The Avondale Ward

The blonde receptionist, a self-confessed reefer smoker, ‘it never did me any harm…’ asked me to leave my carrier bag behind the counter. ‘Suicide risk,’ she said, conspiratorially. She was embarrassed to have to tell me. ‘Regulations…I’ll buzz you in.’

            The canteen was full of hooded and whispering shapes, a smokers’ yard to the left with pigeon netting and a sculpture of a gold cello poised dynamically on its tip—the metal burnished and crawling with golden bees until I thought I was hallucinating.

            I could see through glass into the lit-up ward where people paced, always pacing, in pinks and cabbage greens and hair nets. They would come together, shoal in pairs, keep pace for a moment before darting off towards the corners, very much like the behaviour of different species in a tropical fish tank.

           I lingered a little while watching a woman in the yard throwing balled up bread at the pigeons, ‘pigeon petonk..’ she called it. What marked her out as unusual was her total absorption in her task, a quality that under different circumstances you might admire. I counted the pigeons and looked at the cello,  afraid of mingling with the patients and meeting my friend. I didn’t want to see the man I admired, a natural leader, out of control. That was my role in the relationship so I waited.

          Tony was with his wife in a little room to the left. He leapt up when he saw me through the porthole in the door. The Irish doctor smiled.  I stood in the doorway and Tony hugged me almost breaking my spine with his strength. ‘He’s the fucking nutter…’ he said to the doctor, and then he touched my nose. ‘Daniel, this is all an elaborate ruse to get you sectioned…’ For a moment deferring to the wisdom of his bright blue eyes, his superior intelligence I was fearful—they’ve got me. It was so easy to be commandeered by Tony.

          ‘This is my new office, ‘ he said.   He insisted on introducing me to the patients as if this was another party for him to schmooze, more capital for him to run down to fund his grandiose projects, the fact that a woman was shivering and muttering the name Mary over and over again did not deter him. ‘We’ll talk later,’ he said, ‘I do want to talk to you…’ And he jabbed two scissor-like  fingers at her eyes

          ‘Ah, you must do something serious.’ He turned to me. ‘That retro-folk-doggerel you recite to people—well, it’s like being fucked up the arse by a nose trumpet,’ and he accompanied that phrase with a huge sweeping gesture with his muscled right arm.  ‘The question is: is there anything urgent. Anything we need to attend to..’

            Yes, that was very like Tony- to enthuse to his admirers about their projects, projects they were unaware they had even undertaken. The ticking maths' brain was at work breaking things down, number crunching while others chewed gum.

            ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Of course I’ll do something serious…’

           ‘The great London novel is still unwritten and your own search for authenticity among the spent symbols. Can I rely on you?’

            ‘Of course you can. You’re the Tonester..’ and warming up to his smile I grew excited… ‘the fucking Tonester. The Church of Surf. Your disciples are dotted all along the Atlantic coast.’

            The Irish doctor smirked and jabbed at his pad with his ballpoint,

******

We stood in the yard, what Tony termed the Panopticon, where we could be observed by unseen observers. On one side a sheer cliff of office buildings and  glass swooped dizzily towards us like an angle from Van Gogh’s bedroom. For me the apparently ‘well-adjusted’ the giddiness and daring slant of that wall made me unsteady.

           Tony introduced himself to a Portuguese woman and an Angolan nurse as a Doctor. ‘Not that sort,’ he said shaking his head, a ‘Doctor of Philosophy… We need to get a little group of backers. I have the device with me.’

          Here was his lecture theatre, quite amazing acoustics that picked up the driest stir of tongue against cheek, the release of air like pneumatic brakes from ragged vocal chords. Tony had been talking non-stop for 48 hours and he was getting hoarse. ‘We will have the lecture here… I’ll see who wants to attend,’ and then he spotted in the netting above the feathered remains of a trapped bird wing, ‘ how horrible,’ he said.

*****

The woman approached me by the water filter, middle-aged, quite attractive. An untidy sheaf of papers under her arm. ‘Of course, Tony is very tiring. He’s hypermanic and really all we can do is absorb some of this energy. He’s exhausted me…’ We walked across the ward.  I was suddenly aware of the device Tony had pressed into my hand and I slipped it up my sleeve.

          ‘He’s always been excitable,’ I say, ‘that’s part of his charm but he is often extremely serious…’

            She scratched something down and nodded.

            ‘Our friendship is based on my fecklessness, my silliness and he finds that funny. He’s the family man, the venture capitalist. With a far, far  brighter academic future than mine ….’

            ‘Quite,’ she said.

            ‘But now all he’s repressed, puns, silliness, a desire to dance badly, to talk smut, have all come bursting out.’

            We stopped by the door and I waited for her to find her fob. ‘Please,’ she said, ‘when you get out find the Ambassador of Corfu. I did not murder my husband. Tell him the Duchess sent you.’