Cynara's Note # 37 1971.

A young woman in a mental asylum

Vincent drew pictures in the air with a ghostly brush, bright yellows and blues. I stood in lounge of the locked ward and watched him, his features stern, his hair red and fiery. That was before dinner, before the mass poisoner got to work.  No one else saw Van Gogh at work, a one man or a woman show just for me. Big Sid walked to the window, his large hands joined behind his broad back, the white nurse’s coat stretch over his broad shoulders. Alun shouted at Lucy because she had pissed in his favourite armchair; she spat at him, her claw-like nails ready to pounce. The foreign nurse calmed her and took her off to wash and change, leaving the scent of urine behind. I saw the shrink in the afternoon, not the usual one, but a female who asked me to sit in the chair opposite, and asked me questions all the time reading the note on me. Vincent was there looking at the shrink, his mouth repeating whatever she said to me, but his tone was mocking, and I smiled at his antics, but she saw nothing, just me smiling, gazing at the window. She had increased my medication, writing down how she saw me and how I behaved, and my laughing at Vincent’s mockery didn’t help, especially as she couldn’t see the reason for my laughter,  and even if I said about Van Gogh, she would have written down all that. I said nothing about what I saw, and shrugged my shoulders when she asked why I laughed.  After the dinner of stewed cat and battered vegetables and some kind of pudding and lumpy custard, I sat in the lounge next to Lucy, she smelling of disinfectant or some such stuff. My father wrote and said he couldn’t make visiting me Sunday; saying mother wasn’t well and he didn’t want to leave her. I spat on his letter and screwed it up, but didn’t feel better.