The Dark Threads

by Jean Davison

  On our way back inside, Marlene said to me, ‘He’s a fucking weird creep.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dr Shaw, of course. Making you and Aidan pose like a courting couple for his photo. It’s sick if you ask me. The other day he got me to sit on the floor with Don Parker and he told Don to put his arm round me. What does he do with all these photos anyway? I’d like to get hold of his camera and shove it up his arse.’

  We returned to the therapy room where, led by an arm-waving Sister Speight, we sang ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’. Dad once said that, when he was in prison, the Salvation Army came and sang ‘Bless This House’. It amused me to think of singing to prisoners: ‘Bless these walls so firm and stout, keeping want and trouble out’. What we were doing now seemed no less ironic, but Sister Speight looked deadly serious. Vera, Georgina and I kept exchanging glances and giggling behind our song sheets like naughty schoolchildren. One aid to survival in the mental hospital world was to wring as much humour as possible out of each absurd situation.

  A small group of us once frightened a museum attendant on an outing. We were bored and looking for an exit so we could slip out and go for a coffee, but we wandered off down the wrong corridor.

  ‘You can’t get out that way,’ the attendant informed us. ‘You’ll have to go back along the corridor, turn right and go up the stairs then along the corridor to go down the far stairs which bring you out near the main entrance.’

  ‘Oh, tickle to that,’ said Marlene. ‘Surely there’s a quicker way out.’ She mopped her forehead and waved her arms dramatically. ‘Let us out. We need to get out quick or we’ll be having a funny do. We’re from High Royds.’

  The attendant immediately produced some keys and all but shoved us out of a small back exit a few yards from where we’d been standing. No one was going to be allowed to have a funny do in his museum. Outside in the street, we doubled up laughing. ‘Did you see the look on his face?’ Marlene asked with a chuckle. ‘He couldn’t let us out quick enough when I mentioned High Royds.’

  Even the hospital parrot had a sense of humour. In part of the grounds surrounding the hospital there was a small aviary which housed, among other birds, Popsy the parrot whose party piece was to say ‘O be joyful’ to the watching groups of depressed patients.

  ‘O be joyful,’ Popsy said as Georgina stuck her face near the mesh to get a closer look.

  ‘Don’t you “O be joyful” me,’ Georgina said crossly.

  ‘O be joyful. O be joyful. O be joyful,’ the parrot squawked, running backwards and forwards along its perch.

  ‘You horrible creature. I’ll wring your neck if you don’t shut up,’ Georgina said, sounding as if she meant it, but then she turned to me with a smile. ‘Oh, listen to me arguing with a bloody parrot. I’m so miserable and bad-tempered today, I don’t know what to do.’

  ‘What to do? What to do? O be joyful,’ the parrot suggested.

  We both laughed.

  Mike was sending me long letters with news cuttings and pictures about life in New Zealand. He’d got a well-paid job with a car manufacturer, had never been so well off financially, was living it up at champagne parties and said it was really great out there. But reading between the lines I knew he was homesick. In some of his letters he begged me to join him, offering to pay my fare. He kept telling me he loved me and wanted to marry me.

  And he didn’t even know me.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  I IGNORED THEM FOR a long time but, yes, they were there, these questions in the recesses of my mind, like tiny seeds hidden beneath the soil. Lately they had started growing, spreading their tendrils and thrusting their way up through the darkness to the surface. Despite my drowsiness, I was becoming increasingly critical of psychiatry. How could ‘helping’ include abusing people’s minds and bodies, inflicting pain and humiliation, indoctrinating people into believing themselves inadequate, while fostering a dependency on mental hospitals and drugs?

  ‘I’m sick of this hospital,’ I blurted out the minute I was seated at Dr Copeland’s desk on what proved to be the last occasion I would see him. ‘Is it part of the staff’s training to view us as something less than human beings?’

  ‘I’m not doing that, am I? Why are you angry with me?’

  ‘It’s not you,’ I admitted. He was the one psychiatrist I knew who least deserved this kind of criticism. I twisted my fingers nervously. ‘It’s not just one incident or one person,’ I tried to explain. ‘It’s your … your profession. Psychiatry!’ I spat out the word vehemently. ‘There’s something … something wrong with it,’ I said, fumbling to find the right words from my half-formed thoughts.

  Dr Copeland smiled. ‘Yes, and some of us would like to change things. But who or what has annoyed you?’

  ‘I’ve told you it’s nobody in particular. It’s lots of things.’

  I searched my mind for examples, but could only launch into recounting bitterly my initiation into the mental hospital world on Thornville.

  ‘OK, so you had a bad experience on one of the wards, but don’t judge the whole hospital by that.’

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘It’s also what I’ve experienced over the years since, and what I’ve seen happening to other people. It’s now as well, all the time, and it’s not just … it’s got something to do with … with the whole system.’

  I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I felt I was teetering on the brink of an important revelation but, having finally grasped a bit of truth, I couldn’t digest or express it.

  ‘You’re feeling angry today, Jean,’ Dr Copeland observed, lighting a cigarette.

  ‘Yes, too right I am. Patient’s symptoms took the form of anger today.’ I gave a sarcastic laugh. ‘So why don’t you increase my tablets or send me for ECT?’ I wouldn’t have dared say that to Dr Shaw. I could only say it to Dr Copeland because I could trust him not to do that.

  I gazed at the sky through the window, feeling as though I was watching the clouds through prison bars.

  ‘I feel like smashing every window in this bloody hospital,’ I said, suppressed anger crackling inside me and shooting off sparks.

  ‘Go ahead if it’ll make you feel any better,’ Dr Copeland muttered sleepily, ‘but then you’ll have to pay for them.’ He yawned and stretched.

  ‘You know something?’ I went on heedlessly, my bottled-up emotions bobbing close to the surface. ‘If you’re not mad when you first come into this hospital, you’ve little chance of not being after a while.’

  ‘That applies to the staff, too,’ Dr Copeland replied.

  We both sat silently for a while, then I said: ‘I really don’t understand how I got myself into all this.’

  Dr Copeland leant forward in his chair, resting his chin on his hand propped up by his elbow.

  ‘Jean, didn’t you once tell me that it was you who first asked to see a psychiatrist?’

  I nodded.

  ‘What exactly did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him I thought I was going insane.’

  He sighed. ‘Asking to see a psychiatrist and telling him you think you’re going insane.’ He closed his eyes and ran his fingers across his forehead. ‘Jesus, what a clever thing to do! Like voluntarily putting your head on the chopping block, don’t you think?’

  ‘With hindsight, yes,’ I replied. ‘But I felt I needed help and asking to see a psychiatrist seemed a sensible thing to do.’

  ‘What kind of help did you expect?’

  ‘Not the so-called help I got,’ I said, bitterly.

  ‘But what did you expect?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe I wanted him to reassure me that I wasn’t going insane. I needed someone to talk to and I was scared he wouldn’t take me seriously.’

  ‘So you told him you thought you were going insane to make sure he’d sit up and listen to you? Sounds like you were playing a very dangerous game.’

  I hung my head and thought about it carefully before answering.

  ‘No, that
’s not fair. It wasn’t a game,’ I said finally. ‘I’d been full of conflicts and confusion, and so dissatisfied with life, for a long time. I didn’t know where to turn. Asking to see a psychiatrist was my cry for help. And did you know it takes courage to do that? But how, please tell me how, am I supposed to understand what happened next? Once inside, nothing made sense any more: strong drugs right away, too drowsy to think straight, then ECT only a few days later …’ The words were rushing out now, hot and angry. ‘It all happened so quickly and I was sucked in too deep to get out. It was like … like being crushed with a steamroller. God, how I wish I’d never made that decision to see a psychiatrist, but I was a mixed-up teenager and I thought … I honestly thought I was being … sensible.’

  I nearly choked on the word ‘sensible’ as painful memories flooded my mind, drenching me in self-pity for having paid such a high price for being ‘sensible’. I was holding back so many tears and feelings now that they were rumbling in my stomach and causing painful contractions in my chest and throat.

  ‘I wonder what patients expect of us,’ Dr Copeland said, stroking his chin. I thought I detected pity in his eyes when he said again, though very gently this time: ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said with a deep sigh as I managed to compose myself. ‘I just don’t know.’

  The consultation was over. I was leaving Dr Copeland’s office when he called me back.

  ‘Can I give you some off-the-record advice?’ he asked. He was looking down at his desk as if talking to that.

  ‘OK. I’m listening.’

  ‘Get away from this hospital. I know it’s not easy, but can’t you try to get a job and your own flat?’ His tone was quiet, gentle, almost pleading. ‘You can see, Jean, can’t you, why it’s so important that you get right away from all this?’ He paused, looked up at me and spoke louder, firmer, urgently. ‘For Christ’s sake, Jean, get away from here. Before it’s too late!’

  Dr Copeland left the hospital and I heard from staff that he had given up psychiatry to become a GP. Dr Shaw informed me that I’d be seeing him more in future, an announcement which filled me with dismay. Sister Speight was replaced by a charge nurse called Tony, a pleasant young man in his late twenties. Georgina took a massive overdose and went into a coma. And so life (or whatever it should be called) at the hospital, went on.

  After Dr Copeland left, I did make some attempt to ‘get away’ before it was ‘too late’, but felt trapped. I applied for jobs as a dental receptionist, a typist, and at a hairdresser’s washing hair and sweeping up, but job-hunting seemed pointless. On application forms, or at interviews, how could I explain my long gap of unemployment, and my present situation? How could I get references? Who would want to employ a drugged mental patient?

  I scanned the newspaper for accommodation but this, too, seemed beyond my reach. How could I support myself financially? Nikki, an acquaintance of Jackie, phoned me one evening. I’d never met Nikki but she explained she needed someone to share her flat and Jackie had told her I was looking for a place.

  ‘Well, I was, but I’ve stopped looking for now because … because I’m unemployed at the moment,’ I explained.

  ‘Oh, I didn’t realise you were between jobs, but never mind. We could meet for a coffee if you like and perhaps decide about sharing the flat for later. What kind of work do you do?’

  ‘Office work,’ I replied, ‘but I haven’t worked for some time.’ I hesitated, then plunged in. ‘I’m a patient at a psychiatric day hospital.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘Didn’t Jackie tell you?’

  There was a long, awkward silence.

  ‘Oh, I … er, I see. No, I didn’t know.’

  Another long pause. There was no sign now of her initial friendliness. Her obvious unease was greater than I’d anticipated. I might as well have told her I’d got bubonic plague.

  Before going to bed I looked at myself in the wardrobe mirror. I was not the fat girl I had been on my discharge from Thornville, for I had long since regained my slim, pre-hospital figure. But it was still a dull, heavy-lidded, pale, lifeless creature who stared back at me. Where had I gone? Somewhere in the cellars of my mind there was a dusty memory of how it had felt to be awake and alive. I remembered a girl on a swing in a park – it made me want to cry.

  I sat on the bed and tipped my dosage of pills from their little plastic containers into my hand. Valium pills were yellow, amitriptyline were red, and the white ones were Melleril, and Kemedrin. Resisting a sudden urge to throw them on the floor, I forced them down my throat with a large gulp of water and winced. For a while now my pills had seemed to be sticking, causing a tight band of pain in my chest that hurt more each time I swallowed.

  I lay on the bed staring at the ceiling while Brian’s loud music from the record player downstairs battered my brain. My head felt heavy, groggy, and my stomach acknowledged the arrival of the latest pills with a queasy flutter. It was as if, after years of daily drug-taking, my mind and body were now pleading in unison, ‘No more. Oh, please no more.’

  Existing on pills, going to the hospital, living with my family, being painfully shy, feeling constantly tired, lacking energy and motivation; all these things were getting me down. And now there was this disturbing, restless feeling reminding me that it was of the utmost importance to do something before it was too late. The problem was I’d no idea what this ‘something’ should be. Leave home, get a flat, get a job, get away from the hospital … Yes, yes, yes, Dr Copeland. But how? I felt I’d lost the skills for ‘normal’ living (if I’d ever had them).

  I pulled the raggy, dirty bedcovers over my head, feeling too exhausted to have a wash or clean my teeth. I lay awkwardly in the lumpy, unmade bed, trying as always to avoid the spring that was protruding through the mattress, but it caught the seat of my pyjamas and ripped them when I tugged free. With my fingers stuck in my ears to block out the pounding music, I sought refuge in sleep. I wasn’t feeling very well tonight. So what was new?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SAVED BY THE BELL. My alarm clock rescued me from a nightmare in which once again I was being held down firmly by white-coated men who were about to shoot electric currents into my brain. I leant over to stop it and lay back down. I still wasn’t feeling well and may have been tempted to stay in bed if it hadn’t been my brother’s day off. I lay staring at the ceiling, with my arm stretched across my forehead, until I’d no time for breakfast. Then I got up, had a quick wash, pulled on my jeans and a T-shirt, swallowed a handful of pills and set off for the day hospital.

  I felt sick during the bus journey so had to get off a few stops early. I walked the rest of the way and was still feeling a bit fragile when Tony greeted me with the news that my presence was required immediately at a Case Review Meeting. I’d never attended one but I knew from staff and patients something of what to expect. The room would be full of students and others, all sitting around me making notes, staring, observing my reactions to questions. Tony saw me pull a face and said kindly, ‘You’ll be OK, it’s nothing to worry about,’ as he led me to the office upstairs.

  ‘Tell us about the church you used to go to,’ Dr Shaw said while my audience stared.

  How long ago it seemed since I’d gone to church with Jackie and sung hymns with a joyful heart before the shadows descended. How could they understand? Why should I try to explain?

  Andy, the young friendly student nurse who was presently based at the day hospital, piped up, ‘You’re all right about religion now. I know you can see it from both sides because I’ve heard you talk about it.’

  I turned to Andy who was sitting behind me.

  ‘But it’s seeing it from both sides like that which caused the conflicts,’ I pointed out. ‘If I hadn’t seen it from both sides, I’d have been able to either carry on being a Christian or become an atheist, depending on which side I could see it from.’

  ‘Turn round and talk to me,’ Dr Shaw said firmly.

  Dr Shaw’
s questions made me uncomfortable. As always, they were selective; for example, I wasn’t asked about my father’s adulterous affairs – not that I wanted to be.

  ‘Tell me about your mother’s affair.’

  ‘Has your mother had affairs in the past?’

  ‘Has your mother slept with a lot of men?’

  I supposed if I snapped at them to mind their own business, my anger would be seen as a symptom of illness. They can ask me anything, I thought, to write about in that manila file with my name on it, then use the partial truths and fictions it contains, all the distortions of their blinkered medical perspective, as proof of who knows what. Stop it, Jean, that’s a sick way to think. They only wanted to help, so I should try to cooperate with them. But, Lord, I’d been co-operating for years and look where it had got me …

  I tried to answer questions about my mother honestly, although I felt guilty and disloyal for doing so to these note-taking strangers. And I tried to talk about myself with an openness that rendered me vulnerable. I did this, even though seeing a psychiatrist in the first place to talk about myself now seemed the biggest mistake of my life.

  My throat was parched. I couldn’t swallow. Twice earlier I’d asked Dr Shaw if I could have a glass of water and each time he’d just smiled inanely and carried on with his questions as if my request wasn’t worth acknowledging. Now my mouth was so dry I could hardly speak, my tongue got in the way of my words and I sounded as if I had a speech impediment. An excessively dry mouth was one of the side effects of my drugs, and I expect nervousness at having to speak in front of all these people was accentuating it. Tony stood up and left the room as I struggled on. After a short while, he returned with a glass of water for me. I was very grateful.

  ‘Do you hear voices?’ Dr Shaw asked.

  ‘Not like what you mean. Not audible voices.’

  ‘Not audible voices? Well, what kind of voices do you hear?’

  ‘I don’t hear voices, but I mean sometimes your own thoughts are like voices, aren’t they? A kind of dialogue in your mind.’