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Fifth time I've tried to upload this. Now I remember why I gave up on ff. net.It was so annoying! Anyway, please read this, and if you wanna review than that would be fantastic. Especially if you find anything wrong with it; I'm entering this for a competition and need it to be as good as it can be.
St. Valentine's Sweethearts
I’m on the bus now, yet it feels like it’s only been a few seconds since I was pronounced a dead man back in court. I know my destination. It’s on my file, the one that the guard sitting just across from me is holding in his hands. San Quentin prison. Death Row, to be precise. It’s a strange name, reminds me of rows of crop waiting to be cut down.
I’m trying to whistle the national anthem. It’s very out of tune and extremely inexpert. For some reason my teeth aren’t right for whistling. Also, I’m not entirely sure how the national anthem goes any more. I’m only really doing it to annoy the guard and the bus driver, but I have no idea whether or not it’s working.
Next thing that happens is suddenly the bus jolts like it’s been thrown off a cliff, or someone’s let off a stick of dynamite underneath it. I’m thrown forward like a mannequin and my forehead slams forward onto the bar of the seat in front of me. My temple explodes in agony and spots of almost celestial light flash across my vision. Maybe I pass out. Maybe I don’t. Either way, the next time I look up we’re moving again and my friends seem totally unfazed.
‘Ow!’ I say loudly and indignantly.
I am ignored. Hardly surprising, since I’m headed for a fate worse than a bump on the head. But if I’m going to die then I’m going down irritating as many people as possible.
‘I hit my head,’ I add. ‘I might have brain damage.’ He still ignores me. Not even a jibe about me already being brain-damaged. ‘I could sue, you know!’
I yell some more stuff at him but eventually I get bored and let my head loll back onto the headrest. It’s a long way, and all the landscape is the same. Monotony’s like a drug (and take my word for it, because I’ve tried them all); you try to put up with it for too long and pretty soon you get so worn out that you hop on a plane to the Land of Nod. So I closed my eyes and drift off to sleep.
Unfortunately, it was a return ticket so inevitably I wake up, and the bus is stopped, and the guard has hold of my shoulder and is shaking me none-too-gently. My mouth tastes like an armpit and my head is throbbing even worse.
‘We’re here,’ he says, not coldly, just kind of indifferent. But the way he looks at me is like he feels sorry for me. Well, that’s something. I hope he comes to my funeral.
I step off the bus. We’re in some kind of courtyard or something. I frown. This place is … nice. Not what I expected. There’s a grass around the edges, and the building is white instead of grey. And the sign above the door…
‘Uh…’ I don’t really know what to say.
‘St. Valentine’s Psychiatric Hospital,’ the guard says behind me, like I can’t read.
‘Um…’ I feel like I’ve been thrown into shark-infested waters only to find I’m actually in a toddler’s paddling pool. It’s pretty disconcerting.
‘This is what you were expecting, isn’t it?’ the guard says, looking at me with eyes like lasers.
‘Sure…’ I said slowly. I honestly don’t know what has happened. What it probably is, is that some ditzy air-headed secretary somewhere has screwed up the paperwork, and some poor schizo guy is being sent off to get injected with the kiss of death in my place. Oh well. We could do with a few less nuts in this world. And I’m definitely not arguing.
Oh they’re crazy, that’s for sure. The guy I share a room with – Teddy, who really is like a big bear, except with knife wounds on his face and a broken nose – tells me solemnly that his Momma is going to come and get him out of here. And in the room next to us is this guy called Weslo – a really tiny little guy with dark hair and glasses that cover half his face – who has Christianity pouring out of his ears and rarely says anything that isn’t a Bible quote. Seems strange that being religious automatically qualifies you as being crazy, but I let it pass.
Some of them are in straightjackets and rarely come out of their rooms, because they’re prone to fits of rage. One of them is convinced that he’s dead and this place is Hell. And then there’s Grady. I’ve only seen him once. He’s not even thirty yet but he has grey hair, and he has to be restrained all the time, and when anyone tries to get near him he gnashes his teeth and bites down hard on any body part he can reach.
But scarier than all of them is the main guard – and I call him a guard, not a doctor, because that’s what he is. He met me on my first day.
‘My name is Gabe Grant,’ he said, showing me a grin that should be friendly, but is strangely sinister. ‘I’m here to look after you.’
Gabe scares me, and that says a lot because since drugs fried out a lot of my braincells not a lot scares me. He doesn’t look like a real person. His hair is a medium brown, thick and wavy, and with never a single hair out of place. His teeth are whiter-than-white and impossibly straight. His skin is flawless. His eyes are bright blue. He looks like an actor, someone you’d see in a hospital drama on TV. And it’s this lack of humanity, this plastic, artificial, clichéd personality, that makes me regret those hairs on the back of my neck.
In fact everything about St. Valentine’s is out of place. I’ve never been in an asylum before, although I’ve been to rehabilitation therapy sessions more times than I can count. This place actually feels like a prison. There are bars on the windows. We all have to wear the same uniform, these clinical white shirts and pants. And they never let us out. I notice that after my first week or so. I haven’t actually seen the outside world since I was first brought here.
And every night I lie awake, and I tear my guts to shreds with worry over what will happen when they find out that I shouldn’t be here. That it’s a mistake. I know that one day they will sort it out, that I’ll be taken away. But maybe I’ll be released from this place before that happens. Maybe.
‘Brent,’ Teddy says to me, about midnight on one of those sleepless nights. ‘Why you think they lock the doors in this place?’
‘Huh?’ I’m immediately irritated by the interruption.
‘The doors. Every night they lock our door. Why do they do that? It’s like being back in prison.’
That peaks my interest. I roll my head over to look at him. He’s just a great big hulk of a silhouette in the dim light of the moon, but I can see that he’s got his arms crossed behind his head, in a gesture that might have seemed relaxed were it not for the troubled frown I could hear in his voice. ‘You were in prison, Teddy?’
‘Sure. While I was waiting.’
Teddy does that. Says things and doesn’t explain them. Not a man of words, is our Teddy. ‘Waitin’ for what?’
‘Waiting for them to kill me.’
That’s more like a punch in the gut than any of the scared thoughts I’ve been having over the past few weeks. ‘Whadya mean?’ I ask, my voice shaking.
‘They said they was gonna kill me. Because of what I done to Alice, my sister.’ I’m about to ask what it was that he did but for once he goes right on and says it. ‘It was an accident. We were fighting, and I grabbed her and I broke her neck. They called me a murderer. And they said they was going to send me to…’
I silently mouth the words “Death Row” even as he says them, my blood running cold.
‘Brent?’ He’s worried by my silence.
I somehow manage to talk with a very dry mouth. ‘Why didn’t they send you there, Teddy?’
‘I dunno. They said they were gonna. They put me on a bus. But instead of going there they sent me here.’
By this time I’m actually feeling sick. Stephen King, eat your heart out, huh? Though I really shouldn’t be thinking of hearts being eaten out, in my state. I close my eyes. My whole body is shaking. There are probably sweat-stains on the pillow and sheets. ‘Get some sleep, Teddy,’ I whisper, and my voice shakes too.
‘OK, Brent.’ There’s silence for about 10 seconds. Then he says, ‘Brent?’
‘What?’
‘I haven’t slept since I got here.’
‘Gabe, why are we here?’ I ask.
He smiles that perfect TV-doctor smile. ‘Not getting philosophical on me, are you, Brent?’
‘I’m serious. This is a place for crazy people. I’m not crazy. I’ve never acted crazy. Why haven’t I been released? And why won’t you let us out? This ain’t a real psychiatric hospital.’ There. Now it’s out in the open, the thought that’s been lurking in my mind. ‘There ain’t no pills. There ain’t no communal garden. Hell, there ain’t even any psychiatrists! There’s just us, and the nurses, and you.’
‘You’re here to heal,’ he says in his bogus TV-doctor voice – some pure, practised sincerity cut with rehearsed reproach and infuriating condescension. ‘Aren’t you healing, Brent?’
I stare at him. Then I say, ‘I wanna phone my Mom. I ain’t never seen a phone in this place. When do we get to use phones?’
‘You never knew your mother,’ he says calmly. ‘You were a ward of the state. Tell me, Brent, is there anyone out there that you could call?’
I think about it. I have a brother, but he isn’t a waster like me. He has a wife and kids. And every so often I show up on his doorstep, stay for a few days, get some money off him and leave again. But I wouldn’t say we were close. I also had a girlfriend, but boy did she disappear fast once she found out her soulmate was gonna get terminated.
Of course, by the time all these thoughts have been processed Gabe has already walked away.
I got to the rec room and lie down on the pool table. I do this on purpose, since it means that no one can play pool. I’m hoping someone will come along and punch me so hard I’ll have to be taken to a real hospital. But no one does.
It takes me a while to notice, but the other guys are whispering among themselves. They look scared and worried. I was used to scared and worried people in the outside world but in here it’s not so common. I roll over onto my stomach and ask Teddy, ‘What’s happening?’
‘Weslo’s gone,’ he says solemnly. The way he says it suggests that Weslo is either dead or has joined the Nazi party.
‘Where?’ I ask.
Teddy shrugs. ‘Happens,’ he says.
‘Was he released?’ I ask.
Teddy shakes his head. ‘Just taken away.’
‘I’m glad he’s gone,’ a tall skinhead with tattoos and a thick Bostonian accent snarls. ‘That little guy gave me the creeps. I just shot a few people but what he did was sick.’
That makes me look up. ‘You killed people?’ I ask.
He shrugs nonchalantly. ‘Drug deal gone bad. A few nice law-abiding citizens got caught in the crossfire.’
He sounds pretty casual about it. I’ve met people like him before. To people like him, human life is OK as long as it doesn’t get in his way.
‘What did Weslo do?’ I ask.
The tattooed guy – Danny – laughs. ‘Weslo? You not heard of him? He was a serial killer. Kidnapped all these whores and read them passages from the Bible. Made them repent then set them on fire. And then he moved to another state, started killing off homosexuals. Moved to another and started killing women who had been unfaithful to their husbands. Body count was over 50 before they caught him.’
My mouth hangs open. Weslo - the little nervy guy who carried his Bible everywhere – was a psycho? I’d be more willing to believe Teddy was a rocket scientist, or myself the Pope. I shudder to think what Weslo might have done to me if he’d ever found my records.
‘So … hang on … is everyone here a killer?’ I ask, only half-joking. Then I rephrase it. ‘Were we all headed for Death Row?’
There’s a general rumble of assent. I sit up on the pool table and stare at them all.
‘What the hell is going on?’ I snap furiously. ‘We’re all supposed to be dead! Sure, a mistake might have been made with the paperwork of one of us, or maybe even two, but there’s over a hundred people in here!’
‘You complaining?’ Danny sneers. ‘This place ain’t the Hilton but it’s better than being dead.’
‘But…’ I’m lost for words. I’m no Freud but even I can see that this situation is crazy. ‘How can a place like this even exist? Doesn’t anyone check up on it and notice that it’s full of killers and psychopaths, and that people just randomly disappear every now and then? And when was the last time anyone here talked to someone from the outside world? There are no phones, we can’t send letters and there’s no computers for e-mail. And Gabe and the nurses! They’re always here. Have you noticed that? I’ve never seen a car park outside. They never leave!’ I’m breathless. Only panic and adrenaline have allowed me to talk for so long. And why can’t I sleep? Why can’t any of us just sleep?
‘Brent?’ Gabe says softly from behind me. I yelp and fall off the pool table. ‘I think I’d better take you to your room. To calm down.’
Calm down is right. In the end he has to call a couple of nurses to deliver a sedative and take me up to my room. The sedative makes me drowsy, but of course it doesn’t send me to sleep. And the effect fades away almost as soon as they lock the door. I scream and rage and kick and punch the door, splitting my knuckles and bruising my skin, and not caring. I learnt this kind of behaviour from one of my various and sundry foster-dads, though often he used me instead of a door. But eventually I get tired and I have to sit down. I nearly start praying to Weslo’s God to get me out of there.
I stick my head in my hands and stare down at the floor helplessly. But after a few minutes, my focus draws back onto the inside of my arms.
‘What the hell?’ I mutter, lifting up my left arm to take a closer look.
In the crook of my arm, the inside of my elbow, there’s a hole. Only small, which explains why I haven’t noticed it before. I’m not stupid. I’ve done enough heroin in the past to know that the mark has been made by a needle. But I came off heroin years ago and reverted to cannabis – which was cheap – and cocaine whenever I could get my hands on it. And this needle-mark is recent. So is its twin on the inside of my other arm.
Conspiracy theories flash through my head. They’re keeping us crazy by using mind-altering drugs. This is a research facility where they send people who are supposed to die anyway so that they can test new medicine on them. Gabe and the nurses are aliens who have been probing us. I am now entering The Twilight Zone…
The door opens and Teddy walks in. He looks at me nervously. I probably look pretty nuts. My eyes feel tender and troubled and my hair is pretty much standing on end since I gave up trying to take care of it a while ago.
‘I need to smoke,’ I groan, rubbing my face with my hands.
‘You could ask Gavin?’
‘Gavin?’
‘That guy on the first floor. I reckon he’s been smuggling cigarettes in somehow. He always reeks of smoke.’
‘Good for Gavin,’ I mumble.
‘It ain’t. Gives you lung cancer.’
‘So speaks Teddy, ambassador of good health.’ I was never really any good at talking to people, and I’m too shaken up to be nice, even to poor old butter-wouldn’t-melt sibling-killing Teddy. I roll over on my bunk, wishing I had alcohol, cigarettes and enough drugs to set my veins on fire. I’m such an addict.
‘Brent?’
My jaw clenches, teeth grinding together in frustration. ‘What?’ I growl, my voice muffled by the waves of pain rolling through my head.
‘Why are you here? Who did you…?’
‘Go to sleep, Teddy.’
This time he doesn’t even argue.
I guess it starts about two months ago. Remember the girlfriend I told you about? Well, she came up to, all weeping and worried, and told me she was pregnant. 8 months, and all she’d had to show for it was a little weight-gain and a bit of sickness. Apparently sometimes it can happen like that – there’s no bump to show the human growing inside. And maybe we were just a little too drugged-up to notice. I yelled a lot, comforted a little, and told her that she had to get rid of it. But apparently this is difficult and slightly illegal after a certain point.
So we had the baby. I suppose I should remember stuff about it, like my feelings when I first saw it, or how much it weighed when it was born. But I don’t.
The first few days were … OK. At least compared to the ones that came after. My girlfriend tried to feed it with varying degrees of success, but it still cried constantly. I avoided all responsibility, experimented with new drugs that chased away any traces of responsibility in my mind, whilst in the background the baby cried and the girlfriend did what she could to stop it.
Then, two days later, I woke up and my girlfriend had been replaced by a note, scribbled hastily in blotchy biro on the back of the landlord’s demand for rent, though really he should have been paying us to live in that sinkhole. She was gone. Couldn’t take it any more, so sorry, don’t try to find her etc. And she’d left the baby behind.
I stared at that note for a long time. Then I punched the wall and bruised my knuckles. Then I did some more drugs, more drugs, more drugs to anaesthetize the pain. And all the while in the background the baby was crying, howling, so loud and for so long that the baby became my whole world, despite the fact that I was doing my best to ignore it. Finally the drugs ran out. This was at least a day later. The baby was still alive then.
Sickening for silence and with nothing to eat but cold turkey, I tried to get the baby to stop crying. It had quietened to a pathetic whimper. I found one of its bottles in the fridge and I tried to feed it. I knew you were supposed to heat the milk and then squirt it on your arm or something but I didn’t bother. It was better than nothing. I yanked it unceremoniously out of the cot someone had donated and did my best to feed it. From what I hear, when fathers do this they make some kind of connection, an unspoken thing, so the baby looks into your eyes and you look back and suddenly you’d protect it from an angry bear. That’s a myth. I just felt cold and sick and angry.
The food fuelled its crying once again. I searched the whole house for drugs or alcohol or money to buy either of the previous, but found none. Shame, maybe if I’d been high or drunk I’d have got away with a less severe sentence. I sat on the bed, listening to the wails from the other room. The baby became like a cancer in my mind, a throbbing core of responsibility and dependence. It became The Enemy.
What chance did that baby have? It was an addict before it was even born. And growing up in this place, with us for parents, what was the best it could have become? Look at me, dumped in a cardboard box outside a supermarket, because my mom couldn’t be bothered to walk all the way the hospital. Look how I turned out. In a way, I provided for that baby way more than my parents ever provided for me.
I had a gun in the drawer of the table by the bed, and a box of rounds. You had to in the neighbourhood where I lived. I should have waited, should have let it die on its own. That’s just neglect, and they can’t kill you for that. But I couldn’t wait, I couldn’t. I grabbed the gun, walked into the room where the baby’s cot was, and I blindly fired shots into the tiny bed until the crying stopped. The landlord came pounding up the stairs, busted the door open and started yelling, so I turned the gun on him. There were sirens outside now, passing cops who’s heard gunfire. I came to my senses and dropped the gun. There was more shouting. They took me away.
And a couple of months later I was on that bus.
It should bring me closer to the outside world, but somehow it doesn’t. Just like Gabe and his TV-doctor look and persona, it reminds me of what you might see out of the window on a cheap sitcom. As if in a trance, I wriggle a hand through the bars and reach out, just to be able to touch and to feel outside again, to feel the sweet caress of fresh air instead of air conditioning or heating.
But instead my fingers sink into the landscape. The view outside the window ripples and distorts as I touch it, and my hand disappears up to the knuckles, the midnight world outside sucking in my flesh greedily.
I stare disbelievingly at my hand, frozen to the spot, and then I let out a strangled cry and pull it back, clutching it to my chest. It’s covered in what at first seems to be sticky black goop, but as I hold it under the fake moonlight, now shimmering as if it’s shining through water, I see that it’s blood. Thick, sticky, gut-twistingly warm crimson blood.
Teddy has sat up in bed because of my yelling, and he asks me something but I ignore him. I cross the room in a second and slam my full weight against the door. To my surprise, it bursts open and I go sprawling into the corridor outside. Teddy is calling my name behind me but I just drag myself to my feet, my bloody hand smearing the clean hospital floor, and start running as fast as I can, towards where I know I first came in, the thought of escape screaming in my head. I reach the doors and grab a handle. But then I pause. I look, deep into the outside world that I now know is just an illusion.
What will happen if I cross that barrier? Will I drown in blood? The thought of that stuff filling my lungs makes me release the handle. I can smell it from here, bittersweet and cloying and all-consuming.
‘Have you healed yet, Brent?’ Gabe asks softly. In my head I see him on a TV-screen, asking the same question, only he’s in a hospital, and I’m some sappy guest-star who can’t act, playing a car-crash victim.
I close my eyes and lean my head against the cool glass of the door. I am not surprised to find that my breath doesn’t condense on the surface.
‘No,’ I whisper. ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
‘Weslo would have told you to repent of your sins. Do you repent of your sins? Do you regret it all?’
I shrug helplessly. I don’t feel very sorry. But there’s so much to be sorry for.
Gabe places a sympathetic hand on my shoulder. ‘Only one way to find out,’ he says optimistically. Then he pulls open the door and pushes me out into the night.