The Pause (10 page)

‘Depression,' I reply to the carpet. ‘And anxiety.'

This elicits a series of sympathetic noises from the women.

After my introduction, the spotlight is removed from me while we make our way around the group and everyone workshops their issues, so that everything is out in the open and we can all try to help. And that's the interesting thing about
group. Ed keeps us on track and retains the focus but the group sort of runs things. A clear case of the lunatics taking over the asylum.

I hear stories of rape and drug, alcohol and physical abuse. There are tales of neglect, childhood trauma, children forcibly removed, poverty and utter helplessness. Things that make me wonder what on earth they were all laughing at during dinner last night. And maybe my initial thought was right. If they stop laughing, they'll start crying – or worse. One woman, who is sitting alone, is so dosed-up on meds that she may as well not be here. Her eyes are so glazed and glassy they look like marbles. Her mind, or what's left of it, is elsewhere. She doesn't, nor is she asked to, contribute to group. Remembering her own name would probably be beyond her.

Eventually, after everybody else has had their say, the focus returns to me.

‘So, Declan,' says Ed, trying to ease me into things, ‘tell us a little bit about yourself if you could.'

I don't really want to tell them anything but after hearing from everyone else, it seems that to hold back would be unfair.

‘Well, I'm seventeen years old. My dad's an accountant who thinks he's a comedian. Trust me; he's not.'

Everyone laughs at this.

‘I have a younger sister who should probably be in here more than me.'

More laughter.

‘I mean, she's totally nuts.' I look at my fellow loonies and want to slap myself for being so insensitive. ‘Sorry. I didn't mean …'

‘It's okay,' says Sharon, smiling at me. ‘Everyone's a bit nuts. We're just the ones who admit it.'

‘Please continue, Declan,' says Ed.

‘My mum's a barrister and my hero.'

A large round of ‘ah's.

‘I'm in year eleven at Redcliffe Boys'.' I suddenly realise that there's not much to my life. Not yet, anyway. I'm really just getting started, I suppose. ‘I like reading, movies, playing chess, and hanging out with my friends. Probably sounds pretty boring.'

Everyone happily agrees that it's not.

‘How long have you had depression, Declan?' asks Ed, gently reminding us that this is a mental hospital and not the first night of an evening cooking class.

‘Since I was young.'

‘Because you're so old now,' says Sharon and everyone laughs again. Though the way Sharon says it, they're laughing with me not at me.

Ed prods me as gently as he can. ‘How old were you, Declan?'

‘Young,' I repeat. ‘Really young.'

‘Did something happen that led to it?' asks Ed. Obviously this question is too big for Sharon's group and so they lapse into a rare silence, waiting for me to respond.

I look up at Ed. What has Mum told him?

‘You obviously know something did,' I say.

‘Do you want to talk about it?'

‘Not really.'

Ed and I lock eyes. I quickly look down at the floor. Ed's trying to open the door to my recovery, but it's up to me to take the first steps and I'm not ready. Not yet.

‘Maybe you and I can talk privately,' says Ed.

‘Whatever,' I reply, because I can get away with it.

‘Has anything else happened recently that got too much?'

I look up at Ed again. I know that he knows. And he knows I know that he knows. But I guess the healing, the rewiring, can't start until it's out there.

‘I broke up with my girlfriend.' It seems so lame compared to everyone else's problems I can hardly stand myself.

‘But it wasn't just a breakup, was it, Declan?'

I can feel Sharon's group staring at me, eager to have their minds taken off their own stuff.

‘She was sent to live in Hong Kong.'

This elicits a huge round of ‘oh's, head shakes and ‘that's terrible's from the group. They are so wonderful and supportive that I choke up. I try to hide it but the game is up. Compared to what they've been through I feel so pathetic, but they sympathise with me as if I've lost my whole family in a car crash. Huge chest-heaving sobs wrack my body. My muscles tense as I try to mask what's happening to me but the game is up.

Sharon comes across the room and puts her arm around me. ‘Let it out, Declan. You deserve it.' She hugs me. I mean, really hugs me, drawing me into her, wrapping herself around me. Her kindness consumes me with grief. My head is resting against her chest as my tears cascade down my cheeks and onto her flannelette PJs. I hardly even know Sharon but for the moment I feel as though I've come home. That I'm safe. That nothing can get to me. And right at this moment, cradled in the arms of an almost perfect stranger who had been molested by her father since she was a little girl and then abused and neglected by her own husband, I feel myself begin to heal.

People come and go in the psycho ward. Most arrive in a drug-induced state of serenity, transferred from another hospital or medical centre, or else they're back for their second, third or twentieth stint. Some, however, arrive kicking and screaming, but those people don't tend to stay long, spirited away in the night never to be seen again.

On my second night, an elderly lady went berserk, wailing up and down the corridors like a banshee until she was dragged away by the police in handcuffs. Where do you take someone who goes insane in a mental hospital? Wherever it is, I don't want to go there.

There are a few men but they don't last long either. Loners, every one of them, they spend their time out in the courtyard smoking and trying hard not to think too much about what they've lost. Trying not to think about what went wrong in their lives. Trying not to think too much at all. In group they have neither the language nor the desire to unpack what's happened to them, so they zone out, waiting for time, for life, to pass.

There's a high-school history teacher called Neville who's too young to retire but feels he's too old to embrace or understand the iPad generation that's taking over his classroom. He can barely operate the mobile phone his son gave him, let alone prepare an interactive SMART Board lesson for their sister school in Nepal. When he tells me he's always wanted to write a book on World War I, I try teaching him Word when Mum brings in my laptop, but it would be easier to teach a fish how to use a pogo stick. When he can't even grasp the notion of creating a file and saving it, I shake my head and tell him that there are as yet remote tribes in the Amazon jungle that can put together a PowerPoint presentation and regularly Tweet about their isolated status, but he just laughs and tells me that his kids, his wife and his students did the com
poo
ter stuff for him. After several lessons we both admit defeat. The digital
age has consigned him to the past. With a master's degree in ancient history, he's thinking of starting a lawn mowing business or else stacking supermarket shelves at night.

A huge tattooed trucker, Bill, joins us for a while. His muscular forearms and sausage-like fingers make his cigarettes look like toothpicks. I learn from Sharon that his wife died of breast cancer a few months earlier and he's attempted suicide a couple of times since. Three days after Bill was admitted I came out of my room around midnight to make a cup of hot chocolate only to see his bulbous sheet-covered silhouette being wheeled down the corridor. He found his way back to his wife via his dressing-gown cord and the bathroom doorknob.

The day after Bill left, a young girl, Ellie, joins us. She's in year nine but looks more like year five. Her arms are sliced to ribbons, the fresh scars not quite covering the old ones. I chat to her over coffee in the games room but we have little in common apart from our age. I figured anyone
that
determined to die would, like Bill, get there eventually. But Sharon assures me that Ellie doesn't want to die, she wants to live, and the self-harm, the slicing and dicing of her arms, is her way of feeling something. Anything. Her parents are divorced, so Ellie divides her time between her mother's
mansion on the North Shore and her father's penthouse in Dubai. Like a lot of depressives, she has everything to live with, but very little to live for, so she cuts herself to feel alive.

The woman who floated into group and sat there in an upright coma with her mind far, far away is escorted down the corridor and returned to her family when two-and-a-half bottles of vodka are discovered in her bag that some ‘friends' of hers had obviously smuggled in. The hospital makes it quite clear on arrival that the staff are here to help us get better, but we have to at least meet them halfway by wanting to.

A bipolar patient believes she knows how to communicate with God and attempts to fly down the emergency exit stairwell. She's unsuccessful on both counts. God fails to heed her call or cushion her fall and she winds up with two broken arms, a fractured skull and an adjustment to her medication.

The girl from my first hospital eventually joins us. Her name is Danica and she's trying to forget or get over everything she's seen and heard. The death of her parents, life on the streets, the trains, the abandoned houses.

There are additions and subtractions to Sharon's group, too, but the nucleus remains the same and Sharon's position at the helm is unquestioned.
We haven't really spoken much since that first day in group. At least not about what happened. Somehow it's too big. Beyond words. But she gave something to me that day. I regressed to my own ground zero as Sharon cradled me. No amount of drugs, psycho- or retail therapy, tai chi, cooking and art classes could give me what Sharon gave me in five minutes. And I think Ed, the wily fox, knew what was going on, which is why he didn't intervene. For a few minutes I let Sharon become Aunt Mary, or the Aunt Mary my dad remembers – the one full of kindness and charity before the drink and demons leeched into her mind – and I am finally able to close the door on her. To let her go. And I now know that when Aunt Mary let go of my hand and disappeared over the edge and into the mist, she saved me because when it mattered most, the decency that was buried beneath all her other stuff broke through to the surface. And it was enough. Just.

I learn from one of the group members that Sharon lost a baby boy when he was only three days old. He would have been my age now, apparently. I wish I could help her the way that she helped me. Help her in some small way. But there's nothing I can do.

There's no wi-fi in the hospital and up until now, Mum has been reluctant to buy me an internet dongle. But I guess she thinks I'm getting better because after a few days she gives in. When I finally get it working, I check my email as casually as I can but my heart is racing. When I log in to my mail server I have to wade through the morass of crap that has found its way past my spam filter. There's a bunch of messages from a Russian chick called Svetlana, who is wanting to meet a man like me and would like to send me a photo of herself if I give her my address. There are about twenty emails from various companies wanting to sell me discounted Viagra. Seriously? I'm seventeen years old and, when I'm not in mental hospitals, hornier than the sharp end of a stampeding rhinoceros. I don't need Viagra. I need the opposite. An antidote. Down, boy! But there, amongst all the spam (I don't believe in capital punishment but spammers should be shot at dawn without trial) are several messages from Lisa. The first one is kind of chatty. She lets me know that she's okay. That she's settling in. That she's sorry for what happened. That she misses me more than air (boy does that bring a smile to my face). She still considers us to be boyfriend and girlfriend despite the distance and she hopes I do, too. She then confides in me that at night, when she thinks
about me, about our kisses, and about that time in my bedroom when we did a little more than kiss, she has to muffle herself with a pillow so that her aunt doesn't come rushing in or call an ambulance. On reading this I immediately need some anti-Viagra and am forced to miss group and take a long cold shower instead. By her fourth email she has heard, from one of her friends, that I'm in hospital but doesn't know why. She also understands if I never want to see, talk to, or email her ever again. That she not only has zero respect for her mother but she hates her. Hates her with such venom that she wants to stay in Hong Kong, at least until she's finished school. And when she has finished school she will come back to Sydney to be with me and live with an elderly aunt on her father's side who also loathes her mother. My heart sinks a little when I read her last email. She hasn't heard from me so she has accepted that I've either moved on or else I don't want anything to do with her, which she understands completely. My fingers are just a blur as I type out a reply. I tell her that I've been sick, that I've been in hospital, that I'm
still
in hospital (though I don't go into details), that I haven't had access to email up until now, that I can't live without her and that we
are
still together. That we are still a couple. That no amount of demented mothers or aunts
(hers or mine) will keep us from being together. That I love her. That I have always loved her and
will
always love her.

I hit ‘send', and then refresh my inbox every minute on the minute waiting for her reply. She must have been at school because it takes seven hours before she replies. She tells me that she has been crying because my email is so wonderful. She has read it over and over and over again. She wants to know why I'm in hospital, though she suspects it's related to depression. She tells me that we
are
going to be together forever. That we will get through this. We will negotiate the hurdles. And while there is a small, rational part of my brain that knows that this is probably what everyone feels in their first real romance, I don't want rational. I don't want wisdom. I want Lisa. And although we are 4583 miles/7375.63 kilometres/3982.52 nautical miles apart, we are together.

I think back a week ago to the train platform and what might have been. The wreckage I would have left behind in that moment of pure insanity. Thank God I paused.