"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.