by Peters, Joe
‘They’re all fucking nuts in here,’ I said to Rebecca.
‘We’re all depressed, man,’ she said. ‘What are you in here for?’
‘I accidentally stabbed myself,’ I muttered, hoping that if I said it quickly enough no one would question it.
‘Well, you shouldn’t be in here then,’ she said, looking truly concerned.
‘How can you accidentally stab yourself?’ Fred interrupted, but I ignored him.
‘Where did you stab yourself?’ Rebecca asked.
‘In the chest.’
‘What a load of bollocks!’ Fred snorted contemptuously. ‘He’s a psychopath! He stabbed himself!’
Just as in prison, boredom was the greatest enemy. There were a few arts and crafts classes, but they couldn’t keep that up all day. There was a pool table, but someone had wrecked it, so all we could do was sit around and talk and get on one another’s nerves. I went back to my poetry writing again and someone came in to help me with that. There were supposed to be sessions with the psychiatrist too, but I didn’t want to go over everything in my horrible past again, so I refused to go. They must have decided that my reluctance to talk showed I wasn’t getting better, so they increased me to a ‘section three’, which meant they could keep me for up to six months, whether I liked it or not. I can’t pretend that it was as bad as being in Lewes prison, but it made me feel pretty much the same. They must have thought they would wear me down, but I knew I had endured far worse than this and survived. They kept asking me who my family were and whether there was anyone I would like them to call for me.
‘There’s no one,’ I kept telling them. ‘I ain’t got no one.’
I suppose they could have traced my family, since they had my name and birth certificate, but maybe I wasn’t registered properly anywhere because Mum had kept me out of the system, imprisoned in the cellar for so long. The school my brother and sister went to only found out about me when one of them said something about having another brother who couldn’t speak and never left the house. Until that moment I had been completely invisible to the outside world. It seemed that now I was so again. Maybe the hospital people did find Mum and she told them she didn’t want anything to do with me. She was more than capable of saying that. If they did manage to trace any of my past life, they never said anything to me about it. It was as if I had none. I think there is a law about keeping psychiatric records separate from medical records too, so maybe that was the reason. If I had been forced to go back to Mum, it would have been far worse than anything else I had had to endure since leaving.
The doctor tried prescribing me drugs for my depression, which I resisted at first, as I didn’t want to be sedated, but they weren’t having it.
‘If you don’t take it voluntarily, we’ll have to force you,’ the nurses warned. I had seen enough of their tactics on other patients to know they meant it, but I still wasn’t willing to just roll over and do what they told me without a fight.
The first one they gave me was an antipsychotic drug called Chlorpromazine. The moment they said what it was when they brought me the tablets, Fred started shouting at me not to take it because they were just trying to put me to sleep, so I flicked the tablet out of the nurse’s hand. Next thing I knew the nurse had me down and was restraining me, pushing my head on the floor while his colleague hit an alarm button, which brought four or five others running in, all of them huge and none of them willing to take any notice of my shouts for mercy. They dragged me to the dormitory, pinned me to my bed and injected the drug into my arse without saying another word. It felt as if they were punishing me for refusing to talk to the doctor.
‘What’s all this aggression for?’ I wanted to know when they finally relaxed.
‘You wouldn’t take your medication,’ one of them said, avoiding making any eye contact.
Fred had been completely right. The Chlorpromazine was basically a tranquillizer and muscle relaxant that turned me into a zombie. Even a small dose would have dried out my mouth and tongue and made me feel dizzy and nauseous. The dose they actually shot into me on the bed must have been enormous, because it basically put me to sleep for two days; even on the third day I could barely move and it was as if everything going on around me was in slow motion.
For a while I had to admit they had got me beaten, and I started taking the tablets they gave me because I knew the alternative of being pinned down and injected would be worse. But it wasn’t the last time they found cause to wrestle me to the floor and whenever they did it they were even rougher than the coppers had been on the night they arrested me with Jake on the night that my baby had been born.
Even after that incident I just didn’t seem to be able to stop myself from answering back and making a nuisance of myself. I would try to keep a lid on it but it’s hard to repress your real personality twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week for months on end. I got the distinct impression that some of the nurses enjoyed it when a patient played up a bit and they were able to indulge in a bit of aggression. Maybe they were as bored in that place as we were.
Eventually the doctor must have decided they had broken my spirit of rebellion and that it would be safe to take me off suicide watch and to stop telling the nurses to follow me around everywhere. This was a relief for me and a mistake for them. Despite the drugs and despite the fact that I didn’t talk about it to anyone, the shadow of depression was still looming over me, threatening to swallow me at any moment. I still wanted to get free and if I couldn’t physically escape from the building, then I was going to take the other option and kill myself if I could find any way of doing it. It seemed to me as if the doctors were never going to let me go any other way.
I had noticed that unlike me and the other more difficult patients, Rebecca was allowed to have a cord on her dressing gown because she wasn’t considered to be a high risk. I watched her like a hawk for a few days and the moment she left the gown on her bed when no one else was around I slid the cord out of its loops, went to the toilet and hid it above a loose tile in the ceiling.
When the nurses realized the cord was missing they all went mad searching for it, stripping down all our bunks and emptying out our bags and lockers, but none of them suspected me or thought to look in the toilet ceiling for it. I was in no hurry to use it, knowing that an opportunity would arise again sooner or later, just as the opportunity of taking the cord had in the first place. Just knowing it was there, waiting for me, was a comfort. I waited a week, by which time the staff seemed to have given up searching and forgotten about it.
Deciding that the time was right, I made my way into the toilet as casually as I could, having ensured there was no one else around. I went into the cubicle and locked the door. Standing on the rim of the bowl, I lifted the tile and took down the cord, tying one end to a sturdy metal pipe that ran all the way along the top of the cubicles. I knotted a makeshift noose around my neck with the other end.
I knew that it wouldn’t be long before one of the nurses came in for a routine check, so I had to work fast. As soon as the knots were tight, I stepped off the toilet to kill myself. The knots held and the pipe took my weight, leaving me with my feet swinging a couple of inches off the floor. I felt a crunching sensation in my neck and I was immediately gasping for breath as my natural survival instincts struggled to take over. I still wanted to die, but the pain was frightening me. I didn’t think I could go through with it: it was going to be too painful a way to do it. Even as I struggled for breath, I told myself that if I just stuck it out for a couple of minutes the pain would all be over and I would never have to worry about anything ever again, but still my brain wouldn’t obey me and stop fighting to survive.
It felt as if my face was exploding and I could hear voices in the distance. The nurses must have been able to hear something going on, because they kicked the door in just as I passed into unconsciousness.
When I woke up I was back in a bed in the Accident and Emergency ward of the hospital, with my neck and
head braced in a stiff collar and my hands tied once again to the bars at the side. The pain was terrible. They had an oxygen mask over my face, but I was still gasping for air and there were drips going into my arm again. The psychiatric nurse who had been the main one following me around during my first few weeks was standing guard beside the bed.
‘You’ve got us into so much trouble, you have,’ he said when he saw my eyes had opened. At least that was some consolation, as if I had managed to get one over on them despite all their efforts to keep me pacified and under control.
When I finally got to see a mirror, I was shocked by the amount of damage I had done to myself in such a short time. My face and neck were a picture; with virtually every blood vessel having burst, my eyeballs were vivid red. They told me I had snapped a collarbone too and damaged my brain in some way by starving it of oxygen. I had in short made a complete mess of the whole thing and now I wanted to be dead even more than before.
I had to stay in the neck brace for weeks as the doctors waited for everything to settle back down, with a nurse guarding me twenty-four hours a day. The only good thing to come out of the whole episode was that they weren’t able to force the tranquillizers down me any more because of all the other medication I was now taking. The nurses were actually quite nice to me now, and even untied my hands after the first week. Unable to swallow anything, I had to survive on liquids. They tried to get me to let them push a tube down my throat, but I wasn’t having that and they didn’t insist.
When I was finally taken back to the unit six weeks later, I found that the doctor had gone, apparently forced to resign because of what I had managed to do on his watch. I knew as I walked through those doors, with a nurse close on my heels, that they were never going to let me out now, and they were going to be watching me every second of every day. I was convinced that if I didn’t take matters into my own hands I was going to be in there for the rest of my life. I had to find a way to escape.
Now they diagnosed me as being schizophrenic, with two distinct personalities: one silent, aggressive and sullen, the other loud, excitable and hyperactive. They thought they needed to calm down the hyper side, but it was the other personality that really worried them because they thought it was that one that made me want to kill myself.
Nothing much had changed while I was away and the same patients were all hanging around in the smoking room when I walked back in. They gave me a nice welcome home, the girls running over and hugging me.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Holly wailed, as always.
‘You got me into a load of shit by using my dressing-gown cord,’ Rebecca complained.
‘They’ve confiscated bloody everything because of you,’ Fred grumbled, puffing on an inevitable cigarette. ‘Pencils, rubbers, everything. Bloody fool.’
I felt bad about being the cause of their lives becoming even worse than they were before and I decided to keep a low profile for a while. I was very docile with the staff, taking whatever tablets they gave me without complaint. My collarbone was still weak and I knew that if they felt they had cause to restrain me they might very well snap it, and I didn’t want to go through all that pain again.
The new doctor decided to put me in for electric shock treatment, which was supposed to stimulate the brain or something. It was the most horrible experience imaginable, leaving me feeling as if my head had exploded. I had it four times but it gave me migraines and they had to stop. With every new indignity that they forced on me I became more determined to find a way to get out.
Six months after I got there, workmen were doing some work on the ventilation system, including in the toilets. Because I was now walking around like a zombie, the staff were beginning to loosen up on the security and not following me every moment. On a visit to the bathroom, in the cubicle where I had tried to hang myself, I noticed they were fitting a big vent into a hole in the wall and that the workmen had only temporarily covered it with a sheet of plastic. They had attached a grill to the outside wall, but it didn’t look too sturdy and I thought there might be a chance I could kick my way through it. I saw an opportunity to hatch a plan and went away to think about it.
I couldn’t risk trying to go at that moment, because my bag was still upstairs in the dormitory and there were a lot of staff around who would notice if I went to get it and then carried it into the toilet with me. There was a part of me that wanted to make a dash for it there and then, but I couldn’t bear the thought of losing the few possessions I had, like my clothes and Dad’s watch. I still used to wear Dad’s watch sometimes, even though it didn’t work any more, but that day it was in the bag.
‘Why do you wear a watch that doesn’t work?’ people would ask.
‘It was my dad’s,’ I’d say, ‘and he’s dead.’
That always shut them up.
I knew that there was a moment each evening when the nursing staff changed over shifts and for a few minutes there were always fewer male staff on the ward. If I was going to try anything, that would be the best moment to do it. I knew I had to make my move that week, before the workmen came back and finished the job off, filling in the hole.
The next evening I brought my bag down with me to the community room, trying to look casual.
‘What are you carrying your bag around for?’ one of the nurses asked.
‘People keep smooching in it, so I’m keeping it with me,’ I said.
‘Do you know who it is?’
‘I don’t, no.’ The lies kept flowing now I’d started. ‘It was lying open and I’m really fussy about who touches my stuff.’
He seemed to accept this explanation, and the next day, when I did the same thing, no one said anything.
I needed an accomplice to cause a distraction at the moment of escape and make a noise to cover the sound of me kicking my way through the grill, so I asked Rebecca, knowing that she would do anything for a laugh.
‘I need to get out of here, Becky,’ I whispered. ‘Please help me.’
‘Right,’ she said, rubbing her hands together gleefully. ‘Which nurse shall I go for? We could each choose one to dive on.’
‘I don’t think that’s going to work,’ I said.
I told her the exact moment I wanted her to hit the alarm button upstairs, having counted the number of seconds it would take me to walk from the community room to the toilet. It wasn’t that easy getting the concept of counting seconds over to her, but I still thought she was the most likely of all of them to pull it off for me.
‘When they ask you what happened afterwards,’ I said, ‘just say you fell against the button.’
I needed her to wait exactly a minute from the moment I said ‘go’ to give me the time I needed. I reckoned that by the time the staff had all run upstairs, realized there was nothing going on and come back down, I would be through the vent and away. Becky wasn’t brilliant at counting, especially when she was on medication, so I couldn’t be completely confident things would happen exactly when I needed them to. I showed her how to watch the second hand on her watch and wait for it to go all the way round.
The moment arrived and we both headed off, with Becky staring intently at her watch as she mounted the stairs. I got into the cubicle, with my bag over my shoulder, and closed the door. Sixty seconds had passed but everything was still silent outside, so I couldn’t start. I had taken the plastic cover off the vent and I could feel the fresh air from the outside world on my face as I bent down and peered through to the grill. I had worked out that if I found I couldn’t kick the grill out quickly I would just walk back to the community room and no one would be any the wiser.
Becky must have taken her eyes off her watch and missed the moment because it was at least three minutes before the bells started to go off and I kept expecting to hear a nurse coming in to see what I was up to in there. The moment they went off the ringing was deafening and I could spring into action without having to worry about making a noise. I could hear running feet on the stairs and shouting as I wriggled my w
ay into the vent, feet first, and kicked hard at the grill. It was a tight squeeze, but I just fitted because I was so skinny. The grill was resisting my blows, although it felt as if there was some movement to it. One of the corners seemed to be coming loose and I remembered how when we were smashing the shop windows we had always concentrated on the weakest points. I channelled all my efforts on that one spot and it began to go, eventually springing away from the wall. One more kick and suddenly it flew away, landing with a clatter outside.
I wasn’t sure what I would do next, but at least I was on the outside and I could work out how to get over the fence while the staff were all still trying to sort out what had happened with Becky upstairs. It wasn’t until I emerged from the wall on the other side that I realized it backed directly on to the street. I didn’t have to worry about getting through the grounds and over the fences: I was already free.
One or two passers-by gave me funny looks and I just smiled and nodded as if it was the most normal thing in the world for a man to appear feet first through a wall and drop into a street. Some of them must have realized that the building was a psychiatric unit, but they didn’t seem to know what to do. Perhaps they thought I was dangerous and didn’t want to tackle me. Maybe they just didn’t want to get involved in someone else’s business.
My heart was thumping, as I expected to hear shouting and running feet behind me.
‘All right?’ I said cheerfully to a couple of people who were staring with open mouths. ‘I’ve been working in there and got locked in.’
I could see they didn’t believe me, but they didn’t say anything and I set off at a brisk pace, diving in and out of back streets to cover my trail as quickly as possible. Emerging from one ally into a main street, I saw a bus drawing up and the doors opening. It said it was going back to Plymouth. I jumped straight on, even though I didn’t have any money.