“It just doesn’t make any sense,” Daphne said from behind her cigarette. “Of all the people in the world, I’m me.”
Disinfectant, and the reek of the canteen food laid out on the table, brought back memories of school dinners and dread. Daph wore her favorite tatty jumper, the sleeves scrunched up to her elbows. I had looked high and low for it and she wouldn’t say a word until I had found it and brought it to her.
“You know?” she went on. “It’s a mask I can’t take off.”
At the table behind, a man wearing a ward gown flipped his tray of curried chicken and vegetables high into the air. “There is no God!” he screamed. “Let me out!” and was pounced upon by two of the orderlies.
Daphne explained: “That’s Charlie. God abandoned him.”
The ash from her cigarette fell away and landed in her banoffee pie.
“I keep running into it,” she said, “into the infiniteregress.” With her teaspoon she scooped out the ash. “I love the pie here.”
“That’s good,” I said.
“And I get stuck in it.”
“In the pie?”
“No, the regress.”
“Oh, yeah. I get it.”
“Do you?” She leaned forward. “Do you really?”
I ate a bite of soggy canteen burger. “Are you doing much sport?”
“No,” she said. “They only let you do one. So, I can run, or I can play tennis.”
“That’s too bad.”
“I prefer tennis,” she said. “It gives me less time to think. But nobody here is any good.”
“That’s what you need, to get out of your head.”
She smiled, drew hard on her cigarette, and blew smoke into my face. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
“I know.”
She shook her head. “The doctors and psychologists, they think they know too, but they don’t, neither do you.”
I put the shitty burger back down. “I love you, Daphne, and I want—we all want you to be well, to get out of here. Dad’s been busy redecorating your old room. He’s painted the walls, fixed the stuck window, even built you a double bed. It smells good in there, like his old workshop; you remember the sawedwood smell? Like his workshop from when we lived in Toronto? It smells just like that right now.”
“Has he read my paper?”
“Yeah, we all have.”
“What does he think?”
He thinks you’re confused. “He didn’t say. He doesn’t say much, but that’s dad. He just got to work making you a new bed.”
The orderlies had got Charlie under control and taken him out into the hallway. A grown man screaming, getting wrestled away, Christ, I didn’t blame Mum for not visiting. The tension here, the anxiety: an outburst from a patient, odd questions and smells, shouts and invasions of personal space: it had lost its initial hold on me after my first few
