The World Out There - 19. Nineteen

The first time he saw Nurton Cross was when he was taken out of the prison van, the day he arrived. The place looked like an office building from some out-of-town commercial development, it certainly didn’t look like what it was. That realisation was not reassuring though.

The prison van had arrived at Rokeby House that afternoon to collect him. He’d spent the morning carefully packing the few belongings he had into two holdall type bags. One was the bag his mother had brought him clothes in when he was first taken there; the other one was an old bag Shanice found for him. He didn’t have many possessions - mainly his school workbooks and notepads, the few clothes his mother brought him and the suit Mark Hiller gave him. He took especial care as he packed his suit away - no one had ever given him clothing as expensive as that suit must have been, though when would he ever wear it again? It wasn’t too difficult, in the end, and he got all his belongings packed away.

With his bags, he sat himself down on the bench in Rokeby House’s hallway as soon as he’d finished his lunch - the little he had eaten because his appetite disappeared as soon as he’d got up that morning. Shanice was sat in the home’s office, opposite to where he was sat, and she left the door open to obviously keep watch on him. Did she think he was going to run away? Where would he go?

What was going to happen to him? He wasn’t going to prison; rather, they were sending him to a Special Hospital. He guessed it was like a Psychiatric Hospital, and he knew what one of them looked like. He’d seen enough of them on television, on the police dramas his mother loved to watch, though she didn’t enjoy them as much as the reality TV shows she “had” to watch. On television, they were always shown to be full of disturbed and mad people. Was he one of them? Would he know if he was? His mother always used to go on about how things were always making her depressed. Kids at his old school had always called him weird and strange, and some even calling him mad. Where they right? He hugged his bag of clothes close to his chest as he sat there. There was nothing he could do about anything now, and that was all his own fault.

“Your transport’s here,” Shanice called out as she walked out of the office.

Quietly he followed her out of the home’s front door.

Again the prison van was parked haphazardly on the gravel driveway. As always, the blue uniformed guard in the van had stepped out of the back of it, but that time it was a woman, though she was as heavy-set and sour-faced as the other male guards he’d met.

“Is this him?” the woman guard asked Shanice.

“Yes, this is Liam Andrews,” Shanice replied.

“Get in the back,” the guard told Liam.

“Good luck,” Shanice called out to him. He gave her a quick wave as he stepped into the prison van. He didn’t know what else to say to her. He only really knew her name and she had barely spoken to him while he’d been there.

He was again locked into one of the small metal cells in the van for the journey just him and his two bags of possessions. Yet, in that small metal cell, his two bags suddenly seemed to fill the space that was there. He made sure that he kept the bags between him and the little cell’s blacked out window. He didn’t want his foot touching that grill in the corner of the cell. He knew then what it was for, for prisoners to urinate down, and it turned his stomach. He’d never use it anyway: the idea turned his stomach even more. Using it risked getting urine on his trousers, especially if the van made one of its usual sudden lurches to one side or the other. Soiling his own trousers was disgusting. Or even worse, he could be pissing down that grill and the guard could open his cell’s door behind him. That was even worse, the humiliation was too much to think about. He would hold his bladder as most of the journeys he’d made before in that prison van had been short. He hunched down on the hard and uncomfortable bench there.

The first time the van had stopped, he’d expected it was his stop, but it hadn’t been. He’d heard the prison guard unlocking another cell door and bark, “Get out! This is your stop.” He’d heard the noise of someone else leaving the van, as he slumped back onto his seat.

The second time the van stopped, he still perked up, expecting that this would be his stop, but again it wasn’t. By the time the van stopped for its fifth time and still the guard didn’t open his cell door, he’d felt disappointment washing over him. How far away was this place? Why was it taking so long to reach there? He wasn’t excited to go there, but sitting in that prison van felt like he was in limbo, just waiting for him to arrive somewhere … anywhere. He pressed his face into the bag containing his clothes, the soft and comfortable bag next to him, and closed his eyes.

The van drove for a long time between the fifth and sixth stop. It seemed to be driving on a straight and smooth road - there was little lurching and sharp turning to it. The gentle rocking of the van, during this time, made his eyelids become heavy, causing his eyes to close moment after moment, but each time he’d forced his eyes open - he didn’t want to be caught asleep by that guard. The van did throw him awake when it seemed to turn off that smooth road. Suddenly, it was driving slowly and seeming to navigate a road that caused it to turn from left to right and then back again, and again.

Finally the van stopped, but Liam didn’t move. Was this even his stop? He jumped with surprise when the guard banged on his door and then opened it.

“Get out! This is your stop,” she said as she filled the small doorway.

He followed her out of the van, as he knew he was expected to. As he stepped out of it, he’d looked up at the building before him, the one the van was parked in front of.

He’d been expecting a tall and imposing Victorian hospital, the type where people were locked away inside and never came out of. Instead, he was faced with a brown-bricked building, with dark brown wooden windows and a shallow sloping roof of grey tiles. It looked far more like a nondescript office building than like any form of hospital. He did notice, in the few steps it took him to reach the entrance there, that the building was ringed with tall and very green fir trees. These trees seemed to screen away the view of the surrounding area. Were they in the countryside, in suburbia or somewhere so isolated? He couldn’t see.

The woman guard took him into the building and straight into a reception area. The room felt warmer than the air outside, from the handful of steps he’d taken out there, but that was all that felt warm about it. The room felt so unwelcoming. The floor was covered in a dark grey lino while the walls were painted a dull green. The only furniture there was a wide counter and a long oblong table next to it. Both were made from Formica-cover woodwork and dull metal legs with a handful of dull red plastic chairs pushed to the edge of the room. The Formica had a wood-like effect, a pattern of browns and creams that was supposed to resemble the grain of polished wood, but it was fooling no one. The only decoration to those walls were three, very solid looking doors leading off it. The room was lit with two florescent lights, so bright that they chased away any shadows. The last thing he noticed was the room’s smell, or lack of it. It smelt clean and clinical, with an edge of something chemical in it, but there were no lingering smells of food or people or dirt.

Under its bright lights he could see how clean it was - no dust on any surface and the floor almost unnaturally free of dirt and stains, but that only added to the cold feeling in there. He pushed himself to walk in the woman guard’s shadow, almost trying to hide behind her. He didn’t feel welcome here and wanted to hide away, as he always did, but there wasn’t anywhere to hide.

The woman behind the Formica counter looked up at him, putting aside whatever she had been reading. She had spiky blonde hair crowning her small and neatly featured face and was wearing a pale blue loose-fitting top. Behind her stood a solidly built black man, his hair cut into a neat crew-cut and his face as solidly featured as his body, wearing a bored expression. He wore a black sweatshirt and black jeans, neither of which showed any sign of wear.

“I’ve got Liam Johnny Andrews for you,” the woman guard told the woman behind the counter.

“We’ll take him from here,” the woman behind the counter replied in a heavy Scottish accent.

“You’re welcome to him,” the woman guard said before turning around and stomping her way out of there, not looking back once.

The woman behind the counter stood up as she said, “I’m Bridget. I’m a nurse here and I need to admit you. Warwick here is one of our Health Care Assistants and he’ll be helping me,” she referred to the solidly built man standing behind her, who just nodded his head in agreement.

“Being admitted” seemed to involve a lot of paperwork and Bridget asking him a lot of questions. He didn’t know the answers to many of them, but this didn’t seem to annoy Bridget. She simply scribbled on her clipboard and moved onto the next question. She wasn’t openly scornful of him, the way so many of the prison guards had been, but neither was she welcoming towards him. Her manner was that of a shop cashier, taking his money but not being friendly towards him.

Bridget and Warwick next searched through both his bags. They both put on bright purple examination gloves, then put his bags onto the long table and started to unpack them. Liam stood to one side and watched them do it. They took one item at a time out of his bags, carefully unfolded it, searching the pockets and feeling along all the seams, if it was a book then they seemed to check every page of it. When Bridget pulled a pair of his underpants out of his bag Liam felt a stab of embarrassment, especially as they were a tatty old pair with two holes in the front of them.

Once they were finished, they repacked his bags, though nowhere as neatly as he had done.

Then Warwick had searched him, physically frisked him down. The man’s hands had patted down his body, searching the full length of him, patting him and feeling the contours of his body. It felt strange and awkward. The man’s hands had been so strong and firm on his body. He’d never had another man touching him so closely before but there was no affection in Warwick’s touch. It might have been nicer, even enjoyable, if there was some affection there but Warwick was firm and business-like.

When Warwick had finished, he just stood back from Liam as Bridget said, “Right, little man, let’s get you to your ward. You’re going to be on South Ward.”

Liam nodded his head in agreement and picked up his now over-stuffed bags off the table and followed behind Bridget, as Warwick followed behind them. It was easy to tell what they wanted him to do, and he just followed along with them. Was there any point in doing anything else?

The walk to the ward wasn’t simply along one corridor that seemed to stretch along one side of the building - it should have been because it wasn’t far - but all the locked doors they had to pass through slowed them right down. Each locked door they came to Bridget would open it with a heavy bunch of keys attached to a thick leather belt she wore around the top of her jeans by an equally thick metal chain. Once they were through the door, she would lock it behind them with a key from that same bunch. Was this to be his life, waiting for someone in-charge to unlock the door in front of him?

It was obvious when they reached his ward because they stopped in front of a set of heavy, metal and wood double doors, with a blue sign on the wall above them that announced that it was South Ward. Bridget didn’t open these doors with one of her keys. Instead, she pressed the button on the electronic intercom to the right of the doors. The intercom let out an electronic buzz before a muffled voice spoke out from it, too muffled for him to hear. Bridget then leant into it and loudly said, “It’s Bridget MacLean. I’ve got your new admission, Liam Andrews.”

In reply there was another electronic buzz, though lower in tone and coming from the doors themselves, before the right-hand one opened about forty-five degrees. Bridget pushed her way through it and Liam followed behind her, as he had done on the short walk there.

Inside those doors he found himself in a long and very clinical corridor. It had the same cold and clean smell, with an undertone of something sharp and acidic, as the rest of this place did. There was pale grey lino on the floor, the walls all painted an off-white and so many doors opening off it - solid, thick doors that were flushed to their frames, with a smooth metal lip covering the gap between them and the door frames, not like any doors he had seen before. Staring down this corridor, he felt so lost. This place was so different and alien to him.

One of the doors, two down from the entrance, opened and a woman stepped out. As she locked it behind herself, Liam took a moment to look at her. She was short, probably not much taller than him, with a plump figure under her neat clothes. Her black hair was cut into a neat bob that hung down at either side of her face in two very asymmetrical curtains, a face that’s simple features that were pulled together in a serious expression. Her body was covered in a pale green blouse hanging over neat black trousers. She had an official/manager air about her: there certainly did not appear to be anything medical about her. He would have thought she was a manager or bureaucrat except she wore the same heavy leather belt, threaded through the top of her trousers, with the same chain of keys attached to it as Bridget also wore.

The woman turned towards them and said, “Thanks, Bridget. I can take it from here.”

“Okay there,” Bridget said, as she retreated back throw the ward’s main doors.

“I’m Janet, South Ward’s Charge Nurse,” the woman, Janet, said to him.

“You’re a nurse?” Liam asked, unable to hide the surprise from his voice.

“We don’t wear nurses’ unforms here,” Janet told him.

“Oh, right,” he said. If she didn’t wear a nurse’s uniform, then what kind of nurse was she? But he stayed silent, not asking that question.

“Room 9 will be your room. Come on and I’ll take you to it,” Janet said.

Liam nodded and followed along behind her: it was his sole response that day just to follow behind others.

Room 9 was at the very far end of the corridor, its door firmly locked. Janet quickly opened it with one of the keys attached to her belt, and then held the door open for him.

Liam stepped through the open-door as Janet said, “I’ve got to lock you in here for a little while. All the doors are kept locked on the ward. We’re in the middle of a meeting at the moment. Your nurse will be with you shortly.”

“Okay,” Liam replied as he really didn’t know what else to say.

She closed and locked the door behind him. The door didn’t make a loud and resounding clang the way prison doors always did on the television. Instead, it made a quiet ‘whooshing’ noise, as if the door was pushing some of the air out of its own frame. The lock made a small metallic click as it closed, certainly not a loud clang.

Liam looked at the room in front of him. It was far bigger than the prison cell he had been expecting. The room was a big single room, but certainly bigger than his room at home had been. It was dully decorated: pale grey lino on the floor while the walls were painted a blue-grey colour, a similar colour to his school’s minibus - his old school, because he won’t be going back to there again. The furniture there was all solid and heavy looking, and after a quick glance at them, he saw that they were all firmly screwed down to the floor or the wall, all except a pale wooden chair sat under the window.

Along one wall was the single bed which was made from solid and dark wood. It consisted of a deep and solid base standing on an equally solid dark wooden plinth that lifted it up off the floor. On top of it was a plain mattress and two pillows, all of which were covered in a dull plastic. Filling half of the opposite wall at waist height was a deep and solid shelf, matching the style of the bed. For a moment, he couldn’t see why there would be such a large and deep shelf there, and the realisation came like a light bulb being turned on. It was a table, the room’s only table. Next to it was a wardrobe made from equally solid wood, but with no doors to it: it was an open carcass with its shelves and clothes rail clearly on display. Next to the wardrobe, almost pushed into the corner of the room, was a shiny metal toilet, that was screened-off from the rest of the room by three, solid wooden walls, though it had no door, simply opening onto the room. Using a toilet in his own bedroom, no, no, no. But did that also mean he would be locked in there hours on end? He turned his back on the toilet, he could just ignore it.

Opposite him, at the far end of the room was its window. It wasn’t a big, picture window but it did offer him a view, of a courtyard outside of it. The view was obscured by dark metal bars that ran horizontally from top to bottom outside of the window’s glass.

Most of all, the room was clean, no dust collecting in the corners anywhere, no dirt left clinging to a surface. His old bedroom had always been dusty, always in need of a clean. Housework was never a priority to his mother - she never nagged him about cleaning up his room, so he didn’t. This room felt almost naturally clean, as if no one had ever been in here before him.

Liam slowly walked over to the bed, dropped his bags down onto it and then sat himself down next to them. The mattress wasn’t as hard as it looked, it yielded to his body as he sat on it. This room wasn’t bad: it was bigger than the one he’d had at home, certainly cleaner, but this was going to be his home forever. This was going to be his life from now on and… This was all his own fault. He was here because of his own stupid actions. He stared down at his shoes, his black trainers which were dirty and scuffed, the only thing that in this room that was.