A Town Unlike Alice
DIALOGUE ONE
Alice: “Bad girl, rude girl ripped off her tape – they'd already lost patience with her embarrassing behaviour – and shouted to demand attention. What a horrid personal person, accusing them collectively of abusing her and being unkind to her, in her red faced glasses wearing way. Why am I embarrassing, why am I seen as being personal, when what I accuse them of is making me Other because I'm mad and showing up an ill of our culture?
Cathy: “You mean that headline? You see that and the names you cited as systematic abuse?
Alice: “That fucking headline, those fucking insults!”
Alice's face is working, she is beside herself, her voice and her swearing are loud in the empty, moss stained, patched and mended asphalt pavement space.
Cathy: “Keep your voice down, people are sleeping in those houses.”
Alice's whole body jerks, she turns angry eyes on Cathy and Cathy realises the reproach was a blunder. Don't get loud despite injustice, she might as well have said. Cathy pushes her specs up the bridge of her nose and continues:
Cathy: “Sorry, sorry, I've put my size ten foot in it! Er... what was your diagnosis, if you don't mind me being nosy and asking?”
Alice: “Schizophrenia.”
The word plummets into the pool of sodium lit darkness, shock waves crash and rebound from the sleeping house fronts because “Schizophrenia” has been announced. For a second one hundred stupid myths chase through Cathy's brain, she thinks to herself that she is alone and unprotected in an empty street with a very angry schizophrenic, even though she is only a few steps away from people she knows in the warm, well lit safety of the pub. To gain time she pulls out a battered packet of Stuyvesant and offers it, they both light up. Alice looks hungrily and expectantly at Cathy, Cathy's response has been delayed too long, she pulls herself together, draws on her cigarette for inspiration.
Cathy: “I don't know what to say. All I know about schizophrenia is what I've read or heard people say, it's not much and it's not pleasant.”
Alice: “It is Godforsakenness, utter Godforsaken misery and for that I suffer abuse, I can't pick up a newspaper or overhear a conversation without encountering unthinking abuse of the mad, or my diagnosis used as a term of abuse and usually incorrectly. It's endemic to our culture. Bolt and Frog and Herrick can't see that, can't see it's just as bad as saying Nigger or other racist abuse, if not worse, mad people are too ill to be able to stick up for themselves and they're mocked and derided for being ill.”
Cathy: “Look, you know these people better than I do, I've only just moved into this ward. Can't you sit down calmly and explain?
Alice: “I've tried, I've spoken and been looked at as if I was speaking Greek. They can't understand what I'm saying, their prejudices are too deeply rooted, they have no context into which they can put my personal account of the experience of abuse, it isn't fashionable and politicians use the abuse as much as the man in the street does. They just want the red faced hysteric to shut up and bin her incomprehensible complaints so they can get on with the real business of politics, the red faced hysteric's contribution isn't real to them so she gets left out of their policies as well as their conversation, her burning concerns don't exist for them. Alice is personal, which effectively bars Alice out of their meetings and intialese and debates on party policy.”
Cathy stubs out her cigarette, her dark blue eyes are considering, but she has listened with a generosity that is her leading characteristic.
Cathy: “I never thought of it like that before, I'm sorry I've been so slow!”
Alice: “ You know Claybury hospital is closing? That hospital has been my sanctuary from a society that showers the sick with abuse, what will happen if I crack up again? It has beautiful grounds, anemone filled woods where charms of goldfinches fly – I've watched them! I climbed trees to pick apples when I was in there, there's a lost orchard in the woods, my friend and I kept our ward in fresh apples and even the most withdrawn of patients couldn't resist a fresh apple. But people like Frog and Herrick deplore Claybury as an institution, without so much as asking anyone who has been in there they want to take away warmth, food and shelter, sanctuary and medical attention, and turn the very sick out onto the streets.”
Cathy: “I can see the point of not locking people away and forgetting all about them, I've seen enough of that at St. Margaret's.”
Alice: “Where's that?”
Cathy: “Quite a way out in Epping, it's a hospital for the mentally and physically handicapped, I'm an Art Therapist there. We've had cuts and sent people home when they can't cope, it's disgusting.”
Alice: “Yes, and which of these so earnest on the side of right reformers will take personal responsibility for a mad person, for any of the human garbage I know or you work with?”
Cathy: “Alice, don't confuse the public and the private! People like Lemon Pip opr Frog aren't there to care personally but to see that care is provided. Someone has to work for socialism, others must do the nursing or Art therapy.”
Alice: “In other words put up and shut up, tape mouths and never mind abuse being acceptable, it's called Care in the Community. Mrs Thatcher has said there's no community and that mob don't care.
Cathy: “Good Heavens no! No, I was trying to explain... “
Alice: “No Cathy, you don't get it. The Heavens aren't good.”