The Huts 2

I couldn't hear through the office window what Pea-Head had said to her. Pea-Head wasn’t her real name, of course. I’d been through most of the patient’s files. There was only me and Wullie and the Pole. But he’d left the ward. Before he went he’d pulled open the filing cabinet and told me to go through the files, because I would be doing medications later. I was worried about that. I didn’t know anything about medication. I thought you’d have to be a doctor or nurse or something, to be able to do something like that. And I was only starting out, training to be a student nurse. But I knew Wullie the Pole was serious. He didn’t do jokes. So I was working my way carefully and methodically through each file. The men were in one drawer of the filing cabinet, the women in another. When I’d first arrived in Ailsa ward I hadn’t seen any women, but the ward, like the cabinet, was segregated in the same way. Wullie the Pole said that I was in charge now, but I knew that he didn’t really mean it. Wullie the Pole was in charge, even when he wasn’t there. Wullie the Pole had one final piece of advice before he left. He pointed at the phone as if it was an unexploded bomb on the office desk.

‘Don’t answer the phone if it rings. That way the bastards think we’re busy. And if it’s important they’ll call back. And if it’s not important then they shouldn’t be wasting our time.’

He pointed at the phone again, final warning before he left.

‘Don’t touch it.’

‘Where will I’ll say you are if anybody comes?’ I didn’t mean to say it like a little boy, but that’s just the way it came out.

Nobody ever came. I'd grown up knowing that as a cold hard fact, but it was still something of a shock hearing it. We were a small Scottish village, with only one industry, Glendevon Hospital. We harvested the mentally defective from all over Scotland and nobody ever came. Nobody ever came to our village. And, in the two days I’d been there, nobody ever came to our ward. But it was a question that I had to ask. Not that I expected anything but the answer I was given.

‘Tell the bastards nothing,’ said Wullie the Pole with a dismissive gesture.

Wullie the Pole called everybody, but himself a bastard. It was his kind of shorthand for humanity. I’m sure I was included on that list. Willie the Pole was a funny creature. There seemed to be something lackin’ in him, but he was a hardy enough old man, made out of Polish winter’s native blood and clay, buffeted by the harsh winds and rains of a colder land that showed in the deliberate way he walked, seeming to grab the earth with each step, as if life itself was ready to step in and trip him. He had hands like any ordinary man with fingers like cold metal skillets, that grabbed you and held you when he wanted to tell you even the most innocuous thing: 'like it's a fine day'. Everything Wullie said was made to seem important. He hadn't quite grasped the sibilants of the language so that his clean shaven Slavonic face seemed to grimace as he spat the words out at you like a Gatling gun. There was a rumour that Wullie had a wife. That he had been married for twenty years to one of the McEwan sisters, that he had knocked her up during the war, but even she didn't believe it, even though they had a son, Wullie Junior Pole. Everybody knew Willie the Pole was an old workhorse. Double shifts were not enough for him. He did trebles, working all over the hospital. Backshift. Dayshift. Nightshift. Anyshift. Any shit. It was all one to Willie the Pole and better than that, it was double time. If Wullie the Pole had a home it was Ailsa ward. That was his ward. Even the doctors were scared to go there. The patients, of course, never had a choice. I never had a choice either.

Pea-Head’s official name I saw from the records was Maureen Ramsay. But her real name was Pea-Head. She was born with microcephaly. She didn’t mind being called Pea-Head. I wasn’t even sure if she knew her name was Maureen. Her companion laughed, bending over slightly, crystallising the moment in a pure clear sound. It was hard not to stare, not to jump up out of the chair, not to renounce all thoughts of adulthood and run up and touch her to see if she was real. It was not enough to talk of beauty, beings not of this world, but of an addiction, an inability not to, not to feel, not to want to touch; all of these things and none of these things.

Everything about Pea-Head’s companion was made unreal by who she was and what she was. I’d her records sitting uncomfotably in my lap. My face turned red thinking about them and seeing her. I dragged my eyes from her face and looked once more at her notes.

There was a report from The Edinburgh Institute of Vocational Guidance annotated by a charge nurse George McKay. It read: 'I have also conducted a full general physical examination and Norean does not exhibit any signs of sub normality and her hymen is still intact. Her school records show that she is above average intelligence. Her mother, however, committed suicide. She is almost certain to carry the same defective gene. She is currently without home supervision and shows the same wayward tendencies as her mother. We have twenty one girls residing in our ward at present ranging from ages 14-35. Norean, aged eight, is in the lower age bracket. Ailsa will accept Norean Killean. Her education and training will take place with the higher grade patients. I would like Norean to be tested for epilepsy as a proper diagnosis and as a pre-requisite for medication and our treatment schedule'.