question,’ Gus said, punching my upper arm in a gesture which I discovered was as much part of him as the disgusting little cheroots, ‘the question is not how to cure or be cured but how to live.’
It was a comment which dropped like a diamond into the well of my being where its simple brilliance never ceased to sparkle for me. The people we were treating were not so much looking for a remedy for anxiety or depression, they were looking for a reason to be alive. For the most part, the human race takes for granted that life if not a blessing is at least desirable enough to cling to. But for those for whom the business of being alive is a much more vexed question, the illness is the question, or, to put it another way, the illness is how the question may be posed.
For these hesitant souls it is life and not death that holds the terrors and if I recognised the feeling it was because I shared it. But it took Gus Galen to put it into words for me.
‘See there,’ he said, stabbing with a burly finger in the direction of the old church, as if he were about to accuse it of some serious misdemeanour, ‘that’s what places like that should be for. To help us live. There’s no cure for being alive…’
‘There’s no cure for being alive,’ I suggested into the autumnal silence to Elizabeth Cruikshank.
‘There is.’
The ginger tomcat, against which I waged war, as it used the garden as a latrine and attacked the garden birds I liked to feed, was balancing nonchalantly on the fence outside. I waited a little longer. I wanted her to say it.
‘There’s death.’
She seemed a lot further from me across the three feet or so of space between us in the room than the cat outside.
‘So you were attempting that cure? Rather a drastic one.’ I allowed the smallest trace of irony into my tone.
Again she shrugged, looking not at me but out at the rain which had begun to drizzle down on the elderly tree.
‘Not to me.’
‘Not unwelcome, maybe, but drastic nonetheless.’
Something about her made me feel that the distinction might be one she would understand, but it produced nothing. I tried a different tack. ‘I gather you’ve decided not to take any further medication while you’re with us.’
‘I prefer not.’
‘I see. Any reason? I should say I shan’t force anything on you but drugs can sometimes help.’ It was in my mind that it was drugs which had failed to help her leave life, so I could appreciate her antipathy to having them help her endure it.
‘I’d rather not.’
‘Fair enough,’ I said, deliberately brisk. ‘Let’s see how you go.’
I waited again in case she came out with anything more and the silence thickened, hovered for a moment, as if she might relegate it a second time, hung in the air between us and then attenuated and passed over. I felt there was no more to come from her but I made an appointment to see her the following day.
The principal part of the hospital was located in a modern building across the garden from the old house where I had my room. I was about to make my way over there when I heard the unmistakable voice of Lennie, our office cleaner.
Lennie was a recovered schizophrenic. I say ‘recovered’ but more accurately I should say managed. He had stayed on after being brought in for the umpteenth time from under the pier, where he hung out, madder than the vexed sea and covered with sand and pee and some or other form of the more diabolical kind of alcoholic spirit he consumed, and talking wildly to the more other-worldly ‘spirits’ who, on such occasions, invited him to demonstrate his faith in them by committing his body to the deep. I was the duty consultant that night and, I don’t know why, he took to me and I persuaded him that a regular Modecate injection might prove a sensible precaution against the spirits’ more disruptive injunctions.
Lennie took to dropping by my room, where, if I were free, he would stand and smile and I would smile back. As Gus Galen will tell you, there are important conversations which have nothing to do with speech. One day, he pointed at the window which looked out on to the quince, then transfigured by pale pink flowers, and said, ‘You see the blossom better, doc, if I was to wash the window.’ We had problems at the time getting cleaners and, with one of those brain waves which occasionally I act upon, I decided to make an advantage out of the fact that Lennie seemed to want to be useful. The inspiration paid off: Lennie took the job and was by now our longest-standing, and easily most efficient, cleaner, which arrangement allowed me to ensure that he kept up with his Modecate injections. In turn, he cleaned my office as painstakingly as if it were an emperor’s palace.
He was a bulky man, never to be seen without a yellow woolly bobble hat, which sat, jammed on his black head, atop his six-feet-plus frame, like a baby’s bonnet. He had become a popular figure around the hospital: his disposition was as benign as a baby’s and he had only one enemy, Dr Mackie, who was my enemy too.
Mackie disapproved of the informality of my association with Lennie and disliked the way I worked in general with my patients. And Lennie, as is the way with many psychotics, without any tangible information to go on, had picked this up. It was ironic, because it was drugs, more than words, or kindness, which had helped him in the end.
But now I heard Lennie’s usually deep voice risen to a squeaky pitch and hurried down the corridor to find him upbraiding Mackie who was standing in the hallway looking down at his feet.
‘You dumb fucker,’ Lennie was saying. ‘That’s my clean floor you’ve trod your fuckin’ feet over! Get your fuckin’ act together, man!’
From Mackie’s reddening face I could tell he was about to round on Lennie whose arm I now grasped, sternly saying, ‘Stow it, Lennie. Dr Mackie didn’t mean to muddy your floor. Apologise to him, please.’
I don’t know why this public schoolboy style of address came to me when dealing with Lennie, but he responded to it. He quietened down, muttered a sullen ‘Sorry, doc’, and resumed his manic mopping of the hall floor.
I walked through the grounds to the main building conversing politely, and pointlessly, with a flustered Mackie. I knew he wouldn’t easily forgive my witnessing his humiliation at the hands of my protégé.
Luckily, we met Maguire at the entrance so I had an excuse to get away.
‘Good,’ I said, ‘I wanted to catch you. Mrs Cruikshank. How d’you find her?’
‘Always the same. Quiet as a mouse. No bother.’
‘Do you like her?’
‘What’s to like? Haven’t seen enough of her yet.’
‘Well, keep me posted,’ I said. ‘You know how I rate the Maguire nose. And by the way, we can stop trying to push medication on her. She’s safe enough under your beady eye, no need to force things.’
I had to go cautiously, especially with a suicide case, though in those days we had more leeway. God knows how the poor bastards who work in the NHS cope now. But my sixth sense suggested that, her effort to escape from some intolerable anguish having failed her, my patient was less likely to try that solution a second time.
