The Baptist

coincidental.

Contents

Pinned down

The interim

I became fat

My parents died

A Mary shagged me

Released into the community

Mr and Mrs McCarthy

He ain’t heavy

Sarah in The Bucket of Blood

The sleeping man

Find a friend

A change in life

Dear John

Perfect unison

Driving forces

Skin deep

Martial arts

Dealing with it

Sabotage

Going home

Truth will out

Let the circle

Joking Joe

What lies beneath

Bringing home the girlfriend

The surgeon

Taking flight

Return of Alice

Sojourn

Wreckage

Heirloom

Incognito

St John’s in the Forest

Honey pot

Toy boy

Jump start

Plaything

The Queen of Hearts

Securing the perimeter

Silence of the lambs

Alice

Sarah

John

Alice

The condemned

Connect with Ruby Barnes online

Pinned down

I remember the first time I saw Ray’s glow. A roasting summer’s day, playing football with Ray and his friends on a large green. Ray had the friends, not me. One of those magical afternoons that last forever. Goals galore on both sides, sent sailing between the makeshift goalposts. Time stood still. I wore the watch. My lack of athleticism offered the least danger of smashing it on the hard baked earth beneath the weedy grass. I noted the slow movement of the minute hand, its extension to a straight line with the hour taking an age. Such days are golden when you’re young. I have endured many subsequently. God knows it’s the drugs.

Ray had scored a glorious goal. As he soared up the field, arms spread wide like an albatross, I hugged him and we fell to the ground in celebration. Rolling me onto my back he tore at the grass around us and scattered it unevenly over my hair, face and neck. I caught his infectious laughter. Eyes squeezed tight against the dust, I felt the grass falling between my teeth. I sensed the sun frame him. Then a lone cloud covered the sun, but his red halo remained, burning through my lids. Ray’s knees were a bit painful on my biceps as he bounced his weight on my ribs. I felt the bones flex.

How easily I could have thrown him off. I was three years older and weighed more. Now I’m thirteen years older than him.

A few years later and he would have been my physical superior, with an athlete’s shoulders and the thick wrists of a strongman. Even at eleven he was no pushover at arm wrestling. I was Mister Weedy No Friends, according to my little brother and his mates. But I had mathematics on my side. No, I don’t mean some complex equation of leverage that would continue to overcome Ray’s growing physical prowess. I’m talking of superior knowledge, algebra, calculus and an affinity for symmetry. That was, is, my forte.

My lack of friends and perpetual scowl worried Mum. She said, with her soft lisp, that I was depressed and I knew that worried her, considering Dad’s history. Dad said it was normal teenage behaviour and I would soon discover girls, make friends, play sport, build muscles, drink beer and all that sort of thing. He was scared stiff I’d turn out to be gay. Poof is what people used to say in those days. Homosexual meant deviant and was too embarrassing a word to utter.

I wasn’t totally without macho pursuits, being an active member of a school karting club that appreciated my precision with all things mechanical. But Dad was convinced my preference for neat, matching creases down the front of my denims was a sure sign of deviancy. That he should say that, the ancient deviant.

I wore a Celtic cross on a chain that mum had bought me for my fourteenth birthday. My fingertips habitually traced the continuous loop of silver, imagining the absent Christ, and that wound him up too. He called it my necklace, the adornment of a poof, and snarled that I would be eating Parma Violets next. My sexuality turned out to be the least of his concerns.

Ray was always pulling my chain, teasing me about how successful he was in the school rugby team and the fact that girls were already asking him to discos. Eventually I would snap, which made him laugh. He still smirked as I punched him, the halo growing stronger, feeding off my anger. Ray knew there wasn’t enough strength in my skinny arms to really hurt him. So I tried to kick him in the balls, but Mum caught us and imposed a below the belt moratorium.

One day, soon after the never-ending soccer match, it became too much to bear. Dropping the sporting taunts, he went for my dick. No, not an outlawed wrestling hold, but verbally. Ray said his was bigger than mine, which I’m ashamed to say it was, and further his friends thought my inferior appendage was indicative of me probably being a poof.

I paraphrase. He didn’t say inferior appendage or indicative. Adult vocabulary was my province, along with the maths.

So I sat on Ray’s chest, pinned his arms with my knees. He looked up in disbelief as I leaned forward to push deep muscle pain through his burgeoning biceps. I felt the flesh squelch against the eleven-year-old bones of his upper arms.

‘Okay, squirt.’ That was my pet name for him. ‘If X squared equals two Y plus Z, and Y equals two Z, then what are the values of X, Y and Z? You have no idea what I’m talking about, do you? You’re a thicko, Ray, thick as a plank!’

There was no way he could push me off. Even without the weight difference it would have been difficult for him to get up. Mock sun blazed upon his head. Yes, he strained with those talented footballer’s feet, even arched his back slightly off the bottom of the bathtub, but the water was hot and deep and his face remained beneath the surface. My algebraic challenge probably didn’t reach his ears, six inches under water fragranced with Radox Floral. The red of his halo paled to rose, tingeing the foam, and then extinguished. Bubbles rose to the surface but Ray the plank didn’t float.

It was Dad who pulled me out of the tub. Mum had just stood there screaming until he arrived. My lasting memory, just before my father hurled me across the bathroom and into the tiled wall, was that Ray’s superior penis had grown embarrassingly large in his death throes.

I imagine Dad or Mum tried to resuscitate Ray but, if they did, I missed it as the impact against the wall knocked me out cold for a good while. It would have been too late anyway. I had sat on my brother’s chest for a good fifteen minutes, fully clothed, wondering what would happen next.

What happened next was my parents lost both their sons. One was drowned; murdered. The other was committed to Fairfield Mental Hospital. I had been exhibiting signs of depression, alternating with bouts of manic behaviour, for some time. I guessed they were referring to me turning over the tables in the classroom when I failed, for the umpteenth time, to get one hundred percent in the maths test. Little Johnny Maloney always scored one hundred percent and I could only ever reach ninety-eight. In the unlikely event I ever see Maloney in a bath I won’t get my clothes wet. I’ll just throw in a live electrical appliance.

I feel no remorse. The act saved me from a life of inferiority and bullying, saved the world from a father’s son. And no, God didn’t tell me to do it. The deed made perfect sense at the time, and still does. Ray is a much nicer person as a perpetual eleven-year-old than the boorish, philandering sports hero he was destined to become. I preserved his innocence, saved him before our father’s purpose could establish itself. Drowning is probably the least painful way I could have done it.

Sorry if I’m sounding like some kind of crazed maniac. This is not a tale of serial murder or any kind of mad mathematician on the rampage. No, this is a story of successful rehabilitation in the community.

The interim

However, my English teacher always complained to me, is not a good way to start a paragraph, let alone a chapter. But that was rather a long time ago and such petty rules have since faded in the light of much larger ones. The Authorities were the people who disassembled my grammar and italicised key parts of my life, through their application of prescription drugs to alleviate the symptoms of my supposed mental illness. To deliberately drown your brother in a bathtub is a terrible, if clean, thing. Might it not be excused, if he is the manifest son of Satan?

These days I’m on the myriad pill diet. Compresses of wonderment, transferred weekly from little bottles and blister packs to a plastic morning-noon-evening-night dispenser and then into my stomach. The blue and white capsule distresses me. It sits in the evening compartment like a fat kid on a seesaw.

However, during those earlier days of medication I resembled more a leaking water bomb than a pill box. Hypodermics oozed their contents into the sloshing bag of bones that had sat on a brother.

The story of my ten years in institutional care: I became fat, my parents died, a Mary shagged me and I was released into the community.

I became fat

Ho, ho. Ray would have pissed himself laughing. It must have been the Authorities’ drugs. Full self-awareness returned some months after sitting on Ray and I found myself trapped in a fat suit. I belonged in one of those ridiculous films where an alleged comedian portrays an obese professor or a large lady.

‘You were always so skinny,’ Mum said on her first visit after my return to the world of self-consciousness. Her lisp was a soft comfort to hear. It had been three months or so since eradication of the devil’s progeny. ‘What are they feeding you in here?’

‘They shouldn’t feed him at all-uh,’ Dad snarled. He had a strange way of ending his sentences-uh.

Dad mourned the demise of capital punishment. The Bedford court had declined his offering me as a sacrifice, pointing out it was nearly half a century since the last hanging. I was surprised Dad hadn’t brought a stick with which to poke me from a safe distance.

‘And your little face, it’s disappeared in there.’ She grabbed my jowls with both hands as if I was a chubby baby.

‘He still has that dirty hippy hair though-uh,’ Dad added, running a hand over his own peach-like balding head.

Hair was, indeed, my saving grace. The dark, lank locks I had cultivated before captivity, with the intention of attracting girls and annoying my brother, had somehow escaped the Authorities’ attention. This hair was subsequently to prove an effective lure for Marys.

During the first year of my incarceration I did nothing. That was partially responsible for the obesity. I remained just mobile enough to avoid bed sores. Showering or toilet was the only activity I would willingly indulge in. Even the spoken word I kept to a minimum, begrudging the small energy demanded by speech.

It became a matter of perverse pride to inspect my growing size in the shower. Being small framed, I couldn’t carry a lot of weight without the flesh soon forming bulges and rolls. Where skin touched skin, I washed with care. This was not going to be a permanent physical state and I didn’t want to emerge from my fat suit some years hence, his works to perform, with an incurable skin condition.

My parents died

During his few visits to the nuthouse, as he called it, Dad didn’t ever talk to me about Ray or anything much really. Mum did most of the talking.

‘Are they treating you well, dear?’

If treating me well involved drugging me up to the eyeballs, delivering ever-increasing amounts of stodge at mealtimes and occasional dodgy blanket baths from a meaty male nurse named Mary, then yes, they were treating me well.

‘Of course they are, dear, of course they are. Feeding you, for sure.’

Mum asked and answered. I looked at Dad and he turned away, half in annoyance with Mum and the other half in revulsion at the killer of his chosen son.

I don’t know why Dad visited me. He was there maybe one time in ten compared to Mum and she arrived every week. That means I saw him precisely five times before he died. Dad’s reluctance was understandable, as Fairfield had been home to his fledgling career as the devil’s emissary-uh.

I can imagine Mum and Dad sitting quietly in the front room at home with mugs of tea.

‘Barry, you have to ask him. Why bother to visit if you’re just going to sit there and snarl?’

‘I’ll know when the time is right-uh.’

Well, Dad didn’t know when the time was right. Mum did. The lid of her pot of impatience was rattling. So she posed the fateful question, the one that had been lurking for a year in Dad’s mouth, like a conger eel in its underwater cave.

‘Tell us, love, why did you do it? Why did you hurt Ray?’

I didn’t hurt Ray, I fucking killed the little bastard. She would have to do better than that if I was to break my silence.

‘How could you do that to your brother? Kill him, I mean?’

Was Mum seeking a technical explanation for the method of murder? Kneel on the victim’s chest underwater until convulsions cease and such details? No, her pleading expression said it was a bigger question. So I told her.

‘He had to die, Mum.’

They both recoiled as though I had cracked a whip.

‘Had to die?’ she repeated in a small, high voice. Then softly, ‘Why?’

‘Surely you saw it, what he was becoming?’

‘Thaw it? What he was becoming?’

Mum the parrot.

‘I can’t believe you were oblivious to it. The bullying, the boasting, the strutting.’

She pulled a face that would have told a waiter the food was unfit for human consumption. Dad’s eyes fixed me like a mongoose facing a python.

‘You know what he is. Ray was turning into him!’ I raised one fat hand, with some effort, and pointed my forefinger at Dad. He looked over his shoulder at Mary and I laughed.

‘Him?’ Mum was incredulous. ‘You killed Ray because he was turning into a male nurse?’

‘No, you idiot!’ I had never said that to my mother before. ‘He was turning into his chosen son.’

‘Don’t call your mother an idiot-uh!’ were the last words Dad addressed to me. He was escorted from the premises by security. My jaw wasn’t broken, probably the fat face had protected it, but my nose was. Like I said, Ray had been in the process of turning into Dad.

Mum, Dad and I all knew what that meant.

So, they went home, thought it over and then killed themselves. Well, Dad did all the shooting. Two for Mum. One in the head and one in the cunt. A delayed thank you for giving birth to his nemesis. One through the mouth for him. And, if I know Dad, all shots dead centre. Pleasing symmetry.

I was surprised. I didn’t realise Dad had a shotgun or even knew how to use one. Their suicide pact made a big splash in the media, as these things do. The quality papers used the word fratricide to explain what had driven a respectable middle-aged couple to such a bloody end.

It was their decision. Dad’s life purpose had been proven void. And his works had been successfully frustrated by yours truly. But I was not totally unaffected by the trauma. I regained my sense of smell.

A Mary shagged me

The large male nurse, known to all as Mary, turned out to be a love. When I say a love I mean he was kind and tender. I can’t explain how my parents blasting themselves to pieces reinstated my sense of smell, but I was grateful to my parents for that if nothing else. Mary turned out to be a fragrant love.

Yes, you’ve guessed it, I was attracted to him. I mentioned Mary administered dodgy blanket baths. That was during my early bedridden stage when the Authorities were trying out different drugs and harboured a concern I might harm myself or others. I seem to recall restraints being placed on my wrists and ankles but that could just be memory’s rose coloured glasses.

What I had interpreted as inappropriate flannel work was, in fact, Mary’s conscientious and gentle handling. Rather than the token cleansing dealt out by most of the female staff, Mary’s thorough blanket bath work left the patient as clean and comfortable as a deep, regular bath. Not the sort of bath during which you drown your sibling, though.

An odour of warm cologne preceded Mary’s entry to a room and it lingered on the bedclothes where his hands had touched them. I believe it was Fahrenheit by Christian Dior, subtle spice and sliced summer cucumber, fresh from the garden. I’ve always liked salad.

My new awareness of him was noted and he began to make small gestures such as sweeping the hair from my face when it fell forward.

‘You must let me wash it for you,’ he would offer. One time I acquiesced and fell asleep as he massaged my scalp. I woke a couple of hours later, wrapped up in my bed like a big fat baby.

There was nothing overtly sexual in our relationship, it would have been highly unprofessional on his part, but I found a guilty longing developing when Mary hadn’t been around for a while. I would fantasise that he visited when the ward was quiet and I would ask him to draw the curtains around my bed for a special flannelling.

Mary eventually fell foul of a female patient known amongst us inmates as Dirty Mary or DM. His gentleness was misinterpreted as being of sexual intent and a complaint was made. Scandal spreads like a virus. Other patients from various wards, male and female, were interviewed and added fuel to the fire. If you’re looking for an outbreak of mass hysteria then an asylum is a good starting point. DM said Mary had offered to shave her nether regions. I hadn’t realised that particular service was on offer. Mary the male nurse was dismissed, burnt at the stake.

I took it badly. There were tantrums and there was weeping. The Authorities assumed these were pharmaceutical side-effects and changed my drug regime, letting me regain a little more awareness. At one particularly low point, when I was sitting on my bed sobbing, a small hand reached and lifted the hair out of my face. It was DM.

‘Don’t cry,’ she said. ‘You have lovely hair. I wish mine was like yours, so long and sleek.’

Her voice was Irish, soft and lilting.

‘I know you miss him. So do I. He was so gentle, sensitive. Here.’

DM slipped my hand under her robe. She’d been shaven, but unevenly, and was bristly in patches. Her fingers moved towards my unshaven region. They were cool and thin like a child’s and the touch was mischievous.

My manhood rose from the ashes.

Her intervention was timely. DM introduced me to medication management, sleights of hand that fooled the nurses and allowed the mind to re-establish independence. She showed me we had freedom to roam, not just exploring each other’s bodies but the building and grounds. Fairfield’s great asylum had once been home to over a thousand inmates and self-sufficient from its own land. Gothic towers joining endless corridors emanating from the centre, symmetry on a scale I had never dreamed of. DM guided my breathless bulk on daily furtive excursions. I thought I was in an episode of Scooby Doo. The friendly monster in hiding.

Her fascination was with the top floor.

‘See those little doors? For tiny people. Menzie has the elixir, makes you small. The Mad Hatter has a key on a string around his neck.’

She was wistful in her Wonderland moments.

The Mad Hatter was Dr Menzie, the Clinical Superintendant. She wanted him to unlock the gateway for us to adventure together. DM was such a titch she could have fitted through those doors but I would have been stuck like Winnie the Pooh in Rabbit’s hole.

There were enough peculiarities in Fairfield to occupy a lifetime of wandering. Nurses were numerous but they couldn’t be everywhere, the place was like a small town. Two hundred acres of semi-cultivated land bordering clay pits at the old Arlesey brick and lime works.

Away from the main asylum, but within the grounds, the London Chest Hospital building was still in use for electro convulsive therapy. Those obsessed by demons would be taken in, nicely packaged, and have their synapses washed clean of evil. I had no fear of being selected as my vocation was for good and the staff hadn’t been infiltrated by agents. But Dad, the devil rest his soul, would have had me zapped as a cure for being a poof.

DM and I bonded physically from the outset of our pubic hair inspection. Then spiritually over the spitting incident.

There were other inmates but they mostly remain faceless in my memory. Except for Daly. A pecking order existed amongst the mad, based upon a mixture of social status and lucidity. Daly was of the lowest caste. I found his appearance offensive, a tall scruffiness that would make him a misfit in any conceivable company. He was a contradictory character, white trash prone to tangential lines of ecclesiastical chatter, set off by all manner of triggers. Horses in particular would take him into bible misquotes of riders of the apocalypse. I found this intolerable. Fake agents of good and evil are a pet hate of mine.

At mealtimes everybody, except new arrivals, gave Daly a wide berth. He had a gap between his front teeth through which food sprayed as he ate and coverage increased when he was on one of his rants.

‘We’ll sit away from Daly,’ Mary said on my first visit to the dining hall. I’d been taking my meals in or beside my bed until she liberated me.

Daly eyed me across the tables and I felt self-conscious in my obesity. Once or twice lads at school had tried to bully me for being a weedy swot, but that was nothing compared to what the fat lads received. I knew Daly wanted to come and have a go but DM was a deterrent.

A couple of days later, during another mealtime, DM left the table to follow another inmate to the loo and Daly moved in on me. He pulled out DM’s chair and sat on it.

‘Fat boy,’ he said. ‘You and the gutter brat. Shagging, are you?’

I stopped eating and looked at the knife and fork in my hands.

‘When did you last see your prick, fatty?’ he continued. ‘If you even have one. I bet it’s just a pimple. Pimple dick fat boy.’

Sticks and stones. I had to laugh. Daly was bottom of the barrel and looking for someone to trade places with. My giggles incensed the idiot.

‘Don’t fucking laugh at me, you cunt!’ he screamed.

Heads turned and one of the male orderlies focused on us. It was neither the time nor the place for me to teach Daly some manners.

The door to the corridor opened and DM came through. Daly saw her across the room and grabbed for a glass of milk on the table. He took a gulp and expertly sprayed through his tooth gap all over me. I felt the milk drip down my face.

‘Scumbag,’ DM hissed. She was behind Daly.

Before he could turn she raised a flat hand and slapped him hard in the ear. He sat stunned for a few seconds and then quietly stood and walked back to his meal.

‘You okay?’ she said.

‘It’s just milk. Thanks.’

I felt no anger or humiliation. Just a bit wet.

At his table Daly was eating and sobbing. There were the first tinges of burning sulphur in the air around his head. He wasn’t a fake after all.

~

The most dangerous inmates were straight-jacketed, sedated and celled. Us common or garden loonies were free to wander. Each and every one of us was medicated with the latest wonder drugs and Fairfield’s grounds looked like a training centre for the sloth Olympics. As the main drive was over a mile long it was rare for an inmate to attain the entrance without having to return to the dining hall for the next serving of lumpy mashed potato.

I perfected palming of tablets but couldn’t avoid the plastic tumblers of syrup meds. DM’s constitution was manic enough to remain mobile even with her dosage, so she kept the leadership role. As a pair we explored the perimeter of Fairfield’s acres and beyond. Village folk took shortcuts through the land to the Arlesey pits. Once or twice we encountered a youth on a wheezing Eastern European motorbike, but it was mostly school kids going to fish in the pits or scrump apples from