The Treatment and the Cure (10 page)

“Thanks, mate,” Ray Hoad says. He’s eating the bread by pretending to be wiping his nose with his hand.

You and Ray are pleased at how you managed it so well.

After Ray’s been in the grille for a couple of weeks the screws start to relax the rule about talking to him. He’s able to tell us about the escape.

“I almost didn’t get over the wall. The pole was only light alloy and it was bendin’ under me weight. I just got a finger grip on the top of the wall before it buckled. I was hangin’ there, trying to lift meself, and thinkin’ the screws ’ud see me any second. Then I managed ter shin over and dropped down on the other side. I landed off balance and I thought I’d broken me ankle. I waited a minute ter ease the pain of it, then I started through the scrub. My idea was to get to the highway pretty quick and hitch a lift out of the area before they could get organised. I skirted the lake for a coupla miles, keepin’ in the scrub, knowin’ I’d reach the highway sooner or later. My ankle was slowin’ me up though and when I finally reached the highway, there was fuckin’ cop cars goin’ up and down. I knew there’d be no chance of hitchin’ so I kept in the scrub, skirtin’ the lake, thinkin’ I might come on the railway line and maybe hop on a freight train or somethin’ if one was goin’ slow enough. The line must’ve been further than I thought. I couldn’t come to it. The scrub was pretty thick and I was gettin’ tired. I saw screws twice in the distance. Another time I came on two blokes choppin’ wood and had to drop down quick into a blackberry bush. I felt like a friggin’ pin cushion. The blokes had an old truck and I thought about tryin’ ter pinch it, but it would have been tricky. They were tough lookin’ cunts and might’ve tried to use their axes on me. I dunno whether they’d heard about the escaped maniac or not. So I went round ’em and kept goin’ and got to the edge of this little town. I was gettin’ sick of the scrub and I thought I’d risk goin’ into the town to get some food with the coupla dollars I had. I walked up the street, hopin’ I didn’t look too wild with the cuts and dirt on me.

“An old lady was waterin’ her front garden and she says hullo to me and starts talkin’ about the weather and stuff, and about her fuckin’ rheumatism. Well! I bought some bread and sausage from a shop. The shop bloke was lookin’ at me a bit close, but I didn’t know how far the word had spread about the escape, or whether it was on the radio or anything, so I didn’t know whether the bloke was really on to me or whether he was just a fuckin’ gig. There was an old deserted house at the edge of the town. It didn’t have any windows and the roof was fallin’ in, but I fancied it better than a night in the scrub. The afternoon was gettin’ late and turnin’ cold. I reckoned I should rest in the house till early next mornin’ and start fresh again. To tell the truth, I was startin’ ter think I’d done me dash. I should’ve been fifty miles away by that time. I should’ve been clear away. I got into the house as careful as I could and was eatin’ me food when I hears cars outside. I looked out of a crack and there’s screws and coppers all around. The only thing I could do was hide under a mouldy old bed and hope they’d be careless. They weren’t. I see these big copper’s boots walkin’ up to the bed and a voice says, ’Come out from under there, you fuckin’ animal!’ So I stuck me head out and this young copper’s pointin’ his pistol at me. ’I’m gonna shoot you,’ he says, real quiet. He was, too. Just then a screw comes in and tells the copper to put the pistol away. ’I’m gonna shoot this animal!’ the copper says. So the screw says, real serious: ’I’m a witness. I’ll see you’re charged with murder!’ ’I’ll fuckingwell shoot you too, if you’re not careful!’ says the copper to the screw. ’You’re a psychopath!’ says the screw, and he starts yellin’ for the others to come quick. About a dozen of ’em, screws and cops, come bargin’ in and the young copper puts his pistol away, real sullen. Then some of ’em pulled me out from under the bed and gave me a few hits in the stomach and put me in the car. That was the end of it.”

You are the new pool man. The most trusted one. It’s a lovely job. You can go down there whenever you like and occupy yourself cleaning the filters, or sweeping the concrete surround, or working the chlorine equipment, or stacking the bags of saltash that you use with the chlorine for keeping the water healthy. The vacuuming is the most constant job. You stand on the pool side slowly working the vacuum cleaner back and forwards across the bottom, watching the suction head making clean white swathes through the even layer of dirt that gets on the pool bottom every couple of days.

The old pole has been replaced with another one, but this new one is thinner and softer alloy and couldn’t possibly bear a man’s weight for an instant. It’s good in winter, being the pool man, because the men don’t swim much and you’re alone there most of the time and you don’t have to worry about keeping the PH level of the water exact. You just keep everything looking clean.

Your mother has sent you a little pocket radio and you can stand there slowly vacuuming on cool, sunny days listening to classical music or thinking about poetry. You don’t have to worry much about your lip movements down here because you are alone most of the time and, anyway, you’re the most trusted one now and the screws don’t bother reporting every little thing about you any more. They all know you’re interested in poetry and they make allowance for you being a bit peculiar.

You’ve written a poem that’s been published. That made a lot of difference. The screws think that writing a poem and getting it published means you’re an intellectual or something. It was only a small poem that began:

“The sky lies in puddles
Like pieces of a dropped plate”

The rest of it wasn’t as good as those first lines, but it got published, and seeing it in print in the magazine made you so happy and proud you felt like bursting. It was Marian’s doing. You’ve been exchanging little notes with her each week when the batches of library books are sent back and forth. She would ask you about your reading and you’d write back and tell her your thoughts about Thomas Hardy or John Galsworthy or someone like that. Then she asked whether you were writing any poems, and asked to be allowed to see some of them perhaps. After the first shyness you sent her a few of your poems, very afraid she’d think them stupid and silly. But she didn’t, she liked them. So you kept trying to write more, so you’d have new things to send to Marian.

“Have you thought about publication?” Marian had asked in one of her notes. Of course, you hadn’t. Only real poets get published. But Marian kept on about publication, even saying once that she would get angry with you if you didn’t try to get your poems into print. And so, because you’d rather die than have Marian angry, you sent a poem to a magazine she told you about. It came back with a rejection slip and a message from the editor in mauve coloured pencil on the bottom, saying you should keep trying. The next one came back too, and the next one, and all the others for months. You were a bit uneasy about sending poems out in your mail, wondering what Arthur would think. Arthur or one of the other screws read all the men’s outgoing mail to make sure they aren’t writing insane things or threatening or frightening anyone.

“Er, is it all right for me to be sending poems to magazines?” you’d asked him.

He’d looked at you, pursing his lips.

“Oh, I suppose there’s no harm in it,” he’d said. “Of course it depends on the subject matter of them.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, obviously we can’t allow you to send anything that slanders the hospital or the staff. As long as you only write what’s fair and balanced, it’s all right. For instance, if you use a phrase like ‘the shabby walls’ to describe the ward it would be acceptable, but, say, descriptions of men being beaten, that’s going too far. That sort of thing might bring some reprisal.”

You got the message, especially the part about “reprisal”. You got that part very clearly. And you know what a screw means when he talks about “slander”. One day after that, Arthur had said to you: “The doctor liked that poem of yours, about the magpie.”

“Really?”

“Yes, I showed it to him. He was very impressed. He’s very pleased with you generally.”

That was good news. To have the doctor very pleased with you generally means the shock and medication are a comfortable way off. It means you’ve got room to manoeuvre, but not too much, of course. You mustn’t get too secure.

So you sent the poem about the sky like a dropped plate and a note came back in the mauve coloured pencil telling you it was accepted. Marian was terribly glad about it.

“I TOLD YOU SO!” she wrote. The word “told” was underlined six times. Then one day a copy of the thin little magazine came, compliments of the editor, and there was your poem on page twenty-nine.

You think you’re in love with Marian. You dwell on her all the time, on her long beautiful legs and brown hair and lovely smile and on the little swell at the front of her jumper that you remember from the time you talked to her in the office. Often, when you’re alone, you take out one of her notes and kiss the neat handwriting that she did with her slim, smooth fingers. You think of her frantically at night in the cell, when you know you won’t be able to sleep until you pull yourself and have a climax. The best climaxes come from thinking about Marian.

Sam Lister has a beautiful wife who visits him. Sam’s wife is almost as beautiful as Marian, but of course not quite. Sometimes Sam invites you to sit with them in the visiting room. They talk together in a lovely soft way, about what she’s been doing, the films she’s seen, the friends she’s bumped into lately, or about her job as a secretary. She’s waiting very patiently for Sam to be free again. You think what hell it must be for Sam to be away from her. It’s very painful when she has to go. You can feel the pain of it passing between them and Sam has a desperate look for hours afterwards.

Smiler the screw has started persecuting Sam Lister. We don’t know why. Smiler doesn’t have reasons for anything, he’s just the way he is. He finds fault with whatever Sam does, and keeps reporting him to Arthur. He snaps and snarls at Sam, hoping to goad him into some reaction to punish him for. The worst time for Sam is when Smiler’s on night duty. Smiler comes banging on the cell door all night, so that Sam can’t sleep. After four or five nights of this Sam begins to break down with the strain. Today Sam dropped a scrap of paper on the verandah. Smiler snarled at him, saying he was a filthy, messy pig, then grabbed Sam’s arm and marched him down the verandah and made him pick the paper up and put it in the bin. Sam hasn’t slept properly for weeks now and he stumbled and overbalanced while Smiler was holding him. Smiler pretended that Sam was getting violent. He shoved Sam against the wall hard and then punched him. The screw kept smiling. He always smiles. That’s why they gave him the nickname.

Now Sam is in Arthur’s office, protesting about the persecution. His nerves are making him shake and he’s crying. The shaking and crying will make it seem as though he’s mentally ill and needs shock or medication. Everyone knows that mentally ill people think they’re being persecuted, so Sam is sealing his own fate by accusing Smiler. Smiler is pleased at how beautifully it’s working out.

You watch these things happening, feeling that you should be writing about them in poems, writing about the real things here, the bad things, the way Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon wrote about the bad things they saw.

But you know they’d call it “slander”.

It’s hot summer weather again, just like it was when you came here. The sky stays very blue day after day, and the vegetable gardens are full of green things growing, with a mist of spray over them from sprinklers. You’re vacuuming the pool, leaning a little on the pole and gazing up to where the top of the wall meets the sky. There are some birds sitting there watching you. Some little brown finches are darting near your head, going back and forth from the rafters of the shed beside the pool where the chlorine equipment is. They nest in the rafters. A warm, soft breeze is brushing your skin. A breeze full of lovely smells, smells of earth and green things growing, and of hot brick wall, and of flowers and eucalypts and a small acrid whiff of chlorine to give the mingled smells a sharpness. Someone is calling out, asking Mario about the gardening.

“Mario, you mad wog, we water this bed? Yes?”

“Issa good!” Mario calls back.

Other men and screws are talking among themselves and making a low buzz of voices that floats across like the buzzing of summer insects.

You think you should be happy. Life seems very easy right now, with the summer weather and the nice pressure of the vacuum pole against you and you being the pool man and the trusted one. You should feel happy because Marian is coming to see you for another talk. She’s told you so in one of her notes. You should be grateful because Arthur has made you the trusted one and because Electric Ned says he’s very pleased with you. Yesterday he told you that you’d made a good start in your first year here. You should be grateful too because none of the screws bother you much in a bad way any more, not even Smiler. If you chose, you could go on having it easy, being the trusted one, and the longer you went on the easier it would get. In a couple more years your position would be very secure, and the good reports would be accumulating in your file, so that maybe after a few years they’d start thinking about transferring you to the open section. A few years isn’t long. Men have been transferred after only a few years. Yes, you could have it easy if you play your cards right and a bit of luck is with you.

Now we are having Christmas dinner. All of us at a long table on the verandah. The long table is made from the dining room tables laid end to end and covered with sheets. On the table are soft drinks and potato chips and plates full of peanuts and sweets. There’s a little coloured party hat at each man’s place, but nobody’s wearing them, except a few men like Barry Clarke. A screw put the hat on Barry and tied it with the elastic under his chin and Barry’s too doped with medication to care.

The screws serve up chicken, then plum pudding. After the main eating is finished, Arthur makes a little speech, wishing us a merry Christmas and thanking us for being so good during the year. He says it makes his job easy, having such a decent bunch of chaps to look after.

Then one of the men stands up and wishes Arthur and the other screws merry Christmas and thanks them for putting on such a lovely dinner.

You just keep looking at the tablecloth while the speeches are happening. You look across at Sam Lister. Sam’s had shock treatment. His eyes are vacant and he doesn’t know where he is. A screw has been feeding him the chicken and plum pudding, guiding spoonful by spoonful between his slack lips. The screw puts a party hat on him. It’s a red one with little spangles and it sits up on the top of his head.

Eddie comes out of the office. He’s wearing a Santa Claus suit and carrying a bag of presents. He goes round the table, handing each man a little package in coloured paper. He’s trying to be jolly.

“Here’s a faaarkin present for ya!” he says to you. You unwrap it. There are two ballpoint pens and a packet of cigarettes. The screws have tried to make each present fit the individual, so they’ve given you pens to write your poems with.

You sit staring at the tablecloth, thinking you’re going to die of sorrow.