Coming Undone

by Terri White

  It’s why I get up, dress and join in every day. Not because I think scent class will change me or help me or make the tiniest dent in the madness infesting my mind – but because I want to get out.

  Although even I almost say no to chair yoga. ‘Chair yoga?’ I ask.

  ‘Yep. So everyone can take part,’ says a member of staff.

  I walk into the recreation room cum breakfast hall cum meeting room. A handful of the other patients are seated, waiting to start. I take an empty chair, offering weak smiles at my classmates that aren’t returned. The instructor starts talking us through simple positions and poses as we all stay seated in our plastic chairs. Everyone’s wearing their normal clothes. We sit, some of us panting, raising our arms above our head and then down to the floor in the most unathletic and inauthentic yoga class of all time.

  The only one I go to willingly, speed in my step, is music group. Because as well as control over the television, and being able to watch films at the drop of a hat (though it is a stroke of luck that everyone else in the ward, male and female, seems only to want to watch Law and Order: SVU and Criminal Minds during TV time – they truly are the great unifiers), I desperately miss music. No phone and no computer means no music.

  My ears are starved, my heart and mind quiet. When I arrive at the class, there is a woman, the group leader, holding a black boom box, which must have been from the 90s. She has a slipcase book full of loose CDs and a stack in plastic cases, many cracked, the clear plastic now lined and milky. She’s passing them around the group, who are regarding them with a mixture of excitement and suspicion. The task at hand: to pick a CD, a song on it, that means something and play it. We’re going around in a circle – they choose songs that remind them of school, of kids they’ve lost, of kids they’re barely holding on to, of love they once had. As the songs play, each person leaves the green room, the circle, their place in it, and floats up, up and away, outside, up into the sky where they find their old memories, old lives waiting for them with open arms. With forgiveness. For a moment they’re not mad people sitting on plastic chairs in a circle with other mad people. They’re real, warm flesh-and-blood men and women with lives, with people who love them, who have once, many times, looked at them with recognition, with respect. Who don’t tell them when to eat, how to medicate themselves, don’t ask them to pare themselves open like a rotten fruit in front of strangers. They are safe, a different kind of safe. They are normal. Just like everyone else. It’s the most glorious three-and-a-half-minute escape from behind the wire and walls. And one that ends almost as it begins. The dying seconds of the song, the fade outs that they know so well getting quieter and quieter until it’s over, the spell broken. Now, once again, they’re just a mad person sitting on a plastic chair in a circle with other mad people. They pass to the next person, and their minutes of magic begin now.

  When it reaches me, the magic has run dry: I can’t cope with everyone regarding me, still the new girl, with such suspicion. I’ve been fingering the thick black CD booklet, pulling out silver and gold discs and slipping them back inside again. The 90s R&B and Noughties country music is doing nothing to aid my escape. In my head, there’s no escape, just a straight path home.

  The Jam, taking me home to screaming and broken bones, the warm afternoon I came home from school to be met by Mum on her hands and knees under the ironing board, picking up hundreds and hundreds of shards of black vinyl, now sharp as glass, wincing every time a sliver slid into her skin, drawing a red line as it went, marking its path. She’d been playing a Jam record and her boyfriend had come home from work, thought it reminded her of an unnamed ex and smashed it to pieces and pieces and pieces while she held the spitting iron between them.

  To full dancefloors above a village pub of drinkers, bouncing and vibrating to ‘A Town Called Malice’, swimming in lager and blackcurrant, littered with white crusts, Mum’s sticky perm lit right through with disco lights flashing green, blue, red, orange to the beat of the music. The dartboard rocked under the arrows it received and the bass of the disco, coming a few centimetres off the wall with each chorus. The men, all with no hair, round bellies, shiny shoes, shirts done up to the very top. Necks red-raw and slick with sweat beneath the collars that pinched at them no matter how they pulled, becoming damper and tighter as the hours passed and the drinks sank inside and the slick swam thicker and wetter. The next morning the shirt would lie discarded by the radiator, fingerprints taken in the muck, sweat, yeast that lined it, now flaking off onto the carpet.

  To a bedroom, the end of a narrow double bed in London, white sheets with creases still visible and itchy red wool blankets tucked in tight, ‘Start’ playing as we kissed with open mouths and sighed with closed throats, fingers hooked into hair, clinging on for life and pointing towards oblivion, and the room blurring to distortion around us until everything was noise and fuzz and a blanket of beige, until we’re submerged entirely. ‘Walls Come Tumbling Down’ bouncing off the Artexed ceiling of the house, through each doorway and up the stairs, through the net curtains and out of the open windows into the blue sky outside, laying the path that disagreement will ride in on, joined by raised voices and accusations and the creak of barely held tension, breaking like a wave to rush in with screaming and fistfuls of blood, spilling as it comes.

  When I look at ‘No Diggity’ I’m taken nowhere. I’m here, a mad person on a plastic chair in a circle with the other mad people. I envy the escape, the journey of the others. Even those who silently cry, staring at the ceiling or the floor as they do. No one makes a move to comfort them, to hold them. Everyone’s stuck in their own stasis. We may as well be in individual plastic pods, experiencing this in total isolation.

  The activities room is by the main doors – the doors that are always locked, that allow in the outside world during visiting hours (how it burns to see people come and go freely), but other than that they’re activated by a pass or via the intercom on the door. After each visiting session, they lock the doors and the outside world is once again banished.

  CHAPTER 28

  Jamie is my only friend in town when the overdose happens. My best friend, the one bright and shining wonderful thing about moving to New York, is in LA on a trip. She’s the one who insisted I go to the emergency room when I skyped her, crying through the clamping fog of a hangover, to tell her I’d swallowed two bottles of pills. Jamie came to visit me, at my request. I asked her to bring a book, Drinking: A Love Story, in a desperate attempt to begin to unpick my relationship with booze. She brings the book; in the front she’s written, ‘We’ll laugh at this over a Martini one day …’

  It’s the most painful reminder that I don’t have that many friends in New York. Not real friends. Everyone in New York claims that they’re your friend: the person you met at dinner, who’s a friend of someone else at the dinner, or the friend of your good friend. The person you met at a work event in the bathroom while washing your hands and who said they liked your dress. The person who never said they liked your hair in the line at the coffee shop, but asked enough questions about it to suggest that maybe they did. The person you worked with for a while in an office full of people you barely recognised as people and you thought seemed human by comparison. The bartender you over-tipped because you were out-of-your-skull drunk, which always makes you more needy and more generous. The person you shared a Twitter exchange with and has ‘NYC’ in their location and whom you didn’t immediately despise and you’re pretty sure they didn’t despise you either. The British person you definitely wouldn’t be friends with at home, but here the fact that you share a passport is catapulted to a top-five compelling reason to be friends. The girl who gives you diet pills from Mexico, because she knows how much you hate yourself and can help with finding new ways to hurt yourself. The guy you went on a terrible date with and it didn’t work out but you absolutely had to stay friends. Everybody in New York is obsessed with making friends, with collecting them, like the bones a dog will dig up around the
neighbourhood and bring back like treasures, burying them afresh, guarding them possessively even though they never are brought out into the light again.

  Every dinner ends with ‘Oh my God, we absolutely must meet up’ or ‘Let’s swap numbers’ or ‘Here’s my email’, every unexpected meeting with, ‘We are going to be BEST friends’ and ‘I’m so glad you came to New York’. The first few times this happens, I’m surprised that my phone doesn’t vibrate or my email ping. Wait. They didn’t mean it? New York is full of small, insignificant moments that will be carried away in the wind around you. Nothing sticks. Nothing stays. Nothing’s solid.

  The next morning, I’m off to take part in poetry class. As I leave my room to join the others, the male nurse walks past, the one who has called me The Princess of England since I was admitted.

  ‘Today you look like Fifth Avenue, like Audrey Hepburn,’ he says. ‘But I ain’t mad at you.’

  I take this as a compliment and use it to buoy me for the morning, so desperate am I for human warmth. As I start another week on the ward I can feel the despair, the panic, mounting: when will I go home? In two days, two weeks, two months? I know all are possible.

  I have my second AA meeting; this one is led by Big John, who towers over the room but shrinks whenever he talks about the pain he’s been through. This time, for the first time, I speak. I say, ‘My name is Terri and I’m an alcoholic,’ though my tongue trips on the words. I feel like such a fake. My stories, though true, feel like fiction. Like I’m weaving a fantastical tale. I can’t really have a problem, can I?

  My next appointment with the doctor is tomorrow. I spend much of the night on my knees, praying and praying that he’ll realise that it’s time for me to go home. I get up and am ready in plenty of time for our meeting. I say that I’m sorry, that I’m grateful, that I will always be thankful to them for saving me and that now was the time for me to go home, didn’t they agree?

  The doctor nods lightly, but the words coming out of his mouth are not what I want to hear.

  ‘You seem to be doing well,’ he says. ‘But we can’t get ahead of ourselves, can we? Let’s aim for the end of the week.’

  He may as well have said never. I try to feel grateful that it is at least this week, but I don’t feel grateful, I feel pissed off. Not that I can show it. I say thank you, shake his hand, and am back on the ward in ten minutes, shaking my head, to tell them I’m not getting out today.

  There are, though, a clutch of patients being sent home today, including The Screamer and Daniel. The former is over the moon to go home, sitting with her bags packed from the moment she heard the good news. Daniel is subdued and sad. He will have to go back to his life on the streets, his life of homelessness, addiction and mental illness. He talks about trying to get into a hostel, have a safe place to sleep, to live well, and I hope more than anything that he finds these things.

  ‘Would you like to get dinner with me? After you’re out?’ he asks, and I say yes, knowing it’s a date I will never make.

  After the leavers have gone, we spend an hour examining Hamlet’s monologue. It seems like such a pointless exercise. Half of the patients can’t understand it. I’m bubbling over with frustration. Even before Mary, the evangelical Christian who carries a Bible full of Post-it notes in her hands at all times, shouts randomly, aimlessly, at us about scripture and eternal damnation and hell. You’re already there, baby, I think. What in hell could be worse than this?

  I have all my hopes on day seven being my release date. If I’m kept in I’ll be spending another weekend in here. That, I know, I simply cannot endure. When it arrives, I bother the nurses on reception all morning and they assure me that I will have a meeting with my doctor. Ana has already left, vowing never to return but inviting me for a glass of white wine in her penthouse apartment uptown when I, too, get out.

  I give it everything. Pin my hair sedately, tone down the eyeliner and red lipstick. I practise looking calm, collected, unemotional. I’ve taken my Prozac and beta-blockers every day without complaint, twice a day. Attended every group, made small talk with people who scared me, confused me. I’ve done every single tiny and big thing asked of me. It is time to be rewarded. And rewarded I am.

  The doctor tells me first that he’s diagnosed me with major depression and substance-induced mood disorder. He goes on to say how well I’ve responded to treatment, what an improvement they’ve seen. That he wants to discharge me but would feel much more comfortable doing so if I were leaving to go straight to rehab for three months of intensive in-patient treatment. His request shocks me, startles me. I flinch at his suggestion, a flush flying up my neck and face, as if a dragon has breathed fire in a line across my body.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asks.

  ‘Yes, of course!’ I laugh. ‘It’s just, and I really appreciate you looking out for me, I have to be back at work – in-patient is really not an option.’

  He frowns. ‘Oh, well. We want to know that you’re taking it seriously – that you’re committed to your recovery and your sobriety. You have good insurance and we’ve found that in-patient treatment has a much better recovery rate.’

  I nod and smile, trying not to talk, shout, scream over him. I absolutely cannot be locked up for another three months. I don’t know what the legal situation is, right there in that moment, but I know I can’t do this.

  And here’s the rub of the truth: I’m not better. I know I’m not. I haven’t spent a day, a night, an hour or a minute in this ward sitting and thinking about what actually might be wrong with me, how I can begin to get better. The Prozac I’ve been taking hasn’t made me feel even a little better. The beta-blockers simply make me able to walk around and talk without dissolving into a heaving, weeping panic attack. My focus, for better or worse, has been on getting out of there. Getting back to my life, my job, my existence. However bad it seemed before, no matter how bad it was before, it was mine. And if nothing else, being in here has given me a basic desire to go home and live it.

  He is right to be suspicious of my miraculous recovery and generic statements about my mental health. Because I am full of shit. But right now, what I still need more than anything is to get out of the hospital and regain my independence, my freedom, my life. So I say to him:

  ‘Honestly, I am so committed to my sober life, a life in recovery. This hospital, and particularly you, have made me realise that I do have problems, but with hard work I can overcome them. And I must thank you for that. Because you probably saved my life! And why would I want to give all of that away now?’

  He smiles.

  ‘There must be a compromise that doesn’t require in-patient treatment?’ I try.

  He nods; there is. The solution is an agreement to go to AA meetings, coupled with out-patient rehab three times a week at a centre in Manhattan. I agree, quickly and happily. He gives me a number to call for a service called Bridging the Gap. It’s for prison inmates and hospital patients leaving incarceration and entering AA. They take you to your first meeting on your first day, ensure you’re not pounding shots or shooting up within hours of re-joining the real world. I call, am given my contact for the next day. We’re to meet in a diner.

  I spend my final night in the hospital with a new roommate. She talks all night, constantly, manically about why she’s there, about being accused of trying to murder her boyfriend’s mother, a claim that she isn’t fully denying, while talking in great detail about how she’d do it and what she’d do to her boyfriend while she was at it. I don’t sleep a wink that night. I daren’t turn my back to her. Fearing for the first time what someone in this place could do, would do, in the space of ten minutes before the next check.

  The next morning, I sit, bleary-eyed, with my packed plastic bag and my dead flowers, terrified to the very last second that the paperwork won’t be ready in time or I’ll do or say something that will make them reverse their decision.

  I sit perfectly still, reasoning that if I don’t move a muscle, then I can’t accide
ntally mess it up. And it works. I’m given my discharge papers, a Bridging the Gap information leaflet, a book of AA meetings and a rehab booklet. Half a tree to save my life.

  I say goodbye to everyone, knowing I will never ever see a single one of them again, and a nurse walks me to the doors, unlocks them for me to pass through. The click of the door unlocking sounds like the most beautiful poetry rolling inside my ears. She points the way to the lift. I say thank you and walk towards it as fast as I can without breaking into a run. I don’t look back, not once, terrified of what I might see, determined already to carry as little of this out with me as possible.

  It doesn’t deserve another glance, another snatched look. I climb into the lift, ride it down to the ground floor and stand for a moment on this side of the automatic doors, breathing in the air outside as the doors open and close under my presence. I step forwards.

  CHAPTER 29

  The first afternoon out.

  ‘So, how are you doing?’ she asks, the woman who’s been assigned to help me on the outside.

  ‘OK,’ I say.

  What I don’t say is that it feels like my skin has been lifted off – not bit by bit, inch by inch, like I’d been trying to do for years, but all of it in one swift movement. Like a magic trick I didn’t know was about to be performed. A flash and a puff of smoke distracting from whatever sleight of hand I’d missed.

  But OK is pretty much all I can manage with this stranger who I’d hoped – now seeking softness and kindness wherever possible – would have a kind face. Her face was a mixing bowl of hard edges, flat surfaces and shadows. She smiles knowingly. ‘Yeah. OK.’ She holds my gaze as the silence drifts and I try to match it for as long as possible, worried that to disconnect would be a sign of my weakness, my illness. My inability to handle intimacy, honesty.

  I take a gulp of my coffee, grateful to feel the hot, bitter, sugary burn lift me off my feet momentarily. She tells me these days are the worst, that I’ve hit my rock bottom and that it can and will only get better from here. That I’ve saved my own life. That I just need to take each day in isolation, one day at a time. I cling onto her words like a woman with a half-inflated life raft between her thighs, cutting into the softest bit of her skin.