by Ceylan Scott
‘Do your friendships make you think about self-harming?’ Dr Flores says.
‘More like the lack of friends.’
‘Ah.’ Dr Flores scribbles on his pad.
‘But it’s more complicated than that,’ I say. He raises his eyebrows.
‘And that’s why you’re here,’ he says. ‘OK, so, friends aside, what else are we thinking about the self-harm?’
He’s a great one for collaborative pronouns, the ones that say we’re all in this together, one big, dysfunctional, suicidal team. Except we’re not. At five o’clock each day Dr Flores and the nurses can trot home to their families and watch TV and forget about all the shit that they have heard during the day. The shit stops at the end of each shift.
I tell him the self-harm’s going swimmingly, thank you very much.
‘But what does it do for you? In the moment? Does it feel good?’
Now it’s my turn to laugh. ‘I’m slicing my own skin. Of course it doesn’t feel good,’ I say. ‘It feels horrible. That’s kind of the point.’
‘I see,’ Dr Flores says. He’s the one who should be telling me. He knows all about the blades-on-skin equals endorphins-rushing thing. He told me about it in the first place. ‘Why do it, then?’
Is he accusing me of something? I shrug, as if I’m pondering something. I’m not. My brain is blank.
‘Well, it’s a feeling,’ I say. ‘It’s better than feeling nothing at all. At least it’s something.’
Dr Flores doesn’t agree. He bites his biro. ‘Do you feel numb. Or empty?’ He wants me to say yes, because he’d be one step closer to matching me up with the jargon in his diagnostic manual. I don’t play ball.
‘No.’
‘I’m going to raise your medication. It’ll make you sleepy.’
‘I know.’
‘How are you feeling?’ (On a scale of one to ten – he doesn’t have to say it.)
‘Eleven.’
‘Good.’ He doesn’t have time for my sarcasm. ‘Do you want some leave?’
‘Always.’
He smiles.
If you hit your head against the hardest surface you can find, the bad thoughts shake around your skull so long that they take time to recompose themselves. It’s like when a bus stops suddenly and your shopping goes everywhere, so you have to rummage around the legs of strangers, wishing you hadn’t bought quite such a large quantity of rice now that the bag has split open. You can actually feel the thoughts cracking against the bone. The hardest surface in a psychiatric hospital is the bedroom wall. If you slam your forehead hard enough, then it bleeds under the skin and the bruises are swollen and sore, but at least the thoughts disappear for a third of a second. Bam. A moment of emptiness. Bam. A moment of serenity and calm and quiet.
Problem is, once the dizziness starts to dissipate, the bad thoughts shout again in a second wind of anger and intensity because now not only are you pathetic and fat and ugly, you’re also a stupid little git for thinking banging your head against a wall was going to get rid of them. So, before you know it, your head is cracking against the wall again with a resounding thump, so it’s a bit of a vicious circle, really.
Bam.
What perfect logic.
Emma doesn’t think it’s perfect logic, and she asks me what the hell I was doing as she hands me an ice pack she’s brought up from the kitchen freezer.
‘What are you trying to do, break a hole in the wall?’ She tells me I’ll have to pay for it to be repaired. ‘You don’t have to do that, you know, you can just come and talk to one of us.’
‘You were all busy,’ I say, pressing the ice pack against my aching head.
‘I’m sure we could have made time,’ she responds. ‘We can all hear you from the nurses’ office anyway.’
I’m not sure that they could or would have made time, but I say nothing. People only make time for you when things get dramatic. That’s been my experience, anyway.
‘Do you want to talk about anything now?’
‘No,’ I say. Emma can’t even hide her irritation and desire to be doing anything else; I don’t want to bother her.
‘It’s better to talk than to do that to your head, you know.’
‘My head’s already fucked up,’ I snap at her.
‘It isn’t, but don’t make things worse for yourself, Tamar. You’re supposed to be going out with your mum tomorrow.’
Don’t care don’t care.
She passes me risperidone in a paper cup. If you pull all the folds out, then flatten them, they go from paper cup to perfectly round paper plate. I have a collection on my bedside table.
Ice pressing down. Melting drips of water from my forehead on to my rough lips. A lump in my throat because I didn’t use enough water to swallow and the risperidone has lingered. The clock on the wall hits ten o’clock, which means it is now an acceptable time to crawl into bed and hide.
‘You’re not going to put me back on one-to-one, are you?’ I ask Emma as she tidies away blankets strewn on the floor.
‘No,’ she says. ‘We’ll raise it to fifteen-minute obs, though. I’ll tell the rest of the team.’
‘OK,’ I say, relieved. I don’t fancy the idea of more nights trying not to notice someone staring at me through the gloom.
I hobble to bed and curl under the cover, still in the clothes I’ve worn all day. I can’t be bothered to change. I close my eyes.
Fifteen minutes later, a torch flashes into my face and I start like a deer in headlights.
‘Just doing checks,’ hisses Emma. ‘Sorry.’
I turn over so I’m facing away from the door. You don’t get used to stuff like that. The risperidone kicks in.
The world feels different after you’ve left it for a while. Bolder colours, brighter lights, bigger engines in bigger cars. Louder.
I notice the dents in the newly spread tarmac on the road, the way the traffic lights flicker before turning amber, the magnified sound a crisp packet makes when crushed underfoot. I notice the lumpy shapes that chewing gum makes on the pavement, and the different shades of brown on bark. A man hurries past in a suit that is just lighter than navy, and I notice there’s a button missing on his jacket, second from the top. The greasy smell of KFC. The sound of needles whirring in a tattoo studio.
Mum holds my hand, and I squeeze hers back as we walk down the main road from Lime Grove. We’re OK, I think.
We go to the closest shopping centre and wander without talking around the glass-domed halls, listening to the echoes of a busker’s guitar. A stall is still selling roasted chestnuts, even though Christmas is long gone, and the burnt smell hovers in the air. The escalators are broken, and they’re blocked at each entrance by red-and-white tape, as if stationary escalators are somehow far more dangerous than the ones that run away when you step on them.
I should be happy to be out and clutching hands with my mum, with no alarms going off or threats of needles shoved into uncomfortable places if you don’t do as you’re told. But I’m not. I’m overwhelmed and frightened and the wings of bad thoughts have started to flutter again in the clouds of my brain.
Ignore them.
I pull on my mask of happy and OK; I have to. My mum is tired, but she smiles at me, and she’s happier than I’ve seen her in months and months. She insists on buying me two sudoku books from WHSmith, because, she says, I need to keep my mind occupied, and apparently sudokus are the way to do that.
‘How’s Dad?’ I ask.
‘Lunch?’ she replies instead, dragging me towards the nearest café.
My dad works in a bathroom shop. He can swap from smooth, slick, suited-and-booted to football-watching, beer-guzzling and rough-edged in the space of seconds, as soon as he comes through the door, takes his tie off and hooks it on the coat hangers. He hasn’t been to see me at Lime Grove. I don’t think he can. I don’t blame him.
When I was little, he wore his hair down to his shoulders with braids and velvet hair bands, had incorrect Latin quotes
on his forearms, and played the guitar. Mum’s different now too. She used to wear patchwork quilts fashioned into jackets and golden hooped earrings. We lived on the small red barge then. Mum kept a herb garden in fawn terracotta pots on the roof: thyme, mint, coriander. I used to go fishing in adjacent streams with my puppy Brew, my trousers rolled up to my knees, scooping a bucket into the marbled water and watching minnows the size of my fingers dart away into the lily pads. I always let them go. I just wanted to look.
Mum orders a toasted sandwich for me now, and as I wrestle with the strings of melted cheese stretching from the bread on to my chin she swirls the foam heart on her macchiato into shapelessness. My mum never eats much. She’s tall and thin, and has been on almost every fad diet that there is, as they come and go. Rubbery mozzarella sticks in between my teeth and against my gums, but I can taste it; the tomatoes are fresh and juicy and they burst against my tongue. I think about the half-frozen plate of regurgitated cat food I battled my way through for dinner last night.
Being out feels stranger and stranger; no one looks at me as if I’m going to hurt them or hurt myself. People don’t do a double-take as I go into the toilet, as if to ask: What are you doing? Why are you going there?
What? Are? Your? Intentions?
They trust that I am safe to go to the toilet on my own. What a treat.
The clock eats away at the hour we have left together. I flick through the pages of the Waterstones’ bestsellers – tales of drug abuse and families torn apart by war, as if we need more terrible things to think about. New books have a strange smell to them. I can’t put my finger on what it is, but I like it. It’s comforting.
‘Superdrug?’ says Mum eventually as I study a book about hieroglyphics with mild interest. ‘You can stock up on things. Body wash, tampons, you know. Hair pins? Might be good if you’re not washing your hair.’ Showers in Lime Grove are so heavily rationed that ‘self-neglect’ has become a normal part of our abnormal lives. ‘The shampoos are three for two,’ she goes on. ‘Come and choose which one you want, because they all smell the same to me.’
I choose peach and papaya, lime and mint, and bubblegum scents, put them into her basket.
‘Ooh, nail varnish!’ she beams. She couldn’t be happier that her daughter is out in the real world for a few fleeting hours. ‘They’ve got silver . . . that would suit you. It would go with your hair,’ she says, picking up two bottles with a smile and dropping them into the basket with a clink. She squeezes my arm, and turns to the till.
Cuts flinch under the jumper, under her touch.
The shift from OK to not OK is so quick and so dramatic that, all at once, I know what Dr Flores meant when he said I was unpredictable, volatile.
I focus on the stacks of hair dyes – Raspberry Rebel, Cosmic Blue – and beauty products – face wash, face wipes, razor blades . . .
I can feel the shift in my body, a surge of warped energy boiling up as my mood crashes into the abyss. It is a physical change. I can barely stop my fingers from shaking as I fumble open the nearest packet, prise out the razors in trembling fingers that don’t belong to me – I’m not doing it – shove them deep into the crevasses of my jacket pocket. A familiar itch is creeping up my arms. It is time to move on. It’s too late to move on. The shift has already occurred.
While she is paying, I stumble to the shop’s baby-changing bathroom, adrenaline still swelling my veins, sit down on the hard toilet seat (it has a seat – how unusual), and hold my head in between my trembling legs.
It takes me twenty seconds to extract the blades from the razor with a 5p coin. I snap open the pack of hair pins, curl my hair into a bun, slipping the blades into it, held in by a hair pin. You can’t see them. They’re covered by wispy locks of greasy hair the colour of a faded pink orchid.
I gather my thoughts into a bundle in my arms.
I’m not OK any more. I’m not OK.
But it doesn’t matter. Because I have three strips of cold metal entwined in my hair.
‘New patient alert!’ shouts Jasper suddenly, jumping up from the Ruby table and conveniently spilling his apple juice on the floor as he does so.
We’re halfway through dinner time on the day after my leave and Harper has been crying so much over her jacket potato that her glasses have steamed.
‘Not this again,’ Nurse Will mutters, as everyone clanks down their cutlery and dashes to the window.
Jasper climbs up on to the windowsill and slaps his hands against the pane, his fingerprints clouding the glass. He and Alice stick their tongues out, contorting their faces and making weird noises.
‘Jasper, Alice, get back to the table. All of you, in fact, get back to your seats. Leave them alone, you’ll see them soon enough.’ Agency Nurse claps her hands sharply together and they head back to their seats, chortling as if nothing has ever been so hilarious.
‘What the hell was that about?’ I say to Alice, as she nonchalantly picks up her fork.
‘We were just giving our new patient a mental-hospital welcome,’ she says. ‘You know, lunatic style.’
I look out of the window. The new patient in question is stumbling out of a police car clutching a plastic bag of possessions and nothing else. Black mark. No plastic bags allowed here. A policeman watches her warningly and ushers her towards the front door ahead of him. She has dark ginger hair tousled in a messy clump below her shoulders. Not quite auburn, like Iris’s, but red enough to make me squirm.
The front doorbell chimes through the unit three times. The policeman is impatient. He has better things to be doing than being a taxi service for teenage girls. I bet that’s what he’s thinking. Agency Nurse pours another 200 ml cup of apple juice up to the line but no further and slides it across the table to Jasper, who shakes his head but drinks it anyway, in one long gulp, like he’s taking pills. Alice drinks hers in minuscule sips between each tiny mouthful of bland potato. Different techniques, same calories.
The new patient enters the dining room during after-meal sit-down, smiling like she hasn’t just been locked up in a mental hospital. She’s picked up a nurse, who trails behind her in a flurry of NHS azure. She’s welcomed in the same way that I was, with a bagel with smoked salmon that’s browning at the edges and a tiny helping of cream cheese.
‘I can’t eat anything, sorry, I’m too excited,’ she says, bouncing from foot to foot. She is clearly mistaking anxiety for a positive emotion.
‘Why don’t you have a seat and introduce yourself?’ Agency Nurse says.
‘Hi,’ says the girl, grinning around at our sorry collection of faces. ‘I’m Elle.’
‘Barking mad,’ Jasper whispers to me in between frantic shakes of his leg. ‘So, Elle, what you in for?’
Elle is radiating too much confidence for a new patient. Her face is so flushed that her hundreds of freckles – on her cheeks and the bridge of her nose – are almost hidden.
‘I was at another unit before I came here, in Dorset, but they moved me up here because it’s closer to home . . .’
‘Oh, isn’t that good of them?’ cuts in Alice sarcastically.
Elle ignores her. ‘Well, when I say home, I mean my foster parents’ house, so it’s not really my home at all.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I say awkwardly, but she laughs.
‘Don’t be. I’m as free as a bird. Better than living at home any day.’ She doesn’t expand, and I don’t ask her to.
‘How long were you at your last place for?’ I say, as Alice rolls her eyes and leaves the room, scraping her chair and slamming the door.
‘About a month, I think. Maybe less. It was just until another bed opened up. And now it has!’ she finishes brightly. Her eyes are very green, and strangely round, like a cat’s. They dominate her face somehow. She’s pretty, though, in an unconventional way. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh, I’ve only been here a few weeks—’
‘So you’re a newbie, then? Welcome!’ Elle says, apparently not noticing that I’m less new th
an her.
‘Kind of, yeah,’ I reply, puzzled by the genuine warmth in her face, as if we’ve been friends for years. ‘I didn’t think I’d be here even this long, to be honest.’
‘At my last place, there was a boy who’d been there for nearly four years,’ says Elle. ‘He was basically a permanent fixture. Like a tap,’ she adds thoughtfully.
‘Shit. Well, I’m not going to stay here that long,’ I say.
‘How do you know?’
‘My psychiatrist said it wouldn’t be long,’ I say, although suddenly I’m starting to doubt this.
Elle laughs. ‘You believed that? I don’t believe a word any of them say. They said they wouldn’t section me or make me take medication, and now look at me.’ She laughs again, but there’s a lingering bitterness this time. Without explanation, she stands up, walks to the sofa opposite and sits down again, tucking the nearest cushion under her chin.
‘You’re sectioned?’ I say, studying her.
‘Yeah, since last week. I wasn’t taking the meds they gave me.’
‘So they made you take them?’
‘They can’t make me do anything. They just think they can,’ she says with an air of sly delight.
New patients rock the unhappy state of volatile equilibrium we’ve built for ourselves. Now we’ll have to start from the beginning again, incorporating Elle into the brickwork.
‘A bit of lamotrigine for the lovely Elle,’ sings Nurse Will in an unrecognizable tune, ‘and some more fluoxetine for the fabulous Elle, and a nice piece of risperidone for the ravishing Tamar.’
