Poppy Shakespeare (2 page)
Authors: Clare Allan
4. How Brian the Butcher was late for his break and how he broke us the news about Pollyanna
Everyone talks like it started with Poppy, but really it started before she arrived. The first thing was Manic Pollyanna and
this is what happened.
We was all sat in the common room one morning completely like usual, when Sue glanced up at the clock with no hands and noticed
how Brian was late. 'He's late for his break,' she said. 'I wonder what's happened.' So we all had a look and seen it was
true: Brian the Butcher was nearly three minutes late.
Well just as we's sat there puzzling and wondering what could of happened, there's this huge crashing boom as Brian bursts
in, sending the swing-doors flying either side, hurries across without checking the carpet and sits in his chair bolt upright
with his hands in his lap.
'Is everything alright?' said Middle-Class Michael. And Brian he give this quick look round and he rubbed his hands on his
trousers. Behind him the double swing-doors still flapping, open and shut like the gills of a fish.'Pollyanna's been discharged,'
he said.
No one said nothing. No one moved even, just froze how we was, with our fags halfway to our mouths.
'She's
what?'
said Astrid, had to be Astrid. Then everyone jumped in. And we asked Brian that many questions he panicked and sat there just
shooking his head, and saying, 'Very much so.'
So after that Rosetta took charge 'cause Rosetta and Pollyanna was like best friends. And Brian he taken a few deep breaths
and rubbed his hands on his trousers. And his hands made a sound like sandpaper scratching and bits of skin floated down to
the carpet like sawdust. Then he told us how he'd seen Pollyanna when he come out the toilets for his break, and he never
even known it was
her,
he said, on account of she looked so different, and he said she weren't manic no more, not at all. 'In fact, quite the reverse,'
he said. And she looked all kind of deflated, he said, like someone had let half the air out. Then he said what she'd told
him about being discharged, and we got him to tell it us three times over on account of we couldn't believe it. But the fourth
time we asked he said he had to get going, 'cause his break was up and he needed to wash his hands.
Well there weren't a dribbler amongst us could make no sense of it.
Rosetta just sat there shooking her head, staring across at the empty brown vinyl with the foam poking up through the holes
in the seat and the red letter 'P' wrote in marker pen on the back. 'Just can't believe it,' she kept on saying.'She wasn't
normal last night, Lord knows! She was high as the sky last night,' she said. 'How's she turned normal all of a sudden . .
. Must be the counselling,' she said, 'and the medication.' Must be that. Must be the Lord done a miracle! Let's hope he'll
be helping the rest of us soon . . .
'Just can't believe it,' she kept on saying. Her fag-burnt fingers played with the bracelet she got off Pollyanna for her
fiftieth birthday, with a gold-link necklace and a pair of studs, all out of Littlewoods, two pound a week for the next five
hundred years.
'They're no fools, those doctors,' Rosetta said. 'You got to admit they know their business.'
'Well I'm glad someone thinks so,' said Sue the Sticks, formerly known as Slasher Sue before she give up self-harming. 'Ain't
that right, Vern. I'm glad someone thinks so.'
'Just like that!' Rosetta said. 'They'll be curing us all and shipping us out.'
'Speak for yourself.' said Astrid Arsewipe, taken the hump like usual.
Weren't every dribbler was so convinced the doctors knew their business, but the more Rosetta kept saying they did, the more
the doubts crawled in. And the flops as well, you could see in their faces, even the ones what was so drugged up they looked
like they been whizzed in a blender and poured back into their bodies; you seen their eyebrows twist into frowns as one by
one they realised what had happened.
'You'd think they'd be happy about it,' said Astrid. 'This is what they've been waiting for: us lot to get discharged so they
can move down!'
'Nah,' said Zubin. 'They're shitting theirselves.'
'They look quite
excited,'
said Middle-Class Michael.
'Shitting theirselves,' said Zubin, again. 'If there's one thing flops can't stand,' he said, 'even worse than nothing not
changing, it's anything changing at all.
'Just take a look at him,' he said, and he jerked his head to the corner beside him and everyone turned to look, but all you
could see was the plant in the corner, a 'weeping fig', which I known 'cause it said so, still got the label tied round its
trunk like a tag on the toe of a corpse. Then we spotted him. Second-Floor Paolo; he'd curled hisself up like a wintering
hedgehog under the scaly dead branches, half of him covered in crispy brown leaves and his dark hair stood up in spikes.
'Who's that?' said Dawn.
'Him?' I said 'Second-Floor Paolo. They'll be moving him down 'cause of Pollyanna.'
'Oh!' she said. She thought for a bit. 'Who's Pollyanna?'she said.
It weren't Dawn's fault she couldn't remember, they'd give her too much ECT. It was years before, on the wards, they done it.
They got her all wired up on the bed, and all of these students stood around, who was s'posed to be learning how to do it
- loads of them, I mean, all squashed round - and this one he leant on the thing by mistake, and they hadn't set the dial
or nothing, so Dawn she got this massive electric shock. It was so fucking massive it blown every fuse in the Abaddon, and
all the lights gone out and all the tellies gone off, and all the flops started rioting and hurling their slippers. And it
blown all the memory out of Dawn's brain as well.
But every cloud got a silver lining, 'cause Dawn was brilliant at making tables. The Dorothy Fish got this wood workshop.
No one gone in there except for Dawn but Dawn gone in there pretty much all the time. She made that many tables you couldn't
give them away but she never got bored 'cause she couldn't remember she'd ever made one before. We'd all took about six hundred
home each. Every flat on the Darkwoods was full of them and the drop-in was so packed you couldn't get in through the door.
And we still had about a thousand left over for the common room.
'Who's Pollyanna?' she said again. She always picked me on account I was patient.
'She's gone,' I said. 'Don't worry about it.'
'Who's gone?' she said.
'Pollyanna!' I said.
'Who's Pollyanna?' she said.
Then Rosetta stood up and everyone gone silent. Rosetta got skin like deep-polished wood. The light from the windows shone
off of her face as she stood there besides me, hands spotted black with fag burns. 'I'll go and ask Tony what happened,' she
said. 'I'll ask him how come she got cured so sudden.' She glanced along the line of dribblers, Verna and Middle-Class Michael
and Astrid, picking their letters and paring their nails and scratching their arse respective. I never even thought - it was
that automatic -just leant down and tightened the lace on my Nikes, and Rosetta she passed right over my head and straight
on to Elliot, two seats down, who dived underneath his chair.
6. How Middle-Class Michael done my fucking head in
Lunch at the Abaddon was always fatty lamb, 'cept for Fridays, you got flabby fish instead. Sometimes the lamb was curried,
and sometimes it come in chops, and either way you ate it with a plastic knife and fork what melted into the curry sauce leaving
trails like a couple of slugs. Canteen Coral ladled out the dinner plate by plate. She never looked up on account of she couldn't
stand dribblers, and when it's got to you she gone, 'Peas or carrots,' like with no question mark on the end, and if you said
'Both' she gone, 'Peas
or
carrots,' like you was totally stupid. That was Canteen Coral.
The flops lined up first 'cause they got fed at quarter to twelve in the morning and by quarter to ten there was always like
six of them, shuffling side to side in their slippers and sucking their fingers in front of the bolted doors. By eleven o'clock
the queue gone over the landing and round to the lifts, where nurses herded them down like cows in batches of eight from the
wards. The flops already sat in the common room eyed each other to see who was going to move first, then suddenly they'd all
charge forward, all at once and all together, all of them forward and into the queue what grumbled and shuffled and grumbled
some more as it stretched to fit them in.
Canteen Coral opened the doors at quarter to twelve and not one second before. Sometimes they started to hammer on the glass
but Canteen Coral never heard nothing, just sat on her stool by the fire escape, smoking her Superkings, resting her back
and thinking about how in Abaddon Tower weren't nobody who'd suffered as bad as what she had. One time the van broke down
with the food but Canteen Coral never explained or nothing, just sat on her tight arse smoking her fags, and outside the flops,
who know the time like cows know it's time for milking, they got a bit restless and started to twitch, and then they begun
to stamp their slippers, then suddenly there's tables flying and panic alarms going crazy, and Curry Bob, he butts the door
and cracks the glass with his head, and the nurses grab him as everyone cheers, and then the police rush in and everything's
batons and helmets and shields till they've got them all rounded up in a pen, then in come the crash team in rubber gloves
and give them all jabs up the arse. And all the time it's kicking off there's Canteen Coral, sat on her stool and smoking
her fag and flicking her ash out the door of the fire escape.
We never seen sight nor sound of a flop three days after that, just lain on their beds from A to Z like slaughtered carcasses.
Curry Bob needed that many stitches, his head looked like one of them patchwork blankets everyone knits a square of, and Fat
Cath got trampled and sprained her wrist, and Gunga Din broke three ribs, he said, and one nearly punctured his lung, he said;
doctors never seen nothing so close in their lives, and even in textbooks, he said they said. He was full of it, Gunga Din.
Us day dribblers ate at twelve-fifteen. As the last of the flops gone shuffling through we followed on behind. And sometimes
we give them a bit of a shove, on account of twelve-thirty the hatch come down and Canteen Coral stopped serving. And even
in the middle, if she'd give you your lamb but not done your peas and potato, the hatch come down and what you got was all
what you was getting.
Dinner time come and Rosetta still weren't back. The rest of us, we all lined up. Astrid and Tina and Brian the Butcher, and
Middle-Class Michael who only ate peas, then me and then Wesley, give Big Nose Jase two fags for his morning meds. And Middle-Class
Michael kept going on about this fucking petition, and I ain't saying it was a
bad
idea, not as such, but he just gone
on.
And everyone he'd send it to and everyone who'd sign it and so on, and on and on and on and on and the queue shuffled forward
that slow it was doing my head in.
'I'm not going to bother with Tony,' he said. Like total waste of time. 'You need to go straight to the top,' he said. 'If
there's one thing I've learned in this business,' he said, 'it's not to waste time on people with no authority.'
'I thought he did,' I said . . . 'Tony?!' I said.
'He's a puppet,' said Michael. 'Just has to do what other people tell him. No genuine
authority.'
He give his nose a pull. 'You need to go straight to the top with these things, get to the people who make the decisions.'
'Like who,' I says, 'Dr Diabolus? He don't even
talk
to dribblers!' I says.
'Not
Derek!
he says, like
I'm
half backwards! 'Not
Derek!
Someone with
influence.'
I give a shrug, like who gives a fuck anyway. 'Like who?'
I said.
'Do you know what I'm going to do?' he said. He was that hopped up, his pale blue eyes was watering over the edge. 'Strictly
between you and me,' he said. 'I have a contact at the Ministry.'
The queue shuffled forward that slow, it was going backwards.
'The
Ministry,'
says Middle-Class Michael and he raises his eyebrows and nods, like get where I'm headed.
'You what?' I says.
'The
Ministry!
You know!' he says. 'The Ministry? The Ministry for Madness?'
'Oh, right,' I says.
'Friend of my brother's,' said Middle-Class Michael. 'Chap he was at school with. Works in the press department, I think,
or public relations, that sort of thing. Knows everyone from Veronica down.'
'Oh right,' I said.
'Veronica Salmon . . . You know
her,'
he said.
'Not personal,' I said.
'The Minister for Madness? The new Mad Tsar? They appointed her a few months ago.'
'I know who she
is,
'
I said. 'What you said's did I
know
her!'
'Poisoned chalice, if you ask me,' says Michael. 'Give me Northern Ireland,' he said. 'Give me Transport, any day!' like waving
his hand like they's fucking asking
him.
'I ain't political,' I said, 'to tell you the honest truth.'
'Give me
Education!'
he said. 'Anything but the MAD portfolio! I heard her on the
Today
programme! She said what was needed was a comprehensive cost/benefit analysis . . .'
'Peas or carrots' said Canteen Coral, 'cause we'd reached the front of the queue and even though Michael only ate peas and
even though that's all he'd ate in seventeen years and Canteen Coral knew it, she give him a ladle of stew just the same and
wiped her nose on the palm of her hand when he said how he didn't want it. Then she slammed the plate back on the clean white
stack and the gravy dribbled over the edge and down the side and all the way down to the bottom. 'Well you don't get no more
peas,' she said, just 'cause you ain't having stew.' And Middle-Class Michael said that was fine and she give him a spoonful
of peas in a saucer and tutted a bit and said how she hadn't got time to 'mess about' and Middle-Class Michael taken the peas
and a sachet of salt and put them on his tray, then he slid it along for his orange squash and gone to join Brian the Butcher
at his table.