On a Scale of One to Ten

by Ceylan Scott

  It starts with a few thumps from the bedroom next to me, moans and the sound of something being dragged across the carpet, before picking up into hollering and groaning in the corridor and beyond, into the lounge.

  I hear Elle’s maddened cries for the next half an hour, as she thumps on the corridor walls outside the bedroom, dashing and darting away from nurses who want to inject her, and screaming wildly. I don’t look out of the window or my door, but I’m sure if I did, I would see the chairs that I heard land, flying across the corridor and slamming into the walls, magazines hurled and ripped up on the floor.

  ‘Get away from me, get away!’ she moans, as if they’ve rounded upon her wielding axes and bows and arrows.

  I slam my pillow over my head to block out her guttural cries, hoping that a nurse doesn’t come in and think I am trying to smother the air out of my lungs.

  ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it!’

  The lights in the corridor aren’t turned out at eleven-thirty like they usually are. Elle is far too awake and far too frightened to recognize the quiet that the night should bring.

  She must keep out of their reach for quite some time, sprinting wildly around the ward in a bewildered frenzy, but they catch her finally, because by two in the morning I finally drift into unconsciousness; the ward has gone quiet, but for the soft beeping of the smoke alarm above my head. The muffled voices of a few nurses penetrate the walls of my bedroom, but I can’t hear what they are saying. Jangling keys lock the bathroom doors because of weigh-in in a few short hours. They don’t want any patients filling themselves to the brim with ‘not drinking’ water before they step tentatively on to the scales at 6 a.m. The night is silent. Finally, the corridor lights dim and I release my grip on the pillow over my head, and allow myself to fall asleep. Early in the morning, just as I wake up, Elle is being moved to a psychiatric intensive-care unit halfway across the country, in an ambulance with two nurses and a policeman. I see her climbing into it in the car park as I pull open my curtains too hard and they clatter to the floor. I run over to Emma in the lounge, but she says I can’t see her; Elle is no longer a patient at Lime Grove. She needs space. I don’t want to, but I start crying and I fall to the floor and crouch there, my too-short pyjamas hitching up close to my knees.

  The thought of Elle sitting in the back of a secure ambulance makes me want to be sick. I think of her freckled wrists locked together in handcuffs yesterday, and the bruises that must have formed there, the three small stitches in her forehead, the way she had sat, hunched, in reception, her small frame shrouded by the multitude of policemen blocking her vision.

  Crying is different when it’s not selfish. The pain comes from somewhere else entirely – the area around your heart, against your ribcage – in a relentless current of despair. Selfishness forms in the pit of the stomach. I want to pretend that Elle will be OK, but the truth is that I’m not sure that she will be.

  You could see empty in her eyes, her vacant, faraway expression that she had all of yesterday evening. I don’t think she wanted to do things differently. I wonder if she was thinking anything at all as the ambulance slowly headed up the rush-hour motorway towards a hospital beyond Birmingham. I can’t imagine that anything is happening in her mind. Her mind has defeated her.

  I didn’t help her. I didn’t help her, like I didn’t help Iris. Maybe ‘couldn’t’ is a better word.

  Nurse Will offers me a marshmallow from the pack the night staff have left, because he can’t find any tissues but he wants to do something, I suppose. I take it, but it doesn’t melt in my mouth; my gums and my tongue are too dry, so I have to chew it like rubber. Elle is magnificent and vibrant and I feel like I’m mourning someone with all my heart even though she is not dead.

  ‘She’ll be all right. They’re good, where she’s going. They’ll help her.’

  Will she even remember me? Will I be anyone to her? Yesterday, her face had been so distant, I wondered if she’d recognized me at all.

  ‘Of course she’ll remember you, Tamar. You only lived together. Go and get some clothes on, now, it’s nearly time for breakfast.’

  Life. People roll along in a money-grabbing, stiff-upper-lipped blur. Like a shoal of fish moving with the tide towards the ultimate prize of death.

  Elle wasn’t one of those people. She never wanted to follow the mindless clump of tired people; she wanted excitement and laughter and dances at midnight in shimmering gardens. She wanted to live hungrily and feast on slices of life that other people didn’t find, make noise and change human nature. That’s how I thought of her, at least.

  At first, I hope for a letter, a text, a token from her to let me know that she is OK, but it doesn’t come. Her Facebook account is deactivated weeks later and I hope that means she is alive. I want her to be alive. But I don’t know.

  I think Dr Flores has developed a lot more wrinkles since he met me. Sitting in his swivel chair in front of his desk, I can’t help but notice that his face is lacking the false smoothness that radiated from it when I first met him. The bookshelf has been removed from his office, which is probably my fault as well. The Holy Bible that cracked the screen of his computer sits underneath his arm on the desk – just in case I disrespect it in such a spectacular fashion again. He isn’t wearing his Periodic Table tie, or any other tie, today. Perhaps he remembers how much they offended me. Doesn’t want to get on my wrong side again.

  I haven’t realized that he’s religious until now, and somehow it doesn’t suit him. I imagined him as such a stickler for the ‘evidence-based’ and ‘logical-reasoning’ side of life. Strange.

  He waits for me to start talking. I read the cards from ex-patients on his corkboard. Apparently, he saved Jodie’s life, and Megan can’t thank him enough. I guess these are things to be proud of. I open my mouth but don’t say a thing. I want to talk about Elle and Iris and their red hair and their lives and how I couldn’t save either of them, but Dr Flores says it isn’t my job to save anyone. I ask him if that’s his job and, if so, why couldn’t he save Elle? He says that it isn’t his job.

  I tell him that Jodie disagrees. He mutters about patient confidentiality and pushes the card shut.

  ‘Do you fancy a discharge date?’ he says suddenly, as if it’s as easy as handing out sweets to children. My lips must move into some kind of negative because before I have a chance to answer he says: ‘What’s wrong? You know this is a good thing?’

  ‘Is it?’ I think out loud (which I suppose is what talking really is, anyway). ‘Yeah, I suppose it is.’

  When Alice found out her discharge date she had pranced around the sitting room with glee in her eyes, and wrote the date in bubble writing on the whiteboards in the lounge and the dining room, and the blackboard in the art room so that no one could forget. Dr Flores is probably looking for my spark, too.

  ‘You haven’t attempted suicide for some time,’ he says. I try to stop my mind from turning his words into an insult.

  The worse things get, the higher people’s thresholds become for what constitutes ‘OK’. When I first started scratching myself every so often, ever so little, everyone was stunned into shock and it was all, QUICK, grab the scissors, this is awful, she must stop stop stop. Then, when the self-harm got worse, one doctor suggested that I went back to using scissors because then at least there wouldn’t be a terrible risk of damaging tendons and paralysing my arm, because I couldn’t possibly continue the way I was, self-harming like that all the time.

  Now, the threshold has been raised even higher, by the looks of things. Self-harm all you want, by all means chop off your arm for all we care. You’re not dead, so you must be doing great. Here, have a pat on the back. Have a discharge date.

  ‘What do you think happened to Iris?’ he asks suddenly.

  ‘I killed her.’ It’s a relief to say it.

  I thought Dr Flores would stare at me, his eyes goggling and horrified. He doesn’t. He just puts his biro down on the desk beside him and turns his chair nin
ety degrees, his expression that of blissful unconcern. I’m unnerved, and I get the impression he is waiting for me to expand, but I have nothing more to say. A balloon has burst inside me.

  ‘You killed her? Can you tell me how you did that?’ He isn’t making notes any more; he’s just watching me through his scratched glasses.

  ‘It was – I – it was an accident. We were drunk, she was more drunk . . .’

  The digital clock beeps ten o’clock.

  ‘Tamar,’ Dr Flores says. ‘Iris committed suicide. She killed herself – the coroner’s report said so. Surely you know that?’

  Iris was shy when we first met. Her family moved around a lot, so much that everyone assumed they were on the run. She’d been to three schools in one year. She didn’t speak much at first, just busied herself at the back of the room, scratching intricate doodles in red fountain pen in the corners of textbooks. She wore her hair in two French plaits smoothed tightly around her ears.

  Iris was good at art, and you could see it in her expression as she drew. Mia and I used to watch her from the other end of the art table, scratching PVA from our fingers. Mia didn’t like the way the art teachers swooned over Iris like they’d found the next Picasso. She told me she was going to ruin Iris’s drawing before she did it.

  Paint splattered. Mia gasped, fixed her eyes on Iris. ‘Oh, my gosh!’ she said, reaching for the nearest cloth and scrubbing at the drawing so that the dark strokes on the paper smudged even more. ‘I am so sorry . . .’

  Iris’ blackened hands quivered. ‘Don’t worry,’ she whispered. ‘It’s OK.’

  ‘You can fix it,’ I said, when Mia had gone. ‘Think of Tracey Emin. She just unmade a bed.’

  Iris smiled, properly this time. ‘I guess. Thanks.’

  ‘In twenty years’ time people will say that the paint on your drawing represents the decay of humanity or something. Just touch up the lines around the hairline.’

  Iris obliged quietly and obediently.

  After that, she followed me like a magnet. She started smoking just so she could stand outside the school gates with us. She started talking more, too. She actually had a lot to say, but that didn’t save her life.

  One morning, when it was so cold you didn’t have to have a cigarette to breathe smoke, when there was no one else to see, Mia lifted the lighter to Iris’s red hair.

  Iris’s face said it all before the flames did, and her hair billowed into a smoking russet plumage. Someone who wasn’t me engulfed Iris’s head in a blazer, the school crest beaming gold and grey through the flames.

  By the time the ambulance arrived, Iris wasn’t on fire. She was just sat by the school gates with teeth chattering louder than an angry squirrel and sheens of crimson lining her scalp. Shiny tracks of peeled skin running across her forehead. The paramedics gave advice about dressings and cleaning wounds, then left her to it, because the burns weren’t that bad. She disappeared into school without another glance in my direction, and I didn’t follow her. Not immediately, at least.

  ‘She didn’t find it funny,’ I muttered quietly in Mia’s direction, eventually.

  ‘What?’ said Mia sharply.

  The teachers frogmarched us back to their offices. They knew we smoked every day, and they knew it was illegal, and now they were wishing they hadn’t turned such a blind eye.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘It was an accident,’ Mia said. ‘Tamar didn’t mean to . . . She was lighting her fag and she didn’t look properly . . . You know how long Iris’s hair is . . .’

  A* grades make you untouchable, and she knew it.

  Iris spent a lot of time disappearing from school after that. She was going to the dentist, to a tutor, to visit a llama farm . . . Mia left her alone, for the most part. We went to our detentions for a week and she got 100 per cent on a maths test and then the teachers forgot about it.

  Sometimes I tried to speak to her but Iris would shake her head and mutter quietly until I left.

  She fooled me into thinking she was fine.

  She left a suicide note in her underwear drawer in her bedroom, just above notes about cleaning out the fish tank and buying chocolate sauce for pancakes. It was short. I’m not sure what suicide notes are supposed to say; maybe there’s a convention, but hers didn’t say much.

  Iris said that she was sorry, and she listed every person in her world who she knew would fall down and never quite get back up because of her death: her mum and dad, her cousin who spoke at her funeral. I wasn’t on the list. I shouldn’t have been affected by her death. She said, ‘I have died by suicide,’ the ebony words blasted out from the white background. That was it, as if she just wanted to make sure that everyone knew exactly why she had launched herself off the side of the weir, wearing her heaviest pair of boots, filled to the ankles with stones. She didn’t want any room for confusion. She’d thought this through. It wasn’t an accident.

  The first thing that the police found on her phone was the text that I’d sent her: Are you all right? xxx

  It had been sent at fourteen minutes past eleven, three hours after Iris and I had last sat on the bank of the river, since we stood on the weir. She had been dead for three hours.

  She’d left her phone on the rocks just where the weir met the wispy grass.

  That day she’d joked about how life was crap and wouldn’t it be better to just die than face another day of this shit.

  I’d laughed and taken another swig of cider.

  I’d laughed at Iris as she expressed the pain that she could not fight any longer in her ungraceful, drunken manner.

  I’d left her next to the river as she planned her own death.

  She reached out to me and I ignored her. No, I didn’t ignore her; I laughed. And I told her to jump into the weir for a joke. That I would follow her. I lied.

  Mia was right: I was the last person to see Iris alive and I didn’t save her.

  It was my fault she died.

  You know I said that time in a mental hospital goes really, really slowly?

  The last two weeks at Lime Grove fly past so quickly you’d be forgiven for thinking I’m having fun.

  They hate you here, they hate you.

  I spend three nights at home from Friday to Monday each weekend and I force myself out for a jog every morning, even though the risperidone makes my head spin. Structure is the key. Practise the mindfulness that Janice taught you. Notice. Observe. Touch. Smell. Taste. Don’t judge. Don’t judge.

  The day that I’ll become a free human being, away from locked doors and metal bolts and jangling jail keys, is looming closer and closer, and Jasper laughs at the horror on my face when anybody mentions it.

  Sometimes someone comes up to me and says something like: ‘Tamar, well done. You’re doing so well with your recovery.’

  Recovery is a funny concept, because in reality we’re all recovering from something: a bad cold, a break-up, sex, drugs, rock and roll. No one gets to decide when you do it or how you do it, either. So when Emma or Nurse Will pats me on the back with ‘recovery’ on their tongues – you’re doing it right – I flinch a little.

  Am. Not. Recovering.

  Recovery means commitment and positivity.

  And progress.

  I am none of those things; the only thing that I am doing is trying, but we all know that’s not good enough. You have to win, too.

  They’re getting rid of you because you’re poisonous. They need a bed for someone who isn’t evil, evil. These thoughts are worse when you’re recovering.

  I play a lot of Trivial Pursuit in those two weeks – more, I think, than I have during my whole admission. I learn most of the answers to the questions too, like Patient Will did, so our games are faster than they were before, and I even win sometimes. The TV rule changes and they ban it until five in the evening, so we’re forced to think about something other than the lie-detector results of who got who pregnant.

  I see Toby on both Saturdays, and before I see him I fret and f
luster over what I’m going to wear, like a teenager who is so very normal, and it feels good. The is-my-dress-too-short-panic brings me intense happiness, because this is what I am supposed to be worrying about, not why that person in the street is looking at me weirdly (either I’ve tucked my skirt into my underwear, or he’s planning to stalk and rape me).

  You aren’t wanted at home. You aren’t wanted at Lime Grove any more. You aren’t wanted anywhere, you bad, bad, bad person.

  I pop back lorazepam like Smarties when the thoughts get too much, because that’s what is in my care plan, and wait for it to zonk me out on the downstairs sofa (when bad thoughts happen, the rule is: get to the communal parts of the house quick before you kill yourself). The nurses congratulate me on that: ‘Before, you wouldn’t have done that, Tamar. You would have hurt yourself, wouldn’t you?’

  You’re getting better at this whole life thing, Tamar.

  I have twenty-eight meals and twenty snacks in these last weeks. Harper silently refuses to eat her share of twenty-eight meals and twenty snacks, so they shove her on bed rest and treat her pressure sores with a pressure mattress and give her food through a tube, so I see even less of her than before, apart from when they wheel her into the bathroom four times a day, and she sits there, back curled.

  On the evening of my last night at Lime Grove, I burst into uncontrollable tears, and Jasper lends me his anti-stress colouring book and gel pens.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, between snuffles. ‘I’ll use it tonight.’

  An agency nurse who doesn’t know the rules lets me have a cigarette afterwards, in the garden. The heat from the smoke dries my teary cheeks.

  ‘Better?’ she says, after I take a final puff then pass the stub back to her to bin the evidence.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, despite the fact that it isn’t better.

  They hate you. Everyone hates you. Even you hate you. Get. Out.

  ‘I need a zopiclone.’

  Emma disappears into the nursing room and watches me swallow the tablet without question. Even she understands that the risperidone won’t quite hack it tonight.