budgies too: whose tweets drove the Governor wild with rage in the early mornings of his sleepless nights.
Four floors below in the Lunatic Dormitories, the sun shone through their windows too, between rusting bars, and were it not for the certain knowledge of the bleak winter to come they could even have enjoyed it. For from October without fail the rain wind hail and dark satanic waves would bash beat and rattle their ill-fitting windows like Lucifer and his friends aiming to get in—clawing and crashing at the feet of the place as it clung to the land that had never wanted it, breathing in and out a rancid dragon breath fed with daily regularity by the rumbling discharge of two thousand mental patients at high tide to an open sea—leaving those sorry Lunatics limp with exhaustion throughout the days and rigid with desperation through the growling nights. Above them, on the first floor, were the lower Patient cells with no glazing at all and a bucket for excretions—reserved for those neither useful nor problematic—and during the winter their bed sheets froze to the wall, their piss and shit recorded in glacial layers, whilst in summer they’d be eaten alive by insects: but still the cold, the crawling damp, the bugs flies spiders and infections, were preferable to the buggery and bullying below. Collectively, the Patients and Lunatics were the ‘Residents’.
Most of the doctors lived on the outside, visiting daily with their white coats and superior manners, while the Orderlies, many of whom had accommodation on the fourth, were free men in the very worst of ways: they abused their power, beating and raping on a whim, a dare or a joke, retaining their unfortunate ‘regulars’—their selected sexual partners who were as likely to be men as women—tortured souls with no choice but to comply. The Orderlies were unrestrained semi-educated ruffians with just a four-eyed bean-counter of a Deputy and a mentally broken Governor to restrain them.
❊
As I hurried towards our meeting, the wind blew fiercely across Heroes Square. I couldn’t help worrying, or hoping, that the old man wouldn’t come. For the first time in ages I cared about something, or even about someone, as if we were two men simply at different points of the same experience—but I was afraid too.
He was already there, waiting, his grey hair or what was left of it flapping in the breeze, a personal monument to better times from beneath a brown hat grown tatty and dirty. He was tall and straight, a newspaper tucked under his arm, and his walking stick contrasted with the inner strength that shone from him; it was as though he were a young man disguised as an old one. Once I was close, he turned and began walking and talking, his voice raised above the wind:
‘The Union’s first supporters were the dispossessed nobility of the 1920s and their banker and industrialist friends—the elite families and corporations. After the Second World War, they were joined by the post-fascists like Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Reichspartei with their dream of a single nation-state, ‘Europe a Nation’: they had sensed a second chance to create that dream through diplomacy, rather than force. Their dream was for a modern, dynamic higher form of society, strong and logical, honest, respecting the land; a civilisation based on the greater European tradition, a ‘meritocracy’ where skills could be freed to capture the beauty and wonder of life and to harness science for good, to push humanity forward. Soon they’d sold the idea to the very liberals they hated so much and to the misty-eyed students—the idea that this time it was they who would be calling the shots, that it was they who really knew where we would all be heading. Over the decades, countries flocked to join, driven variously by poverty, the fear of
Four floors below in the Lunatic Dormitories, the sun shone through their windows too, between rusting bars, and were it not for the certain knowledge of the bleak winter to come they could even have enjoyed it. For from October without fail the rain wind hail and dark satanic waves would bash beat and rattle their ill-fitting windows like Lucifer and his friends aiming to get in—clawing and crashing at the feet of the place as it clung to the land that had never wanted it, breathing in and out a rancid dragon breath fed with daily regularity by the rumbling discharge of two thousand mental patients at high tide to an open sea—leaving those sorry Lunatics limp with exhaustion throughout the days and rigid with desperation through the growling nights. Above them, on the first floor, were the lower Patient cells with no glazing at all and a bucket for excretions—reserved for those neither useful nor problematic—and during the winter their bed sheets froze to the wall, their piss and shit recorded in glacial layers, whilst in summer they’d be eaten alive by insects: but still the cold, the crawling damp, the bugs flies spiders and infections, were preferable to the buggery and bullying below. Collectively, the Patients and Lunatics were the ‘Residents’.
Most of the doctors lived on the outside, visiting daily with their white coats and superior manners, while the Orderlies, many of whom had accommodation on the fourth, were free men in the very worst of ways: they abused their power, beating and raping on a whim, a dare or a joke, retaining their unfortunate ‘regulars’—their selected sexual partners who were as likely to be men as women—tortured souls with no choice but to comply. The Orderlies were unrestrained semi-educated ruffians with just a four-eyed bean-counter of a Deputy and a mentally broken Governor to restrain them.
❊
As I hurried towards our meeting, the wind blew fiercely across Heroes Square. I couldn’t help worrying, or hoping, that the old man wouldn’t come. For the first time in ages I cared about something, or even about someone, as if we were two men simply at different points of the same experience—but I was afraid too.
He was already there, waiting, his grey hair or what was left of it flapping in the breeze, a personal monument to better times from beneath a brown hat grown tatty and dirty. He was tall and straight, a newspaper tucked under his arm, and his walking stick contrasted with the inner strength that shone from him; it was as though he were a young man disguised as an old one. Once I was close, he turned and began walking and talking, his voice raised above the wind:
‘The Union’s first supporters were the dispossessed nobility of the 1920s and their banker and industrialist friends—the elite families and corporations. After the Second World War, they were joined by the post-fascists like Oswald Mosley’s Union Movement and Hans-Ulrich Rudel’s Reichspartei with their dream of a single nation-state, ‘Europe a Nation’: they had sensed a second chance to create that dream through diplomacy, rather than force. Their dream was for a modern, dynamic higher form of society, strong and logical, honest, respecting the land; a civilisation based on the greater European tradition, a ‘meritocracy’ where skills could be freed to capture the beauty and wonder of life and to harness science for good, to push humanity forward. Soon they’d sold the idea to the very liberals they hated so much and to the misty-eyed students—the idea that this time it was they who would be calling the shots, that it was they who really knew where we would all be heading. Over the decades, countries flocked to join, driven variously by poverty, the fear of
Similar Books
