by Nathan Filer
I thought she’d be pleased, but she looked frightened now. Really frightened. ‘Please, why are you doing this? I don’t know you. I only wanted to help—’
I was holding her, that was the problem. I was gripping hold of her wrist. ‘No. You don’t understand. I’m not going to hurt you. I never meant to hurt you.’
As she pulled away I let go of her wrist, causing her to stumble to the ground. And in that moment I saw her as a small child again, as a little girl tending to a tiny grave. I had only ever wanted to help her, to make it better, but I didn’t know how. I’d hovered awkwardly, unsure of what to do. I’d wanted to comfort her, but instead I made it worse. I hadn’t known what to say.
I’d asked her name and she said,
‘Annabelle.’
She looked up, wiping a cheek with the cuff of her raincoat. Her hood fell back.
‘Annabelle,’ I said again. ‘Your name’s Annabelle.’
Her face was bright in the moonlight. I could see her freckles, scattered in their hundreds.
‘You don’t remember me,’ I said. I was breathing so fast I could hardly get the words out. ‘It was so long ago. I watched you, I saw you bury your doll. I saw the funeral. And then.’
And then.
And then.
The crying came from nowhere.
That’s how it felt.
But that’s just a way of saying it was sudden. That it caught me by surprise. It didn’t really come from nowhere. Nothing comes from nowhere. It had been inside me for years. I’d never let it out, not really. The truth is I didn’t know how. Nobody teaches you that sort of thing. I remember the car journey, when we drove home from Ocean Cove, half a lifetime ago. Mum and Dad were crying to the sound of the radio, but I wasn’t crying. I couldn’t. And thinking back, I never did.
So here was not crying when I completed Mario 64 in single player mode, with the Player Two control pad tangled, lifeless in the empty space beside me.
And here was not crying the time at the supermarket with Mum, when I let myself forget. I reached to take down the box of strawberry Pop-Tarts from the shelf because Simon liked strawberry Pop Tarts, but nobody else liked strawberry Pop-Tarts, so when I realized what I’d done, I had to put them back. I had to watch myself putting a box of fucking strawberry Pop-Tarts back on a supermarket shelf and hope that Mum didn’t see, because if she did it would mean more trips to the doctor, it would be more hours of silence at the kitchen table. Here was not crying at that.
Here were all the other moments when I let myself forget. Each morning of waking up, of believing for the shortest time that everything was normal, everything was okay, before the kick in the guts reminder that nothing was.
Here was every adult conversation that faltered into silence the second I entered the room. Here was everyone knowing, everyone thinking, everyone trying desperately not to think, that if it wasn’t for me, if it wasn’t for what I did, he’d still be alive.
Here was every single moment, since I first closed my eyes to count to a hundred, since I opened them to cheat.
It didn’t come from nowhere, but it did sort of take me by surprise. The tears falling faster than I could wipe them away. ‘I’m so sorry, Simon. I’m so sorry. Forgive me. Please can you forgive me.’
Annabelle could have left me there. I wouldn’t have blamed her if she had. I’d frightened her, and now she had her chance to get away. To escape from this madman. But she didn’t leave.
‘Shhh, shhh. It’ll be okay.’
I felt her gently take hold of my hand, heard her whispering to me as I wept.
‘You’re going to be okay.’
‘Forgive me.’
Shhh, shhh.
It’ll be okay.
this goodbye, the goodbye
Dr Clement stood to shake hands, clasping my fingers, making it impossible to return a firm grip. ‘Matt, good to see you. Richard. Susan. Please, take a seat.’
‘Would anyone like a cup of tea?’ Claire-or-maybe-Anna offered.
‘We’re fine,’ Mum said in that clipped way of hers, when everyone can tell straight away that she’s far from fine. She worried about these meetings more than I did.
She’d arrived on the ward over an hour before, clutching a carrier bag with a neatly folded pair of black trousers, a crisp white shirt and my old school shoes polished to a shine. She ran me a bath in the patients’ bathroom, filling it with bubbles. I brushed my teeth, and shaved for the first time in nearly a month. Dad arrived from work a few minutes before the meeting was scheduled to begin. We did our special handshake. He said I looked smart.
‘Okay,’ said Dr Clement. ‘Let’s start with introductions.’
There were so many of them. We went around the room, each person saying their name and job title.
I forgot them straight away.
When the student nurse had come to fetch me, he explained there were lots of people; the community team had been invited too, he said. This was a good thing, he explained. They were invited to help with preparations for my discharge from hospital. He offered to sit out if I wanted, except it’d be useful for his learning objectives if he could be involved? I told him his learning objectives were very important to me. I forgot to sound sarcastic. He was grateful, saying I shouldn’t worry about there being lots of people, because I was the important one. When the introductions got to me I said, ‘Matthew Homes, um, patient.’
Dr Clement studied me for a moment over the rim of his glasses, then let loose a single bark of laughter. ‘Good. Well, the purpose of this meeting is to catch up with how things are going for Matthew, and to make some collective decisions about the way we go forwards from here. How are you feeling in yourself, Matt?’
The problem was, because I was the important one, everyone was looking at me. It’s hard to think properly with so many different faces staring at you – your thoughts get stuck.
‘Actually I will get a cup of tea, if that’s okay? My mouth’s a bit dry.’
I started to stand up, but Dr Clement gestured for me to stay put, and said he’d make it for me. He said this whilst looking at the student nurse though, which I guess was an invitation for him to offer. He did, and Dr Clement said, ‘Thanks Tim, do you mind?’
‘No, no. That’s fine. How do you take it again Matt?’
‘Three sugars please.’
Mum flashed a disapproving look, and I said, ‘Or two. It doesn’t matter. I can make it myself if—’
‘It’s okay.’ He bounced out of the room.
From the corner, an electric fan licked at the pages of my medical notes. Dad shuffled in his seat, someone else suppressed a yawn, a lady by the window checked her mobile phone, then dropped it into a flowery handbag.
On a low table in the centre of the room sat a box of tissues, a pile of leaflets about different types of mental illness, and a potted plant with sickly-looking leaves. I probably spent too long noticing these things, too long thinking about them. ‘Carry on,’ Dr Clement said. There was a hint of irritation in his voice. ‘In your own words.’
‘Shouldn’t we wait for, um—’
He tilted his chair onto its back legs, resting his feet on the edge of the table. He wasn’t wearing school shoes to make him look presentable. ‘It’s fine. I’m sure Tim won’t mind. Let’s make a start. How are you feeling in yourself?’
When I returned from Ocean Cove, they put me on the High Dependency Unit. It was for my own good, they explained. It would help me to feel more settled. In the High Dependency Unit all the doors are locked, the nurses sit in an office behind fortress-thick glass, and we eat with plastic cutlery. My medication was increased, and the nurses would watch me take the tablets, then keep me talking about my mood or my sleep or my weather or my climate, until they could be certain I’d swallowed them. It was around this time that someone first mentioned how it was also available as an injection. Perhaps they were trying to prepare me, but this felt a lot like a threat.
I spent most of my time
in bed, or else smoking in the caged square of concrete out the back – always accompanied by a nurse. I had a lot of time to think, and when I wasn’t thinking about Simon, who I thought about most, was Annabelle.
‘Cup of tea with the sea?’
‘What?’
‘I was going to have one. You’re welcome to join me. I can trust you, can’t I?’
The rain wasn’t so much falling, as dancing all around in a fine spray, shining silver in the moonlight. I don’t know how long I’d been crying, only that I’d stopped. I felt emptied out somehow. I felt strangely calm. Annabelle was still beside me, watching me closely.
She reached into a pocket of her bag, taking out a metal Thermos flask with a small dent near the base. She struggled for a second with the lid before it opened. It let out a squeak as the steam was released into the cold night air. That was strange in itself. Or rather, it wasn’t strange enough. I’m a person who reads a lot of meaning into stuff, forever hunting out the small print. You’ve probably gathered that by now. I don’t mean to do it, but I can’t help myself. I see symbols. I see tricks of reality. Hidden truths. But there’s no small print in a Thermos flask. Not a slightly battered Thermos flask with a lid that is tight enough to make a person struggle, but that eventually opens. Nothing – absolutely nothing – is more ordinary than that.
This was actually happening.
‘Or we can go back up to the site if you’d rather? Get some warm soup in you or something? Get you in some dry clothes. You’re soaked right through.’
‘Um— I—’
‘Of course that would mean meeting my dad too. And he’ll want to know what you were doing by the caravans. It won’t be a big deal, but he will ask. Strictly speaking, you were trespassing you know?’
‘I’m sorry, I was— I thought—’
She almost smiled. ‘What am I like? You don’t have to explain to me. I’m just trying to give you your options, that’s all. Because no way can I just leave you here. Not like this. Not to let you—’
She stopped.
I know what she was going to say though. She shook her head inside the hood of her raincoat, ‘I’m sorry. That was coming out wrong. I just mean— I’d be worried about you.’
Dr Clement let his chair drop with a decisive thud.
I could feel him mining the small twitches and movements of my face. How was I feeling in myself?
Perhaps I could have told him what it felt like to turn eighteen, incarcerated on a psychiatric ward. I was in the patients’ kitchen, watching the kettle boil, trying to hear Simon in the bubbling water. When Mum and Dad appeared in the doorway. Mum was holding a parcel wrapped in gold and silver paper with a silver helium balloon tied around it.
I hadn’t even realized what day it was.
‘Thanks Mum, thanks Dad.’
We went to my room to unwrap it. The balloon floated up to the ceiling, bouncing its way into a corner.
‘If it’s not the right one—’
‘No. It’s good.’
‘It was Jacob who recommended it actually,’ Dad explained. ‘We bumped into him the other day in town, did he tell you?’
‘I never see him.’
‘He said he was planning to come—’
‘I said I never see him, okay!’
I didn’t mean to raise my voice like that. It wasn’t their fault. ‘Sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to shout.’
Dad folded the torn wrapping paper neatly, then looked around for a waste-paper bin before dropping it back on my bed and staring out of the window. Mum was sitting beside me. She stroked my hair behind my ear like she used to when I was little. ‘I think he just finds it hard,’ she said at last. ‘Jacob finds it hard. And we find it hard. It’s difficult for the people who love you.’
I stared at my helium balloon hugging the ceiling. ‘I’m finding it hard too.’
‘I know. Oh, my darling. I know.’
Dad clapped his hands together briskly, in that sudden way he does when he wants to be decisive. When he wants to save us from ourselves. ‘Shall we play it then?’ he asked.
I pushed the sadness away. I didn’t want to be upset when they were trying so hard to make it a nice day. ‘It’s a really good present,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
I meant it too. It wasn’t so long ago when I could have wanted nothing more – a PlayStation 3 and some decent games – but now I can’t even think which games they were. What I do know is that Mum and Dad were useless at all of them. But that it was sort of fun watching them try. We’d gone down to the TV lounge to plug it in, and took it in turns to play, sitting on the sunken couch or kneeling on the carpet. And not only us, but Thomas and a couple of the other patients joined in too. Euan, I think it was. And maybe Alex. Was it Alex? It doesn’t matter, because I’ve changed all their names anyway. Nobody in this story has their real name. I wouldn’t do that to people. Even Claire-or-maybe-Anna is between two other names I can’t decide. You don’t think I’m really called Matthew Homes, do you? You don’t think I’d just give away my whole life to a stranger?
Come on.
It was funny, because whenever it was the person I’m calling Euan’s turn to play, he couldn’t sit still. He’d move around all over the place, hardly even watching the screen. And he’d make all the noises with his mouth.
‘Kerpow! Kerpow!’
He didn’t even realize he was doing it.
‘Kerpow!’
I thought about when I was younger; a time when I was poorly, genuinely poorly for once, and Mum had helped me to make a den in the living room, and we played Donkey Kong together on my Game Boy Color. ‘Do you remember it, Mum?’
She looked at me blankly. Not blankly. But sort of distant – looking right through me to some faraway place. Her voice sounded distant too. ‘I don’t think I do remember.’
She’s never kept much. Not from that time. She doesn’t know what she was like – the way she was with me. She doesn’t know how her suffering spilled out of her, filling the house. How it controlled her. ‘You were fucking mad back then,’ I said.
‘Kerpow! Kaboom!’
‘Sorry, darling?’
But perhaps it’s me who has it all muddled up. And anyway – what difference does it really make? She did her best. I guess there’s a Use By date when it comes to blaming your parents for how messed up you are.
I guess that’s what turning eighteen means.
Time to own it.
‘Pardon, darling?’ she asked again.
‘Nothing. It’s not important.’
I leaned into her, letting my head rest gently against her shoulder. I listened to her breathing. When it was my turn to play, I let Thomas take another turn instead. I nestled into the nook of Mum’s arm. Then lay on a cushion on her lap. I fell asleep like that. She’s all bones and hard edges. She’s never been comfortable, but she’s always been there.
‘Ka Blamo!’
That evening they both stayed on the ward for supper. Usually supper was just sandwiches, but to celebrate my birthday Dad bought fish and chips for the entire ward – all the staff and patients. The dining room rustled with chip paper. The whole building smelled of salt and vinegar.
Mum disappeared partway through, then the lights went out, and she came back in with a chocolate birthday cake and eighteen flickering candles. Everyone broke out in a loud chorus of Happy Birthday. Simon joined in too.
He was in the flames.
Of course he was in the flames.
A nurse grabbed hold of my wrist, leading me quickly to the clinic where she held my blistering fingers under the cold tap. I had no idea what I’d done, only that I had been trying to hold him.
My medication was changed yet again. More side effects. More sedation. In time, Simon grew more distant. I looked in the rain clouds, fallen leaves, sideways glances. I searched for him in the places I had come to expect him. In running tap water. In spilled salt. I listened in the spaces between words.
At first I won
dered if he was angry with me, if he’d given up? It made me feel sad to think like that. I don’t know which one of us was most dependent on the other. Over the next few weeks, I would lie in my bed, listening to fragments of conversation drifting from the nurses’ office, to the scraping of the viewing slats. And I would watch my helium balloon slowly die.
The worst thing about this illness isn’t the things it makes me believe, or what it makes me do. It’s not the control that it has over me, or even the control it’s allowed other people to take.
Worse than all of that is how I have become selfish.
Mental illness turns people inwards. That’s what I reckon. It keeps us forever trapped by the pain of our own minds, in the same way that the pain of a broken leg or a cut thumb will grab your attention, holding it so tightly that your good leg or your good thumb seem to cease to exist.
I’m stuck looking inwards. Nearly every thought I have is about me – this whole story has been all about me; the way I felt, what I thought, how I grieved. Perhaps that’s the kind of thing Dr Clement wanted to hear about?
But what I said was, ‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘Sure. Sure. But people have been worried about you. Why is that, do you think?’
‘I don’t—’
The doctor nearest me lifted my file of medical notes, but Dr Clement said, ‘It’s fine, Nicola. We don’t need to write anything. Let’s just listen to Matthew.’
She put her pen down, her face flushing pink. The doctors have a hierarchy, and Dr Clement is at the very top. He’s my consultant psychiatrist. What he says, goes.
‘I want to go home,’ I said.
‘Where’s home?’ Annabelle asked.
She had asked me to walk down to the cove with her. I didn’t protest. There was something in the way she looked at me – a look somewhere between determined and pleading. And maybe I felt that I owed her something.
The rain had stopped. The air was still. Pebbles crunched beneath our feet as we reached the shoreline, where small dark waves broke into frothy white.