On a Scale of One to Ten
Page 15
We both laugh because we know that I am the lunatic.
He pulls himself together and starts to drive again.
I turn up the radio and listened to the pounding of Eminem so I won’t notice the speed.
It’s all about distractions. It works.
I don’t unpack for quite a few weeks after I arrive home. I don’t want to. The bin bags and my suitcase sit expectantly in the corner of my bedroom day after day, waiting for me to empty them and spread the posters over my blank walls where they used to be, to cover the ghosts of Blu Tack still clinging on. It takes some time for it to feel like home again. The curtain rail that I’d pulled from its socket and cracked in two is gone, so I have to tuck towels over the top of my window to block out the pale early-morning light that April has brought with it. Brew, as well, takes some time before he clambers on to my bed again and sleeps at the foot of it, his hefty presence heating my feet and my ankles like he used to, his left canine exposed as he snores gently and rhythmically in his sleep. I stick the name sign that Elle made for me on my bedroom door as soon as I arrive, though. I unpack that. At least I can pretend that I’m in Lime Grove, with its four low walls and locked doors.
I don’t miss it, exactly. Psychiatric hospitals aren’t the sort of places that you miss, but I do wonder what’s happening there, and how long it will take before my time there becomes a faded scar etched into my memory like the white lines on my skin.
Things move even slower than I’m used to in those first few weeks, and for some time I don’t fight the daydreams about Iris or the beckoning that a blunted blade can bring. I don’t care if they throw me back into Lime Grove and chuck away the key for good this time. My parents watch me with frustration and disappointment – ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you doing this, again?’ – but I choose not to hear them. Like I said, I don’t fight it. For quite some time I think that there’s no fight left in me, just the torrents of anger and fear and hatred and love and emptiness and screaming-so-loudly-but-no-one-can-hear.
But, as usual, I’m wrong. There is fight in my veins and fight in my blood and I am a bigger and bolder person than I’ve led myself to believe. I’ve been led down the garden path, where thorns have snatched at my ankles and bindweed has choked my mind.
I’m not re-admitted to Lime Grove. My medicine is changed so that I don’t slobber like Brew or have muscle cramps in my unnaturally induced sleep. Jacob comes to see me. I am surprised by the relief I feel when he arrives. The familiarity of him is therapeutic. He makes me talk to him about Iris and he listens to what I did; it takes time but eventually the monster become quieter and quieter and I’m able to sit on my bedroom floor with lies booming into my eardrums and laugh in their ugly faces and go on a five-mile run instead. It isn’t about Iris, you see. It was never about Iris. It isn’t about the girl I thought I’d murdered, because the mind can play tricks in the dark. Iris wasn’t the reason I got ill, she was the trigger. Dr Flores, Emma, Nurse Will, Dr Chance, Jacob – they just tried to help me find the truth, but I found it by myself eventually.
If you want to know what happened to the weird and wonderful people that I met at Lime Grove, then I’m afraid I can’t tell you about all of them. I don’t know what happened to Elle or Harper. I don’t know what happened to Patient Will; I suspect that he’s still in hospital, but maybe that’s pessimistic. Perhaps he’ll be prime minister in a few years’ time. Alice slipped back into her anorexia and within six months she was back in hospital with a tube scraped up her nose. Her next hospital stay was longer, and I didn’t hear from her for a year. She’s out now, though, and I don’t think she’ll go back to hospital. It feels different this time. Jasper started eating breakfast, and he eats it every day now. He got an apprenticeship and a boyfriend. I still see him sometimes. We made a trip to Mrs Moonshine’s ice-cream parlour only the other day. He had sprinkles.
Toby helps, but he isn’t my cure. There isn’t a cure. Except me: I am the cure.
He can kiss me, we can kiss, he can laugh and tell jokes and run with me and tell me to stop hurting myself, but he can’t make me stop it.
‘I’ve stopped smoking,’ he says, when I offer him a roll-up one day, the filter sitting between my lips.
‘Really?’ It sounds unlikely. I look at his tobacco-stained fingertips.
‘As of yesterday. It isn’t good for my running.’ He snaps out of his own habit with one momentary decision. I don’t know how he does it. I shrug and finish rolling myself the cigarette, clicking the lighter and allowing passive smoke to furl into his nostrils. He doesn’t flinch.
Things are changing.
It isn’t an epiphany. It isn’t like that. I don’t wake up one morning and out of the blue see the light filtering through the curtains and hear the bubbling flow of the water feature outside and suddenly feel alive. That comes much later on, after each morning when I do leave the house even though I just want to hide in bed, after each shower when I clean my body twice over instead of slicing it to shreds with a slippery blade like I want to. After each day that I do not kill myself, and allow the pain to just be, because if I do not cling to it, it cannot destroy me. Only after being smashed and battered and knocked, like Iris on the riverbed, but getting up each time can I say, ‘I am here, I am alive and I am not an evil person,’ and believe it to be true.
I can’t describe what it now feels like to be alive to someone who has not drowned in the darkness. Being alive is raw, and so terrifying that sometimes I look back towards the time before, and the darkness beckons me to crawl back into its depths and grovel at its feet like I used to, and sometimes, tempted, I take a step back. But being alive is also so intensely beautiful and colourful and there are days when I can laugh until I cannot breathe and my stomach bursts with happiness.
I am proud because I killed my monster, then destroyed the evidence, and I annihilated the darkness that tried to kill me, I climbed one hundred barbed-wire fences and I escaped hopelessness.
I yearn for the madness of life and I hope you will, too.
If you are affected by the topics in this book, the below organizations can help.
• Samaritans (UK): call 116 123 or email jo@samaritans.org
• Childline (UK): call 0800 1111
• Lifeline (Australia): call 13 11 14
• Lifeline (New Zealand): call 0800 543 354
• National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (USA): call 1 800 273 8255
• www.mind.org.uk
• www.selfharm.co.uk
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UNDER ROSE-TAINTED SKIES by LOUISE GORNALL
I’m Norah, and my life happens within the walls of my house, where I live with my mom, and this evil overlord called Agoraphobia.
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THINGS I’M SEEING WITHOUT YOU by PETER BOGNANNI
Tess has dropped out of school. She has barely held it together since the death of a boy she messaged countless times a day about anything and everything; who saw the world the same way she did.
The boy she loved, who said he loved her, and whose suicide she never saw coming.
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FACELESS
by ALYSSA SHEINMEL
When Maisie is burnt in a terrible accident, her face is partially destroyed. She’s lucky enough to get a face transplant, but how do you live your life when you can’t even recognize yourself any more? As Maisie discovers how much her looks shaped her relationship to the world, she has to redefine her own identity, and figure out what ‘lucky’ really means.
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Text © Ceylan Scott 2018
First paperback edition published in Great Britain in 2018
This electronic edition published in 2018
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PB ISBN 978-1-911077-24-4
eISBN 978-1-911077-53-4