Authors: Andy Palmer
A week later a famous face appeared in the village: none less than Queen Sissy herself. She materialised in the wildest of her fanciful rags, embellished with elaborate costume jewellery, an absurd hat and vibrant stage make-up, revising beneath her breath the ancient gypsy chants she imagined sufficient to send Zadir back to the waves. She was accompanied by Tolstoy, stood proudly at her side, honoured now with the responsibility for her safety: he stared at everyone sternly as though trying to read their minds, as they were introduced.
‘Your friend, Gajo—your old Governor, is my friend!’ Tolstoy told Frank intensely, slapping Frank’s new-born belly with the force of a lesser man’s punch.
‘Mine too,
’
Frank wheezed.
Then, as Mary arrived with Orderlies on either side, the whole village held its breath, terrified, and refused her entry to any of the shacks. Queen Sissy stepped forward to greet her.
‘Can you do it?’ Mary asked, without pleasantries.
‘I saved my man from the demon drink, and so shall I save you from the dirty doctor.’
There was no doubt in the gypsies
’
minds that Mary was indeed possessed, or even perhaps evil itself, and they got straight to work: Sissy performed her heathen rhymes amid the trash, the village her audience, backed by the feint hushed corrections of the elders (who had themselves refused the task): but no-one doubted her sincerity. As dusk fell, theatrically encircled by flickering candles, she dripped bitter root extract into Mary’s mouth—who lay flat on the ground—and instructed the others to begin as instructed: to mumble their popular prayers in the incoherent manner of the Catholics—to impress the guests, whilst Sissy herself shrieked and pleaded and demanded in her intangible tangle with Saif Zadir.
She threw in some pilfered christian passages: ‘You are banished by the angels! Be tormented with burning sulphur! The smoke of your torment shall rise for ever!’
She raised her arms:
‘Depart, then, depart, accursed Aeshma! fallen spirit, depart with your deceits and seductions!’ and with that she sprinkled them all by surprise with a brown liquid the elders had prepared in secret. She held a fig leaf against her own chest with one hand, then lay the palm of the other hand on Mary’s forehead. With a jolt, Mary began to fight for breath, Tolstoy stepped back.
‘Go!’ Sissy ordered wide-eyed, as though staring at something the others were unable to see: ‘the desert is your home! The serpent is your dwelling! Be humiliated and cast down! For though you have deceived many, you cannot make a mockery of the gypsies! We have prepared fires for you!’
And Mary was never to be disturbed by Doctor Zadir again.
❊
The mist began to clear. I felt a calm wash through my body. Above me stood my grumpy old colleague Frank, older now though more healthy-looking than I remembered him: and smiling. Beside him a woman. I gazed at her. She really was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, her skin so magnificently pale against her rust-coloured hair. The way she stood, the way she smiled—beautifully, her eyes with their look of wisdom, vulnerability and imagination, set like gemstones in a face trimmed with skin devoid of any memory of the years and places that had seen her; a face you know will still be beautiful when it becomes old. She smiled. When beautiful people smile, they become more so, I thought, while the rest of us look like ghouls. Then, I was listening to the way she spoke but not the words, the expression in those eyes and how the upper lid would arch while the lower remained flat, all the time, like she was about to say something wonderful or thinking about something unique, full of dreams and secrets and life. She was magnificent. I smiled inanely.
‘Ollie, do your remember me now?’ Frank asked, and I nodded slowly. ‘I am a Resident Orderly here,’ added Frank, matter-of-factly. ‘I had you pulled out of the Psychiatric Ward: You are now off the drugs. This is Mary, she runs the place.’
‘You will move in with me,’ Mary said.
‘OK.’
Frank was surprised, but pleased: despite their old affection, Mary had never belonged to him, nor he to her.
A man with clear blue eyes dressed identically to Frank walked in, put his arm around him, then looked toward me.
‘Hi, I’m Odd.’ They stood awkwardly side-by-side.
Odd beamed, then turned back to Frank: ‘By the way, I’m thrilled with your progress, my old friend.’
As my memory came flooding back, I discussed with Mary the dreams I had chased, and those I had never done anything about. She said: treasure your dreams, because they are the only thing that is yours. But no, I was thankful to be freed of them: that myriad of missed chances and indecision, of guilt and expectations that had preoccupied and frustrated my decades. With Mary, as once with Noëlia, the air tasted fresher, the sun seemed sharper: I felt my heart beating hard as we talked and joked and fell in love. We told each other: ‘I love you’, so many times—we came to believe it, and she whispered: ‘I love your hands and your eyes, the little wrinkles, the dimple in your chin, yes, I love your hands and your arms, your smile … ’ such that I could forget my own ageing and that awful creeping ugliness that would stare back at me. She delivered indeclinable shameful pleasures at the back of the communal washrooms; in the tool shed on the vegetable garden within spitting distance of labouring Lunatics; and upon the desecrated grave of the former Governor—and nothing would make her stop: beneath a canteen table; propped-up in a concrete stairwell; bent over the former Governor’s colonial antique oak desk, then before the mass of overgrown yellow roses on his south-facing terrace whilst we pretended to admire the view. From respect, or fear, the Residents and Orderlies tried not to notice. And for secret excursions we donned common disguises to run through public parks kicking autumn leaves in the air, or walked absent-mindedly swinging our legs, eating ice cream, before returning to laugh at the Orderlies with their grumpy Lower faces and ogre-like physiques. I’d never imagined such a life before: that this could satisfy me; that this was all I needed.
I
thought
of the great men in the world: the actors, the musicians, the inventors; the people I had once longed to be, because in that moment I knew I was greater than they. I had happiness!
Even marriage! The greatest ogre of them all, sharing happiness, how easy, a logical consequence!
‘Ollie, may I have a word?’ It was Odd.
He led me into the Prefects office. Frank was already there, identically dressed.
‘This may seem a little unorthodox,’ Odd explained in slightly hushed tones, ‘to make such an offer to someone so new here, but you are a former Senator, and you do have rather valuable skills.’
‘I do?’
‘Yes. We would like you to become a Prefect, responsible for conjugal relations. Frank has been telling me about the wonderful work you did for the Union.’
‘I did?’
‘Yes, in my opinion: you prevented people from getting hurt. You could do the same here, don’t you think?
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Ollie, you should perhaps understand something about this establishment. You only get out what you put in. Umm, perhaps “get out” is not the best term,’ and he turned to Frank and smiled.
‘I’m sharing with Mary,’ I responded. ‘I live in her beautiful apartment on the fourth. What more could being a Prefect give me?’
‘Self-respect, Ollie, self-respect. A woollen jacket,’ and he lovingly caressed the fabric of his own lapel, then gestured toward his feet, ’leather shoes—in grey though.’
‘That sounds nice,’ I replied, attempting to conceal the sarcasm.
‘And people here will show you respect. You do want that, don’t you? You will become an important man, and on your own merit. You should always remember to consider your future, Ollie,’ Odd said, intently, and Frank pulled a facial expression as if to refer, good-humouredly, to Mary’s recent scorn toward him.
‘Ok. I’ll do it.’
The following Monday an extraordinary meeting was held in the Great Hall, attended by all the Patients and the most prominent Lunatics. Mary announced that Bedlam was to employ the most up-to-date methods of relationship management as to be found anywhere in the Union: ‘From now on, partner choices will no longer be left to the mercy of our immediate emotions and particular circumstances, but rather to the outcome of professional and subjective analysis to determine the best interests of each party, and of the community in general.’
I became an instant rockstar. People smiled at me, shook my hand, and seemed genuinely pleased to see me: I suppose, nobody wanted to make an enemy of me. I slipped on my woollen jacket and my grey leather shoes, and settled into my small office on the third, a former storage cupboard, where I decided to maintain a strict open-door policy during working hours: 9:30 to 11:45, every Monday, Tuesday and Thursday, except Union holidays.
It was only my second day, when Jennifer Jolly appeared, in all her naked glory:
‘I want a relationship.’
‘With whom?’
‘That’s your job.’ According to her file, Jennifer was a little simple—or at least straightforward, due to oxygen deficiency at birth. But her rationale made perfect sense.
‘Is there anyone you like?’
‘Blofeld. You don’t know him. He was hanged.’
‘I see. Anyone else?’
‘No.’
I spent the next few days milling around trying to come up with ideas: who could make a suitable partner for this erratic, but vulnerable, virgin? It began to occur to me, that for all my experience at Morality and Culture, I had in fact attained no proficiency at all.
Then, at the very moment when it dawned on me that the former Deputy himself might make a positive and constructive match, Odd appeared:
‘Ollie, come quickly,’ and he waved frantically. I followed.
All the Prefects were there, the former Deputy, Mary and Frank too. We all hung around feeling lost in Mary’s cavernous office; the former Deputy looked particularly grave.
‘The Union is withdrawing funding from Rehab asylums,’ Mary said, ‘but we are free to continue as private concerns—it’s privatisation, if you like. We will need to pay rent, and residency payments from the Union will reduce to zero over the next few years.’ We were stunned: most of us had spent our entire lives in the public sector.
‘Those Residents who are not productive will have to be released to the forests,’ she added.
‘But get them well away first, or they’ll rob us blind,’ Odd remarked, panic-stricken: under Mary, Bedlam, with the aid of the institutional compulsory purchase decree, had bought-up large areas of farmland around the institution—beyond its walls, and they could now become vulnerable to rampaging former Residents facing starvation: Bedlam had become a significant regional producer of asparagus, strawberries, apples and cheese.
‘Why would they do this?’ Frank asked.
‘The Union is bankrupt, they can’t afford follies like this anymore,’ replied Mary. ‘It’s cheaper to militarise the police. Anyway, they know the Residents are no longer a threat, and being left to the forests is as intimidating to normal people as Rehabilitation ever was.’
‘Frank,’ she went on, ‘analyse every Lunatic—those with families, ask them for an annual fee, or threaten to send their Lunatic home—find out who is worth keeping.
‘Odd, take the van and leave the ones Frank rejects at different locations . . . ’
‘Shouldn’t we give them some food, tools maybe? Tents?’ Odd asked.
‘No. Nothing. If the Union cannot afford them, neither can we. We will become a Company, so we need to begin thinking like one. And a real one: a private company, owned by it’s leaders: the Prefects, the Resident Orderlies, the former Deputy here, and me. The Orderlies will continue as paid staff, although we can let some of them go.’ It seemed that Mary had thought of everything.
Odd left the room and returned with a bottle of Scotch and a wobbly stack of glasses, and we drunk cheerfully to our new enterprise, excited by the promise of financial independence.