A Town Unlike Alice
JOURNEY'S END AT THE POST BOX
Later that dark, cold afternoon, Alice, resolute and desperate, pushes her sheaf of heavy brown envelopes into the black rectangular yawn of the postbox. Its mouldings are thick with red daub after red daub of outdoors suitable paint, the envelopes thud hollowly inside and there is no getting them back now. Her poems, three to an envelope and no duplicates as the Writer's Handbook said, will the day after tomorrow be exposed to the scrutiny of critical strangers. The air is cold and dry and quavering with early darkness, sheafs of daffodil leaves are growing in the rubble of neglected front gardens, their rounded ended buds nod bluntly. Buds on hawthorn hedges are red beads, the twigs and thorns a crazed wickerwork, there are catkins and black lanterns on the alder trees, the pollen from the catkins is an auburn powdering on the asphalt pavement. But this very early spring is very cold, Alice lets herself back into her house thankfully, switches on the lights and goes to draw the curtains. She has had enough of being outside and exposed in daylight, she wants to hide and dare not tempt fate by allowing herself any happy sense of achievement. Whatever will these editors think? What will they say when they return her work?
Alice looks at the pink folds of her drawn curtains, the warm and dusty room, and begins pacing up and down thinking of Cathy and how people treat her when they find out about her illness. Being a person in her own right is proving more difficult than she'd thought, but the words of a doctor in Claybury hospital come spontaneously into her head: we are problem solving animals, it's only when the problems get too much and we can't solve them or cope with them that we're ill. Cathy, comet blazing and brief as she's been in Alice's life, did provide high powered input and was high powered in her assessment of Alice's potential. That was above and beyond the life of chatting to your newsagent or butcher or the people in the pharmacy, and Alice has the Reader as proof. But there is the bitter disappointment of Cathy's change of heart and Alice is bewildered by the multiplicity of layers in this community that supposedly cares for her, who exactly is it who does the care thing? What is this entity called the “community”? Everywhere Alice meets individual people and is learning how to encounter and get to know them, and if they don't know about her illness they accept her smiles and slight agitation as just what she happens to be like as a person. It's the people who find out who are the problem, they react with terror and promptly cold shoulder Alice.
The media demonise sufferers from schizophrenia and use abusive language. Film makers and thriller writers sensationalise and misrepresent sufferers, generating myths quite happily and with no apparent check on their activity. These are intelligent people deliberately courting ignorance and purveying pernicious lies, imagine the outcry if they did this in the cause of racism! But because they persecute and misrepresent the very vulnerable, they can get away with it and laugh all the way to the bank, the general public seizes on these myths as Gospel truth and so react with terror when they meet Alice. When old friends from school or university find out they drop Alice, she's strange and not a nice person to know any more.
Wait and see what happens to my poems, thinks Alice, let's see if I can fit in somewhere in this bewildering darkness echoing with sensationalist lies. Alice shrugs off her thoughts and lights a cigarette, people hate smokers as well, may as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb! Alice has got a terrible amount of prejudice and injustice to deal with, tobacco is soothing and she needs calming down.