The Treatment and the Cure (22 page)

Did you, on such and such a date, make certain allegations?

Yes.

What were they?

You tell him.

What basis did you have for making them?

You tell him.

Later we get into detail:

Where were you in relation to other persons in the room?

You tell him.

Was the alleged blow struck with an open hand or closed fist?

You tell him.

And then the end:

Is this statement true and correct?

Yes.

Do you wish to add anything?

No.

Dr Grey shows you out a back door. You know Blue and Bull and Nurse Kean are in the building because you passed them on the way in. We are all making statements and the back door is to prevent collusion or intimidation. What you need is a back door right out of this hospital.

It’s strange. You aren’t sure what you expected—perhaps that the Apparatus would begin crushing you immediately, that you’d be shocked and medicated within a week. But nothing happens.

You go on washing dixies and leading the calisthenics and reporting on ward chores in the meetings. The staff speak to you when necessary and answer you when necessary and ignore you the rest of the time.

Bull ignores you especially. He doesn’t even seem to see you any more. A couple of times he’s come towards you in the corridor as though you weren’t there and if you hadn’t been careful he would have knocked you against the wall. Once or twice he has passed your chair and if you hadn’t leant away quickly his big elbow would have hit the side of your head.

“I doubt he’d try anything too blatant,” says Mr Trowbridge. “He’s in enough trouble already.” Mr Trowbridge is on your side. He hasn’t felt much solidarity with his fellow staff since the strike. But you think he’s exaggerating the trouble Bull is in.

“Surely it’ll all blow over soon,” you suggest.

“Not at all,” says Mr Trowbridge. “Bull is to be officially charged.”

“Fair dinkum?”

“Yes. Nurse Kean corroborated your story.”

Bull has been suspended until the official hearing, so you don’t see him. You don’t see Nurse Kean either. She has resigned and gone to a job in the city and can’t be contacted.

On the day of the hearing you are called to Administration and met by a man who says he’s from the Crown Solicitor’s department. He’s prosecuting. He wants to clarify some points in your statement. Then he tells you to wait and you’ll be called. He turns to go into the big room where the hearing is.

“What are the chances?” you ask him.

“Without Nurse Kean, not a cat in hell’s.”

The big room is set up like a court, with someone who looks like a magistrate behind a table raised at one end. Bull and his lawyer are at another table on one side of the room and the Crown Solicitor’s man is across from them. A single chair is in the middle. There are eight or nine other people in the room. As you enter you see Dr Grey giving you a nod of encouragement. You are handed a Bible and told to repeat an oath. That seems odd, somehow. You half-think to remind them you are only a patient, in case the oath is a mistake. You sit in the chair in the centre and the Crown Solicitor’s man asks you some questions. He reacts to your answers as though they are very good and helpful answers. Then Bull’s lawyer takes over and he doesn’t seem to feel your answers are good and helpful at all. He’s been hired by the union and is dry and thin with a dry, thin voice. He asks you about your exact angle of vision when the alleged assault happened. He suggests you couldn’t have seen the alleged blow struck because Bull’s shoulder would have been in the way. Then he asks about your general attitude towards the staff.

“Do you get on well with them?”

“Reasonably well,” you say.

“Only ‘reasonably’?”

“I mean quite well.”

“Why qualify it with ‘reasonably’?”

“I mean I go my way and they go theirs.” You realise your mistake at once.

“I see,” says the dry, thin voice. “You go your own way.”

“To a degree.”

“And I suppose you have your own ideas about things?” The dry, thin voice puts an emphasis on “ideas”. You know what he means by “ideas”.

“To an extent,” you say.

You are nervous now. You have a nagging thought that your fly might be undone. You’re wearing old hospital pants with the fly held by a safety pin. You don’t dare glance down so you lean forward uncomfortably to hide it. Then you think how peculiar you must look, crouching forward. You fluff the answers to a couple of questions and get more nervous than ever. When the dry, thin man is finished with you you slink from the room. Bull watches you go, a tiny smile on his lips. You were beginning to feel sorry for Bull. You’ve been on trial yourself and you know how it feels, but Bull doesn’t need your sympathy. He’s more at home in that room, among those men in expensive suits, than you could ever be.

Bull is cleared. It doesn’t matter. Nothing would be gained by him getting the sack. In a sense it would even be unfair, since what he does to people with his big fist is trivial against what Blue and her sort do to them with the Apparatus. And there aren’t any official hearings about that. No, Blue would never be so crude and silly as to punch anyone in the face.

And yet you did vaguely imagine that reporting the assault would alter something. You weren’t sure what. Certainly not the system, but
something.
It was a symbolic act, a moral protest, a case of the worm turning, and such things are supposed to have a power. Maybe you just thought it would make you feel better. In any case you were wrong. The routine in REHAB is back to normal and a turning worm is still a worm.

The main thing now is to avoid trouble, to be a model inmate and postpone as long as possible any episode that might begin the Snowball for you. Anything could start it and the staff have lots of time. You’ll be here for years yet.

We are in the Ward Meeting. You’ve been a model patient for what seems like a long time and you’ve kept the Snowball from starting. It’s easy being a model patient when you’re scared of the Apparatus. You learn to put off petty resentments. Why
shouldn’t
we be raved at in the dining room? Fourteen minutes is far too long to dawdle over a meal. It amounts to sheer victimisation of the pantrymaids! And so what if the Skin Man was battered senseless by the night-screw? Silly old coot asked for it, interrupting the screw’s favourite TV show! And Blue’s new scheme of mass reprisal is quite sound when you consider it. If someone forgets to wash up the morning tea things, everyone goes without morning tea next day. The staff aren’t trained in psychology for nothing! Not only do you feel all these things are quite proper, you simultaneously understand that they aren’t happening. The battering of the Skin Man didn’t happen. If he has some bruises, well—the silly old fool’s always falling over! You once had the notion that Bull bashed Con Pappas. Just shows how one can lose contact with reality! Lately Blue has resumed her interest in Con Pappas’s welfare and he’s been receiving some excellent new medication. Tomorrow he was to have the benefit of more electrical therapy.

Alas, he won’t be here for it. This morning he broke open a locked razor and began cutting his throat. He’s in the surgical ward now and may live.

Blue begins the Ward Meeting with a word about Con Pappas, then mutters to Wanda that we need sharper razors. They grin together.

“Why did he do it?” asks Christine. She hasn’t the faintest.

“He was very disturbed,” Blue explains.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” you say. “Surely it showed an advance of insight?”

The staff all turn to look at you.

“What do you mean, Len?” asks Blue, inviting you to commit yourself further.

“He finally came to see the value of ‘Negative Reinforcement’ and wanted to give himself the ultimate form of it. You should be proud of him.”

Blue regards you with pursed lips. She knew you’d drop the model patient act sometime and that she could begin to nail you.

The meeting goes on to other matters. The inmates are shirking calisthenics. Reprisals are threatened. Blue decides to test you, in case what you said before was just an isolated outburst.

“What do you suggest, Len?”

“Do what you like,” you tell her. “I won’t take part in calisthenics any more. Not while they’re conducted by abuse, threats and mockery.”

“I see,” Blue murmurs. Yes, you’ve definitely dropped the model patient act and by the sound of it you’ll be ridiculously easy to nail. What you’ve already said is evidence of persecution feelings. Within ten minutes there will be a fresh entry in the report book. Tomorrow morning when you refuse calisthenics the Snowball will begin to roll in earnest and within a few weeks it will have crushed you.

You are very frightened.

The letter comes the same afternoon. You open it and read it and you feel nothing at first but shame. You had almost lost faith. You had almost thrown away the only power you have. The power doesn’t even belong to you really, you just have a slight use of it, a tiny candle flame of it, and you should have understood your duty better. Your duty isn’t to go down in a forlorn gesture but to keep the candle flame alive at any cost.

Next morning you lead the calisthenics, cheerfully, in the cool sunshine. Screws and nurses mock us as usual. They have a special smirk for you. They think you’ve knuckled under again. Blue comes from the office to watch. You do extra knee-bends and jump higher than anyone else and you run on the spot quicker than you’ve ever done. What an abject worm you must appear.

In your pocket the heavy embossed paper that says you have won the National Poetry Prize. Sam Lister must have entered your poem.

The Medical Superintendent comes after breakfast with a copy of a big city newspaper and there’s a bit on the front page about your Prize. Dr Grey shakes your hand and congratulates you. So does Blue, her face flushed with whatever she’s feeling now. Screws and nurses crowd around to read the news. They can’t believe it. Dr Grey says he’s already had phone calls from reporters wanting interviews.

“I’ve told them it’s entirely your decision.”

Blue looks pained.

“Oh, I’m prepared to talk to them,” you say.

Blue looks very pained.

Breakfast is delicious and the pantrymaids seem quieter than usual. They hardly raise their voices at all. Only dour old Mrs Fibbitson behaves exactly as normal. Good old stick! You go to OT and Janice and Cheryl give you a hug and a kiss. You think how once the idea of a hug and kiss from Cheryl was like a mad fever in you. You are normal now, cured of all fevers. Mr Trowbridge seems puzzled, probably figuring whether your prize poem amounts to a real job of Work. He decides it probably does and beams.

“Can I have your autograph?” cries Janice, pretending to offer a pen and book.

“Is your pen clean?” you ask, pretending to hesitate.

That day you do two phone interviews on radio, and a reporter comes for an article. Next day there’s another radio interview and a reporter and photographer arrive from a big magazine. Of course the publicity is mostly vulgar and stupid— they don’t care about poetry, it’s just that you being a mental patient makes a good story. You talk to the reporters calmly, responsibly. You mustn’t overplay it. Blue and her sort expect you to make wild accusations and slander the hospital. That would embarrass them but it’d also allow them to counterattack and show you up as deluded, persecuted, vindictive. You must play it cool, and keep the advantage.

On the third day a crew comes from a national TV news programme. They film a long interview by stages at different spots around the hospital. We even go to MAX and you stand again in the vegetable garden beneath the high wall. It seems a hundred years ago that you were here. The men are up on the verandah with their faces pressed against the wire mesh.

Someone yells “You bloody bewdy!” It’s Bill Greene. He makes a kind of victory gesture with his arm and fist. You wave back. You try to pick out Ray Hoad’s face but you can’t see him. It doesn’t matter. Suddenly it doesn’t seem a hundred years ago. It seems now and for ever. You’re a MAX man and glad of it!

Later the camera truck stops across the road from REHAB. We’re getting a long shot of the entrance with the big words painted above. Blue comes out the door. She hasn’t noticed the truck. She walks a little way, then freezes. A TV camera is pointed right at her. She can probably hear the faint whirr of it. She unfreezes, looks desperately around her, then
runs
back inside.

She
runs!

Hundreds of ducks are rising into the evening sky, gathering into the salt air above the lake, making a soft swish of wings over Elsie Haggart’s drowning place. You’ll be seeing these ducks for years yet. Maybe you’ll be released one day but it doesn’t seem very important. Your victory will stand, whatever happens. The victory can’t change anything directly: it won’t necessarily stop the Apparatus crushing you, nor heal Con Pappas’s slashed throat, nor help Ray Hoad who hanged himself in MAX today, but that isn’t the point.

You watch the ducks go over, each one frail and separate within the dark mass, and you wonder what you really feel about the hospital. Right now it seems very beautiful. The thought comes that the beauty could not be so much if it weren’t for the pain underneath.

No, you can’t hate this place.

Peter Kocan was born in Newcastle, New South Wales, in 1947 and was raised in Melbourne. After leaving school at the age of fourteen, he worked in country New South Wales and in Sydney.

At the age of nineteen, Kocan was given a life sentence for the attempted assassination of a Federal politician. During the years spent in penal and psychiatric institutions, he began writing poetry and several collections of his poems have now been published. His first novel,
The Treatment,
written after his release, was published in 1980. Its sequel,
The Cure,
followed in 1983.

Since 1978 he has lived and worked on the central coast of New South Wales. His hobbies include amateur theatre in which he is involved as an actor and a playwright.

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