"There are places where the mind dies, so
that a truth which is its very denial may be born."
('The Wind at Djemila', Albert Camus)
DAY 1
CORRIDOR
From
a little after seven twenty a.m., when she entered the main gate, until Eva and
Linda came into the hallway at the end of the corridor, Kedzie’s nervousness
was diffuse and fluid. It leaked out and skewed the dimensions of the trees on
either side of the drive, made them loom heavy, darkening the pale sandstone of
the Victorian building. Splashes of it landed on random images as Kedzie went
inside: a reception area modernised with sheet glass screens and potted plants
arranged in a group on the stairs; dust on the plants and the brown edges of
their lower leaves; signs to wards that bore the names of local farms and spoke
of bare golden hills, drystane dykes and small rivers of peat-coloured water; a
wide, windowless corridor that ran the length of the building and smelled of
cooking and stale gloss paint; stone stairs with worn and rounded edges that
threatened to slip her forward and whose wrought iron banisters wound down two
flights, bringing her to a basement corridor with a sign on the wall that
pointed to Fauldshope and Drochil Wards. She opened a half-glass door and entered
a narrow corridor. There was another half-glass door at the far end.
A loud clunk and rattle made Kedzie
start. She looked up. Water pipes ran along the ceiling and down the sides of
the far wall. The walls, the ceiling, the pipes, the radiators connected to the
pipes were all painted the colour of cold butter. Sunlight shone in through
high, large-paned windows that ran the length of the left hand side of the
corridor. Dry, thin ropes looped down from them on metal struts stuck up with
paint. The sky was clean blue with just a remembrance of white in it. It
promised a lovely summer’s day. A small flock of sparrows careened into view
and perched on the top of a wire-mesh fence that was just visible. Their busy
chirrup-chatter, the vibrant whirr of wings as they flew away were inaudible
behind the glass. Kedzie heard only her own footsteps on the stone floor, their
unechoing muffled in the cool, still, dead air of the corridor.
And out of that air Kedzie conjured
ghosts from all the illustrations she had ever seen of Bedlam. Their contorted
features abrupted into the pale, cool corridor in anguish and lunacy. They
languished on pallets of filthy straw.They tore at their bodies in torment and
despair, hooting and screeching in the gloom. Their keepers leered and were
cruel: they drew their fat fists across their drunken mouths.
Kedzie shook her head and pushed her
hands further into the corners of the pockets of her uniform. She looked up at
the windows again. The sparrows were back, perched in a line along the top of
the fence, the mesh bending backwards and forwards as they fluttered and
balanced their everyday ash-and-dust coloured bodies on the wire. She put out
her right hand and opened the second door. Moisture on her palm made it slip a
little on the smooth handle.
She was in a dim and airless hallway.
Two closed doors faced her, and round to her right was a north-facing window,
its incoming light fretted and diminished by the leaves of mature lime and ash.
Beside it was a blue-painted double door with three handles in a vertical line
right of centre; one, a pull-down handle at normal hand height, a round one at
head height, and another round one at an equal distance below the middle one. A
sign above read ‘Fauldshope’. Sellotaped to the metalled glass that formed the
top third of the doors was a handwritten sheet of A4 paper, its thick black
lettering said, “Welcome to Fauldshope.”
Kedzie heard noises behind her. The
sounds of voices and of footsteps filled up the hallway. She turned round and
smiled at two women in white nurse’s uniforms.
“Hi, I’m Kedzie.”
“The new student?” asked the older
one.
“Yes.”
“They told us you were starting
today. I’m Eva, one of the sisters, and this is Linda, one of our auxiliaries.”
Linda smiled and said, “Hi.” She was
thin with black hair. She seemed sure of herself.
“Have you tried to get in yet?” asked
Eva.
“No, I’ve just arrived.”
“Right, here’s how you do it.”
Eva took the top handle in one hand, the
lower in her other and turned them in opposite directions. The door opened.
“The middle handle’s a dummy. It’s
supposed to fool them,” she said as she
pulled the door back to let Kedzie past.
