‘That was a BBC Radio Four production in conjunction with The Cambridge Short Story Prize. The winning entry ‘Todd’ was written by Frances Covington and read by David Tennant. It was produced in our Bristol studios.’
So, there it was, my allotted minutes of Warholian fame – actually closer to sixteen if one counts the continuity announcement.
more than you deserve
I do not count the previous 10,080 minutes as they covered only the edited lowlights of my life so far: arrest, trial, sentencing. Gratuitous, vulgar, lowest common denominator copy. Infamy rather than fame per se.
pillock
The short story, however, is of an altogether higher factorial. An alleged work of fiction yet Frances Covington hints that she knows of my life of trials. It is interesting that a woman whom I have never met has crashed into my orbit on such an auspicious day; April fourth, zero-four, zero-four with the moon in waning gibbous. That she appropriated my story without my permission I will overlook.
tautology
Zadok unlocks my door and pokes his head through the gap. He looks double-shifts rough. The man is truly stuck on the mortgage repayment hamster wheel.
‘You alright, sonny?’ He calls everyone sonny; he likely cannot remember our names due to the sleep deprivation. ‘I thought I heard voices.’
‘You are in the right place then.’
idiot
‘Tee-bloody-hee. But you’re okay though?’
‘Yes, thank you, Mr Priest.’
He comes in and plonks himself down on the plastic chair, leaves the door wide open in case I jump on him. The shower is not his friend. I open the window the full seven centimetres and breathe the air. Our own personal hygiene is under constant scrutiny and any transgressions are passed on to the Clinical Team for opprobrium but he can smell like a dead seal.
Zadok looks at my transistor radio as Chopin’s Minute Waltz winds down and we are welcomed above the rousing studio-audience applause to Just a Minute. ‘Did you listen to the, erm, programme?’
‘I did.’
He draws his podgy hand through his thinning hair and flashes an incongruent smile. ‘At least you haven’t chucked the radio through the window.’
His attempt to inject levity into the situation suggests that he was expecting me to be disturbed by what I heard.
‘I can appreciate the momentary satisfaction inherent in that action but it would achieve little.’
ponce
‘So, you’re not angry then?’ His scrutinous stare would be unnerving were it not delivered through the eyes of a budgerigar.
‘My radio cost me four weeks’ allowance and the indignity of writing a formal request to Dr Siskin.’ I spray a burst of Sauvage Elixir in his general direction. ‘Securing permission for a replacement electrical item that has been used to break glass, rules, and potentially a passer-by’s cranium, would be a hoop too far.’
truth
‘Are you planning on doing anything silly?’ The question passes for a clinical risk assessment in this establishment. I picture myself in a clown costume juggling with eels.
‘No, Mr Priest. I am not.’
get him to leave
Mentor Tormentor has had enough of him, as have I. I turn off the radio and lie on my bed. My photograph of Mango in happier times stares down at me. Frances Covington changed his name to Peaches in the story but it does not suit him. Next to Mango is the black and white picture of Sister Ignatia that I cut from The Guardian newspaper. She has the face of a saintly walnut.
Zadok gets to his feet. ‘If you want to talk later, you know where I am.’ He closes the door leaving his malodour effusing in my two-by-three-by-three cubic metres.
I assume the corpse position; my arms alongside my body, palms open to the ceiling and think about Dr Frances Covington. The therapist with whom my family entrusted their sorry tale is not just a second-rate shrink after all. She understands my special status. I had believed myself to be the only one to hold the terrible privilege, the Herculean burden. Perhaps she bears it too.
Changing my name to Todd in the story was an attempt to adhere to the rules of patient confidentiality but who else has nailed a family pet to their front door crucifixion style? Altering the breed of the dog from Finnish spitz to corgi was hardly obfuscating. Dr Covington made light of my grotesque perpetration of Mango’s demise for the Radio Four listeners: “…. his tongue out like a wacky cartoon character. Todd mimicked it; earning a stern look from Mrs Tussock across the road who was seemingly taking a five-minute break from daytime TV.” Humorous nonetheless.
Dr Covington tried to camouflage Father and Sis but the characterisation of them as weak, stupid and self-absorbed made them instantly recognisable. The portrayal of herself as the incompetent psychotherapist Dr Giselle Henderson-Clow, was hilarious, well-observed and shows a degree of humility that is sadly lacking amongst the medics here. Depicting herself as a fool, getting everything wrong from diagnosis to prognosis was genius. I like her.
The clunk-clunk of the turning lock, a lackey slides the tray across the floor and slams the door behind him. It is a joy to be feared, and quite the accolade in here.
room service
I am bestowed the delicacy of steak and kidney pie. An imprudent choice given that we have a cannibal on Eden ward; two if you count Terry who claims to swallow live sparrows. I pick out the three lumps of meat and leave the cold mashed potato and limp grey beans of indeterminate variety. The flaccid banana for dessert does not appeal. Mother is visiting tomorrow and will doubtless provide a veritable hamper of guilt-induced provisions.
Room service was hard won. One was expected to queue up at the food hatch with the pondlife then sit with them as they downed their dinner in unseemly and boorish haste. For weeks I endured open-mouthed chewing, slurping and burping of the vilest nature. My polite requests for permission to eat in my room were ignored. I am not a man troubled by base instincts so it took considerable effort to overturn the tables without the aid of increased heart rate, arterial tension or a testosterone surge. Alarms blared, neanderthals cheered, key-swingers ran. Et voila! My punishment; to eat alone in my room. Perfect.
do the banana thing
MT is childish sometimes but it is best to appease him.
do the banana thing
I acquiesce and smear the banana on the floor for comedic effect. It works every time. Failure to learn is a characteristic of the stupid, the feckless and the psychopath; categories that are all disproportionately represented within the Venn diagram of the staff on Eden. I do not have long to wait, the gaunt one with a perpetual black eye enters to collect my tray, skids straight across the floor, arms flailing and lands on his coccyx. Laughter is the best medicine. Better than Aripiprazole.
***
‘Hey, B you coming to Woodwork?’
B is an abridgement of Bat which is an abridgement of Batman. Nicknames can become very cryptic in here. No one deigned to explain the aetiology of mine and I did not ask, so for many months I assumed that the name was predicated on my heroic nature or else on my crepuscular habits. When I was introduced to a new arrival – together with the factually accurate but grammatically incorrect advisory: ‘Batman don’t talk much,’ I learnt that my name was in fact a play on the Batman theme-tune and alludes to poor Sister Ignatia; Nun-a-nun-a-nun-a-nun-a-Batman. Not nice.
The Fly is waiting for my response but I walk away. His serious disregard for personal space makes me uncomfortable, so too his insistence on the use of the definite article in direct address; a courtesy that he does not extend to others. I join the end of the woodwork queue as the first door is unlocked, earning an expletive from Big Bob who has to adjust the ‘off ward’ numbers and radio my name to the Orwellian-named Movement Control.
Outside there is unexpected sunshine. It feels nice upon the skin.
stop using the word nice
The walk to the workshop can be strung out to eleven or twelve minutes by affecting a limp or stopping to tie one’s shoe. On this bright afternoon we are all lame and unlaced and Zadok threatens to turn us round and march us straight back to Eden. He relents when Clucky – who claims to have once played the lead in an am-dram production of Hamlet – falls to his knees, his hands clasped in a theatrical plea.
The thick stone walls and cavernous beamed roof lend the woodwork building the air of a deconsecrated cathedral. It has trapped the cold of winter which it will not release until mid-summer. It is rather nice.
nice
crap vocabulary
like a seven-year-old girl
I claim the back workbench that affords a prime view of the kitchen gardens from where I can admire my rows of broad beans, chives and beetroot. No one gets their rows as straight as I do. Pathologically straight, Mr Thurlow says. The xanthic glow of the twenty-four-hour security lights evoke the Russian border. The tops of the straggly pines are visible beyond the outer wall. Ah, there, the undulating flight of a green woodpecker flashes through the trees and away. The only green creature in my top ten favourite animals.
it’s a sign
Mr Rivera is wheeling his trolley between the benches, handing out our works in progress; a woeful collection of coasters, misaligned picture frames and wonky bird-boxes. Julian the Strange is sanding down the chopping board that he has been working on for the past three months. It will be a placemat by the time he is finished. Clucky is making a set of emery boards from ice cream sticks and sandpaper; hardly Thomas Chippendale.
My five-panel bookcase with dovetail joints has two shelves. Quite sufficient as since the discovery of sachets of white powder between the pages of Anne of Green Gables and a chisel in a hollowed-out Mayor of Casterbridge we are restricted to twelve books per person. Most of Eden ward’s patients had no books until the rationing made everyone demand their full quota. Now there are dozens more to count, rifle through and set before the sniffer dogs. I sold off my Orwell and Hemingway collections at considerable profit.
the joy of an unintended consequence
Mr Rivera runs his hand along the top of the bookcase in evident admiration. ‘Well done, Edgar, you’re ready to varnish.’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Mahogany, Tudor oak or clear?’
‘Clear, please.’ I would prefer Tudor oak but it would clash with the grey linoleum in my room.
I dab the flat-bristled brush into the varnish and draw it down the length of the panel. The pleasure is fleeting. My equilibrium is abruptly de-kiltered.
put the brush down
put the brush down
put the brush down
I put the brush down and pay attention to the shift in external Cartesian coordinates that plot my origin, my present, my future. I experience a profound and urgent sense that my life is about to change.
2
The Siskin Chapel is book-lined and carpeted. I sit quietly in the armchair and appreciate the sound baffling and lack of fluorescent tubes. My one thousand pounds per night bed-and-board – footed by Britain’s hard-working families – includes fortnightly forays into this inner sanctum. Not everyone gets the head honcho; Siskin takes only the headliners. I suspect that forensic psychiatrists quickly become habituated; you’ve seen one stranger-stabber you’ve seen them all. They yearn for something stranger, something stabbier. I was saveur de mois for a while.
pretentious prat
Siskin and his disciple sit side-by-side and study me as if I were growing on a petri-dish. He always has someone in tow to serve as supplicant, exalter, venerator; today it is a small medical student with the eyes of a wounded deer.
‘Edgar Wallace, age twenty-five, manslaughter with diminished responsibility, Section 37/41 restriction order,’ Siskin rattles off my credentials.
‘Theodore Siskin, mid-forties, no known criminal record, served six years in Longmarsh, no planned date of release,’ I reply.
The deer breaks off the lid of her biro.
‘He thinks he’s quite the comedian.’ Siskin holds my gaze. ‘Perhaps you would like to tell Ms – he glances at the photo ID lanyarded around her neck – Ms Armitage, how you came to be here?’
The deer inclines her head towards me in rapt anticipation. I inhale deeply as if to steady myself for the great disclosure. I hold the moment. I swallow.
‘I was brought in an armoured police van.’
The deer egg-cups her knee with laced fingers and glances at Siskin for reassurance. The three-day post-application growth of her pink nail varnish suggests that she went out on Saturday night, perhaps on a student pub crawl. She will have told her friends of her imminent visit to Longmarsh, imagine the cachet as she basked in the reflected glory of the gory. They will be eagerly awaiting the next instalment. ‘How was the madhouse? Meet anyone infamous?’
‘Edgar has paranoid schizophrenia.’ Siskin tries to pin me back into the specimen drawer with the sharp end of the diagnosis. ‘He has a high IQ but lacks insight.’
‘“Lacks insight” means that I do not agree with my diagnosis,’ I inform the deer who is now scribbling notes in impossibly small handwriting.
‘Do you recall what we discussed in our last session?’
It was less a discussion, more an instructional monologue directed at the two medical students who had thrown themselves in prostration at the feet of His Holiness. He enjoys casting his pearls swineward.
‘Indeed, I have an excellent memory.’
‘Then perhaps you could summarise for Ms Armitage?’
‘I was told that I need to stop intellectualising and to acknowledge my feelings.’ My current feelings towards the doctor are a merry little band of emotions that often team up when I am in his presence; animosity, dislike and fleeting contempt. I seldom bother with anger; it carries such cognitive disturbance.
‘Would you like to ask Edgar any questions?’
The deer presses the pleat in her Marks and Spencer trousers and offers me a weak smile that suggests a default to appease.
‘Do you hear voices?’
Straight at me from Mental Illness 101. At least she has yet to develop the universal therapist voice and thus her delivery is not coated in insipid faux sensitivity. The usual phrasing: ‘Do you ever hear things that other people cannot?’ is not, as I had originally thought, an inquiry into my exceptional auditory acuity. Siskin’s jaw tightens. He did not expect such a blunt question from the underling. I decide to tell her the truth.
‘MT.’
don’t bring me into it matey
‘You feel empty?’ There is a kindness in her voice.
‘No, I hear MT.’
She wrestles momentarily with the information but it throws her to the floor. ‘Empty?’ she repeats.
‘Mike. Tango.’
‘You hear the voice of Mike Tango?’ She cannot conceal her excitement.
snitch
‘He is being deliberately obtuse.’ Siskin stomps on the embers of her potential breakthrough.
everything you say
will be written down
and used against you
Through the arched window, I watch a dark shadow move across the brick wall, above it a bank of cloud parts to frame a vista of open sky. Way up beyond us in every direction I feel the universe expanding.
‘What are you thinking about right now?’ asks the deer, rallying.
‘The quaquaversal universe.’
The wide eyes widen. ‘Could you spell that, please?’
‘Quebec-Uniform-Alpha-Quebec-Uniform-Alpha-Victor-Echo-Romeo-Sierra-Alpha-Lima.’
Her eyes register a profound pity twinned with helpless confusion. A non-verbal eloquence that will not serve her well.
‘Neologism,’ mutters Siskin through his clenched jaw. He thinks I have invented the word. Everything he does not understand is a symptom.
half-man half-diagnostic manual
Ha ha ha
Siskin nods to the deer and she scribbles another note; my guess is ‘Incongruous affect.’
‘I’m told that you heard the radio broadcast that fictionalised your family’s therapy session.’ Siskin crosses his meagre legs. His shoes are Italian leather and could do with a buffing. He loves a bit of notoriety porn. It was not a question so I wait for the usual one. Here it comes.
‘How did that make you feel?’
‘There was a lot to like. The impressive and highly amusing mix of voices, the wit and humour and the creeping horror when we encounter the sinister yet delightful Todd. The author fictionalised the facts but she caught a profound truth. There was a dark humour in the description of the dog’s demise and the denouement of Todd’s mortality test of his sister brought an unexpected twist.’
‘I wasn’t asking for a review, I was asking about your feelings.’ Siskin smooths his clip-on tie, revealing a shiny band of white flesh where once was a wedding ring. Interesting.
I examine the spines of the rows of books behind him, most appear to have never been opened.
‘Edgar, you threw a hand grenade into your family and the aftermath was broadcast on Radio Four. I expect that ignited some feelings.’ He is a master of the gratuitous image.
‘I understand that grenades are available for purchase on the dark web.’ The slow release of his exhalation is gratifying. Nothing riles Siskin more than intransigent literalism.
‘Have you had any thoughts of harming the therapist who wrote the story?’
It is interesting that he raises potential contact between myself and Dr Covington. He knows something. I stay silent.
‘How do you feel about your father and sister going to family therapy without you?’ Pipes the deer, emboldened by Siskin’s failure to engage me. I am warming to her.
‘They only went once. Father did not find it value for money. But they picked a good one. The therapist seems to know me better than the psychiatrists who have actually met me.’ My comment hangs in the air waiting for Siskin to breathe it in.
‘To understand someone, they have to tell you the truth,’ he says.
‘To understand someone, you have to believe the truth they tell you.’
check mate
you need to find her
