The Treatment and the Cure (13 page)

He shows you a vinyl bag.

“This is the finished item.”

It’s a proper ladies’ shopping bag with handles and a front pocket and metal clasps. It looks hard to make.

“This is how you thread and operate the machine.”

Mr Trowbridge sits down and quickly runs the thread from the top spool down through a series of hooks and loops into the needle, then he brings the thread up from a spool underneath. Then he takes a piece of scrap vinyl and sews across it very fast about twenty times. You can’t follow any of this.

“The cutting is done this way.”

He spreads a roll of vinyl on the table and begins marking it with a set of plywood patterns.

“The main thing’s to use the vinyl economically. It’s expensive.”

Mr Trowbridge has marked a full set of patterns when he is called away.

“Right. Cut out the pieces, then try to work out how they should be sewn together, using the finished bag as a model. I’ll check on your progress later.”

Mr Trowbridge goes.

You take a pair of heavy scissors from the rack and slowly cut the vinyl. After you have looked at the cut pieces for a long time, comparing them with the parts of the finished bag, you think you see how they go. You wonder when Mr Trowbridge will return to teach you the sewing. But maybe he meant for you to just go ahead. Maybe he was teaching you the sewing when he zipped across the scrap vinyl twenty times. Maybe he assumes you now know all about it. You sit there, trying to think exactly what he said before he went, but the more you think about it the more confusing it seems. If you go ahead and try to sew you might get into trouble for doing something you weren’t told to do. If you don’t go ahead you may be in trouble for not doing what you were told.

You’re always like this. That’s partly how you know you aren’t the same as most people. Most people just see one meaning and go ahead and it turns out okay. The only other person you know of who thinks and thinks and worries and worries like you is David Allison in
The Survivor.
That’s why you often feel that David Allison is your only friend, almost the only real person you know.

After a long time you go to ask Mr Trowbridge what he meant. He’s pushing a length of timber through a planing machine which makes the worst noise you’ve ever heard. You shout to make him hear, then you get too close and nudge the timber so that it goes crooked in the machine. Mr Trowbridge yells at you to get back to the vinyl section and he’ll attend to you when he’s ready.

You decide you should try to sew. You put a scrap of vinyl under the needle and press the treadle. There is a burst of electricity, the vinyl whizzes through, and the machine stops in a big tangle of thread. You spend a minute recovering from the fright, then try to unpick the tangle. You can’t figure how to rethread through all the hooks and loops. You try a few different ways but the tangle happens again when you touch the treadle.

Mr Trowbridge returns and shows you the threading again and when he goes away you mess it up. You have to sit there as if you are really keen to understand how it works, as if you are thinking the problem out, but you know you can’t because you are too stupid.

You have sensed the brown-haired nurse glancing at you from time to time from the basket section. You haven’t dared glance back except a couple of times quickly. There is another nurse who is slightly older and more senior and who is Mr Trowbridge’s deputy. The noise isn’t as bad here, and there’s a lull sometimes, so the two nurses do a lot of talking and joking between themselves and with their patients. They even have a gramophone and play records during the lulls in the noise. You learn from the talk that the brown-haired nurse is Cheryl and the senior one is Janice.

“What music do you like?” Janice asks you.

“Oh, any,” you say, surprised at being spoken to.

“Ronnie & the Roundabouts?”

“They’re alright,” you say.

“We’re all crazy about Ronnie & the Roundabouts here,” Janice says. “Except
her
,” she adds, pointing at Cheryl. “And she doesn’t matter.”

“That’s no way to talk about a lady,” says an old bloke in a wheelchair. He seems to act as Janice’s straight man.

“That’s no lady! That’s Cheryl!”

Cheryl grins and pretends to hit Janice with a basket. There’s this constant banter about Cheryl being a bit of a fool who doesn’t matter. She doesn’t appear to mind and she occasionally gets her own back with a wisecrack. All the same, you wish you hadn’t said you liked Ronnie & the Roundabouts. You’re on Cheryl’s side.

It’s odd to have the rack of tools near you. It holds knives, awls, scissors—dangerous things. In MAX you were treated as a maniac who couldn’t be trusted with a knife and fork to eat with. Of course there were inconsistencies—no knives in the dining room but hoes and pitchforks in the garden. You don’t look at these tools much. You don’t want to seem too interested in them. You notice, though, that the pliers have had the wire-cutting parts filed out.

The day drags along to four o’clock. You’ve done nothing but sit glumly at a machine you can’t fathom. Mr Trowbridge has shown you how to thread several times now, getting moodier and more silent each time. He has probably decided you’re a dud. He might even think you are acting this way on purpose—a psychotic’s devious method of asking to go home to MAX. They say madmen often signal in behaviour what they can’t say in words.

Mr Trowbridge escorts you back to the ward, telling you on the way that you’ll need to pull your socks up. A quarter of an hour later the Charge calls you to the office.

“I’ve had a call from OT. An awl is missing.”

You don’t say anything.

“Have you got it?”

“No.”

“I’ll have to search you.”

“Alright.”

Later he tells you it’s been found at OT.

Silas Throgmorton has recovered slightly, perhaps because of all the cups of tea the screws have taken him. You are on the verandah one Sunday morning, reading a little, listening to your transistor radio which you keep tuned low so the classical music won’t offend anybody.

“I’M THE OWNER AND THE MAKER!”

You look up. An old man is standing there. He has a blanket round his shoulders like a robe and is wearing a tall hat with a ribbon of toilet paper tied to it and trailing down his back. He looks like a king.

“It’s all mine!” he shouts, staring at the ward and the yard and everything else within view.

Dunn is in the yard. He whirls round, tugging at his ratty moustache.

“Bah! Rubbish! It’s MINE!”

“Hand it over to me!” the king shouts, pointing a bony finger at Dunn.

“You?” says Dunn with a terrible contempt. He stands in the centre of the yard, hands on waist, glaring at the king. “I had my first billion before you was ever born!”

The king grips the rail. He’s enraged by this insolence.

“You never had two bob in yer bloody life! It belongs ter me! I’m Throgmorton!”

“My arse!” sneers Dunn. “I knew Frogmorton six million years ago, before you was ever heard of!”

“I’m The Owner and The Maker!”

“You’re bloody nothin’!”

Some of the men are beginning to take an interest. The Charge strolls from the office to listen and Fred Henderson and a couple of screws lay their cards down and turn in their chairs. Dunn is yelling that he could buy and sell Frogmorton a trillion times over.

“He’s right, Silas,” the Charge says.

“You’re sacked!” barks the king.

“Aw Jeez, Silas, don’t be hard on me,” pleads the Charge.

“I said you’re sacked! Pack yer bag and git orf the place!”

“Bah!” Dunn sneers. “You couldn’t sack a bloody dog! I’ve sacked more blokes than you’ve had hot dinners!”

They argue over who’s sacked more. Dunn has sacked forty-seven zillion, so he wins.

“What about them goldmines?” Fred Henderson chips in.

“They’re mine!”

“I own the lot! Nine grillion of ’em!”

“What about the sheep stations?”

“I’ve got ’em all!”

“Ahhh, don’t give me the bloody shits! I bought ’em all up six hundred centuries ago!”

“You’re a liar!”

It goes on all morning, with Fred Henderson and the screws helping. Two of the screws are discussing whether they could tape-record it and maybe sell the tape in the pub. They reckon they’d get fifty dollars.

Bimbo is squatting beside Fred Henderson’s chair. He’s a bit worried by all the shouting, specially from the king who is closest.

“Willee root me?” he asks Fred.

“Hah! He couldn’t root a fly!” says Dunn. “I’ve rooted nine thousand zillion …”

But it isn’t a fair contest because Silas has been ill.

Time can drag at weekends, though if the days are fine it’s not so bad and you can stay in the yard and watch whatever there is to watch. You’ve begun trying to write poems about some of the men. That’s a sign that you are more settled now. You can only write when you feel fairly settled. There is a wolfish man who spends all his time lying on the grass with his penis out, masturbating. He does it slowly to a climax and starts again. He takes no notice of female nurses or patients who pass by: whatever pictures are in his mind must be more exciting, and it’d be interesting to know what they are—for the poem you’re trying to write. It seems almost, from the way he rubs his sperm into the soil, that he’s impregnating the earth. It’s as if the grass and trees and flowers of the world only happen because of this; as if all life and beauty flowed from him, the seed-giver. But everyone just calls him Wanker.

The wards alongside are familiar now. The wheelchairs in 7 stay parked on the lawn most of the time when it’s fine, the figures in them slumped and the strings of spit dangling from the mouths. Occasionally one has a fit, arching and gurgling in the chair, and a nurse comes to deal with it while some of the retards gallop around like monkeys when there is a disturbance in a cage.

There are disturbances sometimes among the old women on the other side. You hear screams and long shrill arguments, and the voices of particular nurses who seem to control the women by outscreaming them. Mostly, though, it is quiet. The women are showered each Saturday in the shower room at the end of their verandah. From the bottom of REFRACT’s yard you can see them milling naked at the door, waiting turns, being herded in. The first time you saw them you watched for a minute, slightly aroused by the shock of the nakedness. But they looked too helpless and broken. You felt you were gloating over the final sadness of their lives.

Outsiders often drive along the dirt road at weekends. They drive slowly and peer into the yards and laugh and point out the sights to one another.

“Struth, look at that one pullin’ himself!”

“Hey, wanker!”

“You’ll go mad doin’ that!”

Or they’ll just lean from their cars and call “Hey!” at you, as if you probably don’t understand normal speech but might respond to a call and turn your head. There is a bunch of young toughs inching past in a panel van.

“Hey, want a peanut?” one of them calls to you.

“Don’t you need it to think with?” you reply.

“Better not get fuckin’ smart! I’ll punch yer head in!”

“Be my guest,” you say. “I’m afraid I can’t come out so you’ll have to come in.”

You can hear the tough’s mates egging him on.

“Flatten ’im, Terry!”

“Yeah, Terry, git over the fence an’ wallop the cunt!”

Terry gazes into the yard, at the men. Especially at the huge hunchback who is huffing and beating his chest in what looks like bestial rage.

“Nah,” says Terry the Tough to his pals. “I wouldn’t waste me fuckin’ time.”

The panel van roars off, spinning its wheels.

The hunchback’s name is Lloyd something. You don’t know his surname and can’t imagine him ever needing one. He’s just Lloyd. He is usually very quiet and keeps to himself, grinning and muttering in a corner, twisting his big raw hands together, rubbing his big raw tongue over his chapped lips. If you go too close he’ll give a little snuffle of embarrassment and shuffle away. If Terry the Tough had climbed the fence poor Lloyd would have retreated at once. Lloyd works in the hospital laundry, carrying fouled linen, and blokes say that he eats bits of shit he finds there. When he has his fits of agitation he runs about grunting and beating himself with his fists and tearing up clumps of grass and throwing them in the air. The screws tell him to stop the bloody nonsense and sometimes he does. Other times they threaten him with a needle. Lloyd looks somehow relieved when screws hold him down and jab the needle in. His ugly face softens, his breathing becomes regular, he sleeps. You think Lloyd has a love-hate relationship with the needle: he fears being held and jabbed, but wants the oblivion.

REFRACT holds mostly dills at the weekend. Blokes who aren’t dills usually have parole to wander in the grounds. There are two kinds of parole—company and individual. Company parole lets you go around with another patient and the idea is that each keeps tabs on the other. Individual parole is harder to get. The only special rule for that is that you keep away from certain areas, like the staff cottages where doctors and their families live, some of the female wards, and particularly the Admission wards at the top end of the hospital. They don’t like bottom-end riffraff near Admission. Fred Henderson calls Admission patients Silk Hankies.

“Pampered little cunts, stretched on couches, telling the quack about their bad dreams, havin’ their foreheads wiped with silk hankies! They like to think they’re in some nice sanitarium for ‘nerves’. The sight of us scares the shit out of ’em!”

You wonder if you’ll ever get parole. They’d be wary of giving it to a MAX man. Fred has it of course, but he’s in with the screws. Dennis Lane had it, but look what happened to him. If you had parole you could walk along the dirt road and find where it goes when it curves past the library and the morgue. It must lead to the lake at that end. It’d be so good to walk to the lake and sit and look across. And it would seem odd to be that close to it. For nearly five years you watched the lake from the verandah of MAX, seeing it over the wall lower down on the slope. You learned the lake’s colours and moods—the early morning sheet of sunlight that hurt your eyes, the midday blue with ruffles of white foam, the dark evening pool with the image of the moon or the first stars in it. Or you knew the lake as a foggy blur under sleet, the place where the wind got its run-up to whoosh along the verandah and whine in the barbed wire. Your lake is someone else’s now. Someone in MAX is learning the colours and moods the way you did.

If you ever got parole it’d be company parole and there isn’t anyone you’d want to go around with, no-one you could count on not to get you into trouble. Individual parole would suit you. You’d keep away from the forbidden areas and especially the Admission wards. You wouldn’t want to interfere with anyone’s illusions.

OT is better now you’ve got over being afraid of the old sewing machine. The main thing is to learn the right pressure to put on the treadle and so control the speed of the needle. If the needle isn’t going too fast the thread won’t tangle so often. The first few vinyl bags you made had to be cut apart and thrown in the scrap-bin. The seams came open, or you’d sewn panels in upside down. But then you did one pretty well and the process wasn’t a mystery any more. Now you make half a dozen bags each day and Mr Trowbridge is able to leave you to it. When Mr Trowbridge is sorting out the ten different problems on his mind he’ll walk through the building pointing his long finger and ticking off what’s okay: “Baskets okay. Painting okay. Vinyl bags okay…” The vinyl bag section gets ticked off most times now, which means you can feel fairly okay yourself. Each activity is called a section and you are the only person who is a section all by himself. You’ve never been a whole section before. Mr Trowbridge feels deeply that work is the best therapy for sick minds and he has a set of phrases about it. One is WORK MAKES WELL. The others aren’t as catchy.

It’s surprising how soon the bag work becomes boring. Now it is mid-afternoon and you have done your half-dozen bags and don’t feel like beginning another. You’d like to sit looking out of the windows at the willows by the pond. The trees are catching the afternoon light. Or you’d like to turn your chair and just gaze at Cheryl, who is as beautiful as any tree with light on it. You feel a deep gratitude nowadays that you are allowed to be near women. Not just women. Cheryl. She’s leaning over a table, helping someone plait a basket, and her long brown hair is back across her shoulder, slightly damp with sweat, and there are patches of sweat on the cloth of her uniform. She is hot and tired in the afternoon. A wave of love goes through you because she is tired and because she isn’t as quick and clever as Janice and seldom wins the joking arguments they have. You and Cheryl don’t speak much, but when you do she speaks like one person to another with only a trace of the nurse-to-patient tone; and even that trace is put on with an effort because she thinks it’s the proper thing. But talking to Cheryl, or having her notice you, isn’t so important. The great thing is being in the same room with her for six hours a day. Of course she isn’t in the room all the time. She goes in and out, and it hurts when she isn’t there.

You begin doodling a new bag design on a scrap of paper. You do this a lot now. Since you are the entire bag section you suppose new bag design comes within your jurisdiction. This one looks good—a ladies’ shoulder-bag, small and neat with an outside pocket and adjustable strap. It should be two-tone in colour and fastened with a little fancy turn-lock. You begin making a prototype. You can only work on it for a while each afternoon after your quota’s done. You show it to Janice and Cheryl.

“Oooooh, it’s
beautiful
!” cries Janice. She has an exaggerated way of speaking to patients, half-serious, half-mocking, the way a grown-up talks to a child. If you’re a dill you respond to the serious part and if not you respond to the mocking and join in the game, like two adults discussing Santa Claus or something. But Janice will occasionally stop the game suddenly and leave you stranded, as though abruptly showing that she knows Santa isn’t real and making it seem as though you don’t.

“It’s very nice, Len,” Cheryl says simply.

“Get your eyes off it!” Janice tells her. “It’s for me!”

They have a joking argument over it. Mr Trowbridge comes and they show it to him. He examines it and tells you it’s an excellent piece of work. He’s pleased, not with the bag as such but that you’ve shown initiative. The excitement dies very quickly and you don’t bother making any more of the new style. It served its purpose. It let the staff see that you can turn your mind to things in a rational way.

Your stocks are raised also by the doctor’s attitude. Electric Ned comes to OT one day. He’s the doctor for REFRACT as well as MAX. He got his nickname because he likes giving shock treatment. He brings you a magazine with an article he thinks you may enjoy, something about culture.

“The part about the bush balladists is informative,” he says.

“Mmmmm,” you reply. “I’ll read it with pleasure.”

“Have you seen Len’s new bag design?” Mr Trowbridge asks the doctor. He shows him the prototype and Electric Ned examines it through his thick lenses. Electric Ned is gratified. This tends to prove he was right to recommend you for OT. Mr Trowbridge is gratified. This indicates how much you are being helped at OT. You are pleased as well. You never get on better with staff than when they are taking credit for you.

All you think about now is Cheryl. Each evening when you return to REFRACT you go to the shower room and pull yourself. The shower room’s the only private place in REFRACT. It’s a large, cold room with cubicles and you can be alone there most times because the men don’t shower much except on Saturday morning when the screws herd them in and stand ticking the names off a list as they come out drying themselves. You are in a cubicle, naked, pulling yourself madly and thinking about Cheryl, her beautiful legs in dark stockings, the way she looks when she bends across a table and her uniform rides up round her thighs. You get a crazy urge to run to OT right now, nude, with your prick out stiff and rub it against her. You get a picture of how funny it would look, and giggle hysterically. Then you feel desperate again and pull yourself harder and groan. A shriek comes from the next cubicle and you almost fall over with fright. Your heart thumps and your prick is suddenly limp and small in your hand.