Growing Up Next to the Mental Read online

  Flanker Press Limited

  St. John’s

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Callahan, Brian, 1967-, author

  Growing up next to the Mental : a novel / Brian Callahan.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77117-658-3 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77117-659-0

  (EPUB).--ISBN 978-1-77117-660-6 (Kindle).--ISBN 978-1-77117-661-3

  (PDF)

  I. Title.

  PS8605.A4596G76 2018 C813’.6 C2018-901504-7 C2018-901505-5

  ——————————————————————————————————————————————------——

  © 2018 by Brian Callahan

  All Rights Reserved. No part of the work covered by the copyright hereon may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic or mechanical—without the written permission of the publisher. Any request for photocopying, recording, taping, or information storage and retrieval systems of any part of this book shall be directed to Access Copyright, The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency, 1 Yonge Street, Suite 800, Toronto, ON M5E 1E5. This applies to classroom use as well.

  Printed in Canada

  Cover design by Graham Blair

  Edited by Robin McGrath

  Flanker Press Ltd.

  PO Box 2522, Station C

  St. John’s, NL

  Canada

  Telephone: (709) 739-4477 Fax: (709) 739-4420 Toll-free: 1-866-739-4420

  www.flankerpress.com

  9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) and the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, Department of Tourism, Culture, Industry and Innovation for our publishing activities. We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $157 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country. Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. L’an dernier, le Conseil a investi 157 millions de dollars pour mettre de l’art dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

  This book is dedicated to anyone who has ever suffered from or has been affected by mental illness, which may well be just about all of us.

  1

  I was four when I found him.

  And it remains, unfortunately, the earliest memory I have in life.

  Details at that age should be scanty at best, but I guess a dead body falls into another category altogether.

  It’s as if I was watching it all play out from some nearby perch, with chin planted in hand resting on crossed knee.

  A bird’s-eye view of me, standing by the Waterford River, with him in it, face down and limbs splayed like a skydiver before he opens the chute.

  There are pools in that river where the water is so clear and shallow you can easily see the flashy glimmer off the scales of mud trout. This was one of those spots, smack dab between the Bungalow in Bowring Park and our house near the bottom of Cowan Avenue. (First one up on the right or last down on the left, you told the Northwest Taxi driver or the Mr. Jim’s Pizza delivery guy, since 15 Cowan never made any sense.)

  Yet here was this guy. Dead in shin-deep water.

  I had no real concept of time, but I know I just stared for a while without doing or saying anything. And vivid? I got it down to the sharp shard of rock jutting up like a stalagmite next to my kid-sandalled feet.

  I didn’t think it was a real person, mainly because I’d never seen a real person like this before. Absolutely motionless. Reminded me of the mannequins in the windows down at Woolworths—save for the pose, and his clothes.

  Around nine in the morning and already twenty mid-August sunny-warm-and-breezy degrees, but he was dressed for weather: army-green parka, grey wool mittens, and black hip waders, all of which were toddler-familiar to me.

  Long, straggly brown hair swirled on the surface around his fur-hooded head.

  My trance was broken by a shriek that scattered some pigeons, and for a moment I thought it even gave the corpse a jolt.

  Alas! The babysitter had found me, with my new acquaintance.

  Her exact words escape me, but I know there were some bad ones in there as her fingernails pinched my wrist and I was yanked from the water’s edge.

  Soon there were sirens, people, more sirens, more people.

  I overheard the sitter telling an officer I was only out of her sight for a minute.

  Sure felt longer than that.

  And then my mother. She had been down the road at Corpus Christi Church volunteering with this, that, and the other thing. She had returned home—warily negotiating her powder-blue Volare through the commotion by the park—only to find my caretaker and I were overdue.

  Her heart sank as she flashed back to the park, then sprinted back to the aforementioned scene.

  I could see glimpses of my mother’s anxious face disappearing horizontally behind others as she made her way through the rubberneckers pressed against the criss-cross spruce fence that cordoned the park from Waterford Bridge Road.

  “Is there a little boy there?” Mom asked nervously, approaching one of the rookie Newfoundland constables on crowd control.

  “Sorry, miss. You have to stay back,” he said, perfectly police-like. “Who is it you’re looking for?”

  Her concern and impatience were building.

  “A young boy, Wish is his name . . . Aloysius, I mean. I’m his mother, Marie . . . Mooney.”

  I could see the relief wash over her as our eyes finally locked.

  “Never mind, I see him!”

  A tight hug and a surprisingly brief admonishment later and we were on our way, my mom pausing only to have words with the sitter. I never did see the young woman again, although, all things considered, I suspect the parting was mutual.

  “That’s three this summer,” one white-uniformed man said to another as they hoisted the stretcher and shoved it into the back of their ambulance. Moments later they slowly pulled away, with lights flashing but no siren. I watched as the brake lights suddenly lit up and they turned left into the Waterford Hospital parking lot.

  My mother clasped my hand a little tighter than usual as we crossed the road and headed back up Cowan Avenue in silence, leaving the remnants of earlier mayhem behind us.

  “Am I in trouble?” I finally asked, halfway into our five-minute jaunt home.

  “You can’t just wander off like that, Aloysius. You never know what can happen around here . . . or there. I mean the park. Anywhere.”

  She sighed in frustration.

  Silence again.

  She didn’t say it, but I knew she was talking about the Waterford. I mean, we lived right next door to a lunatic asylum, and bodies were turning up in the river across the street. You could forgive her for being a tad on edge.

  A grand total of seven feet separated our backyard from the hospital grounds: three or so oft-windswept acres of green space apparently set aside for patients to stretch their legs and clear their troubled heads.

  In theory.

  In reality, they were hardly ever seen on the upper or lower tiers of the field. Appearances were so rare they were often mistaken for escapes or wayward wanderings due to an unlocked door or dopey security guard.

  Oh, there was a fence, all right: a six-foot-high chain-link with sharp, twisted ends extending a couple of inches higher to deter intruders. The “deterrent�
�� ran all the way to the bottom of our street—and then just ended. It was as if they ran out of chain link or something.

  So basically, if you were too lazy or razor-shy to scale it, you could just walk around it.

  “The man said it was the third one this summer,” I said, triggering an instant, defensive response from my mother.

  “Not this summer—this year. Third one this year, dear.” I wasn’t sure who she was trying to reassure more. “And what man?” she added.

  I was about to explain when a sudden presence to our right gave us both a start.

  He was at least as tall as the fence, sporting dark green farmer’s overalls that almost but couldn’t quite hide the pair of white-as-new, old-school Converse sneakers.

  The bad brown comb-over was the icing on the cake.

  His sudden appearance, thankfully on the other side of the fence, caused us both to stare for too long. Not just at him, but at the even bigger Union Jack he had attached to a bladeless Sherwood hockey shaft that rested on his right shoulder. The big red, white, and blue curtain draped down his back to the ground with another three or four feet of it hissing in tow over the grass behind him.

  He had been moving at a good clip but clearly slowed his pace to match ours, step for step.

  It was pretty weird, yet par for the course, really.

  My mother masked her unease with a friendly glance and smile, but he never looked up or away from the straight path he marched.

  As the three of us neared the end corner of the fence near our house, he turned about-face with military precision and began retracing his steps the other way.

  No look or word spoken.

  The moment was broken by the telephone that was literally ringing off the hook in our kitchen. The daily wear and tear inflicted by six kids and two adults had bent it down enough to allow the vibrations from a few rings to shake the handset right off the wall mount and down to the floor.

  We’d only discovered the fault the previous afternoon when we arrived home to find the receiver dangling at the end of the twisted cord an inch from the floor, sustaining at least a few cracks against the hard vinyl before coming to rest. We’d assumed our mischievous cat Peter—yes, Peter the cat—knocked it off, until it sprang loose on its own while ringing during supper, when the rule was no calls were made or answered. (Our dog, by the way—a boy—was named Kim. And we lived next to where?)

  Anyway, the plan was to go new-phone shopping today, but the little incident in the park had taken the good out of Mom.

  We were still in the driveway but could hear the ringing, plain as day, through the screens of our open windows.

  Mom scurried ahead, towing me up the cracked concrete steps to the front door and into the house, grabbing the handset on the final ring just as it was dislodging.

  “Hello?” she said, catching her breath.

  Nothing.

  She hung it up but never let go.

  “They’ll call back if it’s important.”

  It immediately rang again.

  “Hello,” she said, this time as more of a statement than inquiry.

  She seemed to stare through me as she listened to the voice on the other end.

  “Yes, I have him. He’s fine.”

  Must be Dad.

  “Wish,” Mom whispered, covering the mouthpiece with her hand. “Take off those dirty sandals and go up and put on your dungarees . . . please.”

  Back to the phone.

  “Yes, dear, I’m still here.”

  I had only been getting one side of the conversation, but Mom’s answers revealed the questions.

  “I’m not sure . . . another patient, I think. Wish found him . . . by himself.”

  “I still don’t know where she was, but we’ll have to find another one. I’m at the Avon tomorrow.”

  “All right, see you when you get home.”

  “Love you, too.”

  I marvelled at the juxtaposition between her tone on the phone and after she hung up.

  “That blessed radio or whatever it is at your father’s office. Can’t hear a darned thing.”

  “That blessed radio,” meanwhile, was the police scanner at the Daily News, which could certainly be loud and annoying if you weren’t used to it. Shouts, screams, or sirens could blare unannounced at any moment as the device searched a dozen or so channels at lightning speed for an open mic.

  Unfortunately, it had been providing agonizing gaps about what was happening in Bowring Park. Snowy breaks in the chatter had left the downtown newsroom with only two confirmed bits of detail: there was a body, and a small boy was involved.

  “They found a boy’s body?” someone shouted over the busy ticking of typewriters and teletype machines.

  “Shhhh . . . no! I think someone’s in the river again, though,” said another staffer, leaning over and monitoring the scanner in the middle of the newsroom.

  My publisher father, Francis “Frank” Mooney, had just dispatched a reporter and photog to the scene when a clearer picture was finally provided, courtesy of the fire department.

  “Brookfield Rescue is 10-23 at Cowan and Waterford Bridge. We have an adult male, deceased. 10-18 have the scene. Our services are no longer required. We’re 10-8.”

  Translation: “We’re here. There’s a dead guy. Police got this. We’re outta here.”

  There was no mention of a boy, which could only be a good thing, my father had reasoned. He’d reached Mom by phone just before heading to the park himself.

  I remember a woman from the hospital coming to our house a few days later to talk to us about what happened, what I could remember, how I was feeling about it now, and blah, blah, blah. More importantly, she confirmed the body was indeed that of a patient from the Waterford, and yes, the young man was the third to die by his own hand in or next to the river that year.

  “But I can assure you, Mrs. Mooney, that we are working diligently with the constabulary to solve this problem.”

  Then the very next day:

  “And I can assure you, Mrs. Mooney, that we have and will continue to work diligently with the hospital administration to find a solution,” said the sympathetic Newfoundland Constabulary officer.

  We had no doubt they were working closely together on their statements. Security in and around the hospital was another thing.

  “You might want to talk to the babysitter,” my mother added as he was leaving. “She was there, too—sort of.”

  2

  We called it the Mental and thought nothing of it. No more than eeny, meeny, miney, mo, and who we were supposed to catch by the toe.

  We never considered it offensive because it was just part of the lexicon that came with the territory, living next to the Waterford Hospital, or, as it was named upon its grand opening in 1854: the Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases.

  We also called each other nuts, cracked, demented, or retarded every day, but more as colloquial jabs of endearment than mean-spirited slurs.

  Or so we thought.

  Mind you, we never used those words to taunt patients. No, sir. We labelled them with awful nicknames that were arguably more demeaning and harmful.

  And pretty funny.

  In our defence, it was asking a lot for a pack of peer-pressurized teens to reflect on the exacerbating effects of stigma and political incorrectness in the 1970s—especially when we were living next door to the institutional poster child for it.

  Over the decades, little progress had been made with any of that. Segregation was still perceived as the best option for the mentally ill and the safest for everyone else.

  None of that meant anything to us, though. The only thing that really mattered in our short-term, damn-the-consequences thinking was how best to make use of that big, open, neglected vastness th
at we came to affectionately and logically dub the Mental field.

  What else were we supposed to call it? The Waterford Field? Had no ring to it at all. Besides, if the hospital was the Mental, and its residents were mental patients, it only stood to reason.

  There was that small issue of it being private property and a restricted area, according to the one small sign affixed to the fence just down from our house. But suffice to say we lived by the axiom that it was easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

  The Mental Field invited all manner of horseplay and hijinks: mini-bikes, dogs, kites, and any sport with a ball in the summer; snowball fights, tackle football, and games of shinny on thin, random sheets of ice in the winter, with many a face-plant when a skate suddenly broke through and dug into the semi-frozen earth below.

  But by late afternoon the Mental’s incinerator and ominous, sky-scraping smokestack would stop us in our tracks when it fired up, silently releasing arches of coal-black smoke that, rumour had it, sometimes included the ashen remains of patients deemed either too crazy and dangerous or who’d died inside with no one to claim them.

  The sight always brought me back to the body in the park, and that image of the ambulance turning into the Mental instead of going to a “real” hospital like St. Clare’s—or a funeral home, for that matter.

  It all added up, now that I was an older and wiser twelve-year-old.

  As a result of that hypothesis and numerous other blood-curdling tales, I made a point of hanging out at the safer, west end of the field near my house, far removed from the physical structure on the off chance a crazed, hatchet-wielding patient in a hockey mask did suddenly come rushing at me through the fog on the field.

  There was also my mother’s strict instruction to stay within sight of our kitchen window while down there, since she’d conceded she couldn’t keep me out of it.

  “Too faaaarrr . . . can’t see youuuu,” echoed the familiar strain from the backyard where she’d be clothes-pinning laundry and literally unable to see the field for the trees.

  “That’s ’cause you’re not up in the window,” was my smartass reply that scored some laughs but saw my unofficial field pass revoked for a day.