by Kim Noble
The nurse handed over the pill and drink. I tossed the pill into my mouth and a second later took a gulp of water. As soon as I’d swallowed, I opened my mouth like I was at the dentist and waited for the nurse to peer in. She nodded approval and pushed the trolley around to the next bed. Then, as soon as her back was turned, I spat the tablet out from underneath my tongue. I’d done it. I’d beaten the system. I would never have to take another pill again.
Day after day I carried on the same act of pretending to take my medicine. At first it gave me a kick, knowing that I had some of the finest medical minds convinced they were controlling me. Then I realised I was still, to all intents and purposes, a prisoner. There had to be a way out, I thought. And then I discovered it. I wish I could have seen the staff’s faces when they discovered I was appealing the ward-of-court order.
Yes, crazy, old, schizo me was taking them to court.
‘No one’s ever won a tribunal.’
‘Have you got a solicitor?’
‘The last person to fight it was never seen again.’
News of my legal intentions was spreading all over the building. The patients on Ward 3 who could still think for themselves were especially excited.
When you’re sectioned, you’re given a bunch of papers explaining your legal status. Everyone is allowed the right of a tribunal. In the Maudsley there was a box where you could post your completed dispute form. I don’t think many people did it with much conviction. Once on the medication, they were lucky if they could concentrate long enough to tick the right box.
It can’t have been that hard, though, because I seemed to appeal without even realising it.
The first thing I knew was when doctors and patients started talking about it. Then Mum said my appeal date had been set.
Odd, I thought, that they’re talking as though I applied for this.
Even more so that they implied I’d already informed them I would be defending myself and not using a solicitor.
It was confusing but I decided to go along with it even though I didn’t have a clue what to say.
Tribunals were held at the hospital. A three-person judging panel, comprising one layperson and two doctors who are not your own doctors, hear the evidence and vote. The hospital then sends its representative and you send yours or, in my case, represent yourself.
Where on Earth had they got the idea that I could do that? I wondered. Is it some kind trick to make sure they win?
Realistically, though, I would never have been able to afford a professional so it was a relief when I found myself sitting outside the tribunal room with my father a few weeks later. It only took a second to work out where I was and what was going on – and just a second more to become absolutely petrified about going in to make my case.
What am I going to say? I haven’t prepared anything!
I’m glad Dad was there because he knew his way around the social services world, thanks to his job, although this was new territory for him. Luckily he wasn’t the only one experiencing a tribunal for the first time. Professor Leff couldn’t make the appointment so he sent a young registrar to represent the Maudsley. This doctor had never attended a tribunal before and he was desperate to look the part in his bow tie but I could tell he was a bundle of nervous energy.
He looks how I feel.
We all sat outside the tribunal room silently. No one dared to make eye contact. Then we were called in. The doctor went through the justifications for my long-term status as a ward of court: I was a danger to myself and to the public at large and my continual refusal to accept the assessment of schizophrenia meant I was likely to not take the medication, which in turn would lead to further psychotic episodes.
It was a persuasive argument, even when put by a perspiring, stuttering bag of nerves. The enormity of the situation suddenly hit me.
What am I doing here? I’m out of my depth. Why did I agree to come to this in the first place?
The funny thing is, I came out later not remembering another word. And yet there was Dad saying, with genuine pride beaming from his face, ‘You really put it up them.’
Did I? I don’t remember.
The letter saying I would no longer be detained under the Mental Health Act confirmed it. Apparently I’d sat round the table with all those professionals and addressed them as if I’d been at the bar all my life. I had – although it was a different type of bar.
My tactics of rebuttal apparently had been pretty straightforward: there’s no point arguing with the doctors because they have evidence on their side. The best you can do is just go in and agree as much as you can and say the action you are going to take. So that’s what I’d done. I’d confessed that while I had originally challenged the diagnosis of schizophrenia, I had now come to accept it as being accurate. I’d also accepted, therefore, that without medication I would become ill and pledged to continue taking the medicine. While that was the case, I’d concluded, there was no purpose to be served in becoming a ward of court or by being sectioned indefinitely.
I had to agree, it did sound persuasive. I just wished I could have remembered it to have basked in the moment with him.
A decision had been made that afternoon and I left the tribunal as the first alumnus of Ward 3 to ever win.
I wasn’t fighting the hospital’s diagnosis, just its right to strip me of my freedom. The verdict didn’t mean I was cured and there was still the little matter of taking the tablets every day once I got home. I had, after all, admitted to suffering from schizophrenia. Miss even one tablet, a nurse warned me, and the punishment would be severe.
‘If we discover you’re not taking your medication then we’ll call you back in and administer the drug via injection every month. Mess around after that and you will be hospitalised until the end of your section.’ She shrugged. ‘It’s up to you.’
I was so delighted to be released I’d have agreed to anything at that moment. But the second I left that austere old building I was searching feverishly for a plan. There was no way I wanted an injection and I certainly didn’t want to be locked up again. But there was also no chance of my taking one more tablet now I wasn’t being watched over by some scrutinising nurse. That would be like asking to be turned into a zombie. It would be the end of my life as I knew it.
It might be chaotic; it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. But it’s the only life I’ve got.
To make it harder to cheat, the hospital handed over a certain amount of tablets and told me to return when I ran out. That was a pretty devious trick. Keeping track of which pill I was meant to be on was harder than it sounds. I spent a good portion of every day worrying, ‘Have I taken today’s one out of the packet or not?’ To really keep the façade of cooperation going, whenever I returned to Denmark Hill I did my best to appear as I remembered the drugs making me – although I did draw the line at dribbling.
Months went by and I didn’t take a single, solitary pill. Eventually the hospital discovered what was going on. I didn’t know how. Kingy claimed I’d admitted it to her but that was a lie. Why would I?
I really thought my days of freedom were up. It turned out I might have accidentally done myself a favour. Professor Leff passed a note to my nurse to the effect that if I had genuinely not taken my medicine and still hadn’t had an episode then there was an argument to be had for desisting with the treatment. I couldn’t have agreed more and later that afternoon I skipped out of the Maudsley a free woman once again.
Now to rebuild my life. Now to get back to work.
Unfortunately, as I was soon to discover, my troubles were only just beginning.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It’s a crime scene now
Hayley smiled as the man poured the coffee.
She could hear men’s voices. It sounded close and yet muffled. Hayley shook her head. Was it suddenly foggy in there?
I must be more tired than I thought.
She didn’t fight it when the man with the coffee helped her up. She didn�
��t resist when he led her down the stairs. In fact, without his help she wouldn’t have made it.
What’s wrong with my legs?
She didn’t even try to prevent it when two other men appeared and all three of them lifted her into a box raised on a long table.
She giggled. Am I in a dream?
Could there be another explanation? She felt so listless, like a toy almost out of battery life, barely going through the motions. Nothing seemed to be working. She just wanted to close her eyes.
But then she recognised the pink, quilted fabric.
My God – it’s a coffin! I’m in a coffin.
Suddenly alert, Hayley’s heartbeat must have been off the scale by now. Still, though, she couldn’t move.
What the hell was going on?
Adrenaline surge fading, she fought hard to concentrate. She needed to be awake. She needed to see everything. She needed to be able to tell the police every last detail.
But I’m so tired.
The fog in her head was settling lower and thicker. It wasn’t a dream, she knew that. It was a nightmare. But this was worse.
Worse than anything she had ever seen.
Because of the children.
She heard them first. The sound was unclear, like a badly tuned radio, but slowly she recognised it as singing. When her eyes focused she could make out five little ones. They were dressed in long shirts, holding hands, chanting ‘Ring-O-Roses’. The children weren’t smiling. They were young but Hayley could read in their faces they knew it wasn’t a game. None of them dared look at the men in the grotesque animal masks standing at the back. None of them smiled. They just gripped each other’s hands as tightly as possible, sang as well as they could and tried not to look at the man filming it all.
‘My name is Patricia – and I am an alcoholic.’
I never uttered those words at an AA meeting but maybe I should have. I needed to do something. I’d entered my thirties full of optimism for the future. Life was going my way, for once. I had a flat, a few potential boyfriends sniffing around, nice lads actually, a job I enjoyed and somehow I’d even taken on the medical establishment – and won. For the first time in my memory I felt truly independent. But there was a problem and I could only think that the drinking was to blame. If I wasn’t at work or the hospital I always seemed to have a glass in my hand.
I never felt drunk or out of control but things were happening to me that I couldn’t explain any other way. I was losing huge chunks of time. Afternoons, evenings, sometimes entire days. How was that possible? I’d close the door of my flat, turn round and find myself somewhere completely different. Ping – ping – ping. Now I’m here, now I’m not. It was like flicking through a film on fast forward. You whizz on a bit, pause to view a few seconds, then press ‘FF’ again to skip to the next scene.
I could only chalk these events up to alcohol-related blackouts. I hated thinking I’d drunk so much I couldn’t remember so many things or passed out for such long periods of time – even though there hardly seemed to be any empty bottles at home – but it was easier than coming up with any other explanation. Somehow I was losing days on end and, shameful as it was, no other reason made sense.
As I sat down to analyse it one day, after another episode where I seemed to have ‘lost’ half a week, I realised everything had gotten worse since I’d started a new job. The gaps in time seemed to have begun then, and my memory problems had worsened. All the things in my life that had always been confusing but manageable had begun to escalate around the time I’d switched from the courier job to an admin position. Of course, when I say I switched jobs, I had no recollection of doing it and – like with so many other new jobs I’d found myself in – it had actually taken me a while to realise what was going on. That, at least, was normal for me …
I’m in an office. I’ve been here before. I’ve delivered and dropped things off here. But I’m not wearing my uniform. And I’m sitting behind a desk. There’s a pad, a computer and a small calendar that says it’s five years since I started my driving job. Where does the time go?
‘How are you settling in, then?’
Good, a familiar face. The other shoe started to drop. This guy’s been at me to apply for a transfer to a desk job for ages. Had I actually done it? Had they actually given me the gig without any interview or forms to be filled out? Surely I would have remembered.
I smiled. That always seemed to help when I was buying time, trying to figure out what was going on.
‘Glad to be out of that stupid truck, I bet,’ he continued. As he spoke he came over and perched on the corner of my desk. ‘Remember, anything you want, anything at all, you come to me. Okay?’
‘Thanks.’
I wonder if he winks at everyone.
A girl on the desk across the room came over. I’d met her before. She was the one I usually picked up from. What was her name?
Carol!
‘He thinks he’s God’s gift,’ Carol said. ‘Lord knows why when you look at him.’ I smiled again as I searched her face for more clues. Carol gestured again at the man. He wasn’t what anyone would call a looker. ‘He’s married, not that you’d know it.’
We chatted for a while. Then I just had to ask: ‘Carol, remind me again what I should be doing.’
Was it my imagination or did she look at me a second longer than was comfortable? Had she already told me this? By the look of it, she certainly thought she had, and recently too. Then she relaxed and went through a few things. It wasn’t hard, mostly paperwork and filing. But I could tell what she was thinking.
Bloody Green Card employees. More trouble than they’re worth.
*
There’s more to sussing out a job than just getting on top of your office duties. Somehow you have to learn your hours and, more importantly, learn how the hell to find your way back there the next day without annoying too many people. Not for the first time I felt like I was trying to board a spinning carousel.
It didn’t help that work wasn’t the only thing that kept me on my toes. Trips to the Maudsley remained a regular occurrence in my life – although I never seemed to remember travelling there. Luckily I only seemed to go for outpatient appointments but even so it was still such a pointless exercise. There are only so many times you can hear a doctor talk about your so-called weight problem before you start to drift off. Listening to them go on and on about this or that eating disorder – when they only had to look at me to see I was perfectly fine – made me actually wish I could have a blackout for once. Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. I didn’t know how it worked but it never seemed to do me any favours.
And was it my imagination or had I started going to the Maudsley more often since I changed jobs?
Appearing at the Maudsley when I least expected it was disconcerting but at least familiar. I opened my eyes and there I was. I recognised the chairs, the waiting room, some of the faces. It was still absolutely confusing to be going to get a coffee or think about nipping out to the shops and then the next second suddenly appearing there, but at least I was used to it. Even if I couldn’t explain it – how I’d got there, when I’d had time to change, all those regular questions – at least it only took me a moment or two to adjust, to get my bearings. It was only when I found myself one day mysteriously in another hospital that I really began to panic.
This isn’t the Maudsley!
A sickening fear swept through me. Anxiously I looked around for clues.
Check the walls. Check the doors. Check the staff.
Check my clothes!
I was in my own things.
Thank God – I’m not in Warlingham.
It was my worst fear to realise I’d appeared there again. There’d never been any warnings in the past. Why would there again? Even after the tribunal, I never doubted that I could be spirited back there at a moment’s notice. I hadn’t realised it before, but I suppose it was my biggest fear.
If I wasn’t in Warlingham then where was
I? And what did they want with me?
I’m in a chair, next to a bed. But wait – the bed’s not empty. I don’t believe it, I’m a visitor!
I got another shock when I saw who was asleep in the bed: it was Mum. The arthritis had been getting worse and worse and finally she’d had knee replacement surgery. She would be in there for a few more days.
‘Then,’ a doctor appearing next to me said, ‘she would need round-the-clock help for a couple of weeks. I understand you live together?’
‘No, I don’t live there.’
‘Really? I thought you told me … Never mind. Perhaps if you could pop round. Your sister says she will help as well. Otherwise we can call on social services.’
Mum wasn’t very good at being helped by strangers. She hated anyone else knowing her business. That part of her personality hadn’t changed. She was always cancelling the meals-on-wheels people or telling the cleaners not to bother returning. I decided that perhaps it would be better for her if I moved back home.
And maybe it would help me settle down as well …
Even though I’d never told Mum I’d gone, I think she was grateful to have me around more. She’d always given me a lot of credit for helping her out when, I had to admit, a lot of those times she’d said I’d helped her to bed I really hadn’t. Still, I could do it more now.
I enjoyed being back home but it was horrible seeing Mum suffer. Even with new joints she was so immobile and in such a lot of pain even if she tried to do simple things like pick up a bag or turn herself over in bed. At least once a week – although of course Mum insisted it was more like every night – I’d hear the thud of her walking stick on the bedroom wall and I’d stagger in to help her roll over and get comfy again.
Apart from weekends now, Mum was still on her own during the day because of my work, so a home help used to come in every morning and wash and feed her and look after the house a bit as well. What I didn’t know at the time was that the woman used to bring her kids sometimes, and even her boyfriend. They’d all hang around the entire day, watching telly, using Mum’s things, generally carrying on like they owned the place. Loads of stuff went missing during that time and naturally I blamed Mum. I thought, She’s blind, who knows where she’s put it? It was years later when I learnt how she’d been terrorised by the people employed to help her out.