Simon came over and asked me for scissors, glue and stiff paper. He took a half-finished collage from one of the cupboard shelves and sat down near me. It depicted the machine he’d taken me to see that morning, but recreated out of pictures of domestic appliances cut from colour magazines. I went over and stood by him for a moment. He smiled up at me, cracking the pusy rime at the corners of his mouth.
‘Unfinished work, left it when I last went out …’ He bent his dirty carrot head to the task again.
I confined myself to handing out materials. I sensed that now was not the time to comment on the work that the patients were doing. When they began to trust me they would volunteer their own comments. There was a still atmosphere of concentration over the bent heads. I went and stood by the window, listening to the faint sounds of the hospital as it worked on through the afternoon. The distant thrum of generators, clack of feet, shingled slam of gates and trolleys. On the balcony below, two chronics in blue shifts struggled clumsily with one another, one of them bent back by the other against the parapet. I stared at their ill-coordinated aggression for a while, blankly, sightlessly. The ‘O’ I was looking at resolved itself into the stretched mouth of a geriatric. At the point where I snapped out of my reverie and realised I ought to do something an orderly appeared on the balcony and separated them, dragging the younger one away, out of sight beneath my feet.
Eventually I went and sat down at a table occupied only by a curly-haired man who had lain his head in the crook of his arm like a bored schoolboy. He was doing something with his other arm, but I couldn’t see what. We sat opposite one another for ten minutes or so. Nothing happened. Around us the workers relit cigarettes and built up the fug.
‘Psst …!’ It was Tom. ‘Come here.’ He gestured to me to join him and Jim. I went over. They were working diligently on the altarpiece. Jim was doing the painting, it was Tom’s job to wash the brushes and mix the colours. Jim had finished on the blue-brown surface of the road and was starting on the white lines. Tom was pirouetting lazily, a pathetic string lasso dangling in one hand, his voice modulated to a crazy Californian dude’s whine; he had the part down pat. But wrong.
‘That man there.’ He pointed at the curly-haired man.
‘Yes.’
‘He’s a real coup for Dr B.’
‘How so?’
‘Cocaine psychosis, authentic, full-blown. Used to be an accountant. Not just some scumball junkie. A real coup. Dr B diagnosed him, all the other units around here are real sore. Go and see what he’s doing, it’ll crack you up. And on your way back bring us another beaker of water, OK, fella.’
I did as I was told. Passing by Lionel, the drug addict, I bent down to pick up an invisible object and looked back to see what it was he was hiding in the crook of his arm. It was nothing. He was deftly picking up and ranging his own collection of invisible objects on the tiny patch of table. As I bent and looked he turned his face to me and smiled conspiratorially. His eyes stayed too long on my hand which was half closed, fingers shaping the indents and projections of my own invisible object. I hurriedly straightened and walked off down the short corridor to the staff kitchenette.
Halfway down on the left I noticed a door I hadn’t seen before. It had a square of glass set into it at eye level, which cried out to be looked through. I stepped up to it. The scene I witnessed was rendered graphical, exemplary, by the wire-thread grid imprisoned in the glass. It was a silent scene played out in a brightly lit yellow room. A man in his early forties, who was somehow familiar, sat in one of the ubiquitous plastic chairs. He wore loose black clothes and his black hair was brushed back from high temples. He was sitting in profile. His legs were crossed and he was writing on a clipboard which he had balanced on his thigh. His lip and chin had the exposed, boiled look of a frequent shaver. The room was clearly given over to treatment. It had that unused corner-of-the-lobby feel of all such rooms. A reproduction of a reproduction hung on the wall, an empty wire magazine rack was adrift on the lino floor — the poor lino floor, its flesh scarified with cigarette burns. In the far corner of the room, diagonally opposite the man in black, a figure crouched, balled up face averted. I could tell by the lapel laden with badges, flapping in the emotional draught, that it was Jane Bowen.
The rest of the afternoon passed in silence and concentration. At 5.40 I gathered in the art materials and stacked all the patients’ work in the cupboard in as orderly a fashion as I could manage. It took some time to tidy up the art materials properly. The patients for the most part stayed where they were, hunched over the tables, seemingly unwilling to leave. Tom and Jim muttered to one another by the window. They had the pantomime conspiratorial air of six year olds, still half convinced that if they didn’t look they couldn’t be seen.
I found Busner in his office. He sat staring out of his window at the lack of scale. On the far corner of the hospital a steel chimney which I hadn’t noticed that morning belched out a solid column of white smoke. Busner noticed the direction of my gaze.
‘A train going nowhere, eh, Misha?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it’s true. We’re a holding pen, a state-funded purgatory. People come in here and they wait. Nothing much else ever happens; they certainly don’t get appreciably better. It’s as if, once classified, they’re pinned to some giant card. The same could be said of us as well, eh?’ He shivered, as if he were witnessing a patient being pierced with a giant pin. ‘But I’m forgetting myself, don’t pay any attention, Misha, it’s the end of a long day.’
‘No, I’m interested in what you say. The patients here do seem to be different to those I’ve met at Halliwick or St Mary’s.’
‘Oh, you think so, do you? How’s that?’ Busner swivelled round to look at me over his glasses.
‘Well, the art work they do. It’s different … it’s … how shall I put it … rather contrived, as if they were acting out something. Like Tom’s behaviour.’
‘An involution?’
‘That’s it. It’s a secondary reference. Their condition is itself a form of comment and the art work that they do is a further exegesis.’
‘Interesting, interesting. I can’t pretend that it isn’t something we haven’t noticed before. Your predecessor had very strong views about it. He was a psychologist, you know, very gifted, took on the art therapy job in order to develop functional relationships with the patients, freed as far as possible from the dialectics of orthodox treatment. A very intense young man. The direction the patients have taken with their work could well have something to do with his influence.’
Busner started stuffing his case with paper filling, as if it were a giant pitta bread. ‘I’m off, Misha. I shall see you in the morning, bright and early, I trust. I think it would be a good idea if you really sorted out that materials cupboard tomorrow.’
‘Yes, yes, of course.’ I got up, scraping my chair backwards and left the office. In the corridor the long lights whickered and whinnied to themselves. The ward was quiet and deserted. But as I passed the door to one of the utility cupboards, it suddenly wheezed open and a hand emerged and tugged at my sleeve.
‘Come in. Come on, don’t be afraid.’
I stepped in through the narrow gap and the heavy door closed behind me. It was dark and the space I was in felt enclosed and stifling. There was an overpowering odour of starch and warm linen. I almost gagged. The darkness was complete. The hand that had grabbed my wrist approached my face. I could feel it hover over my features.