The Treatment and the Cure by Peter Kocan Page A

motions you to the corner table, the worst table of all. You sit down and try to look calm. Being at this table means that the shadow of shock and medication is on you. For three days you stay at the corner table, being terribly careful about every look and move and gesture you make.
    You tell yourself that you’ll be all right. You remember how pleased Arthur seemed with you over the bricklaying and everything, and surely they wouldn’t give you shock just because of the spoon. You can’t be sure though, so you go about for the three days with a pain in your stomach from worry.
    On the fourth day after the spoon, you’re going in to the dining room again and another screw motions you back to your old place at the best table and you know then that they’d just been giving you a little lesson. You know they won’t be forgetting about the spoon though, not for a long time, and you’re going to have to be very careful for a long time.
    Barry Clarke has been taken off some of his medication. He’s not dribbling and wetting himself any more and can talk almost normally and work a bit in the vegetable garden. He’s lost a photo of his wife and baby daughter. He thinks Hartley stole it. Hartley is a famous murderer who killed five men and cut off their balls because he was molested by a sergeant in the army. Hartley knows he’ll be in this place until he dies. We’re having breakfast and Barry Clarke is looking across at Hartley as if he wants to smash him and is muttering horrible curses. Suddenly Barry Clarke goes berserk. He leaps up and heaves the table over so that all the food and the plates go onto the floor. Then he picks up his chair and hurls it at Hartley’s head. Hartley knows straight away what’s happening and he runs for the door. It’s unlocked. Just as he’s about to disappear, the chair catches him on the back of the head. He staggers in mid stride and then is gone.
    Five or six screws surround Barry Clarke. He’s quiet now but is trembling and his face is white. The screws take him outside, and Arthur takes Hartley into the office to dress the gash in his head.
    Barry Clarke isn’t punished very much, just given extra medication again. The screws don’t worry so much about fights like that because fights between inmates don’t really threaten their authority. Not like the dirty spoon. The dirty spoon threatened them.
    Ray Hoad was just about to eat his egg when Barry’s table banged into him. His egg went on the floor.
    “What about my egg!” he kept saying. “I want another egg!” He thinks it’s very unfair.
    If you do something violent like Barry Clarke they sometimes put you in the “grille”. a sort of wire cage, like a monkey cage at the zoo, which is at the end of the verandah. We think maybe they didn’t put Barry there because it’s already occupied. Skippy’s been in the grille for weeks. He has an abnormal brain and whenever they let him out he attacks the first person he sees. Skippy seems very much like the orang-utans you see at the zoo. He sits all crumpled up in the cage, staring out through the wire mesh with red, sunken eyes and flexing his hands and rubbing his lips together slowly. He seems so quiet in the grille that every couple of weeks the screws decide to let him out, but he turns wild and has to be put back. They say Skippy is going to be sent away for an operation on his brain.
    You’re talking to Zurka about what he did to the people with his butcher’s chopper. He doesn’t mind talking about it now. He’s pretty sure he’s to be transferred to the open section and he wants to show that he understands about his crime and why he did it and that it was a dreadful act. The screws say that being able to talk calmly about your crime shows you’ve gained insight. Of course, you mustn’t talk about it too much, or too calmly, or they’ll say you’re dwelling on it or that you aren’t showing a healthy remorse.
    “I had this belief that somebody was after