Stranger on a Train (13 page)

Phyllis was officially catatonic. I knew nothing about her life before she was admitted to Ward 6. What you saw was what you got with Phyllis. She was thin and somewhere in her late thirties. She was just there when I arrived at Ward 6, without a history that anyone bothered to tell me about. A fixture, with long, lank mousy-brown hair which the nurses sometimes drew into a limp hanging tail to keep it out of her eyes during the day when she sat slumped over, her back humped, her lean, expressionless face staring down at the hands in her lap. She spent all day in the chair beside the door between the television section of the dayroom and the dormitory where ten of us slept in open-fronted cubicles, five-a-side, head to head. Every morning Phyllis was pulled from under her blankets and sat on her bed, hunched like a rag doll, while the nurses manipulated her arms and legs out of a shapeless hospital nightie and into a shapeless cardigan, skirt, thick tights and carpet slippers, all dun-coloured. They washed her face and tied back her hair (though it always loosened and drooped into a semi-concealing swathe over her face) and, pronouncing her ready for the day, began to manoeuvre her towards the dayroom. A firm hand at the centre of her back once she was standing would get her to shuffle one or two reluctant steps forward to make a slow incurious progress from her bed at the far end of the dormitory to the chair beside the door.

‘Morning, Phyllis,' her neighbours would say if they were feeling sociable as she came to a halt at the end of their bed, waiting for the next push. On a good day Phyllis might grunt without lifting her gaze from the lino floor. It was never clear whether it was a grunt of greeting or just a grunt. Those of us who were younger were differently angry and were likely still to be in bed, waiting to be turfed out by the ward sister after several warnings.

‘Get up, get up. There's nothing wrong with you. You're young, you're healthy. Nothing but bone-idle lazy, that's all that's the matter with you.'

The covers would be torn back, and we would hiss and curse and sit up just long enough to grab them back and bury ourselves underneath them. No different from being teenagers lying abed while our overworked parents despaired of us. Of course, we were on medication, had diagnoses, slashed ourselves, overdosed (as well as overdozed), cried inconsolably, hit out, acted out, over-ate, under-ate, withdrew, were injected, electroconvulsed, tranquillised, but essentially the three or four members of our dormitory in our early twenties were waging the same war against the grown-up world as any other right-thinking adolescent in 1968. Almost certainly, each of us had missed or muffed the opportunity to do so at a more appropriate time in regular circumstances. The game was played vigorously and to rules.

‘All right, all right,' Sister Marshall would lilt at us, loud and West Indian, with a dismissive wave of the arms. ‘Do what you want. You will anyway.' Her cry calls down the years. Every mother giving up, or wishing she could. ‘Do what you want. You will anyway.' And Sister Winniki, an eastern European dynamo, frantically active, a haunting presence still, would tell us there was nothing wrong with us. We weren't ill like really sick people. ‘Look at poor Phyllis. Every morning she gets up and dressed. She doesn't lie in bed all day. Why can't you be more like poor Phyllis? Up, up, up.'

Nobody really tried to make everyday sense of anything on Ward 6. Our everydays were different. The idea that it would be better to be like Phyllis was never challenged because its absurdity was evident, even to Sister Winniki. It was like a play we acted out, a necessary, even enjoyable pantomime that had its own rules and satisfactions, as well probably for the nursing staff as us. Their job was to make us get up and confront the day, the real world; our job was to huddle and hide from it in various combinations of fear, resentment and disgust. Phyllis just kept still. But sometimes, when one of us had a particularly noisy, riotous run-in with the staff, if you looked carefully, sidelong so she couldn't see you were looking, you might catch the catatonic, immobilised Phyllis enjoying life. For an instant, a smile would flit over her face, a wicked irrepressible grin that came and went in a second. This happened particularly when we claimed Phyllis as our commander-in-chief.

‘Phyllis says I shouldn't go to occupational therapy. She says it's a waste of fucking time … Phyllis wants to watch this programme and she insists on it being this loud; she likes satire. Well, of course that's what she wants to listen to, she's a big fan of Hendrix, who do you think put the record on in the first place … Phyllis doesn't think my skirt is too short … Phyllis thinks knickers are a waste of the earth's resources … Phyllis says I shouldn't take my medication, I should smoke, refuse to go to ECT, spit out my lunch because it tastes like shit, chuck this vase of flowers just past your ear … Oh yeah? Just try and make me, Phyllis'll have something to say about it. Watch out or I'll set Phyllis on you … You don't want to mess with Phyllis, when she gets angry, anything can happen…'

And if you were lucky, as well as exasperating the nursing staff, you might get one of those covert grins from Phyllis, just a flash from behind the fallen curtain of hair. We firmly believed that Phyllis enjoyed playing her subversive part in the war between order and chaos. She was, after all, one of us. And so to my surprise was I.

Us
were the people in our dormitory. Some willing and vigorous, some, like Phyllis, co-opted. There was another dormitory, our mirror image at the far end of the dayroom. They were not-us. They listened to John Denver and wore knee-length pleated skirts and believed in God, and that passive obedience would overcome their emotional difficulties; we listened to Hendrix and Jefferson Airplane, took drugs and demonstrated whenever possible against authority in the belief that our rage was righteous and that if we were disturbed it was only to be expected, having been born into a deeply disturbing world. I can only imagine that the staff must deliberately have organised this bipolar arrangement, it seemed so satisfyingly clear-cut. Bad girls to the left, good to the right. Most virtuous of all was Velda, in her twenties, and as smugly good as good can get. She went to church every Sunday, battled for the use of the solitary record player to clean the blasphemous air with Cliff Richard, wore her hair and clothes neat and tidy and expressed her god-sent disapproval of me and my fellow bad girls at every opportunity. In return for all this virtue she had been visited with a strange and terrible affliction. Just the sort of thing that God is known to gift to his chosen ones. She had woken up one morning ready to brush her teeth and rush off to the office only to discover she could no longer walk in the way that most people walked. Velda now lurched wildly through the world, flinging one leg out sideways and then roughly righting herself to move forward by flinging the other out at the opposite extreme angle. It was a strangely circular motion that generally got her to where she wanted to go, but very slowly and often by endangering anyone in her path. If you didn't see Velda coming in time, you were liable to get violently kicked in the shins or take a nasty poke in the ribs. In spite of months of medical investigation, no physical cause had been found for her ailment, and so, to her respectable distress, she was a patient along with the depraved and depressed in the Maudsley. On the whole, our end of the dormitory was unsympathetic. We decided it was just a way of taking up more space in the world and of threatening the rest of us, who walked in straight lines, with being knocked off our course. We didn't do sympathy much. Whether we took our tone from Sisters Winniki and Marshall or they from us, I can't say. Then the American evangelist Billy Graham came to town to save Swinging London from the wrath of God. He held mass meetings at Earl's Court where true believers, after being harangued on the horrors of hell, could queue up for the touch of Billy's wonder-working hands to absolve and cure them of whatever ailed them. To hoots of derision from the bad side of Ward 6, Velda went one evening in her Sunday finery, and after the sermon got in the queue. The next morning when she got out of bed she was cured, and with tears of joy and hallelujahs, she walked as straight a path into the dayroom as her God might wish. The devil was silenced, Cliff sang out in triumph and the shrinks discharged her as, if not cured, then symptom-free – though some of us murmured that miraculous interventions were as good a reason as any we could think of for incarceration in a mental institution. But Velda packed her bags with a superior smile on her face, in the sure and certain knowledge that the Lord was on her side. I dare say these days she tells her grandchildren about the miracle cure. I wonder if Phyllis has any grandchildren.

Also
not-us
was anyone from outside the world of the hospital. Visitors, our relatives and friends and concerned, baffled boyfriends, were not welcome. They intruded our other lives into our retreat. They dropped in on the ward from having got on with it, worked, worried, coped with all the things we couldn't or wouldn't cope with. We felt the pressure of the real world arrive with them through the ward door like a cold blow. We were vaguely aware that this life apart couldn't go on for ever. Indeed, the hospital had a two-year time limit for inpatients. Either we had to go back to the world eventually, or become permanently hospitalised in one of those places they used to frighten us with. ‘If you don't make more effort, we'll send you to St Bernard's…' The temptation to become a basket case in a vast uncaring mental institution was very great when faced with leaving and dealing with the world in which our friends and relatives lived. Or there were the revolvers. People who left and returned, had done for years, were greeted as old friends when they came into the ward and settled back into its routine and safety with sighs of relief. Somehow, this seemed even more terrible than permanent incarceration, more terrible even than freedom. In any case, our visitors presented us with too much reality, and they did not know our codes. Sometimes it seemed they were speaking another language, in careful, patronising words about things which we had no concern for. Indeed, we had no real concern for them. We cared passionately about each other, the members of our dormitory were our family, the people we knew from outside were strangers, crude and devoid of understanding, too fearful for our psyches to speak as brutally as we spoke to each other or to know how to deal with our panic or depression or what to do when we cut our wrists. When one of us had a crisis, the staff would ask another patient to help out, because we knew the language, what the deal was. For those who didn't, who were nervous with us or took the wrong tone (too soft and gentle, too harsh and condemnatory), we had nothing but contempt. We sighed with relief when the visitors, ours or others', left us to get on with our proper existence. And for me, an only child taught by my mother that our troubles had at any cost to be kept from others, this was a most uncommon experience.

*   *   *

On the
Sunset Limited,
thirty years later, as evening closed in, we set off from New Orleans, Louisiana, towards Texas, and on my next visit to the smoking coach after the hour's stopover, I discovered that we had acquired some new members. A heated conversation on the relative merits of pixies and leprechauns was in full flood as I entered. A man of about fifty but looking older, the ghost of good-looking on his wrecked features, in open sandals, slacks and a short-sleeved shirt that had seen cleaner days, was sitting with his upper body propped against the end wall, a roll-up drooping dangerously from his fingers, a can of beer aslant in his other hand. His head seemed too heavy to be held quite up; his body was slumped as if at any moment it might lose its muscle tone entirely and slide to the floor like an empty bundle of clothes. Still, there was something about him, a bid for dignity perhaps, that lifted him out of the category of a regular drunken bum, and he was holding the attention of the entire coach as he spoke with slow alcohol-sodden care, waving his beer can airily about in order to emphasise the absolute reliability of what he was saying.

‘Don't you talk to me about pixies, sir. Everyone knows the pixies don't exist. They are just for children and the simple-minded. Leprechauns, however, very much exist. There is one here right now. Just there in front of my right foot. Do you see? I have known many of them. I am perfectly familiar with leprechauns. The leprechauns are my friends. And if you think that they dress in green and wear ridiculous caps, then you're a fool who has never really seen the little people. They are quite normally dressed, but a lot smaller than we are. And they are Irish. As I am. Which is why they choose to accompany me and tell me things I need to know. You may claim to be Irish, but only the true Irishman can see the leprechaun. Can you see him?'

His accent veered towards English, overlaid with a slight American twang. As pure comedy he was W.C. Fields, in the current genre he was that drunken doctor who always sits in the corner seat of the stagecoach. He was explaining the reality of the invisible world with exaggerated patience to Conal, who was sitting next to Virginia several places down the carriage. I sat down in a vacant seat opposite the troubling couple. Conal sipped his whisky and smiled scornfully.

‘Yah – you don't know what you're talking about, you drunken old fool. I'm an Irishman through and through. I know my leprechauns, by God I do, and they're very good friends with the pixies. And there are no pixies or leprechauns on this train because pixies and leprechauns don't travel by train. They teleport. You're completely drunk, you are drunk as a horse's arse and you know sweet fanny adams about the little people. You are a fraud. Where do you claim to be from in Ireland, my man?'

‘I do not respond to abusive attacks from the coarse and ill-educated,' the other man said very grandly and with an even stronger English accent. ‘I was born in Ireland but educated at Cambridge University although I was unable, because of financial constraints beyond my control, to complete my degree. I have been used to a better quality of debate and a far better class of person. The sort of person and debate, sir, that you could not even imagine. You merely show up your own ignorance and rough origins by such poorly phrased linguistic attacks. You would be regarded as very uncouth in decent society. I shall speak to you no more. And the leprechaun doesn't think highly of you, either. He's just said so, in so many words.'