Garnethill

Chapter 19

She phoned beforehand, just to make sure that Martin would be working that day. She couldn't bear the thought of turning up at the hospital without a kind face to greet her. The head porter told her Martin was on a back shift so she waited until the afternoon before setting off.

The Victorian facade of the Northern Psychiatric Hospital looked strange because the proportions were wrong. The Doric columns were too thick, the pediments too squat. With different associations Maureen was sure she would have found it beautiful but she couldn't. It looked nightmarishly lumpen. She didn't remember seeing the front of the building until the day she left to go home for good. She sat in the taxi and waved happily as Pauline, her anorexic friend from OT, waved back. Skeletal Pauline was standing in the chubby doorway as the taxi circled a turn. Maureen didn't notice that Pauline was crying until they passed her for the second time.

After the joint session, when Maureen started slipping back into the hazy blackness, it was the thought of Pauline that stopped her toying seriously with the idea of suicide. They had both been abused by their fathers, Pauline had been raped by her father and brother, but their responses were very different: Pauline couldn't get angry and Maureen couldn't get anything else. Pauline could never bring herself to tell: she said it would break her mother and that would be harder to bear than the abuse. She was putting on weight when Maureen met her. They did ceramics together – Pauline helped glaze the target ashtray in Winnie's hall. She was the best student in ceramics, she'd repeated the course three times. She'd been in hospital longer than anyone else in the class.

Maureen couldn't bring herself to go back and visit afterward but she did phone Pauline. They didn't have much to say to each other, their closeness was born of proximity, not affinity, but Pauline was always pleased to hear from her and dragged out the phone calls, talking about how her application for a house was going, repeating gossip from the ward, who was being released and what the staff were up to. Maureen found herself reluctant to phone. She stopped questioning Pauline, trying to cut the conversation short, and the phone calls got further and further apart.

Pauline was released a few months after Maureen. She wasn't given a house: apparently she'd been told that she would have to wait another three months. She'd been offered bed-and-breakfast in a bad area and turned it down. Within a week of her return to the family home she went to the woods near her house and took an overdose. She was missing for three days before a woman out walking her dog stumbled across her body. She was lying on her side, curled into a ball under the base of a tree. Her skirt had blown up over her face. At the funeral a nurse told Maureen that until they found a good-bye note in her bedroom, the police thought it was a murder because they found dried semen on her back. Someone had wanked on her as she lay dead or dying. Months later Maureen traveled deep into the suburbs to visit the wood. It was a scraggy stretch of trees leading down a hill to a main road, cut back at one side for a playing field and at the other for a private driveway. The locals were proud of the old wood but only to the extent that it didn't interfere with their individual property. The trees were thin and ailing, so that a walker would nearly always be visible from either side. Burnt plastic and cigarette ends spoke of children from good homes coming here on summer nights to drink cider and touch each other up and set fire to things. Maureen lay down among the dog ends and looked up at the treetops, empty tears running into her hair, and apologized far too late for leaving Pauline alone.

At the cremation Pauline's kind, bewildered mother cried so hard she burst blood vessels in her right eye. The father stood next to her in the pew, his arm around her, patting her shoulder when she whimpered too loudly. There were two brothers. No one knew which had raped Pauline. She never told. The minister told them that Pauline was a well-loved and dutiful daughter. Her coffin slid noiselessly along the conveyor belt, off through a red curtain.

The handful of mourners who weren't family had met Pauline in hospital and knew about her family. They avoided the usual pleasantries that accompany a young death. Only her mother thought it was needless. The mother had been too distraught to make a funeral tea and since Pauline was the only daughter there was no one else to do it for her. She apologized to everyone for her breach of protocol as the mourners walked single file over the motorway pedestrian bridge to a dingy pub.

Liam bought the father a pint of heavy. Liam had known Pauline and liked her. He knew what had happened to her.

"How the fuck could you do that?" said Maureen, under her breath.

"Hush, hush now," said Liam, and pushed her outside. "I put two acid tabs in it. His head'll burst."

She told Liam he should learn to restrain himself.

"I did," said Liam. "I wanted to give him eight."

Weeks later Maureen heard through the grapevine that the father had suffered some sort of schizophrenic episode and had briefly been hospitalized himself.

She could feel Pauline's wan smile warm her heart as she crunched over the gravel to the side door.

She found Martin in the staff canteen. He was sitting with his back to her but she recognized him from his broad shoulders and muscular arms. The back of his neck was creased and weatherworn, as if he had worked outside for a long time. He was eating a greasy pie and chips. "That stuff'll kill you," said Maureen.

Martin looked up and smiled at her. His white crew cut sat like a tiny halo around his brown face, his eyes were set into a bundle of laughter lines.

"Hello, pet," he said.

He had begun to age in the two years since Maureen had seen him: his ears and nose looked bigger. He reached over the table for the sauce bottle and she noticed that his wrists were swollen and he was wearing a copper bangle. He had red broken veins on his cheeks and white tufts of hair had been carefully trimmed on his earlobes.

"How long's your break?" asked Maureen.

"I've got another half hour."

"Can I sit with you?"

"I'd be annoyed if you didn't."

Maureen went to get a cup of tea.

"I got a phone call from a woman called Louisa Wishart at the Albert this morning," he said when she sat down.

"Oh?"

"She phoned me in the general office and they had to call me over the Tannoy. She said that you'd be coming back to see the hospital and would I look after you."

"I hope you don't mind."

"No," he said, chewing his last forkful of pie and chips. "I got time off for it. Is she your doctor now?"

"Yeah. She told me she'd worked here, I thought you'd remember her."

"Ah," said Martin, wiping his mouth with a paper serviette, "that explains why she was so pally. They've all worked here at one time or another. She must have been young. You don't pay much attention to the young ones."

"She's got big glasses, they take up half her face and she does this-" Maureen clasped her hands together and stared hard at him in an exaggerated mimic of Louisa. "She looks a bit like a fish."

"Naw, pet, I can't place her."

"Well, she's pretty forgettable."

"She doesn't sound it."

Martin was not a warm man but his natural calmness was so soothing it felt like warmth. He didn't seem as calm as usual today. He kept glancing around the canteen as if he was looking for someone. Maureen sipped her tea with a growing sense of unease. Martin watched her. "I saw you in the paper," he said.

Maureen blushed. "Oh, yeah?"

"That's why you're here, isn't it?"

"Aye."

"It's nothing to do with your treatment, is it?"

"No."

"Why does she think it is?"

"I lie to her. About most things."

"Why?"

"I don't want to tell her. I think she's a twit."

Martin was suddenly interested. "Has she got dark hair?"

"Yeah, loads of it."

"I do remember her. She was here a few years ago, just for six months. You're right. She was a twit."

They smiled at each other across the table.

"Why do you still see her?"

"My family worry about me if I don't, you know, see someone."

"I'm going to get a cup of tea, pet. D'you want another one?"

She didn't. Martin came back with a tea cake for her. It was mallow and biscuit, covered in milk chocolate. It was a child's biscuit. She must seem very young to him, she thought. She didn't know whether he was married or had children. He didn't offer information about himself. He wasn't secretive, he just didn't seem to feel the need to justify his life by placing himself in context. Maureen hoped he was married to a nice woman, that his wife trimmed his hairy ears for him of an evening, and she hoped he was a father. She thought he would be a good one.

"I can only tell you some things, pet," he said. "I can only tell you what I actually know. I'm not interested in the gossip, so I don't know what other people are saying. Okay?"

"Yep."

"There's something very bad happening and I don't want to be involved in it, right?"

"What kind of bad thing?"

"I'll tell you in a bit, but you have to promise me you won't repeat it."

"Promise."

He gave her a hard look. "Listen, this is very important, don't just say it like that. Don't repeat it."

"Right, Martin, I promise I won't."

He looked anxiously around the canteen. "I don't know who's involved in this. They might be here right now, watching us."

"Then don't act suspicious. I'm just here to see the place again and you're a helpful porter who was asked to show me round again. I didn't ask to see you, my doctor phoned you, remember?"

Martin's face relaxed. "Aye," he said, "that's right."

"And if they called you over the Tannoy and told you in the office lots of people'll know about it."

"Right enough. Come and we'll make a show of it, then. I'll take you around the old place again." Martin tidied his tray away to the appointed place and the canteen women thanked him.

He took her to George III ward. She was so engrossed in what he had said that she didn't feel much about being back there. "You remembered which ward I was in," she said.

"Oh, aye," said Martin, as if it was nothing.

When they were standing in the lift she asked him if he knew which ward Siobhain McCloud was in. "George I," he said quickly, as if he had known the question was coming. "They were all in George I."

They visited the dayroom and the patients' canteen. On the way over to the Portakabin counseling suites they passed through the gardens. The flower beds were bare now, sunken patches full of naked lumps of frozen mud, like measles scars on the well-kept lawn. Liam liked to sit here with her. They used to bring Pauline out and give her cigarettes. She wasn't allowed them because they suppressed her appetite but Maureen suspected that the real reason was punitive. Pauline wasn't starving herself to death because she wasn't hungry enough.

They walked past the Portakabin where the joint session with Winnie had taken place and back into the main body of the building. Martin led her into the theater lift. It was big enough to accommodate three trolley beds and their attendants comfortably. Maureen looked around the stainless-steel box. "I've never been in one of these before."

"We're not really supposed to use them," he said, "but they're always free."

The doors closed in front of them and he pressed Lower Basement, taking her to a part of the hospital she had never been to before. The lift slid downward, alighting softly, and the doors opened out onto a shallow lobby. They stepped out, turned right and walked through a set of fire doors, straight into a fork in the corridor. The right-hand side led up a long, windowless ramp; the left led down, deeper into the ground. They took the left fork to a corridor running parallel to the kitchen. One of the strip lights was failing, palpitating nervously. The smell of overcooked meat and synthetic gravy wafted up the corridor in a warm stream. Maureen could feel her mouth watering. Martin opened an old wooden door on the left of the corridor. "In here," he said.

They went into a dark L-shaped room. The foot of the L was obscured by a tall dusty hillock of bin bags stuffed with hospital blankets. Martin led her behind the little hill and down the L's foot to a small door. He pushed it open and flicked a switch. A bare lightbulb lit up the little room. The low ceiling sloped sharply to the left and the walls were bare, crumbling stone. Behind one she could hear a steady, low-pitched thrumming like a ship's engine. It was a warm room, perhaps because it was so close to the kitchen. On the walls hung posters of the Partick Thistle football team dating back to the 1960s. A small hand sink stood at the back of the room with a single cold tap. In front of it was a lonely hospital chair made of metal and cloth, taking up a third of the entire floor space. A pile of discarded tabloid newspapers was stacked unevenly against the wall. Some loose tea bags, a large kettle and a transistor radio were sitting on top of a miniature set of beautifully varnished mahogany drawers, with a polished brass window on the front of each drawer to hold a label in place. Martin saw her looking at it. "They used to keep the medicine in that, back in the olden days."

"Is this your den?" asked Maureen.

"Aye. No one knows it's here except me. This is where I do all my skiving."

She motioned to the Thistle posters. "I didn't know you were a religious man."

He grinned sheepishly. "Oh, aye. Season-ticket holder for my pains."

Partick Thistle FC, known as the Jags, is one of the few Glasgow football teams not associated with either side of the Protestant/Catholic sectarian divide. Their fans are known locally for their passive but exceptional eccentricity and the team are known nationally for being crap.

Martin motioned for her to sit down in the chair, took the tea things off the mahogany drawers, put them on the floor, and crouched down on it. He looked uncomfortable so low with his big knees tucked under his chin. His feet were an inch away from hers.

He began to talk. He said that several years ago there had been some sort of problem in George I. The women in the ward were all getting much worse. It turned out that someone was interfering with them sexually. They changed all the staff and the problem cleared up but a lot of the original patients had never recovered. Martin's voice had dropped so low Maureen had to lean forward to hear him above the throbbing hum of the engine behind the wall. "I never knew about this," she said. "Did they prosecute someone?"

"Have you been to George I?"

"No."

"Oh, God, the poor souls can hardly talk. They couldn't go to court – half of them don't know their own names."

"How did they find out, then?"

He looked at a distant place somewhere through the wall and hugged his knees to his chest. "Burn marks. They'd been tied up or something. They'd burn marks on their bodies from the rope. And they were hurt…" He motioned downward.

"Where?"

"Their flowers – their flowers were cut."

"With a knife?"

"I don't know. You don't like to ask questions about things like that. I always thought it might be just that they were scared and they were dry." Martin was crying, his face impassive.

"Didn't they think to DNA test the semen and compare it with possible suspects?"

"There wasn't any semen," said Martin. "He'd wore a rubber. He knew exactly what he was doing."

His voice took on a peculiar timbre, halfway between a cry of despair and a growl. "I was there every day while it was going on. I didn't even notice. I keep my eyes open now."

"Oh, Martin, who would think to look for that?"

He coughed hard and wiped his face dry with his hand. She wanted to touch him. She could reach her hand out just a little and touch his brown cheek, but she didn't think he would like it. It would be done to console her, not him. He pulled his knees tighter to his chest and looked farther through the wall. "If any of us had noticed we could have stopped it."

She reached out and touched his hand with the tips of her fingers. He looked up, startled by the intrusion, and relaxed the grip on his knees. She shouldn't have touched him.

"Anyway," he said, stretching his legs out in front of him, "it doesn't much matter what I feel about it."

"Do they know who it was?" she asked.

"No, but your boyfriend was tied up, wasn't he?" Maureen nodded. "With rope?" She nodded again. "Did you know he was here?" asked Martin.

"Douglas was here?"

"You didn't know, then? I thought that's why you came back. Two weeks ago he asked Frank in the office for a list of patients' names from George I. He said he was doing a follow-up study about how they got on. Frank's a stupid bastard. He told loads of people that Dr. Brady d been in. Frank isn't even authorized to give out that sort of information, so he was telling on himself as much as anyone.

Brady seems to have been a bright man. I'm surprised he hadn't the good sense to use a different name."

"Well…"

"Anyway, those of us who've been here for a while knew what it was about because he'd only asked for the George I names and he'd only asked for that time. Was he daft?"

"Not really. He wasn't very good at being secretive. You think he was killed because he got the list, don't you?"

"Aye," said Martin.

"Did you tell the police about this?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I don't know." He looked at his feet. "That's a lie. I do know. I don't want to be involved in this. It's finished now and I'm too frightened to get involved." He didn't try to excuse himself but left the statement hanging in the air between them. "Was Douglas Brady married?" he asked.

"Aye."

"What were you doing going out with a married man?"

"God, Martin, I can't remember anymore." She'd taken up his time, reminded him of a deep hurt and touched his hand. She stood up. "I'd better be going," she said.

Martin had to stand flat against the wall to let her by. He came out after her and turned off the light, pulling the door to.

"That's a lovely wee den. How long have you had that?"

"Years," he said, leading her through the L-shaped room and back to the kitchen corridor. "Years and years and years. Don't tell anyone. It's my secret."

He walked her down the gravel path to the road and along to the bus stop. She knew fine well where the bus stop was and said Martin needn't bother but he said that he didn't need to do any work as long as she was with him and to shut up. The pavement was littered with dead leaves from the trees in the hospital grounds, helpless little carcasses, unable to defend themselves from the breezy wash of fast-passing cars.

"I think it's kind of you to keep seeing that stupid doctor so as not to worry your family," he said.

"I only do it so they won't hassle me."

"Aye, well, lots of people do good things for the wrong reasons. It's still a good thing."

He waited with her until the bus came and bade her take care.