Not many of the patients in Taylor Ward wanted to be there. Sean was an exception. With a broken nose and a face that had taken a few knocks, he was hard as nails. But he was in hospital because he’d tried to hang himself, and he liked it (hospital). He had a young son, a crushing heroin addiction and had known for some time that life wasn’t worth living. He also knew how he was going to end it. The rope he bought was the right length and the right strength. He didn’t want his family to find him, so he waited until they went out. He had a couple of hours before an unshockable friend was due and he would leave the front door open.
But Sean’s wife forgot her purse, came back ten minutes later and found him tying the rope to the roof rafters and down through the loft hatch.
‘What are you doing?’
‘Just putting up an indoor washing line, love!’
She took him to the psychiatric unit and he found life was good there. He got Methadone and Diazepam, and he was allowed out for an hour each day when he injected his heroin. He told me the ward was the best place he’d ever lived. I don’t know what happened to him, but all good things come to an end and I suppose he reverted to Plan A.
There was another heroin addict, whose name to my shame I can’t remember. It hurts me a little to say that I didn’t like him very much. I tried to avoid his company and spoke to him only when it would have been impolite not to. When I did talk to him, I tried to do so in a civil manner because not many other people, staff or patients, did. I also seemed to be his greatest benefactor of cigarettes.
On one of the regular inspections by the sniffer dogs, they found an empty syringe under his bed. He didn’t get the Methadone or Diazepam that Sean had been prescribed and was forced to go cold turkey. I had to stop him when he described his withdrawal symptoms because it was too horrific.
When I was about to be transferred to another ward I went to say goodbye. ‘All my friends are leaving,’ he said, ‘because you’re my friend.’ I felt guilty and belittled that I had shunned his company.
As an animal lover I enjoyed the visits from the sniffer dogs. The Springer spaniels were so happy to be doing what they had been trained to do. Their tails wagged and they had huge smiles on their faces (don’t tell me that dogs can’t smile, because I know they can).
Other patients didn’t look forward to their visits quite as much as I did. You could tell from their faces which of them had something to hide, and they usually found it – heroin, cannabis, vodka . . .
When I first saw James I thought he was a woman. But I don’t think he knew what he was. Thirty years old, of mixed race, very forthright and with mental health issues that defied both definition and treatment, James was a dedicated alcoholic. It was usually his vodka that the sniffer dogs found, much to his annoyance. The reason I thought James was a woman was his long black hair, brushed across his head from a parting on his extreme right to somewhere around his waist on the left, and the fact that he was wearing a skirt. He was from a broken family, had fended for himself all his life and didn’t give a shit about anything. He would tell you so at great length.
It wasn’t easy to meet the James behind the hair and the skirt, but when you met him you didn’t forget him. And your life was richer for it. He had come to the ward directly from a drug-induced coma in his sheltered accommodation. He hadn’t intended to kill himself; he just liked drugs and alcohol. I’m not sure why they kept James in the hospital, because every time they asked him if he wanted help to kick his habits his answer was ‘Do I fuck’. And when they asked him what he was going to do when he was released, he said, ‘I’m going straight to the fucking off licence so I can get pissed.’ I guess they knew you can’t help someone who doesn’t want to be helped.
During my stay here I met two men called Stewart, two men called Dave, and two men called Sean. I haven’t changed their names, to protect the innocent. I was going to call the next Sean by another name to make things easier for the reader, but that wouldn’t be fair.
Sean Cramer is one of the most talented young men I have ever met. You should remember his name because Sean Cramer is going to be famous. At least he should be, if his mental condition doesn’t get him first. He’s twenty-one, tall, slim and handsome. His personality is straightforward and generous. Sean is a singer-songwriter and he’s world class. I am his number one fan. He is also bipolar.
Sean’s disorder is controlled by a medication called Lithium. But Lithium is known to stifle creativity and that’s why Sean was in the hospital; he had stopped taking his medication because it stopped him being creative. I’m not sure why it was so important that he should be forced to take his medication, but that’s what they were doing to him.
Sean wandered round the place looking glum. Not even his legions of fans could cheer him up. Our men’s ward is on the ground floor and the women’s ward up above. The women’s windows overlook our garden. Every window in a psychiatric facility has to have a metal grille (to stop people getting in, obviously) and whenever Sean was in the garden the women would gather at the grilles to shout and wave to him. It might have been his music or it might have been his looks (they called him Elvis), I don’t know; they never reacted that way with me.
The fact that Sean continued to refuse to take his pills was of great concern to the mental health professionals. Sean had requested a Mental Health Tribunal, at which he intended to argue that the medication was stifling his talent. A Mental Health Tribunal is a sort of trial in a sort of court and its verdict carries the force of law. It takes the medical profession four weeks to prepare for it, during which the patient remains incarcerated. He gets to be interviewed by an independent psychiatrist and has the right to appoint a Mental Health Advocate or a solicitor specialising in mental health issues. Sean and his advocate were certain that they had a good case, and that they were going to win.
I don’t know who was the judge at Sean’s tribunal, but he or she didn’t set much store by artistic talent and the verdict went against him. He accepted it philosophically. On his Facebook page he wrote something like ‘I fought the law, and the law won’. I have no idea if he restarted his Lithium but I heard he enrolled at a drama and music college in Liverpool. I got his autograph as an investment in the future.
Stephen was another artist on the ward. His medium was paint on paper. He wasn’t as accomplished as Sean, but he was certainly more prolific; Stephen could produce a work of art in a matter of seconds. I’ve produced a few works of art myself, so I know a bit about these things. My son sometimes tells me a four-year-old could do better, and I know what he means. It is undoubtedly the case with Stephen’s paintings, but that’s because Stephen has the mind of a four-year-old.
In his thirties with a slouch and bad teeth, he was in most other ways an adult. He was good at smoking for example and he rolled his own cigarettes, although sometimes he would freeze and forget what he was doing until someone reminded him. By then most of his tobacco was on the floor. He had either seven or three children: John, Jennifer, Jonathan and ‘I forget the rest’. He was an expert dribbler, although not with a football.
When coffee was served he always took two cups, each with three sugars; at mealtimes he always took a second helping, even though he had barely started the first. The incredible thing (literally) about Stephen is that not only is he highly trained in specialised restraint techniques and high speed pursuit, but he is also a high-ranking police officer working undercover in a mental hospital.
I think it was because he felt vulnerable (without reason; we all liked him, no one would have hurt him) that he needed to keep reminding us he had a radio in his shirt pocket that put him in direct contact with Police Headquarters. At the slightest hint of trouble he would request emergency back-up. We all waited for the blue lights and sirens, but they never came.
I hope Stephen will keep producing his paintings, because in the same way that putting an infinite number of monkeys in front of a typewriter will eventually produce War and Peace, I know he will prod
uce a masterpiece. Keep checking The Tate.
After my suicide attempt I was taken to the General Hospital until a bed was available in a mental health ward. I had been sectioned under the Mental Health Act so I wasn’t allowed out in the grounds in case I ran away in my pyjamas. That meant I wasn’t able to smoke and I saved about fifty quid. When I was transferred to Ramsey Ward I was desperate for a cigarette, but I didn’t have any. The first person I met who looked safe to approach was Dave and I asked him if he would lend me one. He did and I was very grateful.
The problem with patients in a psychiatric hospital is that you don’t know why they are there unless they tell you. Dave was in his fifties, smartly dressed with a neat haircut and a well-trimmed moustache. And he was a criminal. I know because he told me.
I had guessed from the way he stood and the way he walked that he was ex-military. He had been a soldier since he left school and had seen some pretty terrible things in war zones around the world. He was traumatised by what he saw in Bosnia and had been receiving treatment since then. Discharged from the army on medical grounds, he had settled in a nice little flat in Liverpool. Then one evening, for no reason he could understand, he set it on fire. ‘I called the fire brigade,’ he said. ‘I told the police what I had done and they arrested me for arson.’ So Dave was a criminal awaiting trial. Conviction was a certainty but he was hoping he would be sentenced to treatment rather than punishment. That’s why he was on Ramsey Ward; his sentence had already begun.
So the point I was making is that there is no way of knowing why people are in the mental health care system. Sometimes you can guess, but most of the time most of them seem unremarkable.
A new patient arrived. He came into the lounge, walked up to each of us and shook our hands. ‘Hello, I’m Steve and I’m so happy to be here.’ When I asked him why, he said, ‘Because I’ve just come from the police cells’, and that was it; he didn’t say another word the whole time he was with us. Not a single word; no telling, no guessing, no label on his forehead. I had no idea why he was there.
Chris, on the other hand, had a ginger beard which, even after he had trimmed it, was never shorter than a foot long. Together with his moustache it obscured the whole of his lower face. But you could tell that he was always smiling. It wasn’t just his face that was smiling, it was all of him. His whole happy, bouncy, bumbling personality was constantly, unfailingly smiling. Even the most depressed depressives, and there were a few of them in there, found it hard to be miserable when Chris was around.
Chris wanted to help everybody. So when Donald arrived it seemed to be a perfect match; he was just what Chris was looking for. Donald was old and confused and he genuinely did need help. Chris was straight there, right at Donald’s side. Chris was in his element and Donald was getting the care he clearly craved.
When Donald had been there a few days, and Chris had all but adopted him, two police officers came. They asked to speak to Donald in a private room. Unfortunately they chose a room next to the garden and they didn’t close the window. One of the patients heard the whole interview. He came running into the ward shouting, ‘He’s a paedo! Donald’s a fucking paedo!’
Luckily the nurses spotted what had happened and Donald didn’t come back. We heard he’d been removed for his own safety. Chris was left feeling upset; the ink on the adoption papers wasn’t even dry.
Spike Milligan once wrote, ‘What a mental health patient needs is a cuddle, but that unfortunately doesn’t seem to be available on the NHS.’ I’d like to say that Spike, who knew quite a lot about being mental, was right. Compassion and humanity from the health professionals would go a long way. It would have helped me.
I was brought to the psychiatric ward in a police car (which seemed to impress the inmates) and the first words I heard there were, ‘We’ve been really worried about you.’ I liked that. But when I had heard the same words from ten different people at ten different times in ten different places, I started to wonder. When the words became, ‘We’ve all been really worried about you, George’ (they’d read my file and didn’t realise I never used my first name), it dawned on me that they’d been told to say it and that they were actually thinking, ‘Got to pick the kids up at four and we’ll have fish for tea, then take Johnny to Scouts’, or ‘A quick game of squash with Damien after work, then a couple of G&Ts at the club.’ If that makes me sound a bitter person then maybe I am. But not about this.
I am in favour of euthanasia if a person’s pain is too much to bear. I have taken three of our dearly loved pets, Stella my beautiful Weimaraner, Izzy our stupid chocolate Labrador, and Nat our big fat cat, to the vets when it became kinder not to let them suffer. I was diagnosed with severe depression and I don’t understand how we can be so compassionate to animals, but not to humans. When I went to my GP he asked me a series of questions that he downloaded from his computer and said, ‘Yes, you’re severely depressed’ . . . I should have been a doctor! I was prescribed Prozac, but got all the side-effects without any benefit. I was shaking so uncontrollably that I could barely stand up. I got confused and lost. I came off the Prozac and my mood plummeted. That’s when I started ruminating about euthanasia.
My wife Tara had been very supportive. But I don’t think she could really understand how I was feeling. There had been a news report about a family on a camping holiday who had taken a disposable barbecue into their tent to keep them warm at night. They had all died in their sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning. Easy!
But it’s not easy, and I can testify that it doesn’t always work. I bought a disposable barbecue, blocked up any obvious holes in our garden shed and settled down for a long sleep. Perhaps it was the wrong sort of barbecue, or I hadn’t found all of the air holes. My wife came home from work and found me alive. She called the emergency services and it all went terribly, irretrievably downhill.
Until 1962 attempted suicide was a prosecutable offence; that’s why we talk about committing suicide. It sounds wrong to me. You can commit murder, you can commit armed robbery, you can commit adultery; but the words ‘commit’ and ‘suicide’ don’t belong together. I haven’t yet committed any of the above, but I’ve tried one of them. So far without success.
I broadly believe that my life is my own to do with what I want. It is about the only thing that the state can’t legally take from me. But it makes little practical difference. Even if a suicide attempt is no longer a criminal act, the results are the same. Whether it’s a prison sentence or a section under the Mental Health Act, the poor bugger gets locked up.
It isn’t easy to take your own life and I am not a brave person. I have gone on to the top of a bridge with a rucksack of bricks on my back. I genuinely intended to jump but got to thinking, ‘It’s too cold and it’s dark. It’s raining and miserable; and what if the rucksack comes off, because I’m a good swimmer?’ Razor blades would hurt and leave a mess; and pity the poor lorry driver who had me coming through his windscreen, or the train driver whose wheels went over me. They’d never recover. I know you can’t just put a bag over your head and breathe in stale air until you collapse, because the survival instinct makes you rip the bag away; I know, I’ve tried.
I asked Sean, my heroin addict friend I mentioned earlier, why he’d chosen to hang himself when he could just have taken an overdose of heroin. He said, ‘With a rope it’s quick and final. With an overdose they might find you and revive you.’
It’s a good point, except that as I said before, I’m a coward. The idea of putting a rope around my neck and jumping into oblivion doesn’t appeal to me. I’d rather take an overdose but again, that isn’t as easy as it sounds. I took a whole cocktail of medication over not one but two days, together with a large amount of alcohol. It wasn’t a haphazard, spur of the moment attempt; it was carefully planned. So I didn’t eat at all on the first day until the evening, when I took a fistful of pills over a few hours then went to bed. The next morning I started again, pills and whisky for breakfast and so on all through th
e day. I was becoming increasingly drowsy, increasingly otherworldly. I had stayed away from home for those two days, but I wanted to die in my own bed. So I went there to finish the job.
By the time my wife found me, I thought I was too far gone for medical intervention, so I wasn’t worried. Mistake number one. I also thought that I could refuse medical treatment. Mistake number two. The paramedic treated me against my will, so I hit him. Mistake number three.
It is certainly true that I would have died without the intervention of the paramedic that evening, but that had been my intention. I would like to apologise for hitting him, but given the state I was in I’m sure it couldn’t have been more than a gentle slap. I am angry that he saved my life. But the thing that hurts me most is when people say I was ‘attention seeking’.
By the way, in case you were wondering how old God is, the answer depends. Sometimes he is eight thousand years old; that’s usually when Stewart is speaking in tongues and blessing us with his big tattooed arms. And at other times he is fifty-three; but that’s when Stewart is being Stewart, so I suppose he isn’t technically God.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Like, I suspect, many white Britons, I took little interest in Pakistan. As a country it appeared distant, alien and dangerous. Pakistanis in Britain were peripheral to me – I exchanged greetings with my friendly newsagent, read about extremists plotting to impose sharia law, and walked through streets of Asian faces when my football team played at Bradford or Aston Villa. Two events made me think again. An appeal for help from a young British Pakistani woman, followed by a tragedy in my own life, drew me into the writing of this book and, with it, an understanding of the shared concerns and common humanity that unite us.
The book grew from these facts, but it is not a factual documentary. The character named Martin is not me, although I share many of his thoughts and sorrows. Ayesha is not Ayesha, because the real Ayesha insisted that her identity be protected. As you read the pages that follow you will understand why all the main characters have been changed, locations altered and events rewritten. The whole picture of corruption and violence, the organised crime and the anguish of those caught up in them are terribly real.
Ayesha's Gift Page 24