Tim’s gaze ping-ponged from the wall to the door. He drummed his fingers on the windowpane, plucked at his sweatshirt, his agitation growing. It might be wise to end their session. But he hadn’t clammed up yet, and it was an opportunity she couldn’t waste.
‘Why are you ready to leave now?’
‘My father has a farm. A farm with a barn. A red barn. Chickens, goats, rabbits.’ He accompanied each word with a finger tap on the window. ‘I like rabbits.’
For the first time, Tim’s expression showed a ripple of life.
She was desperate to ask him about the Viking, but if he grew suspicious and shut her down, it might take weeks to regain his trust. ‘Does your father come here to see you?’
The room had grown dark, the window obscured by patches of snow.
‘He called me one time. No, two times. Two.’ He scratched his ear. ‘He sent a Christmas card once. Mrs Belmont said it was long ago. Ten years, twenty. From California.’ He made a sound, like a bark. ‘Palm trees, surfin’ USA. California made him mellow. Mellow yellow. Blue eyes, blue.’
Her ears pricked up. ‘He wasn’t mellow before?’
Tim pressed his whole body to the window until he was spreadeagled against the glass. ‘Fly away. Like a bird.’
Through the flocked snow, she could see the trio of crows, dark as paper cut-outs against a field of white.
Tim muttered. ‘Scopus umbretta. A mustering.’
Scopus what?
She held her breath and counted two beats. ‘So, your father… he’s mellow now. But he wasn’t before?’
He made a noise again, deep in his throat, like water running through a cavern.
‘People start here, go there.’ He traced a line across the glass. As if something had caught his eye, his chin snapped up. In a single motion, he turned and launched his body across the room.
Terror gripped Erin, but it was too late to scream. She covered her head with her arms as he lumbered past and stomped his foot on the floor.
‘Cockroach.’ He examined the sole of his shoe. ‘He’s dead now.’
Her heart banged against her ribs. As she pressed her hand to her chest, trying to slow her erratic breathing, he raised his head and looked at her. Straight into her eyes. A white-hot, electric stare.
‘The doctors have fixed me. I feel it in my blood. It’s humming.’ He pushed up his sleeves to show her the network of veins under the skin. ‘Like bees. Bees in the trees. Bees in the blood.’
10
An anaemic sun traced a slow arc to the mountains in the west. Standing outside Greenlake’s front gate, Erin shivered inside her coat, anxious to start the long drive back to Lansford. But Reggie from the service garage had already given her the bad news that her car wouldn’t be ready until morning. She would have to spend the night here after all.
But rather than stay in nearby Syracuse with its bustle and commerce, she pleaded with the taxi driver to take her to a hotel near the motorway she’d spotted from Reggie’s truck. He was right about the reluctance of taxis to go so far out of the city, but it was the perfect place to hide out and think. In the back seat, she lowered the window and breathed in great gulps of frigid air, hoping to wash away the sour odours and disturbing sounds of the ward. Loosened from its knot, her hair blew around her face.
Mister Golden Hair. The Viking. Was she looking too hard for a connection? How often had she been counselled to avoid attaching any meaning to a patient’s delusions? But from the early days of her training, she’d rebelled against the belief that specific, and often highly intricate, delusions arose from nothing. A basis in reality, however tenuous, surely created the spark for whatever thoughts – however bizarre – sprang forth.
By the time the cabbie pulled up to the entrance of the Roundabout Motel, a squat brick building next to the motorway, a fresh batch of snow was spinning through the air. The torrent of flakes filled the sky like Arctic moths, swirling in the fading light.
At the reception desk, she collected her key and climbed the dingy stairs to room nineteen. Beige carpet, polyester bedspread. The cheap air freshener failed to mask the odour of stale smoke and the whiff of other people’s bodies. She yanked the shiny orange and brown bedspread to the floor and stretched out on what she hoped was a clean sheet, her eyes gritty with fatigue. With her attention fixed to a spot on the ceiling, she waited for her impressions of Tim to settle into a pattern. Diffident (shy?). Flat affect (schizophrenia or meds? Institutionalised?). No eye contact. Poor hygiene. Possible schizophasia.
He seemed articulate enough, though brain-fogged and slow. But that could be a side effect of his medication. The doses they had him on would topple a rhino. His responses to her questions were mainly coherent, with little to none of the jumbled speech or ‘word salad’ some schizophrenics displayed. No eye contact either, except for that one brief moment at the end of their talk. Plenty of staring out the window, picking at his shredded cuticles. On their own, none of those things pointed to active psychosis.
Her thoughts drifted to the famous experiment in the early seventies that shook the bedrock of the psychiatric community. A prominent psychologist, along with seven other mentally healthy volunteers, was able to get himself admitted to a psychiatric hospital when he complained of hearing voices. Once inside the ward, the volunteers were instructed to act normally and report to the staff they felt fine. All were diagnosed with schizophrenia and prescribed multiple antipsychotic drugs. Nearly two months passed before they were released. When the results of the experiment became known, the psychiatric community was thrown into uproar. Especially provocative was the researcher’s conclusion: that once labelled psychotic, it was impossible to be
