The Girl Who Couldn’t Read. John Harding

       4

      The daily morning boat had delivered us three new inmates, judged insane by the doctors at the city asylum. One was an old woman, with untidy straggly grey hair, who sat in a chair, muttering away to herself and carefully picking imaginary fleas from her clothes, imaginary because she had been thoroughly bathed and reclothed at the hospital. She was just the sort of woman one saw about the streets of big cities all the time, begging and sleeping in doorways. I said as much to Morgan.

      ‘Yes,’ he replied, ‘but that does not mean she isn’t mad. A good percentage, if not all, of such creatures would not pass the test for sanity. It is their madness that has led them to their unfortunate situation. But the state cannot afford to treat every one of them.’

      He asked the woman her name, to which she replied, ‘Mary, Mary quite contrary,’ and made herself laugh, a most hideous cackle that revealed she lacked a good few teeth; most of the survivors were blackened stumps. She stared at us a moment and then resumed her flea harvesting, giving it her full concentration as though we were not there. Morgan asked the attendant standing with us for the woman’s history.

      The attendant consulted a paper file she was holding. ‘Persistent vagrant, well known to the city police. Her mind has been ailing for some time now, it seems, and it has finally got to the stage where she is a danger to others and to herself. She tried to take a lady’s purse, being quite convinced it was her own. The police judged it not a simple matter of theft as the woman herself did not consider it stealing but taking back what was rightfully hers.’

      ‘A diagnosis of senile dementia,’ said Morgan, studying the notes. ‘One that I agree with. And this one?’

      The second woman was very young, perhaps twenty or so, and catatonic. Her eyes looked vacantly ahead of her. It was obvious nobody was home.

      ‘May have smothered her baby, sir, although that’s not certain,’ replied the attendant, passing him more notes.

      Morgan stood reading them for several minutes, then handed them to me. There was a coroner’s report into the death of the baby that was inconclusive. The mother had been found in her lodging house sitting holding the body of the infant, which had been dead for several days. She had not spoken and was completely unresponsive to questions and so had been sent to the city asylum for an assessment, where she was judged insane and referred to the island.

      Morgan approached her. He waved his hand up and down across her line of vision. There was no reaction. She did not even blink. He turned to me. ‘Some pathology of the brain means it has failed to function properly. In all likelihood she killed her baby without realising what she was doing. Do you agree?’

      I tried to read those lifeless eyes. ‘Yes,’ I said, slowly, ‘but do you not think, sir, that it’s possible the baby died by some accident or illness and that the woman fell into this state through grief at losing her child?’

      ‘There you go again!’ It was said wearily. He shook his head. ‘People do not go mad because they are upset, man. We all get upset but few of us become mad. Science shows madness has a pathological cause. There is some physical malfunction in the brain. You can require no better proof than this woman here. She shows none of the normal signs of grief, no weeping, no tearing of the hair. As you can clearly see, she is completely unemotional.’

      I did not know what to say. I could not argue with his science. I had only the evidence of my own eyes and my knowledge of human nature. I thought of Lady Macduff and her frenzy after the murder of her children. I thought of Ophelia with her flowers, unable to be reached after the death of her father at the hand of her lover. And I remembered too the suggestion in the Scottish Play that the somnambulant queen has lost a child or is unable to have children. Does she murder Duncan because she is mad or does she go mad only because of the guilt of murdering him? I could not help thinking that Shakespeare understood what makes us humans tick better than modern science as related to me by Dr Morgan.

      I was tempted to say all this but then, remembering my earlier diagnosis of Morgan’s character, decided discretion was the wiser part. There was nothing to be gained by taking him on over this. He was not about to release the woman, and anyway, what was Hecuba to me?

      We moved on to the third woman who, in contrast to the others, had an intelligent, alert expression. Before the attendant could say anything, she herself spoke. ‘I have been sent here by mistake, sir. There is nothing wrong with my mind, I assure you.’

      Morgan turned to the attendant and raised an eyebrow, saying to me in a whisper, ‘They nearly all say that.’

      The attendant looked at the notes. ‘She caused a disturbance at the restaurant where she had previously been employed as a waitress. She’d been dismissed for being absent from work two days in a row.’

      Morgan took the notes and looked them over. He raised his eyebrows. ‘Quite an impressive disturbance, I see. Smashed the place up, threw a plate through the window, broke crockery, swore at the manager and screamed at the customers.’ He lifted his eyes from the notes to the woman.

      She coloured. ‘I was not myself, sir. You see, my little girl – she’s only two, sir – was sick, sir, and I was too worried about her to leave her and go to work. I sent word to explain but they wouldn’t hear of it, sir. And so I lost my job and then I couldn’t pay the doctor’s bills.’

      Morgan looked again at the notes. ‘I see you assaulted the doctor, too.’ There was a stern gravity about the way he said this, as though he named the worst of all possible crimes.

      The woman looked down. ‘I did, sir. I don’t know what came over me. He wouldn’t take my promise for payment for the medicine. He wouldn’t give me anything for my daughter. My head was in a spin, sir. I lost control. But my daughter is better. She’s being looked after by a relative now. And I’m all right, sir. I’m not crazy, really I’m not.’

      ‘We don’t like to use words like “crazy” here,’ Morgan said kindly. ‘What you are is mentally ill.’

      The woman began to protest but he held up a hand to silence her and you had to admire the natural authority the man possessed, because she immediately fell quiet. She was smart enough to know that arguing might reinforce the diagnosis against her.

      ‘You’re mentally ill. It is not something to be ashamed of; it is a physical illness, no different from heart disease or diabetes. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people in this great city who suffer setbacks and difficulties daily in their lives. They do not go smashing up restaurants. They do not attack doctors.’

      ‘It wasn’t really what you would call an attack, sir. I slapped his face, and then only the once, sir.’

      ‘They do not attack doctors. The fact that you did these things, which mentally healthy people do not do, no matter how much pressure they are under, indicates there is something faulty in your brain. This is the best place for you.’

      ‘But,