If symptoms

persist.. .

NO SOONER had I arrived in the hos- pital one day last week than I was asked to go to the casualty department. A young man had been brought in not long before who had taken too many sleeping pills. The hospital being completely full, as usual these days, he was lying on a trolley in the corridor.

He was deeply asleep. He smelt unwashed and had on a black T-shirt with a long legend in white lettering. It started: THE TEN GREATEST FUCKS IN THE WORLD Below this was a list numbered one to ten.

1. What the fuck was that? — Mayor of Hiroshima.

I shall not reproduce the list in its entirety. Suffice it to say that No. 1 was the most tasteful of the ten.

The patient being unaware of my pres- ence, I shook him gently to wake him.

`Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck,' he groaned, expanding the word as a South American football commentator on the radio expands the word 'goal'.

`Good morning,' I said.

`Fuck off,' he said, a little wider awake.

This, of course, put me in a good mood for the wards. First on the left was a girl of 12 who had taken an overdose of her mother's antidepressants. Her father had recently discovered that she had gone to bed with her 19-year-old boyfriend, and had accordingly informed the police. The boyfriend and some of his mates (as she called them) had come to the house and had broken his legs with baseball bats to encourage him to withdraw the charges.

Next to the young overdoser was a slightly older overdoser. Her ex-husband was giving her trouble again: he had put an axe through her front door the day before. He was not a pleasant man: he had, among other things, locked her in a cupboard for days on end.

`Once he held me by the ankles out of the eleventh-floor window of our flat, shouting, "What's it like to die, bitch?"' `You didn't leave him afterwards?' `No.'

`Why not?'

`I loved him. Besides, I didn't know no different.'

At first I was incredulous. How could anyone know no different? Then I looked at her address: a tower block to which I had once been called because a resident had abseiled down the front of the building from his flat on the 15th floor. It was feared that there was some- thing medically wrong with him.

I went up to his flat. He opened the door. All was darkness inside. The rooms were bare and cold, but in the centre of the largest of them was a crude iron bra- zier, with some dying red embers. The abseiler took cocaine and used all his income to buy it. Now he was burning his furniture to keep warm.

`Why did you abseil down the build- ing?' I asked.

`I wanted to test my escape route,' he replied, 'in case of fire.'

No wonder someone in the block con- siders it perfectly normal to be suspend- ed by the ankles from the 11th-floor window.

My next patient in the ward had also been locked in a cupboard by her hus- band — who was a policeman. He want- ed to make sure she did not misbehave while he was out on the beat.

`Why haven't you left him?' I asked her.

`I have, doctor,' she replied. 'Lots of times.' Theodore Dalrymple