Heavy Light by Horatio Clare

Author:Horatio Clare [Clare, Horatio]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473575561

CHAPTER 22

Day 10

As a voluntary patient you are not in hospital by choice so much as cooperating in your own detention, but it feels wonderful to me. If you want to go out you need first to clear it with the nurse in charge. You agree a return time. If for any reason the nurse thinks you should not go out, or if you are late back, you can be returned to section.

‘So you’ll be back at two and you’re going to town?’

‘I want to go to the Hepworth, yes.’

Everyone seems to know about the sculpture gallery but no one has had the time to go there.

I feel newly hatched-out, raw and tentative and obvious, as though everyone I pass knows I am on day release from the mental hospital. There are flights of pigeons in the park, magpies and jackdaws. The first snowdrops are out, nodding their pure white heads at the wind. The Spectator has been in touch, asking me to write four winter diaries for their blog. Offers have come for travel writing and I have said yes to all of them. If all goes well, I will be going to Kenya, where I hope to take Rebecca and our boy, to the coasts of Chile and Peru, and to the Maldives. A magazine wants me to review the opening of a refurbished hotel in Malton. A whole life is pouring into my diary and all I have to do is live it. To stay well enough to live it; to negotiate my treatment so that I do not end up taking pills which will stop me living it.

At the end of the lane is an Asian barber’s. Very little English is spoken here. Odd bundles of wire sprout out of the walls. Loud music plays out of an old stereo. Men converse in Urdu, and two barbers have a go at me, a young man first, unconfidently, then an older, less tentatively. They set me back on the road to the Hepworth slightly less mad-looking. I am deadly scared of running out of time, of being late back. I keep calculating and recalculating the hours and the minutes.

The Hepworth gallery squats over the riverbank, approached by a metal footbridge. Over a weir the river rushes in spate. A heron picks his way through winter wreckage, placing his splayed toes with infinite care, the wind wobbling his crest quills.

A wave of uncertainty hits me in the cafeteria. Everyone else seems so sure about themselves, so assertively sane and confident. The minute you feel you stand out you do, I tell myself. Stop it. Look at the river, the broken branches, the leaf litter, the bent crushed reeds, the bubbling light.

Up the stairs, in the first room, everything is suddenly better. Everything is much more than better. It is a high, wide room. The end wall, mostly window, floods it with brightness. On every other side are the pictures. It feels as though something that has been caught inside me for months is released, a held breath exhaled from a core that I had forgotten I had.

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