Hidden behind the walls of Grangegorman Mental Hospital in 1941, different lives collide, all afflicted by the human cost of wars, betrayals and trauma.
I stood with the English doctor and Dillon, as they stared out into the asylum yard through the door I opened for them.
"My drinking is none of your business," Dillon told him.
"My business is to make you well."
Dillon shook his head. "Insulin injections will make me well. Your job is to keep me safe."
"From whom?"
"Those who want me dead. You don't understand. You never lived through a Civil War."
"I saw my share of horror in France. Twice as many men died there on any given day than during your entire Civil War."
"The Great War was different. Your enemies weren’t friends whom you once thought you could trust." Dillon turned to me. "Close this door. You have us framed like sitting ducks for any sniper."
I bolted the door, intrigued by where this conversation might lead. The doctor addressed Dillon.
"If you’re not safe in here, where are you safe?"
"Nowhere. How do I know that a gunman didn’t get himself admitted as a patient, instructed to smuggle in a weapon and await his chance?"
"Yesterday I visited the attics here and saw what patients bring in and what they leave behind when they die," Doctor Fairfax said. "Handbags, crammed with rosary beads, Miraculous Medals, photos of children, letters beseeching families to visit. I’ve found every type of heartache when I looked through those handbags but never a gun. If you don’t believe me, come and look for yourself."
I’m not sure who was more surprised at this suggestion – myself or Dillon. I tried to avoided those attics. While I had grown immune to the overcrowded bedlam in the wards, those silent attics unnerved me. I saw how the thought also unnerved Dillon.
"Are you saying you’re mad enough to risk going up there with a certified lunatic?"
"I’m not mad," the doctor replied calmly. "Nor, I believe, are you." He turned to me. "Have you a key?"
I shook the keyring attached to my belt. "I’ve a key to everything except Betty Grable’s heart. It’s a bit of a climb, however."
"That shouldn’t be a problem." He turned to Dillon. "You’re a young man still and it won’t be the first time you climbed a flight of stairs."
This was an unfortunate choice of words or Fairfax was a sly bastard, I thought as I led them down a passageway to the backstairs. All of Dublin knew that on Bloody Sunday Dillon had guided two assassins up several flights of stairs in a lodging house in Pembroke Street. But I could not tell what memories were triggered for Dillon by our steep climb up the bare stairs. We reached a door, which I unlocked, and flickered the light switch. The attics were lit by two bare lightbulbs. Dust-laden shelves stretched in all directions, so that it resembled a vast library. But instead of books, the shelves contained rows of handbags, each containing the remnants of a life. The doctor ran his finger over a layer of dust on one handbag and asked Dillon to open it.
"I will not." Dillon seemed equally rattled by the gloom. "I’m no grave robber."
"You’re a trained intelligence officer," Fairfax replied. "Well versed in piecing clues together. So open it and tell me if its owner was mad."
Dillon opened the bag slowly and spread out its contents. Two sets of rosary beads; a tiny bottle that once contained cheap perfume and a faded photograph of three children the image so wrinkled from being constantly held in someone’s hand that it was hard to distinguish their features. There was an unfinished letter, beseeching someone to visit and, most poignantly of all, a door key. Fairfax watched Dillon lightly finger it.
"There’s always a door key, isn’t there, Gus?"
"I couldn’t rightly say," I replied. "We take people’s personal possessions when they are admitted and promise to return everything when they’re discharged. It would be heartless to suggest they bin their front door key because they’ll probably never use it again."
Dillon looked at me. "How can you say you’re not heartless if you work here?"
"The system is heartless," I said. "That doesn’t mean the staff are. We do our best, knowing our best isn’t enough."
I don’t bother explaining how we rarely took away people’s rosary beads, but there was little room on the wards for anything else that might be stolen or cause confusion over who owned it. Possessions on any ward got mixed up. Amid the daily chaos it was deemed best for bags to be stored up here when patients were admitted, where nobody could rifle through them. Often many were only ever opened one more time, when some attendant needed to add in any small personal effects that patients had on them when they died. Families had a right to claim these bags, but very often didn’t even bother claiming their relations’ bodies. I was not obliged to attend funerals but I made it my business, out of respect, to attend my fair share here, each one lonelier than the last.
Dillon looked at the doctor. "Why did you bring me up here?"
"To show that I don’t think you are irreparably insane. I think you’re suffering from a delayed response to deep trauma. It may not be irreversible. Temporary insanity can be cured. How often do your old comrades visit you here?"
Dillon was silent for a moment. "Not every night. Often they come in such numbers that there’s barely room for them all to fit in my cell. We have great chats, such lucid conversations about the merits of the Painter the Painter Mauser over the Colt .45 that I ask myself, why am I locked up? Then I look around at their young faces and realise that every second man there is dead. So, you see, Doctor, I have moments of great lunacy as well as this present moment of clarity. I have no real idea who has been to see me."
Hide Away is published by New Island Books.
Pic: Bryan Meade
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