by John Larkin
I feel slightly deflated. ‘She doesn’t even know me.’
‘Hey,’ she says when she realises that I’ve been stung. ‘It’s not a reflection on you, it’s a reflection on her. She thinks she’s so pious but she’s just self-righteous. I wish she’d just drop dead.’
‘Lisa, you shouldn’t say that about your mother. Even your mother.’
Lisa reaches over and kisses me on the cheek. ‘I’ve just told you that she talks smack about you and yet you protect her. You’re wonderful, Declan. You’re worth two hundred of her. You’re more of a Christian than she is and you’re an atheist.’
‘Agnostic,’ I remind her. ‘I’m worried, though, Lisa.’
‘What about, babe?’ I just love it when she calls me ‘babe’.
‘You haven’t been to Crusaders for about two months. We’re going to be late home tonight. If she hates me already, what about after tonight?’
‘She hates everyone.’
‘Still. I’m worried what she might do.’
‘Declan. She can’t hurt me anymore.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ve built a shield around myself.’ She taps her head. ‘She can’t get in here.’ Lisa nuzzles into me again, even closer this time. ‘Now stop worrying.’
Bombay Bicycle Club’s music doesn’t necessarily lend itself to moshing but boy does it go off. Free from her Rapunzel tower, Lisa really parties. She leads me round the mosh pit like a writhing wild thing. Despite the fact that my dad has all the rhythm of a plank, as far as movement is concerned, I appear to have absorbed my mother’s Mediterranean blood so I am able to match Lisa’s moves.
I’m still only seventeen, but I bump into a couple of year-twelve guys from school and they sort out drinks for me (imported Italian beer) and Lisa (pina colada) and I am soon intoxicated though not so much on the beer as on Lisa. If nuzzling into your girlfriend’s neck during a slow song isn’t the best feeling in the world then I don’t know what is.
For one night we are truly allowed to be ourselves and it’s perfect.
By the time we begin our walk back to the station it’s already eleven o’clock. On the station I stare down the line and check my watch knowing that I’ve well and truly stuffed up.
‘Relax,’ says Lisa when she sees that I’m worried. ‘I told you. She can’t hurt me now.’
But it turned out that The Kraken could hurt Lisa. She could hurt both of us. And although on the train journey home we talk about going to uni together and then teaching English in China, or building wells and teaching in Africa, or motorcycling through Europe, in the back of my mind comes the horrible realisation that this isn’t for keeps. That this is just one of our stolen moments.
My stuff’s packed so while I wait for Mum to pick me up I head back out to the courtyard for some more sun. It’s peaceful out here. A safe haven from the world. A world that is about to come and get me.
As I walk out I see a girl sitting in my spot. She looks about my age, maybe younger. She’s wearing long red flannelette Mickey Mouse PJs and reading The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I open Sartre’s The Age of Reason to show her that I’m intellectual and stuff, too.
She looks over at me and nods.
‘Hey,’ she says. ‘I’m not in your spot, am I?’
Yes. ‘No.’
‘I’m new,’ she says. ‘Got in last night. Not sure of the rules, other than you’re not supposed to kill yourself.’
‘Yeah,’ I agree. ‘They frown on that. It looks bad on their résumés if you do.’
She smiles at this and it’s a stunning smile.
‘Everything okay?’ I say, then realise that this is a seriously dumb question.
The girl laughs.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s fine,’ she says. ‘And yeah, I’m doing okay. Better than yesterday, anyway.’
I want to know what happened yesterday but as I don’t want to be pushed myself, I have to show her the same consideration. We return to our books but there’s a bit of, I don’t know, tension in the air. Things unsaid.
‘Are you allowed to smoke out here?’ she says.
I shrug. ‘I haven’t seen anyone. They don’t really supervise us much. Not out here anyway. I suppose you could.’
‘It’s just that there’re butts on the ground and you can smell it. Makes me want to puke. God, smokers are pigs.’
‘Oh, I thought you wanted …’
She closes her book. ‘My uncle used to smoke. Could smell it on him. That and his cheap bourbon.’ She drifts off, deep in thought.
I sense that her uncle did more than smoke and drink bourbon around her but I don’t know if she wants to talk about it. I don’t. About Aunt Mary, that is.
‘Why are you here?’ she says. ‘You look normal.’
‘Don’t we all?’
‘I suppose.’
‘My girlfriend …’ I don’t know how much I want to tell her. I don’t really have the energy. ‘It’s a long story.’
‘Did you get her pregnant?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘Nothing like that. She got … she got taken overseas. Against her will.’
‘So you tried to suicide?’
‘Sort of.’
‘You’ll get over her.’
‘Not sure I want to.’
‘That’s what it seems like now. You just have to get through this bit.’
‘And you?’
She looks thoughtful for a moment. ‘My uncle, he …’
‘It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it.’ Actually, I don’t want her to talk about it. I don’t want to hear what her uncle did.
‘He killed my mum and then tried to, you know …’
I feel myself turning white at the thought of Aunt Mary.
‘What about your dad? Couldn’t he …?’
‘Mum stuck a carving knife through Dad’s neck, which is why my uncle killed her.’
She says this so matter-of-factly that I feel my blood turn to ice. It makes my own issues seem kind of lame.
‘Used to bash her. Couple of times a month. She’s been in here before. Not this hospital but one like it. They should have kept her here, where she was safe.’
‘Did your uncle …?’ I trail off. It’s too big.
‘No. I got out. Lived on the streets for a while – or the trains. Slept in the rail yards mostly. Just stayed out of sight, in the shadows. Eventually I got sloppy and he found me.’
I look at her and gulp.
‘It’s okay. He blew his brains out. Not that he had much to begin with.’
‘When was this?’
‘Yesterday. My teacher – actually she’s more than my teacher, really – reckons I’ve seen too much. So here I am. Need to work it out, I guess, rather than bottle it up – or they reckon I might go postal in a few years.’
I stare at this girl, this beautiful girl, and shake my head. Sometimes the world is just so messed up you have to wonder if everyone’s insane.
She looks over at me as I stare back at her.
‘Don’t worry,’ she says. ‘This is the happiest I’ve been in my whole life. He’ll never hurt me again.’
Mum comes into the courtyard carrying my stuff.
‘Hey, Dec,’ she says brightly. ‘Ready?’
‘Are they letting you out?’ asks the girl.
‘Going to a different hospital,’ I say.
‘Good luck,’ she says. ‘You’ll be fine.’
‘Yeah,’ I reply, getting up. ‘You too. See you around.’
‘She’s very pretty,’ says Mum as we walk out of the hospital to the car.
‘She was homeless.’
‘Why?’
I realise that if I mention her uncle then Mum will probably start up about Aunt Mary again so I let it go.
‘Drugs,’ I say, because it’s easier.
We go via home so that I can pack some more of my stuff. It’s weird but it doesn’t feel like home anymore. It’s as if they’ve all moved on withou
t me. It kind of feels as though I don’t belong here. There’s a space. A hole in the air where I once was. The normal me, that is. I’ve only been gone for a few days but I’m homesick for the hospital.
Mum’s made soup because apparently that’s the law when someone’s sick. Cold coming on – pea and ham. Viral pneumonia – vegetable. Thwarted suicide bid – chicken and sweet corn. So Mum’s made soup.
I sit at the breakfast bar and try to work up some enthusiasm for my liquid lunch but it’s a struggle. Dad’s at work and Kate’s at school so it’s just me and Mum.
I think about the girl. I think about how strong she’s had to be. How she lived in the shadows. Maybe that’s what I could do. Maybe I could live like that. Slink through life in the shadows so nothing can get to me again. But it won’t work. Life will always come and get you in the end. And if it doesn’t then you’ll probably find yourself lying on a park bench in a disgusting overcoat, mainlining a goon cask every night, looking after a dog that no one wants, while the dog looks after a human no one wants. That’s a life. Though it’s not a life I want. So I have to live again. Slowly. I have to find my way back.
Two groups of early primates climbed down from the trees and stared out into the savannah. One group said (actually, they didn’t say because they couldn’t speak yet), ‘Why don’t we go see what’s out there?’ – And off they went. The other group said, ‘Stuff that for a joke, it’s not safe,’ and scampered back into the trees. The second group’s ancestors we now gaze at adoringly at the zoo and think, ‘Oh, they’re so cute.’ The first group are doing the gazing. They’re us.
Group two didn’t need to evolve much. They were already well suited to their environment. But group one had to change drastically. They had to adapt. They had to walk upright in order to peer over the tall grass, to make sure there weren’t any sabre-toothed tigers or other bitey things lurking about. They also had to communicate to warn each other about the bitey things, and they had to work collaboratively in order to hunt as they changed from herbivores to omnivores.
And the extra protein in this new diet started to do amazing things to their brains. One day a loner, let’s call him Ugg, was wandering around the plain on his own when he was attacked by a bitey thing. In a wild panic, Ugg picked up a heavy stick and thwacked the bitey thing on the head, killing it instantly, which put a bit of a crimp in its day. Ugg gazed down his stick and thought, ‘You know what? If I were to attach a sharpened rock to the end of this stick, I would have something that I would call, oh, I don’t know, a spear.’ Ugg returned to his tribe and showed them what he’d made, and a couple of the blonder ones said, ‘Dude, that’s totally gnarly,’ before they migrated to California.
And so technology and surfing were born. Communal living led to collaboration and cooperation. This in turn led to contemplation as the advent of technology gave our early ancestors free time to sit around the campfire shooting the breeze and telling stories. And the trouble with free time is that eventually you’ll get around to contemplating the nature of existence. Which will invariably lead to some troublesome questions. Why are we here? What’s the point? What’s our purpose? This can lead to a thirst for knowledge, or else to the depths of despair as we come to the realisation that there is no why, there is no purpose. There just is. We are alone in the universe. The lucky ones skim across the surface of life content with shopping, watching home renovation shows or sport on TV, and accumulating stuff they don’t need to fill the void of their inevitable non-existence. The luckiest ones take comfort in an afterlife. They don’t accept the randomness of the universe but instead attribute it to a benign creator. The unlucky ones plump for self-annihilation when the void becomes too much, too empty, too painful. And that is a uniquely human trait. No other species on the planet commits suicide. Animals will fight to the death to defend their young, but that’s sacrifice not suicide.
Being human, it seems, is the greatest gift there is. It is also, for some of us, the greatest curse.
Mum wants to do a bit of shopping before we go so I sit and read in the hammock by the pool until she gets back. By the time we get to the hospital it’s around five-thirty. I think she wanted to give me some time alone. Time to see what I would have missed had I … to see how lovely our home is and she’s right, it is lovely. But I don’t want or need stuff. I want and need Lisa and to not feel this sense of desperation, of nothingness. I sense that Mum has her sad moments, but I don’t think she knows what it’s like to feel emptiness, this bottomless chasm of emptiness. At least I hope she doesn’t. She doesn’t deserve to feel like this, no matter how guilty she feels about what happened to me.
We get to the next hospital and I meet my nurse. His name’s Andre and he’s from Nigeria. He’s a large friendly guy with a beaming, welcoming smile. No sooner am I settled in my room than he’s filling out my dinner order for me. Dinner, he says as he checks his watch, is in about an hour. He tells me the directions to the dining room, which is basically down a kilometre-long corridor and to the left. I should have brought my skateboard.
Mum gives me a hug and a goodbye kiss. ‘You’ll be okay?’ she says.
‘That’s the plan.’
‘Do you want anything before I go?’
I think for a moment. Lisa is obviously out of the question. She hasn’t called or texted again and we’re not allowed to use the net so I don’t have access to email. Besides, if Lisa’s aunt is anything like Lisa’s mum then she probably beat Lisa senseless over the text message.
I shake my head. ‘I’m fine.’
‘You sure?’
‘Maybe get Chris and Maaaate to drop over sometime.’
Mum likes this idea. ‘I’m here for you, Declan. Please be here for me.’
I nod. ‘I’m not going anywhere, Mum. I promise.’
She hugs me again, cries into my hair.
‘Your mum’s nice,’ says Andre, after she’s gone.
‘She’s amazing.’ I can say that to Andre ’cause she’s not here.
‘Is she married?’ asks Andre before bursting into laughter. ‘Only joking.’ He then goes through my bag looking for alcohol or anything sharp. But he’s a little more discreet than the nurse at the other hospital. He doesn’t ask about my laces, which I didn’t bother rethreading, figuring they’d only be taken from me again once I got here. It seems this place is a little more laid back. I suppose the first hospital was emergency care. It was their job to keep me alive. Nothing more. I’m here to get better. To reboot.
I wonder about life on the outside. The real world. My friends, school, ordinary stuff. Lisa. I don’t really want to be here – another nuthouse – but then again, I don’t really want to be anywhere. It’s difficult but I have to trust Mum and the doctors. Left alone, I almost ended it because I didn’t even know that I was sick so, to use Mum’s expression, I have to outsource my recovery to others. I’ll take my medicine and my therapy. I’ll take whatever they dish up because the alternative is too horrifying to contemplate.
Andre has finished going through my bag and now goes over the notes at the foot of my bed. ‘My friend,’ he says, ‘just take your time. There’s no rush. Ed will be along later. Ed Chiu. You’ll like him. Everyone likes Ed. He’s the psychologist. Good man, Ed. Anyway, Declan, get yourself down to the dining room by six before the sharks start circling your dinner tray.’ He laughs again. It’s a loud, infectious laugh and I can’t help but smile.
By the time I shuffle along the corridor to the dining room it’s already quite full. The trays are laid out on the tables and have everyone’s names on them. I find mine and luckily it’s on a table by itself so I don’t have to sit with anyone. The other patients are mostly middle-aged women. They’re seated together and in on some joke that apparently happened at one of the group sessions this morning. One of them has a laugh like a hyena on nitrous oxide. It’s actually more like a screech and it occasionally goes above the threshold of the human audio range: her mouth’s open but there’s no obvious so
und coming out; dogs within a twenty-kay radius are probably looking around and thinking, ‘What the hell was that?’ Maybe that’s the big joke. Maybe everyone else is laughing at her laugh. God knows why they’re in a psychiatric hospital if they’re laughing so much. Perhaps if they stop laughing, they’ll start crying.
A couple of them look over and say hello. I nod back. It’s the best I can do. I’m not comfortable around strangers. Not large groups anyway. I was okay with the girl at the other hospital but that’s because it was just the two of us.
Suddenly I feel really anxious and don’t want to be here anymore.
‘Excuse me,’ I say to the group of cacklers.
‘Yes?’ says the hyena, turning around.
‘Do we have to eat in here or can we …’
‘Oh no,’ she says. ‘You’re allowed to eat in your room if you want.’ She then gives me a wonderful warm smile and I feel awful for thinking so poorly of them.
I try to smile back at her but it’s a total fail.
I pick up my tray and shuffle out of the room. And that’s the thing. I’ve noticed that since it happened – or almost happened – I’ve started shuffling like an old man. I’m even wearing this ancient pair of Dad’s slippers that Mum made me bring in because I refuse to own slippers on general principle. It takes me about five minutes to shuffle back down the corridor to my room. I close the door behind me and turn on the TV. I don’t want to think too much. I find the cartoon channel, content just to be. To live in the moment. That’s all I can handle for now. That and the lukewarm chicken pasta and jelly and ice-cream. But things will get better. They will. They will.
After dinner I go and ask the ward nurse if I can have my meds early. She checks my notes and agrees that it should be okay. I then shuffle back into my room and curl up in a ball in bed. According to the list of activities there’s a group session on after dinner, but I’ve had enough for today.
Although it’s only seven o’clock, I’ve made it through another day without Lisa. I met an inspirational girl, I had a bowl of chicken and sweet corn soup, moved hospitals, had dinner, watched The Simpsons, and took my meds. That was my day. And I’m happy with my achievements. Considering the fact that had I not had that moment’s hesitation on the station, today would probably have been my funeral. Because of that pause, that fork in the road, Dad’s probably out in his shed attempting to cobble together the sort of birdcage that no bird in its right mind would ever think about living in, and Kate will probably be in her bedroom doing whatever it is that Kate does in her bedroom (extracting nuclear fusionable material from a Lego brick or something). And Mum will be enjoying a glass of wine on the sofa rather than crying into her pillow with her heart torn out knowing that life will never be the same again. I’m glad I’m able to give that to them. Spare them that agony. On Saturday on the station I thought they would be better off without me … That everyone would be better off without me. I now see such thoughts for what they are. The ravings of a madman. Which is why I’m here. This is where I belong. For now, at least.