Download from Smashwords (eBook) Sam Smith books Sam Smith books Category:  Mainstream Type: Fiction Pages: 242 Copyright: October 2009 ISBN-13: 9781005998561 Price: $2.99 (eBook) Robert is a paranoid schizophrenic in a seaside residential home. Feeling that something is wrong he buys a handheld recorder to secretly record his suspicions. Aside from an explanatory prologue and an epilogue in summary the whole of the book is a transcript of Robert's recordings as he tries to discover what he feels is wrong without the staff thinking his behavior is deteriorating and having him returned to secure. Not knowing what is wrong he records any observation he thinks significant - about the staff, his fellow residents, the town and its people. And very slowly it starts to make a kind of sense. There is a murder....     Excerpt One tape 1. side 1. Something's wrong. I had to stop there. Just saying that out loud. No, just thinking it aloud. Yes, just thinking it is highly dangerous. Dangerous for me. I stopped again. Stopped talking that is. Let the tape run on, had to rewind. I expect I'll get used to it, learn to work with it. Because this is a tool. A tool. Like a saw, a hammer, a chisel. A spanner. Is a tool. Is the reason I got this machine and all these tapes. Usually I have no trouble talking. Get going and can't stop. Don't want to stop. The words all tumbling out. Coming from the air above my thatch and out through my mouth. Don't know what I'm going to say next. And there it is. What I've said. Makes me laugh mostly. With surprise. Doesn't amuse others. Usually they get up and walk away. Have seen them roll their eyes. So I turn to the person the other side of me. Got to be seen to be talking to someone. Or else. Now I've got this machine. You see I can talk till the quiet cows come plodding home. If they ever do. And the vocabulary is certainly all there. I am, after all, the product of a very expensive private education. So.... talking about myself is fine. It's what I've been used to doing. My difficulty now, a considerable difficulty, is in remembering. And remembering in a sensible order. Which is why I have acquired this machine. My short term memory is shot. To say what I've just said, to explain what had gone before, I replayed the whole tape to listen to exactly what I'd gone on about. Because going on is what I usually do. "You do go on." Oh yes, I do. Go on. But I got this machine because something's wrong. Wrong with me? Wrong with where I am? Wrong with the people here? If it's me, and it could well be me, then I have to be careful. Could be the beginning of another episode. Though it certainly doesn't feel like that. ....Strange to mention my episodes, without the subject being immediately changed. Or a sudden interest being taken in what I am saying. But the subject getting quickly changed by me or they either way. No, it doesn't feel like the beginning of an episode. It's more something without a name. Maybe it's just the strangeness of this place — having a belated impact? Strange to me. Normal, maybe, to others. But I haven't been in a place like this before. Haven't had a room to myself before. Although the room isn't quite 'to myself'. I can't lock myself in here. Can't come and go quite as I please. But I do have streets I can walk down. Shops I can go in.... Wish I could hold my thoughts together. All together at once. Examine them as a whole piece. Draw arrows, little circles around this thought, around that one, join them up, make patterns, see how they all fit together. But that.... that idea is already slipping away from me, another treading on its toes, pushing it in the back.... If I could write. maybe on a page it would all make some kind of reassuring sense. This word connected to that word, following this word, leading to that word. But the thoughts, the ideas, won't come down my arm to my pen. A few get as far as my elbow, and I look at the pen between my thumb and my fingers and I think it hasn't moved. So I think to tell it something else to write, and this time it gets no further than my shoulder. Then I forget to look at the pen, forget even that I'm supposed to be writing. It won't bother them to hear me talking in my room. Not the only one here does it. Funny thing is — and at this point I hear myself whisper, don't want any listeners to know — funny thing is that whenever I play the tape back I listen to it through earphones. Very small earphones. Like the children here wear. I didn't know what they were at first. Thought they were some new kind of plastic jewellery. Worn dangling from both ears Same with the silver phones the taxi drivers down the hill wear clipped to their ears. I initially thought they were some new kind of vulgar jewellery too. Crass self-decoration, like their tattoos and their huge signet rings.... And the taxi drivers, standing beside their cars, to all appearances loudly talking to themselves in public. All so very different.... No, something's wrong. But maybe it's because it simply is all so new. I'm just not used to it. But new's new. And the new is curious. And the new is interesting first time I come across it. And it doesn't worry me. So what does worry me? I don't know what it is that's worrying me. And that's what's worrying me. All I know is that something's wrong. I was becoming agitated there. Let the tape run on. I had to remind myself that I'm doing this to stop myself becoming agitated. Something is wrong. This machine is a tool. Doing this is a means to an end. Not an end in itself. No sirree. And as long as I'm heard just mumbling away in here no-one will bother. They'll just whisper together outside the door and walk away. No, they don't whisper. They lower their voices. One low voice answered by another low voice. Low voice question. low voice answer. When they agree they walk on. And when they get to the stairs, past everyone's door, their voices come back to normal and they start to talk of themselves. They prefer to talk about themselves. And if we're clever we remember to ask about themselves. Ask about their children. Ask about their new car. "New to me. Ha ha." Ask about their holiday. And they tell us. About their car, about their children, about their holiday. As if we're truly interested. As if we have no life of our own. As if we have to live their lives.... Getting excited again. But not agitated. Just running away with an idea. And they're all in here. Inside this head. All the ideas. Just a matter of bringing them together. Then I'll know. But mustn't get agitated. Mustn't sound agitated. Which is why I daren't say to any of them that I think something's wrong. They'll be bound to take it the wrong way. As a symptom. And I'm sure, this time, that it is not a symptom. If I'm to solve this I mustn't get myself put back on the injections. Even on some of the new dark blue tablets. Can't have one thought on its own then, let alone hold a whole lot together. Be Robert as robot again. Told to get up. Told to go to breakfast. No, told to wash. Told to dry myself. Told to get dressed. Asked what I'm wearing. They choose. Lay it out on the bed. Maybe they made the bed while I washed. The bed smooth. Not rumpled where I got out of it. Told to comb my hair. My hair. My hair is yellow. Very thick and very yellow. Bald nurses have envied me my hair. "Something wrong with this world when you're stuck in here with that thatch and I'm out there, with my gleaming dome, trying to impress and pull nubile young ladies." Laughing themselves at what they've just said. As if I don't deserve my hair. Wherever I've been. Whatever I've done. One nurse, a girl, liked to comb my hair. She used to comb it into different styles, different shapes. Gave me different partings. Made my scalp sore. Which was why, dumb as I was that time, I knocked the comb out of her hand. Frightened her. Which was why I was put back on injections.... Or did they just increase the dose that time? They were right. I can see the shock on her face. I don't deserve my hair. Here the nurses are called 'carers'. None of them have combed my hair, yet. One — he's left now — did take me down to the barbers. So the barber would know where I was from? But that realisation didn't come until after. Medication makes me slow like that. Like this. The barber is actually a very nice man. He knows the town's history. And the town was always better back in those days, he says. He doesn't like today. Even if it's tomorrow when he says it. He doesn't like things today. Doesn't like the way things are today. And when he says he doesn't like something, of whatever it is he doesn't like, he says, "No offence." No offence just in case whoever hair he's cutting is a part of the something he doesn't like. "No offence." Or if they're sat behind him awaiting their turn in the chair — he talks to them in the mirror — "No offence." Or if any of their family are somehow involved in what he doesn't like and he doesn't know if they're anything to do with it. "No offence." No offence if you too drive like a maniac. No offence if you too like this rubbish rap music. "Call it music?" No offence if you like a drink. We all like a drink — no offence — but. No offence if you're divorced. No offence if you're a regular churchgoer. No offence....

Guy Fraser-Sampson - Pursewarden
Lack of originality is certainly not a criticism one could level at Something's Wrong by Sam Smith. This is one of the most innovative novels I have read for some time. The form is that of a series of transcripts of tape recordings of someone who, as it becomes rapidly clear, has some serious mental health problems. This is a harrowing work, which raises some disturbing issues about mental health care generally, and care homes in particular. You feel yourself literally getting into the mind of the character, and caring about what happens to him - both rare attributes in novels these days. I am sorry that lack of time prevents me from writing a fuller review.

Coal City Review: Brian Daldorph
Something’s Wrong: in fact as we find out during the course of many short monologues spoken into a tape recorder by the narrator, Robert, there are many things wrong in the sleepy little coastal town of Widdercliffe, and the world it represents. Robert lives in a group home, The Grove, as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic under a Home Office Section. As Robert gradually reveals his story to us, we discover that thirty years ago he got into a pub fight and hurt his opponent so badly that he was convicted and put under a Home Office Section. Robert had used “excessive” violence in the fight. Robert is labeled as mentally unstable, and treated for it with any number of treatments. He realizes that if he’d been merely a pub-brawling thug he’d have served his sentence, gotten out, then lived as a free man.

In the first half of the novel, we see that there’s plenty wrong with Robert and his fellow residents at The Grove group home and their supposed supervisors. There’s the sort of unease all around that a reader senses in Kafka’s The Trial, for example. There’s plenty wrong with Widdercliffe too: Robert is especially fearful of the gangs of young people who roam the streets with little to do but to get into trouble and waste time. Widdercliffe is a dumping ground not only for Robert and the other residents of The Grove:

Widdercliffe seemed to be the kind of town people ended up in. Everyone I met, everyone I listened to, seemed to be from somewhere else. Had drifted to there. Ended up there. A last place. On the land’s edge. No further to go. So they got to lead a life on the edge. Edge of a culture, edge of national events, edge of bankruptcy . . . edge of legality, edge of homelessness, edge of sobriety, edge of sanity . . .

More like a town holding on by the edge. Life balanced on a knife edge. (159)

Robert’s voice in this novel is as compelling as the voice of Dostoyevsky’s narrator in Notes from Underground. In both cases the speaker is an outsider who sees too clearly the shortcomings of the world that won’t accept him.
Robert’s voice throughout 200 pages is crisp and clear and sometimes achieves a sort of effortless plain poetry, as in the passage above about Widdercliffe, and in this glimpse of a black cat:

In the bottom of the hedge I just glimpsed the black oil of a slinking cat. Blackbirds all around are piping their alarm. (119)

Robert has sharp eyes and words for the characters around him too. Here he describes two new workers at The Grove:

The new woman’s got a silly perm and a face like a punctured tyre. She has that pressed-down posture of a put-upon woman. And, new here, she has the quick defensive smile that says she’s frightened of every one of us. (119)

Corduroy man also tried too hard to be friendly. And he’s got those loose lips, which can’t seem to compress together without sliding past each other. When he speaks his mouth turns into a spout. And not only does he have a hip-sinking stance, his belly pushes his t-shirt out. (119)

Corduroy man tells Robert that the staff at The Grove are now called “Support Workers” because they support Robert and the other residents as they move towards independent living. Robert comments:

Every time I see him, and his bad posture, I now think of Support Hose. Like my Gran used to wear. (119)

In the second half of the novel, there’s something particularly wrong: ....