The Offering (11 page)

However, while the nurses may be feeling the pressure it is in us patients that the effects are most readily visible. Our hour with Lucas is our day of reckoning, the time for personal interaction with the purveyor of our fates. The sinners are cast off to his left and the sheep are gathered to his right: sinners, in this case, meaning those who are failing to respond to Lucas’s choice of therapy. The ‘punishment’ is generally an increase (or a decrease) in our medication and additional therapy.

Some of us deal better with it than others. This afternoon when I enter the lounge Brendan is sitting on the edge of the sofa, blinking, his face very white. Sue comes round with the tray of tablets but he won’t take his beaker. Pete puts his hand on his shoulder and says: ‘Take your tablets, Brendan, and then we’ll put on the science programme you like.’

Brendan scratches his head hard and begins to rock. Pete moves towards him but he lashes out at him and rocks even faster.

I try to catch Brendan’s eye but can’t.

‘Take your tablets, Brendan,’ Pete says, but the beaker remains on the tray and the rocking continues.

Pete sits down gently beside Brendan, closes his hand around Brendan’s and tries to open it to place the tablets in it. So much for Lucas’s new rule, I think. Brendan starts to groan. The groaning gets louder.

Pete says: ‘Brendan, stop playing now, take the tablets, there’s a good man.’

Sue takes Robyn, who is also sitting on the sofa, by the arm and leads her to the other side of the room. She herds the rest of us over too. Then Pete takes hold of Brendan’s arms while Sue picks up the beaker. The rocking persists for a split second. The next, the beaker’s contents are flung skywards, Sue stumbles backwards, nursing her wrist, and Pete collides with the coffee table.

Then Brendan leaps up and begins to cry. Not ‘cry’ in the usual sense of the word, admittedly, but there are tears, and his face is contorted. The sound he makes, though, is not a spasmodic sobbing but an astonishing wail, a wail that makes me feel cold and reminds me of something I have heard before, a noise that grows as he raises himself on his toes and subsides as he descends, then continues monotonously with weird oblivion, self-sufficiency and abstraction, that makes me think not of a human weeping but an animal howling. I haven’t heard Brendan make this noise in the five years he has been here; normally he makes no sound at all apart from the odd grunt. To see him cry, albeit in this unusual manner, is as shocking as if he had just come up to me, clapped me on the back and said: ‘How are you, Madeline?’ It is so shocking that my stomach lurches and for a moment I just stand there.

After she has collected herself, Sue says loudly: ‘Brendan! Stop that! Come and sit down!’

Pete is saying: ‘Come on, Brendan, there’s a good man. Look, here’s your book!’

But Brendan carries on making the piercing din.

I find myself walking towards him. My heart is beating hard and I don’t know what I am going to do or even if I should try to do anything at all. I don’t even mean to go up to him.

‘Sit down, Madeline,’ Sue says.

But I don’t. I stand in front of Brendan and watch his chest swell and his arms strain. The noise is like a wall of water, but instead of trying to get it to stop I stand there and submit to it; I go along with it. I suppose I agree with it. It is immense. I seem to be tottering. My body is encased in heat. And then something strange is happening to me too. My own eyes are filling. It is as natural as falling asleep but strange too because I never cry. I keep listening, looking at him, my chest filling till it feels as if it will shatter, and Brendan keeps caterwauling and rising up on his toes.

Then without warning the noise stops, and he drops with a thud onto the sofa as if the strings that are holding him up have been cut, his arms still stiff at his sides. Sue stops shouting, Pete stops talking. Sue hovers but thinks better of speaking; Pete beckons to Mary who is sitting beside him to come away. Brendan sits staring at nothing, his mouth gaping, the same expression of horror on his face. I know he won’t look at me but I think he knows I am present, I think he has become aware of me while he is crying because I have given him attention in a way that no one else has, so I stay where I am.

‘D’you want your book, Brendan?’ Pete says gently. He fetches
The Cosmological Principle
.

Brendan does not touch it. He carries on staring straight ahead. He appears to have fallen into a trance. After another few minutes of not wanting to see the expression of pain on his face any longer and feeling in rather a stupor myself, I go into the corridor and sit down on a chair. I feel as hollow as a stalk, as though all the fluid has been drained from my body.

A few minutes later I hear a voice say: ‘What’s the matter?’ and look up to see Sue’s sharp face.

‘I don’t feel well,’ I say. I wish she would leave. Then I say: ‘What’s the matter with Brendan? I’ve never seen him like that.’

‘There’s nothing the matter with him,’ Sue says. ‘Dr Lucas’s changed his medication, that’s all; he’s just having a grizzle. He’ll be fine in a week.’ She looks cross, whether with me or with Brendan or with Dr Lucas, I don’t know.

‘A grizzle?’ I say. ‘He was howling; Brendan never makes a sound.’

‘Brendan is fine, Madeline. Why don’t you go and watch telly?’ she says. ‘It’ll be time for your meds soon.’ She turns on her heel and sets off down the corridor. I watch her sensible shoes retreat.

For the rest of the afternoon, as Pam sucks her string and twists it, as Miriam builds a castle of red blocks and claims they are yellow, as Eugene walks back and forth, hands in pockets, murmuring Latin, and Margaret strokes Robyn’s scalp with a knitting needle, I think of Brendan and those unearthly cries.

Just before bedtime I realise where I have heard them before: on a misty day at the farm when from my bedroom I heard a hunt and the sound of a fox. My mother said: ‘Foxes are terrible; they kill far more than they need to.’ It did not make me feel better. I remember what my father told me: that no debt is repaid once but many times over, and the price for transgression can as easily be too high as too low.

‘What have you done to Brendan?’ I say. I know I shouldn’t have. It does not do to get overheated. Only amenable patients are candidates for release. Gods must be propitiated or they get sulky, the sky clouds over and the land becomes dark – but then I see him, with his shiny shoes, his perfect hair, his impeccable suit.

‘Why d’you say that, Madeline?’ Lucas says calmly.

‘He cried!’ I say. ‘Brendan
never
cries.’

‘Brendan is a little unstable at the moment due to a modification of his treatment,’ he says. ‘But it’s nothing for you to be concerned about.’

‘Well, I am!’ I say. ‘Whether I should or I shouldn’t be – I am concerned!’

Lucas smiles. ‘And I’m glad to see that, Madeline, it’s a very encouraging sign.’

‘This isn’t about
me
!’ I say.

‘But that’s where you’re wrong, Madeline,’ he says. ‘This
is
about you; this is your session. And I’m afraid I can’t talk about Brendan during it.’

I open my mouth.

‘Like yourself,’ he says, ‘Brendan has been the subject of misguided treatment. I am simply adjusting it.’

I think of many rejoinders, but I do not voice any of them, only sit, feeling very hot, and mutter again: ‘I’ve never seen Brendan like that – and I’ve known him five years.’

‘Okay,’ he says, with a note of finality. ‘I can’t talk about Brendan with you. His case is private, as is yours. Now is there anything else you wanted to ask me before we begin?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘There is something. The programme –
my
programme: I don’t think it’s working.’

‘Oh?’ He raises his eyebrows. I hate it when he pretends to accommodate me, when he personifies patience.

‘I’m not getting stronger, I’m getting weaker. I’m sleeping less, I’m
much
more anxious, I feel sick pretty much constantly and some days the exhaustion makes it almost impossible to get up.’

‘Anything else?’

I stare at him.

‘Now, Madeline,’ he leans backwards and interlaces his fingers. ‘Do you remember I told you when we started that it wouldn’t be easy?’ He holds up his hand. ‘Wait – that you would have to bear with it?’ He pauses, presumably to let his words sink in because as I open my mouth he begins to speak again. ‘Now I’ll ask you a question: do you believe I have your best interests at heart?’

My heart beats strangely and I look away.

‘Don’t you think I’ve seen other patients struggle like you? It’s true you’re finding things difficult, it’s true you’re more anxious, but as far as I’m concerned these are positive signs; they mean you’re progressing. As regards the fatigue, Graded Exercise and CBT are both proven ways to treat it; it can take some people some time before they see any improvement.’

‘But I’m going backwards!’ I say. ‘I’m not even remaining stationary!’

‘You’re progressing, Madeline,’ he says. ‘You’re progressing in leaps and bounds!’

I stare at him.

‘A great many of you are progressing, however it may appear on the surface.’

Is that possible? I let myself consider this a moment.

He rotates in the chair and inhales as if weary.

‘Madeline,’ he says, ‘real healing always makes the situation appear worse for a little while; it’s a well-known concept in the East. Real healing initially appears to be doing the opposite to what you think it should do. It’s the same with memory: the trick to recovering something – anything at all – is to look the other way, to act as if you never lost it. The less you pursue a thing the more likely it is to come to you. It’s like catching a wild animal. At the moment we’re not going to the heart of the matter, we’re concentrating on other ways of facilitating recall. And to that end, for the next few weeks I’d like you to immerse yourself as much as possible in those first months at the farm; I’d like you to bring your journal next time and, before you do, look over it.’

My stomach lurches and I stare at him. All thought of Brendan is momentarily forgotten. How did Lucas know about the journal? Were my possessions
logged
somewhere? But of course they are. In any case, he does know.

‘Will you do that?’

‘Yes,’ I say faintly. What else can I say?

‘By the way, I was quite impressed with the journal,’ he says. ‘I would say that at the farm you underwent a conversion experience; some of the entries are astonishing, epiphanic, extraordinarily intense. Rereading them is your homework this week; I want you to remember what it felt like to be that thirteen-year-old girl – it’s vitally important. All right?’

I say nothing.

‘All right? Madeline?’

‘All right,’ I say. I want to go. I want to curl up, bury myself in darkness. I want to be covered over.

I want to rage, I want to weep, I want to retch. But most of all I want to sleep.

It is a small book bound with string. The spine is split, the cover brown, wound with sellotape that is now flaking and yellow. Inside, stuck or pasted or pressed, there are leaves and flowers, dragonfly wings, sap stains, pollen, holly, dried berries, an empty chrysalis, a buttercup. On one page there is something that looks like blood, on another a brown smudge with green particles beneath the sellotape, which I see on looking closer and reading the entry is mussel soup. I lift the book to my nose but it is as scentless as a bone. There are three photographs: one of a woman in an apple tree wearing a coat that has emulsion paint on it; another of a man holding up sticks of giant rhubarb; another of a girl with her arms around a black-and-white dog. Everywhere there is very small, very crowded writing, an attempt to make the writing illegible to anyone but the author herself.

On four pages there are no words at all. On the first there is a drawn map of the farm; on the second there is a drawing of a mouse; on the third a drawing of a bird. The last page of the four is coloured in black with a biro, so that when the light shines upon it, it is a dull red. The first pages of the journal are taken up with lists. This is the first entry:

This is the journal of my fourteenth year. It hasn’t really begun yet but I already know it will be the best year of my life. My task this year is to find You. The blazing arc of the sky tells me it is possible, the hills say it too, the fields swallowed up in the afternoon sun nod their heads. I step off into the arms of the air …

I turn over the page.

There are days here when the wind comes scudding across the fields and sap runs dark from the silver birches and glistens like snakes and a chord chimes deep in the earth. I think then that Your breath is in the wind and the fields are rooms in Your house and when I sit You have said: ‘Pull up a chair,’ and when I lie in the grass You cover me over. There are days here that feel like years, there are whole afternoons that pass by like dreams, there are hours on end when I can think nothing at all.

You can stack these things up, you can press them together, something will come of it.

‘How much of it did you manage to read?’

‘The opening pages.’

‘You have to read more, all right?’

He is flicking through the journal. The sight of his hands touching it makes me feel nauseous. I turn and look out of the window where I can see the horse-chestnut trees. It is sunny today, for the first time in ages, and Lethem Park has been transformed. It is hard to believe I might be free to walk where I want to soon. This is not an idle dream; he has said I am progressing. He has said the word ‘rehabilitation’ more than once. He has said: ‘distinct possibility’. I have not thought what I would do if I was released, partly for fear of destroying the possibility. I know that for some time I would be in secure accommodation, a sort of halfway house between this world and the next, but after that I don’t know. I have wondered whether I would be well enough to live alone. I believe that my illness would subside dramatically if I was no longer here – Lucas believes it is psychosomatic in any case, and if Lucas and I have unearthed the psychic stuff, then what will there be to stop me functioning as well as any other person?