The House of Lost Souls - F. G. Cottam [95]
Over the road, outside the pub, he saw an ambulance pull up. Its lights were very dull, flashing in the metallic cast of the early July evening. George had left the sanctity of his bar and was talking to the ambulance crew and gesturing over the road towards where he sat. He didn’t think he had ever seen George in daylight before. The ambulance crew were nodding and looking at him, their eyes indistinct in shadow cast by their uniform caps. Perhaps they were here for the cherry tree. Its bloom had gone, after all. He wished they would turn that fucking siren off, though. He wanted ‘Me And Mrs Jones’. He wanted ‘Abraham, Martin And John’. He wanted ‘Harvest For The World’. What he didn’t want, was a fucking ambulance siren. He put his head in his hands and started to cry. He was crying a lot, lately. They had done it, he thought, entirely overwhelmed by the realisation and its implications. They had slaughtered and spawned and he had felt the hot breath of the beast and barely escaped its fury. He bowed forward from the waist and grief and dread cleaved him and he fell to the paved ground and they were on him with straps and fastenings and he saw the disapproval on the watching faces of Hagler and Hearns from their grim and sweating gym posters up above him now in some dim memory as he didn’t resist and surrendered, instead, entirely to them.
Twenty-Two
Paul Seaton was never actually sectioned. His status remained that of a voluntary patient during the whole duration of his time at the hospital. Afterwards, he could never really understand this. It was the era of the thrilling new notion of care in the community. He thought, in retrospect, they should have had him shuffling through streets with bin bags on his feet as soon as the winter arrived. He couldn’t understand why they didn’t just pump him full of some sedative and parachute him into Kilburn, say. There were plenty of mad Dubliners on the streets of Kilburn. One more wouldn’t have made the blindest bit of difference.
The hospital was mid-Victorian, neo-Gothic in architectural style. It was a large building and occupied spacious grounds somewhere between the wooded heights of Dulwich and Crystal Palace. From the windows of the rooms facing northwest on the top floor of the hospital there was a view on a clear day of most of London, its landmarks indistinct from this distance except when the sun reflected off the river and gave the meandering city remote perspective and shape.
There was much about the hospital Seaton didn’t like. But his fall had been so sudden and appalling, he lacked the energy to hate or even very much resent the place. There were areas, though, that he could not help fearing. He feared the confinement of the narrow lifts, with their criss-cross iron gates that had to be securely drawn shut before the enclosed cubicles would drift up and down on coils of asthmatic cabling between floors. And he was frightened of the stairwells, dim stone chasms with purple marbling on the steps and bronze banister rails. He didn’t like the stairwells at all. So he stayed away from the upper floors of the hospital, where the recreation rooms and library and television room were sited and all the windows were always securely locked. And consequently, the view of the city in the distance below remained pretty much lost to him.
Odd aspects of the hospital inflicted emotional wounds he did not expect and could not defend himself against. The food was not terrible. But it was institutional. And its sweetish metallic smell of steam and daily stewing would contrast mockingly with Lucinda’s occasional cooking, in the cramped kitchen of their little Lambeth flat, as she conjured meals over their one bright summer together with the easy flair she brought to most things in scenes he had been complacent enough to think would go on being acted out between the two of them for years. Perhaps, even, forever.
They played music at the hospital through an old tannoy system. There seemed to be speakers everywhere and so there was really no