The Offering (3 page)

This morning I am sitting in one of the high-backed chairs in the lounge, gripping
Wuthering Heights
, unable to raise it from my lap because of nausea, unable to read because my eyes will not convert the markings on the page into thoughts, unable to speak because of an exhaustion too profound for words. This is a bad day. In a while, having done my hour here, I will ask if I can go and lie down. Someone will bring the wheelchair and take me to my room where I will get into bed (though I will not sleep) till dinnertime. Whereupon I will sit up, try to eat something, lie down again and wait for bedtime (a term itself meaningless, so much of my time being spent in bed). Upon which, too sick to sleep, I will toss until morning. Whereupon, too sick to rise, I will begin another day. On very bad days I cannot wake up at all; sleep is a pit I fall into and clamber out of, again and again.

It is sunny this afternoon but cold. All day Lethem Park has been slumbering beneath a thick layer of frost. Birds peck frantically at the ground; trees creak; what leaves remain shiver, I imagine. For we are unaware of these struggles here, cocooned as we are in our gauze of central heating, drugs, fitted carpet. With the humming of the boiler, we cannot hear the stillness that has wrapped the world beyond the window-pane. The seasons pass by like pictures in a book thumbed too quickly.

I pressed my fingers through the bars of the long window by the exercise bike on the landing today, trying to feel the cold, and could not; like the souls it encases, the window is double-glazed. Yet I live for the moments when the natural world interacts with my own, for the sound of rain on glass, wind in the guttering, the smell of pine needles in the lounge at Christmas, the feel of a butterfly’s wings against my palm; for those moments when I can touch something beyond the boundaries of this world.

Once, during a storm, I got as far as the fence. We were walking back from the post office, Robyn and Brendan and Margaret and I, with our weekly ration of sweets. The clouds that day reminded me of those at the farm when the apples turned bad and the lightning struck the chimney. They made my skin crackle and my hair stand on end. We were turning into the courtyard when I broke rank and began running towards the fence. As I began to run the heavens opened. Air seared my lungs, the gale pummelled me. I could taste iron and sulphur and soil; I was elbows and knees, a child in dungarees, my heart in my cheeks and my lips and my eyes. And for the rest of that day, after Margaret’s remonstrations, after the visit to the Platnauer Room – (‘How did you manage it?’ they asked. ‘Some days you can’t even walk to the lounge’; I wanted to, I said. I do not want to walk to the lounge) – after the removal of privileges, the talk about trust and responsibility, I felt it still, a gentle throbbing, not unlike, I imagine, a virgin must feel after her deflowering; a call to further forays. They did not let me go out again after that. Margaret seemed to take it even harder than I did. Why did I do it, she asked: I, who enjoyed walks more than anyone? Didn’t I think there would be consequences? I told her that at that moment I was not thinking of anything at all.

I sometimes imagine taking these brothers and sisters of mine back to the farm. We would cram our mouths with wild strawberries, run naked through the long grass, bathe in the river and play in the wood. We would sleep beneath the sky, dew drenching our bodies, aching in cold and roasting in heat. I would ask the land to refine us, separate us from ourselves, sift the good from the dross and the wheat from the chaff, as it does for each of its children, the stones and the creatures and trees. First pleasure, then pain, which are one and the same, until we became impermeable as stones, as light as air, no more than process, an event, infinitely transferable. Undead. Like the soil under our feet.

I would ask the land for release.

At this moment the park as seen from the garden doors resembles a painting by Turner. A haze of golden moisture blurs the horse-chestnut trees and the spaces between until there is nothing left but a sea of light interspersed by gigantic shadows. It is, I suppose, quite beautiful.

It is now the time of our mid-afternoon ‘Chill’. We have just been medicated. Pam, mousy hair short as a marine’s, huge-shouldered in her pink mohair jumper, is completing a jigsaw on the carpet in a pool of sunlight, laying the pieces in patterns of her own. Robyn – blue-veined, white-skinned, fragile as a bird, hair so fine I can see the skull gleaming through it – is moaning, a meaningless sound we would miss if it stopped. Eugene – rotund, ruddy, blond, sprinkled with eczema – is rubbing his groin with sausage fingers in an abstracted but vigorous way. Miriam is watching television, her eyes half closed and her mouth open, her tongue lolling loosely on her lower lip as if she has just stopped breastfeeding. Sue is reading a magazine, though not really reading it, I think, only passing the time. Pete the male nurse is playing snakes and ladders with Mary, and Margaret is knitting, her large hands almost obscuring the article she is making, which from what I can make out is white.

As for Brendan, he is sitting on the floor, fingers in his ears, bent over
The Cosmological Principle
; page fifty-nine, no doubt, though it may be page sixty. His arms are extended like two small wings and I wonder, as I have wondered many times before, how he manages to keep them raised so long. I watch him read and rock till he comes to the end of the page, then stop. To turn over he must remove one finger from his ear. He sits thinking, jerks his head towards the book, then his elbow. He groans loudly, half rises and sits down again.

Margaret says: ‘All right, Brendan?’

He begins rocking again. After another few agonized minutes he removes his finger from his ear for a split second before reinserting it, shaking his head vigorously as if to say: ‘That wasn’t a good idea at all.’ Now he gets up and walks around the book with his tiny shuffling steps, his skeletal limbs resembling those of a mantis, making small movements towards the book as if it were a hot coal he must pick up without gloves. Then the desire to turn the page and the horror of doing so finally confront one another and he stands, prancing on the tips of his toes, his face twisted into a paroxysm of terror for a few seconds, before darting at the book and turning the page at the last moment. Once he has done so, his face fills with wonder and relief; he sits down and shuffles forward on his crossed legs, bending so far over the book you would think it would be impossible for him to read at all; but he is reading, his head is moving back and forth, and presently he resumes rocking as well. There is a joyful light in his eyes. The light will last until he has reached the end of the page, at which point they will once again cloud with terror.

Brendan refused his lunch again today. He is more twitchy than usual. I suspect it is all to do with the arrival of Dr Lucas; Brendan is our weathervane, our thermometer, our canary in the mineshaft. Any slight alteration, he registers first. I wonder whether the doctor has made changes to his treatment too or whether he is just responding to the general alterations Dr Lucas has made.

Of which there are many. No one is to be exempted from the dining room any more unless they are physically ill; Sue and Margaret are no longer supposed to touch us unless it is to restrain; a penalty system has been introduced with a board in the lounge, on which the nurses must make black marks if we are disobedient and red marks if we are good (Brendan has three black marks against his name, I have one); only those who accrue no black marks are allowed to go to the shop every Saturday (this does not include me because I forfeited my right to go to the shop when I ran to the fence); dinner is now to be eaten at a single sitting by multiple wards at once; and last, but perhaps most importantly, Dr Lucas has cut our meeting time with the panel every third Wednesday.

I was astonished when I heard of this: appearing before the panel is our opportunity to voice our concerns with the board of doctors. Those patients who cannot voice their own concerns are represented by a nurse. Each of us used to get half an hour and though I always had reservations about how effective it was, as even then the doctors did most of the talking, at least it gave me the illusion I mattered; that in theory, at least, I could contribute to my own treatment.

‘What do we do now?’ I asked Margaret. ‘Who do we go to if we are worried about something?’

‘Dr Lucas,’ she said.

‘But he is the one devising our treatment anyway,’ I said. ‘Can’t we speak to one of the other doctors?’ We looked at each other.

‘Apparently not,’ she said.

She seemed worried. What will things be like months from now, for this is only the beginning? I wondered. And then the concept of a beginning, like that of an end, loses all credibility. Here at Lethem Park it can never be other than Now.

It is for this reason that if you asked me to tell you what Lethem Park is really like, I would not describe my fellow inmates, our everyday activities, our treatment or the doctors. I would describe the building itself. Mystics know that the visible is a husk from which the invisible, if attended to hard enough, can be unearthed. I know this to be true: the spiritual character of a place, and a person, can be known through its physical surface. Or am I deluding myself, existing as I do on a shirred margin between sanity and madness, truth and illusion, fiction and fact? In any case, in my attempt to communicate to you what this place is really like, I would tell you about the light: stark blue, insane yellow, ghoulish orange; fluorescent; man-made without exception. I would explain that even things that could be made of natural materials here – pillows, blankets, knives and forks – are synthetic. I would say that there are very few shadows, very few corners, very few places where darkness is permitted to exist; I would say that the light is excoriating, a lance to which we are the boil, and that beneath such light we appear sorry creatures indeed.

I would say that the walls and floors are perfectly uniform, and whichever floor, whichever wall you encounter will tell you nothing. The walls are cool, their surfaces regular; you would not think anything so even could continue for such distances. The walls are pale green and sheeny. Rails run along them, sloping or rising gently at intervals. And the rails, like the walls – like the floors – appear to be interminable. They converge at points that widen as you draw near, that promise arrival, only to reveal further vortices, further distances, further vanishing points. Every so often there is a picture, framed in brown wood, no matter the subject or the style. Oddly, the pictures themselves are all explosions of some kind, the colours primary, vibrant, the compositions overblown and dramatic, usually flowers or fruit. Unfortunately the pictures not only fail to enliven, but their ghastliness serves only to emphasize the surrounding pallor, like blusher on a corpse.

I have spent days studying the walls, I have set my eye parallel to their surface and run my hand over their planes, scouring them for fissures, discrepancies, flaws of any sort – I do not know why this matters so much – and when I found even the slightest crack, tears of joy would spring to my eyes and I wanted to run and fetch someone, I wanted to draw a circle around the thing so it could not be lost, to frame it, erect a little grotto there, kneel in gratitude. In fact the only real singularity we know, the only end-point in this world of deferrals, is that which lies at the end of the long corridor: Block ‘H’. Block ‘H’ is the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns. Or at least, no one has returned since I have been here.

To describe Lethem Park, then, I would tell you about surfaces and the interstices between them. I would describe the doors, the hinges of the doors, the bolts of the hinges. These things have come to mean more to me than people. I am a student of surfaces, I seek footholds in traces, animation in shades, intent in implacable geometry, meaning in the intractability of metal and concrete and stone. A tree, a scrap of bark would be braille to my blindness, balm to my skin. But then I remember that I wept at the foot of a tree and knelt in a bare field; I remember that meaning is a myth, a bedtime story told to young children who are afraid of the dark.

I am not afraid of darkness but of light. My terror is not black but white. But it doesn’t matter now. All opposites fail to signify. There is nothing beneath the veil, below the surface, beyond the window, however beautiful the day may appear to be.

He sends for me again today. He says: ‘I want to fill you in on what will happen when we begin hypnotherapy.’

‘How are you going to do it?’ I say, not wanting to seem interested but needing to know nonetheless.

‘With a light.’ He opens a drawer and takes out something like a pen with a white light at the end that appears when he clicks it.

‘What do I do?’

‘Follow the light.’

‘Like the Israelites,’ I say.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Nothing.’

‘We’ll be using counting,’ he says.

‘Will I be able to stop if I want to?’ I say.

‘Of course. You’re in the driving seat, Madeline. In any case, I shouldn’t worry; some of my patients actually enjoy being hypnotized.’

He leans back in the chair, bobbing a little. ‘Now, in addition to the hypnotherapy I’m going to provide you with some new strategies to target your symptoms head-on.’

He hands me four sheets of paper. The first reads: ‘Lie or sit in a comfortable position. Breathe in for a count of ten through your nose …’ The second begins: ‘Imagine you are floating in a warm place …’ The third: ‘Lie on your back with your legs and arms …’ The fourth is a table with numerous boxes running along the top. The first box says: ‘Challenges to Initial Thoughts’.

‘Let’s run through the table,’ he says. ‘Okay: you feel some anxiety following a session. First of all, “Describe the Situation”.’

‘Describe the situation …?’

‘Yes. For example: “In my room”. It doesn’t have to be lengthy, but it gives us helpful biofeedback from which to map patterns. Then: “First Thoughts about the Situation”, such as “anxious about beginning new therapy”.’