In Hospital Greys
The hospital sat on a hillside, a parasitic growth on the green belly of the valley, grey concrete and white render, a bureaucratic superstructure peeled over the paper and ink of lives winding down. I was always getting lost in those arterial corridors, gutters and feed-troughs, spewing white-coated staff and official, badged maniacs from section to section. The paint and polished floor, the scent of starched nylon uniforms, the wretched stench of medical authority – it was enough to induce a headache on each visit.
I followed the same route as before, along the painted white line on the shining lino floor. I needn’t have bothered looking for it, since I knew my way well enough already, but it had become habit, routine, and in these places, routine was rigid, a strict, disciplined procedure. Deviation was an absence of sanity, and an exit door closed. I was in no personal danger of being detained, but after several weeks, that structure insinuates itself into your own life.
I reached the nurses’ station and felt the same warm surge of sexual arousal I felt on every visit, and fought hard with the images of tangled undergarments and the aroma of detergent. The nurse who appeared to be in charge of my mother’s day-to-day treatment was an attractive, dark-haired woman called Mary Sandoz. We had chatted once or twice on previous visits. She spoke with a slight accent that I could never quite place, and I always felt it inappropriate to ask. Her pale skin and deep red lips spoke of the mystery and allure of Eastern Europe, but there was something more exotic, more alluring in her deep eyes.
My mother was in the dayroom watching television with all the other patients. As usual she appeared distant and faded, washed through too many times. I sighed heavily as I sat beside her. There was something on the news that they were all fascinated by – a man in glasses and a white beard was being pursued by journalists; it seemed very important. I was too tired to care.
I recalled my first time visiting, the day after she had been Sectioned following yet another attempt to kill herself. As I was shown into the mental health wing of the monolithic hospital by the thin-smiling nurse, I saw the sign pointing in the direction of the ECT room. Until then, the thought hadn’t occurred to me that my mother may be receiving electro-convulsive therapy, and ever since I had been haunted by the idea.
I had sat in a small side office and been lectured to by the consultant psychiatrist, Dr Hofmann, a man who was blurred at the edges, as though the strain of dealing with so much human misery had rendered him temporary in this world. I listened to the formless words that came from his soft-lipped mouth but understood nothing. He was speaking from under the ocean, his words filtered through the waves and I just couldn’t tune into his broadcast frequency. I do remember him asking me if I was okay, his words quite sharp and clear, cutting through the woolly fabric that the building seemed to cocoon me in. I mumbled something about insomnia, and when I left after my visit, I had a prescription for mirtazapine in my pocket.
During every visit I felt as though I were underwater. Great currents of conversation and inertia pressed heavily against my ribs as doors were pushed open; gravity itself seemed to have texture and substance, and it slipped through my fingers like melting butter. Within the patient’s rooms and the staff offices, the aroma of detergent clung to everything. In my thoughts, as I sat in the dayroom listening to my mother talk about her medication, I thought about the dark-haired nurse and how her soft pale skin would smell. Pushed face down into the cold hard flooring, the back of her neck would smell just as chemically clean as her uniform, pulled roughly up around her waist.
The first time I had seen the inside of my mother’s room, I had been left feeling confused and slightly scared. There was no handle on the inside; at night she was locked in to sleep on her plastic-coated mattress, in a room carefully groomed to have no sharp objects or any other possible means to aid suicide. It was a lonely, clinical place to spend a night, I thought, never mind the full term of her detainment. Part of me felt like this was my fault. I had been present at the time of her breakdown, I had witnessed several of her attempts to kill herself. Maybe I didn’t do enough then. If I’d been a better son, maybe she wouldn’t have ended up in this place.
But she appeared inexplicably happy and content, unaware of my troubles and doubts. She was getting on with the other patients and the staff were very nice and helpful. I wondered how much of this was down to the medication and how much was genuine.
Away from the hospital my thoughts were strangely not preoccupied with the health of my mother. Rather I was becoming more and more obsessed by the red-lipped, pale-skinned Nurse Sandoz, whose hair reeked of bleach. Yet when the darkness and closeness of night came, I fell prey to nightmares of the consultant psychiatrist, his face a blurred mass of words and hate, spitting furiously at me through concrete and white render. I saw my own doctor and came away with trazodone. The following morning I was paralysed by cluster headaches and nausea. The infamous “trazodone hangover”, an apparently not uncommon side effect. A second visit to my own doctor and she switched it to temazepam. I was beginning to feel chemically dependent.
Two weeks into my mother’s detainment, colours began to fade. Nothing but washed out greys, tones lacking in any vitality or life. Every day, the journey through the heart of the hospital, skull throbbing through over-medicated synapses, my brain sloshing around in a chemical soup, I made my way to see my mother. Even in the colourless pornography of the hospital, my condition seemed worse. Life in soft focus, the edges bleeding away into each other, colour run on the blanket of psychological authority. I found the harsh lighting painful, squinting as I made my way through the corridors on automatic pilot. Nothing but the routine to keep me focused.
Questions were being asked of me. At work, at home. My mother even began asking me if I was alright. I’m just tired, I told her. I had become so used to lying in recent months; to work, to family. It seemed better than telling the truth.
I left her to watch the news, more World Trauma than I could handle, with the crushing, grinding sounds of gears in my eardrums, and the vague, soft, grey images that flickered before my eyes, like a broken television, sound blaring through enormous speakers.
In the hall between the dayroom and the staff offices, white walls and freshly bleached floor. I felt my legs going weak as my vision began to lose solidity, and sound fell away into nothing but a rushing white static of hissing. Soft and teasing on my ears, cold blue detergent and polyester nightmares flooding into my vision like blood into water, spilling across the chemical concrete, vomiting, sideways faint on hard bones, jarred against grey.
When I awoke, it was to a confusion of noise and blurred faces, moving lights streaking across my field of view. I threw a hand limply in an arc and caught something with my wrist before I managed to cover my eyes. Hands were dragging at me and unwillingly I moved with them, succumbing to the tightness, to their insistence. I felt strangely thirsty.
After probably half an hour of confusion, my vision began to clear and I found myself in the office of Dr Hofmann. I was slumped on his leather couch, a glass of water on the table beside me, while he sat at his desk, silhouetted by the large window behind him. I took a sip of water, which tasted metallic, and attempted to sit up.
The voice of Dr Hofmann was low and calm, like a soft song. I shouldn’t rush, I’ve had a bad fall. I should relax and just take it easy. I’ve been under a lot of pressure. I couldn’t see his face as he spoke, and I was still hearing as if I was underwater. His words were like clear audio signals registering in my brain, rather than being filtered through my ears. I imagined in those moments, that he must be a fantastic practitioner, and I was grateful he was treating my mother.
I vaguely recall him asking me if I liked ships and sailing; his words were dreamy, as if he himself were somewhere else. Perhaps he was thinking about his weekend.
He began to tell me about how my mother was doing, never once moving from behind the table that separated us. I sat there and listened, as if in a daze, tuning out of the hospital world outside his office and focusing purely on his words. He explained to me that my mother would likely be leaving his care in a week, since she was showing a marked improvement. He wondered if this made me feel better.
Eventually I felt myself being led out of the office, Nurse Sandoz whispering to me that a taxi was waiting to take me home, the driver already had my address. I wondered how she knew what it was. Perhaps my mother told her.
She smelt of cold running water laced with something alien, something chemical. She held my arm gently as we walked together, and her touch was unnerving. There was something primitive and violent about the way I felt about her. Beneath the uniform of blue and chlorpromazine, she was naked sexuality and brute force, a whispering temptress who represented femininity and discipline. I watched her body move alongside mine, undulations of shockingly provocative force. I imagined she was wearing heels slightly too high; stockings with seams running up the backs of her legs. And were there one too many buttons on her uniform undone?
When she spoke to me I couldn’t hear anything, just a wailing noise like the warning of a Siren’s song. And in slow motion movements, her lips became as red and deep as the blood that flowed in her veins. The only colour now visible to me.
As I watched her from the taxi, I wondered where the real hospital was, and who the real patients were, with nothing but the routine to keep us sane.
Kenny Mooney was born in Berlin in 1978, when politics was interesting. He lives in Glasgow, Scotland, and tries to work as a web designer, while writing and inflicting cruel torture upon guitars. He likes David Lynch films, miserable post punk bands and tea. His fiction has appeared, or is upcoming, in Metazen, Fractured West, Emprise Review and Spilling Ink Review.
