The Ballroom (8 page)

Charles stood and went to his window, hands thrust into his pockets. In the small wood that bordered the buildings, tall trees waved their branches to the moon. Soon, although spring came slowly to these moors, they would be coming into leaf. Beyond the wood lay the farms that would provide food for the thousands within these walls. Soon, it would be time for planting – six hundred glorious acres of self-sufficiency.

He knew that Churchill had recently given a speech in Parliament on the idea of labour colonies for mental defectives. Well, Sharston was a labour colony by any other name. What if Charles might have Churchill’s ear?

He glanced over to the
Call For Papers
, lying where he had left it.

Tredgold needed answering.

He bent over his notebook and scribbled:

One of the main arguments against Segregation is expense, Tredgold’s ‘taxed and taxed heavily’, but the amount needed to keep Sharston going, contrasted with other such institutions (schools and hospitals for instance), is negligible – testament to the self-sufficiency wherewith the patients are employed in growing their own food, caretaking their own cattle and washing their own clothes. At present our death rate is high, running at around 15 per cent. The more men we get out into the fields, the healthier our population will be.

The patients here are a ready-made workforce, one that finds its therapy, moreover, in the good and honest work it does. In the future, there could be more farms like Sharston’s – more patients put to work, an excess produced. We already produce enough meat to sell on to local butchers – imagine if enough meat and vegetables were produced to feed half of Bradford and Leeds!

It is clear from the shortest of my walks in the villages hereabouts that the countryside economy is shrinking – anyone with anything about them is eager to move to the towns. Let us then give over these jobs to our pauper lunatics! Let us do so in great and greater numbers! Let us see our countryside flourish again!

(N.B. The root of the word Eugenics comes from the Greek, meaning of noble birth.
Is it not most noble, indeed, to work towards the highest good for all?
)

Charles read back with mounting exhilaration – yes, there was something there. He particularly liked the last sentence. He underlined it, and as he did so a thought slid into his head.

He
would
write a paper for the Congress.

He would write such a paper that he would convince Superintendent Soames, and Dr Tredgold, and Churchill, and all of the others, that sterilization was unnecessary – that there was another way, a way that did not tax the ratepayer too greatly, and that, moreover, allowed for the possibility of improvement: of culture, of music, of – yes –
joy
, why not say it, in the lives of the pauper lunatics in their care.

He scrabbled in his drawer, brought out writing paper and an envelope and then, flipping back through the pages of the
Review
, he stopped; on the first column was the name of the secretary, a certain Dr Montague Crackanthorpe.

Dear Dr Crackanthorpe,

I was very interested to read your
Call for Papers
in the latest
Eugenics Review
. You ask for work which discusses the relative merits of Segregation and Sterilization.

I should like to put myself forward as a candidate.

If chosen, I will present on the benefits of music and segregation at Sharston Asylum in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Charles Fuller

First Assistant Medical Officer

T
HERE HAD BEEN
an incident in the ballroom. Dan had been too boisterous, it seemed, and was confined to the day room for a week.

So John was sent out to dig with young Joe Sutcliffe instead.

The mornings were a little lighter now, and a pale-orange strip lit the sky as they walked out towards Mantle Lane. Sutcliffe seemed steady enough on the journey out, but as soon as they came in sight of the graveyard, and the grave they were to finish, he started shaking. ‘How many go in there?’

‘Six,’ said John.

‘No.’ He stood by the side of the deep hole, staring down. ‘They’re making me dig it. I won’t do it. No.’

‘What do you mean, lad?’

‘The grave.’ Sutcliffe pointed at the raw gouge of earth. ‘It’s mine. I know it. They’re making me dig it. And they’ll put me in there when I’ve done.’

‘No, lad.’

‘They say you never get out.’ Sutcliffe lifted his panicked face. ‘Not when you’re where we are. Not on the chronics. They say that’s it. That you’ll die here. That you’ll get thrown in a hole like this with people you don’t know, and no one’ll find you again.’

‘Come on, lad.’ John put a hand out to the lad’s shoulder, felt the tremble on him, the thin bones like blades beneath his palm. ‘Calm yourself.’ He climbed down into the hole. When he held out his hand, the boy clambered awkwardly down alongside him, but, once there, Sutcliffe stood frozen and useless.

‘Sit yerself down a while.’ John gestured to the lip of the hole. It was clear there would be no good work from him. ‘I’ll get on by myself all right. And it’s not your grave I’m digging, lad. I can promise you that.’

Sutcliffe hauled himself out and sat on the side of the hole. He shoved his hands in his armpits and stared down at the earth. He looked no happier than before.

‘Why don’t you turn round? Look up there instead?’ John pointed to the brow of the hill, the place the girl had come from when she ran.

Sutcliffe raised a grey, grateful face to him. ‘Can I?’

‘Aye.’ John nodded. ‘Do that.’

The young lad stood, turning three times on the spot, and then, like a dog fussing over its bed, set himself down on the earth, facing away. John could hear him muttering away to himself as he began to dig.

After an hour or so, when sweat was pouring down his face, and Sutcliffe had grown quiet and, from his bent head and thin, bowed back, looked as though he might have fallen asleep, a whistle blew, and the figure of Brandt appeared on the brow, swaggering down the hill.

‘What’s happening here?’ The attendant came to stand before Sutcliffe. He kicked the lad hard in the knee. Sutcliffe sounded a frightened yelp. His face, when he raised it, was panicked, puffy with sleep.

‘Get up. Go on.’ Brandt kicked him again. ‘Get up and get down in there.’ He pulled Sutcliffe up by the elbow and shoved him backwards into the grave, where he sprawled in the dirt.

‘If you don’t start digging, I’ll start digging,’ said Brandt. ‘And I’ll bury you in there.’

Sutcliffe began whimpering. ‘No. No. It’s not for me. He promised it’s not for me.’

‘If you don’t shut up, when you’re finished I’ll send you downstairs.’

‘Please, no …’ Sutcliffe gasped, pointing to John. ‘He said … he said … it weren’t for me.’

‘What’s that?’ Brandt’s ratty little eyes came to land on John. ‘So you’re giving orders, are you, Mulligan?’

John shook his head, lifted his spade, carried on with his work.

‘Hey.’ The man’s stick thwacked him on the upper arm. ‘Hey. I’m talking to you. Can you not hear? Or are you deaf as well as daft?’

Brandt crouched on his haunches, and their eyes were level. ‘Do you know what?’ The man had no front teeth and he hissed as he spoke. ‘I’ve always wondered what you were in here for. What is it then? Being a stupid Irish fuck? I know you lot.’ His spittle landed on John’s jacket. ‘You come over here. Sit on your arses. Expect to be looked after. And now you’re telling people what to do?’

The man’s breath stank of cheap liquor. The edges of his eyes were yellow, but their pupils were beady and black.

‘Why are you never in the ballroom? Don’t they have dances back in Ireland? Can’t lift your feet up out of them bogs? Or is it you don’t like women?’

‘Aye,’ said John.

‘Aye you do or aye you don’t?’

He said nothing more.

‘Don’t they teach you to speak English over there?
En-ger-lish?
’ Brandt made his mouth slack, tongue hanging, like some of the men in the ward. ‘En-ger-lish, you fuck.’ He waved his stick in the air, as if deciding which of the two of them to beat with it. ‘Tell you what,’ he grinned, gesturing towards Sutcliffe, ‘I’ll let this lad off his trip downstairs if you say it. Say, “I’m a stupid Irish fuck.” And you can dance while you do it.’

Sutcliffe had stopped his moaning. John could hear him panting like an animal behind him.

‘
Say it.
’

John’s hands twitched on the handle of his spade.

There was a stirring on the hill above them. A small procession coming down across the railway tracks to Mantle Lane: four men, carrying a plain coffin, and a vicar, all in a line. Brandt twisted to look and then clambered up to attention, his hat pulled off his head and held in his hand. The funeral party stopped at the unfilled grave. One of the men took the boards from it and laid them to the side, and the coffin was lowered in. John could see its pine lid peeking out. Space was tight in there; the grave was full.

The vicar looked uncomfortable, as though he had been pushed on to a stage against his will, long skirts flapping in the cold and the breeze. One of the men stepped forward and put something else in the hole, a small box this time, just a foot long, and when he saw what it was, John’s stomach clenched.

The vicar held his Bible, said a few words, bent for a handful of earth, which he threw on the coffin, then looked over to where the three men stood. ‘Fill this in,’ he said, before he turned and led the small procession back across the lane.

John took a spadeful of earth from the side of the new grave to the other and tipped it in.

‘You know why they do that, don’t you?’ Brandt had come up behind him. His tongue rested between his missing teeth. ‘Put little’uns in’t bottom.’ He reached down with his stick and rapped it on the wood of the smaller box. ‘So as they won’t be lonely.’ He snorted. His mouth was a black pit when he laughed.

John moved away quickly, back to the other grave, digging a fresh load of earth.

‘What about you?’ Brandt called after him. ‘You ever had a little’un?’

John’s load rattled like sharp rain on the lid of the small wooden box. If he covered it fast enough, Brandt couldn’t touch it again.

But Brandt was crouched before the grave now, rocking on his haunches. ‘I always heard babbies were born in here, but I never seen one myself.’

He struck his stick, harder now, on the wood of the tiny coffin. It gave off a small dull sound. Then, tongue between his teeth, Brandt edged the end of his stick between the wood, beginning to ease it open.

John roared, launching himself towards Brandt. He grabbed him by the collar and twisted, wresting him around, bringing his face up to his. Brandt coughed, gasping for breath, hands flailing before him, face reddening from the lack of air.

‘No!’ Sutcliffe was behind him. Thin fists rained on his back. John let go and Brandt fell, gasping, to the earth.

John shook Sutcliffe off and knelt beside Brandt, a knee on his chest, shovel still in his hand. ‘Leave the dead alone. You leave the dead alone or I’ll send you to join them, I swear.’

He stood, shook himself right. Below him, Brandt curled around, gathering his breath, coming to a slow stand, hands on his knees. He spat on the coffin, and blood mingled with phlegm on the wood. He gave a low, black laugh. ‘You stupid Irish cunt,’ he said. ‘You’ll pay for that.’

That night, in the ward, Dan told a story.

It was a habit of his, when the lights were turned out. He would begin low, almost in a whisper, and everyone would fall still and listen.

Tonight it was one John had not heard before, the story of a giant who kept a woman prisoner in his castle on the top of a hill.

‘A hill, my friends, which was white with the bones of the champions who had tried in vain to rescue the fair captive.’

‘At last’ – Dan had a knack: he could make his voice grow, while keeping it quiet, make it travel to the four corners of the room, without waking the sleeping attendant – ‘at last the hero, after hewing and slashing at the giant, but all to no purpose, discovered the only way to kill him.’

Dan paused, and in it John heard the soft breathing of the listening men around him.

‘And this was to rub a scar on the giant’s left breast with a certain egg, which was in a pigeon, which was in a hare, which was in the belly of a wolf, which dwelt in the wild lands many thousand leagues from here … And so what do you think the hero did? He found that egg, and slew the giant, merely by striking it against the scar on his breast.’

The men breathed out, and Dan chuckled softly to himself.

After a while, John heard the sounds of the men sliding into sleep. Soon Dan was snoring too. But John lay on his back, staring up at the dark above him.

He did not want to sleep. Knew what was waiting for him there: a woman and a child. Dan’s stories did not frighten him, neither did Brandt and his threats; it was what was inside him that did.

If he closed his eyes, she was there, just as he had seen her first. A shawl held up to a mouth, covering a smile: Annie.

Would you like to dance?

The slither of her skirt. And him rising to her, as though he had no other choice but this.

And then, a lilting tune. A slow turn. Her throat. The swell of her breasts. The brush of her cheek on his. The taste of her mouth.

Her mouth.

A woman he had thought to be refuge but discovered to be the storm itself.

And then a child, with skin like a song.

And then illness, and a tiny box.

Burying the child himself in the dark, sucking ground.

And Annie’s mouth, a red wound now, framing the words.
You. Everything you touch dies.

You’re nothing.

You’re no man at all.

S
HE WAS MOVED
to work in the laundry – a huge grey-lit room beneath whose high ceilings women moved to and fro. Large puddles of water stood on the ground, and the stench of dirty clothes was sharpened by a harsh, chemical smell. Ella’s eyes scanned the room, but, despite its size, there was only one door in and one door out. The only windows were set in the ceiling. There would be no way of reaching them.