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Fiction

Nomad

Enda Conway
issue seven

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To walk down the narrow corridor of the ancient psychiatric hospital called Saint John’s (or Saint John’s Mental Health Hospital to some) at seven o’clock on a rainy evening in October on the outskirts of Dublin city, to drowsily and cautiously put one slippered foot in front of the other upon that cold and hard moon-coloured floor, to walk passed room after room (doors always left open) where the other patients either sat or stood or did exercises or ate or drank or slept or watched TV or read a book or played games with other patients or drew pictures or made paintings, hands in pockets down the corridor, through the lonely silences – that was what Fleece Bentley did with most of his time. He would get to the end of the corridor, where the big red door with the code buttons beside it stood – the secret room where the many doctors and nurses sometimes hung out and talked and made coffee and tea and where they ate their lunches and dinners and snacks in between those, or where they spent some time on their computers or phones – and then he’d turn and he’d start making his way back down the corridor from where he came, and then it was up and down the corridor a few more hundred times throughout the day, up and down, up and down, up and down. He felt alone in this world of green plastered walls, hard floors, opened and locked doors, barred windows, TVs playing and radios singing and talking, and drug-eyed patients staring at walls and floors and each other, occasionally speaking, and doctors and nurses forever watching, talking, whispering, waiting, and feet tapping and hands fidgeting and clocks quietly ticking or beeping and old building-pipes coughing and whispering and machines warmly humming… or as good as alone… And as he’d make his way back down the corridor one last time each day and then after he’d sit inside his room for a while, either on the bed there or on the chair, he would stare down the corridor once again, rolling his eyes down it like a bowling ball in a leisure centre… as though it was time for him to get up and walk it again.

Sometimes he would walk for hours and miles without stopping once and return to his room only at midnight. And on his way he would observe the other patients in their small rooms, and the doctors and nurses in their bigger rooms, and it was not unlike walking through a shopping centre where you’d see a row of a dozen or so televisions on each side of you in one of the electrical shops there and they are all playing at once, but each one playing a different show to all the other TVs, and you know that you cannot interact with or touch the different people in the shows, but that you can only watch them as they go about their own business, hobbies, chores… and the people in the shows can only interact with each other, should they choose to do so.

Sometimes Fleece closed his eyes and he’d walk very slowly down the corridor, carefully and alertly, listening to the different sounds around him in the building, and he would imagine himself in the outside world somewhere, on a warm, windless Italian beach with no other people around in a hundred miles, and only the sea, the sand, for company. Or else he’d find himself in the French countryside on a narrow quiet road with two rows of houses on each side of him as he moved, slowly through the light breeze, beneath a sky filled with rain-clouds and noisy birds as they flapped their wings. Or he’d be in Egypt on a desert in scorching-hot temperatures, among dry river-beds and burning sands and empty blue skies. Or – he’d be inside an art museum in a big Spanish city, Barcelona or Madrid, or Seville, where colourful paintings gave life and meaning to plain white walls and the rooms he passed through were flooded with people with curious expressions on their faces, and half of them carrying leaflets in their hands…

But before Fleece was a patient in Saint John’s – he had been a nomad for decades. He had been to roughly eighty different countries in his seventy-two years of life on the planet: He had drank sweet wines in Paris, had drank bitter wines in Argentina, had attended baseball games in Boston, once had visited the Amazon river in Brazil, had climbed a mountain once in Japan, ate bread and drank tea in China, had seen the great pyramids in Egypt, had climbed another, taller mountain in Canada, had visited restaurants in Milan, once had sung a song with a friend or two in a pub somewhere in Vietnam on a crazy night out, had played snooker in London, played chess in Germany, had fallen off a motorbike in Columbia once and survived and was brought to a hospital, had sipped beer in South Africa, went surfing in Australia on a long hot beach… He met his wife in Greece, and they married in Athens, and she died in Croatia in nineteen ninety-five, from a sudden heart-attack. 

On this particular evening – at seven o’clock on a rainy day at the beginning of October – Fleece was visiting a wide street in New York city in the middle of Autumn. And he was moving in a westerly direction toward his hidden apartment which he had rented two weeks ago. There were skyscrapers on each side of him and cars zooming by on the road to his right and clumps of noisy people on the footpaths rushing by, and, in the distance, between the buildings, a narrow patch of blue sky could be glimpsed where a triangle of birds dipped toward the pinkish-yellow horizon. A strong incense rising from car exhausts filled his lungs. There was a clean frost in the air and it cut the nose and hands and he could see his breath in front of him as he moved, slowly, along the cement. He listened to the faint push of his hard shoes through the Autumn leaves with satisfaction as his feet operated, and hummed a warm quiet song between his lips, occasionally slowing down when the clumps of people became too dense and noisy.

He came to a wide intersection which stood silent where two massive buildings made of concrete, glass and steel on the outside faced each other, like two pedestrians in conversation, and then he turned left onto a narrower street and he walked along it for about a quarter a mile, it felt to him, and then he stumbled onto a particularly uneven section of footpath. He crossed the street and continued on for another mile. He was within half a mile of his destination when a familiar voice, the voice of the senior nurse – rang in his ear suddenly. And, with a torch, she flashed a fierce cone of light into his face.

‘Fleece Bentley!’ she snapped, croakily, looking at him crossly in the glow of the light between them. ‘What on God’s earth are you doing out of your room so late at night – in the dark?’ she asked, sounding concerned.

Fleece opened his eyes and saw that the corridor around them and the light from the torch was indeed, as she said, full of darkness. He saw the time on the clock on the wall above them as the glow of the light faintly and briefly touched it and it said 12.45 midnight. Around them, and to each side of them, the lights in the other patient’s rooms had all been switched off and the doors were now half-closed, as was usually the rule of law at this time of night. And in the room next to them, Fleece and the nurse, Fleece could hear the faint grunt of a patient snoring as he slept. Everybody seemed to be asleep in the hospital except for himself and the nurse. Only the dim light from his own room at the far end of the corridor had been left on. All this is a million miles from New York city, thought Fleece, and Canada and Greece and Spain and Australia and Paris and Egypt and China and Vietnam and Tokyo and Brazil and… In New York city it was still daylight, he remembered, and the streets were still flooded with crowds of noisy people moving around, and vehicles zooming by, and the air stained with car-exhaust and birds flying in the sky and the tall glass buildings glistening in the piercing sunlight and leaves crunching beneath eager feet and singers singing and dancers dancing and sellers selling and buskers busking and… he still hadn’t made it to his apartment, it hit him.

He eventually answered the senior nurse, as he faced her in the light.

‘I… I was just looking for a home,’ he muttered softly, nervously, in the corridor.