Have you heard of the black stump?
It's not like the fabled black spot of the pirates, immortalised in Treasure Island - although if you came across it, your time might be ticking away just as much as if the palm of your hand had suddenly had a black hole appear on it, sucking your life away until you didn't even exist anymore.
The black stump.
You'd expect it to be capitalised. Bee and Ess. But it's not.
There's one outside the window. Not right outside, just a bit further away. All on its own, as if the other trees had fled in fear or simply didn't want to be associated but such a deformed, maimed exhibit. IT's only a few feet high - a little over waist height at most. Charred and black, the top disintegrated by the lightning bolt that destroyed the rest of the stump's trunk, probably a million years ago. Well, possibly not that far back, but it was before anyone that currently resided in the asylum had arrived.
It was a spectre, haunting the edge of where any dare to go. Promising untold horrors if you were ever foolish enough to stray beyond its marker.
The black stump.
It was black. Completely. Not a hint of browns or greens or greys, or anything treeish remained. And, as mentioned, it was a stump. The other trees that adorn the vista beyond the bars on the window are behemoths in the world of flora. This was a maimed shadow of what was surely its former glory.
But the black stump's power lay not in what it was, but rather in what it had become.
To colonial Australians, it signified, effectively, the end of the world. It marked the edge of what was known and what was unknown. Safe and scary. Okay and ohhhhh no!
Here, we were probably not so distant from them. The black stump was a sentinel, guarding against unwary travellers, warning them to step no further. And if you did, you'd quite possibly suffer the same fate as the stump itself. A lightning bolt from the heavens, striking you down, leaving nothing but your smoking shoes.
Not that we get to go out often, of course. Or are allowed anything more than simple plimsoles.
But that one time. That one time.
I hadn't been here long. A few weeks. I was still the new boy, not yet Reverend Sin, yet to find my feet or have them swept from beneath me. I can't even remember his name. And no-one knew how he had managed to be outside in the first place.
But he was.
Apparently he knew of the Antipodean reference. It obviously translated very well to here.
But he would be the one. He would be the courageous adventurer who tamed the savage beast. Yes, that savage beast was the burnt remnants of a long dead tree, but the significance was the same.
Unfortunately, it seemed the Institute's very own Indiana Jones was actually scared of his own reflection. The bravado was a facade to disguise the fear. He'd hoped, if he pretended to be brave, some of it would actually rub off on him.
It didn't.
We all watched him. We could see him shaking from the Recreation Room. His hands were moving as he was playing an invisible piano impossibly fast. His legs were wobbling enough to make him stumble on more than one occasion. The orderlies saw him too, but, rather than stop him, they enjoyed the entertainment. He wasn't going fast enough to warrant them initiating a chase.
As he approached the black stump, lower case bee and ess, his advance slowed and his trembling increased. He was walking through treacle with ten thousand volts coursing through every sinew. His eyes were glued to the stump as if to look away was to invite an attack.
After forever, he drew level. Even from our distance we could see his face was almost purple. His breath was laboured. His whole body one enormous shiver.
Then he stepped beyond.
He left safe and entered scary.
And he collapsed.
He didn't move and, for a long moment, nor did anyone else. Then everyone did.
Except him.
The sounds of crying mixed with those of cursing as the orderlies reliased they should, perhaps, gone after him a little sooner.
It was fear, abject and total, that killed him. A legend reached out and stopped his heart without the need of a heavenly dagger.
But it could have been something else.
It could have been that, beyond the torched carcass of the tree, no-one could actually go. The world ended as literally as his heartbeat had.
It could have been the black stump.
Monday, 20 June 2011
Friday, 17 June 2011
Sin... Wendy Wotsit....
Wendy Wotsit, in another life, may well have been the female equivalent of Billy Graham. She had a tone and a presence that commanded respect and had a voice that swept over you like a tsunami, washing away all fear and self-loathing.
It was a pity she was doolally. As dippy as one of those funny little weighted birds you used to put on the edge of a glass and wait for it to swing enough to take a sip. She also had a personal hygiene problem - well, she didn't. She didn't mind that her B.O. was Bloody 'Oribble one bit. It was everyone else who had the problem. Wendy Wotsit was more than happy with her odour. Sometimes she'd talk to it. Preach, almost.
Like it was a disciple.
Wendy Wotsit was so called for two reasons. One, her name was Wendy. It kind of seemed natural to call her that, then. Two, she couldn't remember her second name. Just as she forgot to wash and I had discarded my surname somewhere along the rocky path to lunacy, Wendy's wotsit had wandered off too. But that was ok. That was fine, actually, as something else had come along to fill the gap. Or someone. Or, rather, to be precisely precise, someones.
Wendy Wotsit loved to talk. She loved the sound of her own voice. But she wasn't the only one. On a Sunday, because it had to be a Sunday, Wendy would hold court. She was a messiah in the midst of misery. Her messages of hope filled her followers' collective heart with visions of life in the 'real' world - dreams of walls that were more magnolia than glaring.
Until she lost her train of thought and stood staring into the distance, even when the furthest she could see without her spectacles was roughly just short of the tips of her fingers.
Her followers, those who were enraptured by her words, would wait, though. They'd know that, eventually, she'd pick up her lost thought, figure out what order they were meant to go in and get right back into the swing. Then, when she was finally done, they'd follow her (as followers are prone to do), as she'd wander around the recreation room aimlessly. Her path would cross itself more times than an Easter bun, but they'd sweep along her like ducklings following their mother. And she was mother to them, even though every single one of them was over the age of seventy. She was easily twenty years the junior of the youngest, but still they would be lost in her sway.
I couldn't blame them. Everyone in here needed some semblance of hope. They all needed to believe that the asylum wasn't the sum of their lot.
I think I, out of them all, was the only one who dared not dream. My dreams were filled with the cries of the dead. One day, I was sure I wouldn't wake up and I'd heard them haunting me for all of eternity.
Wendy Wotsit, when she could hold her lucidity in her hands and smooth it over her children like a soothing cream to fill out the cracks, was a preacher to her flock. When she couldn't - when her lucidity went off searching for her surname and her hygiene - she existed in a flurry of forgetfulness.
I didn't have that luxury. I dropped my surname like the grenade it was. My mind stayed right where it was meant to be, rattling around in my head, banging on the bars of my self-inflicted prison.
I envied Wendy. I really did.
It was a pity she was doolally. As dippy as one of those funny little weighted birds you used to put on the edge of a glass and wait for it to swing enough to take a sip. She also had a personal hygiene problem - well, she didn't. She didn't mind that her B.O. was Bloody 'Oribble one bit. It was everyone else who had the problem. Wendy Wotsit was more than happy with her odour. Sometimes she'd talk to it. Preach, almost.
Like it was a disciple.
Wendy Wotsit was so called for two reasons. One, her name was Wendy. It kind of seemed natural to call her that, then. Two, she couldn't remember her second name. Just as she forgot to wash and I had discarded my surname somewhere along the rocky path to lunacy, Wendy's wotsit had wandered off too. But that was ok. That was fine, actually, as something else had come along to fill the gap. Or someone. Or, rather, to be precisely precise, someones.
Wendy Wotsit loved to talk. She loved the sound of her own voice. But she wasn't the only one. On a Sunday, because it had to be a Sunday, Wendy would hold court. She was a messiah in the midst of misery. Her messages of hope filled her followers' collective heart with visions of life in the 'real' world - dreams of walls that were more magnolia than glaring.
Until she lost her train of thought and stood staring into the distance, even when the furthest she could see without her spectacles was roughly just short of the tips of her fingers.
Her followers, those who were enraptured by her words, would wait, though. They'd know that, eventually, she'd pick up her lost thought, figure out what order they were meant to go in and get right back into the swing. Then, when she was finally done, they'd follow her (as followers are prone to do), as she'd wander around the recreation room aimlessly. Her path would cross itself more times than an Easter bun, but they'd sweep along her like ducklings following their mother. And she was mother to them, even though every single one of them was over the age of seventy. She was easily twenty years the junior of the youngest, but still they would be lost in her sway.
I couldn't blame them. Everyone in here needed some semblance of hope. They all needed to believe that the asylum wasn't the sum of their lot.
I think I, out of them all, was the only one who dared not dream. My dreams were filled with the cries of the dead. One day, I was sure I wouldn't wake up and I'd heard them haunting me for all of eternity.
Wendy Wotsit, when she could hold her lucidity in her hands and smooth it over her children like a soothing cream to fill out the cracks, was a preacher to her flock. When she couldn't - when her lucidity went off searching for her surname and her hygiene - she existed in a flurry of forgetfulness.
I didn't have that luxury. I dropped my surname like the grenade it was. My mind stayed right where it was meant to be, rattling around in my head, banging on the bars of my self-inflicted prison.
I envied Wendy. I really did.
Monday, 13 June 2011
Sin... Raindrops...
Raindrops.
I prefer the big fat bad round drops that almost hurt when they hit you in the face. The ones where you could almost dance between them. Much more satisfying than the miserly mizzle of the thin and weedy "can't be arsed" variety.
Connors doesn't care - he'll use either for his own peculiar form of water torture.
Sorry, that'll be 'therapy'.
He figured that, if you were being particularly contrary, stick you outside, strapped into your jacket and attached to a small post that had been hammered into the ground for this very purpose, and you'd quickly change your mind. He wouldn't do it when the sun was shining, oh no. Strangely, he didn't when the ground was covered in three feet of snow and foot long icicles were hanging from the branches of the few trees we could see. He missed an opportunity there, I think.
No, he waited until it was raining. He believed that standing in a downpour with no way to take cover, the rain soaking through your clothes until it made every nook and crannie slick, was the best way by far to knock off that 'UN' that had so sneakily attached itself to 'cooperative'.
It was worse when it was cold. Then the water would seep in through your pores, wriggling like maggots into your bones to chill you from the inside. You'd be shivering for about a week afterwards, your body shaking to try and free itself of the sub-zero infestation. You'd feel that, no matter how much you tried to dry yourself off, you were trapped in a liquid bubble that kept you drenched. Granted you often had to use your bedsheets as towels seeing as the best you were offered otherwise was a few squares of paper that aspired to be cardboard. And your clothes weren't replaced. So you either slept naked in sopping sheets or you slept in sopping clothes in sopping sheets, the soppiness increasing exponentially to keep you wet until a week on Thursday.
Of course, as things often do, it didn't always work in the way Connors would have liked. John Willow, for example. He was a beast of a man. Angry always. Called Silverback behind his not so silver back. You could almost expect his knuckles to be dragging along the floor. It took four orderlies, with two in reserve, to subdue him when the Silverback was feeling 'grumpy', and even then cattle prods sometimes had to be employed. He was found across the grounds, the uprooted post still attached to his strait jacket by the thick strap. He was dead. Hypothermia. His brutishness hadn't been enough to protect him from the bitter cold and the onslaught of the rain, not after it had taken him two days to yank that post from the ground before he could make his getaway.
Then there was the lovely Mr. Adams. There was never a more gentle soul. He was gracious and kind and, most times, not even slightly insane. Then Friday afternoon came around, roughly half past three, and he would be a quivering wreck that would screech and lash out at any who dared come close. The schoolboy louts who'd waited for him did that. He still walked with a limp and couldn't properly move the left side of his face.
He was found strangled. The strap was wrapped twice around his neck and was pulled so tight it had embedded itself in the skin and had to be pulled away rather than simply released.
The strap was shortened then. And the post concreted in place.
Every so often, when a storm is brewing, I cause a fuss. I hunt around for a little 'UN' to stick on to the 'cooperative' that I normally am (unless I really need those drugs) so I can be trussed up like the Sunday roast and shoved outside to face the onslaught of the elements.
The thing is, it's OUTSIDE. The thing is, it's FRESH AIR.
The thing is, when things were normal and I could walk along the street and dance between the raindrops without hearing the screams of the dead echoing in my head, I LIKED the rain.
The thing is, Dr. Connors, I like it. Even the drizzle. You know, the rain that gets you really wet.
I prefer the big fat bad round drops that almost hurt when they hit you in the face. The ones where you could almost dance between them. Much more satisfying than the miserly mizzle of the thin and weedy "can't be arsed" variety.
Connors doesn't care - he'll use either for his own peculiar form of water torture.
Sorry, that'll be 'therapy'.
He figured that, if you were being particularly contrary, stick you outside, strapped into your jacket and attached to a small post that had been hammered into the ground for this very purpose, and you'd quickly change your mind. He wouldn't do it when the sun was shining, oh no. Strangely, he didn't when the ground was covered in three feet of snow and foot long icicles were hanging from the branches of the few trees we could see. He missed an opportunity there, I think.
No, he waited until it was raining. He believed that standing in a downpour with no way to take cover, the rain soaking through your clothes until it made every nook and crannie slick, was the best way by far to knock off that 'UN' that had so sneakily attached itself to 'cooperative'.
It was worse when it was cold. Then the water would seep in through your pores, wriggling like maggots into your bones to chill you from the inside. You'd be shivering for about a week afterwards, your body shaking to try and free itself of the sub-zero infestation. You'd feel that, no matter how much you tried to dry yourself off, you were trapped in a liquid bubble that kept you drenched. Granted you often had to use your bedsheets as towels seeing as the best you were offered otherwise was a few squares of paper that aspired to be cardboard. And your clothes weren't replaced. So you either slept naked in sopping sheets or you slept in sopping clothes in sopping sheets, the soppiness increasing exponentially to keep you wet until a week on Thursday.
Of course, as things often do, it didn't always work in the way Connors would have liked. John Willow, for example. He was a beast of a man. Angry always. Called Silverback behind his not so silver back. You could almost expect his knuckles to be dragging along the floor. It took four orderlies, with two in reserve, to subdue him when the Silverback was feeling 'grumpy', and even then cattle prods sometimes had to be employed. He was found across the grounds, the uprooted post still attached to his strait jacket by the thick strap. He was dead. Hypothermia. His brutishness hadn't been enough to protect him from the bitter cold and the onslaught of the rain, not after it had taken him two days to yank that post from the ground before he could make his getaway.
Then there was the lovely Mr. Adams. There was never a more gentle soul. He was gracious and kind and, most times, not even slightly insane. Then Friday afternoon came around, roughly half past three, and he would be a quivering wreck that would screech and lash out at any who dared come close. The schoolboy louts who'd waited for him did that. He still walked with a limp and couldn't properly move the left side of his face.
He was found strangled. The strap was wrapped twice around his neck and was pulled so tight it had embedded itself in the skin and had to be pulled away rather than simply released.
The strap was shortened then. And the post concreted in place.
Every so often, when a storm is brewing, I cause a fuss. I hunt around for a little 'UN' to stick on to the 'cooperative' that I normally am (unless I really need those drugs) so I can be trussed up like the Sunday roast and shoved outside to face the onslaught of the elements.
The thing is, it's OUTSIDE. The thing is, it's FRESH AIR.
The thing is, when things were normal and I could walk along the street and dance between the raindrops without hearing the screams of the dead echoing in my head, I LIKED the rain.
The thing is, Dr. Connors, I like it. Even the drizzle. You know, the rain that gets you really wet.
Tuesday, 7 June 2011
Sin... Surprise...
There's a town in the old mid-west - that's out there in the US of A, y'all - called Surprise.
They say it's called Surprise because the founders would be surprised if it ever became more than the meagre scrabblings it began life as. They'd be surprised if that one-horse town, little more than a one-trick pony, would grow from a few houses, a post office and a saloon - complete with swinging doors fitted to an entrance big enough to accommodate your stetson, your gunbelt and your swagger - into a thriving metropolis.
I've never been, so I can't comment. The Surprised, as I'd guess the residents of such a place might be called, may believe their beloved town has reached the heady heights of city-hood. They may believe it hasn't changed at all and that one horse should have been taken out back and shot, the remains being dragged off to the glue factory. Then, at least, it would be worth something.
My own place of birth, which may aspire to being more than a mere town - although its true title is Great Grimsby but it still has 'Town' in the name of its football team - began as the refuge for a Danish prince and his protector. It became one of the biggest fishing ports in the world. But that was then and this is now. The people of Grimsby, joined so closely with the resort of Cleethorpes they could be Siamese Twins that could scratch each others' backsides without even moving off the sofa, either think it's an OK place to live or it's a hole in the ground that forgot to swallow. Or they don't think anything at all and simply exist.
I suppose that's the same anywhere. It's great, it's OK, it's a dump... or it just is.
Anywhere, of course, except here.
The asylum.
Dr. Connors' personal Paradise.
The residents' private Purgatory.
I can't say it's a dump. It's not. It's fastidiously clean. It's so crispy white you could cut your eyes if you looked up too quickly. But the food is slop. The orderlies - most of them anyway - are arrogant or apathetic. And Connors reigns supreme.
So it's not a dump, but it's not OK and it's certainly not 'great'.
Its founding father didn't hope to turn the one-trick pony into a thoroughbred racehorse, nor was he protecting the heir to a foreign throne. He wanted to help, to cure... no, he wanted to dominate. The latter, though, doesn't appear in the ads.
The asylum, the institute, the home away from anywhere and everywhere - home away from hope - isn't anything really.
It just is.
Why am I not Surprised?
They say it's called Surprise because the founders would be surprised if it ever became more than the meagre scrabblings it began life as. They'd be surprised if that one-horse town, little more than a one-trick pony, would grow from a few houses, a post office and a saloon - complete with swinging doors fitted to an entrance big enough to accommodate your stetson, your gunbelt and your swagger - into a thriving metropolis.
I've never been, so I can't comment. The Surprised, as I'd guess the residents of such a place might be called, may believe their beloved town has reached the heady heights of city-hood. They may believe it hasn't changed at all and that one horse should have been taken out back and shot, the remains being dragged off to the glue factory. Then, at least, it would be worth something.
My own place of birth, which may aspire to being more than a mere town - although its true title is Great Grimsby but it still has 'Town' in the name of its football team - began as the refuge for a Danish prince and his protector. It became one of the biggest fishing ports in the world. But that was then and this is now. The people of Grimsby, joined so closely with the resort of Cleethorpes they could be Siamese Twins that could scratch each others' backsides without even moving off the sofa, either think it's an OK place to live or it's a hole in the ground that forgot to swallow. Or they don't think anything at all and simply exist.
I suppose that's the same anywhere. It's great, it's OK, it's a dump... or it just is.
Anywhere, of course, except here.
The asylum.
Dr. Connors' personal Paradise.
The residents' private Purgatory.
I can't say it's a dump. It's not. It's fastidiously clean. It's so crispy white you could cut your eyes if you looked up too quickly. But the food is slop. The orderlies - most of them anyway - are arrogant or apathetic. And Connors reigns supreme.
So it's not a dump, but it's not OK and it's certainly not 'great'.
Its founding father didn't hope to turn the one-trick pony into a thoroughbred racehorse, nor was he protecting the heir to a foreign throne. He wanted to help, to cure... no, he wanted to dominate. The latter, though, doesn't appear in the ads.
The asylum, the institute, the home away from anywhere and everywhere - home away from hope - isn't anything really.
It just is.
Why am I not Surprised?
Tuesday, 17 May 2011
Sin... Backpacking...
Laura, as loopy as a magnificent man in his flying machine, was a Little Miss Chatterbox that probably inspired the Roger Hargreaves classics. She could talk the hind legs off a donkey at 50 yards, said donkey using its forelegs to cover its burning ears, said ears smoking after the continuous onslaught of noise.
Sometimes that noise made sense. Often, it was simply a jumble of words thrown together. It was as if a hundred monkeys were tapping away on typewriters in her head - eventually she'd either recite the works of Shakespeare or she'd say something that wasn't just a car crash of cacophony.
I was pleased, and surprised, to be there when such a one in a million (words a minute) occurrence... occurred. It wasn't necessarily that Laura was going to say anything of Earth-shattering importance necessarily - but you never knew. We all deserved at least one Eureka moment in our lives.
As it happened, I wasn't just in the room when she managed to string the words together in a daisy chain of meaning - Laura had actually chosen me to be the victim... I mean 'focus' of her tirade. I, being me, didn't mind. If she wanted to let rip the dogs of dialogue, then who was I to attempt to stem the flow? In most cases I switched off, the tone becoming a monotone that I could rest my weary head upon, drifting off on a diatribe of discord. Noise became white noise. Bedlam became blah-blah-blah.
As such it was a good few minutes before I realised I could understand what she was saying.
"Lights on, lights off. Lights on, lights off. It was like a scene out of the Karate Kid, if Norman Bates was Mr. Miyagi." she said.
That made me jump off my cloud and land with my feet firmly on the floor. I didn't want to admit I hadn't heard anything up to that point, so I simply nodded and raised an eyebrow.
What followed was an account of Laura's adventures in the land of Lunacy. How she went from carefree student, backpacking across Australia, to the delightful but disturbed walking fountain of furore. For three quarters of an hour I was, genuinely, held captive by her story. Its weaving way wrapped around me, not letting me escape and barely allowing me breath. How so much could happen to one girl - 21 at the time - and NOT taint her I couldn't imagine. How this particular girl, dark hair flowing as much as her tongue, managed to be sitting next to me, I could. Stalkers and crazies (more so than anyone in here) dotted her journey like a sewing machine stitching a hem. She mentioned friends, she spoke about places with something akin to awe, and she told me of times where she was so scared she didn't know where to turn.
It was times like that that unpicked the seam and redirected it to chair next to mine.
The final straw, the one that broke the backpacker's back, was the wizened woman who turned the lights on and off. The woman who stood in the middle of the hostel room and watched her sleeping. The woman who took photographs of you without you knowing - in the kitchen, watching tv, in the shower. The woman who cackled malevolently to herself, and had access to the knives in the kitchen drawer.
You try not to let her know you're awake and know she's watching you. You try not to move, to keep your breathing soft, to look through almost closed eyes, your eyelashes like bars on the windows of the prison you feel yourself in.
Then you see the knife in her hand. You see her move with a fluidity one so old shouldn't be able to manage. No more pretence. No more pseudo-sleep. Only reaction. Only self-defence.
Only an accident.
I think Laura talks so much because she's trying to tell herself it wasn't her fault, but she can't quite believe it.
Some tribes in darkest Africa or deepest Amazon believe that a photo robs you of your soul. Laura kept hold of her soul, but the photos the old woman took robbed her of her life.
I'd tell her so, if I could get a word in edgeways.
(This blog entry is based on the true events depicted in the book Secret Confessions of a Backpacker by Laura Watts. Find it here: http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/lkwatts)
Tuesday, 10 May 2011
Sin... Mad Mick...
Do you think 'crazy' and 'insane' are the same thing?
Are they hand in hand, wandering down Asylum Avenue, seeing dragons and butterflies in the cloud shapes - Nature's own Rorschach test? Are they like tomarto and tomayto, you say 'potato' and I say 'spud'? Or are they everso slightly not the same? Reaching out to each other with their fingers barely touching, desperately wanting to be one but each being a slightly twisted version of the other?
I think it's the latter. I think they're a shade apart, like white and ivory or magnolia and cream. And I don't think they want to be together. Crazy and Insane stare daggers at each other over the back garden fence, with their only desperation being the desire to be in opposite corners of a ring waiting for the bell to tell them to fightfightfight.
There's a patient. We don't see much of him as he tends to either be in Room 101 or in his own cell. He prefers solitude. Silence is his friend. Michael is his name, and Mad is his game - one he plays very well. Mad Mick has been here longer than anybody else. He's a Founding Father, a legend in the world of weird. The fact that he looks and acts like the secret love child of Back to the Future's Doc Brown and Crocodile Dundee helps label him as a touch... touched. That he built his own tank - the army kind not the fishy kind - throws a hint of tapped into the mix.
When the police came to ask what the big boxy thing with the long turret and camouflage paint (though if it was camouflaged, how did they see it?) was doing parked in Tesco car park, he told them it helps in traffic jams. When they wanted him to sit in their car to have a 'chat', he pulled a knife his father Mr. Dundee would have gone weak at the knees at out from the back of his jeans. He tried to tell them he was simply removing it because he didn't want to do himself an injury when he sat down. Besides, it might damage the upholstery in the car seat, let alone the upholstery in his boxer shorts.
The two officers didn't quite see things like that. He had a knife which, phallically speaking, made them both feel inadequate and he held the keys to what looked like a baby Challenger. And he saw nothing wrong with that.
His knife was confiscated, his tank was impounded, and his collection of guns, ammunition and blades was met with astonishment - not least because most of it dated from the war. Which one? All of them!
Eventually Mad Mick ended up in the care of Dr. Connors. And that was the last the world saw of him. He was deemed clinically insane and a danger to himself and everyone he came into contact with. And you know what? A bigger load of bananas I have yet to hear.
People confuse insane with crazy. They mix eccentric with lunatic. That Mad Mick wasn't the brightest bulb in the flowerbed wasn't in question. That he was insane and would chop out your liver with a flick of the wrist most definitely was. You see, Mad Mick liked a knife that was better endowed than he was. He liked his World War II pistols and his Spanish Civil War helmets. And he liked to go shopping in a tank. But he would also give you his last Rolo - if packets of Rolo were allowed, which they weren't because the last thing Connors needed was a patient on a sugar rush or shoving a sweet were the sun daren't ever venture enough to shine. I'm a nice guy (ignoring the deaths), but he had me beat, and he didn't need Mr. Switchblade to help him do it.
To be honest, I'm not surprised Michael's best buddies were the silence and the solitude. In a world where odd was ordinary, he was extraordinary. He didn't fit in amongst the damaged souls that wandered the halls of the asylum - patients and staff alike. He was out of phase with us common folk. He didn't see things the same way. He saw beyond the horizon, where the world hides from view. And now he hides from the world.
Mad Mick is crazy, just a little bit. But he's not insane.
Are they hand in hand, wandering down Asylum Avenue, seeing dragons and butterflies in the cloud shapes - Nature's own Rorschach test? Are they like tomarto and tomayto, you say 'potato' and I say 'spud'? Or are they everso slightly not the same? Reaching out to each other with their fingers barely touching, desperately wanting to be one but each being a slightly twisted version of the other?
I think it's the latter. I think they're a shade apart, like white and ivory or magnolia and cream. And I don't think they want to be together. Crazy and Insane stare daggers at each other over the back garden fence, with their only desperation being the desire to be in opposite corners of a ring waiting for the bell to tell them to fightfightfight.
There's a patient. We don't see much of him as he tends to either be in Room 101 or in his own cell. He prefers solitude. Silence is his friend. Michael is his name, and Mad is his game - one he plays very well. Mad Mick has been here longer than anybody else. He's a Founding Father, a legend in the world of weird. The fact that he looks and acts like the secret love child of Back to the Future's Doc Brown and Crocodile Dundee helps label him as a touch... touched. That he built his own tank - the army kind not the fishy kind - throws a hint of tapped into the mix.
When the police came to ask what the big boxy thing with the long turret and camouflage paint (though if it was camouflaged, how did they see it?) was doing parked in Tesco car park, he told them it helps in traffic jams. When they wanted him to sit in their car to have a 'chat', he pulled a knife his father Mr. Dundee would have gone weak at the knees at out from the back of his jeans. He tried to tell them he was simply removing it because he didn't want to do himself an injury when he sat down. Besides, it might damage the upholstery in the car seat, let alone the upholstery in his boxer shorts.
The two officers didn't quite see things like that. He had a knife which, phallically speaking, made them both feel inadequate and he held the keys to what looked like a baby Challenger. And he saw nothing wrong with that.
His knife was confiscated, his tank was impounded, and his collection of guns, ammunition and blades was met with astonishment - not least because most of it dated from the war. Which one? All of them!
Eventually Mad Mick ended up in the care of Dr. Connors. And that was the last the world saw of him. He was deemed clinically insane and a danger to himself and everyone he came into contact with. And you know what? A bigger load of bananas I have yet to hear.
People confuse insane with crazy. They mix eccentric with lunatic. That Mad Mick wasn't the brightest bulb in the flowerbed wasn't in question. That he was insane and would chop out your liver with a flick of the wrist most definitely was. You see, Mad Mick liked a knife that was better endowed than he was. He liked his World War II pistols and his Spanish Civil War helmets. And he liked to go shopping in a tank. But he would also give you his last Rolo - if packets of Rolo were allowed, which they weren't because the last thing Connors needed was a patient on a sugar rush or shoving a sweet were the sun daren't ever venture enough to shine. I'm a nice guy (ignoring the deaths), but he had me beat, and he didn't need Mr. Switchblade to help him do it.
To be honest, I'm not surprised Michael's best buddies were the silence and the solitude. In a world where odd was ordinary, he was extraordinary. He didn't fit in amongst the damaged souls that wandered the halls of the asylum - patients and staff alike. He was out of phase with us common folk. He didn't see things the same way. He saw beyond the horizon, where the world hides from view. And now he hides from the world.
Mad Mick is crazy, just a little bit. But he's not insane.
Thursday, 5 May 2011
Sin... room 101...
It's quiet in Room 101. You can hear a pin drop or a mouse's whiskers twitch.
Of course, the only pins are the needles they use to fill us full of drugs and if a mouse managed to get in here it'd probably be eaten by Kevin "Haggis" McNally, who would eat anything, whether it had a pulse once, still or not.
Room 101 is also the only room where, when the lights go out, it's actually dark. There's no phosphorous glow from the glaring white of the walls, floor and ceiling that burned itself onto your retina. Extra thick padding adorns the walls like a landscape of snow covered hills and valleys that's only missing the odd smoking chimney from remote farm houses and the occasional huddled copse of trees. It deadenes all sounds and all light. When you're locked in there, you experience a deadening of not just your senses, but also of your soul. When it's lights out, the lights go out inside you.
I don't really know what I did to be worthy of a stay within its venerated walls. One minute I was staring into space wondering if I really could see the colour blue out of the corner of my eyr and why it kept running away if I quickly turned my head to check, and the next I was under a pile of arms and legs as a fight between Hilda, the woman with the glass eye and black teeth who had served up her pet dog on a barbeque, and Darcy, the girl who had apparently tried to marry her labrador, swept by like a tornado leaving a wake of destruction in its path. I was one of the cars or homes that were lifted like twigs and cast casually aside.
I can't remember what happened after that, really. I know I tasted my own blood and I do recall the weight of three orderlies seeing if each could be the straw that broke my back. Then I was in the Room wondering, instead, if I could actually see little people wandering over the hills that covered the walls. Was I Gulliver to their Lilliput? Was I the giant to their Jack, feeing, fying and foeing while they scaled their beanstalks to hide the golden goose?
Time takes its own course when there's no ticking to keep it on a leash. It will speed up and slow down as it fancies to mess with your mind, taking great pleasure in dragging your days out to weeks or squeezing your weeks into hours. In the end, you forget Time is even out there, watching you, playing with you. In the end you simply ARE, lost in the moment with no notion of past or future. In the end there's only you and Now. And Now is not the best conversationalist in the world.
If you weren't already in an asylum and, by default, mad, you could go insane in there.
I think that's the plan, though. I think that's part of the fun. I think the whole point of Room 101 is to flick the switch and turn your Crazy up a notch or two.
All in the name of therapy, of course.
I don't mind it. I don't fear Time and its games. I sometimes talk to the wee ones on the walls. I embrace the darkness because it's so welcome after the ultra brightness of everything else. And, when I am in there and the lights go out and I die inside, I (for a little while) can't hear the screams.
It's quiet in Room 101. You can hear a pin drop or a mouse's whiskers twitch.
But you can't hear anything else.
Of course, the only pins are the needles they use to fill us full of drugs and if a mouse managed to get in here it'd probably be eaten by Kevin "Haggis" McNally, who would eat anything, whether it had a pulse once, still or not.
Room 101 is also the only room where, when the lights go out, it's actually dark. There's no phosphorous glow from the glaring white of the walls, floor and ceiling that burned itself onto your retina. Extra thick padding adorns the walls like a landscape of snow covered hills and valleys that's only missing the odd smoking chimney from remote farm houses and the occasional huddled copse of trees. It deadenes all sounds and all light. When you're locked in there, you experience a deadening of not just your senses, but also of your soul. When it's lights out, the lights go out inside you.
I don't really know what I did to be worthy of a stay within its venerated walls. One minute I was staring into space wondering if I really could see the colour blue out of the corner of my eyr and why it kept running away if I quickly turned my head to check, and the next I was under a pile of arms and legs as a fight between Hilda, the woman with the glass eye and black teeth who had served up her pet dog on a barbeque, and Darcy, the girl who had apparently tried to marry her labrador, swept by like a tornado leaving a wake of destruction in its path. I was one of the cars or homes that were lifted like twigs and cast casually aside.
I can't remember what happened after that, really. I know I tasted my own blood and I do recall the weight of three orderlies seeing if each could be the straw that broke my back. Then I was in the Room wondering, instead, if I could actually see little people wandering over the hills that covered the walls. Was I Gulliver to their Lilliput? Was I the giant to their Jack, feeing, fying and foeing while they scaled their beanstalks to hide the golden goose?
Time takes its own course when there's no ticking to keep it on a leash. It will speed up and slow down as it fancies to mess with your mind, taking great pleasure in dragging your days out to weeks or squeezing your weeks into hours. In the end, you forget Time is even out there, watching you, playing with you. In the end you simply ARE, lost in the moment with no notion of past or future. In the end there's only you and Now. And Now is not the best conversationalist in the world.
If you weren't already in an asylum and, by default, mad, you could go insane in there.
I think that's the plan, though. I think that's part of the fun. I think the whole point of Room 101 is to flick the switch and turn your Crazy up a notch or two.
All in the name of therapy, of course.
I don't mind it. I don't fear Time and its games. I sometimes talk to the wee ones on the walls. I embrace the darkness because it's so welcome after the ultra brightness of everything else. And, when I am in there and the lights go out and I die inside, I (for a little while) can't hear the screams.
It's quiet in Room 101. You can hear a pin drop or a mouse's whiskers twitch.
But you can't hear anything else.
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