The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls Page 10

  For example, Quarantine is no such thing. Rather, it is the dungeon in which we are thrown to be punished for our misdeeds, whether we know what they are or not. The new inmate does indeed pass her first nights here just as I had, but this is hardly meant to shield the rest of us against disease from the world beyond, no indeed. It is done only to slaughter any remaining spirit in the poor girl, and to prepare her, by way of a good shock, for her life to come, if a life it can be called.

  And another! Bathing. Bathing must be one of the most inhumane practices we suffer, not because it is unpleasant—everything here is unpleasant—but because of its deadly consequences. To begin with, do you remember, Diary, how we are all to come forward in groups of ten to be doused by the watering hose? Well, oftentimes, one of the more incoherent of the prisoners will not realize that she is one of the ten, and so does not step forwards with the rest. Having learnt well that all attention is dangerous here, those round her will whisper nervously, prodding her onwards. Should this not succeed, the disobedient inmate is dragged away by heavy-handed attendants to the Hydrotherapy Chamber. Here, the wretch will be submerged in icy water. If she reacts and struggles to breath, then the treatment is deemed a success, and there are congratulations all round, never mind the near certainty that the patient will die shortly afterwards from cold-induced illness. If she happens to drown and so does not react, the patient is considered to have been just another of the many ‘incurables’, and, as such, her death is no great loss. There is a dramatic rise in the number of fatalities resulting from pneumonia in the days immediately following our bi-monthly bath. Needless to say, the staff never seem to question this.

  And now, dining. An alarm sounds at half-past six each morning, and those of us who are not chained to our cells assemble in the Dining Hall for breakfast. An enormous pot of soup is set down with a great thud at one end of each of the several dozen tables, the contents inevitably sloshing over the sides and encrusting the warped floorboards. In each pot is a rusty ladle. The inmate to reach the table first fills each of a tall stack of tin bowls, dented and scratched, and often unwashed since the last meal. She then passes them, one by one, to the other inmates as we crowd round her to receive our share before taking our places on the long benches flanking the table.

  This may sound bearable enough, but prepare yourself! The soup is made of whatever scraps are leftover from the staff’s meals, and supplemented with whatever is left of ours from the previous day. The Asylum diet consists primarily of this soup, for, not only is it a practical choice from the point of view of the kitchen staff, requiring little effort to make as well as solving the problem of kitchen waste (that problem making the kitchen a favourite haunt for the many rats who inhabit the Asylum), but it can also be both served and eaten with a spoon—rather important criteria within an institution that does not allow the use of forks and knives.

  We are given to understand that this denial of sharp objects is so that we cannot injure ourselves, but, as the staff is only too happy to use sharp objects against our persons, I have come to suspect that the withholding of proper flatware is rather so that we cannot injure the staff.

  We are always kept hungry to ensure that we are too weak to cause trouble, or to fight the staff when they cause trouble for us, although many girls fight anyway, using that otherworldly strength that often accompanies madness, or desperation. Despite our hunger, some of us don’t eat any breakfast on days when the soup is particularly foul. Still others don’t eat at all, neither at breakfast nor at any other time, and it is a wonder to the rest of us that they are yet living.

  Amendment: I have just spoken with a girl called Penny on this very subject, and am horrified to learn that those who disdain their dinners are forcibly fed with rubber tubes crammed down their throats. Not surprisingly, many girls die of choking as a result of this. I suspect I should eat everything I can manage.

  The last sort of inmate is she who will ravenously devour whatever is laid before her, and will then set upon the bits leftover by those who can’t stomach them. I envy these girls; no delicacy remains in them, a loss that serves them well, for, without delicacy, they can attend solely to the business of their own survival. I still have my delicacies, and so, most of the time, I starve. Thankfully, we are each given a portion of stale bread for our dinner, and without this I would surely have turned to dust already.

  Once back in our wards, any hoarded goods will be used as a sort of currency, with the metal spoons we occasionally succeed in thieving from the breakfast table being a highly sought after treasure; the collections amassed by some inmates reach over two dozen, and all stashed inside their thin straw mattresses.

  I suppose that, if you’re not going to get a good night’s sleep, you may as well have a lot of spoons.

  Asylum Letter No. XXI

  It was at breakfast one Sunday that a rat was found floating dead in the soup pot. It was my turn to serve, and so it was I who saw it first. I had not once wept during my incarceration, but now, the futility of our collective efforts to ‘behave’ or to ‘get better’ in the expectation of release—the complete and utter hopelessness of our condition—all descended upon me. An abject sorrow flooded my very being as I looked down at the poor creature, paws outstretched, reaching for its freedom even as it died; I could do nothing but hide my face in my hands.

  In line behind me was the girl with the mass of blond hair—she who had frightened me in Quarantine upon my first night in the Asylum. She was again wearing her tri-corner hat; I believed it was meant to resemble something a pirate might sport, and I saw that it was made up of strips of our striped wallpaper—the same upon which I have been writing these entries—supplemented with druggist receipts and other rubbish no doubt found lying about the unswept floors. I had heard her referred to as Jolie Rouge, which didn’t sound like a real name to me.

  As I sat upon the bench, wiping away my tears, Jolie Rouge peered into the pot to see what had upset me so. She calmly lifted a bowl from the table and filled it with the rat soup. Then, she spun round and flung the bowl directly at one of the attendants—which the girls call ‘Chasers’ for obvious reasons—employed to keep the lunatics under control during mealtimes. The Chaser was stunned; there was a collective gasp—anyone could guess the consequence of such a rebellious act.

  Knowing, as so many mad girls do, that silence is made to be broken, an inmate at the far end of the Hall erupted in hysterical shrieks of laughter. All at once, the entire Hall burst into a riot of wild shouting and flying soup bowls. As the soiled Chaser lunged at Jolie, she leaned towards me.

  ‘Take the rat . . . we bury him in the Walking Yard today!’

  As Jolie was dragged away, the other Chasers on duty made comical attempts to quell the chaos, and I saw my opportunity. I fished the rat from the pot by its tail, stripped off the stocking that was not concealing Anne’s key, and stuffed the dead animal inside. Once the mayhem had been sufficiently contained, we were again locked in our cells. I had managed to sneak in my bundle unnoticed.

  On Sunday afternoons, those who are able are allowed to stretch their limbs in the Walking Yard, which is really nothing more than a fenced-in patch of dirt guarded by a Chaser whose response to even the most miniscule of provocations is a strike across the face with his baton; thus, broken lips and blackened eyes are all too common to see emerging from the Yard, but, to most of us, the air is worth the injuries.

  When I arrived at the gate that afternoon, one missing stocking and a dead rat held behind my back, Jolie Rouge was there to meet me. Her arms were covered in fresh purple bruises, and she walked with a limp. Before I could apologise for the punishment she had clearly taken on my behalf, she pointed to the far corner of the Yard. Eight girls, all of whom I would soon know well as members of the Striped Stocking Society, stood round a small hole dug in the dirt, concealing it from the Chaser. As Jolie and I approached, the girls moved aside to allow us into the circle, and I saw
that they all clutched sad bundles of weeds against their chests.

  ‘The deceased is now present,’ announced Jolie, in her peculiar accent. ‘Let the funeral commence.’

  I stepped forwards and produced the rat. Kneeling in the dirt, I placed the tiny body in the ground, and ceremoniously laid the stocking over it.

  ‘Shouldn’t we say a prayer?’ asked a diminutive girl with large, brown eyes.

  ‘I think Flea’s right,’ said the girl next to her. ‘I saw it done that way when my mother died.’

  ‘Who should say it?’ asked another inmate.

  ‘Valentine should say it. It’s her rat,’ responded Jolie, turning to me.

  ‘Valentine?’ I asked.

  ‘Your birthmark,’ she explained, touching her soft fingertips to my cheek.

  ‘Ah . . . well, I wasn’t exactly born with it, I’m afraid . . .’

  ‘I know.’

  I asked the girls to kneel, and they did.

  ‘Dear Lord in Heaven,’ I began, unsure of what to say as I had never before attended a proper funeral service, ‘please accept this poor, drowned creature into Thy Glorious Kingdom, for it was not merely another Asylum casualty—it also relieved us of the obligation to eat what was surely a bloody awful pot of soup.’

  Each inmate poured a handful of dirt into the miniature grave, and the weeds were laid on top. Within only a few days of the funeral, a patch of dandelions had grown up over the spot, and, every Sunday since, we pick them and make our futile wishes as we blow the downy fluff into the air and watch it float on, past the fence and far away to where we will never go.

  We may not have our freedom, our dignity, or our wits, but friendship within the Asylum is alive and well.

  hospital entry 18: not exactly petite

  From time to time, the asylum Nutritionist chooses to interrogate me yet again upon the topic of why I persist in denying that I have an eating disorder. The Nutritionist is convinced that I am lying, and I am convinced that she is a bitch.

  Due to the whole “eating disorder” investigation, I’ve gotten to thinking about the only time I ever bordered on such a condition. It happened at age sixteen, during my brief affiliation with a major record label (before I got smart enough to leave and start my own), and it was brought on by the most degrading part of this experience: the Photo Shoot.

  After several successive long nights recording, I was driven at dawn to a studio where a stereotypical makeup artist was waiting, brush in hand, to paint my gothic pallor stereotypically orange. The record execs told me that sun-kissed girls make better pop stars, MTV confirmed this, and we all have a job to do, right? (“Don’t you want to help your family?” they said. “Don’t you want to be famous?” they said. “What’s wrong with you?” they said.)

  The makeup guy was a perfect peach in comparison to the hag who came to direct the shoot. She pinched and poked at me, telling me how to pose—“Smile bigger! Look happy!”—and arranging me in such a way as to conceal my ass, which, apparently, was horrendously oversized (FYI, I looked exactly the same then as I do now). This woman’s awful words, deadly to an adolescent girl, haunt me to this day.

  “She’s not exactly petite.”

  She may as well have told me I was the most disgusting, unworthy creature in existence, which, incidentally, is what I felt like at the time for even caring about such things; even then, I knew better than to concern myself with anyone’s opinion of my ass. I knew better, and yet, I was crushed, and so I did what any teenage girl would do: I stopped eating. I didn’t eat for so long that there came a day when I couldn’t stand up without falling right back down again.

  Even now, I am more ashamed of not eating then I ever could be for being “fat.”

  Asylum Letter No. XXII

  Why, Diary! I’ve only just realised that I have not yet mentioned the walls . . .

  Two days after my incarceration within the Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls, I was removed from Quarantine and placed into Ward A in the Eastern Wing of the institution, Cell Block 2. If you recall—and you do, for what is a Diary if not an aid to memory—it was upon my first night in Ward A that I found the little silver pencil.

  There are several floors lined with cells within the Asylum. The Cell Blocks are arranged by approximate age of the incarcerated, with Block 1 confining the inmates even younger than I. The cell walls are solid upon three sides, whilst iron bars stretching from floor to ceiling make up the fourth, which looks out onto a corridor that runs the length of the Ward. The walls are papered over with the broad black-and-white striped print to be found throughout much of the Asylum. This is, no doubt, an attempt to disguise the crumbling state of the boards beneath, yet I can still detect a thick film of filth, the mold multiplying in every corner, and the questionable stains left by decades of prisoners. The paper has aged badly, and the black and white are merging together into a dodgy grey.

  Ward B is the ward nobody wants to be transferred to. The inmates of Ward B are subjected to the same tortures as we, and far worse besides. I have heard that the girls there are kept in chains and manacles, some being strapped down to wooden planks for years interminable, some trapped in cages that allow no movement of any kind, and all being crammed into a den not fit for an animal; the tales of terror are endless, and are a popular topic amongst the Ward A girls as, after the gaslight in the corridor has been extinguished, we lie in our beds and whisper.

  I had survived in Ward A less than a week when I woke in the night to discover something peculiar, to say the least: The stripes upon the walls round me appeared to be moving. Diary, I mean this just as I say it. I swear upon what little I hold dear that the stripes were writhing slowly upon the surface, undulating like seaweed beneath ocean waves, or snakes gliding through a stream.

  The cell was dimly lit by a half-concealed moon; much of the walls were hidden in shadow, and I supposed I could be dreaming (isn’t it funny, the way we immediately leap to this conclusion each time we witness something unusual . . . I could be dreaming, we think, I must be dreaming, and yet we are never dreaming, and we never learn). Shivering from cold and trepidation, I sat up and tried to focus my vision.

  From the bed two down from mine came a small voice.

  ‘You see it, don’t you . . .’

  ‘What is it?’ I whispered.

  Though aware that what I was seeing was beyond impossible, I felt myself being pulled towards the wall by the hypnotic rippling of the stripes, and I rose from my bed.

  ‘I’m not supposed to talk to you . . .’ said the voice.

  The Society’s test was being enforced. A minute passed and the girl spoke again, apparently unable to contain herself.

  ‘They say the house is alive . . . they say your eyes adjust . . . that you see it when you’ve been here long enough. It didn’t take long for you, did it . . .’

  ‘How is it possible?’ I asked.

  ‘Some believe that the spirits of the girls who used to sleep here are trapped inside the walls, but I don’t know . . . I think it is alive . . . the Asylum I mean . . . every part of it.’

  I could not look away. Lifting my arm, I extended my hand, reaching . . . reaching . . . Long tongues of wispy grey lashed and licked at my fingers as they neared the surface, the narrowing distance between my hand and the wall growing so cold it almost burned, like standing barefoot in the snow. I touched my fingertips to the wall at last; the stripes convulsed beneath them. My ears filled with deafening shrieks and wails, and the smoky tendrils shot out to grasp my arm as if to pull me into the wall itself. I wrenched myself away and fell backwards, stunned. The screams had gone silent the moment I broke contact—a door slamming shut.

  I returned to my bed and watched the walls creep until light came through the bars of the tiny window.

  Now, weeks later, the striped walls still move, and I, too, am convinced that this house of madness
is alive, though, in truth, I rarely think on it anymore. It just . . . is. Just another thing one grows accustomed to. Like the talking rats.

  Asylum Letter No. XXIII

  It was the day after the burial of the soup rat that I heard it again: the scratching. It originated from somewhere behind my bed, I was sure of it . . . in the wall perhaps, or beneath the floor . . . from somewhere I couldn’t reach. It was incessant, persistent, and it seemed to come closer with every passing minute.

  Before we are locked inside our cells for the night, all of us inmates are lined up in the Ward Hall and given pills and foul-tasting liquid concoctions. These sedating draughts no longer affect me as I have gradually become insensitive to their influence, and, thus, I lay awake, listening to the scratching and going silently mad (or madder if my diagnosis is to be believed). I had to expose the source or I would get no rest; no rest means greater susceptibility to illness and infection, and that, of course, means death.

  Stowed inside my mattress was a pitiful collection of treasures: the end of a candle from Dr. Stockill’s Laboratory, a match from the floor of Dr. Lymer’s torture chamber, three spoons, my silver pencil, and several scraps of paper. I lit the stub of wax and inspected my hostile surroundings. Beneath my bed, I found a small pile of debris just below a tiny hole in the wall, not more than an inch or two above the floor. As I watched, the hole grew larger, created by something drilling its way through from the other side. Alarmed, I backed away from the bed. Only a few heartbeats more, and all was still.

  I held my candle near the ground; something I could not yet see crossed the flame’s path, and a shadow grew large upon the opposite wall—a shadow of something awful. A profile projected in clear detail onto the striped wallpaper. I saw a pair of pointed claws outstretched, a long, snake-like tail, and there sat I with nowhere to run!

  Then, from beneath the bed, a rat emerged. So this was my monster! It was of a respectable size, but nothing more. The rat sat up on its haunches and groomed itself thoroughly of the dust and dirt, licking its wee paws and wiping its face before straightening its whiskers. After a final shake, it looked up at me.