The Secret Scripture by Sebastian Barry Read Free Book Online Page B

the other side of Roscommon town, a very fine site I am assured. Just to make things not all good news, there will be a very small number of beds, whereas here we have so many. Indeed there are rooms here just with beds, not because we could not fill them, but because the rooms have gone beyond the beyonds, with the ceilings endangered, horrible swathes of dampness up the walls. Anything iron, such as bedsteads, rusts away. All the new beds in the new place will be state of the art, without rust, pristine and nice, but fewer of them, far fewer. So we will be winnowing like crazy.
    I have not been able to overcome this feeling of trying to eject creatures in my charge that will not prosper away from me. It is possibly understandable, but at the same time I suspect myself. I have a really stupid habit of feeling fatherly towards my patients, even motherly. After all these years, which I know for a fact deaden the impulses and instincts of other souls working in this sector, I am jealous for the safety, the happiness, if slightly despairing of the progress, of my patients. But I am suspicious. I wonder if, having failed with my own wife, I am inclined to regard this whole place as a sort of site of marriage, where I can be sinless, unaccused, even, on a daily basis (wretched need), redeemed.
    Second-hand cloth used to be called 'beyond redemption' or not. In the old days all the suits for the males and the gowns for the dames in a place like this would be stitched from charity cloth, the first by a tailor, the second by a seamstress. I am sure even that technically 'beyond redemption' was thought good enough for the poor hearts residing here. But as time goes on, as I am slowly like everyone else worn out, finding a tatter here and a tear there in the cloth of myself, I need this place more and more. The trust of those in dark need is forgiving work. Maybe I should be more frustrated by the obvious cul-de-sac nature of psychiatry, the horrible depreciation in the states of those that linger here, the impossibility of it all. But God help me, I am not. In a few years I will reach retirement age, and what then? I will be like a sparrow without a garden.
    Anyway, I know these thoughts come from present necessity. For the first time I have noticed the effrontery, I think that is the word, the effrontery of my profession. The come-around-the-back-of-the-house of it, oh yes, the deviousness. And now, in a further step of stupidity, I am resolved not to be devious. I have been talking all week to particular patients here, some of them quite extraordinary persons. I feel like I am interviewing them for something, their expulsion, their ruin. That if they manifest wellness, then, they must be sent into exile in that blessed 'community'. I am very aware that this thinking is all wrong, which is why I am trying to vent it here. I must on the contrary be disinterested, as the old word goes, detached, and resist compassion at every turn, because compassion is my weakness. There was a man yesterday, a farmer from Leitrim, who used to own four hundred acres. He is mad in an absolute, pristine way. He told me his family were so old they could trace themselves back two thousand years. He himself he told me was the last of his name. He had no children, certainly no sons, and the name would die with him. The name for the record was Meel, which right enough is a very strange name, and may be from the Irish word for honey, or so he said. And he is about seventy, very dignified, unwell, and mad. Yes, he is mad. That is to say, psychotic, and I see from his file that he unfortunately was found years ago sheltering in a schoolyard, under a seat, with three dead dogs tied to his leg, which he was dragging about with him. But as I spoke to him, all I could feel was love. That was ridiculous. And I am deeply, deeply suspicious of it.
     
    So often my patients seem to me like a crowd of ewes pouring down a hill towards the cliff edge. What I need to be is a