Inside track
I lived in that other yellow place, for fifteen wet years. Locals called it ‘The Mental’ though I wasn’t from those parts, nor were any of my people who never found the gates. There was a long wall, so tall it was hard to tell what kind of day had fallen in among us. I suppose the place was warm in a foolish way. I knew every stranger wandering the scrubbed halls in black and white by negative held up to the known light, the way you can see what shapes are there, and what they want, and see the shades that colour takes away. My favourite corridor opened onto spring apples, flower bunches, frostless lake-water, tyre tracks. Pill-trolleys-fronting-nurses prowled the wards for mouths. I stayed quiet when I heard their apple voices tempt the gathered snakes. The day’s texture was stringy as cabbage or a mother’s bacon. No two days were different except the day of the three swans. Near my long pauses, my walls of safety, lay the banging of pans, steel tray collisions, glass bottles chattering in crates, the sound of nurses humming to themselves like traffic growing nearer. I met everything before it came, and had it gone before it went. Those nurses saw us in shifts, eloped at tea-time in long coats, collected by a green bus that never washed, it’s metal jaws held open as it left, even when winter blew shivers off the lake. I saw them through diesel smoke, stretched across the long bus window, like a queue that never moved, looking back at us, not longingly, suddenly remote and homeward turned. Edward Boyne