Windows of Madness (part 7)

Kate
2005

Kate and I continued to meet after our shifts, on staff nights out and even during official breaks. The retirement home where she worked was just around the corner from the hospital, in a converted red brick suburban villa on the road to the crematorium. Her flat was even closer, and so were we.
All relationships seem to follow a mathematical curve, and ours was peaking, as we rocked and rolled, drank and drank, obliterated the past and future with explorative lust, and stole away from our haven in twilight. I felt guilty all right, but it was repressed like a pain under heroin, and I sped on, blind, eager, intoxicated, and greedy. I was bad, but not yet mad.
One evening, for the first time, we began to think of a plan. Nothing particularly critical or risk-laden – just something which would lead to a temporary escape from our beautiful cage, a touch of normality, and a taste of social life. We had often ventured to favourite pubs in unfashionable parts of town, but never before had we spent more than a few hours together at any one time. Several of the nurses at the unit had been away on courses recently (as always), and I knew it wouldn’t look at all suspicious if I ‘joined them’ for a couple of days. Kate was due for some annual leave, so we agreed to arrange an off-season break in a small seaside town, thirty miles to the West.
The day arrived, and we drove carefully along the Jurassic cliff tops, following the grey ribbon road through undulating hills, frozen hamlets and empty holiday parks, past the flashing gritting lorries, and on towards decisions. We arrived in a squall of sleet, parked on the deserted promenade, and made our way towards the gate of a five-storey terraced house with salt flecked, peeling paint, a wreath on the door, and a beaming middle-aged lady stood at the window.
“Noo then, you’ve picked a reet queer time for a holiday, and no mistake. Still you’ll have plenty of room” she said, as we entered.
“How many guests have you got Mrs. H-----?”
“Er….now you two are here we have abaht …...er…. er…...two” she grinned. “The Christmas trade int what it used to be.”
“That suits us fine” Kate said.
“Well, theer’s your keys. I’ll just let you settle in. Tea’s at five.”
“Thanks a lot.”

We knew what would happen next, but nothing was said, as we lumbered up the four flights of narrow stairs with our luggage, ending up in the gable-ended top room, facing the foaming sea.
“God, it’s cold up here” Kate said.
“Yes, I don’t suppose you’ve got a brazier I could warm my hands on, have you?
“Naughty boy, you know I rarely wear one.”
“Titter, titter” came the onomatopoeic response.
(silence)
Then Kate symbolically drew the curtains over the view, and just sat on the edge of the big brass bed with her pink cheeks glowing and her eyes lowered, like a Jane Austen heroine on the unwritten wedding night. I needed no further invitation, and I kissed her feverishly over her clothes, feeling her serpentine shape with lavish sweeps of my hands, as they hunted for easy routes to the smooth heat beneath. There was indeed no brazier, but instead a wonderfully familiar strawberries and cream torso, sprayed with scent, and looking remarkably similar to Batgirl’s body armour. She sighed appreciatively as I confirmed her contours, and then rolled easily around onto her hands and knees, encouraging me with whispered phrases, as I pulled down her ragged jeans and gently nudged an entry around her plain black pants. Like co-stars in a Michael Douglas film, we bucked and groaned, with long strokes and short minutes, perfectly united, delirious with pleasure-pain, finally spent and done. Deliciously quick.
Then the door clicked shut behind us.
Frozen in post-coital stupor, we eventually uncoupled, and discovered two clean towels outside the door; the clearest possible evidence of our shame and humiliation.
“Whoops” I said.

We hardly had the courage to go down for tea, but we needn’t have worried because Mrs. H was still beaming widely, especially at the bald man with a beer pot across the kitchen (Mr. H as it transpired) who looked desperately tired, but happy enough.
“You younguns have certainly given me an idea or two, since you arrived” she winked.
After tea, it was too dark to explore the deserted shore, so we removed to the nearest bar, drank a succession of warming shorts, and subscribed heavily to the vintage jukebox in its cob-webbed, coal-black corner. Pictures of Edwardian cricket teams hung lopsidedly along the walls and obese young men played darts, while their girlfriends giggled for Britain, and a mongrel farted in its sleep, next to the blazing Yule log. A series of snorts, coughs and honks emanated from the snug, where several shrivelled septuagenarians removed mucous from their sinuses, with well-practised ease.
Notwithstanding these ambient charms, we were unusually contemplative, spoke little, and so returned early to the boarding house, where we watched an old version of ‘Wuthering Heights’ with Mr and Mrs H, before retiring to bed; two spoons in the centre of our big brass nest.
“Good neet lass” I said
“Good neet lad” she answered.
The atmosphere was certainly addictive.

There was a blanket of snow over the town when we pulled the curtains back. Thick, crisp and unblemished, it filled the streets and covered the beach, muffled sounds and hurt the eyes; a fine virginal retort to our sweet depravities, it seemed. But after breakfast we wrapped up warmly and ventured out, saying little again, wandering past the Sunday silent shops and empty school, around the deserted park, and down to the shoreline, where a solitary black dog barked at the sea. There we found a dilapidated shelter just below the promenade and watched the great rollers battering chalk cliffs on either side, a single amusement arcade defying logic with its open shutters, and one small boy standing outside, looking in.
We hugged each other, and Kate felt just as wonderful in her fake fur coat and bobble hat as she did in her exotic white lingerie, acquired especially for our sins.
“Where do we go from here?” she said, at last.
“You’re starting with the difficult ones first” I stupidly quipped.
“I just can’t see you leaving Carol and the kids, Steve.”
“You know it’s difficult Kate, especially about the kids.”
“I know.”
(silence)
“Maybe we’re not right for each other, anyway” she continued “We disagree on so many things.”
“Like what?”
“Well….nearly everything to do with work. You sometimes sound as though you despise the residents at your unit, and that can’t be right.”
“I don’t despise them – I’m too callused to feel any emotion…..”
“So you’re indifferent – that’s just as bad…..”
“I’m emotionally indifferent it’s true, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think about the situation. I probably think about it too much. I think the whole damn place is a sham and a con, and it’s actually doing harm to the very people you’re defending. They need self-respect, not spoon-feeding like babies…….”
“But there are compelling reasons why they behave the way they do. Some of them come from abusing families, poor backgrounds, traumatic circumstances…..”
“Yes… yes….you sound like a full-on advert for the therapy industry Kate. But for every person who blames their disordered life on past circumstances, there are many others who have experienced the same sorts of problems and lived without disorder. These things aren’t really ‘causes’ at all, they’re more like negative influences in a person’s life which can be either overcome, or accepted, depending on the person’s character. That’s the critical variable.
“So, people choose to be mentally disordered?”
“Well, people don’t wake up one morning and make a single life-changing decision to be mentally ill – of course not. What I’m saying is that some people end up in care because they drift through a lifetime of expedient decisions. They evade immediate social responsibilities so often, that they finish up either unnecessarily over-dependent, or dangerously anti-social. In their cases, the whole process is driven by personality disorder, not mental illness – just look through a few histories and see what I mean…..”
“Oh, that’s rubbish, Steve. They do need therapy. Medication, support, care…….”
“There isn’t any medication for the absence of willpower or conscience, Kate. That’s why the existing drugs rarely ‘cure’ mental health problems where personality disorder is an underlying feature. And that’s exactly why psychiatric settings have to give direction and motivation.”
“These people need compassion, Steve….”
“No!” I shouted “that’s just where you’re wrong. They need more structure around them, a positive working environment, and less time to fixate on their own problems. They need to be part of a constructive community, not an open-ended institutional charity which effectively encourages people to be self-obsessed and asocial. Some people need to be parachuted into Africa or Iraq to see what a big problem actually looks like…….”
I could see by her white face that I’d gone too far, but it was far too late to correct the mistake.
“You’ll be telling me you’re in favour of euthanasia for the mentally ill next, Steve.”
“Under certain strict conditions, I’m in favour of euthanasia for anybody who’s enduring a legalised torture chamber. But that’s a red herring – the vast majority of mentally disordered people can certainly lead a positive life, if only we’d stop being ‘saints’ and genuinely encourage them.”
“By ‘encourage’ them, I suppose you mean force them to work at something.”
“The only force necessary to get most people to work in a decent society is to give them a conscience, show them a useful goal, and withhold the soft options.”
“We’re never going to agree on this Steve. You just come across as being heartless.”
(silence).
That was a terminal indictment of a lover.

The argument effectively ended our ‘break’ (or rather it began it), and in the middle of the afternoon we said goodbye to Mr. And Mrs H, and followed the snowplough home. We were too adult to sulk, but our conversation said less than our previous silences, our body language remained foreign, and our past waved farewell to our future. We kissed chastely, and looked uneasily at each other.
“I suppose that’s it, then.”
“It’s for the best.”
Plans were those things we made to remain sane, while we waited for fate.

Back home that night, I fell straight back into the Scalextric slot, going round and round and round the circular arguments, just doing more laps of the track because I’d been away. Falling asleep in my chair, I thought about Kate and what she’d said. I listened to the old slate mantle clock. Tick tock. Tick tock.
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The Unit
2005

It was without doubt an absolutely stunning view. A full moon had appeared amongst a myriad of twinkling stars as if by magic, and the crowd were awestruck. It was of course the day of the 24-hour televised ARSE concert and Woody (Rock God) Willis had just turned his back on the audience and dropped his kegs, to the smiling approval of his fossilised chums in the vast, smug band.
“Hello, is that the ARSE donation line?”
“Yes, it is. Please state your pledge.”
“I pledge never to watch this self-indulgent garbage ever again.”
“Pardon?”
“And, by the way, if Woody (Rock God) Willis doesn’t retire soon, he’ll be listed under palaeontology, not pop.”
“I’m afraid that’s an ageist comment sir, and I should warn you that this call is being recorded.”
“My objections are not in regard to his age directly, but rather his complete inability to sing in tune anymore”.
“I’m afraid that’s a slanderous comment sir and I should warn you that this call is being recorded. As a matter of fact, Mr. Willis could never sing in tune to start with.”
“Well…..he never could play a musical instrument that’s for sure, apart from that one time he stretched some chewing gum between his teeth and plucked it like a Jew’s harp.”
“I’m afraid that’s a racist remark sir, and I should warn you that this call is being recorded. Now, can I have your credit card number please?”
“Is there anything I can say which isn’t classed as discrimination and prejudice?” I asked.
“Providing you humbly accept the axiomatic de rigueur principle that all human beings are equally intelligent, equally talented, equally valuable, equally attractive and equally deserving – yes…… In fact, you’re allowed to talk endlessly about that.”
(pause)
“Sir?”
(silence)

* * *

A trail of gravy from the front door to the monstrous meal-warming machine indicated clearly enough that lunch had recently been delivered, so after twenty minutes or so of reheating it, we began our ‘food hygiene’ preparations. Firstly, we donned our highly important blue plastic disposable aprons, which covered about two square feet of clothing and left the rest to fate. Next, I brandished about the temperature probe to show good form, testing all the hot foods to ensure they were 75 degrees centigrade or above, before documenting the results one by one in the appropriate food hygiene file. Officially, we were ready to go, but because the food was actually scalding hot and some of the patients would have wolfed it straight down and burnt themselves, we had to add cold milk to the soup and wait for the rest of the food to cool down again. During these temperature fluctuations the food bacteria were probably increasing at bubonic plague rates, but we relied on everyone’s cast iron stomachs to see us through, and remained smugly professional that the policy had been ‘correctly’ followed. The whole palaver took some considerable time, of course, and today I observed that all the patients were turned in our direction as though they were watching Tim Henman winning Wimbledon. There was a growing primordial tension in the room, and small hairs began to pilo-erect on staff necks.
Thank God we didn’t have this performance at home, I thought. But what bureaucrat would run their own lives on the same basis as their organisational victims?
To avoid the impending riot, we dispensed with all further preliminaries and started to hand the meals out. Within minutes, complaints and mutterings ran around the room, two plastic bowls of soup hit the deck, and the floor turned into a mud wrestlers pit. Sidney fled for the mop bucket, and the patients launched into their daily litany:
“I didn’t order this!”
“What’s that?”
“Where’s the butter?”
“Where’s the orange juice?”
“He’s wet himself. Take him out!”
“I’ve got too much!”
“I want a cigarette now!”
“I’m not eating that. …Crash!”
As usual, the noise rose to a crescendo and then gradually reduced as the patients had their precise needs met in tailor-made fashion. It was the brutal truth that tolerance, manners, moderation and consideration for others were completely absent amongst our residents, and I despaired when I thought how many thousands of times we had asked them to say a simple “please” or “thank you” for the assistance they were receiving. The problem ran deep, because their ingratitude was the result of being fundamentally incapable of grasping where the food, drink, shelter, and money in their lives was coming from, and how much effort went into its provision. Being cut off from reality in the politically correct bubble of the unit, they had little experience or conception of how food was produced and prepared, or of how hard some people were having to work in the community to pay for it, so it was perfectly predictable they would be dismissive of the end product.
At a rough estimate, each of our residents had cost the tax payer about one million pounds in a twenty-five year psychiatric career, based on the cost of psychiatric hospital renovations, lease and maintenance programmes, staff salaries, medication, transport, day to day sustenance, and welfare benefits. Given that these patients were now disengaged from any serious work based activity, and that they rarely moved out of the system, I could only conclude that our unit was probably one of the most unproductive social organisations ever seen in peace time.
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A Brief History of Madness

Like many things in life, our conception of madness has depended largely on its social context. Up to the eighteenth century, religious principles were used to rationalise everything from the divine right to rule, to the waging of war, to a bad harvest - so mad behaviours were typically seen as some form of devil possession. Minor disorders were effectively obscured (or neutralised) by the rigid routines and heavy demands of feudal society, while major disorders would lead to brutal suppression, home confinement, or early death.
By the 1800’s, the U.K. had become more industrialised and science began to seriously challenge religion as the primary source of wisdom. Contemporary scientific theory suggested that madness was probably the result of genetic inheritance, disease, or atavistic tendencies. For these reasons, the segregation of ‘mad’ people in special hospitals was recommended as a way of reducing the risks of interbreeding, contagion and poor example. Larger madhouses were established to contain the growing numbers of ‘lunatics’ who were no longer sheltered by their increasingly mobile and fragmented families, flocking to the cities and towns for work.
In the period 1850-1900, local madhouses were largely superseded by regional asylums which were basically medical institutions, offering a mixture of rehabilitation and custodial cares. Many remained punitive and repressive, while others offered a more humanistic environment based on the developing liberal and socialist tenets of the day. Indeed, the humanistic movement steadily improved the psychiatric hospital system up to the 1970’s, when liberal individualism began to eclipse the more communal principles of socialism. Asylums were then condemned as Victorian museum pieces, and community care for the ‘empowered’ individual became the clarion call.
The rest (so they say) is history.
But not the future.
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The staff were not entitled to a free meal, even though barrow loads of food were thrown out every day (and trolleys full of delicacies were constantly being pushed past the unit on their way to the managers’ meeting room), so we stood drooling like Pavlov’s dogs while the patients proceeded. Food began seeping out of loose mouths, discolouring chins, running down the front of shirts and plastic aprons, and spilling onto the floor. One man filled his mouth so full that his jaws couldn’t get purchase to chew, while another furtively concealed chips and gravy up the sleeves of his jumper for later use. Bert sent his false teeth spinning across the table as he sneezed full in the face of his neighbour, and Cecilia left the room altogether, leaving her first two courses to go cold, while she went for a cigarette, or a half hour nap. She would of course be livid if the food was mistakenly cleared away or seized by another patient, so I cautiously returned it to the monstrous warming machine for safe keeping. In so doing, I burnt my hand through the threadbare oven gloves, but this was a small price to pay for avoiding the bulging eyes, pinpoint pupils, crimson face, and shaking body of the agitated resident who had mislaid the remains of their meal.
When Cecilia returned, she looked rather piqued that the usual trouble had been circumvented, and so began instead to eat and shout at the same time, covering her neighbours in half-chewed sausage meat, and propelling a large piece of mucous from her nose onto the plate. It was a nauseating display, but I had seen similar things so often that the hideously abnormal had long since become the tediously normal, and I was certainly powerless to change it. After awhile, we began clearing up, and I noticed through the corner of my eye that a third of the patients had now moon-walked through to the kitchen where they were happily supplementing their three course meal with the contents of a ransacked fridge. Clearing them out with a good dose of non-politically correct impatience; I decided I was overdue for a break. The man on the kitchen radio said:
“A long serving teacher killed herself three days after being suspended for allegedly smacking a pupil who repeatedly kicked her during a lesson.”
“Turn off that crap…er…tap” roared Sidney.
A week of shifts in psychiatric nursing was like a Westminster eight-day clock, where some mindless giant wound up your mind, tighter and tighter, until it didn’t seem possible that the spring could withstand any further punishment. I had reached that point now, and desperately needed the thirty-minute break we were legally entitled to, but usually added to our ‘time owing’ book. I was inevitably pursued by three patients variously wanting cigarettes, indigestion remedies and an audience, but I marched assertively to the office and handed the keys firmly across the desk to Richard. Or I would have, if he hadn’t been practising his golf swing in the corner of the room, dressed in open-necked shirt, paisley cravat, tartan tam-o-shanter and plus fours.
“Richard, could you keep an eye on things for half an hour, please?”
“Hmm….hmm…I suppose things are well in hand, but……..”
“Thank you”
“Well…er…I should really be finishing these new tai chi exercises to reduce my stress levels, you know.”
“I’m sure you’ll find time later” I said. “And don’t forget to pick up that boiled egg under the desk – it seems to have rolled into a plastic beaker.”
“Hmmmmm….hmm…oh…thank you.”
“By the way.” I said, glancing at his unusual threads “I thought you must have come incognito today.”
“Steven, I don’t know anybody of that name. I don’t know any foreign ladies at all, and if I did I would use coitus interruptus. Now please leave the room.”
“So, you aren’t wearing golfing attire then?”
“Absolutely not. I’ve just dressed casually in preparation for the annual ARSE barbeque this evening. We’ve organised a happening in the park.”
“Isn’t that where people walk around dressed as clowns, monkeys and superheroes in order to save the world?”
“Your cynical observations couldn’t be further from the truth, Steven. We chant and rant too.”
“Of course…. I stand corrected.”
(pause)
“Does ARSE have an holistic approach to solving the world’s problems?” I enquired.
“But of course. Why do you ask?”

Leaving him then to negotiate with the three patients from the dining room, I sprinted down the corridor towards a far off, little used lounge, ignoring the hammering workmen, the vacuum cleaning domestic and the chiselling engineer who had just arrived to release a patient trapped in the downstairs toilet. Like a daredevil rider hurtling through a tunnel of fire, I fixed my mind on the objective, passed the tongues of stinging flame, and leapt into my glorious bolthole, breathing sighs of orgasmic relief as the door slammed safely shut behind me. Selecting a rare chair which had been spared brown skid marks, I turned up the radio, double-locked the door and picked up a newspaper. The front page had been obliterated by some kind soul who had scrawled “bog off” all over it, but I soon discarded this sheet and began to peruse.
A blind man had supervised his one legged provisionally licensed son on the motorway, and the E.C. had issued guidelines to schoolchildren on how to eat a carrot safely. £10,000 had been awarded to a lady who had tripped over her own feet in a supermarket, because she was distracted by the bright lights and garish advertisements. Somebody had applied to university as ‘Mr. Michael Mouse’ and even though they had no formal qualifications, they had been provisionally accepted. A man had stopped collecting lawnmowers because his garden was so full of them that he couldn’t get to the grass to cut it. Another had just started to collect Concorde engines. Women were waiting until they were over thirty before having children, and men were waiting until they were over thirty before leaving home for the first time. Some youngsters had trashed a skateboard park, a playground and a sports centre, because there was nothing for them to do on the estate and they were bored. The University of Little Fryup was offering courses in Tuck Shop Management, with guaranteed first class honours degrees for the first fifty applicants. A group of WRENS had objected to wearing hats with the badge ‘HMS Impenetrable’. A rare fork which had been used to eat missionaries had come up for auction. Dummy television cameras were being installed in some churches to encourage attendance. Young men on benefits were being taught how to get up in the morning. A man had ‘phoned 999 because he’d run out of cigarettes.
The asylum had indeed been turned inside out.
“Knock! Knock!” came from the lounge door.
“I need a cigarette now!” roared a voice on the other side it.
“Please see the other staff, I’m having a break!” I shouted back.
“I’m going to discharge myself!”
Turning on the T.V. set, I found an interesting quiz programme about identifying strange antiques. Somebody was asked about a piece of ornate pottery, and after toying with it for a few moments, the contestant said:
“Would I drink from it?”
“You might do” said the questioner ”but it’s a spittoon.”
Another contestant said that they liked a beautifully carved Victorian commode, but they “wouldn’t know what to do with it”, and somebody with piggy eyes brought in a painting to sell which had been in the family since 1760, because he wanted to “have a good night out” with the cash. Indeed, most of the sellers wanted to transform their family heirlooms into either “Disneyworld” or “a cruise”, apart from those with a very well developed sense of history, conscience and family honour who just wanted their Grandma’s necklace “to go to a good home”. It reminded me of one of my colleagues who had the same perspective on Grandma herself (“she needs to go to a new home where experts can properly appreciate her”).
“What do you for a living?” the next contestant was asked.
“I’m a stoodent” came the reply.
“Oh, right. Studying which subject?”
“English.”
“Really?”
“Oh, aye. I’m doing me Masters, like.”
(silence).
Finally, a rough looking bloke with sandpaper chin, Z-shaped scars and crew cut came on the show, carrying a 1960’s Mickey Mouse alarm clock. The expert, who modestly understated his vocation by wearing pince-nez, a silk cravat, fob watch and spats, looked at the clock and said.
“What a fine example of American kitsch and post-war popular culture. If it still had the hour and minute hands it might be worth £30 in auction.”
“What!” gasped the man.
“Yes, yes” drawled the expert, in a well-practiced condescending manner.” I can understand your surprise.”
“You bet I’m fucking surprised you fucking tealeaf!” said the man, grabbing the expert by the throat. “That clock’s a fucking family heirloom – it must be worth a fucking fortune. Get you fucking money out.”
“Oh … .goodness gracious...well…I could possibly revise my….”
On another channel, I found thirty neurotic people raving in a studio about Viagra and facelifts, while a smirking demagogue told them where they were going wrong. The audience all came to blows, shook hands, and trooped off grinning at the cameras. This was followed by a repeat series of ‘Missing Link’, the popular general knowledge quiz show, where today the contestants’ specialist subjects were ‘Fred Flintstone’, ‘welfare benefits since 1948’, ‘the sociology of rap music’, and ‘me’. The news bulletin had been cancelled completely, because all the reporters were in Florida bravely covering the heat wave, and all the newsreaders were in rehearsals for celebrity dance shows.
Decide where you want to travel and what political message you want to impart, then design the news around that. Nice job.
I sat back and chewed my dog-eared sandwich, wondering vaguely whether I was breaking a local by-law by not having a conservatory yet. It was probably all right, but I might need non-planning permission, and the neighbours were almost certain to object. Unlocking the door, I girded my loins, straightened my back, squared my shoulders, gritted my teeth, and held my head high.
“I need a cigarette now!” yelled Hettie, who had obviously been standing outside the room for my entire break.
“Follow me then” I said - my head reassuming its habitual position on my breastbone.
(silence).
I was just about to enquire why she wasn’t discharging herself, when I saw one of our cleaners, on a chair, examining one of the new wall-mounted deodorant sprays. They were natty little gismos that periodically pumped out an antiseptic mist into the atmosphere, and could be electronically re-timed. This particular one was malfunctioning and, just as the domestic was explaining the problem to me, it exploded into life and spat a globule of odour neutralising chemicals down her throat.
“At least there’s no need to enquire whether you spit or swallow” I commented.
I gave Hettie her cigarette, and decided to go out for ten minutes of fresh air. The short walk to the high street was hypothermic rather than bracing, but a change was as good as a rest and I strode on toward the cash point of a nearby bank. A man stood immobile in front of the machine, his arms slightly bowed away from his body and his legs well spread like a western gunslinger. After a minute or so it became obvious that this was not the usual convenience banking malfunction, but instead an episode of temporary Parkinson’s paralysis. I waited, and eventually he moved forward with a coarse tremor, struggled painfully with the auto bank buttons, and removed a large wad of twenty-pound notes from the dispenser. He then returned to his Rover, used the wing of a new Mazda RX8 as a handy doorstop and drove away in warp drive, while his large putty-faced wife stared ahead and ignored the protests of an old man in tired boots. This was a fairly typical scene in our retirement town, and I wondered if 20 years of rigger mortis and the startling polarisation of pensioner wealth was really the accomplishment our welfare state claimed. A scruffy man-boy ambled by with his index finger inserted half way into his ear, apparently playing a medley of hip hop tunes with the wax. The pavement was a casino of old chewing gum and spat phlegm; stick or twist. That was your choice.
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The Dropout Centre

This place was so popular that a long queue always formed outside the front door before it opened at 9.00 a.m. The patrons were a liquorice allsorts brigade of red-faced, middle-aged men, young mothers, sullen youths with dirty university t-shirts, and those best described as Star Wars extras. The red-faced men generally congregated around the centre of the main room, discussing Iraq, sport and the Irish question in extremely loud voices, while the less red-faced read newspapers on the periphery. One man always selected the ‘Daily Mirror’, and then walked out with it through the side door.
The youths sat in a purple room, posting CD’s and DVD’s into the various slots which surrounded them, ready for an hour or two of electronic oblivion, while the young mothers quickly unloaded their offspring into the nearby nursery, and headed for the shops. Today, a man who looked like an amoebic Charles Manson opened a brief case full of computer games and booked himself onto work station number 7 for five hours, as a harassed member of staff tried to explain to an itinerant, wild-eyed psychopath that the world wasn’t perfect, and he might have to take no for an answer.

This place was reputedly the public library.
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I wandered on past the usual row of people on a pigeon-stained bench watching their lives go by, the greengrocer cracking jokes with his regular customers before turning back grimly to his cold shop, and three pensioners dressed as children, pushing prams. A germ factory made a beeline towards me, coughing like a bazooka at everyone in his path, while the hive itself buzzed and droned without obvious product. Alongside the parking bays, stood an arms-crossed know-all; waiting for his daily dose of driving errors and the opportunity to shake his head so sagely (one day he would learn to drive and show them all how it was done properly).
But suddenly he was galvanised into frantic action, hopping from foot to foot, with his arms swinging in unison, like a zoo-mad orang-utan waiting to be fed with cherries. Bessie Bunter in a surgical neck brace had appeared, trying to reverse her rusting Transit van with no mirrors into a tight space between two glittering 30k limos:
“Put her in reverse now” he shouted “…..that’s it……left hand down a bit……right hand up…..that’s good….good…..give a bit of welly now….”
“Just mind you own bloody business” said the heavy petting couple in the Deli doorway “We don’t need your effing advice.”

I would have liked to put some coins in the plastic R.S.P.C.A. model dog outside the butchers, but I didn’t have my gorilla suit with me and there wasn’t a T.V. camera in sight. Nor did I particularly want my head shaved, chest waxed, or buttocks submerged in baked beans before parting with my 50p, so I left it all to the experts, and thought about the old Philips screwdriver I used to rake out dog shit from my hiking boots.
Pear-shaped people with pear-shaped lives jostled each other off the pavements, determined to be first in something, while the 18-30 group capitalised on a half hour break in the November clouds to model their shorts, T-shirts and sunhats, amidst the midday frost. An airship appeared around the corner, arms and legs set at 45 degrees to reduce friction, and from the opposite direction rumbled a stocky harridan bent low over her personal empty supermarket shopping trolley with elbows surgically attached to the handles, like a Dalek without the clothes on. This was the clash of the Titans, the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, and the rematch of King Gong and Godzilla all in one sideshow. I stood well back as a massive crunch echoed down the street, and a baying crowd gathered. No need for the dancing bear these days.
Roll up. Roll up. Look at each other.
In the post office window ‘A mature, large lady willing to body massage clients in their own homes at reasonable rates’ now recommended herself before me, while in the reflection of the window a familiar figure sashayed towards a nearby car park. Half turning, I observed Carol pulling herself into the passenger seat of a delivery van, while a nice young man in Rupert Bear trousers chivalrously assisted her; his right hand tightly clenching her left buttock.
“Hee hee hee!” she giggled, as the young man proceeded towards a full per rectum investigation, and then drove off.
Too stunned to think, I filed this interesting information under ‘B’, and walked towards the unit. The germ factory had met a coughing machine at the ‘bus stop and they stood toe-to-toe like bare knuckle fighters in a barrel, spraying murderous salvos of pathogens at each other’s numb and uncomprehending faces.
“Forty-thirty” I scored on the way past.
Or did they prefer the quiet of a championship snooker hall, like most habitual coughers?

With the cage doors swinging open, I walked through a zoo at midnight.
---------------------------------------------------

It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

The sun is in your sign and nothing can stop you. Venus turning retrograde may cause snags and hold-ups. Property prices are set to rise 5% over the next year. Property prices may crash next year warns academic. Weather conditions are rather changeable at the moment with showers and sunny spells in most parts of the country, but with some exceptions. Most people hope to retire early and enjoy the good life. Unemployment in your 50’s can double the risk of strokes and heart attacks says recent study. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Many hands make light work. Older couples are now often forced to stay together for financial reasons. Many over-50’s feel empowered to divorce their partners and start a new life. Parents should ensure that all children eat five portions of fruit or vegetables each day. Pesticides found on all fruit and vegetables in schools says health watchdog. Avoid stress. Keep busy. People will be flooding the sun hotspots this weekend. Skin cancer toll rises.
Circularity, conflict and contradiction.
The dope of our times.
We believe everything and trust nothing.
---------------------------------------------------

I did the lunchtime drug round and went upstairs to check the bedrooms, glancing in the laundry as I went by. The machines were rumbling on as always, with a never ending supply of wet and soiled linen, clothes, slippers and cushions piled around them like sandbags in a flood. The machines had taken six weeks to install and were now worth their weight in gold, but in the interim we had been forced to transport four sacks of brown and white laundry a day to the local launderette. This no doubt further endeared us to the local populace who were already concerned about their property prices plummeting.
Richard emerged once more from the staff toilet (his second office), this time holding a large print edition of Jane Austin’s ‘Persuasion’.
“Ah…..my dear fellow, well met. Do I detect from your mien, a certain ennui? May I, without further dissembling and procrastination, be so bold as to recommend the waters at Bath? My dearest mama swears….”
“Are you saying I stink of piss?”
“My dear fellow….”
“Richard, will you please return to the pump room.”
“B-b-but, I’m due to see Fanny at noon.”
“Well, if you took my advice you’d ditch all those porno tapes, before the cleaner starts gossiping.”

I knocked on one of the bedroom doors two or three times, and heard the inhabitant say:
“Who is it? Get lost you bloody bugger!”
After long negotiations, I was allowed in, and my eyes travelled around the room looking for hoarded foodstuffs. Primrose was notorious for secreting eatables about her person at meal times, and then depositing them in various places around the unit, including positions behind curtains, in plant pots, under her bed, behind radiators and in her chest of drawers - sandwiched between pairs of clean knickers. On one occasion a dreadful, unaccountable smell in the small lounge was traced by the domestic to a decomposing heap of food behind the piano, including yoghurts, sweets, chocolate, crisps, cake, and half a battered fish with attendant bluebottles. Today, I could only find a bunch of six bananas in the wardrobe, but I cast an affectionate eye over the wine gum which had melted on top of the dressing table years ago, and was now a baked on part of the wood’s patina. There was always a mysterious yeasty odour in the air, and being aware of cocaine smuggling methods I investigated no further.
“Bugger off” she said amiably, as I departed.
The top floor was unexpectedly clean and tidy, and as I strolled about I recalled how staff and residents had tried to ‘personalise’ the bedrooms over the years. Some remained entirely featureless because the patient had been so damaged by their disorder that they had virtually no personal interests, pastimes, opinions or sense of self. In these cases, staff had tried to personalise the room in keeping with the patient’s known employment and family history, but it was still an imputation of the patient’s interests rather than a genuine expression of them, and so it always seemed a little sad to witness it. I visited one such room, where a man who’d lived through World War II was surrounded by faded reproduction posters from the period, Vera Lynn records, and lots of model tanks and aeroplanes. This may indeed have triggered his memory and given him back a sense of personal meaning, but I suppose it was just as likely that he’d rather forget the war (and his non-combatant role in it), or that he’d prefer something more up to date now, or that he was pretty much oblivious to it all.
“See you later, David” I said.
There was no immediate reply, but his Adam’s apple wobbled up and down his long, thin neck like a bingo ball stuck in its chute, his domed head assumed an affected pose to the left, and his wise, mocking eyes observed me from the bed. A rambling mantra of circuitous remarks and well-rehearsed fiddle-faddle then followed, and I found myself edging slowly, involuntarily, towards the door. Painstakingly tangential in everything he said and did; his behaviour was a perfect antidote to the rational world he feared. An artist in his dotage, he lay back and sighed.
Yet for some reason David always reminded me of the old chap I’d seen on T.V. who was so lonely after his wife died, that he regularly engineered the company of local antique dealers who came around to buy the few bits of bric-a-brac he had left in his run down maisonette. He’d even sold his own bed and, because he wanted to preserve his deceased wife’s bed untouched, he was left spending every night propped up in a chair. He was last heard of trying to interest the dealers in his oak floorboards.
It was disturbing to think how many tortuous little worlds existed just below the surface of our glossy bourgeois lifestyles, half-civilised manners and smiley badinage. Worlds which were carefully repressed until teatime, and then explored with virtuous vigour by familiar television faces; cameras zooming on the tears.
Worlds which waited patiently to discover us.

Although some of our patients were too fragmented by their illnesses to be seriously interested in personalising their rooms, others took it to the opposite extreme by filling their personal space with shed loads of jumble, clothes, toys, pot plants, and entertainment systems. They were possibly the true products of modern community mental health care, because they had quickly become ‘empowered’ individual consumers, without being remotely interested in the other aspects of capitalist society; individual effort, competition, productivity and wealth creation. This was perfectly understandable, of course, because they were terminally de-motivated by receiving lifelong state benefits, and generally ill-equipped to compete in the open job market.
In effect, care in the community had completely distorted the patients lives by exposing them to an inappropriate and mystifying system, and by leaving them with little choice but to engage in self indulgent ‘retail therapy’, or to sink into a continuous vegetative state. One patient had literally filled their room from floor to ceiling with white elephants of one form or another, eventually needing a further room to store the excess, until fire regulations were employed to authorise a clear out. Within weeks the mountain was reappearing, and the patient was seen depositing a perfectly good hi fi system in a nearby skip, so that he had a ‘good reason’ to buy another. He invariably went shopping by taxi, and sometimes asked the drivers to collect items he had bought earlier, including on one occasion a stuffed moose head and a gigantic doll. These arrived at the unit during one of our official inspections, sat together on the back seat of the cab (total fare £9.50).
Other patients would get through a personal stereo a week, buy roller blades they couldn’t stand up in, eat themselves sick on gigantic bars of chocolate and family sized bags of crisps, or buy expensive items of jewellery which they sold a week later for a tenth of the price. Second hand shops around the town were doing a roaring trade, applying a 100% mark up or more as soon as one of our more gullible souls walked across the threshold. Some patients regularly borrowed money off their wealthier friends in private sector mental health accommodation, where a disposable income of £150 a week was not unknown.
This was serious expenditure conducted by enthusiastic people, but as soon as the money ran out they could not be roused before 10.30a.m., spent hours in bed during the afternoon and were in their pyjamas or nightdresses by 7.00p.m. claiming to be ‘worn out’. They would often cut short organised activities such as occupational therapy or day centre attendance with a tantrum or ‘dizzy spell’, to be discovered later sleeping on the nearest sofa or dancing frantically to personal stereo music. Some tried to spend all day in their dressing gowns, like a team of Oscar Wilde look-alikes composing their next plays. One patient regularly went out through the front door to attend training sessions, only to return minutes later through the side door and go back to bed again. Staff thought they had overcome the problem by checking his bedroom a quarter of an hour after he had departed, until they discovered that he was sneaking back and sleeping in somebody else’s bed instead, or in the broom cupboard. It was almost impossible to keep some residents out of bed, and even when this was achieved, they would often sleep instead on settees, in the hospital grounds, in local parks, or in obliging drop-in centres around the town. I once made the fatal mistake of trying to motivate a particularly shrewd veteran patient by exploring his interests.
“Do you like going for walks, Tom?”
“No.”
“How about reading?”
“No.”
“You do like T.V., though”
“Not really.”
“Did you have any hobbies when you were younger?”
“No”
“What did you do with your spare time?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Would you like a game of dominos now?”
“Maybe later.”
“Would you like a ride out in the car?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is there anything at all you like doing?”
(silence)
“Come on Tom, really think about it.”
(more silence)
“I’m afraid I can’t go until you give me a reasonable answer.”
(shrugging)
“Come on, there must be something”.
“Er…….um……well…… I do watch the radio sometimes.”
This was a fairly extreme case of ‘blanket’ de-motivation, but even those residents who were alert, energetic and interested when pleasure-related subjects was mentioned, were equally lethargic, evasive and disinterested when responsibility-related subjects were at issue. One gentleman was totally deaf when you wanted him to get a shave or change his clothes, yet the first out of the starting blocks when an outing was suggested. Another was too ‘ill’ to attend a training session, yet well enough to eat four chip sandwiches and two cream cakes half an hour later. Formal assessments always confirmed this strange dichotomy, but the unit was incapable of redressing the balance because staff simply didn’t have the expectation that longer-term patients could contribute to their own welfare, even though the old asylum system had clearly demonstrated the reverse.
Such is ‘progress’.
“Buzzzz” went the doorbell.
“I’ve just come to check for radon gas” said a turquoise-coloured man with Geiger counter type equipment, rubber boots and log book.
“By all means” I said. “Please join the club.”
“Club?”
“Yes, we now have almost the entire rainbow of overalls present on the unit. I’m expecting orange to arrive any minute.”
“Yes” he rejoined “That’ll be Chris with his new door locks.”
“He’s due to give a presentation actually” the man added.
“A presentation!” I gasped. “What’s the subject?”
“Er….I don’t know really…. But that’s not the point is it?”
“True, true.”

I found myself imagining the place where all these workmen mysteriously went. Presumably they disappeared down a big hole in the back of the unit, like Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit, and emerged into some surreal world, where fantasies cleverly demonstrated the truth.
No doubt there would be subdued lighting and brass incense burners, a Wurlitzer jukebox playing ‘Part of the Union’; a snooker table and fully stocked bar, a giant plasma T.V. screen showing ‘King Dong’; attractive ladies wandering about in fishnet tights and guinea pig outfits, and the men themselves sprawled on sofas drinking frothing ale from pewter tankards and wearing ten-gallon cowboy hats. A clapperboard would probably appear, and a man with an American accent would shout:
“Action!”
Instantly, the workmen and their friends would assume advanced positions of the Karma Sutra, rhythmically changing partners to the sound of a dinner gong. A full gamut of gasps, grunts and wails would then ensue, before the Bacchanalian tableau collapsed in orgasmic splendour around the centre of the room, allowing our Locality Manager to stumble from the dust with a tiny acorn in his hand. The American director would boom:
“That’s a wrap!”
Well, these people must be somewhere, doing something.
Moving on down the corridor, it occurred to me that Richard had disappeared to one of his ‘meetings’ (i.e. chin wags with overpaid cronies or new shapely secretaries), and this was an ideal opportunity for me to investigate the bulge and television incident I’d witnessed earlier in the week. Tiptoeing into his office like Inspector Clouseau walking on rice paper, I immediately spotted the tiny red glow of a video ‘on’ switch cutting through the gloom of his heavily curtained sanctum, arming me with uncanny intuition. I pressed the ‘eject’ button and was not in the least surprised to see the noble title ‘Moby Dick III – The Shagfest Continues’ slowly appear from the machine’s hot interior, confirming my worst/best suspicions.
“Bang! Bang! Bang!”
“I need tea now!” said Hettie at the door.
“Follow me then” I said, quickly putting away the smoking gun in the nearest holster.
“I’m going to…..”
“Buzzzz. Buzzzzz.”
It was the ‘phone again, but only the Locality Manager wanting “vital” bank nurse figures for 1979, so I put this in the diary for tomorrow (when I had a day off), and returned upstairs.
A number of residents had crept back to bed after lunch, and I had to brave a battery of objections and excuses before they would reluctantly agree to pay lip service to their care plans, even if these only recommended socialising in the T.V. lounge. Checking inside the wardrobes and beneath the beds for those who were astute enough to play hide and seek, I reflected on how much easier it was to let the residents have their own way. They were extremely persistent in their evasive tactics, and could be both manipulative and aggressive in the pursuit of their objectives. Small wonder, therefore, that the staff often played into their hands by actively colluding with the patients’ hedonistic tendencies. Visits to seaside ice cream parlours and fish and chip restaurants, for example, were usually very popular, even though some of the patients were massively overweight and had diet care plans, while ‘social evenings’ with plentifully flowing wine and lager were equally popular for comparable reasons. Similarly, the daily fixation with television was rarely challenged because staff also liked to spend their time watching football and soap operas, as well as endlessly prattling undercover of repeat films and newscasts. Even when the patients remained square-eyed in front of children’s television, this would still be perceived as a useful distraction from more disruptive activities.
Conversely, when social skills, domestic skills, gardening or personal hygiene interventions were suggested to the residents, these were almost invariably greeted with sabotaging tantrums, increased ‘delusions’ or mute unresponsiveness; so it was not entirely surprising when staff started to take the easy options themselves. This was the point that the unit had reached meltdown; where the day-to-day collusion, the mirror-like reflection of staff-patient lethargy and self-interest, and the obscuring of all things with worthless paper work, had murdered the unit stone dead.
“A man of 35 who has never worked complained yesterday that the £30,000 he received each year in benefits was insufficient for a proper family holiday. He complained that this was a major abuse of his human rights, and was considering an appeal. His father, who is also unemployed, said his son was unavailable for comment, because he was resting.”
“I wish somebody would turn that radio off!” I shouted down the corridor.
My head throbbed again, and for a few seconds I felt strangely disorientated, as the hospital colours swam around me, and an eerie whispering filled the corridor. I was unaccountably tense, and I instinctively turned towards the bathroom for a moment’s peace and quiet. At first this helped, but then the room began to turn and warp, a growing tide of nausea threatened to engulf me, and…….

“Bang! Bang!”
A sudden tattoo on the door brought me back to my senses, and as I stumbled across the room to see who it was, the door opened.
“Oh, there you are” said Sidney, looking at my white face. “Are you feeling shite…er….alright?”
“As always, you got it right the first time” I muttered.
“Ah…well…cheer up…. I’ve made some ‘soup for a mug’ downstairs if you want it.
“You mean ‘soup in a mug’?’
“I know what I mean” he answered.
(pause)
“It’s cock-a-leekie I assume.”
“What else, old mate?”

I really had to get out of this bloody awful place. It was just a shift work version of Hades, and yet the chains were so very strong. The chains of age, mortgage, kids, habit, fear, convention, and marriage.
That reminded me.
What was Carol doing with the van driver?

(to be continued)
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