The Treatment and the Cure (7 page)

Your new book of poems has a dark green cover and gold coloured lettering down the spine. You sit in your spot on the verandah and run your hands over the cover and the lettering and then flick the pages over so that you see a fast blur of print. The pages are very white and fresh and smell nice. You haven’t started to read it yet. You want to get used to the lovely feel of the book first. It’s only a cheap book, because your mother hasn’t got much money, but it’s got a beautiful feel. There’s another reason you haven’t started to read it yet. You feel a little afraid to start, in case you find that poetry isn’t what you expected.

Your eye falls on a line of a poem near the back of the book:

“The naked earth is warm with spring.” The poem is called “Into Battle” and that first line gives you a faint prickle of excitement.

“The naked earth is warm with spring

And with green grass and bursting trees

Leans to the sun’s gaze glorying,

And quivers in the sunny breeze;”

Oh, it’s lovely. The hairs on the back of your neck are prickling right up.

“And life is colour and warmth and light,

And a striving evermore for these;

And he is dead who will not fight;

And who dies fighting has increase.”

It’s giving you that same strong feeling you got from the
Bible
words about going through the valley of the shadow of death.

“The fighting man shall from the sun

Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth;

Speed with the light-foot winds to run,

And with the trees to newer birth;

And find, when fighting shall be done,

Great rest and fullness after dearth.”

A whole new world is flooding into you. A whole new way of thinking about birds and sunlight and the sun’s gaze glorying. And then the poem goes on to the end about:

“Through joy and blindness he shall know,

Not caring much to know, that

Not caring much to know, that still

Nor lead nor steel shall touch him, so

That it not be the Destined Will.”

And then the deep music, like an organ, of the finish:

“The thundering line of battle stands,

And in the air death moans and sings,

But Day shall clasp him with strong hands,

And Night shall fold him in soft wings.”

You look round when the screw taps you on the shoulder and see that the verandah is empty. Everyone’s gone in for breakfast. The screw looks oddly at you, but for once you don’t care whether he reports you for acting strangely. Life is wonderful and you can face anything!

You’re not the new man any more. Two others have come since you got here. One of them is Dick Steele, a short, tough “crim” who is doing six years for trying to blast another “crim” with gelignite. He’s got a slow, cold way of looking at you sometimes, as though he’s full of a deep rage and is thinking of the best way to cripple you. But some of the time Dick Steele is very entertaining and tells vivid little stories of the underworld:

“… Jigger Mottram done this big bust, see, and got nine fur coats. Lovely stuff. He takes ’em to Quinn, who’s his usual fence, and Quinn says he’ll give him eight ’undred for ’em. Jigger won’t cop it. He reckons they’re worth two thousand. So they start arguin’ and Quinn tells Jigger ter piss orf or he’ll hand ’im up ter the jacks, see. Doesn’t say it straight out, just sorta hints about it. Well, Jigger won’t wear a nark, so he decides to knock Quinn orf, see, and goes back the next night full o’ grog and walks in the door and lets both barrels go at Quinn. Quinn rolls down behind the sofa and comes up with a pistol and lets go at Jigger while he’s reloadin’, see …”

Dick Steele gathers a little circle of hangers-on around him. Dave Lamming is one of them. Dave has recovered from the shock treatment now but is very timid and nervous and spends a lot of time cleaning windows. He’s frightened of Dick Steele and the fear makes him do whatever he’s told. Dick Steele seems to get his only pleasure from a series of deadly feuds with certain other men. He hates Mario in particular and does everything possible to niggle the Sicilian, then drifts away leaving Dave to face the onslaught. But Dick Steele isn’t a coward. Already he’s had several fights with men bigger than himself and has won them. Only once have you felt the full force of his hatred. Dick is rostered to watch television on the same night as you. Last week you got up and changed the channel, unaware that Dick was engrossed in the programme. He didn’t protest, but just started quietly cursing you with terrible oaths. You quickly changed the channel back. Dick Steele seems able to get any kind of illicit goods. When no screws are looking, he’ll pull out a bottle of wine and pass it around, insisting that everyone take a swig. This is probably meant to implicate us all, so that nobody will rat on him. He is said to have a knife, and we believe it.

The other new man is Sam Lister, a good looking and intelligent man of about thirty. He’s here for one unsuccessful attempt at arson, the only crime he’s ever committed. He was disturbed in his mind when he did it, but is quite normal now. Soon after he came here you got a foolish idea that he had something against you. The idea preyed on you for a long time, until one day you went up to him, trembling and shaky-voiced, and offered to settle it with fists. Sam was very understanding and sat and talked quietly to you, convincing you that you’d been under a misapprehension. Now you have interesting talks with him about the meaning of life and things like that. Sam Lister is the only one you can talk to about your interest in poetry. Sam talks a lot about something called TA, a method of understanding your own inner feelings and how to keep them in balance. He says that every person really has three personalities inside them. The Child, the Adult and the Parent, and that when we feel helpless and afraid it’s because we are acting out the Child part of ourselves, the part that we subconsciously remember from the time when we really were small and vulnerable. And when we feel stern and intolerant and disapproving of ourselves it’s because we are acting the Parent role. The best thing, Sam says, is try to let the Adult part be in control, the part that’s sensible and insightful. The Adult part is in the middle and balances the unhappy extremes of the other two. Sam talks a lot about Inner Balance, which he says is the secret of life.

“Tell me about your life,” Sam says to you. You are sitting with him on the verandah in the bright morning sun, feeling the cramp of the cell and the long night being warmed out of you.

So you start telling him about everything in your past and how and why you did the thing that you got the Life Sentence for. After a while, the nervousness vanishes and you find you enjoy telling Sam about yourself. He’s such a good listener. Soon you and Sam are spending most of your free time together and your life story is drawing out longer and longer, like a serial. Every so often, though, you get a bit afraid again that it’s too uninteresting to bother with.

“I told you it would bore you,” you say.

“Don’t start that again.”

“Sorry.”

Whenever we have free time together and Sam wants to hear more of your life story, he’ll say, “Back to the couch!”

“The couch” is our joke, as though Sam is my psychiatrist or something. Now we are lying on the grass near the pool. The other men are splashing and yelling, but we’d rather talk. We’re lying full length with our faces near each other. Sam is chewing a stem of grass. It’s lovely, lying there in the sun with Sam, talking about things which you want to try to understand about your life, but which would be too painful to even think about if you were just by yourself. Even the embarrassing things, like never having had a girlfriend. Even those things are easy to talk to Sam about. The swimming time is over and the screws are ready to take us back into the ward.

“Is there hope for me, doctor?” you say to Sam.

“I’m not sure yet. I’ll have to hear more. I may be able to save you from the asylum.”

“Oh good!”

“Twenty guineas please.”

You reach for an imaginary wallet.

“Pay my secretary.”

“Your secretary?”

“Yes, Miss Fifi LaRue. An interesting case of nymphomania.”

“Are you curing her?”

“Are you mad?”

A children’s charity has sent bits of broken toys to be repaired and Arthur has made a workshop in an old shed near the sports field, just behind the trees you like so much. Each day seven men and two screws go across to paint tricycles, patch dolls’ dresses, put stuffing into teddy bears and reassemble tiny tea sets.

The first day we went to clean up the shed. It hadn’t been used for years and it had cobwebs and dust and piles of rubbish. In a corner were boxes of old files, dating back to the nineteen-thirties. We read some of them when the screws weren’t watching. There were ward reports on inmates of the time and told how so-and-so was eating shit and someone else had cut his own throat. It must have been very bad in those days before effective medication, when men just stayed raging mad and violent for years, trussed in straightjackets and locked in cells all day and night. It makes you wonder about medication nowadays, whether it’s better to be made into a zombie, like now, or be left to shriek and scream and eat shit like in the old days. But you can’t believe the old files totally. They were written by screws and screws always make the inmates sound very bad. It makes the screws feel like tough men. Lion tamers or something. A lot of screws are touchy about being male nurses. Sometimes they get picked on in the pub when they’re off duty, because of being male nurses. So they like to pretend they’re lion tamers, holding beasts away from the women and children. And when they’ve made the inmates seem very dangerous, they pretend to shrug off the danger, to show what cool nerves of steel they have. They get danger money for working here, and if they didn’t make the inmates seem very dangerous they might not get the danger money. Nobody gets danger money for taming pussy cats. Still, the old files make you think that maybe it was pretty bad here in the old days and that maybe the screws who wrote those files weren’t exaggerating much.

The toy repairing is nice work, once you get over the silly feeling.

“Do we get paid for this?” Ray Hoad wants to know.

“Your reward will be the rosy cheeks of smiling little tots,” says Bill Greene.

“Frig the tots!” answers the Merry Dwarf.

Hartley, the famous murderer, is fitting a red piece on a fire engine. The screws don’t usually like Hartley to leave the verandah area, but he’s been allowed to join the Merry Band. Ray Hoad and Bill Greene say he murders dolls when nobody’s looking.

After a few weeks a man from the children’s charity comes to tell us how much our work is appreciated. He’s a short, tubby man. He appears in the doorway with Arthur. The charity man steps in cautiously as if he’s afraid someone will grab his throat. He stays close to Arthur.

“Chaps,” Arthur says, “this is Mr Fleming from the charity.”

We all stare at Mr Fleming. He’s trying to look all jolly, like a man representing thousands of happy children. He obviously has a little speech ready, but he can’t seem to get it out. It’s probably just dawned on him that he’s actually inside this place and face to face with seven Criminally Insane men who are staring intently at him and maybe aching to rip his gullet.

His big grin keeps slipping off and he has to push it back up his chin.

“Um, er, we just wanted to let you people know how grateful we are…” He trails off, as though suddenly wondering whether we understand normal English. He’s glancing uneasily around, perhaps thinking how there are only three screws here against seven of us.

“You’re doing wonderful work here, er, um, chaps.” He isn’t too sure about calling us “chaps”. Calling us “chaps” might offend us. But Arthur had called us “chaps” so he thinks it must be all right. If Arthur had called us “Your Excellencies”. Mr Fleming would call us that too.

“Er, well, that’s really about all I wanted to say,” says Mr Fleming. He looks at Arthur, wondering whether to go now.

“Did you have something to give the chaps?” prompts Arthur gently, indicating something Mr Fleming has in his hand.

“Oh yes!” Mr Fleming remembers. He has a little framed certificate. “Er, we at the charity wish to present you chaps with a token of our appreciation.” He goes to hold out the framed certificate to one of us, but isn’t sure who to offer it to. He takes a step toward Hartley but falters and steps back. Nobody moves. It’s a terrible moment for Mr Fleming. He’d probably imagined it differently. He’d probably imagined a jolly visit, with lots of back-slapping and himself making a confident little speech and someone stepping forward to shake his hand and then more back-slapping and applause. Now he’s standing here with his framed certificate held out in the empty air while seven silent madmen stare at him. The screws are enjoying it too.

“Thanks very much,” you say to him.

One of us has spoken! He’s so relieved, he goes to put out his hand to shake yours, but loses his nerve and lets it drop.

“We’re glad to help the poor kiddies,” says Ray Hoad.

“And the tiny tots,” says Bill Greene.

“The dear little ones.”

“The darlings.”

Mr Fleming is beaming now and hopping about shaking hands with all of us, except Hartley. Hartley is wearing a grin like Dracula and Mr Fleming sort of bypasses his handshake, as though by an oversight. Ray Hoad and Bill Greene want to go on some more about the Darling Tots and the Wee Kiddies, but Arthur has given them a warning look. They’ve had their fun.

“Well, I suppose I should be going now,” says Mr Fleming, as if going is the last thing he wants to do but has a schedule to keep. He goes out with Arthur, smiling and waving back at us.

“Bye bye,” calls Ray Hoad. “Give our love to the Wee Ones.”

“And the Totties.”

“And the Snotties.”

“And the Potties.”

But Mr Fleming has gone, back to tell his battleaxes what a decent bunch of chaps we are.

You’re digging over a vegetable bed one morning and Arthur strolls down.

“What do you think of books?” he asks.

“How do you mean?”

“Think our fellows need them?”

“Well, reading is a good pastime.”

The hospital is supposed to have a library, but it’s over in the open section and we don’t have access to it. All we have here are a few old books piled up on a shelf at the end of the verandah where the cards and dominoes and chess set are kept. The books are falling to pieces because the rain has been blowing in under the verandah on them for years. They aren’t very interesting anyway, mainly detective stories, and you never see anyone reading them. You wonder why Arthur is suddenly concerned with books.

“I’ve had an approach from the librarian,” he says. “She’s new on the job and pretty keen. She wants our chaps to have access to her stuff.”

“Good idea,” you say.

“Someone will have to handle it from this end. On a weekly basis,” he says. “Are you interested?”

“I’ll have a go,” you say.

“Good. The librarian is coming over this morning to talk to you about it.” This is an interesting turn. Arthur has been a bit distant with you ever since the dirty spoon, and now he’s chosen you for this. You think your stocks must be rising again. An hour later a screw calls you up from the garden and you go into the office. Arthur is there with a young woman of about twenty-two. She is slim and nice looking, with long brown hair. Arthur introduces you. Her name’s Marian.

“Your Charge tells me you’d like to help me extend the library service into this ward,” she says. Her voice is very assured and educated, like a school mistress.

“Yes.”

“Excellent,” she says. She gives you a big smile. “I gather you read a lot yourself?”

“Oh, a good deal,” you say. It seems the right answer.

Marian is wearing a miniskirt and it is right up near her thighs. Her legs are long and very beautiful. You try to keep looking her right in the eyes because if you don’t concentrate on her eyes, you know your glance will keep going down to her legs and then she’ll know you’re not the nice bookworm she thinks you are.

“Your Charge tells me you like poetry,” she says.

“Er, yes,” you say.

“Do you write any yourself?”

“Oh, a little bit,” you say. You feel awkward about that. You’d rather not tell anyone about the poems you’ve been trying to write. You’d prefer to keep all that quiet and safe inside yourself, but Marian obviously wants to hear you say that you write poetry and you want very much to please Marian. You want her to give you another big smile that makes your insides quiver. She does.

You can see a few men out on the verandah looking in through the glass partition at Marian. They’re envying you being right in the office with this girl and so close to her beautiful legs.