Sarah Hall - The Electric Michelangelo

Only when she was gone from sight did he finally have to scream out, a lupine howl from his long upturned throat, and he slumped to the floor. His chest ached. A chronic feeling was pulling hard in him, backwards and forwards, forwards and backwards. He could taste her brine in his mouth. And all he could think about was the great sucking blowing sea at Morecambe Bay, how the tide travelled in and out, in and out, relentlessly, further than almost any other piece of shore on the British Isles, and faster than a grown man could outrun, like the maddening insolvency of love.

That night, Henry Beausang told the police, The Avenue psychiatric hospital was unusually quiet. Most evenings there were minor incidents, such as the singing refusal of patients to take sleeping pills or a fork stuck in the back of a wrist, burrowing for artery. A man soiling himself in some kind of incoherent protest. The inauthentic laughter of the delusive as restraints were called for. But that night the corridors of the ward were hushed, the crazies all shuffled off to bed without much assistance. And he did not like that kind of quiet. No, sir. For it meant trouble later on, usually of the fiery variety or sly eluders running through the hospital grounds with their cotton gowns flapping open at their pumping backsides. He was irritable and, he confessed, he thought he’d have himself a drink to settle the nerves. Not a large one, just enough to take the edge off. He was used to eerie spells of calm with trouble squatting on their backs, hell the state of Georgia was full of them come Klan season, so that didn’t make no never mind. But something told him after this one a portion of damn hard work to put things straight would be required and he’d be as busy as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. Did they know what he meant by that cold quiet before the storm? One or two of the cops nodded in agreement, bewitched a little by the peachy voice. And maybe he’d had a drop more drink for good measure, said Henry, that there was his vice, you see. Anyhow, he was doing the rounds on the upper level when he thought he heard the cage elevator arriving and opening and he went to see which doctor or orderly had come up in need of him to wheel a gurney. But he was wrong, the elevator was not running, it was stuck between the first and the second floors, both lights were on and the needle was ticking its finger indecisively at two numbers. It was an old Otis service elevator with a soprano singing pulley and you could stop it with a red throw-switch in an emergency but sometimes it acted up and got a mind to stall wherever it damn well fancied. So he went on with what he was doing a few hours past midnight, which in truth was nothing much more than looking in on the strapped madmen as they rocked in their beds, thatching the ceiling with their nightmares, and tugging on his bottle from time to time. He went to the medicine station and spoke with the nurse there about nothing much, she’d vouch for that, and they took a drink together too and shared a cigarette.

About three o’clock the hospital lights in the corridors were at their most sullen and he was well warmed by the white brandy. Piracy and crime had not yet wrought havoc on the wards and he began to relax. The upper level was all clear. No patients standing like cemetery statues at the window to be put back to bed and doubled up on meds or strapped down. Looking out of the wired window himself he could tell that it was one of those huge, heavy-moving October skies that made you feel you were on the bottom of a black ocean. The cage elevator was still stuck between floors so he took the metal fire-stairs down to two. This was the unit where Malcolm Sedak was being kept, along with about fifteen other men who had run wild about the city of New York upending lives and maiming relatives — those sick, maladjusted dogs needing to be kennelled out past the normal law. The rooms in this ward had the character of cages where animals await extermination, the smell of faecal minds, and he did not like being there. No, sir, he did not. Half of the patients were lobotomized, and half the rest were heavily acquainted with the electric tongs and the mouth strop. A sense of deliberation on everybody’s part was always present and that gave the ward a feeling of oppression. The floor had a security gate as well as locks on the individual cell doors. There was ordinarily a guard at a post there, who would operate the lock, but he was gone now and the gate was open an inch. That could just have been the man checking into the wing if he’d heard a splay noise, or maybe not. Henry had a feeling that there was some bad ju-ju on the waft tonight, so he took another slug of brandy for luck and went on through into the ward. Expecting nothing but low fluorescent illumination in the corridors he was surprised to see a little patch of orange remarking to him around the corner of the corridor. Then there was a bitter taste to the air, as when they tar the roads. At that point he got a strong sense again of wrongful interference and he was right, for he came upon the evidence. Someone had lit a damn fire in the metal bin where they dropped the waste and laundry, there was an odour of smouldering pitch in the air and there was that smoky, black-wagging tail oil gets when it burns. It was a poor attempt to bum the asylum down, that was for sure; he had known far better in his time. The fire was contained and in no danger of spreading, even while smoke lay up on the ceiling and made him sneeze.

He took a quick look about, escaped patients had a way of taking blunt instruments with inhuman force to the back of the heads of orderlies when their attention was turned. But there was no one else in the corridor. Then he heard a shuffling muffling sound coming from the storeroom. He opened the door and inside was the missing guard, gagged and trussed up like a rag dolly stolen by some little thing’s mean older brother. Now, Henry had no particular enjoyment of this fellow, that was the truth, he confessed. The fact of the matter was the man had got Henry cautioned for drinking on the premises not a month earlier, so he thought on it a while and decided he was best left bound a moment until he extinguished the fire and investigated the situation further, least that would be his story if asked at a later date, which he was now being. Henry winked at the policemen then, comfortable within his own yarn, knowing the tale of his imperfection and incompetence was winning them all over. He did, however, slip down the man’s gag to find out who had gotten to him. Two of them, one big, one smaller, faces covered like bandits, he was told. They had taken the keys to the cells, so surely it was a bust out, said the man, he should secure the main gate.

Quickly Henry checked the doors of the rooms, but all were tight, there appeared to be bodies in every one of them. He took a fire blanket and threw it over the metal bin. Curiously, there was a metal fire iron sitting up against the side of the cylinder that he had not noticed for the leaping flames before. It was only later that night this object took on any significance, turning the stomachs of the cops as they bagged it up for evidence. The other orderlies were called, doctors were summoned, and the usual protocol for lockdown began. They opened up the doors on level two one by one to check the patients and see who, if anyone, had been liberated and replaced with a phoney made of rolled-up bedding. In the ninth cell was Malcolm Sedak, there was a strong smell of smoke in his quarters, and, yessir, in a way an exchange of bodies had been made. He had not been belted in to sleep since his arrival at the hospital, it was not compulsory procedure, and he had never struggled against the nurses to truly warrant it. In fact the man had been one of the calmer crooks in the hospital. He’d maintained an air of accomplishment, dignity and satisfaction, which had truly offended Henry, particularly as his crime was brutal and against a lady, he had heard. But when they pulled the sheets back off him they found the buckles and straps were tight across him. Dear Lord, sweet Jesus, but it was not the same man that had been put to bed a little after sundown. There was a stained pillowcase over his head — not tied so Henry did not think there had been an attempt at suffocation, just slack on him like a redneck hunting hood. His nightgown had been slit off with a knife or scissors around his body and it was lying on the floor next to the bed. Had they known of the extent of his facial injuries they might not have brought the pillowcase off him quite so quickly as they did for he began to moan hellishly as it took patches of wet yellow skin away with it He had been burned severely around the cheeks. Worse stilt when the cover was fully removed from his head, they saw that the man’s eyes had been put out by some kind of branding device, and he was blind.