When I opened the cubicle door I saw there were great sweeps of foam where I’d brushed. Powder was everywhere. My rubber gloves felt claggy.
I wanted to leave it all behind there and then, but merely poking my head out into the corridor brought back the shrunkenness of the fallen world, and the wretched taste in my mouth. I’d seen too much; it had to be expunged. There was nothing for it but to mop the walls properly this time; to squeeze out in the bucket all that revelation.
In a while, though, more stable and beginning to relax, I recalled the whole ulterior purpose of today’s entry into the toilets: the Bleach! That was no problem. My canisters tipped up conveniently over the well of the moon and stars. How simply the stuff gurgled down as if to give my whole vision a longed-for chemical white-out.
Now I could legitimately make my way over there. Standing by the last bowl, I cast an idle eye over the legend on the yellow plastic container I held in my hand:
NOT TO BE USED IN CONJUNCTION WITH OTHER LAVATORY CLEANERS
I mustn’t share it with Seco? A joke? And then the mocking air went green and clutched at my eyes with caustic fingers. I gasped – the worst thing I could have done, because it made me gasp again. Instead of getting out I found myself coughing stupidly at the mirrors over the wash-basins, trying, as I gazed at my reflection, to make sense of the greenness and painfulness of things, and the seemingly relentless malice of the day.
Seco appeared at the door.
‘Eh, Jacob! Saphir says …’ He sniffed, choked, coughed, shouted, and yanked me from the faint green cloud. ‘Santa Siberia! What! You do a Devil’s fart?’
We coughed and retched our way out – out along the corridor by the dining-room, through the foyer I’d mopped that morning, through the double glass doors and right into the rose garden, where he fell to roaring hysterics. And while I comforted my eyes and jerked up a bit more corroded spittle from my insides, he pirouetted among the rose-bushes. Thus among their gaudy blooms, he shed his urbanity and shrieked with laughter. The sun flashed on his sharp Roman teeth.
‘For God’s sake stop laughing and get me a drink, you bastard!’
‘OK OK. I get for you. You lie on the grass. What the hell you doing in there?’ And he coughed and giggled all over again. I stretched myself on the corner of the dry lawn. ‘Eh? What was it?’
‘What’s so damn funny? I could have been killed in there.’
Seco’s eyes narrowed and his grin froze. ‘I save you, mate. You got no gratitude with you bloody toilets. I’m Secondo. I’m second son – Lucky. Lucky for you, eh?’
‘Yes. Sony. Thanks very much. Now for Christ’s sake get me a drink. Please.’
‘That’s better. Otherwise I take you back to you damn toilets and I kill you.’
While he went off to the scullery I lay back. The sun worried the prickly-watery feeling in my eyes. My chest hurt from the gas, my stomach from the retching. I shifted a bit to my side and gazed over the mass of the asylum. Against the tough heatwave-blue stood the observation tower – what else could it be, that great fat Italianate finger, widening at the top to accommodate a windowed look-out under its pinnacles? The whole thing was a celebration of imprisonment, in two colours of brick topped with its gilt pyramid of a roof. It watched over the colony of suffering as if with a magnificent eye; or perhaps was a mere deserted symbol. Either way the effect was that we all policed ourselves, uncertain whether God was really watching from above.
A thought struck me as Seco was returning with the drink.
‘Christ, Seco. Supposing some of the kids have gone in. They’ll damage themselves, poor little sods. And I’ll get the sack. Were the windows open?’ In a mixture of altruism and self-interest I leapt up, swallowed the water and dashed back into the block. A speechless boy was on the point of entering the toilets.
‘No, no, no, no, no! You go to toilet – you die!’ said Seco, slitting his own throat with his forefinger and pointing to the door to emphasise the danger. A look of terror came over the boy’s face as he turned to flee in tears.
I pushed open the door. Thanks to the open window which had allowed me to be so mysteriously oppressed by the lorry, all was well, beyond a faint bleachy smell. A teenager with a palsy was struggling to coordinate himself at the urinal.
The Tower of Bedlam
Holding the yellow canister – my passport – against my grey overalls, I stood windily at a high spot. The hazy blue of the clear half of the sky was air-brushed on to space behind the stucco of the gallery frames: no glass in these slot-thin outer arches. I’d finished the climb and was standing facing a pointed door. It was the entrance to the Art Workshop.
A surprising location: to my amazement I’d been led to the very top of the tower at which I’d stared as I lay painfully on the grass beside the children’s block, waiting for my glass of water. The ascent had started by means of a grand staircase, intended mainly for show, clinging to the inside of the tower’s walls. This had quickly given way to a series of wooden flights which led up from stage to stage. I’d waited for Polly to catch up with me at each one, but had been too impatient to enjoy the vistas over the woodlands of Surrey. There was a layer, as it were, of industrial machinery, and what looked like storage tanks for the oil-fired heating system. Finally, punctuated by a few mysterious doors, there came a spiral in which one lost track of number before emerging high up at the open gallery. In this institution the entitlement to Art Therapy, if Polly’s geography was correct, was clearly dependent more on physical fitness than on psychiatric need.
‘There! In there!’ said Polly, recovering her puff and opening the door. She pointed through the arch at what could almost be described as a bower. I peered in, past the faded timetable of classes pinned to the oak. Who would have thought that this exalted place with its lightflood of ivory and its breezy hangings of unswept gossamer would be the place? I might have wandered about fruitlessly in the shrieking maze of corridors had it not been for Polly, whom I’d met in the dining-hall; as I had on my first day in the job, swimming towards me with her outstretched arms and big wet kisses, full of the Lord’s innocence, sighing into my ear: ‘You’re my only ‘eart, darlin’. My best ‘eart.’ Kiss. Squeeze. ‘Ooh you’re my ‘eart, sweet’eart. Look at you!’ Hug. Kiss. Bristle scratch. ‘One true love (deep breath, long aspiration) hhheart.’
Polly, in her maroon slippers, with her three gypsy teeth and black beard – I didn’t know the clinical name for her condition, no more worldly-wise than a toddler – was one of the ugliest and most spiritually open beings I’d ever met. She rejoiced my heart. And she’d taken me conspiratorially to this eyrie where they ‘do pain’in’. Only she wasn’t allowed to paint. “Cos I carn pain’ nothin!’ she happily stated of the foul prohibition. ‘Nothin. Aint no use me pain’in. Cos I cam pain’ nothin. Ar, you’re my true love ‘eart, aint you, darlin. Cam pain’ nothin, me. But you. Ar, you’re my …’ Kiss. ‘Pain’ me a pitcher, darlin.’
I stood in the arch with a certain apprehension. What was I doing after all? Why was I intrigued by the mention of a woman and her images – to the extent that I should have tangled with chlorine and then made this bizarre climb? I suspected a dissociation; had I run up here in an urge physically to separate myself from an accumulation of pain? Did I expect her to inform me; to ease
