Huts3

The phone rang, but I didn’t answer it. It kept ringing. Then it rang off and kept ringing again. I didn’t answer. For the first time that day I wished that Wullie the Pole had been there. I’d gone from having my feet up on the desk to squirming uncomfortably in the office chair. The office windows were constructed in L shaped bubble of glass, so that anyone in the office could look out and up along the corridor to the entrance to the ward, or down the corridor to some of the bedrooms. There was a staff toilet just across from the office. The cage, were the medication was kept, was in a storage room next door. I felt hemmed in, as if I was the prize exhibit in a zoo. Most of the day patients were in the other side of the ward, in the recreational room, beside the kitchen area. I didn’t know what to do. It seemed that several life times had passed since I’d arrived on Ailsa Ward, but it had only been two days. The phone rang again. I let it ring for exactly fifteen rings, working myself up, so that when it rang for the sixteenth time I picked up the receiver.

‘Halllllo,’ I stammered nervously.

‘Boy,’ said Wullie the Pole on the other end of the line, ‘I told you not to answer the phone’. His voice sounded slurred and angry. ‘Give out the mid morning meds,’ he said, ‘the key is in the desk drawer and has a yellow tag around it.’

I’d seen Wullie the Pole giving out the medication three times in two days. He wheeled the trolley into the middle of the kitchen area and handed out what he called potions and lotions in a blur of sustained activity. Other than that he seemed to sit in his office, smoking Capstan Full Strength and listening to some kind of opera music on the radio, also at Full Strength, so that the office drove you into the arms of the mad patients and the mad patients drove you into the sanctuary of the office.

It was such a relief when he’d left, the first moment of calm and I hadn’t even noticed. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth once more and I didn’t know what to say.

‘I can’t,’ I said, ‘I can’t.’ I felt tears welling up in my eyes. ‘I don’t know what to do’.

‘Don’t be such a little prick,’ said Wullie the Pole, ‘even a half-wit could give out the lunchtime meds’. On the other end of the phone Wullie the Pole seemed to be having some sort of prolonged coughing fit that I wasn’t sure whether it would be mannerly or cowardly to hang up. But he continued as if nothing had happened. ‘There are only six patients that get meds, all the rest get there’s at night, to knock them out, and in the morning, to get them up. Those other bastards get there’s during the day to shut them up and geez a bit of piece. Just gee them there tablets. Diazepam and Temazepam. Just look for anything that ends in pam. Most of them get 100mg, but Joyce gets 200mg. That would be enough to put us on our back for about a week, but it doesnae touch them. Don’t worry about it, you cannae really do any harm. I’ll be back soon. Just ask Michael. He’ll know what to do…And don’t answer the phone again.’ I wasn’t even sure if he hung up. I heard the discontinued sound.

My hands were shaking I had to fully concentrate on them to open the desk drawer. But I clung onto the notion that Michael would know what to do. I’d taken a strong and instant dislike to him when I’d first entered the ward. He seemed just to follow Wullie the Pole about, two steps behind, like some kind of Collie dog. But in trying to avoid the patients and trying to avoid Wullie the Pole we’d struck up a tentative alliance, in the Common Room. We’d both been looking out of the window up, onto the Old Kilpatrick hill, there had been a smirr of red that high up, it was difficult to see if it was human or animal. When I looked at Michael, I thought we’d both been thinking the same thing. We both wished that we’d been up there, up high on the windy crags, and not stuck in the throat closing, cloying, ammonia smelling, warm ward.

Michael was one of the more high functioning patients. He’d never been anywhere else but Glendevon Hospital. He’d been brought there as a baby suffering from cerebral palsy and he’d been to Glendevon Hospital School. He was going a bit bald now, but he’d been there when it operated as a working farm, with the patients as labour. They’d about two football park sized greenhouses then, which also grew plants. Some of the staff in the village had the loveliest gardens. And he’d been in every ward, apart from those that they kept for the real veggies, that never got out of their specially made beds, ‘coffins,’ he’d called them. And he’d never been in the wards where they kept the biters and the fighters either, he shook his head at that, the challenging behaviour ward.

Michael had laughed when I said I didn’t smoke.

‘You’ve got the money now. You can always start!’ he’d goaded me. And it was an increasingly attractive idea. All the patients, apart from the one I wanted to ask me, badgered me for a fag. It went on relentlessly night and day. I’d given up even answering them. I’d just walk away and hide in the office.

I found Michael in his room lying on top of the bed. He looked as if his body was half lying down and half sitting up. But that’s just the way it was for him. He didn’t even seem to be doing anything, just looking out of the window. We both knew that Wullie the Pole didn’t let you lie on the beds during the day. Michael should have been out working, or ‘fannying about,’ as Wullie the Pole called patient’s work, but he was too important to him for that. Wullie the Pole used him as a go-for. He went for the rolls and papers, ‘The Daily Record,’ in the morning. The tobacco in the afternoon and anything else that Wullie the Pole could think of in between. He was like an Ailsa Ward prefect.

Michael levered himself off the bed. I think he could see that I was upset.

‘What is it?’ he said gently.

‘It’s the meds. I’ve to give out the meds, but I don’t know what to do,’ I said in a rush of words.

‘No Problem,’ said Michel, That was something that Wullie the Pole would have said and Michel siad it in exactly the same way.

I wheeled the med trolley into the middle of the ward the way that I’d seen Wullie the Pole doing it. The patients were in the Common Room milling around in their eternal search for fags. I called each one.

Joyce was first. Like many of the patients she’d had her hair done recently by the hairdressers in the hospital. Her hair looked as if it had been screwed into her head. It might have fitted the generic description of perm. She was to get 200mgs, Diazepam. I nervously tapped two tablets into my hand. Joyce watched me with her one good eye.

But it was Michel that was appraising my performance.

‘Don’t worry so much,’ he said, ‘you could hand Cyclops a rubber duck and it wouldn’t make any difference to her.’

Joyce moaned loudly, like a pregnant cow, but that was normal for her. I handed her the two tablets. She’d some kind of white fungus thing in her mouth and one of the tablets seemed to stick in it. I gave her a drink from the plastic cup we used. But I was too late. The tablet dropped from her mouth and fell between her breasts.

I didn’t know what to do, whether just to kid on that I’d not noticed, or put my hand down between her substantial patterned cleavage and retrieve the half eaten tablet. I figured that would be the equivalent of one of the male patients assingned to taking her to the toilet, and wiping her down, which happened so routinely, it was expected.

I looked to Michel for guidance.

‘Just give her another one,’ shaking his head and adding another piece of advice, ‘and don’t tap the tablets into the palms of your hands. These things are toxic. Tap them out onto the plastic white lid of the bottle and drop them into her hand’.

‘What about the one that I’ve lost? Don’t I need to count them or something?’ I asked Michel.

He screwed up his face and shook his head as if I was daft.

‘Just mark it on the sheet. X marks the spot, that she’s been given her medication.’ Michael pointed to the yellow sheet hanging on the clipboard at the side of the trolley.

The other patients were easy after that. I felt that I’d finally achieved something.