by Ceylan Scott
But the truth always gets you in the end.
‘Really?’ says Dr Flores with a tone of scepticism. He likes to think he can see through my lies.
‘I didn’t want her to die,’ I say suddenly.
‘I know, Tamar. I don’t think anyone wanted her to die. Sometimes terrible things just happen.’
He was wrong, because it didn’t ‘just happen’. It wasn’t a fluke or an accident. It happened because of me.
‘No, it wasn’t like that,’ I splutter. ‘I really didn’t want her to die; it was all a mistake.’
‘No one wanted her to die, Tamar. These things just happen, unfortunately.’ He’s repeating himself.
Dr Flores looks at me enquiringly. I look at the floor beneath him, where his suede-clad feet shuffle slightly. Then I look at the squeaky wheels on his chair, the way Post-it notes and string spill out of the drawers in his desk. I don’t look at him.
‘Things don’t “just happen”,’ I say softly. ‘It didn’t “just happen”. It’s my fault.’
‘Often, Tamar, when people die in this way, in the way that Iris died, it can feel very sudden and scary, and people blame themselves when it really isn’t their fault at all; it’s a very common response. But that doesn’t make it your fault.’
‘Shut up! Stop saying it isn’t my fault!’
It’s all just white noise, whirs and cog wheels turning in my brain, a treadmill of buzzes and bangs spiralling in the air and into my pounding eardrums. No, no, no. Nothing but fog and the muffled sounds of I don’t know what.
‘Why is it your fault, Tamar?’
Why am I not dead yet?
‘Tell me about Iris.’
‘I can’t talk about Iris! Stop talking about Iris . . . It is my fault, you know fuck all!’
I’m staring blankly at the equally blank walls of the ‘recovery room’, slow and stupid and dosed up on some medication that I can’t remember taking. I think I’m on five-minute observations; I can hear someone lifting and shutting the viewing slat fairly often, but I don’t turn to look at the face peering through. It’s too much effort. My neck hurts.
The ‘recovery room’ is a euphemism; it’s a room with nothing in it at all – just four white walls, the kind of room they warn you about in films. Four whitewashed walls and a patient in a drug-induced stupor. Nothing else, not even a bed. It’s cold – there are no windows, so they’ve over-compensated with the air conditioning. The fact that I’m in here means I’ve done something shitty. I just can’t remember what. My hands are clasped tightly together like I’ve been scheming, my fingers streaked with red where I must’ve been squeezing them too tightly.
After a while, Emma comes in with a cup of tea with milk and two sugars, as always.
‘It’s sweet,’ I say, as I take a sip even though it’s too hot. My voice is hoarse, like I’ve been shouting a lot.
‘Oh, I put in three sugars this time. You looked like you needed a sugar boost. Milk and three sugars, sorry.’ She sits down, cross-legged on the floor with me, turns her clipboard upside down so I can’t read her notes.
‘How are you feeling?’ she says.
‘Like I’ve been whacked over the head with a hammer,’ I said, and she smiles.
‘It’s probably the lorazepam. It can make you tired.’
‘I know. What did I do?’
‘When?’ she falters.
‘To get myself in here,’ I say. ‘What happened?’
‘Can you not remember?’
I shake my head.
I’d stood up in Dr Flores’ office, she told me, shouting and swearing every swear word in the English language. I’d headed to his bookcase and hurled the books with the hardest covers I could find at him. He’d swerved just as the Holy Bible smashed into his computer. He didn’t have his emergency alarm with him so he just had to yell like a child for someone to come. It took twenty long seconds for three nurses to arrive, crumbs still on their lips from the cake they’d had to leave in the nursing office. They’d pinned me against the wall closest to the bookshelf and, according to Emma, I’d tried to bite them as they held my squirming body with sticky-icing fingers. I think I must have bitten my gums instead, because they feel flayed and a metallic taste lingers in my mouth. I don’t like the tea but I drink it anyway to rinse away the taste of blood. I have finger marks on my wrist and bruises peppered around my collarbone.
‘Are you feeling well enough for dinner?’ she asks. ‘They’re nearly finished but I can get you a sandwich.’
My head spins like a Catherine wheel as I pull myself up to standing. ‘I can come,’ I say.
Neither of us mentions Iris.
A new year. Toby stubbed out his half-finished cigarette and squashed it into the pavement as he leant forwards to hug me. He was wearing his school uniform.
‘You all right?’ he asked, slipping a Polo into his mouth, because if anything could hide the stench of stale smoke, it was mints. ‘I saw you in the corridor at school today, but I didn’t have time to come over and see you, my Business coursework was due in.’
‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t stay long, anyway.’
‘I know you didn’t, you never stay long!’
‘I’d rather sleep.’ It wasn’t a lie. If I could spend every second of my life asleep until the day I died, wouldn’t everything be infinitely easier?
Toby took another Polo from the packet. ‘Chips and vinegar?’
‘Chips and no vinegar,’ I said.
‘Half and half?’
‘Fine, then, but you’re paying.’
It was one pound per paper bag of chips, seeping with grease, and we ate them on the pavement outside the takeaway, the smell diffusing into my hair so that it became the scent of Herbal Essences deep-fried and battered. Two homeless men with a scraggly-looking lurcher asked for four pounds for a pack of chips each. Toby told them they were a pound a bag, and gave them two pounds. They fist-pumped him and walked straight past the takeaway and into the supermarket at the end of the road.
‘Chips,’ he snorted. ‘As if. More like a can of White Lightning and a packet of Royals.’
‘How’s Mia?’ I asked. I asked this every time we saw each other, and his answers were always vague and uncomfortable. I was waiting for the day that he’d say: ‘Oh, Mia? She’s great, she wants to be friends again. She’s really sorry.’ It was never going to happen, I knew that. ‘She’s fine,’ he said. ‘Yeah, she’s good.’ He awkwardly pulled out his packet of cigarettes and was suddenly engrossed in lighting one.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m glad.’
‘Got any New Year’s resolutions, then?’ said Toby, making no secret of the fact he was trying to change the subject. ‘Going to give up smoking?’
I laughed. ‘Not this year; I’ve done that one enough.’ I’d given up smoking ‘for real this time’ at the dawn of each New Year for three years now.
I did have a New Year’s resolution. It just wasn’t the sort you brought up in polite conversation. Or impolite conversation, for that matter.
‘How about you?’
‘No, I’ve got nothing either. I thought about the whole giving up chocolate thing, but, really, what is the point? I like it, so I’ll eat it. I’m not denying myself a bar of Cadbury’s just because. There needs to be actual meaning behind it.’
There was meaning behind mine. Check.
‘Yeah, I think the whole thing’s a bit stupid, to be honest. It’s just another day,’ I said. He dived his hand into the crumpled bag and finished the last chip.
‘You’re such a cynic,’ he said, between mouthfuls of starch. ‘I think this year’s going to be amazing.’
Amazing? I thought back to my New Year’s resolution, scrawled in black ink on the pages of my diary. I thought of that whole diary entry, dated 31 December, the vitriol and the venom seeping through the pages in the words that I had written to myself, smudged with the tears that had pounded on to the paper. I didn’t want to make it through anoth
er year. I didn’t deserve to, not when the girl I had killed was decaying and mouldy in her grave. So, in some ways, my New Year’s resolution was amazing, I guess. It was fitting, at least. It was necessary. I was going to be dead.
When I woke up on the day that I was going to kill myself, I expected to feel something, but there was nothing, bar a slight gnawing in my stomach that I took to be fear. I was as cold and as calculating as the day that I had murdered Iris. The weather, too. I’d hoped for thunderstorms and lightning bolts ricocheting from Olympus or lemonade-slurping sun-drenched skies, but got neither. It was cool, grey and unspectacular. In fact, there was nothing to mark it out as a special day at all, but for the small x in my diary next to 7 January.
I got up and made myself breakfast, like I would on a normal day. Brew thumped his tail as I came down the stairs. My parents were out at work and I’d planned it that way, so it was just me, Brew and the plate of scrambled eggs on the kitchen counter. I didn’t know why I’d made scrambled eggs – I’d never made them before.
I watched two hours of daytime television, because I could, because there was no point in rushing things. I had time. Brew sat at my feet. I didn’t check my phone. Not once. There was no point. Jeremy Kyle shouted at a platinum-blonde teenage mother. I switched the TV off. I was supposed to go to school that afternoon for a history lesson. Fat chance.
I tried not to think back over every terrible thing I’d ever done, because I was meant to be feeling relieved, but I couldn’t help myself. It was the last time I’d be able to think, ever again. May as well make the most of it.
I ran a bath in the old bathroom, the one I didn’t use any more, the one with stickers of dolphins and mermaids trawling the tiles on the walls. I sloshed the water around with my hands to make the temperature even. Having a bath was important, for some reason. My dead body needed to be clean. Clean and submerged, like a body in a river.
I held a green bath bomb that smelt of chamomile and claimed to be packed with deep-sea minerals in my hands, but I didn’t put it in. I forgot, I think.
I slipped into the bath. The mermaids on the walls moved.
Plunging below the surface, water burning nostrils, dancing into lungs that in equal measure try to accept and reject in confusion the muddy flood that prances into them. Water stomping and head-banging about quivering eyelids, each slap more animated than the last. No breath. Flailing arms and spluttering and booming in pounding ears. Tiny milliseconds of air smacking against bleeding lips. And the water dances, pirouettes, more crazed than ever, cackling in delight, wildly spinning in ecstasy, anticipating the drowning. And my lungs are swamped by something more overwhelming than the water itself. Fear charges through my spasming nerves and swallows my sinking brain, and fear wins, right up until the water dance is over and my body is so dead that it doesn’t even feel itself as it is hurled against the rocky pit of the weir, cracking like a clay pigeon splintering against a bullet.
I gasped for air as I emerged from the floor of the bathtub, the bitter taste of soapy water lingering on my tongue. My ears fizzed like they had been filled with popping candy. The bath water was cold. I might have been in there for two, three hours, maybe more, I didn’t know. But I knew that I was being crushed by something, the heaviness of the air pressing down against my chest and my stomach. I was alive, and painfully aware of every breath I took, every ripple on the surface of the water as my icy fingers twitched. Cracked crimson nail polish. The water had turned a pale pink where the colour from my hair had run. Outside, it was starting to get dark as the day waned and the clock ticked and I was still alive.
You’ve already murdered one person, it won’t be difficult to do it again.
I stood up from the bath but didn’t feel a change in temperature. Everything was cold.
There was a curtain rail in the bedroom and shoelaces in the shoes under the radiator. I polished the shoes because it seemed like the right thing to do and I turned small packets of chalky pills over in my hands but afterwards couldn’t remember if I had swallowed them all. I practised knots and nooses on the floor of the bedroom over and over, until I was as good as a sailor; as good as the very water-dwellers themselves. Then I wondered if it hurt to die but Google could not tell me the answer. I wondered if it hurt to be drowned. I wondered about heaven and hell and reincarnation. I wondered if now was the time to repent my sins, and would that help anything? Would begging for forgiveness help anything? I wondered a lot of things on the floor of the bedroom, but it didn’t help, because I was still alive. I was still alive.
I can’t remember the expression on my dad’s face. Can’t remember why he had come home early or whether he was still wearing his tie or if he’d taken it off, like he usually did. I can’t remember what he said, how he said it, or if he said anything at all.
But I can remember that he did not approach. Did not hold my shaking body or my cracked-crimson fingertips, or wipe the saliva from my chin. He left that to the paramedics, who took me with blue flashing lights in a too-hot ambulance to hospital, and sat with me and brought my blankets when my dad did not. I can remember that my dad did not want to see his precious daughter crumpled on the floor with shoe-laces around her neck, and that he turned away from the broken curtain rail and clumps of wall plaster before him, and he kicked the bedroom door so hard that the whole room shuddered for minutes afterwards.
‘There haven’t been any self-harm incidents for a week now.’
‘Oh, good,’ says my mum. ‘I’m so glad to hear that.’
There are four of us in Therapy Room 1, crammed around a small table that the nurses have dragged in from their office: Dr Flores, Nurse Will, my mum and me. My mind is wandering. Like I thought that first day, it is stupid to call it Therapy Room 1; it’s the only ‘therapy room’ in the whole building. No one here has therapy, anyway.
‘It is,’ agrees Dr Flores. ‘On the other hand, we’re not thinking about discharge just yet. After her . . . erratic behaviour on Friday, I think Tamar would concur that we really need to have a little more time to assess what’s going on.’
Friday. I don’t remember my ‘erratic behaviour’.
‘OK,’ says Mum, but I can see she’s disappointed. ‘How much longer, do you think?’
I think she is desperate to pull me out of the false environment that I’ve been living in and back into the fear and bewilderment and pain of real life.
Dr Flores pauses. ‘Let’s think in weeks, rather than months, shall we?’ Weeks makes it sound shorter. ‘We’re carrying on with the risperidone,’ he continues. ‘The side effects should continue to wear off over the next week or so, but if they don’t, there are other options.’
Two little oval pills: one in the morning, one in the evening.
My mum remains quiet and contemplative, as if there isn’t much left for her to fight for, or maybe there is so much that it is utterly overwhelming. She nods in a way that every psychiatrist would love their clients to do: yes, you’re right. You know our daughter better than we do, congratulations.
‘As far as home leave is concerned, we’re going to give her a night at home soon and see how things go from there.’
There is a lot of guesswork. A lot of ‘just see what happens’. You never know, she might not kill herself – wouldn’t that be nice? I am supposed to go home, spend a night in my own house, my own bedroom, my own bed with its polka-dot duvet. I can eat what I want, when I want it, and drink as many cups of green tea as I like. I’ll have to negotiate the tangles of my mind, though, in the blackness of the night, ignore the twisted messages that my brain sends, ricocheting through my nerves.
‘Brilliant,’ says Mum, her cheeks lifting into a smile. Is she secretly as nervous as me?
‘I want you to imagine you are a tree. Would you be an oak, tall and strong, or perhaps the long-lived chestnut tree?’
Elle rolls her eyes at me. It is four in the afternoon, and everyone has been crammed into Therapy Room 1 with its headache-inducing pink, gi
ven stuffing-less beanbags to sit on, and told to get on with it.
Janice, the occupational therapist, often says that she likes to ‘explore through play’, but she also seems to forget what she is supposed to be exploring a lot of the time, or that play is supposed to be fun. She’s given us a piece of paper each, and is waiting with a childish expression on her face for us to draw a tree of our choice.
‘Jasper, would you mind sharing with the group what tree you’ve chosen?’
Jasper awkwardly holds up a messy drawing. ‘Apple,’ he says.
‘And why have you chosen an apple tree, Jasper?’
‘I like apples.’ He shrugs, and Elle snorts from our corner.
‘How about Will?’
Patient Will looks up from his beanbag cocoon, holding the piece of paper. ‘Sorry, I just made an aeroplane . . .’ he says, and attempts to hurl it across the room. It lands at his feet.
Janice sits up in her chair, looking disgruntled. ‘Well, how about you have a think now, and we’ll come back to you?’
‘OK, great,’ he replies enthusiastically.
Janice doesn’t notice the sarcasm, or if she does, she ignores it and chooses to twiddle the rings on her fingers instead.
‘I’ll go next, then,’ she says brightly. ‘I’ve drawn an aspen tree, which symbolizes the overcoming of fears and the determination that lives inside us all.’
‘It’s just a tree, though,’ cuts in Elle bluntly. ‘I mean, I wouldn’t want to be a tree. They don’t do anything, they just sit there for hundreds and hundreds of years until they die. I don’t see the fun in that.’
‘Yes, but this exercise isn’t about that, it’s about exploring—’
‘Trees?’ Elle says sceptically.
Janice clumsily adjusts a pin in her dreadlocks. ‘How about you, Harper, what have you drawn?’
‘A palm tree.’
‘Excellent! What is it about a palm tree that appeals to you?’
‘Don’t know. Can’t draw any other trees, really. I guess they’re quite cool . . .’ She trails off, as if suddenly aware of the faces staring at her.
