Walking

Walking is good for you. If you ask me the world would be a much better place if everyone walked everywhere. There would be no wars for a start. If all the politicians and kings and queens and presidents had to travel by foot they would be far too tired to start arguing with each other.

It's a long walk from my hospital ward to the nearest cafe. Seven miles, someone told me once. Fourteen there and back. They built the hospital just far enough from London to keep all the loonies out of sight. It's an imposing Victorian building, standing dark and austere in lush grounds big enough to be, for many, an entire world. The enormous iron gates at the end of the long drive are always open now, but no one bothers or dares to pass beyond. Remember when they thought the world was flat? If you went to the edge you'd drop off. Fat Stella and one or two of the young men sit at the entrance all day long watching the cars. Fat Stella cries all the time, loud, snotty sobs. Few people pass the hospital on foot and the ones who do quicken their pace at the gates and pull their coats tightly around them. You can hear their thoughts, there but for the grace of God. They look at Fat Stella not with pity but with fear. The rest of the patients slump on the benches in the garden, lie stiffly on the grass, or shuffle round and round the little pathways that lead nowhere, but you never see anyone leave. Except me, that is.

Today I button up the balding beaver collar of my mauve coat and nod at the gardener as I walk briskly up the drive, through the gates and on to the main road into London. I walk like a young woman. Everyone says so.

("Look at Mary- eighty-five you know, isn't she marvellous!")

One of the doctors told me I was a walking miracle, but I informed him that it was nothing to do with thaumaturgy, it was merely a matter of practise. It's a cold November day and beginning to spit with rain, but only my hands register the temperature. I watch them as they begin to turn blue, and then white.

"Put your gloves on, Mary," George the nurse tells me as I am leaving, although he knows I will return with my gloves still in the pockets of my coat. Tonight he will reach for my numb hands, playfully admonishing me in his Irish lilt as he rubs them between his own.

The rush hour traffic is slow and I cross the dual carriageway, weaving between the bonnets of crawling motor cars. With a raised hand I indicate for a large Ford to stop and the driver, in irritation, presses his horn and mouths angrily at me. I stop directly in front of his bonnet and fix him with a severe stare. My eyes have always been my best feature, so I'm told.

("Look at Mary's eyes - have you ever seen eyes so blue?")

("Jesus, Mary, don't look at me like that - you give me the creeps!")

The driver tries some ineffective gesticulations and then winds down his window.

"For Christ's sake get a move on will you!"

I do not move.

"You stupid old cow - why can't you use the crossing like everyone else?"

Slowly I raise my arm higher and point my index finger directly between his eyes. It never fails. Just a glimmer, the merest gulp in his neck, before he winds up the window and begins repeatedly pumping the horn, but it is enough. I raise my eyebrows and pass through the traffic to the big housing estate on the other side of the road. Down the hill, past the station, a school playground full of brown children, and a church with a sign saying, 'Repent Now'. There are few people walking today. An angry mother pushing a pram and dragging a toddler by the arm. Two boys in school uniform running through the rain, laughing. As I reach the parade of shops I slow, pausing to look in the windows, but not for long. I am hungry.

One does not enjoy hospital food. The tea comes out of a giant metal pot, with a suspicious white scum on top which disappears before the half-wits notice, and all the food smells of fish. I suppose they think everyone is too mad to care. So I have my breakfast at The Star Kebab House where the owner, George, gives me tea in a cup and saucer and fetches me a bun or a jam tart from the bakers next door. Today he is standing, as usual, in the doorway of the dark little cafe and he waves and smiles, beckoning me in.

"Hello old Mary - how's my Mary?"

I object to his choice of adjective but then George is Turkish and they do things differently. Sometimes he sits with me at the little Formica table by the door and tells me stories about Turkey, showing me photographs of his children. He has told me his name many times, but I always call him George. I call all men George.

Wrapping my hands around the hot teacup I wait for George to fetch me my cake. He is frying chips for the schoolgirl with the very black hair and the very white face. Her eyes are pencilled dark in an attempt at adult sensuality but she looks just like a small kitten, arching against the counter as she waits for her greasy bag of comfort. I have never seen George make a kebab. Although there is a long menu of different foreign dishes I've only ever seen him serve chips. The chips spit and a radio crackles and the girl moves her shoulders to the faintly discernible beat.

"There you go, my darling, careful now, they're hot."

The girl counts out her change and saunters out, picking at the chips and avoiding my gaze, as most young girls do. Who really wants to believe that one day they too will be old? George wipes his hands on his apron.

"Okay, old Mary, what's it to be? I get you something nice, eh?"

Quickly he slips out of the cafe and returns with a currant bun in a paper bag.

"Okay for you? You want butter?"

I tell him I would like a plate and a knife too.

These days the buns are different. Bread too. Everything is too light, insubstantial. They put too much air in everything these days. When I was young my mother baked every morning, bread rolls, pies, rock buns, heavy doughs that you could feel inside you. I used to sit at the kitchen table making little figures out of the pastry cuttings, and my mother would let me bake the small effigies and eat them one by one. Heads first. She always said I was a strange little girl. After my father was killed in France my mother became deeply religious and took me to church every evening to pray for the destruction of the Huns, whom she regarded as the devil's own army. When the air raids started she looked on with contempt as our neighbours scurried down the underground station like rabbits while she, proud and defiant, climbed on to the roof of our house to shout the wrath of God at the Zeppelins overhead. One evening, as we returned from church through the rubble of a raid, we passed a large hole in the ground, a six foot crater. At its edge I could see the legs of a man, sticking up as though he were diving into a pool. When I think of it now I swear his feet were kicking, but that could hardly have been possible. My mother raised her face to the heavens, called out to the Almighty, and then grabbed my hand and pulled me away, covering my eyes. But not before I had peered into the hole and seen the man with no head.

My mother always said I was never the same again. Today, if you look through my fat hospital file you will find numerous references to the incident. Doctors love cause and effect. Often a keen student nurse will ask me gently and earnestly about my experiences of the war. But what I never tell them is that I was not in the least surprised by that body. I thought about it often, certainly, and my pastry people never had heads after that. I used to cut jagged necks with a knife and paint the edges with cochineal. But really, when I looked down into that hole, it was as if I had always known it would be there. For everyone, everywhere, there is a headless corpse just waiting round the corner. But I suppose most people never see it. Most people spend their lives looking the other way.

I finish my tea and take my cup to the sink behind the counter where George lets me wash up. I rinse it, as usual, twenty times, filling it to the brim, pouring water down the sink until George takes it from me.

"You English! Wasting water all the time. Give it here old Mary!"

I always wash my cup. It seems only right as I have no money to pay for the tea. As I dry my hands a man comes into the cafe and seats himself at my table.

"Sausage, egg, chips - thanks," he calls before burying his head in a newspaper. I return to my seat, knocking the man's foot just slightly as I pull out my chair, and I see him glance from the side of his paper at my legs. He registers interest. I have good legs. Walking is good for the legs, and the young nurses say they would sell their souls for a pair like mine. In an instant the man's watery blue eyes have perused my entire body and come to rest, momentarily in horror, on my eighty-five year-old face, before returning to the more succulent delights of The Sun. I ask him sweetly for a cigarette and, irritated, he reaches into his pocket without meeting my eyes. After such a blunder his guilty embarassment makes him an easy touch and, were I in the habit of asking for money, I would be sure to make a small killing. I thank him for the cigarette and he passes me a box of matches, not bothering to tell me that his name isn't George. He has told himself that he would not touch me, not in a million years. But, as our eyes meet, we both know he would, if there was no one else. No one else to choose from and no one else to see him do it. They do it to old ladies like me. To children too and even, sometimes, to sheep.

George was my first. My mother was pleased that I had a sweetheart, for she thought I was spending far too much time in my bedroom cutting pictures for my scrapbook. I collected pictures of people out of old books, any people I could find. Ladies in beautiful ballgowns, beggars, priests and judges and tiny children in ruffles and lace. Of course I cut all their heads off before I pasted them into my book, and I joined their hands together to make a long, dancing line. My mother called it morbid, and so she was delighted when George, the grocer's son, began calling in the summer evenings to take me walking. Walking, however, was not all George had in mind.

It was only curiosity, but my mother was fond of telling me what that did to the cat. After George there were many others, for it was so easy to skip choir practice and walk on my own to the park, swinging my long plaits. There, behind the bushes, on the warm evenings of war, I learned how life was made. It seemed such a simple act, so simple that I was sure at first that there must be more. If death could be so varied, so enormously and expensively planned, then I was convinced that there must be more to the secret of creation than such a clumsy little manoeuvre. So I tried them all, city gents, soldiers, rich and poor, old and young, until I realised, watching each final grunt at my breast, that they all did exactly the same. As I said, it was only curiosity, but my mother had another word for it, and so did the doctors to whom she finally took me.

After they took the baby away I was locked in a bare white room. There were no windows and so I had to draw my headless companions on the white walls. I painted them in the cold, gelatinous gravy of my dinners, more successfully in the thicker textures of my slop bucket and finally, when I learned to bite the ends off my fingers, in blood.

My mother did not visit me. My only visitors were the nurses with the enormous, evil-smelling syringe. There was one nurse to hold my arms, one to hold my legs, and one to jab the needle in my arse. I was held in cold baths, wrapped in frezing, wet towels, strapped to a metal bed and fed through a rubber tube. When my mother wrote she talked of my freedom, like a carrot, but as the days turned into weeks and months I felt myself more free than ever before. There is a peculiar kind of freedom in a cell. The freedom to kick and shit and spit. The freedom to scream.

And, do you know, you can walk just as far in a cell as anywhere in the world. Three and a half paces, turn, three and a half paces back. It adds up. They thought it was the injections that made me quiet and, years later, the electric shocks. But I know I have always walked myself into silence. When I stopped talking altogether they gave me more shocks to bring back the words that I'd trampled underfoot, and finally they drilled a hole in my head, thinking they could find my voice there. Then they let me out of the cell and I began to walk up and down the long white corridor, through days and nights, days and years. I never saw my mother again. She sent me cards with pictures of Jesus and his disciples, and wrote to me of the cancer that was eating her bones.

"You did this to me, Mary," she wrote when she was dying. "You did this - you and the Huns."

It's just stopped raining when I leave the cafe, waving goodbye to George.

"Take care now, Mary," he tells me. "Be good, Mary."

That's what they all tell me, to be good. And mostly, these days, I am. Mostly now I am a sweet old lady in a fur-trimmed coat, a familiar figure on this route through the northern outskirts of London. A most suitable candidate, you might say, for community care.

That's what they call it, the hospital closing down. They come in hordes now, these new ones, shivering down the long corridor which they call an architectural marvel. They visit us in the wards, and talk of preparation and of freedom, wearing their uniforms of blue jeans and earrings, the men too. They like to tell me they understand. The painting woman wears lots of silk scarves and her blackened eyes are smug with secrets. We sit around a table with poster paint and sheets of sugar paper and she looks at my little headless figures with a grave pleasure. Fat Stella sometimes comes and paints too but she never finishes her picture once she starts crying. The painting woman sems to like this; she holds Stella's hand and tells her she's doing well. When Stella's sobs begin the painting woman looks at her with pride, like she's hit the jackpot.

And then George comes to teach me how to cook. George, with his ponytail and his girl's voice who is young enough to be my grandson, comes to teach me how to live outside, in the pristine flats which they tell us will be our new homes. I like going to the supermarket. George lets me choose our lunch, and he enjoys explaining to me the value of the coins and notes. The ladies on the till call me 'love' and 'dear' and they nod and smile at George, telling him what a marvellous job he's doing. Usually I compliment George on the way back to the hospital, knowing that a bit of flattery will mean that he lets me sit with a cup of tea while he makes the lunch. It was George who took me to see the little box where they think I will live. I told him straight away that I would not go, that the hospital had suited me well enough for seventy years, but George patted my hand and told me that even the most wonderful opportunities took some getting used to. He told me I would do well on the outside, that my community orientation was already perfect and my social skills almost impeccable. He said they would all be proud of me.

As I step into the wet street outside the cafe I see the brick. It's lying beneath the scaffolding surrounding the newsagents. Really it is only half a brick, but it will do. No one bothers about the old lady stooping under the scaffolding to pick it up and so I have time to perfect my position in front of The Star Kebab House and take aim. My arms are nearly as strong as my legs. There is an explosion of shattering glass and suddenly everyone around me notices that I exist. George is running to his broken window, waving his arms. George is staring at the glass in his dinner, blood trickling from a splinter in his cheek. Georges everywhere stop and look at me as I wait for the sirens.

The two policemen are surprised to see their culprit. I tell them my full name and give the address of the hospital, which makes them nod at each other. One of them starts talking into his radio while the other ushers me firmly into the car.

"Shouldn't let them out really," he mutters to his partner. He grins at me, a boy's nervous grin.

"Right then, love, let's get you back."

I give him my sweetest smile and he looks relieved. Sometimes I enjoy a ride in a police car, and it loks impressive in my hospital file. Tonight George will sigh as he fills in his special report form.

"You've blown it again, Mary," he will tell me, shaking his head. "Now you're never going to get out of here."

I'm rather looking forward to a month or two back on the locked ward. At this time of year it's always so dark and wet outside, and the locked ward has a nice stretch of blue carpet, thirty feet by ten, well-worn. As I said, walking is good for you. It doesn't matter where you go.

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