The End of Madness

By Anouk De Silva

In the not-too-distant future, Lark's End is a ravaged wartime town on Australia's east coast, where a troubled Saul Manning finds himself institutionalised following traumatic experience. As he is introduced to the ways of the Rainbow Lighthouse, a refuge for both autistic and mentally ill patients, he gradually learns of its haunting past, as

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anouk De Silva Books
• Release date: Oct 26, 2022
• ISBN: 9781951966423

Book preview

Chapter 1: Rebirth

When I am dead, my dearest,

Sing no sad songs for me;

Plant thou no roses at my head,

Nor shady cypress tree:

Be the green grass above me

With showers and dewdrops wet;

And if thou wilt, remember,

And if thou wilt, forget.

~ Christina Rossetti

It was the oddest sensation: that of flying and swimming at once. The first thing he felt, as usual, was intense discomfort. And it was strange, it occurred to him, that one should spend all but the entirety of one’s waking hours experiencing discomfort, yet never become desensitised to it.

Saul raised his eyebrows for the first time that evening, still very much dazed from the haze from which he had recently awoken.

He couldn’t remember what had happened to him, but he wished fervently that the numb headache he was experiencing would soon depart. Headaches. Life was so full of them that it was a wonder anyone ever got anything done by thinking clearly. He tilted his head forward and glanced down, and immediately felt a wave of nausea as he noticed the tubes that were connected to his arms and face, and for the first time realised he was wearing a ventilation mask.

Everything was still a blur, and it took a good half-minute before he was able to focus and recognise where he was: in bed.

But it wasn’t his own bed; he knew that instantly. His mattress was flat and hard, for one thing. This one was soft and comforting, cushioning his aching back and stiff leg muscles. He was propped up at a slight angle against three large pillows, and as his eyes continued to come into focus, he blinked several times and saw that the bed itself was raised, and sat on wheels. Despite the lingering vomitish sensation, he tried to turn his head, which was still intensely sore, and from the corner of his eye he noticed the marble floor beneath. He wondered inwardly how long he had been sleeping…and then, slightly startled, he began to wonder if he was still asleep, and dreaming.

It’s a hospital bed, he thought. All these bloody tubes and the mask should have given it away.

Saul had been dreaming of a shawl – a garment that had come undone from about the nape of a young woman’s neck as she strolled along the shore of an ill-tempered ocean, and was now scattered to the winds, helpless, yet free. The words of an old poem he recalled about letting go of one’s death lingered as a soundtrack of sorts to this scene.

For a few brief moments, he watched the shawl as it washed up on the beach, the waves crashing around it as it blew this way and that in the merciless clutches of the water. Then he became the shawl itself: lost, whispering desperately to the incessant winds, looking for help, crying for company – but no one could hear him, and no one responded. The poem had finished with a pronounced And haply may forget. The sound of the waves, the echo of water crashing with each roar of the tide, was overwhelming. It was all he could grasp with any of his senses before waking up and realising where he was.

What on earth had happened? He wondered again if he was still dreaming. That whole pinch yourself to make sure thing had never made sense to him. What if you were simply pinching yourself in the dream, and just as capable of feeling in that imagined realm as in this real one? Or what if you were pinching yourself in reality and discovered that not only were you trapped in a nightmare, but you’d just pinched yourself hard enough to hurt?

And then, instantly, he remembered. He remembered almost everything – or so he thought. It was as though the memory had emerged from a cocoon inside his head and burst forth, flooding the room with a new life’s promise, just as the embryo enters the womb and begins to sprout a whole new being. If ever life flashed before one’s eyes, this was his moment of clarity and cognition – except this flash only contained a snapshot of the past seventy-two hours. And, fleeting as it appeared, it wasn’t exactly pleasant.

He recalled sitting on a river bank somewhere, after going for a long walk. What had seemed like random flashes of memory became more lucid and coherent as he also recollected the time he had spent sitting there with his bottle of sangria, drowning himself in the sweet liquor, becoming more and more blasé about the act that he was about to commit…

And then, again, darkness. He had no memory, yet, of being interrupted, or finding himself called upon to perform a rescue – to save two lives rather than taking his own. He didn’t recall clutching the shrieking baby boy in his arms, desperately wrapping him up using part of his shirt, as his mother refused rescue and, with one final frightened glance at her terrified newborn and his unexpected saviour, threw herself into the river. Saul would eventually be reminded of all this, of course. After all, one would imagine this sort of event was hardly a daily occurrence here. The problem was that it was a regular enough occurrence in the world Saul confronted these days, that for now, at least, it eluded his memory. Soon enough, for better or worse, he would be reminded of carrying the wailing infant through the merciless thunderstorm for what had felt like several miles, from the river to the boardwalk and over the bridge as the rain beat down on them, across fields and backstreets full of deserted and overcrowded houses alike. Although he caught momentary sight of the large digital banner adorning the bridge, which boldly posed the question: ARE YOU WORKING HARD ENOUGH?, he would not remember it later. But he would remember, eventually, stumbling over a jagged rock that jutted up from the muddy waters between two of these fields; he would remember clutching the baby against his bosom with perishing hopes as the near-fall brought him face to face with a rainbow-coloured reflection that was shimmering within the splashing puddle. He would wonder, again, if what they said about rainbows was true: that they contained all the colours of the spectrum.

And at long last, he would relive in his mind the exhausted sense of relief that drove him to stagger towards the isolated building at the top of the winding road beyond the hill, neither beckoning him in all its glorious majesty, nor turning him away in its bitter shame. He would perhaps not recall stumbling for a final time and losing consciousness as he brought the screaming bundle of joy past the stunned row of security guards, past the large sign adorning the front garden that read RAINBOW LIGHTHOUSE to the steps of this lonely place… or being carried on a stretcher into the emergency ward for critical assessment. But those memories and others would have to wait till later. Now was the time of agonising. That was the customary pattern.

He had a fleeting vision of two nurses with halos attached to their heads, possibly cast as angels in some Christmas in July nativity play, attending to him in the haze. One of them seemed a little impatient, and was gently chided by the other, and reminded of their duty of care.

He imagined that a nurse or doctor might actually walk in at any moment and see that he was awake. They would probably welcome him back to consciousness with some worn cliché: My, young man, you gave us quite a scare…. But as soon as he imagined it, he realised that what they would actually say (if they ever arrived to check on him) would most likely be considerably more stern, insensitive (You’re lucky you found this place when you did, son…). Or was that his paranoia playing up again? He couldn’t quite tell at this point. All that mattered was that he was here… No. Even that did not matter. Nothing did, any more, or so it seemed. Yet he was still here, and that pained him. He desperately wished he could return to sleep, despite some of the horrid dreams he had been having. Dreams, after all, only lived in the mind. Now he’d have to continue existing in the actual nightmare of reality, knowing that even his attempt to escape it all had failed. And as usual, the worst part of that was that nobody else even knew, nobody else saw it that way, and even if they did, they never acknowledged it. Life just seemed like death on wheels most of the time.

He flopped his head back against the pillows and sighed. As he tried to remember what had happened again, a sudden wave of revulsion exploded in his stomach and forced his body to contort violently. Without raising his head, he turned over to the edge of the bed, propped himself up slightly using his hands and elbows in a spasmodic frenzy, and expelled a bucket or so of watery vomit onto the floor. As his head hung there and he waited to see if there was more to come, he heard the gentle tapping of footsteps along the corridor. Saul’s eyes grew slightly alarmed, but he thought (and hoped) it was a nurse doing the rounds – or better yet, a cleaner. This last thought made him snicker involuntarily, a sound that was stifled immediately by the sight of a small boy standing in the open doorway, staring at him with an expression as blank as the surrounding walls. Saul gazed back, then found himself compelled to wave. The boy giggled, covered his mouth quickly with one hand, and took off down the corridor, squealing in apparent delight: Tee hee! Tee hee!

Bemusing as this encounter was, it wasn’t the most unpleasant image to have planted in one’s mind just before trying to return to sleep. Something his mother used to tell him a long time ago, before putting him to sleep, came to him suddenly: Think of something nice. And now Saul did just that. He felt a grisly retrospective satisfaction at having thrown up and thereby at least lightened some of the overall load…and a faint hope that his puddle of puke wouldn’t stink up the air too much before someone dealt with it.

Chapter 2: The Dark Hour

Lark’s End was a small settler town on Australia’s lower east coast, one of a handful of such spots that had been set up by state authorities in the wake of the nation’s full-blown commitment to the war drive. Declared safe zones by local councils, these towns were initially constructed to stem the inland flow of city refugees – a rather peculiar amalgam of recently arrived migrants, displaced layers of the urban working class, disenfranchised small business owners, retirees and elderly couples. Some of them had packed their bags promptly and sought relocation as soon as Chinese ships had been rumoured to circulate Sydney Harbour, whilst others had, in one way or another, drifted away from the central hub of military action towards a decidedly quieter habitat.

Indeed: the third world war had been well and truly underway for some time, accompanied by all the standard jingoistic fervour of chest-puffing politicians, servile corporate media pundits, and rabidly patriotic layers of the populace. And yet, perhaps events had not quite proceeded as even the most astute commentators had foreseen.

Wracked by years of financial crisis after crisis (which saw the complete and final collapse of cryptocurrency scams, among other phenomena), confronted with the threat posed by perpetually crashing market economies and an increasingly desperate, volatile population in just about every country, the western ruling classes in the earlier decades of the twenty-first century were compelled to plunge humanity into a third world war. But of course, in order to do so, they would have to at least appear to persuade the mass of the population that it was necessary, that it was in everyone’s best long-term interests, that it was for the greater good, and that there was no alternative. The prospect of nuclear-armed powers deploying and showcasing their weaponry as they stood off against each other didn’t exactly inspire confidence worldwide. Thus it was proposed at a conference of elites from each of the NATO-allied nations to form cooperative international alliances, split between two major factions of rule that would share collaborative power, to govern during the war. A new war-time regime was declared: one that they promised would save democracy for good.

The traditional conservative parties, led by those in Britain, France, Australia and elsewhere, now fell under the all-encompassing umbrella of Freedom. WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER, TO KEEP AUSTRALIA FREE! was their breakthrough slogan on the local front. The more hardline layers of this new global party had emerged from the notorious Qanon conspiracy theory movement, as well as the various extreme right-wing tendencies that had animated the former Reclaim, United, National, and First Parties all over the world. The Australian Coalition embraced them with open arms, even as they were somewhat cautious to be seen publicly alongside the more openly militant elements (a caution that appeared to wane by the day, if anyone cared to notice). And so, the Freedom Alliance was formed. Who would challenge them as an effective opposition?

What value or principle would dare stand against the precious freedom of economic anarchy?

Why, justice, of course. For was it not the general case, regarding the human condition, that any quantity of freedom had to be reined in, if only to ensure that it did not exceed the limits of survival?

Thus, the traditional liberal and self-proclaimed leftist parties (which of course did not include, in Australia at any rate, those who called themselves the Liberals), formed the oppositional coalition of redeemers, reformists, revisionists, bureaucrats, green activists, social-democrats, leaders of the labour aristocracy, and business tycoons of all sorts. They declared that they were determined to bring about justice in a world hell-bent on striving for unrestricted freedom, and the first step towards doing that, naturally, was to pledge solidarity in naked bipartisan fashion with virtually every policy that Freedom laid out – which included, first and foremost, committing to the imperialist war drive.

"FREEDOM IS THE ENEMY OF OUR ENEMIES.

FREEDOM IS YOUR FRIEND!" was proclaimed across a massive banner overlooking the town bridge.

Now caught up in the competition of best banner, the Justice Alliance unfurled its own – a high-tech digitised version. WE’RE ALL ABOUT A FAIR GO FOR ALL AUSTRALIANS, proclaimed the Justice billboard. On the same day this $20 million sign was raised, Justice signed an authorisation initiated by Freedom to ban all Russian and Chinese imports into Australia, shut down their local embassies, and expel all diplomats from their posts. Their financiers and supporters began seeing to it that all traces of art, music, literature, and virtually anything else that was even perceived to have connections to Russian or Chinese culture, was dutifully removed, or destroyed.

We just can’t risk it with these people, they’re not upholding their end of the bargain. Australians – we’ve always looked after ourselves. And we’ll fight to the end if we have to! We don’t need your vodka! We don’t need your rice! These last lines, spoken (or rather, barked) by one of Freedom’s poster-boys at a violent rally in Lark’s End Square, blossomed rapidly into a populist chant.

It wasn’t long before the town witnessed several brutal attacks against people of Asian appearance. Some of the thugs involved in these pogroms would also harass old men in the street, demanding to know if they had Russian ancestry. Only but one of these poor fellows succumbed to this campaign and answered truthfully that his grandfather was Russian, but that he had emigrated generations before, probably before any of them or even their parents had been born. They didn’t like his answer, or the way he offered it. His honesty was appreciated, though. As a reward, they beat him down with his own walking stick. Then these five large youths dragged the old man along the street for almost two hundred metres, taunting him along the way as blood poured from his face. They took him to the middle of the local park and hung him from a gazebo crossbar.

The horrific incident was never mentioned in the local media, and none of the boys was ever brought to justice despite angry protests the following day, and demands for the Freedom mayor to resign. With the supposed threat of Chinese vessels entering Australian waters and the consequent halting of imports via sea, the entire national economy and all its major institutions had been openly transformed into an enterprise directed solely towards assisting and abiding by the decrees and directives of the other locally stationed US-allied powers, and of course their imperial master. After all, Australia had been a foremost junior partner of the American military machine for a long time, dating at least as far back as the forgotten economic boom that followed the settlement of accounts between the major powers in the wake of the carnage of the second world war. While the masses at large had initially cast a collectively wary but apathetic eye upon the rapidly changing landscape, there had emerged alongside this standard fare of supposedly typically Australian lack-lustreism a growing restlessness brewing among more hardened and experienced layers of the country’s toilers. Their waking hours were entirely consumed, nowadays, with performing whatever tasks were required to assist the war effort. The mining boom that had sustained the Australian economy for several decades was a thing of the distant past, a relic of times that virtually nobody remembered. Work wasn’t so much hard to come by now as it was practically impossible, given the ever soaring rate of inflation and