The Million-Rand Teaspoon

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The Million-Rand Teaspoon Page 17

by Nikki Ridley


  It was hard. It was incredibly hard. I had to dig very deep to find those wells, and so often they were just filled with tears.

  What had I done to myself? How had I come to be here? Hell, I had really stuffed up! The severity and the permanence of the situation I was in slapped me in the face so hard, I was left not just reeling, but broken on the floor. I was blind, and I was in an institution for the insane! The worst thing was that it didn’t just slap me once, but many times, because I was still medicated twenty-four hours a day, and that kept me from grasping the situation on any kind of continuous level. I would be ‘zoned out’ for hours, and it would hit me just before I was due for the next lot of pills. I was medicated throughout my stay at Townhill – as were all the patients. I can’t blame them, really, because with over 400 patients to cope with, I guess it is easier for the staff to keep everyone docile than to have to deal with the true extent of each individual trauma and madness.

  On being ‘upgraded’ to an open ward, the cacophony of sound changed. There was less banging and screaming, but the voices were now all around me, and close to me. Many voices – belonging to the creatures that brushed up against me and crowded in on me. I often couldn’t make sense of what they were saying, nor could I understand the movement, and so I was no less panicked than before. I felt harassed. I was harassed!

  I also discovered that there were long fingers in Townhill. The other inmates (I assume it was them) stole my things. I was a soft target because of my blindness, and so the few possessions I had with me – my Walkman, a little radio and other bits and pieces – vanished very quickly.

  I clearly remember being depressed and incredulous as to how people could steal from me when I was helpless. Ironic.

  Then there was the noise outside. There was a workshop on the grounds, and they did a lot of metalwork there.

  I had always had particularly acute hearing, but now the loss of my sense of sight heightened it even more, so that I was intensely aware of and affected by sound – even distant sound. The noises coming from the workshop consequently drove me to distraction all day, every day. As if it wasn’t bad enough. I just couldn’t block it out. There was banging and hammering, and, worst of all, the angle-grinder! It screamed through my brain.

  All I wanted to do was get out of that place.

  I was not ‘all there’ cognitively, in many respects, and I laugh now at an acutely clear memory I have of wanting to escape.

  I had made friends with another inmate in the open ward. I wasn’t sure at the time what his problem was, but he didn’t scare me like the others, and he quickly became a much needed ally. I remember hatching an idea one day that if I could only get the key, I could get out, and thinking that since he could see, he could find the key for me … because I had had enough of this shit and I wanted to go home! I remember whispering to him to ‘pass me the fucking key!’ and him replying, ‘I don’t have the fucking key!’

  I think he was schizophrenic. I was blind and permanently beside myself. Two loonies in a loony bin, conspiring to escape. Hilarious.

  I think I realised how laughable it was even then, because I started getting better. It was the first of many light moments in the general gloom and distress of my existence in Townhill, and I began finding the strength to focus more and more on the positive day-to-day things – of which there were a few.

  First and foremost was my psychologist. She stood out from many of the others for me because we ‘clicked’, and she came across to me as being an incredibly good person. She became a good friend while I was in Townhill. She helped me a great deal. I had weekly therapy sessions with her, and thanks to those I soon faced re-evaluation and transfer to another, more relaxed, section of the institution.

  Then there were the gardens. They were huge and expansive, and beautifully kept.

  I couldn’t ‘see’ this, but I could feel it. I could feel the way they were laid out, and I could sometimes see the colours if not the actual shapes of the trees and flowers – and in the strange way that people with cortical blindness sometimes know what it is they can’t see, I knew. I walked often in the gardens, led by one of the nurses, a Zulu woman whom I remember as being very kind and gentle with me, and I gradually traced them with my slow steps till it seemed to me as if I could see them.

  There were trampolines and a physiotherapy gym in the grounds, and they had specific exercise regimes designed for patients. My motor skills were not all that great, in particular my fine motor skills. My left hand was weaker than my right, as it still is today, and I was given a lot of exercises to do with that.

  I was taught to walk with a cane, so that when I was finally transferred to the third and most relaxed ward, appropriately named Libertas, I was able to move around relatively easily by myself. I never fully mastered the use of the cane, but it was an improvement in that I didn’t need to be led everywhere as before.

  There was the weekly Friday night dance, held for the patients in the two open wards. Everyone enjoyed them, and I didn’t need to be able to see to get the general atmosphere of hilarity that reigned on those nights. Two wards full of mixed nuts dancing and partying together … and endlessly trying to bum cigarettes off each other, even though no one ever had any!

  It wasn’t all good, even after the initial trauma had passed and I had learnt to deal with the facts of life. There was unpleasantness. I encountered it in some of the caregivers, some of whom I really thought were in the wrong line of work (but, hey, I guess they can’t be too choosy. It’s not as if people beat the door down to work in a mental hospital), and I encountered it in my fellow patients and inmates.

  Some of it was sad. Some of it was disturbing. There were people in there who never ceased to give me the heebie-jeebies, and there were some for whom my heart bled. There was ‘Wa Wa’, as we called him, who’d had his skull smashed in by a bunch of thugs with a baseball bat, and growled and spat constantly in hatred of the race group to which his attackers had belonged, no matter in which direction you tried to steer the conversation. ‘Damn bloody …’ He couldn’t say anything else.

  Then there was one guy who’d ended up in there because he had severe epilepsy and suffered incessant fits. Like me, he was in there because no one could take care of him on the outside, but he shouldn’t really have been there. At least I thought so. It wasn’t his fault, and he wasn’t mad. He was just a danger to himself and needed constant supervision.

  Then there was the guy who’d been caught having it off with a goat. Illegally sick.

  Oh yeah, they were all in there.

  There were the truly criminally demented, the schizophrenics, and the people who had been badly hurt or traumatised, or who just couldn’t cope with the world, with all the kaleidoscopic behaviours that came with them, and all the tragedy that came with their histories. There were many who had very little chance of getting out of there – ever. It was a strange place to begin finding meaning and happiness in life again, but I was faced with a choice. I could choose to see my cup as half empty, or I could choose to see it as half full. I chose the latter, as difficult as it was at first, because I knew that if I moped and felt sorry for myself, I was going nowhere. I would only get worse with the passage of time. I had a long way to go and a long, hard slog ahead of me. I could do very little for myself. I had to be bathed and dressed by the nurses. I had to be fed, like a baby, unable to bring a spoon to my mouth with my own hand. I couldn’t find my mouth.

  As my resolve, and my ability, grew to be positive, I became less afraid, and found more to regard as interesting and entertaining. The same blithe outlook on life that had probably helped bring me down before, now helped me get up again. I was able to get on with ‘today’ without worrying too much about next week, or next year, or ten years down the line.

  However, I do remember being very conscious of what I must have looked like to people who had known me from before my overdose. I particularly remember visits from my psychologist friend from Shekane. The first co
uple of times she visited, I didn’t really know who she was or why she was there, but after she had come to see me a few times, I was struck by the fact that we had played squash together at the courts in Dalton the last time I had seen her as the ‘old me’. I had been as close to recovery then as I had ever been … and yet here I was.

  She was incredibly patient with me, and I remember thinking that it must have been very disappointing and painful for her to see me this way – physically impaired, blind, disorientated and confused – and it made me acutely aware of just how quickly things can change.

  In remembering just how close I had been to recovery, just how close I had come to not being where I was, I thought that the rehabs don’t actually give people enough time to recover. They expect the impossible. They should keep people there longer, far longer, though I know that for financial reasons, and also because they can’t always keep people there against their will, that is not really feasible.

  It was hard to think these thoughts. It was hard to be so aware of the fact that it was me who had done this to myself, and not some outside force that I could blame and rave against.

  It was so hard.

  Yet, in retrospect, I think my concern for what my friend felt is evidence of my growth in the face of that challenge: it would previously have been unlike me to have thought about how anything could make someone else feel.

  My ‘freedom’ was granted after a battery of simple tests to gauge whether or not I had the potential to cope with life on the outside – things like what the date was and what my name was. Basically, they needed to know that I had a consistent awareness of who and where I was from day to day, and that I was not simply swimming around in my own mental fishbowl – just reacting to what was going on around me without much insight.

  I was in Townhill for just under a year, and although I left with an impression of a place well run, I’d be lying if I said that it was an easy time. It had been incredibly difficult. Yet it was the time that I grew the most, because I had nowhere to go but up, and as the months went by, I had to face the psychological challenge of acceptance anew with each level of improvement. That, coupled with the desire to get out of there, is what pushed me past the stage where I could easily have collapsed in on myself and fulfilled the doctors’ prognosis.

  When I left Townhill, my sister took me in (or should I say took me on), and it was she who finally stopped all the medication.

  That decision effectively gave me my life back, because I could then begin to match my attitude with a physical improvement. It wasn’t overnight – in fact it took months – but I eventually progressed to the point of being able to dress, bathe and feed myself.

  What had been missing before was as much the concentration as the co-ordination required to do those simple tasks. The medication had been keeping me from re-learning that, but at Townhill they had just put it down to severe brain damage.

  The Unimaginable

  Lynn

  THE DAY I GOT THAT CALL FROM MARK TO TELL ME PAUL had overdosed, that they thought he was going to die and that I must come up to Jo’burg immediately was, for me, less of a shock than the delivery of a profound sorrow.

  As brother and sister, Paul and I had been incredibly close, and I had experienced his addiction first-hand when he’d stayed with me, on numerous occasions, when I’d lived in Jo’burg. Yet this came as, if not exactly a surprise, a horror that I’d not thought about rather than thought would not happen.

  He’d had so much life in him – so much fire – too much fire to go down. Yet, at the same time that I thought this, I had never really believed that there was any way out for Paul.

  I’d had a good relationship with him, but I’d always had so much going on in my own life, that as much as I’d looked out for him, I had removed myself from any familial obligation to try to fix him. I truly believed that the only person who could do that was Paul himself, and that freed me to have a relationship with him that precluded the distance that constant disappointment creates between two people. I had accepted his addiction. I hadn’t liked it, but I was powerless against it, and so I took a more practical approach to dealing with it. I’d had him followed in Hillbrow, so that I always knew where he was. If I found he was passed out somewhere on the street, I was happy to know he was alive. He always made it, so I didn’t worry. I couldn’t. It wouldn’t do Paul any good, or me, and I knew that he would always come to me, because he could. My door was always open for him because I wasn’t trying to change him.

  When my mother became sick with worry because he’d disappeared into Hillbrow again, or walked out of an expensive rehab after a couple of days, I didn’t commiserate with her. I knew he’d turn up at my door within forty-eight hours. I became inured to worry because I had neither the time nor the inclination to fight a fight that was neither mine nor within my power to win. I was not naive about the drugs he was taking, and Paul never tried to pull the wool over my eyes. He actually went the other way. He was very direct with me. Very honest. He’d tell me that if I didn’t give him fifty bucks he would go and steal it from someone else.

  Eventually, I was so tired of it all that I’d give him the money. It wasn’t going to make a bit of difference to his habit not to.

  It drove a wedge between my mother and me. I knew that what they were doing was futile. All the money and all the attention in the world were not going to bring Paul around. It frustrated me that they could not see this. As long as he was living the life he’d chosen and getting away with it, they were wasting their time and their money, and the longer they continued to waste their time and money on him, the longer he was going to get away with it.

  I believed that he should take responsibility for himself. I believe that is all anyone can do.

  Paul had never been ‘bad’ in the ugly way a person can become when they are on drugs.

  There had been the theft and the prison sentences, but to me he was basically a nice kid. He was always easy with me. I didn’t judge him. I treated him with respect, and so he treated me with respect. He was wayward, in trouble, and getting into lots of trouble, and he even stole from me, but I understood that it was the drugs and not he.

  None of it was good, but I guess I always assumed that he would somehow just … well, go on.

  He was simply out of control. I hadn’t thought that he was at death’s door at any point. He had always looked okay to me. He’d had that emaciated ‘heroin chic’ look in Jo’burg, but the last time I had seen him, in Plett, two years before his overdose, he’d been running – and I’d thought he looked good. Stunning actually – and totally oblivious to the stares of appreciative women in the small seaside town where I have been living now for the past ten years.

  I had just moved down to Plett then, and Paul was working at the Beacon Island Hotel. He stayed here for about six months, and as he looked fine, I didn’t pry into what, if anything, he was up to. It had seemed like the worst was long over, though I never doubted he’d play with whatever came along. I just didn’t stick my nose in his business. If he’d survived Wellconal addiction, he’d survive anything.

  He looked fit, he was young and he was good-looking. Hardly the profile of someone on the slippery slide to nowhere, or death. It wasn’t like he was filthy and rummaging through dustbins, or incapable of functioning socially. There had been bad times, and he had done bad things, but he didn’t seem that bad himself. I didn’t think that it had changed his person all that much, and he wasn’t inherently bad or dysfunctional. He was my brother who took drugs and kept landing himself in hot water. It would end. He would come right. He would have to. Or it would go on, as life does, and it would all end up somewhere in a place beyond anyone’s control except his.

  It would just be a matter of time and maturity. Of hitting his head hard enough so that he would wake up and smell the coffee. No one could help him but himself, so eventually he would – to some degree, or just keep on taking drugs till … whatever. The outcome was in a future that had
nothing to do with my daily life, and I was sick of it anyway. To me, Paul was a survivor. He had survived one overdose. He looked okay. It was the best that could be hoped for at the time, and I’d left it at that. I had to. His drug problem had ripped my family apart already. I wouldn’t let it take me down or wreck my relationship with my mother any more than it already had.

  Then after Paul left Plett and returned to Johannesburg, I had other things on my mind. I had a son, Daniel, in December 1994, and he became my whole world. I didn’t really take much heed of anything else after that.

  When I got the call, I flew up to Jo’burg as soon as I could get my son and myself ready, and went straight to the hospital.

  It was terrible to walk in and see Paul lying there, in a coma, hooked up to this heart monitor. Beep. Beep. Beep. That machine made the only noise in the room.

  It was devastating, but it soon got worse. Much worse. Paul ‘woke up’, and then things got really awful. There was no more eerie beeping, because it was drowned out by the noise Paul made.

  He was still technically in a coma, and would be for eleven days, because he was unresponsive to outside stimuli, but he went MAD.

  He started screaming. He screamed and bashed on the bars of his cot. He rattled them. Rattle. Rattle. Rattle. Screaming all the time. It was hideous. He was like something possessed and in terrible pain. He couldn’t talk. When he wasn’t screaming, he grunted and growled – these deep guttural sounds, like an animal.

  Wherever he was in his head, it must have been a horrible place. He must have been so scared and so lost in that place, and it didn’t seem as if he could hear us at all. I don’t think that he was at all aware that we were there.

  The first time I visited, I was with my brother Mark, and we both left after about forty-five minutes. We couldn’t take it any more. I’m sure they must have medicated him to calm him down, but I don’t remember anything except those screams. They were the screams of someone in HELL.

 

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