The Smell of Hollow Water

The three men standing around the bed in the stone dark ward looked like upright coffin lids in their brown overalls. There was a dim light from a torch that needed new batteries and, it could be said, a barely brighter light from the mind of its operative. Nonetheless, Den’s was the voice of authority for now.

‘Grab her feet, Jeff. No, down there, down the bottom end. Those are her hands, you pillock!’ Den pulled the sheet up a little and Molly’s feet appeared. They were white with curled up yellow toenails and thin blue veins threaded through them. Jeff thought they looked like they were made of onion skins. He bent over to see better but a smack round the ear brought him back up sharpish before he could get close enough. He was too slow for Eric though, who took another swing at Jeff’s head.

 ‘Leave it out, Eric. Let’s keep him in working order, eh?’

‘Why do we have these morons doing stuff? More bloody trouble than they’re worth.’ Eric was two marbles short of a game himself but that’s the value of ignorance.

Den tapped the side of his nose. ‘Cheap,’ he said, ‘and lots of ‘em. Like cockroaches only bigger.’ He hefted the top end of Molly by the armpits and glowered at Jeff, his eyebrows falling together over his nose like a black cloud with rain in it. ‘Ready? Don’t want to drop her now do we?’

Jeff wasn’t sure about the words but he knew the look, it said to get it right or else. Jeff’s eyes drifted back to Molly’s feet. Small, they were, with big callouses on the outsides and big dark holes round the backs. He thought he saw something slick and shiny down there and leaned in again.

‘Oi, cretin! Pick up the sodding feet!’

Jeff took hold of Molly’s ankles and lifted. Underneath, bits of Molly peeled away onto the sheet where a stain that looked like a map spread out on all sides, and in the splodge of muck Molly’s heels had left behind, a clutch of maggots wriggled like fat-slicked rice grains. A smell wafted up into Jeff’s nose and he vomited.

‘Stupid bastid!’ The back of Eric’s hand arced through the air again on course for Jeff’s head, and the lucky ring he’d won off Sid, who said he got it off a gypsy, took a little bit of ear lobe with it as it swung on by. Two penn’orth of blood splatters dotted bright red landmarks onto Molly’s map and Jeff stopped: a puffing statue with sticky strings of regurgitated peas and mash down his front. He plucked at his pockets. He cricked his neck sideways a little. If anyone had been paying attention, they would have noticed his eyes roll up so he looked like he had ping-pong balls in there instead of proper eyeballs. Jeff threw his head back and howled. Next he threw the gurney that Den had docked by Molly’s bed, and Eric had to jump aside quick as a frog off a log so as not to get hit. Then he threw Molly, but Molly didn’t notice because she was dead.

Jeff was big with big feet, big hands and a big head. Not such a big brain though, if the bricks and pictures and lists of words they gave him when he was six were anything to go by. But he was a lucky man; he had a job with a uniform and he got his tea in a real mug sometimes. Jeff liked his job, although maybe not when there were worms in the bed.

When he woke up after heaving Molly over the yardarm, there was a hint of daylight scraping at the grease on the window high up in the wall. Jeff’s backside hurt. He pulled his knees up to his chin and hugged them. ‘Time to go home, time to go home, Andy Pandy time to go home.’ He stuffed his fist into his mouth and chewed at his knuckles, ‘Andy Pandy, Milly Molly Mandy.’

‘Wakey wakey, shake-a-leg.’ Bright light slammed into Jeff’s face and a jet of water scythed across the room to shatter off his head in a shower of needles. He dropped down sideways onto the floor, squinting his eyes open just enough to see the reflections in the puddles flashing and bursting apart as new deluges crashed into them from the dome of his hulking rump.

‘Stand up, gotta get the crap off your filthy arse.’ Eric had the hosepipe and there was not much he liked better than washing down the solitaries in the morning.      ‘Bend over, let the dog see the rabbit.’ He narrowed the end of the hose with his finger and aimed a straight jet at Jeff’s buttocks. Jeff knew enough not to whimper so he bit his tongue instead. Eric’s tongue was having a better time of it, following a leery trail around his teeth and lips as he targeted dried-on bits of faeces with his jet. Dirty bastid should know better. He squeezed the end of the hose a little more until his finger became too cold to hold on.

‘Awright, you can get dressed now.’ Eric threw a canvas shift, stiff as starch, onto the floor where it began to sink into the tundric tarn around Jeff’s feet. If Jeff had been the quick sort, he could have rescued it before the water broke in and stole all the dryness. But he wasn’t the quick sort, and Eric’s foot beat him to it and trod the gown into the water, ‘Too slow to catch a cold, Big Boy.’ He scrubbed the gown around a bit in the murk; let it sop some of this up, save him a job. ‘Come on, get a move on.’ Then he kicked it over into a corner and stood with his hands on his hips, his mouth looking like a graveyard with a couple of derelict tombstones perked up in it, his eyes looking like a malevolent cod on a slab.

Jeff’s feet were turning pink; the kind of pink where you couldn’t feel the floor any more. He lurched a heel forwards and rode it like a ballerina – arms out, trailing leg arabesquing behind him. For a moment, Jeff was an alabaster frieze, a pallid silhouette against tiles the colour of dirty bottles; and then he wasn’t. Fire broke out in Jeff’s knee when it hit the lino. A million volts lit up his cramped-back toes, two million went through his hip with its cracks and runnels no one knew were there, and knives chopped at his deep-freeze sausage fingers. ‘Big boys don’t cry,’ he said through a mouthful of gnarly bangers like you would never get from a shop. ‘Big boys – ’

‘What’s going on here?’ A woman in a blue dress, gingham check like a café table cloth, was standing in the doorway, tugging the waistband of her apron back down from under her bosom where it kept on hitching itself. It had been a long night and there was Jeff looking like a lardy great new-born; curled up with his knees on his chest and making sucking noises. Just what she needed. Then she caught sight of Eric.

‘Where do you think you’re going?’ Eric was sidling towards the other door on shuffling feet that left a mop trail across the floor. He stopped and shuffled on the spot instead. ‘You get back here and help Jeff onto his feet, you hear me?’ Eric put his hands in his pockets because somehow that made his jaw jut out and having a jutting out jaw made what he said more true.

‘He slipped, he’s a clumsy bastid!’ Clumsy bastids had it coming, in Eric’s view.

‘I’ll bet he did. Get a bit of help with that, did he?’ Maureen peered down at Jeff’s vast goose-bumped foetus. A trickle of blood ran out of his mouth to copper the chlorinated amniotic spillage that was pooled beneath him. ‘Come on Jeff, no bones broken,’ she said in reifying denial. ‘On your feet, you big lummox.’ Maureen bent to lever an arm out of the blubbery puckered mound and pulled. ‘Eric – lift!’ she snapped, sharp as a dead twig. ‘Neither use nor ornament, you are sometimes. Call yourself a High Grade? Don’t know why we keep you on, really I don’t.’

Eric, galvanised by the thought of not being kept on, got a grip on Jeff’s other arm. Slithery like a fat eel, he thought. No, like cold tripe, that was Jeff. A heap of cold tripe, wobbling and –

‘Lift, Eric!’ Another dead twig, louder this time, more like a shot from the groundsman’s rifle when he was shooting rabbits. He lifted. Access to free tea bags, patients’ fags, and the occasional bit of how’s-your-father was probably worth the trouble of lugging Jeff back to his ward in the sopping-wet-altogether. He reflected on the image; a snigger made its way up his chest, bubbled in his throat, and let itself out down his nose with a schkkk sound and a fine spray of mucous. Maureen raised an eyebrow but said nothing. Getting Jeff sorted out was her priority for now. Sorting Eric out would be a different matter, uppity little weasel. She would do that later.

After supper, Jeff was in his brown overall again and looking for more white feet in a crumpled bed that smelled of blocked toilets. But there was only one this time because Alfie had lost the other a while ago. Jeff wondered how he was going to lift Alfie when he only had one ankle to get hold of. If he dropped him they might give his job to someone else. He patted his overall. It was like the ones Eric and Den had, and the man who fixed furniture in a shed at the back of D wing. That was staff, that was.

‘Now what you going to do, eh?’ Den dug Jeff in the ribs and wafted the sheet up and down so Jeff could see there was only one leg. ‘Bit hard for you, counting to two, so we got you a punter with only one this time.’ Eric had moved the gurney into place and he slapped Jeff on the back as he hovered nearby with it. Jeff thought maybe that meant they were friends so he slapped Eric back and Eric pushed him away. ‘Gerroff!’ he said, ‘go round the side and lift him up under his arse.’ Jeff had seen what was under arses in their beds, all rucked up in the rubber sheets and smelling like the cess pit when it overflowed, but it was the thought of Molly’s maggots that made him retch.

‘No time for that, Jeff,’ Den said, pulling Alfie’s top sheet off and dumping it on the gurney, ‘we’ve more customers to shift before morning. Or will I give your job to Easy Elsie?’ Den was the Boss, he could do that, give his job to Easy Elsie. Jeff began to huff and hum.

‘Yeah, give it to Elsie,’ Eric crowed. Eric liked Elsie, who was big up front and happy to put out for a fag. Eric was always willing to oblige with both the fags and the putting out. Jeff clutched his overall and synchronised the huffing and humming to a rhythm his feet made, going up and down on the spot. ‘Get a bloody move on!’ Den had hold of the gurney so he gave it a hefty shove and ran it into Jeff’s shin. That should wake him up. Eric was ready with Alfie’s top end.

‘What yer scared of? Iggly wiggly worms? I’ll put ‘em down your neck if I find any.’ Eric dangled an imaginary worm in the air, ‘Wriggly worm in your pants,’ he said, hamming it up with a bit of a jig.

‘Early bird,’ said Jeff. ‘Early bird. Catches the worm.’ That was something he knew. He felt better now that he knew something, so he flattened his arms, made a forklift of them and slid them under Alfie’s bony bum. Together, Eric and Jeff lifted Alfie onto the gurney, covered him with an old curtain, and clanked him off to the morgue. They would get a cup of tea there and Jeff liked sitting with Den and Eric drinking tea. He held his mug like they held theirs, laughed when they laughed, read the paper when they handed it to him with the pictures upside down.  But there was no tea for him this time round.

‘Jeff, you stink! You’ve still got honk down your front,’ Den said, holding his nose. ‘And your sleeves, look at your sleeves.’ He pointed and Jeff looked. Alfie had made his coat dirty which was a bad thing. Dirtybastid bad. He stood, wondering what to do about it. If he kept it on he was a filthyarse,  but if he took it off he wouldn’t be staff and Den might give his job away. His eyes started to roll up.

‘Go down the laundry and get a clean one, Jeff.’ Den thought it would be less bother if Jeff threw his brain seizure or whatever it was, down there rather than here. He could get his cuppa and a couple more smokes in peace because it would take Jeff a while to trundle all the way over there and back. ‘Go on, get a shift on.’

‘Yeah, get a shit on!’ Eric inhaled a glob of saliva and had a fit of his own, coughing and yodelling at his clever wordplay while he filled up the kettle from a tap near Alfie’s foot.

With dawn winking through the balustrades of a façade built to look like a mansion, Den, Eric, and Jeff were just back with what was left of Dave Bertrand. He’d spent three days decomposing in a sluice room while the orderlies got on with shovelling in food at one end of the other seventy nine patients and shovelling up shit at the other. Dawn, neither cosmological nor philosophical, had much of a place on D3.The phone on the wall rang and Den took his time answering it. Maybe it would stop and they could get outside for a kick around; clear the putrid air from their insides. But it didn’t stop so he picked up the receiver before the clanging set Jeff off again.

‘Ok,’ he said. ‘Ok, where is she?’ He nodded and rolled his eyes and rubbed his face so that by the time he said, ‘Be right there,’ and hung up, Eric was on his feet looking lively.

‘One more job, lads.’ Den rubbed his hands together, workmanlike.

‘Where to, Den?’ Eric rubbed his hands together too and patted his pockets where Alfie’s playing cards and a packet of cigarettes were now stowed. Dave didn’t have anything worth half-inching; this next call might bear better fruit.

‘Kitchen. Some tart or other.’ Den snorted at his unintended joke.

‘She’s a tart?’ That’s why she’s in the kitchen, because she’s a tart?’ Plain old single entendre foxed Eric most of the time and while a tart in the kitchen sound right, nothing else did. ‘What sort of a tart?’

‘The sort that has ‘medical accidents’.’ Den tapped his nose and pulled his mouth down at the corners. Eric couldn’t imagine a medical accident, never mind one you had to talk about with a gawky look on your face, and he wondered if Den might be just pretending to know something. He decided to follow it up anyway, you never knew. ‘What sort of accident?’

‘You know, where a medical man has a ‘bit’ of an accident with his ‘bit’ on the side.’ Den started gurgling and shifting his eyes about as though someone might overhear, but dead Alfie and dead Daft Dave were not interested. Eric was though, and he gave it some thought because it required a response, one that would get him a straight answer and not another pantomime. He pulled his eyebrows together to think.

Jeff pulled his eyebrows together too, hoping to spot a clue about how to react. Den’s face was laughing but Eric’s wasn’t. It was very uncomfortable not knowing whose face to believe.

Den was also watching Eric, his mouth half open waiting for the penny to drop, waiting while Eric’s brain pinballed the idea around in his head. Finally Eric’s face, tenterhooked into an expression half way between no one home and louchey leer, began to show faint signs of a light coming on, ‘Old Doc Wilbur was doing it with a patient?’ That wasn’t news in itself but Eric was eager to know for sure, he could trade that information for fags or biscuits.

‘Bingo!’ Den started a snorting laugh that he covered with one hand and Eric joined in, thinking how it might even be one of his own ports of call and would that make him and Doc Wilbur brothers, in a kind of a way? Dick brothers? His hand in his trouser pocket took a little trip downwards, as if a quick handshake could confirm this unexpected new status. Den saw what he was doing, the little movements down there. Like a mouse lost in a sporran, he thought, and considered giving his own mouse a bit of attention, turn it into a big bastard rat. He let his hips make a few thrusting movements and Eric did the same. Soon, the pair of them were yawking and sniggering and jigging about like demented puppets. Jeff took stock and ventured a smile. No one shouted at him so he thought he might join in with the thrusting too, and he lunged forwards like a limbo dancer. He must have been good because Den and Eric started laughing and hawking up and bending double at the sight of him.

‘Come on,’ Den said, spitting out the product of a night’s Capstans, ‘let’s get her shifted before the kitchen staff get in or gawd knows what’ll be in the porridge.’ He made a face, ‘Seems there’s a bit of a mess in there so don’t go throwing up on me now, Jeff.’ Jeff bugged out his eyes and shook his head, tight little shakes side to side. Whatever it was, he wouldn’t do it.

There was a mess in the kitchen alright. There was a china doll head with blue lips lolling over the end of the big steel table where the vegetables got chopped. A pair of breasts pointed straight up in the air like jelly moulds. Two legs made a wishbone and dangled over the sides, the feet at the ends stiff and purple where what was left of the blood was pooled. The rest of the blood was on the table, under the table, over the floor, creeping under the cupboards, sinking into the cracks between the tiles, and gluing itself to the wooden skirting board behind the store cupboard. It stuck to Den’s shoes where he stood trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

‘Jesus wept!’

‘That’s Elsie! That’s my Elsie! What they do to her? What happened?’ Eric’s chest was a drum, ‘What the fuck they do?’

‘Sterilised her. They sterilised her. Got rid of it and sterilised her. Oh God.’ Den was bent over, hugging his head with his arms wrapped round the back of it and rocking on his feet – heel to toe, toe to heel.

‘Got rid of what? Sterilised? You mean like – like milk?’ Den shouldn’t be doing this, crouching down there yammering like he was a Low Grade. Orderlies knew things, they were staff, so they knew things. For once, Eric wanted the hierarchy to kick in so he could be sure he wasn’t to blame. ‘Fix her Den! She’s my girl, Elsie is!’ But Den was occupied with breaking his own advice and adding his dinner to the spreading sea of biologicals.

More than being stark naked with a hosepipe on him, more even than maggots and bad smells, Jeff could not be doing with noise, especially the shrieking wailing kind. It shut bits of him down and flipped him into automatic and set him off humming. Jeff put his hands over his ears. He looked down at his feet and picked each one up in turn – dark strands of Elsie’s blood stretched and broke as he lifted; little beaded threads of Elsie clinging to his shoes and leaving prints on the floor when he put his feet down somewhere else. Jeff tried it out in another part of the kitchen, went back to get more blood on his shoes, started again somewhere new. Round and round, humming like a hive of snuggling bees. Dark red shapes, bright red shapes, shapes with shiny metal in them that flashed and twinkled like stained glass. Jeff reached down to pick them up, a fairground crane clutching at its prizes. There was a mirrored one, a long pointed one, and one so sharp it cut his hand. He put them in his pocket, all except the sharp one that glinted red and startling bright under the lights. He kept that in his hand and stroked it with his thumb so that it cut and sliced and slit.

‘Eric, Jeff – get the hell out of here.’

‘But what about Elsie?’

‘Elsie’s dead, you imbecile! And who do you think they’re going to blame – the docs or a couple of low-lifes like us?’ Den had his head screwed back on and one foot up in the sink, sluicing it under the tap. ‘You want to go to jail? Wash your feet, quick, and get going.’

Eric was not too clever but he wasn’t excessively stupid either, not for this place, and he knew a thing or two about washing things down. Snappy as anything, he grabbed the fire hose, unreeled it, and turned it on. A tower of water shot out across the kitchen, sending Elsie’s blood sloshing out towards the walls. An equal and opposite force knocked Eric onto his back where he let go of the hose, leaving it to dance a torrent on the ceiling before it fell flat and spewed out over the floor again.

‘Get going,’ Den shouted into the swooshing echoes. ‘Jeff, move yourself, you big dumb bugger!’ He skidded out of the kitchen with Eric behind him, and ran down the corridor; its dinner trolleys, gurneys, and the wilting remnants of occupational therapy baskets lined up like spectators at a race.

Jeff stayed with Elsie. Being hosed with freezing water was a familiar experience and he fell into position like a dancer, taking his place on the floor in a rounded heap – his knees to his chest and one fist in his mouth. His other fist held the slippery shiny prize that was working away and making his hand slippery shiny red.

‘No idea,’ Den told Maureen when Maureen asked where Jeff was. If Den and Eric were back from their nocturnal visitations, then Jeff should be too.

‘Why would he not come back with you?’ she asked.

‘Dunno why. He was having one of his funny turns, I reckon.’ Den was shifting about and picking at his chewed down finger nails. There was a big fat rodent here, Maureen could smell it. She turned to Eric, more in hope than in expectation of a proper answer. ‘Where was your last job, Eric?’

‘Not the kitchen,’ he said, shaking his head and keeping his chin down because jutting it out somehow didn’t feel quite as honest as he would have liked. Anyway he was losing his thread, what with thinking he remembered what happened and Den telling him something different. Best not look at Maureen or she would know he was lying. If he was lying. Eric was none too sure about that now. He made a face like he wanted the toilet and Maureen told him to go quick or she would put a pad on him, so he scuttled off. The caretaker’s shed might be a good place to wait it all out.

‘Not the kitchen, Den? Is that right?’ Maureen believed her rat was ripening, but then Den couldn’t help looking devious and guilty, it just went with his face.

‘It might have been the kitchen.’ Den’s voice crept out on old slippers, hoping it wouldn’t be noticed.

‘You’d better not be lying to me, Dennis Oakley.’ Maureen wrestled her apron back into position and lodged it in her waist. She breathed up a Matron’s-worth of chest to fill out her bib and set off under the steam of the quick-march bustle that came with it.

As she got closer to the kitchen, Maureen’s quick-march seemed to slow to a wading, labouring, plod-through-mud. There was a chill in the air like stagnant fog over cotton mills but with a low hiss woven into it. She tucked her elbows into her body and folded her forearms across her chest. With every step, the hiss – like the sound of a dozen TVs left on after God and the BBC had finished saving the Queen – got louder. That sound was not the right sound for a kitchen. And the smell of water – it wasn’t a smell like the smell of the sea, or like the wet tile suntan oil smell at the lido. It was more as though cold and wet had joined forces to make their own smell; metallic, echoing, and hollow.

As Maureen was wading through the metallic, echoing, hollow smell that sounded like forgotten televisions, Jeff was putting things right the way they should be.

when you’re being hosed down you have to be on the floor and curled up and not wearing clothes he takes off his clothes and drops to the floor and curls up then he uncurls because elsie is wrong she’s dirty all kinds of dirty too he will have to get her cleaned up let the dog see the rabbit he pulls her off the vegetable chopping table and her legs stick out so she falls like a shop window dummy and won’t be straight no matter what he does he pulls her this way and that but every time he gets one side of her flat the other side flips up in the air he’ll have to hug her he’s been hugged when he wouldn’t be straight and lie still six nurses sat on his arms and chest and legs until he couldn’t move or breathe then they wrapped him in a wet sheet rolled him up like a carpet and left him until he was properly still and quiet he doesn’t have a wet sheet he’ll just have to sit on her he gets one leg flat on the floor with the other up in the air there’s only one way to make that leg lie down so he sits on it with all his weight this time it stays flat not quite straight but flat he tries to line the rest of elsie up straight because it’s annoying when things are out of whack by the time he’s done elsie’s legs are where they should be when another bit of her goes right she makes little crunches and he stops grinding his teeth a moment to listen he gets to work on her arms too and rests his face on her to feel the sound through his cheekbones then he thinks that she really should be curled up because it’s the proper way to be when you’re under the hose

Oh God, Jeff …

he takes elsie’s arms and pulls them towards him but her legs swing off in the other direction like on a fairground ride he takes her legs instead but the same thing happens her arms and head swinging away from him over the floor once when he’d refused his injections two nurses put their feet in his stomach and pulled his arms and knees into the middle until he was bent like a banana then another nurse made a dart of the syringe and shot it into his backside he sits on the grey tiled bed of the new red sea with his feet planted in elsie’s midriff and pulls her limbs towards him good thing he’s a big boy he can do it on his own eric will be proud of him the new crunches say he’s got it right little soft crunches little spurts of movement just need to get her knees and her hands to her chin if he hugs her if he curls his knees up into her knees and wraps his arms round her shoulders she’ll curl up properly

What did you do, Jeff? Oh Lord, what did you do?

he gets up moves the hose so it points right at elsie wakey-wakey and lies down behind her he folds his legs so his knees push into hers and bends his head and neck to wrap elsie’s head and neck and moves them down towards her chest then he puts his arms over hers to pull them into her chest he mustn’t touch her breasts that would be rude she won’t like that but they’re in the way his right hand keeps dropping onto the nipple of one of them because it sticks out suppose he removed it got it out of the way the knife in his hand was on the floor near elsie so maybe it’s hers that would be fine he can’t see her breasts so that’s also fine he knows he shouldn’t look at them he’ll have to do it by feel elsie will understand he’s thorough and he likes fiddly things but it’ll take a while he gets a rhythm going cuts and hums shake-a-leg break-a-leg all fall down he’s making elsie right well done jeff cup of tea.

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Author note. During my clinical training I worked in a number of large institutions for people with what had been called mental retardation, then mental handicap. This story draws on the conditions I experienced and the all-too-recent history of those places.