Engleby (44 page)

The ‘abnormality’ must arise from arrested or retarded development (no); disease (e.g. schizophrenia; no); injury (no); or inherent causes. It’s this loose category that M.E. fits, and his own narrative shows us how.

The crux is that there seems little doubt on the basis of what he has told us that Engleby was indeed suffering from an extreme abnormality of mind, and that this abnormality did substantially impair his responsibility. If necessary, I can go further into the extent to which his personality disorder was shaped by biological factors it was beyond his reasonable capacity to modify.

I respectfully recommend that, if the defendant’s guilty plea is accepted, the court consider making a hospital order under Section 37 of the Mental Health Act 1983. A requirement of the Act is that hospital treatment is ‘likely to alleviate or prevent the deterioration of the condition’. Although medication and psychotherapy are generally of v limited use with such patients, I believe M.E. could easily benefit from both, particularly the latter. I have communicated with the relevant authorities at Longdale hospital.

I put the sheaf of papers back on the desk.

‘Personality disorder’. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If instead of ‘schizoid’ he’d gone for ‘borderline’ personality disorder as his main diagnosis but had been equally unsure about that one too, might he have ended up describing me as having borderline borderline personality disorder?

What a way to spend your life.

But then again, if the court can be made to see it Exley’s way I’ll get to pass my time being scrutinised in a hospital – albeit with razor wire and maximum security – rather than being banged up in a ‘normal’ prison.

I was also shocked to find so much Freud in his report (there was plenty more I’ve spared you). It was rather as if in a paper written by a Treasury economist you found continual reliance on Marxist economics.

Marx and Freud. Blimey. Say what you like about that pair of flat-earthers, they are nothing if not durable. Long after their train has gone, they are still kicking their heels in the station waiting room, grabbing the wrist of any poor traveller with half an ear to listen.

Freud dreamed up the Oedipus theory on the basis of
not
having seen his mother naked on one occasion as a child; and on further supposing that
if
he had, then he
might
have been aroused. And from that triple non-event, he extrapolated a universal ‘truth’. Ah . . . Where would we be without the hard men of science and their rigour?

‘I sometimes seem to myself to have been more of a short-story writer than a scientist,’ he wrote, as though warning his apostles that Anna and Emmy and Lucy and all the other ‘hysterical’ women were merely characters in a book. But he claimed his fictions were true – even when it became clear that there was no such thing as ‘hysteria’, or not as he understood it; even when it was shown that these famous girls whose cures were to form the basis of a human panacea had not been cured at all, but carried on their spastic clacking and paralyses – even when it was clear that they in fact had epilepsy or, in one shameful case, Tourette’s syndrome – named after a former colleague in Paris, a man he’d worked with!

On the other hand . . .

I suppose we don’t really believe that Jesus Christ was literally and actually the son of God. I mean, a few fundamentalists do, but no one else can seriously believe that he was God –‘son’, avatar or incarnation.

But that doesn’t mean his teaching is all worthless. Surely there’s wisdom in much of what he said; and surely we wouldn’t want to throw that ethical baby out with the superstitious bathwater.

And so with Freud. The edifice may have a foundation of guesswork and opportunism; but over the years, as he practised, the old short-story writer – the O. Henry of medicine – may have had moments of psychological insight, may he not? I mean, he was quite a clever man and he spent many years in practice.

And in the search for human happiness, are we really so well off and so pure that we can afford to ignore any such offerings, however tainted their parentage?

Especially if, as now, they seem to be working to my advantage by steering me towards a semi-civilised hospital with ‘medication’, therapy and craft rooms – rather than a Category A, round-the-clock fisting.

Or so I argued as I lay in my cell last night; so I reasoned – so I weaselled with myself.

Twelve

My name is Mike Engleby and I’m in my eighteenth year at an ancient institution. Ring a bell? This one isn’t a university, though; this one is Longdale Special Hospital (formerly Asylum for the Criminally Insane), in the village of Upper Rookley.

It’s 7 March, 2006 and I understand that a film about gay cowboys has just won an Oscar. I’m only 52, but I feel a bit cut off from the world, as you would if you’d spent so much time in here.

But although I feel detached, I think that recently there’s been an improvement in my memory of the past. With this in mind, I think it’s time to bring my account of events up to date. I don’t have access to what I wrote earlier, though I know it’s kept on file here and is frequently referred to by the people who ‘treat’ me. I daresay I could have a look at it if I asked nicely, but I don’t really need to since I can remember everything in it.

My improved recall is frankly a mixed blessing. But the fact is that, after a few hazy years, probably affected by ‘medication’, my memory has not only recovered its encyclopaedic range, it now has fewer gaps and a really tight focus on detail.

Take the day I arrived here, seventeen years ago.

The irritating thing was that I could see very little of Upper Rookley from the back of the van in which I was being driven. When you’re going to be placed in an institution for an ‘indefinite’ length of time, one of the things you must worry about is the view. Odd, this, because I’d never thought of myself as visually alert, but I’d grown mighty tired of the sight of my prison cell during nine months on remand and I was desperate for some longer vista.

The van had a window, but I could only see out if I stood up, and the two prison officers with me were uneasy about that. Nevertheless, I could sense the topography as we turned into the high street, and through the barred, one-way glass of the window I caught a glimpse of the front of the cigarette shop whose backyard had supplied me with goods for Spaso Topley to ship onwards via the Jackson Rears.

I was reassured to see it. I don’t know why.

Another odd thing was that in the five years I’d spent at Chatfield, with all the Monday morning siren practices and ‘sir, sir, Bograt’s escaped’, I’d never had a clear idea of where Longdale actually was. There were no signs to it from the village, and the teenage boy seldom lifts his eyes from the pavement. If Raquel Welch and John Lennon had moved into the cubicles on either side of mine in Collingham, I would have greeted the news with little more than a grunt as I toiled off to Mug Benson’s double French. This is how most people live: alive, but not conscious; conscious but not aware; aware, but intermittently.

What was I thinking in those days? What
was
I thinking? Most of my life has been like that, like a woodlouse under a stone – while, as Newton put it, the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

The van swung left not far from the back gates into Chatfield and began to climb. I was feeling carsick, as you do with no view out, and had vomited twice into a bucket, which the screws had stopped the van to empty by the road. Carsickness is one of the most underrated of trivial ailments; you’d rather die than have it carry on. So when the van finally stopped, the door opened and I was deposited outside my indefinite future home, a maximum security institution with thirty-feet-high walls crowned with twists of barbed wire, I viewed it with intense relief.

The handover from prison to hospital was a category shift (in the Ryle not the Home Office sense of category). Longdale itself was like Chatfield with higher walls: Victorian brickwork drenched with institutional indifference, its towers and windows of abandoned hope; but at the front there was a bright new block, something like a go-ahead primary school. This was the reception area, into which I was led by the prison officers, to one of whom I was still handcuffed. Two ordinary-looking women sat behind a long whitewood counter on bright red office chairs.

Forms were filled. I waited, wondering when I would next see any room like this, something that passed for normal.

Eventually, I was taken forward to a glass door. The screw removed my handcuffs. My shoulder was taken by a hospital employee, a burly young man with a beard, accompanied by an older man in spectacles, who smiled at me.

I was led into a glassed-in area where I was scanned by metal detectors and body-searched. Then they took me to a cubicle where I had to strip. The young man peered beneath my lifted scrotum, then asked me to bend over while he shone a torch up me. Then he peered into my mouth, pointing the light beneath my tongue, and I tried not to breathe on him, having not drunk even water since I’d vomited. They gave me a blanket to wrap round me while my clothes were passed through an airport scanner before being returned. Dressed again, I went through a short glass corridor under closed-circuit cameras that twitched their necks like birds.

After three more doors, one electronic, two worked by keys, I found myself in open air.

I glanced back through the modern transit building to see if I could still make out the prison officers on the other side; but I couldn’t. They were gone, they hadn’t said goodbye.

But I was no longer a prisoner or a criminal; they’d taken off my handcuffs; I was a patient now. My identity was changed, from an object of vilest hatred to something broken that must be cured. The transformation was too much for me to take in; it literally took my breath away, and I gasped.

I asked the men with me if we could stop for a moment. They let go of my arms.

I looked up all round me at the English sky. It was a grey March afternoon: cold, cloudy, any day.

The large asylum buildings loomed in front of me, with their battered doors and original cast iron drainpipes still in place from 1855.

Here was my indeterminate future, my home, and it was no more or less than I deserved: it was merely inevitable and familiar.

I put my head back and sniffed the wind.

I thought I could smell rain.

To begin with, I was pleased to be there. I was no longer ‘Egghead Jen’s Crazed Killer’. They couldn’t call me the ‘Fen Beast’ or ‘schizo Scribbler’ any more.

No. I was an object of concern and care; I was to be scrutinised, medicated, cured – released!

I was compliant with all this up to a point. I was put in a new building, where I had a room of my own with a bed, chair, table and so on. The window, however, was too high to see through. It was barred and sealed. If I stood on the chair I could see a bit of distant green and some buildings, but it wasn’t up to much. I was locked in, and the door of my room, which was made of steel, had a low-level square of reinforced glass through which they could shine a torch at night. It had a rectangular slit through which they could pass newspapers, books, a plastic mug and ‘medication’ without opening the door.

So in fact it was like a cell, and at the start, while I was being ‘stabilised’, I was locked up for long periods of the day. This was ‘for my own safety’ and was a ‘temporary measure’. Eventually, I was given to understand that, if all went well, I would spend the day in various occupational therapy and day rooms, moving about with a degree of freedom. I would then graduate to a dormitory.

They gave me drugs, though I think only because it made them feel they were doing something medical. Some of these drugs made my tongue swell up. Some gave me blurred vision and a shaking hand. Most of them made me feel disorientated and afraid. All of them made me feel thirsty.

Inside my room, I was allowed newspapers, books and a radio. After a good deal of paperwork and letters to my bank, I had access to money of my own with which to buy these things. In general, the experience was better than being on remand in prison, because I did get to leave the room for three or four hours a day; I could go to the toilet, use the showers, walk to the dining room and so on. The staff were not dressed as gaolers but as nurses, though I was told that for some reason they belonged to the Prison Officers’ Association. I didn’t get beaten up, though there were plenty of extremely unstable-looking men that I stayed clear of.

I didn’t like the dormitory (noises from the psychotics, smells, bad hygiene), but on balance I’d say Longdale was also better than Chatfield, down there in the valley. No Baynes, Wingate or Hood. The only thing that nagged at me, even at the start, was the question of how long I’d be there. While a prison term was daunting, it was finite; but the doctors at Longdale were free to review and renew my detention indefinitely.

They say that if we knew the hour and place of our death, we could not go on living. Not knowing when my release might be, if ever, posed similar questions. Or to be precise, just one question: Why bother to go on?

The trial, incidentally, was something of a triumph for my team. Because I’d pleaded guilty to manslaughter, there was no identification issue and the DNA match wasn’t questioned. Two shrinks for the defence and two for the Crown asserted that I was bonkers, but the judge, as Exley predicted, would not accept their opinion without putting it to a jury. Exley let me see the report of the prison medical officer, for the prosecution. It was written – scribbled, actually, in blue ballpoint – on a standard form available from Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. This is what it said.