Patient Blue

‘I discovered a body in the sea, near where I live. He was a victim of a plane crash caused by, whatever it is that’s causing this chaos. I was trapped and unable to move with the head of the dead man, an African, in my lap for over an hour. I believe that event was the catalyst for many of the problems and issues I now have.’

‘Just the head, no torso?’ asks Andrew.

’The whole body, but I was in shock and couldn’t move and I was sittiINGHng in the sea and then it went dark, it was a nightmare.’ulia said, ‘do you feel you were fine and perfectly happy before the discovery of this body?’

‘No.’

‘So perhaps finding the body, obviously a traumatic event in its own right, allowed deeper, darker, more troubling issues you had been repressing to surface?’

‘If by that you mean I was a screw up before finding the body, then yes I was. One thing I know that has affected me badly, my twin brother Davey died and I found him we were very close.I was never quite the same after that.’

‘Yes twins usually are very close and when that bond is broken prematurely, possibly deliberately, the consequences on the psyche and sense of betrayal can be devastating.’

‘I don’t know if it was suicide or an accidental drugs overdose but either way I seem to have the same addictive personality. He was very charismatic, people craved his attention but in my case when I say addictive personality It doesn’t mean you meet me, you love me and can’t get enough of my wit and wisdom.’ there was a ripple of laughter. I crave oblivion and an altered mental state, maybe he did too. We were enthusiastic users and abusers of recreational and social drugs and I was also a very anti-social drinker. I smoked Cannabis mostly at the start, but then imbibed more and more chemicals. Despite what they say, the liberals and right on types, doing drugs is a mistake, in many ways an irreversible and potentially terminal error, a tragedy, especially for an adolescent.

Apart from damaging your physical health, far more perniciously, it retards your development. You don’t grow emotionally or become what you could and should have been. You can never quite fulfill your potential. I started doing drugs seriously when I was eighteen and my mindset is somehow still trapped at that age. This doesn’t mean that I’m young at heart in fact quite the opposite. It actually means that I’m thirty five and somehow out of step with my peers, everyone and everything a kind of man boy with none of the advantages but all of the flaws. I feel different, other.I am different.

‘It would be far more interesting if you were a ladyboy.’ The others, including Julia Brain laughed, it was George who had spoken and his expression is dead pan. As he stares at me I can feel myself blush, ignore the remark and continue.

’As to the cause of this addictive personality? Well I could blame my parents, school, dodgy DNA, peer group pressure, who knows? But at thirty five, who cares get a life, get over it and move on. But that’s why I’m here I can’t move on and people soon realize everything about me is superficial somehow hollow, fake. I have no real depth therefore that makes me uninteresting and not worthy of consideration. An outsider looking in and no one cares that it’s cold outside.

I loved someone once but she didn’t love me.’I look at Rosslynne but she is staring at the floor. ‘Eventually I ended up just sitting in my bedroom, too paranoid to go outside and occasionally slashing at my arms with a razor blade. I stopped taking drugs I knew I had to or die I tried to move on. Sometimes I know I’m not thinking like an adult. I have no partner she left realizing that all the things about me I have just said were true long before I did.No kids which is probably just as well. I rent a flat that I can only just afford and I’ve just heard that the company I work for, that relies on the internet’—

‘Wang Pulse affected,’ said Anne.

‘Well and truly Wang Pulsed, that company is closing its UK based operation and moving back to Spain. I won’t be invited to go with them. I often view myself from a distance as if dislocated from my own body, maybe another effect of the drugs and I don’t like what I see. I’m excited rather than scared about what’s going on with nature, the weather and everything. To me it’s the great leveler, we’re all fucked together. The end of the world for me is the end of the world for everyone else and they’ve all got more to lose than I have and I like that thought. A decision made by Terra—’

‘Terra?’ it was Andrew.

‘Yes, this blue planet earth and don’t forget his old mate the sun. I’m starting to think we’ve pissed them off and now they want us all gone.’

‘The sun has got his hat on,’ sang Guru George.

‘and he’s coming out to play,’ Rosslynne completed the line.

‘Thank you Michael for your candid thoughts and honesty. It’s difficult sharing your inner emotions and feelings with others, but it is a vital first step on the road to your eventual recovery and future happiness. OK everyone let’s have around of applause for Michael.’

There is some halfhearted clapping and Rosslynne gives me a lovely smile which certainly makes me feel a whole lot better.

That evening after dinner, another colourless affair with a meal comprising of sausages chips and peas followed by a type of apple crumble and instant custard. Rosslynne and I again sit together on the bench under the Oak tree. The heat is stifling and the thick air hard to breathe. It is a crystal clear night full of stars and a huge pink tinged full moon hangs suspended on the horizon.

‘I found today difficult, the group confession thing I gave away more than I was planning to I just sort of started and couldn’t stop.’

‘Does it make you feel better, saying it out loud? When I went through the same thing I felt it helped. But today was just the start. Each day here you’ll be encouraged to reveal more and more about yourself until you’ll have been stripped bare and that’s when Julia will try to rebuild you. She’s very subtle.’

‘So what did you reveal?’

’Enough, mostly a lot of guilt feelings, did you ever meet my parents I can’t remember some of my friends did?

I blanch at the term friends, so I was just her friend and so insignificant that I didn’t even get to visit her house or meet her parents.

‘Anyway they were lovely, always kind and loving, gave me everything I ever wanted. They were rather rich actually and all they ever wanted from me was to be happy and settled. Of course I know all that now but at the time, when I was young, late teens I went off the rails. I was cruel to them, told them I hated them, got drunk, took drugs went with a whole string of unsuitable men, not you of course, unsuitable, well maybe a bit.’

‘Thank’s’

None of them loved or even liked me but only wanted to sleep with me and then move on.

‘I did, love you, that is I mean--’

‘I know and I was very fond of you, but the time wasn’t right.’

Fond, I think, jeez that’s a kick in the nuts, fond. I mean you’re fond of your aunt or a dog, fond.

‘I’ve lost count of the number of men I’ve--– So this is how I behaved and I knew it upset them but I didn’t care,my poor dad, he was especially hurt by all this and tried to talk to me but I just blanked him. My God, how I regret that now. Somewhere in there I met you, Reading festival sometime or other.’

‘Yes, pissed down and we spent the Saturday night in that small kids tent that leaked.’

‘Oh yeah, got really stoned as well, good sex. I really liked you—’

‘Fond.’

‘very fond.’ She says this with a smile.

‘I could tell you were keen and wanted a relationship,something more than just a fuck.’

‘It was three actually.’

‘Three what?’

‘Shags in the tent.’

’Really, so is this what we are to call you now, Michael three shags Johnson? I only remember the one by the way,which means one of three things. One, I was so stoned you screwed me twice whilst I was comatose, two, you imagined two screws that never happened or three, the last two screws were completely unmemorable.So which of the three is it?

‘Let’s just go back to what you said earlier that the sex was good.’

‘Fair enough, anyway, even though you were an obvious stoner you were remarkably conservative really, rather old fashioned and traditional. Qualities in a man I now like rather a lot, but at the time I wasn’t ready for a relationship I preferred just the screwing part, however many times that was and didn’t want anything else, certainly no commitments.’

‘I see, a modern girl’

‘I preferred the term enlightened at the time, though now I would probably say deluded. But you sound sad, don’t be, that is the past I’m not that person anymore, in fact I haven’t had sex or even much thought about it since I lost my baby. There have certainly been no intimate relationships and I gave up heavy drinking and drugs, apart from Calmodine and the occasional spliff ages ago. My parents both died in Sri Lanka in the Boxing Day Tsunami, swept away and their bodies never found. Do you know that the locals say all the beaches and destroyed buildings where it struck are full of ghosts of western tourists, wandering and crying, lost and confused,never able to find peace or move on. They also say there are no ghosts of any local people killed as they all received religious rites and blessings from holy men and were able to pass over, find peace. I sometimes wake in the middle of the night just thinking about poor mum and dad wandering lost in a foreign land trying to find their way back home, to find peace, find me. That thought always makes me weep.’

‘I’m sure that’s not true, just stories, if there is an afterlife your old mum and dad will be there.’

‘Do you think there is a life after death?’

‘I never used to but the older I get the less skeptical I become. I mean if you see a dead person and I have, not just the body in the sea, my brother, they look dead not like they’re asleep, but an empty vessel. Whatever the spark was that made them alive, an individual was gone. That must mean if that spark is gone,then it’s gone somewhere, somewhere else where the essence of that being still exists.’

‘There must be millions of wandering ghosts now, with all the disasters and tidal waves and volcanic explosions. All of them lost and confused and scared not knowing where to go trying to find somewhere.’

‘I think their essences’ their souls always find their way home.′

‘That’s comforting I like that idea.’

I believe in ghosts and spirits and am not actually sure they do always find their way home. Davey still walks this realm this earthly plain I know it with certainty. I’ve seen him at the edge of my dreams. He can’t seem to escape or move on, still here and searching for something, searching for me.

Rosslynne continued. ‘I hadn’t seen my parents for five years, they hated Danny and even after his death. I refused to meet them, almost like I blamed them somehow for driving me into the clutches of a man like him. I don’t know why as they had never done anything wrong and all the bad choices I ever made were mine and mine alone.’

‘You were young, mistakes happen and God knows I understand that.’

’But one day, before they went on that final holiday I realized I was missing them and was being selfish and stupid, so I phoned and arranged for us to meet after they returned.I spoke to dad on the phone and he seemed really happy to hear from me. I so wanted to make it up with them, my lovely kind caring mum and dad, let them see who I was now, their only child who had made mistakes, learned by those mistakes and come through the other side.I was excited at the thought of seeing them both again I had even decided to move back to the family home, even though I was in my twenties. The house was certainly large enough and my aunt Barbara,who I love a lot, lives there already as a kind of unpaid house sitter. I’ll tell you more about her someday she’s quite a character, rather scandalous actually. But of course it didn’t workout and they were gone forever.

‘Your parents sound lovely and I’m sorry they died.’

’Their death was the final straw for me I felt cursed,like some dark unwholesome force was sitting on my shoulder malevolently hurting me when I was most vulnerable. The funeral was very difficult. My uncle and other respectable aunt arranged it and they were very cold towards Barbara and me as were my parent’s friends who at best were icily polite. I wore inappropriate clothes to the funeral, black but the skirt was too short and the top too low and you could see my tattoo.

‘Tattoo?’

’Yes on my breast, just above the nipple, see.‘Rosslynne pulls down her top to show me the small butterfly tattooed in red and blue on her left breast.’

‘I love it,’ I say in a low voice.

‘Thanks,’ she adjusts her top and continues, but I don’t think it went down too well at the funeral, kind of confirmed my salacious scarlet woman image.′ The blow of my Parents death sent me into something of a decline. They left me the house, more a mansion actually and an estate worth rather a lot I’m a rich woman,worth about four point two million at the last count.′

‘Jeez, really?’

‘Yes really. I moved into the house with Aunt Barbara,rattled around the place discovering pieces of my lost childhood.Their things were still all there, clothes, mum’s jewellery dad’s golf clubs he loved that game but could never play well. I found my school certificates and even a swimming certificate and my old Brownie uniform. I missed them so much and now they were gone and my whole life seemed a disaster. Eventually I ended up here as a voluntary patient and six weeks later you walk in. Possibly coincidence, possibly fate, time will tell.’

The lights go out and the grounds are plunged into darkness. Weak emergency lighting illuminates the inside of Sapphire House obviously on the same emergency grid as the nearby Crawley Hospital.

‘Power cut,’

With the lights now out, the full Moon casts a soft glow over the garden, whilst the sky above displays a faint aurora of subtle hues of blue, green and violet.

’Beautiful, says Rosslyne.

I close my hand around hers, ‘so are you.’ She does not withdraw her hand and we sit together in silence watching the spectral display until at just past ten Hanif, calls us back inside.