by Ceylan Scott
It’s not too late.
Yes, it is. You killed her, you killed her.
I slip into the bath, clutching the small blade. For a few minutes, I lie there, listening to my heavy breathing, smelling the perfume of the bubble bath, thinking about the triangle of thought–feeling–behaviour. Trying to piece it together. Of course, now, I think, it doesn’t matter.
A nurse knocks on the door. ‘Just doing checks, Tamar, everything all right in there?’
‘Yes, I’m fine, I’m just having a bath, that’s all.’
I stretch out my arm in front of me, and press down, slice the blade across my skin. I watch it split, blood starting to ooze out. I curse. It’s not deep enough. I don’t stop to think. I should stop to think.
And suddenly I am angry, I am slashing, wildly gashing deeper, deeper into my undeserving body, my self-hatred spewing out as I sprawl in the bath. I am evil. Until, all at once, blood spurts into my face, thick and dark, one spray for every heartbeat, one for every mistake, it clings to my eyelashes, I taste its metallic taste in my mouth and I am screaming, screaming and the blood keeps coming and I know I am going to die, I am going to die and I lurch for the emergency alarm and everything is gone.
My eyes flicker open. The bath is swirling red. A nurse bursts in. I can hear the alarm screeching. Have I pressed it? Have they pressed it?
Am I dead? Am I dead? Seconds falter. Blood spurts.
Someone pulls me up out of the bath. Panicked voices beside me.
Voices from the patients’ lounge.
Numb.
A towel is pressed down on to my arm. A vest slips over my head.
Dizzy.
I open my eyes. Black spots block my vision. Nausea.
Staggering to the toilet, retching once, twice. Someone holds back my hair.
Red paints the towel, seeping through.
Stumbling blindly to my bedroom, supported by stodgy fingers and someone swearing. Emma, maybe. I’m not sure.
Will it stop? Will the blood stop?
I sit wrapped in a thin NHS towel on my bed and they hold my arm above my head. Blood travels slower when it’s travelling up. Tracksuit bottoms pulled up over my legs. I open my eyes.
‘That needs stitches.’
Blundering to a taxi takes twenty seconds, maybe less.
Feel the juddering of the engine, a jolt. Lights slowly flash by: reds, ambers, greens.
20:19.
The dull smell of burning rubber fills my nostrils. Petrol. Mints. Time is slow.
Am I dead? Blood is etched into my mind, oozing through my brain, muffling my senses.
Vomit lingers in my mouth. I swallow. Press down on my arm.
20:30.
I regain coherence sitting on a hard plastic chair facing an old woman in a purple shirt, who is wearing smudged turquoise eyeshadow and a bruised expression.
‘You say you did this to yourself?’
I nod. The place where her eyebrows should be is raised. I always get this. The wasting-our-time-and-resources look. She reaches for a biro and writes in swirly, fat writing ‘DSH, laceration to left forearm.’ She draws circles over her is, not dots. She asks a few more questions: my address, my date of birth and who is this woman in uniform with you? Oh, you’re from the loony-bin.
‘Is it still bleeding?’ I gingerly unwrap the towel. A trail of blood dribbles down and soaks my trousers.
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s slowed down a lot, though,’ says Emma.
‘In that case, just wait over there, please.’ She gestures to a cluster of equally uncomfortable-looking chairs on the other side of the room.
Emma takes me over to the corner, next to the vending machines. On the wall next to us is a sign that says Take Care Not Antibiotics and another that says A&E is for EMERGENCIES. The wall is painted an apricot orange, with cracks where it reaches the shiny floor. Opposite us sits a young man in football kit with a very swollen wrist and an older man with his wife, who is complaining of chest pains. Outside I see the flashing blue lights of a real emergency.
Suddenly, I begin to feel stupid. The cut is hardly bleeding. I bet they’ve seen far, far worse. They’ll think I’m whining, pathetic.
‘Can we just go back to the unit?’ I turn to Emma, who is cheerfully taking a piece of strawberry gum out from a packet. ‘I can dress it there, we’ve got bandages . . .’
She shoots me an implacable look and I fall silent. I can tell that people are looking at me, looking at the raised, purple scars on my arms, sickened, disgusted. I disgust myself.
We wait for an hour. Emma buys me a bottle of water and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps from the vending machine because she says I look blue. I’m not hungry; the crisps scratch the lining of my throat, but I eat them anyway.
We don’t talk.
A baby with a pale face arrives after an hour and twenty-two minutes, her arms cradled tightly around a haggard woman’s neck.
After two hours, a nurse comes out of a door at the end of a corridor.
‘Tamar?’ She is holding a few pieces of paper in her hands.
‘At last,’ mutters Emma, standing up and walking swiftly over to her. I follow.
‘Could you just sanitize your hands for me?’ the nurse says, pointing at a bottle stuck to the wall.
The nurse is a young woman with dark brown hair scraped back into a ponytail and three cartilage piercings. She smiles again as I awkwardly climb on to the bed, kicking off my shoes. I return the smile weakly. Emma sits down on a flip-out chair next to the sink. There’s a small pot in the corner which has a sticker on it saying Contaminated sharp objects only. I find myself thinking of my blade, submerged in the most definitely contaminated bathwater. There is no way I can salvage it now.
I lose.
I am twisted, OK. I know.
‘Tamar, can I have a quick look at your arm?’
I pull off the towel with trepidation, half expecting her to burst out laughing, or to say, ‘Here? You came here? To A&E? That cut doesn’t even need Steri-Strips.’ But she doesn’t. She holds my arm very gently in her (slightly sweaty) hands and squeezes it back together with her thumbs.
‘You’ve just nicked the top of an artery there. You’re very lucky. A little deeper and you could have . . .’ I could have what? Died? ‘It could have been a lot worse.’
I look at the nurse’s name badge: Millie, Nurse, Emergency Dept. Outside my cubicle, some paramedics wheel in a middle-aged man still in his suit. I wonder vaguely what his job is. Banker? Lawyer? Travel agent?
‘Well, I think it will close up nicely.’
In the cubicle next to me, the machine that the banker/lawyer/travel agent has been rigged up to is beeping. Beep. Beep. I hear someone talking to him.
‘Hello, John? I’m Matthew, one of the A&E doctors. Do you have any pain?’
The man called John grunts in reply.
‘OK – have you had any pain relief? No? In that case, we’re going to give you some paracetamol. It will help with that, all right?’
Beep. Beep.
Millie returns with a tray of dressings, and a tube of what I recognize to be saline solution.
‘Can I just check your blood pressure?’ I offer my arm and she slips the cuff on. As it squeezes, my scars become dark and my cut begins to bleed more heavily. ‘Oh, sorry. I should’ve done it on the other arm . . .’
Beep. Beep.
‘John, we need to take some bloods and insert a cannula.’ John makes another incoherent sound. ‘No, it’s just a sharp scratch. The cannula is in case we need to put a line in.’
Matthew is dressed all in dark blue and is carrying a pink stethoscope. He appears from the cubicle next door, drawing the curtains, walking purposefully past my cubicle.
Beep. Beep.
Millie washes the cut with the entire tube of saline solution, dabs it dry.
‘You haven’t done anything silly with pills, have you?’ she asks, looking up at me, daring me to lie. She turns to Emma, who also shakes h
er head. ‘I saw your notes . . .’
‘No,’ I reply quietly, ‘not this time.’
She says nothing, but starts to fill a syringe with anaesthetic. ‘This will sting a little,’ she says. I wince and turned away from the throbbing hole in my arm. ‘You OK?’ I nod curtly. She starts to put me back together with thick blue thread and a hooked needle slipping through my skin.
‘Can you give me your arm, John? Can I roll up your sleeves?’
Beep. Beep.
My arm throbs.
‘I’m just going to tie this around your arm. It’s a bit tight.’
Millie tugs in another stitch.
‘You’ve got some good veins, John, this will be easy.’
‘How many more?’ I ask, battling the urge to yank away my arm.
Beep. Beep.
‘Maybe nine or ten,’ Millie says. ‘Not long.’
I notice a tattoo of a butterfly on the top of her arm.
‘OK now, sharp scratch.’ John groans.
I can almost see it, the needle slipping through the skin, Matthew untying the rubber strip, filling up the tubes, inserting the cannula, probably making a mess. Doctors always make a mess.
Three stitches down. A thin trickle of blood worms out of the cut, down the curve of my arm.
Beep. Beep.
‘There we go, John. We should get the results back in a couple of hours. Is there anything else that I can do for you?’ More moaning. ‘I’ll just sit you up, shall I?’ The creaking of the mattress being bent into a ninety-degree angle. ‘Do you want your curtains open or shut?’ No response. ‘I’ll leave them open, so you can see what’s going on. It’s less boring that way.’ Matthew reappears with a tray, disappears into a room opposite.
Beep. Beep.
Millie dresses my arm with gauze and tape and Emma rings for a taxi back to the unit. We stand outside the hospital next to an old man smoking his life away. I want a cigarette. Twelve stitches sitting in my arm. Snaking up to my elbow.
I am watched all night. Back to square one.
Dr Flores takes me off one-to-one the following morning. Obviously he can’t be bothered with me any more. Thoughts muddle their way into my brain like angry strokes of graffiti. Everything is muffled by the flat ache of failure. I am a three-time failure.
My arm is swollen and bruised, the skin around my stitches sore and puckered with shades of purple and grey, but it is back together and if not for the stiff wad of dressings along my arm, I could pretend nothing has happened.
They searched my bedroom and have stolen every single blood-encrusted blade I’d hidden – amongst balls of Blu Tack on my noticeboard, swimming in a bottle of foundation, between the pages of my history textbook. They found them all. They’ve taken most of my clothes, too, but by the time they’d taken my socks I’d started to think it was a little petty.
Elle doesn’t talk to me at breakfast. She focuses on placing slices of bread in the toaster in the kitchen with a nurse, who watches her carefully in case she tries to electrocute herself or something. She sits at the other end of the table to where she usually sits, closer to the door. Jasper argues about eating his cereal, so eventually he is allowed to eat it with a plastic teaspoon. I guess it feels like less food in his mouth. Patient Will complains that his room has been rigged with cameras again; he’s felt the electronic waves. Lopsided Nurse hasn’t rubbed in her foundation so there’s a shadowy line around her chin, and she’s tried a new shade of nude lip gloss that doesn’t work with her heavy mascara.
There is a lot of noise in my brain this morning, did I say that? Like a fuzzy old-fashioned television, the sort that used to crackle with static electricity when they got hot. That is my brain, just louder. I start a bowl of fruit and fibre, but I don’t taste anything, so I swap halfway through to a piece of toast that Elle has made. I spread Marmite like it’s peanut butter, layers and layers of thick gloopy paste, because I need something to feel. Even if it is just the overwhelming sting of yeast extract.
Dr Flores saunters into the dining room and beckons to me, and, defeated by the toast, I jump straight up and follow him. His trousers gather an inch above his ankles today, and he fumbles with his waistcoat as he ushers me into his office with a manner of over-practised soothing.
He sits down and swirls milk into his coffee.
‘How are you feeling, on a sca—’
‘Zero,’ I reply dully.
He taps the NHS teaspoon against the NHS mug. ‘Really?’
‘Zero,’ I say again adamantly.
‘How is your arm feeling?’
I shrug.
He shrugs back. ‘Uncomfortable, I’d imagine.’
‘Yeah. It’s about an eight.’
He smiles. ‘Took the words right out of my mouth. So –’ he takes a sip of coffee – ‘why did you . . .?’ He makes a slicing action along his arms and I wince.
‘Don’t do that.’
He doesn’t apologize.
‘How can we help you, Tamar?’
‘You’re the doctor.’
He nods. ‘You’re right, I am. I can give a diagnosis, I can prescribe medication, but I can’t—’
‘What’s wrong with me, then?’ I say. ‘You tell everyone else what’s wrong with them – Jasper’s anorexic, Elle’s bipolar. What am I? Or am I just making all this up to waste your time?’
I think he takes that as a threat. It isn’t meant to be.
He stirs the mug of coffee. ‘You know, Tamar, sometimes labels aren’t the most helpful thing. Eating disorders are clear. Sectioned patients are required to have a diagnosis. You’ve got some problems, and that’s why you’re here; we’re here to help you work through them.’
I’m still waiting for the day that Dr Flores says something that isn’t a quotation pulled hastily from a textbook.
‘What can I do to help you?’
I watch him as closely as he watches me, and feel a twinge of pride when his eyes lower first.
‘You can’t,’ I respond flatly. ‘And I think labels are helpful.’
‘That’s very useful to know,’ he says.
It isn’t useful to know. He doesn’t want my opinion on his opinions. I notice he isn’t wearing hair gel today, but I can’t work out whether it makes him look better or worse. Less like a hedgehog, at least.
‘Do you want to talk about last night?’ he ventures again.
‘There’s nothing you don’t know already,’ I say.
‘Yes, but I’d like to hear it from you, so I can get a better picture, and we can have a think about where to go from here.’
‘I guess I messed up a bit, I wasn’t thinking.’
‘You weren’t trying to kill yourself?’ he says.
‘No, I just took it a bit far. It was an accident.’ I’m quite a good liar – have I mentioned that before?
‘So, you’re not feeling suicidal? What’s the risk of it happening again?’
I don’t tell him that the desire for death has been raging through my veins like a stampede of angry bulls, and that every fibre of my disgusting being should be charred and powdered in a dusty crematorium.
‘I’m OK,’ I say. ‘It was just a slip-up, I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be sorry, Tamar. I’m really glad we’ve been able to have this chat, today. I think what I’m going to do is keep you on the unit this weekend, just to let things settle. Is that all right?’
‘Yeah, whatever,’ I say. I don’t care, I don’t care whether I stay at the unit for ever. It doesn’t matter where I am. Nothing matters, really.
‘How do you think the risperidone is going?’
‘It doesn’t stabilize my mood, it just makes me tired. And I drool at night,’ I reply. ‘Elle said it can shrink your brain.’
Dr Flores waves his hand dismissively and laughs. ‘Don’t listen to Elle – I haven’t heard anything like that. If we leave it as it is at the moment, and maybe we can think about increasing it later on. The side effects should lessen with time, too.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘That’s fine, I don’t mind.’
‘Can you tell me what’s been bothering you these past few days? You’ve been seeming quite unsettled to some of the staff, would you agree with that?’
‘Yeah, I suppose.’
‘Why?’
Why? I can ponder that question in my sedated brain for days and I still won’t have any answers. It’s hard to make space for other thoughts when you only want to kill yourself. In fact, it’s hard to make space for anything. It’s hard to make space for remembering to eat or piss or smile when it’s expected of you. I answer him, though, and that surprises me.
‘It’s just Iris. Yesterday was her birthday.’
‘Ah. How old would she have been?’
‘Seventeen,’ I say. My mouth has been hijacked and the words are spilling out like the tumbling weir where she died. I don’t talk about Iris, and no one talks to me about her. Except Mia. That is how it was. But now . . .
‘I see. How does that make you feel? Thinking about her?’
‘Like crap,’ I say. ‘I hate it.’ I can feel a pulse in my thumb.
‘Why?’ he says. ‘What is it that makes you feel crap? Do you think it’s your fault?’
I know she is dead. I know that Iris is dead. I know that it was sudden and so shocking that the waves of horror shimmered in the distance for months afterwards. I also know that it is my fault, that one second she was there and her heart pumped crimson blood through her veins, and the next she was gone, blood frozen solid, and I could have prevented it, but I did not.
‘It wasn’t your fault, what happened with Iris, you understand that, don’t you?’ he ventures, leaning apprehensively towards me. ‘Can you tell me what happened?’
My mind darts through the maze of lies, trying to find the truth tangled in its prickly boundaries.
‘I don’t talk about Iris,’ I say.
He ignores me. ‘When you were lying in the bath, were you thinking about her?’
‘I always think about her.’ Iris is the unfitting piece of the jigsaw in my brain. Of course I was thinking about her in the bath. How could I not?
‘What were you thinking?’ he says.
‘That the bath water was probably a lot warmer than the river.’ That is a lie. I wasn’t thinking that.
