“I need to see her,” I begged. “I need to see my wife.”
“You have to leave now, Dr August,” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry it’s this way, but you clearly need help.” She closed the door sharply, the latch clicking behind the creaking white wood. I stayed there and hammered on the door, then on the windows, pressing my face against the glass. They turned off the lights inside so I wouldn’t know where they were, or perhaps hoping I’d get bored and go away. The sun set and I sat on the porch and wept and called out for Jenny, begged her to speak to me, until finally her mother phoned the police and they did the talking instead. I was put in a cell with a man brought in for burglary. He laughed at me and I throttled him to within a few heartbeats from death. Then they put me in a solitary cell and left me there for a day, until at last a doctor came to see me and asked how I was feeling. He listened to my chest, which I pointed out in my calmest possible voice was hardly a rational approach to diagnosing mental illness.
“Do you consider yourself mentally ill?” he asked quickly.
“No,” I snapped. “I can just recognise a bad doctor.”
They must have rushed the paperwork through, because I was taken to the asylum the very next day. I laughed when I saw it. The name on the door was St Margot’s Asylum. Someone had scrubbed out “for Unfortunates”, leaving an ugly grammatical gap. It was the hospital I had thrown myself from in my second life, at the age of seven years old.
Chapter 7
Mental health professionals are, by the 1990s, expected to themselves seek regular counselling and observation for emotional and mental well-being. I tried being a psychologist once, but found the problems I had to diagnose either overwhelming or too subjective as to bear consideration, and the tools at my command either childish or overblown. In short, I did not have the temperament for it, and when I was committed to St Margot’s Asylum for the second time in my existence, albeit the first time in this life, I felt a mixture of fury and pride that my sanity, cultivated despite severe provocation, could be so misunderstood by the ignorant mortals around me.
Mental health professionals of the 1960s make their 1990s counterparts look like Mozarts trampling upon Salieri’s lesser work. I suppose I should consider myself fortunate that some of the more experimental techniques of the 1960s had not yet made their way to cosmopolitan Northumbria. I was not tested on with LSD or Ecstasy nor invited to discuss my sexuality, as our one and only psychiatrist, Dr Abel, regarded Freud as unsanitary. The first to discover this was the Twitch, an unfortunate woman whose real name was Lucy, whose Tourette’s syndrome was treated by a mixture of apathy and brutality. If our warders had a notion of habit-breaking therapy, they acted upon it by hitting Lucy across the side of her head with the palms of their hands whenever she twitched or grunted, and if she became louder as a consequence–as frequently happened when provoked–two of them would sit on top of her, one on her legs, one on her chest, until she nearly passed out beneath them. The one time I attempted to intervene, I received the same treatment and lay pinned beneath Ugly Bill, the head day-shift nurse and sometime jailbird, to the vociferous approval of Clara Watkins and Newbie, who’d worked there for six months and still hadn’t said his name. Newbie stood on my wrists, mostly to show willing, while Ugly Bill explained to me that I was being very naughty and disruptive, and just because I thought I was a doctor didn’t mean I knew anything. I cried with impotence and frustration, and he slapped me, which gave me cause to rage and through which rage I tried to control my tears, converting self-pity into fury, but I could not do it.
“Penis!” the Twitch shouted at our once-weekly group session. “Penis penis penis!”
Dr Abel, his tiny moustache quivering like a frightened mouse on his top lip, clicked his pen closed. “Now, Lucy…”
“Come on, give it to me, give it to me, come on, come on, come on!” she screamed.
I watched the progress of the flush through Dr Abel’s cheeks. It was a fascinating luminescence, almost visible on a capillary-by-capillary basis, and I briefly wondered if the spread of his blush was representative of the speed of his blood flow through the shallow dermis, in which case he should seriously consider more exercise and a good massage. His moustache had ceased being fashionable the day after Hitler invaded Czechoslovakia, and the only thing I ever heard him say which made any sense was, “Dr August, there is no greater isolation a man may experience than to be lonely in a crowd. He may nod, and smile, and say the right thing, but even by this pretence his soul is pushed further away from the kinship of men.”
I asked him what fortune cookie he’d got that from, and he looked bewildered and asked me what fortune cookies were, and if you made them with ginger.