by William Wall
Serena: Tony.
Me: How do you know?
Serena: So now you want to know?
Me: Fuck off, Serena.
I hung up. I went into my brother’s room. He wasn’t there. I opened all his drawers and looked through them. I lifted the mattress on his bed. I checked the pockets of his jackets and coats in the wardrobe. I even checked his shoes. What was I looking for? I don’t know. But if he had a secret life, like if he was up in Ballyshane the night of the accident, there must be something. In the end all I found was a packet of Rizlas and a packet of Durex, not Tingle Me idk just common or garden condoms. I already knew he smoked dope. They all did. And everybody says a packet of Durex is a Reasonable Precaution Against Life. They told me nothing.
35
We’re living in this dead inside where nothing moves except us. Our selves are the only thing we can hurt. I started cutting that evening. I did it in the shower. I almost didn’t do it. Then I fucking slashed it. A deep slash, no thinking. Just above my T-shirt line, on my left arm. Who was I slashing? Me. There was so much blood. I think I went too deep. I thought if I pushed my finger into it I would feel my own bone, my skeleton inside my own body, the Lucy in me. I saw the blood wash out pale and pink, down my arm, down my legs, spinning down the plughole. I thought: I could fucking do myself, I could do it just now. And then I sat down and cried. The water came down on my head and burned away tears and blood. It fell on me like fire. It was the pain. The pain was me.
I did not want to be me.
I covered it with Elastoplast but it leaked. I panicked and put two more Elastoplasts on it. I tried to pull the edges together with the sticking plaster. I remembered reading somewhere that you could do it with Superglue, but I didn’t think we had any. It was eleven thirty at night. What if I bled to death in my sleep? I googled deep wounds but I couldn’t look at that stuff. I thought, If I die at least they’ll know they fucked me up big time. I thought about writing a suicide note. But, like what if I didn’t die, I would feel so stupid tomorrow. And my mam would kill me. Then the blood stopped leaking and I had time to think about the pain. Note to self: Never do this again. Like I actually wrote that on my phone and saved it as a reminder. It was so sore. At least I wouldn’t end up going to Accident and Emergency. That’s where they took my brother. He had to have his head X-rayed. I bet a million they found it was completely empty. Not worth the X-ray. No brain, no brain damage. They let him out as fast as they took him in. My dad collected him. Sometimes babies are born without a brain – I remember that from my baby phase. Anencephaly. The condition of having all or part of the cerebral hemispheres absent. There was a boy who lived to be twelve. He just never had a thought.
The pain kept me awake and so I heard my brother coming home at two in the morning. Tosser Kennedy was the Designated Driver. I watched them. Tosser and my brother sat in the car for five minutes, then my brother got out. He was seriously drunk. Like when he got out of the car he tried to lean on the door to say something to Tosser and he missed the door and fell face first back in. Then he got out by going on his knees. This is how I see it: my brother is falling into a deep well, when he will reach the bottom nobody knows. Some evening I will come home from school and my mam will be watching the Bake Off and she’ll say, Your brother is dead. Then she’ll flick the channels.
OK, that’s not possible. She would be Freaking, she wouldn’t just be sitting there. And my dad would stay in the office until very late so he wouldn’t have to deal with it. And someone would blame me. But really it’s all of us, my brother included.
And how would he die? He would drive my mam’s next car through a stone wall, or jump in the river like John Brown, or maybe he would cut his throat with a razor blade. Or maybe, like me, he would just choke to death in the dead air of our family. Something would happen and he would be dead. I already had a broken heart.
36
It was snowing. We call it snow in Ireland but, as Serena Never Tires Of Telling Me, they have different varieties of snow of which ours is the pissiest. She Has Seen The Real Thing. It was a thin straight snow and when it landed on the ground it was the size and shape of a grain of rice. But minute by minute it was covering the ground and the ground was frozen. Like the earth would break if you hit it with a hammer, the whole world would crack down the middle. Frozen things break. Standing at the bus stop with Holly. I love Holly like the best thing you can love, we don’t even need to talk to understand each other. We were so cold. We stamped around and tried to rub each other warm. The bus was probably delayed by the snow. In Canada and places they have snowploughs but in Ireland if two snowflakes fall it’s a weather alert code red. I love the weather forecast. It’s my favourite programme. Holly nudged me and started to sing ‘My Resistance is Low’. And I sang along. It was funny because Holly had a cold. We were happy. My phone rang. It was Serena. She was crying. Like Serena has a liquidity problem. She breaks down under stress, even if it’s only stress she imagined.
I couldn’t understand what she was saying.
Slow down, girl, I said, what are you telling me, I can’t hear properly.
Holly came close and put her ear to the phone. We looked at each other.
Holly said, She’s saying she’s in the hospital.
I tried to talk. Serena, Serena, slow down. Serena. Are you in hospital?
I couldn’t get her to stop. Then the call ended. Did she end it? Or was it my crappy signal?
Holly said, We better go see her. Do you think she...?
What? Do I think she what?
She sounded shook. Like really shook.
Well, she’s sick.
She said something about an ambulance, Holly said.
I could see what Holly was saying. I said: The night we set fire to the bin I helped her undress…
Holly gave me the retina scan look. Like she was thinking, Bitch, you did Serena too!
No way, I said, don’t you start. She was frozen and she couldn’t get out of her clothes. I helped her that’s all.
And your point is?
My point is she cuts. I saw her legs. The other times she got dressed in the bathroom and came out in her dino onesie. But this time I saw her legs. She cuts and she cuts bad.
Holly walked away to the other side of the bus stop, clapping her hands and stamping her feet. She waited over there for like thirty seconds, looking at the advertising, which was for Fifty Shades of Grey. Like we saw the trailer on YouTube and it looks like it’s about tall buildings, big offices and helicopters. Holly said it looked like it was about a bank. We didn’t read the book yet. I watched Holly watching the ad and when she came back I saw she had been crying. Her face was wet under her eyes. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed hard. I pulled away. I knew what she was telling me. She must have seen something.
Fuck off, I said, none of your business.
Does it hurt?
I nodded. All the time. That’s why I did it.
The bus came just then. We got on. Some boys from the boys’ school hooted and whistled. They always do. Boys take a lot longer to grow up. Down in the middle of them was Jason Clancy who fancies Holly. He used to be with Helen Minihan but she dumped him. She is a bitch. She is with a guy who has a job in the hotel now. Jason Clancy has a car. He smokes which is ew. He fancies getting into her pants anyway. I bet his hands smell of smoke. I don’t think it’s a soulmate thing. Holly ignores him. We sat second row from the front, that way we could just look at the road. There was an old woman with shopping bags in the front seat. She talked to herself and answered back. She was talking about something that happened at the shop. The neck of her, the brazen neck, I’m shopping here twenty years, miss. I have to call the manager. Go on then and we’ll see what he has to say about it and I coming in here this past twenty years, I know my rights.
37
All the time Holly and I said nothing. We didn’t look at each other. We got off at the hospital stop. The snow was in little hard bits. People wore
long coats and hats and scarves and gloves. I was shaking because the hospital terrifies me. I get nightmares about my dad’s operation. I see them opening his chest like a box. Inside that box there are monsters. Like things out of Alien. Like when they put the guy on the table with all the food and he’s twisting around and then the thingy comes out of his chest. Like the lizard thing. Idk. And Sigourney Weaver omg. It comes out of her tummy. Like giving birth to an alien lizard character. I had that dream one night. The guy who made the alien also made the aliens for Close Encounters of the Third Kind. What are the other two kinds? And what if there’s more than three? I blame Serena for all that shit.
She was in Ward 2B. They told us at the reception. They don’t care why a patient is in. That’s someone else’s problem. They look at their computer screen and a ward number comes up and that’s that. I suppose if they knew why every person in the hospital was there they would die of the weight of all the pain. She’s in 2B, next please? We went up there but the nurse told us she was asleep. I was a bit relieved. I didn’t want to find out what happened. I think Holly was relieved too. We were just about to go away when the nurse stopped us.
If you wait for a bit we’ll have to wake her up to do her stats.
Oh OK.
Are you friends of hers?
We nodded.
She’s very upset about something. Any ideas, girls?
We shook our heads. I could have told her Serena is Very Upset about things often, it’s a thing she does. But it felt like I would be letting her down. And then, we all get upset. Except maybe Holly. We’re all just moving from one crisis to the next like the rest of the country. Like we’re supposed to be in recovery but everyone older than my brother is emigrating and the only way to see a doctor is to overdose on mood modifiers.
My phone rang. It was my brother. He asked me where I was. He said Mam was looking for me. There was some kind of protest outside my dad’s office and she was hoping I wasn’t there. I said I was visiting a friend in hospital, and what was the protest about? My brother said: One of Dad’s evictions looks like it went wrong. Talk to you later. And he hung up.
Like Dad’s evictions usually go well as long as you’re Dad.
The smell of hospitals. Farts and urine and disinfectant and stale clothes and something that might be blood. And the sound of machines. Who knows what the machines are for? And I always have the feeling that under the whole thing there are dead people. Like, where do they put the corpses? It has to be in the cellar or basement. I don’t like being near dead people unless I know them personally and even then I’d prefer them to be alive. And where do they put the people with infectious diseases? What if there is an Ebola patient only they don’t know it’s Ebola yet? The first signs are the same as the flu.
Oh she’s waking up now, the nurse said. She pointed at the big window in front of her desk. You can go in if you like.
Serena was as pale as ash. Her eyes had red rims around them. Her hair was stuck to her head. When she looked at me I couldn’t bear to look her back.
Hi, guys, she said. She did not smile.
I sat at one side of the bed and Holly sat at the other. We didn’t know what to say. After a bit I saw Holly take Serena’s hand. Serena let her. They held hands all the time after that except when they took her blood pressure. Eventually I said, Leary nearly had a heart attack today.
Holly said, You’re lucky he’s not in the next bed. You’d get the Weimar Republic all over again.
Leary was big on the Weimar Republic. There was a question on every test. Origins and growth of the fascist regimes in Europe; the Nazi state in peace and war. He thinks the Nazis are coming again.
I said: There was a rat got into the photocopy room and he needed to do like thirty copies of thirty pages or something, you know the way, like he’s Mr Handout, and everybody knows he’s terrified of small animals. Remember that weird sort of diary to camera item he did once? Girls, we all have our hangups. I’d say the rat was terrified too. Locked up with Leary. Everybody’s nightmare. It was probably a girl rat.
Holly said, You could have had Leary and the rat in here.
That got a half-smile from Serena. She squeezed Holly’s hand. A nurse came and did the things they do, temperature, blood pressure, pulse. It’s weird. They put a clothes peg on your finger and a pump-up sleeve on your arm and they swipe something across your forehead and touch your ear. It’s like the Last Rites or something religious. Everything OK, pet? Yes, nurse. Be sure and call if you need anything. Yes, nurse. All your signs are fine anyway.
They are so calm. She went out again pushing her clinky trolley. A little smile from Serena. Like she knows that no one sees the signs. Serena is superior, she knows it somehow, she just assumes it, I would say it is her biggest fault. It’s one of the things that makes me hate her. When I hate her. It makes me want to hurt her.
I said: How did you do it?
She looked away. Holly almost lost her hand but held on to it in time.
Serena, I said, the night of the bin fire, I saw your legs. I saw the cuts.
She turned to me. Her eyes were hot and dry.
Some friend you are.
We need to talk about it.
Fuck you, Serena said.
Holly looked at me. I knew she was thinking, Look who’s talking! So I took my jacket off. Then I took my school jumper off. Then I unbuttoned my left sleeve and rolled it up. It would not go up far enough so I pushed it the rest of the way. Serena stared at my arm. Holly started to cry. The tight sleeve made the cuts look red and fat. They looked like rips in a mattress with the stuffing showing.
I said, We have to fucking talk about it. Right?
Outside Serena’s window the snow was thickening. I thought you could almost follow a single flake from the sky to the ground. But your eye could not distinguish the white from the white. All you could know was the falling. We are three girls on a see-saw, three of us on one side, but the mass on the other side is so much. We are so high up we will never come down. So high we can hardly breathe. See-saw, Margery Daw, sold her bed and lay on straw.
And later Holly and I were like zombies. We walked back out to the bus stop. We stood at the bus stop. The snow was a fine sugar sprinkled over everything. We didn’t talk. We didn’t look at each other. Then the bus came. It was crowded and we had to stand. We got off at our stop and went our own ways. The only thing that was said between us was coming down in the lift at the hospital. Holly goes: Why didn’t you tell me? And I said: Because I’m afraid. She said: Afraid of me? And I’m like: No, I’m afraid of what’s happening to me. And she had no answer to that because now she was afraid too. Holly had an answer to everything when we were small.
38
So it turns out she overdosed on Xanax. It is not an easy thing to overdose on. You need a stockpile. It took her an hour and a half to swallow them. She took them with vodka. Vodka is the go-to liquor for teen suicides. I googled Xanax. It won’t kill you except it’ll stop your breathing. Like it’s hard to be alive and not breathing. But the vodka nearly killed her. Her mother was calling her for dinner and when she didn’t answer she came up to her room. She saw the blister-packs and she saw Serena. She saw that she wasn’t moving, there was vomit on her bed and on the floor, a bad smell. She called the ambulance. In the ambulance her breathing stopped. They got it going again somehow. Ambulance people are ace. She didn’t know much about what happened, they told her things. Her dad works in the hospital but he didn’t come down once to see her.
My first idea was that she met Mr alt.com and that he did something bad, like bad idk maybe raped or worse. What’s worse than rape? But she didn’t meet him. So she said anyway. She said she was getting her head together. Quick WhatsApp summary:
In case ur overthinking I did not meet the guy.
That’s good news anyway.
Thanks.
Welcome.
Ur so jugmental.
I just want you to get well.
Im ge
tting my head together ill be different just watch.
Cool baby love you.
!!???
That was her last message: !!???
So now she has compulsory counselling and a psychiatrist. Her dad is pissed about it. It’s not good for his reputation. And her mother is concerned. That’s what she told my mother. My mother said to me, If you ever do something like that I’ll kill you. Which is ironic really. Suicide by matricide. Or would it be infanticide? I’m scared that Serena will tell her psychiatrist about my cuts and he’ll call my doctor or something, whatever they do. Official channels. Or maybe he’d phone my mam. I stopped cutting for a week while Serena was inside. Then I extended it by a week. It felt good to be clean, but I wanted to go back to it real bad. I am a recovering self-harmer. I think. Idk. I googled Alcoholics Anonymous, the Twelve Steps, but it’s all about God and I don’t do God. Like, We sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God. Like prayer and meditation ffs. Conscious contact with God, Jesus wept. Like ever heard of Twitter? Twitter is the Antichrist of meditation and if you’re not there you’re not anywhere. God does not tweet. Like: Thou shalt not kill @ISRAELITES @EVERYBODYELSE.
39
But then my brother broke three plates on the floor. He did it like a woman in a movie, even stamped his feet. I saw them break, all the little needle points, the blades, the shards. When a plate breaks it leaves little needles of pottery everywhere. If I walked on them in bare feet they would lacerate my soles. It would be like walking on hot coals. It happened because my dad would not give him the keys of his car. Something terrible was behind it idk maybe drugs. And my brother said my dad was a knobhead. And my mother slapped him across the face and I could see he was going to slap her back, but he didn’t. And my dad left the room and my mam said to go easy on him because the protests were getting to my dad, like every loonie lefty in the country was out trying to keep non-compliant tenants in their houses. Non-compliant tenant is my dad’s code for poor. And of course they were all commies. And my dad was trying to get a court order to stop them. And my brother Tony said it served him right. And my mam almost hit him again. It was idk seriously painful. My dad and mam epic fail the stress test every time. So much for parenting skills.