Betty

INTROUCING BETTY BUT NOT A CHANGE OF SUBJECT

Cathy is sitting on the hearthrug at her mother-in-law's house, beside a rich coal fire. Her mother-in-law, Betty, sits more conventionally in her favourite armchair and knits, each careful knot of white wool adds to the openwork of a baby's shawl. The peace depends on the bubbling licks, settlings and flarings of the fire, and on the regular clicks of Betty's knitting needles, the rasp as Cathy turns another page, it is a peace of unity and they have achieved it together. Cathy is reading a book from the library which contains a section on schizophrenia. It has informed her that dopamine is a chemical messenger found in the brain and that a too great flux of dopamine, or too many dopamine receptors, is thought to cause the hallucinations and confusion of schizophrenia. The book has described the classic age of onset in men, but not in women, which annoys Cathy because she happens to know the classic age of onset in women is usually ten years later than in men, twenty-nine to their nineteen, that is neither mentioned nor explained. The book uses technical terms like “diminution of affect” but without explanation, and, not being medically trained, Cathy hasn't a clue what the book is trying to tell her so technically.

Something Alice once said comes into Cathy's head: “Books present my illness s a meaningless and arbitrary accident. My illness blights my life, it could indirectly kill me, it doesn't seem to make sense.” Cathy's book describes schizophrenia from the outside, humanity and human similarities with the so called normal are entirely left out. How can one begin to understand what the illness feels like when it is presented as a set of meaningless aberrations? Cathy knows Alice finds medical attention frightening, no wonder! The sort of book Cathy's reading isn't any bloody help at all because it frightens her without giving her any insight or useful information. Cathy lays it down on the hearthrug, pushed her specs up the bridge of her nose and turns to an article in New Scientist which Derek, her partner, had recommended her to read.

The article is about a genetic explanation of schizophrenia, it reads with clarity and is a good bit of reportage. It suggests that the gene for schizophrenia is linked with the gene for language and that is why it has never been bred out in human evolution, and also why the incidence per head of population is the same throughout the world, whatever the race or culture. Schizophrenia is linked with what makes people unique as a species, the capacity for language. It is the price we pay as a species for the incredible gift of finding grammar and sense in language and which permits such richness and variety in our various means of communicating our humanity to each other. That puts the finger right on the spot of Cathy's feelings for Alice as another human being in her own right and with human feelings. If she looked at Alice and saw a meaningless set of aberrations she would be gawping at a weirdo's deformities, not seeing an unhappy person. It would be sick fascination with the aberrant, that way of looking that makes us shudder and promptly look away again. What help is that to people like Alice? But Alice paying the price for what allows us to communicate the essence of our beings, ennobles her and excites not sick fascination but the deepest feelings of compassion.

Cathy has noticed how Alice never directly says what the matter is, she is always oblique and gets into horrorstricken muddles like her confusion of herself as Guy Fawkes on Bonfire night. Alice has neither the mastery nor over view to be able to hold a calm conversation about it, to step outside herself and describe what's going on. But if people look at her only to see weirdness and deformity, Alice is naturally inhibited, she's allowed no common ground as a basis for mutual understanding. How must that feel, being choked with horrors no-one will admit or compassionate? Suddenly Cathy thinks of the horrible experience of being dumped by a lover, thinks of how she's felt before she'd gained an over view, how she's wanted to go over it and over it to try to understand and make it come right, get back onto the familiar loving footing. Cathy remembers how that feels, how urgently you want to talk and how all talk is redundant until you can use the word betrayal. Suppose you were denied the use of that word because using it made you a weirdo?. Cathy's heart turns over with horror at such a predicament, and Alice, Alice is seen as a weirdo all the time! How unspeakable, her tongue is pierced and stopped, her agony is incommunicable!

Cathy sucks in a sharp breath, looks up and finds Betty's eyes on her, query in them. Cathy says: “Sorry. Suppose you were dreadfully unhappy and frightened, and people made it impossible for you to explain, then used you as a target for dehumanising abuse? I've just seen – felt – how this is for someone I regard as a friend.” Cathy launches into an explanation of Alice, and Betty has stopped knitting and is listening with her full attention. When Cathy sputters to an impetuous halt, Betty observes that she's always pitied the mentally ill and that life is cruel for them. Life can be very cruel, says Betty, shaking out the shawl she's knitting, and she recounts the kidney failure and near death of the infant for whom she's knitting it. Betty says she's going to finish it and she's living in hope the child will live to wear it. Cathy is rapt, Betty is completely on her wavelength and Betty's hopefulness for the future, in the teeth of gloomy outlooks reassures the volatile Cathy and calms and strengthens her. Calmly, Betty resumes her knitting and Cathy lights a cigarette and stares into the dancing caverns of the fire.

Cathy has never noticed any impairment of Alice's acute intelligence, Alice shines a clear white light on the implications of the meaningless and arbitrary accident theory, and can see herself dying in despair of God and humankind, taking her history of illness and enforced silence about her suffering with her into oblivion. Suddenly Cathy feels terribly unhappy and a tear rolls down her nose. She sniffs and hurls her cigarette end into the fire. Betty quietly asks how she, Cathy, is keeping and whether her work as an art therapist is putting her under too much strain, that and her new friend? Comforted, Cathy answers abstractedly, and her tears dry in the warmth that glows from the fire. She smiles a quick grateful smile at Betty, whose shrewd eyes hold Cathy's for a moment, then return to her knitting.

Cathy glances at her book and her open copy of New Scientist. A thought about that book pops into her head, it presents schizophrenia as dysfunction, as a deviation, but how many people does Cathy know who function properly? What about the abrasive personalities at work that annoy other people, the people with problems with their children or partners, the ones who forget important guidelines at work, or simply don't notice the importance of the human beings under their noses? What right, thinks Cathy, angrily tearing her empty cigarette packet into strips have we to assume we can expect perfect health and a trouble free life, and that death will never apply to us? It would be kinder if we helped each other out and tried to understand, rather than slamming the door in Alice's face by labelling her dysfunctional and schizophrenic. “Love thy neighbour as thyself” thinks Cathy, who attended a Church of England primary school. Where does that bit come in? Oh yes, Jesus said it and the disciples asked who is my neighbour – must have been thinking of the nasty people next door, thinks Cathy with a mental grin – and Jesus told them the parable of the Good Samaritan. Cathy is taken aback by herself, then with characteristic honesty admits it may be religious but it's exactly what she's been thinking all evening!

Cathy looks up and tells Betty that saying dysfunctional limits rather than increases understanding. Betty starts to reminisce about the geriatric patients she nursed, and says they are all human beings with feelings however ill or disabled. She is very serious and even angry about some of the lives and deaths she's witnessed, the emphatic, thoughtful tales pour out of her, her knitting remaining forgotten and bunched up on her lap. “Well it comes to us all” Betty sums up: “It makes me laugh the way politicians treat nurses, and ultimately it's those same nurses they'll depend on”. A bred in the bone socialism gleams in Betty's eyes, she shakes out the shawl again and that reminds her of the dangerous illness of the baby for whom it is intended. “It's sad, mind, when they die so young.” she observes, but Cathy can see it is a death Betty will take in her stride, she won't collapse or despair however unhappy it makes her, and in the meantime she'll hope the baby lives.

Suddenly something clicks in Cathy's mind, excitably she tears a new cigarette packet open and lights up – Betty has talked the whole time as if Alice was just another person! To Betty, Alice is another woman, it is as a woman and friend of Cathy's that Betty speaks of her. This calm, kindly assumption strikes Cathy with the force of a religious revelation. She catches herself thinking this and realises simultaneously the truth of religious faith, it is faith that keeps Betty knitting a shawl for a dying baby, faith that keeps her from despair despite her full knowledge of how seriously ill the baby is. It is faith that, here and now in the hot red firelight, creates the peace that is so restful to Cathy, faith strong enough to lift the weight from her shoulders and yet to cause Betty to sit and knit so quietly. Cathy thinks of Alice and Guy Fawkes, it is as if Alice has lost faith in goodness, and has no faith in anyone ever showing her kindness. Alice's despair adds to her unhappy thoughts and there is no light of joy in her darkness, she is in effect Godforsaken. Cathy thinks, yes, if you put in in these terms Alice's illness could be seen as a spiritual crisis, and if Alice has lost faith, it is other people's attitudes that are the cause. It doesn't mean I'm religious though, thinks Cathy defensively. She stops, struck by what a ridiculous way of putting it that is, just to save face!

Goodness and gladness are tangible in Betty's room, the heat of the fire rises from the faith it took to light it, as that heat strikes the side of Cathy's face she feels its goodness. The faith it takes to knit that shawl is gladness made tangible, knot after white knot even if the baby dies. Hesitantly, Cathy tries to explain to Betty, only to discover that Betty is there before her, to Betty it is crystal clear. . But not,” her socialist and Dissenting ancestors looking through her eyes, “Not in any church. No indeed. No-one tells me what's right or wrong, what I should or shouldn't do. I can think for myself.” Cathy laughs, this is characteristic Betty, and Betty smiles then gives her a quick look: “Mind, I wouldn't force people to agree with me. You'll make up your own mind, do it your own way, do it yourself.” She calmly carries on knitting, smiles a little and adds: “There's ham in the fridge, and salad in the salad bowl. You help yourself, I'm off out soon, It's Bingo tonight.”