A long morning in the hospital. On the ward there is an uncharacteristic, brisk efficiency. Valuam trots hither and thither with a clipboard compiling what look like inventories. For some reason he is dressed casually today, or at least in superficially casual clothes. It was always obvious that he would iron his jeans and check shirts, and also that he would wear sleeveless grey pullovers. Not for the first time it occurs to me that there is a strange symmetry between the sartorial sense of the psychiatric staff and that of their patients. Valuam with his strict dress which looks hopelessly contrived, Bowen with her bag lady chic, Busner with his escaping underwear. All of them match up with the patients in their charge …
I am working on something of my own which I hope will provide some inspiration for the patients. It’s a worksheet, about six feet square, on which I have done several representations of the hospital. Each one has been executed using a different technique: pen and wash, gouache, oils, charcoals, pencils, clay. This morning I spend time cutting the stencil for a silk-screen print.
Patients, en route for therapy sessions, or dropping out of the medication line, pause by the tables I’ve pushed together in the dining area and ask me about the work. An auxiliary, a middle-aged Filipino woman, stops her swirling, watery work with tousled mop and zinc bucket on the ward floor to discourse at length on swollen ankles, injustice and the vagaries of public transport. I listen and work distractedly; the image of the dead idiot imposes itself on me startlingly. It slides in front of my eyes from time to time with an audible click: the ridge of greasy, nylon quilted collar, the scrubby, scrawny neck, the long face, the exploded eyes …
At noon then. Jane Bowen comes and sits near me, salutes me but does not converse. She rolls one of her withered cigarettes and stares out of the window abstractedly, drawing heavily. Her hair is scraped back tightly from the violet, inverted bruises of her temples. She gazes towards the hill where the idiot lies. I have an impulse to tell her about it, which I repress. The weather outside the hospital is playing tricks again; long, high bands of cirrus cloud are filtering the wan sunlight into vertical bars, which cut across the area that lies between the hospital and the Heath, creating shadows of diminishing perspective, like the exposed working on an artist’s sketch.
Eventually I get up and go and stand beside her. I am conscious of her body retreating from me inside the starched front of her white coat, leaving behind a white buckler. We both look out of the window in silence. My gaze drops from the idiot’s bier-bench (I cannot see any evidence of discovery, service vehicles, or whatever) to the chronics’ balcony below, the open area projecting out from Ward 8.
As once before, two cretins are embracing in a painful muted struggle. Their gowns flap in the wind, they strain against one another, locked in a clumsy bear-hug. Then one moves with surprising speed and agility, changing his hold so that he grips the other from behind, pinning his arms — and at the same time leaning backwards over the rail that runs above the concrete wall bounding the balcony. The two faces tip up towards Jane Bowen and I, white splashes that resolve themselves into … Mark, Busner’s son, who was at school with me, who had a breakdown at university and attempted suicide. He is pinioned by the handsome, black-haired man who I saw in the treatment room with Jane Bowen. The man’s face is glazed over with brutish imbecility. I feel another jolt of nausea, stagger and place my hand against the pane for support. Jane Bowen looks at me pityingly and gestures with her fag.
‘Your predecessor, Misha, our ex-art therapist. Who just happens, purely by coincidence, to be my brother, Gerry.’
‘That’s Mark with him, Busner’s son!’
‘Yes, Zack felt it would be a good idea to have them farmed out to Ward 8 for a little while. He thought you might find it a tad shocking to encounter them as patients.’ She turned to face me and said quite calmly, in a flat kind of a voice, ‘Get out of here, Misha. Get out of here now.’
She wasn’t issuing advice on a career move. This was a fire alarm. I acted on it quickly, but hesitated on my way across the wide expanse of industrial-wear floor covering, skittering on one leg like a cartoon character speeding around a corner that turns into a vase. Abruptly I realise that the Parstelin has completely altered my sense of my own body. I am acutely aware of the connection between each impulse, each message and the nerve-ending it comes from. My whole physical orientation has shifted, but remains whole.
This apprehension occupies me as I run to the lift. Patients ‘O’ at me hysterically, but there is silence, or rather a descending wail that has nothing to do with speech and everything to do with what children hear when they press the flaps of cartilage over their ears, in and out, very fast. Sheuuooosheeeuuooo.
‘A, hehehahahoohoohoohoo!’ Clive does the twist by the coiled hosepipe in an anonymous bay, off the short corridor I run down on my way to the lift.
‘Misha, a word please,’ Valuam comes out from his office, trouser material high on each thigh, scrunched up in marmoset hands. His peeled face tilts toward me, fungus poking out from the door. Another door swings open five yards further on and a hand emerges to pluck at my sleeve, a round, dimpled hand on the end of that dripping sundae body. I run past it and in my mind the flashback of thrust seems hard and mechanical; my penis a rubberised claw torn from a laboratory retort and thrust into the side of a putrefying animal. I must take the stairs.
Four flights down I stop running. They’re going to let me leave the hospital. A drug is just a drug. I was bloody stupid to take it at all, to fuck with Mimi, but if I stop it now my head will clear in a couple of days and I’ll be back to normal. I won’t have this strange sense that I am someone else, someone who is compelled to be reasonable.
There is no cause for alarm. I certainly cannot question the quintessential character of the stairwell. There is no denying its objective status. Thick bars of unpainted concrete punched through with four-inch bolts. The handrail a fire-engine red bar, as thick as an acroprop. Parstelin is a drug — I realise — that makes you acutely aware of things-in-themselves. Their standing into existence is no longer nauseous, but splendidly replete. That said, I gag a little and cough up a whitey dollop, somewhere between sputum and vomit, which plops into the drift of fluff wedged at the back of the stair I stand on.
Among the scraps of silver paper, safety-pins and nameless bits of detritus, a part of me. The fugue is broken by a whoosh of dead air that gusts up the well from below. Someone else has entered the staircase, pushed hard on a pneumatic door, maybe three flights down. The windows on the stairway are cut at oblique angles into the outer wall of the hospital. It is clear from the view, which affords me no sight of the huge bulk that contains me, that the staircase runs down the outer edge of the ziggurat’s sloping wall.
I pick my way down, pausing from time to time to cock an ear and listen for sounds of pursuit, but there are none. It is plain to me now that I have been suffering from a delusion, that the ward has overtaken me in part. I never denied that I was highly strung. I need some bed rest and the opportunity to read the papers. The lower I get the freer I feel. I know I haven’t really escaped from anything — and yet there’s the temptation to laugh and skip, to strike some attitudes.
I calculate that I am still two floors above ground level when the staircase blocks off its own windows. Light is now supplied by yellow discs that shine on the walls. The yellow light disorientates me. It must have done. I can genuinely no longer tell whether I am above or below ground level. The doors that lead off the staircase are blank oblongs. I panic and push at one, it wheezes under my palm and I tumble out into a corridor.
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