Authors: Andy Palmer
❊
I’d noticed it only minutes after I’d showered; I stunk. A sour, sickly smell, disgusting in fact; I was quite sure it was the smell of fear, of the devil trying to claw me back. It reminded me of the way the prostitutes smelt, when they used to accost me in town, although theirs was dry whereas this was damp. Maybe it was my body’s sorrow; maybe there were other signs too like those hardened eyes—and I stared once more into the washroom mirror greying, greyed so old and decayed I might have scales on my skin and claws on my toes. All the minutes waiting their turn for the one that would outlive me in this dreadful place. This day I would die, and my body was making its preparations. I would never eat another breakfast, never again brush my teeth, never again feel tenderness. Then all of a sudden through my reflected decrepitude I saw confidence and rebellion, a look I hadn’t wielded for far too long. I wanted to live! But what else was left to me: only despair, or this my nonsensical response to an irrational world?
I took a short walk in the asylum garden. Spring flowers were everywhere including an abundance of wall flowers in yellow and orange—my childhood favourite, and daffodils. Yes, they reminded me of my youth. I stooped and ran my palm gently across the opened flowers, the fresh soft petals brushing my tired old skin; in them I could truly understand the ugliness of all this.
I could see the hidden cameras, the poisoned water, the tentacles, the grey denouncers laughing sinisterly with their Lunatic friends . . . I would tell them to fuck off. They’d be surprised—surprised that I knew—and I could hear the trackers counting; my mind was coming back and things were becoming clearer, those damn pills the blasted numbing gone.
I entered the washrooms, then a toilet locking the cubicle door behind me. I dug a shard of glass from the cistern that I’d hidden there the week before. My heart thudding, I made my way back out and into the milling crowd of the garden. I was nervous but certain, walking on a little further, pushing my way to the middle through a din of voices meshed together, ready for my final claim of freedom; my refusal to be dominated. As I raised the glass to my throat, I closed my eyes and felt a violent jolt, people grabbing as whiteness flooded everywhere like an icing I could almost taste—but shifting, mosaic sands.
❊
To the astonishment of the former Deputy, who had quietly double-checked the legal niceties—under an obsolete law never repealed, institutions housing ‘former citizens who have forsaken their place in society by their actions against it,’ were considered beyond the normal judicial system: in so far as the Governor—having been appointed by the local magistrates—was free to administer whatever justice he might consider appropriate. And the former Deputy himself, as acting Governor, had no intention of challenging Mary over a selfish lecher he’d always abhorred anyway.
For this auspicious occasion—Bedlam’s first execution—Mary had formally requested the involvement of the nearest town, and in response they proudly enticed their finest carpenter out of retirement. Having dismissed the rather popular idea of a Guillotine, due to the inability to procure or produce a suitable blade at such short notice, they urgently constructed a gallows with reference to dogeared diagrams unearthed from the county library: and fashioned from teak because, as Mary put it, ‘everyone should know it’s not going anywhere.’
The following Sunday came without the glimmer of a change of heart. To the contrary, all corners of Bedlam—where few people had known Blofeld anyway—together with the local townspeople, were engulfed by a sense of communal spectacle. Churchgoers religiously pressed their Sunday best; identical chairs were hired and fastidiously arranged in symmetrical patterns with printed names—the Mayor, the Bishop, the head of the Women’s Institute; and due to a last-minute lack of space the overflowing Lunatics were permitted to watch from the Governor’s terrace on the 5th floor, alongside the budgies.
The day’s events began with punch, squash, fairy cakes and a dixieland jazz band that poured it’s comical nonsense from a marquee buzzing with local representatives and minor celebrities, amid flapping flags and bobbing balloons, candy floss and toffee apples. Then, a military band proudly performed a regimental piece, followed by a junior school performance of a seasonal play that everyone knew by heart, to universal delight.
As they stripped Blofeld’s cell, they’d found it stuffed with his paintings—over one hundred in number and catalogued in his own unmistakable hand; the more recent creations of which amply demonstrated ‘moral insanity’: there was one of Olimpio Galasso in a woman’s dress, entitled ‘Giusy Barbita’—it was irrefutable evidence of his guilt. And now those fanciful follies of his formed the hilarious focus of the day’s entertainment as guests partook in a variety of fairground amusements based on their ridicule and destruction, such that Blofeld could be left in no doubt that this day was indeed to be the end of his existence in every sense. And as the day wore on, between admiring comments on the renowned carpenter’s gallows woodwork, the respectable people of the locality threw passing hateful glances at the two chained men, occasionally followed by projectiles of spittle.
The official County Artist made an impassioned technical speech to the patient crowd, criticising Blofeld’s work; enthusiastically refuting its artistic merit step-by-step with his sharpened pencil until the Mayor’s own five year-old daughter—a proclaimed prodigal talent—was invited to paint a fashionable red dress over the nudity of Jennifer Jolly—the only person forbidden to attend.
Frank sat handcuffed to his chair with a sock stuffed in his mouth, face-to-face with Blofeld.
‘This man threatened our way of life,’ Mary declared resolutely in her preamble from the stage, pointing at Blofeld. With the fluency and the mannerisms of an experienced corporate speaker, striding from left to right using calculated gestures, she labelled Blofeld an ‘anarchist, who would lead us back to the dark ages,’ and described with certainty the philosophy of social progress feared by such men—to which the Bishop was to add solemnly: ‘it’s the world through the devil’s eyes.’ The audience grumbled approvingly.
As the appointed hour arrived a silence fell that reminded Frank of a solar eclipse—even the budgies on the Governor’s crowded terrace fell quiet, as Odd led Blofeld in pigeon steps up the gallows
’
stairs, the sound of the dragging chain amplified. Audibly filling his pants with his final meal, Blofeld sobbed so uncontrollably that Frank was staggered the others felt no sympathy.
The Deputy stood behind a wooden lectern borrowed from the Bedlam Chapel.
First placing the tidy noose around Blofeld’s neck, Odd then retreated to the rear of the stage beside a tall brass lever, proudly sporting a burgundy tie embroidered with Bedlam’s newly re-envisaged emblem.
As the former Deputy delivered some random bible excerpts—for he was not a religious man himself—in an exaggerated preacher’s tone, with a tug of Odd’s arm the trap-door swung open and everyone heard the easy crack of Blofeld’s neck. It was almost an anti-climax. For a moment no one knew what to do, looking from side-to-side, then encouraged by their equally uncertain neighbours they began to clap and cheer, the military band kicked-off again its muddled rhythm, people began mingling, and the Women’s Institute brought out the ice cream as the heavy-boned and chained Orderly Gonville Broomhead was rushed out and unceremoniously hanged in the background.
‘Shall we go after the Governor now?’ enquired the former Deputy, hopefully.
‘No,’ replied Mary, who had already thought the topic through thoroughly. ‘I’m not sure it’s in our interest to have him back. He’ll be more trouble for us here than there!’ and with that she briefed Odd to go and find him with a simple message: ‘tell him to disappear, and he’ll be left alone.’
Taking-on his second mission to the gypsies with zeal, Odd dressed himself in the typical clothes of a Lower: denim shirt, track-suit trousers and sports shoes. But despite such thoughtful preparation, as he arrived at the gypsy village he was immediately betrayed—by his natural posture: standing military straight (‘posture distinguishes the classes’, as his father would remind him as a boy) rather than in the stooped way of the Lowers. The gypsies looked at one another, and then with curiosity and fear at his short-cropped blond hair, his soft city face, and his reassured blue eyes. Then, some recognised him from his previous visit, and sniggered.
‘We know of no-one of that name,’ they told him conclusively.
Unable to convince them of his good intentions, he wandered again to the village proper, back and forth he went bemusing the locals with his abstract descriptions and his own peculiar manner. Finally, he realised that nothing was left to him but to return to Bedlam empty-handed once again, with the good news—that the Governor had already disappeared.
‘We should have kept Frank apart from the others!’ snarled Mary to Odd’s vague report. She beat the table with a clenched fist: her problem was far from solved.
For 366 days Frank was confined to his cell on the North Wall.
‘Thank you. What’s happening today?’ Frank would enquire. But the Orderlies had been strictly instructed to return his questions with obedient silence; a silence encouraged by the installation of a Perspex box with revolving door for the delivery of his ‘concentration meals’—a disciplinary nutrition gradually augmented by noiseless gifts: of chocolate, biscuits or cake, from empathetic Orderlies—men who too had lost their freedom in Mary’s new order.
Frank lay in his cell. On his bed. On the floor among the various bugs: his eyeballs tracking their stealthy progress. He would walk to the door, turn, and walk to the window—four steps, or less, or more—he crouched, sat, stood and stared. He tried press-ups. Squats. But as his sentence began to pass he just lay; the physical restlessness abating amid a growing mental calm. From his persistent interrogations he managed to learn that the former Governor had probably been the hilarious bear, and from the subsequent events he deduced that his esteemed friend had indeed escaped—otherwise, why kill Blofeld? Frank also assumed, just like everyone else, that the Governor’s visit had indeed been an aborted rescue of him—of Frank, and so now with a martyr’s sacrifice he resorted to telepathy, squeezing his eyelids tight and gripping his fists, or else scanning as intensely as he was able the horizon from his north-facing window:
‘Leave me here,’ he pleaded, as plainly as he could, in the hope it might reach his friend. ‘I am ok here now!’
It was amongst these days of welcomed solitude, in his sanctuary amid a thousand inmates, that the warm breeze of nostalgia—rather than the icy winds of regret—reached him. In chronological order, for he now had sufficient time, Frank worked through his years revisiting ancient friends and relatives, moments of love and awe—and boredom, and then onto the solemn events of the shocking betrayal that had led to his incarceration: for the possession of ‘obscene literature’—books that had been perfectly legal just fifty years before, such as Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and The History of England (since replaced by The History of European Integration). Frank pictured the historic apartment building he’d admired so much, and the apartment that he’d lovingly refurbished with his own hands and imagination—now inherited by the very same sister that had denounced him: he’d been officially categorised as dead (by the removal of his citizenship). He recalled the extensive pseudo scientific analyses that had led to that—his mind proven ‘unsanitary’ by the same political doctors who then imposed an open-ended confinement—Institutional Rehabilitation—‘for the good of all’. But now, finally, he was over it. He felt ready to continue life inside Bedlam: to make the most of it. These walls work both ways, he mused: here I am protected from all of that.
Following their frantic escape, the former Governor and Dalma had no choice but to leave their beloved circus. Dante hooked them up via a second cousin twice removed, of whom he had many, on a state work group populated with Lower, homeless and gypsy casual labourers. They were a rag-tag gang of aimless souls living from hand to mouth, and the work was filthy, tough and appallingly paid. ‘You won’t last long ’ere,’ remarked Tolstoy sadly, as he dropped them off.
Indeed, the hard labour and meagre rations steadily reduced the Governor until he was as thin as a rake, with a shrunken face indistinguishable from the others, as though he’d been gripped by the claws of another of Mary’s degenerative curses. The Governor and Dalma stuck amongst their own: with the gypsies, avoiding the company of the homeless who would steal as soon as look at you, or else hurl foul abuse mid-sentence; their minds warped by cheap alcohol and drugs. To the Lowers, forever singing their traditional songs, the Governor would cheerfully relate: ‘my great grandfather was a Lower, they called him Red Beard!’ but they remained unamused, returning blank hateful round faces to his simple magic tricks. His public school voice alone was enough to convince them he considered himself superior, which he did, but only because of their manners as they limited their friendship to prying questions and unashamed disapproval with the answers.
Within six months the Governor had lost over thirty kilo to the cause of freedom, and had grown a long mangy beard that he never washed.
He’d begun to dwell on his isolation: he missed the companionship—the camaraderie—of other gentlemen; that uplifting urge to earn their respect: not simply of his Lodge Brethren, but more recently of Tolstoy and Dante—men from a different world perhaps, but men nevertheless who lived according to certain rules and a sense of duty.
‘My own face has become a lie,’ he mumbled each time he caught a reflection of it. And every morning he woke with the same vivid thought: of Frank. It wasn’t guilt, or precisely even an issue of friendship that ate at his masonic soul, but honour, tenacity: a desire to be steadfast; solid. Love, he pondered, is accidental, but friendship is a reward: for the worthy. And how could he ever be worthy while Frank remained locked-up?
‘Frank will be okay: Odd and Mary will protect him,’ Dalma tried, in a variety of ways, to reassure him.
‘No,’ the Governor would answer, ‘they see him as a threat. He doesn’t fear them like the others.’
Gradually, Dalma grew disillusioned with her obsessive Gajo—he had become skinny, disorientated, and serious. Gone were the sexist public school jokes and the rosy red-wine cheeks, the dramatic statements and the boyish enthusiasm, and instead she shared in his improbable schemes and alcohol-fuelled regrets. She tried to console him with the ever-fresh fruits of her body, preparing herself with the tremors of a wedding day virgin and by permitting her new friend—a teenage beauty who worked nearby as a house maid and occasional whore—to assist her in adding pleasure to their love. But the Governor could not find his old self. Dalma would watch him, rigid and passionless as he moved his impoverished frame from one awkward position to the next with neither pleasure nor playfulness: just a wrinkled unidentifiable expression fixed on a wrinkled old face.
‘What happened to my Gajo?’ Dalma pleaded glum-faced to her new friend.
‘You lost him in Bedlam,’ she told her.
Within the year Dalma was secretly celebrating life with a gypsy youth called Marco, who handed her without asking the joy and passion she required to handle the darkness of the Governor’s worsening days.
‘How can I live with myself?’ the Governor would say, crying on her shoulder, until finally Dalma accepted there was no alternative remaining to them: ‘we will go and get him out.’
Universally renowned for his own corpse-like features, Frank emerged after those 366 days of solitary as a portly man.
‘What?’ he protested, at the wall of faces staring back at him.
Barely able to move and disinterested in exercise his whole life, the weight had crept on him, fed by the sympathetic treats from the downtrodden Orderlies, and now the other Residents—who had for so long been awaiting his re-emergence—were aghast.
‘You’re huge!’ they told him in tactless unison.
Frank told them to fuck off, with an air of disinterest, and followed the Orderly to his new cell.
It was during those long months of uncertainty—over what should finally be done with Frank, that Mary had first become aware of Saif Zadir’s renewed presence: Late at night, as she tried to leave realm of reality, she heard his heavy slow breath, then his soft-soled squeaky shoes, his neck chains colliding lightly in the corridor, and his stethoscope being laid against her door. But whenever she ran to once more confront his evil spirit, he was nowhere to be seen. After almost a year of frantic insomnia she materialised at Frank’s bed in the middle of the night—for he was also the only one to whom she could reveal weakness—demanding he contact his gypsy friends to procure an exorcist.
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ he asked grumpily, half asleep. She stared at her fingers, then back at him for a moment, as he put on his wonky glasses—partly for protection, as his awkward sleepy eyes tried to avoid her glance.
‘The gypsies hate me. They’d haunt me themselves if they had the chance,
’
she replied.
‘Well, you’ll have to let me out then. These people don’t use cellphones.’
The former Governor and Dalma conjured the schemes by night that they discarded in the cold light of day. It seemed an intractable puzzle—how to save Frank?—until that very same night when Mary had descended to ask Frank for help: hundreds of miles away, under a full moon having made love again as in the old days, the Governor finally hit upon it: Frank was as big a problem for Mary, as for him!
‘Bedlam Residence.’
‘This is your Governor speaking.’
There was a pause. ‘I shall connect you to the former Deputy.’
‘No. I want to speak to Mary.’
Mary received the call with her natural charm. In spite of everything, she still had a soft spot for the Governor’s chummy nature and independent spirit.
‘Frank is not like the others,’ he explained, ‘as I think you know. He is rebellious and disobedient, and he doesn’t know how to be any other way. You will either need to kill him or let him go, or he’ll be a thorn in your side.’
It was a gamble, but she’d had plenty of chance to do the former. Perhaps she already had? He continued speaking, unaware of his perfect timing.
‘Yes, let’s do it. Let’s get him out
. .
. ’ Mary interrupted
.
‘But I must maintain face,’ and then after a pause, ‘there is one more condition
. .
. ’
‘Yes?’
‘That he brings me back the finest exorcist in the Union.’
Frank was dumbfounded. Having reconciled himself with a destiny of homely hobbies and worked-for pleasures within the safety of the Bedlam walls, he was confronted by two people plotting his unrequested extraction.
‘But I don’t want to leave,’ he told them at a secret rendezvous in the vegetable garden, and shrugged: ‘it’s easier here.’
‘What about your freedom?’ Mary asked, a little sarcastically.
‘I am ready for comfort now, Mary,
’
the plump Frank replied, grinning.
The Governor, bearded and skinny as a rake—dressed as a bin man—was dumbstruck, and looked toward Mary for help.
‘If you stay, you won’t be any trouble?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Frank replied.
‘Then go and find my exorcist, and we shall make you a Resident Orderly like Odd, with an apartment on the fourth. But you must always support me. Do you accept?’
‘Yes,’ and Frank thought for a moment. ‘I want the Governor left alone, he wants to be free. Let him have his circus.’
‘I will mark him as proven dead,’ and she turned to the Governor: ‘we will give you a grave here in Bedlam Cemetery, gratis, for two years.’
‘Most generous,’ the Governor responded.
‘Frank’s treatment will have to be a little more public though,’ she added. ‘We will remove him under the premise of Chemical Rehabilitation. He will then reappear as a refreshed and unflinchingly loyal subject!’ —His rehabilitation would carry the fear of brainwashing home to the others—as the ultimate price for disobedience—whilst providing the perfect cover for Frank’s later reinstatement in a position of obedient privilege.
‘Quite brilliant!’ the Governor remarked, stepping back to admire Mary.
‘Yes, indeed she is,’ added Frank, with a flash of his old love.
‘Well I’ve had enough sleepless nights to think it up!’ she said.
So the following week Frank threw a tantrum worthy of a movie starlet in the canteen, and the Orderlies restrained him with their newly-learnt techniques of minimum force. Returned once again to North Wall solitary with his bugs, Frank was then removed the following day, secured like a madman to a stretcher by the Rehabilitation team in their sky-blue coats, screaming and spitting as he went—and he was delivered to the gypsy village in a grey van. Afforded the welcome of a lost son returned from the dead, there was a banquet of roast donkey and pilfered whisky, and countless slaps on the back.
‘Why do you want to stay in Bedlam?’ they asked him perplexed, again and again.
‘They feed me, give me a bed. I can learn things, read. I’m not bothered about freedom anymore: for me, it doesn’t exist.’
A number of them—convinced he had literally returned from the dead—retired gracefully before dark for fear he would turn into a vampire, while others suspected he was surely now an agent of the Union and so kept their distance behind suspicious eyes and sharp whispers. The majority, however, remained until all the alcohol was gone.
After a few days, Frank—via the necessary hierarchy—had organised a Diwano, and he sat before the elders.
‘An exorcist?’
‘That’s right.’
‘We don’t exactly do exorcism, in your Christian sense,’ the central elder remarked, to sniggers from the crowd. ‘But we do have our own methods against the demons, if that’s what you mean. So perhaps we can help
. .
. ’