Catch Me When I Fall

by Nicci French

  ‘Holly,’ he said, ‘what’s going on? Where did you get to? I tried to find you. I’ve been running around all over the place trying to find you. One minute you were sitting on the bed in your nightclothes and the next minute – oh, you’re still in your nightclothes, aren’t you? What’s going on? What have you done? There was this call – they said you’d attacked a young–’

  ‘It’s nothing,’ I said. ‘I had a stupid accident.’ I held up my hands, which had been bandaged by a nurse when I arrived. ‘I fell over and scraped my hands and knees. They brought me in here and now they’re asking me a whole lot of questions. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘Is this your husband?’ asked Dr Mehta.

  ‘Nice, isn’t he? Everyone loves Charlie.’

  She turned to Charlie. ‘Can I have a word?’

  The two of them moved back behind the curtain, leaving me alone on the stage without an audience, except God. After a few minutes Dr Mehta returned alone. ‘Charlie’s just outside,’ she said. ‘You can see him in a minute.’

  ‘Is he taking me home?’

  ‘I need to ask a few more questions. Tell me about things. How are you sleeping?’

  ‘You’re too late,’ I said. ‘A few weeks ago I was too busy to sleep. I went days and days without it. You know the research that says if you deprive someone of sleep they go mad? It’s true. But I’m over that. I’ve been sleeping and sleeping like… like a whale? Do whales sleep? Like a beach whale.’ I laughed. ‘It sounds like a whale on holiday. I mean a beached whale. Like a bear. Bears sleep all winter. Lucky them.’

  ‘How’s your general health? Are you fit and well?’

  ‘Don’t I look it? The picture of health. I’m probably the healthiest person in the building.’

  ‘What about, well, for example, your sex life?’

  ‘What do you mean “well, for example”? Are you embarrassed? Go on, admit it. Are you new to this? Do you think you’re competent to assess the state of my sex life?’

  ‘I’m interested in how you see it.’

  ‘Things have not been obviously brilliant. Just to show you that I’m brazenly unembarrassable and not a violet blushing unseen wherever it is, I did a few weeks ago have sex with somebody I’d never met before while under the influence of something or other and, yes, I am married, and, yes, I am happily married, and do I regret it? Oh, my God, yes – which sounds like a fairly sane response to me.’ I paused and tried to concentrate. ‘I’ve told you all this, haven’t I? Or did I tell the other one? The other female doctor? You’re all women. Don’t you allow men to work here? Not that I’m complaining. I’d find it hard to talk like this to a man. Not that you’re being much help. I thought you were a psychiatrist. Couldn’t you give me some words of comfort? Because I do need comfort. I know I’m gabbling on, but underneath that, I know I’m sad.’ I looked at her. Scribble, scribble, scribble. ‘Nothing? Just another black mark? Another F? You know, Doctor, I think I’ve put enough effort into entertaining you. I’m starting to feel tired. My head aches, and my ankle throbs, and my hands and knees hurt and I just want to go off somewhere and lie down. If you want to write me a prescription for something, that’s fine. Otherwise I’ll be on my way.’

  Scribble, scribble, scribble. She looked up. ‘What about food?’ she asked.

  ‘No, thanks. I’m not hungry.’

  No smile.

  ‘I meant appetite. In general.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Eating heartily?’

  ‘I’m going to maintain a dignified “No comment”. No person shall be compelled to give evidence against herself.’

  ‘Are you having problems at work?’

  I pulled a face. This was an uncomfortable area. I was going to have to tread carefully here. ‘I don’t know how much time you’ve got. They were being completely – which they would admit themselves if they… well, they will admit it one day – unreasonable. Oh, this is all pointless anyway. What can you possibly know about my life? I’m brought in here like a dead bird dragged in by a cat and dumped at your feet. I don’t even understand my life and I’ve been stuck with it for twenty-seven years.’

  I looked up at Dr Mehta.

  She wasn’t scribbling, just staring into space. ‘Let me have a word with your husband,’ she said.

  ‘Haven’t we already done this?’ I asked. ‘I feel we’re trapped in a pattern.’

  While they were away I worked out a list of things I was going to say to her. I tried to arrange them in order of priority but they slipped away from me and I had to start again, and then they were back.

  ‘I didn’t see you there,’ I said.

  ‘Miss Krauss,’ said Dr Mehta. ‘I’m going to talk to my consultant. No doubt he’ll come and talk to you…’

  ‘So there is a man on the premises,’ I said. ‘Do you keep him hidden somewhere? Bring him out on special occasions?’

  ‘However, I’m very clear that I want you to be admitted to a psychiatric ward as a voluntary patient.’

  ‘It was the dead bird, wasn’t it? And the cat. It was only a comparison.’

  Dr Mehta spoke as if she hadn’t heard what I’d said, as if I wasn’t even in the room. ‘As I said, I would like you to be admitted as a voluntary patient. If you aren’t willing to accept that, we’re going to consider assessing you under a section of the Mental Health Act for compulsory admission.’

  ‘Sectioning me? Are you serious? That’s what they do to lunatics running around in the street with knives threatening people. Look at me. I’m sitting here with you calming, I mean calmly, having this fucking stupid conversation.’

  ‘Compulsory admission is a more cumbersome process. You need two separate doctors and a social worker and we have to fill out a lot of forms, but we’ll do it if necessary. And now you might want a word with your husband.’

  ‘To say goodbye? But I don’t want to say goodbye, I want to go home. That’s all I need. Everything will be all right if I can go home.’

  Dr Mehta didn’t seem to be paying much attention. I was like a radio that had been left on while she was getting on with her work. She went and Charlie came back and he looked as if he was the one who needed help.

  ‘Holly,’ he said, in a dead voice. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘Did she talk to you? They want me to stay. I’m tempted to make a break for it if you can find me my clothes. I can’t go out looking like this.’

  Then I saw his face, furrowed and tired and blotchy in the bright hospital light, and all the fight went out of me. I was left feeling drained, humiliated and bitterly ashamed of myself. I put out a hand and touched his arm gently. I saw him wince. ‘If you think it’s the right thing. I’ll do whatever you want. Just tell me.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I’ll sign on the dotted line, Charlie. You don’t need to worry.’

  I wanted him to protest, but he didn’t, just nodded slowly.

  ‘They’ll make you better,’ he said.

  24

  They didn’t make me better. They made me worse.

  I was like a car that needed basic repairs but, instead of being taken to the body shop, was taken to the dump where the vehicles are piled on top of each other, stripped of their doors and their radios and anything that’s of any value, then left to rust.

  The Zimbabwean nurse gave me tablets, which she said would settle me, but I don’t think I took them. I remember I had to be held by both arms and something was broken, fragments of jagged glass on the floor.

  I behaved like a flailing, frightened toddler. I spat the tablets out as hard as I could. Dr Mehta showed me a syringe, I saw the droplet at the end, glistening. She pushed it into my arm as I tried to wriggle out of the way and almost immediately a wave of warmth spread out from the needle up my arm and across my body. It was safe to let go now. I could let myself fall into sleep and nothing mattered and a little bit of me hoped I would never have t
o wake and fight and strive again.

  The days were like a dream of which I retain only a few fragments. I look back at them and see a woman who must be me. I think she was me, she must have been me, whatever that means. It was as if inner and outside worlds had run into each other so that I could no longer tell the difference between the two. So I watched myself, and then I lost sight of myself, jerking back into consciousness with a start, then once more sliding helplessly away.

  I had thought they were going to take me somewhere safe and quiet, where I could get well. It wasn’t like that at all. I know, because I was told later, that I was in a psychiatric ward under sedation and then I was assessed and then a few days later I was released into the care of my husband because the consultant judged me not to be an imminent threat either to others or to myself. How could I be? I was in such a vegetative state I couldn’t even feed myself. Nobody had been seriously hurt in the rumpus on the bridge. No charges were to be brought.

  That’s what I was told, but I didn’t experience it. I remember images: light on the lino, bandages on a young girl’s wrists, an old woman chewing her lip, food served from a trolley, plastic forks, pills. I remember sounds: screams in the middle of the night, a woman holding whispered conversations with herself, the chatter of nurses on their break, the TV. And smells: disinfectant and cooking and piss. I remember the consultant’s sparse grey hair, baggy sweater, kind eyes. I think I called him ‘Daddy’. I think he held my hand. Or perhaps that was Charlie. Or perhaps that was a dream.

  ∗

  I remember Charlie told me one day that a strange youth with a shaved head had thrown a brick through our front window and giggled as he ran away. I moaned something that was going to be the beginning of a confession, but he patted my hand and told me not to worry.

  I remember flowers in a jug, blowsy, over-coloured, hothouse things that I could smell in my sleep. Charlie didn’t know who they had come from, and I didn’t want to imagine, so I tried to get rid of them. I knocked the jug to the floor, but it was plastic, and bounced across the lino. A nurse tutted and mopped up the water and pushed the flowers back into another jug which she stood on the table at the bottom of my bed, out of reach. Every time I looked up, I saw them there.

  And I remember a meeting with the consultant psychiatrist Dr Thorne, although even remembering it is like watching a film in a language of which I don’t know a single word, a culture in which I can’t read the gestures or the facial expressions. I was propped up in bed and my whole body felt heavy and inert. I looked at my arms lying across the blanket. Charlie was on one side of me and Dr Thorne on the other, and there was a cluster of students, younger than me, eager children.

  ‘What’s your decision?’ I said. Then I surprised myself, and Dr Thorne, I think, by reaching over and clutching his arm. ‘What’s happening to me?’

  ‘You’re suffering from a bipolar affective disorder,’ he said.

  ‘Manic-depressive?’ said Charlie. ‘Yes. I thought so.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not me.’ Or maybe I didn’t say that, just thought it.

  I heard words – ‘rapid-cycling bipolar disorder’, ‘drugs’, ‘episodes’, ‘chemical imbalance’, ‘florid’, ‘regime’. I heard my name repeated, but I heard it as if it belonged to someone else. I looked down at my hands with their torn nails, the wedding ring on my finger. A tear splashed on to the rough brown blanket and disappeared.

  ‘I’m a manic-depressive?’ I said, through the buzz of hard-edged, ugly words.

  ‘Yes, Holly,’ said Dr Thorne. ‘You’re suffering from an illness.’

  ‘No. I’m suffering from me,’ I wanted to say. Maybe I did say it.

  ‘We can help you,’ he said. ‘We can make the pain go away. Lithium,’ he said.

  I knew that word. It’s a word for other people.

  ‘Side-effects,’ he was saying now. ‘Nausea, diarrhoea, weight gain, thirst, skin problems.’

  ‘Clozapine,’ he said. ‘Until the lithium kicks in.’

  Kicks, I thought. Iron hoofs smashing against my head.

  ‘I’ll lose myself,’ I said.

  ‘It’s not like that,’ he said.

  I remember going home. Days after I had arrived at St Jude’s in a police car, Charlie led me out, clutching my nightie and my own private pharmacy in a paper bag. I felt the cold rain on my face, the ground beneath my feet.

  ‘One step at a time,’ said Charlie.

  So I began my journey.

  There was a taste on my tongue I couldn’t get rid of. Headaches came and went. My skin felt twitchy. But above all there was tiredness. I lay in bed. Charlie brought me tea and food and kept track of the pills. He watched me as I swallowed them. Sometimes he even pushed them to the back of my tongue for me and held the beaker of water to my lips to wash them down. Once each day he ran a bath, led me to it and washed me, sponging my shoulders and my breasts and between my legs. He might as well have been washing a piece of dead meat. In fact, once I’d got that image into mymind, I couldn’t get rid of it. Itexplained everything over the previous months. I thought of myself as a hunk of meat, hanging in a forest somewhere. It would attract flies. It would become infested with maggots. It would attract scavenging animals who would bicker and fight among themselves as they each tried to rip away a piece of the dead flesh.

  ∗

  I tried to read a novel but I couldn’t make sense of the words. I couldn’t remember who the people were. Always there was that taste on my tongue, which seemed to underlie everything, what I looked at or heard, so that even music seemed to have a nasty tang. I preferred to lie in silence with the curtains drawn. When I slept, I dreamed about Rees, Stuart and Deborah, about the skinhead pissing at my feet, about hands groping me and faces leering, and the dreams leaked into my waking days. I couldn’t stop thinking about all the people who hated me. I’d made them hate me, begged them to hate me. Images from my past clustered around the bed like inquisitive visitors. I saw their faces in my mind, their hostile, watching eyes; I thought of them out there, in the real world beyond my head, waiting to get me when at last I ventured out. I pulled the covers over me. Sleep was better than waking and darkness was better than light.

  Every day Naomi came round. I would hear her low, clear voice in the kitchen and it comforted me. She left cakes, bread she’d baked, soup, casseroles that I couldn’t eat because I felt so queasy. Sometimes she came upstairs and put a hand on my forehead, or even took my pulse. She said I’d be all right. I mustn’t worry. I just closed my eyes and heard her feet tap-tapping their way out of my room again, down the stairs to the kitchen where Charlie sat, not even pretending to work any more, letting everything slip through his fingers, waiting for me to be better again. I heard them talking together, although I couldn’t hear what they were saying. My life was going on without me in it.

  Meg came: she sat on a chair by my bed and said things that didn’t need an answer from me, and I think she even read to me from the book of happy poems that I’d given her all those eternities ago, but maybe that was all a dream. Another dream.

  I tried to say that I knew about everything but the words came out wrong; they made no sense. She leaned forward and wiped my cheeks with a tissue, so I knew I must be crying but I was too far away from myself to feel the misery. In my secret life.

  Out of nowhere came an image from my childhood: my father, sitting at the kitchen table with his face in his hands and tears dripping through his fingers. I had always thought of him as exuberantly cheery, so where had this picture of wretchedness come from?

  ‘My father,’ I said to Charlie, as he pushed pills into my mouth.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘He was like me.’

  ‘You mean… ?’

  ‘He was a manic-depressive. Of course he was. Why on earth didn’t I realize it before? It explains everything and–’ I put a hand over my mouth.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘He killed himself, didn’t he? It’s obvious. He was
like me and then he killed himself. It’s in my blood, hard-wired.’

  ‘Stop it.’

  I hated the pills I pushed down my gullet several times a day. They looked modern. They were small and glossy and came in plastic bottles with proprietary names on them. But lithium wasn’t a brilliant bit of chemical manufacture like aspirin or penicillin. It was an element, a clayey metal I’d seen in chemistry class at school. It felt geological, and it was in me now, like veins of metal in rock. I could taste it on my tongue and I was sure I could see and feel changes in my body, which no longer felt as though it belonged to me.

  ‘I’m manic-depressive. The bits of me that make me special – made me special – are just part of my illness. Who am I now? I’ve always thought that I am what I do. I am all my memories of myself. But now that’s been taken away from me, the good times and the bad times. The times of feeling so low I wanted everything to end, and the times of feeling I could do anything, fly high, all the wonderful times I’ve had. Now I think that wasn’t me, not the real me. They were all just symptoms. When I’ve behaved badly, when I’ve behaved well, it was just because of a chemical imbalance in my body. It’s a great excuse but I don’t want it. I want to be me. Me being bad, me being good, me being me.’

  Who was I talking to, shouting at? Me, of course – another me, the old Holly Krauss, that distant figure from a lost world whose colours and vivid sensations I barely recalled. Just me.

  I wanted to be hugged tenderly, to be held carefully, so that I didn’t break again. I lay in my bed, which felt like a fragile boat tossed on towering waves. I closed my eyes and felt the waters suck me under.

  I got out of bed and put on proper clothes, cleaned my teeth, brushed my hair. I looked at my face in the mirror and didn’t recognize it. I went downstairs slowly, step by step, feeling my way with outstretched fingertips, like a blind woman. I wandered from room to room, and everything was unfamiliar to me. The house seemed to have changed: nothing was in quite the right place; the doorway had shifted sideways, the kitchen sink was lower than I remembered.