by Ceylan Scott
We didn’t speak on the journey. Jacob turned Radio One on and laughed at the unfunny jokes the presenters made. We got caught at every red light there was and I sat there and thought about how this showed that the whole world was against me; I was hated, even by traffic lights. I didn’t blame the world. I was a murderer, after all. Jacob took a route I wasn’t used to – a stretch of motorway, through three roundabouts, past a McDonald’s Drive Thru, down winding roads creeping through dreary suburbs, and over one toll bridge.
Turn off down a badly maintained road past the hospital and buzz the gates at the end, get greeted by the drone of a bored-sounding receptionist sat in front of a computer. Wait for the gates to creak open with a shudder.
It was a low-set, poorly painted white building with slabs of grey concrete still exposed near the bottom. There was a small token lime tree near the front door.
Jacob knew the nurses and they greeted each other with shouts and aggressive handshakes. The receptionists were protected by a screen in case someone tried to kill them. They made sure that the front door was shut and bolted in two places before they opened the door that led out of the waiting room.
I walked through it to the other side.
The park is saturated in mud from the April shower earlier in the day; it has spread from the grass on to the gravel paths that entwine their way through the trees. The playground to my right looks older than when I last came here a few years ago; the swings are rustier and they creak in the breeze, and the see-saw has lost the bright scarlet colour it once had. A small child and his father sit morosely in the soggy sandpit, half-heartedly scooping the heavy sand into buckets.
‘OK, then,’ says Dad, sitting down on the nearest bench, Brew panting by his side, like he can’t imagine anything worse than a jog.
‘Dad,’ I start. I’m not sure what I’m going to say.
‘Sorry,’ he says stiffly. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Why?’ I reply, though I know why.
‘It’s just . . . it’s nice to be spending time with you again. It’s nice that you’re getting better. Off you go . . .’
It’s like I am the dog: he has released me to dart into the bushes, chase squirrels up trees, bark at my own shadow as it flickers between the leaves. Freedom – for a limited time only.
I don’t know if I should stretch like I used to before I started to run. I try to touch my toes but find I can’t reach. Good start.
My feet feel stiffer than they used to as I speed up into a jog, trainers slapping against the wet ground and spewing mud on to the backs of my calves. I follow the path round to where I used to go: steeply up, dodging smooth tree roots that swell out of the ground, and brambles that snatch like gnarled claws at my ankles as I go. My heart flutters. I’m not used to it doing this. I remembered strong, consistent heartbeats that pounded with every step forward that I took, not confused taps like a bad drummer. I turn round and see my dad staring down at his phone on the bench below me. I can just disappear and he won’t know. I shake my head to eject the thought and carry on running, even though my legs have started to ache and a stitch is gnawing in my side. This isn’t like me. I don’t get stitches. Or, at least, I didn’t two years ago. The path curves round and the lake lies in front of me, dark and still. A swan courses through the middle, and it would be romantic if it wasn’t for the extent of the algae squatting along the banks, collecting the rubbish that has been thrown in – parking tickets, empty crisp packets, a Sainsbury’s shopping trolley perched above the water.
One, two, one, two. The mud splats have reached my thigh. That is OK. Mud is OK. My heart rate begins to level out. A duck quacks indignantly and runs across the path in front of me, its feathers ruffled, as if I’ve disturbed its sleep in the reeds. I’m running . . . in my head there are other runners beside me, and I feed off their energy, their eyes fixed low on the ground, their necks sticky with sweat, their breathing . . . I can run faster, faster than every person I overtake and faster with every person I overtake, my legs slicing through the air faster than I want to go.
The fog that wandered into my brain and made its home there years ago, snuggled around my pre-frontal cortex, lifts. It doesn’t go away, but it lifts. If Dr Flores wants to know what number I’m on now, I’d give him a nine. I am alive.
My daydream ends when I’m suddenly aware of my phone vibrating in the tight pocket of my Lycra leggings, buzzing against my thigh. The fog flops back down. People don’t call me. Panting for breath (it could have been the running; it could have been the panic), I pull it out.
It’s Toby.
I don’t like phone calls. I don’t like the fact that you can’t see the person on the other end of the line. You don’t know if they’re laughing at you or laughing with you, or cursing you into the flaming pits of hell. You can’t see their expression or their body language. You can’t guess what they’re thinking.
Trembling, I press Accept and hold the phone to my ear.
‘Hi,’ I say.
‘Hi,’ says Toby.
‘Hi,’ I repeat.
‘Yeah, hi, sorry, I was just ringing because your dad told me you had your phone today. I wanted to see how things were.’
‘They’re good,’ I say.
‘Look, I’m sorry about my party.’
‘That’s all right,’ I say. ‘I don’t really remember it much anyway. I’m sorry too, though. I probably ruined it for everyone.’
He laughs. Is he disappointed?
‘You don’t remember?’
‘Nah,’ I say. ‘Not a thing.’
‘Oh, OK then. Cool . . . I’ll let you get on with it.’
What would Elle do? Fuck it.
‘Wait. I – shall we hang out some time? Next weekend?’
‘Yeah, sure. Count me in.’ I think he’s smiling.
There has been a shift in Elle over the past week. Everyone has felt it. She’s crossed some invisible canyon on a tightrope and found that the grass is not greener on that side.
It starts when Alice is discharged. She leaves with her mum’s arm tight around her back, her dad clutching her suitcase and her brother tugging at her coat. Elle hugs her and steps back with a curious expression on her face. I can’t tell exactly what she is thinking, but I understand it. It isn’t fair.
Something has changed. It just isn’t obvious what, but her nursing observations increase to one check every five minutes. A torch flashing every five minutes in the night. Her slots from the shower schedule have remained unused for the past five days; ten minutes extra of wasting time running water over cold hands in the bathroom for the rest of us. She still talks and eats with us at mealtimes and goes to school; she hasn’t fallen into a cavernous pit of depression where staring at the wall is the only thing to do, but something is different. I think we noticed the change before she did – quietly spoken comments about ‘Does anyone have a right to live?’ and sweating that makes her palms so clammy that the cutlery slips in her fingers and clatters to the floor. The nurses take her blood pressure every morning and every evening to check that the nervousness in her brain isn’t about to cause a heart attack. Before, she wanted to talk about travelling to distant countries and starting psychiatric hospital revolutions, but now Dr Flores prescribes her double the dose of lamotrigine and makes sure that a nurse watches her take it with two cups of water, and she speaks about death more than she does life.
The shift is even more pronounced when Dr Flores doesn’t write her up the leave she’s hoped for at the weekend – she still has nowhere to go – and her usually mild manner turns and she lashes out like an angry cat, outstretched claws and tear-filled eyes. I hug her as she cries into my shoulder blade, her face so flushed you can’t even see her freckles, desperate for the familiarity of being jolted from foster carers to respite carers to foster carers that the outside world holds.
At her tribunal, the doctors make it clear that Elle will not be meeting the outside world any time soon, especially not with the way things ar
e going at the moment. She remains sectioned under the Mental Health Act so that they can continue to pump her up with the medication that isn’t helping her – it’s too late – and deny her the freedom and the ability to live as more than just another statistic. Because she ‘can’t make decisions for herself’; her brain is just too far gone, they say. I think that is how she sees it, anyway. It crushes her.
I am already awake by the time a piercing whistle screeches into my bedroom. I sit bolt upright in alarm; there must be an emergency. It sounds different, though – it has a friendlier tone, somehow, not the screech marking imminent panic I’m used to. Nurse Will sweeps open my bedroom door, swinging the whistle around his forearm.
‘I’ve adopted a new technique to wake you lot up,’ he says with a grin, putting the whistle to his lips again. It sounds more feeble now I know that it isn’t an emergency.
‘You’re so weird,’ I mutter, turning over in bed and trying to convince myself it isn’t morning.
‘You’re the one in the psychiatric ward,’ he says. Not many people can get away with saying that, but Nurse Will can. I laugh.
‘Don’t be so rude,’ I say.
He blows the whistle again in response and swaggers out of the room, looking pleased with himself.
It takes twenty minutes after getting up and dressing in the first clean clothes I’ve worn in a week to realize that Elle isn’t here. The door to her bedroom is ajar and the curtains haven’t been opened, but she isn’t in there.
Jasper comes down for breakfast this morning still dressed in his purple pyjamas, disdain radiating from his face as he nibbles cornflakes into minuscule pieces, but the space where Elle should be sitting next to me is empty. I don’t say anything. Patient Will notices that she isn’t there, too. He doesn’t say anything, either, but I see him staring at the empty plastic chair as he scrapes jam out of the plastic packaging. A nurse looks at us, as if daring us to question Elle’s disappearance.
‘I don’t like blackberry jam,’ Patient Will says instead.
‘There’s some strawberry in the box,’ says the nurse.
‘I’ve finished now,’ he replies quietly.
‘Maybe tomorrow, then, Will.’
Sit-down and morning meeting and morning snack and an hour of school pass laboriously and in an apathetic trance, waiting for Elle to walk in shouting, ‘Surprise!’ Lime Grove doesn’t feel right without Elle. It feels like an infinitely unhappier place.
Finally, at lunch time, I can’t wait any longer. She hasn’t turned up and no one has uttered a word about her all day, and I’m beginning to wonder whether her existence has been a figment of my imagination.
‘Where’s Elle?’ I ask, putting a greasy chip in my mouth and turning to Patient Will.
‘Ran off, apparently. Ask Jasper, he seems to know more than anyone,’ says Patient Will, as he twirls the grey haddock around his fork with undisguised disgust.
‘She’s run away? Again?’
Will nods. ‘This morning. She’s been gone hours. Didn’t you notice?’ He turns his attention to the wrinkled pile of peas instead, scooping them up and shovelling them into his mouth.
I have noticed. Of course I’ve noticed. Jasper prods the bowl of jelly in front of him with a teaspoon.
‘It’s not as bad as it looks,’ says the nurse on Ruby table. ‘You don’t even have to chew it.’ She makes a point of scraping her own bowl, because the jelly is obviously so damn delicious that she can’t bear to leave a single bit.
‘Oh,’ I say. I can’t think of a response.
‘They’ve called the police already,’ says Jasper, when I ask him during his post-lunch sit-down. ‘I heard them on the phone. They said she’s a “high-risk missing person”.’
This escape isn’t like The Great Escape, and we both know it. It isn’t going to be happy happy dancing dancing; Elle has slammed so hard down to rock bottom in the past week that the energy she expended spinning in circles and skipping during our escape is going to turn into agitation and pain and it is not going to end well. I say rock bottom. Rock bottom is actually a really difficult thing to define. There are times when you think you’ve crashed to the rock at the bottom, only to discover that you were actually hanging by your fingertips from the ledge just above it. Rock bottom is always far lower and far darker than you think.
‘How did she get out again?’ Why weren’t they watching her? Why did they let her get away?
‘Don’t have a clue,’ sighs Jasper. ‘She’s been gone since before breakfast, though, so it must’ve been when the night shift was still on. Maybe they were tired.’
‘Yeah, because that’s a fantastic excuse,’ I say, waiting for him to smile. He’s too worried about Elle to smile. So am I; she could be anywhere, doing anything at all. She could be dead.
We file solemnly into the classroom. No one complains about going to school for an extra two hours today, not even Harper. She sits down and draws a spider diagram with a red whiteboard pen and hardly moves for the next hour, except to pick up the paper she’s using and wipe the table with her sleeve where the pen has run through.
A trainee teacher tries to explain the Cuban Missile Crisis with a globe and some Post-it notes, but I don’t care about the Bay of Pigs invasion; I care about whether Elle is alive or dead or just existing, so not a single date is branded into my memory. Or perhaps he’s just a terrible teacher. He pulls a tissue from his sleeve and wipes sweat from his forehead.
‘So, from this, what can we say with regards to how the development of nuclear weapons has affected our attitudes to warfare?’
No one wants another mushroom cloud engulfing innocent people. That’s obvious. What’s the question, again? The supply teacher leaves me with a biro and two thin sheets of unlined paper so I can use my broken brain to create five hundred perfect words on what happened in Cuba in 1962. I spin the globe round twice until I find Cuba, covered by a tangerine Post-it note that hides half of Mexico from view as well.
Flip a coin. Is she dead or is she alive?
I tie my greasy hair back into a ponytail, then undo it and plait it instead and try to convince myself that I’m doing everything I can to stop the terrible seconds from passing. Harper rips out another piece of paper from the pad next to her, swaps to a green marker pen and continues with her spider diagrams. From the other side of the room, Jasper listens to Maureen drone on about symbolism in The Picture of Dorian Gray. I’m not sure if he is actually listening, but he nods methodically in all the right places and sweeps a highlighter over the pages of the book every so often.
‘It’s very much a work of philosophy, a novel that’s really supposed to make us think . . .’
‘Yeah, yeah . . .’
‘So, what can we say about the portrait? Is it supposed to just be a picture of Dorian Gray, or does it represent something more?’
‘It represents something more,’ repeats Jasper in a bored tone.
‘Quite,’ says Maureen, adjusting her false teeth.
The police turn up at Lime Grove just as the lessons end, at three o’clock, and they stomp in with their heavy black boots and upturn everything in Elle’s room: the mattress on her bed, every single sock. I don’t know what they’re looking for. We are kept in the dining room as their search starts to extend to the rest of the building – in case she’s left a cryptic note crumpled behind the DVD rack in the lounge or in amongst the towels in the linen cupboard. They probably find a lot of things: the gunky wax strips that Alice tried to use before discovering they were too sticky and out of date, the broken cigarette lighter that had somehow sneaked its way into the magazine box last week, underneath the thin pages of Take a Break. They don’t find any clues to Elle’s whereabouts. In fact, there’s no sign of any developments regarding Elle at all until late into the evening, after dinner, when Harper starts and points out of the lounge window.
Elle is being supported out of the ambulance by a paramedic and a policeman. She can walk, but she holds tightly on
to their wrists, and they do the same to her, arms interlocked. She isn’t wearing any shoes or socks, her pale feet tentative on the tarmac as she heads towards the front door. On one side of her forehead is a dressing, blood seeping through. Her hair has been tied back by someone. She didn’t do that. Elle never wears her hair back.
Two chimes of the bell.
I don’t see her for an hour, even though I know she is in the building. The viewing slat to Therapy Room 1 is closed and I can’t even hear muffled voices from the other side like usual; they must be whispering.
I catch a snippet of conversation with her when she comes out. Someone has taken her dressing off. She has three stitches embedded in her forehead.
‘Where did you go?’ I say, pulling her into a hug. She smells of petrol and earth.
‘He found me,’ she whispers. ‘It was so far from everywhere, but he found me just as the train was coming.’
‘What? Elle!’ I’m not sure what she’s saying but I want to cry. ‘Who found you?’
‘I don’t know, I don’t know. I think he was a workman or something. He pushed me so hard that I just collapsed on to my head in a clump of nettles. I’m so sorry.’
‘I’m glad you’re OK,’ I say.
The stitches on her forehead wrinkle as she forces a smile.
‘Elle,’ said Nurse Will, coming out of Therapy Room 1. ‘Let’s go and get your head dressed again, please.’
She meekly follows him upstairs and into the clinic room.
No one wants to talk for the rest of the evening; even the TV hasn’t been turned on to detract from the uncomfortable silence. The whole ward, in fact, remains entirely quiet for hours – until, that is, the middle of the night.