The Mirror World of Melody Black (19 page)

‘Abby?' Dr Barbara's expression told me that she'd continued to talk, but nothing had registered.

‘I'm worse,' I repeated, then returned my gaze to a blank patch of wall. She kept looking at me but I didn't meet her eye. I didn't want to see confirmation of what I already knew. That there was nothing to be done.

‘Abby, listen to me. This won't last for ever. I know it doesn't feel that way right now, but you have to trust me. You've spent the last week semi-comatose, but now you're beginning to come round. If it seems like things are getting worse, that's only because you're starting to function again. You're starting to think and feel things.'

‘I don't want to feel things,' I told her. ‘I don't want to feel anything ever again.'

‘I know you don't. But trust me, please. It's just a matter of time. Things can only get better from here.'

After Dr Barbara had left and the lights had gone out, I took my cobalt-blue dress from the bedside cupboard and held it in my lap. I had to do this every so often. It made me feel even worse, but I had to do it all the same. Everything else I saw on the ward was blank or pastel or neutral. The pillows and linen and doctors were white. The curtains and walls were off-white. The nurses were an insipid, washed-out green. But my dress was still astonishing – a flash of colour as vivid and violent as lightning on a moonless night. And when I looked at my dress, I felt like Eve standing outside the Garden of Eden, able to peer back through the gates at something truly sublime and for ever lost. I couldn't look at my dress for very long.

That night, as I sat cradling my dress like it was a murdered infant, I realized that Dr Barbara was right about at least one thing. The new problem I was facing was that I was no longer semi-comatose. I had become alert enough to comprehend, without any filter or anaesthetic, how awful I felt, and this was why I had reached my lowest ebb. From this a more general insight followed, even though I'd assumed that any new insight was now far beyond me.

The problem was thought itself, the self-awareness that made it possible for me to look at my dress and understand where I had been, where I was now, and where I was going – or not going. It was a uniquely human problem, something no other animal had to put up with, this ability to suffer in multiple tenses – simultaneously to mourn the past, despair of the present and fear the future. The kindest thing would be for one of the doctors to give me a full frontal lobotomy; that was the only thing that could solve this problem for good.

I wasn't going to get a full frontal lobotomy. I'd been born in the wrong decade.

The only way out of this prison was to get better. And since this wasn't going to happen, I'd have to fake it. I'd have to make the doctors believe that I was well and no longer a threat to myself. Then I could take the steps to make sure I'd never come back here.

Hello Abby.

I don't know how else to start this letter. I've been looking at a blank sheet of paper for God knows how long, and this is all I've come up with. But it's probably best to keep things simple. Please assume that my words fall short of what I actually want to say.

I came to see you a couple of days ago, or I tried to. I made it as far as reception. I thought that if I could get someone to call you – if you knew I was already there – then you'd have to change your mind and let me in. Turns out you're not taking calls, either. I should have known. I've left about twenty messages on your mobile.

They sent a doctor out eventually. He was nice. He made me a cup of coffee and let me rant at him for five minutes. Then he repeated what I already knew: he couldn't let me see you, couldn't even take a message, since this is expressly against your wishes. Barbara finally agreed to pass this letter on, but only when she thinks you're ‘capable of reading it'. That paints a pretty bleak picture.

Needless to say, the doctor I saw at reception couldn't tell me anything about how you are – patient confidentiality. All he could give me were generalities: that you were in a safe environment and would be receiving the best possible care, etc., etc.

I had a plan, of sorts, when I walked into the hospital. I was going to wait as long as it took, just refuse to leave until someone had communicated with you on my behalf, or at least given me some concrete information. Instead, I found myself leaving within half an hour, having apologized profusely to the doctor and receptionist. All very British. They gave me a number I could call if I needed to speak to anyone again. It's for some sort of mental health support charity. I haven't used it yet.

I'm sorry: a couple of pages in and I'm already sounding bitter and self-pitying. That really isn't my intention. I'm not telling you any of this to make you feel bad. I imagine you feel bad enough already – much worse than I do.

I have this problem that never seems to get any easier. When you're at your lowest, I always think that there must be some magic combination of words that would help you. But I can never find them. They're always just beyond my grasp.

All I can find to say right now is that I'm here for you, whenever you're ready.

There's one other thing too, and again it's something you might not find particularly easy to hear. But I promised I'd tell you if I managed to get in touch.

Your mum phoned, the day after you went into hospital. I hadn't really figured out what I was going to say to your family at that point – I was hoping I'd get the chance to see you first – but I wasn't going to lie to her, obviously. She's called or texted every day for the past week, and yesterday she came over to the flat. (She was here at ten, so God knows when she left Exeter.)

She's worried: that goes without saying. She's worried and she wants you to call her. Please just think about it.

I love you. I miss you. I don't think there's anything else I can add.

Beck x

When you want to die, smiling is not easy. I discovered this the next morning when the nurse brought my breakfast.

It was premeditated, of course. After I put my cobalt-blue dress back in the bedside cupboard, I stayed awake for a few hours, planning my first move.

It seemed simple in principle: a slight reconfiguration of the eyes and mouth, just to let her know that I was pleased to see her, that I was grateful for my cereal.

The nurse's sharp recoil told me that I'd got it wrong somehow.

Later, I spent several minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to understand and correct my error. I had the vague recollection that all primates could smile, and it wasn't a skill that had to be learned. Baby primates could smile just a few weeks after birth – even those born blind. So why did it seem so unnatural? My mouth felt tense and tremulous, like overstretched elastic. But maybe this wouldn't be discernible to an outside observer? My lips at least appeared to be curving in the right direction. The bigger problem was my eyes. I'd read somewhere that you could always tell a genuine smile by looking at the eyes rather than the mouth.

I covered my mouth with a hand and stared straight ahead. Two doll's eyes stared back, as cold and hard as marbles. I didn't know how to rectify this.

Soon the nurse was tapping on the bathroom door.

I gave up.

The problem, I later realized, was that I'd started with far too big a step. I couldn't fake a smile right now – any more than I could recalibrate the hollow monotone of my voice. These things would have to be practised, rebuilt piece by piece. In the meantime, I should think small. I should focus on the small cosmetic changes that I had some hope of effecting.

I started by washing again. Real washing, as opposed to sluicing myself off once every forty-eight hours. Soap, shampoo – the works. A couple of days later, I asked to borrow a disposable razor and spent the next fifteen minutes shaving my legs under the unflinching gaze of one of the nurses. It took fifteen minutes because I had to concentrate on every stroke. All my nerves were shrieking at me, telling me to press down as hard as I could. And that would have been disastrous. It would have set me back weeks. I kept my eyes locked on their task, thinking only of the endgame.

When I'd finished, I had a long nap, then spent the rest of the day reading the first chapter of
Gone with the Wind
. That felt even harder than shaving my legs, but it was an investment worth making. Both the day shift and the night shift saw that I was reading. They could see how engrossed I was.

I don't know exactly how long it took me to get off psychiatric intensive care – time was still hazy – but it must have been less than a week. It all seemed much too easy.

I washed. I read. I dressed myself in my own clothes. When Dr Barry asked me how I was, I told him three or four rather than zero. These scores seemed unfeasibly high to my mind, but he never questioned them. Instead, he marked them on my chart, and soon the evidence of my ‘recovery' was there for all to see, plotted on a tidy graph.

It was a monstrous sham, but it was a sham that no one felt inclined to question. Even Dr Barbara, whom I'd assumed would see through my pretences in an instant, seemed content to accept the signs at face value. It helped, I suppose, that I didn't have to lie to Dr Barbara directly. She wasn't going to ask me to rate my mood out of ten. She was noting the subtler measures of my improvement: the fact that I'd made a bookmark out of a folded paper towel, and this had started to creep down the vast bulk of
Gone with the Wind
; the fact that my hair was washed and brushed. I didn't have to make anything too explicit with Dr Barbara.

It helped, too, that my face was beginning to give hints of expressive capability. I couldn't yet manage anything approaching a warm smile – let alone a happy smile – but I could do a passable impression of a
brave
smile, something that told the outside world I was at least trying.

Still, it struck me that it took so little; just a few minor changes in demeanour and I was indisputably on the mend. So what, exactly, defined the line between crazy and not crazy? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that sanity was just a matter of behaviour. Its degrees could be measured by the cleanliness of your hair, the set of your facial features, how you respond to a series of social cues.

For the doctors and nurses, this was what sanity was.

Although there was no substance underlying my sham recovery, I could still appreciate the several ways in which being off psychiatric intensive care was better than being on it. First, there were fewer nurses. I'm not sure what the staff to patient ratio had been on Nile, but I am certain there were more of them than us. Amazon, where I now found myself, was closer to being a regular hospital ward. There might have been six to eight nurses present at any one time – slightly fewer at night.

Of course, the practical result of this lower staffing ratio was less supervision. There still weren't locks on the bathroom doors, but most days I could get through a whole shower without anyone interrupting me. Far better than this, though, was the fact that I could now smoke unsupervised. The move to Amazon had come with all sorts of trusts and privileges that would have been unimaginable on Nile. Previously banned personal effects – house keys, nail files, lighters – were retrieved from the locker room behind the main reception. The keys were superfluous, obviously, but I suppose some psychiatrist somewhere had decided there was an important symbolism implicit in their return – the promise that I was one step closer to my eventual release.

I was more impressed by the symbolism of the lighter, since this meant I was now trusted not to set myself or others on fire. For several hours after its return, the lighter never left my person. The keys I buried at the bottom of my bag. They were another item I did not want to think about.

If Nile was essentially a prison, then Amazon was a halfway house, the sheltered accommodation set up to provide a safe transition back to the outside world. At times, it felt no more terrible than a hall of residence – if you allowed yourself to forget that all its residents were insane.

Amazon Ward was a long L-shaped corridor with a dozen bedrooms leading off it. There was a small kitchen, containing a kettle and a microwave and an always-full fruit bowl, which adjoined a larger dining area with two round tables. Opposite the nurses' station was the dayroom, where there were sofas and magazines and a television that seemed to be permanently tuned to
Homes Under the Hammer
. This, I suppose, was someone's concept of safe viewing – the kind of innocuous daytime programming suited to a group of damaged and fragile women. Except I found
Homes Under the Hammer
anything but innocuous, and I was willing to bet I was not the only one.
Homes Under the Hammer
was a programme in which smug, middle-aged idiots bought and sold property, usually generating a huge profit while simultaneously pricing the rest of the population out of the market. These people all owned homes already. Many of them owned multiple homes, which was why they were able to borrow such vast sums of money from the bank. They used phrases like ‘strengthening my portfolio', and were constantly referring to the
ladder
.

I avoided the dayroom whenever I could, but this was not always possible. Because on Amazon, independent movement was not just permitted, it was continually encouraged. If you tried to stay in bed past nine in the morning, it wouldn't be long before a nurse was opening the curtains and ushering you into one of the communal areas. This was the flipside of greater freedom. With it came caveats – rules and responsibilities.