by Ceylan Scott
‘Stop being so creepy,’ I say to him, as I take the pill from the paper cup he hands to me, like always. It’s almost ten o’clock, almost time for bed again.
I watch Elle as she puts her pill in her mouth and swigs back water. I watch her as she takes the pill back out again and slips it into her pocket with unnerving skill. She doesn’t see me looking at her.
‘I’ve got even more fluoxetine for the fantastic Alice!’ Nurse Will calls out.
I can still hear him singing, ‘Quetiapine for the quintessentially curious Will,’ as I leave the clinic room and walk down the corridor to my bedroom.
‘Oh, Will, you super thing, we’ve also got you some sertraline!’
Hooray. Super-lucky pill-guzzling Patient Will. Mental hospitals have an extraordinarily warped view of reality. Which, I guess, is quite ironic, when you think about it.
It takes half an hour for the risperidone to kick in: a huge pressure pounding against my eyelids as my head droops on to the pillow that’s still damp from last night’s dribble. Risperidone sleep isn’t like other sleep; you can sleep for twelve hours but you still won’t wake up refreshed and buzzing and ready to face the day. It’s not that sort of sleep. I’m vaguely away of my bedroom door swinging open, the harsh light of a torch flashing against my face, then a click and a return to the darkness. I don’t know the time.
However, I do know that at one-thirty in the morning, Patient Will kicks off. I recognize his voice now. Listening to someone else having a madness attack is frightening. You want to go and grab them and hold them but hugs don’t fix Patient Will, because if I tried to do that he would think I’m strangling him and his frantic breathing would become more and more frenzied and he probably would hit me. I don’t leave my room as Patient Will shouts the building down, his laboured breaths drumming louder and louder and LOUDER in my head, engulfed in terror and confusion that nothing can solve.
In some ways, it’s more frightening when it isn’t happening to you, because at least then you can feel every single awful sensation in your body, and you can clutch hold of them and let them wax and wane. I can only hear, and hope that he makes it through the night in no more than two pieces.
Luckily I’m too dosed up to worry for long. I guess that’s why some people call psychiatry ‘social control’. I understand that now. But I’m also too drugged up to protest for change.
At Iris’s funeral, everyone wore purple and yellow, like the flower, but that didn’t hide the fact that autumn was sidling in and everything was decaying. It was a dull Monday afternoon, and the grey clouds hung low in sprawling shapes like giant puppets.
Iris’s coffin was oblong and pine, unceremoniously draped in a white sheet, like her parents hadn’t wanted to think about it. They sat on the front pew in church, eyes fixed straight ahead, arms linked. They didn’t cry, but pain was sculpted into the ridges of their brows, into the skin hanging loosely from jutting cheekbones, their unironed clothes, the stubble on her father’s chin that looked like hundreds of tiny parasites. I watched them. They didn’t cry.
The church was small, and the stained-glass window poured a kaleidoscope of light on to the altar. Iris’s cousin reminisced in the pulpit about that time when they fell into the wasps’ nest and spent the night smothered in vinegar, but no one laughed. Iris was a gem, he said.
Outside, the gravestones were small but each one was tended with an unnerving dedication, with perfectly cut grass and jars of red roses.
The air was cool and I could see my breath swirling in front of me. I thought of Mia, how we used to pretend to be dragons when we were younger, snarling and chasing each other in the frosty school playground, until things went wrong.
I felt cold hands clutch my shoulders, and Mia locked me in an awkward embrace. ‘You all right?’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ I replied. I didn’t deserve Mia’s comfort, didn’t want it. ‘You’re holding me too tight. I can’t breathe.’
Mia loosened her arms. ‘Sorry, Tay.’
I ran out of the creaking church gates, ran all the way to the main road in a numb trance, caught the first bus I found, and did not get off until it terminated at the edge of the city, an hour later. I walked home.
One step, two step.
Let me tell you how anxiety is.
I knew people were looking, because my footsteps were too loud even though I was trying to be quiet. I was painfully aware of myself and I tried to focus on the cracks in the pavement as I walked, because apparently that’s the thing to do, but I just ended up swaying sideways and almost crashing into a child. Oh, God, it looked deliberate. That kid’s parent is going to think I’m some kind of psycho trying to beat her son up; quick: apologize, apologize. Now! Of course I said nothing and just scuttled awkwardly past like a crab, which was terrible because now that mother was going to hate me forever and ever and I can’t rectify the situation. I’d only been out five minutes and I’d already ruined someone’s life. What if that kid’s mother goes to the police about me? I briefly considered buying a different outfit from the charity shop across the road but I couldn’t go in there because I’d never been there before and it might be a front for drugs, kidnapping or prostitution. So instead I just turned into the corner shop and checked from behind the postcard stand that the person at the tills was someone I knew.
So, I was standing there at the till and Lucy was in an unusually friendly mood. I knew she was doing it to compensate for the fact that she’d noticed the slight wobble in my eyeliner and was trying to act normal so I didn’t feel deathly embarrassed. I tried to fix it before the funeral, I really did, but it’s hard to do when your hands won’t stop trembling. I redid it four times before I came, but it didn’t help as eyeliner is always best the first time round anyway. She was asking me what A-levels I’m taking and I was looking frantic and going red and trying to speak but it was coming out in a high-pitched screech like a dying eagle or something, so instead I just mumbled under my breath something about the Cold War, which I knew she’d find desperately boring but I said it anyway because it was better than the silence. By now Lucy was staring at my every imperfection and I was painfully awkward; she was looking at the way I was standing – perhaps my back was too hunched or my arm looked unnaturally placed? Oh, God, what if I have food in between my teeth? A knot in my hair? Heavy breathing, ugly legs, weird laugh, horrible clothes, horrible face, horrible voice, horrible, horrible, horrible. But Lucy just smiled and said, ‘History A-level? Oh, that’s nice.’ She made a joke about Rasputin that I didn’t understand, then I grabbed my cigarettes, bared my teeth in what was supposed to be a smile, and left.
The bell tinkled as the door shut and I saw a police car driving down the street. I wanted to cry. That’s it – they’re looking for me. Heads down, boys. Keep looking at those cracks. I was counting musical instruments in my head because I couldn’t think of anything else and I needed to stay calm.
Piano, cello, oboe.
The police car crawled towards me and I was sure it was slowing down.
Bassoon.
I could feel my heart rate going funny, like a broken clock. No, no, I needed to stay calm. The police car drew up beside me and I continued staring at the cracks in the pavement. Maybe, if I can’t see them, they can’t see me.
Saxophone. Violin.
The police car drove past and I watched its blue and yellow checks become smaller and smaller until it passed through the traffic lights and disappeared at the roundabout. I stayed put for a few minutes to allow the dizziness in my head to subside, then I walked home, trying to ignore the fact that I knew someone was following me.
When I got home, I frantically unlocked the front door and staggered up to my bedroom, panting and shaking like a dog. I smoked half the packet of cigarettes out of my window, curled up into my curtains. It made me feel sick, but I would choose sick over terrified any day.
I am never, ever, for as long as I live, leaving the house again.
‘Time to learn!’
exclaims Nurse Will. ‘Education is the building block of success, so everyone into the classroom!’
He makes a sweeping gesture with his arms as we file ungraciously into the makeshift classroom consisting of too many tables crammed into Therapy Room 1. We have school every weekday.
Elle stands by the window and remarks on the weather, waving a copy of The Great Gatsby. I haven’t known her long, but she’s charged into my life so loudly that it feels like she’s been a permanent fixture the whole time. Like a rechargeable battery. When I’m around her, problems are eclipsed by a haze of positivity and beauty. Elle makes time go faster because she has so much to say and to think about that there aren’t enough minutes in every day, so she ignores the constraints of night and day, because there are more important things to do, to be, to hope for.
She is everyone’s lifeboat, an amber whirlwind of life, the only one who can navigate the realities of madness. The only one who can get us singing ABBA into the dodgy karaoke microphone, rousing people with impassioned speeches like we are an army fighting a war. I suppose in some ways we are; it’s just a different kind of war. Maybe that’s why I don’t tell anyone that she isn’t taking her medication, because maybe then she’ll stay how she is, colourful and dancing in the corridors at midnight, even though I know that things are only going to go one way.
‘You can actually see the wind rustling through the trees,’ she says now. ‘I can see the wind.’
‘How? There aren’t any leaves,’ I say.
‘You don’t need leaves to see the wind,’ she replies quaintly, the pages of The Great Gatsby opening in a fan.
‘That’s lovely, Elle,’ says Maureen, the half-sighted English teacher with grizzled hair and a limp. ‘Let’s have a seat and you can think about wind imagery then. Jasper, do you have your essay on Mr Dorian Gray?’
Jasper passes over a dog-eared piece of A4 paper. ‘Elle ate the rest of it, sorry,’ he says, with a smirk in Elle’s direction.
‘Oh, dear,’ wheezes Maureen earnestly, ‘you really shouldn’t do that, Elle, paper will give you terrible indigestion . . .’
‘So sorry,’ says Elle. ‘It won’t happen again. It’s just, you know, I get so hungry sometimes that I can’t contain myself. I just eat the first things I see: Jasper’s homework, pen lids, knitting wool . . .’
‘She ate a furball once,’ I add.
‘Oh, yeah,’ breathes Elle, as if a fond memory has dawned upon her. ‘I ate the therapy cat’s furball. Tasted like mustard.’
‘A furball?’ splutters Maureen, horrified. ‘No, you mustn’t eat furballs, Elle.’
‘I’ll try,’ says Elle, very seriously. Jasper snorts.
‘Stop,’ I whisper to Jasper, stifling an explosion of laughter. ‘You’re scaring her.’
On the other side of Therapy Room 1, Alice is deep in a conversation with John, the supply teacher, about the reproductive system of chimpanzees. She is spending days at a time at home in the middle of the week, has been promoted to the Sapphire table and is eating everything on her plate, heckling Dr Flores for a discharge date.
‘So what you need to do is draw an annotated diagram . . .’ John says.
Obligingly, Alice takes a pencil and pencil sharpener from the tray and begins to draw. Patient Will stands up and leaves, muttering woes to himself. No one stops him.
For the next hour, I stare at a pile of history dates dotted between clumps of text in Comic Sans, but it doesn’t go in. Luckily, the perks of being a mental patient mean that I’m allowed to blame my ‘difficulty in concentrating’ for the fact that I’ve only written the Learning Objective when Maureen hobbles over to see how much I’ve done. Elle continues to stand up, barking occasional remarks about Jay Gatsby and Daisy Buchanan and green lights and traffic lights and road accidents to whoever will listen.
‘I think it’s creepy. I mean, he’s essentially just stalking her,’ she says, standing on one leg. ‘I wouldn’t want to be Daisy.’
‘Can you please write down your thoughts?’ says Maureen testily. ‘I’d like to see them down on paper.’
‘If she doesn’t eat it first,’ says Jasper under his breath, and Maureen shoots a look.
When the clock finally hits three-thirty, Elle is the first to dart out of the room and into the dining room for a snack. Jasper follows with a grim expression. Soft cheese and bread sticks. It takes him forty-five minutes to finish it.
A new ice-cream parlour, just ten minutes away from Lime Grove. ‘How lucky is that?’ says Nurse Will. ‘Not all recovering anorexics get to go to an ice-cream parlour, you know.’
He’s taken me, Jasper and Elle.
The parlour is called Mrs Moonshine’s. The surfaces are still wooden and unpainted and covered in screwdrivers, and there is one saw propped up in the corner. The blackboard behind the counter drips promises of caramel and spiced fruits and peppermint ice cream smothered in melted chocolate.
‘You all right?’ I ask Jasper, who is holding his hands clenched tight by his sides to conceal his shaking.
‘Yeah,’ he says with a forced grin. ‘It looks good.’ But I know he can only see the calories leeching out of the chalk and seeping into his skin.
‘You can just ask for it without the caramel,’ I say. ‘Elle can do it for you. She’s doing it for me.’
‘We’re as pathetic as each other.’ He laughs gratefully. If he isn’t the one who orders the scoop of syrupy vanilla ice cream, then he isn’t supposed to feel guilty. He doesn’t ask for it, or choose which sickly calorific flavour out of twenty to have. He has a thought process. I’m just awkward.
Elle pays ten pounds all in shining silver coins because Nurse Will wants to get rid of his change. The woman behind the counter grumpily counts every last five pence with stumpy fingers before slipping it into her Italian-flag apron with a grunt.
Elle and I share a tower of ginger ice cream and real cream and ginger-nut biscuits crushed like breadcrumbs over the top, and Jasper obligingly eats his scoop of vanilla ice cream with a teaspoon Nurse Will has brought from the unit in the pocket on his chest. That’s Jasper’s rule: if he misses breakfast, he will eat every single other meal with no complaints or rolling of eyeballs.
‘I think we should go do something,’ says Jasper as he clangs down his teaspoon with a flourish. He hasn’t scraped out the pool of ice cream that has melted at the bottom of the bowl.
‘I don’t think so,’ says Nurse Will. ‘You’re on sit-down.’
‘Seriously?’ Now Jasper does roll his eyes (the meal is settling in his stomach and he’s allowed to complain). ‘I just ate ice cream. That means I should be able to forfeit a sit-down.’
‘It’s great that you ate it, but don’t wind me up. A sit-down is a sit-down.’
They’re both winding each other up. Jasper is going to do his sit-down, but Nurse Will isn’t going to make him.
‘Fifteen minutes? Then a lap of the park before going back to the unit?’
Nurse Will tuts and shakes Jasper’s hand. ‘You drive a hard bargain, young man.’
I think every psychiatric ward needs a Nurse Will.
Nurse Will times exactly fifteen minutes on the stopwatch on his phone and as it beeps we stand up with scraping chairs and swiftly leave the shop, the woman behind the counter waving with her stumpy fingers as we go.
‘One lap only at a leisurely pace, am I understood?’
‘You’re so unprofessional,’ says Elle airily, as she slips her hands into gloves. They’re decorated with reindeers that have bobble noses.
‘She’s joking,’ says Jasper.
It is true, though – Nurse Will is unprofessional. He shouldn’t take us on a walk around the park, past the creaking swings still wet from last night’s frost, and the disused skatepark decorated in patternless graffiti, but we aren’t going to complain. A lap around the park is like gold for the strange people who are locked away night and day.
So we don’t tell anyone about our walk among the frozen cigarette en
ds and dying tangles of ivy, among the shards of sunlight, because Nurse Will could get kicked out of the unit quicker than it takes us to finish our lap, and we’d be stuck with no one but ever-changing figures in nursing uniforms swapping shifts at every chime of the clock.
But he’s given us a taste for freedom.
Overnight it snows. The nurses open the door to the garden in the morning, and the sharp air spills in as they let us out.
We play in the snow like eight-year-olds. We are teenagers, all of us, but, locked away in the madhouse, who can judge us for making snowmen all morning long? We aim snowballs at the half-open window of Dr Flores’ office, and it isn’t until Jasper gets one in and it splatters against the grubby carpet that he sticks his head out with a queer expression on his face. I think he’s smiling. Perhaps he is puzzled that it seems the snow has managed to cure us of our sadness in one day, and our flushed faces snorting at him are enough for him to spend the rest of the day pondering. He waves as he shuts his window and returns to his desk.
The Great Escape is Elle’s idea, but it takes the three of us to manufacture it. We sit at the bottom of the garden when everyone else has gone in, next to the withered potted plants, a relic of the failed Gardening Club.
‘This fence isn’t even high. If we wanted to run away, they couldn’t stop us,’ says Elle.
At first, I’m not sure if she’s joking. Sometimes she’s hard to read. Iris painted on the flicks in her eyeliner so nobody could tell what was going on underneath. She was silent, and Elle wears her heart on her sleeve, but they’re both as mysterious as each other.
‘It’s just roads behind it – I can see from my room. Ten seconds and we’d be gone.’
‘I’d give it twenty,’ says Jasper, a grin forming. ‘Twenty seconds to freedom.’ His black hair tumbles over his eyes and he brushes it back impatiently.
‘Look,’ Elle continues, standing up, ‘we just move this bench closer to the fence and we’re halfway there. We should do it.’