This part of the hospital was beyond the world of work, it was a secret underworld. From time to time we would pass workers clad in strange suits of protective clothing: wearing rubberised aprons, or plastic face masks, or Wellington boots, or leather shoulder pads. They looked at us inscrutably. It was clear that they were intent on their jobs; maintaining the whine, stoking the hum, directing the howl. It was also clear the Simon wasn’t taking me back to the ward, he had business here. I caught him on a corner.
‘Where are we going, Simon?’
‘To see something, something worth seeing. I promise you won’t be angry.’
‘Can you tell me what it is?’
‘No.’ He wheeled away, calling over his shoulder, ‘Come on, it’s not much further.’
The corridor walls gave way to sections of masonry. Embedded in them were the filled-in remains of long-dead windows. I realised that we had reached the place where the new hospital had been grafted on to its predecessor. There were the marks of cast-iron railings, pressed and faint, like fossilised grass stems. More than ever I sensed the great weight of the hospital crouching overhead. A dankness entered the air; at intervals trickling pools of water seeped up on to the floor. Eventually Simon stopped by a set of double doors, old doors belonging to the former hospital, the top halves glassed with many small panes. He pushed them apart on failing rails.
We were in some sort of conservatory. Round, twenty-five feet across, fifteen feet up the walls gave way to a dirty glass dome, which arched overhead, almost out of sight in the gloom. There was daylight here, filtering down weakly through the tarnished panes. Water dripped audibly. In the centre of the room stood a giant machine for doing things to people. This much was clear from the canted couch positioned halfway up its flank. Otherwise it resembled a giant microscope, the barrel obliquely filling the uncertain volume of the room, the lens pointing directly at the couch. The whole thing was festooned with hydraulic cabling. It had originally been painted a kitchen-cream colour but now it was corroded, atrophied.
Simon and I stood and looked.
‘Good, isn’t it.’ His voice was full and resonant. He’d lost his sullen edge.
‘Yes, very striking. What was it for?’
‘Oh, I’ve no idea. I got left alone one night in casualty and just started wandering about, I found this. I don’t think anyone’s been here for years. Funny, really, because it’s right in back of the MDR.’
‘MDR?’
Simon beckoned me over to the grey-filmed window opposite the door we’d entered by. I circled the giant machine, stepping over the edge of the vast plate that riveted it to the floor. Bits had fallen off the machine — bolts, braces, other small components — but given the scale of the thing, they were large enough to bruise your shins if you knocked against them. Simon was vigorously rubbing the windowpane.
‘Look, can you see?’ There was no sense of sky, or the outside, but light came from somewhere. Outlining a squat blockhouse, clapboarded with massive concrete slabs. It was like some defence installation. ‘That’s the Mass Disaster Room. If there’s ever a nuclear attack, or an earthquake, or something like that, that’s where all the equipment is kept to deal with it.’
‘Well, like what?’
‘I don’t know, no one will tell me. I only found out about it because I came across the door with the notice on it.’
We stood at the window for a while. The conservatorylike room, the giant machine, the blockhouse. All thinly lit by an invisible day. There was something eerie about the atmosphere. The eeriness that washes over when you step obliquely out of a populous area — from a crowded park into a little grey copse — and look behind you at the life that still goes on, children and dogs.
Back up in the ward Busner was hurrying about the place, gathering together all the staff members. A circle of chairs had been roughly arranged in the association area. Anthony Valuam and Jane Bowen were already seated and engaged in earnest discussion when we arrived. Valuam showed no curiosity about where we had been. Simon himself had reverted to sullen, disturbed type as soon as we arrived at the ninth floor. He disappeared into a shifting knot of movers and shakers and was gone from sight.
‘Sit down, Misha, do sit down.’ Busner flapped his poplin-bumped turkey-skin arms. I sat down next to Mimi, the voluptuous nurse, who had been and gone to the optician. The rest of the staff began to trickle into place, auxiliary as well as medical. There were canteen ladies here in nylon, elasticated hair covers, and psychiatric social workers with rolled-up newspaper supplements. They chatted to one another quite informally, swopping cigarettes and gesturing. The patients took no notice of this assembly — which to my mind more than anything else underlined their exclusion from the right-thinking world.
Busner called the meeting to order.
‘Ahm! Hello everyone. We’ve a lot to get through today, so I’d like to get under way. We don’t want to run over, the way we did last month. Before we come to the first item on the agenda I’d like to introduce to you all a new member of staff, Misha Gurney. Some of you will, no doubt, have heard of his father,’ Busner’s face purpled at the edges with sentimentality, ‘who was a contemporary of mine and a dear friend. So it’s an especial pleasure for me that Misha should be joining us on the ward as the new art therapist …’
‘Wait till you hear what happened to the old art therapist …!’ Before I had had time to wheel round in my chair and see who had whispered in my ear, Tom was gone, soft-shoe shuffling down the corridor.
From then on the meeting deteriorated into the usual trivial deliberations that — in my experience — seem to accompany all departmental meetings. There were discussions about the hours at which tea could be made, discussions about shift rostering, discussions about patients’ visitors. My attention began to falter and then died away altogether. I was staring fixedly over the shoulder of a middle-aged woman who liaised with the ward on behalf of the local social services department. Through the two swing-doors, between her and the entrance to the dormitories, I could see Clive. He was staring at me fixedly, or so it seemed; his great globular eyes were incapable of anything but staring. He was rocking from side to side like a human metronome. If I narrowed my eyes it appeared as if his bizarre messianic hair-do was rhythmically pulsing out of the cheek of the middle-aged social worker. This trick hypnotised me.
Mimi jabbed me in the ribs. ‘Misha, pay attention!’
Busner was saying something in my direction. ‘Well Misha?’ he said.
Mimi whispered, ‘He’s asking what you intend to do in the art therapy session this afternoon.’
I started guiltily. ‘Um … well … err. I intend really to, ah, introduce myself to the patients with a series of demonstrations of different techniques and then invite them to show their own work so that we can discuss it.’
This seemed to satisfy Busner. He turned to Jane Bowen and whispered something in her ear, she smiled and nodded, tapping a yellow biro stem on the edge of her clipboard.
Soon after this the meeting broke up. I drew Mimi to one side.
‘Thanks for that, you saved my hide there. I was miles away.’
‘Yeah, absurd isn’t it. Zack’s like most benevolent dictators, he seems to think that by letting us all discuss a load of trivia we’ll feel that we have an important decision-making role in ward policy.’
‘How long have you been working here?’
‘Oh, quite a while. Ever since I qualified, in fact. There’s something about this ward. You might say that it and I were made for one another.’ The middle-aged social worker came over to where we were standing, Mimi introduced us and then they went off together to discuss a patient. The social worker was blushing furiously. It wasn’t until later that I realised she had thought I was staring at her throughout the ward meeting.