32
32
I T MIGHT BE A new start but it certainly isn’t a fresh one. At least, your dad doesn’t seem fresh. Instead, with his unwashed clothes, stubbly beard, and bad breath, he seems decidedly stale.
Regardless, here he is in the car – driving you from Bobby’s house to somewhere as of yet unknown. A rambling old pop song is spilling out of the speakers. Listening to it makes you feel a little nauseated, like you’ll always be there, in this car, listening to this song that grows and grows but never ends. Your dad hasn’t told you where you’re going yet and – not wanting to disturb what you sense is a delicate peace – you haven’t asked.
But after half an hour of not speaking, you bite the bullet. ‘Dad, where are we going?’ you ask, looking straight ahead at the road.
For a second, you think he’s not going to answer. Then, past the roundabout and over a bridge, he lowers the volume of the radio.
‘Do you know what’s happened to your mum?’ he asks.
You hesitate. ‘Yeah,’ you say. ‘The police officer told me.’
‘What did he tell you?’
You think about what you want to say. ‘She said Mum got sick and then she went to the hospital. And that I had to go with Bobby for a while till you were ready to come and fetch me but that I could stay with Auntie or Cousin Paul.’
Your dad nods slowly. ‘And do you know why she’s in the hospital? What illness she’s got?’
Though your dad’s eyes are fixed on the road ahead, you shrug. ‘I assume she’s got like…’ You hesitate. ‘I assume she’s got, like, some sort of madness or something. And she’s in a hospital for mad people.’
‘Correct.’ Your dad indicates right, frowns at a bicyclist cycling in a wobbly way. ‘Though I think you’re supposed to say mentally ill rather than mad. Mad is a bit pejorative these days.’
‘What does pejorative mean?’
‘It means not nice.’
‘Oh, OK.’
Your dad pauses at a stop sign. Then, upon seeing that no one and nothing is approaching, and after checking both of his blind spots, he continues.
‘They don’t really put people in hospital for being mentally ill any more. It’s not very common. Back in the old days, they did it all the time. But there aren’t many psychiatric hospitals any more. They all sort of closed down in favour of something they like to call community-based treatment.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Community-based treatment?’
‘Yeah.’
‘In theory, it’s where people are treated at home.’
Your mind goes to a film you saw once. The film was set in a psychiatric hospital. You don’t know how accurate it was, but there was a lot of screaming and someone got stabbed. Also, the doctors were frightening and wore long white coats.
Merging onto the motorway, your dad then asks you if you know what job he does. ‘And do you know what my job is? Where I go every day? What I do for a living?’
You nod again. ‘Actuary,’ you say. ‘Risk and numbers and risk and businesses and risk.’
‘Use your words,’ your dad says to the road ahead of him, his voice monotone and expressionless. ‘You’re just saying one word at a time. C’mon, you’re a big girl now. You can do it. Speak in proper sentences.’
You wonder whether he is joking. You are a bit too big to be referred to as a big girl, and a bit too big to be told to speak in proper sentences. Also, as far as you’re concerned, you were using your words and every sentence is a sentence that happens one word at a time.
Your dad overtakes a van hogging the middle lane. He points at the van and, apparently talking to you, says: ‘That’s very dangerous driving there, it doesn’t look it but it is—’
You interrupt. ‘OK,’ you say, interrupting. ‘You’re an actuary. As far as I know, actuaries work with numbers a lot and their main job is assessing risk for companies and stuff. But I don’t know much more than that.’
Your dad stops cursing at the long-gone middle-lane hogger and nods.
‘Yes, actuaries assess risk. I assess risk. But we all assess risk, every day, in our own way. We look both ways before we cross the street, assess whether the car that’s approaching is going to hit us if we cross the road now. You sniff the milk before you pour it to figure out whether it’s going to give you a bad stomach or not. You know what I mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘And it’s usually a risk and reward thing. You can put your money here, you might lose it all but you might win big. If you cross the road now, you might get to your destination quicker but you also might die. If you go to this dodgy-looking eatery, you might sate your hunger but you might also get diarrhoea. And if you go to this cheap car garage…’
You sense your dad is rambling. You wonder if he is OK. You wonder if your dad is now also mentally unwell, wonder if he is feeling pejorative.
‘… if you speed on the motorway, you might have a quicker journey, but you might also get a ticket, which would be—’
‘I’m not—’ You were going to say, ‘I’m not really following’ but then you stop yourself. ‘OK, Dad, I get it.’
Your dad takes a deep breath. ‘What I mean is that, according to some know-it-all doctors, your mum should stay in the hospital for a while. The doctors have had her risk assessed, so to speak. And decided that she is high risk and decided that she needs to stay in hospital. And, in my opinion’ – he places his hand on his chest – ‘this is a false assessment.’
‘High risk of what?’
Your dad slaps the flat of his palm against the steering wheel. ‘Well, exactly. It’s unclear what they mean. High risk of doing what to who, when? They won’t explain their working. There seems to be no process. To be honest, I doubt they even have a clue what they’re doing.’
‘OK. Can you not just… can she not just… she can’t just—’
‘She can’t just leave, no. It’s locked.’
‘Locked.’
‘Yeah, it’s a locked ward.’
‘Locked,’ you repeat again.
‘So patients stay in. They have to, legally speaking.’
‘So it’s like a prison?’
‘Maybe. Anyway.’ Your dad clears his throat. ‘We’re going there now.’
‘To visit her in the prison?’
‘In the hospital, yes.’
‘But if we go in, won’t we be stuck there?’
‘No, we’ll just be visitors.’
‘OK. That’s nice, I guess.’
‘It’s nice. But it’d be nicer if we got her out of there.’
You do a pause.
‘Is that what we are doing now?’ you ask, eventually.
‘Yes.’
‘Right.’
You do another pause.
‘How?’
‘Maybe if we took her on a walk. And then we just didn’t take her back.’
‘Is that allowed?’
‘Of course not.’
The roads are all thoroughly unfamiliar now. You have been in this car for well over an hour. You don’t know what village or town or city you are in. You couldn’t even begin to place where you are on the map.
Then your dad turns a corner and, without warning, you are presented with the sea. You like seeing the sea. You haven’t seen it in ages. It’s all choppy – its grey the same grey as the sky and the roads and the fields and the hills. You wonder how cold the water would be. You wonder how it would feel to walk into the water up to your waist, let the waves crash down over you or else jump over them again and again.
‘Dad,’ you say.
‘Yes?’ Dad says.
You think of what you want to say. You think of telling him about the word ‘sea’, about how, in Latin, it’s not ‘sea’ but instead ‘mare’. You think of saying that ‘mare’ and ‘sea’ aren’t related words, or at least not very related words. You think of saying that no one spoke the Latin we think of as Latin, that this Latin was an only-written and therefore artificial language, that the Romans spoke something called Vulgar Latin, which was much simpler. You think of saying that lots of English actually came from a dead Germanic language called Proto-Germanic, whose word for ‘sea’ was ‘saiwa’. You think of saying all these things simply because you know them. You think of adding that you think it’s fun that words change over time. Fun that, somewhere down the line, ‘saiwa’ turned into ‘sea’, just like seeds turn into trees, just like babies turn into people, just like mad people turn into mentally ill people.
‘What?’ your dad prompts again.
‘Sometimes I feel like I’m from a different planet,’ you say.
Your dad looks straight ahead. His face is impassive, his hands are at ten o’clock and two o’clock. ‘Sometimes?’ he says.
‘All the time,’ you say.
Your dad checks the rear-view mirrors before indicating and then turning left. When he slows to a stop, he checks his blind spots one last time before turning the engine off and unbuckling his seat belt.
‘Welcome to the club.’
Further reading:
The Art of Etymology (Or Where Words Come From)