The Treatment and the Cure (2 page)

“For Christ’s sake Barry, don’t be such a bloody pig.”

He takes the spoon and tries to show Barry how to put it in his mouth, but as soon as he takes his hand away the spoon goes crooked against Barry’s tongue and the food spills.

“Bloody sure you won’t be invited to Government House!” the screw says.

Barry is mumbling something with his thick tongue. The screw takes a while to understand what he’s saying. Barry wants to go for a piss.

“No, be buggered!” says the screw. “You can wait.”

A minute later there is a trickling sound under the table and you feel your foot getting wet. Barry is pissing. You try to pull your foot back out of the way. The screw notices the piss and throws up his hands in disgust.

“Jeeeesus!” he says. He goes for a mop.

The rest of the afternoon you stand looking out through the verandah wire at the lake. Now that you’re here, actually here, and you’ve seen and heard enough to make you think that maybe you’ll survive all right, you start to remember the other thing, the Life sentence, and the hollowness comes back into your stomach. You’re doing Life. That means seventeen or even twenty years in this State. Fifteen if you’re very lucky. But that’s when you’re doing the time in gaol. Doing it here, well, who knows? Being here means you’re Criminally Insane, a psychopath, and they don’t let psychopaths out if they can help it. You look along the verandah and think that this is for fifteen or twenty years, or maybe until you’re an old man. Just this verandah and the outside yard and the dining room and the vegetable garden stretching on for probably twenty years at least. You feel the way you did when you were a little kid lost in Woolworths big store and you just stood there crying until some kind lady bent down and asked you what the matter was and then took you by the hand and found your mummy for you. Then your mummy gave you a big hug and you cried some more, but differently, because the fright was over. But now there weren’t any kind ladies and no mummy, and crying wouldn’t help.

There are some men down in the vegetable gardens working with spades and mattocks. Some of them are bare to the waist and brown from the sun. They’re working slowly, and you can hear the soft sound of the mattocks hitting the earth and a faint sound of the talking and sometimes a shout or a joke. Screws are standing around on the high ground watching the men, or strolling among them. One screw’s listening to the mid-week races on a transistor radio. Across the wall, the lake is a different colour from before lunch, darker blue and all ruffled by a lovely breeze that you can feel on your face.

At three o’clock two pantry workers carry a big tea-urn and a tin of biscuits down to the garden workers, then come back and bring another urn and more biscuits out to the verandah. You line up with some other men for a cup of the tea and a biscuit. The tea has milk and sugar in it. You begin to feel cheerful again, thinking that, anyhow, this is better than gaol.

At six o’clock the men start gathering near two heavy doors at each end of the verandah where the cells are. All the screws are there with their bunches of keys. The men go through the doors and start undressing and putting on pyjamas. Each man has a little plastic cup of water and some of them have a book or magazine too. Then a screw leads each man to his cell and locks him in. Your cell is halfway down the row. It has pale yellow tiles on the walls and the floor is some kind of rubber. It has a bed and an open rubber tub like the gaol tubs for pissing in. You can shit in them too, but they’re so small it’s hard to squat over them properly, and the shit smell fills up the cell all night.

When everybody’s locked up, the screws go away. You sit on your bed and look around the cell. It has a window with a sort of steel lattice over it. You can see the main wall a few yards away, and along to the left you can see part of the main gate. There’s a rose bush growing under the window, but you can only see the top of it because of the angle of the sill. It’s very quiet, with only a cough or squeak of bedsprings from the other cells. You can faintly hear a television set from another part of the ward where five men are sitting up till nine-thirty. You’ve been told about the roster for sitting up, and that you’ve been put on the roster for another night. All the cell lights are left on till the rostered men are locked in their cells. The light in your cell seems awfully bright, with the bare bulb over your head and the reflection from the yellow tiles. A low rhythmic sound of moving bedsprings comes from one of the cells.

“Hey Don!” a voice calls.

“What?” another answers.

“Stop fucking yer fist!”

“Get stuffed!”

After a while the night screws come down the row of cells, trying all the locks and looking through the narrow peephole in each door. You see an eye looking at you.

“G’day,” the screw says.

“Hullo,” you reply.

The eye disappears. From the window you can see the day screws going out with their kitbags and then hear the noise of cars driving away. It’s very quiet again.

You stay at the window, watching the sky getting dark above the wall and the leaves of the rose bush jerking in the breeze. Then you think you’ll try to sleep. You get into bed and pull the blanket up over your head to block out the light. You find it hard to breathe like that, so you try screwing your eyes shut tight instead, but the light is still bright through your eyelids. You try facing the wall, but the tiles are reflecting the bulb straight into your face. You lie there, trying to think of something. You think of the roll of toilet paper beside your tub. You could lay a few thicknesses of toilet paper across your eyes and maybe tie them behind your head so they’ll stay in place. You congratulate yourself on your brilliance, but then realise that the screws might think you are mad if they peep in and see you with toilet paper tied around your head. Shock treatment. Medication. No, you don’t dare risk it. You toss and turn for what seems like hours, then you drift into sleep.

A loud banging wakes you up and daylight is in the cell. Your door is thrown open. Men are carrying their tubs outside to empty them at the lavatory on the verandah. You take yours out too, come back and make your bed, then get your clothes from the piles at the end of the corridor, and dress. You wash and shave with a locked razor at a row of basins on the verandah.

The morning is beautiful. The sky is hazy blue and the sun coming up from the other side of the lake makes the water like a sheet of blazing steel, so blinding you can only look at it for a moment. Birds are singing. The men are cheerful. Two of them are playing ping-pong and the sound of the ball going back and forth seems a bit like birdsong, only faster. There are several card games going and the players are slapping the cards down with great energy and talking and arguing loudly. Not all the men are active though. Some have gone back to lie on the benches they’d been stirred from the night before. The same little blue columns of cigarette smoke are rising from them again. There’s a whirring sound coming from the television room where somebody’s buffing the floor with an electric polisher. You have ten minutes walk up and down the verandah to stretch your muscles, falling into step with Bill Greene and Dave Lamming who’re doing the same thing. Dave’s a thin little timid man. He’s worried. Yesterday he told the Charge he had a headache and asked for an Aspro. The Charge said he’d speak to the doctor about it. Bill Greene is disgusted.

“You’ll never learn, Dave!” he says.

“It was a bad headache,” Dave replies.

“Electric Ned’ll give ya more than a bloody headache when Arthur tells him about it.”

“I get my headaches a lot.”

“Well, Electric Ned will say your headaches are really just a sign of mental distress and he’ll whack some shock into you.”

“I’ll tell him I’m all right.”

“He can’t believe anything you say. You’re mentally distressed.”

“I’ll ask Arthur if I can clean some windows,” Dave says.

Cleaning windows is Dave’s own therapy for when he’s upset. Whenever you see Dave with a bucket and rag you know he’s trying to soothe himself. Dave is very upset now. His voice is trembling.

“You don’t really think they’ll give me shock do you?” he asks Bill.

“Aw, probably not,” Bill replies in a softened tone.

“D’you reckon they will, Len?” Dave asks you.

“Aw, probably not,” you say. You’ve no idea really, but you hope they won’t. You’re telling yourself never to complain of a headache or ask for an Aspro. Be careful about windows too.

Breakfast is delicious. Orange juice, scrambled eggs, two slices of buttered bread. You’re very hungry after the long night in the cell.

After breakfast the garden workers start putting on work-boots and wide hats. You’re called to the Charge.

“How d’you fancy a bit of gardening?” he asks.

“I’d like it,” you reply, having to check yourself from adding “Sir”. You don’t dare call him “Arthur” yet.

“Well, Grumps will give you some work gear.”

Grumps is an old inmate who looks after the clothing store and does errands for the screws. He wears old tatty slippers and shuffles along swearing and moaning under his breath. You go with Grumps and he gets you a pair of boots and a straw hat. He takes a long time because he keeps stopping to swear and groan.

When you’ve put on the boots and the hat you go to join about twenty other men waiting at the verandah gate. Five or six screws are there and the senior screw unlocks the gate and you all go through into the outer yard. The screw unlocks another gate and you file through into the vegetable garden. The men amble over to a tin shed and another screw hands out spades, mattocks and hoes. Then they wander to various parts of the vegetable garden and start digging or hoeing or turning soil over.

You ask a screw where you’re supposed to work. He points to a plot where another man is digging.

“You can help Zurka,” he says.

Zurka is a Pole. You remember the name vaguely from the news a long time ago. He ran amok in a train with a butcher’s chopper. Killed a couple of people. You don’t remember much about it, just the name. You start digging beside him. It feels good, the strain on your muscles, the earth under your feet, the warm sun on you. After a while you’re sweating and the drops are trickling down under your shirt. The soil is already warm and dry on top from the sun and it throws up little bursts of dust when you turn each spadeful over, but an inch or two down it’s still damp. You work very hard for a while, to show the screws how willing you are, until you start to get very sore in your back and shoulders, and also in your hands from gripping the smooth spade handle.

“The new bloke’s a goer,” you hear a screw say. Then he calls out to you: “Don’t bust yourself, mate!”

You grin back at him, wondering if he’s being sarcastic. You have a breather and look around at the other men. None of them are working hard. They seem to be taking a minute’s breather for every minute’s work. You do the same, but cautiously, in case you overdo it and get into trouble for bludging. The breathers give you plenty of time to look around and listen to the birds. There are small brown darting birds like sparrows—finches, you think—that fly so close over your head you hear their wings, and magpies walking about on the turned soil as though they’re inspecting the work, and other birds sitting in rows on the top of the wall, and lots of seagulls wheeling in bunches and crying out.

There’s some talking among the men and among the screws who sit or stand around on high points keeping watch. Whenever there’s a question about planting or watering or anything important about the work, the screws will call out to ask Mario what he thinks. Mario is a very dark Sicilian who used to be a market-gardener, and he’s the unofficial foreman here. His English is very poor. He only has two phrases: “Issa good” and “Issa no good”, so you have to ask him very simple questions.

“We water carrots? Yes?”

“Issa good!”

If Mario doesn’t agree he shakes his head sadly as though he’s in despair at such foolishness.

“We dig this bed, Mario?”

“Issa no good. Issa no good.”

“We dig that one then?”

“Issa no good.” More despair. More head shaking.

“What about this other one?”

“Ah, issa good!” Mario brightens up.

“Mario a cunt? Yes?”

Mario makes a rude Sicilian sign with his fingers.

At ten-thirty the morning tea and biscuits are brought down and we all lie on the grass around the urn for fifteen or twenty minutes. Sometimes, if there’s an interesting conversation going on, we stay drinking tea and lying on the grass for half an hour. It’s lovely lying there with a pleasant tiredness in your muscles and the sun on your face, listening to the talk. Then a screw will sigh wearily and say: “Ah well, boys, we’d better strike another blow or Arthur’ll be after our balls,” and the men get up slowly and go back to work. We stop work at eleven-thirty and hand our tools in at the tin shed. Anyone who wants a swim can go to the pool. Almost everyone does. There are piles of swimming trunks and towels and a big red ball to play with. For thirty minutes you float in the cool blue chlorinated water or join in a rough game of water-polo, or sunbake, hardly able to believe you’re really in the madhouse you’ve heard such awful tales about.

Electric Ned comes round after a couple of days. He wants to see the new man.

“He’s a bit absent-minded,” Bill Greene tells you. “Once he asked old Tom Hawksworth how he was settling in. Tom had been here for twenty-two years.”

This incident is famous here. If anyone asks you how you’re settling in, you know they’re having a joke.

Electric Ned wears thick glasses and a white coat. He comes up to you on the verandah and shakes your hand very politely.

“You’re Mr Tarbutt then,” he says.

“Yes, doctor.”

“How are you settling in?”

“Very well, thanks.” You get ready to grin, but he’s quite serious.

“No problems?”

“No, doctor.”

“Feeling all right?”

“Yes, doctor.”

“Doing a bit of work around the place?”

“Yes, gardening, doctor.”

“Fine.”