by Ceylan Scott
‘I’m not fucking drinking it!’ she shouts suddenly, swiping her arm across the table, slapping the cup to the floor. She stands up in one swift movement of panic.
‘Could you just pass the milk?’ says Emma to the boy in the Batman T-shirt, apparently not noticing the irony. She stirs it into her tea.
‘Sit down, Alice,’ says Nurse Will, standing up as well.
‘No,’ she says, climbing away from the table and making for the door, but Lopsided Nurse is there before her, holding it shut.
‘Get out of the way!’ screams Alice. ‘You can’t make me drink it, fuck off!’
‘Don’t swear at me,’ is all Lopsided Nurse says.
The boy continues to scrape out jam from the corners of the packet as if this scene is perfectly normal. I hope it isn’t perfectly normal, but I can’t help but worry that it probably is. I try to concentrate on my toast but it’s impossible. Alice is screaming and fighting her way to the door handle as Nurse Will tries to grab her.
‘Get off me! Go away!’
‘Calm down, Alice,’ says Nurse Will, grappling to keep her arms together behind her back. ‘Calm down.’
‘Fuck you, and your stupid fucking milk!’
No point crying over spilt milk, I think. It lies in a puddle on the floor.
I can’t be here. What am I doing here?
Most of the patients disappear to Therapy Room 1 for a vaguely named ‘education session’, but I’m not allowed. I sit on a burgundy chair until Alice is brought back in – she’s quieter now. A boy appears suddenly and sits on the chair next to me without so much a glance in my direction. He is holding knitting needles and wool.
‘Where were you at breakfast?’ I ask after a while. I hadn’t seen him that morning.
‘In bed,’ he says. ‘I’m a serial cereal avoider.’ He’s probably spent the extra hour in bed thinking up that pun.
He starts knitting aggressively, with elaborate arm movements and nimble fingers; maybe he’s done too much knitting, been locked away for too long. He’s pale, so pale and thin that wiry blue veins branch down his translucent arms and the bones in his elbows jut out in unnatural directions. His dark hair falls messily against his head. It’s almost black, an eerie contrast to his ivory skin. I watch his emaciated legs jigging in his blue polyester track-suit. His grey eyes are focused on the knitting with an almost obsessive glare. I’m not sure if I like him.
‘Jasper’s notorious,’ cuts in Alice from the other side of the lounge. ‘They wake him up at six o’clock but he still manages to miss it.’ There’s a note of bitterness in her voice. I guess she wants to miss breakfast, too.
‘I don’t eat cereal,’ Jasper continues airily. ‘I don’t agree with it.’
‘Jasper also doesn’t agree with candyfloss, for the reference. He says it’s like eating a flavoured wig. Reminds him of his grandma. Nothing at all to do with the sugar content,’ she adds snarkily.
‘If you’d seen my grandma’s hair, you’d hate candyfloss as well!’ He makes a gagging noise.
‘You’re an idiot,’ says Alice. ‘Anyway, Tamar, I mean, do we have to call you that? Do you not have a nickname?’
‘What’s wrong with her name?’ snaps Jasper. ‘I’m sorry my friend is being so rude,’ he adds to me. He’s being sarcastic, I think.
‘You can call me Tay. Tay, Tamar, whatever. I don’t mind.’
‘Cool, so, Tay, have you met everyone?’ says Alice. ‘Patient Will – the guy who ate jam for breakfast – has been here the longest out of all of us, coming up for a year. He’s lovely but sometimes he doesn’t take things as a joke.’
‘He’s psychotic,’ Jasper offers helpfully. ‘He was a right state when they swapped his meds a few weeks ago, banging on about God knows what at God knows what time of the night.’
‘Louis,’ Alice chips in. ‘Everyone loves Louis.’
‘Nothing more to say about Louis, really,’ says Jasper. ‘You missed him – he used to have your room. Left a few days ago. He’s so normal it makes everyone else look even crazier than we already are.’
‘Except he was paralysed in his left leg,’ says Alice. ‘He had this thing where his emotional stress manifested itself physically, so actually he wasn’t really paralysed at all. Can’t remember what it’s called. Weird, I know.’
‘Alice—’ says the Lopsided Nurse warningly.
‘Then that just leaves us, I guess,’ says Jasper, turning to Alice.
‘The eating disorders,’ Alice says, raising her hands in a thumbs up. ‘Three of us were discharged earlier this week, so now there’s only three of us, but Harper doesn’t speak, so I guess she doesn’t count.’
‘So, why’re you here?’ Jasper says, turning back to me.
‘I—’
‘No, don’t tell us! We have to guess.’
‘You’re on one-to-one, which means you’re obviously really dangerous . . .’ Alice starts. ‘I reckon you’re paranoid. You couldn’t find the meaning of life so you compensated with drugs until you got so high you ended up in the back of a police car on a one-way trip to the funny farm.’
‘Bullshit,’ says Jasper. ‘She’s not paranoid, are you, Tamar? I’m thinking desperately insecure but disguised as a psychopath.’
Charming.
But they’re right. It is my fault that Iris is dead so, yes, I’m a psychopath.
Lopsided Nurse shifts uncomfortably in her chair. She opens her mouth as if to say something, her lower jaw hovering for a few seconds, before shutting it and returning her attention to her magazine.
‘So . . .? Who’s closer?’
‘Oh, I just . . .’ Where do I start? Why am I here? I’m here because I’m a murderer. Hi, I’m Tamar, and I am a murderer. Nice to meet you. Is that what they wanted to hear, though?
‘I had a breakdown, I guess. I . . . tried to kill myself.’
‘Join the club,’ says Alice, reaching out to shake my hand as if it’s something to be proud of. ‘What did you do?’
The nurse looks up again. ‘I’m not sure this is a suitable conversation to be having, Alice. How about you change the topic?’
Alice rolls her eyes. ‘Fine, then. It’s weird, isn’t it? That a mental hospital is the one place you can’t talk about stuff like this. They banned us from playing hangman as well,’ she adds, before standing up and wandering out of the room.
Jasper jigs his legs up and down.
‘Stop it, Jasper,’ says Lopsided Nurse.
‘Stop what?’ he says in false indignation, but his legs do stop. ‘How long do I have left?’
‘Fifteen minutes, then you can go.’
‘For God’s sake.’ He picks up the half-knitted scarf. ‘Whose is this anyway?’ He starts to knit without waiting for an answer. His legs begin to shake again.
‘What’re the rules about smoking?’ I say suddenly, realizing that the restless feeling that I have is because I haven’t had a cigarette for days. I hadn’t remembered to. Am I even a smoker?
‘Not allowed,’ says Jasper. ‘Don’t even bother asking any of the nurses on shift today. They’ll all say no. Good thing is, they change so often, you probably won’t see half of them again, so you can just ask the next batch tonight. Sometimes you get lucky.’
I wonder if I’m expected to get up and do something. Not that there’s anything to do, or anywhere to go. Milk remains spilt on the wooden floor, a tribute to Alice’s angry refusal at breakfast. They just replaced it with more milk, so she ended up having to drink more anyway.
Jasper continues to jig his legs and knit.
That night, the one after the weir, Iris’s mum rang my dad and they spoke for quite some time. I’m not sure exactly what was said. Afterwards my dad came into my bedroom and sat on the end on my polka-dot duvet cover.
I was pretending to be enthralled by my biology textbook. I still felt drunk from the afternoon.
‘Tamar, I’ve just been on the phone to Iris’s mum. She’s very worried because Iris hasn’t com
e home yet. Did she tell you if she was going anywhere? She couldn’t have left with someone else?’
‘No,’ I said, looking up, ‘she said she was getting the bus at eight-fifteen. When I left her it was only ten minutes until it was due to arrive. I don’t know where she would be if she didn’t catch it. I don’t know, sorry, I’ll text her.’
So I wrote a text to Iris. I sent three kisses and asked her if she was all right.
Later that night my dad came into my room again, and asked if I was OK – it wasn’t like me to spend so much time up here, alone. I replied that I was fine thank-you-very-much. He left again, but came back a few minutes later with a chipped mug of tea. Tea – the cure for all.
‘Have you heard back from her?’ He faltered as I shook my head. ‘Iris’s mum thinks it might be time to get the police involved.’
‘Wha—?’ I spluttered, colour rushing to my face like I had been turned upside down. ‘The police? But she’s not, I mean, you don’t think . . .’
Dad never got rattled by anything. He kissed me on the forehead, got up and left, and I did not see him for the rest of the night.
I thought the police would come immediately, sniff out the guilt lurking beneath my lowered eyes, handcuff me and whisk me off to prison because I was evil. But they didn’t. They didn’t come until late afternoon the next day – a man and a woman with a blonde bob. Dad talked to them first, offered them cups of tea. They declined, I remember. They wanted water instead. I sat at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the quiet murmurs behind the half-open living-room door, watching the clock in the hall shudder with each passing second. The dull hangover in my head thumped.
Less than twenty-four hours ago, we were drinking by the weir.
Our living room was different back then to how it looks now. We still had the cream leather sofa that we’d had since I was a baby. My parents went through a phase when most things were leather. Easier for wiping up baby sick, I suppose. The floor was pale and wooden, but no one bothered to polish it, so if you walked with bare feet you ended up with a splinter or three. There was a collection of small china animals on the mantelpiece, too: a ginger cat curled up next to the candle holders, a seal, a tawny owl with a broken beak, family photos.
The policewoman was called Kerri, I think. I’m not sure how she spelt it, though; there are lots of ways you can spell Kerri. She called me ‘darling’ a lot, and phrased her questions like they were meant for a four-year-old. The first thing that they wanted to make clear to me was that I wasn’t in any trouble. You’re not in any trouble. Ha. They were just here to ask some questions, and perhaps I could help them. It wouldn’t take long.
‘Tamar, I want you to imagine for a minute that you are Iris. Where might you have gone? Who are you closest to?’
Policeman-Philip, I think he was called, said, ‘Maybe one of your school friends?’ Philip had tattoos covering his arms and up his neck to where it met the stubble below his chin. It looked hard, until you realized it was just fish and a dolphin.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘She said she was getting the bus, that’s all she said. I left because she said she was leaving soon, otherwise I would’ve waited with her. I should’ve waited with her, I’m sorry.’
‘You don’t need to be sorry, darling. Was Iris drunk?’
‘A bit, yeah. I mean, she could still walk.’
‘She could still walk? Could she walk easily?’
‘She was a bit unsteady, we both were. I really don’t remember, I’m so shocked.’
‘We understand, darling.’
Actually, they didn’t understand. They didn’t understand the shock that I was now a murderer, leached with blood-thirsty evil like Jack the Ripper. I wasn’t shocked for Iris. I was shocked for me. The police carried on asking me questions, and I carried on responding. After a while they left, their glasses of water untouched on the sideboard. They were sure she’d turn up, they told me. I shouldn’t worry.
They found Iris’s body half a mile down the river, at the place where it starts to meander around the city outskirts. It was black and oil-tinted, tossed up in the stinking mudbanks amongst broken beer bottles and deflated children’s balloons. The charcoal shadows of sprawling warehouses hung low over the murky water. She was battered and bruised, swollen, her auburn hair entangled in overhanging branches. Seagulls had already begun to pick at her, squawking and bickering over her corpse. In fact, that was how they found her: from the unexplained mob of white swooping birds.
It’s not your fault, Tamar.
Dwelling on it won’t help.
Iris made bad decisions.
You’re not responsible.
It was an accident.
You’re not in trouble.
Time moves differently in a psychiatric hospital. So differently, in fact, that it sometimes can seem as if time has stopped altogether. The tears roll oh-so-slowly. The days fuse together, swallowed into the whitewashed walls and plates of frozen dinners and risperidone. I watch daytime TV for what-must-be-an-hour, only to see the second hand triumphantly meeting the twelve: it’s been only a minute. Turn to the TV. Repeat. Someone kicks off and gets restrained. Mood is ruined. At least it’s not me. Turn back to the TV. Eat. There’s only so much Jeremy Kyle you can watch. Repeat. Is the clock tick-tocking? Watch post-watershed TV for, let’s see, six rounds of the second hand, before Louise says turn it off because it’s ‘inappropriate’. Try to sleep. Fail to sleep. Go back to the lounge and the TV and change the channel to something less inappropriate. End up watching Alice arguing with the nurses about broken showers for the third time today. Harper paints her nails with fierce concentration. Play one round of Trivial Pursuit with Patient Will until his meds kick in and his eyes glaze over. He knows the answer to every single question. The nurses’ station beeps. Something chugs out of the printer in the corner. Maybe notes about that evil new patient on the block, Tamar. Clock hits 10 p.m. I go back to bed. I’m off one-to-one now – that’s something.
Dr Flores hasn’t given up trying to make me talk. He tries to catch me when I’m not expecting him – early in the morning before breakfast, when I haven’t even brushed my teeth.
‘So, let’s have a thought shower about some possible triggers for the self-harm.’
‘Thought shower?’
Dr Flores is an idiot.
‘Yes,’ he says, as if it should be obvious. ‘Like a brainstorm, except we don’t use that phrase any more.’
I roll my eyes.
‘Can you stop?’ Dr Flores raises one eyebrow. He’s good at doing that. I used to try when I was younger, contorting my face in front of the mirror, but I never managed it.
‘I’ve tried before and I can’t do it,’ I say. ‘I feel even worse.’
‘You can do it,’ he insists. ‘It’s like any addiction, Tamar. You can, it’s just that it’s very difficult. I’ve seen people do it.’
‘Why do you think people die from addictions, then?’ I snap. I watch him switch on his pondering face. I don’t think he’s ever really pondering, he just wants to make it look as though everything that comes out of his mouth is carefully constructed gold.
‘Because not everyone wants to get better. Do you want to get better, Tamar?’
Do I want to get better? That, I guess, is the big question, the question that will answer every single problem in the land. Do I want to get better? Dr Flores stares at me for ten seconds.
‘I don’t know,’ I mumble. Shouldn’t I know? I should know. The answer should be obvious. I’m supposed to want to get better. ‘I don’t want to feel like this any more.’
‘Do you want to get better?’ he repeats. ‘There’s a difference between wanting to get better and wanting to get better. I think everyone can recover. It takes time – it might take years, but it can be done.’
He’s talking generally; he’s not saying ‘you’. Why? Am I the exception to the otherwise flawless rule?
‘Don’t you talk to anyone at all? How about you
r friends at school?’
I laugh. ‘What friends?’
I did have friends, once.
I’d known Toby since I was four, and Mia since primary school, and ever since Year Nine we’d followed the same morning ritual: two cigarettes each between the yellow lines in the pedestrian-only area at eight in the morning, before the school buses arrived half an hour later. A few eager Year Sevens with oversized rucksacks struggled up the school drive, their skinny frames heaving under the weight of soon-to-be-forgotten cellos and sports kits. It was normal, because Toby had his shirt hanging out like he always did, and Mia’s hair was French-plaited and hung on her left side like it always did. The dark concrete school buildings stood behind us, a jigsaw of grey teaching blocks sitting between a network of coloured walkways. It probably looked better from above.
People began to back away when I went insane; it didn’t take them long to catch on. Tamar: the strange loner freak with scars on her thighs and cobwebs in her mouldy grey-blue brain. ‘Keep away from Tamar,’ parents warned their children. ‘She’s trouble, that girl.’ My illness didn’t command sympathy and grapes and bunches of flowers. No sympathy for psychos. People didn’t want to have anything to do with that girl, the one who sliced her own skin for fun. But I wasn’t trouble; I was in trouble.
‘I haven’t had friends for a long time,’ I say, and Dr Flores laughs, even though I’m not joking.
‘Don’t be melodramatic – I’m sure you have some friends. Who did you sit next to at school?’
‘The wall,’ I say.
‘What about Toby, then? He’s your friend?’
‘Sometimes, I guess, yeah.’
My first memory of Toby was when we were both four, at a garden party hosted by his parents. Barbecue grills were smoking pink prawns that oozed pale oil, and I’d had my hand slapped by my dad for trying to pick one off and almost scalding my fingers raw. Toby had taken me to the garden shed because we were going to play hide and seek, and I was the seeker. He told me to wait in there, count for twenty seconds. It was cold and damp and a fat black spider spun a web above my head with nimble, hairy legs. I stood up close against the rusty children’s bikes and broken deckchairs, picking clumps of cobweb out of my ponytail. I counted to thirteen, then waited a few more seconds because I’d got confused and didn’t make it to twenty. I could hear the clinking of glasses two metres away under the bare cherry tree. The door was locked. My dad found me squatting in the corner next to the old rabbit hutch and the sawdust it had spilled, crying and crying like the world was over. Toby had to apologize to me and a few days later I received a card that he’d obviously been forced to draw, of him and me holding hands.
