, but it’s slightly awkward her saying it in front of the doctor and all the other staff. As a member of the Therapeutic Community it saddens you to see a fellow inmate in the grip of persecution delusions. You speak up:

“Perhaps if contact were restored with the children, Elsie might begin to get her ideas into normal perspective.”

“They don’t write!” moans Elsie.

“Well, do you write to
them
?” Blue wants to know. Blue doesn’t feel that weeks as an electroshocked zombie need interfere with letter writing.

“I can’t write very good,” says Elsie. In fact she can’t write at all except to sign her name.

The obvious thing would be for someone to help Elsie write a letter once a week, but nobody wants to get involved in her problems. You certainly don’t. Elsie Haggart is a pain in the neck. You make another suggestion:

“Maybe Elsie could buy a postcard at the canteen each week and post it home. Ones with nice pictures the children would like. It’d be something at least.”

The canteen sells lovely postcards. Lake scenes with pelicans, and kangaroos with joeys peeping out.

Elsie Haggart mutters agreement. She’s calmer now that someone is taking her part. Blue is considering. She’s aware that she could make a small concession in return for the persecution talk being cooled. And the concession would be to you, not Elsie.

“But Elsie is off withdrawals. How would she buy postcards?” Blue wants to know.

You put on a perplexed expression, as though this is a major stumbling block, as though being off withdrawals is an act of God or something.

“Well,” you say, “what if withdrawals could somehow be restored, on the understanding that Elsie improves her behaviour?”

Blue considers again. Dr Muckerjee has been nodding and listening. He probably hasn’t followed it too well because of his limited English, but he murmurs to Blue that it seems fair.

So Blue agrees.

The postcard idea won’t work, except for a week or two, and Elsie Haggart will be off withdrawals again very soon. It’s nothing to you.

You are on the Patients’ Committee now in Cecil’s place. Cecil was too timid for the job and wouldn’t report other patients. Not like Christine with her notebook. Being off the committee hasn’t helped Cecil’s nervousness though because now he’s afraid Blue will start on him for having proved so useless. Each morning before breakfast you go around and check whether the chores on the male side have been done. If something isn’t done you go to the person and remind him. If he still doesn’t do it you report him. At first you tried to cover for people by doing some of the chores yourself, but it got too much. Now you figure if people are too stupid to keep out of trouble it’s not your concern. Besides, one or two bad reports at each Ward Meeting keep Blue happy.

Syd Hicks has been chucked off the committee also and you are leading the calisthenics in his place. You are getting to be Blue’s golden-haired boy these days. You and she understand each other, like two people who understand the rules of a secret game.

Con Pappas has been transferred to REHAB and he thinks all his birthdays have come at once.

Your policy of being sociable with the staff interferes a lot with your writing. Lots of times when you want to be outside under the sky with your own thoughts you are playing snooker with some screw instead, or talking about football or playing cards. You are freer at OT and can daydream while you sew the vinyl bags, but you have to keep your quota up or Mr Trowbridge might get the idea you aren’t as well as you ought to be. Apart from weekends, the main time for thinking about poetry is on your evening wander back to REHAB. It’s a lovely time, perhaps because it only lasts an hour, including the stop at the canteen and another stop at the lake, and so every minute seems precious. The day is just turning cool then and the shadows are lengthening and there is an evening breeze to ruffle the water and the trees and dry the sweat from you as you come to the top of Glory Road. Or if the day is wet you walk in the rain in an old overcoat and enjoy the different scene that the rain makes, when the lake is like wrinkled iron and the grass and trees and buildings are plastered with water and the roadway and gutters stream with it.

You have begun to think a lot about this hospital. Before, you thought mainly about your own experience of it or about inmates you’ve observed or known. Now every evening when you reach the top of Glory Road you look across at the hospital spread out on the slopes and wonder what this place really is, what it’s for, how it came to be. It has a history and customs and laws and a government. People come here and exist for a while and then die or go away. This place is like a town with its generations that pass by, but stranger than a town because no-one is born here and no-one marries. The only important human event that ever happens here is death. Mr Trowbridge started you thinking this way when he set up a paper-shredding section at OT, with a big machine that chops newspapers and other papers into ribbons which are then baled and sent away on a truck. The Records Office sent dozens of boxes of old files. It took three days to shred them. You browsed among the boxes, reading the yellowed folders that gave off puffs of stale dust. Each folder told of someone who was here forty or sixty years ago. Forty or sixty years ago someone was here, alive, and the sun and wind and grass and water were as real for them as for you now. It has given you a sort of ache to understand how lives can be sucked back and dried and silenced into folders, the folders stamped
Cancelled,
and then shredded to nothing. You began making notes for a poem.

It took a while to see the theme clearly. At first it was to be a sort of history of the hospital and what has happened here through all the years those yellowed folders represented. Then you saw it. The poem would be a series of dialogues between the files and the shredder, each file, each life, giving its last testimony as its turn came. And the shredder, remorseless but not cruel, holding its sharp blades ready until each testimony was told.

Sam Lister and his beautiful wife have come to see you. Sam was with you in MAX years ago. You are walking with them by the lake and you and Sam are remembering the times then when the two of you talked and talked—about happiness, and the meaning of life, and whether we’d be free some day and things like that. Sam is still the same, though there is the slight embarrassment between you now because he is free and you aren’t yet. And Sam’s wife is as beautiful as you remember her from the times she visited Sam in MAX. She walks along a little apart from the two of us, shy of intruding on memories she isn’t part of. Later we sit behind a wall out of the wind and eat sandwiches and talk some more. You show them the poem. Sam reads the fifteen closely written pages, not saying anything, then passes them to his beautiful lady and she reads them and doesn’t say anything for a long time either. You stare away into the wind, wondering if you’ve made a mistake. Then they both tell you, quietly and feelingly, that it’s the best poem they’ve ever read. You are very pleased that two people you like so much like your poem, but you have that odd feeling of wanting to change the subject so you won’t seem to be making a big deal of your work.

“Will you have it published?” asks Sam’s lady.

“Easier said than done,” you say.

“It ought to be published,” Sam insists.

“Yes,” says his beautiful lady. “I want a copy of it.”

“Take that copy, if you like. I have another.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes, take it. I’d like you and Sam to have it.”

Sam’s lady folds the poem carefully and puts it in her bag. She leans and kisses you lightly on the cheek. Whacko, you think to yourself, that’s the stuff to give the troops! You walk back to the car with them. They seem sad and quiet. You act cheerful and wave them off with a big smile. As soon as the car goes out of sight loneliness drops on you like a ton weight.

The staff are on strike. They don’t like the new Medical Superintendent who has replaced the one with the famous bad breath. Dr Grey sat in on a Ward Meeting soon after he came. It was an awful shock, especially for Blue. Dr Grey didn’t sit quietly nodding like Dr Muckerjee, instead he looked very alert and he talked to the inmates as though we were really quite intelligent. He said we should help ourselves more and not rely on the staff to run our lives. At first Blue smirked and made faces to the other nurses, as though to say they might as well let this fool have his foibles. When the Skin Man got up and said about needing skins to patch himself with, Blue told him to sit down and shut up. Dr Grey overruled her briskly and invited the Skin Man to continue. Then he explained to him very carefully that he didn’t need patches, that it was just an idea in his mind.

“It’s pointless,” Blue said. “You could tell him a hundred times and it wouldn’t do any good.”

“Then we’ll tell him
two
hundred times, or however many times it takes!” answered Dr Grey.

Another patient complained that her medication was making her feel sick. Again Blue tried to bully the patient and again Dr Grey overruled her. After listening to the patient’s story Dr Grey told Blue to reduce the medication a little.

“But why?” Blue wanted to know. “This one’s always complaining about medication.”

“All the more reason to do something about it.”

“It’ll just make her more troublesome!”

“People
behave
badly because they
feel
badly within themselves. The best way to improve behaviour is to take away some of the bad feelings.” Dr Grey was addressing the whole meeting as well as Blue. You’d never heard a doctor saying things like this before. Always before it was as if psychiatry was a private mystery that belonged to the staff and which patients weren’t entitled to know about. You realised in those few minutes that something very important was happening, and that it could change the whole situation for patients who were able to grasp it. If, as a patient, you are able to hear the kinds of things the doctor tells the staff, you’ll be able to judge whether the staff are acting in accordance. Blue and the other screws and nurses realise this too and they don’t like it.

It seems Dr Grey sat in on Ward Meetings and Group Therapy sessions throughout the hospital and said the same things. His name is mud now amongst almost all the staff. They call him “The Idiot”. The odd thing is that Blue acts as though the patients ought to despise Dr Grey as much as she does. She often jokes with you about “The Idiot’s latest brainwave” or something. You grin and agree.

Now the strike is happening.

All the nursing staff are out, except for a few supervisors and one screw or nurse left in each ward as an “observer”. The “observer” is supposed to give necessary medical care so that nobody will die and create bad publicity. The “observer” isn’t allowed to give psychiatric medication, only medical stuff like insulin, so you are free of the nuisance of having to spit your tablet down the sink. You’ve been watching other inmates to see how much madder they get without their medication. You can’t see much difference.

The pantrymaids are out “in sympathy”. The dixies of food are still being delivered from the main kitchen, so you and Con Pappas take over the pantry and keep the meals going. It’s wonderfully peaceful at mealtimes now, without the shouting and abuse, though the “observer” nurse appears to feel that if the meals are being kept up the shouting and abuse should be kept up as well. You are dishing lunches across the servery. Christine waddles in a few minutes late and the “observer” yells that she can bloodywell go without so she’ll learn to liven her bloody self up in future. It’s intolerable. You push a meal across to Christine and she stares at it, her little fat chin wobbling with distress.

“Have your lunch, Christine,” you say.

“I said she can go without!”

“Have your lunch, Christine.”

“Did you hear what I said?”

“Take it, Christine. It’s okay.”

The room has gone very quiet. The “observer” is staring bug-eyed at you. Maybe she’ll dash the plate on the floor or something. If so you’ll dish up another. If this was a male screw he’d probably try a bit of knuckle at this stage. That’d be awkward. More importantly, it’d obscure the lesson of what is happening. The lesson is that bullying and abuse don’t work without the whole apparatus of shock and punishment and Negative Reinforcement. The Apparatus has only been stopped for three days—after eighty years—and already this nurse has reverted to a puffed-up bag of nothing.

“Oh, have your bloody lunch!” she yells at Christine, then stalks out.

Later a supervisor comes round. The supervisors have been told by the union to stay on duty, for humanitarian reasons.

“If it was up to me I’d be out with the rest!” he tells you fiercely. He sees you are washing the dixies. “You doin’ the pantry work here?”

“Just the necessaries,” you say.

“Dishin’ up meals?”

“That’s right.”

“A lotta people are feelin’ pretty savage about anyone who helps undermine this strike action.”

“I imagine so,” you say. You aren’t sure whether you are being threatened. This supervisor was already steamed-up when he came in, perhaps from the strain of his humanitarian role, and may just be cranky.

“And you’re just doin’ the necessaries?”

“That’s all.”

“Mmmm,” he grunts, then walks around the pantry, examining it. He’s looking at the floor to see if it’s been mopped lately. Con Pappas starts to come in the other door with mop and bucket. You motion him away.

“Alright then,” grunts the supervisor. He goes out.

Nothing much happens in REHAB during the strike. Cecil collapses with an asthma attack and the “observer”—a different one—agrees to phone for a doctor. “The German” comes and attends to him. All the doctors are working long hours in the geriatric and retard wards. “The German” walks through the dayroom on her way out.

“Iss everyvun heppy?” she calls.

“Happy as fuckin’ Larry, Doc!” bawls Syd Hicks. Syd is getting frisky now without his Largactil. He’s wearing only a singlet and a sock.

“Ach, I tink you are
too
heppy, eh?”

“Friggin’ oath, Doc!”

“The German” wags a finger at him and goes out. It’s hard work just keeping the geriatrics alive, so Syd Hicks being too happy hardly matters.

Mr Trowbridge is keeping OT open. You go a couple of times but Mr Trowbridge tells you you might as well stay and look after your ward and keep the meals going. The union is talking about having a strike over Mr Trowbridge as soon as the strike over Dr Grey is finished.

It ends after four days and the screws and nurses and pantrymaids come back. You are curious to see whether they keep a bit quiet for a day or so, or even for a few hours. They don’t. If anything they are more swaggering than ever. Of course they’ve no reason not to be. The Apparatus is back in action.

And they’ve heard all about the episode of Christine’s lunch. Blue jokes with you about it. It’s okay. You and Blue understand each other.