In the hot summer of 1988-89 I was spending my holidays from university working as an assistant nurse in the local mental hospital. Large parts of Baillie Henderson Hospital or the Toowoomba Lunatic Asylum were built in 1890, long verandas framed two or three stories red brick buildings with heavy doors and barred windows. Some of the older patients still referred to me as ‘Warden’. There had once been 3000 patients living at Baillie Henderson, with a farm, dairy, book bindery, bakery and stable. Now it was a huge complex of active wards, abandoned buildings, grassy lawns and giant trees. Around 700 people called it home.
I was working in a locked ward in Ridley House where 4 beds were bolted to the floor and I sat watching from a chair and table, also bolted to the floor. I was doing night shift from 11pm till 7 am with an agitated schizophrenic. He was going through opiate and alcohol withdrawal. He had been judged a suicide risk so I had to sit with him through the night and make sure he made it to breakfast. One wall of the constant surveillance room was inch thick clear plastic reaching from floor to ceiling. In the middle of the wall was a door and it led to an exercise area just outside that was framed by a 10 meter high fence. We sat, he and I, through the night and it was the first time I heard the album Tender Prey by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
It began when they come took me from my home
And put me in Dead Row,
Of which I am nearly wholly innocent, you know.
And I'll say it again
I..am..not..afraid..to..die.
He had many problems. He lived with his mother and loved heroin being two of the main ones. He cut himself, burnt his flesh with cigarettes and often passed out, waking up in strange places and situations. Once he had awoken in bed with a man he did not recognise, both of them naked. This event was constructed as significant in his chart history, but he did not remember a thing. As the shadows of the huge bunya pines outside played against the whitewash 4 meter high walls we listened to Nick Cave croon and scream of Deanna.
We will eat out of their pantries
And their parlours
Ashy leaving in their beds
And we'll unload into their heads
On this mean season
This little angel that I squeezin'
She ain't been mean to me
He cried sometimes. We listened to Tender Prey all night, over and over again, he did not sleep and I was not allowed to. He smoked hand rolled cigarettes constantly and turned the tape over with fingers stained yellow with broken nails. We talked about books and films, music and the underworld. He knew Rimbaud and the others. He dreamed in colours. Wrote poems too and would I like to hear some. So while the masses fled to the City of Refuge he gave me psychic horse whispers from his tattered note book.
You stand before your maker
In a state of shame
Because your robes are covered in mud
While your kneel at the feet
Of a woman of the street
The gutters will run with blood
They will run with blood!
Home made tattoos slipped out blue from beneath the frayed cuffs and collar of his arrangement. Strange insects and scripts seeking the light. His watery eyes held me for a few seconds at a time. Never one to hold a glance his thin voice blew over me like a cold breeze from the swamp that had once been at the bottom of the hill, but had been drained by the settlers after they had killed all the blacks. We raged on until morning. Every 25 minutes I had to make a physical estimation of his condition, including what he was doing at the time, his mood and behaviour. Often he was just lying on the bed talking about how fucked everything was. Occasionally he was crying as he mumbled about how he needed some Hammer and would do anything to get it. Or it was how disappointed his mother was in him. All made worse by the lack of sedatives and lack of attention his medicinal need was receiving from the staff. My shift finished as porridge of Government Issue was brought in to him. He was not hungry and as I left the room the final sounds came from Tender Prey which I would buy later that week.
One morn I awakened
A new sun was shining
The sky was a Kingdom
All covered in blood
The moon and the stars
Where the troops that
lay conquered
Like fruit left to wither
Poor spiritual food.
The sun rose over the hoop pines of the car park as I pulled out from the hospital. For over a hundred years the bad apples of my home town were kept at Baillie Henderson. It came to the slow phasing out of the seclusion for the delusional. I would later come to share bar space with him in the outside world as he bled his legend around town. Falling over and getting up again. He would come to use the toilets in my father’s tiny bookshop to shoot up in. I wonder where he is today……
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