Love on the NHS (39 page)

Feeling fully awake despite the early hour and too restless to read or watch television, Luke decided to search for a young lady doing the course with him. He found her listed on a search engine and a link to her page on Facebook. Typing in her name on the site, he was faced with an implausibly large list of candidates of who might be the real her. None of them quite seemed right, yet each teased at the possibility of her identity. A search for someone else in the class produced three people who had photos - and all three photos could have been this person. The tidbits of information shown hinted at their maybe being who he knew - each one of them. So Luke thought it best since he wanted to befriend them to approach every one with a friend request.

Searching his own name, he found only myself. Not a single doppelganger. Then he searched all three of his college tutors and they all had alter-egos in America doing similar jobs. The English tutor had an American equivalent employed as a university professor. The science tutor had someone with a name different only by one letter who had written a book on science available to buy; it could not be his teacher as the book had been published years previously and his tutor was only 24. The maths tutor had an American namesake whose mugshot was online on a database of offenders. She had been arrested for a violent assault in Florida. How strange that almost everyone else at his college had all these twins, tesselations, patterns they were part of. The most curious facet of the phenomenon was that he recalled perfectly well his previous Facebook account - that had been the account he had had when he had lived in Highlake. There had been no trouble finding locals he had wished to add back then - all were perfectly easy to find with no duplicates. There was something about Duldrum. He had to get out of there. A fearful synchronity was present.        

Luke's thoughts ebbed, his wakefulness flushed out. Preparing to turn the laptop off he took a last look at the time. It was 02:31. Ha! he exclaimed.

The Samaritans were very variable in the quality of service they offered. Sometimes they were a godsend and sometimes an insult. On a bad day, Luke dropped in to see someone; he knew how they could make him feel worse but as his mother had told him, "Old habits die hard." Luke pressed the doorbell and a young man who obviously did not understand the concept of listening came down to speak. When the conversation finished Luke was so aggravated that when he left he shouted in the street; and an employee outside a cinema next door began to stare at him and raise his eyebrows sardonically. Luke yelled, "You're not so special just because you work in an arthouse cinema, you bloody twerp." He soon regretted saying it - and quickly left before a further scene was caused.

As he was so worked up, he continued to shout but not at anyone in particular. He was angry at the world, letting off steam. Jimmy the homeless man happened to be on the opposite street and noticing him whistled. Luke turned and spotting Jimmy stopped in his tracks, lost for woods.

"Come here, pal!"

Luke ran across the road.

"What's wrong, Luke? I'm not going to watch you like that. Come and sit with me."

"I've been to see the Samaritans and they were awful. I really needed someone to talk to and they treated me like a fool."

"Hey, come on John," replied Jimmy, mistaking Luke's name as ever. "Don't let them work you up, they're not worth it, pal. Come and see down here with me."

Luke agreed and lowered himself onto the street next to Jimmy.

"I've got this," said Jimmy, reaching to a plastic bag behind him. Inside was a bottle of wine. "I was going to have it myself but I don't need it. You have it. Go on, pal. It'll do you good. Just relax."

"Are you sure?"

"Absolutely! Drink it!"

Luke smiled and took a hearty glug, then passed it back to Jimmy. They passed it back and forth, Jimmy taking a few sips but he insisted that Luke drink the lion's share of the bottle.

"Look at this," said Jimmy, rolling the sleeve of his denim jacket up.

"My god!" cried Luke. A gnarled elbow exposed a bone around which was red bruising and the size of the gash, revealing such a horrific nakedness of human anatomy, made Luke recoil. "How on earth did you do that?"

"I cut myself. I don't want to live anymore."

"Good God. Can you not get any help? Have you been to the hospital?"

Jimmy sniffed. "They just throw me back out on the street."     

Two more homeless people taking a walk spotted Jimmy and approached.

"Hey Jimmy" cried the man.

"''Ey! If it isn't Dick! And how are you, Joanna?" he said looking at the smiling woman. The two sat with Jimmy and Luke and shared in the drinking of the wine. Since Jimmy needed some money he began to plead with passersby leaving the cash machine by them to give him money. "Please have you got anything to spare, love?" He would ask most the women. "You can't give us a few pennies, can you?" he asked the men. Then he would finish with a joke: "I take chip and pin." Another homeless man passed and waved at Jimmy; he waved back. Luke scanned the man's face. It seemed familiar. He had seen that face before. Where? Then it came to him! In the Royal Duldrum Hospital. The man had been a patient in there, absentmindedly and silently sinking into the mauve armchairs in the lounge and shuffling around the corridors. Luke had on one morning even accidentally found him sat on the toilet where he had left the door a little open; and on seeing Luke witnessing him with his underpants down he had merely carried on unmoved.

Luke had read that with the closure of most mental hospitals in the 1980s it had led to a lot of mentally ill people living on the streets. It had never quite hit home to him until now, though; sometimes firsthand knowledge of a situation made it more clear, not so easy to confine into one of the mind's many filing cabinets. He did not believe rebuilding those hospitals was the answer as there had been so much abuse and poor outcomes for people in those institutions. It was obvious, though, that care in the community was an oxymoron - there was barely any care for people at all. When Luke had spoken to Bridget on the phone recently she had told him about her plans to study counselling and open a homeless centre that offered therapies - now that was a brilliant idea.       

There were some hostels, though never enough, that existed to provide shelter for homeless people but few of them offered anything besides a roof. Bridget wanted to offer exercise classes, short and basic courses in literacy and numeracy, and counselling for troubled residents. There would be no limits on who could enter, no turning away people who consumed drugs and alcohol. She also wanted to study reflexology so she could offer foot massages. Luke thought it was a magical idea as it would help the residents feel relaxed. Bridget on one occasion had massaged his feet, all the while explaining the connections in the nervous system between the parts of the foot and the body. At the end, a stomach ache that had been bothering him cured itself and he was left questioning a lot of mainstream science.

Having finished the wine, Luke and the others continued to sit for a couple of hours; then conversation began to dip and Luke wished them well and said his goodbyes. Then he made a peregrination in no particular direction in search of invitingly wafting odours of food. He found a small cafe that specialised in locally sourced cuisine and placing an emphasis on organic meals, and so being its target audience he naturally decided to eat there. When he had sat down and ordered a meal of chickpea and coriander soup, he awaited it with excitement. Then two young women entered the cafe who by the looks of them were students. One white and one black, they appeared very close - perhaps lesbians, thought Luke, though he did not want to be presumptious; women were obviously more intimate with other female friends than men males tended to be.

As he waited for his meal, Luke wondered what to do. First he checked his phone but there was nothing to see to there; then he read through the menu and he soon had exhausted it; thereafter he flitted his eyes from table to table making a closer inspection of who was sitting in the establishement with him. Two old ladies were sat at another table to his left, out of his line of sight, and were chuckling about something. A short, bald man now entered with a black T-shirt on and walked behind the counter into the kitchen and proceeded to banter with the staff. He turned to look in Luke's direction and piercing him with a humourous gaze, Luke turned his eyes away and checked what the two young girls were doing. The black girl saw him direct his eyes towards their table and appeared upset. Luke gathered she did not look happy about something - angry, even - and she was staring in his direction.

Luke then decided it was best to look down for a moments. Gathering his courage with a too audible gulp he then looked up again and saw her meet his gaze again; had she remained looking at him? Or had she only turned her eyes back in his direction when she had noticed him do the same first? He now felt he was making enough faux pas to soon require him to make an early exit - and desperate not to waste the money he had already spent on nothing, he quickly took hold of a newspaper on an empty table and began to read it. On the front page was a story about a high school massacre. A man of seventeen years old had used his father's shotgun that he had stolen from its locked case to kill five other children, then turned the gun on himself. Moral debates were raging about whether guns should be made harder to get hold of or not and the usual camps of pro- and anti-gun control were firing shots at one another.

It occurred to Luke that it made no difference either way whether people had access to guns or not. That such events were fairly rare, a few a year at the most, even in a world in which hundreds of millions of people owned guns and ammunition in their homes proved that they were exceptional cases. That was not to say he dismissed them - for lives had been lost. Yet he was certain that the central issue in each story was never the guns themselves - it was about bullying or the way a school operated or about a lack of optimism among many young people; and it was even becoming clear from many of the massacres that psychiatric medication was taken by many of the killers. Opinions were beginning to grow louder that there was some link. It was known that pharmaceutical companies had censored full results of their tests before releasing drugs; and suspicions were growing that psychiatric medication could set off the fuse of a desperate person.

Another thing Luke noticed was that most of the incidents occurred in America which was probably attributable to its winner takes all culture. A nation that found it hard to compromise could find it hard to convince somebody who felt angry act rationally. Many times when negotiators had been sent it to attempt to get a shooter to put their gun down, it had been an utter failure; no doubt this was largely because such a militaristic approach was taken to the attempts to combat massacres. Besides negotiators would be dozens of armed police ready to kill. People could often act according to other's expectations of them. Children in privileged schools, being expected to achieve well, even if they were not academically gifted, often would do so. On the other hand, even bright students could sadly fail in more lacklustre schools where expectations were lowered - not always for the bright students themselves, sometimes perhaps only for the others in the class who they had to follow in their level of progress. If in their response, police expected the worst of massacre shooters, then more often than not they wrote their own ending to what would unfold.

Crash! A plate clattered in the sink behind the counter. Luke was disturbed from his inner thoughts. Dreading that the black girl might still be looking at him, Luke reared his head up again over the parapet of his newspaper and saw that she was not. Shortly, however, she did turn towards him again and noticing the news story about the massacre he was reading looked ever more annoyed. What did she think of him? That he had been staring at her because he was racist - or that he was just a sick man who was reading too much about something people should not? Luke had very little experience of mingling with other races and so did not know what to do. He wished he could have a different upbringing - knowing and living among many different ethnicities. He had not. He had lived almost exclusively among people with similar religious, cultural and skin colour tones to his own and so he would probably always remain instinctively uncomfortable.

He sighed. But at length his food arrived and although he ate it while looking glumly down at his plate, he enjoyed the meal. After he had finished and made way to leave, the black girl still appeared annoyed and he thought, maybe some day people of different races will live in mixed communities rather than one race to one area. He knew it already happened to a large extent in Canada and was by all accounts a fantastic success - violent crime and racism was nowhere near as much of an issue there as in the United Kingdom.

LXI

There were so many reasons Luke wanted to move away. The apartment leaked too much heat when it was cold and it seemed no matter how long he left towels to dry on the radiators they would always feel damp again later. The neighbours were noisy coming in and out of the communal areas; the weather was too often grey and there was no joy in the local life. Yet no matter how many times he checked on the HomeSwapper website, it seemed a swap would never happen. He had received three offers for exchanges but all had invariably been in dire locations. Luke did not want to leap out of the frying pan into the fire. The amount of places that are considered decent to live in the United Kingdom has dwindled in recent years by a very large number, and if you look on the internet at websites on which ex-pats and other people discuss living in various countries, it would seem the same is true in many other nations too. At times the internet could make Luke feel it was all over - it contained on it enough information that validated that presumption.

There were more mean landlords in the world than there were good ones and so getting a home outside the social housing swap scheme was even harder. It was a shame that when someone told another person they were a landlord, at let us say a dinner party or in a bar that they were not treated with contempt. The idea that people who let out properties were clever or resourceful did not often bear resemblence with the truth. Luke had found that very few landlords would let out flats to anybody receiving DSS assistance, as it was known in the parlance of lettings ads. The stigma attached to being unemployed caused more problems than most people would ever know. People could become trapped in poor areas that were ghettos as there were no landlords outside those areas who would accept a person who was disabled - nor people who were ill nor unable to find a job either.