‘Asylum’ (Opening)

Opening Excerpt from ‘Asylum’ a Novel in Draft. Excerpts from part of the Middle and from the End of ‘Asylum’ are also posted on Medium. All Excerpts can be read on a standalone basis or in sequence.

It was the curse of mankind that these incongruous faggots were thus bound together — that in the agonized womb of consciousness these polar twins should be continuously struggling.

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Journal

Thursday 26 October 1916 — St Matthew’s Asylum, Belfast

They told me yesterday I have been here for five days. I arrived on 20 October. I asked them where I was. They said St Matthew’s. I wasn’t well. My parents had sent me here to help me get better. I can’t remember anything much about anything anymore and I told them so. They said it was my medication. I wanted to know how long I would be here. They said a few weeks, until I was better.

I asked them today for a pencil and some paper to write on. I like writing. It has always helped me when I’ve felt bad before. I know I feel bad now. I think I feel worse than I ever have. That’s why I’ve started to write this; to make it all go away. The nurses have given me a blunt pencil to write with. They said I wasn’t allowed anything sharp.

The hospital has provided me with clean clothes to wear and they are keeping safe for me all the things I had with me when I arrived — a pen knife, a packet of cigarettes, a box of matches and one shilling. They showed them to me and asked me to sign for them.

I don’t like it here. Last night, I heard people shouting and screaming. I couldn’t stand the noise so I put my head under my pillow.

I am finding it hard to write this, to concentrate. But I need to. I have to try.

When I woke this morning, I saw the others here properly for the first time. Some of them shuffle along. Some of them sit their heads down and just look into space. Some of them talk to themselves and mouth words I do not understand. One of them came up to me and spat in my face. I don’t know why he did it. I hadn’t said or done anything to him.

Why have my parents put me here? What have I done wrong? My father has always shouted at me since I have been little, when I was bad before. I don’t remember him ever being so cross with my brothers and sisters.

I think I have always been different. I have always worried that my parents don’t love me. I think I have always been an endless source of trouble to them. I wish they listened to me when I felt bad but I think it is all my fault. My father always tells me I am forever doing wrong things and that God doesn’t love me when I do them. I don’t like my father when he says those things to me. My mother has always tried to be kind. But she only ever does what my father says. She is quiet but he is loud.

However bad I feel again now, I have to get out of here. I don’t belong here. I am not like the people I saw this morning.

I do believe in God and I don’t think He means for me to be here. He’s not cruel. He is kind. Sometimes I think that my God isn’t the same as my father’s. We don’t pray to the same one. But I do pray, because I was always taught to, every night before I go to bed.

I hope I get out soon. I like being with my friends and working on the farm my father manages. We laugh together and in the summer bring in the hay and swim in the flax pond when it’s hot. I know they poke fun at me. They say I can get cross for no reason and act the eejit. At times they call me crazy and at others they say I look sad. But I like them. I have known them all for as long as I can remember.

I asked the nurses this morning if they had heard from my family and friends. They said they hadn’t but they were sure I would hear from them soon. They would visit and I would be well again before I knew it.

I hope they come and visit me. I don’t want to be bad when they come. I want to be well again for them. I do not want to be the other people they say I can be. Then I can go home and back to working on the farm.

A nurse has told me I have to stop writing now. She is going to take my pencil from me, my spare paper and what I am writing but I will get them back when I ask.

I’m so scared. I feel more like a child than a man writing this. I’m thirty-three.

I wish I weren’t here. But I am. I’ll be home in a few weeks’ time.

I still have my whole life ahead of me.

Part One

Beginnings and Endings

I saw my life as a whole: I followed it up from the days of childhood, when I walked with my father’s hand.

Robert Louis Stevenson: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Chapter One

Monday 25 April 2005

Collapse

I often think to myself that my finger had been poised over the self-destruct button all of my life, and on that day I pressed it.

I wonder what my life would have become, had I got out of bed that morning, on a crisp sunny day in April 2005.

There are times in our lives, when we look back and seek to tease out the consequences of our actions and to imagine how things would have been had we acted otherwise.

I have often re-examined that moment and wonder. Had I got out of bed, how would things have been different? Would I have remained on my deeply rutted course of meeting my own and others’ expectations? Would the events of that morning in April 2005 have occurred later, subject only to a mere delay? Was there an inevitability about them?

But you, no more than I, can determine the consequences of actions we took or decisions we made at crossroads in our lives. In many ways, it is better that we do not, as we are spared knowledge that would surely be unhelpful to us. We have no choice but to keep our eyes firmly fixed on the present and a present eye on the future.

On that morning I awoke with an overwhelming sense of anxiety. I could not move; my heart was beating rapidly; I was sweating profusely and shaking. I was in the utmost distress. I felt physically and emotionally bankrupt. Yet my mind kept pushing me back to a reality of its own choosing.

I will not because I cannot or I cannot because I will not?

What was the right answer to that question?

Normally I would have been up, showered and out the door by 7 am latest and it was now already 8 am.

In my mouth, I could taste the pungent residue of the red wine I had drunk the previous evening. I reached in the bedside table drawer for the bottle of Valium I kept there. It was empty.

To the idle observer, the bedroom in which I lay would have seemed well appointed. It had been one of the many reasons that my wife and I had bought the house. On opposite sides of the bedroom were floor to ceiling windows, one facing west and the other east.

Out of the west facing window, our pebble-stoned drive could be seen with high brick walls encircling it. Electronic gates served as our drawbridge. Beyond lay a minor road, which separated the house from pastures stretching as far as the eye could see.

The eastern window offered a view of the gardens which took up the larger part of the two acre plot on which the house was situated. From that window, could be seen the fifty foot poplars on the northern boundary, the leylandii on the eastern perimeter, the heart laid to lawn with arching apple trees and in the foreground a thirty foot willow, which draped its branches to the edge of a large pond stocked with koi. Behind the pond, there were two dovecotes, now inhabited by a colony of some twenty white doves, which I had bred from one mating couple. Yet further still lay the henhouse.

The world had stopped. I was locked in an inferno of my own creation. Yet invading my consciousness, I could hear the steady thrum of rush hour traffic as it made its way to the junction separating Coventry from Birmingham, some to head one direction, some the other, but all carrying its occupants on their way to their normal routines, ways of life they had perhaps followed for years and would do so again.

The fountain in the pond continued to flow, spouting its water in a steady splash, the water circulating to aerate and cleanse. The doves in their cotes had long since woken to continue their daily routine, feeding their young and flying miles in search of food and bedding. The cock was crowing in the henhouse.

I am ill … There is no way of going to work again … I must go to work … I’ll lose my job and won’t be able to pay the bills … I am ill … There is no way of going to work again.

Thinking in a box; no exits; ensnared by logic. Ultimately it was Hobson’s choice. Not that I knew then to what extent, but I did know I was seriously ill. Only one answer — stay put.

“Are you alright? It’s nearly 8.30.”

At first I didn’t respond.

“Patrick?” She repeated.

I turned full circle where I lay, as if to throw off the lowering clouds that engulfed me and simply said, “I’m ill.”

Just that.

I was never so abrupt with Ella and, to her, my tone of voice must have spoken volumes.

As I lay there, I heard my wife pad downstairs and put on the dishwasher. Moments later I could distinguish the click of the phone in the hall, a pause, and then I caught what seemed to me my secretary’s name. I could just make her out saying I wasn’t feeling well and so wouldn’t be in. With that knowledge there came the slightest lightening of the burden I was carrying.

One day to pull myself together. I have bought one day.

With hindsight, throughout the whole of my forty-five years, my intellect, my rational nature had ruled. They were my dominant force, my guiding principle. They had driven me at times to work endless hours; eighteen a day; all weekend; three days on the trot with no sleep. I had abused myself physically and emotionally.

But on that day, the worm turned. My mind had been torn from the helm and usurped by its kinsfolk. Rebellion had been declared and victory won. It was they who were now calling the shots. After years of subjugation and abuse, of being given no voice, they now had me in their thrall.

It’s our time now; our turn. You will do what we say.

Had I got up and gone to work that morning in April 2005, how different would my life have been? That single question has often plagued me over the years.

Had I known it then, my decision, that failure to act was to have far reaching consequences, which would tear my life apart.

Sometimes, I wish I could go back to that day and live it again.

But I can’t.

© 2017 James Hanna-Magill