Muriel muttered. She glared at the nurse.
‘Six thirty you get up,’ the nurse said. ‘Not four. We’ve got to get ourself into a routine.’ She watched Muriel wiping her hand down her nightdress. Obsessive-compulsive behaviour, she said to herself. Tics.
In the country the medical care was under the supervision of Dr Battachariya, a plump smiling little man; fat eyes, like disappointed raisins, were studded into his golden face. She screamed when he tried to examine her.
‘You have had a baby, Muriel?’ he said shrewdly. A rude, unmannerly man, prying about like that with his plastic gloves. ‘When was that?’
She mumbled something.
‘Where is the little blighter?’
‘With my mother,’ she said.
The first week passed. Now who was mad? Who was bad? Who was stupid?
If they had been florid, talkative and lively with delusion, the long years of Largactil and dormitory wards had made them vacant and passive. If they had been blundering, inadequate and lost, the passage of time had taught them cunning, the thousand expedients of institutional life. A breezy humorous disregard was their attitude to the doctors; the doctors sat with downcast eyes, their voices droning, their thought processes slowed.
Day room. People sit about on vinyl-covered armchairs. None of the furniture here has any resemblance to the furniture used outside. They are not things that people would have in their houses. Jaws move, champing on nothing. Cigarette smoke curls up. My mother died … I had this accident … I worried all night because I hadn’t done my homework … I should never have got married. Hum, hum, hum. Questions are meaningless when you can’t sit still in your chair. They are like bluebottles buzzing round your head: hum, hum, hum. I had no idea there was such filth in the world … At this point there was no food left in the house … I knew he had got a knife … I knew that if I allowed myself to go to sleep I should die during the night. Each night in the six o’clock news there is a special message for me. People stare at me whenever I set foot in the street. Someone had broken my glasses/started a fire/informed on me, hum, hum, hum. Marilyn Monroe stole my giro. I went to the café till my money ran out.
Can you name ten cities? Can you tell me the name of the Prime Minister? Manic motion, impelled to tread, tread, tread along the corridors, hands flying about face and ears.
You must have some feelings about yourself? Stare. A slow shake of the head. Shoulders held rigid, gaze rigid, face and hair grey. A certain rigidity of posture, says the doctor. Seemingly negativistic. How long is it since we first saw you now? No reply.
An affective problem … semi-aggressive … schizophrenic excitement … marked thought disorder. What about a little injection? You aren’t afraid of a little injection, are you?
These were Muriel’s best friends: Sholto, and Emmanuel Crisp. There were a few hangers-on; Philip and Effie. At first she had been a lost soul, wandering around the day room washing her big red hands together. She had missed her mother, in strange ways; Evelyn with her chattering and her nagging and her little ruses to defeat persecutors and spies. It was a fair bet that Evelyn had taught her a thing or two, and unless in fact she were missing her it was impossible to account for the hollow feeling that she carried around inside. At the same time, she was growing a little garden of resentment and speculation, watering her weeds in the small hours when she lay staring into the darkness, wide-eyed despite her sleeping pill. The Welfare did things for people, she now learned, got them money so that they could live on the outside, got them gas fires and shoes. They had never got anything for her. Even when Evelyn let them in, she wheedled around them and said that everything possible was being done. Pretending to be sane was a great strain on Evelyn, and this strain was the origin of many of the stand-up fights they had after the Welfare had gone. Sometimes she said to herself, Mother should be here, not me, left in this homely home-from-home to pursue a career as a lunatic. She was told that in pursuance of the truth about her mother’s life they had sliced open her body, peered into it and pulled out her insides. She thought back on the process with satisfaction.
Now that she knew more about other people and their way of life, she often wondered if her crimes entitled her to some sort of record. She could read properly now; there was a book, in great request among her friends, which had records of everything under the sun, and most of these activities – county cricket, nonstop dancing – seemed less interesting than her own. Ought she to put pen to paper about it?
Sholto advised caution. Was the baby found? he asked. No; or she would be in a prison. Still in the canal then; sunk into the soft mud at the bottom, strangled by green weeds, trapped under the rusting wrecks of bedsprings and fridges. He offered to consult Emmanuel Crisp, who with his church connections was an expert on all matters charnel.
Emmanuel thought. A peat bog will preserve anything, he said. That is not in question. Mud; soft mud, still water. And, a canal: acid in the water, surely. There’s not much to infant bones – ‘but what you have there, Muriel, is perhaps a skeleton.’
Sholto asked more questions. Was she blamed for her Mother’s demise? No. Foul play was not suspected, Crisp put in. Could she handle the scepticism her claims would provoke? They were pernickety, the publishers of this record book, they did not entertain idle claims, they might want her to repeat her feat under test conditions. You can get another child, said Sholto, winking lewdly so that she would grasp his meaning, but you cannot get another mother. Keep it to yourself, he advised. The fact is, Muriel, that you can’t prove a thing.
‘I could, though,’ she said. ‘If I found the bones.’
Crisp was a tall man, pallid and spare. He had a precisian’s lip, a cold eye; his hair was coiled about his dome like a woolly snake. Wherever did he get his wing collars, Sholto asked him.
‘Charity,’ said Crisp briskly.
‘Myself I have fits,’ Sholto explained. ‘Crisp’s life has been different. He was the verger once at St Peter’s.’
Crisp cleared his throat. ‘I left undone those things that ought to be done.’
‘What things?’
‘My flies. Later, a gas tap.’
‘He is one of those people who do not know what came over them,’ Sholto said. ‘He lived to tell the tale, though he leaves me to tell it. They put it in the Reporter: SEX BEAST VERGER: VICAR SPEAKS.’
‘Have you ever heard of entrapment?’ Emmanuel Crisp asked. ‘It was what they call an agent provocateur. She said she was from the Women’s Institute. She wanted to go into the choir stalls, and see the organ.’
‘You know you took her wrong,’ Sholto said doggedly. ‘You did it on purpose.’
‘She touched my sleeve.’ He shuddered. ‘I often pray for her.’
‘The vicar never spoke up for him. He’s left now.’
‘He’s dead,’ Crisp said. ‘Or ought to be.’
As a group, they got together in the day room. It was a new idea, to mix the boys and girls together. Autumn had come; but next year, Effie said, they would meet out of doors where there was more privacy. God willing, Philip added piously. Emmanuel led them in a verse or two of ‘The Church’s One Foundation’; then they broke up for tea.
After this came a period of considerable longueurs.
