I needed a lift – ‘Something to raise my spirits,’ I told myself, and vodka would gain me entrance to Jean’s house. In return, I knew Jean would share a joint or two with me. I knew that her mother, Rita, a skinny woman with bad teeth, skin the colour of cheap candles and the protruding stomach of a heavy drinker, would pounce on any bottle she saw. I made sure the one in my pocket was visible, but had no intention of mentioning the other, secreted at the bottom of my bag. I wasn’t going to let her get her hands on that: it was for Jean and me to have later.
When I got to her flat, Rita was already drunk, with the lopsided belligerent stare that so often follows alcohol-induced good humour.
‘Here! Give me some of that,’ she said, pointing to the bottle she could see.
Jean took it from me and gave me a wink as she poured her mother a stiff measure. ‘That should do the trick, Mum,’ she said, but I knew from her second wink that she meant it should finish her off and then we would have the sitting room to ourselves.
Good thing, I thought, when I saw the condition Rita was in, that I had had the presence of mind to hide the vodka. Otherwise we wouldn’t have stood a chance of getting rid of her until either she had passed out or the bottle was empty.
Once the half-bottle was finished, mostly drunk by Rita, her bloodshot, blurry eyes turned to me. ‘Got any cash with you, little rich girl?’ she slurred.
Behind her Jean shook her head at me.
‘No, only my bus fare,’ I said, and received a snort of disgust.
Since there was no more drink in the house and no money to buy any, Rita took herself unsteadily up the stairs.
‘She’ll be there for the night,’ Jean said, and, sure enough, within seconds we could hear Rita’s rumbling snores. With her mother out of the way, we opened the second bottle and some Coke and put them on the scuffed coffee-table.
‘What happens if she wakes up?’ I asked, as Jean put a tape in the small stereo.
‘She won’t. She got her Giro this morning and she’s been on the booze all day,’ Jean answered.
As though some form of telepathy had told them that a bottle of vodka was in the flat, a group of teenagers, most of whom I knew, arrived, with bottles of cider. Joints were rolled and vodka poured. When a joint was finally passed to me, I held it to my lips and dragged as much of the smoke into my lungs as I could.
I could hear the bass vibrating, the thumping of the drums that almost drowned the words of the song on the tape that Jean had put on.
I lay back on the cushions as the electric guitar reached a deafening crescendo and closed my eyes. This is better, I thought.
‘Here,’ said one of the boys, breaking into my contented reverie. ‘Open your eyes, Jackie – got something good for you.’ I obeyed and looked over to where he was. A hand with nicotine-stained fingers was held out to me and I saw a couple of small white pills resting in the palm. ‘You ever tripped, Jackie?’
I looked at him vacantly. I could tell by the challenging expression on his face that he was pretty confident of my ignorance. ‘Yeah, sure,’ I replied, having no intention of admitting that I didn’t know what he meant.
‘Liar,’ he responded.
‘I’m not!’ I retorted.
He grinned, daring me, and gave me one of the pills – ‘Swallow that, then.’
It looked harmless enough. I picked up a glass of vodka and Coke and quickly washed it down.
For a few minutes nothing happened. There was no buzz and none of that wonderful numb feeling. Just as I was beginning to think that the pill had been a joke at my expense, my eyes were suddenly riveted to my hands. I could see the bones under the skin, and when I moved my fingers they flashed different colours.
I giggled, then looked at Jean. Her eyes were huge and her hair streamed with the colours of the rainbow. I could feel everyone watching me, but I took no notice. Instead I looked around the room, just staring at different objects.
There was a picture on the wall, one of those prints in an imitation gilt frame of an exotic woman. Dark-skinned with thick black hair tumbling to her shoulders, she was wearing a gold dress that showed a generous amount of cleavage. I thought she was beautiful and, as I watched, her bright red lips smiled back at me.
As my gaze rested on the picture the woman’s face changed. Lines appeared, scoring her forehead and feathering at the corners of her eyes. Her mouth caved in, and instead of white teeth I saw a dark cavity where they had fallen out. In front of me, her hair thinned, turned grey and brittle. In just a few seconds she was no longer young and beautiful but an old woman whom the ravages of time had marked cruelly. Eventually an ancient, toothless crone stared mournfully back at me.
The music swelled louder and louder until its reverberations filled my head and I placed my hands over my ears, trying to block out the deafening sounds. The room seemed to turn darker, the voices of those in it mocking. Still holding my hands over my ears, I glanced around frantically.
Someone had lit a candle, a red one that had been stuck into a chipped white holder. Beads of wax ran down – like drops of blood.
All of a sudden I wanted to leave the room and, with a rush of energy, I jumped to my feet. I was intent on getting to the front door, opening it and running into the night. Then I simply wanted to run and run.
Jean caught hold of me as I headed for the door.
‘I need to get out,’ I yelled, as I pushed at the arms that were trying to restrain me.
‘You’re just tripping, Jackie. You’ll be all right in a bit,’ she soothed me. ‘What you fucking given her?’ she shrieked at the boy, who was watching us with a smirk on his face.
‘Just a tab, Jean,’ he muttered, as he saw the fury on her face.
‘What did you think you were doing? She’s too young, you fucking idiot.’ She gave me something to drink. ‘Swallow that, Jackie, it’ll help bring you down.’ She held the glass to my mouth.
But when I looked at her, instead of the rainbow of bright colours that had glistened in her hair there were now streaks of blood, and the hand holding the glass was dripping with it.
I started to shake. ‘Blood! It’s blood!’ I said.
‘Put the candle out and gimme it,’ she said, to one of the others. Then she showed it to me and explained it was just the wax melting that had made me think of blood. As her words sank in, they calmed me a little.
The room changed again. The music quietened, my panic subsided and the people faded into the background. Instead of seeing them, I found I was looking at a fairy scene. Without finding it odd, I saw Snow White with her dwarfs in front of me. ‘Can you see them?’ I asked.
‘See what, Jackie?’
‘Snow White! She’s so pretty.’ I reached out to touch her long diaphanous skirt.
‘Jesus.’ Jean forced more liquid down my throat.
That was when Dave arrived. He took one look at the group and the state I was in, then threw everyone except Jean out of the flat. ‘Scum bastards! Tossers,’ he shouted at their retreating backs, before he attended to me. He put his hands on my shoulders and pressed down gently until I was sitting on the sofa. He sat next to me and held me gently. He talked me down from that trip, and when I had stopped hallucinating, he made me drink something – I think this time it was coffee.
It was Dave who took me to the bathroom, where I vomited all the alcohol I had consumed. After that he cleaned me up. Jean offered, but he refused, shouting at her for allowing this to happen. Then he shouted at me.
‘For fuck’s sake, Jackie! Do you want your uncle to have won?’ Still feeling sick, I just looked at him, uncomprehending.
He caught hold of my shoulders again but this time he was not as gentle. He forced me to look into the mirror. I saw a pasty-faced girl, her hair falling in lank clumps around her face, her mascara forming black rings around her eyes. ‘You look like a fucking panda. A stupid one,’ he added, in case I thought I was forgiven. He gave me a light shake. ‘Stop the drugs, Jackie.’
‘You sell them!’ I said, with the last ounce of defiance I possessed.
‘Yeah – so what? Anyhow, it’s weed I sell, makes you mellow – but you’ve been messing with other stuff. That’s for losers. It’ll do your head in.’
I tried to say that I could manage it, but I knew he was still angry so I nodded miserably.
He took me home with him, bundling me out of Jean’s and dragging me round the corner to where he lived. There, he said he had borrowed his father’s car. ‘He’s asleep and you’re not getting on the back of any motorbike in that state,’ he said grimly, as he opened the passenger door. He placed his hand on the back of my head and pushed me in.
Yes, I remembered that, but not the drive. I must have dozed off. I had another dim memory of stumbling through the front door – and then I went cold as my mind told me something else. I took my hands away from my face and looked again at the familiar room I was in.
I wasn’t at my uncle’s house. I was at home.
Shit, I thought. Shit, shit, shit.
I had given Dave my parents’ address.
I had woken them up, of course – they hadn’t been expecting me. Now I remembered their shocked, angry faces and the shouting.
First they asked why I was there, then how had I got home, who had brought me, and wound up to ‘What time do you call this?’ and ‘Just look at the state of you.’ Then they realized that they wouldn’t have approved of wherever I had been and there was more shouting.
‘Where do you think you’ve been?’ my mother had screeched.
‘You’ll come in at a decent hour!’ my father had added.
‘Leave me alone!’ I had shot up the stairs to the sanctuary of my room.
The following day, little was said about my behaviour. Maybe they were too busy arranging Christmas – or maybe they were postponing their decision on what had to be done about me. But apart from telling me that I looked dreadful, they seemed to have made a pact not to talk about that night.
I cannot remember that Christmas, who my parents invited or what presents I was given, or how many times I made myself throw up. In fact I can’t remember much of that time before I eventually woke up in hospital.
37
I have no recollection of the night when an ambulance, its blue lights flashing, turned into our driveway. It had been summoned urgently by our doctor, and I wondered how my mother had felt when the neighbours saw the unconscious form of her daughter being carried out of the house on a stretcher. I have no idea of what she told them when I didn’t return home for a month. Nobody said and I never asked.
Maybe that white space where a memory should have been frightened me so much that I never sought to fill it. I have been told of that time, little bits of information imparted to me in stages, as I have of the following days and what happened thereafter. It has mixed with my own memories until I am unable to separate which are mine and which were given to me by someone else. All I know is that it happened.
I learnt, much later, that it did not take long after that night for my parents to seize on the excuse, with apparent relief, that what was wrong with me was not their fault. The psychiatrists all agreed I had a mental illness, although they disputed among themselves as to what name it should be given. They agreed on one other thing when they talked to my parents: it had been caused by something outside their control.
The consensus was that my troubled mind was nothing to do with the adult world. My parents had never made me feel unwanted and unloved, had they? But I might have been born with a problem, a weakness, that had manifested itself as I developed.
How about a split personality, or dissociative identity disorder, as it has since been named? That seemed, in light of my actions that night, to be possible. Or perhaps it was even schizophrenia, which often showed itself with the onset of the teenage years. Nowadays, with all the medical breakthroughs, that could be treated – or, rather, controlled with drugs. The NHS could become my new supplier.
So, there really wasn’t a lot to worry about; unfortunate, of course, but not insurmountable, and certainly not my parents’ fault. That was the eventual diagnosis, which must have given them so much relief. Without having had to confess any acts of bad parenting, they had been absolved of blame.
I was thirteen.
38
I was frightened – frightened of the deep depression that enveloped me, as though a damp dark fog had wrapped itself round my limbs and curled round my mind, stifling it. It obscured my vision of day-to-day living, visited me at night and woke me each morning with its mocking scorn at my futile efforts to live my life.
As soon as Christmas was over, I knew I could no longer cope. I had thought of suicide, of taking one of the blades from my father’s razor and slashing at my wrists until I opened one of the blue veins I could see beneath my skin. I imagined that I would then sit and watch, almost curiously, as my blood ran out slowly, taking my life with it. Or should I look for a supply of those pills, the white ones that made me relaxed and sleepy, and swallow them all one night?
I imagined a dreamless sleep and then nothing. That was what filled my thoughts constantly over those weeks.
But in the times when the fog lifted and glimpses of something intangible, maybe a shaft of light, indicated that I might have a future, I resisted its demands. There was inside me a tiny kernel of hope that once I reached the magic age of sixteen I could walk into adulthood and escape everything oppressive in my world: my uncle’s presence and my parents’ disapproval.
So when that small spark of optimism came, I knew I wanted to see adulthood and explore what those years might bring. I might learn to drive a car, listen to music in a disco, have a circle of friends, and one day even find someone to love – someone who in turn would love me. I decided that I was going to fight the fog and not let it take away a future that just might be good.
Coupled with those flashes of optimism, there was a fear: fear of what I might do before I found it was too late to turn the clock back. It was this that made me admit to my mother I was ill.
I was not prepared to tell her the full extent of the illness that caused those dark thoughts and the hopeless despair that stalked me. I informed her that I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was vomiting again as I had done as a child. I omitted to tell her that my own fingers were the cause of it. But I wanted a reason to visit the doctor and I wanted to go alone.
‘Can you make me an appointment?’ I asked. ‘I can take myself there,’ I added, trying to give the impression that I was being considerate. My mother gave me a searching look, then said she would make the phone call.
I wanted to talk to someone whose opinion of me was not coloured by what my parents had told them. To the best of my knowledge, the doctor had only seen me for childhood ailments. Of course, then I didn’t know about medical records and that every appointment made with the psychologists had been recorded and sent to the GP I was so desperate to see.
Neither did I know that my parents had already been talking to him about me. I had no idea that they had already made enquiries about me going into residential care; my father was still opposing it, but with less vigour each time I showed another sign of being out of control.
An appointment was made for the following day.
As soon as the surgery opened, I was there. I sat in the waiting room flicking through ancient magazines, anxious to get it over with. ‘He has a patient with him,’ the receptionist told me, when I asked how long he was going to be. ‘He’ll see you next.’
My mother, not a patient, had been with him. Through the window of the waiting room I saw her, head down, leaving by the back door. She must have thought I wouldn’t notice her as she scuttled out, but I did.
I was full of rage. I believed she would have poisoned him against me, that it would now be pointless to ask him for help. But I decided to try anyway.
‘I’m depressed,’ I told him, once I was seated in his room. ‘I have bad dreams,’ I added. ‘Thi
ngs frighten me,’ I said, averting my eyes. There, I thought. That was more than I had ever admitted before – so where was the prescription pad for him to write on? There must be something he could give me that would make me feel better.
Instead of the concern I had been hoping for, he looked at me impassively, then talked about teenage hormones. He asked if my periods were regular and, of course, when the last one had been.
Just checking, I thought, to make sure I’m not pregnant. He took my pulse, said everything appeared to be in order and told me how lucky I was, good parents, nice home, et cetera. When he had finished talking about my burgeoning hormones, he scribbled on the pad, which had been hiding in a drawer, and handed me a prescription for a tonic.
‘That should sort you out,’ he said gruffly, and then I was out of his surgery with nothing accomplished.
Could no one hear me? Could no one see I needed help? But, of course, no one could.
That night was the first time my angry, terrified five-year-old self appeared. She stepped out of my body, ready to scream and shout at the world that had betrayed her.
My parents had witnessed, when I was younger, the toddler me, the one who had talked in a baby language and rocked herself against a wall, but then the word ‘regression’ had been bandied about. This time there was no mistaking it. They realized that something was seriously wrong.
I had completely disappeared when my younger self put in her appearance. Gone to a place where my thoughts, my hearing and all sense of who I was vanished. And the little girl who sat in her room likewise had no recollection of me. At first she was quiet, a good child who brought her teddy bears down from the shelves, where for several years they had lain neglected, and placed them in a corner. She sat down with them, picked up the one that had been her favourite, Paddington, and cuddled him.
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