The Yellow Room

(Staff Quarters): The room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here. Normally when I wake up like this, there’s a man by my side, or a man recently vacated, leaving a warm hollow in the mattress. Normally, when I wake up like this, I’m in an unfamiliar house belonging to man I don’t know. A man I don't recall meeting, but must have done.

But this time it’s different. Normally when I wake up like this, it’s because the unfamiliar man has gone to work or gone to get croissants, and each time I wake up wandering where I am, I have a headache and a dry mouth. I pay the price for being naughty, as we all must. 

But this time it’s different, because this time I feel good. And there is no hollow in the mattress because it is a single bed. Queen size, perhaps. Not a double. Definitely not a king. 

I sit up and still my head feels fine. There is a TV mounted on the wall. Not one of those giant things, but big enough. There is also an en-suite, which is useful. A desk. A laptop. By the side of the bed is a truckle table with orange juice, one of those multi-packs of cereal, a jug of milk, a coffee pot and a pain au chocolate in plastic wrap. 

Wherever I am, this is not as bad as being hung down a storm drain or finding myself in a 10 x 10 room with a kid and no windows. In fact, there’s a huge window in this room and the sunlight’s pouring through. I go to the door, but it’s locked. Whoever the guy is, he's being overly cautious. I went with him willingly enough, (presumably), and my sexual favours are freely given. No lock and key required. 

I go to the window.

It’s a sash, which has always confused me due to a lack of spatial awareness. I can never work out whether up or down. Ridiculous, really. Draw it on paper and I’ll understand immediately, like the offside rule, but in reality, there is always the smallest second when I try to push up from the sill instead of down from the recess. 

Doesn’t matter either way. The nub, the spigot, whatever that thing is called on a sash window, has been removed and the hole painted over. It is jammed solid. ’Tis a weird guy I went home with last night.

And there are bars. 

This freak’s thought it through. 

I’ll give him his dues, though. He’s got one hell of a view. There is a lawn down below, rolled flat. Anyone for croquet? Beautiful flowering shrubs frame the grass. Across from the lawn is a huge building which must once have belong to the gentry before the post-war government sucked them dry. There are cars parked outside the sweep of steps leading to an imposing double door. My eyes are a bit grainy, but it looks like a hotel. A hotel without signage. Maybe one of those very expensive ones which doesn’t advertise. It drips with wisteria. I have read that in parts of America it is considered a weed. Not here. Here it is wanted. 

Some folks are taking the air on the lawn. It’s just the most breathtaking spring day. I can almost smell the grass, except I can’t. There is a singularly tall man doing a namaste, or something pretentious like that, with one leg bent akimbo. I think it’s called the stork. He is taking deep breaths and chanting something. He is facing my window, so I wave. He doesn’t wave back. I’m a psychiatric nurse, so I know a fucking nutter when I see one. 

Whilst I’m tinkling away daintily on the toilet, a thought occurs to me. If the building opposite is a hotel, or some kind of retreat, then I am probably in the staff wing. This means I probably slept with a waiter last night and he has temporarily locked me in while he does what he has to do because a strange woman roaming the staff quarters would probably get him fired. I get that. That’s OK, as long as he’s not too long in bailing me out. My shift doesn’t start until eight, but I want to enjoy the weather. 

The other thought that occurs to me, and I don’t know why I didn’t prioritise it, is that the wallpaper is disgusting. Seriously ill-drawn. It is yellow, the colour of madness, (or is that orange?) and it has faded in parts, so the effect is an undulating wash of pus. It has patterns in it which make no symmetrical sense or bear any particular form. They might be flowers, but if I look long enough I see wolves and demons, owls, eels - and by the sash window, staring at me cheekily, is an Edwardian-looking boy with a slightly squint eye and a flat cap, who would almost certainly have died in the trenches if he had been real. Once spotted, I can’t seem to escape his gaze. 

It’s the sort of wallpaper detail that can drive a person mad. I mean, just what the fuck is he looking at? Go get your brains blown out at Passchendaele. 

So I start peeling him off. 

The Hotel: Bram locked the car and felt a frisson of megalophobia when faced with the daunting walls of the psych hospital. If it looked like this on a June day, what the hell did in look like in January? The surrounding moor didn’t help the aesthetic. 

He had an appointment with the governor, the head psych. Probably the only sane person in the building. Across an ugly patch of broken asphalt, he saw a long block with bars on the windows, and a figure waving. Probably waving at the drainpipe currently doing the stork. A member of staff trying to get his senses back. 

The vestibule carried the scent of all institutionalised buildings: antiseptic, baked-in dust, boiled cabbage and something else undefinable: sweaty trainers, rubber mats, chalk. He doesn’t know if those smells are genuine or implanted at birth like ancestral memory. 

He was ushered into an office in which a handsome-looking man was reading the paper, glasses perched on his head. He seemed untroubled by his occupation, or maybe his face was just naturally gifted. They shook hands, made small talk about the fine weather, and settled down to business - non-productive as that business might be. 

‘So,’ said David Warner. ‘You’re in your last year of psych.’

Bram nodded, gratefully accepting the tea that was procured by an orderly who bore an unerring resemblance to Sidney Poitier.

‘Any regrets at your choice?’

Bram was surprised by the honesty, or maybe the acuity. Because yes, he had plenty. Put at his ease in this manner, he parried the honesty with a thrust of his own.

‘I was all intent on going into this line of business: the institutional side of things —’

‘For the pension,’ said Warner.

‘Yes. Honestly, for the pension. And the complete lack of accountability.'

Warner got caught up stroking the dark hairs on his forearm. Thinking. Someone screamed in the distance. 

‘My advice?’

‘That’s what I’m here for,’ said Bram. ‘And I’m really grateful you found the time.’

‘You have a good turn of phrase,’ said Warner. ‘Found it hard to refuse.’ 

He leaned forward across his desk and fixed him with his handsome eyes. He was getting on in years, but even so … Bram was hetero, but really, this man was a heartbreaker.

‘You have to be a very particular kind of person,’ Warner went on. ‘You have to be able to divorce yourself completely from this shit show when you get home. Because for people like this, the people who end up here, there is no cure and no redemption. If we could hang them, we would. So we do our best, try to keep them safe from themselves and others, and go home to our wives or lovers. Or we just go home to ourselves. Get a dog if you’re going home to yourself.’ 

Bram laughed. ‘In some ways, you’re more fascinating than the patients.’

‘I am’ said Warner. ‘Because the patients, the inmates, these very, very dangerous people, are not fascinating at all. They are simply God’s day off. A big, banal, fuck off to the world.’

‘Did you want to help? At first?’

‘Of course. But now I just bide my time, do what I’m trained to do. My immediate assessment of you is that you should take the private sector. Plenty of rich flakes out there in need of validation. Most of the time, psychiatry is about listening to people. Could just as easily go to a fortune teller, or your barber. Same thing, just cheaper.’ 

‘I get it,’ said Bram, and he really did. ‘I just need to do this paper …’

‘I’ve given it thought,’ said Warner. ‘And I think I have an interesting case study for you. And the reason I chose it is because I think you know that these particular people can’t be helped. You're a realist, and I admire that. It took me years to get where you are. And I’m here to tell you, there is nobody in this prison who is safe amongst the general population. And yet every now and again, for political exigency, we do just that.’

‘Never ends well?’

‘Rarely. If we didn’t keep these people doped up to their eyeballs, most of the staff working here would be maimed or dead, and that’s the truth. Nobody in here is a miscarriage of justice or a misdiagnosis. They’re here for a reason, and if your paper achieves nothing else, state your case loud and clear.'

‘And then, of course,’ said Bram, ‘there’s all those people in the middle.’ 

*****

‘Susan Gibbs,’ said Warner. The two men walked side by side along the asphalt, which continued its negligent disrepair around the block. They were heading towards another wing, walking past a recreation area where dusty people sat smoking cigarettes and looking at something in the distance. 

‘She’s here?’ said Bram. 

‘A fact not widely known,’ said Warner. ‘The public believe she was released in 1980 and is now living under an assumed name, somewhere a long way from Hartlepool.’ 

‘She’s the child killer, right?’

‘Yep. Immortalised in a grainy black and white photo taken in ’68. A striking ten-year-old child who just happened to murder three younger children for kicks. Highly intelligent in a general knowledge context. Her appetite for history, reading, art, documentaries, soap operas, quiz shows, you name it, she absorbs it.’ 

‘And you’re happy with the TV in the rooms?’

Warner stopped for a moment. Maybe he was thinking, or maybe he just enjoyed the shaft of sunlight which had escaped the brutalist building and briefly bestowed a halo upon him. 

‘Like I said earlier, Bram, we can’t hang them. In the absence of that definitive end to things, we try to keep them as stimulated as possible. Susan even has a Netflix account, paid for by her many admirers. They’re donating under a misapprehension, of course, but people are strange.’ 

Bram didn’t argue with that. ‘So she’s been incarcerated all this time?’

‘No,’ said Warner. ‘After twelve years, when she was twenty three, the powers that be deemed it appropriate to release her. There were plenty of mitigations. The kid lived the typical, dysfunctional story of abuse and neglect. She’d been initially diagnosed with a psychopathic personality disorder. I’ve no reason to quarrel with that assessment, but it was thought a lot of her behaviour was down to her upbringing. Or lack of.’ 

They turned left, where the shadows loomed long, and entered a blue door with flaked paint and moss on the approach steps. Here, the smell of the institution was stronger. ‘This entire building is max security,’ Warner said, ‘but this wing is where the real dangerous people live and breathe. Hannibal Lecter territory, especially in Susan’s case.’

Bram felt like he wasn’t getting the whole story and told Warner so. Warner took Bram’s elbow and starting singing, in a low and tuneful voice, ‘Let me take you by the hand and lead you through the streets of Bedlam …’ 

Then he stopped and leant his back against a soiled wall. ‘We’re nearly there,’ he said. ‘So here’s the full story. Susan was released in 1980 under a supervision order. A new town, different hair colour and, of course, a new name. The striking little girl had become a very pretty woman. Manipulative. During that period of ‘supervised’ freedom, Susan picked up men in bars and clubs. Went home with them. Killed them. Three in total. It was kept very quiet: your classic exercise in cover-your-arse bureaucracy. She pleaded guilty in a closed court, the families were told her name … her assumed name … and had to settle for her incarceration here. Neither the family of those men, or the people who write her letters, know who she really is. You can’t put that in your thesis,’ he told Bram. ‘Top secret. You’ll have to work on scenarios and implications.’ 

‘Has she ever acknowledged the children she killed?’

Warner shook his head. ‘In my opinion, she got too much therapy. They knocked it out of her head and replaced it with unicorns.’ 

*****

In the cell is an ageing woman of sixty eight. She looks every gruelling minute of it. Grey hair, bad skin, piercing blue eyes top and tailed with sore red rims. She is scratching at the wall, occasionally making a broader arm gesture, like someone removing wallpaper. 

The door to the cell is opened by a nurse, who then stands to attention against the wall. Warner needs no introduction, but Bram does. Susan looks up from her task and floats a lascivious look across, which made his stomach churn. 

‘Oh, you’re back!’ She says to him, in a voice which is high-pitched and creaking but which she thinks is Lauren Bacall. You know how to whistle, don’t you?’ ‘I can’t remember your name, but I guess we had a good time last night. I need to leave now though.’ 

She made for the closed door. The guard stopped her. ‘I have a shift at eight,’ she protested. ‘I’m a psychiatric nurse.’

She looked at Bram, still flirtatious. ‘Lovely view,’ she says, pointing to a bare, featureless wall. 

*****

‘What was that?’ asked Bram, as they made their way to the carpark at the front. 

‘That was a kindness,’ said Warner. ‘You asked about the advisability of TV and internet access, but she’s technically a patient, not a criminal. Of course, we monitor things very closely. She can find out who the King of France was in 1315, the mating habits of beluga whales, but no socials, of course. And no other nasties. We also monitor what she watches on Netflix.’

Warner stopped before the car and adjusted his belt. 

‘Last night, Susan watched Shutter Island on Netflix. I doubt she understood the ending, but the view she was seeing this morning was the garden at the asylum. After that, before she slept, she read an old short story called Yellow Wallpaper - a late-Victorian classic of the genre. A woman locked in a room with a wallpaper which she finds increasingly distracting.’ 

‘So she just acts out what she sees on the screen or in a book?’

‘Yes, like I said, way too much therapy in my opinion. A refusal to see things for what they are.’

‘Hence the kindness you alluded to.’

‘Yes. In Susan’s head, she is twenty-three and beautiful. Every morning she wakes up in a different room with a different view, with the vivid impression of a recently departed male. She just doesn’t acknowledge the nature of their departure.’ 

They made their farewells. ‘I hope it helped,’ Warner said. 

‘I think so,’ said Bram, shaking hands. ‘Thank you.’

It helped alright. He’d scratch out a thesis paper - title and pertinent theme still unresolved. He’d been thinking of the letters after his name and the well-appointed office in which a steady, lucrative stream of wealthy fuck-ups could unburden themselves, but the realities of this hinterland of madness, this profession which Warner had chosen, was not what he wanted. Maybe he didn’t want any of it. It seemed so futile. 

Maybe he should learn to lay bricks.

*****

The Panic Room: This room is unfamiliar. I don’t know how I got here … 

‘Drink your juice, Susan,’ speaks a disembodied voice. ‘It will send you back to sleep. When you wake up again, you’ll be in a much nicer room …’