Bring Out Your Dead

PAIN, the Pauper Asylum and Institute for Neurotics, is about to be shut down as part of the Care in the Community policy Under the brooding -- if roving -- eye of Dr. Michael Swan wander inmates William, frail and hallucinating, Eddie, dreaming of the sea, and lumbering and mutely psychotic Miller. There's love in the laundry, squabbling in the Wet Weather Room, and a slide show every two weeks. And Dee, who claims she could have an affair with Gorbachov, will fight to preserve it all. She'll glue herself to the skirting boards -- they'll have to drag her, screaming, from the gas brackets. Staff and inmates unite in their sense of dislocation, in their dread at the world outside, as their haven slowly crumbles around them.