On a Scale of One to Ten

by Ceylan Scott

  A MESSAGE FROM CHICKEN HOUSE

  People say stories matter because they are another way of telling the truth. My daughter recovered from mental illness because she found a way to change her story – it didn’t have to end the way it might have done.

  Ceylan’s brilliant and disturbing novel is based on her own experience, but it’s also about choices in this story – conflicted, sometimes half-hearted, reversible, brave, but always about gradually finding the truth about what happened.

  Unless we read about this, we may think we are alone or things don’t matter, or help isn’t there. It is. And we all do matter.

  BARRY CUNNINGHAM

  Publisher

  Chicken House

  Contents

  1: Then

  2: Now

  3: Then

  4: Now

  5: Then

  6: Now

  7: Then

  8: Now

  9: Then

  10: Now

  11: Then

  12: Now

  13: Then

  14: Now

  15: Then

  16: Now

  17: Then

  18: Now

  If You Need Help

  Copyright

  To my mama

  The two girls had been drinking since three, a swig for every crash of the river. The Golden Virginia they were smoking like shrivelled worms falling out of rolling paper. They tried to blow rings in the sticky air.

  Failing.

  Giggling.

  Heads spinning. Could be the alcohol, could be the heat.

  Now it was late, and the sky was pale pink, like the smooth inside of a conch. Cans of cider glinted in the grass and trees flopped like vast ivory wigs, heavy from the weeks of rain. Henna patterned the girls’ bare arms, a memory of windswept festivals bleeding colour.

  The blonde girl swigged.

  The second girl made daisy chains the lengths of her legs. She picked them up and threw them into the river, where they floated like tiny lilies. A crow leered over a piece of overgrilled bacon from a discarded barbecue. It squawked, its black eyes shining. The girls talked.

  The first girl beckoned to the surging river ahead of them, brown and black and foaming. They laughed. The second girl nodded.

  Their fingers interlocked in a drunken clasp and they swayed as they stood up. They didn’t put any shoes on. The weir in front of them shouted.

  ‘We’re such idiots,’ said the blonde girl.

  ‘Such idiots.’

  They stumbled over soapy tangles of moss and their calves turned pink with the cold. The branches of a dead tree sprawled like bones and the blonde girl’s faded lilac streaks echoed the sunset.

  ‘Jump, Iris,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow you.’

  The first thing they do at Lime Grove is try to make me talk about the monster.

  Dr Flores and a nurse in a blue uniform, trying to hollow out the small scraps of truth, asking me one hundred questions in one hundred different ways in the hope that one will catch me out.

  How did the self-harming start?

  Will you tell us what happened?

  You know your behaviour isn’t normal, don’t you?

  Let us help you.

  Only you can help yourself.

  How do you feel? On a scale of one to ten?

  I don’t talk. The monster won’t let me. The room is decorated in a painful pink palette: cracked pink walls, pink metal cupboards, pink leather armchairs and a forlorn-looking fuchsia beanbag in a corner. The sign on the door says it is Therapy Room 1, which is stupid because I didn’t see a Therapy Room 2 or 3 and this doesn’t feel like therapy. Denim cradles my thighs but I’m shivering at the knees and my hair is dripping more grease than a deep-fat fryer. Angry spots have swollen around my lips. I don’t know why.

  Dr Flores scribbles something down on his notepad, holding it at an angle so I can’t read his spindly writing.

  ‘Sorry, we have to take notes,’ he says. ‘It’s standard practice.’

  Dr Flores is lanky but short in all the wrong places. He chews his pen lid like gum and is wearing a three-piece suit, a stripy purple shirt, and a Periodic Table tie that knots perfectly around helium. He is wearing scratched, thick-rimmed glasses and lots of hair gel, which makes him look like a hedgehog. I get the impression he doesn’t like me, but maybe it’s just easier to distance yourself from the fate of a patient if you don’t like them and they don’t like you.

  The nurse reeks of newly qualified. Her blue uniform is creased and new, her smile moulded like clay.

  ‘Let’s have a think about how you felt when—’

  ‘When can I go home?’ My voice cracks more than I want it to.

  ‘You have to stay here for an assessment.’

  ‘Assessment of what?’

  Dr Flores looks down at the bandages wrapped around my arm, the small round plaster where the cannula pierced my hand, the bruise on my neck that looks like dark wine, and it’s his turn not to answer.

  ‘What happened to Iris?’ he asks instead.

  After an hour, he stops asking.

  If you really want to know everything, the first thing I’ll probably tell you is that growing up I lived in paradise and then it was shattered when I moved into the town with the smoke and the cars and the people and the identical rows of red brick houses and the oppressive grey skies, but I barely remember that, and that’s not why I’m mad.

  I’m taken down a dim strip-lit corridor, numbered doors on either side. Some of the doors are brightly decorated with posters of names and KEEP OUT signs. We stop outside the door with a number 4 on it and a viewing slat above it. Inside is a bed with pale-green blankets, a scratchy navy carpet, bare walls, a wardrobe and a chair. It’s whitewashed, with one lime-green wall. Who chooses lime green? A whiteboard above the bed and pens in primary colours. Maybe they think I’ll write out everything that happened. I imagine it in blood red, a headstone looming over my pillow.

  Two more blue nurses watch me strip to my underwear and scan my body with metal detectors and no regard for dignity. They press stodgy fingers into the lining of my bra and sit on my bed to shake out the contents of my bag into metal trays. I think I can call it my bed, anyway. You aren’t allowed biros. Too sharp. You aren’t allowed biros or make-up or perfume or drawstrings on trousers or laces on shoes. I can see them glancing at my arms: shiny, raw layers of scar tissue over scar tissue and a few wet cuts. They leave me half a bagful of shitty magazines and one rogue cigarette filter.

  I get into bed in my underwear. One of the nurses sits in the open doorway reading a magazine. One-to-one – it’s a nice term for suicide watch. I’m not going to be left alone.

  I stare at the red light on the ceiling and listen to the nurse turning pages.

  I can’t get comfortable on the slippery sheets. The curtains, held up by magnets, flutter even though there’s no breeze, and the green light from the corridor stops me forgetting I am in a hospital. Nurses beep in and out of the office next door with a swipe of cards. Distant humming from the motorway. Sirens. Coughing from the nurse in the doorway. Cups of tea coming and going. Packets being opened. Whispered conversations.

  Rain starts to scratch at the window, and Iris is everywhere. I can see her in the fluttering of the curtains. I can hear her in the rain, and when I close my eyes I can feel her breath on my neck, her arms on my back, her hands around my throat. Her fingernails digging into the palms of my hands. I stumble out of bed with Iris clinging to my ankles, and the nurse gives me two oval sleeping pills. Then I manage to get rid of Iris, until the storm is over and tomorrow begins.

  I wake to sharp light. A new nurse is sitting on the chair facing me.

  She’s sh
ort and plump, with dyed dark-red hair that has a sort of mercilessly straightened quality about it. For a while I watch her, still lying in the cocoon I have made for myself, as she flicks quietly through ‘My husband ate our baby!’ in bubble writing. On the floor next to her is a clipboard and an observation sheet.

  I sit up. She turns to me.

  ‘Morning,’ she says brightly. Too brightly. ‘I’m Emma.’ She has a faint accent, Scottish, it might be.

  I smile awkwardly. That’s a thing about me: I’m awkward, I think. I always feel like everything I’m doing is awkward. Even that sentence was awkward.

  OK, so there’s Emma sitting on one of the standard NHS chairs with holes in it and spongy stuffing spewing out, and I’m sitting on my bed and then she asks if I want a shower.

  ‘Yeah,’ I reply lamely. I say it like I’m struggling to make a decision, even though I’ve been certain that I want a shower since before I got here. Emphasis on the ‘y’ in ‘yeah’. Why did I do that? I don’t know.

  ‘You’ll need something to cover your dressings, they can’t get wet. We’ve got some waterproof sleeves you can use . . .’ She turns to the wardrobe behind her and passes me a piece of plastic that smells of rubber.

  I leave my room and head towards the sign for the nearest bathroom.

  ‘Oh, no, you can’t use that one,’ Emma calls after me. ‘The cold water doesn’t work. It’s a safety risk, you might get burned. Don’t try the one opposite, either, the shower doesn’t work at all in that one.’

  I follow Emma to a shower room at the other end of the corridor. ‘This is the only one that works at the moment, sorry!’ she giggles.

  ‘OK, thanks.’

  Emma hovers. Great. She’s not leaving.

  ‘Just imagine I’m not here,’ Emma says, stepping into the bathroom after me. ‘I’ve seen it all before.’

  I start to undress, half clutching the napkin-sized NHS towel against myself, half battling to take off my vest with one hand. How can I imagine she isn’t there? She is there – right there, pretending not to look at my naked body as I fumble with the shower switch, but I know she is looking. You never know, I might try to drown myself in the toilet bowl. I suppose she has to keep her guard up.

  The shower judders unenthusiastically into life. I reach for the shower curtain.

  ‘Sorry, you’re not allowed to shut those.’

  I turn towards the wall in a last-ditch attempt to preserve my dwindling dignity. I feel every inch of my body as I move under the stuttering shower. I can feel each drop as it splashes against my body. My nerves have come alive, and they’re fuzzing at each touch. I look down just to check I’m not sending off electricity sparks. Of course I’m not. Why would I be? Why did I think that?

  There are no proper taps in the bathroom; just buttons embedded into the side of the sink. There’s no toilet seat either. I don’t know why. They’ve overestimated my ability to self-destruct. I wouldn’t have done anything with a toilet seat, I don’t think.

  I half-heartedly clean myself with a bar of stodgy soap, not daring to turn around and look at Emma, in case she is laughing at how vile my body is. I don’t want to see. The shower shuts off as shampoo is running down my face, and with my eyes closed I search for the switch, splattering against parts of the wall with soapy hands before finding it. If Emma wasn’t laughing before, she definitely will be now. Foams of shampoo slide over my shoulders and swirl away into the drains. I blink water out of my eyes and turn the shower off. Cold post-shower air blasts me and I seek warmth from the pathetic towel, but it is no better at that than it was at hiding me from Emma. I pull off the plastic sleeve and there are beads of condensation on my arm. A nurse walks past the open bathroom door, keys jangling from his hips. Nurse? Jailer, more like.

  I dress too quickly, shoving on my clothes; the zip on my jeans scratches against my thigh as I pull them up. Someone calls a patient for their medication.

  ‘I’m asleep,’ comes the reply of a boy, in a hassled tone. ‘I’ll take them later.’

  Back down the corridor in Emma’s shadow, past a door with a sign that says CLINIC ROOM. Outside is a short queue, two boys and a girl wearing an over-washed Mickey Mouse onesie with the hood up. A nurse hands out paper cups. She watches each patient as they swallow the contents, makes them open their mouths and stick their tongues out afterwards. One by one.

  Emma keeps up a steady stream of jovial chatter about her three dogs, who aren’t allowed on the sofas, the apple tree in her garden, her university friends who don’t drink alcohol, the attractive painter redecorating her house . . . I smile and nod and pretend I don’t want to be dead.

  We end up in a kind of lounge. My damp hair drips down my back. Another nurse in blue sits in a beanbag in the corner of the room, his eyes fixed on a TV morning chat show. The flat-screen TV is behind a see-through panel. He’s singing ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’ and raises a hand in my general direction. I quietly sit down on the edge of the nearest sofa, the smallest one, trying to ignore the anxiety that is starting in my stomach and making its way up to my chest and down to my legs and ankles and feet. Pins and needles in my calves. Emma sits next to me.

  ‘Nurse Will, that agency nurse is refusing to give me any paracetamol because she says Dr Flores hasn’t written it up.’ The girl in the Mickey Mouse onesie marches into the room.

  ‘And what do you want me to do about it, Alice?’ the nurse called Will sings from his beanbag.

  ‘I’ve got a splitting headache . . . Please?’ says Alice.

  ‘Can’t do anything, sorry,’ he sings unsympathetically. ‘Talk to Dr Flores when he gets in.’

  ‘Fine, then,’ she says grumpily, before sweeping out of the room as dramatically as she came in, apparently not noticing my pathetic presence. Regret is rushing through my veins about every single bloody stupid mistake I’d ever made, because now I’ve ended up here. I can’t be here.

  ‘We usually go down for breakfast at eight,’ says Emma, in an obvious attempt to engage me in conversation.

  My mind doesn’t have space for mundane things like that. I can’t stay here, being followed around like a naughty dog, prodded with metal detectors and viewed through a viewing slat like a different animal, an animal in a zoo. I’m not supposed to be here. I just nod and pretend to look at the clock on the wall, though in truth I can’t actually work out what time it is at all, because my brain is too tired and aching from lack of sleep and too much thinking. I read four-thirty, which is obviously wrong.

  By the time I read quarter to five, more patients are congregating.

  ‘Alice, come over and introduce yourself,’ says Emma patronizingly to the onesie girl.

  ‘Hi.’ Alice sits obligingly next to me on the sofa.

  ‘This is Tamar.’

  ‘I’m Tamar,’ I repeat dumbly. How long have I known Alice for? Approximately seven seconds, and I’ve already made an idiot of myself.

  ‘That’s a nice name,’ she says.

  ‘Thanks.’

  The conversation dries up. She smiles again and turns to picking her fingernails. Even her fingernails are more interesting than me.

  A nurse with lopsided eyeliner appears at the lounge door. She looks like she’s learnt to do her make-up on YouTube. ‘Let’s go downstairs,’ she says. ‘Breakfast’s ready.’

  The dining room is divided in two. Half of it is made up of blue plastic tables; the other half houses a battered snooker table, and a sad selection of burgundy chairs. The tables have names, Emma tells me – Ruby, Sapphire, Emerald, Diamond. We are jewels. I sit where I’m told to – on Ruby; that’s for people who need more ‘support’ she says – and wait for other people to start eating first. I watch how much they eat and how fast they eat it, and I chew each piece of toast in my mouth twenty times accordingly. There are twelve patients and six nurses.

  A boy sits next to me, swaddled in an oversized Batman T-shirt. He looks tired – not in the red-puffy-eyes way: more in his laboured movements; the w
ay his limbs seem too heavy for his body and his chin leans low against his neck as if it is too much effort to hold it up. His lips are dry and a network of small fissures runs through them, as if he doesn’t drink enough water, which maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he just sticks to the cup of apple juice that he’s pouring unsteadily. His hands are a patchwork of scabby grazes, over the knuckles and up to where his fingernails begin, dark and cracked. He spreads butter on his toast but doesn’t eat it. Instead he has two cups of clear golden apple juice and a packet of jam that he eats with a teaspoon.

  Alice sits opposite me, chewing toast. She’s chopped one slice into eight pieces.

  On the other side of her is a girl who is curved into herself like a frightened caterpillar. She’s holding a piece of paper, crinkled from too much paint. I make out ‘Harper’. Is that her name? It doesn’t suit her. Harps are big and clunky and impossible to move but she would be small even if she’d not starved herself down to nothingness. Her hollow cheekbones mean her glasses perch uncomfortably on her face, making her eyes look huge, like an insect, a bluebottle. She touches the spoon beside her and flinches. Spoons don’t bite.

  Nurse Will and Lopsided Nurse eat their breakfast on our table too, acting as though they aren’t interested in how much we eat, what we eat and how we eat it. It’s not convincing. That’s why they’re there. As soon as they finish one plate of food, something else is produced: cereal, yoghurt, juice. Alice eats it all solemnly and pensively. Except for the milk.

  ‘I’m not drinking it,’ says Alice flatly. ‘It’s disgusting.’

  ‘You’ve got to drink it,’ says Nurse Will. ‘Just chug it all down in one and it’ll be over before you know it.’

  I scrape Flora over my toast, listening to the argument as it brews on the Ruby table.

  ‘Two sugars are the way to do it,’ Emma says, ripping open packets of sugar and pouring them into the mug. ‘There’s no other way as far as I’m concerned.’

  ‘I’ve had milk on my cereal already this morning, I’m not drinking it as well,’ Alice says adamantly.

  ‘Look, Alice, we’re not having this discussion again,’ says Agency Nurse from a chair across the room. ‘You need to drink the milk.’