The Mad & the Bad by George Birks

Author:George Birks [Birks, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781491897706
Publisher: Xlibris
Published: 2014-03-13T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

Jock got clobbered across the shoulder blades by a patient wielding a mahogany table, so he would be off sick for months. I heard Frank on the phone. ‘We need feet on the ground,’ he said grimly, as if we were about to confront the Tet Offensive. Military teamwork kept us together, military discipline stopped us getting injured or murdered, and military barking-of-orders at the patients got us through the day.

We students all knew better, of course. Kindness helps people in pain; brute force does not. We had been taught to respect patients’ opinions. To use sweet reason. In the classroom, sweet reason made sense. Faced with a psychotic individual, it didn’t. Sweet reason flashed across your mind before you jabbed the needle in. It was an option; it might work, but you wouldn’t want to test it.

So there was a sharp intake of breath when we demanded an extra student nurse and Gladys, a five-foot Indian girl, turned up from Verbena. Verbena didn’t entirely prepare you for S1, especially not now. We’d got a newcomer: a British vice president of a multinational oil company, flown in from Algeria where, short of booze, he had discovered high-grade Moroccan kif. Broken windows at an embassy party made the company lose patience and check their insurance policy.

He was med-evacced to Heathrow and driven to a private clinic in Knightsbridge, where they raised an eyebrow, shuddered, wrapped him in a padded jacket, and despatched him in their discreet blue and gold ambulance to S1 at Swanning. I had to fill in his admission forms.

The padded jacket had gone back in the ambulance. He wouldn’t sit down; kept prowling around. I took down the details. We were in a glass-walled office that ran across the corner of the ward. He hadn’t a clue where he was, but he sure as hell knew he didn’t like it. He stared through the glass at the other patients—the ones who were sane enough to be allowed out of their rooms, that is.

‘Fuck, fuck, fuck,’ he said.

He opened and slammed every drawer of a tall filing cabinet, in turn. BANGGG. Heavy files swung and crashed against metal. BANGGG. As I clipped the clinic’s referral sheet onto his paperwork, thinking, Low boredom threshold, he swung around to my side of the desk, slightly behind me. I looked back in time to see two large pale hands descending, and I ducked. Strangulation! I was too young to die.

Maybe he read the terror in my eyes. He whipped my arms behind my back, frog-marched me three steps to the filing cabinet, jerked out the empty middle drawer, pushed my head violently down, hoicked my ankles up towards the ceiling, and shoved the drawer shut. The whole manoeuvre took just a few seconds. My forehead rested on cold hard metal, and my shoulders and upper arms were trapped. I heard him roaring, and the tension was released; the drawer shot out. I tumbled backwards, banging my skull. The oil executive was gripping a small brown forearm, trying to get it off his neck.

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