The Treatment and the Cure (6 page)

“Dad used to feel them up on the tram, specially when it was crowded. Sometimes, if a pretty girl didn’t have the fare, he’d offer to let her ride free for a feel of tit. Lots of ’em didn’t have the fare during the Depression. Another lurk was to pretend he was gonna hand them over to the cops for avoiding the fare, then offer to let them go for a good feel. Sometimes they were so frightened of the police they’d let him have a proper root. He’d keep them on the tram till he finished his shift, then take them back and root them behind the depot shed. He came unstuck though. A freak coincidence. He tried it on with a passenger who happened to be the wife of the bloke driving the tram. A big fella. He was gonna murder dad. Dad threw his ticket bag in the bloke’s face and leapt off the tram and down an alley. He never went back on the trams.”

Bob Fleet has a favourite limerick:

“There was a young lady from France

Who fell from the tram in a trance,

The gallant conductor

Leapt down and plucked her

Away from the traffic’s advance.”

But he always pauses before “plucked her”.

Away to the left from where you’re working in the hole is the swimming pool and you can see Ray Hoad vacuuming the bottom with a long pole that has a suction nozzle on the end. Being the pool man is the best job of all. It’s privileged. The pool man can go down to work whenever he wants during the day and without any screws to watch him. The pool man works the chlorinating equipment too, and if he doesn’t do it right he could gas everyone, so you don’t get to be pool man unless Arthur and Electric Ned are very sure about you.

Bob Fleet is after Ray Hoad too. He calls Ray his “wife”.

“Oh Ray, my wife, let me have you!” he calls out.

“You can root my boot on your birthday!” Ray Hoad yells back.

You’ve got the brickwork finished. It’s been three weeks and it looks good. Arthur is pleased. They start heaping grass and rotten vegetables and other stuff into the hole to let it turn into compost. Then one of the supervisors from Administration comes around and notices how the new brickwork joins the main wall up to about four feet and he’s worried that it might provide a foothold for anyone trying to scale the wall and escape. Arthur doesn’t think it will, because there’s still sixteen feet of sheer wall above.

The supervisor isn’t convinced, and says that part of the new brickwork must be knocked down.

You’ve been moved from the corner table in the dining room, away from the messy eaters and the disturbed men. You’re now at the best table, with Bill Greene, Ray Hoad, Zurka and a couple more. It’s much nicer; you can talk while you’re eating, and you can ask for the salt to be passed and someone will pass it. Grumps is there too. He doesn’t talk much, except to swear and groan softly under his breath, but it’s good having him at your table because he never eats his lunchtime dessert and always lets one of the others have it. You’re right across the table from Grumps, so he usually pushes it across to you.

The men are put at different tables according to how well they are, and according to what the screws call their “level of socialisation”. Being at this table means that the screws are satisfied with you and you can feel relaxed because hardly anyone at this table ever gets shock or very heavy medication. But if something happens and you get shifted back to one of the other tables, you know you’re in trouble.

You’re at the table one morning at breakfast time, waiting for the meal to be passed through the servery and brought to you. You notice that there’s a tiny bit of dried food on your spoon from the last man who used it. You aren’t bothered by it much, but you’re trying to scrape the fragment off with your fingernail.

“What are you doing?” comes a friendly voice over your shoulder. It’s a big, blond screw called Smiler.

You show him the spoon with the dried fragment on it.

“I was just trying to scrape this stuff off,” you say.

He takes the spoon and examines it. “It wasn’t washed properly,” he says. Then he says in the same friendly voice: “Why don’t you go and ask for a clean one?”

Maybe your mind isn’t very alert today, or maybe you’re too relaxed by being at the best table.

“Right,” you say, and you go over to the servery and call to one of the pantry workers.

“Hey Freddie, would you give me a clean spoon, please?”

Suddenly there’s a dead silence and everyone is watching you. You realise Smiler has set you up like a pigeon. You can hardly believe your own stupidity. Arthur is inside the servery. He takes the spoon and examines it very slowly and carefully, holding it up to light as though it’s a holy relic or something. Then he hands the spoon back.

“You’re getting very fastidious, aren’t you?” Arthur says in a voice that makes your veins run cold.

You take the spoon and go back to your seat and have your meal, though you can hardly eat for worrying about what will happen. You see Smiler grinning. It went so perfectly.

At dinner time you go into the dining room with the other men and you’re about to sit at your normal place when Smiler says: “You’ve been shifted, Tarbutt.” He motions you to the corner table, the worst table of all. You sit down and try to look calm. Being at this table means that the shadow of shock and medication is on you. For three days you stay at the corner table, being terribly careful about every look and move and gesture you make.

You tell yourself that you’ll be all right. You remember how pleased Arthur seemed with you over the bricklaying and everything, and surely they wouldn’t give you shock just because of the spoon. You can’t be sure though, so you go about for the three days with a pain in your stomach from worry.

On the fourth day after the spoon, you’re going in to the dining room again and another screw motions you back to your old place at the best table and you know then that they’d just been giving you a little lesson. You know they won’t be forgetting about the spoon though, not for a long time, and you’re going to have to be very careful for a long time.

Barry Clarke has been taken off some of his medication. He’s not dribbling and wetting himself any more and can talk almost normally and work a bit in the vegetable garden. He’s lost a photo of his wife and baby daughter. He thinks Hartley stole it. Hartley is a famous murderer who killed five men and cut off their balls because he was molested by a sergeant in the army. Hartley knows he’ll be in this place until he dies. We’re having breakfast and Barry Clarke is looking across at Hartley as if he wants to smash him and is muttering horrible curses. Suddenly Barry Clarke goes berserk. He leaps up and heaves the table over so that all the food and the plates go onto the floor. Then he picks up his chair and hurls it at Hartley’s head. Hartley knows straight away what’s happening and he runs for the door. It’s unlocked. Just as he’s about to disappear, the chair catches him on the back of the head. He staggers in mid stride and then is gone.

Five or six screws surround Barry Clarke. He’s quiet now but is trembling and his face is white. The screws take him outside, and Arthur takes Hartley into the office to dress the gash in his head.

Barry Clarke isn’t punished very much, just given extra medication again. The screws don’t worry so much about fights like that because fights between inmates don’t really threaten their authority. Not like the dirty spoon. The dirty spoon threatened them.

Ray Hoad was just about to eat his egg when Barry’s table banged into him. His egg went on the floor.

“What about my egg!” he kept saying. “I want another egg!” He thinks it’s very unfair.

If you do something violent like Barry Clarke they sometimes put you in the “grille”. a sort of wire cage, like a monkey cage at the zoo, which is at the end of the verandah. We think maybe they didn’t put Barry there because it’s already occupied. Skippy’s been in the grille for weeks. He has an abnormal brain and whenever they let him out he attacks the first person he sees. Skippy seems very much like the orang-utans you see at the zoo. He sits all crumpled up in the cage, staring out through the wire mesh with red, sunken eyes and flexing his hands and rubbing his lips together slowly. He seems so quiet in the grille that every couple of weeks the screws decide to let him out, but he turns wild and has to be put back. They say Skippy is going to be sent away for an operation on his brain.

You’re talking to Zurka about what he did to the people with his butcher’s chopper. He doesn’t mind talking about it now. He’s pretty sure he’s to be transferred to the open section and he wants to show that he understands about his crime and why he did it and that it was a dreadful act. The screws say that being able to talk calmly about your crime shows you’ve gained insight. Of course, you mustn’t talk about it too much, or too calmly, or they’ll say you’re dwelling on it or that you aren’t showing a healthy remorse.

“I had this belief that somebody was after me,” he says.

“Who?”

“I didn’t know exactly. Spies, or something.”

“Why were they after you, did you think?”

“Because of my feet.”

“Your feet?”

“Yes, I believed that my feet gave off a terrible stink, and that everyone could smell them, and that the spies or whatever they were could follow the smell of my feet.”

“Did you wash your feet?”

“Yes, ten times a day, but it made no difference. I still thought they stank in a peculiar way. Different from normal smelly feet. Foul. Horrible.”

“Did you ever try to get help?”

“I went to psychiatrists. Tons of them. They just gave me expensive pills that I couldn’t afford. In my mind I knew that the thing about the feet was caused by mental illness, but I couldn’t snap myself out of it.”

“The expensive pills didn’t do any good?”

“I couldn’t afford them. The psychiatrists would give me a prescription for pills but I didn’t have the money to get them all the time. I could hardly afford to pay the psychiatrists’ fees.”

“But there were free clinics and stuff like that.”

“I didn’t know about them. I didn’t have anyone to advise me, and my English wasn’t so good then. I just didn’t know anything, except to spend all my money going to private psychiatrists who fobbed me off with pills.”

“Weren’t there Polish groups that could have helped or advised you?”

“Bah! My own countrymen didn’t want to know me. They are bastards! Bastards!”

“And what actually happened, on the train?”

“I started carrying a butcher’s chopper to protect myself. That day I was on the train and I thought the spies were getting close. I thought they were coming along the train, through the carriages to get me, maybe throw me off. Then I saw that the other passengers were staring at me in a funny way, as if they knew what was going to happen. I suddenly thought that they were the spies and that they had false faces on. Plastic faces or something to disguise themselves and that underneath the false faces they were really the spies and that they were grinning and laughing, knowing they finally had me cornered. I knew I only had a minute left before they pulled off their faces and killed me.”

“So you decided to defend yourself?”

“I pulled out the chopper and went at them. I think I was screaming with terror, but I thought I’d get some of them before they got me. I was trying to chop through their plastic faces.”

“It must have been very horrible.”

“It was very horrible. The blood and the faces coming open and everyone screaming. I don’t know how it ended. I fainted or something, after I’d chopped a few people.”

Zurka is obviously very sorry and sad when he’s telling about the last bit, about the train. You are quite sure he’d never do anything like that again. You’d bet your bones on it. If it was up to you, you’d let Zurka go to the open section. Yet when he’s talking about the psychiatrists who took all his money for pills and fees, or about his Polish countrymen who wouldn’t help him, you get a faint cold feeling of worry. There’s an edge in his voice that makes you think he’s spent the years here remembering the wrong they did him. It’s probably nothing. You’d still let him go to the open section if the decision was up to you. Yet you’re glad, somehow, that it’s someone else’s decision.

Everyone is confident for Zurka. While you’re sitting with him, Eddie comes up the verandah. He’s got a brown parcel.

“Won’t be faaarkin long now, Zurka,” he says. “The transfer’ll be through any day.”

Zurka nods and smiles.

“You’ll be in faaarkin clover in the faaarkin open section. Puttin’ all the faaarkin sheilas up the faaarkin duff.”

Zurka smiles again, but shakes his head a little to show he has no intention of doing anything so irresponsible. You understand his position. The screws are watching him all the time now, gauging his mental attitude towards the transfer. If he seems too eager it might look bad. If he doesn’t seem eager enough it might look bad.

Eddie remembers the parcel.

“Faaarkin parcel for ya, Len,” he says, handing it over.

You start unwrapping it so that Eddie can see the contents. All letters and parcels have to be opened in front of a screw.

“Nobody sends me any faaarkin parcels,” he’s grumbling. “You blokes are faaarkinwell spoiled rotten. If I was in control you’d all be on faaarkin bread ’n faaarkin water with chains on ya faaarkin legs.”

Your heart gives a little leap when you unwrap the last of the paper. It’s a book,
Best English Poems: Chaucer to the Present Day.

There’s a spot at the far end of the verandah where you like to sit and be alone sometimes. Of course you can’t really be alone, because of the other men pacing up and down near you, or lying along the benches beside you, or because the toilets are just next to your spot and there are always men there talking and smoking while they’re on the lavatory. The toilets have little low half doors on the front and you can always see somebody’s head and shoulders above the top and their feet at the bottom with trousers crumpled around them. A couple of screws are always on watch on the verandah so that you’re under observation. But you can sit there in your spot and look out at the lake through the wire and not talk to anyone and pretend that you’re almost alone. You have to be careful not to overdo it, that’s all. If the screws see you sitting quiet and staring too often, they’ll think you’re too withdrawn and might report it to the doctor. So you space out your alone periods. You make sure the screws see you playing billiards or cards, or see you talking and laughing with other men. When you’ve let them see you doing those things for a while you know it’s probably safe to go to your spot and try to be alone for maybe an hour. If you do it for more than an hour you’re taking a risk.