This is a story I found in a folder among my mother's papers after I had finished the book. I can only think that I decided, at some point, that I had had enough of looking in the bulging suitcase that held so many ranting, unhappy writings. This story is not like those scribblings. I've changed the names of the two other women involved. It was written, apparently - it is not dated - soon after my mother's first stay in the psychiatric hospital. There are several different versions of this story, all typed out on A4 paper, many with hand-written changes. It could use a little editing but I've left it more or less as she wrote it, changing only glaring mistakes of spelling, syntax and punctuation. There were other bits of prose in the same folder in the suitcase, but none as long as this story. All are, however, coherent and not self-obsessed. My mother was, I think, trying to see the world beyond herself. She was trying to be a writer.
Portrait of a Mad Woman
by Ann McAllester
I sometimes wonder what has happened to Olivia, but I do not try to find out, since I am ashamed that I let her down.
The last few nights I spent in the hospital I slept in a room with only three beds in it. There was me, Olivia and Lisa. Lisa was about my age, a slender pretty girl who had never married and felt that she had failed as a woman because she had no husband and no child. She had been a theatre sister in the [a different hospital in Scotland], but would never work as a nurse again, we knew. The media had been making a meal of the trial of the Yorkshire Ripper; there had been a great deal of talk about schizophrenia, about "voices": during this time Alice had hidden away from the rest of the ward, as though she were afraid that we would blame her for his atrocities, or as though she blamed herself. She was schizophrenic. She had spoken to me one day as we sat on a bench in the sun, smoking and drinking Nescafe.
"I am mad, you know."
"So I am."
She smiled, and told me that she had often been a patient in this hospital; that once she had been in a locked ward for a year: we both looked to the main hospital building, to the top stories where the locked wards are, wards from which some people do not emerge until they are dead, wards from which we sometimes heard strange, frightening sounds. I could not imagine neat gentle Alice up there, locked in.
We sat smoking in the sun as she told me a story of a broken love-affair; of a beloved sister who took a silly, mistaken mixture of drugs and alcohol, of ambulance men who came to take her to hsoptial and called to the mother and sister waiting in the hall, "She's dead"; of shorter and longer stays in this hospital and of a lifelong regime of prescribed drugs that she hated to take, but was afraid not to take; of the mother she lived with, was dependent on, who complained about having to come to the hospital to visit her, who thought the doctors were wicked fools who made her daughter ill, who filled every visiting hour with a nagging whine to the effect that if only Lisa would come home with her and stop taking the drugs, there would be nothing wrong with her.
I saw the long thin white lines on Lisa's throat and wrists: she told me of her voices, who told her to kill herself.
"I am so afraid of dying alone."
I saw no end to Lisa's sadness.
We all three cried, the day I left the hospital. To Olivia I left my make-up, for her to play with; To Alice, a begonia in flower that my sister had brought me from England, for her to care for. I think they wept because I was going home to a husband and children, to my home. Perhaps they wept because they would miss me. They were without envy: I felt ashamed to have so much that they did not have, would not have, yet in neither of them did I ever detect the unmistakable whiff of jealousy. Curious, yes, and full of wonder.
"Is that your husband?"
"Are those your children?"
"Aren't they beautiful!"
I said I would come back, that the three of us would go out together, that we would go to the beach.
It was summertime.
I went back for them one day, but Lisa was out with her mother. Olivia was excited at getting into the car. It was a long time, she said, since she had been in a car, when she was a child, before she sent to Carstairs. My little blue car was a miraculous toy to her, another wonder that made me ashamed.
"Is this really yours? Imagine having a car! That's wonderful."
She did not know what a seatbelt was. I had to strap it round her, try to explain what it was. She talked excitedly as I drove, exclaiming at everything we saw, admiring and delighting in the everyday world of shopping streets and traffic lights. I slowed down so that she could see everything. She was entranced, fascinated, frightened like a child on the big dipper.
Olivia was twenty-seven. When she was four her mother put her in care, and since then she had lived only in children's homes, remand schools, borstal, psychiatric hospitals. When she was eighteen she was sent to Carstairs, the prison hospital for the criminally insane in Scotland, and she had remained there until a few weeks previously. The mother she had not even seen since she was a child had suddenly shown a belated interest in her, had expressed a desire to have her home. Olivia had been brought to the hospital in Edinburgh so that she could be weaned off the drugs she had become used to in Carstairs and rehabilitated so that she could perhaps one day go home to her family. The nurses took her out to teach her to cross roads, to use buses, to buy things. All her adult life had been spent in Carstairs, where all her friends lived; it was the only home she had known. It was hard for Olivia to adjust to a new world, to have choices and expectations and hopes, to live with people who had expectations of her, to meet a family she hardly remembered, people for whom she felt a fierce love and an overwhelming anger because they had relinquished her, a little girl of four. When she was unhappy, Olivia would cry and beg to be sent back to Carstairs. One evening though she went out and drank half a pint of beer in a pub. The alcohol reacted with the drugs in her body and she reeled back to the ward, sick drunk. She was threatened the next day, like a child, that if she took alcohol again she might be sent back to Carstairs. I saw fear in her eyes then. Her black eyes became very still through the haze of her hangover.
It was a hot day so I stopped the car and bought Olivia an ice cream cone. She ate it with happy greed. I asked her if she would like to go to the botanical gardens. She replied that she could not imagine what that might be like; she had only ever seen the hospital grounds and the garden inside the big wall of Carstairs. She would like to go to the botanical gardens; some of the other patients in the ward had told her it was beautiful. I wondered if we would meet anyone we knew there, and how I would introduce Olivia...this is my mad friend...new to Edinburgh...she's from Carstairs.
The gardens were deserted. We were to be the only people there. Two young women in jeans and bright summer blouses, alone in the sunshine in one of the world's most beautiful gardens. It was magical. I remember at boarding school each winter there would be some little girl from abroad who had never seen snow: when the darkness lifted from the calm Perthshire landscape a glistening fairyland would be revealed, entrancing little girls out to see, to feel, to play with it. I remember that once we had a Swiss au pair girl and that we took her to see the sea. Olivia's delight was like that, but her exuberance was uninhibited. No nuns exhorted her to be lady-like, no cultural memories bade her show decorum and grace. She, a grown adult woman who could [use] language that embarrassed even the male psychiatric nurses, who had wallowed in the ghoulish details of the Ripper trial, who knew by name all the most vicious and depraved of Scotland's criminals because she had lived with them, this same Olivia danced through that garden. This slim Olivia in her blue jeans, with dark shining hair and inexpertly applied make-up on her too-young face skipped from place to place, greedy to see and to feel everything, embracing trees, rolling down grassy banks, burying her face in the flowers, sucking in their perfume.
"This is what heaven must be like. I never though there was anything like this." We went into the glasshouses. I took her to see the aquarium, thinking she would enjoy the sprinkling shoals of tiny fish: but she was alarmed, frightened by the gloom and the sudden movements of the fish, terrified by the big black fish so slow and silent underneath the leaves of the giant water-lillies. I remembered a friend of hers saying her child had become ill after dreaming repeatedly of these same black fish, waking screaming in the night and struggling to get away from the black monsters she felt were stalking her.
I took her out of there quickly and we went through the bright aridity of the cactus house but Olivia shrank from the plants as though she felt they would reach out and inject her with some poison of their own, and I took her into the hothouses filled with gentle dripping jungles and into an Aladdin's cave filled with orchids and sumptuously flowering creepers, but she clutched my arm and made me promise there were no snakes there. I shivered. I could not find the way out, and I was becoming afraid that a madness might come over Olivia to make her break the glass walls as I had seen her put an arm through the window of our hospital bedroom so that she might have a piece of glass to kill herself with: like Lisa she had those thin white lines on her neck and arms. I was afraid at bedtime to go to sleep in the room with those two. A nurse sat watch in the dormitory all night, but a nurse peered only occasionally to see that all was well in the little room. I had nothing to fear.
We had our lunch outside the cafe, sitting on wooden chairs at wooden tables, though it had begun to rain. We ignored the fat wet drops that fell splat around us. Olivia ate a roll filled with ham and salad, a cream-filled cake and a cup of coffee. She ate daintily. She had impeccable manners. Then in the rain she ran exploring hands over the Henry Moore [sculpture], not speaking now, puzzled by her own delight in these things. She touched also the Barbara Hepworths, glancing at me with a worried little frown, as though hoping that I would be able to tell her why she liked them.
I took Olivia back to the hospital and left without going in. I said I would phone and arrange for us to go to the beach with Lisa. Olivia wanted to go to the beach: she had never been to the beach and asked me to describe it and to tell her what we could do there. She could not understand what I told her. I did not know how to tell her of the long waves and the seagulls, of the wind along the sand and the islands out there in the mist.
As I drove away I began to shake, in my stomach. I had not realized how tense I had been, being with Olivia, how much more mad she had seemed to me that day when I no longer shared her hospital life, how frightened I had been in the glasshouses lest she might suddenly become wild and destructive, how frightened I was of taking her to something as powerful as the sea. I was afraid of being alone on the beach with my two friends, Lisa and Olivia. My own madness was too recent, too raw a wound that they might reopen. I was afraid for myself and so I let Olivia down. I did not fulfill my promise to take her to the beach. That was cruel. I joined all those other people who should have looked after Olivia but did not, or could not.