Mary Dogood
by
Daniel Boyle
Published by Daniel Boyle at Smashwords
Copyright Daniel Boyle 2011
Cover photo www.dreamstime.com
This book is dedicated to those who bought a copy.
Hell is other people
-No Exit
Jean-Paul Sartre.
He never said a truer word
-Mary Dogood. Whose memoir this is.
Blowing Up Dad
I make no apology for trying to blow him up, my father. I mean, let’s face it, if I hadn’t been caught, if there hadn’t been the trial, and the brouhaha in the newspapers and on the television, if there hadn’t been all that lazy, ludicrous drivel about a Devil Child, or Mad Mary, or any of the other lurid epithets that were heaped upon me, who would have cared? ‘Forty-five-year-old baker blinded in gas explosion. Queen summons PM to palace. Safety of gas appliances high on agenda.’ I really don’t think so, do you?
At the time, I did not deem my actions a complete failure. I had been nabbed, of course, but while I may not have killed my father, as had been my very definite intention, I had at least managed to deprive him of his vision. But, alas, as I grew older and acquired insight, even that small crumb of comfort fell from my grasp. For I came to appreciate that to blind a man who was so monumentally insignificant was a sort of mercy. That while the world’s indifference towards that little man would remain un-diminished; he would no longer have to witness his lack of substance in the disdainful stares of his fellow men. I mean, I ask you, consider the whip-round his colleagues had for him. A derisory seven pounds and fifty-five pence was its yield! And there were eighteen of them employed at that bakery for heaven’s sake! Then to actually take that pittance round to the hospital and there to count it out onto his seared and bandaged hands, well, can you think of anything more contemptuous, more indicative of the low regard they had for him?
If only he’d had the power of reflection, I might not have been driven to such drastic action. If only he could have seen that my mother had ran away with another man because she could no longer stand his monologues on, for example, the functions of yeast in the baking process, or the secret of great choux pastry, or other tedious illustrations of bake-house esoterica. That she could no longer stand his obsessive hobby of using the Japanese art of Bonsai to cultivate miniature versions of tropical trees and shrubs so that every room in house resembled an Arboretum. But he could not reflect and see these things. As far as he was concerned, my mother had absconded because of me.
“She couldn’t cope with raising a difficult little cunt like you.” He would shout---or scream, usually.
I knew that this accusation was false, of course, and had his chastisements remained merely verbal they would not have bothered me one tiny jot. After all, I was constantly the object of similar abuse from the pond life I daily shared a classroom with.
“Look at that stuck up fucker!”
One slapper had sneered as I wrote down an answer in English class, and at the same time as I was silently counting down the seconds to the explosion.
“See the way she looks down her nose when she writes. And look at the la de da way she fucking scribbles! Like she was doing a fucking autograph or something. Like she was somebody! Fucking vaggie!”
But my father was not long content with aiming only verbal abuse at his ‘difficult’ daughter. Very soon after mother left there were slaps, then came punches, then kicks, then resort to a broad, heavy-buckled, brown leather belt, and in the fullness of time the worst of his attacks would come as a medley of all four.
I should say that I’d suffered three years of such abuse before I thought that enough was enough. And in considering possible forms of redress, going to ‘the authorities’ did occur to me, in case you’re wondering. But I’d eavesdropped on chatter at school from girls (and one boy) who suffered similar treatment, or who knew someone who did, and the consensus was that ‘the authorities,’ while well meaning, were not the smartest option. Because all a violent parent or guardian need do was lay off for a while and convince ‘the authorities’ that they had mended their ways then, when things had settled down, start setting about their offspring or charges again and giving them a little extra for having gone to ‘the authorities’ in the first place. Of course, a victim could always lodge another complaint, but the risk then was of being put into care, and sometimes, as in my own case, (of which more anon), that could result in maltreatment that was as bad, if not worse, than had been suffered at home.
So, no, I resolved to eradicate the problem of my abusive father in my own way. And I was aided in this decision by The Blue Lady, who, as accurately as I can recall, began to appear to me about midway through the third year of my passion, and on a night when I had taken a particularly severe beating from my tormentor.
At first, I feared The Blue Lady. And I am sure you would have too, if you had awoke in the dark to find her floating at the foot of your bed. If you had seen her, hovering there, with those exquisite blue robes being ever so slightly teased by the light, night breeze coming in through the open bedroom window. And with those brilliant rays pouring forth from her delicate alabaster hands and her slim, bare feet. For although her sad eyes clearly oozed sympathy, her stubborn silence and refusal to respond to my whimpered promptings was very disconcerting indeed. But eventually, on her sixth or seventh visitation, she did react to me, though not by using anything so mundane as speech. Instead, she used her powers to have me pick up the pencil I kept by my bedside and write two words in the diary I made irregular entries into at around that time. And the two words I found myself writing were ‘Warren Oates’.
Now, only a fool could fail to grasp that Warren Oates could be the name of a person, and the more I thought about it, the more that name rang bells. And, sure enough, just a few days after The Blue Lady’s visitation, as I was throwing out some old newspapers, I saw the name in one of them. It appeared in a television listing that told of an upcoming rerun of an old, 1970, US television film entitled ‘The Movie Murderer’. It was on in the wee small hours and, as my father was on nights, I had been able to watch in peace and quiet, and with considerable interest. The Warren Oates in question was an actor, and a very good one I recalled thinking as I watched him, who had played the part of a professional arsonist hired to burn down film sets. Particularly intriguing was the method used in one of the fires, whereby he pricked suspended liquid-filled balloons with a pin, and when the liquid had dripped away, the balloons had somehow burst into flame. A great inferno then ensued, but by then, Warren Oates was long gone from the scene of the crime.
If the filmmakers ever explained what combustible material was left in the balloons when the liquid was gone I had missed that. But I could well remember an experiment in science class showing how phosphorus would spontaneously combust when exposed to the air. What if phosphorus had been the substance in the balloons? It made perfect sense. The liquid would prevent the phosphorus from igniting. But once the liquid was gone and oxygen found its way inside the punctured balloon--------?
Oh, how the room filled with the sound of my beating heart as those thoughts and events began to coalesce and take the shape of a plan! A plan that began to assail what proved to be the very frail walls of my conscience. Could I really blow up my father? Well, why not? Wasn’t he beastly to me? And could I have arrived at this point without the clear encouragement of The Blue Lady? A woman who could levitate? Who could appear and disappear at will? Who could communicate by means of telepathy, and effuse rays of the most brilliant hues from her extremities? If such a one as she could see justice in my plan, who was I to question it?
“Yes! I would do it! I would most definitely do it!” I resolved.
My first task was to make a flow chart depicting the logical sequence of steps I would need to take. Steal phosphorus. Buy balloons. Secure tweezers and rubber gloves for manipulating phosphorus. Devise method of holding neck of balloon open so that (a) water can be introduced, then (b) phosphorus can quickly follow. Secure hammer. Secure nail. Use hammer and nail to puncture (ever so slightly) main gas pipe going into boiler. Suspend balloon above tiny leak. Puncture balloon. Leave house in calm manner (perhaps humming a tune to convey nonchalance, perhaps, cheekily, pretending to have forgotten something and going back into house for a jiff) Go to school. Behave in utterly normal manner. Watch the slappers scream and giggle at typically inane remarks, or even nothing at all, just scream and giggle for the sake of it. Listen as they exchange make up tips, read their horoscopes, talk about the latest boy to be permitted a dry rub or given a wank. On hearing bell, make way to class. Take seat. Smile at teacher. Do work. Wait for knock on classroom door as bearer of tragic news arrives to break it. Swoon on hearing I am now an orphan. Allow a decent interval to pass (two to three weeks) before allowing wan smile to appear on lips in public. Live happily ever after.
The cardboard core of a toilet roll proved capable of holding the neck of the balloon open so that the water and the phosphorus could be introduced.
But despite my meticulous planning and attention to detail, I almost failed at the first hurdle. I was in the science lab, had secured the phosphorus and was depositing the jar amidst the jumble in my rucksack, when I heard a noise behind me. It was a girl. Her name was Chanterelle Lloyd (that was indeed her name, her parents had unwittingly called her after a mushroom, yet presciently so, as she was terminally thick, and her attempts to be accepted as the ‘mate’ of the head slapper, Tammi-Toya Beasley, were truly pathetic) but had she seen? I mean, had she seen? She showed no sign of having done so. Just kept on chewing her gum in typically bovine fashion, with her heavy lower jaw slowly rotating clockwise through three hundred and sixty degrees, and then followed me with her lifeless, slow-blinking eyes as I smiled and went lightly past her to the open door.
Even when the theft of the phosphorus was discovered, and threats of exclusions, of police involvement, and warnings of the dangers inherent in handling such a substance, were being issued daily, Chanterelle Lloyd stayed schtum. Surely, I was in the clear.
And so the big day arrived. I don’t know why I did it, some subconscious desire to give him a reprieve, perhaps, to give him one last chance to be a proper father. But for whatever reason, I tried to make small talk with the little tyrant as I gave him his breakfast.
“How was night shift?” I asked, in what I thought was a civil tone of voice. “What did you bake last night? Meringues? Danish pastries? Éclairs?”
He looked up from his Sun newspaper and fixed his little black eyes on me. “You taking the piss?” He asked in that low, menacing voice he would often put on.
“No.” I said, all wide-eyed and innocent. And for a Nano second he seemed confused. Was I taking the piss, or was I genuinely interested in the previous night’s confections? Then, his features hardened again.
“Cos if you are I’ll bounce you off them four fucking walls.” He said, before going back to the Sun, turning a page, and then running his hand across that greasy pate of his, with its wispy, thin, black hair that receded more each day so that his pallid and putty skinned face seemed to get bigger commensurately.
Well, that was it. It was all systems go from that point. When he had gone to bed, I washed up, and then went down into the basement. And there I began working my way through the steps on my flowchart. In what seemed no time at all, I was seated at my desk and writing down the answer to the question ‘Is Character Destiny?’ when considering the life of King Lear. A topic I alone had been tackling as the slappers had opted for some contemporary drivel penned by a former stand-up comic.
Anyway, I was just dotting the ‘Is’ and crossing the ‘Ts’ when the knock on the classroom door duly came and an ashen-faced headmaster entered to extract me and give me the mixed news that, while there had been an explosion and my house had been badly damaged, my father was still alive.
My obvious and abject disappointment at this intelligence was taken as anguish and concern for my father and earned me innumerable hugs of comfort from school secretaries, women police constables, and, finally, nursing staff at the hospital. There a doctor told me that my father would undoubtedly live, but that he would never again bake professionally as, somehow, they were not sure how, his eyesight had been destroyed in the conflagration.
This uncertainty about what had caused his blindness would last until the discovery that, among the miniaturized exotic shrubs my father had tried to rescue from the inferno was Excoecaria Agallocha, which belongs to the family Euphorbiaceae, commonly known as The Blinding Tree. The heat from the blaze had apparently caused the shrub to excrete its latex sap; my father had touched the sap and then rubbed his eyes with his toxic digits.
That he had survived at all was explained in our insurer’s report. It referred to the history and structure of our home, which was just over two hundred years old and had begun life as a farmhouse. But the rapid industrialization of the surrounding area in the nineteenth century had so encroached on both arable and pasture land as to make farming no longer viable. (I had often wondered how our house had come to stand so alone and separated from the rest of the town by a busy ‘A’ road, and now I knew). But I digress. It seems that in its structure that old house was very robust indeed, with the spaces between the heavy floor joists packed with cinder ash and other byproducts used as soundproofing. It was this ‘deafening’ as it was called, that had absorbed the impact of the blast and unfortunately saved my father’s life.
As I have said above, I was initially able to comfort myself with the thought that I had exacted some sort of revenge on my cruel parent. And when unobserved, I could even smile at the prospect of our reunion. Being blind, he could no longer beat me, of course, and if I wished to, and when he was least expecting it, I could, and with marvelous impunity, give him a right good slap on the head, or aim a hefty kick at his backside. And it occurred to me, too, that I could set harmless snares about the house when restored to a habitable standard: mousetraps in the biscuit tin, for example; or surreptitiously moved chairs and furniture to occasion pratfalls and hilarious collisions. I even dared to contemplate placing a harmless reptile, a corn snake, say, in his bed at night, and then standing invisibly by to watch his reaction to it’s slithering touch as it tried to constrict his ankle or something.
But, alas, thoughts of such mirth-filled days proved to be premature. For it transpired that Chanterelle had seen me take the phosphorus after all, and, surprisingly for such a dimwit, had found a way to put her knowledge to profitable use.
That terrible truth came in a note that Chanterelle dropped on my
desk as she passed by. “See me up on the scool (sic) roof at
dinertime (sic) its about that
fosf-----fosafer---fosaref---that stuff.” It read.
Well, how could I refuse? But why the school roof I wondered? The
building was a flat roofed nineteen sixties affair, and so had leaked
like a sieve since day one, which meant it was under almost constant
repair and always accessible, but why up there?
“You know Tammi-Toya?” She asked, rhetorically, referring to the head slapper.
“Yes.” I said.
“Well she said if I want to stay her mate I’m going to have to give her things.” She went on.
“Things?” I said.
“Presents and stuff.” She explained
“Oh.” I said
“Yeah.” She said. “ Only I got no money for that, so you’re gonna give it me. If you don’t I’m going over to the edge there and gonna shout down to all them in the playground that you nicked that---that stuff--- you understand? Every week I’ll expect a couple of quid, maybe more some weeks.”
“But I never have any money.” I said.
And that was the truth, as my father made me walk to and from school, and take a packed lunch and all to save money. But Chanterelle seemed to take my answer as a defiant refusal to cough up. Because her rotating lower jaw suddenly stopped at twelve o’clock, hovered there for a moment, dropped back to six o’clock, stayed there for a while also, so that I could plainly see the grey chewing gum at rest on her heavily furred tongue, then began its gyrations again, but now at an alarming rate of revolutions per second.
“All Right.” She said, curtly. “I’ll go tell ‘em, shall I?” And with that, she began walking, as purposefully as obesity allowed, towards the edge of the roof.
Now, had I merely stolen some phosphorous, Chanterelle’s accusations would have meant nothing to me. I would simply have denied them. It would have been her word against mine. And let’s face it I was a model pupil. I was a good girl. I was a clever girl. I did as I was told, and I did it without fuss, for I had no desire to draw attention to myself as I considered any form of celebrity to be vulgar and common, and still do. After all, we’re all God’s children and no single one of us should be put above the rest. Of course, my developing charms had, I knew, brought me to the attention of some male teachers, but that was nature’s fault and quite beyond my control. By contrast, Chanterelle had, as I have said, the intellectual capacity of an amoeba. She was also obstreperous and had been excluded from school on at least two occasions. Well, whom do you think they would have believed?
But I had done much more than steal phosphorous. I had used it to cause an explosion at my house, an explosion still under investigation. What if Chanterelle’s accusation struck a chord with someone? The police perhaps, or someone at the gas company, and what if that little niggle grew into a suspicion? Could I be certain that my arson was beyond detection? I mean, hadn’t Warren Oates eventually been apprehended? What forensic methods would be available to a suspicious policeman or gas fitter? Some tool, or device, or procedure, that, when applied to the evidence, would tell the true story of what happened in that basement?
These were the thoughts that crowded in upon me as I watched Chanterelle waddle to the edge of the roof. I could see the stern, accusing faces, of my judge and jury. I could hear the awful thwack of the gavel as the twelve good persons and true entered with their verdict and order was called for. I could see myself, small, and trembling, and all alone in the dock as the verdict came in: “Guilty as charged, your Honour!”
“Chanterelle! Please don’t.” I cried, hurrying after her. “Chanterelle, can’t we talk about this? Please!”
Perhaps she genuinely didn’t hear me. Perhaps she was trying to ratchet up the mental pressure I was already feeling by pretending not to hear me, I honestly do not know. All I knew was that I had to stop her getting to the edge of the roof and calling down to the hundreds of boys and girls below. And so, I ran faster, and faster, shouting and pleading as I went, begging her to stop. Then it happened.
My foot caught in a torn piece of roof felt (it must have been something like that) and I was immediately propelled forward at breakneck speed. I instinctively stretched my arms out to break my fall, but it was not the roof I collided with. It was Chanterelle. And while the impact of the collision steadied me, and even left me upright, the forward thrust of my movement was transferred to Chanterelle, and the force of it was such that she went flying over the edge.
I cannot describe my horror as I watched those gargantuan, mottle-skinned thighs sail out in to space, those great hams, made even more prodigious by the constrictions of thigh length, elasticated stocking. And those voluminous knickers, meant to be white, but turned a sort of battleship grey from poor laundering, or perhaps because of no laundering at all! I tell you honestly, that grotesque collage of images was to stay with me for a very long time indeed.
The people below were lucky. Chanterelle made an uninterrupted passage from the roof’s edge to the concrete surface. Had she struck anyone on the way, that person would surely have gone with her to the afterlife. As it happened, the only ill effect on those below was a severe bout of mass retching as they saw Chanterelle hit, and almost instantaneously spread out over, a considerable area of playground.
But I was not so lucky. More roof repairs had been required and the janitor and roofing contractors had chosen the precise moment of my collision with Chanterelle to step out onto the roof for their inspection. Well, I ask you, how must that tragic sequence of events have looked to them? As if one girl had deliberately pushed another girl off the school roof to her death? Of course it must have! It’s what I would have testified to had I witnessed it myself, and can understand why no one believed me when I said it was an accident.
And so, convinced I was a murderer, the police took possession of my belongings, and a cursory search of my rucksack revealed, lying crumpled up among the detritus there, a piece of paper on which I had written: ‘Steal phosphorous. Buy balloons. Secure tweezers and rubber gloves for manipulating phosphorus----etc.-----etc.-----etc.-------!’
Retribution
Do you know what hurt me most of all? At my trial, I mean? No one believed that my father had beaten me. No one. If he beat me, why hadn’t I complained, they wanted to know? Gone to my teachers? Gone to the ‘authorities’? Gone to anyone? Well, I’ve already explained why not to you. And I tried to explain it to them, but they wouldn’t listen. And then, reinforcing the belief that I was lying, there was his bravura performance with his huge, dark, sun glasses, and his white stick tap-tap-tapping on the court room floor as he made his way, ever-so-bloody-slowly, to the witness box! And once he was up there, well, it was all “Yes your Honour” this, and “No your Honour” that, and with every obsequious and mendacious word being spoken in this simpering, whispery little voice that he was so putting on!
Completely fooled them, he did! Completely and utterly foxed them! Which meant that I had no motive! Which meant that I had apparently got up one morning and thought: “I know, I’ll blow up my father today!” Which meant that I must be mad! And mad enough too, to have deliberately pushed poor, fat, Chanterelle off the school roof!
I’m telling you, those jurymen were hardly out until they were back again. And all that stuff about not being able to look the accused person in the eye if the verdict is guilty? Don’t believe a word of it. Every man and woman there was looking straight at me as the verdict was being read out, and every look said the same thing----“I am heartily proud to have played a part in your getting your just deserts you wicked, wicked girl!”
I was sentenced to indefinite detention and for the next eighteen months or so was kept in various Young Offenders institutions where psychiatric assessments were made and reports were prepared on my mental state. Unsurprisingly I was deemed to be a very disturbed young woman who was subject to persecutory delusions (my father’s beatings) and psychotic episodes (The Blue Lady), findings that eventually landed me in Riverdale secure hospital, where I would remain for the best part of twelve years.
So, what can I say about Riverdale? I do realize that I must confine myself to recounting only the salient points of my incarceration, events that simply have to be recalled if this memoir is to make any over-all sense. But that said I doubt if something of the history and the fabric of the place will go amiss.
So, let’s see. Riverdale Secure Hospital dated from the 1890’s, and its remote location, I was told, reflected society’s attitude to mental illness at the time of its construction, which was, ‘out of sight out of mind’. The nearest village, Dalton, was five miles distant, while the nearest town, Clippenheath, stood about ten miles from Riverdale.
The first thing a visitor encountered on approaching ‘Ravingdale,’ as it was know to staff and inmates alike, was the outer perimeter fence. It was of the chain link variety, very heavy gauge, and rose twenty feet or more above the bleak and empty moorland that surrounded the hospital and stretched for as far as the eye could see. The chain link spans were suspended between rather elegantly tapered goose-necked concrete posts that nodded inward towards the hospital, and were topped off with a nasty assortment or barbed, and razor wire. Traffic going to, or coming from, the hospital had to pass through a gatehouse in the perimeter fence that was manned twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. And in the ‘no man’s land’ between the fence and the high, thick, concrete wall that encircled the considerable collection of buildings that made up the hospital proper, huge aluminium columns held clusters of arc lights that garishly lit up the grim landscape below during the hours of darkness. And in those hours, dog-handling guards regularly patrolled ‘no man’s land’.
Having passed through the gatehouse on the perimeter fence, the visitor next encountered, after two hundred yards or so, Riverdale’s red brick facade. This, in it’s turn, also contained a manned security post with personnel under the strictest instructions to search every vehicle entering or leaving the hospital, including those owned or driven my members of the staff. Given these stringent arrangements, it was easy to see why, when I arrived at Riverdale, there had never been a successful escape.
Having gone beyond this latter checkpoint, a visitor would find himself confronted by the first in a series of strategically placed large boards holding Perspex covered maps of the hospital’s neat, lawn-dotted grounds. These also gave directions to the various administration and clinical blocks, as well as to the wards, the recreational centres, the kitchens, and the stores etc.
The last building to have been added to these maps was The Sir John Duncan Memorial Ward, which was named after some long dead hospital benefactor whose wife had been declared insane and committed to Riverdale, sometime in the early nineteen twenties. The official story had it that the knight, impressed by the level of care his wife received, made provision for Riverdale in his will. Cynics have claimed, however, that the poor woman was never insane, that her husband had pulled strings to have her committed, and that his bequest was made out of gratitude to Riverdale, for keeping his wife prisoner, and for so thoroughly destroying her will to live, that she drank poison and died a slow and agonizing death. Whatever the truth of the matter, The Sir John Duncan Memorial Ward, had, a year or two before my arrival, been adapted to house a score or so of the most ‘disturbed’ women in Riverdale.
It was not, strictly speaking, a ward at all, as each inmate had her own green-painted, breeze block-walled, room containing a bunk, a toilet bowl and wash-hand basin, a bedside cabinet, some shelves, and any personal belongings that the hospital authorities deemed permissible. Each room also had a tiny window, which was a blessing, and beyond the room door was a communal area where television could be watched, Ping-Pong played, books read, or other hobbies pursued. The ward also contained a well-appointed office for the use of the unit’s resident psychiatrist.
My first impression on entering the Sir John Duncan was olfactory in nature. For despite being spotlessly clean, even scrupulously so, there was yet a goodly whiff of stale sweat, urine, and cigarette smoke about the place. And no amount of scrubbing, polishing, and disinfecting could ever dispel it. Only time, I would discover, could dissipate that acrid combination when, after many months in the ward, I awoke one day to find that I had, and had for some considerable time, failed to notice the pungent mix. And since my fellow inmates continued to smoke incessantly, suffer from their Hyperhidrosis, or piss themselves where they sat rather than miss a minute of their favourite television soap, I had to conclude that my odorant binding proteins had become inured to the guff.
But that process of gradual acclimatization would apply to most aspects of life in the Sir John Duncan. And the truth is, I had little difficulty in adjusting to the regime there. After all, I had never been one for going out much. My routine had seldom varied from home-school-home again-watch TV/read a book- sleep-get up and go to school again. So, what was to miss? Walking to and from school? I thought not.
In fact, for a very long time life at the Sir John Duncan was preferable to that which I had endured at home. There was no one to beat me for a start, or even to trouble me, as my reputation as a homicidal maniac went before me, and even mad people could apparently see the sense in giving such a person a wide berth. Then there were the recreational activities. These included a gymnasium, a well-stocked library, a small film theatre, and various arts and crafts classes in which I enrolled, and through which I discovered hitherto hidden aptitudes, as in calligraphy, and computing for example.
Despite my ability to adjust, however, and to pass my time in useful and enjoyable pursuits, do not assume that I did not hanker after freedom, especially as I grew into womanhood. For the longer I remained in Riverdale, the more aware I became, through books, newspapers, television and film, of the changing world outside. And the more I became aware of that world, and what it had to offer, the greater was my desire to join it before my best years were behind me. That is why I hold in the utmost contempt those fools who object to convicts having access to colour TVs, and decent sanitation, etc. Only those who have never lost their liberty could think that creature comforts compensate for such a forfeit. But wait, I am preaching, and that is not the purpose of this memoir.
In addition to the official divertissements, mentioned above there were also those occasions when ennui was dispelled by the ‘mad’ living up to the public perception of them and going, well, mad. One such incident occurred when ‘Big Bertha’ (not her real name), a giant of a woman weighing in at twenty-odd stone, acquired a contraband consignment of ‘Yaba’, or Amphetamine, to give it its Sunday name. She had heard that the drug was an appetite suppressant and could therefore cause weight loss, and, having decided to slim down a.s.a.p. had swallowed a handful of the 15% pure tablets (as any dealer will tell you, the norm is around 5% purity, with 95% adulteration being achieved by cutting the drug with talcum powder or something similar).
In attempting to describe what happened thereafter, you will see I’ve relied on musical metaphor, plus medical information gleaned from textbooks. I hope the latter is accurate, but to be on the safe side you can check the terminology yourself. Anyway, here’s what happened.
Twenty minutes after ingestion, the Yaba began to play adagio on Bertha’s central nervous system, causing her to sway as sinuously as her great weight would allow, while she manipulated her fat arms in the manner of a Polynesian hula dancer, and beamed euphorically at anyone who caught her eye. Then, gradually, adagio gave way to accelerando as the Yaba began to pluck more insistently on Bertha’s sensory neurons. Next came presto, then, finally, crescendo as the Yaba pulled and hauled Bertha’s neurotubules hither and thither, and generated an axonal flow of tsunami proportions. And what was the outward manifestation of this sensory chaos?
Firstly, Bertha’s benign smile became a rigid grimace as she tried to control the intense inner compulsion to move about. To be on some spot other than the one she found herself on at any given moment in time. And as that awful impulse to hyperaction would not to be blunted, or subject to any restraint whatsoever, Bertha began to pace frantically back and forth, back and forth. At first, her movements were merely speedy and surprisingly nimble for such a large woman. Then Bertha’s by-now-clanging cerebellum caused her incessant movements to become jerky and uncoordinated, so that she began to charge around the ward like some malfunctioning robot. Finally, extreme copropraxia and coprolalia took hold and Bertha began thrusting her giant hips suggestively, as she fondled her breasts and crotch while shouting obscenities, coughing, sniffing, grunting, and, occasionally, barking.
Now, as you might expect, this quite terrifying sight caused a tremendous hullabaloo among the other inmates, and there was great shouting and tumult as women threw themselves from the path of the rampaging Bertha. And, as you might expect the uproar was not long in bringing, first, the ward orderlies, and then the guards proper into the fray. And after many failed attempts to wrestle Bertha to the ground, efforts that saw orderlies and guards sent flying in all directions as Bertha laid about her with her great fists, and her even greater belly, a hypodermic brimming with tranquilizer was finally, and brutally, rammed into Bertha’s neck, and emptied of its contents. That done, the communal area was quickly evacuated, and orderlies, guards and inmates alike all watched from secure spots as Bertha wound down, stopped, teetered for a moment, then collapsed with a resounding crash to the floor.
I mention the ‘Bertha Melee’, as it came to be known, not because it was a unique, or even rare, occurrence. There were many disruptive events at the hospital, and only a few involving Bertha, during my time there. No, I mention it for two good reasons. One of these I will keep to myself for the moment---for dramatic purposes-----the other, is that it is a neat way of introducing you to Claude McBean, the security guard. He smuggled the Amphetamine into the hospital. Indeed, it was McBean who smuggled most illegal goods into the hospital. And that he did so was an open secret among the inmates. For too many people had benefitted from McBean’s crookedness for it to remain concealed. And that was why, conversely, he could be utterly certain that no one would ‘inform’ on him. There were too many people beholden to him, depending on him for their supply of prohibited goods, be it drugs, or sex toys, or whatever else they wanted. Even those, like me, who did not depend on him, would nevertheless keep quiet about his activities, for fear of what his ‘regulars’ would do to anyone who compromised their ‘provider’.
And none of that would have troubled me one jot if it weren’t for the fact that Claude McBean’s invincibility also allowed him to abuse his position in another way, and take gross advantage of some of the women in his charge. And yes, unfortunately that is what I mean, by ‘gross advantage.’ Again, I would have cared nothing if those poor souls had welcomed Claude’s awful attentions, but many did not. And some of them, I’m quite certain of it, did not even understand what was happening to them. And even if one of those intellectually challenged victims had unwittingly given some sign of her tribulations, there were plenty there, I’m sure, who would have defended Claude and given him an impregnable alibi.
At one point, it seemed that I had been singled out for some of ‘Claude’s special love’, as he liked to call it. As well as taking arts and crafts and computing, I had decided to use my time in Riverdale to continue, and advance, my education, (by the time I left I had good degrees in English Literature, and Modern History) and so began studying for my ‘A’ Levels, as soon as I was permitted to. (I was awarded ‘A’ passes in English, Math, Physics, and Art. I had applied to do Science as well, but was refused permission) No surprise then that I was often to be found seated at a table in Riverdale’s well stocked library, which is where I was when McBean made his move. I had just raised my head from Southey’s Thalaba The Destroyer when I noticed him watching me.
Have you ever seen, or met, a person you can sum up in one word? I mean, everything about them, their physique and their persona all bound up in one word? Well, Claude McBean was such a person, and the word that summed him up was ‘Oaf’. He was tall and thick set, and when he walked he had this weird habit of ever-so-slightly bending his right knee, every third or fourth step so that he seemed to be rolling along quite nicely and then tripping up on some unseen object. But what was---I was going to say what was ‘remarkable’, but to apply such an adjective to Claude would be way too generous. So, let’s say ‘odd’----what was odd about Claude, was, when you looked at him, I mean really looked past the premature baldness (which he tried to disguise in time honoured fashion with a hideous, dandruff-dusted comb-over) looked past the flabby, sallow skinned and black-bearded face with it’s pendulous lips, flat little fleshy nose, and incredibly tiny, glistening, dark eyes, was how tender he was in years. At first glance, you thought (back then) late-thirties, or early-forties, when in truth, late-twenties, or early-thirties was probably nearer the mark.
“Oh. Poetry.” He said, as he stood over me and slowly spun the anthology with a heavily nicotine stained index finger
“Yes.” I replied with a tight little smile.
“You like it then? Poetry?” He went on.
“Yes.” I said again, thinking, correctly as it turned out, that any communication with Claude McBean should be kept as simple as possible.
“I do poetry.” He said. “ You wanna hear?” And this time a small, neutral shrug kept my tight smile company.
“All Right.” He said. “Listen to this.”
“Mary, Mary quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
Are there weeds in there?
And dandelions?
‘Cos if there is--I’ve got a fucking big hoe!”
This last line was delivered through a wheezing laugh, and with his hand firmly gripping an erection whose impressive contours were plainly visible through his heavy, serge, uniform trousers. Well, I was, well, not angry as such. In fact, I don’t get angry in the traditional sense of the word, with extravagant gestures, a raised voice, and other histrionics. No, I was, I suppose, ‘annoyed’, is the best word to describe how I felt. Just the way I did with my father and Chanterelle. Annoyed that, there was I, minding my own business, and yet these people wished to hurt me in such terrible ways.
So I looked at Claude in a way that I hoped conveyed my annoyance, and do you know what? It worked. He looked back at me for a long, silent moment, then turned on his heels and rolled off, only noticeably quicker than he rolled up. Later, years later, Claude would tell me that this ‘terrible thing’ in my gaze had deterred him.
“It scared the shit out of me.” He would say. “Seeing that look. And coming from such a pretty and angelic little face. Fucking frightening!” He would say.
And that was why he never tried to force himself on me again. And thinking about it, I think I know what the ‘terrible thing’ was that Claude saw. There is a line in Southey’s Thalaba that goes:
But in her eyes there dwelt
Brightness more terrible
Than all the loathsomeness of death.
And while reading the poem I had been sort of struck by those lines, and had been reading them over and over, and, well, somehow, I don’t quite know how, those lines, being stuck in my mind, must have, somehow, shone through, if you see what I mean. I mean, I must have been imagining what a look like that would actually look like, and got it absolutely right, and at just the right time-- when I was trying to convey my vexation to Claude. It’s the only explanation I can think of.
For the first nine years or so life in Riverdale was, on a clinical level, largely uneventful. I ate, slept, studied, and went on various treatment regimes designed to alleviate whatever problem they thought was ailing me. All of it was quite unnecessary of course, but not at all onerous. I mean there was no electrotherapy or anything like that involved, although some inmates did regularly receive shock treatment and seemed to benefit from it. And neither were there drugs. Mostly my ‘treatment’ involved long talks with the ward psychiatrists, of whom only the last two need concern us here.
Doctor Francis Arbuthnot would be the last but one. She was a plump, homely looking woman, with a round, kindly face, and thick, curly grey hair. She had a lovely smile and I liked her a lot. As she was a great dog lover, you could always smell her animals off her and see their cast-off hair on the navy blue, box-pleated skirt that she wore every day during all the time that I knew her. And you could see too, the dogs’ tooth-marks on the heavy brown brogues that always accompanied that skirt. But I didn’t mind the dog smell, the dog hairs, or their tooth-marks. What I did mind, though, but not so much that I got annoyed about it or anything like that, was what she sometimes did with her top dental plate.
She would do it after she’d put a question to me, and especially if I was giving a lengthy answer to a question, such as ‘who did I think The Blue Lady was?’ Well, I’m sure you’ll agree there’s no short answer to that one. But, anyway, what she did was manipulate her top plate with her tongue so that her dentures peered out from between her little Cupid’s bow lips. The reason I didn’t get annoyed was that I knew she was doing it unconsciously, and, as I’ve said, I liked her a lot.
Which was why, after long years of refusal, I eventually consented to hypnotherapy sessions with Doctor Arbuthnot, the object of them being to plumb the depths of my subconscious and ascertain what, precisely, had happened up on the school roof prior to Chanterelle’s awful demise. Had it been an accident, as I asserted, or had something more sinister occurred?
Well, the whole episode was an unmitigated disaster. As far as I can recall, my ‘rerun’ of events on the roof followed the explanation I had always, and unwaveringly, put forward. Except, that is, for the moment when I turned and saw the janitor and the workmen step out of the stairwell leading onto the roof. The difference under hypnotherapy was that from the corner of my eye, I glimpsed something ‘blue’ disappearing into the stairwell and for some unknown reason that slight alteration to the narrative threw me into some sort of hypno-hysteria that had me screaming like the proverbial banshee. Meanwhile, back in the ‘conscious world’ Doctor Arbuthnot was choosing that precise moment to drop down dead.
An autopsy showed the cause of her death to have been a heart attack. But there were some who were unkind enough to say, and say very pointedly, that heart attacks ‘can have many causes’: like a sudden threat being made against the victim, or perhaps an actual attack. (As death was not immediate, and Doctor Arbuthnot had hit, and bruised, her face while falling to oblivion, ‘suspicions’, naturally, arose.
I knew very well where it all emanated from, of course. It was all that, ‘Mad Mary’ hogwash bubbling up again. But I tell you I liked the woman! Why would I want to harm her? And I was in a trance when she succumbed! If anyone was in danger during that session, it was I! The person who put me under was dead! I could have been left in some zombie-like state for the rest of my days! As it happened, however, a good slap from one of the orderlies was enough to bring me to my senses. But that could have been down to luck, who can say!
What I can say, however, is that the nightmare of my final years in Riverdale, began with Doctor Arbuthnot’s death. And those who were quick to cast aspersions would do well to reflect on that. And reflect, too, on the fact that Doctor Arbuthnot, I very strongly sensed, was sanguine about the prospect of my being released someday. With her recommendation, which I felt sure would be forthcoming, although she never actually said as much; I would perhaps be let out on license. Finally, those who conducted the whispering campaign and raised doubts about the cause of Doctor Arbuthnot’s death should know this, they put a weapon in the hands of a wicked man, and he quite ruthlessly deployed that weapon against me---and to devastating effect. Well, to devastating effect for him and me both as it turned out.
Doctor Templeton Lightbody
Every institution has its grapevine, as I’m sure you’ll know, and Riverdale was no exception. No surprise, then, that even before he arrived as Doctor Arbuthnot’s replacement, Doctor Templeton Lightbody’s ‘slightly soiled’ reputation was the cause of much speculation. No one could say with any precision what sins he had committed. Not even if they were of the venial or mortal variety. But it was the generally held view among the inmates of the Sir John Duncan ward, that their new psychiatrist had been ‘invited’ to leave his previous post, at an altogether more august institution, and ‘apply’ for the vacant berth at the humbler Riverdale.
By the time he did arrive, I had of course matured into full womanhood, and was of an appearance that could be described as ‘comely’. I had grown to considerably above average height for a female. I had a fine head of lustrous brown hair that I kept long. I had good bone structure in a heart-shaped face whose component parts were: large hazel eyes, set well apart and in milky white Sclera; a slim nose (that some may have thought a tad too long, but who’s perfect?); and a mouth that conformed to the orthodox aesthetic by being generous in width and full of lip. My physique, for its part, was suitably curvaceous, and I could slip quite easily into a size 10 straitjacket. (I speak in jest).
I could see all of these attributes being slowly taken in by the watchful grey eyes of Doctor Templeton Lightbody when we first met in his ward office. He was a weedy little man, fiftyish, with narrow, rounded shoulders and a thin, sharp, pointy face. He wore brown lather sandals, and was seated on top of his large, mahogany desk, with his hands palm downwards and held beneath his spindly thighs; as if he was afraid of what they might do if left free to roam. He sat leaning slightly forward and swinging his legs back and forth in the space between the two columns that housed the desk drawers. On the out-swing I could see the area of skin between the top of his bobbly, white nylon socks, and the bottoms of his hitched-up, Crimplene slacks (a sort of brownish colour, they were) and note, with no little revulsion, its chicken-like texture and pallor.
The conversation that day was remarkable only for the way in which Lightbody would laugh at his own inane remarks and throw back his head to reveal a scrawny neck whose skin seemed barely able to contain the enormous Adam’s apple that bobbed crazily beneath it. I never so much as tittered once at his terrible jokes, but it didn’t bother him. A man as full of himself as Templeton Lightbody saw a poor response to his ‘humour’ as a sign that it was simply too sophisticated for the listener. If, after a joke had fallen flat, you too had seen the fixed little smile on his wire-thin lips, the way he inclined his tiny head to the left, and that oh-so-condescending look in his eyes, I’m sure you would agree.
These ‘getting to know you’ sessions went on for about six months. Sometimes, as per hospital rules, a female orderly would be present. But after a while Lightbody began to ask if I wouldn’t mind seeing him in his office in the evening, and alone. Such one-to-one sessions, he assured me, would be more conducive to his gaining ‘insight’ into my problems.
Well, call me naïve, but I went along with his suggestion in the hope that this ‘gaining of insight’ would lead Lightbody to the view that I was fit for release. And indeed the first such encounters were quite formal affairs, with the physician seeming genuinely interested in both my history and prognosis. So, one evening, I braced myself and raised the question of my release.
Lightbody was fussing over a cactus plant that, along with a full- length mirror, he had added to the office’s fixtures and fittings some weeks before, when I put the question to him. He froze suddenly, and then, still bent over the plant, he slowly turned his head to look at me and repeated my question.
“When might you expect to be released?” He asked.
“Yes.” I said
He turned back to the cactus for a moment, tweaked at some spines, then left the succulent and assumed his usual position seated on his mahogany desk, hands beneath thighs, legs swinging.
“Is something wrong, Mary.” He asked. “I mean, what’s brought this on? This, talk of release?”
“Well, I have been here for a very long time, Doctor Lightbody. Isn’t it natural that I should think of my release?”
“Mmmm.I suppose.” He mused, then, with a big forward swing of his legs, he jumped from the desk, thrust his hands deep into his pockets, hunched his narrow shoulders and began to kick at something invisible on the thick, office carpet.
“Yes I suppose release should be on your mind. So, try to think about it logically, my dear.” He then went on. “ I personally have a big say in who is, and, who is not, released from Riverdale. Not the only say, mind you, but a big one nevertheless, perhaps even a pivotal one; you do know that don’t you?”
“Of course.” I said
“Good. That’s good.” He said. “ And do you also know that ugly rumours continue to persist about the actual cause of Doctor Arbuthnot’s death? That some doubt continues to inhabit the minds of those others who would have a say in your release?”
“But I had nothing to do with it!” I protested. “I was in a trance!”
“Precisely, my dear.” He oozed. “Which means that even you cannot be entirely certain about what went on. And then there is the question of why hypnotherapy was being used in the first place: to try to determine what took place on the school roof. Your extreme reaction strongly suggests you were far from pleased with whatever bubbled up from your subconscious. Perhaps your long-held claim that the obese Chanterelle’s death was accidental----took a bit of a bashing?”
“It was an accident! Nothing came to light.” I said, in a voice that faltered slightly as I recalled that patch of blue disappearing into the stairwell. Could it have been The Blue Lady, I asked myself for the thousandth time, and hated myself for letting that possibility worry me in the least? For even if it had been her, and even if she’d ordered me to harm Chanterelle, it didn’t mean I had. I mean I wasn’t her slave, was I?
“Alas. That is not the commonly held view among those--other—decision makers. In those lofty quarters the hypothesis is that the fat girl’s death was not an accident, and since you continue to insist that it was, there is no remorse on your part.”
“ I’m sorry she’s dead.” I said.
“That is not the same as saying you’re sorry you killed her, my dear.” He replied.
No kick or punch from my father, no stroke with that heavy brown belt of his, had caused me the pain and anguish that Lightbody’s comments brought with them. I had never been able to say precisely when I would be released from Riverdale, but given my years in that place, I had allowed myself to believe by then that freedom would come to me sooner rather than later. But now, in view of Lightbody’s remarks, I cursed myself for a fool for having indulged in such optimism.
“What precisely are you telling me, Doctor?” I asked, needlessly, but because I simply could not think of anything else to say. ‘Could scarcely even think under the circumstances.
“That your chances of release are, for the foreseeable future, -----not fantastic, my dear.”
“That’s not fair.” I said, stupidly, and again because the gears in my thought process were slipping hopelessly.
“ But of course, if I could be somehow persuaded to chip, chip, chip away at those negative perceptions of you that are held by the High Panjandrums. If I could be encouraged to say that Mary is not the bad girl you suppose her to be, well, who knows, you may yet bid farewell to Riverdale before you are too much older.”
“Persuaded, Doctor? Encouraged? What do you mean?” I asked, though my composure had returned sufficiently for me to guess what he meant. Indeed, it was his oleaginous tone and steely gaze as he spoke that had cut through my momentary befuddlement and restored me to full alertness.
“You were little more than a girl when you came here, isn’t that right, my dear?” He asked.
“Right.’” I agreed.
“And in your time here you will have had to rely on, shall we say, DIY, when it comes to sexual activity, or, you may have had the benefit of some ‘apparatus’ perhaps? I know that sort of thing does go on, but you needn’t ‘fess up’ if you have, because it is of no interest to me whatsoever. No, what I’m getting at, what I’m saying, is that you have never met Mr. Mouse, have you, my dear?”
“Mr. Mouse? No.” I said.
“Of course you haven’t. Because Mr. Mouse lives in men’s trousers, and you have never seen inside men’s trousers, have you, Mary?”
“No.” I said. As he walked to a spot behind me.
“Good.’” He said, with a sort of sigh, and then went on in similar vein. “Well now, turn around and meet my Mr. Mouse, Mary my dear.”
Well, were it not for the fact that I then knew what horrors lay in store for me, I’m sure I would have fallen about laughing at the sight of him. There he was, with his awful Crimplene slacks lying around his ankles, and with his shirt held up at his waist to show the purple Y-fronts with green flashings from which his spindly legs with their fowl-like covering seemed to dangle.
“As a special treat, I’ve decided to let you perform the final unveiling, my dear. So come forward and kneel before me.”
“But Doctor.” I said. “If I do as you ask, how can I know you will advocate my freedom? How can I know you will not---try to keep me here for as long as possible? You certainly would have reason to”
“You cannot know that, Mary. But can you afford not to gamble that I am a man of my word?”
He was right, of course. If I had refused, I would most definitely be condemning myself to many more years in Riverdale. And yet, even if I agreed, I did not believe for a moment that Lightbody would fight my corner. But what options did I have? If I had gone to the ‘authorities’ and told them of Lightbody’s ‘proposition’ would they have believed me, a girl they suspected of murder and mayhem, or would they have taken the word of one of their own when he dismissed my claims as lunatic ramblings—as he assuredly would?
It was, in modern parlance, a no-brainer. And that was Lightbody’s ace-in-the-hole. His word would always prevail against mine. That was his great strength. And it was in thinking about this unfair advantage of his that I recalled something I had read somewhere about one of the oriental martial arts that taught it’s adepts to turn an opponent’s strengths against him. A crude example would be that, if some hulk came charging at you, you should use his own momentum to throw him to the ground. And so it was, with that half remembered and hopeful fragment in mind that I did as I was bid and hooked my thumbs into the loose legs of Lightbody’s Y-fronts and pulled them downwards. And as I did so, my thumbs inadvertently raked the sides of his puny thighs, causing him to sigh again and shiver ecstatically.