As I worked, the association area remained empty. Except for Tom, who paraded back and forth from the nurses’ station to the great windows, to the serving hatch and back to my side, trailing his flushable fashion accessory and a second mantle of smoke. From time to time he paused and struck an attitude of such ridiculous campness that I was driven to stifled giggles. He came back just as I was reaching the higher shelves.
‘I wouldn’t …’ he said.
‘Wouldn’t what?’
‘Touch the work up there.’
I dragged over a plastic chair and stepped up on to it. Now at eye level I could see that the works up here were the top of the range. Simon’s collage, Hilary’s miniatures, Jim’s tableau and a couple of others I hadn’t seen before. One was particularly striking. It was an abstract, constructed entirely out of pieces from The Riddle. The red acrylic squares had been glued together to form a box, open at the top, within which four more pieces had been set, up on edge, facing each other.
Standing on the plastic chair, eyes level with that top shelf, I had a momentary double-take. I whirled round and, too late, heard myself saying something stupid. ‘Well, well, this seems to be where the top dogs put their stuff …’
Tom tugged at my trouser leg. I descended and he gathered me into a huddle in the corner of the great flat room, which was now washed with scummy light. My hand rested flaccidly on the ventilation grill. Tom said, ‘Get out of here Misha.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Get out of here. This is a shit place, the people here are shit people. They’re fucked up and weird, more weird than you can imagine. They’re far more weird than mentally ill people. Mentally ill people are light entertainment compared to this lot.’
‘What do you mean? Explain yourself.’
‘Well, consider Simon, for one.’
‘What about him?’
‘You were there when Valuam assessed him?’
‘Yes …’
‘How many doctors have to examine a psychiatric patient before admission?’
‘Two.’
‘And …?’
‘Well, I suppose I thought that since Simon had plainly been in and out of the ward a great deal it was rather glossed over. Fair enough, really, if a little irregular.’
‘Wrong. Simon’s mother holds a teaching appointment with this ward … she regularly arranges to have her own son sectioned.’
‘It does sound a little irregular.’
‘Irregular! The whole thing is some weird fucking busman’s holiday maan …’ Tom’s arm tightened round my waist ‘… but that needn’t upset our love Misha, we can screw together like Mec-ca-no …’ I pulled away from him ‘… Bitch!’ And turned to see Jane Bowen, regarding me quizzically.
Later that morning, I started drawing up some group worksheets. These are an invention of my own. Large sheets that three or four people can work on at once. I would lay down a basic pattern of lines which the particular group could embroider on, using whatever materials they pleased, or ignore. I worked steadily, with concentration. Two patients who I didn’t recognise were sitting at a table in the association area. They were striking some kind of a deal. From where I sat I couldn’t hear a word they were saying. Every so often one of them, a little ferrety man wearing a yachting cap, leant out from the table to shoot me a stare. It occurred to me as not unlikely that the deal they were discussing with such attention to detail was, in fact, meaningless.
Eventually I heard a murmur of voices that suggested agreement. I turned to see them exchanging stacks of pieces from The Riddle. The acrylic squares had been threaded on to a cord or wire of some kind, through a hole pierced in the corner of each piece. The two men both had necklaces entirely constructed from the discarded elements of the pop psychological pastime.
The group worksheets took me all morning. No one paid any attention to me any more. I could see now that the atmosphere of the ward was as sodden as compost. It only took a matter of hours for any given individual to be enmeshed, and start to decay. I was yesterday’s novelty.
Busner wasn’t about. Valuam and I exchanged strained salutations, sometime in the empty mid-morning. He had a snappy little check number on today. His footsteps were even more like clockwork, more pathetically authoritative. I thought to myself, what exactly am I doing on this ward? I don’t need the money. I’m not sure that I altogether believe that my particular skills can help the patients. Busner’s cynicism had certainly had the effect of dampening whatever residual idealism I had had — I wonder if that was his intention?
Around noon a middle-aged patient called Judith had a partial fit in the short corridor that led from the association area to the women’s ward. At first it seemed as if she was simply having a rather heated exchange of words — albeit with herself. But this escalated into hysteria. She vomited as well. Mimi and another nurse arrived very quickly, while I was still standing, poised between the inclination to pretend I hadn’t noticed and the desire to show that I could cope. The nurses smoothed Judith’s limbs, set her on her feet and led her away. The vomit and distress was somehow accounted for and absorbed.
I was conscious all morning of wanting to avoid Tom and Simon. I didn’t really want to see Jim either. I ate lunch alone in the dining-room set aside for staff. I couldn’t understand why I was meant to be there. None of the other staff from the ward were. Later on it transpired that it was someone’s birthday and they had all gone for a drink in a pub across the road.
In the afternoon I got the patients who turned up to try and do something with the worksheets. Some of them were interested, some were immersed in their own projects. Clive turned out to be a surprisingly effective group leader. He dragooned three rather sheepish depressives into snaking wet trails of paint up and down the large gridded sheet. Their regular actions formed swirl after swirl. He stood back and surveyed them at work like some sort of gaffer. Looking at Clive, his jaw working, rocking as ever, I remembered that he was meant to have been discharged today. I wondered why he was still on the ward, but his pop-eyes, his shiny elbow pads, dissuaded me from asking.
Neither Tom nor Jim appeared for the afternoon session. The model flyover stayed on its shelf. Simon cut and pasted his collage. He had lost interest in me as well. He had reverted to the exaggerated, scab-picking parody of surly adolescence. I wondered where Mimi was, with the faint, sickly lust of an adolescent. I wondered if she had thought me a wimp, or chicken, for not helping out with Judith.
The afternoon ended and I was headed for the lift. This time it was the door to the cleaning cupboard that swung open an invitation. Her buttocks pulsed and scrunched against a plastic sack of soda crystals. Once again it was sickeningly brief. But this time before she left she made me eat two small, green, candied pills.
‘What are these?’ I said.
‘Parstelin — it’s a compound preparation of the MAO inhibitor tranylcypromine and trifluoperazine. It’s not recommended for children.’
‘Why should I take them?’
‘To understand, dummy. After all, since you aren’t mad, they won’t have any effect on you, will they?’ Her voice was offhand, light, mocking. It was no big deal.
‘S’pose not.’ I dryly swallowed them.
‘Don’t eat any cheese, or drink Chianti. You might have a bad reaction if you do.’ She slid out through the gap in the door. One breast, delineated by soiled nylon, and again by ridged cotton, was outlined against the doorjamb for a moment, and then gone.
The rest of the week passed on the ward. I carried on with the worksheets and seemed to be making some progress. Increasing numbers of patients came to the afternoon art therapy sessions and stayed to try their hand. I started to get on well with the quieter patients. This was a mixed blessing. On more than one occasion Hilary held me prisoner for over an hour with talk of her friends, and the mechanics of her exact rendition of them as watercolour images. Likewise Lionel, the mysteriously psychotic accountant, was intent on sitting down with me on Thursday afternoon, a companionable arm about my shoulders, and together we leafed through glossy sales brochures for office equipment. Each article was a revelation to him; one he viewed purely aesthetically. ‘Look at this one,’ he said, gesturing at a modular workstation done in mushroom, ‘lovely, isn’t it?’ It was all I could do to mumble assent.