Birmingham Friends (32 page)

Some things I don’t do

I don’t stand for hours in impenetrable silence. The crust of my silence can still be broken.

I don’t touch myself intimately when other people can see.

I don’t relieve myself in my bed, except during treatment.

When we are outside for our morning shuffle round and round the scabby paths of the airing court, I do not look for leaves, shreds of groundsel, human waste, sycamore seeds to eat, nor do I chew my shoes, the hardest of leather (no laces) which can eventually be devoured after hours of sucking.

But nor do I – their mark of a degree of trustworthiness – get led out to work in the kitchen, garden or laundry.

What I do

When I am allowed near my bed, I find myself standing there for many minutes at a time, not knowing why I am there.

I sit in the dayroom and time must be passing but I can’t tell how long, nor can I solve the problem of how to lift and move an arm or leg even when there are alarms and fights on all sides. I look at the shiny wood of the floor and find patterns.

I can’t sleep at night. I listen to hours of coughing and muttering and Mary’s airborne chatter and women relieving themselves in the privy in the corner. I stretch my eyes open wide to see if there is any hint of light in the sky between the bars of the windows even though there is no reason to hope for tomorrow. I talk to myself as there is no one else. I summon Mozart and Brahms in my head but they refuse to be roused. I call on my Daddy dream.

On first arriving here I am energetic with fright. I charge to the walls and hammer myself against them while high sounds come out of my mouth. ‘Up the stick,’ they say. ‘Side room for her – that’ll teach her.’

I am in a room with thick Rexine walls and a curved floor so my mess slides to the gutters at the edges. I am covered by a hard canvas jacket, my arms strapped round me so that I can only buffet my sides and shoulders and head against the yielding wall until I fall. I find myself in here several times, hardly knowing how I got here. When they come to retrieve me I hear spring-loaded bolts snap back. The first time, they bring nurses from the men’s wing to help. They charge in clumsily together like fat beetles and there are blue sleeves with white chevroned cuffs round me and a stench of male sweat.

‘You could’ve managed this one, surely?’ they bellow. ‘She’s only a little tiddler!’

After several afternoons in there and the stunning doses of peraldehyde, I sit quiet.

Nurse Tucker knows why I’m here. I haven’t told her, but she knows.

*   *   *

‘Darling, whatever’s the matter?’

Douglas followed me, hovering anxiously at the bathroom door as I rushed from our bedroom, still holding the empty cup from my morning tea.

‘Are you ill?’ He stood at a loss, toes on the edge of the lino in his pale blue pyjamas, as I retched. The tea had brought on instant rebellion from my stomach. I felt better immediately and drank a glass of water, doing fast calculations in my head once more to make sure. I’d missed my last period, I must have conceived during the first half of August, which made me about five weeks pregnant now.

‘D’you think you’ve caught a chill?’ Douglas asked, still standing back from me as if I might explode. He rubbed his hand through his unbrushed hair. ‘What? What’re you laughing at?’

I felt a strong sense of relief. Something I could do for him, and do right. I went and put my arms round him. ‘Definitely not a chill,’ I said happily, looking up into his perturbed face. ‘Darling – we’re going to have a baby.’

‘A what?’ He was so flabbergasted that I laughed even more.

‘You do know the facts of life don’t you? This has happened the past couple of mornings except you didn’t notice. And my period’s very late.’

A flush spread across Douglas’s face, and I watched his expression break into a bashful kind of wonder. I realized he had scarcely thought himself capable of producing a child.

‘Oh, my love.’ He sounded awed. His scarred cheek twitched slightly as it did when he felt strong emotion. He held me close. Then he turned brisk, deciding to take charge. ‘We must take very, very good care of you. You must give up your job straight away, of course.’

‘Nonsense.’ I went to the basin and splashed water over my face. ‘I’ve got heaps to do and I can’t just give it up now. Exercise in pregnancy is supposed to be good for you. Don’t fuss, Douglas.’

But he did fuss. Fuss would be a gentle word for it. That Sunday I was due to visit Olivia. The hospital had agreed to me visiting on my own, and I was anxious to go as often as possible without Elizabeth. We were settling into a pattern of seeing her once a fortnight, on alternate weeks. Elizabeth was occasionally accompanied by Alec. Douglas already resented this. Now it became a symbol, an issue on which to focus his lack of trust and his need to control me in order to feel safe.

‘You’re not to go,’ he ordered on the Saturday afternoon. I was sitting with my feet up looking through a box of books. I realized, as I looked at the old, forgotten titles, that Angus had given me several of them.

‘Douglas,’ I said quietly. ‘Please don’t start giving me orders. I’m going to Arden tomorrow. I’m sorry it means not being with you all day, but you did say you had work to do, and I simply have to go.’

‘But you need to rest, not keep gallivanting about all over the place. Don’t you care about our child?’

‘Oh don’t be so ridiculous,’ I flared at him. I was really needled by him lecturing me on a subject about which I knew far more than he did. ‘I’ve been out shopping all morning carrying heavy baskets of food for your dinner, which is far more exhausting than sitting on a train to Leamington. But it doesn’t even cross your mind to stop me doing that, does it?’ I stood up, still holding one of the books, intending to leave the room, but Douglas seized my arm, gripping me tightly.

‘Don’t raise your voice at me,’ he said in an aggressive voice. ‘I’ve provided you with a child. What more do you want?’

I looked up at him coldly. ‘Let go of me.’

Douglas loosed my arm and I stood before him, turning the book over in my hands. The soft, leather cover of Angus’s gift to me made me feel choked with bitterness. What did I want? To be with someone who I didn’t have to tread round so carefully, who didn’t want to keep me in a box with a few holes punched in the lid. Someone who could love me properly and let me be.

‘I’ll tell you what I don’t want,’ I said, keeping my voice low. I was always conscious of my mother overhearing if she was in. ‘I don’t want to be treated like a Victorian wife, nor like a member of the regiment. If you want me to respect you then you’re going to have to stop being so mistrustful and childish about it. I’m not your mother, so there’s no need to behave like your father. I’m going to visit Olivia tomorrow. If you’re not happy about that, then I’m sorry, but she’s my friend and she needs me.’

Douglas’s face had gone tight with fury. ‘Everybody needs you, don’t they?’ he sneered. ‘You’ll run round after anyone except me.’

He slammed out of the room. Feeling immediately sorry, I ran down after him to the front door, but he was already off down the street, lighting a cigarette. I saw him bend his pale head to the lighted match, watched his painful gait, his jerking angry manner, and thought how much he felt like a stranger to me.

In the railway station, among the unpredictable, jolting movements of the crowds, I felt already that I wanted to protect my unborn child. To warn off anyone who moved too quickly or advanced too close, shielding my stomach fiercely with one hand. It was a feeling I knew Lisa would understand and I longed suddenly to tell her about the baby.

On the journey, rattling through the freshly ploughed Warwickshire fields, I sat sucking peppermints, wondering in what state I should find Olivia. I had observed no change in her during the summer. She remained withdrawn, frozen, and I seldom got her to speak about anything other than the immediate facts of her state or occasionally an event on the ward. I realized suddenly that Olivia and I had never discussed having children or how we might feel about them, and thinking back on that, it seemed a strange lack. I wondered what sort of parents Douglas and I would make. Surely he would see this child as a sign of my commitment to him, make him more able to trust? But I was already beginning to see how quickly communication could break down between us. I had to admit to myself that I was becoming miserable in my marriage.

Olivia was brought in to see me not by the bacon-cheeked nurse this time, but a younger, less buxom woman with a gentle air and a very straight brown fringe between her eyes and her starched white cap. She seemed apologetic and didn’t impose a time limit on us, sitting herself quietly by the door as if trying to pretend she wasn’t there.

There was something different about Olivia, a slowness, as if to move at all was unbearable for her. Most striking of all was the fact that her hair was now short, lopped in a rough pageboy level with her earlobes.

I loathed asking her how she was. It seemed such an obviously foolish question, almost an insult. Instead I said, ‘I like your hair.’ In fact, had it been more expertly cut and more often washed, it would have suited her delicate features very well. ‘Did you ask them to do it?’

She lifted one hand slowly to the back of her head and stroked her hair vaguely, as if wondering what I meant, and then shook her head. I looked round the room, already feeling desperate for something to say. I had a familiar feeling of wanting to shake her, to force her to talk to me but we had been so long out of the habit of talking, even if she were capable of it now.

‘Was there a show or something on yesterday evening?’ I asked eventually.

Her eyes rolled up towards the ceiling, before she looked dully down at the floor again, frowning. ‘I can’t remember.’

I was frightened at the way she spoke. I had tried to hold on to her, believing she would somehow revert to the person she was supposed to be. That with rest and encouragement she would surface again, break through this blankness which was all she seemed able to present to us now. But she was becoming unrecognizable as the person I had known before. I didn’t know what to believe about her any more. I began to wonder whether she was really losing her mind, and whether she was, after all, in the right place.

We sat in silence for a moment. Feeling nauseous, I fished a peppermint out of my bag and offered Livy one. She refused the sweet, but suddenly grabbed my wrist, gripping me tightly. Moving closer to her, I smelled a stale, sweaty odour coming from her. Her eyes were stretched wide, terrified.

‘You’ve got to help me.’ She spoke in an urgent whisper. ‘They’re doing things to my head. They took me to a room downstairs and put pads on me, here – ’ She let go of me then and pressed her fingers to her temples. ‘And electricity went through my head. It hurt worse than anything I’ve ever known and I couldn’t control my body. They held me down . . .’ She started to cry, not sobbing, but making high, mewling noises. ‘They’re going to do it again. They said every day. I can’t – I can’t – they’ll kill me.’ She was panting now, seeming beyond tears. ‘They can do anything they want.’

I had heard of the new treatment, though never seen it. Electroconvulsive Therapy. The textbook definition: an attempt to stimulate the brain by passing an electric current through it.

‘Daddy must have told them to do it.’ She seized my arm again as if she thought I wasn’t hearing her, or that I might get up and run away. I held her hands, despair sinking deep into me. What could I do when she was in this state? There was silence.

Then Olivia whispered, ‘They’re going to kill me. I shall never come out of here.’

‘I don’t understand.’ I took her other arm with my free hand, so that we sat locked together. I wanted to keep her from moving about and attracting the nurse’s attention. ‘Livy, my dearest, dearest friend.’ Tears ran down my face. ‘Just hang on, please – please, darling. It won’t be much longer now . . .’

For a few seconds she sat motionless, her cheeks very white. Her eyes moved across my face, as if searching me for solidity. But her gaze was so strange.

The nurse walked across to us with apparent reluctance. She spoke calmly, with sympathy. ‘I’d better take her back.’

Olivia sagged, exhausted. I wanted to make promises to her, but could think of none I could offer honestly. Instead I kissed her as she stood passively in my arms.

As she left me, I said, ‘I’ll do something Livy . . .’ She didn’t look back as she was led away.

Outside I took deep breaths of the cooling air, leaning against the wall trying to control my rising nausea. I failed, and vomited wretchedly into a tangle of shrubbery at one end of the building.

I knew Douglas would be timing my journey back from Arden that day and, in spite of himself, adding each moment of what he considered my lateness to his catalogue of my wrongs. But I felt defiantly that his needs in this case were less important. I had to talk to someone. I also needed one of Lisa’s cups of sweet tea. I got off the bus early and walked through to Stanley Street.

The light was going and in the narrow entry it seemed darker. I found the court unusually quiet. The children must have been inside eating. I could hear the sound of a wireless through an open window and cutlery clattering and voices.

‘Surprise surprise,’ Lisa said, opening the door to me. She was more relaxed now Don was home. She turned to him. ‘Look who’s come to pay us a call.’

Don nodded at me as I peeled my coat off, raising his round, freckled face for a second from the job he was absorbed in at the table. He was dismantling the clock which had long sat silently on the mantelshelf. He was a quiet man with an easy manner and I never felt awkward in his presence.

‘We’ve just finished tea,’ Lisa said. She was in her apron still and the old slippers which by a miracle were still surviving. ‘Here – ’ she pulled a chair out from the table, ‘sit yourself down.’ She chased the boys outside but allowed Daisy to stay. I gave her a peppermint. ‘You look terrible,’ Lisa remarked, pouring tea.