familiar gurgle of the plumbing as it
coped with the staff-supervised evacuations of the patients preliminary
to their bedding down.
-- What else doesn't she know about? Toilets, maybe?
Tea, excessively spiked with milk, sweetened, she sipped and eventually
drank down. They all three watched her intently. Abruptly Paul realised
they were doing something he normally objected to in principle: treating
a patient as a thing instead of a person.
-- Simply because I can't talk to her. Hmmm . . .
He turned to Natalie with an exclamation. "Chuck over a notepad and a
pencil, will you? Let's try and get her to write something down."
-- Is she going to have to have this explained too? No, thank goodness.
With something approaching briskness, the girl set aside her empty cup and
took the pencil and paper. She examined the point of the former and made
a tentative mark with it as if to be sure that was the way it worked,
then wrote quickly. Paul noted that she was right-handed but preferred
the rare, though not remarkable, grip between index and middle fingers.
She showed him the result, saying at the same time, "Arrzheen!"
He found confronting him four symbols like a child's incomplete sketch
for two Christmas trees, a fishhook and an inverted spear.
*8*
All the way home Paul kept shivering, although the car's heater was
switched on full.
-- The way hope seemed to leak out of the girl's face when she realised
I didn't understand what she'd written down. My imaginary terrors have
come to life in her; she's stranded in a world where nobody can speak
to her and nobody knows who she is!
-- The curious greedy "ah-hah, they're locking you up too" expressions
of the patients as we took her through the dormitory to her cell. Maybe I
should have experienced that instead of being protected and isolated. But
it would probably have broken me into little bits.
-- She can't be under any illusions about where she's wound up. Things
may baffle her but people she does appear to understand. Packed in head
to foot to head in what were once fine stately rooms but now stark with
chipped plaster, faded ugly paint, bars at the windows and locks on
the doors.
The keys in his pocket jingled, not audibly but in memory.
-- And I told Natalie this afternoon we had eighteen free bed-spaces.
Whose word am I taking for that? Every ward so crammed we only have room
for a poky little locker too small to hold a kid's toys alongside each
bed. Anything too much or too numerous for the locker to hold: taken and
shut away. How do people reassure themselves of identity? Belongings,
possessions, mementoes: the solid proof that memory doesn't lie. And
bit by bit we chip away the mortar of their lives. Christ, how did I
ever wander into psychiatry for a living?
The lamp-post standard outside his home appeared around a bend, and he
slowed. There was no need to get out in the rain and unfasten the gate;
he'd left it open this morning.
-- And that's something Iris won't let me do when she's here. Being with
Iris has turned into an endless series of-having to get out in the rain
because an open gate "looks bad." And might let dogs into the garden.
He halted the car and switched it off. As darkness rushed in, so
did fatigue, and he sat thinking along the same lines for another few
minutes. This car was a Triumph Spitfire, not because Iris hadn't had cash
for something more ambitious but because the car she originally chose
was four inches too long for the gate to be closed behind it and there
was only a narrow verge -- no pavement across which it could have been
rehung to open outwards. Moreover, fitting a modern gate that folded by
sections would mean sacrificing the present one of stout oaken bars which
the daily woman warranted to have been made by a joiner in Blickham with
such a
coped with the staff-supervised evacuations of the patients preliminary
to their bedding down.
-- What else doesn't she know about? Toilets, maybe?
Tea, excessively spiked with milk, sweetened, she sipped and eventually
drank down. They all three watched her intently. Abruptly Paul realised
they were doing something he normally objected to in principle: treating
a patient as a thing instead of a person.
-- Simply because I can't talk to her. Hmmm . . .
He turned to Natalie with an exclamation. "Chuck over a notepad and a
pencil, will you? Let's try and get her to write something down."
-- Is she going to have to have this explained too? No, thank goodness.
With something approaching briskness, the girl set aside her empty cup and
took the pencil and paper. She examined the point of the former and made
a tentative mark with it as if to be sure that was the way it worked,
then wrote quickly. Paul noted that she was right-handed but preferred
the rare, though not remarkable, grip between index and middle fingers.
She showed him the result, saying at the same time, "Arrzheen!"
He found confronting him four symbols like a child's incomplete sketch
for two Christmas trees, a fishhook and an inverted spear.
*8*
All the way home Paul kept shivering, although the car's heater was
switched on full.
-- The way hope seemed to leak out of the girl's face when she realised
I didn't understand what she'd written down. My imaginary terrors have
come to life in her; she's stranded in a world where nobody can speak
to her and nobody knows who she is!
-- The curious greedy "ah-hah, they're locking you up too" expressions
of the patients as we took her through the dormitory to her cell. Maybe I
should have experienced that instead of being protected and isolated. But
it would probably have broken me into little bits.
-- She can't be under any illusions about where she's wound up. Things
may baffle her but people she does appear to understand. Packed in head
to foot to head in what were once fine stately rooms but now stark with
chipped plaster, faded ugly paint, bars at the windows and locks on
the doors.
The keys in his pocket jingled, not audibly but in memory.
-- And I told Natalie this afternoon we had eighteen free bed-spaces.
Whose word am I taking for that? Every ward so crammed we only have room
for a poky little locker too small to hold a kid's toys alongside each
bed. Anything too much or too numerous for the locker to hold: taken and
shut away. How do people reassure themselves of identity? Belongings,
possessions, mementoes: the solid proof that memory doesn't lie. And
bit by bit we chip away the mortar of their lives. Christ, how did I
ever wander into psychiatry for a living?
The lamp-post standard outside his home appeared around a bend, and he
slowed. There was no need to get out in the rain and unfasten the gate;
he'd left it open this morning.
-- And that's something Iris won't let me do when she's here. Being with
Iris has turned into an endless series of-having to get out in the rain
because an open gate "looks bad." And might let dogs into the garden.
He halted the car and switched it off. As darkness rushed in, so
did fatigue, and he sat thinking along the same lines for another few
minutes. This car was a Triumph Spitfire, not because Iris hadn't had cash
for something more ambitious but because the car she originally chose
was four inches too long for the gate to be closed behind it and there
was only a narrow verge -- no pavement across which it could have been
rehung to open outwards. Moreover, fitting a modern gate that folded by
sections would mean sacrificing the present one of stout oaken bars which
the daily woman warranted to have been made by a joiner in Blickham with
such a
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