Between My Father and the King (12 page)

The patients of Park House could not, of course, be taken to the Hospital Hall. The way there led through winding, urine-scented passages, past dormitories where ghostly, wildly staring men exposed themselves, standing in rows by the windows, or pressed their faces up to the glass, like people trying to climb in or
out of mirrors. Sometimes we learned weeks afterward that a dance had been held at Hospital Hall, or a concert to which members of the public came, and where the superintendent had got up and given a talk about the New Attitude; or that the patients had performed a play there, under the supervision of an enthusiastic young doctor, and local drama clubs had been invited, along with newspaper critics, who had used the words ‘promising', ‘talented', ‘therapeutic'. One day, when a wildly struggling woman was dragged into the ward, we learned that she had been the lion's back legs and tail in
Androcles and the Lion
.

Ah, well, perhaps we were our own drama. There were two Christs, one Queen of Norway, no female Napoleons; there was Millie, as round as the full moon, who had dressed up as a man, taken an axe, and murdered three people on a lonely farm; there was Elna, who had held her child under the water in the washing tub, holding it there till it no longer struggled; there were those whose arms were folded close in cloth or canvas straitjackets; and there were the many who suffered from having no interesting delusions, who were not known as characters, and were not pointed out with pride because they had murdered or would murder or lay claim to European thrones. They were the self-centred, irritating epileptics, the paranoiacs, proud and persecuted. And the huddled quiet ones with sun-stained faces — in their quietness, a different kind of violence, an assault on everything that we imagined human. There was no place for them but Park House. They sat in the sun and rain alike, wearing no shoes or pants, their world or no-world contained in their minds, and other people might as well have been planets or stones or anything, as long as they were not identified. The violence of these patients lay in their refusal to name or be named. They sat in their straitjackets for meals at one of the long tables, and their throats were massaged to make them swallow, as if touch could provide some clue to the name and nature of their bodies. Then they would lumber out again into the sun or
rain, with their hands and feet disowned by their minds, and their blood heavy and blue and swollen; in the yard, unaccustomed to walking, they moved stiffly, like blue snowmen.

So days passed, and weeks and perhaps years. Sausage days came and went; rice days snowed on us. We had honey one day, thickly peopled with ants, but honey; and apple pie made of little burned apples, topped with pastry that tasted like damp cottonwool layered with scorched brown paper. But we liked it, and we asked for more. Doctors visited, and went away shaking their heads; new doctors fled timidly through the screams and cries of the park and the yard. Heads were shaved, and head operations performed, and the strange people with bandaged heads and damp faces and ink-filled eyes lay in the small rooms along the corridor, stared at with fear by patients and nurses alike. One heard the conversation after a few days: ‘Hasn't Molly changed? You wouldn't know Marion. Cristina's so docile. She spoke today. I've never heard her speak before.' Yet, as more days and weeks passed, there was Molly sitting nameless and dead in a corner of the dayroom, and Cristina with the blank eyes, giggling and saying nothing, and Marion in a canvas jacket, being taken to solitary confinement. Once someone was allowed to go home, and was returned by terrified parents, unable to face the estrangement of her simple cooing and rocking in all-day masturbation. And once someone else, Leila or Doris or Nora, was promoted to another ward, and went with envious farewells; not to the admission ward — that would have been too much to hope for — but to a place where they had rugs on the floor and a tablecloth on the table, but no contemporary furniture. The seats in that dayroom were like seats taken from old-fashioned
motorcars or railway carriages. Sitting on the buttoned and worn splitting leather, one had the absurd sensation of travelling, so that if one sat close enough to the windows, which opened six inches only, and looked out at the unattainable sky and not at the animal-filled park, one could quite easily imagine oneself out for a Sunday afternoon run in the country.

Then suddenly, one day in early summer, the superintendent became determined about the New Attitude, and the need for Park House to have a share in it. He was a kindly man who liked pastel shades and pictures of lakes and bright bedspreads; he was also realistic enough to imagine that a few films of murders and barroom brawls and lovely ladies kissing handsome men would help the patients of Park House to face what was called the ‘real world'. And he was sensible enough to know that Park House people could never be taken to see films in the Hospital Hall, mingling there with the gentle convalescents who carried handbags and wore their own clothes and used handkerchiefs.

So it was decided to show films in Park House itself, in the dayroom, after the more violently uncontrollable patients had been put to bed. There would be no screen. The walls, though gravy- and sausage-stained, and stuck with bits of apple pie, were of a light colour, but unfortunately there were no blinds, and the daylight at that time of year was not of a secretive nature but outspoken and honest, and preferred the company of the sky to being tucked down between hills. Our bedtime was half past six. How could we see a film in that light? ‘Your bedtime can be extended, an hour perhaps,' the matron said graciously. The first film, it was decided, would be shown in a week's time, on a Tuesday.

Oh, it did not seem possible, such bliss. For Tuesday was sausage day — of very real and symbolic value in a ward of women. It was also canteen day, when the sister of the ward went with a large clothes basket to the canteen and returned with tins
of biscuits, which were not for us, and tins of sweets, which were thrown in handfuls into the middle of the dayroom, prompting a lively scramble and a few black eyes and bleeding noses. They were paper sweets, with mint intestines, and words written on the outside of the wrapper, ‘The Sweet for All Times and All Places', so that, eating them, one felt a delicious sense of inclusiveness.

There was not really much excitement in the week of waiting for our first film to be shown. Each day had its small pleasures: food; fights; the appearance of the doctor, perhaps a smile from him; the occasional escapes. (Timmy, who made a daring escape, also made the mistake of paying the taxi-driver with a check made of toilet paper.) For me, there was a visit to the kitchen to collect a tray of stew. There I saw what looked like the activity of a whaling station: huge vats of meat boiling; a man with long hairy arms using one of them to stir a copper pot full of semolina; trays of white failed scones. It was also in that week that I managed to get hold of a book to read, by finding a small locked shelf where three volumes rather drunkenly held each other up:
A Girl of the Limberlost
,
Moths of the Limberlost
(I remembered my mother saying what lovely books these were), and another book, which I read, about a sheepdog who gets his university degree and becomes a lecturer at the University of Glasgow. It was also in that week that we spent a whole day downstairs in the yard, in the sun; climbing on the verandah rail, we could look out over the harbour and see the tide drawing slowly in towards the streaked grey mudflats, and the lines of warmth dancing up and up into the sky. From somewhere in the city we heard a tramcar and a three o'clock factory whistle, and then we knew that the world was still there, and people still went out shopping, and worked in factories, making biscuits and blue bags and plastic raincoats.

Tuesday came. The impossibly violent people, like naughty children, were whisked off to bed. A timid-looking new attendant entered the dayroom and built a fence of benches around himself and set up a projector. Then he announced the name of the film.

‘It is,' he said, ‘the Marx Brothers in
A Night at the Opera
.'

And then I remembered the laughter, the stifling, collapsing laughter, the pails of whitewash, and the banana skins, and the step-ladders and garden rakes, all the beautiful paraphernalia of accepted nonsense, without any strangeness or fear in it, no monstrous ballooning faces phosphorescent in the dark, just something obviously and happily mad. ‘A Night at the Opera.' I waited. The attendant, still looking timidly about him, began to show the film.

The projector whirred and the pictures danced about, finding focus on the pale wall, then they settled, and the sound began, raucous and quick, and the blurred wall cleared a little, but not much — the room was so light — then there was a cry and a whirring sound and a noise like water, and the people in the film retraced their lives swiftly and relentlessly. The film began again. We saw figures moving about, laughing in a stupid fashion, talking quickly or not at all or out of step with the violent whining sound. Light speared the screen, like rain, and flickered, and all the time the dumb sad man with the round eyes like paddling pools and the hair like wheat stood in rain, whether the sun was shining or not; he was pathetic and strange, and his companion, the little man with the toy hearth-brush for a mustache, seemed shrunken, as if he hadn't had enough to eat, and cold, standing there in the rain. One of the patients ran up to him and tried to stroke his face; another shook her fist at him; another blotted out the whole screen with the shadow of her magnified head. Then something funny happened. I cannot remember what it was, but I laughed, dutifully.

It was no use, I knew that. The laughter had gone; the characters were speaking another language.

‘Shall I go on?' the attendant asked, when Noeline punched Lorna in the stomach. ‘It's really too light to show it, and' — he pointed to the patients, who were becoming more and more restless — ‘the experiment doesn't seem to be working.'

‘A little longer,' the sister said, wiping away the traces of her lonely laughter. ‘It's their bedtime soon, anyway.'

Darkness came suddenly then, as it does in the North, and the film stopped raining, and there they were, the blonde women and the little man and his sad dumb companion, playing his harp, his curls like wheat hanging over his eyes. So it really was the same film I'd seen years ago,
A Night at the Opera
, but it wasn't total laughter because nothing can be total laughter unless it is also total tears, and it wasn't that, either.

Then, towards the end of the picture, by some trick of the light, the rain began again, and the people waved and swam, as if they were drowning fast, and the sound broke down with a harsh cry that turned into a wailing, like the wind in the top branches of a tree. In the opera house, the moon shone; a cardboard palace toppled over and was trampled on; all in silence now.

And then the film ended, abruptly. Someone ran to the black-stained wall and pummelled it with her fists, as if she were knocking at the door of a secret room that would open to reveal the treasure there for everyone to take, as in the story. But nothing like that happened; there were no secret panels.

The attendant placed the film in a flat silver box marked ‘Urgent', gave a scared look about him, and moved towards the door.

‘Bed, ladies,' a nurse called out in a reminding voice.

So we went to bed, assaulted by sleep that fumed at us from medicine glasses, or was wielded from small sweet-coated tablets — dainty bricks of dream wrapped in the silk stockings of oblivion. The shutters were closed across the wooden moon. Outside, in the hospital grounds, where the gardens were, a fake wind shook
the cardboard trees in a riot of collapsing mirth. Then the day's thin scenery toppled over, revealing the true dark. A real wind came blowing clearly, without pretence or laughter, from the cold actual sea, and spread its layers of knives across the empty stage. Unless it was protected by some miracle of faith, tomorrow would bleed, walking here.