Made In Hull: Stories 1969 - 2005 Part 3 (1/4) By Rich Mills

(1/4), (2/4), (3/4), (4/4), Part 1, Part 2,

Crisis Talks (Part 1) (Hull Royal Infirmary and Pearson Park)

Waiting in A&E. Too much time spent sitting, waiting, hour upon hour. I wanted to get up and leave so many times, but I knew that I had to stay and keep waiting. For all our sakes! The intensity of the situation made my head ache, but I breathed through it and sunk my head into my hands, still waiting. Among the drawn-out periods of waiting there were breaks, when for example an A&E doctor, and a psychiatrist, called me into a small eight foot by eight foot consulting room. Here, as with the Triage Nurse I'd spoken to on arrival, I was questioned and examined, assessed and pondered over.

Pouring out my built-up angst and overbearing depression to stranger after stranger, never feeling uneasy as the floodgates opened. Straining against the downpour to keep my voice calm and still. Broad shouldered, each certified an emotional sponge for my woes, these professionals empathised but never sympathised, understood but never judged. The final diagnosis was a psycho-social disorder, and I was apparently in what is known as Crisis. I knew that, the whole world and his fucking dog knew that. I'd had my head up my arse for weeks, in fact I think I was planning my escape from all the shit around me by trying to disappear up said arsehole.

Obviously (now) a stupid escape route, as you just end up covered in more of the brown stuff you've created for yourself.

There's too much shit in this world. Cat shit in the bath every morning, baby shit up your nails, the copious amounts of shit we all talk. From now on I'm gonna be a Charmin Man, a cleaner of crap, protector of porcelain, slayer of shit. If I didn't hold onto that idea, then I may as well let myself just drown in it all. I had no will left. What kept me going was the deep-rooted survival instinct to fight against suffocation. A short taxi ride and I was back in familiar, but somehow now changed from only a few hours previous when I was here, surroundings of Pearson Park.

What I had come back to was not my home, my community, it had started to erode away from me already. I doubted whether I had a home anymore, or a family! I mean fuck the community, what had I done to my home and my family?

I thought I'd destroyed both that day. Why was I such a fuck-up and why was I here? Not in the tossy (metaphysical) philosophy sense, I mean why the hell was I standing outside this great looming grey building, three storeys high, a huge grey cube plonked on the corner of Park Road, overlooking the park entrance from Cave Street and Park Grove. Once the whole building had been two separate grand Victorian semis. The residences of the long dead and now extinct in these parts, gentry, that once roamed this green inner city space.

It was now a Residential Centre for people in Crisis, like me. So I was at the right place after all. I stood once again looking up at the battleship grey walls rising up away from me.

Continued ...next page(2/4),

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