Quincey P. Morris might be who you think he's not.

Blood and Jam (September 21, 2009. Issue 9.)

I slammed the payphone down, how conversations ended with my Mum, after another  pointed argument about money for cigarettes.  A plaintive plea to come home, describing homesickness and hateful roommates, and the system, and the Doctor, and being her little boy. 

Please.

Her denials led their normal course, until I hissed with anger, for everything the world had done to me, for everything I had done to her, and for her decision to send me away.  It was an enflamatory rage that coursed through my head, like a preburner to all the promise of puberty. 

I was eleven.

Three chattering kids came running up from the Annex, and I turned to see the most recent admittance, Jen, drenched in her own blood, being lead by Staff to the Office.  Glasscuts dribbled from her arms, her spiky Goth hair flattened and leaning to one side.  We watched through the Office window as she was taken to the Treatment Room, until curtains were closed and the show was over.  I felt stunned, anger forgotten, lacking comprehension like a short circuit that kept repeating.  I didn’t understand then the relief pain can give a person, the vindication in the outside looking like how the inside feels.  All I could compute was how they would clean the long splotchy drips of blood from the carpet, and what a stupid thing it was to do.

In as light a manner as possible, another Staff emerged from the Office, jangling the kitchen keys loudly.  ‘Time for supper,’ he said with a smile, as if the nothing had happened.

We followed in silence and hushed whispers to the kitchen, for hot chocolate and jam on toast before bed.

*

Behind the mask-all-evil magnolia paintjob, the wire-hatched Office window, (through which peered the Staff in their eternal vigilance); beyond all those fire doors, with double locks and small sneakwindows, was the knowledge that we were all fuckups for ever being there in the first place.  It was no prison where everyone would proclaim their innocence; we would hide our causes for joining this exclusive membership, guard our imagined privacies against jeers, laughter, derision, though a mere hour in the Consultation Room with the Doctor would stir up the riverbed of our emotions to uncontrollable,  clouded extremes.

(Years later, I found reports in pdf as to why the place was shut down.  Sexual abuse by a Staff was there, under my nose, though I knew nothing about it at the time.  I have not dug any further, for fear of what I may find.  The words to Victims, a song by Culture Club, come to mind.)

For a while, they did not grind us down.  The admittance of one charismatic career criminal lead us to gang-like brotherhood, drugs, sex, truancy and AWOLs, which inevitably led to his expulsion and draconian changes to the rules.  People came and went, Morning Meetings, led by the Doctor, brought up issues.  The tyranny of his rightness would either drive you mad or make you conform.  You learnt the right things to say, just to leave.  It took me a year.

*

The one night that I recall the most, we gathered in the TV room to watch a favourite cop show.  Somehow it had slipped past the Staff, who usually read the TV guides in advance with fundamentalist dedication.  We sat in the dark, unaware of the storm to come.  The flavour of the air changed as the issue of child abuse became apparent.  The tension racked up as the baddie mistreated the toddler, while the portly copper followed the papertrail of hospital reports, and questioned the dedicated mother who could see no wrong in her new boyfriend, nor admit any guilt of her own.  It culminated in the ambulance men phoning the police, and the hero knocking down the door as the abuser tried to strangle the life from the little tot.

How we roared with anger.

That roar still haunts me.  The entire room erupted.  It was the growl of the injured, the scream of the scarred, but mostly it was the recognition that no policeman had been there for us, that no hero would come to save our day.  The TV had lied, and we knew it with our own broken bones and our mental scars.  Face to face with what had put us in that room, and led to all our misdemeanours, it just wasn’t fair.

A riot could have easily happened then, yet a Staff with a happy smile knocked as the credits rolled, and ears still ringing with that roar, we all walked down the blood-dripped carpet, to the kitchen for jam on toast and hot chocolate before bed.  And one boy, though I don’t know who, prayed for a hero that he knew wouldn’t come.