by Anne Enright
I never did study for those exams – I became a born-again Christian with my lunch-mate and we cycled to prayer meetings with naggins of whiskey in the baskets of our bikes, also those big carafes of Californian wine with a wide lid you could flip off with your thumb. We were quite fervent, and very wild.
I hadn’t been a Catholic for some years, but now that my non-death was over, it made sense to become in some way reborn. There was also something even simpler. It happened, standing beside the plastic hood of a hospital phone booth when I faced my mother and insisted she tell me what was going on.
The corridor was busy, but my memory surrounds us both in a blank whiteness into which the passers-by walked and faded, as she told me the truth. But this whiteness was not the strangest thing; the strangest thing was the thought that happened in my brain, suddenly, without hint or premonition. My mother said, all in one go, ‘Don’t tell anyone, but the doctor said you were going to die,’ and the phrase I heard in the very centre of my head, the phrase that occurred without beat or pause, was, ‘Going home.’ Or perhaps just the word ‘home’. And with this word, or this sense of the word, there came (I am embarrassed to say) a burst or suffusion, an experience of light, that seemed lovely to me.
This is only true. I am only telling the truth here, about the light and the word in the centre of my head (a place you don’t normally hear things with, if you know what I mean). I suppose it was the shock. But I have no idea why it should have manifested itself in this way and not another. I have only the vaguest idea why ‘death’ and ‘home’ should, at sixteen, have been the same thing for me, and both so lovely. Though, as we know, death is enchanting to the young.
In my second year at college, Martin cast me as Constance in a student production of Shakespeare’s King John. He was very keen on her rhapsody that went, ‘Death, death, oh amiable lovely death, / Come let me buss thee, and kiss thee for a wife.’
He kept saying, ‘Make it funny. Make it funny.’ After that, he gave up. My morbidity always annoyed and unsettled him. He came to ignore it, so that I could not use it against him. He was quite right.
Some years later again I found myself in a room in England going home for real, with a bottle of sleeping pills, some serious alcohol, and various implements of destruction. I might describe all this (the dark grey breeze-block walls, the striped orange curtains, the sagging student bed) but I have always found that talking about suicide is a deeply contradictory thing to do. It is a sort of oxymoron. The only people who can talk about it properly are dead.
I dislike the self-aggrandisement suicide attempts involve, and I hate the double misery when they fail. This may sound harsh, but those who try suicide are not, by definition, gentle on themselves. Or not for a while.
And, of course, you spend a long time wondering why. I fell out of the world, temporarily, on Easter Monday 1986 – so maybe it was just a Catholic hangover, the remnant of spending my early life praying to a dead body on a stick. Maybe I had Seasonal Affective Disorder, maybe it is genetic, maybe it was me being in my twenties, maybe it was Ireland being in the 1980s.
The older I get the more political I am about depression, or less essentialist – it is not because of who you are, but where you are placed. Ireland broke apart in the eighties, and I sometimes think that the crack happened in my own head. The constitutional row about abortion was a moral civil war that was fought out in people’s homes – including my own – with unfathomable bitterness. The country was screaming at itself about contraception, abortion, and divorce. It was a hideously misogynistic time. Not the best environment for a young woman establishing a sexual identity, you might say, especially one with adolescent morbidity and tendencies towards ecstatic suffusions of light, one who was over-achieving, but somehow in all the wrong ways, one who was both maverick and clever. I mean, what do we need here, a diagram?
Many of the people I knew at college left the country in the eighties. The newspapers said that people emigrated for jobs, but most of the ones I knew left because they could not breathe any more. They left because the place did not make sense. They ran away. As, finally, did I.
I went in the old style, on the boat to England with a typewriter and a single suitcase. I didn’t quite stand in the prow of the boat, but I had, by then, left everything behind. I felt as though my life had been bundled up and hurled towards this moment. I was going to become a writer – because that is what people like me did. And so I sat, in an evil little breeze-block room, from 8 p.m. till 4.00 in the morning, every night for eight months in a row. And I discovered that I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t any good at it. I could not write. Or at least, that was my excuse at the time.
Anyway, I woke up alive as opposed to dead, the day after Easter Monday, which is a no-name Tuesday, and then I went to sleep again for another fifteen hours. When I woke up for the second time, the world was very tender and I walked into it, pleased to be still here, or pleased enough. And though I told almost no one, I quite enjoyed my suicide. I felt vaguely fulfilled. I felt renewed. And the years that followed were busy and interesting and good enough, except that I always had this, like a sweet in the bottom of an old pocket, a little yearning something – the desire to die.
I find it all a bit disgusting, now. It is easy to write nice sentences about this kind of thing, but depression functions in the place where people hate both themselves and other people. It attracts complication, paranoia, impossibility, slippages, sneering, and pride. These emotions are ragged and infectious; they happen, not only inside you, but between you and everyone else in the room. The depressive think that they are self-contained, but they never stop leaking misery, banality, and hatred – because it is also a dull state as everyone knows, a grey old thing. God, I hated being depressed. You make all the wrong calls. You get a week of feeling artistic for every two years of feeling like shit.
By the time I fell apart in the fullest, social sense, I was working as a television producer, and television producers have nervous breakdowns the way old ladies have potted plants – it is only what the condition requires. But I wasn’t going to kill myself because of television, I was going to kill myself because . . . actually, by then, I had lost even that – the sweet in the bottom of my pocket. And though I functioned, just about, I was in a state of such solid anguish, I would have done anything to bring it to an end.
I was saved by a ‘good’ GP (they must come in both varieties, like fairies) – who was the first to ask the right questions; he went through a list of them, as he had been trained to do, and referred me to a psychiatrist who got me a bed, two days later, in a nice middle-class home for the tearful, where I fell like a stone, and stayed fallen for some months. I was dosed up to the gizzard. Such tranquillity. Life was like a television set in another room. It was just something we have forgotten to turn off for a while – company.
In hospital, colours come in blocks. You turn from the old white of the painted ceiling to the fresh white of the sheets, you let yourself creep out for a while and live among the curtains of flesh pink, and you listen to the crying jags of women who have lovely homes that they can’t stay in any more; a good-looking girl in a pair of white silk pyjamas who walks down the corridor, sobbing, while a nurse guides her by forearm and wrist, saying, ‘It’s only chemical. It’s only chemical.’ All this as you stand there, looking at the twenty-pence piece that you have saved for the phone, and never use.
Even though no one knows what is wrong with you, everyone is too tactful to visit, or too unsure, all except for two gay friends who have seen everything hospitals can do, and know the solace of a good dressing-gown. Even they seem muted by the nothingness of the place, or maybe by the nothingness in my voice after all the pills. In the smoking-room, one of them looks at a crucifix that is tied to a cable running down the wall. He says, ‘My goodness. I didn’t know He was electrocuted.’
‘Who?’
‘Christ. I just didn’t know they killed Him that way.’
On which
joke, and a tape that Martin brings, complete with a Walkman to play it on, I live for some days.
There was another woman in the room with me, whose life was genuinely sad while mine was only askew. She kept her face turned to the wall. When I opened the curtain to go to the toilet, I would see her shoulder poking up under the blanket, the swell of her hip and the useless line of her legs.
The nurse came in from time to time and shouted our names at us. Hello, Anne. Hello, Connie.
She should have been ‘Miss’ something – Patterson, or Hanley or Maguire. She might have been fifty, or sixty. Respectable in the old style, I could tell that she found the loss of privacy an irritation. Her nightie was brushed cotton to the ankle, sprig-printed, with a bib front that was threaded around with blue ribbon and edged in cotton lace. She had mannish, tartan slippers and the dressing-gown was a pink candlewick thing with some of the threads fallen, or picked away.
It was a week, or more, before I looked up from all this to her face.
I wore a white nightshirt striped with blue that was unaccountably torn at the neck. My mother insisted on bringing it home with her, so she could stitch it back together again.
My parents came every other day and Martin came on the days in between. Connie did not have visitors. Of course she was single and her parents were dead. But there should have been a little rally of women, who divided the week between them and came in every other day. But Connie was alone. She was having her little time.
For two weeks, or perhaps three, we were together, which is many hundred hours; awake at odd times, or asleep at odd times. We got up for a cigarette, or to go to the toilet, and had our visitors (insofar as they could be had) and waited. I did not know what I was waiting for, but she was waiting for the drugs to work. Because she was an old lag.
My parents said hello to her when they came in the door and this made me more aware that I never spoke to her, nor she to me. She would turn away then, out of misery, but also out of pity for my daily visit, and what might be said. (‘No, they haven’t done a Barium meal yet. Actually, I haven’t got a peptic ulcer.’) I could tell the difference between her listening back and her not-listening back. She was only sometimes aware of the words that were spoken in the room.
Oh, but she jumped. She jumped for the doctor, when he came in with a smile and shouted carefully about her drugs. He talked about different mixtures, and what they could try next, and he mentioned lithium, so I knew that she was quite bad.
I was bad, but I was not as bad as all that. I did not have a doctor who talked to me as though he was presenting Blue Peter, for a start. I didn’t look at him and whisper, ‘Yes, Doctor,’ while clutching the covers to my chin like a five-year-old child. My doctor (who was a woman) knew that I was depressed, not deaf. She did not discuss my medication in front of other patients. I spoke to her in full, social sentences, not in this woman’s plaintive, tea-and-sandwiches, ‘No, Doctor, I think I’m worse today.’
‘Hello,’ I said to my doctor when she came in, and ‘Hello,’ she would say to me, and, ‘Hello, Connie,’ to the woman I had never spoken to, who must be called by her first name.
‘Hello, Doctor,’ she would say.
Everybody had to be nice to us. As if we cared.
I don’t know if she slept or not. She never cried – she seeped a little. I could hear her seeping, from time to time.
One day, a woman came to visit. She brought her children, I heard them outside the door, the jump-up-and-down of them, in the dinginess of the ward. Connie was very proud of them, and of her niece, it must be, who brought them to see her. She came back to the room and gave me a snooty look, as though I had underestimated her, very badly.
Still, we were both too tired for all that. Something like that could set you back for days.
After some unspecified time, she started getting her rage back. The whole mess inside her head started up again. I could tell, by the way she sighed, or blinked at the ceiling, or turned away. She was a frightened old woman. She was a five-year-old child. I had the world ahead of me and didn’t even bother to be polite. I knew all this even though we did not speak. It was the look on her face: her little tea-and-sandwiches face, only now there was spit in the egg mayonnaise.
Sick. Well. It was all a new language for me. How long before you don’t have feelings, just symptoms, just a direction, like Connie – ‘up’ or ‘down’.
It’s only chemical.
I had to remake myself. I had to unmake myself. I was a bunch of chemicals. I was a dog that had to be walked, or it would bite. I had to be careful with myself, like a trusted cup that you carry to the table as a child and do not spill. I had to think about power – because I was surrounded by the powerless. I was one of them. I had lost, discarded. I could not manage. I would not engage with, in. I could not admire. I did not trust.
I remember the window; the helpless kindness of my father as he sat in front of it, and my mother, hovering. Or Martin, who has a trick of stillness, sitting with me in the smoking-room. I remember, with some reverence, the packet of fruit pastilles he brought me. I knew, as I sat up in bed and ate them, that I would be better. A year for the green, and a year for the black. I counted them out. Maybe two years for the yellow.
One day, Connie sat up and combed her hair.
All this happened many years ago. I wonder whether I have passed her in the street. I wonder if she is dead, or if she is better. Probably neither – a little worse, very much the same. From the way she talked to the doctor (Yes, Daddy. No, Daddy) I would guess that whatever did for Connie happened when she was very small. We were opposites, in a way. The place where she was most damaged was the place where I was happiest. It was time I took my good fortune seriously, and went home.
There is a certain ruthlessness about a recovering depressive, and like alcoholics we are never cured. It takes rigour. No sharp knives. No breakages of the skin. No baths after nightfall. No pockets. No rocks. You must learn to accept many things: that mornings are like this. That some days you will not leave the house. That a survey of 86,000 nurses over 20 years showed that those who drank no coffee were twice as likely to kill themselves as those who drank at least two cups per day. So you must drink coffee. You must avoid nurses. You must eat avocadoes. You must experience daylight. Because you have your likes and dislikes like everyone else, except every choice you make leads in a straight line to life, or to death.
For six months, the medication turned all my thoughts into symptoms, and made me question everything about who I was. It dismantled my personality. The chemical happiness that crept up on me was not a joyful one, but it kept me alive, and after a while I came to appreciate the soggy buzz of it. I had a place to stand. When I was able to think again, I would make decisions. I would change the circumstances of my life, and so give life itself a chance to return.
So, after a decent interval, I gave up the job and married the man and wrote some books. They were fragmented books, because this is what I knew best, but also, I fancied, because I lived in an incoherent country. They were slightly surreal, because Ireland was unreal. They dealt with ideas of purity, because the chastity of Irish women was one of the founding myths of the Nation State (well that was my excuse). But they were also full of corpses. Beautiful ones, speaking ones, sexual ones, bitter ones; corpses who did not forgive, or rot. Who was the corpse? It was myself, of course, but also Christ, the dead body on a stick. And it is the past that lies down but will not shut up, the elephant in the national living-room.
There is an Irish attitude to death that is both quiet and honourable. It is to do with the dignity of the individual, and the modesty of their leaving individuality behind. Hospice nurses are like midwives, they understand pain, and work through it towards a conclusion that is much to be desired. Catholics are good at dying, as a rule. Maybe I was just a little quick off the mark.
My friend, who pointed out the electrocuted Christ hanging from the cable on the wall, died, maybe three years after
wards. I was thinking about him the other day as I was going up the stairs. I remembered coming in to the hospital one morning, expecting to find his dead body, only to see him sitting up, with his partner and parents, eating a yoghurt. This happens all the time – ancient little ladies in particular come back for one yoghurt, two yoghurts, another twenty yoghurts for the road – and these are moments of such sweetness and grace: just one minute more of someone you love, that you would think every second of life was just one more second of bliss.
And then they die. Such a cruddy affair. Real death is hard work, and grief is hard work, and you never do get them back. Real death cured me of the fake deaths that I had undergone, with all their lyrical undertow. I was too angry now, almost irritated by the whole business. It was not an attractive prospect, after all.
Every year, on my friend’s anniversary, I think about what has changed since he was alive – and for many years there was nothing to report, no news for the dead. There were material shifts: money or lack of it, a change of address, unlikely juxtapositions of the people he knew (You went on holidays with who?) but for a long time, when I checked the beating of my heart, I found a kind of push in my chest instead. Scar tissue.
I’m still a bit odd. I don’t go out a lot. I have an occasional ability to attract people’s obsessions or to smell out their damage. So I like a bit of distance. I keep my small paranoias, a little armoury of them – a quiet, but highly resistant, neurosis about opening or posting letters, for example, and a fairly odd approach to the whole issue of getting my hair cut. But maybe that’s doing all right, for forty.