Bonfire Chapter 1
This is the first two chapters from the Penguin book. There won't be any legal issues--the deal is done.

(edit:
I mean done as in not happening. i.e. contracts negated. I just thought I'd post the two chaps I finished here so as people could read it.)



CHAPTER 1

The minute I heard the reinforced door click shut behind me, my heart sank. It was more than just nerves, more than just the vaguely ominous feeling you get when you’re trapped in a place with really bad décor and no obvious point of egress. This was genuine trepidation. This place gave me the screaming heebie jeebies. I hated it from the word go.

What kind of choices had I made that had left me inside a maximum security psychiatric ward? Should I tell somebody that there had been a mistake, that I didn’t belong here, that I had to get out? Who would I tell? What difference would it make? I was stuck here whether I liked it or not. And I didn’t like it.

I fucking loathed it, to be honest. The proportions were all wrong. The ceilings were too low, the lights were too bright and the carpet was rank. There was too much yin and not enough yang. It’s not surprising, really. The people who design psychiatric wards are not, as a general rule, art critics, feng shui experts or interior decorators. Secure psychiatric wards are rarely featured on the front cover of interior decorating magazines. For good reason. Their straight, smooth corridors are typically devoid of both decorations and natural sunlight. The swatches used to design their truly awful colour schemes often appear to have been carved from the flesh of the living pastel animal. Rare feature walls are either adorned with third rate art (the type that has been lingering in a government storeroom for two years, waiting for somebody to emancipate or burn it) or body fluids . It can often be difficult to tell one from the other, particularly while psychotic, but the effect is the same—they make you uneasy. They creep you out.

This was a new secure ward, built when the last of the big psych hospitals closed down. It was supposed to accommodate twenty four of the meanest, baddest, most escape prone, most socially dysfunctional patients in the system. It wasn’t built with panoptic vigilance as its guiding principle. It certainly wasn’t built with good taste in mind. No, like all new units, it was built under budget by the lowest bidding contractor.

The sea of fluorescent glare, the soupy carpet and the laminated peach walls did nothing to alleviate the rising string crescendo in my head. But really when I think about it now, it was the two hundred pound ball of acid wash jeans hurtling right at me that actually caused my blood pressure to spike, sent my heart flapping into my mouth like a fish struggling on a hook and made me moan like an abandoned infant at a Romanian Orphanage. A manly moan though, deep and resonant. More a moan of surprise than terror.

Acquired momentum and gravitational force drew the acid wash object inexorably towards the door, but as I mentioned, the door had clicked shut and I was now standing in front of it. Caught by surprise, I had neither the space nor the neuromuscular control to simply step aside.

Newton's third law of motion is applied to collisions between two objects. In a collision between two objects, both experience forces which are equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. Such forces cause one object to speed up (me) and the other to slow down (the absconding patient). If the colliding objects have unequal mass, they will have unequal accelerations as a result of the contact force.

It’s just physics. I don’t make the rules, but I have to live by them, just like everybody else. There was no fancy Jackie Chan stunt I could pull to get out of this. I couldn’t dodge out of the way like Indiana Jones at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Weighing about the same as this absconding patient meant I had no choice but to slam my head against the door and slide to the ground while he rolled over the top of me, panting heavily.

Fuck, I thought. I just ironed this shirt.

I gripped the guy around the middle with my legs to make sure he didn’t get up, flipped him over and got him in a scissor hold, figuring I’d hold him there until I thought of a better idea. I was just getting up when four bodies leapt on top of us, knocking the remaining breath out of me. At this point I forgot the physics—I couldn’t actually see anything except flailing limbs. Somebody started pulling my shoes off. Slender hands fumbled with the buckle of my belt, twisted at the buttons of my jeans. Oh, great, I thought. Some pileup pervert. I love this place already.
“Get his pants off!” said a female voice, the tone regal and filled with command. Through a gap I saw a hypodermic syringe being drawn up.
“WAIT!” I yelled. “I’M A NURSE.”

—

Several minutes later, my new boss, Terry, was proffering his hand for me to shake. I didn’t return the gesture as I was too busy rebuttoning my pants, but I nodded as he pointed out the various features of the ward. The store room—locked. The tea room—locked. Michael, my friend from the pileup was being dragged kicking and screaming into the seclusion room—now also locked with him inside it. He mooched around in there for awhile occasionally kicking the door and yelling before sinking to his knees and falling asleep on his arms.

“So,” said Terry, after the dust had settled. “Tell me about yourself. Have you been nursing for long?”
Terry was a Limey. I couldn’t place the accent precisely, but it was from the North. He loved to smooth back his hair with the palm of one hand and jingle his keys with the other. The staff called him ‘Remington Steele’ behind his back.
“Started five years ago. Qualified in ’99.”
“General trained?”
“Yeah. Neurosurg and cardiothoracics. I did a three month stint in ICU but decided it wasn’t for me.”
“Why not?”
“Faeces.”
The corners of his mouth twitched up, but he was too professional to smile.
“All right. So why do you want to get into psych nursing?”
“Honestly?”
“Yeah.”
“Because I’m saving for a Jag.”
His face relaxed into a broad grin.
“Great. That’s exactly what I wanted to hear,” he said. “We don’t need any more bleeding hearts. If I get another fucking philanthropist come through here I’m going to scoop out my own eyes with a dessert spoon.”
“Doesn’t that seem a little drastic, sir?”
“Don’t call me sir. I work for a living. Okay, maybe it is a bit drastic. But I’m telling you, for the record, that what we need here is people who can draw lines.”
“Lines?”
“People who have clear professional boundaries. I don’t want zealots. I’ve no need for nurses who skip meal breaks in order to provide higher quality patient care. It’s a thin line between skipping lunch and letting patients sleep in your living room because they’ve got no other place to stay. But it’s a line.”
I didn’t see this as an inevitable progression at all, but I held my tongue.
“On this ward,” Terry continued. “You see people sitting around telling jokes. They take it easy. When you work on a surgical ward you’re trying to fit in as many linen changes, cannula removals and nasogastric feeds as you possibly can. Psych nurses draw straws for that kind of thing and if they get the short straw, they call the union.”
“Really?”
“Well, not exactly. But you see my point. We’re professional, but you want to keep things relaxed on a psych unit. You don’t want people feeding off your manic energy or your own need for drama. You can afford to kick back because the ward is being well managed and you know exactly what’s going on. And when the shit hits the fan, you’re right where you need to be, understood?”

What an inspiration Terry was. You could tell he was full of concern for his charges, but he was wearing handmade Italian cowboy boots, designer jeans and he wasn’t afraid to run the ward significantly over budget. After all, it wasn’t like he was digging the money out of his own pocket. It was a Sunday when I started, yet here he was, diligently working overtime for double pay because he couldn’t find anybody else. That’s real dedication. You don’t find that in many professions. And he was saving to take his wife on a holiday, which is nice.

He reached into his pocket, gave his keys a jingle. At least I think they were his keys. Then he gestured at his shirt. Black. Western themed. He looked like a country singer—the Garth Brooks of psychiatry. “You see this?” he said. “Egyptian cotton. Five years, mate, and all this could be yours. Just try to be cool and look as if nothing much fazes you and you’ll get along fine.”

We walked into a room that was designed like a fishbowl, reinforced glass windows in a hexagonal shape. Blinding white shafts of morning sunlight beamed in through the glass, but the halogen lights in the office were still blazing. The idea was that you could see where the patients were at all times. Unfortunately the arrangement was reciprocal and they could also stare in at you whenever they felt like it, drooling and grunting. There they were—hunched in arm chairs or knocking on the windows. They looked harmless enough. Unpalatable, but harmless. A slender bearded bloke with scruffy hair walked up to the window and placed his lips on it, blowing hard to expose his uvula. Judging by the lip shaped smears on the window, it was a pretty old joke. I ignored it.
“Jean-Francois,” said Terry, under his breath. “He’s a shit.” Then louder. “So, you’ve met the team?”

The people who had jumped me before were now leaning back innocently in swivel chairs, doing sudokus or reading newspapers. A big guy crunched a piece of peanut butter toast with one hand while he surfed the internet with the other.
“I don’t think we’ve been formally introduced,” I said.
The internet surfer laughed. He spun around on his chair and stood up, a tall man, well over six feet, in his late thirties with brown hair greying at the temples. I immediately noticed his loud Hawaiian shirt, electric blue with orange palm trees. I patted my pocket for my sunglasses but I’d left them at home.
“Nice threads,” he said, with no trace of self consciousness.
I looked down at my own crumpled pale blue shirt. One side of my collar was sticking up and a button had fallen off.
“Thanks,” I said. “I always try to make a good impression.”
He extended a hand. “Don’s my name.”
“Pleased to meet you,” I replied.
“You’ll be working with Don and myself today,” said Terry. “Gus is out on the floor. This is Tracy. She’s just finished the night shift.”
He smoothed back his hair with his left hand, while he jingled his keys with his right.
Tracy noted the coin toss, ignored it and smiled ruefully.
“That was a near miss,” she said. “Michael’s probably going to be asleep for the next twelve hours. Could have been you, lucky guy.”
“I don’t feel lucky,” I replied, rubbing my head. “That’s Michael in the seclusion room then?”
“Yes. He’s actually a really nice boy. Just sniffed a bit too much petrol.”
I stared at her.
“It’s always hard to know how much is too much,” Don quipped, deadpan. “Go on, Trace. Hand over and you can go.”

Handover is an integral part of psychiatric nursing. In a handover, you summarise relevant clinical information about your patients for the staff who are taking over for the next shift. The goal is fast and effective information transfer so you can get out of there and go home. Concise information transfer. I can’t stress enough how important concise handovers are.

Tracy glanced down at her watch, yelped and sprinted for the door.
“Is that the time? Christ, I’ve got to get the kids ready for school.”
“What about the handover?” I bleated after her.
She ran back, gave an exasperated sigh and shoved a bit of paper into my face.
“It’s all here. You know them all anyway, Don. I’ll see you later.”
Don continued to look at her with eyes like pebbles. I had seen that look before. So had Jean-Francois.
“Oh, all right. Jesus.”
Walking over to the whiteboard she pointed sequentially at each of the patients’ names.
“Chronic. Histrionic. Moronic. Gin and Tonic. Tonic Clonic. Hydroponic.” There. That should do it.”
She was out the door before I could ask her any questions. Now that’s concise.

After the very brief handover had finished, we walked out into the day room and Terry introduced me to the patients.
“I always like to get the feel of the ward as soon as I come on,” he enthused. “Just so as I know what I’m dealing with. Now look. We’ve only got one seclusion room and Michael’s in it. So try not to wind anyone up, okay? Because there’s not much we can do if they go off.”
“Okay.”

When you see movies like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or Awakenings you get the impression that asylums are filled with wacky characters who although disabled are really diamonds in the rough. Their stories are always entertaining or tragic and poignant. There is always a sound developmental reason behind their behavioural problems and you are given the impression that if they didn’t get such a raw deal, they would be functional members of society. You are also given the impression that although they are mentally ill, they are all fundamentally humans and they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.

Keep in mind when you’re watching a movie about a psychiatric ward that you’re only seeing the bits Hollywood thought you might find entertaining. Some thoughtful screenwriter has cut out hours and hours of mind-bending tedium for your viewing pleasure.

There is a lot of stigma surrounding the mentally ill and there are some great people with mental illnesses out there. But let’s face it: there are also many mentally ill patients who are a complete waste of oxygen. They don’t deserve your respect at all. They are just evolutionary freaks and predators with all the sexual ethics of sewer rats and they were never going to be useful members of society. They don’t even have entertainment value. Their stories are tragic, but not tragic enough to warrant a mini-series. And they are absolutely mind-numbingly boring to talk to when you can get anything sensible out of them, which is almost never.

Case in point: Archie Lonergan.

Terry let me walk ahead while he stood back a little way. “This is Archie,” he said, pointing to an obese man in an armchair. His mouth moved slowly and soundlessly, plosively chewing the fat with his favourite fictional characters on the television set.
I looked down at Tracy’s notes.
“Chronic schizophrenic,” they read. “Forty-five years old and lived with his elderly mother until he was thirty. Tried to kill her with a letter opener because the voices told him to. Burned out. Occasional command hallucinations. Largely brain damaged. A bit antsy today. Missed his enema last week.”
Archie was wearing a cable knit cardigan and a handlebar moustache, a sign that at least some of the staff had a sense of humour. He didn’t bother to get up—he was entranced in the daytime soaps. Truth be told, I wasn’t sure if he could get up. I think his ass was fused to the urine soaked leather.
“Don’t take it personally if he doesn’t say hello,” said Terry. “He’s having difficulty coming to terms with the fact Thorne shot Ridge on the Bold and the Beautiful the other day. It actually happened in 1987 but he just can’t bring himself to believe it’s true.”
“The Bold and the Beautiful, eh?” I asked. “Classic television drama, that.”
“Fuck off,” Archie grunted. His eyes didn’t even move.
“We’d better go,” said Terry. “He gets aggressive.”
“Command hallucinations,” I asked. “What are they?”
“Voices in your head that tell you to do stuff,” said Terry.
“Like what?”
“Like kill people.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“See that you do. It’s pretty common around here.”
I didn’t get a chance to clarify what he meant by that. I was destined to find out in due course.

We walked along the hall and out through a hardened glass door into a what Terry liked to call the quadrangle; cracked earth, a few pavers and an assortment of cigarette butts with an easily climbable six foot fence bordering one end. I noted the fence, wondering what the point of it was. Perhaps the state government was planning to train tomatoes on it at some later stage. A sulphur crested cockatoo was biting pieces off the branch of a gum tree and spitting them into the drought bleached grass below. He caught my eye, screeched loudly and rocked from side to side, grey tongue lolling. Behind the wire fence, parked, was the groundskeeper’s golf buggy, three trolleys attached to the back.

“They’re for lunch,” Terry explained. “Empty now, but about twelve o’clock they will be filled up with curried sausages. Always curried sausages on a Sunday.”

Hardly haute cuisine, but less revolting than some of the meals Food Services concocted as I was soon to discover.

“Bev,” said Terry, gesturing at a slight, whiskered man in his late fifties with a line drawing of a sceptre on his upper arm. His mouth was a grim and overly wide. He made a whistling sound as he breathed, which I later realised was the result of a tracheotomy.
“Bevan McKenzie,” read Tracy’s notes. “Mentally subnormal. Fifty-five years old. Chronic schizophrenia. Terminal Ca of the lung. Delusions of grandeur.”
“KING GEORGE,” Bevan pointed at himself and wheezed in a voice ruined from years of smoking fifty cigarettes a day. “KING OF ENGLAND, RULER OF SCOTLAND, PRINCE OF WALES, DUKE OF NEW SOUTH WALES, PRIME MINISTER OF NEW ZEALAND, FIRST LIEUTENANT OF THE SOUTH AFRICAN ARMY, GRRR.”
His speech became unintelligible towards the end but he may have finished with ‘Boris Yeltsin’s gay lover.’
“Impressive credentials,” I noted.
“Not really,” said Terry.
I raised an eyebrow. We walked away from the patient.
“George—uh, Bev—has lung cancer,” Terry said quietly. “He’ll be dead before Christmas. Poor guy.”
I found out later that this was overly optimistic. Christmas came and went and Bev was still hale and hearty, if one could ignore the litre of mucus he had to expectorate each morning in order to get his respiratory system fired up. I couldn’t. I don’t want you to think Bev is a main character in these memoirs. He’s more of a backdrop, a revolting bit of scenery that serves to remind us of the ugliness of psychiatric nursing.
Served to remind me anyway. Every hour, on the hour, he would report to the nurses’ station with his co-patients. He’d tap on the window and bark: “SMOKO!” in his gravelly voice.

They say these people are chronically unemployable but surely there’s a market for them as novelty timepieces?

Also sitting on the treated pine bench where Bev was perched was a grandmotherly woman, a shawl across her knees. Her presence seemed incongruent in the ward, which was largely populated by ragged men in opp shop clothes.
“Hello,” she said sweetly. “I’m Mathilda.”
“Hi Mathilda,” I said. “Nice to meet you. Do you come here often?”
“I live here,” she said. “At least until they renovate the Opera House so I can move back in.”
“You must be quite well off to live in the Opera House,” I said. “What is it that you do for a living?”
A merry peal of laughter escaped her lips.
“Oh, I don’t work,” she scoffed. “No. Goodness me, no. No! I own a chain of superstores around the world. Marks and Spencer, you’ve probably heard of them.”
“Yes, I have.”
She smiled and turned to Bev.
“Goodness me, this young man just asked me what I did for a living! I haven’t been asked that in thirty odd years.”
“Hernnh,” Bev grunted, incomprehensibly. He hawked and spat, and all four of us stood gazing at his royal gob of mucus for a while until Terry seemed to gather himself together.
“Imagine that,” she said. “A living! People like us!”
Mathilda’s notes read: “Sixty-three years old. Bipolar disorder. Recovered alcoholic. Ten years ago she destroyed her life in a six month gin soaked manic bender. DELUSIONS OF GRANDEUR.” Nice of Tracy to point that out. For a second I thought she actually was a tycoon who lived in the Sydney Opera House. No wonder she got on so well with the King of England.

Back in the day room, we met Stephen, a fatuous looking man in his fifties. He was dressed as a twenty-year-old might have been in tennis shoes, jeans and a t-shirt. I was never exactly sure of Stephen’s diagnosis, but whatever illness he suffered from made him unable to converse as a normal person might. His speech was scripted and he spoke almost entirely in clichés. He and Terry got on like a house on fire.
“How are you today, Steve?” asked Terry.
Steve gave him a grin and a double thumbs up.
Tracy’s notes were scant. “Controlled epileptic retard,” they read. “Paranoid ideation not so evident this shift. Fatuous.”
“Sleep all right?”
“Like a baby.” Stephen extended his thumb again.
“You look well.”
“Good as gold.”
“Well you know what they say, Steve. Beauty is a fading flower. This is my young apprentice. It’s his first day here.” He turned to me. “Go on, talk to him.”
Steve was Terry’s favourite and he presented him like an exceptionally stupid dog for me to pet. Evidently a chat was obligatory, but how do you start a conversation with somebody like that? I couldn’t ask him what he had been doing, because I knew he hadn’t been doing anything apart from watching the soaps every day for the last twenty years. We couldn’t talk about the weather, because like Johnny Cash, he hadn’t seen the sunshine since I don’t know when. We couldn’t talk about social events or newspapers because he’d never been invited anywhere and couldn’t read, hence the moniker ‘Controlled Epileptic Retard’. His hobbies were:
1) sitting on his arse; and
2) grinning stupidly; and occasionally
3) salivating slightly.
He didn’t know any other tricks. His seizures were controlled, so no entertainment value there. He couldn’t catch a ball. He couldn’t even fetch. And it would be inappropriate for me to rub his head vigorously, smack him on the back and say: “There’s a good Stevie! Does Stevie want a can of Chump? Does Stevie want a ball bounced off his forehead?”
I’d have to try something he could identify with.
“Did you see Bold and the Beautiful yesterday?” I ventured.
“Yes,” he smiled.
“What did you think of it?”
“Silly as a goose,” he said, incomprehensibly, raising his index finger.

My life floweth away like a river.

I don’t know what happened to Terry at that point. Perhaps Steve’s similes had lulled him into some kind of persistent vegetative state. He just stood there, grinning stupidly, waiting for somebody to institutionalise him. Oh, wait. They already had. He scratched his chin, idly, staring up at the ceiling.
“Shall we go?” I said.
“Just a second. I want to talk to Steve.”
He put his hand in his pocket, jingled his keys again.
I wanted to grab Terry by the shoulders, shake him vigorously and tell him to get a fucking grip. But I didn’t. Not then.
“Nice weather we’re having, isn’t it Steve?”

There was a collective sigh from everybody in the day room, the sound of a tiny atmosphere escaping from a tiny dying planet. Somewhere, deep in space, a star flickered out.

“Oh for God’s sake, can you shut the fuck up?” groaned Anita, a young woman in a robe and a pair of Daffy Duck slippers . “We’re just trying to watch television.”
Terry turned to look at her. Steve seized the moment and without wasting a second, pulled his shoe off and threw it at the back of Terry’s head. When Terry turned back, Stephen held his thumb up, grinning from ear to ear, one holey sock exposed for all the denizens of this particular galaxy to see.
“All right everybody, settle down,” said Terry. He gave his head a brisk rub, found Stephen’s shoe and helped him put it back on.
“What was going through your mind just now when you threw that shoe at my head, Steve?”

Anita wailed. She punched herself in the face three times in swift succession. Tight, hard punches, lots of power. Jab, jab, hook. She could have been a contender.
“Can’t you see,” she said. The last part was almost a scream. “He’s a fucking idiot! There is absolutely no point talking to him! He’s like the funnel web spider of imbeciles—he’ll suck you up and leave you a hollow husk! Then he’ll feed you to his babies!”

Privately I agreed. Publicly I agreed. I was in complete agreement and would have signed and notarized an affidavit to that effect if somebody had put one in front of me. She was talking sense. It was probably the only time I ever heard her talk sense.
I glanced at Tracy’s notes. “Anita Cordwell. Twenty-three years old. Diagnosis: borderline personality disorder. History of deliberate self harm. Brought in by mother three years ago. Since then numerous self-harm and suicide attempts including burning, cutting and overdoses. Picking at scabs on wrist, despite nursing advice to let them heal. Small laceration to left calf. Appears to have been self inflicted with fingernail.”
That was the half of it. Anita knew how to push everybody’s buttons.

Anita had the advocate and the police in here at least three times a week at the beginning of her admission, accusing staff and co-patients of raping her and physically abusing her. There was no evidence of any misconduct and they got bored eventually. She was delusional and psychotic but also malicious. If you told her she couldn’t have an extra cigarette, she’d report you for touching her inappropriately. The only way you could legitimately get revenge on her was to mess with her menu. One of my colleagues had her on pureed cabbage for a year after she accused him of watching her while she got changed.
“Petty, I know,” he said. “But healthier than radioactive isotopes. Definitely healthier than the braised shit on toast we usually get from Food Services.”

I’d spoken to Anita’s mother a few times. She’s a high functioning lady, good job. Well, not that good. She manages a telephone counseling service. She told me she’d initially discovered Anita’s predilection for self harm when she’d refused to attend the sports carnival at school. Apparently Anita couldn’t wear shorts, because she’d carved ‘FAT’ into her thigh in a serif font, which obviously is going to hurt more, especially in 72 point with a blunt razor blade. Anita’s mother was heartbroken about what’s happened to her daughter but carried on, stoically attending care planning meetings and visiting once a week, bringing back modest clothes which are typically then strewn about the floor of Anita’s hebephrenic room in favour of strips of chiffon, fluffy bunny slippers or slinky nighties.

Anita still constantly accuses the staff of indecent conduct towards her. Her voice is high and shrill. Not bandsaw shrill, more melifluous like the sound of the Kee Kee bird that builds its nest in the Kukumbee mountains. (All right, I’m not a naturalist. Or a geographer. But you get the picture; voice shrill. And whiny, did I mention whiny?)

“We’ve talked about you hitting yourself, Anita,” said Terry. “It’s not on.”
“Don’t make me hit myself then. Just stop being such a fucking idiot. You’re like the Emperor of Fucking Idiots right now.”
“Language Anita,” said Terry.
“Language, Anita,” parroted Jean-Francois, inanely.
“Oh shut your Frog gob,” she retorted.

Jean-Francois, a disgruntled looking slim, bearded man in his early thirties was now mooching around in a chair by the window, reading Marcuse and occasionally coming out with meaningless quotes. Not from the book. He was too psychotic to assimilate written information at that point. This was just multilingual word salad. Rhyming sometimes, but lacking any classical form or structure. The poets Pope and Dryden, to pick a couple of names at random, would have hated it. They would have thought it was too open and lacking in sufficient heroic couplets. Shakespeare would have thought it was shit. Coleridge might have liked it.

“In Exopoo I was interred,
Add a fifth, subtract a third,
And now I’m thinking I’m a bird
And all I can do is shit.”

He was like a psychotic French Dr Seuss. It was hard to take.

Tracy’s notes read: “Jean-Francois Gavage. Card-carrying shit. Son of a French diplomat. Marijuana induced psychosis.”
Jean-Francois was an intelligent guy, quite the provocateur, with few if any moral restrictions on who or what he was prepared to sleep with.. I’m sure he had some redeeming qualities but I couldn’t actually be bothered to discover them and he didn’t feel inclined to share them with anyone. I was very polite to him (as I always am to everybody, everywhere) but I spent as little time with him as possible. I just couldn’t seem to get interested.

“Salut, Jean-Francois,” said Terry, inclined his head slightly. “A new staff member for you to meet.”
Jean-Francois stared at me balefully.
“Frotteur,” he said, seemingly enraged. “Espece d’enculeur de cochons!” Pig fucker.
The guy was off the show. There was no way he could carry a conversation.
“That’s French,” beamed Terry. “It means hello.”
“Bonjour is hello,” I replied. “That’s not hello.”
“Leave it to, me, my young ami. Ca va, Jean-Francois?”
“Fils de pute,” said Jean-Francois, his wide smile almost a grimace, insane eyes pleading. « Connard. » Son of a bitch. Wanker.
Uncomprehending of this torrent of abuse, Terry ploughed on in his broken traveller’s French. “Ou est-ce qu’il est, la charcuterie ? Il est laid, ce bebe.” Where is the deli ? This baby is ugly.

“A lot of professionals are crackpots,” Stephen piped up.
“Thanks for that, Steve,” Terry said, ignoring him. “Jean-Francois, j’ai perdu mon chien. Ou est-ce qu’il est? » I lost my dog. Where is he?
« A l’embassade. Il se couche la avec ta mere. » At the embassy. He is sleeping with your mother.
“Bon!” said Terry.

You begin to see now the extent of my mistake. I had fucked around in school to the point where all I could do was empty bedpans or stand around listening to inane conversations between fuckwits. That was all I was trained for. If I spent five years in this job, I could end up like Terry, universally despised by everyone on the ward. Kids, if you’re reading, let this be a lesson to you. Shaking a little, I walked back into the office where Don was spreading out his newspaper.
“What the fuck am I doing here?”
I realized from the smirk on Don’s face that I must have spoken the words aloud.
“Welcome to psychiatric nursing,” he said, glancing at my ashen features. “Ninety-nine percent boredom, one percent fear.”

I plonked myself down in the chair beside him, leafing through a well thumbed copy of Virgil’s Aeneid. Terry came in, looking put out.

“I don’t like you reading books,” he said. “Just so you know. Magazines are okay, but not novels. Understood? We’re here to do a job and that job doesn’t involve reading books.”

I slapped it shut. Terry grabbed a copy of Sports Illustrated off the desk and walked out again, flopping down into a chair in the day room.

“He’s quite the tosser, isn’t he?” said Don. “He loves Steve. Thinks he’s some kind of Peter Sellars type retard, really the messiah underneath. Anyway, never mind. Only eleven and a half hours to go. Here, have the finance section.”

He handed it over. I settled in for a long, boring ride.


—


As it turned out, it didn’t take too long for things to liven up. By midday, things were cooking. Lunch was on its way and Terry, perhaps with the intent of alleviating his own boredom, had quickly succeeded in winding the patients up to the point where they were baying for his blood. Oblivious to the bad feeling he had engendered he had then fallen asleep in his armchair right in front of them. Don and I were watching him occasionally, but with no great concern, until Anita snuck up behind him and started loading something into his open mouth.

“Come on,” said Don. “We’d better go out there before he gets himself killed.”

“Anita,” he said quietly. “What do you think you’re doing? What are those.”

“My tablets,” she said mischievously. “I’ve been saving them.”

“Terry,” said Don softly. “Wake up.”

Anita seemed to sense the dramatic moment slipping from her. Her audience’s attention was wavering. She took action. She improvised.
“I’m tired of you all pushing me around!” she screamed. Then before we could stop her, she turned and ran full pelt against the plexiglass. There was a sickening crunch as her nose broke, but the glass, although smeared with red, was undamaged.
She let out a wail. “Abuse!” she yelled. “I want to file a fucking complaint! I’ll have your fucking registration! Get me the police! I need a fucking lawyer! I want to go to a real hospital! Now!”

All the commotion seemed to have woken Terry up, and he sat bolt upright, swallowing whatever it was that she had put in his mouth.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Don wearily. “Anita, calm down and come into the treatment room. You’re bleeding all over the place.” He turned to me. “You, grab Terry and try to get him to vomit.”

“I can help you with that!” said Mathilda. “I used to be bulimic! It was, I don’t know. Before I took over Miramax, anyway. If you vomit within the first ten minutes it’s easier.”

“There’s some bicarb of soda in the cupboard,” said Don, walking out the door, gripping Anita by the shoulder. “If that doesn’t work, give him charcoal.”

Just at that moment, Archie stood up, eyes blazing, fists swinging. He went right for Steve who scurried for cover behind me. For the second time that day I found myself standing in the eye of the whirlwind. I threw up my hands, managing to take most of his punches on my arms.

“I’M GONNA KILL YOU!” said Archie, face like an attack submarine

“DON!” I yelled.

“SMOKO!” growled King George in his cancerous baritone. Always good for novelty value, King George. Maybe he thought he was back in Narrandera shearing sheep. Or a young jackaroo in the Northern Territory pausing for a quick fag in between cattle musters (all this occurred prior to his coronation)

Don let go of Anita and took a step towards me. She immediately started banging her face against the door of the office.
“Abuse!” she screamed. She was really making a mess of herself. A cut had opened up above her eye and her face was swollen and puffy. Don grabbed her again, led her off. No help from that quarter. Terry had jumped up from his armchair, green at the gills. He tried to grab Archie’s arm, but Archie was like a man possessed. Terry flew back on the floor, stunned.

“Fuck this,” I thought. I leaned back and punched Archie fair in the face as hard as I could. I expected him to go down like a diving dotcom. But he just stood there, unholy rage burning in his eyes. That’s when I realised I wasn’t dealing with a normal human being. I grabbed one of his arms, wrapped my legs around it and held on for the ride.

“Come on Terry,” I said panting as Archie swung me around like a kid on a Ferris Wheel. “I can’t handle him by myself.”
Terry stood up, shakily and stepped in to grab the other arm. Slowly the flailing subsided. Archie allowed himself to be led into the seclusion room, where Michael lay in slumber on a mattress. Don came jogging out of the office, helped Terry to drag the mattress off the floor and into the main part of the ward, Michael’s incumbent form still upon it.
“Where’s Anita?” said Terry.
“Locked her in the fire cupboard,” said Don.
“Good plan,” said Terry. “Note to self: get more seclusion rooms.”
Tosser. He slammed the door shut and we all turned around.

To find no Michael. Just an empty mattress.

As one we ran to the back door. Michael was a relatively tall and lanky guy and we arrived just in time to see him run full pelt at the fence, put his hands on top of it and vault over it, laughing wildly as he did. The white cockatoo which had been sharpening its beak on the wire flew off, squeaking in protest. Michael squawked back and sprinted across the grass, flapping his arms like wings.

“He’s as fast as a springbok!” said Steve, popping his head up from behind the couch.

“Stay here,” I said, grimly, but I was actually starting to enjoy myself. I leapt over the fence and hijacked the groundsman’s buggy.
It took me about three minutes to get it started, by which time Michael was loping across the grounds, as fleet footed as a gazelle. I could barely see him in the distance. I chugged after him, with two trolleys of curried sausages and a tureen of pea and ham soup attached to the back of the vehicle. The menu was from the 1920s. So was the vehicle judging by the speed at which it went. There was no way I was ever going to catch him but I knew Terry and Don could see me through the window and I wanted to put on a good show.
“STOP!” I yelled, raising my hand in the air. “POLICE!”
When Michael turned around and saw me chasing him in the golf buggy, he laughed so hard he stopped where he was and fell to his knees, pounding the dirt with his fist.

He was still laughing when I walked him back on to the ward and into the seclusion room. Terry wasn’t though.
“Can I see you for a minute?” he said.
I followed him into the nurse manager’s office, a sinking feeling in my stomach. He bumped his computer mouse as he sat down. A game of solitaire flashed up on the screen.
“What was that all about?” he asked. “The patients’ dinner was still attached to the back of that buggy. If you had stacked, you both would have been covered with scalding pea and ham soup. Not to mention all of the patients would have gone hungry. It was a disaster waiting to happen. I thought you had a bit more going for you than that. Have you ever even driven one of those things before?”
“No,” I said sheepishly. “But when I was a kid, sometimes me and my friends used to push each other round and round the car park in supermarket trolleys.”
He didn’t look amused. “So what possessed you to go chasing after a patient on a high powered dune buggy?”
We were obviously talking about different vehicles now. But fuck it, I mean, you either see the funny side of something like that or you don’t.
“It’s just . . . He had too much of a head start,” I improvised. “I never would have caught him . . . on foot.”
“Look, I’m going to have to issue you with an official reprimand. It will go on your file and after twelve months it will be erased. And if anything like this happens again, I’m going to have to recommend you transfer off this ward,” said Terry. “And another thing—”
He broke off suddenly.

His face was white. Beads of sweat were gathering at the corners of his forehead.
“Are you all right, Terry?” I asked voice full of concern.
“Well, now that you mention it, I don’t feel so hot,” he said. He leaned his elbows on his knees and spat on the carpet in front of him, blowing hard. He let out a loud fart at the same time.
“If you vomit within the first ten minutes, it’s easier,” I said, convivially.
“I’m not going to vomit,” he said, making a gargled retching sound. “You can go now.”
“Are you sure?” I said. “I mean, there’s nothing I can get you?”
His breath came in short gasps.
“Just . . . go!”
“Nothing? Not even a glass of water? Cup of milky tea with an arrowroot biscuit in it? Bowl of chunky pea and ham soup? Saucer of curdled dogs’ livers?”
“Go!”
I skipped out the door as the first splash hit his handmade Italian cowboy boots.