Notes from an Exhibition (31 page)

Most of Ray’s family had disowned her. Once a week her tiny mother came on her way to Confession and sat there crying for half an hour before Ray led her back to the elevator.

She shared with Ray her old dream of escaping Toronto, escaping stifling, backward Canada entirely and heading somewhere warm and southerly, like Marseille or Malaga, where they could be wild and mad and artistic. Somewhere out of Hemingway or Mavis Gallant where they would fit right in. She only meant it as a dream. A dimly outlined but not quite lost part of her was still a well-brought-up, rigidly schooled Havergal girl. She would escape Etobicoke eventually and her parents but only into marriage or maybe a job and another Etobicoke, another suburb, another Canada. All she had been through had not quite stifled the confident girlish assumption of a husband, some day, and a sweet little screwed-up family of her own. When she was feeling brutal, when Ray was jabbering to herself about starlings talking code and radio waves in the bedsteads she knew she would survive and pass beyond this and leave poor Ray behind to rot in Hell.

The nice nurses, Marci, who was
her
nurse but also Bobby and Pat, were pleased with her progress. (Pat thought the
art was helping and would take the pictures up, or was it down, to the shrink for assessing.) But on bad days it seemed as though she had landed herself in a world where the rules had changed for ever and where simple expressions of frustration or passing sorrow became great black marks against her name, prolonging the sentence she was under.

They took her off close observation. They stopped coming to the bathroom with her. They let her mother bring in (the wrong) clothes so she could get dressed when it wasn’t a Monday. But whenever she talked of her dreams or the future, Marci or Bobby or Pat would say, ‘Now let’s not run before we can walk. How about doing me another nice painting. Paint me your house in Etobicoke or paint me your mom and dad.’

Ray picked up on the dream of the warm south, however, and took it as some kind of promise. She was very sly about it. All she said was they had to have their passports or they’d never get free. Ray got her tiny mother to bring hers in. She was shameless, blinded her mother with science, said it was the law or something.

She’d had a passport since the Kellys went back to Ireland for her grandmother’s funeral and a pilgrimage to Knock. Joanie didn’t have one, having travelled no further than America, but she figured a driver’s licence would be a start. So when it was her turn she made her sister get her that. Butter-wouldn’t-melt-Winnie, who looked so scared to be visiting such a place it seemed only kind to give her something else to worry about.

‘I’ve got nothing here that’s me,’ Joanie told her. ‘It’ll remind me who I am,’ which seemed to silence Winnie’s
questions. ‘It’s in my dresser,’ she added. ‘In the little drawer on the right.’

Winnie was obviously terrified of doing a bad thing but still sufficiently guilty and impressionable to do as she was told. She was such a Little Miss Perfect with her smooth blonde perfection and smooth, unambitious mind that she probably felt the Clarke wasn’t far enough from home for her to be rid of this terrible blot on her eligibility for the life she felt she deserved. If a driver’s licence got the two of them states apart, so much the better. Or was the poor child merely scared and guilty when it was proudly announced that she was now going steady with Josh MacArthur, who had just been made captain of the hockey team so wasn’t going to enter his father’s business just yet?

‘I guess I’ll be putting plans for secretarial school on hold,’ Winnie breathed proudly and Joanie wanted to shake her and forgive her and weep and cry out, ‘No! Run for the hills!’ but all she could think of was the cool square of precious cardboard Winnie had just slipped her and she responded so blankly her parents exchanged a look that said
not yet awhile
.

Ray was convinced the licence was all the Canadian authorities in New York would need to issue Joanie with a passport. Joanie didn’t like to disillusion her but remained sharp enough to know having the thing back in her possession was just symbolic, a small but authoritative wedge between her and her tormentors. The fact was their consent would be needed along with the handsome shrink’s opinion before she could go free and make use of it but she took to keeping it with her at all times. Unless it was a Monday.
She learned from Ray. She, too, became sly. Apart from the moment when the television came on, the only galvanizing times of day were meals and medication. Even before the grilles were rattled up over the serving hatches they could hear food things being loaded into the dumb waiter floors below and would start lining up with their trays. The further gone among them even started dribbling, like Pavlov’s poor dogs. The food was boring and fattening but at least it carried the faint possibility of surprise; a different colour Jell-O or – sign of summer turning to fall – a plate of grey or brown meat instead of steam-limped egg salad.

Medication also required a line to form but here there was no element of surprise, merely the rattling trundle of the meds trolley but it might have been an ice-cream truck in August for the eagerness with which most patients stopped whatever they were doing – even if this was merely staring at a patch of wall. Or perhaps the correct analogy was church, for many of them actually held their mouths obediently open as they approached and let whichever nurse was on candy duty place the pills directly on their tongue before handing them a paper cup of water to wash them down.

Just as she had been raised in a church where sticking out your tongue at God showed a lack of reverence and the wafer was placed in a politely cupped (and gloved) palm, so, from her first day in the pill line, her reflex was to hold out a hand and pop the pills herself. Pat or Bobby or Marci would always watch to see the swallow but they never asked her to open her mouth again to let them be sure. She learned by accident, when a pill snagged on a
tooth once and nearly choked her, that it was simplicity itself to throw them into her mouth in such a way that she could hide them in a cheek. All she had to do then was gulp the water down through her teeth. The taste was vile and bitter however and it wasn’t always easy to scoop the sodden pills out again. Instead she learnt to get her palm as hot and sweaty as possible first so that the pills would stick to it. She then pretended to put them in her mouth but, distracting the nurse with a rare, gracious thank you, would take the proffered paper cup with her right hand instead of left.

Ray often went missing in the evenings, especially at understaffed weekends, and was usually off on one of her illicit assignations with a kitchen porter or ward orderly. She was as horny as a mink. She didn’t simply do it for favours. She was, she claimed, very highly sexed. She blamed it on the unnaturally high concentration of oestrogen caused by cooping so many women together in an airless space. She said it sort of floated among them along with the food smells.

One time, however, she was gone for two whole hours on a weekday. It didn’t seem right to draw attention to it but as the day wore on Joanie started to wonder if perhaps Ray had escaped after all, and on her own. Like any boarding school, the Clarke was a vibrant rumour factory. Usually the rumour was along the lines of
Southern
Fried Chicken tonight
or
Princess Margaret’s changed her
hair!
Just occasionally the buzz would be to do with a disappearance and would rapidly escalate, fed by fear as much as rebellious excitement, because so often an apparent escape proved to be no more than a hushed-up
suicide attempt and the patient would reappear, chemically manacled and, on one memorable occasion, with both legs in plaster.

But Ray was suddenly back among them, quite unharmed and certainly unsedated, in time for the afternoon pill line. The buzz abated as fast as it arose and, when Joanie tried to ask her where she’d been, she only got jabbering in reply about the patterns the starlings were making in the park nearby. So perhaps Ray had merely escaped for a walk in the snowy sunshine or a light-fingered visit to the public library or a department store.

When the first policeman arrived, it was nothing extraordinary. Policemen often accompanied new arrivals or called in to check on patients who had been admitted against their will. But then a second one showed up, with a woman in tow. They asked questions of the nurses then, with Bobby accompanying them to keep a watchful eye, began to move around the ward attempting to question patients. They were short-staffed that day – Marci had flu – and Bobby was plainly harassed at the unexpected extra duty and wanted them gone as soon as possible.

‘You’ve been here all morning, haven’t you?’ she asked.

‘Could be,’ Joanie started to say but then changed her mind. ‘Yes,’ she told her and realized the woman, who had on a dark suit and looked petrified, was examining her.

‘No. That’s not the one,’ she told the policemen and they moved on but with a backward glance from the woman who wasn’t as sure as she’d sounded.

When they reached Ray, Ray was painting her cheeks with blue poster paint and simply stared in answer to Bobby’s questions, so they spent little time on her.

The story emerged, as stories tended to, through the serving women at supper. There had been a hold-up at the bank a short way down the street. Using a toy revolver, afterwards dropped on the pavement, a young woman in white gloves and a headscarf patterned with poppies had persuaded a cashier to hand over the contents of her desk drawer. She left the bank at speed and appeared to jump into an uptown cab. However the headscarf was subsequently found on the handrail on the ramp into the Clarke.

The investigation descended into chaos as patient after patient now owned up to being the robber, excited by the sudden glare of attention. All closets and drawers were searched, mattresses lifted and many secret shames and irrational hoards were uncovered but no wad of banknotes. In the end it was decided that the thief had behaved eccentrically on purpose and laid a cunning false trail into the hospital before making her escape. The hawl had not been huge – a few hundred dollars – and did not warrant an expensive investigation.

The only after-effects were a brief tightening of ward security, with a nurse appearing from the nursing station the moment any patient lingered by the elevators and an even briefer surge in visiting families, as if parents and siblings wanted a share of the hospital’s mild and temporary notoriety.

Ray woke Joanie just before dawn on a Sunday morning. She put a finger to her lips then whispered, ‘Come on. Get dressed. Everything’s ready.’

‘How do you mean?’ Joanie asked.

Ray was dressed for outdoors and had a small, brand
new tartan suitcase with a zipper. She handed Joanie an identical one.

‘You’re serious about this, aren’t you?’ Joanie said.

Ray nodded.

‘But I’ve got no money.’

‘I’ve got money,’ Ray whispered. ‘Enough to get us to Europe I figure.’ She unzipped her case and produced a brown-paper shopping bag stuffed with bills. ‘Maybe even Tangien,’ she added.

‘Where did you …?’

‘I sunk it in a pair of plastic bags in one of the John’s tanks. Come on. Hurry. We have to get out before six-thirty. Don’t forget your driver’s licence. I already packed your art stuff. And hey, look. I got us winter boots.’

Joanie dressed, shivering with excitement and faint with early-morning hunger. She stuffed the suitcase to bursting with her clothes. She took her driver’s licence from her dressing gown pocket and zipped it into the neat little compartment inside the lid. Then she joined her in the corridor. Ray made her take off her new boots so they wouldn’t squeak on the linoleum then they slipped around to the day room the long way, avoiding the elevators and the nurse’s station. One of Ray’s conquests had left a serving hatch unbolted for them so they were able to lift it gingerly, wincing at the risk of it clattering, then slip through to the servery bolting it behind them. They avoided the service elevator in case it was alarmed. Ray knew her way through the service staircases like a practised rat and they emerged through a fire door, among the dumpsters at the hospital’s rear.

Then they ran. There was no real need for this. It was
a hospital, not a prison, and they weren’t on a forensic ward but months of conditioning – years in Ray’s case – made them react like fugitives. After two blocks Joanie started to laugh and had to stop running. She was slithering around in the snow in any case as Ray had bought her boots about three sizes too big. She couldn’t quite believe this was happening and half-assumed their plan would run out of steam soon and they’d head back to the ward after a cooked breakfast in some café.

But Ray, who wasn’t laughing, drew her on, still glancing about her for nurses and orderlies.

‘Hey look, Ray, starlings!’ Joanie said but got no response. ‘I can’t believe you held up a bank, Ray,’ she added because the bit about the starlings was mean.

‘I didn’t,’ Ray said, looking at her sideways the way she did. ‘I don’t know what you mean. New York,’ she added in an undertone. ‘There’s an early train to New York.’

And Joanie realized she was serious, that this wasn’t some crazy jaunt.

‘I checked it all out,’ Ray said. ‘I went to a travel agency. We can get a boat to England from there. Or South America. What do you think? South America’s warmer.’

‘I don’t speak Spanish. Let’s go to England. Then we can get the boat train to France and keep going south.’

Joanie had no idea what a boat train actually was but people talked of them in clipped tones in English movies and it sounded glamorous and foreign and a long way from Etobicoke.

They caught a bus along Queen’s Street then a car to
Union Station. The station was already surprisingly crowded and, quite suddenly, Ray’s resolve began to drain away. She started to mutter under her breath, never a good sign. Joanie realized that in the outside world Ray was still pretty much a shy fourteen-year-old fond of her pinking scissors and wondered how long it would be before her medication wore off, assuming she had been taking it and was not, like Joanie, becoming sharper-sensed by dodging two doses in three while saving the rest for emergencies.