The morning shift must have been told all about the gibbering idiot brought in overnight, but now a self-absorbed silence was all I could manage. Vacantly I stared at the floor, looking up only once to the rulers' portraits above the duty officer. Yesterday's tyrants had vanished; occupying pride of place were the Bahraini ruling family, but instead of the accustomed regal pose their eyes exuded fear.
Nothing makes sense any more
, I told myself but, in the view of those ever-attentive officers, not a word passed my lips.
I can't recall exactly when the new transportation arrived, perhaps between 9 and 10 am, but this was no police van. The tones had changed too. Last night the voice of officialdom rasped; this morning it cooed. Like a child at the dentist's, I was assured that everything would be all right (and, like a child at the dentist's, I knew they were lying). Hemmed in either side by officers, I clambered into the back of the van, and sat myself down in the middle of a bench. A lozenge-shaped pane of glass afforded a view, but my vision was still unsteady so the townscape held no charms for me.
By this time, not only were purposes hidden but our whereabouts and direction were utter mysteries as well. The driver seemed to be swerving all over the placeâmosques, schools, shops swam across my field of vision, my hands clutched the bench to keep balanceâas if he were in a movie trying to shake off a pursuer.
Eventually, my sole surviving rational brain cell concluded that we were somewhere not far from the Old Town but in a suburb seldom if ever visited by me before. Like a slingshot in slow motion, we came off a roundabout that looked familiar (but Manama has more roundabouts than a centipede has legs) and the driver made a wide-arcing left turn across a driveway and into neatly kept grounds dominated by a long, low, palm-fringed building set back from a high wall topped by razor-wire.
As the remorseless August sun glared down, the officers walked me into the building, a hand under each elbow as if I were going to run away. Only one question remained in my crumbling mind:
Where in Hell am I?
I didn't have to wait long for an answer. It was in the writing on the wall, a sign in Arabic and English. We were passing through the foyer now, past Indian guards, going up in the lift. Ignoring me, a matronly woman in nursing-issue white and grey addressed the police in practised no-nonsense tones. My vision stopped swimming. I saw her, and my new home, with clinical clarity. My future, so agonising in its approach, was now here, in the Bahrain Psychiatric Hospitalâthe insane asylumâand there was no telling when or where the nightmare would end.
Chapter 9
WHISTLING IN THE DARK
But darkness opens like a knife for you
and you are marked
down by your pulsing brain
and isolated
and breathing
your breathing is the blast, the bullet, and the final sky
.
LAURIE LEE
A M
OMENT OF
W
AR
(
MONTPELLIER, OCTOBER 1937
)
AUGUST 1990
Arabia's burning daylight had closed down the night like the flick of a switchblade. But the knife in my pulsing brain was still there, driven up to the hilt. The shearing of my consciousness sent past, present and future possibilities colliding and crashing together, shooting sparks through my unsleeping brain: thousands upon thousands of glimpses of what was, is and might yet be, most of them dire and many pointed straight at the final sky.
If my mood was manic, my basic curiosity had returned. Knowing I was in a madhouseâin the Middle East, of all placesâcertainly wasn't a jolly adventure but what I call my rational sense (or the observer within) received enough stimulus from the new situation to ignite a host of inquiries:
Am I safer here? Isn't this still Bahrain? If Iraqi troops are going to land soon and Westerners are to be evacuated I will still be here when they arrive. With all the other Westerners gone, will I be (a) slaughtered in my hospital bed; or (b) missed altogether because nobody would expect to find a Westerner in a Bahraini asylum?
Every question led to a split choice; every mental road forkedâand yet the questions bombarded my mind without let-up.
Does anyone else know I'm here? Will they have phoned my family in Australia, spreading alarm? Won't that mean that when I get out of here (when will that be?) I will be forced to go home, thus burying my six years of travel and word-work with the shame of returning with my tail between my legs?
The contrast between my racing, overheated mind and the loss of my physical freedom imposed an immense, almost unbearable strain.
Will I be strapped to a bed and given electroconvulsive shock therapy? Does anyone here speak English?
Anything could happen and there was nothing I could do about it. Again I felt panic rising, my breaths were gulps for air.
Putting its purpose to one side, it could have been any hospital room. The deadlocked doors contained small square windows covered in chicken-wire gauze, which rendered them a tad less opaque than the face of the security guard who sat just inside the door.
The first room I was shepherded into was a games-cum-lounge space converted to a meal room three times a day. When the plates were cleared away, table-tennis trestles went up, and most of the day a large TV screen played, with the sound turned down, though none of the other inmates seemed aware of its presence.
From the meal room I walked down a wide corridor, with the doctors' and nurses' rooms on the left and, a few metres on, the wards themselves. Sterile hospital beds with plastic coverings to guard against bedwetting were my first impression. At the far end of the room were a couple of beds with leather restraints to prevent the uncontrollable patients from falling out.
Oh God, don't let them put me in one of those
.
Now I was in the matron's charge. Grimness of face, seriousness of purpose epitomised her every gesture. Until I met her, I noticed that one of my more obvious traitsâa sense of humour, however warpedâhad vanished without trace. Matron brought it back. Once she had established that I knew my name, she asked, âDo you know why you're here?'
âBecause the police brought me here,' I said, deadpan. She reminded me that I had been running down the road in the middle of the night, screaming. I didn't deny it, but tried to pass it off as a natural occurrence, a routine event like stocking up on groceries.
Most of her first day's efforts were spent calming me down. To this end, she prescribed regular doses of lithium and plenty of bed rest. I was assigned the bed nearest her office, and it was only with the greatest difficulty that I could stay on it. Later in the afternoon, Matron must have added Valium to my light pharmaceutical diet, and thisâcombined with the debilitating impact of nervous exhaustionâ plunged me into dreamless unconsciousness, from which I awoke sometime after sundown. The distant blue light of the TV in the meal room, and the murmur of its canned voices, punctuated by the evening call of the muezzin, reminded me of where I was, resolving a puzzle that had given me a startled half minute or so.
Occasionally, a low moan would issue from the other end of the wardâominously from one of the beds with leather strapsâand this would send a new shiver of fear down my spine, but my mind was still too seized with its own torments to dwell on other people's pain.
At six in the morning, lying on my right-hand side, I opened my eyes and sawâas one sees a picture hung askewâtwo Filipino male orderlies, in starched white coats, seated opposite each other at a table, reading the morning paper. This was the paper I was supposed to be still working on. One orderly turned to an inside page, so that the old newspaperman in me (able to read type upside down and now, I found, sideways) could not miss the front-page banner headline: HUMAN SHIELDS, which set a new train roaring out of control down my mental track.
If the Iraqis come, they will take me hostage. The terror will increase, the agony will drag out. Will it become so insupportable I lash out, am punished, tortured, or shot, or will I go insane?
The already insane constantly ask themselves that last question, I discovered: it's the most logical thought they have.
I don't belong here
, I told myself. But then I could also see that, the way my world had dissolved, perhaps others would be better judges of that.
Breakfast meals were brought in on a trolley with the main course on hotplates. In this respect, you get better service in an asylum than at most hotels these days, if only because hospital managements don't consider self-service to be a safe option. If I had one complaint, it would be that plastic cutlery tends to be inadequate in any given encounter with chargrilled sausage.
The meals were wrapped in cellophane, their destination written in marker pen: âEUROPEAN MEAL' or âASIAN MEAL'. Quite a few of the residents were Indians, perhaps not surprisingly in a society where people from the subcontinent are often treated little better than slaves. At the time I thought it reflected an odd strain of racism that the meals should be segregated thus, but it was probably an attempt to cater for the cultural preferences and religiously prescribed dietary imperatives of one and all. Not that this mattered much: the psychological upheaval of my life had left me with little appetite.
That morning I was invited into one of the administrative offices. Ranged on seats, from left to right in front of me, were four medicosâ three men and a womanâin white coats, each with biro poised over clipboard.
âDo you know what has happened to you?' the woman asked in a clipped professional manner.
I wanted to say, âI went mad.' (That says it so much quicker.) Instead I said, âI was running down the road last night screaming it was the end of the world.'
The tallest man, on my left, asked, âWhy did you think it was the end of the world?'
To tell the truth I can't remember what my answer to this was, but clearly this was no time to discuss theology.
âDo you remember attacking the police?' came another verbal arrow, this time out of right field. I did. This had a psychological, fear-based cause but to put that into words was beyond me: I felt as if this were a âjob interview' where certain answers would win more favour but one could never know what answers those were.
While the chorus line of pens jigged its way across the massed clipboards, trying to make sense of my stuttering response to the previous question, I turned to the womanâthe matron who had greeted me upon my arrivalâand put a couple of queries of my own.
âHow long will I be here?'
âA few days, until you are better.'
âWhere will I go then?' (Clearly, the question presupposed I wouldn't have any choice in the matter.)
âThat is yet to be decided.'
âWhere are you all from?'
âWe are Egyptian psychiatrists,' Matron replied archly. It occurred to me that the diagnosis of the best Egyptian psychiatrists living in Bahrain mightn't take account of my odd Western, even Antipodean, character.
Back to bed I went, none the wiser about their assessment of my mental state. What struck home was that, if my inquisitors could deduce that state only from my behaviour and words, they could not know my background, fears, loves, dreams and hopes, and so whatever they concluded was likely to be wrong. The idea that âYou can't know me so you can't help me' first took root there. It was to prove a dangerous one.
The lithium continued. That afternoon, when I asked Matron about my diagnosis, the cement in her face set so hard I thought it would crack: âYou are not entitled to know that.' I disagreed emphatically but then withdrew into my shell, biding my time. Some 24 hours later my vigilance paid off. Matron was called away and, after briefly checking the coast was clear, I ducked into her office and riffled through the notes on her desk. I was in luck: the second page was headed âJames, Haley Ken (I thought
Western name order mustn't be a subject in Egyptian medical universities)
. âDiagnosis: Borderline manic depressive. Post-traumatic stress syndrome.' I darted out again: no one had spotted me.
Back on the bed, a corner of my pulsing brain seethed with anger. None of this would have happened if my immediate boss hadn't bad-mouthed me to the deputy editor and played on the insecurities of an office newcomer to bolster his own self-regard. In a perverse way, my being here seemed like karmic retribution:
This'll make him ashamed he treated me so badly
. It was a couple of days before an alchemy of the heart transmuted such crazed thoughts of pure vengeance into something nobler:
I wouldn't want anyone to go through what I'm going through. So if he is shamed by this turn of events it will make him better; and if he isn't, or cannot be, his reaction is not worth adding to my worries
.
I don't mind saying now that such meditations were so intense, and cut so deep, they amounted to a prayer.
Compassion didn't come from any expected quarter or in any expected form. None of the news executives visited, a disappointment that spun off a cycle of emotions, from contempt to eventual acceptance that there must always be an explanatory factor we cannot know but that, if we did know, would enable us to forgive all. In my plight, the factor I
could
grasp was the need for a newspaper's top management, in days of uncertainty, to be on deck, attending to a hundred more important matters.
Just then, a wrapped parcel arrived from the editor himself. It contained a new set of clothes and a couple of books: one Agatha Christie, and John Le Carré's
The Russia House
. (Thankful though I was not to have been forgotten, I wondered about the choices, although now that sounds churlish.)
I received my first visitâand it wasn't from the preoccupied managers but from one of my colleagues: an Indian named Sunil who, I knew, in these extraordinarily unsettling times had lost virtually his entire video sideline. He and his family were doing it hard, and I would have guessed the names of a dozen other people before imagining he would walk through that doorway. My eyes brimmed with tears; he and his wife had brought me a cake. That simple gesture in my hour of adversity taught me that, while the gifts we usually choose are infinitely replaceable, the one thing we treat as infiniteâtimeâis finite. Which is why the freewill offering of our time is the most valuable of all gifts.
Sunil and his wife visited three times during the ten days I was kept in the hospital. Without that repeated signal of caring, I feel sure my inner turmoil would have resulted in some drastic explosion. As it is, I distinctly remember growling at another inmate one afternoon (as I had at the policeman) and pushing him provocatively, even though he had done me no harm. Only the remembrance of a connecting thread with the outside, and the steadying hope that this surreal existence would end at some point, prevented me from boiling over altogether.
My only other link to that larger drama going on outsideâthe geopolitical one that triggered my mental collapseâwas via the media. Seeing those newspapers with their HUMAN SHIELDS banners had piqued my journalistic curiosity.
As mentioned, the TV volume was down low but no attempt was made to keep the daily newscast from us. At one point I was sure the Iraqis had invaded Bahrain and taken over the television studio because the evening prayers, which came on just before the 7 pm bulletin, were chanted against the backdrop of a Shia mosque in Baghdad.
And so the days passed, without any hint how long the doctors would keep me there. No one suggested my parents or other relatives back home had been notified: the shiver of humiliation that ran down my spine at the very thought made me hope against hope that they hadn't. (They hadn't.)
It must have been a week into my stay that Matron called me into her office and told me I wouldn't be going back to the paper (I suppressed a wry smile) but that the paper had agreed to pay for my air ticket out of the country. The term âshipped home' sprang to my beleaguered mind. Then I realised that, the Gulf being on the EnglandâAustralia flight path, I could choose either destination.
The chance to âright myself' and pick up the threads of my lifeâ composed for the previous six years of one part journalism, one part what a perceptive friend once called being an âinternational vagrant'â appealed strongly.
That argued for a flight to England, where nearly five months ago I had clearly made a wrong turning. Adding more weight to that side of the scales, the prospect of going home the way I felt appalled me.