Seconds to Snap

by Tina McGuff

  Except, one morning, I found myself waking to the sound of footsteps. Half asleep still, I felt a strange sense of familiarity. Did I know this person? My eyes slowly opened and I managed to half turn my head, to see my dad standing at the nurses’ station.

  His voice rang out loud and clear: ‘I want to see my daughter!’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s not possible, Mr Halford,’ the reply came back. ‘She’s too sick to see anyone. It’s really better if you leave now …’

  I could see my father now and the nurse standing beside him, taking his arm; trying to lead him away from me. At that moment, he turned to look in my direction and, from then on, it seemed as if everything happened in slow motion. He caught sight of me lying in bed, surrounded by tubes and monitors. And, for a moment, I looked into his eyes. Oh, my God, the look on his face was awful!

  I had never in my life seen a look like that: terror filled his eyes. There was devastation, anguish, love and hate all on his face. In that second, I could see my father was devastated beyond belief. He put his hand up to his mouth – an involuntary movement that seemed to come from the depths of his soul. He couldn’t bear it – he couldn’t bear to see me like this and, right then, in that very moment, I saw that this was killing him. I was killing him.

  Suddenly, a whole pack of nurses surrounded him, taking him by the hands, arms, whatever they could, blocking him from my view, ushering him out of the ward and out of my sight. Dad! I wanted to cry out – Dad! I’m here – I’m here! Don’t leave! But he was gone and I was left with a pain in my heart stronger than anything I’d ever felt in my poor, wrecked body. The sob that came out of me seemed to come from deep within, so hard and fast that it actually made my body scream out in agony. This was unbearable – I was crying and sobbing now, so hard I could scarcely breathe. I gasped and gasped – drinking in the air with desperation, like a diver coming up to the surface of the sea. I wanted to live now. I wanted to live so much! I couldn’t put my father through this pain any longer; I knew that now.

  Dad had been determined to see me. He had defied all the doctors’ orders, he had fought the nurses, and he’d come to see me; he cared about me. Now I knew I would have to eat. Enough was enough – I couldn’t break my father’s heart any longer. As the tears flowed, I managed to call out: ‘Dad! Dad! Dad!’

  The nurses came rushing over to my bedside, to try to calm me down, but I only wanted one thing now: to see my father.

  ‘He’s left,’ a nurse told me. ‘He’s gone.’

  No! I felt like an utter failure. I’d failed to make my dad happy, failed to stop them all going through this distress. I couldn’t bear the thought of hurting them any more. Sister Cummings came and sat next to me and hugged me. It was what I needed more than anything – to feel the comfort of another human being, to feel love again.

  Finally, I stopped crying enough to ask: ‘Has anyone else been in to see me?

  ‘Every day,’ she said, nodding. ‘Every single day for the past three weeks one of your family has either called or been in.’

  I was aghast. They all cared! And look what I was doing to them!

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I was so confused.

  ‘We have to keep all information from the patients so they can focus wholly on the recovery process,’ she explained.

  ‘But I need to know they care!’ I insisted, tears filling my eyes once again. ‘I didn’t realise. I just … I just didn’t know. Please, please will you tell me if anyone calls for me?’

  Sister Cummings nodded.

  ‘And please tell them I will be eating from now on, if they ask,’ I added. ‘Will you do that? Please? Tell my dad – call my dad now and tell him. The look on his face! Oh, God! Do you think he’s okay? I hope he’s okay. I want you to call him and tell him I’m going to eat again. Please – please do it now!’

  Sister Cummings knew this was an important moment for me – and I wouldn’t take no for an answer. So she got up and picked up the phone at the nurses’ station, holding it close to me so I could hear her words.

  ‘Hello, it’s Sister here, on the ward. Tina has asked me to call you to make sure you were all right and to let you know she says she is going to start eating as from now.’

  That was all I heard and all I needed to hear. That night, I slept better than ever before.

  Chapter 13

  A Setback

  I can’t sleep. I’m exhausted – every pore in my being needs to sleep, but something is stopping me. I sigh. And slowly a strange feeling comes over me – a cold, terrifying sense of foreboding and doom. My body goes cold with the sudden surge of terror and my eyes flick open. There, over my head, hanging from the white tiled ceiling I have stared at for weeks, is the shiny blade of a guillotine. A blade. Glinting in the flickering neon lights, teasing me with its sharpness and violence.

  I freeze with fear. What do I do? In my panic, I sit bolt upright and look up again. It’s still there, hanging between the tiles, threatening at any minute to fall and split me in two. I can almost feel the edge of the blade as it cuts hard and deep into my bones. Now I’m breathing fast, I can’t rest, I can’t sit back.

  ‘Tina, are you okay? Come on, lie down – you look exhausted.’

  Nurses at my bedside – they pull my arm, they try to hold me down, but I can’t move. I am rigid, like stone. The blade, I tell them. There is a huge blade there. I can see it, menacingly shining and sharp. Why can’t they see it, too?

  ‘There’s nothing there.’ The voices try to reassure me, they think I’m losing my mind. But it is as real to me as my own hands, now quivering with fear. A long rod is produced – they are poking at the ceiling tiles, just to show me. To prove that there is no blade. But it is hiding. I can tell it is still there and, no, I won’t lie back down again. Instead, I crawl to the bottom of my bed and curl up into a small, tight little ball, far from the trajectory of the hanging guillotine.

  I don’t want to die, I whisper into the silence of this night. I don’t want to die …

  I had started eating the day after Dad’s visit, just as I had promised I would. But it was a slow process – at first, I could only manage tiny morsels of food because my stomach had shrunk so much. The nurses marvelled at my sudden appetite, quietly pleased, though unwilling to make a song and dance in case it pushed me to resist them again. I nibbled on little pieces of macaroni cheese, sucked on mashed potatoes and slowly crunched my way through a handful of Rice Krispies. One bite at a time, I told myself, forcing myself to chew and swallow as if learning this skill for the first time. Soups were gently sipped, Build Ups drunk and cauliflower cheese approached with extreme caution. At each new meal, I felt like a bomb-disposal expert, trying at once to overcome the fear and panic in my brain with every mouthful but determined to see it through.

  But my mind was still in a very strange place. The guillotine episode was as real to me as anything I’ve ever experienced and, later, when I talked to Dr Ballinger about it, she said it was a hallucination brought on by exhaustion. Now, for the first time, I saw how far I’d slipped from reality. Not just emotionally – my mind was actually tipping over into the point of insanity. It was a terrifying thought; I realised now just how fragile my mind was. All this time, I thought I was perfectly okay – and then, in one second, my mind had snapped. When had that change occurred? I flicked back through my memories to try to pin down when I had lost hold of reality. During all those hours I had spent exercising? The day I decided to stop eating? Or drinking? Or when I had become consumed with fear about eating calories in the air? Maybe this went back to the day in Italy when I’d seen the women gesturing to each other on Rimini beach – or before that? I didn’t know. The line between sane and insane was infinitely minuscule and I had clearly crossed it without ever realising.

  But I tried to push this thought to the back of my mind as I focused on getting better. Every day, I managed a little bit more food; every day, the scales were brought and my weight rose steadily. Eventually,
by November 1986, I’d put on a stone – enough to allow a family visit. I felt a rush of happiness as they all came in to see me, but noted the scared looks in their eyes. I was still very fragile, I knew that, and my skin was paper-thin. They sat around my bed as I questioned them all about school and their lives – here, surrounded by my loved ones, I felt safe.

  It became a feature of my world now, this safety I craved: the comfort and the familiarity of the smells, sounds and routines. Each morning, I woke to the scent of linen, soap and baby powder. It was a comforting smell, a smell that made me feel as if I was being cared for. I was well into my teens now but I still used Punch and Judy toothpaste and a princess toothbrush; baby lotion was my preferred moisturiser. In some ways, I felt that here, in the hospital, growing up wasn’t a concern for me. Boys and relationships were out – too complicated emotionally. No, here, I could still be a child.

  My childhood still held such happy memories – it was a place I could retreat to in my mind, a place that gave me relief from my present circumstances. Thinking about our lives in South Africa reminded me of a simpler time, a time of swimming with my sisters, of running outside together barefoot and screaming with delight, of dancing to Grease, playing fetch with the dog. I was fond of my childhood – it was all so much easier than the grown-up world I had been thrust into at thirteen years old. A violent, ugly world I didn’t want any part of.

  Once my weight was back up to 7 stone, I was allowed out of bed again and, slowly, very slowly this time, I began to move around the ward. But there was no more running for me – I couldn’t have run even if I had wanted to, which I didn’t any more because I knew that I had to keep the weight on. Now I could take my meals in the dining room and, during the day, I was allowed to wander into the communal areas – the TV room, dining room – where there were male patients, too. They had a separate ward but we shared those two rooms.

  Gradually, I started to meet people. Barrie was in his late twenties and very small, with the most amazing blue eyes I had ever seen. Very cute, with a lovely face, he laughed all the time. But not a funny laugh; it was hysterical laughter. His manic eyes never laughed – it was bizarre. The nurses would occasionally bring him into the main TV room and sit either side of him, for security. Whenever I spoke to him, he would just laugh. I never knew how to react to Barry for I had never seen anyone like this before. I didn’t feel scared, just confused as to what was going on.

  One day, I sat down in the dinner hall next to a man in his late fifties.

  ‘Hi, I’m Tina,’ I introduced myself.

  ‘Leslie,’ he responded warmly, and held his hand out for me to shake. I chased a potato round my plate with my fork while Leslie chatted amiably.

  ‘I’m here for a rest,’ he explained, tucking into the beef casserole he had in front of him. ‘About four years ago, God came to me and told me I needed a rest.’

  ‘Oh, right,’ I said, nodding encouragingly.

  ‘Yes, She said that I had been working very hard and I needed to come here for a break.’

  ‘God is a lady?’ I was curious.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Leslie replied, nodding emphatically. ‘Well, She’s female – actually, She’s an alien. She’s lovely though, really lovely! She has told me that in 2000, She’s going to come down to earth and collect me in her spaceship.’

  ‘Have you been here four years then?’ I was confused – Leslie said God had told him to have a rest four years ago but I hadn’t seen him before today.

  ‘Oh, no,’ he said, smiling, as if the thought was a preposterous one, ‘I only stayed a few weeks that time but, two weeks ago, She came back and told me I needed another rest because I’d been overdoing it. I’ve been getting ready, you see …’

  At that, Leslie winked at me confidentially.

  ‘Getting ready for what?’ I asked.

  ‘For Her arrival, of course! I’ve been working A LOT on that! You know, building stuff and making things and generally sorting everything out. But She’s always watching out for me!’ He chuckled to himself then.

  ‘She said I’d made everything so nice for her and she was very, VERY pleased with what I’d done but it was time for another rest, so here I am!’ At this, Leslie spread his arms wide, indicating the hospital. ‘Just as She planned it!’

  We carried on chatting for another half an hour, while I nibbled delicately on the vegetables and drank my Build Up. Eating was still very difficult for me, a real effort, and usually it took a good hour to get a small morsel of food down. I always made sure my mouth was hidden behind my hand as I ate because I was still so self-conscious about eating in front of others, but Leslie was so charming and friendly, he made me feel instantly at ease.

  As I walked back to my bed that afternoon, I wondered about him and his story – it all seemed so plausible and, clearly, Leslie believed whole-heartedly in what he was telling me. So who was I to say he was wrong and the doctors were right? It occurred to me then that most of the religious stuff I’d been taught sounded crazy if you really sat down and thought about it. I mean, what was Jesus if He wasn’t an alien sent down to change the world? Walking on water, changing water to wine, the feeding of the 5,000 and rising from the dead? I mean, it was all way out there! If Leslie wanted to believe God was a lady alien in a spaceship, who on earth was I or anyone else to tell him otherwise!

  Steadily, as the months passed, my weight went up. At mealtimes, the nurses watched me carefully to ensure I was eating enough. The funny thing was, while they were studying me, I was watching them, too. I got to know all the nurses, their shift patterns, their footsteps and who was the most lenient. Since I still craved cigarettes, I used to hide one in my bed and then smoke it late at night. I always knew from the footsteps who was coming and going, how long they stayed for and what direction they were coming from. And I learned to judge when I could light the cigarette and then when to stub it out in some water in a polystyrene cup and throw it in the bin next to my bed.

  It was only another month or so before my sectioning was lifted. Now, with my freedom restored, I got out and about and even managed a couple of visits home – I always imagined how lovely it would be to see my sisters but, actually, back in the flat, I never felt happy. Home was a place full of misery and trauma, my memories of it all warped by my illness. Now, the ward was my home and, as nice as it was to see my sisters, I couldn’t wait to get back there after each visit. It was as if the walls of the flat would crowd in on me and I felt like I needed to run away.

  By July 1987, on the cusp of turning eighteen, my weight was up to a record 8 stone 2 lb, but my depression was at an all-time low. With the weight going back on and anorexia loosening its grip on me, I had no choice but to face the truth about my life. While most of my friends now had boyfriends, were leaving school, starting jobs and generally getting on with their lives, I was stuck in here, suspended between childhood and adulthood. I had no qualifications, no building blocks for my future and my relationship with my family was growing ever more distant. I was so disappointed in myself, at the way I had turned out, and I was clearly a burden on my family. What did I have to look forward to in life? My periods had stopped years ago and, though the doctors reassured me they would return one day, who could say I hadn’t harmed my fertility for ever? Could I expect the same as everyone else – a man to love me, children to care for? I didn’t think so. Letting go of the anorexia invited in all the unwelcome thoughts that the obsession had kept at bay. My world was flooded with darkness. What was the point of putting on all the weight? What could I possibly hope for after this? Returning to my mum’s pokey little flat, only to suffer her and my father’s constant disappointment in me? I just could not imagine what would happen to me after I left the hospital. It kept me awake at nights.

  One day, I decided enough was enough. First thing in the morning, I stole out of the hospital and visited the local chemist’s. I was full of nerves as I asked the lady there for some razor blades for my dad’s razor and she guided
me to the counter.

  After handing over £2.25, I left the shop, still shaking with terror of being found out. Then I ran all the way back to the ward and into the toilet cubicle, where I used to hide my cup for bulking out my body with water. I hadn’t done that in ages now – I knew that I was only cheating myself when I cheated the scales.

  My heart was pounding out of my chest with adrenalin. I looked around the cubicle – there was a toilet, small sink, tap, mirror and bin. The walls were a depressing grey. It was a dire sight and a horrible realisation to know this would be the last thing I ever saw – a dark, miserable toilet in a hospital.

  I stood there, looking at myself in the mirror. Then I started to cry – I cried with disgust at myself, at the mess I’d made of my life. Since that dreadful tap on my shoulder five years ago, before my life had spiralled out of control; I wanted it all to end, I wanted to be happy. To go back to that joyful, innocent time when everything was so simple and easy. But I knew it never would. The tears streamed down my face. No matter what happened to me now, things could never be the same again. My life had cracked the moment my mother had, and I couldn’t repair things now. I was damaged; I was at the bottom of a very dark hole and nothing could help me get out. It was hopeless …

  So I opened the blades. There were six in there, all very shiny and sharp. I had never seen razor blades singly before and was surprised at how sharp and thin they were. As I took one out and held it against my neck, I wondered how to do it. Quickly or slowly? Now I was shaking like a leaf.

  Suddenly, I heard someone crying in the next toilet and it made me jump – I was so focused on what I was doing, I hadn’t even noticed anyone going in there. The sound brought me into sharp focus. It occurred to me that if I carried out my plan of slitting my throat, the person likely to find me, the one who would hear the thump of my body against the wall and see the blood run out from under the door, would be the woman crying in the next cubicle.