by Terri White
Those who came to try to rescue him and who would later bury him would know that I was there. Or someone like me. That he had done something so brutal, so beyond forgiveness and understanding that I had no option but to end him like he ended me. I had to end what he started all those years ago. And for me to live, to survive, he had to die.
CHAPTER 13
The rage blossomed, touched the far reaches of me. I had believed that all I needed was to reach London and my life would be OK; I would be OK. But it hadn’t worked out like that. What few gaps were left untouched by rage were filled with sadness. And I needed to get it out of me.
I lay in the dry, empty white bath, ran the water, splashing over and around my skin, until it filled up around me. I left the cold tap untouched; the water that gushed and flowed over me scalded my skin a deep, livid red, the colour of poppies in November.
I took the plastic lady razor in my hands, captivated by the promise of what lay ahead. I hadn’t yet learnt to smash the razor out of its plastic casing, so it was a much harder, bloodier job. I took shallow breaths, held it in my right hand, lifted my thigh and an arm out of the water. I placed the razor against my skin, gritted my teeth, swallowed, shut my eyes tight and yanked down, across, as hard as I could. It pared me open and blood spilled out of the slices and onto my skin and down into the bath water, which became pink and cloudy right up to my neck. I put my head beneath the surface of water, mouth open and dark in the diluted iron I was floating in.
The monsters were inside me. The one monster. I felt him beneath the covers; I saw the shape of him at night, felt the touch of him on my sliced skin. I broke beneath him all over again, our bones blended together until I couldn’t see where he ended and I began. We were the same person; he’d had hold of me for almost all of my life. But I hadn’t realised it, thought I had relegated him to the shadows. And now he was back to claim what was his: me. The thread that had been left on the floor as a little girl, he’d picked up in both hands and made it into rope for me. I drank every night, picked up a cheap bottle of red from the local shop and skipped food altogether. My obsession with hurting myself grew and grew.
I’d been involved with a new man, older than me, who seemed to know me absolutely and not at all. He thought I was mad; I was mad. I called him over and over, desperate to be told we were OK, but really that I was OK. I would wake up of a morning, not really sure what I’d done the night before. I went out, drank too much, woke in the early hours to go to the toilet and found the entire bathroom painted in bright red vomit – it was in the sink, on the ceiling, on the door, on the toilet. I got on my hands and knees to clean it up and by the time daylight came I couldn’t remember if it was ever there or if it had been a violent nightmare.
The days and the nights passed in the same high-pitched frequency. I walked from one room, one street, to another, never really knowing where I was, who I was. I barely registered the people I passed as I did. Whether I knew them or not. The thick layer between me and the world numbed me, kept me safe, but isolated me entirely. Inside the white warmth, I slowly went more mad. I couldn’t sleep, except for when I was unconscious from drinking. I became deranged. I stockpiled pills, painkillers from over the counter and emptied them into a drawer. I texted the man and my mum to say that I loved them. The first handful went down the hardest. The tablets were dry, my swallow tentative, scared. The cheap red wine added a layer of roughage to the pills, made my throat close and gag.
Once the first fistful was out of the way, the second, the third, the fourth were easier. I drank and drank the very bad wine. I lay on the bed, waiting for the gradual drift-off that I’d seen, read about. But I just felt sad, mad and sick. I was sick in my own mouth and swallowed it down. I played the same song over and over, the repetition like the car that went round and round the block soothing the baby.
Then, banging. The shout of ‘Fire Brigade’. I stayed perfectly still, presuming that I could make them disappear by willing it so.
They started to try to break the door down. The banging got louder; the rhythmic booming calmed me. Fifteen minutes later, the door had still not given way, and they were not giving up. There seemed to be no other way out. I went downstairs to my flatmate’s room. She had so far slept through the many men trying to crash through the front door below.
‘There are some people who want to get in,’ I said.
She looked at me, in my underwear, cuts showing, crying, and she finally heard the banging. Then she was up, on her feet, and there were people, people, people. They wanted to know what I’d taken; they were not so bothered about why. I’d taken the paracetamol tablets. My skin had come out in hives. I’d turned red all over and couldn’t stop crying. They asked about my cuts. I told everyone that I just wanted to die.
When I got to the hospital they told me that I could have died, that if I’d just gone to sleep I would have done – not immediately, beautifully, serenely – but later, once the paracetamol had eaten my liver and other organs. Then it would have been too late. They gave me an IV drip. The man came; he brought a book of poetry called Staying Alive. He left and I didn’t see him again.
Someone, I’m not sure who, apparently called my mum. She didn’t jump in a car, onto a train. She stayed at home. Said there was nothing she could do anyway. Then, by surreal coincidence, her friend overdosed on insulin a few hours later. She went to her bedside. She called me afterwards on the hospital phone and said, ‘How can people be so selfish as to do that to themselves?’ I agreed.
She didn’t come that night or at all. I woke up the next morning and my best friend, who’d been in Manchester, was sitting at the end of my bed. My eyes filled with tears at this moment of extraordinary kindness, a kindness I wasn’t used to and struggled to recognise.
The nurses changed shift and the new one stopped by my bed, examined the IV and my notes and tutted, ‘I thought so.’ Apparently I looked like the kind of girl who would try to commit suicide.
I was due to go home the next day, but the psychiatrist I’d seen once since being admitted needed to speak to me. The man and my flatmate had been to see her. They told her that they didn’t think I was well enough to go home. My flatmate said she was convinced that she’d come home to find me hanged from a noose off the ceiling. I was livid. How dare she expose me to them?
The doctor suggested that I stay in the hospital. I refused. She mentioned sectioning. I argued against it. I lied beautifully. I wasn’t suicidal; I’d never really been suicidal. I hadn’t even really been depressed. I’d just been having a hard time. I talked my way out of it. She let me go home. My friend’s dad came down. He made dinner, put food in the oven, talked to me about life and what it meant, ultimately, and I was so desperately sad and grateful for this act, I thought my heart might stop right there and then.
But it still felt like it was just the first act. That it wasn’t over. That the shadow would be back to claim me again. I waited for him.
CHAPTER 14
I’m sitting in Heathrow. It’s May 2012. I have a slight pile of dollars – ending my life in London had pretty much entirely cleared me out – and a copy of American Psycho. That and one giant pink plastic Primark suitcase is all I have with which to start my new life in New York, where I’ve taken a job on a magazine.
I sit outside W.H. Smith, my legs frozen at the thought of walking to the gate. I want to go; I really do. I think. But I have a weight in my stomach that won’t shift. A rock lassoed with rope and tied to the bottom of my rib cage. Every movement reminds me that it’s there, as I walk down the white corridors, along the moving metal pathways and arrive at the gate. The plane’s there. Once I step onto that plane, I know it’s all going to change. Everything.
I clutch my tote bag and handbag tight. When I get up, too quickly, jerking as they call out the row number my ears have been listening for, my fingers flex open and both of my bags fly through the air and land at the feet of a suited man who glances at me with thinly veiled irritation. Heat
and colour rush to my face and I’m so, so sorry, on my knees, pushing two-pence pieces and bits of torn-up paper, red lipsticks without lids and tampons that have no wrappers back inside the bags. As I kneel among the mess of the life I am not really leaving behind, but carrying on with me, I remind myself that I don’t believe in signs and, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t believe in one as heavy-handed as this.
The plane takes off and the zooming, zapping excitement, the kind that is supposed to crash through your bloodstream and into your bones at moments like this, is absent. I muster up a touch of fear, an emotion I’m innately more comfortable with, asking for wine, hoping that this will prove to be the kindling for the feelings I’ve misplaced. Possibly never had.
I arrive in New York, knowing that the answer to everything, the way to fill the gaps inside me, is on the other side of the Arrivals gate. I get in the line for a yellow taxi and then I’m in the back.
Speeding speeding speeding speeding.
The skyline comes into view, the one that I’ve dreamed of, fantasised about, touched and tasted in films, in books. The lights, the noise, the fever I beckon into my open ears. In the middle of the skyline, the Empire State Building rises, her majesty cutting through the cotton clouds, her mystery, her seduction in full flow.
Before I’d ever even set foot on the hot pavement, the city was burned on my brain. Not just what it looked like, but what I thought it felt like. From the Brooklyn brownstones and the Manhattan rooftops to the steaming manholes and the glittering skyline: I’d seen it and experienced it thousands of times over.
Whenever stress made my shoulders sag or I shared sour words with a friend, I’d escape to that bit of my brain marked ‘New York’ and wander the streets there, feeling free. I knew that the city was not only holding the life I’d been waiting to live, but the best version of me I was still set to be.
Yet, now, here, my body in the place it had longed to be in, I feel cold and underwhelmed, unmoved. My stomach stays in place, static. I stare out of the window, waiting, willing myself to feel … something. I have to. How else is the city going to carve me out anew?
The cab pulls up at the apartment I’m staying at – a tiny, neat Airbnb on the Lower East Side between a Chinese take-out and a dry cleaning store. From the window of the perfectly square white kitchen, with its perfectly round white table and two matching chairs, it has a view uptown, of the Empire State. To the right of the kitchen sits an efficient two-seater sofa, in what could never really be described, truly, as a living room. Then right again lies a green bathroom, with a bath built out of tiles, and a plastic divider rising out of the edges of the bath to protect whatever modesty might be on display. Through the final door lies a bedroom with a bed close to the floor on slats, and a TV on the wall dominating the room.
I know from their Airbnb bio that a PR girl lives there with her boyfriend, apart from the times they rent it out for fistfuls of quick cash. I try to glean clues of their existence from the flat, which is spick and span, precise and controlled. There’s no room between the furniture and the walls. Your movement is dictated entirely by the shape of the apartment and the objects that have been placed in it, mapping your way. Could they not dance in the kitchen if they feel like dancing? Where do they hold each other? Where do they laugh?
I walk out of the flat and go to the bar on the corner, sit on a high stool at the bar and order a pint of beer from a weary bartender, scratching his beard. I imagine that, hearing my accent, the other person at the bar – a dark-haired man in jeans deliberately designed to look dirty, and a leather jacket – will turn to me and ask me about myself. This is how New York will go for me. How it goes for everyone when they arrive. He doesn’t look up from his phone. There are a handful of couples in the bar – a bar that I will come to know well. None of them glance my way.
For a second I wonder if I’m invisible. Do I exist here? With these people? I watch them talking, touching hands, fingers, elbows lightly. A brunette with black-rimmed glasses and a single tattoo laughs. The Strokes play. I feel like I’ve walked onto a stage play where they’ve just finished blocking out the painted scenery, a member of the audience who’s taken a wrong turn and ended up in the middle of the action, against all the rules, ruining all the work that has already been done. Disrupting the flow. I drink. Stepping outside, the world shifts around me and wobbles, waves coming over the Williamsburg Bridge. The yellow traffic lights are perfectly in position, the rectangular street signs nestling next to each other, pointing off in different directions, like an air traffic controller bringing us, them, home. Yellow taxis, horns honking, a bodega cat arching its back in the doorway, trash on the street corner already rotting and spewing itself into the air, the cigarette smoke that billows and jets past, carried along on a thin-legged stride.
The familiar and alien jostle and jut against each other. My head swims and I close my eyes, astonished that the picture, the stage remains set when I open them. I walk the block and a half back to the apartment, a performative walk. I feel I’m being watched, being assessed. I get into bed, even though it’s not yet dark, I turn on the TV and lie under the covers as the commercials rush through the adverse side effects of whatever medicine is being sold: heart attack, excessive sweating, impotence, baldness, rash, blisters, stroke, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, kidney failure, cancer, coma, death.
My first week at work begins the next morning. The sense of otherness and emptiness has followed me from the apartment to the office I sit in. I look out through the one window onto the floor at the people whose heads barely pivot to mine. The hours drag and contort in front of my eyes. I feel as if I’m on display; they watch to see what I’ll do, how I act. Every arm stretch for the phone, every word scribbled down, feels contrived, unreal.
Most of the women I’m working with have been excruciatingly rude and unfriendly so far – a highlight is being told ‘I won’t stab you in the back, I’ll stab you in the front’ on my first day. Several of them wanted my job, it would seem, and are furious they didn’t get it. Conversations end when I enter a room. Direct questions are ignored, no matter how many times I ask.
I go to the bathroom. I want to disappear, if only for a second. There’s no toilet seat on the bowl and I sit cross-legged on the floor, my hands clasped over my ears so I can lock the world out, enjoy the muffling and the woolly noise.
I’m not sure how long I’m in there, but it’s long: too long. The lights turn off, presumably because I’m not moving, my muscles tense and hold, my hands still and tight over my head. I sit in the dark and feel terrified. I become convinced that someone has turned the lights off and is waiting outside for me to emerge, feeling my way, delivering myself into their hands, their patient violence.
My breath quickens and deepens, the tingle reaching my limbs, my head, as I sit like a statue, frozen and taut. Seconds pass, minutes pass as I sit there; I’m not sure how many. Tears start to run down my face as I try to stay completely still, completely quiet.
Then, whoosh, the bathroom door opens and light floods the room once more. I take my hands from over my ears, open my eyes, stand up, straighten my skirt, pull two sheets of tissue from the dispenser and wipe my face before walking out, face contorted into something approaching, if not a smile, then a non-grimace. I go back to my desk and it continues.
CHAPTER 15
Two weeks later, on what is, I’ll come to learn, a typical New York summer’s day, I move into my first proper apartment.
In the ninety-plus-degree Manhattan heat, the sun roasts the foul rubbish that has been heaped out on the sidewalk and kicked around: scraps of meat cooking for the second time, now moist and sticking underfoot. Horns scream, steam charges, sweat runs into the cracks of cement between the bricks that make the buildings that hold the sky that puts a lid on the madness bubbling and bursting out down below.
The advert describes a large studio with charming period features: an enviable location in the famous, infamous Greenwich Village,
on Christopher Street. The place where all of the artists and weirdos and outsiders and beautiful freaks I carry inside me had lived, had walked, before my feet brought me here in the shadow of theirs.
Up the stairs, the stairs, the stairs, the stairs, the stairs, past the sticky off-white walls, over rough grey carpets, there is a chipped grey door. Inside the door: one room, two windows on the farthest wall that look out onto more windows, more bricks. A tree looms, the shadows of its branches lying across the bed, casting a stain across the body that lies there, never moving.
The kitchen has no windows, no light, save for the harsh yellow bulb in the ceiling that glints off the chef’s knives lining the wall as they wait, waiting for me and my gasping, thirsty skin. A couch and an old TV are the only landmarks between them and the bed. A thin rectangular room is tucked behind a door holding a burnt orange bathroom, a toilet that will block often and an exposed pipe connected to a makeshift shower.
Across the hall, two grey doors identical to mine, just with different numbers. One is vibrating, pulsating, shuddering under the sound of the shrieking, moaning, screaming women of the violent porn being played on a loop inside by a man whose face I will never see, not once, in the year to come. I think of him often, I think of the women on his screen, who need me, who need rescuing from him.
I pay $2,500 for a shoebox, surrounded by other people existing in their own shoeboxes. The ten-feet by thirty-feet rectangles holding us all inside our own stories, our own dreams, our own nightmares. The sounds, smells, tastes slipping underneath the doors and out into the world we keep at bay, the small clues to what is really happening in every apartment, in every room, in every building, on every street, in every neighbourhood, higher and tighter and more and more until the breath is taken from us and we stand tall, sucking the few inches of air above our heads.