The Ballroom (6 page)

Beyond the windows was green, mucky-dark in the low winter light, but green all the same. Hills in the distance, covered by a thin haar of mist. She stared out at the green, not moving for a long time, and the water had grown cold and scurfy by the time the nurse came back.

‘Hurry up. You’ve to put this on.’

The woman carried a uniform with writing on the pocket. Ella knew what it said.
Sharston Asylum.

It was hard to dress with the feeling not yet back in her arms. The nurse watched, impatient, then pushed her hands away and stepped in to button the jacket herself. The clothes were clean but faded and soft with use, and Ella wondered how many people had worn them before her.

The nurse bent to shove her feet into cramped boots, then, ‘Sit down,’ she said, pulling out a needle and thread from her apron. ‘This will hurt.’

Ella bit the inside of her cheek as the needle passed through her skin. But the woman was quick at least.

‘How long?’ she said, when the nurse was done.

‘Till what?’ Standing again now, the nurse yanked Ella’s collar into place.

‘How long till I leave?’

The nurse lifted her upper lip. Her teeth were grey. ‘Depends. Most get moved. Chronic ward. And then you stay there.’

No.

Not me.

She was taken to a room and the nurse stood by while a man pushed her down into a chair from which straps hung on either side. When she was strapped in, he went and stood behind a camera, which blinded her with a sudden burst of light.

Back in the ward, five women were on their hands and knees, scrubbing. Ella looked, but Clem wasn’t amongst them.

‘Take this.’ The nurse pointed to a brush beside a bucket.

She did as she was ordered, dropping to her knees and joining the line. It was hard to grip the brush, but she wet it, bending her head and setting to scrubbing till the floor around her knees had darkened with damp. She could feel the nurse standing behind her watching. But she knew what she was doing, knew how to be good, knew how to work hard, and after a while the nurse went away.

After dinner, they were shunted together into the day room, which was painted brown; the windows had bars, and it had a thick reasty stink to it, even worse than the ward. In the far corner was a piano and a thin yellow bird in a cage. Fires were lit in the grates, but they were covered with a padlocked guard. Clem was there though, and Ella felt a small lift at the sight of her, sitting by the piano bent over a book.

Close to where Ella sat someone was muttering. ‘
My head. Head is boiling. My head is boiling, my head, my head.
’ The speaker kept reaching up to pluck at herself. Patches of her scalp were so bald they shone. In her lap lay a tangled bird’s nest of hair.

One woman stood before her chair, gaze fixed on a point just ahead of her, arms and hands making the same movements over and over again. Ella’s eyes passed over her and then were pulled back. She watched the woman reaching out – plucking the fibres to test the strength of the thread. She was performing the actions of a spinner at the mill. Forward and back. Forward and back. Searching for the broken threads. Watching the thick, fluffy wool get thinner and thinner, till your eyes couldn’t see straight any more.

‘Why are you here then?’

She turned. On the other side of her sat an older, ill-thriven woman with greasy hair like rags. A red mark stained the side of her cheek. She had a small table in front of her and appeared to be sorting coloured beads into different piles: red, yellow, green.

‘I smashed a window,’ said Ella. ‘Why’re you?’

‘I took a gill of ammonia.’ The woman spoke in a thin and listless way. ‘I felt like someone else.’

I felt like someone else.
It made a sort of sense.

‘Who’ve you got?’ the woman said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Outside? To ask for you? I’ve got my girls. My girls’ll come and get me soon.’

Ella shrugged.

‘Careful then.’ The woman left off what she was doing and leant closer, her breath foul. ‘You don’t want to go in with the gawbers. You only go out feet first. If no one comes for you, they put you in the ground in a hole with five others. No name. And that’s where they kill them. They kill the babbies in there.’

The woman’s eyes had changed; they were glassy and dead now, like the fish at James St Market when they’d been left out too long.

The chair beside Clem was still empty, and Ella stood and crossed swiftly towards it. ‘Can I sit here?’

Clem looked up, eyes distant, then, ‘If you like,’ she said, before turning back to her book.

Ella watched her read a moment, then, ‘I went downstairs,’ she said.

Clem didn’t respond.

‘They put me in a room with a window, there were—’

‘Two holes in the door.’ Clem put a finger to her place and looked up. ‘I know. You weren’t there for very long though, were you?’

‘A day and a night.’ Ella bridled.

‘Yes, well. Like I said. Not very long.’

Clem looked away again. As she lifted her hand to turn a page, Ella caught a glimpse of her wrist, where red marks, like scratches, crosshatched her skin. As though she felt her watching, Clem pulled down her sleeve and covered them up.

Later in the afternoon, the doctor appeared, and a stillness came over the room at his entrance, the chelping chorus of women quietening to a low, anxious hum. He spoke to the nurses, extending his finger every so often to point at one or two of the women,
What about her?
he seemed to be saying,
or her?
And the nurses would nod and smile or shake their heads and say something back.

He began moving around the patients then, asking them brief questions, feeling their necks, noting things down in his book. When he reached their side of the room, he spoke to Clem. ‘Reading again, Miss Church?’

Clem nodded as a small red flush clambered up the side of her neck.

‘Be careful.’ The doctor wagged his finger. ‘Or one day you might never come out of those books.’

Clem seemed about to say something back, but his gaze moved quickly on to Ella. ‘Miss Fay.’ The man frowned. ‘I hope you’re feeling calmer now.’

Ella’s heart was drumming, but she copied the way Clem sat, putting her hands in a quiet fold in her lap, sitting a little straighter in her chair.

He eyed her for a long moment, then, ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Very good.’ He scratched out some notes and pocketed the book. ‘Time for a little music, I think,’ and he moved to the piano, where he seated himself with his back to the room and lifted the lid.

Music came, gentle at first, pooling out from the instrument and lapping at where they sat. Then the doors to the ward opened and two male attendants appeared: short and stocky, poured tight into their jackets. They were the men who had brought her here.

‘Who are they?’ She turned to Clem, whose head was up; she was watching them too.

‘They’ve come to take people to the chronic ward.’

‘Who goes in there?’

Clem shrugged, but there was a new tightness to her voice. ‘We don’t know till they go.’

On the other side of the room Old Germany, her hair still in bunches, rose from her seat, making her way with determined steps to the middle of the floor. At first Ella thought that she was offering herself up to be taken, but then the old lady closed her eyes and began to sway, hands fluttering like two small birds at her chest. She was dancing. Dancing to the piano.

The men were making their way towards where they were sitting. Ella’s stomach clenched, but they passed her by, heading instead to a small woman with short-cropped hair, sitting shrunken in her chair with her face screwed tight. The music from the piano grew in volume. The men bent down, and the woman began to cry, softly, calling for her mother as she was hauled from her chair.

Old Germany’s movements were larger now, limbs lifting and falling, lifting and falling, turning on the spot.

The men came back, and the nurses pointed to the spinner. The men lifted her, and she yelped like an animal, twisting to be free: ‘
They’lltekemestomachapart. There’sapartitionthere. That’sit. Where they get in. That’s where the spirits get in.
’

Raw fear flashed in the woman’s eyes as she was carried past.

The music finished when the men were gone, the sound of it still trailing in the air as a thin spatter of handclaps came from the top of the room.

‘
Thank
you, Doctor.’ It was the Irish nurse. ‘That was
gorgeous.
Wasn’t it just
gorgeous
, everybody?’

‘Chopin,’ said Clem under her breath, shooting the woman a murderous look. ‘“Raindrop”. Not that
you
’d know.’

The doctor stood, gathered his music, then gave the room a funny little bow. Somewhere in the distance a clock struck three. Ella looked down. Deep marks gouged her palm where her fingernails had dug into the skin. How long had she been here for? She looked up and around the room: at Clem, deep in her book; at women plucking at themselves, women staring into space.

Panic sent its dark root deep inside her.

T
HE WEATHER CHANGED
– rain slamming in off the moors and pelting the windows so there was no outside work to be done, not even the digging of graves, and they were shut up in the day room with the dark-painted walls that swallowed the light.

He stayed in his corner, as far away from the others as he could get. In this long, thin day room there was a rule: the far-gone ones were wheeled in each morning and set in one half, where they stayed for the rest of the day. Ruins of men, faces eaten by disease, many of whom did not know their own names. As the day wore on, the smell in the room thickened: sweat and tobacco, and the heavy linger of those who could not look after themselves. It made your eyes smart. Clagged up the back of your throat.

There was a line in the middle of the floor, invisible, but stronger than any painted in tar, and those on John’s side would not cross it, not even if a billiard ball had fallen from the table and rolled away. On this side, stretching from the middle fireplace, were the rest of them. Not so bad as the others, perhaps, but that was not saying much. There was the old soldier who talked only of the Pashtun and spent hours attempting to blacken his boots to be ready for battle. A toothless old-timer named Foreshaw, of whom it was said he had been in there since the place opened, almost thirty years ago, and that he had once drunk the blood of a sheep. A scattering of Irishmen, one of whom, by the slant of his accent, could only have been from the same side of Mayo as John himself. And though John did not know the man from before, he knew the brokenness on his face, the restless eyes – as though the world were a trap ready to spring upon you – had seen it on too many faces to count. And on most of them too, the same bafflement, as though unable to understand that this was where they had ended up.

He did not look at any of them if he could help it, not on either side of the room, staying in his corner by the canary instead. It was darker here, quieter. He always tucked a bit of bread from breakfast in his pocket for the bird. Close to where he sat was a shelf of books, some old newspapers, a worn-out billiard table, a few cues with no tips, and a piano that no one ever really touched.

John turned the pages of the papers; they were days old, and the leaves were crispy, but it was something to do, even if there was nothing there he wished to know about: old football matches, Ireland, a Fenian murder not five miles from where he grew up. He knew the family name. He pushed the paper away.

‘Tell us again, Dan.’ John looked up, saw Joe Sutcliffe speaking. He was a new one in there, young and skinny with a tremble on him like a sapling in a high wind. ‘Tell us about the running girl.’

‘Oh, she was a beauty all right.’ Dan was standing in the middle of the room, feet planted wide, holding forth to a small clutch of men. ‘She came towards us so fast I thought she might fly. Long hair like snakes around her head. First thing I thought was she was a Spanish
dona.
Or an Irish queen. Isn’t that right, John lad?’

John said nothing; they didn’t need stoking from him.

As the day wore on and the weather did not lift, the men played cards, hunched over the folding table in the middle of the room, betting for tobacco, or matches, or both. The assistants turned a blind eye as Dan shuffled and dealt the stained old deck, the cards rifling from his fingers. From where he sat, John saw what the others did not: saw the cards tucked up Dan’s sleeves, ready to be brought out for a royal flush.

Occasionally, after much cajoling, John would join in for a brief hand or two. While they played, they smoked. They smoked as if they were paid to do it; they ripped the old well-thumbed books to shreds to use as papers. They smoked their tobacco packets down to the last crumb and then they traded for more.

On Thursday, the doctor visited the ward, making his way around the patients, and then, when he had done with touching necks and taking pulses, came back over to John’s corner of the room. ‘Dark old spot you’ve chosen here.’ The man thrust his hands in his pockets, staring out at the rain splaying itself against the window. He looked at John sideways. ‘What’s the name again?’

‘Mulligan.’

‘Mulligan. Ah. Yes. I remember now. Do you like music, Mr Mulligan?’

‘Well enough.’

‘Well enough.’ He gave a smile. ‘Well. That will do for me.’ He sat himself at the piano, pausing with his fingers above the keys before lowering his hands to play.

As the music began, many of the men turned their heads towards it. A stillness seemed to come over the far-gone ones on the other side of the room. The card players put down their cards and leant back in their chairs.

John closed his eyes. Behind them was a road, curving through hills.

Morning.

Rain stopping. Clouds shifting and the sun sliding free. The gorse singing yellow after the rains.

He breathed in the scent of the wide sky, the road. And when the music came to a stop, he stayed where he was, eyes shut, wrapped in the feel of it still.