by Lily Bailey
This is the choice before me: die from the bite itself or die from catching a disease in the dirty operation. Do you remember the girl who went to Thailand and contracted HIV from the needle giving her a tattoo?
I do.
I brought clean needles with me in my first-aid kit that I could get out and use, but somehow they feel dirty just by being here. I turn down the anesthesia. The doctor protests, shaking his head and waving his hands back and forth.
“It’s going really hurt,” translates Pim. “The doctor is no sure even strong man could take pain.”
But I am resolute. A scalpel is bad enough; it is my limit; it is as far as I can go. No needle will touch my veins. I have a small unused scalpel in the first-aid kit. I tell Pim to get the doctor to wash his hands in front of me. The doctor does as instructed, and I take the scalpel out of its sterile packet and pass it to him with shaky hands.
I lie back on the doctor’s bed.
“Just do it,” I say.
Today is Saturday, and we are at a fair in the neighboring town.
In England, large outings with kids involve meeting points, emergency procedures, and risk assessments. Here, Pim and Kamon wander off to buy food for the evening, calling over their shoulders, “Pee Antan, watch children!”
I want to shout, When and where shall we meet? And are any of them allergic to peanuts or carrying EpiPens?
Before I can say any of this, at least eight of the twenty kids in my care shoot off into the bustling crowds. Shit. If they get abducted, is it my fault?
I urgently need to make some lists about how letting some of the children run off was irresponsible, but if I focus on that, I might lose even more.
“No worry!” says Bim, looking at my face. “No worry!”
She takes me by the hand
(HAND HOLDING: A young girl held my hand, and I didn’t try to stop it happening.)
and leads me to the pick-and-mix stall.
Mook, Cindy, Bim, Boom, and Fah fill brown paper bags from rows and rows of candied maggots, caramelized spiders, and stag beetles on sticks. They try to get me to eat a sugared locust. Would I rather cause cultural offense or have a dirty mouth? It’s an easy one by now. Locusts every time.
“Open mouth!” says Boom.
I stick my tongue out, and Cindy plops it on my tongue.
I feel its sugary body fizz and disintegrate on my tongue, its legs crunching against my teeth.
“Good?” says Bim “Good?”
Cause cultural offense or tell a lie? A lie every time.
“Delicious!”
Somehow, after an hour or so, I chance upon the rest of them at the bumper cars. The fair is huge; it seems incredibly lucky. Perhaps I didn’t do anything irresponsible. Perhaps there was just a larger plan I didn’t know about. Then Kamon and Pim appear.
Pim counts the children and pats me on the back. “Good job, Pee Antan! Good job!”
My time in Thailand comes to an end, and on the way to the airport, I sit and wonder how long it is going to take for my body to shut down because of the ways I have contaminated myself here.
Sea, Bim, Boom, Mook, Pupe, and Ali wanted to come and say good-bye, so they’re in the back of the pickup truck with me.
I see myself splashed across the headlines of newspapers in the Heathrow WHSmith bookstore upon my return, doomed to be forever archived among the bald fifty-year-old men with clear aviator glasses who seem to make up the majority of the pedophile population. I imagine what it will be like when they lead me away in handcuffs and strangers spit at me.
On the positive side, Ali has mastered his ABCs, counting to 100, and a collection of vaguely useful English words. He has been accepted by the local school.
The journey takes about two hours.
The children hug me, and for the first time I feel relaxed, because hugging people you have known for a while when you leave them is a social protocol.
I cannot be accused of doing anything wrong.
After a few minutes of good-byes, the children climb into the back of the truck, and Pim shakes my hand before slamming the door. Then they start to drive away. Little Sea is wailing, and Bim is hugging her. I hear Pupe call “H-A-M-B-U-R-G-E-R—HAMBURGER!” and “G-O-O-D-B-Y-E—GOOD-BYE!”
They are waving and getting smaller and smaller. I watch until I can’t see them anymore. I wonder how helpful it is for a child living in a remote Thai village to be able to order a hamburger in English. Then I take the sanitizer out of my backpack so I can kill the bacteria from Pim’s handshake.
When I arrive back at Heathrow, I am surprised there is no blue siren squad waiting to read me my rights. Only Mum and her fiancé Oliver, cheering at arrivals, saying how well I look.
· 18 ·
Dublin
I’ll leave for Dublin next week, and Ella, who has been home for summer, will be going back to school shortly after that. Already the days are getting shorter. We walk Tuffy in the park together in the afternoons, taking the dusty bridleway to the big lake looped by spindly trees, their shadows clawing across our path.
“Hey,” I ask today, trying to sound offhand. “You know the thoughts you were getting about holding your breath to keep Mum alive? How are they now?”
“They’re good,” says Ella. “I just did what you said, and they went away. I feel a lot better about the whole thing now.”
I am stunned. How come I can’t do what Dr. Finch tells me, but when Ella hears it secondhand from me, she gets it right away?
“That’s amazing! Great. I’m so pleased.”
If she’s fine, if she’s not like me after all, maybe I can tell her. Can I? Can I?
“Whatcha thinking?” she says.
Not everything. But something?
“I’m thinking . . . I’m thinking that I want to tell you how I knew what you should do. The thing is, I have OCD. But not what you think of as OCD. I didn’t realize I had it for a long time, because it’s mostly in my head. The main thing I do is make lists of bad things I’ve done. But I’ve also had magical thoughts, which can be part of OCD. I’ve had thoughts about being able to control whether people I love get hurt, often you, in fact. I’ve seen a psychiatrist about it, and I’m trying to get better. But it takes up a lot of my time.”
Now it’s Ella’s turn to be surprised.
“No way!” she says. “I always thought you were so perfect! I thought you knew how to tell me what to do because you’re clever. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me! Tuffy, come here! That is not your picnic!” Tuffy is ten now, and selectively deaf.
“Well, I’ve told you now.”
And it’s true—I have. Okay—I gave her an outline, a sketch.
But some pictures are best left unpainted.
I decide to go back on medication to make the thoughts go away. I’m on the lookout for my friend, wondering when She will jump out from behind the doorway of some dark thought.
Surprise! Happy failure to you! She’ll shout, tooting a party horn with relish. That’s a nice little chemical dependency you’ve got going there. Harder than you thought without me, is it?
Or perhaps She won’t be so gleeful. She always hated the pills, after all; the way they dulled her shine. Maybe She’ll swoop in and tell me not to take them—say that we could start over instead. But there’s nothing, not a peep.
Taking the pills again means seeing Dr. Finch a few times. There is a tension between us. We walk the corridors in silence, and talk in her office is purely strategic.
I am about to go to college and things will be fine. I’m not going to do my routines. This will be a fresh start.
“How?” asks Dr. Finch.
“It just is. I’m going to a different country and starting again.”
“Then why didn’t that work when you went to Thailand? We’ve only just got you stabilized on your meds again. We want things to continue getting better for you, don’t we? I just think you should think carefully about this.”
“That was dif
ferent,” I tell her. “I wasn’t approaching things with the right attitude. I wasn’t implementing all the CBT we’ve done in the right way.”
She raises an eyebrow.
I don’t care.
I have finessed my system to increase efficiency. There are now nine categories, and any bad action will fall into one of them.
This means I no longer end up with lists hundreds of letters long. Also, I now write down my bad actions rather than storing them in my head. This is a sound strategy, as it means I cannot lose any. Because someone might find my lists if I use a notebook, I’ve chosen to type them out in the notes section of my securely passcoded iPhone. When I get to the end of a routine, I still do my moving actions to close it and repeat my mottoes. Then I get Blank Slate, as before, and the whole thing starts again when I next do something wrong.
The categories are:
BODILY FUNCTIONS
LIAR
BORING/LOSER
PERVERT
IDIOT
BITCH/UNKIND
RUDE
POSH TWAT/SPOILED
SELFISH
Trinity College’s halls are located in Dartry Road, Rathmines, a fifteen-minute drive from the center of Dublin. Foreign students are bused there from the airport, in nervous silence. Instinctively, I add AWKWARD to my list as penance for not mustering up an engaging conversation. I put it into the category LOSER, before mentally slapping myself.
Resist.
Resist.
Resist.
I am assigned to Cunningham House, the oldest hall on the block. In its entrance hall, I meet a girl called Aoife, who says I should feel free to “come visit” her on the third floor and “hang” any time I like. Just being in the presence of a future proper friend sends me into overdrive.
OVERKEEN, STARED AT HER BOOBS, and BREATH SMELL spring up like unwanted weeds, and though I smile on the outside, my stomach starts to twist.
Once I’ve shaken off Aoife, I locate my room at the end of a corridor on the second floor. I lock the door, and my suitcases fall from my clenched fists. I lie on the bed and order the words that have popped up into their appropriate categories, rapidly hammering them into my phone.
The kitchen is about ten yards from my room, but paper-thin walls mean I can hear voices and laughter from the corridor. My new friends have arrived. I walk toward the babble, without generating a new word. I push open the peeling orange door and the conversation stops. Six expectant heads turn my way. The room smells of pizza and feet.
“Hi! I’m Lily!” I grin, feeling like an IDIOT. Smiles all round.
“Pull up a chair!” says a tall, waif-thin girl with long red hair. Keela.
“Where are you from? Not Ireland, I guess?” This question comes from a girl twirling a strand of her hair around her finger at the other end of the table.
“Haha! You got me. I’m from London.”
What kind of POSH TWAT says “You got me”?
“Oooooh. London!” they chorus.
I smile in what I hope is an appropriate way, take a seat on a devastatingly squeaky plastic chair—please don’t let them think I am farting—and try not to do anything seriously wrong.
This works well until my general tepidness causes a torrent of words to spin into the BORING category. Perhaps I should lead the conversation and impart wit and charm? Perhaps I should host the gathering, and, at the cost of generating hundreds of words for the list, shine bright?
I try it.
Freshman Week dawns gray and drizzly. So far I’ve acquired four main friends: Molly, Deirdre, Nessa, and Keela. Cunningham is a single-sex accommodation, but the boys’ compound is linked to ours. Integration of the sexes is going to be crucial to successful first-year life, so we’re relieved that the boys waste no time infiltrating our kitchen on night one. We rally ourselves with drinking games where the numbers and characters on playing cards take on strange meanings. King—make a rule! Nine—bust a rhyme! Six is dicks! Drink up lads! Jack—never have I ever . . .
Throughout the day, I’ve teetered between making sure I’m not boring and disappearing to write down generated words. Currently I can’t keep up with the speed of words being produced, so I just type down the word and promise myself I’ll do a full report of the content later.
I check the time: 8:00 p.m. I’m frazzled. In front of me, a bottle of vodka and a plastic cup beckons. Four is whores! Drink up girls! Yippee! I tip my head up to the ceiling and drink.
Music pumps. Lights flash. I love these people. These people are my friends. They love me back. I am accepted. These people. Are so beautiful. I smell of vodka, but I am free. I took some pills, and I am flying. Genuinely—there are wings fluttering in my stomach. This is it. Right here. In this nightclub. We were dancing and I bumped against Molly’s bum but it doesn’t matter. I am not a pervert because it was an accident. She knew that. I knew that. This is me. This is life!
In the morning, my head is over the toilet, retching. I woke up after two hours with a stomach full of vomit. It’s now midday, and things haven’t let up. I’m not the only one. Chunks of sick lined the toilet bowl before I even contributed. If other people are sick, does it cancel out my disgustingness?
Getting so drunk my memory fails results in Blank Time. But there are troublesome implications. Endless possibilities that I can’t account for. Did I tell lies compulsively? Did I shit myself on the dance floor? Perhaps I sprayed a fleck of saliva on someone during a drunken conversation?
E-mail to Dr. Finch:
Hi, Dr. Finch,
I am sharing a bathroom and kitchen with seven other girls, and encountering the same problems I experienced when living with a group of people at school. I am constantly scared that I have left fingerprint smudges and skin cells behind, or something in the kitchen sink or on the floor. I keep checking everywhere, though I’m really not sure what it is I have left behind. I found a piece of fluff in the kitchen cupboard that was the same color as the wool on my sweater. I thought, thank god I checked so that I could find the fluff and throw it in the bin, that was a close call, but fluff isn’t really incriminating so I think I must be looking for something else.
I am also stressed that the people I live with think I am doing very bad things, but that’s just usual so not much to be done I think.
Hope you are well,
Lily
Dr. Finch asks, What would really be so bad about leaving evidence of your presence behind? Everyone else does it and is not concerned by it. Tackling OCD involves taking risks to find out what actually happens and whether or not it is as bad as feared.
She signs off her e-mail “Rachel.”
After a few days, my reputation precedes me. I’m a legend, mostly known for things that happened during Blank Time—things I don’t remember.
“Have you met my English friend Lily? She’s crazy fun. Like properly nuts. You should hear what she did last night.”
This is my standard introduction. God knows what they say about me behind my back.
The only category I have conquered is BORING. Everything else is worse. All time not partying is dedicated to routines. I get about two hours’ sleep a night; often I don’t go to bed at all. There isn’t enough time.
Diet Coke is my weapon.
Which is not to say I don’t get into bed: I spend hours there every day. People don’t disturb you if they think you are asleep, prompting less human contact and fewer routines. Lying as still as possible reduces words too.
I’ve begun to think there are cameras in my room. These days, even scratching an itch on my arm in private needs to be written down in BODILY FUNCTIONS.
If someone does come into my room, I’m desperate for them to leave as soon as possible, because I’ve started to worry that the room smells bad. Personally, I can’t smell anything, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a bad smell. I spend hours sniffing my sheets, clothes, books, and folders, searching for smelly traces and inspecting for fingerprints and old skin. I’m worri
ed that it is my actual body that stinks, but, inconveniently, I have to take myself everywhere.
Showering and toileting are a mission. I’ve decided to stop eating most of the time, because it means I won’t have to poo in the communal toilet. A benefit of avoiding food is that I don’t risk poisoning myself or others, and that I won’t leave fingerprints or traces of skin in the sink, fridge, cooker, or anywhere else unsanitary. When I can no longer ward off the hunger pangs, I have a bowl of Ready Brek cereal. In the terrible event that I have to defecate, I go to McDonald’s drenched in shame and pray I don’t see anyone I know.
It’s easier to pee in the sink in my room and disinfect the area afterward. I take responsibility for all hair and anything else (skin, nails, you name it) in the shower the seven of us share. Every time I shower, a new wave of communal body debris has arrived, which I pick out and discard, so no one can think it’s mine.
I’ve become a compulsive liar. If I tell someone I did something an hour ago, but actually it was an hour and six minutes ago, I’m a liar. If I tell someone I’m going to my room to get something, but actually I’m escaping to do my routines, I’m a liar. If I tell Keela that Deirdre had asked where she was, before remembering that Deirdre actually asked “Have you seen Keela?,” I’m a liar.
The college has a student counseling service, so I ask if someone can help.
The counseling offices are around the corner from the main campus, just a few doors down from the National Art Gallery. On the appointed day I make my way toward the large rising block of glass that I recognize from the website. I hunch forward against the cold, my collar up and scarf wrapped around my neck three times.
Inside on the third floor, pastel-colored furniture, plastic plants, and a cheery receptionist make me feel a little more positive. But then I spy a friend of Keela’s in the waiting room. Oh, the shame, the burning shame. Her eyes flick up at me and then quickly down. Perhaps she feels the same?