33

The DHU was in uproar tonight. It’s a full moon and there are two new patients on the ward. Some shenanigans between them at supper time resulted in one being taken to a seclusion cell. As a result, I was here early, waiting in the corridor for Dr Webster’s room to be unlocked.

The calm up here is like paradise after the man-smells and chaos of the DHU. While I was waiting, I heard the opening bars of the first aria of the Goldberg Variations drifting up from somewhere on the lower storeys. A patient? It seems unlikely, but perhaps someone’s co-operation in the safe space has earned them music privileges.

Dr White unlocked the office for me with obvious reluctance. ‘Is there a music room in the building?’ I asked.

He pointedly ignored the question. ‘We’re reviewing your access to the computer,’ he said.

‘I believe you mentioned that during our work together,’ I said. But my attempt at ingratiation came out as sarcasm.

‘In the meantime, I’m going to have to ask you to use it strictly within office hours as it’s too disruptive to have you up here at other times.’

‘Won’t Dr Webster be needing the computer in office hours?’ I asked.

‘I’ll be back at eight fifteen,’ he said as he locked me in and left. I listened out for the diminuendo of his heavy tread and the fading jingle of the loose change in his pocket.

Once he was gone, I checked to make sure Webster’s spare keys were still in the tin where she keeps her Hobnobs. As it turns out, she’s unlikely to be needing either. I’ve eaten the biscuits, and the keys … Well, perhaps better not to say.

I logged on as her tonight and found the extract appended above.

It’s going to sound like wisdom after the event, but I rather had the sense that someone was reading my testimony.

She’s too smart to say it anywhere in the text, but it’s clear that Webster meant for me to read it.

The sense of exoneration makes me almost tearful.

My elation is succeeded by a chastening sense of regret that I was so dilatory in giving my testimony. I can think of half a dozen better witnesses than the ones she was armed with. She jumped the gun, really. If only she’d had my information on the accident.

But imagine: Ron still alive and compos mentis!

Through the window, London is the orange blur in the sky behind the outpatients’ unit.

These fragments I have shored against my ruins.

What to do in the time left to me?

Rereading: I give him Q’s file.

I give him Q’s file?

Surely, Webster meant to write I show him Q’s file?

Could she be so soft, so credulous, so daddy-fixated as to give those papers to White, a man who is at best an aggrieved quack, at worst …? Well, no worst, there is none.

Not a hint of softening in White’s attitude to me. Just the threat to revoke my use of the computer. He doesn’t believe her. Or he can’t believe her?

I’m beyond worrying about myself, but Webster has no idea what she’s tangling with.

It’s the Glenn Gould version. I can hear it clearly now. Someone’s opened the window and the music is

Knowle Court

DECEMBER 2010–?

1

So much has changed since I last looked at these pages that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Pages. How tenacious the old metaphors are.

I find myself once more in a library, surrounded by the spines of old books. I recall Pascal Sheldon’s cadaverous and self-satisfied face: the printed book is dead. Dust rises when I ease one off the shelves. So these are an obsolete technology, like Victrola needles and buggy whips.

It is a volume of Mayakovsky and its unstamped bookplate suggests the students of Knowle Court found nothing of interest here. The cover is of a pretty constructivist design. The poetry has the gritty scent of revolutionary Moscow. I hear the steely timbre of his voice, insisting – what I’ve grasped myself too late – that words possess the kabbalistic potency of the tetragrammaton:

I know the power of words. They seem a trifle

Fallen petals beneath a dancer’s feet

But they hold a man’s soul, and lips, and bone.

When I think of my children, I tend to remember them when they were little, before their difficult-to-negotiate passage into altered teenage carcasses. These are two snapshots: Lucius, launching himself into a stumbling run towards some climbing apparatus with the asymmetrical bulge of a sodden nappy halfway down one trouser leg; Sarah, perched naked on a toilet seat, calling imperiously for Leonora to wipe her bum.

But how? My eyes have never seen such things. What other memories have been extirpated to admit these ones? Yet what can I do but express the soul I find imprinted on me? You cannot choose what to love. Beliefs, as Webster said to Ron, are what we invest our emotions in.

The tremor in my left hand is like the ominous grating note of a failing engine. I am growing weaker daily. What is this testimony but the collateral sparkings of a dying consciousness? I am the shadow thrown by a guttering candle. But while the flame still burns, I will complete this task.

*

Dr Philip Marshall White, Webster’s much-admired PW, had stolen up on me while I was working at the computer. I had the presence of mind to turn and shield the screen from him. He insisted on seeing it. I pulled out the power cable from the back of the monitor; the display contracted to a tiny dot and vanished.

This minor act of insubordination was the pretext he needed to cancel my access to the computer. That wasn’t all.

‘We think it’s counterproductive for you to have therapy at the moment,’ he told me. ‘You’re too unbalanced. We’ll be looking for better pharmaceutical outcomes before we risk overstimulating you again.’

They started me off with oral doses of antipsychotic drugs which made me nauseous and confused. For a couple of days, I was able to avoid taking them by concealing the pills under my tongue or palming them and then flushing them down the toilet, but the nurses had the instincts for deception of Las Vegas croupiers. When blood tests confirmed that I hadn’t been taking the medicine, Dr White confronted me. This time, I lost my temper with him and called him a fraud and liar. He summoned the restraint team and they forcibly injected me with a massive shot of Acuphase. I was asleep in the seclusion cell for almost seventy-two hours. They didn’t bother with pills after that, they simply stuck me with a fortnightly injection of haloperidol and whatever else they thought would keep me pliant.

With no computer access and my mind too washed out with drugs to read, I found the time passed terribly slowly. There was a careful hierarchy of activities for the clients in the DHU: creative writing and pottery for the most biddable, painting for others, but the hard cases, of which I was now one, had to be content with watching daytime television through the fog of antipsychotic medication.

And the drugs had a whole raft of unpleasant physical side-effects. I had muscular spasms, an agonising tightness in my neck and back and uncontrollable twitching in my face. The medication induced a sense of restlessness that could find no outlet. It was intolerable to sit for any length of time. I ate standing up so that I could keep moving, and I spent hours in my cubicle shifting from foot to foot, trying to console myself by muttering poems under my breath. There was a whole number of them in there, intact, that I couldn’t remember ever reading: Hopkins, Esenin, Mandelstam; I knew they were among Vera’s favourites and it crossed my mind that she’d coded and tossed them in, just as my mother used to sew a five-pound note into the jacket lining of my school uniform for emergencies.