The Mirror World of Melody Black

by Gavin Extence

  I asked the nurse who was wheeling me through to my room if I was allowed visitors.

  ‘Usually,’ he said. ‘As long as they’re scheduled. A doctor will talk to you about it later. You’ll have a personalized care plan.’

  ‘I don’t want any visitors,’ I told him. ‘I only want to see Dr Barbara. No one else.’

  Time passed. I’m not sure how much.

  I was back on the lithium and feeling like a zombie, which, on the whole, was an improvement. Undead felt so much better than alive at that point. Actually dead would have felt better still, but no one was prepared to give me this option. A couple of rashly scrawled midnight signatures and my right to death had been irrevocably waived.

  The downsides of lithium: headaches, stomach aches, nausea like you wouldn’t believe, tremors, perpetual lethargy, the inability to read, dizziness, constipation, weight gain.

  The upsides: the inability to think, a memory that’s shot to pieces, spending most of the day asleep.

  I would have spent all day – every day – asleep had it not been for the doctors and nurses, who were constantly bothering me. First there was the incessant feeding. Three times a day, a nurse came to watch me eat, not leaving until every plastic spoonful had disappeared. They had me on a strict two-thousand-calorie, sodium-controlled diet. I also had to drink two litres of water a day. It didn’t matter that I was neither hungry nor thirsty. The nurse would stay as long as it took. I assumed that if I refused to eat or drink I’d be fed through a tube, like the girl opposite. Occasionally, I wondered if this wouldn’t be an easier option.

  When it wasn’t food, it was blood. My lithium levels were being monitored almost continually. Mere moments after the first blood test of the day, it seemed I was being shaken awake for the second, the third, the fourth. If I’d had a cannula, it might have been possible for them to draw the blood while I went on sleeping, but, of course, I wasn’t allowed a cannula. Cannulas counted as sharps and were not permitted on the ward. Neither were my house keys or nail file. Both had been taken from my handbag upon my arrival. They’d also taken my compact, because of the mirror (a ‘potential sharp’), and my cigarette lighter, for more obvious reasons. The compact meant nothing to me – it wasn’t as if I was going to worry about applying make-up – but the lighter pained me like a missing limb every time I thought of it. If I wanted to go for a cigarette, I had to be chaperoned down to the garden by a nurse who never took her eyes off me. The garden was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high metal fence, beyond which there were tall trellises that blocked out any view of the outside world. You could hear traffic, and occasionally pedestrians, passing on the side road that abutted the hospital, but you could see nothing.

  Smoking was the only activity in which I retained any semblance of interest, and whenever I was being uncooperative, refusing to sit up for blood tests or water, the nurses would bribe me with cigarettes. At night-time, I was put on nicotine patches.

  I tried to stop washing, too. Of all the pointless activities that constituted my day, this seemed by far the most pointless. I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t seeing anyone who wasn’t mental, or so used to dealing with the mental that it made no difference. And washing seemed such a monumental and fruitless effort. I’d just get dirty again.

  I explained the situation to the nurses, as best I could, but that only seemed to make matters worse. Every other day, one of them would march me down to the shower and wait outside while I went through the same mindless farce. The shower had a lock on the temperature control so you couldn’t burn yourself. Nevertheless, I was still on ten-minute checks; if my shower lasted longer than that, the nurse would poke her head around the door to make sure that everything was okay.

  My showers never lasted more than ten minutes, and I didn’t bother with soap or shampoo. I just stood under the tepid water like a mannequin until the nurse started knocking on the door. I didn’t shave my legs either. I wasn’t allowed a razor unsupervised, and after a few days, my leg and underarm hair was downy rather than prickly, so had ceased to be a problem.

  One day, long after time had stopped meaning anything, I happened to catch sight of my reflection as I was undressing for my shower. The only mirrors on the ward were in the toilets and shower rooms, and because of my continual torpor and shaky vision, I rarely bothered to look in them. But on this day my attention was snared out of pure bewilderment. For several moments, I didn’t recognize my own face. My skin was pale and oily. My hair was a dirty blonde mop. My cheeks looked too fat and my eyes too narrow. I thought the fatness was probably because of the lithium and the hours upon hours of lying perfectly still. Unfortunately, there was nothing much I could do about this. There was no chance of hiding and later disposing of my meals, much less the lithium. The nurses watched me far too closely. But I couldn’t stand seeing myself like this in the mirror: a pale, greasy blob.

  After a few minutes of gruelling thought, the solution I struck upon was this: I would make sure I didn’t look in the mirror again.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Dr Barry asked.

  ‘Worse.’

  He nodded, as if this were the only possible answer. Which it was. How could anyone hope to get better in a place like this?

  ‘How about the nausea?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘On a scale of one to ten; ten being very bad, one being—’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Ten?’

  I shrugged again. It wasn’t really a ten and he knew it. If anything, the nausea was starting to taper off. But I couldn’t stand the way he was looming over me with his patronizing eyes and his stupid ten-point scale of wellbeing. Dr Barry was constantly making me quantify things that it made no sense to quantify. I resolved that if he asked me to rate my mood, one to ten, just one more time, I’d tell him zero and be done with it. No more talking for the rest of the day. It was times like this I wished I’d been admitted to the Carmelite monastery instead. At least then I’d have some peace. You could bet those nuns knew when to shut the fuck up.

  Although he was up against some stiff competition, Dr Barry was by far the worst doctor I’d ever met. He was about eight feet tall and had a beard that made my skin crawl. His default expression was one of smug complacency, except when he knew you were looking at him, when he’d contort his features into a poor imitation of paternal concern. In all honesty, I had no idea why he was even allowed to practise psychiatry. If he’d taken a photo of me, any moron on the street would have been able to diagnose my mood after a single glance. Yet Dr Barry lacked either the initiative or the imagination to discern anything without first conducting a ten-minute questionnaire. I could only assume that he’d been hired based on his height alone. It was probably useful to have a giant on psychiatric intensive care, whatever his medical incompetence.

  I didn’t know if Barry was Dr Barry’s first or second name, but I presumed the latter. He wasn’t the sort of doctor who would offer up his first name, which lost him a lot of respect in my book. Of course, if it turned out that I was wrong, and Barry really was his first name, I’d have had an even harder time respecting him. But that wasn’t the point.

  He stared at me for a few moments, his face smug and complacent, and I stared straight back. He didn’t have the balls to tell me I was a lying bitch and my nausea couldn’t possibly be a ten, not still. If he’d said that, I might have been able to warm to him a little. But instead, he just rubbed his beard, then decided to placate me with more medication. ‘I’ll have one of the nurses bring an anti-emetic with your lunch,’ he said. ‘How’s your appetite?’

  I couldn’t remember which way the scale ran for appetite, and I didn’t care. ‘Six and a half,’ I told him. Then I pulled the thin NHS covers over my eyes and waited for him to go away.

  ‘You are getting better,’ Dr Barbara insisted, and I felt a surge of weary disappointment.

  ‘I’m worse,’ I mumbled, hardly bothered if my voice was audible or not. ‘Every day I’m worse.’

/>   This truth was so self-evident to me that it was inconceivable no one else had noticed. Yet they talked, instead, of positive signs: the fact that I was sleeping less, that I could now sustain a conversation for more than two minutes if I chose to do so (which I rarely did). They didn’t seem to realize or care that this was all just surface.

  Inside, I was broken. Every hour I had to spend awake, or even half awake, was an ordeal, from the moment the nurses arrived with breakfast until lights out in the evening. And the worst part was that I knew it would go on and on like this for ever. Every morning I awoke with the hollow notion, seeming to emanate from my stomach, that I had another day to get through. Then I’d wonder how many more days there’d be after this one. The figure I came up with was ten thousand. I don’t know why. And when I tried to think about all those days and what they might mean, I could only envisage them as an endless line of dominoes, every one a double blank and falling in horrible slow motion. One domino every twenty-four hours.

  I decided that this – the sheer hopelessness of my situation – must be why everyone was now insisting that I was getting better, despite so much evidence to the contrary. You couldn’t trust doctors to be straight with you when you were beyond help. They didn’t want to make their lives difficult by admitting you were a terminal case. Of course, Dr Barbara used to be different, but now she’d finally snapped as well. I’d made her snap. I’d pushed her and pushed her and now she was lying to me too, pretending I was improving so she’d have an excuse to stop coming. I thought for a reckless moment that I should make things easy for her, remove her from my visitors list along with everyone else. Except Dr Barbara was still bringing my cigarettes every couple of days. The idea of this final crutch being withdrawn sent ice down my spine. Smoking was the only thing I had left – the only thing that could possibly help those dominoes to fall faster – and I knew I’d fight to the last to preserve this precious resource. There was no way I’d do anything to force Dr Barbara’s hand.

  In the meantime, I’d just have to put up with her mendacity, in the same way that I had put up with her bringing in clothes and toiletries, and all the other daily accoutrements that no longer held any relevance to my life. There was an overnight bag stuffed into the bottom of the bedside cupboard which I’d never bothered to unzip. I knew that Beck must have packed it for her, and I couldn’t bear to think about that. More to the point, there was no reason I could imagine why I would choose to wear my own clothes rather than the ones the hospital provided. The very idea of choosing which clothes to wear seemed a colossal and futile effort. Why wear one thing instead of another? Much simpler to let the nurses take charge and replace my NHS nightgown whenever they deemed it necessary.

  Unfortunately, Dr Barbara had not stopped with the pointless overnight bag. Some time after, there had been a pen and a book of crossword puzzles. Later still, when she knew that my headaches and nausea were starting to subside, she’d brought in an imposing copy of Gone with the Wind, which had sat untouched for the past few days. Initially, I went through the motions of opening the book and running my eyes back and forth across the countless rows of text, but it might as well have been printed in Arabic. Even though I’d seen the film, the words evoked nothing for me; they passed through my mind like flour through a sieve. For a long time, I wondered why Dr Barbara had brought me such a long and difficult book, one that had no significance or connection to anything I knew about. She claimed that it had just been sitting on one of her bookshelves and she’d thought I might like it. But this seemed implausible. After a while, I realized a more likely explanation was that she’d chosen it because it was long and difficult. It was something to keep me fruitlessly occupied, in the same way that prisoners were made to sew mailbags or break up stones with a pickaxe. If I managed to read a page a day – which seemed a very ambitious goal – then Gone with the Wind would keep me busy for the next three years. After that, Dr Barbara would probably bring me War and Peace or something. Anna Karenina would have been a better choice, but there was no chance she’d bring me that because of the suicide.

  ‘Abby?’ Dr Barbara’s expression told me that she’d continued to talk, but nothing had registered.

  ‘I’m worse,’ I repeated, then returned my gaze to a blank patch of wall. She kept looking at me but I didn’t meet her eye. I didn’t want to see confirmation of what I already knew. That there was nothing to be done.

  ‘Abby, listen to me. This won’t last for ever. I know it doesn’t feel that way right now, but you have to trust me. You’ve spent the last week semi-comatose, but now you’re beginning to come round. If it seems like things are getting worse, that’s only because you’re starting to function again. You’re starting to think and feel things.’

  ‘I don’t want to feel things,’ I told her. ‘I don’t want to feel anything ever again.’

  ‘I know you don’t. But trust me, please. It’s just a matter of time. Things can only get better from here.’

  After Dr Barbara had left and the lights had gone out, I took my cobalt-blue dress from the bedside cupboard and held it in my lap. I had to do this every so often. It made me feel even worse, but I had to do it all the same. Everything else I saw on the ward was blank or pastel or neutral. The pillows and linen and doctors were white. The curtains and walls were off-white. The nurses were an insipid, washed-out green. But my dress was still astonishing – a flash of colour as vivid and violent as lightning on a moonless night. And when I looked at my dress, I felt like Eve standing outside the Garden of Eden, able to peer back through the gates at something truly sublime and for ever lost. I couldn’t look at my dress for very long.

  That night, as I sat cradling my dress like it was a murdered infant, I realized that Dr Barbara was right about at least one thing. The new problem I was facing was that I was no longer semi-comatose. I had become alert enough to comprehend, without any filter or anaesthetic, how awful I felt, and this was why I had reached my lowest ebb. From this a more general insight followed, even though I’d assumed that any new insight was now far beyond me.

  The problem was thought itself, the self-awareness that made it possible for me to look at my dress and understand where I had been, where I was now, and where I was going – or not going. It was a uniquely human problem, something no other animal had to put up with, this ability to suffer in multiple tenses – simultaneously to mourn the past, despair of the present and fear the future. The kindest thing would be for one of the doctors to give me a full frontal lobotomy; that was the only thing that could solve this problem for good.

  I wasn’t going to get a full frontal lobotomy. I’d been born in the wrong decade.

  The only way out of this prison was to get better. And since this wasn’t going to happen, I’d have to fake it. I’d have to make the doctors believe that I was well and no longer a threat to myself. Then I could take the steps to make sure I’d never come back here.

  16

  A LETTER, UNDELIVERED

  Hello Abby.

  I don’t know how else to start this letter. I’ve been looking at a blank sheet of paper for God knows how long, and this is all I’ve come up with. But it’s probably best to keep things simple. Please assume that my words fall short of what I actually want to say.

  I came to see you a couple of days ago, or I tried to. I made it as far as reception. I thought that if I could get someone to call you – if you knew I was already there – then you’d have to change your mind and let me in. Turns out you’re not taking calls, either. I should have known. I’ve left about twenty messages on your mobile.

  They sent a doctor out eventually. He was nice. He made me a cup of coffee and let me rant at him for five minutes. Then he repeated what I already knew: he couldn’t let me see you, couldn’t even take a message, since this is expressly against your wishes. Barbara finally agreed to pass this letter on, but only when she thinks you’re ‘capable of reading it’. That paints a pretty bleak picture.

  Needless to say,
the doctor I saw at reception couldn’t tell me anything about how you are – patient confidentiality. All he could give me were generalities: that you were in a safe environment and would be receiving the best possible care, etc., etc.

  I had a plan, of sorts, when I walked into the hospital. I was going to wait as long as it took, just refuse to leave until someone had communicated with you on my behalf, or at least given me some concrete information. Instead, I found myself leaving within half an hour, having apologized profusely to the doctor and receptionist. All very British. They gave me a number I could call if I needed to speak to anyone again. It’s for some sort of mental health support charity. I haven’t used it yet.

  I’m sorry: a couple of pages in and I’m already sounding bitter and self-pitying. That really isn’t my intention. I’m not telling you any of this to make you feel bad. I imagine you feel bad enough already – much worse than I do.

  I have this problem that never seems to get any easier. When you’re at your lowest, I always think that there must be some magic combination of words that would help you. But I can never find them. They’re always just beyond my grasp.

  All I can find to say right now is that I’m here for you, whenever you’re ready.

  There’s one other thing too, and again it’s something you might not find particularly easy to hear. But I promised I’d tell you if I managed to get in touch.

  Your mum phoned, the day after you went into hospital. I hadn’t really figured out what I was going to say to your family at that point – I was hoping I’d get the chance to see you first – but I wasn’t going to lie to her, obviously. She’s called or texted every day for the past week, and yesterday she came over to the flat. (She was here at ten, so God knows when she left Exeter.)

  She’s worried: that goes without saying. She’s worried and she wants you to call her. Please just think about it.