Four Gated City (84 page)

For Lynda this was a time of great confusion about herself. She had been alone most of her childhood. At school she had had a friend or two, but was by nature solitary, and she had always known what people were thinking: she said this to the doctors who were called in. Didn’t everyone? For Lynda had not known that everyone could not hear what other people thought. She had assumed that people did. She had not known herself to be abnormal. Now she was told by one doctor after another that she was not well-she was suffering from hallucinations. She began to stand up for herself, to insist she was not lying, she was not imagining: then she began screaming and fighting. The doctor hated her, she said-she could hear what he was thinking. The doctor was not Dr Lamb, but an earlier version of him, much less worldly-wise and sophisticated, using methods quite different from anything used by Dr Lamb over a decade later. Lynda had been taken off to an expensive private mental home, and there treated with electric shocks. She had had half a dozen of them and they were discontinued. Then she had a course of insulin. Lynda was much improved, the doctor said. For Lynda had become cooperative. When told she was ill, she kept quiet. She had observed in the hospital that patients wishing to leave did as they were told and kept quiet about symptoms. So she tried to do the same. Yet from time to time she had outbreaks of violence-once when another patient was being dunked forcibly in and out of an ice bath, and she was trying to prevent this from happening. And once when they threatened her with the electric shock machine for being disobedient.

Lynda was discharged back to a father doing his best not to resent having lost a wife because of his sick daughter; and ready to help Lynda to be normal. For a couple of years Lynda had fought a silent battle for ‘reality’. She thought she was worse when they said she was better. For one thing, the voices, once friendly and helpful, were now dreadful. It was as if she had an enemy who hated her in her head, who said she was wicked and bad and disobedient and cruel to her father. Before it had been as if she had
had a friend close to her who had ‘told her things and kept her company’. But now she tried to behave well because of this cruel tormentor in her head. She kept quiet, paid a great deal of attention to her clothes (for she noted that ‘they’ took this as a good sign), was beautiful and lived in a state of terror.

Then she had met Mark. She supposed she loved Mark; for listening to what he thought, she knew he was a good man. But she tormented herself because he did not know what she was like; she did not dare tell him about herself. And, worse than anything, since she had had the electric shock treatment, she had had periods of feeling dazed, of feeling shaky and out of control. And so she married Mark, and left her father who had handed her, bound and helpless, to the doctors, where she had struggled and fought and been bludgeoned into silence by drugs and injections, held down by nurses and dragged screaming to have electric shocks.

She clung to Mark, ‘Oh save me, save me!’ but when he made love to her felt she was being assaulted, until, cracking again under the attacks of her inner enemy, who said she was cruel and unkind to Mark, found haven in the mental hospital with Dr Lamb who had been able to send away the voices for long periods at a time-with blessed drugs that kept her permanently in a state where she did not have to know that she was a freak.

And so: Lynda need never have been ill.

This fact, which was obvious when you came to it, had not been seen by the people closest to her, Mark, Martha; even when Martha had had in her possession some of the facts which made it obvious. There is something in the human mind which makes it possible for one compartment to hold Fact A which matches with Fact Β in another compartment; but the two facts can exist side by side for years, decades, centuries, without coming together. It is at least possible that the most fruitful way of describing the human brain is this: ‘It is a machine which works in division; it is composed of parts which function in compartments locked off from each other.’ Or: ‘Your right hand does not know what your left hand is doing.’

The civilized human race knew that its primitive members (for instance, Bushmen) used all kinds of senses not used by itself, or not admitted: hunches, telepathy, ‘visions’, etc. It knew that past civilizations, some of them very highly developed, used these senses and capacities. It knew that members of its own kind claimed at certain times to experience these capacities. But it was
apparently incapable of putting these facts together to suggest the possibility that they were calling people mad who merely possessed certain faculties in embryo.

Suppose Lynda had been a fifteen-year-old in a society where ‘hearing voices’ was not sick, but a capacity some people had; a great many people, if they did not suppress it. Suppose she had met someone who could have suggested to her that when she heard her future stepmother saying she hated her, wanted to kill her, it could have been a bad mood, the kind of bad-tempered impulse anyone may have and then afterwards forget. This person might have asked Lynda, who was a reasonable girl wanting to be reasonable: ‘Would you like to be judged on your fantasies, Lynda?
Think
-are you what you imagine when you are at your worst? ’ Or suppose the doctor had been one of the doctors who are biding their time; who, knowing quite well what the truth is, have to hide their knowledge because of the prejudices of the profession they belong to; he could have supported her, consoled and advised her father, and-suggested she should keep quiet if she didn’t want to be locked up.

But she had had no such luck; had been made a psychological cripple before she was twenty.

Like hundreds of thousands of others. Probably millions. There will be no way of knowing how many. These crippled, destroyed people will become another of our statistics, like the ‘roughly’ forty million dead of the Second World War, or the X million who die when there is a famine, though they could be kept alive on what goes into the dustbins of America or Britain.

Soon, probably in the next decade, the truth would have to be admitted. It will be admitted with bad grace, be glossed over, softened. And just as we now say ‘they burned and drowned witches for a couple of centuries out of a primitive and ignorant terror’, soon we will be saying: ‘When they stopped torturing and killing witches, they locked people with certain capacities into lunatic asylums and told them they were freaks, and forced them into conformity by varieties of torture which included electric shocks, solitary confinement, ice baths, and forcible feeding. They used every kind of degradation, moral and physical. As the methods of society for control and manipulation became more refined, it was discovered that the extremities of physical violence were less effective than drugs which deprived the victims of their moral
stamina and ability to fight back; and more effective than the drugs, were techniques of persuasion and brain-washing. By these means these members of the population with capacities above normal (those people now considered to be in the main line of evolution) were systematically destroyed, either by fear, so that their development was inhibited from the start (the majority) or by classing them with the congenitally defective.

Sometime quite soon Dr Lamb would say: ‘Yes, it seems we made a mistake.’ Dr Lamb? Probably someone in the heart of that profession. There is a sound principle that the place to look for the reaction to anything is at the heart of that thing. Meanwhile, it is wise to keep out of the way.

Lynda, lying sobbing on the floor: ‘No doctor, no doctor, no, I’m not, it’s not true, you are, how do you know you aren’t, nobody said you could, you aren’t God, why do you say that when it’s not true, no, I’m not cruel, I’m not a murderer, I’m not wicked, I think terrible thoughts, doctor, oh I’m wicked, I want to kill people, I want to hurt people, please don’t give me that injection, please, please, don’t, doctor, my mind gets silly and fuzzy, please don’t, yes, yes, give me, give me, give me my pills, please, please, please … oh yes, punish me, I’m wicked, I want to kill you, I want to kill everybody, yes punish me …’ And on and on in a scream, if a toneless whisper of a scream can be a scream-a formalized scream then, Lynda remembering or living again, or using a ritual to forestall repetition: ‘No, no, no, no, I’m not, you’re wrong … yes, I’m wicked … Martha, shall we stop now? ’

Lynda rolled over on her back and went to sleep where she lay. So did Martha.

When they woke, they bathed, dressed, ate, and supported each other to the hairdresser, since their sense of reality, that is, their sense of how to conform to the outside world was still weak.

Nearly a month had been spent in the basement. The ordinary world was extraordinary: lovely or grotesque, everything shone out in recognition to their newly washed eyes.

They wished to surprise Mark by their return to humanity but he was not in the study.

Lynda’s hair, in a graceful chignon, was coloured strawberry-roan. Her eyes, enormous now, were enhanced by silver, jade-green, ash-grey salves. Her make-up made the most of the prominent facial bones of her skull. The weeks of near starvation had
rendered her breastless and removed her buttocks, but in a ‘twenties dress that had been her mother’s, of sage-green chiffon whose skirt descended from her knee on one side-the right, to her ankle on the other, in a diagonal of jagged points, like the serrated edge of a leaf, and with a foot-long cigarette holder in pale silver that matched her elbow-length silver-grey gloves, she looked both extremely fashionable, and beautiful in an intriguingly damaged way.

Martha’s hair was light brown, cut as was the new mode since she had been immolated in the basement, in a short glossy helmet shape. A look of health had always, she felt, suited her; and her face was tinted with a very faint rose with a hint of apricot. Her eyes were emphatic with gummed-on eye-lashes an inch and a half long, in mink-colour, and her eye-paint was pale cinnamon and black. Making the most of every minute of her being excessively thin, with great hollows about her collar bones and hips, she wore an Edwardian blouse with a boned collar in cream net, and a trailing garnet-coloured skirt in taffeta, so tight she could only stand or sit gingerly on the edge of chairs; the waist was twenty inches. This had belonged to Margaret’s elder sister. She had to stuff her bra with rolled stockings in order to achieve the authentic low nursing bosom.

While waiting for Mark, they drank his best brandy, and studied various new dispositions of the material on his walls. Mostly to do with the spread of mental illness and the lack of facilities for dealing with it. The leaves from Dorothy’s diaries had been moved to the areas near the ceiling from whence it seemed, rockets and space ships took off to chart stars and/or study the possibilities of how to kill and damage as many human beings as possible. By standing on a chair Martha read: ‘Again rang the Gas Board. Said they would send a man. Time spent on getting a connection: twelve minutes. Told them to ring before coming. Nobody came.
Next Day
. Rang to ask when man was coming. Time to get through, eight minutes. Girl said she did not know: once she had reported work, out of her hands. I had to go out. Was out two hours: man came while away. Lynda asleep-not well. Rang Gas Board. Girl said she would remind. Asked them to telephone first. Next day. Man came nine o’clock. Looked at freezing cabinet door. Said he would report it. Went. Next day, rang Gas Board. Girl said would inquire. Afternoon another man came. Said would inform makers of fridge,
not their responsibility. Would take two weeks.
Three weeks later
. Rang Gas Board to ask. (Their line engaged, took
twenty minutes’
.) Girl said once firm informed out of her hands. Suggested I ring Firm. Rang Firm. Could not get anybody. Said branch that sent men around in Eating. Would remind. Asked them to ring before coming.
Two days later
. Man came when Lynda and I out. Rang Gas Board and firm.
Five days later
. Man came from Firm. Said would supply new door to freezing cabinet. Cost thirty shillings. Asked why should pay for new door to cabinet, shouldn’t have broken, only three years old. He said, off record, this design obsolete, no good, fridge redesigned. Suggested I buy a new one. I said no. He said he would bring new door when ordered.
Ten days later
. Came with door: wrong size. Suggested I should run fridge without door to freezing cabinet: would work without, but more expensive to run. I said no, must have door. Two days later. Came with door. Next day. Door wrongly done. Fell off, and cracked. Rang firm. No record of transaction. Tried Firm’s branch. Said young man transferred to branch Acton. Told them. Said would send a man …’

This fragment was stuck next to an account of some rocket in the States that had failed to leave a launching pad.

There was one epic, poor Dorothy’s masterpiece, which was fifty-odd pages single-spaced foolscap detailing the matter of the new cooker that had been delivered with a defective door, and which involved the visits of twenty-odd men, three months of time and a near explosion when a mechanic switched on something that a previous mechanic had just connected wrongly.

There was accumulated mail.

A letter said the house was going to be compulsorily purchased for demolition, or redevelopment.

Another from Maisie said:

‘My dear Matty! Remember your old pal? Yes, it’s me! Life is much the same. But I’m at Gokwe now. Did you hear-I was
married
? What do you know! Well, when you’re married you wish you weren’t married and you forget all your loneliness when you had no one to hold and cherish. Are you all right these days? This is to say my Rita is coming to visit England. Can she stay with you?
If inconvenient, do not hesitate to say so
. She is a good girl if I say it myself. She is looking forward
very much to meeting you. I often tell her about the old days and all the good times we had when we were young.

Well, that’s all for now.

Maisie Canfield
(His name is Denis, Denny for short.)