Sin City (2 page)

“Would you like to see the library?” I suggest. The library is the best bit of the hospital, small, but very quiet. I've never seen a burn-hole in the library. It's the only room with pictures – proper ones in stiff black frames. The books have pictures, too, or some of them. I've looked at every picture in every book at least a thousand times. Mountains are my favourite. I've never seen a mountain, not a real one.

Carole shrugs. “Okay.”

I walk very slowly in case Carole is on pills. Many of us are. It's a long way to the library, seems longer still this time, with neither of us speaking. The corridors are grey and very cold. Carole's shivering.

“Have my coat.” I wear it all the time indoors. It makes me feel there's more of me.

“No, thanks,” she says. “I'm boiling.” Her voice is wobbly like the ash.

There's rain outside, sleety rain, and the sort of wind that claws, whining through a broken windowpane. I never go outside.

We turn a corner. There's a trail of number two across the lino, human number two. The smell is terrible.

“We're nearly there,” I say, to give her hope.

The library is empty. People prefer just sitting, or TV. Miss Barratt's there, of course. She always is. She's grey as well, but very very clever.

“This is Carole.” I try to keep my voice low. Libraries are like church.

“Hallo, Carole. And what can we do for you, dear?” Miss Barratt wears glasses, but mostly round her neck. She wears them on a long gold chain which twitches when she moves.

“Get me out of here.”

“Come on now, it's not so bad, is it?”

“It's worse than bloody prison.”

Miss Barratt hates bad words, pretends she hasn't heard. “Do you like reading, Carole?” She puts her glasses on, takes them off again, then puts a smile on, keeps it on. She's really trying. Miss Barratt always tries. Her dress is gravy-coloured, her feet are long and thin. “How about a book, dear? Let me get your details down, then I can issue you with tickets. What's your other name?”

“Joseph.”

I hold tight to the bookshelf. “Joseph?” I repeat.

Carole turns to face me. “Yeah, it's Jewish. I'm only a quarter Jewish, actually, and I don't look Jewish at all, not even a quarter. My father's father came from …”

St Joseph must have sent her. Sent her specially when Sandy wasn't there. Sandy's her own age and should be looking after her. But St Joseph made it me. She hasn't got his eyes. St Joseph's eyes are brown, dark brown in all the pictures and the statues, and hers are blue, a greenish-blue with tiny darker flecks in them. Her hair is fair and wavy, lighter at the ends.

Joseph's more like me. Plain and lined and getting on, with thinning hair which comes out on the comb. I always wear a fringe. Sister pinned it back once, but too much of me was showing. We don't have mirrors here, so I'm not sure what I look like. I've never been that sure. I'm on the inside and I look different from the inside. I tried to tell the doctor that, but he didn't understand.

Carole's staring at the floor, trying not to cry. She's been in tears already, I can tell. I think she's sad about her father. She started telling us about him, then her voice went dead.

Miss Barratt sits down at her desk, starts filling in a form. “Norah's quite a reader, aren't you, Norah?”

I don't reply. I'm very slow at reading, but I like it for the quiet. Sometimes I read backwards, start books at the end. The important things happen at the end.

Miss Barratt shakes her pen. It isn't working. “We've got some nice romances.”

“Romances?” Carole makes a face.

“Or Westerns. What sort of thing do you like, dear?”

“Crime,” she says, fiddling with her hair. “Horror stories. Death, funerals, suicides. Mass suicides.”

Miss Barratt looks quite frightened. I try to help her out. “
I
like books with pictures in.”

Carole swings round to the window. “What's that noise?”

“Only the pump, dear.” Miss Barratt tries another pen, a black one. “It's very old, so it makes that sort of roar, revs up every hour or so. You won't hear it once you've been here a few weeks.”

“I'm not staying a few weeks. No fear!”

I cough to fill the silence, feel a dribble from my bladder, try to hold it in. Miss Barratt's writing Carole's name on tickets. “Joseph, C.” I've never heard of Joseph as a surname. There was a Joe in Belstead, but he died, and a female patient who called herself Josephina, but her real name was something else.

Carole walks towards a desk, puts her handbag down on it. “Hey, can patients sit in here? I mean, if you've got some work and stuff, you can do it here?”

“Yes, of course.” Miss Barratt looks relieved.

“I'll stay here then, if that's okay. There's something really urgent I want to get on with, and that other lounge-place stinks.”

She sits down, tips out her bag across the desk-top, finds a sheet of paper with writing on it, scribbled small both sides. I feel excited. She's clever like Miss Barratt. I've stopped her crying. I've brought her to the library. She likes the library. It doesn't smell at all.

I find a chair, sit down very quietly so I won't disturb her writing. She's doing something urgent, writing very fast. She stops a moment, frowning, bites her pen, sneezes, starts again. Words are tumbling down a whole new sheet of paper, black important words. Her legs are twisted round each other. Her shoes are red, and dirty. Her hair is falling round her shoulders – wavy hair, lighter at the ends. She shakes it back, combs it with her pen. I keep my eyes down till she goes on writing, watch again. Her hands are small. She wears five rings, all silver, and a bracelet with a heart on. I'm glad St Joseph sent her.

Carole Joseph.

Joseph.

I smoke Players No.6 because … I smoke Players No. 6 because … because they'll give me cancer, because they waste my money, make me cough. Stop it, girl, you've got to take this seriously. I smoke Players No.6 because I'm dead keen to win this competition and you have to send three rotten cigarette-pack fronts with every entry form. I've never smoked them before and never would again – except I won't win if I tell them that. I smoke Players No.6 because … because I've got to get away, got to have a break. They'll probably take my picture if I win, squeezed between two Names – maybe a DJ and a pop-star, or Miss World and … Imagine Miss Joseph and Miss World! “Nice big smile for the cameras, girls. That's great, darlings. That's absolutely great.”

Blast. The pen's run out and I haven't got a pencil. I'll have to use my eyebrow one, which smudges. If I don't get on with it, I'll miss the closing date. October 16th. Only two days left now.

I smoke Players No.6 because … because … I'm scared and broke and I hate this hospital. I've tried to kick the habit, but I started sweating, shaking, and I sucked so many fruit-drops I put on half a stone. Fruit-drops don't do much for you – not like nicotine. I smoke Players No. 6 because I love my fix. That rhymes. Perhaps I should do it in poetry. At least it would be different. Fix, kicks, six.

Six used to be my lucky lucky number until it let me down. It was September 6th they caught me. I'd noticed the first dead leaves, just that morning on my way to the supermarket, even picked one up, held it limp and faded in my hand. Yet it was summer still for all the normal world – girls in flimsy dresses, the ice-cream man in shirt-sleeves dishing out his Soft-Whip, the smell of rotting peaches. I didn't have a summer, not at all, not this year. I was crying in the shop, sniffling up and down the aisles without a Kleenex. It was Kleenex I took first – a mini-pack. I meant to pay, honestly. It was just that I had to use them straight away, to wipe my eyes. The other things I didn't even want. I don't know why I did it. I still feel frightened if I think about it – not just the police-station and the court and the psychiatrist, but the fact it was me sitting on that bench with a great burly policewoman beside me in a room with khaki walls and a “WANTED” poster just above my head – a smiling rapist. Imagine smiling in your “WANTED” photograph.

All I took was a packet of Kraft cheese slices and a small swiss roll. The swiss roll was past its “sell by” date, and marked down to half price. If I'd really meant to steal, then why take cut-price things, instead of caviare or gin or something? I love swiss rolls – unrolling them and scraping out the filling, eating it first with a spoon. I never did with that one. They caught me at the door. We had swiss roll at school every Tuesday dinner. Cold with tepid custard. I was Somebody at school – even did my A levels. Then my father died, just two weeks afterwards. Molière and Hamlet, then a funeral.

I smoke Players No.6 because my father died. That's true, in fact. He smoked himself, Rothman's Kingsize. We also shared noses and the same colour hair. (I'm nothing like my mother.) I'd been accepted by Southampton and he was so thrilled with me, so proud. His child at university! His nose and hair and mouth at university. They never went, in fact. I turned down Exeter as well. And Keele. I smoke Players No.6 as a substitute for Keele. I smoke Players No.6 because I loved my father best in all the world and he went and died of cancer, killed the summer. Died of Rothman's Kingsize. The doctor said perhaps I want to die as well, subconsciously. With Dr Bates, everything's subconsciously. I smoke Players No.6 because they'll kill me in the end, help me join my father. Want a ciggie, Dad?

God! It's hot in here. Really sweaty hot. They could use it as a sauna if it wasn't for the boiler and those great fat lumbering pipes. It's even got the slatted wooden benches. I hide here every morning, use it as a bolt-hole. The library was hopeless. They wouldn't let me smoke there, and Miss Barratt kept tiptoeing up with books, dropping them on my desk like a dog with an old slipper. Next, I tried the flower-room which at least smelt better than the ward, but those stiff bouquets in cellophane reminded me of death again, and someone always found me anyway. Bathrooms are all right for half an hour, but after that, they always flush you out, make you clean the bath when you haven't even used it. This boiler-room is perfect, if you can stand the killing heat. It's down some steep stone steps, so you feel extra safe, and can use the slats to write on, or lie flat out and doze.

I just can't stand that ward. People wouldn't believe it if they saw the wrecks they keep there. Some of them have been patients since the early 1920s – except patients is the wrong word, since they weren't even ill when they came in. Martha Mead was frog-marched here in 1906 because she stole a loaf – just one loaf and eighty years in hospital. She's ninety-seven now. I could still be here in 2067, a dribbling hump like she is, with my tongue lolling out and my fingers bent like claws.

It was really only chance I landed here at all. Jan went away for just three measly days, and the social worker chose day three to call. Okay, I'd let things go a bit, but I'd planned the tidy up that evening, do my washing, clear away the mess. And I only wasn't dressed because I haven't got a job. What's the point of putting all your clothes on when you've nowhere to go and nothing to get up for? Old Frog-Face just assumed that I was cracking up. I admit I cried and shouted, but if she hadn't come, I wouldn't have. I hate the way she pries, looks in all the cupboards, lifts up fraying edges in your mind. I don't think she believed in Jan at all. The other twice she visited, Jan was out again. It was just bad luck, but she thought I was lying, or confused. I'd hardly invent my best and oldest friend, one I went to school with, one who offered me a home when my father died and my mother went to pieces. If you can call Jan's bedsit home – one crummy room in Vauxhall.

Anyway, Frog-Face dried my tears and helped me mend the Hoover, then went and ratted on me, reported back to someone, so I had to see the psychiatrist again and he suggested Beechgrove. Suggested, hell! You can't argue with psychiatrists. I did, in fact, for half an hour, but the more I ranted on, the more he said it proved I needed help.

Help?

I miss Jan, actually. It seems centuries since I've seen her, though it's only just ten days. She's frightened of the hospital, won't come near it, not a second time. She was meant to bring me in, but she panicked when she got here. She saw two patients just outside the gates. One was male, old male, with his flies undone. He had bought a paper,
The Sun
, I think it was, and he was slumped on the ground, not reading it, but tearing it in strips, very neat and careful strips, all the same shape and size and laid out in a row. The other was female – foreign, obviously, with white hair straggling down a dark and pitted face, and coarse hairs on her legs. The legs were bare. She wasn't doing anything. That was the trouble – there was nothing left of her. No mind, or thoughts, no hope. Just a framework toupéed with white hair.

Jan stopped, right where she was, started tugging at a button on her jacket. It was loose to start with and she'd been worrying at it all morning like a wobbly tooth. “Carole, you
can't
come here. Over my dead body.”

“Don't be silly.” I sounded sharper than I meant to. “Dr Bates is expecting me at ten.”

“Well, ring him up or something. Say you're ill. They should never have sent you to a place like this. They're all mad and old and …”

“What d'you mean ‘all'? You haven't seen them yet. Those two are probably staff.” With Jan, I'd always been the joker. It's hard to break a habit, even when you're about to join the dead.

Jan didn't laugh. “Come on, love. I'll take you back. I'll even take the day off. We'll go to a flick or something – my treat.” The button had come off now and Jan was mauling it, poking it with a finger, chewing on it, flicking her nail against it with a maddening pinging sound. I snatched the button from her hand, cradled it in mine. It looked so weak and sort of hopeless, with no purpose left, no longer one of four, a useful member of a team keeping out the wind; just a bit of bone hanging from a thread. “Okay,” I said. “The flicks it is. I'll just tell Dr Bates, though. He won't mind.”