Fredrik’s wife, a lady of great charm, wise enough to prepare herself for Hackney life with two or three Liberal Arts degrees, and a wicked sense of humour, was now a psychiatric consultant at the Hackney Hospitaclass="underline" this being the only kind they went in for. She had, Fredrik explained, recognized the snapshot of the nurse that accompanied the story of the railway vanishing act in The Gazette. The girl’s name was Edith. Edith Cordoba? Edith Drake? She couldn’t remember. But she wasn’t English. She was sure of that. East Coast American? Wore expensive shoes. Had worked in the hospital for almost a year, which constituted some kind of record. And she wasn’t even on Valium, with Noveril chasers.
Could it be? Edith Cadiz a nurse? It was time to visit this hospital, to trace the infected fantasy to its source. Fredrik knew where some of the bodies were buried. He had been working around here shooting standard-issue inner-city squalor, that could be assembled fast to provide a poverty-row back-up for a ‘major Statement’ that a ‘Very Important Personage’ wanted to deliver, at peak viewing time, to his future subjects. ‘One’ had been suffering lately from a rather disquieting sensation that ‘something ought to be done’. His uncle felt much the same way about South Wales. Much good had it done him. Or them. A lecture was even now being hammered out by half the unemployed architects in the country, who could — under the protection of the blue-blooded ecologist — safely savage the half who had managed to climb off the drawing board.
I left Fredrik to his task; blowing foam into the pub phone, while he sold a potential essay to Germany, analysing… the reformist uses of the very instrument he was now clutching in a stranglehold. ‘Discontinued alternatives,’ he was screaming, while he waited for a simultaneous translation. I would adopt my usual method, and circumnavigate the hospital walls; see what the stones had to say.
The hospital site covered ancient parkland, and might yet be profitably developed. It had, in the meantime, been designated the dumping ground for all the swamp-field crazies, the ranters, the ultimate referrals. Leave here, and there is only the river. The shakers were swept in — or delivered themselves, gibbering, at the gates: they were rapidly tranquillized, liquid-coshed, and given a painted door to contemplate. The only other ticket of admittance led, by way of the left-hand path, to the Drug Dependency Unit; which attempted, by methods traditional and experimental, to wean the helpless and the hopeless from their sugary addictions. The main thrust of this enterprise — stilling the inarticulate voice of rage — merely created a host of new, and more exploitable, addictions. Only the pharmacists and the Swiss turned a dollar. The wicked old days of brain-burning and skull-excavation (with soiled agricultural instruments) were a folk-memory. That machinery was too expensive to replace. A wimpish revulsion against water treatments led, logically, to the gradual suspension of all bath-house activities. Whole wings were simply abandoned to nature; eagerly exploited by rodents, squatters — and smack dealers who traded their scripts without quitting the sanctuary of the hospital enclave.
Looking up from the east end of Victoria Park, or out of a shuddering train, the hospital was minatory and impressive: a castle of doom. The endless circuit of its walls betrayed no secret entrances. Window slits flickered with nervous strip-lighting. Grimy muslin strips muted any forbidden glimpses of the interior: recycled bandages. The steep slate roofs were made ridiculous by a flock of iron curlicues.
An increasingly anorexic budget was dissipated in child-sex questionnaires, plague warnings, and reports (in six languages) justifying the cleaning and catering contracts. The nurses, to survive, established their own private kingdoms. The doctors kept their heads down, writing papers for the Lancet, that might catch the eye of some multinational talent scout. Better Saudi, or Houston, than this besieged stockade. They sampled, with reckless courage, bumper cocktails from their own stock cupboards.
My circuit was complete. I was back where I had started: in Homerton High Street. I had discovered nothing. My notebook was scrawled with gnomic doodles that might, at some future date, be worked into a jaunty polemic. Of the dancer, there was no trace. I would return. And I would be armed with a camera. Without a blush of shame, I was starting to enjoy myself.
III
Edith Cadiz had never felt so much at her ease. She found herself, for the first time in her life, ‘disappearing into the present’. There was a physical lift of pleasure each morning, as she climbed the sharply tilted street from Homerton Station. The day was not long enough. She ran the palms of her hands against the warmth trapped in the bricks: she grazed them, lightly. She held her breath, relishing to the full the rashers of moist cloud in the broken windows of the East Wing. Often she stayed on her feet for twelve hours; not taking the meal breaks that were her due. She was absorbed in the horrors that confronted her. No human effort could combat them. Ambulances clanged up the High Street: security barriers lifting and falling, like a starved guillotine. This was a world that Edith had previously known as a persistent, but remote, vision: a microcosm city. There was nothing like it in her reclaimed Canadian wilderness: an impenetrable heart, with its broken cogs, shattered wheels, and stuttering drive-belts. Her dispersed mosaic of dreams allowed these damaged machine-parts to escape from ‘place’ and into time. The victims, vanished within the hospital walls, grew smooth with loss. They dribbled, or voided themselves in distraction, staring at, but not out of, narrow pillbox windows. They were all — the tired metaphor came to her — in the same boat: drifting, orphaned by circumstance, unable to justify the continuing futility of their existence.
And it was endless: floor after floor, deck after deck — unfenced suffering. There was no pause in her labour; nothing to achieve. It could never satisfy her. Faces above sheets: amputated from the social body. They did not know what they were asking. They took all her gifts, and put no name to them. The shape of her hands around a glass of water held no meaning.
Each nurse laid claim to some part of the building as territory that she could controclass="underline" imposing her own rules, her own fantasies. It might be a special chair dragged into a broom cupboard. It might be a cup and saucer, instead of the institutional mug. It might be a favoured cushion, or a colour photograph cut from a magazine, presenting some immaculate white linen table on a terrace overlooking a vineyard: Provence, Samos, Gozo, the Algarve.
Edith made her decision. She rescued all the children she found lost within the inferno of the wards. They were not always easy to recognize. Some pensioners had discovered the secret of eternal youth. They shone: without blame. They remembered events, and believed they were happening for the first time. They entered chambers of memory from which no shock could move them. They were small and unscratched: they learnt to make themselves insignificant. But some children were fit to pass directly into the senile wards; never having experienced puberty or adult life. They were overcome, shrunken, shrivelled; hidden behind unblinking porcelain eyes. Most did not speak. They should not have been there. They were waiting to be moved on, ‘relocated’. Their papers were lost. Some were uncontrolled, hurtling against the walls, on a hawser of wild electricity. They would leap and tear and shout, spit obscenities. They would punch her. Or cling, and stick against her skirts, burrs: huge heads pressed painfully against her thighs. One child would lie for hours at her feet, and be dead. Another barked like an abused dog.