school photos 19

Janine decided to kill herself. She’d followed the other defeated shufflers from the breakfast room, to the telly room and took a chair facing the door. People sat around watching the door, or watching the telly, sometimes doing a bit of both. Nobody looked at each other unless they bumped into each other in the corridor. The telly was never off. It was the one consistent voice, filling in the corners of silences, an antidote to every condition, but the human condition. Two policemen. Tweedledee and Tweedledum delivered a new face to the ward. They looked at her out of the corner of their eyes as if they wanted to eat her out. Uniforms. They were so predictable. Mr Williams processed the boy, sectioned him with a mandatory twenty-four hour stay, do not pass go, and got rid of Tweedledee and Tweedledum in double-quick time. He was smart that way. Policemen made everybody nervous and nervous patients were hard work. Not that anyone ever did any work with the patients, but the idea was a good one, a sound one, clinically proven.

There was an empty room three doors down, Janine’s side of the corridor. She knew that’s where they’d put him. She waited to see who could be coaxed out of the nurse’s office to escort him to his single berth, his new home, before she sprung up from her chair and made her run. Just her luck. It was her designated case-worker, Stephen, on the seven a.m. to three a.m. shift. His skin was the colour of mixed concrete. His body was a curve ball with his feet kicking somewhere at the bottom. She hated his fruity smell and the stained oversized shirt and trousers he wore as a uniform.

            Stephen held his hand out in a stop side warding her off. ‘Just give John a minute to get settled before you jump on his bones Janine.’

            ‘Just give him a minute Janine.’ Her head was tilted and her face screwed up in disgust as she mimicked his poofy voice.

            John looked round the side of him, peeked at her,  looked at his feet, a firecracker lighting his cheeks.

            She felt a tingling in her vagina as if a pilot-light had come on. She melted into the pleasure of his kinked smile as he sneaked another look at her sideways through his long lashes and looked at the floor.  Excitement and protective tenderness spread under her skin, made her glow, a pressure in the eyes and ears and a tingling contentment in the timbre of her pacified voice and in the way she answered. ‘I’m just goin’ to my room to lie down for a bit.’  

‘You can lie down anytime.’ Stephen licked his thick lips as he spoke and proprietarily took John’s elbow to guide him away and along the corridor.

Janine could have slapped Stephen, but the damp boyish smell of John lingered. She stood watching the back of his neck, the shape of his head, and remembering the form of his face, the crook nose, eyebrows that suggested something dirty and bright eyes that were hidden, but, she decided, they wouldn’t be hidden for long. She would make him worship her in the privacy of her room, but not in public. Not yet. God she was flushed herself.  If she let go of what he looked like that first time, even for a minute, it would hit her harder later.

The rules of ward and world were written on her face and body.  Nobody flaunted sex like she did. If you did you were cheap. And if you were cheap you weren’t worth talking about—though everybody did. There were certain things that you didn’t need to ask, and even if you did, you knew not to, because that made you cheap. Made her look cheap.  If you were cheap you were a slut. You became a different kind of person, a pod person, that looked the same, that acted the same and talked the same as everyone else, but that was just a ruse, to sleep with someone and make them the same as you, a slut, a pod person too. Only men, even poofs like Stephen, couldn’t be sluts. They could only be men. They held the answer of how to unslut a slut. They did that in chapel or church. Then a slut became a lovely bride. Such a loving mother.  The poor thing. She hated that. Hated men. Hated herself most of all, but hoped she could play this one different. She waited until Stephen passed her in the hallway going the other way, going back to write something trivial about her in his report. He waved an admonitory finger.

Her room door was lying open, but she could tell if somebody had been in rooting about, nobody had.  She stood at the window,  fingers in her tush and waited for a sense of normality to come along, wash her away, in the same way she waited for a bus. It took longer than expected.  A glow radiated from the dark yellow curtains that looked cheap in daylight.  The window opened three inches, enough to push a fag dout out, or some make-up case that you didn’t need, or a can of Coke that had got too warm and flat. Her eyes glazed. She fixated on the sandstone gable of another ward and the grassy knoll with the wind whipping through the sprawl of a rhododendron bush. She sniffed her fingers. Loping out the door to wash her hands, he was standing that awkward way in the hallway, reading over the fire regulations on the wall that no one ever read, avoiding looking at her, seeing her, making her not exist. She wasn’t having that. Nipping at his bum she made him turn.

‘Hi,’ she kept her voice low, friendly. His face was lipstick red. She liked that and the subterranean blue of his eyes that flickered away from her face. ‘I’m Janine. I saw you coming in.’ She laughed, stuck her hand out for him to shake. That relieved some of the tension in his shoulders. He smiled back at her, crinkly delight round his eyes as he gripped her hand. She held his hand a few seconds too long, rubbed her juice into his thumb, marking him with her scent. ‘Thought since no one else is, I’d show you around.’

‘That’d be great,’ he said.

‘There’s not much to see,’ she said in a mocking, confidential tone.

‘That’d be great,’ he said again, floundering with conversation, the way most men do.

She easily took the slack. ‘What’s that in your hair? Her expression took on a slightly perplexed look.

He patted at his head as if searching for a piece of lint and expected to find an nit or bug.

‘No there.’

He leaned over and down. She moved her head sideways ran her fingers up and down through the scalp of his hair, marking him as hers once more.

‘You got it?’ He straightened up.   

‘Emm,’ she replied, slipping her arm through his. She led him two circuits of the ward and threatened to blindfold him and see if he could do a third alone.

The pilot-light was on, burning hot. After lunch, she pushed him into a chair in the corner of the dayroom, grilled him, until she knew everything about him and the reason why the police had delivered him to her. She kissed him, or made it seem that it was his idea, and he kissed her.   His hair flattened into her forehead.  A pressing together. Lips slipping against each other, a testing, slick and cool.