She spoke at a million miles an hour, like you’d expect a crazy person to, and it was mental.
The nurses had let me go back to my room after I’d finished with David. I’d stayed there writing the stuff he’d asked me to. I’d not seen or heard anyone all afternoon. Now, looking up at the girl in my doorway, I was thinking my fears about everyone in this place being mental and crazy were realistic. Maybe I should try to stay in my room as much as I could. Crazy breeds crazy, everyone knows that, and if I spent time with them maybe I’d end up turning crazy myself. I couldn’t have that. I needed to keep my head down and get out of here.
‘Are you coming, or not?’ She said, with her hands on her hips. I had a strong feeling she wasn’t going to move until I went with her.
‘Come on,’ she said, walking into my room, taking my hand and dragging me up. ‘If you don’t come for dinner you’ll get in trouble, there are rules you know, and you have to stick to them.’
I had no idea where to go for dinner, so I followed her down the corridor. I was conscious of the fact I was still wearing the clothes I’d had on since I got there. I wanted a shower. I wondered if my dad had put shower stuff in the bag he’d brought in. I didn’t even know where the bag of my stuff went. I’d forgotten to take it back to my room. Last time I saw it was in the therapy room.
‘Hmmmmm, yummy, smells nice, doesn’t it?’ The girl asked. She was walking right next to me. ‘I’m Caitlin by the way, what’s your name?’
I looked at my feet, knowing I couldn’t answer her, and felt a bit rude for it.
We passed the therapy room. I stopped and went to open the door to see if my bag was in there.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ Caitlin asked. She grabbed my hand and put herself between me and the door. ‘That room is off limits.’ She had the tone of an authoritarian headmistress, but the body of a skinny teenage girl. I wondered what she was in for. She was definitely a bit off the wall.
‘Come on, you two.’ A nurse ushered us to carry on down the corridor.
Caitlin rushed ahead, giving me a smug look as she went.
The dining room wasn’t that big. There were a couple of blocks of tables with more of the blue chairs. I counted twelve patients. There were nurses in there supervising, too.
It was noisy, full of chatter, and everyone seemed to be behaving. Even though Caitlin was clearly mental, I’d still not seen anyone staring at walls or gouging out their eyeballs and I was pleased.
I felt like the new kid, standing by the door and not knowing quite what to do.
‘Sit down, Adam,’ one of the nurses said.
I sat down on an empty chair and in front of me there was a mouldy-green coloured beaker and plastic cutlery. In the middle of the table was a jug of water and some napkins.
Caitlin was sitting opposite me. A girl I didn’t know was sitting next to her. We waited for a small white plastic plate of food to be put in front of us. It was a bit like being back in primary school.
It looked like tinned macaroni cheese with a very hard white roll on the side that was impossible to cut with our flimsy plastic cutlery. It didn’t look the best, but I didn’t care, I was starving. I put my head down to eat.
Laughter came from the corner of the room but I ignored it.
‘Blake, what on earth–?’
‘Blake, take those off now,’ someone said. I could tell it was a nurse; it was an adult’s voice. A chair scraped across the floor, shoes squeaking.
Caitlin kicked me in the shin.
I glared at her. I wasn’t interested in what was going on. I just wanted to eat my dinner and get back to my room.
‘Look,’ she whispered, using her eyes to gesture behind her.
‘That’s enough, now.’ The nurse’s stern voice echoed across the room and the room fell deadly silent.
Three tables down, a large, goofy-looking boy, about my age, was wearing a pair of pants on his head.
I recognised those pants. They looked like the SpongeBob SquarePants ones Jake bought me for my birthday as a joke.
I put my fork down. The nurse was struggling to get my carrier bag off Blake’s lap. He wouldn’t let it go.
‘Oh my God, Blake.’ A voice cut through the silence.
A teenage girl was walking towards Blake, looking so bored and so pissed off. She was tall, pretty, and had short pixie-like hair. She was in baggy joggers and a hoodie that had London on the front; like the sort you get on the stalls up on Oxford Street.
‘You’re such a retard,’ she said in Blake’s face. ‘Gimme the bag.’
He wouldn’t budge.
‘Give it to me,’ she screamed in his face. He jumped and let go.
‘Josie,’ a nurse addressed her.
‘Don’t worry, I’ve got this,’ she said.
She whipped the pants off Blake’s head and walked towards me with a big smile on her face.
‘Yours, I believe?’ She held out the bag.
My jaw was on the floor. She was amazing. She had more control over Blake than the nurses did.
‘You might wanna get these washed, though.’ She put the pants in the bag. ‘Don’t know where Blake’s been.’ She winked at me.
I held out my hand and she hooked the bag over my fingers, and sat down next to me.
‘Show’s over, morons,’ Josie shouted and the chatter returned.
I couldn’t stop staring at her. I was totally mesmerised. I thought I was being a bit psycho, just staring, but she didn’t seem to notice.
‘I saw some scruffy-looking bloke bring that bag in earlier. I saw you on the list for therapy this afternoon, knew he was there, put two and two together, got four.’
I sort of smiled at her.
‘Who was the bloke, your dad?’
I nodded.
‘You hate him?’
I nodded again.
‘I hate mine, too, and my mum. They got me put in here,’ she sighed.
I looked at my plate. I still had some food left and wanted to eat it but thought it’d be rude while she was sitting talking to me.
‘Yo, Adam,’ she poked me in the arm, really hard. ‘You mute?’ She asked.
I nodded.
‘Cool,’ she said, smiling. ‘I’m Josie,’ she held out a small, skinny hand with really dry knuckles.
I shook it. She had a tight grip. It took me by surprise.
She leant in and whispered in my ear, ‘This place can get crazy at times, but stick with me and you’ll be all right.’ Then she sat back, winked and smiled.
Six
I was outside.
Out of the ward.
I’d gone through the door with the keycode on it, down the stairs and out of the other door with the keycode on it. I was sitting on a bench that was a bit soggy from the rain.
I was free from the dense air of that place, free from its endless, dark corridors and my dingy room. Free from Caitlin being bossy and Blake putting my pants on his head.
The air outside smelt like rain and I was sucking it up. I sat with my face to the sky, smelling it, taking in as much of it as I could because in about five minutes, I’d be back inside that dungeon.
‘Just light this, don’t pull on it too much, light it and just hold it, they won’t know you’re not smoking,’ Josie handed me the cigarette she’d just rolled. ‘Make it look like you know what you’re doing.’ She winked.
Smokers were allowed outside, for supervised fag breaks every couple of hours, after meals and between therapy and activities, Josie had told me.
‘Privileges,’ she’d whispered as we were walking down the stairs behind a few of the other smokers and one of the nurses. ‘If you don’t smoke you aren’t allowed out, so pretend.’
I’m glad she made me go out. The fresh air felt so good.
She handed me a lighter and I put the cigarette in my mouth and tried to light it.
‘Pull on it a bit, but only a tiny bit,’ she said. She was watching Damian, the nurse who was supervising us,
to make sure he wasn’t watching. ‘Shit, just pull on it,’ she said in a whispered panic as he started to walk over.
‘I didn’t know you were a smoker, Adam.’
‘Bit of a nosy parker, you are,’ Josie said.
‘Just doing my job, Josie.’ He smiled.
‘Well, you lot have had him doped up to his poor bloody eyeballs and locked up in there, so now he wants to enjoy a fag.’
‘And he can’t speak for himself?’
Josie looked up at him with her eyebrows raised. ‘If you did your job properly, you’d know he was mute, so no, he can’t speak for himself.’
Damian’s face changed. ‘I’m sorry, Adam. It completely slipped my mind,’ he said.
I shrugged. There wasn’t anything I wanted to say if I could.
He backed off and went over to the others.
‘If I wasn’t a raging lesbian, I’d fancy him a bit,’ Josie said.
I wouldn’t have guessed she was a lesbian. I’d never seen a real lesbian before. I’d only ever seen them in the porn films we’d watched after we hacked into Nathan’s dad’s computer.
We sat in silence for a bit, her smoking, me awkwardly holding a fag, which I was sure had gone out.
‘Adam.’ Josie turned her body around to face me and crossed her legs up on the bench. She took a long pull on her fag and then blew it out slowly.
‘I heard about what happened to your friend,’ she said.
My body froze, including my breathing and probably my pulse. Then panic took over and all my senses went into overdrive. My breathing and pulse raced and the blood must have been flying through my veins. I tried so hard to control it, keep it inside so she didn’t see, but if she knew about me, about Jake and about what happened that night, any second, she’d tell me what a monster I was and how …
‘It’s OK,’ she said. She touched my leg gently. It made me back away.
I wanted to get up and run away. I didn’t want to hear what she was going to say to me, how she’d already judged me.
‘I read it in the news, and then we had an assembly at school about it. They wanted us to know about it so we could stop it happening to us.’ She paused. ‘I guess they wanted to warn us.’
They’d done an assembly about us at her school? Oh God, she knew everything. She knew what I’d done. I tried to breathe deeply and slowly to keep the panic under control.
She’d got her tobacco packet out and was rolling another cigarette. ‘I knew it was you when I saw your name go up on the board at the nurses’ station, the day they brought you in.’ She licked her paper and stuck it down.
She reached out her hand and touched my chin, pulling my head up to look at her. I flinched.
‘Adam, look at me?’ She asked.
I caught her eye. I didn’t want to, but she wasn’t giving me any choice.
‘It wasn’t your fault, you know that?’
I didn’t want to talk about it. I shrunk down and turned away. Why wouldn’t she stop talking about it? I’d been doing whatever I could to stop myself thinking about what happened, because it was like a really awful chain reaction. If I thought about it, even a little bit, the memories would start up. Then all the bad stuff would happen, feeling sick, not being able to breathe, getting all panicky, my heart racing, and my head spinning. Exactly what was happening now.
Josie was really staring at me.
I looked down at the cigarette in my hand which had gone out, but not burnt down. She held the lighter out at me and tried to smile.
I couldn’t walk away from her. We were being supervised. I had to stay put. I had to be good, stay in control, not act insane or have any breakdowns or anything like that. If I kept calm, they’d let me out, I knew they would.
‘It really, really wasn’t your fault,’ she said. She lit her cigarette and took a huge pull. ‘I get it though, I do.’ She blew out the smoke and batted it out of my face with her free hand.
I looked at the floor. Begging her, inside my head, to please just stop.
‘Right, fag break over,’ Damian announced. ‘Let’s all get back inside.’
Thank God. My breathing was so shallow, my pulse thumping, my back sweating, and I felt sick. Sick like I was about to throw up everywhere.
I held out the unfinished cigarette. She took it off me and threw it in the bush. She flicked hers in after it and walked next to me back through the keycode door. Inside I took the stairs two at a time and was first through the ward door as soon as Damian opened it. I couldn’t get up there quickly enough. I just wanted to go to my room and be alone.
Damian took my arm as I tried to walk away. ‘Do you think you can handle staying out here for a bit, Adam?’ He asked.
I was confused.
‘Just, you’ve been in your room all day. I think it will do you good to stay out here for a bit, if you think you’re up to it?’
‘Wanna play pool?’ Josie asked, grabbing two cues and smiling brightly.
Oh, God. I looked at Damian for an escape route.
‘It’ll be fun. Josie’s a demon, though. She can beat anyone,’ he said, either ignoring or not understanding the pleading look on my face. ‘Go on. If you don’t enjoy yourself, I’ll let you have the chocolate bar I’ve got saved to go with my cup of tea later,’ he said.
I didn’t have a choice. I had to be good so they’d let me out.
I shuffled over to where Josie was setting up the pool table and picked up one of the cues. I’d only every played pool once before, in the pub with Jake and Nathan while we were waiting for my dad to turn up from the bookies with that week’s food money. I was crap. I’d lost. Twice in a row.
Josie pulled her hoodie off and chucked it on the chair. My eyes were drawn straight to her arms which were covered in scars. Some were white, some were big and purple. Some were still scabs.
She chucked the chalk to me but I didn’t catch it. My head still felt fuzzy from just being outside for the first time in ages.
She laughed as she bounced over and grabbed it from by my feet. She placed it in my palm and rolled her eyes at me. ‘I’m gonna whoop your arse if you can’t even catch the chalk,’ she laughed. ‘You wanna break?’
I shook my head. I watched as she leant over and broke the balls perfectly. She potted a yellow then looked up at me smugly.
She caught me staring at her arms. Her hand went up and rubbed them protectively. ‘You want to know?’ She asked.
I was curious. She seemed so normal and strong and confident. Not the sort of person who would be locked up in this nut house and definitely not the sort of person I’d expect to do stuff like that to herself.
I went to take my turn.
‘I’ve been doing it for ages. My parents hate the fact I’m a lesbian,’ she said, while I took my shot and missed. I was still crap.
She took another shot. ‘You’re gonna lose, by the way.’
I shrugged. I didn’t really care about playing. I was only there because Damian said so.
I lined up my cue, took a shot and missed.
‘When I came out,’ Josie carried on, ‘my whole world was turned upside down. I had a girlfriend, you know, but ’cause I’m only seventeen, Mum and Dad thought it was just a phase, that I’d grow out of it. They thought grounding me would be the answer. Lock her up; keep her in there until she changes her mind. It’s bullshit. They’re my parents; they’re supposed to love me no matter what, right?’
I didn’t know if they were or not. My dad didn’t love me no matter what.
She bent over and lined up her cue, ‘It’s not like I killed anyone … Shit, sorry, Adam,’ she stood up and looked at me. ‘Sorry.’
I looked at the floor. I knew she didn’t mean it, but it still made me feel like I’d been punched in the stomach. The thing is you can’t stop people saying words like death, killed, and dying. People just say them, then realise after and feel bad, but there’s nothing really to feel bad about. They just said a word, that’s all. I let her carry on.
‘I’ve been in here since,’ she said. She bent back down, lined up her cue and smacked a red straight into the far right pocket.
‘Fancy grabbing us a hot chocolate?’ She smiled. Her story was over, just like that. She told it all and didn’t cry or panic or anything like that. I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand how she could be so calm about all those feelings.
I put my cue down. I didn’t know where to get hot chocolate from. I looked around to see if there was a kettle or something.
‘Over there,’ she said. She was pointing near the nurses’ station where there was a hot drinks vending machine. ‘We’re allowed three hot drinks a day from there, but we aren’t allowed to take them back to our rooms unless we have a visitor with us. We have to drink them here. Go to the nurse and ask for a token,’ she said.
I went over to the nurses’ station slowly. My head was spinning again. I think Josie was trying to be my friend. I didn’t need a friend. I was just keeping my head down, getting on with things, doing what they told me to do, trying to stay calm and act normal so they would let me out. The sooner they let me out of there, the better.
I didn’t bother with the tokens in the end. I knew I should have stayed out there really, but Damian had only asked me to try. I’d tried. I went straight back to my room and got the pad and paper out from underneath my bed. The quicker I got all this down for David, the quicker they’d let me go.
When you’ve been friends with someone for ever, you never imagine them not being there. They’re a part of you. Especially when you see them every day. Your life revolves around them and, everything you do and everywhere you go, they’re right there with you.
That was us. That was me, Jake and Nathan. Where one was, the others weren’t far behind. Except for one time in year eleven, before it all happened, right before our exams. For a moment, I thought it was all over.
The Deepest Cut Page 5