Betty Saw Bugs
Douglas Thompson
Doctor Clarence gently prised the old tattered teddy bear from the clutching hands of his least curable patient: Elizabeth Paton, known affectionately as “Betty” among staff and fellow inmates. Inmates. A term Doctor Clarence only allowed himself to use inside his own mind these days, something of an asylum in itself, meaning safe place to hide. He felt increasingly under siege from political correctionists, sociological revisionists, and management restructuralists.
Today as a fresh experiment he gave Betty a writing pad and a pen and asked her to relate from the start her story of how she had found herself at Greenwoods West Secure Mental Health Facility. To his surprise Betty grasped the pen pretty well, as well as the idea, and after a brief thoughtful look out the window and a pick of her nose, began her demented narrative:
When did it start my dears? My ears, my mouth and nose? No. No. No. Nos. Lots of them. Eyes then. It started with my father’s eyes. They were black when I saw them, when I saw him, only the once, before he left us, before he stayed with us, because he never did. But he must have visited us, me, just the once because that’s what I remember. Him sitting there just the one night with his black eyes, short black hair and black moustache. Black jumper and blazer and trousers too. Oh, a whole heap of black.
I must’ve been four years old, my mammy later told me.His black eyes, see, they were cockroaches, shiny black shells that flipped and crawled at the corner of your sight. His moustache, it was an earwig. See, what am telling you is we was poor and the house crawled with them things, and lots more too, spiders and ants and lice and slaters. So to little me, his eyes were beetles, and his moustache an earwig, writhing, creepy, sting and nip you, like I told you.
“That’s very good, Betty…” Doctor Clarence nodded his head sympathetically, speaking slowly as if to a child, and for a moment he could have sworn Betty eyed him back with something approaching consternation.
As he read over her first missive, observing the positive effect the exercise seemed to be having on his patient, he asked Betty to write another one, about her childhood perhaps, or her schooldays, or her first job. “What did your mother do for a living?” –he prompted her.
Betty lifted the pen and began scrawling again:
Mammy told me she was an entertainer. That she’d been in the circus. Sure, she was always entertaining someone. Men mostly, bringing them all back to our house, her little circus she called it.
All her men had insect eyes, their hairy arms and chests were like spider’s webs. Horrible. Like someone ought to have cleared them all away with a feather duster. Those insect men they always took mammy into the next room and tortured her with all their beetles and lice and all the little grubs that poured ouof them, white lice, silver fish. Writhing, writhing. Sometimes they bruised Mammmy, hurt her bad. Man, she fought hard against all those insects. That’s housework she said, she told me. Every woman’s always trying to keep all them spiders and cockroaches down. Bang! –she’d say and slap her hand on the dusty table. That’s all you can do. Bang! And keep those damned crawly insects down, because they’re always breeding.
School days? They teased me, because I didn’t get as many baths as they did. But I knew I was clean. I mean clean in the way that really matters. I looked into some of them teachers’ eyes, they way they looked at the older girls, and I saw the woodlice there, writhing like when you expose them under a rock. Expose. That’s a good word.
And when the boys lied and fought or the girls squabbled and teased, I saw those beetles and spiders climbing up out of their stomachs and running out of their eyes.
I’d see two adults talking, man and woman, teachers in the corridor, and there’d be black roaches running out his trouser legs and scuttling up her legs, over her tights up towards her short skirt, and no on else could see it, as she shifted her hips around. Hell, wasn’t she even itching?
He’d lift his hand and he’d be pulling a bat out of his collar or from behind his ear and he’s throw it up into the air half-dead, and she’d laugh all loud, mouth wide open, head thrown back, then she’d grab that little black bat with her carefree hand and crush it, bend it over like a little sandwich and thrust it down over her tongue, swallowing it whole and smiling.
My first job? Well I couldn’t read so well, what with all them insects wriggling around everywhere but my Uncle Jack he got me a job in his drugstore and he noticed I was real useful because I knew who was trouble and who was not.
Man comes in, eyes all wriggling with earwigs, ants coming out of his cuffs and scuttlingoff all over the counter. I’d tell Jack, we had a secret signal for that, and he’d post someone to keep an eye on this fella or that and he said I weren’t ever wrong. One day a guy came in with worms for hair, hundreds of the all going everywhere, and when he opened his mouth a rat peeked out and said hello, like he lived down in this bloke’s black sewer of a stomach. It would have scared most girls, but I kept my cool real good and nodded my signal and sure enough this horror pulls a knife and asks me to empty the till. I start to tell him about all those worms in his hair and how there’s some dribbling down his neck now, and he squirms and starts looking for them, then Uncle Jack whacks him on the head with a sack of spuds. That was a good day for sure, we had no more trouble after that, word getting around and all, like I was some witch not to be messed with.
Sometimes on my way home I’d see giant spiders getting on the bus or climbing the front of buildings, putting their furry feelers in through open windows.
Way I figured it, they were bad ideas I was seeing, and the way they get about, spinning their webs and catching people. Like betting shops and pubs and clubs and casinos. All those places, I’d see men queuing up with insects brimming from their eyes and shirt-collars, and herded there by big
giant spiders, six feet high and rearing up, all furry limbs and lots of shifty eyes looking every which way at once. And those who came out after, I’d still
see them the next day, still see the spider-silk on them as they went about, glinting silver in the sunlight, catching, clinging, they didn’t know it was there or they’d have tried to brush it off. But it clung real strong.
People’d try to tell me that all them wires and cables I saw every day, stretched from one building to the next, pylon to telegraph pole and such, they’d try to tell me they were for communication. But I knew better. Them were spider’s webs too,and I could see the monsters that wove them every night. You pull ten down they’d put back twenty in their place, in the space of a night. Them shifty hungry spiders, they had the whole city trapped and cocooned in their grip, even if maybe only I could see it.
“Did you ever have a young man, Betty, a beau? A suitor? A sweetheart?” Doctor Clarence asked now, sitting back and taking a different
tack, while noticing Nurse Watson walking by with her dinner trolley, the fine shape of her legs. “What can you tell us about that? Please…here, write it down, just as before…”
Paddy his name was. He chatted me and my friend Elsie up one night in the queue for The Palais, but I knew by his eyes it was really me he was after. His eyes weren’t beetles, mind, they were more like ladybirds or blue butterflies, fluttering and flighting, full of fun. And the wind was blowing hard that night, I remember that well. A howling gale, lifting people off their feet in their Saturday-best clothes, breaking umbrellas like screeching bats, scrunching them, discarding them in the gutter. Discarding, there is another good word.
See because, that’s what he done with me after he’d gone out with me a while and got bored. He discarded me, and went out with Elsie instead, but I got my own back. I bided my time, then one night I cornered him in Fletcher Street, behind the market, when he was half-drunk and heading home
for the night. I’d heard he’s had a bust-up, a tiff that day with Elsie. So I flashed my legs and my eyes at him, and I bit his ear and promised him something hot just to steal him back for the night. And it worked, he came home with me, all excited. His eyes were woodlice then alright, hundreds of them all racing over each other and wriggling with energy, like when you find them in a compost heap eating a rotten old stump of wood. He was real worked up. A big lump in his trousers, I could feel it, a “big snake down there”, he whispered, and maybe he shouldn’t have gone and said a phrase like that to a girl like me.
We kissed and kissed behind the door, then on the sofa, then on the bed, and his snake was writhing around in his trousers, I could see
it, practically spitting venom it was. And he said he wanted me to see it and hold it. But then he came over all shy and said he wanted to put the lights out too. And that really confused me, like he really wanted to scare me. But is was his funeral of course, in a manner of speaking. Lights out, his snake broke free and thrashed around and spat and bit and jabbed at me. It was real bad behaved. I grabbed it by the throat and squeezed it hard to try to throttle it, and Paddy cried out like he was connected to this thing. Maybe it had bitten him too, because he seemed to be losing consciousness suddenly, eyelids all a flutter and I knew I had to do something to try and save him.
It made a lunge for my arse, the foul thing, and I sure as Hell wasn’t having it up there. Then Paddy, God knows what he was thinking of, grabbed me by the hair and forced my head down towards it. Hell, I was horrified for the first few seconds, then it dawned on me that maybe he knew what he was doing and this was a stroke of genius, the only sure way to kill this monster. I like to think of it like that anyway, that Paddy was trying to save both our lives, and at least saved mine. That way I can remember him fondly.
So in that split-second of dark and confusion and fear, Imade a decision. I went for it. I just took that damned snake right into my mouth real quick and bit its head off in one go. Oh how Paddy screamed. I called the police and ambulance and all, but they don’t come out so fast to scuzzy neighbourhoods like ours. And there was so much blood and twisted sheets and Paddy’s fading breaths and vacant eyes. I held him in my arms as the last life drained out of him, the poor thing. My sweet Paddy.
I don’t know why the police wanted to know where that snake’s head had got to. I tried flushing it down the lavatory, but stone me if the damned thing didn’t float. I took it out in a bucket and buried it in the garden, three feet down, just to be safe.
And all these nice people have taken care of me since. Nice nurses, male ones too sometimes, nice young men. And sometimes they do things to the other patients. You don’t believe me? You don’t think I know about that? They try to keep it secret, but old Betty knows, and hears them in the middle of the night, wheeling their trolleys over to the disused storerooms in B-wing, to hold them down and do their things. But aint nobody ever tries nothing with old Betty for some reason, for all these years. No, sir. They keep their snakes well away from me.
*
Doctor Clarence tried not to look shocked as he read over Betty’s final missive, but he needn’t have worried. By the time he looked up she was fast asleep apparently, in her chair, the usual medication kicking in.
He stood up and went to the window and gazed out from the fourth floor. Night had fallen and the lights of cars and nearby apartments were etched in the darkness now, lending some brief illusion of safety and comfort to the frenetic drama of everyday life. He had long been aware of Betty’s case history notes of course, but hadn’t really expected the central story to come to life again tonight. He shivered, but strangely it wasn’t the horror that shocked him, but the ordinariness, the innocence.
His own trouser-snake twitched in its habitual home, indeed it felt a little like a ghost had just bitten it. Nonetheless, and to his shame, he realised the story had aroused him a little.
Passing by the ward desk, he noticed Nurse Watson was still on duty and making herself a cup of tea in the cramped kitchenette. He strolled casually in and pressed himself against her from behind, on some wafer-thin pretext about reaching over for some kitchen roll to blow his nose on.
He could have sworn her response wasn’t entirely cold. She turned her lovely young blonde head to one side, brushed her hair back over her ear and smiled, baring, he suddenly noticed to his alarm: her perfectly formed and enormously sharp white teeth.
Doctor Clarence gently prised the old tattered teddy bear from the clutching hands of his least curable patient: Elizabeth Paton, known affectionately as “Betty” among staff and fellow inmates. Inmates. A term Doctor Clarence only allowed himself to use inside his own mind these days, something of an asylum in itself, meaning safe place to hide. He felt increasingly under siege from political correctionists, sociological revisionists, and management restructuralists.
Today as a fresh experiment he gave Betty a writing pad and a pen and asked her to relate from the start her story of how she had found herself at Greenwoods West Secure Mental Health Facility. To his surprise Betty grasped the pen pretty well, as well as the idea, and after a brief thoughtful look out the window and a pick of her nose, began her demented narrative:
When did it start my dears? My ears, my mouth and nose? No. No. No. Nos. Lots of them. Eyes then. It started with my father’s eyes. They were black when I saw them, when I saw him, only the once, before he left us, before he stayed with us, because he never did. But he must have visited us, me, just the once because that’s what I remember. Him sitting there just the one night with his black eyes, short black hair and black moustache. Black jumper and blazer and trousers too. Oh, a whole heap of black.
I must’ve been four years old, my mammy later told me.His black eyes, see, they were cockroaches, shiny black shells that flipped and crawled at the corner of your sight. His moustache, it was an earwig. See, what am telling you is we was poor and the house crawled with them things, and lots more too, spiders and ants and lice and slaters. So to little me, his eyes were beetles, and his moustache an earwig, writhing, creepy, sting and nip you, like I told you.
“That’s very good, Betty…” Doctor Clarence nodded his head sympathetically, speaking slowly as if to a child, and for a moment he could have sworn Betty eyed him back with something approaching consternation.
As he read over her first missive, observing the positive effect the exercise seemed to be having on his patient, he asked Betty to write another one, about her childhood perhaps, or her schooldays, or her first job. “What did your mother do for a living?” –he prompted her.
Betty lifted the pen and began scrawling again:
Mammy told me she was an entertainer. That she’d been in the circus. Sure, she was always entertaining someone. Men mostly, bringing them all back to our house, her little circus she called it.
All her men had insect eyes, their hairy arms and chests were like spider’s webs. Horrible. Like someone ought to have cleared them all away with a feather duster. Those insect men they always took mammy into the next room and tortured her with all their beetles and lice and all the little grubs that poured ouof them, white lice, silver fish. Writhing, writhing. Sometimes they bruised Mammmy, hurt her bad. Man, she fought hard against all those insects. That’s housework she said, she told me. Every woman’s always trying to keep all them spiders and cockroaches down. Bang! –she’d say and slap her hand on the dusty table. That’s all you can do. Bang! And keep those damned crawly insects down, because they’re always breeding.
School days? They teased me, because I didn’t get as many baths as they did. But I knew I was clean. I mean clean in the way that really matters. I looked into some of them teachers’ eyes, they way they looked at the older girls, and I saw the woodlice there, writhing like when you expose them under a rock. Expose. That’s a good word.
And when the boys lied and fought or the girls squabbled and teased, I saw those beetles and spiders climbing up out of their stomachs and running out of their eyes.
I’d see two adults talking, man and woman, teachers in the corridor, and there’d be black roaches running out his trouser legs and scuttling up her legs, over her tights up towards her short skirt, and no on else could see it, as she shifted her hips around. Hell, wasn’t she even itching?
He’d lift his hand and he’d be pulling a bat out of his collar or from behind his ear and he’s throw it up into the air half-dead, and she’d laugh all loud, mouth wide open, head thrown back, then she’d grab that little black bat with her carefree hand and crush it, bend it over like a little sandwich and thrust it down over her tongue, swallowing it whole and smiling.
My first job? Well I couldn’t read so well, what with all them insects wriggling around everywhere but my Uncle Jack he got me a job in his drugstore and he noticed I was real useful because I knew who was trouble and who was not.
Man comes in, eyes all wriggling with earwigs, ants coming out of his cuffs and scuttlingoff all over the counter. I’d tell Jack, we had a secret signal for that, and he’d post someone to keep an eye on this fella or that and he said I weren’t ever wrong. One day a guy came in with worms for hair, hundreds of the all going everywhere, and when he opened his mouth a rat peeked out and said hello, like he lived down in this bloke’s black sewer of a stomach. It would have scared most girls, but I kept my cool real good and nodded my signal and sure enough this horror pulls a knife and asks me to empty the till. I start to tell him about all those worms in his hair and how there’s some dribbling down his neck now, and he squirms and starts looking for them, then Uncle Jack whacks him on the head with a sack of spuds. That was a good day for sure, we had no more trouble after that, word getting around and all, like I was some witch not to be messed with.
Sometimes on my way home I’d see giant spiders getting on the bus or climbing the front of buildings, putting their furry feelers in through open windows.
Way I figured it, they were bad ideas I was seeing, and the way they get about, spinning their webs and catching people. Like betting shops and pubs and clubs and casinos. All those places, I’d see men queuing up with insects brimming from their eyes and shirt-collars, and herded there by big
giant spiders, six feet high and rearing up, all furry limbs and lots of shifty eyes looking every which way at once. And those who came out after, I’d still
see them the next day, still see the spider-silk on them as they went about, glinting silver in the sunlight, catching, clinging, they didn’t know it was there or they’d have tried to brush it off. But it clung real strong.
People’d try to tell me that all them wires and cables I saw every day, stretched from one building to the next, pylon to telegraph pole and such, they’d try to tell me they were for communication. But I knew better. Them were spider’s webs too,and I could see the monsters that wove them every night. You pull ten down they’d put back twenty in their place, in the space of a night. Them shifty hungry spiders, they had the whole city trapped and cocooned in their grip, even if maybe only I could see it.
“Did you ever have a young man, Betty, a beau? A suitor? A sweetheart?” Doctor Clarence asked now, sitting back and taking a different
tack, while noticing Nurse Watson walking by with her dinner trolley, the fine shape of her legs. “What can you tell us about that? Please…here, write it down, just as before…”
Paddy his name was. He chatted me and my friend Elsie up one night in the queue for The Palais, but I knew by his eyes it was really me he was after. His eyes weren’t beetles, mind, they were more like ladybirds or blue butterflies, fluttering and flighting, full of fun. And the wind was blowing hard that night, I remember that well. A howling gale, lifting people off their feet in their Saturday-best clothes, breaking umbrellas like screeching bats, scrunching them, discarding them in the gutter. Discarding, there is another good word.
See because, that’s what he done with me after he’d gone out with me a while and got bored. He discarded me, and went out with Elsie instead, but I got my own back. I bided my time, then one night I cornered him in Fletcher Street, behind the market, when he was half-drunk and heading home
for the night. I’d heard he’s had a bust-up, a tiff that day with Elsie. So I flashed my legs and my eyes at him, and I bit his ear and promised him something hot just to steal him back for the night. And it worked, he came home with me, all excited. His eyes were woodlice then alright, hundreds of them all racing over each other and wriggling with energy, like when you find them in a compost heap eating a rotten old stump of wood. He was real worked up. A big lump in his trousers, I could feel it, a “big snake down there”, he whispered, and maybe he shouldn’t have gone and said a phrase like that to a girl like me.
We kissed and kissed behind the door, then on the sofa, then on the bed, and his snake was writhing around in his trousers, I could see
it, practically spitting venom it was. And he said he wanted me to see it and hold it. But then he came over all shy and said he wanted to put the lights out too. And that really confused me, like he really wanted to scare me. But is was his funeral of course, in a manner of speaking. Lights out, his snake broke free and thrashed around and spat and bit and jabbed at me. It was real bad behaved. I grabbed it by the throat and squeezed it hard to try to throttle it, and Paddy cried out like he was connected to this thing. Maybe it had bitten him too, because he seemed to be losing consciousness suddenly, eyelids all a flutter and I knew I had to do something to try and save him.
It made a lunge for my arse, the foul thing, and I sure as Hell wasn’t having it up there. Then Paddy, God knows what he was thinking of, grabbed me by the hair and forced my head down towards it. Hell, I was horrified for the first few seconds, then it dawned on me that maybe he knew what he was doing and this was a stroke of genius, the only sure way to kill this monster. I like to think of it like that anyway, that Paddy was trying to save both our lives, and at least saved mine. That way I can remember him fondly.
So in that split-second of dark and confusion and fear, Imade a decision. I went for it. I just took that damned snake right into my mouth real quick and bit its head off in one go. Oh how Paddy screamed. I called the police and ambulance and all, but they don’t come out so fast to scuzzy neighbourhoods like ours. And there was so much blood and twisted sheets and Paddy’s fading breaths and vacant eyes. I held him in my arms as the last life drained out of him, the poor thing. My sweet Paddy.
I don’t know why the police wanted to know where that snake’s head had got to. I tried flushing it down the lavatory, but stone me if the damned thing didn’t float. I took it out in a bucket and buried it in the garden, three feet down, just to be safe.
And all these nice people have taken care of me since. Nice nurses, male ones too sometimes, nice young men. And sometimes they do things to the other patients. You don’t believe me? You don’t think I know about that? They try to keep it secret, but old Betty knows, and hears them in the middle of the night, wheeling their trolleys over to the disused storerooms in B-wing, to hold them down and do their things. But aint nobody ever tries nothing with old Betty for some reason, for all these years. No, sir. They keep their snakes well away from me.
*
Doctor Clarence tried not to look shocked as he read over Betty’s final missive, but he needn’t have worried. By the time he looked up she was fast asleep apparently, in her chair, the usual medication kicking in.
He stood up and went to the window and gazed out from the fourth floor. Night had fallen and the lights of cars and nearby apartments were etched in the darkness now, lending some brief illusion of safety and comfort to the frenetic drama of everyday life. He had long been aware of Betty’s case history notes of course, but hadn’t really expected the central story to come to life again tonight. He shivered, but strangely it wasn’t the horror that shocked him, but the ordinariness, the innocence.
His own trouser-snake twitched in its habitual home, indeed it felt a little like a ghost had just bitten it. Nonetheless, and to his shame, he realised the story had aroused him a little.
Passing by the ward desk, he noticed Nurse Watson was still on duty and making herself a cup of tea in the cramped kitchenette. He strolled casually in and pressed himself against her from behind, on some wafer-thin pretext about reaching over for some kitchen roll to blow his nose on.
He could have sworn her response wasn’t entirely cold. She turned her lovely young blonde head to one side, brushed her hair back over her ear and smiled, baring, he suddenly noticed to his alarm: her perfectly formed and enormously sharp white teeth.