Tales of Disturbance

The Sanitarium

She was bailing us out with her savings, which were depleting at an alarming rate. Worry was always etched across her brow in the same expression when she mentioned this – causing her chestnut eye brows to wrinkle. I was sorry, but I knew I had once been more sorry. Now I was simply used to it. But I was, as I told her, going to make it better. I was going to pay her back when I got my book deal. She was also, as she now saw fit to bring up; paying for this accommodation on the edge of a mountain in the most expensive country in the world, so I could research a tentative, potentially hopeless, story about a man who possibly didn't even exist. She poured herself more Chablis before she continued. I had talked her into all of this and she seemed to acquiesce at the time. It turned out she didn't acquiesce at all. It turns out this sort of seething rage had been bubbling under the surface, and actually it was a sort of desperation that had driven her to finance this, and apart from making her posh new friends, she'd regretted it ever since.

And what sort of man was I anyway, to agree to let her do it? She was warming to her theme now. And underneath the facade was cold rage. I had barely protested, she accused. No, hadn't even asked her if she was sure or discuss it first. I had just accepted it, as if she had some sort of Father-Christmas-like obligation to me. I was so – what was the word? Entitled. What exactly was she getting out of this arrangement? When she had been unemployed she'd gone out and got a job. Had I been a man, that's what I would have done in these eighteen months. I mean, was I one? A man? 

As soon as she said this, I knew she was descending into Lady Macbeth. We used to joke in happier times about this. She had been in a production at University, and had been utterly terrifying. From time to time when I had forgotten the milk or to fill the car up with petrol, where she would say utterly convincingly: 'I would have plucked the infant from my breast and dashed his head against the rocks had I sworn thus'. I asked if she was going to dash my head against the rocks? She said I wouldn't chance it if I were you. I said I thought she would make a great Lady Macbeth in real life, there was no doubt about that, and she had said, well being married to her, that obviously made me Macbeth, a murdering tyrant who couldn't see the wood for the moving trees of Dunsinane where our marriage was Dunsinane wood, Macduff was on his way, and my days were numbered. I said if the woods of Dunsinane were moving already, that made her mad, (as Lady M was at that part of the play) and come to think of it, dead. And having no soul, and indulging in the sort of shameless social climbing that made me want to throw up, meant she'd be a good candidate. She said she'd rather be married to Macbeth. A murdering tyrant would be preferable to me, and at least he had a bit of ambition and some sort of plan for his life and then had picked up the nearest object, which at that moment had been a trainer, and flung it at me. She had missed by a country mile, but it knocked over the wine which really peeved me, as I'd troubled to go to three shops to find it specially. Yes, I repeated, all she cared about was her shameless social climbing, just to make me look bad. She had said I certainly didn't need any help in that department. At that point, I'd grabbed the keys and left.

She had made friends with a millionaire couple in Klosters. I had no idea how she had wormed her way in, but she had, and she spent her days with them. This meant I'd had to stomach several unbearable dinners in a luxury setting. They were the impossible standard. They were so rich it was faintly ridiculous. Bankers, and their ski seasons and holidays to Thailand & the French Polynesia. And their domestic arrangements were similarly hard to understand: Caviar, hot tub, two outdoor pools, turquoise water overlooking the Alps. From the outside it sounded like they were living inside a cliché but being there was other worldly, and completely intimidating. And in this place the clear face of my utter failure was particularly hard to digest. And because I was insecure, on the way home from these evenings, I'd take it on myself to remind her that she'd married a journalist by choice. Why hadn't she gone for a premier league footballer? Or banker like big Stephan, there in his Alpine place sipping champagne from diamond glasses. I was never going to be able to give her the luxuries by which she appeared to measure the value of her life. She would remind me that I had chosen to marry someone with standards – I could have married a looser – yes I could have married Helen Buffet. Why didn't I marry Helen Buffet who had frizzy hair and no standards, who wouldn't know any millionaires at all! Then I could lead a nice boring life drinking tea in a caravan and I'd never have to bare these evenings in pure luxury that were so distasteful and unacceptable, when all she was trying to do was help me have a good time. Then we'd go to bed in silence the argument thickening the air in the room all night and still hanging in the morning.

The research was going very badly. The Geneva reading room walls were closing in. I couldn't find anything original about these hospitals, anything that hadn't already been said. I needed this publication; some earnings, or the marriage was certainly over.

Bored with sitting quietly I spent the next weeks, driving up and down the coast, thinking and looking for abandoned hospitals. The effort was half hearted, and I couldn't find any. I'd end up sipping a latte a café, or spending too much time and money staring at supermarket shelves, selecting ingredients for the evening meal before returning to the self catered accommodation to her discontent and irrational anger. The thing she was angry about the most, was not that I was jobless, or unambitious. Sure, she was disappointed by many things: the one bedroom property we lived in, barely in North London, the lack of a second car or a reliable first car. Even the bicycle was faulty. But mostly it was me; my very essence that disappointed her. I was a disappointment. 

Standing outside the sanatorium, I noted the ivy that softened the harsh geometric lines. Nettles grew, their spears tall as if the place needed defended. A buttery light was descending over the crest of the nearest hill when I first got out of the car. Now even in that short time, darkness was rapidly descending; the trees silhouetting themselves against a sapphire sky. All the cliches of scary stories crowded around me . Against my better judgement, I walked forwards, knowing all the time I wouldn't enter tonight.