by Ceylan Scott
The monster had started with a pair of nail scissors, a small scratch and an ouch. But now it had grown.
Later, when it was lighter, my bedroom door swung open, hitting the chest of drawers. My dad was dressed in the pink shirt that Mum hated and he leant on the door with a revolted expression on his face.
‘It smells like a bloody tobacco factory in here, Tamar,’ he said, walking over to the window and reopening it. ‘We told you not to smoke indoors. It’s not difficult, really, is it?’
‘It was out of my window . . .’ I said lamely, sitting up and digging my fingers into Brew’s fur.
‘Don’t give me that. If you have to smoke, you’ve got to do it in the garden, end of.’
‘Sorry. I’m sorry,’ I said.
He sighed. ‘You’ve got school in half an hour, anyway, so you better get ready.’
‘OK, I’ll get ready,’ I said.
Uniform on: crumpled shirt, stiff tie, blazer with too-short-arms.
I said I wouldn’t leave the house by myself ever again, but sometimes it isn’t good to give yourself the choice, especially when you’re prone to making the wrong ones.
Dad gave me a lift because I’d stopped taking public transport on my own. Fear had become my natural state of being.
‘Thanks,’ I said as I got out of the car.
The walk from the school gates to the front reception was exactly one hundred yards. I counted my steps.
I sat at the back of a history classroom rolling fags, a small pyramid building behind my pencil case. Rolling fags and talking. Vaguely aware of my mouth opening and shutting. The topic of the day: sandwiches vs. wraps.
Now, if you think about it, a wrap is far more diverse – you can put all the same stuff in a wrap as a sandwich, the difference being (besides their superior taste) that when toasted, you have to call a sandwich a panini or toastie or something, whereas a wrap still remains the same, unadulterated thing that it was to begin with. Although it’s fair to say that you can’t have a jam wrap – that’s weird. So perhaps sandwiches still have the upper hand . . .
It was starting to become more of a monologue. I did this a lot, I think. I wasn’t zoned out, quite the opposite. It didn’t take long before the familiar panic began to build in the base of my stomach. I scanned the room: heads down and furious scribbling, ignoring me.
All I had to do was copy the words in front of me. Take notes: In World War Two, conscription was implemented . . .
I can’t do it.
Why don’t I understand?
Maybe I should get up and leave.
Or burst into tears.
Or both.
No, no, no.
I’m the only person in this classroom who can’t do it.
The rest of the class are going to pass their history A-level and I’m not. I’m not.
I used to be good at history. What went wrong?
‘I can’t do this; it’s actually impossible.’
‘Yes, you can, Tamar.’ A note of exasperation in Mr Peters’ voice. ‘And get rid of those cigarettes, please, or I’ll do it for you.’
When I’m anxious, I can talk for England; when I’m really anxious, I am silent and paralysed and small.
Toby scribbled furiously, his elbow jutting out. He knew what he was doing.
Mia hunched low over her book, her hands moving swiftly across the page. She knew what she was doing.
Everyone knows what they are doing.
I’m the only one in the whole classroom, the whole world, who is lost and frightened and confused and can’t understand the PowerPoint on conscription.
Cardiac arrest, myocardial infarction, heart attack. I felt it coming in the minutes before it happened – a sudden sputtering and juddering of the pulse in my chest. My hands tingled, and I felt the blood as it stopped, pressing up against a blockage, swelling under the pressure. I knew I was going to die.
The scream came out shrill and weak but it still pierced the rustling-paper quiet of the classroom as I collapsed with a crash on the floor, my chair flipping up and clanging down as I fell. My chest was on fire: a sharp, raw pain coursing through the gaps in my rib-cage and up towards my collarbone, a torrent of lava gushing through my veins and into my aorta and into my heart.
‘What the fuck, Tamar?’ said Mia, jumping to her feet.
‘Call an ambulance,’ I yelled hoarsely. ‘My heart is stopping!’
‘Oh, my God, no it’s not. Stop with the theatrics,’ Mia said.
‘Can you sit up?’ said Mr Peters, kneeling beside me. ‘Toby, go and fetch the nurse.’
‘No!’ I cried. ‘I’m dying.’
‘Just take a deep breath . . . Breathe in. And breathe out. In. Out . . .’
How many fifteen-year-old girls have heart attacks? In. Out. How many of them then die on the floor of a classroom?
The school nurse hurtled in, a first-aid kit in hand. She looked like someone who’d been waiting for this moment her whole life.
‘If you’ll just pop your sleeves up for me,’ she said, brandishing a blood-pressure cuff.
‘What?’
Toby and Mia and Mr Peters and every other bloody pupil in the room stared at me.
‘Come along, I need to check your blood pressure,’ the nurse repeated impatiently, tapping her knee. ‘Roll them up.’
‘No,’ I snapped, backing away from the cuff. ‘I’m feeling better. I’m fine.’ I didn’t feel fine. My ears were ringing.
‘You weren’t fine a second ago,’ said Mia.
‘That’s enough, Mia,’ Mr Peters said warningly.
‘Come along, roll them up, please. I need to check your blood pressure. You said you were dying.’
The next decision shattered the fragile mask I’d been wearing – you can only wear masks for so long – and destroyed everything that was normal and safe and close to me.
She pulled my school jumper over my elbows and up to my shoulders. Strands of fluff from the lining stuck to the hairs on my arms as the sleeve bunched up.
A silent gasp tiptoed through the room.
‘What the fuck have you done to your arm?’ said Mia.
The school nurse didn’t take my blood pressure.
‘I think you had better come with me,’ she said.
Mia didn’t like me when we first met, aged six. She pushed over the Jenga tower that I had built in the quiet area of the playground, with its tiled walls and patterned tarmac, then ran over to the nearest teacher, with tears fluttering amongst her camel eyelashes and accused me of pushing over her Jenga tower, the one she’d worked ever so hard on. When the teacher came over to reprimand me, I picked up the nearest block of wood and hurled it towards Mia’s head. It didn’t reach her head, though. It just landed a few inches away from her shoes.
‘Tamar!’ The teacher had frogmarched me to the ‘naughty wall’, the wall where I would pay for my heinous crime, and stood me up against it for the rest of break-time. My fingers traced the rough dips of cement surrounding the iron-red bricks. I still remember how it felt against my six-year-old fingernails, and the tears that soaked into my crinkled school dress as I watched Mia tackle the boys in a game of football like I’d always been too scared to do. She stuck out her tongue at me when she saw me looking, grinning like a china doll come alive. It wasn’t only that Mia didn’t like me at first. I didn’t like her either.
We were forced into a friendship by Toby, really, when he knelt on one knee, the knee that was grazed and dusted in crumbled dirt and remnants of mud, and proposed to her in that same quiet area. She fluttered her eyes in the same way, in a way that a six-year-old shouldn’t know how to do. Toby told her that she was the prettiest girl in the school, and that he was in love with her.
‘You have to be friends with Tamar, too, though,’ he had said, as he squirmed away from a kiss she planted on his forehead. ‘If we’re getting married, Tamar has to be your friend, too.’
‘OK,’ Mia said. She’d taken my hand in hers and clasped it t
ightly, too tightly, and smiled at me. ‘We can be friends.’ Her nails dug into my palms.
‘OK, I’ve got the vinegar,’ says Elle, as Jasper loiters suspiciously outside Therapy Room 1.
‘What’re you doing?’ he asks. You can almost see his ears prick up in interest.
‘We’re playing a game,’ says Elle brightly. ‘Want to join?’
Jasper sidles in and closes the door.
‘Why do you have sachets of vinegar?’
‘It’s obvious, isn’t it?’ Elle says with an exaggerated eye roll.
‘Is it?’ Jasper rolls his eyes back at her.
‘Well, we’re using vinegar instead of vodka. We each have to say three things about ourselves and someone else has to guess which one is a lie.’
‘And the vinegar comes in where . . . ?’
‘It’s a forfeit,’ she says impatiently, aggressively tossing her hair behind her ears. ‘Sit down.’ She grabs his ankles and he collapses into the beanbag beside her.
‘All right, all right . . .’
‘I’ll go first!’ Elle says, tossing a greasy packet of vinegar over to me. ‘OK . . . I’m half Irish, I like spaniels and my mum was a whore.’
‘Er . . .’ I turn awkwardly to Jasper, who shrugs with his eyebrows.
‘It’s easy,’ she giggles.
‘I don’t know – you don’t like spaniels?’
‘No! I’m half Welsh, not Irish.’
‘How is that easy?’ mutters Jasper grumpily, as I peel open the vinegar and pour it into my mouth, forcing back my gag reflexes as it gouges into the wounds in my mouth where I’ve bitten my gums in my sleep.
‘Shut up,’ I say, when they laugh at my grimacing.
‘Your go, Jasper,’ natters Elle, juggling with the packets in front of her.
‘Erm, well.’ He rubs his chin. ‘I have a beer-bottle-lid collection in my bedroom at home—’
‘A beer-bottle collection?’ Elle snorts. ‘Why?’
‘Don’t interrupt,’ says Jasper snarkily. ‘I haven’t finished. I have a pet snake and I love food.’
‘Well, it’s obviously the last one,’ I laugh. ‘I mean, no offence . . .’
‘Get yourself another pack of vinegar then, Tay,’ Jasper says smugly. ‘Nobody said I don’t love food.’
‘Yeah, he just doesn’t eat it,’ says Elle knowingly.
‘It’s so disgusting, though,’ I grumble as I hold my nose and squirt it on to my tongue.
‘Go, it’s your turn,’ says Elle, with a swift clap of her hands. Things always go too slowly for Elle. She is the cheetah in a world full of overfed house cats.
‘Oh . . .’ Who am I? What is there to say about me? Tamar? Sometimes I’m not even sure whether that name has anything to do with me. What makes me? ‘I run. I can run, sometimes. Once my friend locked me in the garden shed for three hours when I was younger, and I’ve killed someone with my bare hands.’ I say three truths. What is wrong with me?
‘Shit. Deep,’ says Elle.
Jasper points a finger at me. ‘I knew it,’ he says. ‘I said you were a psychopath as soon as I met you!’
I give a hollow laugh. ‘You called it.’
‘The lie is that you can run!’ says Elle with a grin.
‘No,’ I say. ‘I’m actually a convicted murderer.’
‘Don’t worry, we still love you just as you are,’ Jasper says.
Would they, though? If they really believed it, would they?
Nurse Will swings into the room without knocking. ‘Just doing checks. Everything good in here?’
‘No, Tamar’s a murderer,’ says Elle.
‘Oh, she is, is she?’ Nurse Will gives a bark of sardonic laughter. ‘Try not to finish these two off then as well, will you? Oh, Elle, Dr Flores wants to see you in his office.’
Elle jumps up with a groan.
I’ll try. I really will. But I’ve killed a friend before, so I can’t make any promises.
He’s out of the room with the clipboard at his side before I have time to respond.
Jasper and I sit in silence for a few minutes, before he slips the vinegar packets into his pocket.
‘Green tea?’ he says.
We sneak into the patients’ kitchen – one of the agency nurses forgot to lock the door. Jasper stands on the lookout. It’s possible to see directly into the nurses’ office from the window in the door; they are sitting in a circle talking about something. Probably the weather. They like to talk about the weather. ‘Nice day today, isn’t it? Bit chilly, though.’ Of course the weather doesn’t matter to us, because we barely go out.
‘For fuck’s sake, hurry up, Tamar,’ Jasper says, turning around. I laugh.
‘It’s not my fault – the kettle’s taking ages! Just move away from the window so they don’t see you.’
The kettle steams and rumbles and clicks. I pour the boiling water into polystyrene cups and laugh again. It is stupid. I’m laughing because I am boiling water to make tea.
‘Let’s go.’ Jasper dramatically sweeps open the door and ushers me past as if we’re part of an important secret operation.
‘Stop being an idiot and get the door,’ I snap, and he sticks his tongue out at me.
‘All right, Mum.’
We’ve held the door to the bedroom corridors open with a rolled-up newspaper, and no one has noticed, because chats about the weather in the nurses’ office are far more important. We go into Jasper’s room, and stick a Maroon 5 poster over the viewing slat with Blu Tack and lock the door, which is pretty pointless because it can be opened from the outside anyway. But somehow it makes it more exciting. Jasper takes two crinkled teabags out of his suitcase.
‘How did you get them in?’ I ask.
‘Hid them down below,’ he says, pulling up his T-shirt and snapping the elastic on his boxers.
‘Are you joking? I’m not using them!’ I say, throwing him a look of disgust, before seeing him grin. ‘You’re disgusting.’
We sit on the floor next to the wardrobe and brew the tea for longer than necessary, until it is no longer green but a sludgy brown colour.
‘Cheers.’ Jasper winks at me and we both dissolve in helpless laughter at the ridiculousness of the situation.
‘We’re going to be in so much trouble.’
Jasper puts a finger to his lips. ‘They’ll never find us,’ he whispers.
Of course they do find us. They slam on Jasper’s door and call for a response but we are too involved in our green-tea-drinking high to care. Instead Jasper just climbs into the wardrobe and shuts the door, so that when one of the nurses sets off the emergency alarm and four of them burst into the room at the same time, it is me they round upon.
‘What are you doing in here? This isn’t your room. Where’s Jasper?’
Two more nurses dash in.
‘Sorry, I’ll go.’
‘Hang on a minute, Tamar, what is going on here?’
I’m still smirking, but they aren’t laughing. The alarms still screech through the building, ricocheting off the walls. A few patients peer through the open door.
‘Nothing, nothing, we were just—’
‘We?’ says Emma. ‘Who is “we”?’ As she speaks, the agency nurse, who’d left the kitchen door unlocked in the first place, opens the wardrobe. Jasper stares guiltily out at the room, his black hair unkempt around his shoulders. He is curled up in a corner, as if that will hide him. I see him blushing, and as I stumble to leave I knock over a cup of tea.
The nurses don’t find our antics funny. They leave Jasper to clear up the spilt green tea from his bedroom floor with tissues from the bathroom, and they send me down to talk to Dr Flores, who does not look up to greet me; he carries on tidying his desk when I walk in. His office is always untidy, and I’ve never seen him tidying it, so it seems strange that he’s chosen now to do it. I guess he just can’t be bothered to give me the time of day.
‘We – myself and my colleagues – are trying to run a hospital, Tamar. A ho
spital is somewhere that people come to get better. Had you realized that?’ The cold sarcasm in his voice shocks me. ‘Since you’ve come here, you seem to be hell-bent on breaking every rule that we’ve put in place for your safety. Why?’ He packs a pile of notes into a folder and moves it aimlessly to the other side of the desk.
‘I haven’t been breaking rules. I want to go home.’
He turns and raises his eyebrows at me. ‘Jasper, as I’m sure you know, has an eating disorder, and we have certain rules about things like tea, or chewing gum, which I know you’ve also been giving to people, because some of our patients use these to escalate their self-destructive behaviours. Did that occur to you? Did it occur to you that the rules we have in place here are not solely for your inconvenience?’
I am a naughty schoolchild in a headmaster’s office. A convicted criminal before a judge.
‘No,’ I reply lamely. ‘Sorry.’
He doesn’t respond. Instead he sits in silence as if he’s studying me. Psychiatrists have a good way of doing that: looking at you and somehow managing to make you feel incredibly uncomfortable. Maybe that’s a technique designed to get answers out of you. I don’t know. It’s not very effective.
‘What do you want me to do?’ he says finally with a sigh. ‘I’m not going to keep you here if you continue to hamper the progress of other patients.’
‘Discharge me, then,’ I snap. ‘Being here is hampering my progress.’
‘Being here is only what you make of it,’ he says. ‘Think about that tonight, will you, and I’ll catch up with you next week. Is there anything else you want to ask me?’
I shake my head. ‘I’m going to bed,’ I say.
Upstairs, Emma unlocks my bedroom door with a curt ‘goodnight’ and returns to watching TV in a surly manner, flicking channels from Supersize vs Superskinny to the news. I hear something about terrorist threats muffle through the walls of my room.
