Bird Blood Snow Read online

  They went through the sallow soft on their pedals, following the dogs. They could hear the cracking and the pushing of the boys in the overgrowth.

  When the yelp came, it was hard and percussive.

  They slipped the chase dogs and they bounded away and flashed out into the sallow and they heard the sound of a bigger animal and the whip of branches crashing off in front. And they shone their lights and sped shouting in their flanks along the two paths.

  *

  NEXT CLIP: Very distorted. Poor light. Main detail the chrome parts of the bikes ahead, mud wheeling up off the bikes in front into torchlight, a grey, flat fringe of trees (blurred in the speed...)

  *

  The deer bolted. It had stayed still as long as it could, the stink of the incoming dogs thickening like a wave in the air. And there was a tipping, when the deer knew, and it ran.

  The sallow wood was netted with cycle paths, fudgy and slick with mulched leaves and a high panelled fence of wire demarked the far side of the area, cutting it off from new building land. It was into this they drove the deer.

  It sped ahead of the grey lurchers and burst from the cover and seeing the two flanks coming so bright with light it launched itself at the mesh and the dogs hit it. They were off their bikes and running now, and the others came out of the forest.

  *

  ...sudden white screen (directly into torches?) The phone is picked up. A shot of the roe deer in the mesh fence. CLIP STOPS.

  NEXT CLIP: The dog has the deer by the neck. The deer is still standing and the dog holds its head by the neck down into the ground. There is laughing and clapping. CLIP ZOOMS in on deer’s eye.

  *

  They regather the dogs and the deer bolts against the wire again and gives out a low guttural scream. Time seems to decelerate, the force of the deer’s leap hanging it there for a while, the torchlight glittering electricity in the disturbed wire. There is a thwack, an air-gun pellet spreading its force and flattening on the animal’s hide, delaying there by its all-forward force before its power is gone through as pressure into the receiving muscle, a sound energy seemingly, travels into the bone. And the deer drops.

  CLIP: The deer drops from the fence. The thud (of a crossbow bolt?) They fall to kicking it.

  Something snapped. And I understood with this sickening, brutal act I needed help.

  He came to us of his own accord. This is positive. It suggests he is aware, at least periodically, of his delusion.

  Given the repeatedly violent outcomes of his delusional episodes it’s possible he is at odds with the delusion itself; that he can’t quite believe it, precipitating a combat; which itself suggests there is a personality there we can ‘get back to’, that actually wants to exist.

  Dropping the medical speak for a moment, I think locking him away would make him more violent, and more insane.

  – So your suggestion?

  We recommend he is committed to a psychiatric facility, for his safety, and for the safety of everybody else. He will be less threatened there.

  – Can he be cured?

  Some mental illnesses are just that. People get ill for a while, they recover, they get over it – like a common cold. I’m not sure this boy’s condition is so simple. There are too many factors. It’s more like an inherited disease.

  Worst-case scenario, if he can’t adjust – or we can’t adjust him – we can actually make him a world that will sustain his delusion, and give him no cause to get violent. Main danger of that is, given the artificial stability, he could go on to try and control everybody outside that framework. It can give a fake sense of power and importance. But with the chronic, it’s sometimes better than trying to medicate the thing out of existence. You invariably lose a lot of the positive parts of an individual’s identity when you do that.

  – He has been hellish violent. There’s EST, of course. If he doesn’t change.

  Remember he came to us. That was a cry for help.

  From some viewpoint far away in his delusion he’s seen signs of a safe place, and he’s approached that safe place. He’s shown acknowledgement. There’s a distance to go, but that’s a large part of the battle.

  – What made him?

  A trigger, usually. Something referring back to his childhood, a time he was happier.

  [The following draft from notes and tape recorded-material. Originals taken.]

  I’m just watching the three of them, playing some board game. Clackety. Clackety. They’re infantile. With their shaved heads, their pyjamas. They don’t even get the game and it’s too confusing for them and after every baby-rattle shake of the dice they argue. I think they just like the sound of the clackety plastic cup. They laugh like truly ill people. It angers me that I find it hypnotic myself, that clackety plastic cup. Part of me wants to rescue them. To put them from this misery.

  I get up and I go over to the three nurses and it’s like my body doesn’t come with me. Like it stays there watching the infantile men with their shaved heads and pyjamas. Feels sometimes, my body, that it’s too heavy for my mind to pick up – heavy like wet clothes – so I just leave it sometimes now. Let my mind free of the weight. It sits there, in those same angular pyjamas, that crinkle and rub and I don’t know why, why they dress us in these borrowed robes like this.

  And one of those nurses looks at me. She’s looking through my mind right next to her over to the slow body I’ve left still sitting, but she doesn’t know that I feel a proximity. That I imagine I hear her.

  ‘Such a shame to see a handsome boy like you so beaten.’ Oh! How she spoke of my glories.

  And I say to her, up there right close, ‘no one has beaten me,’ to reassure her; and I say it whispered straight into her mind, ‘no one will beat me.’ I implant it; push the words I say right into her corners. I wallow in her fissures. And as I do that, I can feel her terror at the world.

  I look out through her eyes, see my body sit. My dummy self. My decoy.

  Whatever they have given me has split my body from my mind. Has weighted me physically.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I say. Whisper it inside her. Clackety. Clackety. ‘Don’t worry about me.’

  The buzzer sounds and through the glass screen I see the doctor coming in. He’s black, a huge man. He wears a bizarre light on a headband, like one big eye.

  There is a sudden absence of clackety, the infants clear the game away. It has a specialness, I believe, that glass. It magnifies him, and he is not the great size he seems to us, out here, this side, in the day room.

  The nurses go in to the doctor, into the glass station where they often sit like spiders in the centre of their web. (And I cannot penetrate, I cannot penetrate his glass, cannot follow them in, retreat, my mind, into my heavy body.)

  They take his coat to hang up on the door. It magnifies only him, the huge doctor. He sits down. And when he has collected his thoughts and rested, he looks up at me and asks who I am.

  His glass cannot stop me hearing her. I inhabit her chemicals now. I imagine my mind walks a thin wire to her: ‘Lord,’ said the maiden, ‘the fairest and noblest young man you have ever seen.’ (She means me.) ‘And for Warburton’s sake, and your own pride; be patient with him.’

  For I am a new thing to him.

  *

  From the ___________ MSS. Referencing the Serpent and the Stone fairy tale

  For that night previous, our hero, in his bedrugged state [i.e. psychiatric medication] fell to dream. He dreamt of a one-eyed man, a man that was black of skin; and it was as if the dream was some narration:

  He dreamed of a big man and the coal was engrimed into his skin. It was as if he had internalised the coal. His hair and skin were black. He had one eye.

  The man was a big man and he worked within the mountain.

  Many years ago, a great serpent of timber had been trapped under the mountain, and – forced to live there, starved of light and air – turned black.

  For centuries it wander
ed underground the hill, growing until it stuck and died amongst the passages and wends.

  All men are part of a long line. And the one-eyed man still had the thread of his line in him.

  His father’s fathers had been woodcutters and they had taken timber from the wooden serpent when he lay upon the land. And so the one-eyed man – though he was not then one-eyed, for this was to come – followed the serpent into the ground to continue that work.

  They built up a great cairn and from it a tunnel down to where the serpent lay. And many men went; and they cut the stone from the serpent’s tail and sent it above ground, and the man who held that stone in his hand had as much gold as he wished in his other hand.

  And this is how he lost his eye: they worked with picks and spades to hack the monster’s wall, and there in the dark, no bigger than a lizard’s scale, a shard came from the wall into the big man’s eye.

  And it damaged his sight.

  They have given me victuals. Black pills and white, red pills and grey.

  In a while I start to feel my mind gather a heaviness, a fluid heaviness of water, like it’s pouring itself back into my slow body, a hole dug in wet sand. Like everything’s mingling.

  He wants to kill me, this oppressive man. I’m feeling my travelling wire tighten with the weight of the rest of myself, hear it sing with tension. Since you have been an oppressor for so long, I shall make sure that you will not be so again.

  He will not admit who he is. This coal miner. Even his black hair silvers like coal. That’s in this vile white light.

  He’s telling me of my road ahead. He is a mis­believer; he denies I have a strength. He talks repeatedly of cutting downs, of suffering – of an hypnosis.

  He tries to slow me. Sings out: you are not strong. You are not strong enough. But I am a hole in wet sand. A hole dug in wet sand. And I will kill him if the wire snaps.

  *

  Card # blot 04: Peredur Ap Efrog

  The face of a fox terrier, a riffled coated dog, close up. An older dog, whitened at the beard. It’s missing an eye (it’s right eye), lost it in a fight with a rat, perhaps. Or another dog. It changes completely if you turn it.

  Now it’s a dragon, from above. It’s wings out, part folded. Something a medieval knight might fight. Or have on his shield, perhaps.

  -Something from the Middle Ages?

  We’re always in the middle ages of something, aren’t we?

  *

  Card # blot 06: Peredur Ap Efrog

  It’s obviously a vagina. But turn it on its side...

  Like this.

  Trees, a lakeside bank, reflected in still water. It’s evening. Late summer.

  *

  Card # blot 02: Peredur Ap Efrog

  Witches. Spelling, touching hands. Their hooded garbs, loose sleeves, red hoods. Their thin pinky goose necks. But, turn it. On its side. See their fate. Each of them...

  Kneeling and bleeding. Her own blood. Dying. Her reflection in a shining, polished floor.

  *

  [I could only make black and white copies; on the test there are blotches of red around the ‘feet’ (low, where the two shapes join as the card is upright), and the ‘heads’ are red and the ‘necks’ pinkish.]

  *

  Police Force: ................

  Division: ......................

  Misc. Prop. No. ..............

  Description of item: Notebook recovered

  from S.O.C. Doctor’s notes, handwritten.

  Identifying mark: .............

  LAB. REF.

  Patient shows unusual awareness of his situation, and highly (surprisingly) developed verbal skills. Able to respond with sophisticated answers. (Remember he grew up apart from other kids, developing his own worlds and probably with plenty of early input from his mother, before things went wrong. This ‘betrayal’ of a seemingly utopian infant world would add to adult dysfunction. Note also: takes a degree of imagination and creativity to build delusion as he has.)

  He has vivid (visual) imagination. Approach to RTs v. advanced. Note patient’s awareness: stock answers, then complex pictorial response suggesting capacity to build story.

  Suggests he is [‘is’ underlined] in charge of violent side. Has a concept of serenity (see response to blot #6), but [several words, handwriting illegible].

  Unsure whether to continue one-to-one sessions. Request ♂ chaperone next session. He is surely physically strong. His coordination is good. Recommend increase app. of mild sedative med.

  – And if he doesn’t?

  – Co-operate with his initial treatment? We will be forced to take further steps. It’s the last thing we want to do. There’s inevitably side effects. Always are. The first step would be EST.

  – Shock therapy.

  – Yes.

  – That has to be voluntary. Does it not?

  – There’s voluntary, and ‘voluntary’.

  *

  From Western Journal of Psychiatry, Obituary

  The medical and psychiatric community today pays respect to the memory of Doctor H. Brubaker

  Doctor Brubaker was assaulted while working at the psychiatric unit of the ----- Institution. It was a violent and severe assault. Despite the concerted efforts of medical staff, he failed to recover from his injuries.

  Our thoughts and feelings go out to his family and to the staff at the facility who are deeply shaken by the tragedy.

  It is understood that the offending patient has been moved to a secure psychiatric facility.

  *

  Note to self:

  I do not want to ‘create’ him. Do not add things to him that are not there.

  Be careful not to ‘write’ him. Be aware: I am a writer. The writer’s job is to ‘build’ characters into whole beings. Do not fill in gaps with untruths just to do this. Resist inevitable pressure from editor to do this. Ask for more time.

  Do not falsify a narrative line. Work harder to get the truth out.

  The women got up and welcomed him. Their curves were diminished in the starched white clothes, and there was a measured, round softness to the way they talked. There was a trained, unthreatening thing to them. It created a tension, like a quiet room.

  As they started to talk he could see a gurney approaching, and a prone man upon it.

  One of the women met the gurney and helped the man from it to a bed; then Peredur watched as she bathed his head with a flannel, and applied some ointment to his temples and cleaned off a gluey stuff that was on him. And she talked that gentle way, and the man seemed to stare vacantly out. Then he made a bizarre guttural noise, as if some statement to Peredur, and it reminded him of the deer caught in the fence, that noise, and it went through him.

  Two more prone bodies came into the ward on their gurneys, and the nurse went rhythmically about the same process, bathing and settling the men into their beds.

  Then Peredur asked one of the patients who was with him, ‘Why are they like that?’

  ‘Oh! There’s a monster in that room,’ he said. He grinned cruelly, but left it at that.

  They took him along the corridor, and behold, he came across the fairest woman he had ever seen, sitting behind a desk where they pulled him up and bade him to sit. In his mind he was going to fight the dragon. That is what he tried to believe.

  ‘Will you be very good for me and swallow this,’ she asks. And she gives him a small, smooth pill.

  She is smooth voiced as she tells him, ‘It’s ok. I’ll be here. Count backwards, for me,’ she says. ‘Count back. Ten, nine. Eight, seven...’ Her whisper like a receding sea.

  He is unconscious when they hit him with electricity and some deep place inside him starts at the spark, a vision of two dogs running through a forest, bags of picked-up shit at eye-level in the trees, and the glittering of light in the fence as a deer busts into the mesh.

  They have wheeled him into the sun.

  The lawn slopes away manicured to the river behind t
he fence. Again, high-wire panels. The ground roughens towards the water, sedge and iris. There is a fringe of willows.

  He looks up at the home: the long facia of the day room. The orderlies and nurses going back and forth, answering the patients’ calls.

  Those inside, through the patio glass, look grey, dark; those outside – in their white clothes, their borrowed robes – bright.

  When one goes in, they turn dark; when one comes out, they brighten white.

  There is a laburnum on the riverbank, dying of some fungal disease. Half of it is yellow flowers, like it’s half on fire, half dead.

  Beyond the trees and beyond the river he sees a man walking with his dogs. Two greyhounds folding with speed in front of him.

  Even from here he sees that they have been through wet ground, strangely three feet each darkened with dirt and a fourth clean, as if they have each lost a shoe.

  He lifts a hand to the man who greets him back. He wells with tears, and the world blurs, as if the river has spilled out.

  *

  Re: Patient: P. Ap Erfog. (sic.)

  To the Board,

  He seems to be responding well. There is a marked improvement in his patience, and he is calmer. (Expected, with the EST, and the medication, but nevertheless an excellent platform for improvement. I hesitate to say rehabilitation as I suggest his condition is far too chronic.) He even socialises infrequently with the other patients.