The Dark Side of the Mind

by Kerry Daynes

  When I left Wales and got home I still felt so angry. It was a bile, virulent and nasty. The anger didn’t subside, it bubbled up in quiet moments and, increasingly, in the early hours of the morning where I would find myself wide awake. I had spent too long looking into the abyss, the dark crevices of the mind where bad things dwell and fester, and now it was gazing back into me.

  *

  I carried a general grumpy malaise around for weeks after the Bridger trial, one that no amount of dog-walking, my preferred method of mindfulness meditation, could seem to alleviate. I knew my objectivity was under strain and for a forensic psychologist that’s a big deal; a tightrope walker who has missed their step and may or may not take the next one. Although perhaps I wasn’t yet ready to say it out loud, I was having doubts about my career and where it was going. Was I making any real difference? What did I want to do? Who did I want to be working with? I didn’t have the answers but I did know that I was struggling with what I’d been left with.

  I wasn’t in a great mood that day at the hospital. It was a general hospital with male and female wards for acute psychiatry and the base for a raft of outpatient clinics, including complex care, psychiatry of substance misuse and learning disability. I’d been here more times than I could remember over the years, the disinfectant smell and the sounds of the place familiar and institutional.

  I’d been here so many times, in fact, that I knew that the only half-decent thing to eat in the canteen was a jacket potato, so I headed straight there and picked up a tray, slamming it down a bit too hard on the runners around the front of the hot plates.

  It wasn’t quite lunchtime and the canteen was empty apart from me and an elderly man, still in his dressing gown and slippers, and his visitor. I slotted myself into the table furthest away from them, next to the window overlooking the car park. I just wanted to be alone with my subsidized potato and my existential crisis.

  And then she sat down directly opposite me. Eating hadn’t helped my mood at all and my immediate thought was simply: Oh. Get. Lost. There were rows of empty tables, each of them with an artificial gerbera flower in a pot and four perfectly good chairs, the moulded plastic ones with holes in that look like Connect 4 frames. She could have sat in any of them but had instead plonked herself in the one chair out of all the chairs that was closest to me. I looked away, trying to avoid eye contact.

  She didn’t get the hint at all and smiled and said, ‘Hello.’ She was in her 50s, her thin, light brown hair was short and her neck and shoulders were exposed by the summery dress she had on, the strapless kind with elasticated shirring around the top to keep it up. I noticed her bra strap was a grimy, indeterminate grey and digging into her flesh in a way that looked quite uncomfortable.

  She grinned and said, ‘Hello I’m Lucy,’ and I just nodded my head, not wanting to give her the slightest hint that I might be willing to engage. The people over in the other corner got up and left and I was about to do the same. But she started talking to me.

  I realized quite quickly that she might be learning-disabled and it made me stop for a second. I remembered what my mum had always said when I was young: if someone you don’t know talks to you it might be the highlight of their day, the only conversation they may have.

  She seemed harmless so I dug deep, took a big breath and made an effort to be kind. I arranged my face – another thing my mum still tells me to do – and stayed sitting there opposite her while she chatted away. She got up and came and sat directly next to me, and started to show me her jewellery. Her hands were stacked with heavy silver, the kind you get on the market with the incense and the dreamcatchers, rings all the way up her fingers, the skin underneath them green and a bit sweaty looking. That’s when I noticed the finger. Her left-hand ring finger was shorter than the others – it was a stub, missing its top knuckle and the nail.

  ‘What happened to your finger?’ I asked. I’m no stranger to asking personal questions, something that was especially true at that particular time, when I was having to ask a lot of men about their masturbatory habits. But I felt unusually familiar myself that day; perhaps I had lost all sense of social convention because I was so burned out with it all. And she was so friendly.

  ‘I cut it off,’ she said.

  The mental health worker in me automatically assumed it had been an act of self-harm and that some intolerable emotions must have overtaken her. ‘What made you feel like doing that?’ I asked.

  Nothing really, she said, it was for her ex-boyfriend. He’d gone to prison and he had written to her saying that he wanted to be able to ‘always keep a piece of her with him’. She had done as he suggested and cut her finger off for him so he could have it. He had been really romantic like that, she said.

  That’s when I remembered it – a disembodied finger that had been found while I was working as a locum at a prison, not long after I started out. Was this woman the owner of that withered digit from all those years ago?

  It had been found by prison officers Wright and Aktar in a cell belonging to a prisoner named Fillingham. It was brown and all shrivelled, like something you find in the natural treats section of the pet shop. Although technically speaking it was a finger tip, the cut had been made just underneath the top knuckle, a three-centimetre stub from what looked like a ring or index finger. The nail was still there, still with the barest shimmer of pink polish on it. The colour reminded me of Avon’s Iced Champink lipstick, a shade I wore as a teenager in the 80s, pearlized and a bit childish.

  I’d been walking past Fillingham’s cell that morning and glimpsed the pair of them hunched over the narrow desk, with the drawer open. A selection of items – socks, toothbrush, comb – were laid out on the grey wool blanket on the bed, in the kind of neat, systematic way I recognized as routine search procedure. Officers always work their way around clockwise from the cell door, checking over every piece of furniture and surface as they go. Fillingham would have been frisked and moved to another cell while they were doing the search.

  Even in his 40s, Aktar could have passed for an adolescent, albeit one with some impressively dense dark facial hair. Wright was a broad slab of a bloke, younger than Aktar, only a few months out of training, and he was breathing heavily, looking quite nauseous. He was tugging on his tie and I wondered if he had forgotten that this part of his uniform is, for safety reasons, a clip-on.

  I popped in to see what they were looking at so intently and then they showed me. I said: ‘A finger? Shit.’ Not the most eloquent observation, but I hadn’t come prepared for this development.

  We all stood looking at the finger for a moment and then, for some reason, we all held out our hands and looked at our own fingers, like we were doing an audit.

  The finger had fallen out of an apparently unopened packet of batteries, which on closer inspection had turned out to have been opened and resealed by someone keen to hide something. One of the batteries’ innards had been taken out of its printed casing and the finger was hidden inside.

  Fillingham possessed a full complement of fingers, so they knew it wasn’t his, but he was notorious at the prison for being able to get hold of things. He was a kind of contraband corner shop. If you wanted some ink, Fillingham could knock you up a tattoo gun made from biro casings and radio batteries. Pornography, hooch (a prison homebrew made from fruit, sugar, bread and whatever else they can get their hands on) and even copies of the technical manuals used by prison psychologists. I’d heard that Fillingham offered coaching sessions to men who were due for parole board hearings. For a price, of course.

  I’d heard he also had a particular fetish for collecting skin. He hoarded slivers of flesh from any inmate that was prepared to hand it over. He had all the prison self-harmers donating bits of themselves, and he was suspected of providing some of them with cutting tools.

  Aktar sealed off the cell and I went to my meeting, carried on with my day. I heard that Fillingham denied all knowledge of it, invoking what I like to call the Shaggy Defence (‘
It wasn’t me!’). As far as I knew, the finger had never been traced to an owner, in the prison or out, alive or dead. And now here was Lucy, sitting next to me in a corner of a hospital canteen.

  ‘Oh, I understand,’ I said, and she smiled, probably not accustomed to such casual acceptance of her explanation.

  ‘How did you get it to him in prison?’ I asked, saddened that she felt she needed to cut off a digit to prove her commitment to this man. A tragedy dressed up as romance.

  She had wrapped it in clingfilm and put it in her knickers when she went to visit him, she said. Then when the guards were looking the other way she had passed it to him. She looked into the distance and raised her shoulders, wistful, as if she was remembering something beautiful.

  How had she done it? Did she see a doctor to get it sewn up? Did no one think to ask where the missing piece had gone? I couldn’t begin to ask her these questions because I didn’t really want to know any more. The human mind likes to close a story; to mine, here was conclusion at last to the story that had started that day, 15 years earlier, in Fillingham’s cell.

  It was time for my meeting and I managed to extract myself from the corner she had me wedged in.

  ‘My social worker says I’m vulnerable,’ she said, almost as clarification, as I squeezed past her. And I felt that sadness again. Lucy had somehow come to believe she was at fault for being vulnerable. Why was the onus on her? She wasn’t missing that finger because she was vulnerable, she had been coerced into chopping it off by someone who was willing to exploit her.

  I told Lucy how much I had enjoyed meeting her – meaning every word – and told her to remember that there were plenty of men in the world but she’d only got nine and a half fingers, and she needed to look after them. She promised me she would.

  As I put my tray on the stacker on the way out, old ham sandwiches and cold cups of tea spilling out of it, I felt I was also clearing away a different kind of mess. I knew I couldn’t truly be certain that it was Lucy’s finger in Fillingham’s possession that day, but I was going to choose to believe it was, and that, in this resolution, a mystery had been solved. Not only the puzzling case of the finger, but the question of what I was going to do next.

  It was time for me to take a break from frontline forensic psychology – from the sex offenders, and all the disillusionment I felt with the system I’d seen failing for so long. I would go to work in women’s mainstream mental health services, where maybe I could help women like Lucy. The abyss I had been staring into was becoming a new horizon.

  CHAPTER 10

  SAFE AND SOUND

  Denying emotion is not avoiding the high curbs, it’s never

  taking your car out of the garage. It’s safe in there, but you’ll

  never go anywhere.

  Brené Brown, Rising Strong

  When she was eight years old, Maya had contracted scarlet fever. Although for most children the discomfort of such an illness – her throat ballooned and her body ached all over – would make for unpleasant memories, for Maya the experience of being sick was a revelation.

  Confined to her bed, she had been cared for by her mother, who showed her a level of affection and attention that she’d never experienced before. Her dad had left her alone. More significant than this was the way she had been treated by the visiting doctor, a man she described as being ‘like an angel’. She told me how he promised he would make her feel well again and had tucked her gently into bed. No one had ever done that before.

  Her dad had been a gambler and a heavy drinker. If he wasn’t home by 6pm in the evening everyone knew he’d gone to the pub and that they were in for a long night. Sometimes when he came home he would line the children up in a row – there were six of them, and he’d have to get the youngest out of bed – and hit each of them one by one, usually a punch in the stomach, so that the others could see what was coming to them next. He once punched Maya in the face so hard that it knocked her front teeth out. The scar was still visible on her adult face, a bright slash of fibrous tissue running from her nose to her lip.

  Once, he poured a pot full of boiling rice over her mother’s head when she wouldn’t give him money. Another time, he had drowned the family cat’s litter of new kittens in the bath, forcing Maya and her brothers and sisters to watch.

  It was a reign of pure terror; callous violence administered by a man who took great pleasure in the theatre of his abuse. For most children a broken limb or even a fall from a bicycle is a big life event, something they remember all their lives because of just how much it hurt. Maya’s father made sure his daughter spent large chunks of her childhood in fear and pain.

  The moments she remembered feeling happy or secure were scant. The police were regular visitors to her home, she said, and she recalled the promises of an officer who had wrapped a blanket around her and reassured her that she would make things better, but had never come back. Another time, she and her siblings had moved out with their mother to a refuge and she made a friend there, Anne. She wished she had stayed in touch with Anne; she hadn’t had such a friend since. But their father had found them, and life had very quickly furred over with its familiar sadness again.

  *

  It was my first job after my encounter with Lucy in the hospital canteen. I started to wind down and then closed my private practice. A few weeks later I started a new role as a consultant psychologist, within a private group of women’s recovery hospitals. All of the facilities were small and homely, in discreet settings. This one, an old converted townhouse in a leafy residential street, innocuously located in a well-heeled North Manchester suburb, was a place where women who’d suffered major mental health episodes came to spend time and reacclimatize before making the transition back to their everyday lives. There were just six beds here and I had high hopes for what I was going to achieve in this kind of environment, it felt so welcoming and natural – a long way from the clinical interview rooms with fixed furniture and guards standing by that I knew from prisons, or the sterility of secure hospitals and wards. The doors of this hospital locked automatically behind you, but that was to keep the danger out, not the patients in.

  So my heart sank when I discovered who the other fresh arrival to the hospital was. The nurse manager announced during morning handover that our new resident Maya was joining us with a diagnosis of ‘erotomania’ and a history of stalking. With my own experience of being the unwanted object of someone’s attentions still raw, I felt instantly uneasy about working with her. I needed a stalker on my caseload like I needed a dose of Ebola. How was I going to find the objectivity I needed to build a rapport with her? And yet, personal worries aside, the professional in me was also curious. My thinking had made a major shift away from the strict diagnostic labels by that stage, but erotomania is fairly unusual and I was keen to know what it meant for Maya.

  The word erotomania sounds increasingly Victorian in today’s parlance. But in fact the idea has existed in medical texts for many hundreds of years, with no precise definition. It went through various incarnations and modifications via a range of psychiatric luminaries (including Sigmund Freud, who suggested the term described a way of repressing homosexual urges). The problem it now describes was first declared a syndrome by a French psychotherapist – G G de Clérambault – after he counselled a female patient who stood outside Buckingham Palace for hours at a time, certain that King George was communicating his love for her by moving the curtains. In 1942, his seminal paper ‘Les Psychoses Passionnelles’ was published and the phenomenon became widely known as De Clérambault syndrome, until erotomania joined the fourth edition of the DSM as a form of delusional disorder and superseded it.

  Erotomania is simply the illusion of love. It describes a false belief, held by a person, that their target – most often someone older who occupies a higher social status than them – is passionately and irrevocably in love with them, although the target in question has often had little or no contact with the person labouring under the delusi
on. The diagnosis is more commonly applied to women than men, although men can also find themselves besotted by an indifferent, if not completely oblivious, sweetheart.

  Erotomania was also known in the early 19th century as Old Maid’s Insanity, the lack of a husband being presumed so harrowing for any woman over a certain age that it would push her into a state of amorous hysteria (no one’s sure who coined that phrase but it almost certainly wasn’t an old maid). I have always enjoyed the irony of this particular name, given what we now know about how men tend to struggle more with bachelorhood in old age – dying younger and developing more degenerative diseases such as dementia.

  Once a person diagnosed with erotomania has ‘established’ their belief in the other person’s desire for them, he or she will usually begin to reciprocate the imagined love. This could mean anything from leaving flowers on the doorstep to more overt declarations, to which they hope the target will respond favourably. More often than not, the person with erotomania finds their romantic overtures rejected, so they start to generate reasons that excuse or explain the rebuff and continue to allow them to believe their target really is in love with them. It is common for them to come to the conclusion that an external force, such as someone’s spouse, is standing between them and a life of unbridled bliss.

  I was once asked for help by a man who believed the object of his affection’s husband was holding her captive and that she must therefore have so-called Stockholm syndrome (where a hostage develops a seemingly paradoxical emotional attachment to the kidnapper). This was the only possible reason he could find for her refusal to run away with him, and he asked me to put the official stamp of diagnosis on her. He also put Wild West-style ‘WANTED’ posters up around his village, appealing for information that would help lead to the arrest of her family for holding her captive. He later appeared in court wearing a sheriff’s outfit, accompanied by a miniature Shetland pony (who did not make it past door security checks). I wasn’t available to assist the sheriff at the time, but part of me wishes I had been.