Vacant Possession

  The house itself, a crumbling grey core, looked out over the fields and towards the road. Gravel paths ran away from it, with flower beds on either side. There were parked cars, an ambulance, a scatter of Nissen huts and sheds, and a colony of new buildings, made of metal and varnished wood and plate glass. Beyond these was a belt of dark trees, and more fields. There was a faint ground mist, and moisture in the air.

  When the car stopped, Muriel scrambled out. “Hang on a minute,” Miss Tidmarsh called. She took her by the elbow. It reminded her of Mother.

  The paths were dotted with little signposts: Hunniford Ward, Greyshott Ward, Occupational Therapy. She did not have time to read them all, but she could read much better than they thought. She craned her neck, straining back over her shoulder. “Come on, my dear,” the woman said. My dear; for the second time. Mother never said it, only “You useless lump.” Useless lump or my dear, the meaning was the same.

  Inside the big building the tiles were cold underfoot. Another woman came out, wearing a blue and white check garment. She had an elastic belt and a paper hat. “Oh hello, Miss Tidmarsh,” she said. “And how are we today? Got another customer for us?”

  She had a special way of looking at Muriel, as if she looked straight through her and around all the edges to assess her size and shape. She shifted from one foot to the other, a little self-consciously, and twanged at her elastic belt. “We’re supposed to be going into mufti soon,” she said. “What do you think of that?” The woman made some reply. Muriel looked around the entrance hall, up at the ceiling. The nurse asked, “How about a cup of tea?”

  “That would be brilliant,” Muriel said.

  The nurse gave her a queer look. “Not you, dear. Patients’ tea comes at ten-thirty, you’ve missed it.”

  “I’ll have coffee,” Muriel said. “Jam, ham, Spam, roast beef, cornflakes, and Ovaltine.” Miss Tidmarsh laughed.

  They followed the notices that said ADMISSIONS. The ward had thirty beds. This is your locker, this is your orange bedspread, this is your bedside mat, this is where you will live. “And then, dear, in a week or two, when Doctor has had a talk to us, we’ll be moving on.”

  Muriel sat on her orange bedspread. “My head hurts,” she said. The nurse took away her dress. She took away her knickers. She gave her a thin cotton gown.

  “Don’t you wear a bra?” she said. Muriel shook her head. The nurse smiled. “We don’t want to droop, do we?”

  “I don’t know what we’re talking about,” Muriel said. “Our head hurts.”

  “We mustn’t be cheeky. We’ll learn that soon enough, dear. Haven’t we got slippers?” Muriel shook her head again. “You’ll have to get your visitors to bring you some.”

  “Will I get visitors?”

  “You’ll get your family, won’t you, dear?”

  Muriel thought this over. Baby: drip, drip. Mother. She closed her eyes tiredly. Mother always said she would haunt.

  “Pay attention, dear,” the nurse said sharply. Muriel slapped the palm of her hand against her head. “That won’t help,” the nurse said. “I can’t give you any medication. Not till you’ve seen the doctor.”

  “When will that be?”

  “That will be on the ward round. Tomorrow.”

  When Muriel was left alone, she sat on her bed and dangled her feet. She examined them, hanging there on the end of her legs, her fat red toes. She had done a lot of talking since Mother died. Before, days had gone by without speech; weeks, months. Except for rhymes. She’d not give up making those rhymes, she enjoyed them. They were all she remembered from St. David’s School. Sing a song of headache, holler scream and cry, Four and twenty nurses, baked in a pie. She would not cry; she could not be bothered. She scratched her knee instead. A blind was drawn at the window, and the ward was in semi-darkness. She felt the walls close in on her; safe again. Back in the prison of her body, and back in the prison routine with its sights and smells and noises; rumbling tummy, creaking ankles, the steady beating of the heart.

  The first person Muriel met was Sholto. He stood in the long corridor blocking her path, a sinister dirty little man with bow legs. “Are you mad, or stupid?” he enquired.

  “Both,” Muriel said promptly.

  “Join the élite corps.” Sholto sprang forward and pumped her hand.

  Country life. The birds woke her up at four o’clock. She struggled out of her dreams and threw back the bedclothes. She put her feet on the cold floor; head down, she blundered to the window. It showed her a pale milky light and her own pale reflection; the features blurred, amorphous, underwater. She rubbed her right hand down her nightdress, thinking of the clinging green weed.

  “Come on, dear, back to bed,” said a voice behind her. “What are you doing up at this time? Didn’t you have your pill?”

  Muriel nodded. “I swallowed it.”

  Early morning waking, said the nurse to herself, a sign of clinical depression. “Back you go,” she said.

  “Those damn squeakies in the trees,” Muriel muttered. She glared at the nurse.

  “Six thirty you get up,” the nurse said. “Not four. We’ve got to get ourself into a routine.” She watched Muriel wiping her hand down her nightdress. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour, she said to herself. Tics.

  In the country the medical care was under the supervision of Dr. Battachariya, a plump smiling little man; fat eyes, like disappointed raisins, were studded into his golden face. She screamed when he tried to examine her.

  “You have had a baby, Muriel?” he said shrewdly. A rude, unmannerly man, prying about like that with his plastic gloves. “When was that?”

  She mumbled something.

  “Where is the little blighter?”

  “With my mother,” she said.

  The first week passed. Now who was mad? Who was bad? Who was stupid?

  If they had been florid, talkative, and lively with delusion, the long years of Largactil and dormitory wards had made them vacant and passive. If they had been blundering, inadequate, and lost, the passage of time had taught them cunning, the thousand expedients of institutional life. A breezy humorous disregard was their attitude to the doctors; the doctors sat with downcast eyes, their voices droning, their thought processes slowed.

  Day room. People sit about on vinyl-covered armchairs. None of the furniture here has any resemblance to the furniture used outside. They are not things that people would have in their houses. Jaws move, champing on nothing. Cigarette smoke curls up. My mother died…I had this accident…I worried all night because I hadn’t done my homework…I should never have got married. Hum, hum, hum. Questions are meaningless when you can’t sit still in your chair. They are like bluebottles buzzing round your head: hum, hum, hum. I had no idea there was such filth in the world…At this point there was no food left in the house…I knew he had got a knife…I knew that if I allowed myself to go to sleep I should die during the night. Each night in the six o’clock news there is a special message for me. People stare at me whenever I set foot in the street. Someone had broken my glasses/started a fire/informed on me, hum, hum, hum. Marilyn Monroe stole my giro. I went to the café till my money ran out.

  Can you name ten cities? Can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister? Manic motion, impelled to tread, tread, tread along the corridors, hands flying about face and ears.

  You must have some feelings about yourself? Stare. A slow shake of the head. Shoulders held rigid, gaze rigid, face and hair grey. A certain rigidity of posture, says the doctor. Seemingly negativistic. How long is it since we first saw you now? No reply.

  An affective problem…semi-aggressive…schizophrenic excitement…marked thought disorder. What about a little injection? You aren’t afraid of a little injection, are you?

  These were Muriel’s best friends: Sholto, and Emmanuel Crisp. There were a few hangers-on; Philip and Effie. At first she had been a lost soul, wandering around the day room washing her big red hands together. She had missed her mother, in strange ways; Evely
n with her chattering and her nagging and her little ruses to defeat persecutors and spies. It was a fair bet that Evelyn had taught her a thing or two, and unless in fact she were missing her it was impossible to account for the hollow feeling that she carried around inside. At the same time, she was growing a little garden of resentment and speculation, watering her weeds in the small hours when she lay staring into the darkness, wide-eyed despite her sleeping pill. The Welfare did things for people, she now learned, got them money so that they could live on the outside, got them gas fires and shoes. They had never got anything for her. Even when Evelyn let them in, she wheedled around them and said that everything possible was being done. Pretending to be sane was a great strain on Evelyn, and this strain was the origin of many of the stand-up fights they had after the Welfare had gone. Sometimes she said to herself, Mother should be here, not me, left in this homely home-from-home to pursue a career as a lunatic. She was told that in pursuance of the truth about her mother’s life they had sliced open her body, peered into it, and pulled out her insides. She thought back on the process with satisfaction.

  Now that she knew more about other people and their way of life, she often wondered if her crimes entitled her to some sort of record. She could read properly now; there was a book, in great request among her friends, which had records of everything under the sun, and most of these activities—county cricket, nonstop dancing—seemed less interesting than her own. Ought she to put pen to paper about it?

  Sholto advised caution. Was the baby found? he asked. No; or she would be in a prison. Still in the canal then; sunk into the soft mud at the bottom, strangled by green weeds, trapped under the rusting wrecks of bedsprings and fridges. He offered to consult Emmanuel Crisp, who with his church connections was an expert on all matters charnel.

  Emmanuel thought. A peat bog will preserve anything, he said. That is not in question. Mud; soft mud, still water. And, a canal: acid in the water, surely. There’s not much to infant bones—“but what you have there, Muriel, is perhaps a skeleton.”

  Sholto asked more questions. Was she blamed for her Mother’s demise? No. Foul play was not suspected, Crisp put in. Could she handle the scepticism her claims would provoke? They were pernickety, the publishers of this record book, they did not entertain idle claims, they might want her to repeat her feat under test conditions. You can get another child, said Sholto, winking lewdly so that she would grasp his meaning, but you cannot get another mother. Keep it to yourself, he advised. The fact is, Muriel, that you can’t prove a thing.

  “I could, though,” she said. “If I found the bones.”

  Crisp was a tall man, pallid and spare. He had a precisian’s lip, a cold eye; his hair was coiled about his dome like a woolly snake. Wherever did he get his wing collars, Sholto asked him.

  “Charity,” said Crisp briskly.

  “Myself I have fits,” Sholto explained. “Crisp’s life has been different. He was the verger once at St. Peter’s.”

  Crisp cleared his throat. “I left undone those things that ought to be done.”

  “What things?”

  “My flies. Later, a gas tap.”

  “He is one of those people who do not know what came over them,” Sholto said. “He lived to tell the tale, though he leaves me to tell it. They put it in the Reporter: SEX BEAST VERGER: VICAR SPEAKS.”

  “Have you ever heard of entrapment?” Emmanuel Crisp asked. “It was what they call an agent provocateur. She said she was from the Women’s Institute. She wanted to go into the choir stalls, and see the organ.”

  “You know you took her wrong,” Sholto said doggedly. “You did it on purpose.”

  “She touched my sleeve.” He shuddered. “I often pray for her.”

  “The vicar never spoke up for him. He’s left now.”

  “He’s dead,” Crisp said. “Or ought to be.”

  As a group, they got together in the day room. It was a new idea, to mix the boys and girls together. Autumn had come; but next year, Effie said, they would meet out of doors where there was more privacy. God willing, Philip added piously. Emmanuel led them in a verse or two of “The Church’s One Foundation” then they broke up for tea.

  After this came a period of considerable longueurs. Winter closed in over the fields. She stood by the window of Greyshott Ward and watched the rain beating against it. It was a year before she was put into a charabanc and taken in a great herd of chattering fellow patients to the shops in town. The journey took thirty minutes, and the excitement mounted with every mile. They went into a sweet-shop, and into a hardware store where the patients looked at bread-bins and said which colour they would have if they had any bread of their own. She looked around and was very tempted, but she stole nothing at all. Afterwards, back on Greyshott, she was praised up for her good behaviour.

  She had special clothes for the outing, given her out of a cardboard box kept in the nurses’ room: a blue frock with six buttons, and a mackintosh that was only a bit small. Back on Greyshott she was given her old smock again. A nurse stood over her waiting to take the outside clothes away. When she came to take her dress off, she could only account for five buttons. The nurse made the noise “tt-tt” and blew a little through her teeth. It was something only nurses should do; if patients did it they got shouted at. She scooped up the dress and the mackintosh and dropped them back into the box. “Come on, get dressed, you idle sod,” she said. “I can’t do it for you.” Muriel saw the dress and the mackintosh disappearing, the box borne away.

  She sat on the end of her bed, rebellious. “Tt-tt,” she said, and wagged her head slowly, and cast her eyes to heaven. By watching other people, by stealing their expressions and practising them, she was adding to her repertoire. I was no one when I came here, she thought; but after a few years of this, there’s no saying how many people I’ll be.

  Effie was often Her Majesty the Queen. They went along with her, lining up by the ward door. She wore a pink plastic shower cap that had been brought in from the outside by some long-forgotten visitor. She offered them each the tips of her fingers, and her very sweetest smile.

  “And how long have you been at Fulmers Moor?”

  “Ten years, Ma’am.”

  “Indeed? You must have seen many changes in your time?”

  Between official engagements, Effie sat and looked at the wall a great deal. From time to time a ripple of emotion made her face quiver. She would put a hand up to stop it, and then she would leap up in a frenzied pursuit of the nearest nurse. “I want my Largactil,” she would bleat, “I want my Modecate, I want my nice Fentazin syrup.” Tranquillised, she would lean against the wall, her face serene again; only a blink of the eye, only a minute parkinsonian quiver of the extremities, to show that she was alive at all.

  “I make no showing,” Crisp said, petulant. “I’d better get a delusion. I hope to become a public man,” he told Dr. Battachariya. “I hope to be appointed Ambassador to St. Petersburg. Or Governor of the Bank of England.”

  Dr. Battachariya sucked his pen. He questioned him closely. “What is the difference between a ladder and a staircase?” he asked him.

  Crisp smiled. “A ladder is a series of portable gradations,” he suggested, “of either metal or wood; sometimes rope. It consists of two uprights, with steps, called rungs, between them. It serves as a means of ascent, as does a staircase; but a staircase, designed on the same principle, is a fixed internal structure. Suppose for the sake of argument that you were a window cleaner—and some honester men than you or I, Battachariya, do in fact earn their living in that fashion—then taking stout cords, you could bind the ladder to your vehicle’s roof, and thus transport it; which you could by no means do with a staircase.”

  Dr. Battachariya toyed with his ballpoint. He was determined to fault it. “Don’t you think your explanation is rather over-elaborate?” he asked. Crisp smiled again; his dry, remote, ecclesiastical smile.

  Muriel sought him out. “Crisp, give me a book,” she said. “A book
of sermons. Anything.”

  “What do you want a book for?”

  “I want words. I’ve got to have more words. I was kept stupid on purpose. I want some like yours.”

  “Listen,” Effie said sharply, “this is the bloody Savoy. Do you know what we had where I was last? No doors on the lavatories, pardon me. One toothmug per seventeen imbeciles. Crisp, you don’t know you’re born.” Recovering herself, she added, “Balmoral is no better.”

  But next day Effie went on the rampage. She had a filthy tongue in her head when she wasn’t giving regal addresses. She ran screaming and cursing down Greyshott Ward and out into the corridor.

  “I don’t need hospital,” she shouted. “I don’t need nurses. I’m not sick. I may be daft but I’m not sick. I don’t need getting up at six-thirty every day, Christmas Day, birthday, Queen’s official birthday and every bleeding Sunday. I need to get up when I want and make myself a little cup of tea.”

  Two stout male orderlies got Effie by the arms and brought her back to Greyshott. They argued with her as they dragged her along. “And how would we get your breakfast, if you got up any old time you felt like it?”

  “I’m not here to have breakfasts. I could get my own.”

  “Go without is what you’d do. And if we didn’t get you up, what’s to say you’d ever get up at all? What’s to stop you lying in bed all day?”

  Sholto stood by, scratching his head and looking on.

  “The patients for the shifts,” he remarked, “or the shifts for the patients?”

  Dumping Effie on her bed, reaching for the screens to pull around her, the orderly stared at Sholto; his face crimson, his breathing heavy. “Get your frigging ugly face out of here, Sholto Marks,” he bellowed.