Sam Smith

Something's Wrong Sam Smith

A transcript of 18 double-sided cassette tapes recorded by an ageing paranoid schizophrenic. The making of these tapes began as his attempt - an aide memoir and thus means of bringing some order to his fragmented thoughts - to discover the 'something wrong' that he feels is hiding within his mind. Cataloguing all that he feels might be important he describes his day-to-day life in a residential home in a seedy seaside town. He reports on the puzzling behaviour of the town's inhabitants, along with that of the staff and residents of the home.
 While he tries to work out what is wrong there is a robbery, arson, and a local girl is murdered, all of which he suspects himself being responsible for. Then he helps an evicted girl move into a stone hut, and this action on behalf of another frees him from his self-suspicion.
 The 'something wrong' that he had subconsciously registered, but belatedly realises with the arrival of this year's statement, is that the trust fund that his late father created for his welfare is being used to pay for his enforced stay in the for-profit residential home.
While he works out what to do, if not to get off Section 41 of the Mental Health Act, at least to stop his trust fund being further depleted, piece by piece he discloses what he did to get himself placed on a Home Office Section. In the making of escape plans he tries not to draw suspicion onto himself. 
He absconds and sets himself up in a bedsit in a small market town until the last of his savings run out and he takes to the road. The tapes find their way to a campaigning mental health charity. Hence the transcription, hence this book.