The Dark Threads (18 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
WAS NOT CONCENTRATING
on the picture I was drawing with a crayon at OT. I'd been thinking about my adolescence and how strongly I'd felt, at fifteen, that life was never meant to be like it was. But my search for answers had led to more questions. And what now? I was scribbling trees and clouds, and birds flying over Rainbow Land, while preoccupied with pain born of the fear that I'd never be able to ‘spring free'. But there
had
to be an answer.

A group of students were looking around and one of them, a red-haired, freckle-faced girl of about nineteen, went into raptures over my picture.

‘Oh, isn't it good? My, aren't you clever!'

Both she and I knew a child in primary school could have done better but she called over her fellow students: ‘Hey, look at this. Isn't she clever?'

They stood around me talking as if I was a precocious five-year-old.

‘Oh yes, it's very good.'

‘I wish I could draw like that.'

‘Yes, me, too. It's absolutely marvellous.'

I said nothing, finding it easier to pretend to be too sick to respond to them in the hope that they would quickly lose interest in me. After a while, the students began talking among themselves about an ECT session they had observed.

‘God, wasn't it awful! I felt sick and dizzy and I almost passed out,' a tall blonde girl said. ‘My reaction really surprised me because I'm not usually squeamish.'

‘Yes, it was dreadful!' someone else agreed. ‘When the patient started twitching like that, I couldn't watch.'

Suppressed anger rose in my throat as I listened to a description of how distressing it was to watch someone looking as I must have looked when my brain was tampered with in that, what now seemed to me, barbaric way. I stood up. It was time, anyway, to go back to the day hospital. Marlene and I were to have a relaxation tape session before dinner. I screwed up my childish drawing that they'd been pretending was a Picasso and dumped it in the bin.

‘Oh, Jean, you missed something really good this morning,' June, the student nurse at the day hospital, said. ‘We had the use of a video camera and we filmed a group of you patients sitting talking. You know how Sally keeps saying she can't make conversation? Well, we played the film back and each time it came to a part where she'd joined in, we stopped it and said to her, “Sally, you say you can't make conversation, but you're wrong. Look! There you are. Talking.” She couldn't deny it because she was on film to prove it.' June turned to Nigel, the other student nurse, her eyes wide with enthusiasm. ‘That's right, isn't it, Nigel? It just shows how a video camera has great potential as a therapeutic tool.'

Sally, the newest day patient, looked at me and raised her eyebrows behind their backs.

‘Yes, that's what we need here,' Nigel said. ‘More progressive methods.'

A therapeutic tool? Progressive methods? Why were they so bent on trying to prove there was something wrong with our perception? Wouldn't it have made more sense for them to try to understand what Sally
meant
when she kept saying she felt she could no longer make conversation?

Neither did the use of a relaxation tape make sense in the circumstances. I mean, why bother sending Marlene and me upstairs twice a week to lie on foam matting on the floor and listen to a relaxation tape? Fine, if we had a problem relaxing, but my problem was managing to keep awake. And so, too, it seemed was Marlene's.

* * *

‘Imagine you're lying on a sunny beach …'

The tape had only just begun and Marlene was already snoring. There was a pause somewhere during the tape where you were supposed to be in a state of deep relaxation, then, after a few minutes of silence, the ‘voice' would start prattling on again about sunny beaches, against tranquil background sounds of soft, rippling water and the occasional cry of a seagull. Marlene stirred, yawned and then stood up during the silent bit and switched the tape off. She was about to go back downstairs: end of holiday.

‘Er, Marlene. I don't think it's over yet,' I said.

‘Oh hell!' she said. She switched it back on and lay down again. ‘Wake me up when the fuckin' thing's finished.'

‘I will if
I
can manage to stay awake.'

‘I don't think these tapes are meant for people like us, Jean, do you? I'm forever struggling to keep alert 'cos I'm on this bloody Melleril and it knocks me out. Last thing I need is a fuckin' relaxation tape.'

‘Yeah, me too,' I said. ‘I could lie here and sleep all day.'

‘The treatment we get at this place doesn't make sense, does it?' asked Marlene. ‘I mean, when you really come to think …'

‘You're still on the sunny beach, feeling warm and comfortable and peaceful and fully relaxed …' droned the deep, slow, male voice on the tape. ‘Breathe deeply, slowly … In. Out. In. Out. Just relax and let go of everything, let it all go…'

‘When you come to think about it,' continued Marlene, ‘it doesn't make any fuckin' sense.'

‘Now I'm going to count to ten …' the voice on the tape was saying gently, ‘and when I get to ten, you'll open your eyes and be fully awake but you'll still be deeply relaxed. You'll still feel comfortable, peaceful and deeply, deeply relaxed. One. Two …'

‘It doesn't make sense, does it? It doesn't make any fuckin' sense at all.'

‘Five. Six …'

‘No, it certainly doesn't,' I murmured sleepily.

But I suppose I did seem a nervous wreck, and not only because of the old social anxiety. I realised how shaky my hands were when I took some photographs for Mandy with her camera; each one came out blurred. And, even alongside the drowsiness, there was sometimes an intensely distressing feeling of restlessness. Years later I saw that a nurse at the day hospital had written in the Nursing Notes: ‘Seems very nervous, when sitting down constantly moving arm or leg, but always very pleasant.' Mr Jordan at last told me (no one else had ever done so, as far as I can recall) that the restlessness and tremors were common side effects of the type of drugs I was taking. To lessen such effects, a drug called Kemedrin was added to my prescriptions.

In the hospital corridors one day, I stopped and leant against the wall watching life – mental institution life – pass me by. I tried to imagine the mentally sick of the Victorian era being herded through these same corridors. How many people had lived, suffered and died in this place? I'd heard it was built in the 1880s to keep about 2,500 ‘pauper lunatics' out of sight and mind of the public. Could their sad spirits have sunk into these walls? Sometimes, feeling an almost uncanny sensitivity to atmosphere, I thought I could sense the gloom of both past and present as if it was clinging to the walls and dripping from the ceiling.

Didn't mental patients used to be chained to the walls, doused in cold water, whirled around? What strange methods of treating people there were before the use of drugs and electric shocks. But how much progress had really been made? My thoughts turned to myself and I remembered how Mr Jordan and Dr Copeland had once pointed out that if I'd been living in an earlier period, I wouldn't have become a patient or inmate anyway. They were probably right. After all, I hadn't been talking or behaving in ways which caused concern to anybody outside the psychiatric profession. In a historical period with different ideas, I wouldn't have viewed my problems as ‘medical' so would never have thought of going to my GP, asking to see a psychiatrist and agreeing to voluntary admission. There would have seemed no option but to carry on working and try to sort things out for myself. And what would have happened to me? Nothing worse than what had happened, surely? Perhaps nothing at all.

As I leant against the wall ruminating, interrupted only occasionally by one or two inmates who shuffled up asking if I'd got a cig or a light, I felt trapped. Almost as if I, too, were shackled to the wall in this awful place. I realised with dismay that I was no nearer to resolving my problems now than I had been at the age of eighteen when I'd first decided to seek psychiatric ‘help'. Not only that, it seemed all I had done since then was to walk deeper and deeper into a fog from which I could find no way out.

What about my brother? I asked myself. Does one escape the conflicts of adolescence by remaining a child? But his was no easy escape. Last night he'd woken me with one of his tantrums. I'd lain in bed listening to him shouting at my parents, but what I'd really heard was an insecure child aged about five yelling, ‘I hate Jean! I hate Jean! Mum wanted a girl but instead she got me. And then what happened? Four years later she got what she wanted. A girl!'

‘Be quiet, Brian, you'll wake her up,' I heard Mum say.

‘She's always been the favourite. I hate her!'

I didn't believe Brian really hated me. I felt he said these things because he was hurt and angry. There had been another time, not long ago, when he'd told me that I was the only person who was ‘all right'. This was when he had come into my bedroom late one night and, after the usual argument about him waking me up to get to the wardrobe, we'd somehow got talking. He'd actually sat on my bed and talked about some of his insecurities and fears, and about his wish to have a girlfriend. On and on he'd talked well into the night – how much
he
had needed someone to talk to. When he left my room I sank into sleep, feeling drained but hopeful because it seemed like a breakthrough in communication with each other. The next day our relationship was back to ‘normal' and it was hard to believe I hadn't only dreamt he'd sat on my bed and talked to me like that.

Although Brian spoke and acted as if he was intellectually and emotionally impaired, some things didn't seem to fit with this. For example, his knowledge and appreciation of classical music was impressive. He would, however, play his music on the record player loudly at all times of day or night. I heard Mum making sarcastic comments to him, not about his lack of consideration for others in playing the music too loudly or at inappropriate times, but about his taste in music, as if it was wrong or ‘soppy' to like classical music. I wondered if Brian would have turned out quite different if he'd been brought up in a different family.

Since the onset of adolescence I had often felt angry about what I perceived to be the inappropriate and unintelligent responses of my parents, blaming them to some extent for Brian, and later perhaps me too, becoming (each in our different ways) ‘screwed up'. But now I had come round to realising that my parents, like everyone else, could only behave within the bounds of their own limited capabilities or perspectives. So what was the point of being angry with them? No point in anger or blame. And nothing to rebel against any more. Not even God.

No, not even God. I remembered how a few weeks earlier I had gone to Pastor West's farewell service. He was moving to Scotland. Once again, I had heard the familiar hymn-singing, hand-clapping, gospel message, prayers. But now, even the pain and struggles and conflicts of losing my Christian beliefs had largely subsided, leaving only a dreadful emptiness, a kind of emotional deadness inside …

I was still leaning against the wall in the hospital corridor when a wild-eyed man in a long, shabby overcoat shuffled up and pestered me for a cig.

‘No, I haven't got one, I don't smoke,' I said.

‘Well, fuck you!' he shouted in my face. His foul breath made my stomach lurch, but since I was already leaning up against the wall I couldn't step back. I had long since stopped being afraid of these sad people, but was relieved when he went away. All the way down the corridor he shuffled along, shouting, ‘Fuck you! Fuck 'em all! And fuck the whole fuckin' world!'

After the main service in the church there had been a Youth Rendezvous meeting in the hall at the back. More hand-clapping, singing and praying – along with a break for tea and biscuits. I experienced so acutely the feeling of being alone in a crowd as, with cup and saucer awkwardly balanced on my knee, I sat there dumbly, battling with the usual feelings of shyness, which now reached a peak.

I glanced round and noticed that everyone in this packed room was laughing, chatting – except for me. I don't fit in, I don't belong, I thought sadly. I don't belong anywhere. There can't be a God or surely He would help me, especially here if these are His people. Oh, why do I still keep returning to this church like a pin to a magnet?

Travelling home from church on the bus that evening I knew it was finally over, ‘it' being the last bit of hope I'd cherished for so long that one day a miracle would happen that would enable me to regain my beliefs. I'd hoped that one day I'd return to church with Jackie and pick up where I'd left off when I was about sixteen, only less shy, and stronger in faith, none the worse for my worldly wanderings. Somehow, right then and there on the bus, I suddenly knew, clearer than ever before, that it could never be so. The God of my childhood and teens was not going to rise from the dead. Not now. Not ever.

Oh well, so what? People's beliefs often change as they get older, which is how it should be, I told myself. That was the last time I'd go to church and now I'd put that part of my life right behind me, and this time I really would let go. I'd stop looking back. Even so, it had been a lovely dream while it lasted.

It had started to rain; the bus window was so splattered with raindrops that I could hardly see through it, but there was another reason for my blurred vision. I paid my fare hardly daring to turn properly and then I returned my gaze to the window. Don't cry, Jean. For heaven's sake, don't cry. This was so unlike me. I rarely cried at all these days and certainly not in front of people. I surely wouldn't cry here in front of a whole busload of people.

I fought tremendously hard to hold back my tears but they just seeped out of my eyes like water from a leaking tap. Soon my face was hot, my nose running and my cheeks wet with scalding tears. But at least they were silent tears. With my face still riveted to the window, nobody could see me, nobody need know, although as the grey terraced houses, the parade of shops, the cinema on the corner, sped by through a blur of rain and tears, I was becoming increasingly worried about getting off. Opting for a swift solution, I stumbled down the aisle, my long hair hiding my face, and got off a few stops earlier than usual.