Not knowing quite what else to do, Louisa took a tray and moved along in the queue. She was filled with a hideous, yawning sense of panic. The smell of the breakfast was making her feel sick.
‘Pancake?’
She shook her head. ‘Just coffee, please.’
‘Over there.’ The man pointed across the room with a serving spoon, from which something oily dripped. With the other hand he pressed down a yoghurt and a plastic container of rather stale-looking fruit salad onto her tray.
As if in a dream, she found herself at a station with different cereals and a tea and coffee machine. Cereal and liquids were spilled everywhere, as if there’d been a food fight. She poured a coffee and sat down at an empty table. The coffee was weak and only lukewarm, but she drank it. A man on the other side of the room started loudly and tunelessly singing a song by The Cure, prompting someone else to yell at him to pack it in.
Then a man nearby got up on his chair and called out, ‘I will execute judgment on him with plague and bloodshed. I will pour down torrents of rain, hailstones and burning sulphur on him and on his troops and on the many nations with him. Repent! You are all sinners!’
That set off yet another outburst from someone else. Louisa put her hands over her ears and shut her eyes. This had to be a hallucination – none of this could possibly be real. This place was hell on earth.
Then there was an overpowering smell of body odour, and a gruff voice enquired, ‘You going to eat that, Highness?’
Louisa opened her eyes to see a man clamp his hand down over her yoghurt. His hair was so matted it was forming into dreadlocks and his nails were long and filthy. Louisa shook her head and he pocketed it in one swift, deft move and shuffled away.
A young woman sat down in the seat opposite and banged down her tray. ‘Well you look like you got off the train at the wrong station!’ she said. She was about Louisa’s age and striking with long, black hair parted down the middle, and a symmetrical oval face with defined cheekbones and dark brown eyes. ‘You look much too clean and normal to be in here.’ She cut up her pancake and began to wolf it down.
‘I don’t belong here,’ said Louisa. ‘There’s been a mistake.’
‘Ha!’ The girl grinned. ‘That’s what they all say. Oh, for Christ’s bloody sake!’ The end of her plastic fork had snapped off. ‘They give you these stupid things so you can’t do yourself an injury, but they’re enough to make you want to slit your bloody wrists!’ She picked off bits of pancake with her fingers and ate them. Then she rubbed a blob of jam from her chin, wiped her hand on her dressing gown and held it out. ‘Kerry. Nice to meet you.’
‘Louisa.’
‘Love the stitches.’
‘Huh…? Oh, this.’ Louisa touched her scalp. It was still sore.
Kerry peeled off the foil from her yoghurt and licked it. ‘So, first time, eh?’
Louisa nodded.
‘I can always tell. It’s the look of complete and utter terror – dead giveaway. So, Louisa, what brings you to the loony bin?’
‘They said I tried to commit suicide. But it isn’t true. There’s been a horrible misunderstanding. I have to get out of here.’
‘Ah, suicide attempt.’ Kerry nodded sagely. ‘That, my new friend, is the one thing that’ll always get you fast-tracked straight into the nut house. Rule number one: never, ever tell a medical professional you’re thinking of doing yourself in, OK? And certainly don’t ever try anything they could construe as a suicide attempt.’
She swung around. ‘Hey, bugger off!’ she called. The man who’d taken Louisa’s yoghurt was back, his disgusting smell billowing towards them. Kerry waved her own empty yoghurt pot triumphantly in his face. ‘Look! I’ve finished! And even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t give it to you anyway, Dan, so eff off!’
She turned back. ‘Guard your yoghurts and puddings with your life, OK? And if you really, really don’t want them, make sure to give me first refusal.’
Louisa couldn’t help but smile. But it felt an incongruous thing to do, as if her facial muscles weren’t quite capable of it any more. Kerry grinned back.
‘That man,’ Louisa said. ‘Dan? He called me “Highness”. What’s that all about?’
‘Oh, Dan thinks he’s a Plantagenet king. No one knows precisely which one, least of all him, but I’d put money on it being Richard the Third – he has the look of a nephew-slayer about him if you ask me. He thinks this place is his royal palace and we’re all here because of him, paying him court or whatever medieval dudes do. Congrats on your blue blood, by the way. I’m just a scullery maid – I wash the floors and empty the piss pots. My dad always used to say I was a right scrubber, so I suppose it’s apt.’
Louisa laughed. Kerry looked nothing like a scullery maid. She looked more like a princess on some ancient tapestry, with her flawless skin and blue-black hair, gleaming as if she were standing under a bright, full moon.
‘And what about you, Kerry? What’s your diagnosis?’ Louisa asked.
‘Me? I’m schizo. I hallucinate stuff. I stopped taking my meds because they didn’t agree with me. They’ve got me on some new stuff. It seems to be working all right for now, but whatever they give you, it always stops working in the end. Or at least it does with me.’
‘Oh, that’s bad luck. Sorry.’
Kerry nodded towards her fellow patients. ‘The largest cohort in here are the bipolars; manic depressives they used to call them. Some are manic, some depressed, then after a while they all swap over to keep things interesting. The drugs that work for one person will screw up someone else completely.’ She yawned. ‘But then, essentially, you’re screwed anyway if you keep on landing up here. A lot of people just don’t take their meds, then they end up in the revolving door system. Which is what this place boils down to, essentially.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘They stuff you full of pills, get you vaguely stable, then chuck you straight back out onto the same mean streets you came in from, with no support. And the whole process gets repeated ad infinitum.’
‘Oh, I see. Who’s that appalling nurse?’ asked Louisa.
‘You mean the one with the evil glare who looks as if she dyes her hair by sticking her head in a bucket of toilet bleach?’
‘Yes, her.’
‘Sharon Bell; Nurse Enema as she’s more commonly known in these parts. Word is she applied for a job as a concentration camp guard then discovered the war was over, so she decided to go into psychiatric nursing instead.’ Kerry grinned. ‘Basically, she just wanted a job with victims. But seriously, don’t worry, it’s nothing personal: she hates the whole of humankind. Her husband ran off to Bangkok with all their money and a suitcase full of sex toys. She’s going to have to work till she drops, and she takes it out on us.’