Strictempo

Dancing in the dark

Till the tune ends

We’re dancing in the dark

And it soon ends

We’re waltzing in the wonder of why we’re here

Time hurries by; we’re here

Then we’re gone . . .

Hannah slid around the polished floor in the arms of her partner, trying to follow as smoothly as he led. Her arm ached because Terry was much taller than her, and it meant that her right hand was held in his at a very awkward angle. She hoped she was doing the right steps. She had learned to do the quickstep—side, side, step behind—at ballroom dancing classes at school, but once rock ’n’ roll impinged on her consciousness she’d given up, so she never learned to foxtrot. But Terry had medals, bronze, silver and gold, for ballroom dancing, and he used his body to signal to Hannah what she should do next, gently pushing her ahead of him. As long as she didn’t try to think about it, she made the right moves, or enough of them to allow Terry to manoeuvre her around the floor without either of them looking too foolish.

Of course, she felt foolish anyway. What fourteen-year-old in 1962 would not flush as pink as her layered net petticoat with embarrassment at doing ballroom dancing in public? Luckily, there was no one of her own age to see her. She was humiliated only in her own eyes.

Dances happened once a week, on Friday nights. The rug on the dayroom floor was rolled away to reveal polished wood that was perfect for dancing. The chairs and low tables were already ranged around the edges of the room. Danny was in charge of the record player. Reading from the record sleeves, he would announce the next dance.

“Right, it’s a samba. Let’s make this a Ladies’ Excuse Me. Of course we’ll excuse you, ladies, we know you can’t help it.”

Danny was very outgoing, which made him a natural choice for master of ceremonies. Not that anyone had chosen him; he just took charge of social activities, and no one else wanted to do it.

The music was mostly provided by three LPs called Sinatra Sings Strictempo, Volumes 1 to 3, which were special dance tempo arrangements of Frank’s best-known songs. Once or twice during the Social, Danny would announce, “Right, now, specially for the wild teenagers in this establishment, it’s . . . the Twist!”

He tried to sound enthusiastic, but his heart wasn’t really in it. Danny was only in his early thirties, but he liked a decent tune, with a proper rhythm, and a singer who could sing. Hannah was the only teenager in the hospital but, in fact, almost everybody danced to the Chubby Checker records she had asked her father to send. Everybody, that is, who danced at all. But even the patients who sat in their chairs all evening seemed to enjoy watching the energetic gyrations of the more active inmates, and were to be seen tapping their feet.

Nonetheless, it was with something like relief that Danny announced, “Right-oh, Pop-pickers, that’s your lot. Back to good ol’ Frank.”

It was in the hospital that Hannah discovered she could dance. Not the ballroom stuff, which was a matter of getting the steps right, but the Twist. She hadn’t mixed much with people of her own age for some time, so she didn’t normally go to dances. Even when she was at school, she didn’t dance. She wasn’t popular, and didn’t have a boyfriend, so during the dances she stood with a few other loners against the wall because only girls with boyfriends were asked to dance. Then she’d stopped bothering to go, telling herself that dancing, like sport, was for idiots.

But having contributed Chubby Checker and her two Elvis singles to the hospital record collection, she was committed to dancing to them, and lo and behold, it turned out she did the Twist like a dream, and, with Terry, who was older, she jived everyone off the floor. The first time, everyone stopped dancing and stood in a circle around her, clapping and cheering her on, as if she were in a film. It surprised Hannah to find that she could dance, but there was no doubt that she had a natural sense of rhythm, and moved with a freedom that she didn’t possess in normal circumstances. Secretly, from then on, she looked forward to the Friday Social. She liked being able to do something physical with ease, and she discovered she also liked being watched. She knew she danced all the better for having an admiring audience.

Part of her still thought that, in a way, dancing was for fools, especially when she watched the patients shuffling around the dayroom every Friday during the therapeutically approved Social. Anyone who was mobile was chivvied by the staff into going downstairs. They went from ward to ward turfing people out, even looking in cupboards for the more extreme unsociable types. There was always one cupboard with an unwilling socialite in it. The Social was supposed to be good for everyone: practice at joining in and being part of the larger community. It reminded Hannah, when she was not dancing herself, of the Caucus race in Alice in Wonderland. Round and round the room—always clockwise—they all went for the allotted two hours, as though they thought that if they went round enough times they’d break out of the circle and dance off into the real world. But Hannah knew by now that the real world was the last place most of them wanted to be, and the going round and round was actually a reassurance, or a kind of magical rite they hoped would keep them within the safe confines of the walls. Still, there was nothing else to do on a Friday evening, and, as long as Hannah felt no one outside saw her, she joined in with her teeth only slightly gritted. In fact, rather than singers of the acceptable peer-group taste, she loved Sinatra’s voice, the melodies of the songs he sang and, most of all, the lyrics.

It seemed to Hannah that she had been going round in circles for ever, but this particular circle had been going on for only six months. It just seemed like an eternity. Funny things happen to time in the Bin. She had been there for four months. Before that she had been in her mother’s room for two days. Before that she had been in Banbury with her father for two months. And before that . . .

Let’s take it nice and easy

It’s gonna be so easy

For us to fall in love

Hey baby what’s your hurry

Relax and don’t you worry

We’re gonna fall in love

The problem now of course is

To simply hold your horses

To rush would be a crime

’Cos nice and easy does it every time

Two weeks after Hannah’s fifteenth birthday she sat, silently, in the headmaster’s study while he told her that he would have to ask her to leave. For a moment Hannah toyed with the idea of saying no, since he asked, on the whole she thought she wouldn’t. But she’d been at the school for long enough to know the code. This was a liberal, progressive, vegetarian boarding school where self-government and rational discourse were the golden rules by which all members of the community were supposed to live. So punishments were known as “the consequences of one’s actions,” prefects were called “servers,” and “being asked to leave” meant that Hannah had been expelled.

A dogged air of reason hung heavily about the place, and it was supposed to go without saying that individuals of any age responded rationally to rational treatment. Or else, as was now apparent. If smugness were asphyxiating, you could have died of it there.

Hannah knew there was no point in arguing with facts, however conveyed, and she certainly wasn’t going to give Nicholas, the Head (they were on democratic, first-name terms with the staff) the impression that she cared.

“All right,” she said, “I will.”

“I called your father and told him I could no longer accept responsibility for you after noon today. Unfortunately, he’s moving this weekend and can’t come to get you. I said I would keep you here until Monday, and put you on the train.”

This was Friday. Hannah saw her chance.

“You’ve given up responsibility for me from midday. I’m not your concern after that. I’ve got a friend I can stay with in town, and there’s a party I planned to go to tomorrow night.”

It was a party Hannah had been to the previous night which was the cause of her present situation.

According to the school gossip, Nicholas had really wanted to be a lawyer, but he had done his familial duty and taken over the school when his father died. He nodded seriously at the logic of Hannah’s argument, in spite of its obvious legal incorrectness. He was also, of course, swayed by the potential disruption of having an already expelled Hannah rattling round the school all weekend.

He agreed to let her go, provided he could talk to the parent of the friend she planned to stay with, and if she promised to leave the party at midnight. (Nicholas never lost his faith in promises and reasonable requests—the following summer he was killed while on holiday in Gibraltar, run down by a lorry driving in the wrong direction down the one-way street he was cycling along.)

Hannah did leave the party at midnight, a strict attention to honour she would always regret on principle.

When she left Nicholas’ study, his secretary stopped her.

“We phoned your mother to ask her if she could take you, since your father wouldn’t. She said no. No one wants you, do they?”

Hannah just stared at her. Only later did she decide that the secretary must have been suffering hopeless love for her boss, and that that, rather than personal hatred, caused her to say what she did.

All in all, it was a pretty miserable weekend. Hannah had come seriously adrift. She had always relied until then on her proven capacity for survival to take her to the brink of disaster but no further. She hadn’t really imagined that anything so final would happen.

It was a kind of paradise, that school situated a mile or so from the garden city of Letchworth. It spread itself comfortably over several acres. Unmade paths (pitted with potholes that the pupils had to fill at weekends when their actions required consequences) linked the rambling country houses where they lived with the main teaching block, set around an old stone courtyard. There was an orchard just behind it where, if the weather was fine, Reg would conduct his Philosophy of Religion classes. But the trees, part of a system of organic gardening, though full of fruit, seemed only to bear wormy apples. One especially sunny day, Reg arrived with a great basket of cream cakes and distributed them among Hannah’s class. He said he’d wanted one himself, but couldn’t have borne to eat it while watching their yearning, junk-food-hungry faces gazing up at him. The vegetables in the organic garden next to the orchard grew on in silent disapproval, as Hannah’s form briefly raised their cholesterol levels and deepened their understanding of the Buddhist way. But as Hannah remembered the occasion later, in the hospital, and could almost taste the choux pastry melting with the whipped cream in her mouth, she was no longer certain that it had happened. She thought, perhaps, that the cream cakes were only ever promised—a tantalising joke—and that the virtue of the organic vegetables was never in serious jeopardy.

Beyond the orchard was the neatly mown and rolled playing field, laid out for cricket, lacrosse and football; and beyond that was a meadow which, though strictly speaking not school property, was very much the pupils’ territory. Courting couples and smokers, released from the day’s lessons, wandered into, and then disappeared beneath, the thigh-deep grass and wild flowers. From a distance their position could be spotted by the plumes of forbidden smoke that spiralled up into the air, like the camps of so many Indians, signalling to one another.

It was idyllic, as Hannah remembered it.

Of course, she hated the compulsory cold bath and morning walk before breakfast, especially on frozen winter mornings when her curses took on visible form in front of her face. And she had never been able to summon enthusiasm for muesli. A decade later, it might look neat and healthy in pretty earthenware bowls on the modern breakfast table, but at school it came by the gallon in vast tin vats, copiously wet and thick, waiting to be slopped into the pupils’ plates and given a good stir every now and then with a giant metal spoon so that the repellently plump raisins were distributed fairly throughout the dreadful, glutinous mess.

It certainly wouldn’t have looked, to an outsider, as if Hannah would remember her time at the school as idyllic. She took the precepts of self-government and maintaining a questioning attitude to life as far as she could. She joined the school council and proposed wild (and probably illegal) motions, which were passed, and then, on the informed advice of the Head, expunged from the minutes. She refused to participate in the dangerous madness of lacrosse, laid down her stick and sat, a precursor of Bertrand Russell, in the middle of the pitch until the games teacher called the Head, who thereafter drove Hannah out into the countryside at the beginning of each games period and left her to find her way back in time for English. As she trudged across the fields smoking the cigarettes she had stuffed up her knickers, she had the uneasy feeling that whoever had won the battle, it hadn’t been her. She took down every other line of the notes the physics teacher wrote on the board, and turned them into poems about parallax; and maths classes were held up while she demanded to know why she should accept that parallel lines meet at infinity. So what if it was axiomatic? What if it wasn’t true anyway?

But until she started climbing out of the dormitory window to attend midnight parties, nothing more dramatic happened than a look of weariness and the suggestion from Hannah’s tutor that she might channel some of her energies into joining the debating society.

Finally, though, she found a way to get to them.

She had returned to school that term after a particularly angry Easter at home, determined to be bad. She made a clear and conscious decision as she stood in the rattling corridor of the train, hating the place she was leaving behind, but knowing also that she wasn’t going to get what she wanted from where she was heading. So far she’d been awkward and difficult but remained within the ethos of the school. And then it came to her, like a revelation, that going too far was a territorial concept. It was a matter, literally, of going beyond the school bounds. It never seemed to matter greatly what was going on in the meadow where the couples sank out of sight and the puffs of smoke rose, so long as it was going on between members of the school. As in a properly constituted family, what went on, discreetly, between themselves was tolerated. Outsiders, even the partial outsiders, were another thing. There were some non-boarders at the school, but they had to be off the premises once the school day was over, and the local town was off-limits without written slips and a good reason. Being caught in the town without an exeat was a serious offence.

So Hannah began to spend most of her free time there, in a coffee bar which had just opened. The new coffee bars, with their hissing, foreign-sounding machines and drinks—Gaggias, espressos—and their rock’n’roll-filled jukeboxes, were notoriously the first step on the recently invented teenagers’ rocky road to ruin. Once or twice Hannah was seen through the steam-clouded window by a passing teacher and the warning she received confirmed that she was taking the right route.

She met Bob, five years older than herself, and a trainee reporter on the local paper. He had read a little Kerouac and Burroughs and pressed copies of Jude the Obscure and Ulysses on Hannah. She and Bob blew smoke at each other across their cappuccinos as they discussed despair and Raskolnikov. Very existential, and a perfect fit for Hannah’s own private sense of doom. They set each other stories to write that had to begin: “The chair hated the table . . .” and they mulled over the novel Bob planned to write when he wasn’t so tied up with reporting council meetings and weddings; it was to be five hundred pages long and span five minutes of the hero’s life. And she climbed out of windows and down drainpipes late at night to join him and his friends in their celebrations of the human predicament, which, like most other parties, consisted of cider and heavy petting, although, for reasons Hannah couldn’t fathom, they never quite succeeded in going the whole way.

None of this was radically different from what was on offer at school. It was possible, most weekends, if you were in with the right people, to sneak out of the dormitory and attend a huddled gathering in one of the huts dotted around the playing field that served as rooms for some of the sixth-form boys. And, in all likelihood, both Hardy and Joyce were freely available in the school library. But the fact that Bob was not from the school was crucial. They knew it and so did Hannah. She’d found a place she felt she belonged that was neither school nor home, and what was more, she was accepted. If it also breached the fundamental, unspoken rules, then so much the better.

Until, that is, she was caught returning in time for breakfast, happy and tired, from that last party, and she was out, firmly and for good. The limbo weekend was a prelude to going home, and that was not a happy prospect.

For a year before going to the school she had been living with her father and stepmother, locked in a grim and silent battle. Her stepmother was a plain, hard-working and, to Hannah, mysteriously Protestant woman who had been diligent and dutiful all her life. She had brought up a family on her own when her first husband deserted her, and ran a newsagent’s that required her to be up and busy by five every morning, seven days a week. She always wore one of those dull, flowery, sleeveless overalls that slipped over her ordinary clothes and tied firmly at the waist, as if to emphasise her commitment to the virtue of persistent hard work. Her lips seemed perpetually pursed and quivering with self-righteousness. Now, in middle age, she found herself, improbably, the companion of choice of Hannah’s ageing and tired, but still handsome and, to her, debonair, father. She devoted herself to maintaining his comfort and continued presence with further drudgery and was less than delighted when Hannah arrived: insolent, angry and bent on winning back her vanished-but-now-found father. For his part, her father sat at the still centre of the rivalry, wondering wistfully if he shouldn’t write his memoirs. “After all,” he would say from the depths of the chintz-covered armchair he had substituted for excitement, “there’s nothing Errol Flynn did that I haven’t done.”

The social workers and shrinks who by now were hovering over the dysfunctional family could see that no good was going to come of this arrangement, and since returning to the volatile mother Hannah had run away from was deemed out of the question, they decided to send her to the school, which took a small number of council “cases,” and where, it was hoped, the liberal, progressive atmosphere would suit Hannah.

Well, now they knew. And Hannah had wondered on the train home what Banbury was like (the previous Friday being the first she’d heard of their move from London), and what kind of schools the town had.

She needn’t have bothered. Hannah’s stony-faced father met her at the station and took a deep, chest-expanding breath as they walked to the car.

“I’ve done a lot of bad things in my time, Hannah, that I should regret.” He had, and some of them not entirely unconnected with the predicament Hannah now found herself in. “But I was never sacked from school. Now, you earn your living like everyone else. I’ve got you a job locally. You start tomorrow.”

So education was at an end, and, though this was unexpected, Hannah supposed that if one jumped off the edge of a cliff, one had no right to be surprised at anything one might find at the bottom.

She went to work the next morning at Cullens the grocers, filling the shelves and packing orders into cardboard boxes. It wasn’t altogether unpleasant; for one thing, they roasted their own coffee and the fumes of the best Arabica filled the air deliciously.

Since Hannah wasn’t speaking to anyone in the house, nor they to her, she spent a lot of her time wondering. When she wasn’t filling shelves, she lay on her bed in the spare room in the attic and wondered why it was that Lolita, silly girl, didn’t appreciate Humbert, and how it was that Radio Luxembourg always faded to a crackle whenever they played a record she liked, and whether there really were more spiders in her room than anywhere else in the world, and what was going to happen.

The first thing that happened was that she got the sack again. It wasn’t anything she’d done especially, more a matter of attitude and facial expression. The former being about not taking the initiative fast enough when goods needed replacing on the shelves; the latter, more decisive, fault being the greater problem. Not looking as if she minded about anything required an internal organisation of her facial muscles to keep everything light and steady, but the external manifestation of this internal effort tended to bring the word “belligerent” to the furious lips of those who scanned the language to explain the anger Hannah engendered in them. Anyway, that was what the manager said, that he didn’t like the belligerent look on her face and she shouldn’t bother to return on Monday.

On Monday, thanks to her father’s efforts to keep her employed, she began work selling shoes at Freeman, Hardy and Willis. She quite enjoyed it, and although she missed the smell of fresh-roasted coffee, she discovered a new pleasure in the scent of leather. She particularly enjoyed the tea-breaks, when she gossiped with her fellow sales assistant, who (though she seemed fairly old to Hannah) was about twenty-eight. What interested Hannah most were her tales of married life. It seemed that after nine years of what was apparently a happy marriage her husband had never, not once, seen her naked. She undressed in the bathroom and they “did it” under the bedclothes with the lights off. This was the first grown-up sex Hannah had heard about (apart from the dirty bits in Lady Chatterley she’d tried to make head or tail of at school) and she was amazed.

“Never? Not once?” she’d ask, thinking how difficult it must be to arrange in a small council flat.

“Well, it’s not nice, is it?”

The other assistant found Hannah just as odd: the peculiar school she’d been to, and expelled, and Hannah had confided to her that what she really wanted to do when she grew up, as she still thought of it, was to be a writer.

They found each other very interesting.

But it was that last confidence that did it. The manager had overheard them talking and later in the day Hannah was called into his office.

“We took you on as a trainee. There’s a lot to learn about this business. I’m afraid you haven’t been quite honest with us, I don’t think you intend to make a career in the shoe trade.”

Hannah confessed.

“Then I’m afraid you’ll have to go, and give someone else the opportunity.”

Having been ejected from three places in even fewer months, Hannah decided to take a more positive approach to life. She went home at lunchtime and packed her suitcase while they were downstairs in the shop. Time, she thought, to be somewhere else. She was in trouble again, and she couldn’t begin to imagine what more trouble would be like; or how many sackings there would have to be until she came to that black, unfathomable place that was designated by everyone (her father, stepmother, Nicholas, her mother and herself) as “where Hannah would end up.” She decided to short-circuit the whole process. She sat on the train heading for Bournemouth and her mother without any strong sense that she was making a final move. But sometimes it’s easier to leave before being asked.

I’d sacrifice anything come what might

For the sake of having you near

In spite of the warning voice that comes in the night

And repeats and repeats in my ear

Don’t you know little fool

You never can win

Use your mentality

Wake up to reality

But each time I do just the thought of you

Makes me stop before I begin

’Cos I’ve got you under my skin

The staff watched the dancing, although not merely with approval. They kept a careful eye on Terry during the Social. And while his movements were smooth and assured as he partnered Hannah around the room to Frank’s crooning, he was careful always to keep a good six inches between them. Terry, she had been told, in confidential whispers, was there by Order of the Court. He had a history of sexually assaulting minors, but the judge had given him the chance to have treatment instead of putting him in prison.

“But they watch him all the time. One false move, and he’s behind bars,” Pat, a fellow patient, told Hannah with a proper sense of drama. “Don’t tell anyone about it because it’s a secret. No one’s supposed to know, to give him a chance to have normalised relationships.”

Hannah had become used to the peculiar mix of psychosocial jargon and colloquial speech in which most of the longer-term patients spoke. They prided themselves on having a technical knowledge of their own and other patients’ conditions.

In fact, Hannah heard about Terry from half a dozen patients, all of them insisting that she must never mention it to anyone else. Only Terry, and his current girlfriend, Sally, another patient, never spoke about why he was there, which was in itself suspicious, because there was nothing the inmates liked more than describing their illnesses to each other.

Hannah had never come across a sex offender before, and Terry didn’t fit her picture of how people who did that kind of thing should look. Deep down, she didn’t really believe it. He was a handsome, well-dressed man in his late twenties, who spoke with a public-school accent. He was always polite and well mannered, and was very attentive to Sally, who seemed flattered to have such an elegant boyfriend. But it was a fact that he wasn’t allowed to go out of the hospital grounds, and Hannah noticed whenever she was alone with him in the dayroom, within seconds a nurse would appear from nowhere, and stand or sit nearby until someone else arrived.

Hannah had learned a great deal about people during her four months at the hospital: strange things, the kind of things you don’t learn anywhere else. But, surprisingly quickly, even the oddest details of people’s lives and problems came to seem almost normal and everyday.

There was Pam, so tall and thin she could have been a model. Pam was twenty-three, and hadn’t been outside, except in an ambulance, for five years. She was agoraphobic, Hannah learned. But that wasn’t all. She was also claustrophobic and frightened of new people, though no one seemed to know the name of that particular ailment, and she was given to fits of panic for no apparent reason at all. Once, when Pam tried on Hannah’s drainpipes, she had a claustrophobic attack because of the tightness of the jeans around her waist and legs, and they’d had to hold her down, writhing and screaming blue murder on the floor, while a nurse cut them off her with a pair of scissors. By then, this was no more than part of an ordinary day for Hannah, and it hadn’t really been necessary for the nurse to ask if she was upset by the commotion.

Sally, Terry’s girlfriend, had a chronic inferiority complex, according to Pat, who had been in the hospital for two years and was the most adept at jargon. Sally was one of a pair of identical twins: the very twins who a few years before had been on television every night for months advertising home perms. She was the “twin who didn’t have the Terri.” Or maybe she was the one who did. Pat couldn’t remember. But she was certain it was very significant that Sally was going out with Terry.

“Terri, you see?” Pat explained with a knowing nod. Hannah nodded back. She thought she could see that it was significant, but she was not experienced enough yet in these things to know how, exactly. Every Saturday Sally’s twin, Jackie, would come to visit. They really did have the same hairstyle, short and waved, and astonishingly, Jackie always arrived wearing exactly the same clothes Sally had on that day. Sally insisted it was because they were psychic with each other, but Hannah noticed after a few weeks that Sally was called to the phone regularly every Friday night. One week, she crept down the stairs to listen and overheard Sally whispering into the mouthpiece.

“. . . the pink shirtwaister and black winklepickers.”

Hannah was sorry because she liked the idea of telepathic twins. But the harmony between Sally and Jackie didn’t go beyond the sartorial.

In the dayroom, Jackie would begin each visit by recounting her week for Sally. There were dances and films and an unending rollcall of boyfriends. Sally sat listening to all this with an increasingly grim face until Jackie had finished and asked, “So what have you been up to?”

Sally, of course, being a patient in a mental hospital, hadn’t been up to much. She would offer whatever hospital drama had occurred and talk about Terry and how well they were getting on, and their plans for marriage, later, when he’d finished . . . that is, when they were discharged. Jackie’s look of smug satisfaction at the course of her own life turned to distaste as Sally told her about the life of the hospital. It was, her downturned mouth silently said, not nice; not a nice thing to talk about. And when Sally got on to Terry, Jackie contrived to look very superior and knowing: a look which clearly had a history in their lifelong relationship and which elicited an automatic response from Sally. Three visits out of four, Sally would stop talking, take a long look at Jackie’s expression, and, without any further warning, fly at her twin sister, grabbing handfuls of Terri-waved hair and slapping her carefully made-up face. Usually a nurse was nearby, ready to pull them apart, and Jackie would straighten her clothes with a prissy, self-righteous movement, and leave, telling the nurse that her sister was never going to get better, she had always been like that, mean and envious, and always would be.

Hannah decided it must have been Sally, after all, who didn’t have the Terri.

The visits were allowed to continue because the doctors apparently felt Sally had to work through her identity problems. But eventually they were stopped when, one Saturday afternoon, Jackie was found smooching in a dark corner of the entrance hall with Terry, after she’d said goodbye to Sally in the dayroom. Terry swore Jackie had pretended to be Sally, and eventually Sally accepted his version, but she refused to see her sister after that, and it was agreed by her doctor that the visits had better be suspended for the time being.

Douglas never danced. He was as quiet as Danny the MC was boisterous, but he attended all the Socials and watched from his chair with a benign, myopic smile. He was a Scot of indeterminate age, but it was certain that he was younger than he looked. Mild was the essence of Douglas, who was shy to the point of anguish, but eventually managed to have a quiet courteous relationship with most of the patients. People were inclined to tell him their troubles, because he was capable of sitting still for ages and never interrupted beyond a murmured “Oh, dear,” or “That’s a shame.” He wore a tweed jacket that might have belonged to his father and cavalry twill trousers with heavy patterned brown brogues, and walked slowly, which Pat said was as much to do with the heavy tranquillisers he was on, as his natural slowness of temperament.

Pat also related the story about Douglas’ only attempt to join the occupational therapy group. He did a painting of a sporran, very carefully, extremely detailed, a bit of a work of art. He was proud enough of it to show it to Pat, and then to his doctor at his weekly session. The reason why Douglas had never returned to occupational therapy was because Dr. Watt (something of a laughable figure among the patients, and, as it happened, a Scot himself) had taken a long moment to consider the painting, and then asked, “And what exactly is this, Douglas?”

“A sporran, Dr. Watt,” Douglas explained politely, a little hurt that it wasn’t obvious.

“Yes, Douglas, a sporran,” the doctor mused, rolling his r’s. “And what is behind a sporran?”

Douglas flushed bright red, as he was inclined to do when anything biological was mentioned. He was, Pat confided, almost certainly a virgin.

“A kilt,” Douglas said, somewhat resourcefully for him.

“That is true,” Dr. Watt conceded, a little tetchily. “And what is concealed by the part of the kilt—a skirt, mind you—that is hidden by the sporran, Douglas?” he asked, and went on without waiting for his patient to come up with a further obfuscation. “A weapon! Am I not right?” He made use of the subliminal pause before answering his own question. “A weapon, Douglas, that is what. A weapon is concealed behind this object you have drawn. You are very angry, aren’t you?”

“No,” Douglas muttered deep into his chest, and became thereafter, according to Pat, an even milder version of himself, and an ex-artist.

Hannah never quite worked out what, exactly, was wrong with Pat. She was a skinny, shapeless and spinsterish young woman who wore glasses with lenses half an inch thick, and spoke in a high-pitched, whining voice. Pat gave as full an account of her troubles as she did of others’. She was a depressive, she said, and her problem stemmed from having a neurotic invalid mother whom she had had to look after for most of her thirty odd years. She had never married, hardly had any boyfriends, because her life revolved around the demands of the sick woman. One day, for no particular reason she could recall, after two decades of uncomplaining service, Pat started screaming in the middle of preparing a poultice for her mother’s troubled chest. She flung the boiling muddy muck at the old woman, who managed to duck so that the nasty stuff made an unpleasant mess on the wall. After that Pat went very quiet and sat in the corner of the bedroom she had inhabited since childhood, waiting, it seemed, for something to happen. When they came to take her away, she was as relieved as her ailing mother, who was fixed up with a home help, which, frankly, turned out to be a much more satisfactory arrangement for all concerned. Pat had been in the small psychiatric hospital in Bournemouth ever since. On the whole she seemed happy enough, but from time to time she was subject to terrible depressions, when she turned her face to the wall and stared at a fixed point for several days on end. Luckily, some patient-drama always came along that was interesting enough to pull Pat back from her dark place and allow her to take up her role as hospital reporter.

Hannah understood very well when Pat told her about sitting in her room waiting for something to happen. It was what Hannah had been doing for the past four months. She might, currently, be moving around the dayroom, propelled by the pressure from Terry’s body, but her life, and consequently her mind, were static.

She was marking time, and during her first few weeks at the hospital she had learned that there was nothing to be thought about the future. Just as being pushed backwards around the dayroom had no implication for travelling, so the daily activities of sleeping, eating and talking to people were without meaning beyond the moment.

It was a curious condition for a fifteen-year-old to be in. All young children live with part of their minds constantly busy rehearsing the future. The “what happens next” of stories becomes a pattern for their own lives. “When I’m five, I’ll be going to school.” “When I’m grown up, I’m going to be . . .” “When I get married . . .” And the curiosity about what will be becomes a propellant. At fifteen, a person might be confused by the many but invisible possibilities ahead of her, but very few live without possibilities at all. It would be alien to the restless energy of young human creatures.

But Hannah had run out of possibilities. It was as if the door to the dayroom had vanished and there was nothing beyond circling in strict tempo. She might have panicked, but it seemed she had used up all her panic when she swallowed the sleeping pills her mother kept in the drawer, so she held still, marking time in strictempo, as if waiting for something to happen. But she had not the slightest notion of what it might be. Or rather, she knew there was nothing that could happen. So, at fifteen, in the year the Beatles recorded “Love Me Do,” she danced her old-fashioned dance and closed down the part of her mind that wrestled with the future.

This was not the reason why she was in hospital. It was not a sign of Hannah’s neurosis. Her sense of the absence of any possible future was fully endorsed by her doctor, the same Dr. Watt who had stifled Douglas’ creative impulse. But, in Hannah’s case, Dr. Watt was being no more than realistic. And so was Hannah.

There was nothing that could happen. Hannah’s life was on hold. Dr. Watt, to give him credit, had tried to push it in a direction, to get her father to understand that, in spite of her expulsion, she had to be allowed to go back to school; but having failed, there was little he could do but wait and see. It was generally agreed by the staff that this was the best thing to do, but it was also recognised that it was not possible to keep a child in hospital forever. Eventually, something had to be done, though no one, so far, had come up with any practical solution.

The staff at the Lady Mary Hospital did not consider Hannah to be in need of hospitalisation. That is to say, they did not feel she needed treatment because, although she had arrived after a small overdose and clearly had depressive tendencies, both her act of swallowing the handful of pills, and her depression, were perfectly rational responses to her circumstances. She was not technically mentally ill, but very troubled, and with cause.

She had been admitted to Lady Mary’s not on the recommendation of any doctor, but at the insistence of her mother, after Bournemouth General had assured her that Hannah was all right and could be sent home the morning following the pill-swallowing episode. She had demanded her daughter be sent to a psychiatric institution with such vehemence, not to say hysteria, that the admission doctor thought it a good idea to do it to keep Hannah out of her way for a bit, and to give them a chance to find out why the girl had tried to kill herself only two days after leaving her father and moving in with her mother.

They contacted Hannah’s father, and the following day he arrived, unhappily at the same time as her mother came to visit. The nurse on duty heard screams in the admission ward and found father and mother standing on either side of Hannah’s bed, each turned towards her, their heads almost touching over Hannah’s body like the apex of a triangle, shouting at her in unison.

“How dare you do this to me!”

“. . . do this to me! You’ve never been anything but trouble! I’m sick to death of you . . .”

“. . . sick to death of you . . . and the trouble you’ve caused me . . .”

“. . . you’ve caused me . . .”

It was Hannah, in the bed with the covers over her head, who was screaming.

The nurse hustled both adults out of the ward before the rest of the patients began screaming, too. In the office, deprived of the focus of their rage, they began yelling accusations at each other. She blamed him, he blamed her, for this turn of events, their voices rising until their present situation was left behind and pure hatred rang around the corridors of the hospital. Several male nurses and a couple of doctors came running at the commotion, tranquillising injections at the ready, only to discover it was visitors, not patients, they had to separate.

Later, Hannah told Pat that it was the first time in five years her parents had been in the same room, and certainly, when they were standing over her bed, the first time in a great deal longer that they’d agreed about anything.

It was decided that Hannah had better not go back to her father either, for the time being, and since there were no other relatives, the hospital was the only place she could be.

They didn’t give her any treatment, apart from a couple of tranquillisers after her parents’ visit. She was not on any drugs, and her weekly sessions with Dr. Watt were brief enough.

“How have things been this week?” he’d ask her.

“Fine, thank you,” Hannah would reply.

“Is there anything you want to talk to me about?”

“No, not really.”

Then, after a long pause, while they both listened to the silence, Dr. Watt would make ready to get up from his chair.

“Well, if you’re sure there’s nothing . . .”

Hannah would get up and say goodbye.

Every session was the same. At first, Dr. Watt’s “Is there anything you want to talk to me about?” sounded more meaningful to Hannah than was intended. He was a doctor, after all, and all the other patients had their problems aired in their therapeutic sessions. Hannah felt his words were probing for something that he had knowledge of. She started to feel he knew something and was inviting her to tell him about it. But she couldn’t think what it might be. Nothing was happening in her life, and she didn’t mind that, and therefore there was nothing she wanted to say. Yet, perhaps, there was something she couldn’t think of, or needed to discuss. She pondered the problem and finally came up with the notion that she was pregnant, and Dr. Watt knew it, but she didn’t. She got increasingly alarmed by this phantom pregnancy, in spite of the fact that she had only had one sexual experience, and that two years before, and penetration hadn’t occurred. But it is remarkably easy for a troubled young girl to imagine impossible things, particularly when the life of the mind is blank. Eventually, she summoned up courage and responded to Dr. Watt’s invariable question, which was, in reality, no more than a concealed way of saying he hadn’t come up with any solution to her situation.

“Am I pregnant?”

“I don’t know. Are you?” he asked, a little startled at the sudden possibility of Hannah having a future, after all.

“I don’t see how I could be, but I thought you might think I was.”

She explained about the sexual encounter two years before, and Dr. Watt assured her that she couldn’t be pregnant, but that he’d arrange to have her tested to put her mind at rest. After that the future receded once again, they reverted to their regular catechism and Hannah stopped worrying that there might be an answer to his question.

Hannah had soon become accepted as the baby of the Bin. Pat, especially, took her under her wing, but the other patients too looked out for her. If someone got wildly out of hand, throwing things, or themselves, violently about while Hannah was in the room, another patient would tell them to pull themselves together.

“Not in front of Hannah,” they’d say. And unless the situation was completely out of control, her presence usually had some calming effect.

Word got back to her old school that Hannah was in terrible circumstances, scrubbing floors in the workhouse or madhouse, depending who was telling the tale; but the truth was that life at Lady Mary’s was much more interesting than most places a fifteen-year-old might find herself, and, at the same time, rather safer, calmer even, than she was used to. Apart from the fact that she didn’t know how she was ever going to leave, she was not unhappy or frightened in the converted Victorian mansion just up the road from the seafront. She had certainly been both frightened and unhappy for enough of her life before that to know that what she had was asylum in the old, true, sense of the word: a refuge, a breathing space, a place of safety. If this was the place in which everyone said Hannah “would end up” it was by no means the worst she could imagine. Being stuck was not unpleasant, it was downright restful so far as she was concerned. And however much the doctors and nurses might cluck at each other about her continuing presence there, Hannah didn’t mind being in the Bin at all. All she had to do was dance an old-fashioned dance round and round the dayroom.