by Jean Davison
Neither did the use of a relaxation tape make sense in the circumstances. I mean, why bother sending Marlene and me upstairs twice a week to lie on foam matting on the floor and listen to a relaxation tape? Fine, if we had a problem relaxing, but my problem was managing to keep awake. And so, too, it seemed was Marlene’s.
* * *
‘Imagine you’re lying on a sunny beach …’
The tape had only just begun and Marlene was already snoring. There was a pause somewhere during the tape where you were supposed to be in a state of deep relaxation, then, after a few minutes of silence, the ‘voice’ would start prattling on again about sunny beaches, against tranquil background sounds of soft, rippling water and the occasional cry of a seagull. Marlene stirred, yawned and then stood up during the silent bit and switched the tape off. She was about to go back downstairs: end of holiday.
‘Er, Marlene. I don’t think it’s over yet,’ I said.
‘Oh hell!’ she said. She switched it back on and lay down again. ‘Wake me up when the fuckin’ thing’s finished.’
‘I will if I can manage to stay awake.’
‘I don’t think these tapes are meant for people like us, Jean, do you? I’m forever struggling to keep alert ’cos I’m on this bloody Melleril and it knocks me out. Last thing I need is a fuckin’ relaxation tape.’
‘Yeah, me too,’ I said. ‘I could lie here and sleep all day.’
‘The treatment we get at this place doesn’t make sense, does it?’ asked Marlene. ‘I mean, when you really come to think …’
‘You’re still on the sunny beach, feeling warm and comfortable and peaceful and fully relaxed …’ droned the deep, slow, male voice on the tape. ‘Breathe deeply, slowly … In. Out. In. Out. Just relax and let go of everything, let it all go…’
‘When you come to think about it,’ continued Marlene, ‘it doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense.’
‘Now I’m going to count to ten …’ the voice on the tape was saying gently, ‘and when I get to ten, you’ll open your eyes and be fully awake but you’ll still be deeply relaxed. You’ll still feel comfortable, peaceful and deeply, deeply relaxed. One. Two …’
‘It doesn’t make sense, does it? It doesn’t make any fuckin’ sense at all.’
‘Five. Six …’
‘No, it certainly doesn’t,’ I murmured sleepily.
But I suppose I did seem a nervous wreck, and not only because of the old social anxiety. I realised how shaky my hands were when I took some photographs for Mandy with her camera; each one came out blurred. And, even alongside the drowsiness, there was sometimes an intensely distressing feeling of restlessness. Years later I saw that a nurse at the day hospital had written in the Nursing Notes: ‘Seems very nervous, when sitting down constantly moving arm or leg, but always very pleasant.’ Mr Jordan at last told me (no one else had ever done so, as far as I can recall) that the restlessness and tremors were common side effects of the type of drugs I was taking. To lessen such effects, a drug called Kemedrin was added to my prescriptions.
In the hospital corridors one day, I stopped and leant against the wall watching life – mental institution life – pass me by. I tried to imagine the mentally sick of the Victorian era being herded through these same corridors. How many people had lived, suffered and died in this place? I’d heard it was built in the 1880s to keep about 2,500 ‘pauper lunatics’ out of sight and mind of the public. Could their sad spirits have sunk into these walls? Sometimes, feeling an almost uncanny sensitivity to atmosphere, I thought I could sense the gloom of both past and present as if it was clinging to the walls and dripping from the ceiling.
Didn’t mental patients used to be chained to the walls, doused in cold water, whirled around? What strange methods of treating people there were before the use of drugs and electric shocks. But how much progress had really been made? My thoughts turned to myself and I remembered how Mr Jordan and Dr Copeland had once pointed out that if I’d been living in an earlier period, I wouldn’t have become a patient or inmate anyway. They were probably right. After all, I hadn’t been talking or behaving in ways which caused concern to anybody outside the psychiatric profession. In a historical period with different ideas, I wouldn’t have viewed my problems as ‘medical’ so would never have thought of going to my GP, asking to see a psychiatrist and agreeing to voluntary admission. There would have seemed no option but to carry on working and try to sort things out for myself. And what would have happened to me? Nothing worse than what had happened, surely? Perhaps nothing at all.
As I leant against the wall ruminating, interrupted only occasionally by one or two inmates who shuffled up asking if I’d got a cig or a light, I felt trapped. Almost as if I, too, were shackled to the wall in this awful place. I realised with dismay that I was no nearer to resolving my problems now than I had been at the age of eighteen when I’d first decided to seek psychiatric ‘help’. Not only that, it seemed all I had done since then was to walk deeper and deeper into a fog from which I could find no way out.
What about my brother? I asked myself. Does one escape the conflicts of adolescence by remaining a child? But his was no easy escape. Last night he’d woken me with one of his tantrums. I’d lain in bed listening to him shouting at my parents, but what I’d really heard was an insecure child aged about five yelling, ‘I hate Jean! I hate Jean! Mum wanted a girl but instead she got me. And then what happened? Four years later she got what she wanted. A girl!’
‘Be quiet, Brian, you’ll wake her up,’ I heard Mum say.
‘She’s always been the favourite. I hate her!’
I didn’t believe Brian really hated me. I felt he said these things because he was hurt and angry. There had been another time, not long ago, when he’d told me that I was the only person who was ‘all right’. This was when he had come into my bedroom late one night and, after the usual argument about him waking me up to get to the wardrobe, we’d somehow got talking. He’d actually sat on my bed and talked about some of his insecurities and fears, and about his wish to have a girlfriend. On and on he’d talked well into the night – how much he had needed someone to talk to. When he left my room I sank into sleep, feeling drained but hopeful because it seemed like a breakthrough in communication with each other. The next day our relationship was back to ‘normal’ and it was hard to believe I hadn’t only dreamt he’d sat on my bed and talked to me like that.
Although Brian spoke and acted as if he was intellectually and emotionally impaired, some things didn’t seem to fit with this. For example, his knowledge and appreciation of classical music was impressive. He would, however, play his music on the record player loudly at all times of day or night. I heard Mum making sarcastic comments to him, not about his lack of consideration for others in playing the music too loudly or at inappropriate times, but about his taste in music, as if it was wrong or ‘soppy’ to like classical music. I wondered if Brian would have turned out quite different if he’d been brought up in a different family.
Since the onset of adolescence I had often felt angry about what I perceived to be the inappropriate and unintelligent responses of my parents, blaming them to some extent for Brian, and later perhaps me too, becoming (each in our different ways) ‘screwed up’. But now I had come round to realising that my parents, like everyone else, could only behave within the bounds of their own limited capabilities or perspectives. So what was the point of being angry with them? No point in anger or blame. And nothing to rebel against any more. Not even God.
No, not even God. I remembered how a few weeks earlier I had gone to Pastor West’s farewell service. He was moving to Scotland. Once again, I had heard the familiar hymn-singing, hand-clapping, gospel message, prayers. But now, even the pain and struggles and conflicts of losing my Christian beliefs had largely subsided, leaving only a dreadful emptiness, a kind of emotional deadness inside …
I was still leaning against the wall in the hospital corridor when a wild-eyed man in a long, shabby overcoat shuf
fled up and pestered me for a cig.
‘No, I haven’t got one, I don’t smoke,’ I said.
‘Well, fuck you!’ he shouted in my face. His foul breath made my stomach lurch, but since I was already leaning up against the wall I couldn’t step back. I had long since stopped being afraid of these sad people, but was relieved when he went away. All the way down the corridor he shuffled along, shouting, ‘Fuck you! Fuck ’em all! And fuck the whole fuckin’ world!’
After the main service in the church there had been a Youth Rendezvous meeting in the hall at the back. More hand-clapping, singing and praying – along with a break for tea and biscuits. I experienced so acutely the feeling of being alone in a crowd as, with cup and saucer awkwardly balanced on my knee, I sat there dumbly, battling with the usual feelings of shyness, which now reached a peak.
I glanced round and noticed that everyone in this packed room was laughing, chatting – except for me. I don’t fit in, I don’t belong, I thought sadly. I don’t belong anywhere. There can’t be a God or surely He would help me, especially here if these are His people. Oh, why do I still keep returning to this church like a pin to a magnet?
Travelling home from church on the bus that evening I knew it was finally over, ‘it’ being the last bit of hope I’d cherished for so long that one day a miracle would happen that would enable me to regain my beliefs. I’d hoped that one day I’d return to church with Jackie and pick up where I’d left off when I was about sixteen, only less shy, and stronger in faith, none the worse for my worldly wanderings. Somehow, right then and there on the bus, I suddenly knew, clearer than ever before, that it could never be so. The God of my childhood and teens was not going to rise from the dead. Not now. Not ever.
Oh well, so what? People’s beliefs often change as they get older, which is how it should be, I told myself. That was the last time I’d go to church and now I’d put that part of my life right behind me, and this time I really would let go. I’d stop looking back. Even so, it had been a lovely dream while it lasted.
It had started to rain; the bus window was so splattered with raindrops that I could hardly see through it, but there was another reason for my blurred vision. I paid my fare hardly daring to turn properly and then I returned my gaze to the window. Don’t cry, Jean. For heaven’s sake, don’t cry. This was so unlike me. I rarely cried at all these days and certainly not in front of people. I surely wouldn’t cry here in front of a whole busload of people.
I fought tremendously hard to hold back my tears but they just seeped out of my eyes like water from a leaking tap. Soon my face was hot, my nose running and my cheeks wet with scalding tears. But at least they were silent tears. With my face still riveted to the window, nobody could see me, nobody need know, although as the grey terraced houses, the parade of shops, the cinema on the corner, sped by through a blur of rain and tears, I was becoming increasingly worried about getting off. Opting for a swift solution, I stumbled down the aisle, my long hair hiding my face, and got off a few stops earlier than usual.
Walking through the cold wind and rain, my face stinging as my tears flowed unchecked to mingle with the elements, I realised, through a throbbing sensation from within, that at least I felt more alive when I cried. It was worse not to be able to cry. And to feel dead inside was the worst feeling of all …
‘Fuck you! Fuck you! Fuck you!’
The reappearance of the ‘Fuck you!’ man returned me to the bleak hospital corridor. When he reached me he shuffled to a halt and stopped swearing. I was about to tell him again that, no, I hadn’t got a cig, but this time he didn’t ask. He stared intently at my face.
‘You’re crying,’ he said.
I pressed my hands against my wet cheeks. He was right.
LOOKING BACK 9
I WAS FIFTEEN WHEN I went with Dad to a meeting at the Pentecostal church he used to go to in his teens. I was struck by how happy and uninhibited everyone seemed, with a spontaneity similar to that I could remember from Salvation Army meetings: people shouting ‘Yes, Lord. Amen!’ ‘Hallelujah!’ ‘Praise Him!’ and clapping their hands to the joyful choruses.
A teenage boy came out to the front and gave his ‘testimony’. He spoke about his life and how he had become a ‘born again’ Christian. How different he was from the boys I knew. He seemed to have found a real meaning and purpose to life, and I longed to be the same.
All noise in the packed church subsided while a small man with a loud voice proclaimed the ‘Good News’, that old, familiar story of Jesus Christ, Son of God, coming to earth to die on the cross and rising up from the dead so that ‘whosoever believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting life’.
As I sat and listened to the Gospel, an old flame was rekindled within me. Would it be possible for me to regain something of that strong, simple faith I’d had in early childhood? Could the meaning and message of the gospel have any relevance for me personally in my day-to-day living?
It was time now for the ‘appeal’. Those who felt the call to commit their lives to Christ were invited to kneel at the front as a public declaration that they were asking Jesus to come into their heart. This ‘accepting Jesus’, which could be done either publicly or privately, was what was meant by being ‘saved’ or ‘born again’. My father made his way to the front, and knelt in tears.
I went home with the Gospel Message buzzing around inside my head. Something about that church got hold of me right from the start. It was like a powerful magnet pulling me to it.
I persuaded Jackie to come with me and we started going regularly. Someone gave us a tract about being ‘born again’. We took it into the Cellar Bar one night and, there in the dim lights and din, we read and reread it, discussing each part, hardly hearing the pop songs blasting out from the jukebox.
I spent restless months lingering in a kind of limbo, buffeted by doubts, but feeling a strong urge to commit myself. I thought I couldn’t be ‘saved’ until I could believe without doubts, since faith was obviously essential to salvation – ‘whosoever believeth’. Then, while I was lying awake one night, I realised something.
That’s it! I thought excitedly. I don’t have to wait until these conflicts and doubts go. I can come ‘just as I am’. I got out of bed, knelt at the side, and gave myself to Him who understands our innermost thoughts and feelings.
After that night, I tried hard to be a good Christian. I prayed daily, read my Bible and sought God’s guidance in every aspect of my life. I was young, idealistic and very sincere.
After Dad returned to church I think he did try to curb his bad moods, but during yet another period of family squabbles, sulks and disruption, he told me he was looking for other accommodation. He said again I would have to hurry up and decide whom I wanted to live with – ‘her or me’. But I knew now that I needn’t make that decision because soon I’d be old enough to leave home. Roll on sixteen.
By the time my sixteenth birthday came, my parents were still living together, and religion had become as much a part of my life as breathing. Stretched taut with spiritual yearning, I sought the fullness of God.
My soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth
for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no
water is.(Psalm 63:1)
But questions, questions, questions, kept springing, unwanted and unbidden, to my mind. What did this mean? What did that mean? How could I know for certain that the Bible was true? And supposing I had got it all wrong. I mean, supposing that God didn’t even exist? My mind was forever demanding answers, throwing up doubts, engaging in an intense intellectual and emotional struggle to understand, to believe, to know. I tried hard to blot the doubts from my mind, hold my critical faculties in abeyance and accept Him by faith as I buried myself more and more in a world of bibles, hymns and prayers.
I struggled over difficult theological concepts, prayed hard for spiritual enlightenment, strength and guidance … and I fell down before the resurrected Christ, saying like the father in the Bible story:
‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.’
Again, I felt the strength of that bond between Dad and me. We looked to our beliefs, hoping to invoke the power of God to smooth out our family problems. We wanted miracles. And why not? For did not Jesus Himself say that when two or more people were gathered together in His name, He would be right there in the midst of them? So together, just the two of us, we got down on our knees in my bedroom and prayed each in turn out loud, self-consciously at first, then more boldly as inhibitions and defences dropped.
How can I describe those sweet moments I spent together with my earthly father and my Heavenly Father, bound by cords of love, both human and divine? The sense of wonder and awe which filled my heart as we knelt before the throne of God defies description.
At least that’s the way it felt at the time. But feelings, especially intense adolescent feelings, cannot be trusted. Of course, I know better now, having learnt such a lot since then. And yet, it’s as if a small part of me was left behind in the past. It’s still there now, wandering through the graveyard of lost beliefs searching for I know not what.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
EVERY MORNING I PASSED a bench in the grounds where a man sat dejectedly, body slumped forward, head down low. I could imagine his picture on a poster with a caption urging people to give generously for the mentally ill. Although not restrained in a building as past inmates had been, he seemed doomed to exist inside the prison of himself, forlorn and hopeless; one of society’s misfits.
My mind barely registered seeing him until the day he wasn’t there. Each morning after that, the empty bench reminded me of this man. Perhaps I should have attempted some small caring gesture, at least tried saying ‘Good morning’ to him. And now it was too late.
But it wasn’t too late for me to give Arnold a cup of coffee. Arnold, a day patient, was a stroke victim. The staff didn’t make him join in the therapy like the other patients as he didn’t seem capable, so he was left to sit and vegetate most of the time. Occasionally, a nurse, perhaps trying to be cruel to be kind, snapped at him to ‘Get a grip on yourself, Arnold!’ He used to be able to get a grip; he used to be a senior police officer. But now he was ‘unfit for duties’ as he could hardly walk or talk, couldn’t use his hands properly and dribbled down his chin.
