Huts66

It was difficult to work out if mum was doin’ the dishes downstairs, or just standing outside my bedroom door banging two pots together. She wasn’t even doing it on purpose. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she started whistling. Monday mornings didn’t seem to bother her. And I knew with stiff-jointed certainty that one Monday followed another, like a Corpy bus, and when I got to her age, it wouldn’t bother me.

But I shut my eyes, just in case I’d missed any sleep. And I held my breath, like I did when I was younger, and wondered whether I could drown myself under the covers that way, and speculated whether that was suicide: a mortal sin. That made me think about those Saint-guys that used to go around hitting themselves with sticks, and jumped into gorse bushes, and immersed themselves in freezing torrents, because they felt the growing spectre of an impure thought, urgently pressing against their stomachs. I didn’t need to do any of that. I just waited. Monday and the thought of work beat me enough.

Mum started whistling. I imagined a Great Crested Warbler would sound like her, or vice-versa. Only one of them would be noisier, and it wouldn't be a stupid bird. I turned over; my cowardly hand sneaking out of the warm blankets, into the cold certainty of Monday life, and turned of the alarm before it had even Big Benned. It just wasn’t fair.

I splashed my face with cold water from the sink in the toilet, and was half way to being a Saint, but looked at my eyes in the mirror, to see if they looked sick enough to miss work. I coughed experimentally. But it was only a smoker’s bark echoing back at me, which reminded me that I was, definitely, definitely giving up smoking and cutting back on my drinking. A thought bobbled up to the surface, like an iceberg, reminding me that I’d said something to Gillian Ambrose, but I couldn’t remember what. It didn’t matter. I was giving her up, as well. I’d just be happy being myself.

Mum had my tea and toast on the table. She mussed my hair as I sat down, as if I was still a stupid little kid. But I didn’t mind. I nicked one of her fags. I didn’t really like Embassy, but I didn’t have any of my own. The smoke in my lungs helped me figure out what I was going to wear to work, since I’d nothing in my wardrobe worth wearing, and whether I should emigrate and become a lumberjack in the Tucon. I didn’t know where that was, but I knew it was better than going back to work in The Huts, with Wullie the Pole, and all the other half-wits.

Ailsa Ward’s Monday smell was deceptive. It spoke of every kind of cleanliness. It was all iodine, chlorine and Domestos, like an army of cleaners had marched through brandishing mops and buckets, as if it was a real hospital. At first, it clung like fag smoke to my newly ironed denim jacket, then half way between hanging it up and turning around to meet Wullie the Pole’s disapproving glare, it was away. I couldn’t smell anything, but the comforting smell of Old Spice and my oniony oxters.

‘Right that’s us away,’ said Peter.

‘That’s us,’ said Carol. Her little dimples made her chubby cheeks look younger, and she even included Wullie the Pole in her shy smile.

I’d grown used to her. With the time I’d spent on nightshift, even to quite like her. But the cold gravity of Monday mornings did not allow my face to form anything other than a downward sickle-moon curve. I tried to smile gallantly, especially as she was pregnant and liable to drop at any time, but my facial muscles hadn’t warmed up properly. My expression turned out more like I was sitting on the pan, not sure if it was solid or liquid.

Not that she noticed. Wullie the Pole, of course, missed nothing. He was tucked neatly into his chair, but roused himself enough to fling the ward keys at me, from across the desk. ‘For fuck sakes,’ he growled, ‘let them out.’

Peter Davenport dropped his set on the desk at the same time. I had two sets to choose from, but no way of escaping myself.

‘See ya,’ I said as brightly as I could. I let them out, watching them drift together, briefly touching and bouncing apart, before escaping out of the cloakroom into the freshness of the gale force winds and rain.

I wandered back along the main corridor, clocking a couple of patients that were still sitting in their jammies, in the dayroom, watching telly. I knew Wullie the Pole wouldn’t like that. But I said nothing, just kept it to myself and gloated; picked out the right key in a oner and nipped into the kitchen. The breakfast trays were already set up, with the hot plates keeping everything warm. As usual there was plenty of sausages. They were in the new five-gallon containers, with the metal lids still on, keeping them moist. I tried one just to make sure they were cooked right through. I’d have also have tried the scrambled egg, but it looked like it was made of yellow Mechano pre-set plastic, which was good, because it was easy to scoop onto the patient’s plates. I checked the bolts on the metal shutter of the serving hatch were still in place. I didn’t want any of the patients pulling them up and getting at the food before we were ready, and Wullie the Pole moaning at me about it again.

I heard a few raps at the door. I knew it was Pea-Heid by her knock. She would want to get into the kitchen and get set up and I would just be in the way. But I stayed put, pushed further back into the corner of the kitchen against the giant fridge, killing time, trying to avoid Wullie the Pole. I lit a fag and pulled open the fridge door, as if I was checking something, rather than doing nothing.

‘Whose is the cake?’ I said to Pea-Heid.

Her little cork-screwed curled head turned slightly, as her one good eye kept focussed on the hot-plate, as if the sausages were live fish and ready to jump back out and escape into the kitchen sea.

‘It’s Michael’s,’ she slurred out of the good side of her mouth.

There was a sharp authoritative rap on the metal shutters. When I pulled them up Wullie the Pole had already set up the Med’s trolley and was barking out commands to patients within earshot and some not; doling out the pills and potions and lotions that made our world go around. I barged past Pea-Heid, who was already serving up breakfasts.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Wullie the Pole, ‘I lost track of time’.

‘Chlorpromazine,’ he said, looking down his specs at me, handing me a thimbleful of cloudy liquid, to pass on to Annie Cochrane that was standing closer to him than I was. She was good at waiting, her mouth already open, standing blinking through her thick specs, with high forehead, tufty-hair and big feet, the dead spit of a baby vulture. I held the syrup up to her lips and she tilted her head back, getting most of it in her mouth. She was whirling away to get at the feast that was breakfast before I could remind her to wipe her mouth properly, but not before Wullie the Pole pushed the Med sheets into my waiting hands, and stomped along the corridor, retreating back to his office.

After the initial rush, it was all the same old routine. I wheeled the Med trolley back along the corridor and locked it in the cage. All the patients went to work, apart from Michael and Pea-Heid, who cleared the tables, mopped the floor and stacked the dishes in the dishwasher. Sometimes I helped them by pulling the metal bins outside, those that were filled with scraps from breakfast, for uplift to the farm piggery.

But I was too tired, and sat in my favourite seat in dayroom, listening to the radio and looking out into wind blown shape of sheep, like cotton buds, that looked just out of reach, stuck on the tops of the Old Kilpatrick Hills.

It wasn’t too bad, the morning had passed quicker than I’d hoped. I fumbled in my pockets for the ward keys when I saw Michael trudging towards me. He needed them to put the metal bins out. It would have probably been better if he had a set of his own, just like Wullie the Pole.

‘Who’s the cake for?’ I asked, as I handed him the keys.

‘It’s mine,’ said Micheal, sloping his shoulders down, making himself smaller, in the way I’d come to know so well.

I handed him a fag. That was one of the good things about Michael he wasn’t like the other patients that were always following you around saying, ‘geez a fag, geez a fag, geez a fag’. He didn’t seem to bother. He’d take one if you gave him it, but that was it.

‘What age are you?’ I said, joshing him along, ‘I haven’t had a birthday cake since I was about seven’.

’65,’ said Michael, matter- of- factly, half-smiling, as if he was flipping back through all those years.

‘That’s you retired then,’ I laughed, ‘we’ll need to get you a job as a lollipop-man’.

He shook his head. ‘Yes,’ he sighed, stubbing out his fag in my ashtray.

‘I’ll need to go and pack,’ he said, turning to walk away.

‘Why, where are you going?’ I asked, holding onto the image of Michael, Wullie the Pole’s batman, working as a lollipop man.

‘Morrison House,’ whispered Michael.

‘Wait,’ I said scrambling up from my chair. ‘They can’t do that’.

Morrison House was in the old part of the hospital, which still had gargoyles holding up the cast iron roofing drains. It was also the furthest away from the administrative block, a Dickensian embarrassment, with blocks of beds, like runways. I was glad I hadn’t got a student placement there. Next to the challenging behaviour wards it was the worst place to work. Maybe, it was the worst. I’d only ever been there once. Underneath the sanitary draping of rub-on smells, it was like losing the battle of the giant latrine, with herded patients as casualties. Even in remembering I found myself involuntarily holding my nose, trying to avoid the kind of amorphous shit, that lurked in dark corners and corralled lung tissue, like asbestos, so that I seemed to breath out the smell of that ward days later.

‘That’s the geriatric ward,’ I said to Michael, ‘you’re not a geriatric’.

‘No, I’m not,’ said Michael stopping, weighing up his words carefully, and looking at me to give him further grounds for hope.

‘Have you spoke to Wullie the Pole?’ I asked.

‘Yes-sss,’ he said, sounding it out, like a betrayal; a hole in the world.

‘I’m tired now,’ he added, in a hollowed out voice. ‘And what with my arthritis getting worse, it’ll give me a chance to get a rest,’

The tiredness showed most readily in the crow’s feet around his eyes, even as I looked on, his face seemed to slip readily into old age.

‘Ach, you’ll be all right,’ I said, slapping old Michael on the shoulder. Glad it was him and not me.