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NEW AUTHORS SHOWCASE
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6M P3 |
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Black Dog Day By Leo Vine-Knight |
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Synopsis ‘Black Dog Day’ is based on 24 hours of a psychiatric nurse’s life. The narrator struggles through a sea of flashbacks, numbing events and rebellious impulses, as he tells a story of insidious madness. Like Channel 4’s ‘No Angels’, it is a serious critique of modern values through the comic lens of a profession on the brink.
Excerpts from Chapter 1 Vignettes August 1974
Hettie smiled as she heard the splashing in the bath, and turned back towards her other ‘babies’. There were 23 cats and 4 dogs in her tiny terraced stone cottage, as well as an assortment of guinea pigs and rabbits in cages along the walls, and two noisy parrots flying about at will. The carpets had long since rotted away under the constant flow of uric acid, and they had now been replaced with shovel loads of saw dust, brought weekly from the local carpenter’s workshop. She raked up the caked mass of urine, dung and vomit once a week, and bribed the dustbin men to take it away (against their better judgement) each Monday.
On Tuesday, she went shopping for ‘lights’ and other waste material from the butcher, continuously boiling this offal in a vast cauldron on her 1950’s Belling cooker. The combined smell of stewed intestines and stinking floorboards was overpowering to everyone but Hettie, and in a moderate breeze the reek could be detected 200 yards away. The fumes were entering the next door neighbours’ attics and condensing as a horrible sticky scum, so the Environmental Health Department and the Parish Council were now attempting to take her to court. She ignored each Summons when it arrived, putting it alongside the other unopened buff envelopes behind the broken carriage clock on the white splattered mantelpiece.
“Idiots!” she said.
But later that week a loud, persistent knock was heard on the front door, and when Hettie at last opened it, she saw a man from the Council and two police officers standing on the doorstep. She quickly slammed the door and addressed them through the letter box, but when it became clear that they were going to force an entry if necessary, she wearily capitulated and let them in. They stood askance at the scene before them, and instinctively clutched their noses as the odour hit them like mustard gas, and the cats circled their legs. Over the years, all the furniture had been burnt on the open fire, and now only a brass bedstead occupied the room, covered in grey sheets and sacking. In the back yard they found the skeleton of a donkey, and upstairs they discovered a half grown alligator in the bath.
April, 1946
‘The White Cliffs of Dover’ played on a distant radio while David sat listlessly in the little office attached to warehouse 3, and watched the belching trucks drive out of compound C. He pulled down the short sleeves of his khaki tunic, reached again for the dog-eared letter in his pocket, and drifted off into fruitless thought. The war was over, he had avoided contact with the enemy by being inconspicuously diligent in Supplies, and now all he had to do was wait for his discharge. But the end of the war meant the end of many things in David’s life, and now he was left with a hollow feeling that wouldn’t go away, the hot tacky sheets of restless sleep, and nagging anxiety. His parents had been killed in the Blitz, his best friend from school had stepped onto a land mine, and the school itself had disappeared into a crater, having taken a direct V1 hit in the last months of 1944. These were the images of his days and his nights - as love, conscience and memory collided in growing darkness.
He had hated discipline ever since school, but he couldn’t act without it, and the prospect of civilian life, job hunting and independence mortified him. He wanted to get married to a nice girl who would look after him, but he could never aspire to the sort of passionate courtship he’d seen on ‘Brief Encounter’, and he carried his virginity around like a second head. He was tall, stooped, balding and ineffectual, dithering and stuttering his way through the world in a daze of puzzlement and worry. Adrift, forlorn and self-pitiful, his unattractiveness was slowly turning into misogyny and decay.
There had been one special lady in his life during the war, and they had sometimes gone to the pictures or a dance when their leaves coincided, but his romantic overtures had never extended beyond a private erection in the cheap seats, and now she was gone. Years of Errol Flynn, cocky yanks and celibacy had taken their toll, and she had written:
“Dear Davy, I’m afraid I have some good news. I’ve met a wonderful man called Frank who wants to marry me. He loves to tickle me with his thin black moustache, and has a case full of nylons and chocolate which he found near the docks. He is so good that he gave me a ring off the third finger of his left hand as an engagement gift, and I am besotted. I am also pregnant. If only you had kissed me once in the four years we had together, it could have been so different, but yearly handshakes at Christmas were never going to be enough for somebody hot blooded like me (particularly when you kept your gloves on). Goodbye. Yours truly, Daisy
David folded the letter carefully away for the twenty-fifth time, thought about his friend from school, and prayed for divine intervention. It came the following day in the form of a letter from his sister, who invited him to stay ‘for a few weeks’ until he got himself sorted out with a job and lodgings.
Two years later, she kicked him out onto the street, and told him that he was obviously incapable of keeping a job, and that she didn’t like the ‘unhealthy’ way he looked at her husband. David spent ten minutes looking at the closed door and his heavy bags, and finally decided to take a grip of the situation; appearing thirty minutes later on his brother’s doorstep instead. As the years passed, David’s siblings all took it in turns to parent him, but as the options ran out he became increasingly desperate to prolong his stays, developing a puppy like charm when anybody was kind to him, evading challenges with vague quizzical looks and half-deafness, and feigning illnesses.
Eventually, the family G. P. brought David to the attention of a consultant psychiatrist, and he recommended that David be admitted to the regional mental hospital for a short period of assessment. David was initially petrified, but he agreed, and then quite enjoyed the extra attention, free meals and regularity of the ward, taking great interest in the behaviours of long stay patients, and the role of the nurses. His condition deteriorated shortly afterwards, and as frequent temporary stays merged into contiguous long stays, David willingly exchanged the army for the asylum, and felt safe again.
March 1988
The Victorian mansion stood eerily in the mist, its perpendicular windows and oaken doors sitting in Gothic relief amongst the vast gritstone walls, while the little chapel tolled its bell, and a crocodile of grey shapes made its meandering way down the gravel drive. Past the high privet hedges, the old crooked beech trees, and the huge gate posts with their carved eagles, and on towards the waiting coach. Here, one or two white faced people turned around and looked back at the place which had been their home for decades, while a collage of cream coloured dormitories, ‘airing court’ daily walks, greenhouse labour, ‘kind’ trolleys laden with sweets, and weekly services at the chapel, swam before their frightened eyes. The others kept their heads down, and simply marched on.
This was the day that eight people left the asylum to ‘rejoin’ society. |