Windows of Madness (part six)

Llewelyn
1968

Llewelyn completed his last day at secondary modern school, leaving behind the old wooden entrance plaque with his initials burnt into it with a magnifying glass, the row of concrete bike slots that had buckled countless front wheels, and the little path down to the yard where he once pole-axed somebody with a clod of mud to the temple (in error). He walked through the clinker car park where he used to explore the workings of old Dinky toys by dropping bricks on them, alongside the railway line where oblong diesel trains had now replaced the puffing steam engines with fine brass names, past the branch line tunnel blocked by Dr. Beeching and down into the suburban gardens of home, with sweet peas, marigolds and red admiral butterflies on all sides. A late-middle-aged, balding man came limping towards him with his gabardine coat over his arm and a pair of beer bottle-bottom glasses glinting in the sun. The guillotine of cancer, heart attacks and strokes seemed a very long way off.
But it was there waiting.
“Hello” he said to the retired matron, who was gardening with her back to him.
“Good afternoon Llewelyn” she replied, without turning.
“Ah! Hello there” said somebody else, hurtling towards him from across the road like a scud missile. It was his mother’s mortal enemy desperately wanting some inside information on how badly off they were this week.
“’Hello” said Llewelyn, shooting through the front door and bolting it.
“Nice to see you” she warbled through the letterbox. “Tell your mother I’m thinking about her.”
“Okay.”
“She had such a nice little home-made coat on this morning.”
“Fuck off” he thought.
Panting on the other side of door like a fugitive, he then went into the kitchen, got a jammy dodger and took stock. He was glad enough to leave school, but his future was indistinct, and he hadn’t even arranged anything for the holidays with his school friends again, in case they said no. He would probably hang around their neighbourhoods in the hope of an incidental meeting, but in the mean time he would practice his bowling along the side path using the bin as stumps, read his library books (currently ‘The Lost World’) and go down to the cricket ground where he spent his time selling cushions and collecting autographs.
This kept him fairly busy, but he had just enough time left over to experiment with a right-hand side hair parting and brilliantine, although this made him look like a young Adolf Hitler without the moustache; so he did the wise thing and tried growing a moustache as well. In the event, his six weeks holiday passed very quickly and he soon reached the day when he left the house resplendent in his gravy-stained tie and darned sports jacket for his first day of ‘O’ levels at the Technical College. It was about two miles away, and he had intended to catch the bus en route, but when he saw a lengthy queue of cavorting baboons who obviously had the same destination, he got cold feet and walked instead. This made him slightly late, and meant that he had to endure the heart-pounding anticipatory stress of knocking on a variety of strange closed doors before he eventually found the correct room, finally passing through a silent, staring multitude in search of a spare seat.
“What’s your name?” said the lecturer.
“Llewelyn -----, sir” he replied.
“Are you sure you’re in the right place?” the lecturer asked cockily.
“This is the town brothel, is it not?” Llewelyn retorted.
He then grinned inanely at the lecturer’s white face and his unresponsive peers, hoping that they couldn’t smell the sweat generated by his incubator jacket, long walk and molten embarrassment. It was just dawning on him how incredibly gauche, nervous and shy he was in strange circumstances, and how easily he responded to pressure with acerbic sarcasm. He had been released from the fairly uniform and unselfconscious world of a boys’ school in the 1960’s, into this challenging pre-adult world of a further education college, and he was drowning like a kitten in a sack. His haircuts invariably made him look like a village idiot and his choice of clothes was decidedly pre-war, while his short neck and tall collars ensured that periscopes, rather than ties, were necessary accoutrements. The new faces, co-educational novelty and harder work, all threw up tremendous adaptation problems, and he soon discovered how incredibly difficult it was for certain people to be normal.
He also found out that self-confidence did not always flow from knowledge and achievement - it was more frequently the product of blissful ignorance. Knowledge made you aware of your weaknesses, as well as your strengths, while ignorance could sustain your vanity forever.
For Llewelyn, it was the psychedelic escapism of 1968 and 1969 which showed him a glimmer of hope. He was not an obvious revolutionary, with his basin haircut, Michael Caine glasses and podgy face, yet the seeds of personal revolt had been carefully sewn and consistently cultivated. He desperately needed an identity beyond the definitions imposed by home and college, so he greedily explored the alternative worlds of Sonny Barger, flower power and underground music, in the hope that these would provide a Holy Grail solution. He was too much of a wimp to use L.S.D. immediately, but by 1969 he had purchased an 80 c.c. Yamaha motorbike and bought his first ‘Black Sabbath’ L.P., demonstrating clearly to the six people on the planet who may have been interested that his personal rebellion had begun. The voting age had been reduced to 18, the first man landed on the moon, and he was ready for take off.
Initially, their motorbike club was laughably eclectic, with both scooterists and bikers joining forces to circulate around town and occasionally pose outside the chip shop, but by the time Llewelyn had left college the gang had seriously powerful machines, leather jackets, and denim waistcoats with their gang name on the back. They had all-night parties, big ‘runs’ to Wales and the Lakes, their first serious sexual experiences and cheap thrills as they rode en masse through the cobbled squares of quiet towns with gaping locals. Llewelyn met a few genuine characters during these years, including the youth who was so greedy he licked out chip bags, and the chap who could recycle a cup of tea up through his nose and back into the cup. There were also the really tough guys who drank their own urine in public toilets to show ‘class’ and the man who insisted on wearing an anorak instead of a leather jacket – even though this blew up like a balloon when he was riding, and led to his nickname ‘armchair’. But all this was nothing compared to the top man in the local Hell’s Angels chapter who reputedly ate dog shit.
Indeed, for all their bravado, they were still ‘weekend’ deviants, who conscientiously returned to their offices and apprenticeships on Monday morning and shrank into the background when gangs of tattooed desperados from the city rode to the coast. Compared to these knife-wielding anarchists with hairy shoulders and huge beer guts, they were just a bunch of second division runts with delusions of grandeur. Not quite as deluded as the local bloke who went around in full racing leathers and a helmet on his pushbike, but deluded nonetheless. There was certainly a wonderful feeling of camaraderie at times, but they were basically frauds and impostors, trying to pretend their adolescent antics were leading to a profound counter-cultural end.
They weren’t.
After a few years subtle changes appeared in the dynamics of the group and they started ‘racing’ rather than riding, and arguing rather than laughing. One night during a party somebody pissed in Llewelyn’s petrol tank, and someone else nearly died when they were pushed into a swimming pool while drunk. Things were due to change again.
The sine wave of love and hate.
---------------------------------------------------

Mad Mexican Bandits

In the 1970’s, every cowboy film (or series) seemed to have a resident mad Mexican.
“Ha! Ha! Ha!. You are my special friend gringo” the Mexican would laugh “And tomorrow I shoot your balls off.”
Llewelyn knew exactly how the gringo felt, because one of his friends was a bit like that. He was a good chess player, but whenever he started losing he would embark on a whole series of distracting manoeuvres, including cracking his knuckles, humming inane tunes loudly, and releasing his six pet budgerigars into the room, where they would proceed to chirp, fly and crap. If all else failed, he would somehow contrive to nudge the board onto the floor while he was dunking his ginger biscuits. He had absolutely no shame.
Like some people haven’t.
One day Llewelyn left his prized racing bike in his friend’s garden shed, and when he returned he found that the bike had been burnt to a crisp (along with the shed itself and half the garden). A rubbish fire had got out of hand his friend announced apologetically, and there was absolutely nothing he could have done about it. It was a year later, when Llewelyn saw his friend coaxing their family cat into the oven, that he could finally see the truth.
---------------------------------------------------

Llewelyn had left the ‘tech’ in 1970 with a hand full of ‘O’ levels, joining the local office of an insurance company and then transferring to their regional office two years later. This represented a fundamental conflict, of course, between the financial necessities of life (working in the office), and his anti-establishment self-imagery (riding with the bikers); a battle which was fought on many levels. His employers knew that he had a motorbike, and they noted his long side burns, collar length hair, shiny-elbowed suit and seditious sense of humour. This meant that perfumed prats with kipper ties and smug smiles could amble in ten minutes late and spend another five discussing their orange Morris 1800’s with the Chief Clerk, while Llewelyn was publicly flogged for being two minutes late and reminding the Chief Clerk that they were all on flexitime anyway. He slowly dug his own grave, but he was pleased that he was finding his voice at last; even daring to criticise the jailers around him.
At home, the situation had reached crisis point, with his middle-aged mum developing total hypochondria and settling for a life on state benefits. There were endless references to multiple chronic illnesses, constant affected coughs and groans, long periods of ossification in the fireside chair, and apoplectic attacks if this was ever questioned. Rapid walking round the back of the house would be replaced with a grimacing snail’s pace at the front, coughs and sighs would multiply and grow in volume as the front door was answered, and an arthritic inability to hold a pen would be contradicted by five page vitriolic letters of abuse to the doctor’s surgery and welfare agencies. At the same time, nobody else had an illness worth mentioning.
“You’ll get this house when I’m dead” she sobbed in the morning. “It won’t be long now”.
“I want you out! Out! Out! You bloody good-for-nothing! You’re no son of mine!” by the evening.
From that time onwards Llewelyn used a healthy scepticism in his dealings with the world, because he realised just how cleverly another person could rationalise their actions, ‘spin’ their attacks, and fool some of the people all of the time. Even if it meant convincing themselves of blatant untruths, ignoring counter-evidence for years, losing all self-respect and bringing themselves to their knees; the easy option was sometimes just too much of a temptation. As he later realised in his professional life, subconscious evasion of responsibility was a very widespread phenomenon indeed.
He’d been living in a flat since 1971, but when he returned to his hometown to visit friends his mother would sometimes put him up, and this would inevitably end with a cataclysmic row and his ejection from the house. He would then crawl round to see one of his long suffering pals and beg for a night’s lodgings, losing quite a number of friends in the process. Indeed, it was one of his most savage learning experiences to discover that many of them secretly reviled him for being ‘intellectual’ (i.e. he had an office job), and abandoning his mother in her ‘hour’ of need. An easy mistake to make, he supposed, for people who had enjoyed the security of a stable family all their lives and had no experience of long-term neurosis. They couldn’t see that his callousness had at least kept him sane, that there were many sides to every story, and that an hour of need could sometimes stretch to forty years.
Shortly after Britain joined the E.E.C. (1973), his fading love affair with motorcycles ended in divorce, as he found himself rolling down the road at 60 m.p.h. in a t-shirt, with his flesh mixing into the tarmac. He got away with a broken collar bone and deep abrasions, but the wounds were still bleeding three weeks later, and he’d had enough. His mother visited him in hospital, but minutes after her arrival she fainted, ending up in a bed next to Llewelyn with the Cheshire cat smile of a well-practised martyr. He took stock of his life while he was recovering, returned briefly to the civil service (where he was then working as a clerk), and handed in his notice.
He really couldn’t imagine himself spending his entire working life with grey soulless managers admonishing gossiping staff for petty bureaucratic crimes. For him, it was death by a thousand cuts, and with all due respect to everybody, he wanted ‘out’ yesterday. He now needed something which rose above all this dog-eat-dog stuff, something which was more secure, reliable and objective. He wanted to enter the domain of fundamental explanations, overarching knowledge, philosophical insight, artistic merit, quads and ivory towers, academic qualifications and regular intoxication. In short, he wanted to solve his problems by becoming a student.
Ha. Ha.
So, he ran towards explanations, and away from understanding, not thinking for a moment about the past.
The past that imprisons the future.

The Unit
2005

It was nearly Christmas, and the sickness calls were coming in with greater frequency than the disingenuous inter-departmental greetings cards. In the vain hope of assistance, I thought I should inform Richard that the qualified nurse who was supposed to be on duty in an hour - now wasn’t. I trudged to our leader’s door, knocked and entered, just in time to see him turn off his personal T.V. set and move a large heap of official documents to the centre of the desk. Spluttering a little, he commented:
“A-a-ah, what a Godsend Ceefax is, Steven. An absolute must for all managers. I was just checking the weather forecast and traffic congestion pages to help the inspectors plan their return journey. Jolly good, eh?”
Yes, the inspectors were here again and Richard’s statement was certainly sycophantic enough to be true, but somehow his bright red face, perspiring top lip and bulging half-zipped flies told a different story.
“Oh, I thought I may have caught you in flagrante, Richard.”
“Hum…humph……I certainly don’t know any lady of that name, Steven. And if I did, I certainly wouldn’t do it in the office.”
“Just joking.”
I made a mental note to investigate further when he was out of the room, and told him about the late sick call.
“Sick again eh? Well, he’s had a really tough time recently. Poor weather on his holiday, investments only yielding 5%, and now he has to look after his own children because the child minder’s away – we must give him all the support we can.”
“He’s actually off with diarrhoea.”
“Hum…hum. Well, he does have a tendency to stomach problems.”
“He also has a chronically bad back, recurrent gout, frequent migraines, and long term depression which is resistive to all known medication.” I pointed out.
“Hum…hum. Well, nevertheless we must give all the professional support we can. Ring around and see if anybody else is available.”
“It seems like I’ve got no choice.”
“Yes…..yes…… and don’t worry so much, Steven. I’ve always got things well in hand. You know that.”
“True, true” I agreed.
Returning to the main office, I couldn’t help wondering for the hundredth time why the Trust was so gullible with staff sickness time. Up and down the country, millions of pounds were being spent on incapacitated nurses sitting at home, and further millions were being spent on replacing them with bank and agency nurses. In a situation where money was in short supply for essential equipment, new wards, medication and reducing waiting lists, it was incredible how the government and managers would dole out public finances with such mindless profligacy.
Yes, the ludicrousness of our professional lives had now reached critical mass, and managers were even sending boxes of chocolates to people on sick leave to make absolutely sure that the absentees couldn’t accuse their employers of being ‘uncaring’. A number of staff on long-term sick leave had complained that they felt ‘left out’ and abandoned in their ‘time of need’, leading to a sudden wave of paranoia amongst managers who felt vulnerable to disciplinary proceedings if they didn’t demonstrate how highly they valued their invisible workforce. Predictably, some of these absentees then began to complain that management were becoming too intrusive, and that they should not ‘harass’ staff while they were suffering at home.
“Buzzzzz” went the doorbell, interrupting my reverie.
“I’ve just come to check there aren’t any ligature points in the unit” said a yellow-coloured man with large identity badge worn medallion style on a gold chain.
“Okay, that’s fine” I said, feeling my own throat constrict a little.
“Buzzzzz.”
“Excuse me a minute, I’ll have to answer the door again.”
“Okay boss, I’ll see you later.”
“I’ve just come to undertake an environmental risk assessment and option analysis” said a grey-coloured man with rheumy eyes, clipboard and sad moustache.
“Be my guest” I said.
“You’re not trying to bribe me are you?” he said hopefully.
“Not on my salary.”
“I’m just going for a dump” Sidney interjected, farting lustily.
“There’s no need - you’re already in one” I replied.
“Yes indeed” he agreed.
“Don’t you ever think about the great mysteries of life, Sid?” I said.
“What? You mean the possibility of life after death, Stonehenge and things like that?”
“Well, I already know there’s life after death – I work here, but I was thinking more of the great unsolved mysteries. Like why do we never see dustbin men rushing around emptying our bins in the afternoon? Why do we get nothing but junk mail on Monday mornings? Why do people dig holes in the roads and then disappear for a month? Why do amateur athletes have to visit the Fancy Dress Shop before entering televised marathons?”
“ And how does spending millions more on the Health Service lead to record levels of sickness and incapacity?” Sidney chipped in.
“Indeed.”
I watched him go to the bog, and wondered.

Many of my colleagues burnt the midnight oil studying regulations on ‘carers’ leave’, ‘compassionate leave’, ‘special leave’, ‘study leave’, ‘adverse weather conditions’, ‘medical appointments in work time’, and ‘union duties’, so that when they ran out of regular sick leave and standard holidays, they could then spend the remainder of their time also at home. Some had become formidable workplace lawyers challenging every decision with senior managers and threatening to go to the House of Lords and E.C. courts. Others settled for using two or three days of carers’ leave simply to save on child minding costs, or to visit relatives in hospital once a day. Compassionate leave seemed to cover everything from the funerals of distant relatives that the applicant had never seen, to the funerals of their friends’ relatives, to anything that couldn’t be squeezed into the other regulations easily. It was only a matter of time before special leave would be claimed and given for easing the depression staff suffered following the death of their favourite T.V. celebrity.
“My radio has broken” interjected Maddie.
“Oh, yes?”
“I want a new one”
The cassette had come to the end of its run and stopped.
I knew what it felt like.

On my way back to the office I noticed Richard sauntering out of the toilet, carrying a large print edition of Raymond Chandler’s ‘The Big Sleep’.
“Any news from the chief inspector?” I said.
“Huh! Any more heat from that punk and I’ll go crazy. I could put a slug in the bum, real easy.”
“Good Lord…. I’ve heard they’re bringing back leeches in healthcare, but that’s going a bit far isn’t it?”
“No kidding Stevie boy…he’s got something to hide. I’m gonna hire a private dick to follow his ass every which way.”
“Ouch.”
I then noticed that the front of Richard’s trousers was erected like a taut tent, and that he was using a blur of camouflaging hand movements to disguise the area, somewhat akin to the dance of the seven veils.
“Excuse me asking Richard, but are you having any trouble in the nether regions?”
“Oh Christ, I thought you hadn’t noticed. My doctor gave me these new tablets for erectile dysfunction and now I can’t….er…..deflate my member. It’s somewhat embarrassing I’m afraid.”
“Indeed, but think of the advantages.”
“Advantages?”
“Yes….. The capacity to pole vault high buildings……the useful place to rest a breakfast tray…..the….er……..”
“Yes?” he sniffed.
“Well…..if all else fails you could always freelance as a self-propelling battering ram in drug busts. The list is endless really.”
(silence).

On arrival at the office I began ‘phoning around for somebody who wasn’t currently sick, but I did so with a certain amount of understandable pessimism. After twenty minutes or so, my last remark was:
“Okay, never mind. I’ll see you next week (hopefully).”
“My son works in healthcare management, you know” said Sid.
“Oh, I thought he was an undertaker?”
“No, that’s Peter. It’s Todd who’s the manager.”
“He’s in the right job by the sound of it.”
“Then there’s Jekyll and Hyde.”
“Your grandchildren?”
“No, our two dogs.”
“Oh…. rather you than me Sid. All that tramping about in hail storms at 6.00 o’clock in the morning, just so you can pick up shite in plastic bags and have your balls sniffed.”
“It’s not that bad Steve. I only walk round the corner to the play area, crunch an empty crisp packet in my pocket, and bend down on the blind side of the ref. There’s no need to move anything.”
“You’ve got it all worked out Sid.”
“Yeah, it’s dead easy and a wonderful pastime. In fact, I’ve been trying to get the wife more interested.”
“Really?”
“I keep telling her that dogging is very fashionable at the moment – all that fresh air and exercise. But she’s just not interested.”
“How strange” I said.

Anyway, I’d tried everybody under the sun, including all those who worked on this unit and the other wards who might be interested in overtime, all two qualified nurses on the vast hospital bank list, and three nursing agencies – all to no avail. Messages had been left and replies not received, mobiles were switched off and numbers were unobtainable. Richard would have been very helpful, but he unfortunately had two very important meetings to attend, plus the inspectors debriefing back on the unit. So:
“Could you possibly do a long day, old boy?” he crooned.
“I’d be much happier if everybody came in and actually worked the hours they get paid for” I replied.
“Hmm….hum…All the sickness procedures are being followed. Remember, it’s even worse on some of the wards. We’ve got a lot to be thankful for, you know.”
I didn’t know that, but in any event we agreed that I’d do the long day and take some time back the following week. A loud radio down the corridor announced:
“ 20 per cent of the N.H.S. annual budget is being thrown away according to latest figures …. More than £10 billion is being wasted on sick or idle staff, theft, bed-blocking, fraud and hospital infections.”
“Hmmmmm……..hmmm.” said Richard, working hard on his doodle pad.
“Don’t worry too much about the inspector’ meeting” I sniped on the way out “I’m sure things are well in hand.”
“Of course, of course……. and by the way Steven” he said “ You haven’t got a spare rubber have you?”
“You don’t need one for autoeroticism” I smirked.
“Eureka!” he said “I’ve been struggling with 15 down all morning.”
He turned back to the ‘Daily Spurt’ crossword, and I left.
“I need a cigarette now” said the lady fastened to my elbow.
“Follow me then” I said.
“I’m going to discharge myself.”
“I’ll have a fag too” said Bert (another of our old timers).
“Always remember this maxim in times of trouble” said Sidney “A man with a hole in his pocket still feels cocky.”
“Thanks Sid.”
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Bert
1959

Bert didn’t have a great time with his leg-iron and his limp; the unfortunate consequences of childhood polio. He was inevitably bullied, excused sports, short of friends and shy. There wasn’t much to recommend life, but he enjoyed gardening and he spent countless hours weeding and digging, while his mum stayed inside and drank. She wasn’t very happy either, having been abandoned by her husband for a “whore” across town, and left saddled with a crippled, sullen child. Cheap sherry dominated her days, and then her.

The years drifted unpleasantly by, and eventually Bert left school to join the ‘Parks and Gardens’ division of the local council. His limp wasn’t so pronounced by this time, and he enjoyed the outdoor life, the comparative seclusion, and the sanctuary from home. Then once upon a time, romance came into his life; a little buxom lady recently divorced and just a tiny bit desperate, who was encouraging her two small children to feed stale buns to the ducks. She was forward and encouraging, while he was naïve and besotted. They married within the year and for a short time he was on cloud nine.

Until her first husband came back.

Bert would always remember the afternoon he impaled his left foot on a rusty nail and returned home early from work. The dog was still in its kennel, but his wife was arched over the back of their Ikea sofa, with a sweaty Minotaur drawing close to cardiac-arrest behind her. The Minotaur was a lot bigger than Bert, so he just wiped himself on the curtains, and winked before he left.
---------------------------------------------------

The marriage continued in a fashion, but there were more stains on the curtains, and Bert once more retreated into his work. To make things worse, the courts decided to send him six community service ‘clients’, who quickly converted his quiet refuge into a noisy purgatory, and set a time-bomb ticking. Most of the lads did a reasonable job, but one in particular made Bert’s life hell; answering back, bullying the others, terminally idle, and genetically incompetent. He was number one in the pecking order because he’d got away with 150 hours weeding for permanently scaring a woman’s face from temple to mouth. He was a first class evil bastard.

Like some people just are.

No excuses, no psychobabble, no hiding behind the curtains and brushing it under the carpet. No self-righteous twaddle at everyone else’s expense. He just was.

Towards the end of the youths’ assignment, Bert decided to inspect a flowerbed that they’d been planting out in the shape of a clock (part of the town’s entry in the ‘Best Kept Gardens’ regional competition). He found the bully systematically digging up the flowers, and grinning widely at the pile of human dung he had left stinking at 12 o’clock. Bert charged forward and pulled the spade away, but the youth turned around and smacked him painfully on the cheek.

“Fuck off, weirdo” he spat “I’m out of here tomorrow, anyway.”

Something snapped.

It was a nose, in fact. Bert’s block head smashed down on the youth’s proboscis sending blackheads and blood spurting all over his prickly chin, while muscular hands gripped a scrawny neck, tighter and tighter. And tighter still.

He had nearly killed the youth, the police told his wife later, and now he was in serious trouble. But he hadn’t said a thing since the attack, just sitting in a daze, gently rocking to and fro on the edge of his bunk in the cells. The police doctor had been called in, and then the consultant, who recommended Bert for a period of psychiatric assessment.

It looked as though there’d been a lot of anger locked up in Bert for a long time.

Like there sometimes is.
---------------------------------------------------

Lunchtime was almost with us, so I hastened to the dining room and switched on the monstrous aluminium machine which reheated the meals when they arrived from the main hospital kitchens. Drilling and hammering continued in the background, harmonising beautifully with the domestic’s vacuum cleaner, the radio in the small lounge, and the assorted 120 decibel statements being made by staff and patients as they talked at and past each other. Not the ideal ambience of a discrete little bistro, I observed, but any port in a storm.
“Don’t worry” said Sidney “At least you’ll get time and a turd.”
“Beg pardon?”
“Time and a third for the extra duty this afternoon.”
He was always nearer the mark the first time.

This reminded me of my earlier tete a tete with Richard, and his strange behaviour in the upstairs office. I must have a sniff around his desk (it was the only way of finding out what the managers were really up to, after all).
What could it be?
Secret memo’s about redundancies (please God please)? A wonderful new referral from the regional secure unit? Stealthy enquiries from the local paper? A record-breaking agency nurse account? More staff straight from the psychiatrist’s couch?

My mind boggled with anticipation.

(to be continued)
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