The Offering
Authors: Grace McCleen
Table of Contents
Prologue: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
June 2010
Genesis: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
January 2010
A Condition of Complete Simplicity
Exodus: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
March 2010
Leviticus: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
April 2010
Numbers: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
May 2010
Deuteronomy: Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
May 2010
The Road through the Pine Trees
Epilogue: The Long Corridor
July 2010
The Land of Decoration
The Professor of Poetry
Grace McCleen’s first novel,
The Land of Decoration
, was published in 2012 and was awarded the Desmond Elliott Prize for the best first novel of the year. It was also chosen for Richard & Judy’s Book Club and won her the Betty Trask Prize in 2013. Her second novel,
The Professor of Poetry
, was published by Sceptre in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Encore Award. She read English at the University of Oxford and has an MA from York, and currently lives in London.
First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Sceptre
An imprint of Hodder & Stoughton
An Hachette UK company
Copyright © Grace McCleen 2015
The right of Grace McCleen to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Scripture quotations taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version Anglicised Copyright © 1979, 1984, 2011 Biblica, all rights reserved.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 444 77001 8
Hodder & Stoughton Ltd
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
This book is dedicated to Ella
Lethe: a river in Hades whose water, when drunk, made the souls of the dead forget their life on earth.
*
Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
June 2010
The Quiet Room
There has been a great deal of talk here recently about an event concerning myself and Dr Lucas, which took place from what I can gather in the Platnauer Room some two weeks ago. I presently find myself in the Quiet Room while Dr Hudson, who has taken over my care in Dr Lucas’s absence, devises an appropriate plan. I said to Dr Hudson: ‘I do hope that whatever happened will not prevent my release from Lethem Park, something Dr Lucas talked about on many occasions.’
That was when Dr Hudson stared at me.
People have been staring at me a great deal lately. I have become something of a celebrity. I am sure you could ask anyone on this ward who I was and they would say: ‘That’s Madeline Adamson.’ Then they would stare at me some more. Their eyes used to pass over me as if I were a chair or a cabinet; now they widen and darken, as if the chair had sprouted arms and legs, as if its arms had reached up to the fluorescent light like branches craving alms of the sun, and its legs twisted, tuber-like, into the carpet.
This attention neither excites nor disturbs me. In fact, I cannot remember a time when I felt so peaceful. What is more, I am sure it has nothing to do with the cocktail of medication I have been prescribed; there have been periods before when I have been sedated and I was far from peaceful although temporarily stupefied. Now, however, I find I am contented to drift from one moment to the next and if several hours pass in which I have done nothing other than consider my hands in my lap or the birds beyond the window, it does not matter. I celebrate time, I press it into my hands. I receive it like water in a desert, yet when it slips through my fingers I do not mind.
I think upon reflection this room should be called the Empty Room. It contains only a chair, a mattress and a sink. It is rather pleasant to occupy a room so unashamed of its own emptiness. Recently space has become pleasant to me; it lets in the light. For the past forty minutes or so I have been gazing at a block of sunlight high up on the opposite wall. The room is getting darker now but I do not move to switch on the light. They will switch it on soon enough. They will slide the panel across. They will say: ‘You mustn’t turn off the light.’
And I will say: ‘Why?’
I have just caught sight of one of the younger nurses peering in at me through the window in the door. I smile at her but she slides the panel shut. I wonder what startled her. People have been behaving so mysteriously recently, even Margaret. She doesn’t come into the room any further than she has to and seems almost anxious to leave. I am glad to say that in the last few days, presumably having observed that I am not exhibiting any signs of alarming behaviour, something of the old friendliness has developed between us again, though not perhaps the same degree of warmth.
I don’t know, I can’t read people any more. I can’t see what’s underneath. When I was a child I was a great reader. I looked for the message inked high in slow-turning clouds, the thing in the ground, in the air; there in the beat of the line. Now when I look for a sign I’m not quite so sure. Things cast long shadows, they threaten to gesture, but finally pull back, withholding revelation.
Lucas could not read me. I remember this much. Those who cannot read cannot see. I was raised to do both.
*
Lethem Park Mental Infirmary
January 2010
Beginning
The new doctor has taken an interest in my case. It has been gravely neglected, he says, much misunderstood. He has a plan. If I follow it he anticipates good results. But let me describe him.
He roared into a parking space beneath the startled horse-chestnut trees two weeks ago in a low-slung sports car. A door like a wing rose up. Two lucent brogues appeared on the gravel. The door swung down, the brogues advanced. I watched it all from my window.
His name is Dr S. Lucas, he is over six feet tall, speaks with a booming voice and has a laugh that rings down corridors. He has blue-black hair that is swept straight back from his brow and piercing black eyes. Staff and patients part before this person like the waters of the Red Sea, from which he emerges without a drop adhering to his sheeny suit. I have seen more than one of the younger nurses blush in his presence.
I met him on Friday. He was sorting papers at the desk when I knocked at the Platnauer Room and he came towards me, extending his hand. ‘Madeline,’ he said. ‘Come and take a seat.’ It was as if he had been waiting to meet me for ever.
The room smelt of emulsion and aftershave. I saw it had been renovated. A table lamp cast a note of sophisticated intimacy over the new carpet, leather upholstery and gilt-framed photographs of young children and wife, smiling Colgate smiles. On the desk was an iPad, notebook and bouquet of freshly sharpened pencils. A vase of white irises stood on the sideboard. The sight of them made me uneasy.
‘You like the flowers?’ He was looking at me enquiringly.
‘Yes,’ I said, but in truth the smell (or was I imagining that?) was making me giddy.
‘I believe in bringing nature indoors,’ he said. ‘We are only just beginning to realize the therapeutic benefits of being in nature.’ He launched himself back into the leather rotating chair and flipped open a brown folder. ‘So, how are you?’ He flicked through the papers in the folder, which presumably concerned myself.
I considered this, then replied: ‘I don’t know. I’ve been here too long to know things like that.’
He smiled slightly as if I had made a joke, though that was not my intention. He said: ‘Yes, twenty years is a fair stretch by anyone’s standards.’
‘Twenty-one,’ I said.
‘Sorry, twenty-one. You’ve been round the mulberry bush, haven’t you?’
He was referring no doubt to the plethora of therapies I have undergone since my admission at the age of fourteen, suffering from a depression (so they deemed it) that made normal functioning impossible, as well as periodic episodes of violent psychosis – ‘psychotic breaks’, the doctors call them – in which I lose consciousness and, apparently, my identity, and when I re-enter my body have no recollection of anything I have said or done. Thanks to medication, they occur now only once or twice a year.
‘And yet,’ he said, ‘in spite of the attention your case has received, I believe the doctors who treated you have been misguided. We are not dealing with a breakdown here, bipolarity, hysteria or even catatonia; it was an
event
that brought you here; something happened the night you ran away. When the police found you, you were dishevelled, incoherent. Over the next few weeks you stopped speaking, eating and sleeping.’
He leant back in the seat, the black leather creaking appreciatively. ‘I’m writing a seminal paper on amnesia’s long-term effects, Madeline. I think you’re suffering from dissociative amnesia. Something happened that was too traumatic for your mind to process. So it effectively erased it. Your current illness is symptomatic of such repression. Do you remember anything at all about that night?’
‘No.’
‘Do you feel the same person as that teenage girl?’