“Okay,” he said lowly. “Um, so…see you in two weeks?”
“It may be prudent,” the doctor said quietly, “to wait until this episode has passed before starting him on the drugs. It won’t make any difference to Darren, but it might help some of your concerns.”
Jayden nodded, looking to Darren for some kind of guidance on which option to go with. When coaxed, Darren simply shrugged.
“Maybe start next Monday?” Jayden tried. He’d be out of the other side of it in a week, right? They rarely lasted more than four or five days, and it had started on Sunday, so…“We’ll start next Monday.”
The doctor made a note. “In which case, I’ll see you again two weeks from then. Any concerns, do call me. And please avoid the NHS online symptoms checker?” he added, in a flash of humour. “Otherwise you’ll have convinced yourself that you both have a rare form of cancer or something equally extreme before the first week of treatment is out.”
Jayden smiled thinly, but the joke didn’t dispel his anxiety. He felt sick and stressed, and a headache was beginning to form around his temples. They were really doing this again. Really going back to drugs, and that night Rachel had called him down from Bristol because Darren was having some kind of manic fit or something, and…
He shook off the gnawing worry as much as he could, and rose from his chair, thanking the doctor and guiding Darren out of the office, new prescription in one hand and the horrible list in the other.
He didn’t want to do this—but they had no choice.
Chapter 13
On Monday morning, Jayden put out a glass of orange juice and a single pill. Darren eyed both dubiously, then sighed and knocked them back like a professional drug addict.
The episode had lifted on Friday morning, but Darren had been subdued and preoccupied anyway. Jayden suspected he was angry with himself over the pills, and tried to derail any negative thoughts, but it was hard when Jayden was upset too. He hated having to do this. He hated having to rely on drugs to keep Darren safe and stable—and even worse—relying on drugs that weren’t reliable. He hated the whole bloody mess, and he hated having to insist on treatment when Darren didn’t like it, but he hated even more the potential, without any treatment at all, for Darren to…
Jayden had been at university in Bristol when Darren had last tried medication—citalopram, in theory for six months, but it had only lasted three before he’d had a major suicidal fit. He had locked himself in his flat in the middle of some weird episode, and had scratched at his wrist until he split it open, digging almost down to the bone. By the time Jayden had reached Southampton, Rachel had managed to break in and had had Darren taken to hospital. Darren had been irrational, furious, panicky, and hurt; he had clung to Jayden, removing himself from the hospital the minute his wrist was wrapped, but had rejected Rachel outright until the drugs wore off and his rationality caught up to him again.
It had been horrific, the sight of his blood-splattered room, and Jayden hated even the memory of it.
But he’d not been there all day and every day, not like this time. He hadn’t seen every minute of Darren on citalopram, or the earliest responses to it. He hadn’t seen most of the build-up, just weekends of increasing illness until that midnight phone call, and…
And this time, with the fluoxetine, Jayden was struck by the nothingness.
That first morning, Darren knocked back his pill, had a shower, and kissed Jayden goodbye at the door. He texted a couple of times during the morning until he went to work for the two-to-ten shift, and Jayden was woken briefly at quarter to two by that warm, heavy body sliding into bed and curling around his back in comfortable silence.
And the second morning, they did it again. And the third, and the fourth, and the fifth. And on Saturday morning, Jayden woke Darren up with honeyed-porridge-in-bed (he wasn’t stretching to a fry-up, because Rachel’s cat would be all over him for the rest of the day if he did that) and yet another pill, and Darren knocked that back too, and nothing happened.
“Do you feel any different?” he asked on the Saturday, and Darren snorted.
“Not yet.”
“Well…that’s good, right? I mean, if…”
“It means nothing, Jayden. The citalopram didn’t kick in until week three either.”
It didn’t last quite that long. By the following Tuesday, Darren had lost his appetite completely, to the point where he was even refusing soups. Which he usually inhaled in the winter. By Wednesday morning, he wanted water instead of juice, complaining of feeling sick, and when Jayden texted at the end of his day at the office, Darren’s only reply was still feel sick and its nowt 2 do w/ this scene :(.
On Thursday, Darren got out of bed, and promptly fell right back into it. “Fuck,” he breathed, clutching his head and physically swaying. Jayden caught his shoulders.
“Dizzy?”
“Yes.”
Jayden kissed his hair. “Okay?”
“Mm.”
“You going to be all right on the stairs?”
“Should be. Think I might puke, though.”
He didn’t, in the end, but he sat shivery and swaying at the kitchen table while Jayden forced another pill and a glass of weak squash down him. He refused food, even when Jayden pointed out he’d start losing weight he couldn’t afford.
“Well, if I eat, I’ll hurl,” Darren said grimly. “So what’s the point?”
Jayden kissed his hair and went to work worried.
On Friday, they saw Dr. Zielinski again, who made a load of notes but said it was all perfectly normal and fit with Darren’s recorded reaction to citalopram, but milder. (Jayden was stunned by the appetite loss being milder, but fine.) And milder was a good sign. Apparently.
Jayden didn’t quite believe him, because Darren had eaten on citalopram, although he did have to admit that it hadn’t been much. He continued with the small-and-frequent diet, and tried not to snap at him whenever he refused it. Physical side effects were fine. They could cope with those. They weren’t dangerous, not like the mental ones on the list. Not like suicidal thoughts and self-injury and irrational behaviour. Physical was manageable.
And then the drug really hit.
The mental side effects arrived in force on Sunday morning, like a party of unwelcome guests traipsing mud all over the carpets and eating everything out of the fridge. Darren was quite suddenly drowsy—stupidly so, given he was on normal weekends off for a good few months while the force trained up some new crime scene officers—and listless. The apathy returned in full-force, and Rachel’s piano lessons were promptly dropped. He started rubbing his hands on everything, and when the sporadic snapping started in the evening, Jayden wanted to cry.
“Are you feeling funny?” he asked lowly at dinner, while Rachel was on the phone in the living room.
“Don’t feel anything,” came the dulled reply, and Darren sighed heavily, head propped wearily on his hand. “I’m really not up for food, Jayden.”
“You’re still feeling sick?”
“No, I just…I don’t want any.”
Jayden made him a small plate anyway, but most of it was left, and Darren went back up to bed by seven. Jayden put it in the microwave, but had no real hope it would ever be eaten. Not now.
“He’s getting weird again,” Rachel said bluntly after he’d gone. “What’s his schedule for the next few weeks?”
Jayden dug it out—he kept a diary, to align his time off with Darren’s—and handed it over. She scrutinised it carefully, muttering to herself in places, then began to write it down in her own diary.
“Time to set up a watch for him?” Jayden asked, folding his arms and hunching in on himself. He felt cold and sick. He felt horrible for having to say that, like Darren was an unruly child or a…
Or a mental patient.
“Yeah,” Rachel agreed.
Jayden double-checked the locks on the kitchen cupboard doors that night.
* * * *
The phone was ringing wh
en Jayden let himself into the house, and he caught it just as the answering machine light came on.
“Hello?” he said, fumbling with the front door and his jacket, almost throwing one arm out of its sleeve clumsily. The cat regarded him sceptically from the sofa.
“Hello, darling!”
“Mum!”
“Of course, darling,” Mum said cheerfully. “How are you both?”
There was a question. “Um, we’re, you know, us.”
“Mm,” Mum said. “Are you free on Saturday afternoon? There’s some combat-ship…”
“Battleship, Mum.”
“Oh, whatever,” she said. “There’s some big boat owned by the Royal Navy that’s parked up…”
“Moored.”
“Parked up—stop arguing with me, you might be twenty-three but I’m still your mother—in Portsmouth that’s letting the public have a poke about, and your father’s decided to take Rosie on Saturday. I’m going to do some shopping,” she added snottily, and Jayden laughed. “But we’ll be having lunch after Rosie’s tired herself out and we can’t come all the way down there and not see you.”
‘All the way’ was about fifty or so miles, but Jayden supposed it was a long way if Rosie was in the car too.
Then he winced.
“Um, well, we’re not busy…”
“But?” Mum said sharply.
“Well, um…Darren’s…” he fumbled.
Her voice softened. “Is everything all right, darling?”
“…Darren’s started some new antidepressants,” he said lowly. “And he’s not very well. He doesn’t do drugs…”
“Oh, I know, I remember your insisting on having him over all the time after he was attacked,” Mum said dryly, and Jayden grimaced. The hospital had put him on codeine to get him through the first few weeks of physiotherapy for his shoulder, because cocodamol hadn’t touched the pain, and he’d spectacularly thrown up on Mum’s old coffee table after Dad had clapped him on the back in greeting one evening that summer. Even painkillers made him sick and sleepy.
“Yeah, well,” Jayden said weakly. “He’s, um…well, the side effects just kicked in, and he’s not…he’s not good.”
“How bad is not good?” Mum asked gently. “He’s not hurting himself again, is he, darling?”
When they’d stopped the citalopram, it had been after Darren had…well, for lack of a better term, freaked out. He’d told Jayden later the drugs had made him not just numb, but came with the sensation of his body being suffocated in cotton wool, and the rest of him just drifting away. Like a cord had been cut between his mind and his body, and he’d flipped out one evening. He’d locked himself in his flat in his last minutes of rationality to stop himself actually…actually killing himself, and Jayden was eternally grateful for that, but…what he'd done to his wrist…it had looked like raw mincemeat, and Jayden had been sick when he’d seen it in the hospital at four in the morning, having hitched several rides down from Bristol in tiny increments to get there.
“No,” he said, and Mum made a little noise of relief. “But it might be not yet, you know? Rachel and I are watching him, but he’s not right, and I just…you know, especially with Dad…”
He’d never quite forgiven his father for telling Darren to get his act together. Darren had—they got on like a house on fire, because Darren was into all those bloke things that Dad liked, like cars and rugby and bacon sandwiches and stuff—but half of Darren’s bloody problem was that he thought in a fucked-up way about his own mental illness, and Dad didn’t help. Dad’s views on mental illness were just backward, and…
“Darling, you know your father doesn’t mean to be harsh.”
“Yeah, but you can’t just get over it, Mum, and I’m worried that if he says anything now, Darren’s going to take it really badly, and…”
“All right, darling. How about this? We do want to see the two of you, and it’ll do Darren some good to be reminded he’s got a family who love him, won’t it? But I’ll tell your father not to say a word about anything to do with depression. Or how he is in general. How’s that?”
Jayden worried at his bottom lip. On the one hand, Mum usually ruled Dad with an iron fist, certainly when it came to the important things. On the other hand, Dad was really, really good at saying things Mum didn’t like, just to get a reaction out of her. He liked winding her up.
“Can we play it by ear?” he asked eventually. “I’ll see how he is on Saturday morning, maybe? I mean, I’m hoping he’ll have settled down a bit, but if he’s really bad still then…”
“All right, darling,” Mum said, and Jayden kicked off his shoes and took the phone to the sofa to try and relax a bit. “How are you, anyway? You sound a bit stressed.”
He settled into the cushions. “I am,” he said and launched into his day.
For a little while, and having a good long bitch to Mum about the whole thing, he felt a little less out of his depth, a little less like this was some huge overwhelming thing that was going to eat his life until Darren either settled down and got better, or…
Or.
* * * *
The nights were the worst. In the day, Darren had to hold it together, had to relearn how to use the autopilot that had gotten him through the worst days at school and at the house on Hayley Lane, where Mother and Father might have seen. The days were empty voids of nothing, and he didn’t even have the energy to hate anything, but they were days.
Nights…
Night were different. On the lucky nights, he slept, and could pretend in the world between waking and sleeping, when he drifted between the two with Jayden’s heat against his back or side, that it was just a sleep-induced simplicity. And then he woke, and the emptiness failed to fill, and he knew that he was wrong.
More often, he couldn’t sleep. The drug would swing around to the other side and force him awake. At first, he had tried to keep busy—to do write-ups for work, or watch TV, or trail string on the floor for the cat, or even read, God forbid. But it never worked. His mind refused to focus, slipping and sliding around everything that wasn’t a hollow awareness of the shell he had become. His brain felt separate from his body, and he felt suddenly clumsy and out-of-control. He felt as though the strings had been cut.
Lying awake at night and staring at the ceiling, trying his hardest not to wake Jayden beside him, Darren felt that heavy weight settling in the centre of his chest again, like a familiar but loathed animal, and felt as though he had to strain to breathe. There was a band around his chest, tight and painful, and another around his brain, keeping out the entire world and preventing any escape from the darkness and the drugs.
Every night, he struggled to breathe. When he would eventually drift away and wake hours later, almost startled by it, he had to assume he had been successful.
* * * *
By Saturday, the physical side effects were…sort of wearing off. The dizziness and the nausea had subsided, but Darren still didn’t want to eat, and still was veering between sleeping like the dead and all the time if Jayden let him, and random fits of crushing insomnia that wound Jayden up too, because Jayden was stressed to the point where he’d wake up if Darren so much as moved away from him in bed and…
Saturday was a gorgeous day: icy cold, brilliantly sunny, and effortlessly still. Jayden insisted they take the train into Portsmouth and then walk down to Gunwharf Quays, where Mum had decided they’d be having lunch, and Darren didn’t argue. It was a tired sort of day.
“Are you really feeling up to this?” Jayden asked for the millionth time as they approached the waterfront.
“No,” Darren said. “But it’ll take my mind off it for a bit. And I need that as much as anything.”
Jayden squeezed his wrist. Last night, Darren had been so utterly lacklustre that he’d fallen asleep on the sofa whilst Jayden and Rachel had been making dinner, and Jayden hadn’t had the heart to move him. He’d slept downstairs too, to keep an eye out, and Darren hadn’t so much as twitched
until six o’clock this morning. When he had, it had been to use the bathroom, and then he had collapsed into their bed and slept again for another two hours. And he still seemed tired.
“Do me a favour?” Jayden asked.
“What?”
“Try and eat something?” Jayden wheedled. “You’re losing weight now.” And Darren didn’t exactly have a lot of it kicking about in the first place.
Darren grimaced. “I’ll try.”
Jayden paused at the door to the gastropub-restaurant-place Mum had chosen. (Definitely Mum, because the menu was like eight pounds a meal, and you wouldn’t catch Dad dead paying that kind of money.) “I’m really proud of you, you know,” he said quietly. “I know it’s not easy and you feel crappy and I can’t really help you with it, but you’re trying, and that means…”
Darren caught his hand. He looked haggard somehow, lines in his face that hadn’t been there four weeks ago. He looked older. There were dark smudges ground in under his eyes, and those eyes were dull instead of their usual sharp, glittering sea-green, and there was none of his usual brash confidence in the way he stood.
“I don’t think this is going to work,” he said hoarsely, and Jayden squeezed his fingers. “And if it doesn’t, I’m really going to need you because I don’t think I can take the citalopram reaction again.”
Jayden let go of his hand and hugged him tightly, burying his nose in the cool fabric of Darren’s jacket for a moment before shifting to kiss his ear. “I’ve got you,” he whispered, and Darren was suddenly clinging back fiercely, like something was trying to pull him away. Jayden’s chest ached. “No matter what happens, I’m going to be there, okay? And we’ll deal with it. And maybe it will work, and if it does, then…”
“Then I’ll be a pill-popper for the rest of my life,” Darren muttered bitterly.
“Stop it,” Jayden coaxed, pulling gently on his hair before rubbing the scalp, trying to comfort and scold at the same time. “If it means you actually get to live that life instead of…instead of always waiting for the next bad day and having those shadows chasing you around…you know, isn’t that okay?”
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