Sin City Read Free Page A

patients since the early 1920s – except patients is the wrong word, since they weren’t even ill when they came in. Martha Mead was frog-marched here in 1906 because she stole a loaf – just one loaf and eighty years in hospital. She’s ninety-seven now. I could still be here in 2067, a dribbling hump like she is, with my tongue lolling out and my fingers bent like claws.
    It was really only chance I landed here at all. Jan went away for just three measly days, and the social worker chose day three to call. Okay, I’d let things go a bit, but I’d planned the tidy up that evening, do my washing, clear away the mess. And I only wasn’t dressed because I haven’t got a job. What’s the point of putting all your clothes on when you’ve nowhere to go and nothing to get up for? Old Frog-Face just assumed that I was cracking up. I admit I cried and shouted, but if she hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have. I hate the way she pries, looks in all the cupboards, lifts up fraying edges in your mind. I don’t think she believed in Jan at all. The other twice she visited, Jan was out again. It was just bad luck, but she thought I was lying, or confused. I’d hardly invent my best and oldest friend, one I went to school with, one who offered me a home when my father died and my mother went to pieces. If you can call Jan’s bedsit home – one crummy room in Vauxhall.
    Anyway, Frog-Face dried my tears and helped me mend the Hoover, then went and ratted on me, reported back to someone, so I had to see the psychiatrist again and he suggested Beechgrove. Suggested, hell! You can’t argue with psychiatrists. I did, in fact, for half an hour, but the more I ranted on, the more he said it proved I needed help.
    Help?
    I miss Jan, actually. It seems centuries since I’ve seen her, though it’s only just ten days. She’s frightened of the hospital, won’t come near it, not a second time. She was meant to bring me in, but she panicked when she got here. She saw two patients just outside the gates. One was male, old male, with his flies undone. He had bought a paper, The Sun , I think it was, and he was slumped on the ground, not reading it, but tearing it in strips, very neat and careful strips, all the same shape and size and laid out in a row. The other was female – foreign, obviously, with white hair straggling down a dark and pitted face, and coarse hairs on her legs. The legs were bare. She wasn’t doing anything. That was the trouble – there was nothing left of her. No mind, or thoughts, no hope. Just a framework toupéed with white hair.
    Jan stopped, right where she was, started tugging at a button on her jacket. It was loose to start with and she’d been worrying at it all morning like a wobbly tooth. “Carole, you can’t come here. Over my dead body.”
    â€œDon’t be silly.” I sounded sharper than I meant to. “Dr Bates is expecting me at ten.”
    â€œWell, ring him up or something. Say you’re ill. They should never have sent you to a place like this. They’re all mad and old and …”
    â€œWhat d’you mean ‘all’? You haven’t seen them yet. Those two are probably staff.” With Jan, I’d always been the joker. It’s hard to break a habit, even when you’re about to join the dead.
    Jan didn’t laugh. “Come on, love. I’ll take you back. I’ll even take the day off. We’ll go to a flick or something – my treat.” The button had come off now and Jan was mauling it, poking it with a finger, chewing on it, flicking her nail against it with a maddening pinging sound. I snatched the button from her hand, cradled it in mine. It looked so weak and sort of hopeless, with no purpose left, no longer one of four, a useful member of a team keeping out the wind; just a bit of bone hanging from a thread. “Okay,” I said. “The flicks