Runwell Hospital doesn't have an A&E. It doesn't have an orthopaedic ward nor a diabetes centre. No ambulances as such.
It has padded cells and patients who either rage with a demented fury or others who sit staring into a vacant space remembering what ever it is that people with mental illness recollect.
Runwell Hospital is in Wickford, Essex. It has an austere and chilling facade with its pale blue and pastry cream painted walls. As though it should be in Brighton, or some other seaside resort full of ice cream parlours and children but instead is full of screaming patients and drug addled schizophrenics. A fraud of a facade. Make up on a corpses face.
By and large, the wards are like any hospital ward. Beds lined up, three or four to a ward, with small framed windows that capture the light and hold it in a distant haze. A gauzy mist of an untold fairytale.
Rochford Ward has three beds with three female patients.
Rose sits with her missing legs bandaged at the thigh. She stares out the window and mutters something incomprehensible. Words fall in jumble of litter. Sounds that she, and she alone, knows the meaning of. Her husband died having spent twenty years caring for his wife who was diagnosed with dementia at the age of fifty seven. Rose is now eighty two. She has spent the winter of her years in a timeless lane choc a bloc full of ancient memories of a time long past.
Helen, who lies in a bed diagonally opposite to Rose, has suffered from delusions all her life. Unless she is sedated, which she has been since puberty, she sees maggots seeping from people’s eyes and mouths and crawling ever towards her. She first had these delusions when she was fourteen. These visions terrify her as it would any sane person. Helen is no longer sane. Her dreams have driven her into that exclusive club of madness. She is now forty seven. Her parents, now in their late seventies, visit her every week. They no longer weep. They stopped weeping many years ago when their daughters mind killed the daughter they had loved. They visit now because.
Just because.
The third patient is one Eleanor Harrison.
Eleanor is sixty eight and first showed the signs of dementia five years ago. Since then she has slid into a silent world, much like Rose's where she chases her memories. By her side on the hospital provided cabinet sits a framed photograph of four people. Two adults and two children.
Eleanor sits and while she sits she rocks gently back and forth as though seeking the time when, as an infant her mother would rock her in her arms.
Today, Eleanor has a visitor.
"Hello Eleanor, How are you today?" A smart women dressed in a tailored suit enquires. Beside her stands a Doctor.
"She likes to be called Ellie and not Eleanor. Eleanor has bad memories apparently."
"Ellie? My name is Vicky, Vicky Hargreaves. I represent solicitors. Braithwaite and Bent. I have come to give you some news. Can you hear me Ellie?"
"She can hear you, or at least we think she can. She cannot speak though but we believe she can still hear what's being said. Try again."
"Ellie? You have inherited some money. That is good news isn't it? When your brother died he left you some money. Not a lot but enough for you to buy some small things. Ellie?"
Eleanor had started to rock more violently now. Back and forth but so hard that the chairs legs were lifting off of the floor and she was uttering a low, deep moan.
"Oh god, what did I say?"
"She didn't know that her brother had died. Perhaps that caused this outburst. If you'll let me pass I will give her something to calm her."
From a kidney bowl shaped dish he produced a plastic syringe. Eleanor's rocking was too violent for him to try and placate and so he simply stabbed the syringe through her floral dress and into her thigh.
"A sharp scratch Ellie and then you will feel fine again. Good girl."
Within moments her rocking ceased.
Water. Like a pool. Like the one in Romney. The one me and Stevie used to play in. Mum and Dad took us there. Want to go again. Me and Stevie. Want to go again. Go in the pool. Go in the pool. Not swim though. Just lay under and breath. Fill my lungs. In the pool.
"Does that often happen?"
"I have never seen her behave that way before. You fancy a quick coffee? I can give you a bit of back ground detail?"
"Yes, Ok. I will have to be quick though. I am just a junior partner at the practise and they expect me back this afternoon."
They walked the sterile floors and into a small kitchen area where he made the both coffee's his milky and sweet. Hers black without.
"My names Tom by the way. Been here about five years now. Crazy place to work huh? Why don't we take these outside?"
She smiled politely at his pun and followed him into the late summer sun.
"So then," she asked, "What do you know of Eleanor Harrison?"
"She and her Mum lived on Canvey Islands. Moved there in the 50's after her Mum had divorced her husband. He took the boy. When Ellie first came to us, about three, maybe four years ago, her Mum, who is dead now, brought her to us. She was still able to communicate but on a very limited scale. The photo she has on her cabinet is a family portrait taken back in the late 40's. Apparently the family had a small holiday home on Romney in Kent. She and her Mum, after the divorce moved into Essex. Oddly, so did her Dad with his new family but he never saw his daughter. Never visited. They split up when she was about fourteen. When they split she promised her younger brother that she would come back for him and look after him. She was little more than a child herself. She never did of course. Her brother lived somewhere in Kent."
"That is so sad. Family's eh?"
"Absolutely. What makes it even sadder though is this. Once every year she would see her brother drive past her home with his wife. He did this for a number of years and well into his adult life. Drove from his home in Kent just to look at the place where his sister lived."
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