Hut10

James Munn had his notes, arranged neatly, on his desk. We, his captive audience, arrived back in dribs and drabs. I looked at the clock above his head. We weren’t really that late, only five or ten minutes. James Munn even had someone wheel in an old fashioned blackboard on a pedestal. He’d drawn, I couldn’t believe it. He’d drawn a fucking graph on the blackboard.

Gillian Ambrose, smelling of promises of uncut smoke, almost imperceptibly stroked my hand with one finger, as a reminder and a promise of the taste of her, which made me glad that I was wearing thick Wranglers with a heavy zip. Head down, I walked quickly, sliding into my chair, and hiding my growing embarrassment beneath my desk. Gillian meekly went back to the seat that she had being sitting on when we first arrived that morning, as if it had been permanently assigned to her.

Maureen Hargreaves, clean as carbolic in her patterned summer frock, was sitting nervously at the next desk to me, looking straight ahead and fumbling with her pencil case in a way that made me smile. She’d already drawn the graph from the blackboard and marked it as a normal distribution curve, even although I knew that, like me, she didn’t have a clue, what that was. It was as if we were both back at Glendevon High School. Only Maureen Hargreaves would have squared paper for a graph. I was sitting a little bit behind her and had to reach out and touch the back of her overly white arm to get her attention.

‘Can I get a bit?’ I said pointing to the graph paper, watching like litmus paper her chest and face changing colours.

‘Do you want a rubber as well?’ she said, quickly adding, ‘I’ve got a spare one,’ as if she had been overly promiscuous with her generosity.

We could have conversations, like that, about concrete things: pencils, books, desks, bits of paper. Then suddenly we would stop. I began to blush as well. I tried to stop, but couldn’t help myself. We were like a set of traffic lights primed to red. I hoped nobody else noticed because, somehow, that made it worse.

James Munn began to speak and that allowed us to focus on something other than our childish blushing, to look away from each other.

‘This is the list of patient’s name that you as a group have remembered.’ He had a single piece of A4 sized paper in his left hand.

‘This is a list of the names of the people in this room.’ He made that sound ominous and even more so by juggling one piece of paper up and the other down as if they were being weighed and he was the scales. The list with people in the room’s names on it settled much higher.

He had all the individual scraps of paper on his desk arranged into piles. He picked one up.

‘This list of patient’s names has only eight names on it.’ He held it up as exhibit A and my face started turning so red that I was sure that Maureen Hargreaves took a quick peek at me out of the side or her eyes and just as quickly looked away.

‘I’m not going to embarrass anyone…’ My breathing slowed down as James Munn spoke, ‘…by naming them, but if I was a graphologist and I’d say that this is the same handwriting and it has 18 names on it. Why is that, when you’ve been working on a ward for the past three or four weeks, with an average of 25 people in it and you only know about a third of their names?

Rab Morrison whispered, loud enough for everyone to hear, ‘because they have been hiding from you,’ which I and most other nervously laughed at, waiting to find out if it was funny.

James Munn looked directly at him and nodded, ‘you’ve been hiding from yourself, yet in this class of 30 you know three quarters of them, even though you’ve just met? Why is that?’

James Munn had put down the offending sheet of paper back on the desk and I was sure he was going to tell everybody why, without I hoped naming me. Maureen Hargreaves stuck her arm in the air, her face like a red rag, to ask a question, with courage that question avoiders like myself could only understand. James Munn frowned slightly and then smiled.

‘Maureen Hargreaves. You have a question for me?’

‘Yes Sir. No Sir,’ said Maureen Hargreaves, finally putting her hand down and promoting a little nervous laughter from someone behind me, ‘em I was just thinking that em most of us know each other from school…’

I could see from James Munn’s face that he hadn’t thought of that, had not factored that into his analysis. Maureen Hargreaves was destroying his beautiful theory before he had even outlined it and she was doing it because she knew the curves and whorls of my handwriting, almost as well as I knew her neat little script.

‘and em, we could have just made up patient’s names and wrote them…’ Her unfinished sentence finished with a burst of blushing so intense her big blue eyes almost filled with tears and she looked down at her desk.

I almost cried too. It was brilliant. I wondered, briefly, if she had cheated and just made up patient’s names and wrote them down, but I knew Maureen Hargreaves would never do that. Unlike me, she would know all the patient on her wards names.

James Munn used courteousness as a weapon so that he smiled even more and said ‘that’s a very interesting point,’ and then explained why she was wrong, ‘if students had made up names there would be more people on the patient’s list than there are. The lists would have a tendency to balance. The fact that many of you know each other does not detract from my main point. You see the same people every day, but you don’t know their names. Why is that?’

James Munn looked up at us and waited long enough for someone to answer, long enough for a fit of nervous coughing and staring at the desk, long enough for the pressure to build so that someone, anyone, must answer.

‘Because we forget,’ said Gillian Ambrose, stating the obvious, so succinctly and matter of factly that is was stupid.

‘Yes,’ said James Munn beaming at her and flipping over the blackboard and writing forget and circling it in red chalk.

‘And why do we forget?’ said James Munn, looking at Gillian Ambrose. I could see her staring into the distance, were the answer was, the delicate muscles in her face working, as if she was chewing it over, but James Munn added, ‘please don’t answer that, name someone else to answer for you.’

I started believing in God then and praying to Him and even promised to stop wanking for now and all eternity if she would not nominate me. I knew she wouldn’t do that to me. She couldn’t do that to me. She just couldn’t. But of course, she did.

Gillian Ambrose looked at me, but I didn’t look at her. James Munn looked at me. Everybody looked at me, except Maureen Hargreaves. And with every set of eyes on me I grew redder and redder, so that I was creating a mini heat haze and my head was boiling like a kettle, with thoughts crashing into each other and making no sense, so that I almost forgot the question and would have had to ask it again, but that would have been even more embarrassing. It seemed like hours or days or months, but eventually I stuttered out a bit at a time, delaying the answer to the question that I’d forgotten, even longer that that:

‘be…cause…we don’t…see them!’

‘Yes!’ said James Munn, sounding overjoyed with my answer, but not as overjoyed as me, ‘Excellent’. He wrote we do not see them on the blackboard and circled it with red chalk and drew a line connecting it to forget.

‘Why don’t we see them?’ asked James Munn. ‘Please nominate someone.’

I was ready for him, with an answer this time. ‘Eh, Snoddy…Robert Snodgrass.’ I said emphatically.

But me naming him didn’t seem to bother him. He just shrugged and said: ‘I don’t know.’

‘Ok,’ said James Munn, momentarily disappointing me by letting him off so easy, ‘why don’t you guess?’

‘I don’t know,’ said a non fazed, Robert Snodgrass, but his innate cool school boy smugness was disappearing like the red hair on his head.

‘Ok,’ said James Munn, ‘why don’t we see patients? You must have an opinion on that?’

‘No.’ said Robert Snodgrass.

‘That’s interesting,’ said James Munn, ‘as health care professionals don’t you think we should have opinions?’

‘eh, yeh,’ said Robert Snodgrass indulging him.

‘And you don’t have an opinions?’

‘No,’ said Robert Snodgrass grinning.

‘In that case,’ said James Munn, ‘there seems little point in you being here today. You can make an appointment to see me at my office some time next week and we’ll talk about whether you have a future in health care, although at this point I would seriously doubt it.

‘He can’t do that can he Barry?’ asked an incredulous Robert Snodgrass.

Barry Ferguson had been slouching, on a plastic chair, behind the blackboard. It practically obscured him. But his bulk made him stand out. It looked like he was sitting on a primary one’s chair. He stood up when his name was mentioned and he was almost yawning when he addressed Robert Snodgrass as if they were the only two in the room.

‘It was my turn for the job, but you’re dad helped appoint him and not me as head of student training. Have a word with him. But I’d say you’re fucked.’

Barry Ferguson sat down again and went back to doing the things that he hadn’t been doing before.

Robert Snodgrass’s leaving left a hole in the way that I thought our world worked. But James Munn was still smiling. He simply added another word to the blackboard and circled it: power. He linked this to the other two circles, we do not see them and forget.

‘Why don’t we see patients? Why do we forget them? All the energy, but James Munn’s voice, seemed to be sucked out of the room. ‘Is it something to do with their relationship to power? Patients cannot make us see them. Mentally handicap patients, in particular, are invisible. We do not see them. Even those closest to them…’ James Munn looked at us sitting in rows, ‘…who work with them every day do not see them. Our brain is designed to process lists. Things that we need to do. Things that we have done and we draw on a reservoir of knowledge to process this information. But certain kinds of information is more important to us than others. Every single piece of paper had my name James Munn on their list. Partly that was because I told you my name. But I would suspect that in 99% my name would be on your list anyway. It’s not because my name is memorable. James Munn is no more memorable than the obscure Barry Ferguson, but my name would be on your list because of who I am. And that is shaped by what my relationship to you is. I am your tutor. I have power. Patients have no power. We overwrite the things that are not important to us. Every patient that you see and whose name you don’t remember shows me what you think of them. It shows me that they are not as important to you as say, some obscure football type. Say a…’ he faltered here, ‘a Stanley Matthews. We tend to forget things and people who are not important to us. We tend to forget them because they have no power. They can’t make us see them. They tell us who they are, but we immediately forget, because that information is not important enough for us to retain. The mentally handicap are the most invisible of any group in society and it’s up to us to change that. One of the first things that we can do is by learning their name and then be learning who they really are’

‘Now,’ said James Munn nodding to Barry, who had a stack of what looked like academic papers, ‘I’d like each one of you to place this face down on the desk. Fill your name on the top left hand column on the sheet provided. It is a Wechsler Intelligence Test. The test should take about 50 minutes. It’s just a simple test made up of different ways of processing lists, much as you did this morning.’

James Munn flipped the blackboard over and pointed to the graph that he had already drawn. He drew a chalk line down the board and pointed to it in a way that assumed we already knew about graphs and what he was talking about.

‘This quadrant is one you are familiar with. It is a grouping based on people with mental retardation. Idiots’

James Munn took another slice to the left of that quadrant, using green chalk to emphasize the difference: ‘Imbeciles’.

The last slice was the thinnest and he labelled this in red. ‘Morons’.

‘Most of the more general population fall in between these two groups. He drew parallel lines down the nipples of the big curve. ‘But you I expect to be in this elite group’ and smiled, pointing to the extreme right of the curve, in a way that implied the same group as me.

Barry Ferguson put a hand on my shoulder, as if to reassure me, when he put the test in front of me. It didn’t work. I went to write my name and my mind went blank.