Vacant Possession by Hilary Mantel

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