annashay 
by Tim Pears
IT WAS CALLED a mental hospital in those days. Why they put me on the children’s wing, I don’t know. I was still a child myself. Maybe that’s why. I was sick with education. I’d had enough, studying other people’s successes. I suppose I wanted to make my own mistakes.
It was a huge Victorian asylum. A semi-circular building, which housed kitchen, laundry, and administrative offices. Radiating from this panopticon were six long blocks, or wings, each with rooms and wards either side of a long corridor. Each ward hosted a different category of patient.
One ward held children temporarily, after they’d suffered some kind of breakdown. The psychiatrists juggled drugs, tried to balance their out of kilter chemistry with medication. Being wholly ignorant myself, when their families visited I watched surreptitiously, tried to detect signs of damage inflicted in the home. My general theory then was that the majority of adults were unfit to be parents; that society itself was one huge lunatic asylum, really.
On a different ward were severely handicapped children who could not speak but uttered periodic screams or howls. I’m not sure they made more noise at night than in the day but it seemed like they did because the other wards were so quiet then. On a late shift it was like being in a rain forest, the unearthly sounds these patients made.
This was a time of blossoming therapies. Actors and dancers, musicians and painters, who couldn’t make a living in the harsh world outside used their art to help people with mental health problems. I fell for a dance therapist called Rachel and wangled the staff support slot. She never said much, just put on records and danced to the music, and patients joined in if they wanted. Some of the howlers were brought to her class in their wheelchairs, which I couldn’t understand. I think it was the regular nursing staff’s way of poking fun, undermining Rachel. But she welcomed them and asked me to wheel them around to the music. You could tell how much they liked it. Their groans took on a new strain of joy.
I tried to sneak into any class with the Down’s Syndrome patients, but they were popular with all the nursing assistants, apart from one or two who didn’t like being touched. Every new member of staff, and therapist, must have thought the same as me: that here were a group of people who may have been handicapped yet had extraordinary insight, who perceived one’s unique qualities. But then another new employee appeared and the Down’s patients’ avid friendliness transferred to them. It was a kind of benevolent initiation rite.
Anorexia was not as common then as it would soon become, but still there were often one or two stick-thin girls who’d decided to stop eating. Their parents were the ones I felt most sorry for. If I’m honest, it was a relief to be transferred to the men’s wing.
At first the psycho-geriatric ward was a shock. There was no therapy. No-one here was getting better. They were old men who had either developed dementia or already had mental health problems, surviving despite them into decrepitude. Billy had been there all his adult life. I was told he’d been admitted originally because he was homeless, unemployed, without kin. Billy could not stay still. He would get up from his chair and stumble around, trembling. ‘What can I do?’ he asked us nurses, desperate to be useful. ‘What can I do?’
Most of the nurses here were ex-servicemen. They seemed to treat the patients like prisoners of war, grudgingly, and amused themselves where they could. One of them told me they’d discovered how to help Billy, when constipated with the drugs, empty his bowels. We accompanied Billy to the toilets, sat him down, and the nurse lit him a cigarette. Billy puffed away until he started coughing, a real smoker’s cough, which activated the required result.
It was a casual cruelty, expressed, for example, in teasing the patients during the medication round: withholding the ubiquitous Largactil from those who desired it, forcing it upon those who refused.
Mr Martin lived in a state of perpetual surprise as to what he was doing in the hospital. ‘I need to go home,’ he said, his eyes wide with worry, even terror. An ex-bank manager, he was unfailingly polite. ‘I can’t stay here, I’m afraid. My wife will be most concerned.’ Mr Martin managed to escape from the locked ward at least once a week. Often one of the gardeners brought him back before his absence had been noticed, but once I was sent to look for him and found him outside one of the children’s wards, staring in through a window.
Most of these old men had no visitors. They’d outlived their contemporaries, been abandoned by offspring, were marooned. The one or two patients who had visitors were often confused by the attention. Within minutes of their relatives leaving, they forgot they’d ever been there.
Gerald was a cantankerous chap, despite tranquilising medication. He had home-made tattoos like some of my friends, rendered barely legible on his aged skin. He was mostly immobile and his speech was slurred but confrontational. ‘Wanna fight?’ he yelled. The ex-Army staff baited him. I was once giving him a bath when his fist shot up from underwater and caught me clean on the jaw. I fell back in surprise. If he’d been physically stronger I’d have been knocked out, for sure—it was a beautiful uppercut.
Some of the patients were bed-ridden. One bald old man lay curled up on his side. He did not move or speak or interact with us in any way. We spooned food into him and replaced his incontinence pads. Over the months I was there he grew smaller, curling up a little tighter each day, his bones locking, reverting to a kind of ancient foetus.
We worked four long days on and three days off. A staff nurse was in charge of each day shift, one an ex-serviceman, the other an effeminate, humourless chap called Simon. Simon was a big guy, tall and overweight, but light on his feet. If someone was in his path or he was in theirs he would dance out of the way. If he was a different kind of man, I told him, he could have been a great boxer.
I got put on to Simon’s shift. Probably I requested it, I can’t recall now. When we came back from our three days off, the incapacitated patients invariably had bed sores. Simon made sure we turned them regularly and they healed, but then we’d be off for another three days. One of these patients was dying. Deranged, and in great pain from cancer of the bowel. His shit had an infernal stench. I longed for him to go. When eventually he breathed his last it was late on our shift.
I helped Simon lay out the body. He turned some lights off. In my memory I see us working by candlelight, which couldn’t have been the case. We washed the dead man, blocked his orifices, tied his jaw shut, dressed him in a clean hospital gown. Simon proceeded in silence, and I offered whatever minor assistance I could. He continued patiently, long after the end of our shift. I believe it was around this time that I lost what was left of my childhood religious faith, yet simultaneously acquired the beginnings of something similar that replaced it, if that makes sense. A faith in people, maybe. Some people.
I handed in my notice a few weeks later. I felt I was letting Simon down, but I had to leave. There was a great weight bearing down on me, I was too immature for this kind of work. Dreams of tenderly murdering patients had invaded my waking thoughts.
At the end of my final shift I said my goodbyes and left the hospital. Walking across the car park, I experienced a strange sensation. My chest lifted, I was filled with air, it was like I was floating free from the ground. Then my feet touched down again. I got into the car and drove away.
oOo
Tim Pears is the author of twelve novels, including In the Place of Fallen Leaves (which received the Hawthornden Prize and the Ruth Hadden Memorial Award) and Landed (which received the MJA Open Book Award, and was shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize and the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.) He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has been the recipient of a Lannan Award.
