The Life and Loves of a She Devil (12 page)

Ruth then took a bus to the job centre, where the unemployed went, for the most part vainly, to look for jobs, and said she wanted work as a prison officer. She gave her name as Vesta Rose and produced a false address. She said she had had experience abroad in the caring professions. She produced her certificates.

‘What a pretty name!’ said the girl behind the desk, idly, before looking up at Ruth and wincing. Ruth had scraped her hair tightly back from her face, which made her jaw look longer than usual and her eyes deeper set than ever. She had regained at Restwood the weight she had lost at the Travelodge. Restwood ladies and staff ate white soft food, high in carbohydrates, low in protein.

‘There’s no work in the prisons,’ said the girl.

‘I understand there is, at Lucas Hill Hospital.’

‘Lucas Hill!’ said the girl, ‘that’s different! They always have vacancies there. Do you really want to go to Lucas Hill?’

‘I have a friend who works there.’

‘Then you understand the kind of place it is? Our responsibility is towards the employee as well as the employer. It used to be called a PCI, a Prison for the Criminally Insane. They’ve changed the name but not the inmates. Ha-ha!’

‘People like that are to be pitied, not blamed, and certainly not laughed at,’ said Ruth, and the girl immediately and nervously rang the hospital and made an appointment for Ruth to see the domestic superintendent.

The Lucas Hill Hospital was a pleasant, new building painted in pale green, and with many cheerful murals on the walls, composed by qualified artists in the manner of children. In the corridors patients walked and stood and barked and yelped, and nurses with dispensing trolleys moved amongst them, dosing and injecting.

Doors closed heavily, with electronic clicks; windows were shatter-proof. There was no need for keys or bars. Some of the nurses were kind; a few were unkind and enjoyed the exercise of power over the helpless. Some were intelligent, most were not. For the most part, staff worked here whom no one else would employ. They were too fat or too thin or too stupid or too vicious or too black or too white or for one reason or another would simply never ever look good in any front office anywhere.

The domestic superintendent did not enquire too closely into Vesta Rose’s past experience. She seemed strong, capable and clean, and was likely to be less dangerous or disturbed than the inmates, many of whom were murderers or arsonists or given to public acts of gross indecency. Arsonists, here as anywhere, were the most feared: sex offenders the most hated. Some inmates, of course, were there by mistake, or had unwisely pleaded insanity at their trials, and so were now incarcerated for an indefinite time, or until they could prove their sanity, which in Lucas Hill Hospital was a difficult thing to do.

Ruth had some difficulty locating Nurse Hopkins. The staff was two hundred strong: the inmates numbered two thousand. She found her eventually on the Emergency Tranquillising Team or ETT, which could be summoned by bleeper within seconds, as necessity on the wards arose. Nurse Hopkins would lay the troublesome, flailing patient out and lean on him or her while a tranquillising injection was administered.

‘I love this job,’ she said to Ruth, over coffee in the canteen. ‘You get to meet such interesting people, and I like to be useful.’

‘Women do!’ said Ruth.

‘Someone has to do the dangerous work,’ said Nurse Hopkins, showing Ruth the scars she had received from hidden knives and gnashing teeth. ‘But it’s better than standing around watching people die. I used to work in an old people’s home. Have you ever done that, Vesta?’

‘Never,’ said Vesta Rose, with a clear conscience.

‘Don’t,’ said Nurse Hopkins, with fervour.

The two women got on so well they agreed to share a bedroom together in the nursing block.

‘I feel safe with you,’ said Nurse Hopkins. ‘A lot of the staff here are nuttier than the patients.’

Nurse Hopkins was four feet eleven inches high and weighed fifteen stone. She had some trouble with her thyroid gland. Her parents, reporting her to the doctor when she was twelve as sluggish, had been required to feed her thyroid extract, fashionable at the time, which had only exacerbated her problem. She felt very cold much of the time, and wore many woollies, mostly bought from Oxfam.

‘Freaks! That’s what we two are,’ Nurse Hopkins would remark, not infrequently.

Nurse Hopkins had several hundred thousand dollars in the bank, left to her by guilty parents, but she enjoyed the security and regularity of working at Lucas Hill Hospital, amongst people more peculiar than she. Ruth suggested that they pushed their beds together, end to end, and removed the footboards, so that Ruth’s toes could be covered at night, and Nurse Hopkins not be too draughty. One so long, and one so short!

‘Mixed together,’ said Nurse Hopkins, ‘we’d make two proper people, though still a bit on the heavy side.’

Ruth applied for work in the dental department of the hospital. It was a busy place. There was an epidemic of biting; many patients were so incorrigible in this respect that their teeth had to be removed altogether. Other patients had teeth too rotten to be saved. The dentist was an elderly man who came from New Zealand, where many a proud father’s present to his daughter on her eighteenth birthday was to pay for the extraction of her teeth and the provision of even, handsome, painless, false ones. He prided himself on his extraction rate, and was grateful to Ruth for her strong, firm, swift hands. Only in a domestic situation, it appeared, was she clumsy; as if her hands had learned to protest long before her mind.

‘No broken teeth and bleeding jaws now you’re around,’ he’d say. He drank a great deal. The dentistry he specialised in — the art of extraction — had quite gone out of fashion, and the only work he could obtain now was in government service.

‘Still, it’s something to be useful!’ he liked to say. ‘These poor people — the dregs of humanity. But they have their rights to healthy jaws the same as anyone else.’

He admired the strength and size of Ruth’s teeth.

‘But I would have preferred to be born with little white pearly ones,’ she said.

‘Then have them,’ he said. ‘Whip your old ones out, and fit brand new.’

‘I mean to,’ she said. ‘But first things first. And I have lots of time.’

‘Women don’t have lots of time,’ the dentist observed. ‘Unlike men.’

‘I mean to put the clock back,’ she said.

‘No one can do that.’

‘Anyone can do anything,’ she replied, ‘if they have the will and they have the money.’

‘We are as God made us,’ he protested.

‘That isn’t true,’ she said. ‘We are here in this world to improve upon His original idea. To create justice, truth and beauty where He so obviously and lamentably failed.’

At this point in the conversation the ETT, headed by Nurse Hopkins, brought in little Wendy, the wretched girl from the Eleanor Roosevelt Ward, to have her top teeth extracted. No amount of Largactil, Triagrine, or electric shock therapy could prevent her chewing her bottom lip away; apart from her need to devour herself she seemed as sane as anyone and a great deal prettier.

‘You see what I mean?’ said Ruth.

‘This is an extreme instance,’ said the dentist. ‘God moves in a mysterious way, that’s all.’

There was a yelp from Nurse Hopkins as Wendy turned her teeth on her helpers, and a rush for syringes, and after that they were too busy to resume the conversation.

When work in the dental department slackened Ruth would help out in the occupational therapy department. Here half the classes made raffia baskets, which the other half would then unravel. Union regulations forbade the selling of goods made by prison labour, and the argument, frequently offered, that this was a hospital, not a prison, cut no ice. Every home where there was a sick-bed, or even a case of measles, would qualify for exemption, once Lucas Hill Hospital was allowed indulgence. Besides, who out there in the outside world wants raffia baskets? Better unwind, unravel. Occupation is all: possessions meaningless.

On Saturday afternoons visitors were allowed in, and on Saturday evenings the prison officers would hold a party with the fruit, cake and wine the visitors had left behind. The inmates could not, for the most part, and in the opinion of the officers, appreciate these delicacies, and experience showed that if given them they became restive and given to complaint. Some even cried, which was an act of regression, and put the day of their release yet further into the future.

To cry in Lucas Hill was a sign of both ingratitude and madness, and was frowned upon. Lucas Hill was a particularly pleasant place the feeling was, staffed by people trained and anxious to help, and to be sane was to be grateful for being there.

Sometimes inmates would escape; they would be promptly brought back by the police and locked into the quiet cell, to teach them gratitude. This special cell was padded and contained nothing except a lidless lavatory bowl. There was a grille in the door, through which cheese sandwiches and cartons of rather good orange squash could be pushed, and a glass panel which the staff could see through, but the inmates not. Patients often stayed in the cell for a week before the door was opened. When it was, they were indeed grateful for what they had and seldom ran away again.

In Ruth’s spare time she went to secretarial and book-keeping classes in the city. These were offered almost free by the government to women and girls. The work was not popular with men, who prefer to dictate letters and spend money rather than account for it. Ruth was a hard-working pupil and progressed rapidly in her studies.

‘Why do you do it?’ Nurse Hopkins asked.

‘Because I am ambitious,’ said Ruth.

‘But you’re not planning to leave Lucas Hill?’ Nurse Hopkins was worried, but not, Ruth thought, worried enough.

‘Not without you,’ said Ruth, and Nurse Hopkins shivered with pleasure, and Ruth was gratified.

One Tuesday evening, when Ruth felt that she had sufficiently mastered the basics of accountancy and book-keeping, she took the bus into the city. She got off at Park Avenue, where Bobbo’s office was, on the tenth floor of a new office block, marble-halled, and with its vestibules alive with the sound of splashing fountain water. Opposite this building was a fast-food restaurant, and here Ruth sat, taking care to be in a dark corner, eating baked potatoes, sour cream and chopped chives at her leisure. She watched and waited for Bobbo to emerge. She had not seen her husband since the day she took her children to the High Tower.

Bobbo came out with a young blonde girl, clearly not Mary Fisher but of the same type, and presumably some kind of secretary or assistant, since she looked both adoring and diffident. He kissed the young woman very lightly and casually goodbye, and they parted their ways, but for a little while she stood looking after him, with longing and love. He did not look back. Bobbo seemed confident, prosperous and well, able to inspire love. He hailed a taxi and, running back across the road to catch it, seemed for a moment to look straight in at Ruth. But he failed to recognise her. Ruth thought that after all that was not strange: they now inhabited different worlds. Hers was unknown to him: those on the right side of everything take care to know as little as possible about those on the wrong side. The poor, exploited and oppressed, however, love to know about their masters, to gaze at their faces in the paper, to marvel at their love affairs, to discover their foibles. It is, after all, the only return they can extract from the daily brutal using-up of their lives. So Ruth would recognise Bobbo, lover and accountant; Bobbo would not recognise Ruth, hospital ward orderly and abandoned mother. Convenient, indeed essential, as it was to her plans not to be recognised, still she resented it. Any lingering spark of compunction, any trace of those qualities traditionally associated with women — such as sweetness, forgiveness, forbearance, and gentleness — were at that moment quite obliterated.

Bobbo caught his taxi. Ruth waited until all the lights on the tenth floor were extinguished, and then made her way to Bobbo’s office. She let herself in with the master key she had taken care to pocket before setting fire to No. 19 Nightbird Drive. Her plans, vague then, centred mostly around the notion that she must practise doing what she was not allowed to do, were now fully formulated.

Bobbo’s office had lately been redecorated in tones of buff and cream. Ruth thought that was Mary Fisher’s taste. Bobbo’s own room seemed more like an hotel lounge than an office; it contained a sofa long and soft enough for agreeable dalliance, with, presumably, such members of Bobbo’s staff as took his fancy. That would not be to Mary Fisher’s taste. The staff themselves—some six of them—shared, with many filing cabinets, rather more crowded quarters than Bobbo himself enjoyed. But that was the way of the world.

Ruth drew the blinds and lit a single spotlight and with the aid of this and one of Bobbo’s pens began work on the files marked ‘Clients’ Account’ and listed under ‘A’. She moved theoretical sums from one ledger to another, signed a cheque for $10,000 payable to Bobbo and made out on his business account into his personal account, typed an envelope to his bank, enclosed a compliment slip, and added it to the pile of letters awaiting postage. It was the custom of Bobbo’s office to post letters in the morning, not the evening, since they were then less subject to loss and delay. She made herself a cup of office coffee, tried the sofa for comfort, tidied up after herself, adjusted the photograph of Mary Fisher, went through the personal drawers of the staff and discovered a love letter or so, kept in the office no doubt to be safe from husbandly eyes, left, locked up properly, and went back to Lucas Hill and the room she shared with Nurse Hopkins.

This process she repeated every week, peacefully working through the files from ‘A’ to ‘Z’ until a great many dollars indeed had been transferred into Bobbo’s deposit account from his clients’ account. She removed any reference to these transactions on Bobbo’s bank statements by simply removing noughts with Tipp-Ex. It had always been Bobbo’s custom to file his bank statements unread, apart from a glance and a groan at his current account. Those who deal professionally with the affairs of others seldom pay proper attention to their own. Nevertheless, Ruth wanted to be on the safe side, although it seemed unlikely that he had changed in this, any more than in his amatory habits: the love of a woman, given and received, will do so much, no more. Bobbo loved Mary Fisher, but liked giving and receiving pleasure from passing strangers, as many people, female as well as male, do.