On a Scale of One to Ten

by Ceylan Scott

I’m the sort of person that things never end well for. I can’t even drink a cup of green tea without ruining everyone’s day and trying to kill an anorexic patient. I think these thoughts will keep me awake, but they don’t. My medication courses through my veins and encases my brain, and I sleep.

  ‘You’ve got a visitor, Tamar,’ Nurse Will sings, as he saunters into the lounge. ‘A young man.’

  ‘We’re not in the eighteenth century,’ I say.

  ‘Doesn’t change the facts,’ Nurse Will replies, flopping into his beanbag in the corner of the room.

  ‘Is it Toby? I didn’t know he was coming.’

  ‘Oh, so you know the young man in question?’

  ‘Go away,’ I snap. ‘Can you open the door?’

  He huffs his way back to standing and unlocks the door with a clank. Toby stands in the hallway, running his fingers through his hair.

  ‘I can leave if this is too . . .’

  ‘No, no. It’s a nice surprise.’

  Something shifts in his face. A muscle underneath his skin or something. Relief, maybe. I smile when he smiles.

  ‘That’s good. I just wanted to see how you are, really. I thought about phoning the ward but it didn’t feel the same as coming in person . . .’

  ‘We can’t stay here,’ I say, interrupting him before he enters into a monologue of War and Peace. ‘My room’s just up the stairs.’

  I’ve never done that before. Had a boy in my room. And I hadn’t imagined that the first time would be on a hospital bed with ten centimetres between us and a nurse peering through the viewing slat like we are courting birds in a zoo. But that’s just how things turn out.

  ‘So,’ Toby starts. ‘How are you? This place seems . . . nice.’

  ‘Yeah, we’re all categorically crazy, so things can be a little wild at times, but we get by.’

  He grins as if he isn’t sure if he should be grinning. Uncomfortable and jaunty at the same time.

  ‘I’m glad it’s not too bad. You know, when Mum told me you were in a . . . mental hospital –’ he lowers his voice as if those words are taboo – ‘I was kind of freaked out. But I’m glad you’re getting better.’

  No one says anything about getting better.

  ‘Look, Tay, there’s no point in pretending I don’t know about stuff,’ Toby says, looking directly at me. He’s been waiting to say this, I can tell. ‘Your parents . . . I mean, our parents are pretty close.’

  I try not to look alarmed. ‘So, what? You and your parents sit down every evening and gossip about me?’

  ‘Come on, you know it isn’t like that. We’re just worried about you.’

  ‘What do you want me to tell you, then?’ I say.

  ‘I just want to know why,’ he says softly. ‘I don’t understand why.’

  Of course he doesn’t understand why. He’s never woken up after a night of scarcely sleeping to another day of barely staying awake with evil, evil, evil hollering in his brain. What have you done to deserve the right to be alive? Nothing. You’re a murderer, and, even worse, you’re destroying the lives of everyone around you. You’re a burden. Your parents hate you, they’ll cry with relief at your funeral, if you even have a funeral, that is. You ungrateful, ugly, selfish, evil piece of shit. Don’t get out of bed. Stay under the covers where you’re not bothering anyone. Stay under the covers; then, tomorrow, kill yourself.

  ‘It’s hard to explain,’ I say. ‘I guess I was just feeling miserable. I hadn’t slept well and I had two essays due in. I panicked.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘Yeah. We all get miserable. Essays are shit.’

  I smile at him, because I know he is trying to help. It’s not his fault I can’t bring myself to talk about it.

  ‘Exactly,’ I say cheerfully. ‘It will probably happen to you too!’

  ‘Great,’ he says with a laugh. ‘I look forward to it.’

  ‘Did my parents tell you to come?’

  ‘No!’ he said indignantly. ‘I just – I was worried, that’s all . . .’ He lingers at the foot of my bed.

  ‘It’s OK. Sorry. Thanks for coming,’ I say.

  We sit in silence.

  ‘I brought Maltesers,’ he says suddenly, pulling a crumpled sharing packet out of his jacket pocket. ‘Can you eat?’

  I take one because he looks so miserable and swill it around in my mouth as the chocolate unwraps itself and the biscuit fizzes against my tongue.

  ‘How are you?’ I say.

  ‘Good, yeah. Things are good. We won the county championships last week. We thought they would call it off because the hail was chucking it down but it went ahead.’

  Cross-country is worlds away from Lime Grove. It’s everything that Lime Grove isn’t: it is messy and open and freeing and fierce and made up of wind and mud and cold air. I used to run with Toby. He was an exercise fanatic, but he could drop everything and get any drug you wanted within an hour and smoke himself into cannabis oblivion the day before a ten-mile race. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him eat a single green vegetable, apart from the time that his mum hid peas in his vanilla ice cream when we were six.

  ‘Where to next, then?’ I say. ‘Nationals?’

  ‘Yeah,’ he replies. ‘Gotta go to London.’

  ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘You should come back some time. You know, when you feel up to it,’ he says. ‘We miss you.’

  He reminds me of the time when I ate one too many Toxic Wastes on the coach journey to a tournament and the driver had to pull over on the hard shoulder so that I could throw them all up on the grass verge, and the whole team had to return home before we arrived at the competition venue. We were twelve then, and Toby was as lanky and gangly as he ever was, boxed into that stage of puberty where he’d stretched up but not out.

  He looks different now, as he reminisces over the time when he lost his way on the course and the race had to be called off halfway through. He’s filled out with muscle weight and he coughs tar from his chest like he didn’t do when he was twelve. His eyes have changed colour too, almost.

  It is not until Nurse Will knocks on the door and announces that visiting hours are almost over that I realize I could have studied his face all night – each twitch of his eyelids, rogue hair over his eyes, the defined jawline like strokes on a charcoal drawing.

  ‘Thanks for coming,’ I say as I walk with him towards the exit. ‘It was fun.’

  ‘Yeah, Tay, there’s something I need to mention . . .’ he starts. ‘Mia . . .’

  I stop.

  ‘Well, she’s been talking about stuff recently, you know, about Iris and the stuff she said, and she wanted to talk about it with you, not for long, you know . . .’

  I almost see the lump that Toby swallows in his throat.

  We turn towards the waiting room, and there is Elle, bobbing up and down like a rubber duck in a bath, as she always does, and she is talking to someone, a girl with a slight curve at the top of her back, a girl with a brown French braid, twisted over one shoulder. I can see her lips moving, her pencil features hissing syllables into the air. Elle nods and smiles, looks at me, and they laugh together.

  Mia’s told her something. Elle knows what has happened. She knows who I am.

  Mia pauses like a cat about to pounce; I know, because I can see her mouth form a static groove in her cheeks.

  I go over and sit down, and Elle disappears. Toby hovers by the door, looking flustered, one leg up like a flamingo, then gives me a quick smile and a wave goodbye.

  Mia and I are left, awkwardly sitting on the burgundy chairs, in a silence more unpleasant than a screaming baby.

  ‘Tay—’ she starts. ‘You OK today?’

  I’ve got lockjaw.

  ‘I wanted to come and see you,’ Mia says. ‘I know it’s a bad day today, and it would probably be playing on your mind.’

  Time is warped in a psychiatric hospital but I nod. I know the day. I was just trying not to think about it.

  Mia looks at me. ‘You OK?’ she r
epeats. ‘Or are you faking it?’

  I open my mouth and shut it again. Today is the fourth of March.

  On that day years ago, Iris’s birthday, it had been Mia’s idea to get piercings. She’d had her nipple pierced by the same sleazy guy who’d done my nose ring; no gloves and an electronic cigarette in between his chipped teeth. I’d followed suit because she was right; Mia was always right.

  I’m not sure whether she has never liked me, and my madness was the excuse that she’d been looking for to hate me. Whatever it was, she didn’t take it well. She took it worse than anyone else.

  ‘You just had to, didn’t you?’ says Mia suddenly, like she’s reading my mind.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know what,’ she snaps. ‘Causing scenes at school, getting yourself here. After Iris.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I say. ‘It’s not like that . . .’

  ‘I can’t actually believe you, Tamar! You just swan around like everything is so much harder for you, when it’s not! It’s fucking not, OK? Life is shit for everyone, it’s shit for me too, but that doesn’t mean we all have to start moping and slitting our wrists for everyone to see. You’re a fucking idiot. You just used Iris as an excuse to get attention, everyone can see it. You weren’t even close to her. She was just some girl in our class.’

  ‘You’re not even giving me a chance to—’

  ‘What, so you can revel in yourself and your petty problems even more?’ She stands up, her chair scraping loudly. ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘You can’t be serious . . . I didn’t choose this . . .’

  But she is already at the other side of the dining room.

  ‘You saw her last, Tamar,’ she says over her shoulder, slamming the door as she leaves.

  I don’t have time to focus on my breathing and notice the fast rising and falling of my chest before the world around me begins to crumble into a thousand tiny pixels like a broken TV, and vomit rushes into my brain and I’m heaving like a dying dog on the floor.

  ‘Tay . . .’ Elle is crouching down beside me. ‘It’s all right . . .’

  ‘What did she tell you?’ I whisper.

  I hear Mia being ushered out of the front door with a clink of keys and a beep of a code.

  Elle laughs. ‘What are you talking about? I thought she was your friend?’

  ‘Friend? Is that what she said?’

  ‘She said she was your friend, Iris’s friend – that it was Iris’s birthday. Who’s Iris?’

  I’m not angry with Toby for bringing her, and I don’t know why. Maybe I should be. I’m angry that she’s thought to come, that she’s thought about the best way to reach me, bringing with her all the memories that I’ve tried in vain to forget. She blames me for Iris, and so does every other person in the universe. I know it. I’m angry, but she’s right.

  You killed her. You killed her. You killed her.

  On the fourth of March last year I went into town and bought Iris a birthday present: a bottle of bubble bath. It was impersonal, could have been for anyone. I ate two pints of my feelings in ice cream and watched Friends, stared at the blurred shapes on the TV screen, hoping for a cheap laugh to quell the guilt hacking away at my abdomen.

  Iris would have been sixteen; legal to smoke and have sex and get married.

  I stole that milestone from her. Iris is dead. I am alive.

  Later I found myself by the weir. An eerily warm March night, moisture hanging in the air, the snowdrops almost over. Everything was clammy – my socks saturated in warm sweat, my hands sticky with the blood from the dark cuts on my forearm.

  The police found me knee-deep in the water, my skirt billowing out in its depths. I didn’t put up a fight, so they didn’t section me.

  Was I going to jump? I don’t know.

  I spent the night in A&E. They pronounced me sane enough to go home at eight-thirty the following morning. The doctors gave me precautionary antibiotics in case the river water that had leached into my cuts gave me septicaemia. I didn’t take them.

  I sat with the school counsellor in a room with frosted windows at the back of the school, near the sports hall. It smelt of lavender and crushed orange peel. Brittle cactuses on the desk didn’t need watering; they were dead.

  Six sessions, once a week, every Thursday, for one hour, during the first half of double French. A ‘safe place’. I said every single thing they wanted to hear from a person turned inwards with grief.

  I know Iris won’t come back, yes. I know she’s gone. She’s a dead purple-and-yellow flower, crumpled petals curled in on themselves, under the surface of the earth . . .

  If I made it poetic and beautiful, the school counsellor would not see through the rippling illusion, the lies.

  ‘Will you self-harm again?’

  ‘Of course not. I’m not crazy, honestly.’

  ‘Is there something you’re not telling me?’

  Iris, a flowery ghost girl lying beneath the world with the earthworms, in the soil, blissfully Resting in Peace. Tamar, a sad and confused friend to the flowery ghost girl . . .

  I smoked cigarettes that looked like fireflies as I lit them up, and scratched the flaky skin on my arm with the blunt scissors.

  Why shouldn’t I draw scissors across my skin? Who’s to say I don’t deserve it?

  The school counsellor bought my lies, fed them into her eagerly written notes, and after six weeks said I was ‘OK’. The worst was over. I would plummet no further.

  Normal life resumed and I went to double French again.

  The plummet had already begun.

  They all knew. They saw from the way the craters below my eyes were dark tulips against the rough edges of my skin. The anaemic blue of the whites of my eyes.

  I got moved back a year, came in for one hour a day; one hour on a magenta plastic seat that someone once drew a swastika on incorrectly, so actually it was Hindu and signified something delightful.

  One hour of algebra. Solve the quadratic equation x = trips to the sun-frazzled mind + graveyard wanderings. It’s easy, Tamar, we did it for GCSE, remember? All I had to do was walk the length of the main corridor, try not to be smashed into a locker by the scurry of Year Sevens hurtling through because they were late for the bell, and enter the Maths classroom with FINE written across my forehead, and talk to no one for fifty-nine minutes. Get up, ignore the homework instructions that my shaken-champagne-bottle head did not have the space for, and go, go, go, leaving the school bell ringing for lesson number 4.

  No one said a single word to me except for the teacher, who gave me a password on a crumpled scrap of paper for a revision site and told me I’d need it. He didn’t tell anyone else that.

  And Mia. One minute we were friends, and the next she couldn’t bear to look at me. We’d thundered through ten years of a turbulent friendship, but she couldn’t handle the monster. I couldn’t handle the monster, either.

  My mum cried a lot at different times once the monster came. Apparently different tears are actually chemically different; so maybe if you put all the drops of her tears under a microscope you’d find every molecule of every emotion, except happy. She didn’t cry happy tears. She was a lot meeker now, too, and she congratulated me even when I didn’t deserve congratulations. I went to school for an hour; I hadn’t saved the world.

  The counsellor told me I didn’t know myself. She said that I was disconnected and I needed to find my identity, my true personality beneath the drama and the tears and the turmoil. She was wrong. I didn’t have identity disturbance; I knew who I was. There are nice people: the ones who help little old ladies cross the road and give sandwiches to homeless people. Then there are the mindless hedonists who love themselves a little too much. Then there are the bad people: the thieves, the serial killers, the mad axe-murderers. And then you have me. I was the most dangerous person of all. I knew I was evil.

  Every night I checked my wardrobes, under my bed, behind my curtains, just to make sure there was nothing lurking, someone planning to
avenge Iris by smothering me with pillows in my sleep. I protected myself by sleeping on the floor, curled up like a cat, without any pillows or covers. I put a knife in the drawer of my bedside table. I didn’t deserve such obsessive self-preservation, but I did it anyway.

  It was strange, I guess, that despite my exhaustive efforts, I couldn’t quite protect me from myself.

  I try not to think about Iris after Mia’s visit, but when you try not to think about something it usually makes you think about it more. Iris’s birthday today. Iris is dead. I am alive.

  And . . .

  I think of the three razor blades that I’d smuggled in in my hair, but so far have managed to avoid using. I think of other ways out, but hospitals for suicidal people think about things like that carefully. Anti-ligature curtains, anti-ligature doors, baths, sinks, windows that don’t open properly. The options for death are limited. I sigh.

  And then I know what I am going to do. My fingers skim the battered skin along my left forearm, tracing a long blue line down to my thumb. It protrudes slightly. I walk into the bathroom. I turn the bath tap on, pressing it over and over every twenty seconds as it times out. From my jeans I extract the three razor blades, fresh from the pack.

  They hadn’t searched me carefully enough. I hid them on the magnetic curtain rail in my room, in all sorts of other places too.

  I win.

  I make three thin scratches on my thigh, watch to see which one draws the most blood. A sort of experiment. I choose the second one, a sharp sense of fear lurching into my stomach. I am scared. I am scared of failing, I am scared of succeeding, I am scared of the mess I will leave behind.

  And my palms are sweaty and my heart beats an insane tattoo against my ribcage. Slowly, I begin to undress.

  Naked, I walk over to where everyone leaves their body washes. We aren’t supposed to leave them around, but we do. I pick out a children’s bubble bath. I’m not sure whose it is, but the smell reminds me of childish, carefree, rubber-duck bath-times. I squeeze a liberal amount into the bath tub and swirl it round, watching as its amber colour dissolves into nothing.

  Should I stop?