Bag of Weasels. Chapter 1

Back in the time when my world had unravelled and my life spun away, I was taken to a building, all battleship grey and electric lights, to be fixed up, measured, watched and labelled.
And in there was Ralph: unapproachable Ralph, the Mad Maori, furious angry and dangerous. He was tough guy big, a natural born lump, they came in mob-handed when Ralph fetched up, kept him by the security door and braced themselves for violence. He could scare people shitless with just a look, pin them to the spot with his energy, but when he rolled up on the wrong side of the door he looked over his new domain and just smiled at his keepers. He dwarfed them all.
He recognised me as his fellow sufferer, adopted me if you like, and we did the wards together. We were the scourge of the lockdown Psyche Ward; day and night, through thick and thin, me and Ralph.
And that's where they gave him his scizophrenia: they wrote it down where it counted. In the end, they knocked him down with drugs and head games, shuffled him off to a quiet place in his head where they could watch him safely.
But when he was at his most fantastic, Ralph had told me a tale of London. A true story - he swore, about what he'd seen and found in the city.
"London's calling," he said softly one night, as we dossed aimlessly on the cheap plastic chairs in the perma-lit corridor. "The houses have been speaking to me."
Now that was a turn up, at the time. Ralph may have raged at our white-coated keepers, but fair enough. He'd seemed the full ticket to me when he'd arrived: he wasn't one for speaking loads, but he was one of the few here who could speake in sentences that had a beginnning and an end and made sense in the middle. He'd told me he'd been a roofer once.
Over time he'd started up his dark mutterings: "In the derelict, find it in the derelict," he'd say over again, eyes staring hard at the floor, their whites flashing against his dark skin. His other fave came in later: "Burn my soul and let me live." And then he'd say to himself, "I have to get back, I have to get out, I have to get out," over again with his other two mantras, but at least that last was a common sentiment in there.
But he'd never mentioned conversational houses before.
"That's why I'm here," he said.
You don't say.
There was more:"Where they've been left, where they've sat empty, something's come in, come alive in the gaps out there, and it's talked to me."
I did not flinch, or laugh or hit the panic bar that snaked round the ward. This was my friend. I listened.
"Some can't hear it, they are deaf to its pleas, but I could. Soon I was hearing it everywhere, in all the empty places. As long as the place had been left to itself, it could come out safely, come out and gather itself."
Well. I was in the right place to hear this sort of stuff.
Ralph got defensive: "Look, Sunny, I don't think god is speaking to me," he said in his tough-guy voice, "The devil isn't telling me to kill women or something, I don't think the Queen is a twelve-foot lizard. I haven't hurt anyone, I've got no plans to. But something showed itself ,Sunny, London showed itself. It called out to me.
"What did it say?" I was indulging him.
"I don't know, I can't put it into words right now, but it left me soaked, drenched with tears."
"Why? What was so sad?"
"I think," Ralph paused, and looked down, sort of sheepish now, "I think it was dying."
We sat in silence in the sick yellow light. I thought that was it. "Then Ralph turned to me and said, "You know, it felt so sad, and lonely, and so desperate but, something else too. I can't really put into words Sunny, but it lit me up. From the inside. Me, my head, the houses, everything. Made me feel alive. It felt golden."
After telling me this, big tough-guy Ralph had tears in his eyes. I'd never seen that before. And I'd never heard the like of it either. That would change, but I couldn't know then.
Time went by, and like I said, they smashed Ralph up and then turned him loose, and it came to pass that I too was thrown back like a skinny fish, back into London where I floundered and forgot it all, day to day and day and night, as I sank into my patterns and ways and wandered my way into this story.