When Daddy Comes Home (20 page)

A
ntoinette looked at the small pile of clothing which had been placed at the foot of her bed: a print dress of faded dark maroon, a shapeless fawn cardigan, baggy knickers with suspenders attached and a vest. Beside them lay thick brown lisle stockings, a wincyette nightdress and a pair of scuffed, well-worn, lace-up black shoes.

‘Your clothes,’ the nurse told her.

‘But I have my own.’ The thought of wearing the hospital uniform which had covered so many bodies was abhorrent to her. The distinctive smell of cheap soap mixed with the musty smell of the unaired laundry where the racks of washing dried repelled her. And somehow she knew that in giving up wearing her own clothes she would be giving up her own identity. She would join the world of vacant-eyed women whose days were spent rocking backwards and forwards in their chairs as they hummed tunelessly to the music in their heads, or become one of those who only heard the ghosts of their past. Some of them talked to their ghosts in a language that was theirs alone, and sometimes the ghosts induced anger – shouts, curses and plates of food hurled into the air.

The uniform would mean she was one of them. It would dehumanize her and turn her into just another face in a crowd
of people who had been robbed of their individuality and become little more than animals to those who cared for them. That’s what it represented to the nurses who stripped the women of their clothes and herded them naked into communal showers where, without a vestige of dignity, they were hosed down. The nurses did not see the women in their care as people who had once had desires and hopes. There was no trace of empathy on their faces when they distributed the drugs which took away life and thought and dreams, or stood by when electric shock was given.

Antoinette thought of the thirteen-year-old Mary and saw her tottering pathetically from wall to wall. The only time she was ever noticed was when the nurses dragged themselves from their chairs and turned her round. But if she were dressed in the clothes of a normal girl, with her hair neatly braided and her face washed, and if she hadn’t been made dull eyed by the onslaught of the drugs, would the profession that prided itself on kindness have treated her like a rag doll? Or would they seen have an abandoned child?

Antoinette knew what the uniform meant. It was the first step to a lifetime in this place. It was the first admission of defeat.

‘I have my own clothes,’ she insisted, coming out of her reverie.

‘I know you have but who’s going to wash them? That’s why we have hospital clothes – so you can have clean ones every week.’

Still she stood refusing to touch the pile on the bed.

‘Antoinette,’ the nurse said patiently, ‘people in the ward you came from get visitors but nobody here does. So what does it matter what you wear? And here you have someone to
take your clothes away and bring them back all clean and nicely folded, so I don’t see what there is to complain about.’

‘I’ll wash them myself.’ With those words, she turned away. She knew she could not hold out for ever but she was not ready to become one of the lost souls who lived inside this strange other country, separated from the outside by walls of prejudice and indifference.

T
he sister arranged for her to have books to read. Antoinette found that her concentration was beginning to return and she enjoyed being able to read again. She returned to her childhood favourites, starting with the mysteries of Agatha Christie. She had not read any of them since she was thirteen and now there was a comfort from their familiarity.

During the long days in the communal room, she would settle herself as comfortably as possible on one of the hard wooden chairs and lose herself in her book.

Two women, one no more than twenty and the other five or six years older, were always together and she knew they were convicted murderers. She noticed that, unlike the other patients, they could hold a conversation and, when she couldn’t read any more, Antoinette was desperate for some company. Apart from the nurses and the one session she had a week with her psychiatrist, she was starved of human contact. But so far, neither woman had approached her; they did not seem to want any other company and sat huddled together, ignoring the other patients. Antoinette wondered what she could do to attract their attention and make them want to mix with her.

There was no entertainment in the room except for an old television which the nurses commandeered. Antoinette had brought two packs of cards with her and one day, feeling more eager than ever for some company, she decided to use them to tempt the women into wanting to play with her. She put her plan into action by pulling up a chair near them and shuffling the cards for a game of patience.

From the corner of her eye, she saw that she had got their attention and before long, the elder of the two women approached her. ‘What’s that you’re doing?’

‘Playing solo. Do you play cards?’ she asked carefully.

‘No. Don’t know how,’ was the grudging answer.

‘I could teach you, and your friend – if you’d like to,’ she offered casually, hoping that the other woman would bite at the line she had so carefully baited.

The woman thought for a moment and then said, ‘All right. We’ll join you.’

From then on, every evening the two women and Antoinette formed a trio. After supper the cards would appear and Antoinette taught them the games she had learnt from her English grandmother. She wondered where her grandmother thought she was living these days. What explanations had Ruth given to her of what her daughter was doing with her life? No doubt she was saying that Antoinette was giving her trouble but that she was bravely coping, she thought wryly. But it hurt to think of her family and she pushed them firmly out of her mind.

Routine was important to Antoinette and gradually she found her life in the main building settle into a comfortable rhythm. She was not happy but the clouds of her black depression had
lifted, leaving in their place a placidity that made her content with very little.

She found that the nurses were almost motherly to her, taking pleasure in her gradual return to normality. It seemed that she was a rarity. In these wards, people were not expected to improve and they hardly ever did. The nurses were more like guards than carers and seeing a patient begin to recover gave them a feeling of accomplishment. Antoinette was aware of this and tried even harder to please them, for she was still just a teenager who craved approval. She could not help thinking that all the nurses were sure that she should not be there and that helping her along the path to recovery had become a challenge. She was aware that she was being treated differently.

Although they were kind to her, she sometimes thought that the team of nurses was trying to trick her into saying she wanted to leave by asking questions such as ‘Is England a place you would like to visit?’ or ‘Will you see your grandmother when you are there?’ She knew that they were trying to make her admit that there was a future for her beyond this place but it was not something she was ready to consider. The future was something that she had blocked out of her mind; she was still too busy with dealing with her past and coping with her present. So she never answered their questions but only smiled.

After her refusal to wear the hospital uniform there was no more mention made of her having to conform. Instead, she washed her clothes herself and a couple of times a week she was taken to the hospital laundry where she was allowed to iron them. She had worried that wearing her own clothes would make her look different to everyone else, as though she was trying to set herself above them, but no one appeared to notice. Even her card-playing friends, who she thought might
object to a privilege they didn’t have, did not seem to mind. They had lost the desire to wear their own clothes. Why spend all that time washing and ironing them, they said, when our uniforms are done for us? The older one pointed out there were no men to attract so who would see them anyway?

Antoinette did not tell them that she did it to remind herself who she was.

Although she still had to be observed and have daily reports written about her, the nurses did not appear to believe the ward sister’s report that she was a threat to the other patients. In such a ward, however, caution was always exercised and she was not allowed to leave the room without an escort.

Antoinette’s two friends, her fellow card players, did not seem like murderers but Antoinette had been warned to stay vigilant. It was the elder, Elaine, who was really dangerous, the nurses said, and after looking into the cold depths of her eyes, Antoinette believed it.

Elaine, Antoinette was told, was a double murderer. She had killed two members of her family in cold blood. Not only had she never given an explanation of why she had done it – except that they had annoyed her – she had never shown any remorse. Antoinette believed that the annoyance she had felt was the explanation. Before she had arrived on ward F3A, Elaine had stood on a chair, pushed her fist through the bars and smashed a window. Snatching up a shard of glass, she had jumped down and held it to the throat of a nurse, laughing as she did it. The alarms had rung, male orderlies had appeared and eventually she had been persuaded to relinquish her weapon and let the nurse go. She had been given tranquillizers followed by electric shock treatment but there was still something about her bearing that warned of impending aggression.

The younger girl, Jenny, with her mop of dark auburn curls and blue eyes, looked more sad than violent, Antoinette thought. Jenny seemed intimidated by Elaine who watched her every move but until Antoinette arrived, they were the only two women in the ward who could relate to one another and that had made them cling together.

Antoinette knew that it was not the desire for her company but their enjoyment of playing cards that made them mix with her but she also acknowledged it was only boredom that made her seek out theirs. A week after they starting playing, the three received an unexpected bonus. Nurses on night duty get bored too and now the evenings were spent with five women playing the games Antoinette taught them and in return she bargained for pots of tea and permission to stay up later. The women played for counters made out of paper and Antoinette, who was the better player, had the sense to allow Elaine to win at least once a night.

Entering the sitting area of the ward one day, after she had returned from her session with her psychiatrist, Antoinette found Jenny sitting dejectedly by herself. During the nights they had sat together, the younger woman had roused her curiosity. Unlike Elaine, there was nothing about her that gave any indication of repressed violence. She had seen Elaine shaking with rage and once she had flown into a temper and two nurses had struggled to control her. But Jenny seemed harmless.

Antoinette crossed the room to take a seat by her. ‘Where’s Elaine?’ she asked. It was seldom that Jenny was alone; the older woman seemed a permanent fixture at her side.

‘She’s got bad stomach cramps and they’ve put her in a side ward to rest. The doctor’s coming to see her later.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that. I hope she’ll be all right.’

Jenny shrugged indifferently and continued to stare sadly into space. Antoinette sat quietly waiting for her to speak, and after a few minutes, she said, ‘You know, I’ll never leave this place.’

Antoinette didn’t know what to say. She only allowed herself to think of one day at a time and never thought of being released. Her only ambition for the future was that she hoped to be transferred back to the psychiatric ward. Besides, not only did she hear the note of bleak acceptance in Jenny’s voice but she’d also been told that by the nurses that Jenny was almost certainly in here for life. Eventually she plucked up the courage to say timidly, ‘But what did you do?’

‘I killed a baby,’ was the bald reply.

Antoinette flinched and, seeing her recoil, Jenny put her head in her hands.

‘I didn’t mean to. It was an accident. But nobody believed me. I was only fifteen years old then. My mother worked for these people and so did my dad. He was the gardener, me mom the housekeeper and they had been given a cottage. Part of their wages it was. It was damp and the owners never did it up even though they had loads of money. They were a snotty couple – always going out and asking me to watch their baby. They left her with me one night when she must have been teething and she just wouldn’t shut up. You know what babies are like once they get started – they can scream and holler for hours. Well, in the end, I was in that much of a temper that I picked her up and shook her, and I shook her too hard. Her neck broke. It was terrible and even though I said it was an accident and I hadn’t meant it, there was a huge fuss and commotion and they called the police. Me mum cried and screamed, me father beat me. They all said I was a murderer and then they put me in here. They turned my mum and dad
and my brothers and sisters out of their cottage anyhow. I’ve not seen any of them since. I don’t even know where they are now.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Four years and I miss my family every day. You know, I’m not the same as Elaine.’

Antoinette knew she wasn’t. She saw the double tragedy: a life that had been snuffed out and one that was wasted. Pity stirred in her. Then she pictured a tiny baby being shaken so hard that its fragile neck snapped and she found it impossible to comfort Jenny. Instead she said, ‘Let’s play a game of cards, shall we?’

Antoinette shuffled and dealt but her heart was not in it. Jenny was the same age as she was and surely she deserved a second chance. But the chances that she would ever leave were slim. The best she had to look forward to was a transfer to the one of the unlocked wards, and that was only when the authorities were sure that she had become too institutionalized to attempt an escape.

Antoinette was beginning to realize that failure to recover meant becoming a permanent resident of the strange world that existed inside the hospital.

Even in the psychiatric ward, she had seen people arrive searching for a cure to their problems, only to find that the ‘cure’ condemned them to a lifetime inside this place.

She thought of two people, a slim pretty girl in her late teens and a young man not much older, who had been admitted to hospital with the same problem – addiction to alcohol. They had not known each other but they both came from families of strict Methodists, who saw their illness as a sin.
The two of them had met in the unit and been drawn together by their common bond – their desire to overcome their alcoholism.

Antoinette had seen them sitting together in the lounge, their heads close together as they talked quietly, not needing any company but their own. Other times she had seen them walking in the grounds, their hands almost but not quite touching. Patients in the psychiatric ward were allowed to mix freely and it was obvious to everyone that these two had fallen in love.

Fired with the belief that the depth of feeling they had for each other had cured them, they signed themselves out against their doctor’s wishes. They were going to start a new life together, the couple told everyone, and with good wishes from everyone for their future, they left.

Two months later they returned, their skin yellow, their eyes aged and their hopes dashed. Their new life had taken them straight to a pub. Just one drink to celebrate our release, they had told each other. Just another because we are cured, then another and another until they forgot about their cure and what they were celebrating.

This time round they were given treatment that was designed to save them. In the twenty-first century it would be classed as torture. They were locked for three days and nights in separate side wards. Nourishing food was withheld. Instead, they were given whiskey. When they weakly pushed it aside, it was held to their mouths and poured down their throats. When raging thirsts awoke them, instead of the cool refreshing water that now they craved, more whiskey was given. Pills were washed down by the liquid which had become their worst enemy, pills that made their bodies heave with the effort of spewing the force-fed liquor out. Their
bodies convulsed again and again as the whiskey mixed with burning bile rose up their throats and spewed from their mouths in hot gushes to splatter on to the floor where it remained for the three days of their ‘cure’.

The nurse who told Antoinette what she had seen described how the rooms stank with vomit. As the patients grew too weak to lean out of their beds, it made pools in their bedding, clung in lumps to their hair and filled everything with the stench.

When it was over, they no longer loved whiskey and their sense of dignity and self-respect had been destroyed. Once again the couple was discharged but this time they drank vodka. They might be able to replace the whiskey but nothing could ever replace their feelings of self-worth. Alcohol deadened their grief of its loss until once again they were returned and another ‘cure’ administered.

Eventually, they gave up their fight to live in the world outside. They now were in separate wards for long-stay patients. It had not been deemed necessary to place them in locked ones. They had nowhere left to run to. Antoinette had seen them wandering in the grounds, but never together. They were two lonely lost people whose sickness had drawn them together but whose cure had driven them apart.