On a Scale of One to Ten

by Ceylan Scott

  I crawl into bed – the bed, my bed – and wait for the drugs in my body to bid me goodnight. I sleep, eventually. Sleep is predictable. I don’t dream.

  It is so bittersweet, I’m not sure that I can stomach it. I unstick the photos of Brew with glasses on, of Toby and Elle and Brew eating a pig’s ear that have lived on the noticeboard for long enough for dust to settle and muffle their shine. Nurse Will supervises my bin bag use (moving out = stress = trying to suffocate myself with strips of plastic) as I shove all my belongings into the bags without a second look.

  ‘Do you really want those?’ he says.

  ‘What?’

  He points at the wad of papers that I’ve stuffed, higgledy-piggledy, into the nearest bag.

  ‘Yeah. I want them.’ My hands clutch my collection of case-management notes, which I requested. I press them against my stomach in an attempt to smooth out the creases.

  Tamar is generally bright on ward. She continues to have symptoms of persistent dysregulated mood and there is evidence of some cognitive rigidity in relation to DSH.

  I take them back out of the bag and put them on the bed. ‘I’ll take them later.’

  Jasper hovers into view. He’s wearing the same grey Batman T-shirt that he wore when we first met, only it isn’t so baggy any more. It doesn’t sag from the pile of bones that used to make up his chest.

  ‘Do you need any help?’ he says. I nod.

  Nurse Will doesn’t say anything as Jasper comes into my room and kneels by the pile of clothes.

  Tamar has gone AWOL from the ward on one occasion. The risk of her absconding again is medium.

  ‘You’ve got a lot of stuff,’ he says, picking up a pair of leggings I don’t know I own and folding them into my suitcase.

  ‘It was a surprise to me, too.’

  He laughs.

  ‘You made yourself too comfortable,’ he says with a grin vaguely in my direction.

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘This is not your home, it is a hospital,’ says Jasper in a nasal voice, imitating Emma with wagging fingers.

  She continues to have delusional thoughts about killing a friend of hers two years ago, but does not experience any other psychotic symptoms. Her friend committed suicide. Tamar will need support in the community to deal with these irrational beliefs.

  ‘You do not live here,’ Jasper finishes.

  He is right; it isn’t my home. My home doesn’t have windows in the doors and anti-ligature curtains that collapse if you draw them too tightly. It doesn’t have temperamental toilets with no seats or tattered carpets stained with God knows what, or frighteningly unwell people asleep in the room next door, or incredibly amazing people asleep in the room next door, breathing in time with the beeps from the smoke alarm on the ceiling. It doesn’t have any of that.

  Her symptoms are concurrent with that of a personality disorder (borderline).

  Personality disorder?

  ‘Don’t cry,’ says Jasper, and Nurse Will materializes a tissue from nowhere. They’re good at doing that, nurses. Finding tissues. ‘These better be happy tears. You’re free, you can do whatever you want!’ Jasper’s hand finds mine and I feel pressure squeezing against my fingers.

  That is true. I can do absolutely anything I want in the whole wide world. I can bake a cake or read a book or run from Land’s End to John O’Groats and then back again just for fun. I should ask Toby about that. We should do it. Why not?

  I knew I was a bad person. I was right. I have a personality disorder.

  I blow my nose too sharply, and my nose ring slips out, catching the tears as they tumble down.

  ‘Yeah, they’re happy,’ I splutter. I think they are, anyway.

  ‘What d’you want me to do with this amazing creation?’ says Jasper, holding up a papier-mâché elephant I’d made in art group a month ago.

  ‘You can keep it.’

  ‘Very appropriate,’ he says, examining its tusks. ‘I am an elephant.’

  ‘You’re not an elephant. You can’t keep it if you say that,’ I say, making to grab it.

  ‘No, no, I want it! I was joking,’ he says. Behind every joke there is a truth. I hate that he hates every inch of himself more and more as every week goes by and he gains a kilogram of lard. A kilogram of life, more like. ‘I’ll call it Ellie.’

  ‘Very original, well done,’ I say, between tears that make me gasp for air.

  ‘Yeah, I thought so too.’

  ‘Don’t forget your things in the nurses’ office,’ says Nurse Will. ‘I’ll grab them.’

  He leaves me on the floor with the two bin bags that I can kill myself with. I hear his card swiping the office door open, my locker swinging open.

  ‘You staying for lunch?’ asks Jasper.

  ‘I don’t think so, no. My parents are supposed to be coming at eleven.’

  ‘But it’s vegetable lasagne day!’ he says indignantly. ‘You can’t miss out on that.’

  I smirk. ‘Poor me.’ I’m not going to miss the cold plates of defrosted congealed slop disguised as food. Especially not the vegetable lasagne; the last time I ate it, my fork met ice crystals between layers of stodgy pasta and slippery peppers.

  ‘OK,’ says Nurse Will brightly, kicking the door ajar with his foot and slamming a plastic box on to my bed. ‘In here, we have some incredibly dangerous items. Cue dramatic music . . .’ He pulls it open and withdraws a pair of tweezers and a bottle of Bleach London Sea Punk hair dye with a flourish. ‘Use them wisely.’

  I haven’t dyed my hair since I got here, and it’s returned to the pale blonde colour that I’d tried so hard to hide with layers of bubblegum pink and pastel blue. The girl by the river isn’t my identity any more.

  ‘Oh, and this—’ Nurse Will holds up a razor, its thin edges shining under the ceiling light, and hovers it in the air. ‘I think I might give that to your parents . . .’

  I pull out the drawer of my desk. Glistening fragments of the DVD I’d once broken to cut myself lie in shards around the incomplete worksheets that my school sent me months ago.

  ‘Anyone for some source analysis?’ I hold up a page of history notes.

  ‘Going . . . going . . . gone,’ says Jasper, rapping his knuckles on the side of my bed as I cram the notes into the nearest bin liner.

  My room looks different without the clutter littered all over the floor or the posters on the noticeboard above my bed. It’s more clinical, somehow, like it isn’t my room any more. It is just room number 4 in the humourless bedroom wing of a psychiatric hospital, empty of any personality or warmth. Waiting for the next person to tiptoe in and set up home. I hope that they make it theirs in the same way that I’ve done. Not that it matters. I walk out into the corridor, holding back another wave of tears surging up my gullet, and peel off the name sign that Elle drew for me in her first week: swirls of gold and turquoise and smudged black ink. Now it can be anyone’s door.

  Five pieces of A4 paper have been stuck clumsily together and Sellotaped to the wall of the lounge. ‘goodbye tamar’ it says, in sloppy lower-case writing and still-wet paint.

  ‘Patient Will made it,’ Jasper says. ‘I saw him doing it in art group.’

  I feel a sudden and unexpected surge of affection. He hasn’t come out to say goodbye but the buzzing from his thoughts being transmitted and read by MI5 was screeching so loudly in his brain that he smashed his fist into the wardrobe so hard he broke two fingers and a thumb.

  My parents arrive on the dot of eleven. Nurse Will unlocks the door to downstairs and I follow him, the bin bags clumping down each stair behind me.

  ‘Bye, then,’ I say huskily, as Jasper grabs my arms and pulls me into a hug tight enough to totally cut off the blood supply to everything below my waist. I know he doesn’t like hugs; hugs mean that I can feel the bulges of fat swimming below the surface of his skin, so this hug means something. ‘Don’t forget to eat up everything that’s on your plate.’

  ‘Every scrap,’ he says with a grin, releasing
his grip.

  ‘Including breakfast.’

  ‘Of course,’ he says dismissively. ‘Breakfast’s my favourite meal of the day!’

  The reception area flashes before me. I need to remember every single detail – the photos of every member of staff that hang, lopsided, to the left of me, the rumbling water dispenser with its thin triangular cups, the threadbare cushions tossed lazily on the sides of broken plastic chairs. Slick patterned floors, obviously designed by someone who hates teenagers: nauseating flowers with beaming faces splattered across shades of grey. I want it to remain familiar, right down to the ruthlessly bleached smell, which is lost the further you go into Lime Grove. The receptionist fiddles with her headset, then picks the gaps between her teeth with a single glittery false nail.

  ‘Right, then, Tay, let’s make a move,’ says Dad, as he strides purposefully into the reception area, dragging my suitcase behind him. ‘No point in waiting for the grass to grow.’ He blinks and a piece of metal glints in his ear. An earring has been forced into the decade-old hole in his earlobe.

  Actually, there’s every point in waiting just a little bit longer. The moment that I step out on to the hard, dusty April ground, I’ll be free. I can go home and dance and sing in the shower just because no one will see me, then eat a pint of Ben & Jerry’s (there will be no one to watch me and scribble down ‘binging behaviour’ in my notes) in front of whatever ‘inappropriate’ TV show that I want to watch. Fuck it, I could even watch Come Dine with Me. There will be no more tree-worshipping in a dingy therapy room with Janice and her meaningful rings, or grazing my throat with undiluted doses of sedating PRN that I don’t want.

  Dr Flores doesn’t come to see me off, but it doesn’t matter. He doesn’t have to. Nurse Will unlocks the door to the outside world for the final time, with a disappointingly soft high five, and I step out of my cage like a tiger from a zoo.

  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 first 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. 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 at the cold. The branches of a dead tree sprawled like bones and the first girl’s faded lilac streaks echoed the sunset.

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

  ‘It’s cold, so fucking cold . . .’

  ‘My dad’s going to be here soon.’

  ‘You go first, then.’

  ‘Just jump . . .’

  The engine of a car broke the silence, pulling up in the gravel of an invisible car park.

  ‘My dad’s here. I’d better go. See you at school?’

  ‘Yeah.’ The second girl looked down at the weir.

  ‘Do you want a lift?’

  ‘No, don’t worry, Tamar. I’ll get the bus home.’

  The first girl shrugged OK, then turned and walked to the car park. She clicked open the door of the car and slumped on to the seat.

  ‘Are you OK?’ said her dad. ‘You look drunk.’

  ‘I’m fine.’ She turned the radio up louder and looked out of the window as her dad drove off, away from the drowning, away from Iris.

  Iris put her boots back on and filled them with stones. She left her phone by the side of the river. She walked back on to the weir and jumped into the surging pool below. For a few seconds her body was tossed around as if all her bones had been removed. Then, as more cascades of white water tumbled over the weir, she disappeared, her hand lingering above the water for a few seconds, as if searching for something, anything. The roar of the river was all that could be heard. Clouds had crept into the sky and they were black and low and ready to burst.

  ‘You ready?’

  ‘I’m so out of practice,’ I say with a grimace.

  ‘You’re not! I heard you ran the warm-up in twelve minutes,’ says Toby with an air of envy. Twelve minutes to cover the stretch of a swampy field as it curls past sheep protected by one thin electric fence, and across the bridge at the end. Two opportunities for death in twelve minutes.

  Being zapped into the stars.

  Cracking on to the road six metres below.

  ‘I wasn’t the fastest,’ I say. ‘Loads of people beat me.’

  ‘Yeah, but they’ve been practising.’

  I laugh at his earnest expression. ‘How do you know I haven’t been practising?’

  ‘Whatever,’ he says with a grin. ‘May the best runner win?’

  ‘May the worst runner lose,’ I reply, holding my hand out, but he pulls me against the slippery Lycra fabric he’s wearing and holds me there a little longer than usual.

  ‘You feel horrible,’ I say, stepping away from him. I don’t think he’s hurt, because he holds my hands in his and shakes them with so much exaggerated vigour I think my elbow sockets are going to pop out.

  ‘So do you,’ he says smugly.

  I peel off the waterproof jacket I’m wearing, static electricity fuzzing the ends of my arm hairs as a man in a megaphone calls us towards the start line, and throw it on to the pile of clothes someone has started next to a marshal in a yellow jumper. The secrets engraved into my arms are exposed to the world: the ghosts of thin white scars in methodical rows tracing every inch of my arm. The thick red scar along my left forearm, the faint marks of the stitches still peppered on each side like the railway tracks that Elle tried to hurl herself on to.

  Enough. Focus on the run.

  Focus on the gun.

  The gun in the man’s hand as he raises it into the air.

  Bang.

  I am supposed to be running. I need to run. The swarm of people thunders around me, megaphones booming with the voices of bored-sounding women. People jostle into me. I start to run. My eyes search for Toby and his too-tight Lycra, but everyone is dressed the same and I can’t make him out in the blur of sinewy legs and fluorescent spiked trainers.

  Do I want this?

  My feet squelch into mud that every person in front of me has churned up and each spike on my trainers sinks down, drifting into the earth. I’m settled in the middle of the pack as the gaps between runners grow and I have space to move my arms and legs without worrying about barging into someone.

  In through the nose, out through the mouth.

  I focus my eyes on the gloopy ground in front of me; there’s spitting rain and the smoky smell of sausages sizzling in fat in a portable food van. The weather is the sort of unsettled, anaemic white that precedes a rainbow. There might have already been a rainbow, but I’m too focused on the ground to see.

  All I need to do is run: ignore the beady-eyed thoughts, like the crow by the river, clutching on to my neck, and move my feet. It is simple. Or at least, the theory is simple.

  I don’t win. I end up somewhere unspectacular, in the middle of the cluster, the sort of place where people would forget you. That’s OK. I want to be forgotten. There are still hordes of stragglers bringing up the
back as I stand at the food kiosk and squirt ketchup over the hot dog that I’ve been smelling for the past half an hour.

  Toby comes and hugs me, and I feel the curved edges of his glinting silver medal digging into my chest bones. His arms, freckled with mud, brush against my own arms, bumpy and pale and exposed to the world.

  ‘You did it!’ he says, delightedly. ‘You did amazing.’

  ‘You did amazing. I did fairly average,’ I retort.

  ‘You didn’t. You were good.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say.

  ‘So . . . chips?’

  ‘I’ve just got this!’ I say, holding the hot dog up towards his nose.

  ‘No, I mean, we should go get them from town. You know, for old times’ sake.’

  ‘All right,’ I say. ‘Let me just tell my parents, though. If they notice I’ve disappeared, I’ll be on the police’s missing-persons radar within a minute.’

  ‘Really?’ He grimaces.

  ‘You clearly don’t know my parents,’ I say, laughing.

  We take Toby’s car into town – his battered old burgundy Volkswagen Golf that his aunt loaned him when he passed his test.

  ‘Just shove everything on to the floor,’ he says, indicating the lighters and dirty running socks and spilt-open first-aid boxes that gild the leather seats.

  I can’t help but wonder how he managed to pass his test; he stalls on roundabouts and sends a foul burning smell through the car as he judders up a hill in completely the wrong gear. He laughs so hard that he ends up slamming his forehead into the top of the steering wheel when he accidentally accelerates through a red light. If I hadn’t been fearing for my life, I probably would have laughed with him. Look at that – I’m fearing for my life. I must be enjoying myself; congratulations to Toby, the boy who’s made me fear for my life.

  ‘Slow down, Toby, for God’s sake!’ I yell as he swerves violently round a ninety-degree corner, hacking up the groaning gear stick into position.

  ‘I am,’ he replies. ‘Don’t interfere with my driving!’

  ‘Don’t drive like a lunatic, then,’ I reply, and he tuts, and before I know it the car has stopped and he’s sprawled across the steering wheel shaking with laughter, and I’m laughing at him because his hair has fallen over it like a stream of falling leaves and he’s shaking like a leaf and he’s covered in mud like autumn leaves.