The Treatment and the Cure by Peter Kocan Page A

favour.
    You’re at the moment of truth now, and must either obey or defy him. Either way, your life is going to be made miserable from this moment on. You’ll be his stooge or his enemy. His face is very grim. You may already have hesitated too long. Just then Bill Greene, who is on the other side of the room, picks up the cushion and throws it as though playfully at Dick’s head. The crisis is over. You’re not sure whether Bill Greene understood what was happening and deliberately helped you, but you feel grateful anyway.
    Sometimes, when Arthur comes down to the vegetable garden and you’re talking to him a little away from the other men and screws, you almost tell him of the pressure building up in the ward because of Dick. It’s the only time you’d dare, down in the open with just the two of you and no other ears to hear. It would be a very serious thing to do. It would make you a nark, a phizzgig, the lowest form of life. Also, if it got back to Dick that you’d ratted on him, he’d never rest till he’d paid you off. You try to imagine what it feels like to have a knife in your stomach. So you don’t say anything to Arthur.
    The climax comes in a strange way. One morning Dick comes into the dining room with the others and he’s got a long gash down his face. It’s raw and bleeding. Arthur wants to know what happened. Dick won’t say.
    “They got me, that’s all,” he mutters.
    “Who got you?” Arthur wants to know.
    “I’m not sayin’.”
    So Dick is taken into the office. A senior supervisor is called from the other part of the hospital. The supervisor takes a dim view of it, examining Dick’s wound and then coming into the dining room to stare at all of us, as if trying to pick the vicious assailant. We see screws moving around the ward. They’re searching for the weapon that wounded Dick. The atmosphere is very tight and bad, the screws all with hard faces that they get when there’s trouble like this. There’s a rumour going among the men that Dick inflicted the wound on himself.
    “You know that big nail in the wall on the verandah? He shoved his own face onto it.”
    “Why?”
    “Because he’s fuckin’ mad!”
    “He’s trying to frame someone.”
    “He hates himself!”
    “He’ll have ter join the queue!”
    We don’t see Dick any more. We learn he’s been locked up in a far cell. Then we hear he’s making confessions. About the wine, for instance. Screws open the ceiling of the shower room and find a cache of wine there. Then screws are sent to search behind one of the toilet cisterns and find a long knife, Dick’s own. Then it’s said that Dick has confessed to having buried a revolver somewhere in the vegetable gardens. By the afternoon two dozen screws have come from outside with long sharp iron rods and are moving methodically across the vegetable gardens, poking the rods down every few inches, hoping to strike the metal of the buried gun. For two days they poke the earth. The gardening work is stopped and all the men kept locked on the verandah under close watch. The screws can’t find any gun.
    “A bloke feels like a faaarkin idiot,” Eddie complains. “Pokin’ the faaarkin ground all day.”
    Once they thought they’d found something. The screws all hurried to the spot and dug a huge hole to unearth something solid that a rod had struck, but it was only a rock. Then a man from the army comes with a mine detector and goes slowly over the whole surface again, but can’t find any buried metal. The screws decide there isn’t any gun.
    After a couple more days, Dick is sent away to the gaol. We all breathe easier, as though we’ve been freed from a tyrant. For a long time there are jokes about growing guns in the garden.
    It’s winter. There are a lot of wet days and we don’t go to work in the garden when it’s raining. When we can’t go down to work we have billiard and snooker tournaments, with all the men and some screws gathered all day long in the