Sin... all white?

Blue. My favourite colour.

Profiteroles, my dessert of choice.

Risperdal, my drug of enforced peace.

White... well you'd expect everyone to like white, wouldn't you? Clean, crisp, pure. Can't stand it myself. Strangely, my dislike of the colour turned up, tapping me on the shoulder and saying 'Hi', not long after I arrived here. I think it may have had something to do with the glaring ghastliness of pretty much everything around - the walls, the uniforms, the lights that burn into the back of your head like lasers in your eyes, even when they're closed. I would think that could have an effect on your opinion of something.

It's like, I used to like snow. Snowfall, snow scenes, snowballs and snow angels. Oh, and snowmen of course. I once pushed a small snowball down a hill with my family to try and see how big it would get when we reached the bottom. In the end, we couldn't move it and it was bigger than us. I used to like crisp, starched white sheets on my bed. Now, I have them and I hate them. Now, if it snows, I would turn from the window and star at the wall. I would, but it's pointless - the wall and the ceiling and the floor are as white as the snow.

In a blizzard, it's like I am being suffocated by the total expanse of nothing.

But blue... what I wouldn't give for a bit of blue. We have the sky out the window, when it's not overcast. We have... erm... Nope, that's it. The sky. That's all the blue we get. You even find yourself looking into people's eyes for a hint of another colour. But even they're surrounded by white. Granted quite often, in here, that's tinged with red.

Why do you think it is that they remove all colour from our world? Is it therapeutic? Meant to calm the savage beast? Red is the rag to the bull so remove any trace of that and its compadres? Do they think, if there a glimmer of green or an orchestra of orange, the inmates would take over the asylum?

No. It's control. Pure and simple. A demonstration of what they can take away from you. They may profess to be able to give you back your mind, but in reality - something severely lacking in here - they strip you of everything you have and everything you are.

Possibly, it's so they can rebuild you from scratch. An blank easel to sketch out the new, improved, you. Yeah, it might be that. And pigs soar through the skies big little fairy wings, their tails spinning like a helicopter's.

If you don't have anything left, you don't have anywhere to go. You lose yourself in the void, stumbling at first to find your way, then acquiescing and resigning and merging yourself until you, too, become void. Then they have you. Then you are there's and they can do with you what they will.

Ask Caroline. Ask Jersey. Not that they'd tell you. One from fear and the other from arrogance.

On my original 'application' to join the ranks of the insane, I pleaded paranoia. You may not believe me, given my growing belief that 'THEY' have plans that do not necessarily include the full well-being of the residents, but I'm not paranoid. I'm realistic and observant.

Being the only sane person in here, someone has to watch out for my fellow freaks.

Just because you're NOT paranoid, doesn't mean that they're not out to get you. All white? I mean... all right...?

Sin... fiddling...

The plastic bit on the end of your shoelace is called an aglet. I know that, even though I am only allowed to wear slip on shoes. Bit bizarre that, isn't it? That I know it, and that it actually has a name.

Does everything have a name? Even the silliest little thing like the bottom curve of a paperclip? Not allowed them either. You could kill yourself with a paperclip, just as you could with a shoelace. Not that I would. I used paperclips to... clip paper. Kind of does what it says on the tin, although they tend to come in boxes rather than tins. I also use - or used - paperclips to create my incredibly clever and stupendously useful Fiddler.

I'm a fiddler. No, I'm not made out of paperclips. But my hands like to be doing something. Tapping, clapping, unwrapping. I get fidgety if I'm not doing anything. So I took a paperclip, one day, and bent it. Then bent it again, until it was a quite pretty looking 'Y' shape, and thus the Fiddler was born. It slots right into your fingers, perfectly sized to twist and turn as absently as your mind wants to wander. Therapeutic almost.

A whole industry has been built from executive toys. Mini Newton's Cradles, stress balls shaped like faces and more. My own invention did exactly the same thing and cost next to nothing. I even put it on ebay. And had questions about colours and sizes!

People will buy anything. Apparently someone sold a piece of burnt toast on ebay once.

The burnt bit looked a bit like a cross between Garfield and Elvis. Didn't cost me much either.

Sin... 41...

41 is such an UGLY number, don't you think? It kind of sticks in your eyes like a knife in a corpse. Nothing like the glorious curves of the number 8 or the angular artistry of a 44. 41 - hideous, really.

Now 42 is another matter. Possible, or rather probably, because of my love for Douglas Adams' works, I think 42 is a fine example of the numeric aesthetic. Maybe it is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything, but it's probably just the number of the house I grew up in. When I moved in there, I could touch the tops of the holly bushes in the front garden. Now, they're more than twice my height. The world turns and drags us right along with it.

41. That was the house across the road. It had a small camera that eye-spied anyone who might knock on the door. The house was a mirror image of the one I lived in - a simple three bedrommed terrace - so I was surprised to discover it was actually a brothel. There were no red lights in the windows or 'Playgirls Massage' signs in the garden, and I never really saw a steady stream of visitors, but when the police raided one day, that was the apparent reason. It was a shame, really. They were nice neighbours. And the underwear on the washing line in the back garden was quite something to behold for a growing lad.

17 is another number I really don't like. Not as much as 41 - 17 and I are still on speaking terms - but it's not one of my favourites. When you write the numbers down, they don't seem to flow, as if they were thrown together one day on a chain gang and are forever handcuffed to each other. They bicker and fight and strain in different directions but it's all for naught. The 1 and the 7 are eternally tied together.

Bless.

You get a lot of thinking time in an asylum, you know. A lot of chances to contemplate your navel, whether there's an event horizon in the back of your head ready to suck the whole of existence into another plane of reality, and whether the sausages you had for lunch actually contained anything resembling real meat. When you're done with all that, there's not much left to keep zee leetle grey cells entertained. I'd thought long and hard about how many turns of the spanner it had taken to bolt all those chairs down and spent many an hour wondering about the number of tins of super brilliant white paint it needed to paint our entire world its particular shade of blinding.

So. 41. Not the prettiest petunia in the flower bed.

If you add the numbers together, you get 5. I don't like that either. 5 haunts me. It screams at me in the night and taunts me during the day.

I knew a bus, once, with that number. It had cigarette burns in one of the seats and was used frequently by a man who one day took a gun with him to cash his unemployment benefit cheque.

That was the start of it all.

41. It's an ugly number, don't you think?

Sin... ink spots...

It was his own fault, he should never have insisted on looking at those ink-blot things. I did tell him to give them a miss. There was a three year old copy of FHM to flick through instead of the book of splats that invaded your head.

But he wouldn't listen. He never did. He'd been a teacher. He was used to being - or least trying to be - in charge. He was used to knowing what was best and trying to guide others. So he didn't listen.

Roger Stainsbridge. Teach, as he was called - naturally. He'd been a teacher for most of his life, respected and proud. At 54, he snapped. At 54, Mr. Stainsbridge decided he'd had enough of the threats and taunts from the children he was supposed to be helping on their way to a better life. It was only a minority of pupils, but they were relentless. They saw the chink in his armour and they crow barred it open to slash at the fresh meat beneath. The crack? A fifteen year old girl. The crowbar? A joke, a rumour, a big wooden spoon of spite.

There was nothing in it. No indiscretion or desire on either part. Teach was in it to teach and wanted only to help those in his care better themselves. The girl wanted to learn and to better herself. She wanted more than McDonalds or Tesco. She wanted a career. But she was failing. She was introverted to an excruciating level and wouldn't say 'boo' to a butterfly, let alone a goose. She was the class outsider, the one whom even the geeks could pick on. But she was an extraordinarily talented artist. Her escape from her self-imprisonment was her oils. And, of course, this was something more to fuel the fire of abuse.

Being a teacher for so many years, Teach had wings wider than an albatross, and many of his children had been taken under them to give them a boost or a tweak or a push in the right direction. This time it was the turn of the girl. History, and Mr. Stainsbridge, doesn't relate her name. She was just 'the girl' - spoken in lower case. It was enough, to this year's class, that he'd shown an interest in her. Modified photos, produced on the school's computers, showed them together. Back-of-the-class whispers invented stories ranging from secret kisses to full blown affairs. It was a joke, that's all. A schoolboy prank.

But the girl, already painfully shy, didn't find it funny. Her hanging herself with her own school tie, wasn't a joke.

Teach didn't find it amusing either. After the ring leader had taken his beating and spent his week in hospital, after Teach had been released from prison for the attack, which he freely admitted, the taunts and the slashed tyres and the egged windows began. And Teach, a teacher for most of his life, dedicated to others, snapped. It took five people to hold him down as he launched himself at the group of boys who wore their ASBOs with pride. His grief - at the girl and the tatters of his career - fed his anger.

And Roger Stainsbridge became a resident at the Nuthouse.

A year after being admitted, Teach picked up the book of ink blots. An hour after, when, in every one, he saw the girl with the tie around her neck pulled taut, he began to cry.

It's been six months. The tears still flow.

Sin... wobbly handles...

"My handle's loose."

Caroline told me that once. I was never one to follow rules, not really. So the one about, if you weren't told, don't ask, didn't particularly apply to me. Well, it did, but I didn't take any notice. People had a tendency to die around me, so they weren't going to complain - oh, hold on... yes, they would, given the chance... OK, forget that. People in here, mental as anything, were not going to complain. How's that? Better?

Good.

In here, where you spent your days in a daze, wading through a haze, things either bothered people or they didn't. There wasn't much of a mid-way. Tolerance stayed on the outside, not wanting to step through the door lest it be warped into a special brand of crazy along with the rest of us. Not that people get uppity, don't get me wrong. You had your Banjo Bensons and your Olivia de Halibuts who could snap if you so much as breathed the wrong way near them. But mostly, people were chilled. How else could you be with a murder of orderlies ready to tie you down and play pin cushion with your arm at the drop of a hat or the roll of a die?

Or the toss of a coin..?

The Corner-copias, eye-spying their spot on the floor, wouldn't move if you stay off their hallowed spot. Most others were too deep in their own private purgatory to worry about anyone else.

So if I wanted to ask my questions or make my statements, nobody was going to mind too much.

Well, there was that time with the Whippet, but that's another story.

I was the only one in the institute who was there voluntarily. Even though my 'voluntarily' no longer had the same definition as Dr Connors', I wasn't actually insane. If you forgot about my claims of death and destruction and concentrated just on my usual mental state, I was fairly sane - I flew close to the precipice of whoop-de-doo but I never quite reached the leap into the abyss below. You may think differently, but you'd be wrong.

Just because I'm in a mental home doesn't make me crazy.

So I asked Caroline, quiet and sweet, with quite tiny feet, why she was there. Why she was a member of the Crazy Club? What was her own brand of barmy? She said her handle was loose.

I think that's possibly the best reason I've heard. Some will say they had a wobble. Some will tell you, straight out, the deepest depths of the troubled psyche. I, myself, give various versions of paranoia. Caroline's handle was loose. It was a long time before I discovered the truth behind what had loosened it. By then Jersey had become her 'friend', she had merged with the wallpaper and her fear had faded. By then she was dead.

The institute and Dr Connors were meant to be the screws that tightened that handle back up. It seems they just screwed her up more.

I wonder how they were with putting up shelves.

Sin... full moon... half moon... total eclipse....

Jupiter has 63 moons.

Greedy, don't you think?

Way out there in the vast vacuum that is space, it has 63 moons. Why? What does it do with them all day? Are they like marbles and it's a cosmic game in the playground of the solar system? Or are they Jupiter's children?

Now THERE'S a school run!

Does the fact that the planet is called a 'gas giant' mean that it's just a big ball of wind? Like Flatulent Freddy? Or Freddy the Fart as he was also known. Or simply 'The Fart'.

Freddy the Fart was the only man I have ever known, possibly the only man in existence, who, no matter what he eats, breaks wind constantly. From a bottom burp to blowing a gale (and Gale would certainly not be grateful) he had the whole range of wind related exhausts within his repertoire. On most occasions, it was just noise. Once or twice, or thrice, The Fart would deliver such a resounding, window shaking eruption that the whole room would look up, and those closest to him would vomit.

You could almost see the cloud of green gas.

Jupiter has 63 moons. Considering where the planet's and the person's Gaseous Giganticus similarities lie, we're pleased he hasn't had one moon. If he had, I would think certain of the more temperamental residents would ensure it was a total eclipse.

63 moons. I wonder if they're like Facebook friends. Each spouting random thoughts, changing their statuses and profile pictures a dozen times a day. Here's a photo of Titan sunning himself on the day side of the planet. Here's Io, acne erupting over its face like volcanoes spewing lava (or is that the other way round), skating on Saturn's rings. Jupiter herself Tweeting that she wishes she could get some housework done but all the children running around is making her head spin.

Our dear old Earth has but one moon and, seeing as how precious she is to us, what do we call her? Moon. As simple and unimaginative as that. Not Phobos. Not Titan or Kryton or Vulcan. Moon. Her hold upon us and this planet is such that she can affect the lee and the low of the oceans and rivers. Men can be transformed into werewolves (apparently), savage beasts that can be only be killed by a silver bullet piercing their heart. More than half of Dr Connors' pets owe their current situation to the lunar tick.

Wow. Imagine what state your mind would be in with 63 of the buggers circling overhead. And imagine what the sky would look like when those moons are full. The satellites would set it alight.

Jupiter, as I may have mentioned has 63 moons. We have just one. I think that's plenty, thanks.

Sin... white rabbits...

I like rabbits.

Never had one in a stew, and don't intend to. But generally, whether fluffy or not, long eared or short, I like rabbits. Bugs Bunny was an absolute star. Bambi's Thumper could slap his feet with the best of 'em. What's not to like?

The recreation room is large, rectangular and white. In one corner, up high and out of reach, is the television, nicely enclosed in a see through box to protect it from whatever crazy might want to rip it down and dance upon its screen. As this is an asylum, you'd think it was full of said sad crazies, but it's not, not really. Mostly, they're ill or damaged. The last thing they would feel like doing is tearing televisions down and jumping on them.

Facing the television corner are four rows of ten seats. The chairs are hard plastic so they can't be torn. They're bolted to the floor so they can't be thrown, especially at the imprisoned TV set. Along the walls there are similarly plastic, equally hard and uniformly bolted chairs.

On one wall is a window. It has solid, slightly rusty bars on both the inside and outside. It's toughened to withstand a head being slammed against it in either a vain attempt at escape or frustration, even though that head would, and has on occasion, been stuck between the bars. But a window is a window. It opens up onto the outside world and, even if that world was a building site or a bomb site, it would still be outside. As it happens, though, the panorama that greets you when you step uo to the bars is so much more than rubble and rocks. A vast area of grass. An occasional oasis of a flowerbed or patch of shrubbery to break up the beautiful monotony of green. In the distance were trees. Lots of trees. And not one building to break the vista.

I would never have thought that the stunning view was deliberately placed by Dr Connors to please the patients. He wouldn't have given that as a present. It was for visitors. It was for his own view - his office being off to the right of the recreation room. We, the residents, were only gifted with anything beyond the walls of the asylum by luck or default.

At any one time there as many as fifteen or more standing at the window. Even if there was nothing to see apart from what you had seen every day since you arrived - nobody walking across the grass, no animals feeding, no birds flying or clouds drifting - it was still compulsive viewing. But, for some reason, there usually was something to be seen.

Rabbits.

An abundance was putting it lightly. To say there were a good few bunnies hopping across the lawn was like saying Everest is a big hill. There could be three rabbits in the immediate vicinity to the building for every resident that felt the need to gaze out on a daily basis. And that was without those that trailed off to where the treeline began. The were breeding like... well... they were breeding like they were rampant. It meant that, close up, there was sometimes no grass to be seen, just a constantly moving sea of fur. Stare at it for too long and you could feel nauseous, but you couldn't take your eyes away. Sure they were cute. Sure they were funny sometimes, the way they'd hop and jump and munch. But more than that. They were free. They were a sign that this place wasn't the universe.

In a way, those little furry creatures were Hope.

Today, though, there were no rabbits. Today, though, there was only grass.

Cries of horror, whimperings and vacant stares faced the window today. But the window stared back, impassive. It had no answers. It had woken this morning, just like we had, to an empty scene, devoid of life other than plant - and the odd insects and bugs that skittered and burrowed. But we weren't bothered about the creepy-crawlies. We were bothered about the bunnies. Our friends. Our hope.

No rabbits meant that all we had was in here.

It's almost night-time. Evening, when the sun goes down, the lights come up and the rabbits and residents sleep. No explanation has been forthcoming from Connors or any of the orderlies. All say they don't know, and some say it with a smirk that indicates they actually do.

Everyone, myself included, has slumped - physically and emotionally. When you're a patient in a mental asylum - when your only friends are a needle and a bundle of fluff the other side of a pane of glass, you might think there's no further way down to go.

But there is, if you have hope. Because you can lose it or it can be taken away. And you may never know why.