The Treatment and the Cure (4 page)

George Pratt’s yells fade to low sobbing and you go back to sleep.

You’ve been here a few weeks now.

It’s hard sometimes, having to go into your cell at six o’clock every night, especially on hot stuffy nights when the walls seem to press in on you and you know you won’t be able to sleep for hours yet and you don’t feel like reading. You can stand at your window and look out at the patch of grass and wall and the dulling edge of sky above the wall, but you’ve stared at them so often and so long that they seem to be closing in on you too, just like the cell. At times you feel so closed in you almost panic and have to get a grip on yourself. And when you’ve got your panic under control a little and are feeling better, you realise you’ve only been in the cell for maybe an hour and there are more hours to go before you’ll be able to sleep, then you get panicky again. All you can do is lie on your bed, with your face turned away from the light and think, except that you don’t want to think too much.

The cell is about the same size as the little rented room you had when you were free. You lie thinking about the last night in that room, when you were preparing to do the thing that you got the Life Sentence for.

You were sawing the barrel from a .22 rifle. The hacksaw blade was too light for gunmetal and kept bending and warping. You were also worried about the noise of it. The walls were very thin and you were afraid the men in the other rooms might get suspicious. They might even be spying through some crack or peephole, though you’d often examined the walls for openings and could find none. Still, you couldn’t be sure, and the thought bothered you, especially whenever you masturbated.

When the barrel was off you began sawing the stock, halting every few seconds to listen. The stock came away after a long time. You put the sawn off pieces in the bottom of your wardrobe and then sat looking at the gun. It was small and neat, yet somehow larger than itself, as though huge forces lay inside it. You imagined it displayed one day in a glass case with a printed card describing what it had done.

For a long time you stood posing with the gun in front of the dressing table mirror, striking attitudes, experimenting with angles and postures. It was a new self you saw: the set of the shoulder, the curve of the cheekbone, the elbow cradling the gun, all seemed suddenly significant. You felt a kind of hum coming from inside yourself, like the hum of a live bomb.

You were thinking, again, about the problem of the photograph. It seemed impossible. You’d wanted to leave a picture of yourself where the police and reporters could find it; one showing you at just the right angle, with the gun held just so, and a smile on your lips. The smile was important. You weren’t a glowering maniac, but a young instrument of fate. A blond death bringer. Your smile, frozen forever on the photo, would symbolise the poignant tragedy of everything. The picture mustn’t look posed, though, more like a lucky accident that future historians would be grateful for. But how to do it? You couldn’t ask anyone to photograph you. You knew nobody. Besides, the gun would cause alarm. For weeks you thought you’d had the answer—you’d take a photo of yourself in the mirror: then you realised you’d only get a picture of yourself taking a picture. You weren’t stupid, exactly; it was just that your mind ran into blind alleys like that. Now it was too late to arrange anything. You didn’t have a camera nor any money to buy one. The last of your money had gone on the gun.

You’d put the gun back into the brown paper wrapping and into the old carry-bag with the box of bullets. You thought vaguely of trying to tidy up the room. The police and reporters would be coming here and you wanted to make the right impression. Some things would have to be got rid of, such as the pile of girlie magazines. They weren’t part of the image. The police and reporters would snigger and think you were one of those men who can’t get a girlfriend. They wouldn’t understand how you had
chosen
to live without girls and all that stuff. Had chosen the harsh road of destiny. They’d just think you were inadequate.

You began to feel that sweaty, nervous arousal that always came on you when you’d been thinking too long and too hard. All day you’d been preoccupied with the gun and the plans and now your mind was starting to race and whirl, like an epileptic’s brain when a fit is coming. Masturbation was the best thing then, because it made you calm afterwards and stopped the racing and whirling in your head.

You sat pondering the problem of Mrs Cassidy’s bra again. Mrs Cassidy was the landlady. A big, talkative woman with floppy breasts that swung and wobbled inside her blouse. She hung her washing, including underwear, on the clothesline near the door of your room. You wanted to steal her bra and masturbate with it. It would be tricky. You’d have to do it under cover of darkness. You could keep the bra until just before dawn and then return it to the line. It made you terribly excited, thinking what you could do with Mrs Cassidy’s bra. You could ejaculate into the cups. The sperm would dry and probably be unnoticeable against the white of the fabric. Mrs Cassidy might then wear it, actually wear your dried sperm against her nipples! You got a big horn just imagining it.

You opened the door and looked out into the yard to where the bra dangled almost within reach. Your heart hammered loudly. Then, as always, you got scared at the last moment. Perhaps the bra had been set as a trap. Everyone in the house thought you peculiar. They might have a system for keeping you under surveillance, watching the clothesline day and night. No, you weren’t going to fall for it.

Mrs Cassidy cleaned your room every day. You would rather she didn’t, but she just barged in with her own key when you were at work. For that reason, you kept the girlie magazines locked in the wardrobe. She, too, would misunderstand about them. Once, though, you’d deliberately left them out where she’d see them, excited by the thought of what her thoughts might be. Seeing the magazines, she might visualise you masturbating, naked and sweating on the bed. Many times since then you’d masturbated over your own mental picture of her mental picture of yourself.

All that was safe, or as safe as anything sexual could be. As long as you never actually showed sexual feelings to anyone you could feel in control of the situation. Even leaving the magazines for Mrs Cassidy to see was fairly safe. Even if she did have the thoughts you imagined her having, she’d blame her own dirty mind and you wouldn’t be implicated. In your dealings with Mrs Cassidy, and everyone else, you came across as a polite, aloof young man with important things on his mind. Sometimes Mrs Cassidy and her male lodgers sat drinking beer in the kitchen, laughing and joking for hours. They’d invited you to join them at the beginning. Of course you never did. You were too shrewd to be caught like that. They never asked you again.

At work, too, you kept apart. The noise of the machinery in the factory was maddening, but at least it prevented conversation. At smoko and lunchtime, when the other men sat outside against the wall and talked about cars and football and sex, you always went down the street and sat in a quiet spot by yourself where you could think your own thoughts. That was the great thing, to be able to think, and you couldn’t do it with people around. Sometimes you felt as if you had hardly any body at all, just thoughts. There were even moments when you’d suddenly become aware of your body … a hand … a foot … and been astounded that you were an actual person with flesh and hair.

Now you hadn’t been to work for several days. There wasn’t any point.

The sexual arousal had gone. You sat staring around the room. You thought again of tidying up, but it seemed too much trouble. Torn butts of cinema tickets lay on the floor. Films were your only luxury and you spent most of your money on them. In a cinema you could float out of yourself into the bodyless world of feeling on the screen. To stop being yourself was lovely, it was happiness. Films had one terrible drawback though … they came to an end. The lights always came on and the real world was there waiting.

Last night you’d seen “Dr Zhivago” for the seventh time and the return afterwards had been very bad. The final scene, where Lara walks out into the street under huge portraits of Lenin and Stalin, to disappear forever, “a nameless number on a list afterwards mislaid”. had filled you with a sort of ecstasy of grief.

You wanted to explode, literally, like a skyrocket, into nothingness. That was feeling, pure, untouchable, and you’d gladly have died right there in the seat rather than return to yourself and face the street outside with its squalor of traffic and people.

On the bus ride home you tried to keep that scene unspoiled in your mind, staring straight ahead with blank eyes like a shellshock victim, and whispering “Lara, Lara” under your breath. It was no use. The conductor came for the fare. Then a fat man sat beside you. The dirt on the floor and the traffic and the grinding of the bus’s gears and the press of the fat man crept steadily through your consciousness until Lara was completely gone and all beauty and feeling with her. You were just yourself again, a shabby youth on a dirty bus. You knew it couldn’t continue.

Dave Lamming has been getting shocks almost every day. He’s had ten now and is like a zombie. He can’t talk, or eat, or control his bowels, and the mess in his trousers stinks very much. His eyes are vacant and stare straight ahead, and if you try to talk to him, he’ll just stare at you and maybe smile in a strange way, as if he half understands what you’re saying, but he doesn’t really understand anything, not even his own name. About four or five days after the last shock he starts coming out of the zombie state and then he’s just very confused and can’t remember anything. He doesn’t know where he is.

“What’s this place?” he keeps asking. A hundred times a day. “What’s this place?”

“The railway station,” Ray Hoad tells him.

“Is the train coming?” Dave wants to know.

“Yeah, any minute now.”

So Dave sits patiently on the verandah, waiting for the train. Then he gets anxious.

“Why doesn’t it come?” he asks.

“Won’t be long,” says Ray Hoad. Ray even tries to sell him a ticket. After another few minutes Dave has forgotten that this is the railway station.

“What’s this place?”

“The surgical ward,” says Ray Hoad. “You’ve just had your appendix out. It was touch and go. Complications set in.” Dave feels his abdomen.

“You’ll have a whopping bill to pay, mate,” says Ray Hoad. Dave feels his pockets.

“I’m broke,” he confesses. “I can’t pay.”

He goes to the office to tell them he can’t pay the bill for his appendix. Electric Ned is there with Arthur. Through the glass partition we see Dave waving his hands and talking. We feel the joke’s gone too far. Electric Ned and Arthur are looking our way. They know someone’s been having fun with Dave. You drift into the background, away from Ray Hoad. Ray’s not worried though. Ray Hoad isn’t bothered by anything. He’s our best at sport too.

There’s a rough little field between the ward and the main gate, and at weekends the screws take us out to play cricket in the summer, or soccer if it’s winter. It’s lovely out there on a fine afternoon, the sky very clear with maybe just a few wisps of white cloud floating up high and the leaves of the trees touched with sunlight at their edges, so that if a breeze stirs them you get a beautiful, slow flash of golden light through the whole tree. The grass on the field is thin and tough and there are bare patches of brown dirt. When someone runs across and scuffs the bare patches it kicks up a small cloud of dust that catches the sun. If enough people are running about and scuffing the bare patches, you seem to be looking through a haze of dusty light across the whole field. The knock of the bat against the cricket ball makes a good sound, dry and solid, and makes you feel good somehow because that sound means that the bat has caught the ball cleanly in the centre and the ball is racing along the ground very fast. If the ball reaches the main wall it’s worth two runs, or if it goes down under the trees it’s worth two also. It’s best when it goes down to the trees when you’re fielding and you can run down after it and hurl it back with a big throw and then stay near the trees for a minute, looking up through the leaves with the brightness and shadow of them on your face. Sometimes the ball is hit right over the wall and a screw has to unlock the gate and go outside to find it in the scrub, and while you’re waiting you can lie down on the ground, or roll a smoke, or just stroll about and think your thoughts.

The ball’s over the wall now and we’re waiting for the screw. There’s Horse McCulloch sitting cross-legged in some long grass. He’s called Horse because he’s small and barrel-bellied like a Shetland pony and has a sandy coloured forelock. He’s talking to Geoffrey Cleary who got four years for being a peeping Tom. Geoffrey is talking about how it felt in court.

“Were the women in the court?” Horse wants to know.

“Yeah, they had to testify.”

“What sort of things did they say?”

“They told how they saw me sneaking outside the windows and stuff like that.”

“What else?”

“Whether I had a horn or not.”

“Fair dinkum?” Horse is excited.

“Yeah. The charge is more serious if you had a horn while you were looking in the window.”

“Did you have a horn?”

“Not every time. I had one in court though.”

The ball has come back. Clarrie Morton is batting. Clarrie used to be a boxer in the tent shows, and his nose and ears and eyes and mouth are all bruised out of shape. His mind’s out of shape too from so many punches. Sometimes he thinks he’s a cowboy film star called Dan Bunyip with a clever white stallion named Alligator. Or that he’s Tony Palomino, a famous crooner that girls faint over. But now he’s batting and doesn’t think he’s anyone. His reflexes are all wrong and he can’t hit the ball at all. He’s getting angry and very red with effort. After he’s missed the ball ten or twelve times he grabs the bat by its blade and stares at the writing on it.

“No wonder this bat’s no bloody good,” he yells. “It’s made of English willow!”

“Christ, no!” says Ray Hoad. He’s shocked at the news.