Sometimes when the phone rings, just picking it up and answering, takes more energy than the normal man can bear. When I heard Steve Gouch’s voice, I was already planning ahead. I wondered where my house keys would be, and where Bob’s house keys were, and what I’d say to him. We’d already been through all that before; did that dance and moved on. Only, it seemed, we hadn’t. But there was something in Stevie’s tone, even before I’d listened to anything much that he had to say, that told me: this isn’t good.
I walked along Dumbarton Road, the wind flapping at my denim jacket and pulling me back. The external door lock on Bob’s flat was on its permanent-broke setting, and with the wind churning up and gathering wind blown debris at my feet like dust demons, it felt like home. Near the top of landing I could see Bob’s flat door wedged open, with a leather couch half sticking in, and half sticking out, blocking his front door.
Bob squeezed, eel like -I wasn’t sure how - around the leather couch and, looking the other way, as if I was a ghost, passed me on the stairs. I edged my hand into the gap between the doorjamb and doorway and rolled the couch back into the hallway, so that I could get into his flat. The windows were wide open, but the curtains were gone. Steve had part-warned me, so I knew what to expect, but it was like the shock of seeing a whale for the first time. Anything portable that could fit through the window had been flung into the bin area of the tenement backcourt.
Kid’s faces were peering up at me, waiting to see what bit of entertainment would come out next. The more entrepreneurial bin-combers, Stevie Gouch’s two bobbing red- headed sons among them, were already scouring the debris for things worth keeping like clothes, books, pens, records and videos still in their cases. They held things up, like dead fish, for others to inspect, keeping some and flinging others away.
Our house, in contrast, was standing like a fort with all the curtains shut and the blinds down. I edged open the door. Drawers in the kitchen were lying open, with the cutlery lying spread out over the work surfaces. Bob was using a tea towel to clean them, but was putting them into black bin liners. But he would also spend time peering out a crack in the curtains, watching and watching. Then he would sprint up stairs, as if he’d missed something and take up a new watching position, behind another set of curtains. Cassie was crying in the hallway.
‘You’ll need to phone the doctors or something,’ I said.
‘I’ve already phoned. It’s the weekend,’ she snapped back at me.
‘What you meant to do? We cannae put up with this for the whole weekend. I don’t know. Maybe you should phone Gartnavel, or something? I mean; they’ve got to do something.’
We could hear Bob opening the window up the stairs and shouting out long lines of gibberish to some kids playing on the grass slope and Jack his dog barking in accompaniment.
‘I wish that dog would shut up,’ I said, running up the stairs.
Just as suddenly as he had opened the window, Bob shut it, and took up his peering and prowling position, behind the curtains. He was muttering to himself, some arcane language of repetition. But it was his eyes that spoke most. They had a reptilian non-blinking quality of indifference. He made it seem quite easy to understand a belief in demons, and satanic possessions, and why in the Middle Ages people had been burned at the stake.
‘Come Jack,’ I shouted, slapping my thigh, to bring the dog downstairs with me.
‘Leave HIM,’ boomed out a voice something like Bob’s.
But Jack, with ears close to his head, somehow, shortened himself and sneaked out, padding down the stairs with me.
‘What did Gartnavel say?’ I asked Cassie, who’d just hung the phone up.
She lit a fag, but her hands were shaking. ‘They said, we should take him up to get assessed on Monday!’
‘Monday! What fucking good’s that? What are we meant to do until Monday? I cannae put up with that. How can we wait ‘till Monday? And anyway’ I ranted, ‘he’ll no go. I tried talking to him, but he said there nothing wrong with him’.
‘I know,’ Cassie said, shaking her head, as if she was reliving rather than retelling what had happened earlier, ‘he said we need to get rid of the knives and any silver. And I tried to talk to him, to make him stop. But when I grabbed his arm to make him…I was scared… I tried to talk him round, and said that maybe it would be a good idea if he went to see the doctor, because he hadn’t been sleeping…He’s not been sleeping…Not slept in about three days, but he just looked at me and said, “it’s you that needs to see a doctor. No’ me. ” ’
‘What can we do?’ I said, as we heard Bob opening up the bedroom window upstairs again, and the dog scrambled under the kitchen table.
‘I don’t know, but I worked with a guy before, that was a psychiatric nurse and he was really nice,’ Cassie said. ‘I can’t remember his name, but I could text wee John to find out and get his number’.
Cassie wasn’t exactly smiling, but it seemed that we wouldn’t need another Kitchen Roll for her eyes. She’d got a text number-from the guy whose name she couldn’t remember-of our local outreach psychiatric team. It felt as if Santa has sprinkled gold dust on us.
Cassie couldn’t get through to Mardenhill Resource Centre. The automated reply gave the hours of opening, and gave a contact number for Gartnavel Hospital for further enquiries, out with those hours. But we’d already contacted Gartnavel Hospital and they’d suggested we bring Bob up on Monday. Cassie didn’t know what to do. Neither did I.
‘Phone them,’ I said.
‘You think I should?’ Cassie said.
‘What harm can it do?’ I said, with even less enthusiasm than her.
I could tell by the deep sigh, and Cassie’s facial expressions, that it was the same person she had spoken to earlier on the phone at Gartnavel. But her face changed when she signalled for me to get a pen. I searched about, but, of course, with Bob’s tidy up spree there weren’t any. Finally, I found a small bookie’s pen in my denim jacket.
‘Right! Right!’ said Cassie nodding.
When I handed her the pen she quickly wrote another number down on top of the number that she already had for Mardenhall Resource Centre.
‘What was that all about?’ I said.
‘They only give the number out in cases classified as an emergency,’ said Cassie, looking as mystified as me.
Bob started cleaning out the kitchen, but the good thing was, at least, I’d no longer knives to contend with. I tried to talk to him, but he wouldn’t look at me, just kept bagging, until I had to grab his hands. Finally, Bob got bored with the tug of war, and scuttled up the stairs to man the curtains again and shout at himself and any passing neighbours. But, as soon as I’d moved into the living room he was back down the stairs and back to bagging in the kitchen, as if he’d never been away. Another tug of war and-the prize of undefeated, black-bag, champion-Bob raced back up the stairs to stare at the curtains.
I had to stand in the hallway between the kitchen and living room to stop Bob coming back for another clean out. ‘How did you get on with Mardernhall?’ I shouted through to Cassie.
‘I can’t get through,’ she said, ‘maybe I copied the number down wrong, or Gartnavel gave me the wrong number. I don’t know. It always rings out. You’ll need to phone Gartnavel to check’.
‘I’m no’ phoning,’ I said.
‘You need to,’ she said.
‘I’m no’ phoning and that’s it,’ I said, as Bob appeared at the top of the stairs, looking down at us. ‘Give me the phone through,’ I said, relenting. ‘What was the number?’ I dialled Mardenhall first. ‘It’s engaged,’ I said, ‘that means somebody’s in,’ and passed the phone cable back under the door and the phone back with it.
I thought we were lucky when Cassie got through almost right away. I could hear Bob upstairs in the toilet.
‘I need to go to the toilet,’ I said to Cassie, as if I was five-years old and needed her permission, and also to remind her that there was some kind of cosmic rule that as soon as somebody else is in the only toilet that’s the time you need to go most, and she’d be next. But I smiled at her as she spoke on the phone. And she smiled back
‘Right. Right,’ Cassie said. ‘Monday.’
But it was all-wrong. ‘What did they say?’ I asked.
Cassie sighed. ‘I spoke to someone from the Emergency Outreach Team. They said that they’d need to assess Bob, but they couldn’t do that until Monday. And asked if I wanted an emergency appointment’.
‘How can they do that?’ I asked. ‘What kind of Outreach team are they, that sits in their office and doesn’t even answer the phone and can only give out appointment three days later?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Cassie.
I went back into the kitchen to get the kitchen roll. But, I just couldn’t comprehend it. ‘Did you tell them how bad he was?’ I asked. ‘Didn’t you tell them it was an emergency!’
‘Yes,’ sniffled Cassie. ‘the guy seemed really nice. He asked if I thought Bob was dangerous. And I said I didn’t think so, but wasn’t sure.’ Tears ran silently down her face and she wiped them with her paper towel. ‘…I wasn’t sure and asked him what I should do next and he didn’t seem to know what to say, after a while, he said, that he wasn’t sure. But what if he is dangerous I asked him. “Oh”, he said, “if he’s dangerous we can’t come out. We can’t put ourselves in danger and he’d need now need to log Bob as potentially dangerous from the conversation that he’d had with me”.
I didn’t quite get it at first and had to think about it. ‘So…’ I said, speaking to myself, as much as her, ‘they’re an emergency team, that only come out when it’s not an emergency…And…they can’t come out to assess whether Bob’s dangerous, in case he’s dangerous and they get hurt…How do they know he’s dangerous, unless they assess him…How do they get away with it. That’s like phoning the fire-brigade and the fire brigade telling you that it’s the wrong kind of fire and maybe it’s too big for them. Give me that phone.’
I didn’t expect to get through to Mardenhall Emergency Outreach Team first time and didn’t. When I did get through the man seemed to know who I was, but it was like talking to a big fluffy teddy bear, that had been programmed with a number of set phrases. One of them was that he couldn’t speak to me because I wasn’t a relation. And because of confidentiality. Confidentiality, in teddy-speak, means that they can't talk about anything they've not already spoken about. The other set phrase was: I wish you the very best of luck with your situation. I nearly said thanks.
