Notes from an Exhibition (30 page)

‘I understand. Sometimes I’m not sure
I
know who I am any more.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Nothing. I’ll be there in about half an hour, Antony.’

She had trouble hanging up neatly because her hand was shaking. Then she made herself roll off the bed (in the special way her latest back man had taught her), strip off her travelling clothes, retrieve the steamed ones, shower and dress before she could panic and change her mind. At least by calling round in the early afternoon she spared anyone the obligation to lay on any kind of meal.

It was a sort of terrace of charming houses, much older than the houses she had walked past along the seafront. He met her out on the street, so perhaps he was as nervous as she was. He smiled. She laughed. They shook hands and then he just looked at her.

‘You’re so like her,’ he said.

‘No I’m not,’ she laughed. ‘She was always so dark and striking and…’

‘You’re like who she became, then. Because I can see you were sisters.’

‘Oh. Oh good. What a beautiful place. Have you lived here long?’

‘I was born in this house.’

‘Oh goodness.’

‘After you. Please.’

She walked through the unexpectedly subtropical garden to the pretty Georgian porch and through the open front door.

Used to the clean lines and calm paintwork of Simple Gifts and her house in Rosedale, the initial impression was one of a kind of crazy 1970s exuberance now frayed at the edges. Her mind had nowhere to settle. She had startled a shorthaired woman sitting on one of a pair of old brown sofas with her back to the door. As Winnie said, ‘Hello. I’m Winnie,’ she turned, stared at her with an expression she knew all too well from patients at the Clarke and slipped quickly past her and up the stairs.

‘Morwenna,’ Antony said quietly.

‘I guessed.’

The woman had looked confusingly like a combination of how Joanie might have turned out and her early memories of their mother early in the mornings, without makeup. Perhaps illness had aged her but she looked at least twenty years older than Joanie was when Winnie last saw her.

A young man, clearly her brother, but cut of a sunnier cloth, was visible in a paved area at the back. He was talking excitedly on a cell phone.

‘Jack, our GP, wanted to hospitalize her,’ Antony said. ‘But I wouldn’t let him. I don’t want her locked up.’

‘Is she …?’

‘She turned up out of the blue. She’s been wandering, staying all over the place for more than ten years now. She seemed quite calm at first but perhaps that was just the shock of learning about Rachel having died. Then she …’ He sat at the bashed-up old pine table. Winnie sat
across from him. ‘There’s an old lido across the seafront from here. A sea-water bathing pool from the Thirties, you know?’

‘I know,’ she nodded, although she didn’t.

‘She took herself off there without warning one morning and tried to drown herself.’

‘Jeeze.’

‘Jack has got her medicated now but, well, we’re all a little jumpy.’

Winnie could not believe she had managed to impose herself at such an appalling time. ‘Maybe I should go,’ she said. ‘Gee, I’m so sorry.’

‘You don’t understand,’ he said with a rueful smile. ‘We’re just happy to have her back where we can care for –’

‘Hello?’

The young man had come in, tucking his cell phone back in his jeans pocket. He was a honey, in that poignant stage between being a pretty boy and whatever came next. Just Petey’s type. He looked her straight in the eye and held out his hand. Just her type too, actually.

‘I’m Hedley,’ he said. ‘How d’you do.’

‘This is Winnie,’ his father said. ‘From Toronto. We’ve been e-mailing.’

Hedley glanced quickly from one to the other and for a second she could see he thought they’d met on some wrinklies’ dating site.

‘You knew Mum,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m your long-lost aunt.’

‘Oh my God of course you are!’ He laughed, kissed her, hugged her and sat her down again. ‘Let me put the
kettle on. Have you had lunch? When did you get here? Antony didn’t say anything.’

‘Well it sounds as though you’ve had other things to …’

‘Oh. Well. Quite. But still. Tea?’

‘Yes please.’ She chuckled.

He had that gift, Petey had it too, of being able to improve the atmosphere in a room simply by entering it. He busied himself filling the kettle, putting a cherry cake and teacups and little plates on the table. Nothing matched but it was charming.

‘One good thing about a death,’ he said, ‘is not having to bake another cake for months. This freezer is
packed
! That was Oliver,’ he told Antony. ‘He and Ankie have driven down this morning. He was calling from Truro so they shouldn’t be long. They’d been to that gallery on Lemon Street. Oliver’s my hubby,’ he explained.

‘And who’s Ankie?’ Winnie asked and saw that his face briefly clouded over.

‘Oh. She’s … she’s a painter friend.’

They had tea and cake and then Winnie opened her bag and took out the envelope of photographs she had brought them, of Joanie, of her parents, of their house in Etobicoke, of Simple Things, of her place in Rosedale, of their grandparents, of her Josh. An instant second family. She wrote down names for them, dates when she could recall them. She sketched out what she knew of the Ransome family tree. She told them they must come visit. Prompted by questions, she told them about the Clarke Institute and volunteering there and Joanie escaping it and managed not to cry, although she got a little choked
up when she explained about Ray Kelly and the whole train thing.

There was what her grandmother used to call a
speaking
silence
then, as the two of them took everything in. Even chatty Hedley fell quiet and his eyes looked full and teary.

‘You must be very hurt and angry,’ Antony said at last. ‘At the way she cut you all out of her life.’

But before she could think of an answer they were interrupted by Hedley’s phone chirruping and a video message coming through of the first trimester scan of his sister-in-law Lizzy’s baby. Which of course made everyone happy and led to congratulation phone calls and Antony had to take the phone upstairs to Morwenna’s room to show her the scan too, although there was really nothing to see but a blob with a heartbeat. Winnie knew he’d be asking her to come down and join the party and she’d be shrinking in on herself and saying no, not just yet. She badly wanted to be able to go up there and say hello and look I’m not so bad really and give her a big hug and buy her a ticket to Toronto for a nice long visit. Even offer the poor woman a job if she wanted one. But although her mind was upstairs with that stricken deer she had encountered on arriving, she sat with Hedley and slipped into counselling mode instead. She told him she knew it was hard for him because it was always hard when you wanted to help the one you loved and they sort of pushed you away but at least she was here at last and at least she was safe. And he gave her a long, tearful hug, which was nice of him as she needed it too by now.

Antony came down again, looking shattered, and Winnie thought she really should be leaving them, at least
for today but then they started pulling out photographs for her to see and then suddenly this drop-dead gorgeous man appeared, a real silver fox, who turned out to be Oliver and so there was another round of introductions and a confusing explanation of how Ankie, who sounded kind of demoralizing, had insisted on being dropped at the airport suddenly which had held him up. Then there was more tea and she felt she badly needed the bathroom, less to use the John than to sit quietly in a clam space for a few minutes to give her poor jetlagged head a chance to catch up.

When she came out, Antony was loading the dishwasher and the boys had disappeared somewhere. She was an inveterate snoop so she thought to seize the chance of looking around the place before she started socializing again. There was a broad staircase, very light because of a tall, thin window to the back of the house with blue glass at the edges.

And then, of course, she came face to face with some of the paintings. She’d somehow guessed they were Joanie’s even before she saw the signature – R. Kelly – that was exactly like the J. Ransome one she’d been working on in her teens, the same Greek E and neat underlining.

She knew absolutely nothing about what she thought of as modern art. On holidays with Josh they’d tended to home in on buildings rather than galleries, although she liked museums and museum shops. There was a big painting above the staircase and another on the landing. She could see they weren’t
of
anything but the colours were fantastically intense, probably too intense to be hung so near one another. There was a blue like seawater over
sunny sand and a thin strip of orange you could almost feel like heat on your face if you stood near enough. She caught sight of other smaller paintings through open bedroom doors. (Morwenna’s door – she assumed it was hers – remained firmly shut.) There were no pictures anywhere but Joanie’s and Winnie sensed how her sister would not have made life easy for this kind family.

She came upon a little flight of wooden steps, a ladder in effect, let down from an attic room off one end of the landing. She started up there then stopped because Hedley was up there with Oliver’s arms about him but they sensed her and called her up.

‘Sorry,’ Oliver said. ‘Haven’t seen him properly for weeks.’

‘We were just looking at these,’ Hedley said. ‘Come and see. Can you manage?’ He held out a hand to hoist her up off the last few rungs. God alone knew how she would get back down.

It was a kind of lookout tower, like being in a lighthouse.

‘Was this her studio?’ she asked him.

‘One of them. But look. This is what she was working on at the end.’

There were six pictures. The boys had arranged them in a rough semicircle which made the little room feel like a sort of chapel. Six circles. Only they weren’t all circular. One was a sphere, like a burning sun, but the others seemed less even. Or perhaps it was an illusion? She had built up layers of paint in such a way that the longer you looked, the more colours seemed to emerge until it was like cloud lifting off a planet. One, which seemed murky
brown at first, nothing like the intense canvases on the stairs, slowly revealed itself as having patches of bronze and even purple within its texture.

‘Did she tell anyone what they were?’ she asked tentatively, shy of revealing her ignorance. ‘I mean, they’re beautiful, really, but what was she trying to
do
here?’

‘I think it’s whatever you want it to be,’ Hedley told her, still staring at the paintings and she saw how his waist had gotten enfurled by Oliver’s arm again.

She heard another door open and the woman, the girl for God’s sake, Morwenna appeared at the foot of the ladder thing.

Winnie smiled what she hoped was her least threatening smile. Morwenna stared up at her. It could so easily have been Joanie down there, an older, wounded Joanie, that Winnie had to swallow before she dared speak.

‘Hi,’ she said, her voice still cracking a little bit. ‘Did you
see
these already? Come and see them. Come on up.’ And she held out a hand.

For the first few days … Or was it weeks? She had lost all sense of calendar time. For the first few whatevers she was only allowed out of her nightgown to bathe, and then only with a nurse in the bathroom in case she drowned herself or decided to run naked down to one of the men’s floors.

Her mother had done her packing, so of course had chosen the long, warm, sensible nightgowns she never wore any more over the babydolls she had bought for herself. She had tried asking for the other ones during one of their visits but whatever chemical straitjacket they had strapped her in made her tongue feel so fat and heavy that her words came out mangled like a drunk woman’s.

‘I hate this Little House on the Prairie shit,’ was what she thought she’d said but her mother only looked distressed and said,

‘No, dear. Don’t try to speak. We can just sit here a while and be nice and calm together.’

And calm she was, for what seemed like the first time in months. For that she did thank the drugs. Or the shocks. Whichever. Her fears had gone. And the baby. They would have drugged her and given her an abortion, of course. Everyone knew that had been going on for years. To corrupted daughters and wayward spinster sisters alike. So much easier than sending them to an aunt in Whaletown B. C. or wherever. This way if they had to say anything they could say she was taking a rest in the Clarke for her nerves.

‘Such a clever girl, but her nerves wear her down sometimes.’

There was less shame attached to the Clarke than there had been. Quite smart people had been here. The Butterworth boy, the Claythornes’ eldest. Even Angela O’Hara, that social meteorite.

She was relieved to be rid of it, monstrous thing. When it progressed from talking to her in her dreams to hissing its poisonous suggestions through her dress material and any number of layers in waking hours, she had become desperate. Pot didn’t help so she tried getting drunk on top of it. And look where that had landed her. But she needed them to be honest with her.

As soon as they had stitched her and strapped her and given her a transfusion to replace what she had lost, but before they started her in the chemical straitjacket, they had let her talk to a shrink, a proper doctor. He was handsome and had one of those fantastic hero jaws, blue-black with five o’clock shadow, and a chin she wanted
to brush with her fingertips. Married, of course, and too old for her but she could imagine her mother calling him, with that defiant innocence of hers, a fine,
upstanding
man.

He was kind but firm. He ran a battery of tests on her. She had to name the Prime Minister, and give the date, which she got wrong, and her mother’s maiden name, which she got right, hooray. He made her look at ink blots and colour spots and tell her what she saw. He made her answer multiple choice questions like, ‘You see a boy squash a worm under his foot. Do you a) feel sick b) laugh or c) feel nothing’ or ‘The house is on fire and you can only carry one thing. Do you rescue a) your favourite book, b) your favourite dress or c) your sewing machine.’

A social worker joined him. A woman. Sensible shoes. Not attractive. She asked her all sorts of questions about Havergal and her family and her parents and university plans and did she have a boyfriend and, oh well, did she have a
best
friend and, oh well, how about her sister. And so on.

Finally she got a chance to ask some questions herself so she asked them.

‘You’re not pregnant,’ the shrink told her. ‘There was no baby.’

So she knew at once what they had done. She tried to think back, through the throbbing at her wrists and her memory of the pain and blood, to work out when they had done it. Perhaps they had slipped an injection into her? Perhaps she had been out cold for hours and not known it?

* * *

At last they let her start getting out of bed for more than the bathroom. They loosened the chemical straitjacket so that she could walk on her own. Well, shuffle. Her steps, like her tongue, remained slurred and heavy. And they let her pull on a dressing gown and slippers to join the party of damaged girls and crazy ladies and women you’d change buses to avoid, all milling around. She wasn’t allowed off the ward yet. Keeping her in the nightgown was their way of doing that. Other patients, properly dressed, were at liberty to move around the building more, even catching the elevator down into the podium to visit the self-service cafeteria overlooking College Street or, in the case of patients nearly ready to be discharged, actually to leave the facility and walk around in the neighbouring streets.

The floor she was on was high up, tenth or eleventh she’d have guessed though it was hard to count the floors of the nearby university buildings for comparison without the drugs making her dizzy. It didn’t feel like a ward, not like where she’d been to have her tonsils out, because they had their own rooms off a corridor. Once she got up a nurse showed her how her bed turned into a sofa for sitting on during the day.

‘Neat, huh?’ she said. And it was.

There was a little closet, with hangers built-in so you couldn’t use them to cut yourself and a little dressing table thing and a window that didn’t open even a crack. (The windows didn’t even break. She knew because there was one woman who kept hurling herself at them, given the chance. Not a fire extinguisher or a chair or something sensibly hard. Just her head.) The school-food smell
never seemed to be quite ventilated out but drifted around the hallways, blending with the sharper smells of disinfectant, shit and disgusting pink soap.

She pulled on her dressing gown and her nurse, who was Marci with an I, showed her around. As well as the bedrooms – some of which were large and shared, she noticed, there were bathrooms and shower rooms, all kept locked, meeting rooms for group therapy and staff chats, Marci said, and on the other side of the tower, to the left of the elevators, a dauntingly large common room. Half the room was a cafeteria with a noisy metal screen that rolled up over the serving hatches.

‘That’s where you can do crafts and stuff when we’re not feeding you,’ Marci said. She was as cute as a kitten and had almost certainly dressed up as a nurse when she was little but never banked on ending up in a place like this with not a man in sight.

The other half had fifty or so vomit-coloured Naugahyde chairs arranged in a big rectangle. A TV was suspended from the ceiling in one corner and patients had rearranged the chairs to form a kind of movie theatre. There were windows everywhere, narrow and unopening, but at least they were there.

‘So,’ said Marci. ‘You’ll probably forget all this but it’s on the back of your door in any case. Breakfast is seven-thirty, lunch is at a quarter to twelve and dinner’s real early at five so we can go home and you can go to bed before it all starts again. All right? Weekends you can sleep in until nine. TV goes off at nine p.m. Medications are dispensed by one of us from a cart right here. That’s three or four times a day. You’re down for ECT so that
happens Mondays. Don’t get up on Mondays. Don’t have breakfast. Just stay right put, although you can go to the John, and we’ll give you a sedative and wheel you down. You’ll kinda lose a day but you’ll get used to it.’

Sunday nights were thus blighted with the knowledge of what was to come. Some of the ECT patients, like the one with the obsession with tapping her knuckles on things and the one who wasn’t house-trained and kept laughing, used to start getting wound up about it at about ten on Sunday night and their nervousness spread like a virus and the whole floor would get jittery. If there were going to be fights or breakouts or those terrible moments when orderlies – hey! Men! Hello, boys! – had to be sent for to sit on people, they tended to be on Sunday nights. She learnt to go to bed early on Sunday and would lie there listening to the flare-ups and shouts spread around her like panic in a monkey house.

And what people had always said about the deranged and full moons? It was all true.

The dread of the shocks was worse than the thing itself. They made her pee then sedated her then wheeled her off. She ached afterwards, though, and felt horribly confused and disorienta-ta-ta-ted. It was as though every Monday night she had to start all over again on the personality she had been slowly building out of little soft bricks all week. She knew they were hoping the baby would go, the idea of the baby; be burnt out of her by the shocks. She thought it had but then she’d wake on the Tuesday and there it would be. Hello, bitch. (It was a girl.) At least she reached the point where she could see that the baby was just that, an idea, which was sort of
like it still being there but under a glass dome so she couldn’t hear what it was hissing.

She didn’t see the handsome shrink again, just the nurses, but they must have been told all about her because Marci with an I used to sit with her regularly and ask her questions that were caring but kind of searching too, like a mother going after your splinter with a sterilized needle. And she took notes, which wasn’t very friendly.

‘You know,’ Marci said. ‘You have a lot of unrealized creativity.’

Well, no kidding.

‘I do?’ Joanie said. She could manage short sentences by now.

‘Did your parents stop you painting? Didn’t they like what you did?’

‘She didn’t like me going to life class.’

‘Huh?’

‘Nudes.’

‘Oh.’ Much note-taking here.

‘She wanted me to do nice paintings. Flowers and stuff.’

‘If you weren’t allowed to paint, I’d have thought all the need and the ideas would sort of swell up inside you until you’d burst.’

She didn’t grant that tired attempt the reward of a reply but she let Marci show her where the ‘craft stuff’ was kept and she began to paint and draw again, anything to avoid being dragged into making hideous Christmas cards that would never be sent and baskets that would later be unwoven.

Drawing was a challenge here because pencils were too
sharp to be safe so she was only allowed crudely coloured wax crayons. She experimented with using the crayons under water paint though and painted over and over again the views of the streets far below, the endlessly re-ordered coloured blocks the parked and moving cars made, the shocking flare of an occasional brightly coloured dress or scarf weaving through a grey sea of tweed and gabardine.

After her initial horror of them, when venturing across to the day room felt like her first day at Havergal all over again, she learned that most of the patients could be ignored. They were a mixed bunch, from the very, very quiet to the off-the-wall loony but she soon detected a middle ground of wry, lost girls like herself, girls still young enough at eighteen or nineteen to be girdled in a family’s disappointment as well as their own despair.

When they weren’t being cajoled into handicrafts or group therapy – which was like the world’s worst party with stilted conversation, no boys and no booze – they sought each other out to compare scars. She didn’t warm to any of them however. They seemed to be using their depression and theatrical negativity as substitutes for the talk of dates and clothes and makeup and crushes that had been so mind-numbing at Havergal and the competition was as thinly veiled. My parents are worse than yours. My mother is more destructive. My suicide wasn’t just an attempt! Huh, yeah but my outlook is so bleak it would kill you if I gave you even a tiny peak at it! They got the message after a while that she was a stuck-up bitch and they stopped tapping on her door with their blunted nails or seeking out her lunch table and started talking about her in corners instead.

The one girl she did feel any kind of bond with was Ray. As tall and skinny as her and just as dark, Ray was eighteen but had been there for a staggering four years already. She was a schizophrenic, shut away for trying to kill her father with a pair of pinking scissors when he came after her in her room once too often. She only succeeded in taking his index finger off him, so he couldn’t wave it at her any more. No one had believed her account of him attacking her, because she was always saying stuff. He was a janitor at a salt factory on the lake and could still use a broom with one finger less and a daughter who was crazy, so hadn’t even lost his job which seemed unjust. But at least he could no longer get at her.

Ray heard voices and was so bad at taking her medication sometimes that Marci and the girls had to hold her down and inject her. She muttered to whoever was haunting her when she thought you couldn’t hear her and she hated to meet your eyes straight on but that was fine. Joanie and Ray would sit side by side and, while Joanie painted or drew, Ray would tell her stuff she had learned.

Ray had a wild side and had learned that some of the orderlies would do things for you if you let them get fresh, like bring you beer or magazines or smuggle you out for a tour of the building. She had the layout of the Clarke down pat like any lifer. She knew about the locked wards – the forensic ones – on floor four, where the killers and criminals went while they were assessed for their fitness to stand trial and left locked up if they were deemed too crazy for justice. She knew about the juvenile wards and the unspeakably exotic gender reassignment clinic in the podium. She was naturally clever, Ray. She had grad
uated from high school by correspondence course and had read every novel in the hospital library. She also knew whole tracts of the Bible by heart but seemed to like Jonah best. When Joanie joked that they should slip down to the gender reassignment clinic to escape as guys, Ray laughed so loud and long the nurses came running as they thought she was having a fit.