A Girl for All Seasons...

It's cold today. Frosty the Snowman came in the night, with his buddy Jack Frost, and had a pillow fight in the recreation room, spraying a dusting of white over everything.

Though white on the existing glaring white of the walls, floor and ceiling was a little redundant.

Their pillows, of course, were from that ice hotel up in Norway, or wherever it is. So they'd be ice pillows.

Yes, I know the pillows there are NOT made of frozen water, but for the purposes of this entry, let's just say they are. Frosty and Jack would have no real need for real, fluffy, feather-stuffed pillows, now would they?

Their frozen touch could be seen across almost every surface. The windows were almost opaque with a crystallised coating that seemed to resist any attempt to write your name or a random obscenity in. Hands were prone to stick to the metal arms of the chairs if you held on to it for too long, ignoring the burning cold sensation. Areas of the floor were alternatively slippery when wet or mini skating rinks and various residents tried out their non-existent skills with spins and leaps that left them in heaps against the walls.

Occasionally, there'd be the sound of a snap as the whirling wonder landed awkwardly and broke an ankle or wrist. The infirmary would be full by the end of the day.

Sitting in one corner, beneath the wall-mounted television set, was Connie.

Connie was a dear old dear who was just slightly nuttier than a nut. A peanut. Salty but you still couldn't get enough of her. She was a delightful woman who had not a single spiteful, hurtful or even slightly sinister thought in her head.

If, in fact, she had thoughts in her head.

Connie's particular delusion was obvious. It was a particularly peculiar parody of SAD. Seasonal Affected Disorder. Whereas most people became down in the dumps during the winter months, with a lack of both energy and enthusiasm dragging them into despair, Connie actually FELT the seasons. She BECAME them.

In spring, she was a budding flower. She would stand in a different spot each day, and she would, effectively, blossom. From a crunched ball, Connie would - excruciatingly slowly - unfurl. It would take hours for this to happen, and I couldn't understand how her joints wouldn't be aching or she'd walk with a permanent limp from the stiffness of holding odd positions for so long. But she didn't. In spring, there'd be a spring in her step, and that remained regardless of the season.

In summer, she decided beach play was the flavour to savour. An imaginary ball or frisbee would be thrown. Often, other residents would join in her play and once or twice a good dozen would be leaping or diving to catch thrown objects that weren't there.

I, myself, had won a tournament on a few weeks ago.

You do what you must to remain sane...

Today, it appeared, Connie had decided that, as Frosty and Jack had done their own brand of redecoration, it was winter. As such, it was also Christmas.

So she stood in the corner of the room, beneath the television's enduring onslaught of MTV. He arms were straight, at an angle down but away from her body. Her face was fixed. A smile. She had fashioned small stars and snowflakes from the toilet paper that Mucous Mickey always had with him and she'd hung them from various parts of her body.

A tissue angel was on her head, flopping forward, attempting to cover her face.

She was a Christmas tree.

How can you not smile? Not in a 'huh? Freak!' way, though. In a 'how wonderful' way. We're all, apparently, crazy in here, so no-one really cares what your daily doolally is. Rather than mumble in a chair all day or sit staring out of the window, however, Connie entertained, whether intentionally or not.

She was a Christmas tree. And I think that is nice.

It's cold today, but I can't help feeling warm.

Happy Halloween

Ghoulies and ghosties and long-legged beasties and things that go bump in the night.

And that's just the staff.

Halloween, or the preparation of, in the asylum is a wonderful thing. Last year, we had Abbie and Kristy joining in the festivities, one by losing half her tongue and the other by having a broken collarbone inflicted her by heavy-handed orderlies.

That was thanks to a glow-in-the-dark skeleton they'd decided to hang over the door so it would 'attack' anyone who came through.

In an asylum, that was likely to have a detrimental effect on the mood of the residents. And it did. Hence the hospitalisations. This year, they've decided to be a little more creative. Webbing, plastic spiders and fake cut out pumpkins adorn the rooms and corridors.

I think they genuinely want us to have a little fun. I actually believe they have, in this once instance, our interests in mind. I'd say 'to heart' but they'd have to have said organ for that to be true.

Saying that, they'd have to have a mind to have our interests resident in there, and I'm not so sure that's the truth either.

Anywho-be-do.

Halloween. It's a wonderful thing.

Half the world gets dressed up as creatures of the night. Horror has come a long wait, don't you think? Mummies and ghosts and monsters used to scare and terrorise us. Now they're the stuff of panto and party.

That's because the real monsters don't have arms hanging off or fangs. They don't burn in sunlight and they don't grow teeth, hair and claws during the full moon.

The real monsters smile at you. They stand behind you in the queue for the checkout waiting to pay for the groceries in their trolley.

They sit opposite you at breakfast and tell you they love you.

We don't have a day for them. There's no celebration for the real monsters.

But the night before All Saints Day, when the witches are meant to fly and the darkness is meant to rise, children put on costumes. They dress as Dracula or as the walking dead. They knock on the doors of complete strangers to ask for sweets or money.

That, I think, is scary.

Because one of those strangers could be one of the monsters that smile and say "Hi" and let you pay for your carton of milk first because they have a trolley full.

"Don't you look scary in your costume? I have some sweets for you. Come inside."

Lorraine. That's what happened to her. Dressed as a bat, complete with wings and fake fangs. Eight years old. Outfit made out of cardboard and black bin liners and lots of permanent marker. With a little bit of mummy's make up thrown in.

'Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to...'

Well you know how it goes.

Three weeks later, almost the end of November, they found her. She'd missed Bonfire Night, but her reappearance caused lots of fireworks in itself. They caught him. He said he'd been looking after her. He seemed to believe it too.

Aliens is one of my favourite films. Little Newt tells Ripley that her mommy says there are no monsters, not real ones.

But there are, aren't there?

Feel...

Forgive me, reader, for I am Sin. It's been an age and a half since my last entry and, for that, I feel I must apologise.

Time flies when you're feeling numb. In here, even that still means you are actually FEELING, even if it's only an absence of sensation.

I don't know where the time has gone. Has it been days? Weeks? A couple of minutes? I don't know. It 'feels' as if it has been some time.

The air is different. It's been inhaled and exhaled and tastes as though it's been partly digested. The sunlight can barely be bothered to reach in through the bars on the windows to tease us with the hint of warmth. Even the birds outside seem to be unable to raise enough effort to take flight.

I want to tell them that I'd fly, if I could. I'd leap from the ground and soar way up high. Even Icarus would have felt exhilarated at some point whilst looking down on the world. Granted, when his wings melted, the world would have been looking up thinking 'That showed you!' Still, he heart must have been fit to burst as he took to the air.

I'd tell them that I, too, would wish to soar. Even if my own fate mirrored that of poor Icarus, I'd take the risk. If I were destined to hit the ground face first, then fair enough. At least I'd have tasted freedom.

They're free, those birds. Free and they don't know it. Free and they stand, pecking, ambling, lethargic.

It's a different day, of that I'm sure.

And in the days or hours between the last I remember and this, something has happened. Something bad.

A 'me' something. A flip and catch something. Even without my coin, I can tell.

A car taking four young men to their first term at University has skidded off a road, somewhere near Edinburgh. It missed the tree. It didn't miss the fence or the dip that made it flip and roll, much like a coin, and it didn't miss the edge of the cliff that caused it to fall into the sea. Not that the cliff or the fall or the impact of the waves would have made a difference. Three of them were already dead.

The fourth took a further three minutes as the water came in. His heart gave a little dance in his chest and stopped beating before the fluid could fill his lungs. Before it could even reach his mouth or nose.

I can hear their cries. They screamed as the car spun out of control. One soiled himself. He didn't notice.

I can hear them. That's how I know something has happened. That's how I know that I flipped and the sea caught.

But I don't remember it happening. No pull. No twist in my gut. No pressure build up inside my skull. Nothing.

Except a few missing days.

Even feeling numb implies a sense of 'feeling.' As much as I wish I could join those birds and show them what they have, right now I wish...

I wish...

I wish that I wasn't.

But wishes are for those that have enough stacked up behind them to deserve a wish, whether a star is involved or a genie or simply a sigh. I'm not one of those. Even if I had anything in the bank prior to my finding my coin, I'm well overdrawn now. I wouldn't be surprised if I received a statement demanding charges.

As such, I accept. It is what it is. Such is life... and death.

I can hear them. The boys.

It was a Mazda. A white one. One of the boys was called William. Or rather 'Will.' He had a girlfriend. And a son.

Sweet little boy.

Bump Day...

Just what was it about Wednesdays anyway? And, shut away and doped to the eyeballs as we all were, how on Earth did we even know what day of the week it was?

I wonder if it's a collective consciousness. Ants have that, don't they? When one is threatened they all are? When one sneezes, they all say Gesundheit? How they know how to speak German is beyond me.

But a collective consciousness. A 'hive mind'. We're - or rather THEY'RE -almost there anyway. When one panics or throws a wobbler, there's a domino effect that has them all toppling over in one form or another. If one starts screaming uncontrollably for no other reason that the sun hit them in the eye through the window or the person next to them farted, the noise levels in the recreation room suddenly increase to levels only surpassed by standing next to an erupting volcano or under the Niagara Falls.

With the shiny walls, ceilings and floors glaring enough to make the air itself sometimes appear to be white, the room has the acoustic resonance of the Albert Hall. You'd never find the Proms being performed here, but there are certainly enough who feel the need to make their own music. Not that moaning and crying is actually anything close to being melodic, but the tune is often picked up and carried by the rest of the residents.

I prefer a little Snow Patrol or Eurythmics, myself.

Anywho.

Wednesdays. Bump day. The hike from Monday morning becomes the slippery slope to the weekend. In the outside world at least. Out there, where the sun shines and the grass grows and you can happily turn MTV over to Coronation Street or X-Factor - should you wish to -without fear of someone trying to rip your face off or, in the case of the orderlies, taser you.

In here, where the sun apparently shines and the grass probably grows and MTV is the only channel that the television has learned how to play, the weekend doesn't exist. Nor does the week. Or the month, year, hour or minute. Seconds and days are interchangeable. An hour and a heartbeat set to sea in a beautiful puke-green boat. A week and a day walk hand in hand along Tedious Terrace, pausing to look in the window of the old pawn shop where patients can swap their souls for an unhealthy dose of needles and neglect before continuing on the way to lunch at the Comatose Cafe.

Not a great menu there. They don't even do a decent bacon butty. And the coffee doesn't just taste like gnat's piss...

But Wednesdays. Once upon each Wednesday when the sun is high, whether or not it hits someone in the eye, one or another resident steps up to the mark and makes the Battle of Brian look like a walk in the park.

The Battle of Brian was a skirmish in the frozen foods aisle at Tesco one Saturday afternoon. There was only one tub of Cookie Dough Ben & Jerry's left and two men put their hands on it at the same time, with neither being willing to give it up. Both, by pure coincidence, were called Brian, though they didn't know it until the police informed them. It got very nasty. A bag of frozen peas can do a lot of damage, more, in fact, than an 8 serving cheesecake. The frozen chicken, however, is the weapon of choice, it has to be said.

That's going to leave a scar...

Oh yes, Wednesdays. Around ten-thirty in the morning, someone picks up a carelessly discarded wobbler and throws it. Or, to put it another way, they kick off. Randomly and for nothing evident to the pseudo-rational mind. I might have said at some point that I'm the only sane one in here. Granted there's Jeremy, so perhaps not the only one, but I assume you get my point. The door to chaos is unlocked and left ajar, and, like the cupboard under the stairs where all the junk goes, it all spills out.

Like clockwork, when the clock has been wound so tight it's almost ready to snap and poke you in the eye. Then it does. But not quite like the sun.

But, how do they know it's a Wednesday? Ask me another.

How do I know? That's when I have my weekly - or weakly - consultation with Dr. Connors. Although it seems to be getting more frequent for some reason. He wants to see me more and more.

And every day can't be Wednesday, can it?

I Wonder...

When I close my eyes and want to go to sleep, I think of death, instead of sheep.

When the world closes its eyes, and can no longer see, what does it think of? Is it sheep? Is it me? When the sun sets and day becomes night and the demons come out and sanity takes flight, does the world's slumber become a nightmare causing a rumbling, grumbling quake of the earth?

Ask me another because I just don't know. I dream of death.

So. Last night I had a dream.

I dreamt of Joy and joy and smiles and laughter. Things that I remembered, but then... after... Her face became molten. It seeped and it cracked and it melted and dripped down onto her lap. Her eyes still had their sparkle, she couldn't lose that, even though one was sitting with the drips in her lap. But her voice was a bubble, the velvet was gone. It sounded like gargling glue had gone wrong.

I awoke with a start - or was it a stop? Either way, I sat upright. I was sweating and hot. My mind was spinning away with the wind and more than the others, I thought Sin had sinned.

But it had nothing to do with me, I am sure. Joy simply couldn't deal any more. I couldn't blame her really, I had been there too - all the deaths and the screams and the horrors down to me, and the ghosts that haunt in the dark I can't see - so why did I dream of her face becoming goo?

For a while I just laid there, staring up in the dark. My mind drifted like a leaf on a breeze whirlpooling in the park.

Was I was telling myself that I should do it as well? Take my own life and leap down into hell. Maybe I knew that by just being alive, it all carried on, the beast continuing to thrive. But I couldn't, I wouldn't, I didn't have the strength to draw the final curtain and bring it all to an end.

But perhaps, deep down, I knew that I must, lest the world, due to me, crumbled to dust.

That knowledge I bury under a mountain of guilt which I pull over my head like a thick winter quilt. I'm doing what's best and what's right and what's... easy. And if they give me the drugs, it's almost lemon squeezy. And I'll continue to ignore that I know Joy is right. That to kill herself was to win the fight. If I don't, then I know that I'll have to stand up and be a man. I'll have to commit suicide. But I don't know if I can.

When the world closes its eyes, and can no longer see, I wonder, does it dream of me?

The Power....

We had a power cut today.

With a loud click, coming from nowhere in particular but seemingly everywhere in reality, the lights went off.

And the television set went off.

And the blinking light on the CCTV cameras.

Oh, and the security locking on the doors.

Nobody noticed that one straight away. In fact, the only thing that bothered anyone, apart from the orderlies, was the television. When you only have the company of the insane or the indifferent, a TV is your lifeline to the outside world.

Granted ours was stuck on MTV, producing a raucous mix of beat and breasts - sometimes a bit much for a few of the residents - but at least it had a semblance of life. At least you could see people having fun.

Not that it was always a good thing. When you're wallowing in misery, dipping your toes in the pool of pissed-off-ishness, someone ELSE having fun kind of put the boot in to kick you over the edge so you almost drowned in the sea of shitty-attitude.

Today, though, everyone had seemed to put on an up. The mood was light. The orderlies had minimal reason to interfere with the residents and the residents themselves gave the orderlies little to worry about. It was sunny outside and the warmth was filling everyone with an unusually buoyant radiance.

Then click.

Then moans. Cries. Screams, in places.

Then chaos.

NEXT is a popular clothes store. When they have a sale, people queue up outside from around 5am. I imagine, when they open their doors, the scene would be much like it was here. People would be milling around, running, pushing. Clothes would be torn or dropped to the floor. The odd unfortunate would be trampled underfoot.

A sudden lack of television had the same effect, pretty much, the only difference being that there wasn't 70% off ladies skirts.

I wondered if NEXT sold asylum scrubs... Maybe there was a gap in the market...

The orderlies must have been dozing, lulled into a false sense of sanity by the morning's mood. It took them a few precious seconds to react and jump in, attempting to instil some calm with their usual brand of brute force. Head locks and half-nelsons did next to nothing to bring the throng to heel.

In the ensuing pandemonium, someone fell or was pushed against the door.

Now Dr. Connors is all about high-tech. State of the art. Top of the range cameras. Top of the range locks. Why use a key when a four digit number will suffice? You can steal a key, but not something that's committed (no pun intended) to memory. Less chance of the lunatics taking over the asylum.

Yes... Good luck with that.

When Ian, who never listened to the voices in his head no matter how much they screamed at him, fell backwards into the corridor, there was a sudden hush (possibly even from within his head). It was as if someone had taken a 3D photograph of the room and everybody was frozen in place. Then the milling about ceased and a flood of patients very impatiently poured out of the recreation room and into the hallway.

About three minutes later, the power came back on.

About three hours later, order was, once more, restored. Well, apart from dear old Edna Cuthbertson, who'd accidentally found the furnace room and decided to burn her clothes. Unfortunately she'd used her hands to put her scrubs into the incinerator. She wouldn't be putting her hands anywhere after that.

Only two residents had managed to find the door to outside, through the nursery. They were caught picking flowers, just this side of the stump. Eight were back in their cells, curled up on their beds quietly. A further fourteen were found in the laundry room, making tents out of towels and singing around a small fire -the source of which hasn't been discovered. Eddie, all smiles and sunshine - despite the dent in the back of his head from playing catch with a bowling ball - had a broken femur from the rugby tackle used to catch him.

And me. They spent an awful lot of time searching for me. I hadn't actually moved. Whilst everyone else was enjoying the pseudo-freedom and running riot, I didn't move. I stayed in my seat and stared at the blank TV.

The sudden hush from Ian opening the door had been preceded by another one. In my own head. When the electricity went off, the screams - even the dull echo of the screams - stopped also.

I, for the first time in so long, was sitting in silence. Internally and externally. And I relished it.

I wasn't under any illusion that it was the electricity causing this beast to come alive inside of me. That was my own creation. I certainly wasn't Frankenstein's prototype or anything of the sort.

But, when that click was heard...

I wonder if it came from me. Whatever curse I battle with has an off switch, and some sort of electromagnetic pulse was emitted that killed the TV and everything else. I suppose it was better than leaving MTV and killing the patients.

No. It wasn't me - this time.

We had a power cut today. All of us. Including me.

The Silver Screen...

The silver screen.

Why is it called that? Well, because the screens used to be silver - duh! Back in the days of black and white film, when a flickering feature was the highlight of the week, screens were silver for the better reflections and contrast. And now 3D movies are growing, they might make a comeback. Same deal.

And anywho, the White Screen just doesn't have the same glamorous ring to it as the Silver Screen, now does it?

If a movie were to made of your life, would you go see it? Would there be enough in your day of waking, working, soaps and snoring to enthral the viewer? Would a red carpet be laid out, flashing photographers shouting out your name?

"Look here!" "Smile!"

And who would play you? Someone dashing or alluring? Brad Pitt? Matt Damon? Ryan Reynolds? Jennifer Aniston? Penelope Cruz? Or someone more... normal. An actor without the perfect skin and face and nose? Who would you choose?

Me. What do I think?

Is my life worthy of a movie? I doubt it. Even in the days of Avatar and Harry Potter, or where werewolf and vampire vie for the love of a girl, the story of a man who can kill people with his mind. Not entirely believable, is it?

Saying that, it's not even my mind. I don't actually know what it is. It's something inside of me. Evil? A demon? Ask me another.

I really don't know. But that's why I'm here. That's why I eat the slop and spend my days in a single recreation room with only MTV and puddles of Mickey's mucous to keep me company.

Who'd want to see a film about that?

But. Who would play me?

Now I'm not vain enough to believe the like of Pitt or Damon would want to step into my shoes. Maybe Mark Wahlberg. He's not the clean cut action star. He's played the comedic and the calamitous. Or Kevin Spacey. Sure I have a little more hair. No. He draws attention to himself. Even without intending it (though he is an actor and that's what he's there for), you're drawn to him. I'm an everyman - and I believe that is glorifying myself.

Ordinary Joe. That's me. A little more ordinary than most. Or, at least, that's what I'd like. But the deaths. The screams. Maybe that's a little more than ordinary. it doesn't change me, though. It simply drags me out of my shoes and throws me about in the grumbling storm clouds above. And the deaths rain down.

A movie about me, on a screen silver or white.

Hardly Oscar material.

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