by Lily Bailey
“Hey,” she says. “I’m Frankie. Are you a smoker? You look like a smoker. Want to go and have one with me when you’ve made your drink?”
I haven’t had a fag in over a day. I’ve been too scared to leave my room or ask where the smoking area is.
“Okay,” I say. She steps back and indicates with an elaborate flourish of her arm that it’s my turn to use the hot water tank. She stands impressively still, but it’s the sort of stillness that makes no promises as to how long it will stay that way. She squints her eyes and looks me up and down without saying anything.
She reminds me of a cat.
We walk into a snow-covered courtyard in the center of the building. We sit on the bench and watch twirls of smoke float into the night sky.
Frankie is thirty-two, but acts ten years younger. She tells me she’s been shuttled in and out of mental hospitals since boarding school, and suffers from bipolar disorder. She is also a part-time heroin user. Frankie is in a senior position at an oil giant, but you wouldn’t know it. She giggles like a schoolgirl when her boss comes to visit, playing the too-ill-for-company-right-now card.
Early in my stay, her fifty-year-old boyfriend, Archie, whom she met in a previous rehab, comes to see her. He is also a heroin user, and the staff disapprove of him visiting. We all sit in the garden chain-smoking our way through a pack of cigarettes. Frankie turns to Archie and looks at him lovingly, blowing smoke on his face with a little smile.
I leave them to have some quality time and toddle off back to my room. I assume the reading position, sitting upright and holding a book in front of my face so that the nurses won’t bother me, because reading is considered a healthy use of time that needn’t be interrupted, whereas staring into space is not. I’m coming to the end of an hour-long loop of routines about what happened while smoking outside when a flushed Melanie bursts through my door without knocking, meaning I’ll have to start again.
“Have you seen Frankie? You were hanging out with her earlier, right?”
“I was with her earlier, but I haven’t seen her since I came back to my room.”
“Okay,” she garbles and runs off in the other direction.
Meds are at 9:00 p.m., and I notice that my pills have been changed again. Since Dr. Dax has yet to explain yesterday’s change, I think there might have been a mistake. The man dispensing, who I haven’t seen before, tells me it’s best for me to take them, and that there definitely hasn’t been a mistake.
A gray-faced Frankie is pulled in the door by nurses a little after that. It turns out she’d sneaked out and gone home with Archie to do some heroin.
I’m getting water from the dispenser in the main corridor when she arrives.
I am relieved to discover that I can still feel sadness.
· 23 ·
Loser, Friend
“They wanted to move me to the addicts’ ward,” Frankie explains to me with her mouth full over breakfast the next day. “But I wouldn’t let them. You’re the only one I like here, so we have to stay on the same ward.”
I smile, adding the word LONER to the LOSER category, because my grin is so wide it probably makes me look like a friendless creep.
“Have you been to any of the stuff on your timetable?” Frankie asks. I shake my head because I don’t want to talk with my mouth full, adding STUPID MUTE to my list, also in LOSER.
“Neither, it’s a load of bollocks!” she declares. “Tell you what—today we’re going to have fun!”
“What sort of fun?” I reply, trying not to sound too reserved, because that would be three things in LOSER in less than a minute.
“I dunno! We’ll find things to do. There’s loads of stuff to do in an old place like this—it’s like a castle! We should explore.”
“But you’re on five-minute checks . . .”
“Don’t worry,” she grins. “I’m a pro.”
Frankie informs today’s nurse, Kelsie, that we are going for a cigarette, and Kelsie in turn informs us that she will be watching us from the window.
Out in the garden, I’m in for another surprise. A willowy, pale-faced girl with dyed blond hair and a narrow angular face is puffing away on a cigarette. With a jolt, I realize we were at school together. She was in the year above: sassy and popular. Now here she is with bandaged wrists, looking like death.
“Hey.” I struggle. “It’s Chloe, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
Too late, I realize people here don’t want to be recognized, and I hate myself for handling the situation tactlessly. Frankie, on the other hand, is oblivious.
“Oh, cooool, babes. What boarding school were you guys at?”
“Hambledon,” we answer, in sync.
“Haha! No way! I have a stepsister there. Do you know Katie Moore?”
“I didn’t know her. But I remember her name,” I say.
“She’s okay . . . ,” continues Frankie. “But her mum, my supposed stepmum, is a BIATCH! She totally ruined our family. And I’m not even joking. Chloe, you, me, and Lily probably have so many friends in common. Haha! Funny, isn’t it? Us three, all graduates from the best private schools in the country, headed straight to Chesbury University. Boarding really does fuuuuuck you up!”
Chloe gives a thin smile.
“Okay . . . we’re off now!” says Frankie. “See ya later!”
Shutting the door to the garden behind us, I give Chloe a little wave. Frankie has no time for good-byes; she is marching along the corridor.
“We’ve been gone for about seven minutes, so they’ll be looking for me already. Our nursing station is up those stairs . . . so we need to go this way to avoid being spotted.”
We sprint down corridors, past patients getting creative in the art room, and via various “engaged” rooms in which people are being made better by talking, before hurtling through a door, down some stairs, and through another door. That door must be a magic portal, because suddenly the buzz of the hospital is far behind.
“Woah,” says Frankie, looking down at a tiny staircase that leads to a lower level. I dash down it, giggling, keen to prove that I am not a LOSER.
“Come on, Frankie! Look at this old wooden door!”
Frankie arrives at my side, panting.
“It’s gonna be locked. I know it.” I laugh.
Loser.
Loser.
Loser!
“Push it!” Frankie is right behind me now, shoving into me as I grip the door handle.
We tumble headfirst onto the carpet.
We appear to be in an old doctor’s office that looks like it hasn’t been used for ages. Over the years, stuff must have just stacked up as staff used the room for storage. To the average person it might look like a dump, but to two bored inpatients, it’s a treasure trove.
Frankie is spinning round on a swivel chair behind the desk with a notepad and pen she has found somewhere.
“Now, Lily,” she drawls in a thick German accent, pretending to make notes, “I’m going to give you your diagnosis! You’re batshit crazzzzyyyyyyy!”
I’m rooting through a box that turns out to be full of hundreds of yellow journals from the British College of Psychiatrists, dated 1950–1990.
“Frankie, shut up, someone’s going to hear us! Quick, come and look what I’ve found!”
Frankie crawls round a gilded mirror that for some unknown reason has been plonked in the middle of the room, and crouches next to me.
“Look at all these old journals!”
“OMG!” squeals Frankie. “Well done you! Bedtime reading for a month!”
But Frankie can’t wait till bedtime. She pulls out journals at random and flicks through them so quickly it reminds me of fast-forwarding through videotapes when I was little. The journals are filled with garishly colored adverts about how fantastic pills are. A cartoon helicopter promises that Parnate is a Depression Lifter. A few pages later, a paper ticket superimposed on a crowd at a train station says that Orap offers a first-class return from hospita
l to society. Then there are people in fun-fair mirrors who are wiggly, short, and tall, and the caption says that “depressed people come in all shapes and sizes. . . . Nearly all of them will respond well to PROTHIADEN.”
“These adverts for pills are classic!” Frankie laughs. “The pharmaceutical industry would never be allowed to advertise like this these days. Do you think these things are worth anything? Like, are they collectable?”
“Maybe. . . . I want to read the studies in them while I’m here; they look really interesting. Let’s take some,” I say, with more confidence than I feel. “It’s not like anyone wants them.”
“Agreed. And shit! Look at the time. That new nurse is going to be going mad!”
We hide the journals underneath my parka, which I put on to go for a cigarette. It looks like I’m about to give birth to a square baby.
“Why do you only want the ones from 1981?” Frankie asks.
“Well, I want twelve months’ worth. A set.”
“Is that an OCD thing?”
“I don’t think so. It’s just logical.”
“K babes, I get ya,” says Frankie, grabbing journals at random and flinging them into the handbag she takes everywhere with her. “You’re right. We need to go now.”
I open the door a crack and peek round to make sure no one is coming.
“Coast clear!”
Out we dart, looping round the upper levels of the hospital to avoid going via the main nursing stations from other wards and being spotted—somehow, Frankie knows where they all are—before descending again to our ward.
“Where’ve you been?” demands Kelsie, drumming her fingers against the wall.
“We were in the art room, making pictures” says Frankie without a second’s hesitation.
“Where are the pictures, then?”
“They’re on the art rack, drying, because we painted them. Duh!”
I nod enthusiastically, hoping I’m a good partner in crime.
“Oh!” says Kelsie, smiling. “Well, that’s lovely. Really, lovely. . . . See you later, then.”
Suitably appeased, Kelsie shoots off in the other direction. I tell Frankie I’m going to dump the journals in my cupboard and start reading some of them. Frankie says “No stress, man,” which I think means “Okay,” and heads back toward the lounge.
I tiptoe past the nursing station, desperate not to engage in conversation with another human. I hide all the journals in my room, except for November 1981, which I clamber into bed with. I’m gambling on the fact that the nurses won’t know what it is, and will just assume I’m reading another book.
I lean back on the pillows and assume the reading position, staring with intent at a page advert that is filled by a child’s painting of a crying face on a stick body titled “My mum.” The face has eyes with paint drips running down from them like tears, and a big pink frown. In the corner the artist has signed “Cordelia W. age 4.” Then underneath that, a line of text reads: “Which antidepressant is highly effective and avoids the tricyclic hangover? See next page for prescribing information.”
It has been an hour and fifty minutes since I’ve been by myself. I’ve enjoyed hanging out with Frankie, but the routines have piled up as usual, and now I’m at bursting point. When I spend uninterrupted time with other people, a dam builds in my head. It can hold the words back for a while, but at some point they’ll surge free and overflow, and there will be chaos.
Lying back, I try to sort out the words.
On the morning of day five, someone knocks on my door. I look up and see Tilly through the observation slat.
“Lily,” she announces, marching into the room, “we need to talk. The nurses tell me you haven’t been going to your activities. Remember what I said about not complying with treatment?” Big smile. “Well, if you don’t go, I will have to tell Dr. Dax, and we might have to move you to a more secure ward.”
“That’s true,” I say, “but you also haven’t stuck to the timetable. I haven’t been assigned a therapist for CBT yet.”
Tilly’s smile falters. Frankie’s face pops up at the observation slat. She’s pulling faces and wagging her finger like Tilly. I try not to laugh.
“We are trying to arrange the best possible treatment for you at a difficult time. At the moment, that means going to your activities.”
“But none of those activities work for me. They all involve sitting in a large group of people for long periods of time, and that sort of situation sends my OCD into a whir.”
“What about yoga?”
“Yoga is hell. I just lie there doing stuff in my head and getting stressed because they’re telling me to pretend I’m on some mountain that doesn’t exist. Maybe it would be great if I was better, but right now it’s the last thing I want to be doing.”
“The nurses will keep me informed. Think about it.” She pats my shoulder, which sends a ripple of aftershocks through my body.
Will traces of my SHOULDER be left on her palm?
Tilly turns to leave the room. Frankie’s face disappears, only to fly through my door thirty seconds later.
“Morning! Breakfast time! So you have to go to your activities?”
“You eavesdropper!”
“Noooo, it’s not like that, I’m just looking out for you!” She grabs the personalized timetable from my hands. “Oooh! You have art today! So do I. We’ll go together.”
Jenny’s voice wafts through the room like a relaxation DVD.
“Use whatever medium you like. There’s Plasticine, crayons, pencils, or paint. The choice is yours.”
There are six of us around the table. A fat woman from another ward stares vacantly into space, rolling the pink Plasticine around slowly.
To my left, an ex-military guy called Sam, who is being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder, is using the yellow Plasticine to make handguns.
On my right, Frankie clutches crayons in the air, raring to go. A pink-haired girl called Delia is getting her brushes and paint palette ready.
Finally, there’s Amy. Amy was from Kansas, but now lives in Fulham with her husband and two kids. Her problems mainly center round the fear that her face doesn’t look as good as those of her mum peers. She also finds being class rep stressful, and is increasingly alienated by mum-to-mum playground politics.
“Basically,” she summarizes, “I am so goddamn sick of tiger mothers getting me down. Ya know?”
Jenny nods sympathetically, then says, “Today’s theme is confidence. I would like you all to draw, make, or create something that expresses how you feel about confidence. You have thirty minutes.”
Frankie leans close and whispers to me: “Challenge—I bet I can make something more clichéd than you.”
“Oh, you are so on,” I hiss back.
Frankie draws herself as half Lucifer and half Gabriel. I draw a gawky human puppet being pulled up from a curled ball to standing: the taller she gets, the uglier she becomes.
“Oh, wow, that is breathtaking, Lily,” says Jenny, when the time limit is up. “Can you describe your work to the group?”
“Uh, yes, I, uh . . . I think . . . Too much confidence is ugly. Yes, that’s what I think. That’s why I made this.”
Frankie has pulled her sweater halfway over her face and is trying to disguise her laughter as a cough. She’s not doing a very good job.
“Gosh!” interjects Amy. “That is just one of the most powerful things I’ve ever heard. Too much confidence is ugly.”
She shakes her head in disbelief. “I’m going to write that down. Ya know, I might get it printed on a canvas and hang it in my hallway. Too much confidence is ugly . . .”
· 24 ·
Skating
This morning, when I wake up, I picture some white skating boots and my head. For hours, all I can see is the tip of the blade smacking into the back of my skull, gradually chipping away at the bone until blood spurts everywhere. I convince myself I will never be able to think of anything else for the rest of my
life, and the thought swells and magnifies.
Outside, I can hear Dr. Dax stalking the corridors. She swoops in on a cloud of sickly perfume and designer clothing, perches on my bed, and tries to chat about whether I am enjoying my stay.
I cannot cope.
I scream at her and ask her why she keeps changing my medication without explanation. My SPOILED category is going into overdrive, but for once, I don’t care.
“I can’t stop eating!” I gesture round my room toward the sweet and chocolate wrappers littering the floor and the stack of crisp packets in the bin. I wave the banana I’m halfway through eating at her like a crazed ape girl. “I never used to be like this! Those pills make me eat everything in sight, and Frankie said it’s true because she’s been on them and you stop knowing when you’re full. And why have I had no proper CBT? Dr. Finch said that’s the only behavioral therapy for OCD that works. Why did I spend yesterday afternoon listening to dumb people defining the word stress on a big whiteboard with a spider diagram, and why did I have to make a ‘worry tree’ in depression class?”
Dr. Dax replies evenly, “I’m sorry you feel some negativity toward the service you have received.”
“It’s YOUR fault!” I howl. “YOUR fault I can’t stop thinking about ice skates, because this treatment is WRONG. I wouldn’t be thinking about ice skates if it weren’t for YOU changing my medication and making me sit in huge groups of people and I FEEL ALL WRONG IN MY HEAD AND IT’S WORSE THAN BEFORE. And now you’re sitting here making me feel angry, and all I can think about is ICE SKATES HITTING MY HEAD—”
I picture another white boot taking aim. I wince. The thought becomes so vivid, I hear my skull crack.
“Lily,” Dr. Dax says slowly, “have you ever considered the fact that you might be psychotic?”
“I’m not! Dr. Finch said another doctor would say that! It’s an intrusive thought, which of course you don’t know anything about, because I’m not sure you even know what OCD is. GO AWAY!”
“As you wish.”
Dr. Dax leaves.
