Madness is all in the mind: Chapter 1: first day in the madhouse

I hadn't expected the garden. Not a real, growing, colourful garden, crammed with life-sustaining sunshine.

I stepped out of the hollow corridors of the institution into a scene from the real world. The very residents I had seen the night before, crying into conformist coco, were back to life, lounging in the sun.

Around the edges of the garden complex flowers bloomed, flowers I knew not how to name, merely to marvel at. A pond, though empty of fish, was crammed to its dark depths with life spanning the rainbow from green to brown. Over the coming months I would sometimes see frogs and newts emerge or return. Amphibians, living an undecided existence, like a mind swapping between conscious and unconscious state.

I sat on a sun lounger, with a renewed view of my fate. Maybe it wasn't so bad, a few weeks of sunlit days. At least I could use the nights to study. Maybe I would even come to learn from the doctors here.

I slurped weak lemon squash through a straw. If only there'd been ice it would have been perfect, but they didn't do ice. It had caused upset in a previous patient and was no longer available to the residents.

A young woman walked over and set next to me. She was blonde, beautiful and clad in a skimpy bikini. She smiled with the confidence of a gambler in the middle of a winning streak.

"Hi," she said, "I'm Candy. Just to warn you from the start; we'll probably end up having sex, but it won't mean anything."

I was a bit nonplussed by her frankness. That sort of thing only happened in movies, and in the kind of movies I'd only managed to see once, when the Denly sixth form boys made their famous voyage to Soho.

"Ok, thanks for the warning. I'm Lester. I'll probably get all philosophical and deep, but it won't mean anything."

Candy laughed appreciatively. The kind of laugh that could make a man high. "So why you here Lester? What kind of crazy are you?" She demonstrated the word crazy with a rapid whirling motion round her mind; I guessed she'd be good at charades.

"I decided to go mad. So I just stripped down to my pants in the middle of the High Street and shouted 'wibble, wibble'."

"Good for you; I've felt like doing that so many times. 'Look at me I'm mad, wibble, wibble'. If only I'd thought of it."

"But you managed to get in anyway. What kind of crazy are you, if you don't mind my asking?"

"I don't mind your asking Lester, you can ask me anything." She paused, as if to soak up a passing ray of sunshine, as if she was solar powered and needed that extra zap to get her through the explanation. "I'm sex crazy; that's my kind of crazy."

"Sex crazy?"

"Mad for sex. Can't get enough of it. Well, in fact I get too much of it. Can't say no. Get myself into Trouble." She somehow managed to say trouble with a big capital T.

"There's less temptation here," she continued, "I've only had sex a few times."

"You should put yourself in a nunnery."

"I tried that; I just brought disgrace to the mother superior."

I didn't need to know the details, though I'm fairly sure I only had to ask. Besides, I had a vague recollection of the News of the World headlines from the previous year.

"Do you have a girlfriend Lester?" Candy asked.

"I do, here name's Catherine. Cathy."

"Cathy, that's almost Candy, just two letters different. If we do sleep together you'd only be 40% unfaithful, just to the 't' and 'h'.

"Have you ever considered that I might not want to sleep with you."

Candy howled with laughter for several minutes, writhing around on the floor in hysterics. She was right, of course, she was not the sort of girl you would say no to, even if it meant being unfaithful to 't' and 'h'. Eventually she got up from the floor, still laughing, and rejoined me, catching my eye with a mischievous stare. I decided to change the subject.

"I don't know anyone yet. Who's that over there? I nodded to a young man a few feet away, who was sitting with a typewriter perched precariously on a flimsy wicker table. He typed furiously, an endless stream of words, pausing occasionally to change paper and add the finished sheet to an already large pile on the floor beside him, held down with a flat stone.

"That's Michael," said Candy, "he's writing a novel."

"What's he in for."

"He's writing a novel."

"That's hardly a definition of madness."

"Oh, in his case it really is. All he does is write, write, write and write. Even at night you can hear him tapping away." She leant forward in a whisper. "He didn't even have time to sleep with me when I asked him."

"Ha," I said, "so you're not irresistible. And you laughed when I said I might not be interested."

"I didn't say he turned me down. Just that he didn't stop typing while we were doing it." She paused to take a drag on her cigarette, giving her lips an excuse to pout seductively. "It wasn't the worse ever."

She let the words and tobacco fumes hang in the air between us for a moment, before stamping out the cigarette.

"So Lester, tell me about Catherine, this Cathy you're so ridiculously faithful to. Is she mad too?"

"No she's not mad. She's on the same psychology course as I am, at Cambridge. She probably sees me as homework. Hopefully she'll be here to visit at the weekend."

I had hoped to impress Candy with mention of Cambridge and a fellow-Cambridge student girlfriend, but she betrayed no interest.

"Perfect," she smiled, "we can have a threesome." I tried to object, but my mind was too busy acting out the image and by the time I had words ready she'd upped and bounced away, smiling something about my not being the only good looking boy in the garden, even though I clearly was.

"You'll have to show me round," I shouted to her shadow, but her shadow displayed no interest in responding.

As I sat in the sun, talking to Candy's shadow, I little realised that this would be the high point of my time at the EverCareHome for the Mentally Disturbed. It would soon become unbearable, starting with that afternoon's interrogation by the staff psychologist, in fact before then.