Vacant Possession. Hilary Mantel
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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 sweetshop, 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.
Effie subsided. She began to cry, her chest heaving with the shock and horror of her outburst.
I’ve killed a psychiatrist … I pulled all the stuffing out of the doll … they put gunpowder through my letter box … they sang in the streets outside my house … a strange letter came, postmarked Scarborough.
Philip had the secret of perpetual motion. Chug, chug, chug. I am a tractor. I am a Centurion tank. I am a shiny red new Flymo. Otherwise sensible, Philip oils his moving parts each morning.
Crisp attributes it to the decline of faith. You may hear it, he says, as Philip garages himself for the night: the melancholy long withdrawing roar. In days gone by, Philip might have believed he was possessed by a devil, but the trend this century is to penetration by rays, bombs in the skull, and possession of men by machines.
I am the internal combustion engine, says Philip.
After a year or two Muriel became angry. She went to the end of the ward where the charge nurse sat in his little plastic cubicle. He was a fair-haired belligerent man, with a habit of sucking on his underlip. His biceps bulged pink and scrubbed beneath the short sleeves of his tunic. He was reading his racing paper.
When he saw Muriel he folded up his paper and put it down.
‘Eh up, it’s Jane Fonda,’ he said. Muriel did not know why he used this name, which he always did. He was looking amiable, but amiable was not his bent.
‘I have a question,’ she said.
The charge nurse lit a cigarette. ‘Fire away.’
‘Can’t I be treated like a normal person?’
I’m worried about everything. What things? The bomb. What do you think will happen to you? Stay in hospital; then I’ll die. You got very drunk, didn’t you? Why did you go to the pub, do you think? My sinful nature. When did you last eat, do you think? 1952.
I’m