broke a claw from the body. The crayfish felt like steel pins. He rolled up beneath the kitchen window and moaned, while the crayfish shrieked into his ear.
There was no getting away from the fact that he was an imposter. Jim and Jimmy lifted him up and carried him to the building known as 'The Foyer' where he was declared sane and returned to the custody of the large motherly woman who was his wife.
Harry Joy returned to the room he had shared with the imposter. He lay in the small bed and ate an apple. His eyes were dark with hurts and cunning: envy, fear, jealousy, rage, all showed their colours.
Alice Dalton arranged the vases on the table. Normally she kept the vases separate from the cups, saucers, bowls, teapots, coffee-pots and so on, but tonight, she put them all together as if she wished to concentrate their power, to intensify their colour. There was a gayness, a girlishness about the work of Clarice Cliff with its bright colours, its stylized little houses and trees and, also, an optimism about the mechanical future suggested by those strange triangular handles and spouts which had first been marketed under the 'Bizarre' name as early as 1929. Now, perhaps the optimism did not appear to be well founded and was, therefore, all the more appreciated.
It was Mr Harry Joy who had pointed all this out to her, and he had been able to talk for hours about those triangular handles and their significance. They had sat here, in this very room, their knees almost touching, and there had been a sense of almost breathless discovery, and while they had not become lovers everything was laid out, like a feast, and they were merely arranging the table decorations and putting out the place names, the final little touches, so that when the feast began it would have been a splendid thing, not only satisfying to the baser appetites but to the higher senses.
But he was gone, snatched from her, and she was bereft. She knew it was, in one way, her fault and that she had been
For Alice Dalton's great pride was in her business abilities, her talent for facing unpleasant facts. No one knew what it was like to run a place like this. Those who criticized could not have done it. In sheer administrative terms, it was as complex as a large hotel. They criticized her for her lack of feelings, but they did not see her feelings, not her real feelings, and so they could be surprised on those rare occasions when sentiment gushed forth from Alice Dalton in a great wave as she wept and held some unfortunate whose mind was filled with shards of madness.
Twenty years ago, as a young nurse, she had been very different. She had tried to believe that there was no insanity, merely a lack of love or understanding, and this could be remedied, her love given, her love returned. Perhaps para-doxically she also believed the world of the mad to be at once more intense and more beautiful and therefore, romantically, envied it.
She had had a lonely youth. She had read poetry and novels and when she learned to drive had avoided squashing the cane toads that gathered on the roads at night. She had released blow-flies trapped against the glass and was attracted to psychiatric nursing as soon as she knew such a thing existed.
And yet it was to prove too much for her: this dull, grey piss-soaked world of the mad where people did not get better or worse and where no amount of moist-eyed love seemed to do anything but invite rejection and derision.
At twenty-one she had a complete breakdown and was admitted to hospital. It was here, at last, that she was to develop her attitudes towards mental illness, her list of unpleasant facts. She grasped the nettle of commerce. She felt herself grow strong, and when she returned to nursing her superiors felt her to be mercifully free of the romanticism that had afflicted her before.'
Alice Dalton had become objective.
She had never been a feminist. She was too much of an authoritarian to believe in any sort of equality. And while those around her came to regard her as strong, while they stepped out of her way, as she gathered power and influence, she craved to be recognized as a poor weak woman by a strong and sensitive man.
Yet such men rarely came her way. Mad people, she dis-covered, were not normally very bright, were more likely to be poor than rich, and were less likely to be sensitive (in her definition of the term) than sane people. Her marriage to the schizophrenic Henry Dalton lasted two weeks, and while she cried at his funeral, something inside her had acknowledged his suicide as beneficial to both of them.
The nights then were long and lonely and she felt it was not unreasonable for her to have Mr Harry Joy and she had expected more sympathy from the Department of Social Welfare. She arranged the Clarice Cliff and wiped the slightly dusty lid of the 'Bizarre' sugar bowl. She wished she had been alive in 1929, working for Clarice Cliff and her girls at the pottery, painting gay scenes, travelling to London to promote their wares, wearing artists' smocks and smiling at the' camera.
Did they meet men on their visits to the capital? Or were they too left alone as she was, at eleven o'clock at night, with this... itch. She did not wish to ring for Jim or Jimmy. With her finger, she began, but in the end it was always the same no matter what the feminists said about masturbation and the clitoris, had always been the same, always would be. There was a hole. A damn hole. An aching emptiness that had not yet revealed itself, not yet, and for the moment, this moment, she could always delude herself into thinking that the final humiliating need to press the buzzer for Jim or Jimmy could be avoided. In her mind Alice Dalton had a mental picture of herself as something quivering, vulnerable, glisteningly pink: a garden snail without its shell.
Harry Joy watched Nurse walk towards him. He was a dis-tinctive figure. He had no hips and no arse. He kept his trousers done up tightly with a rope belt but it still looked as if his backside had been stolen from him and when he arrived at the bench and turned to sit down there would be a big empty sack of material hanging from the back of his belt.
Nurse called Harry by the name of Mo because, as he said, 'Anyone with a mo like yours is called Mo, always have been and always will be.'
'Good news for Mo,' he announced and placed a crinkled brown paper parcel on the bench between them. He made no invitation to open the parcel. Harry stared at it and looked away.
'Mo is getting out,' Nurse said provocatively.
'How?'
When it came to answering questions, Nurse always liked to take the Scenic Route rather than the Freeway. 'To survive in this place,' he said, 'you've got to be mad as a spider on a thirty-dollar note. Are you mad?'
'No.'
'No, you're not mad. You won't survive. See,' he indicated the garden with outstretched hands, 'this is my job here. It's my work. I've got my notebooks, all my memories. This garden is like my brain, full of memories. All my little rabbit burrows, full of memories. But look at you!'
Harry's trousers had food stains on them. His pyjama coat was filthy. The left-hand slipper had been stolen and replaced by an odd one. He looked cowed and rat-like.
'You've got your buttons in the wrong holes.'
Harry redid his buttons.
'There. That's better. You're a good-looking fellow.'
Harry grinned coyly.
'Sit up straight. There you are. A good-looking fellow.'
'You should have seen me when I had my suit.'
'Forget your suit. Why are you always talking about your suit? You don't need a suit.' Nurse was shaking his cupped hands up and down. 'She's a lonely woman,' he said, 'and you're a good-looking fellah.'
Harry didn't understand. 'You sweety-talk her and... ' he raised his eyebrows and grinned lasciviously. 'You know what to do.'
'She won't.'
'Yes she will. Look,' Nurse dropped his voice to a whisper although there was no one nearby, 'they steal your slippers and your shirts. I can't look after you all the time. I'm too busy. You wait, they'll come and give you Therapy next time you lose your slippers. They'll take your faces and your pictures.'
'Don't talk about the black.'
'Alright then, but... '
'She'd never look twice at me,' Harry said, 'she hates me.'
