Your Voice in My Head (5 page)

I go back to their house. As I recall, I climb into bed and Mum’s cats come to comfort me. But that’s not true because our cat, Roxy, died ten years ago, and Mum is not allowed cats until years later, when Lisa persuades Dad they are a
good idea. So there is nothing crawling on me but my own anxiety.

Mum is figuring how I can get help as an outpatient somewhere, until, waking on my first morning home, I have a nice cup of tea and then destroy the bathroom. Outpatient no longer seems so viable. I tore that room apart. I wrote on every wall. I got words written up on the ceiling. How? When you’re losing your mind you can manage the same unthinkable feats as a very drunk person. I don’t know how I got to the ceiling. I did it in a fever dream and was shocked when it was over, to see what I had done. Mum is terrified. “Your father’s going to go crazy!” When you’re unhinged, you make others unhinged. It’s like watching someone yawn. It’s catching. But that isn’t what happens. Dad comes home from work early. He silently examines the room, as if it were an art installation. Then he comes out, crying.

“It’s just objects.”

He wraps his arms around me.

“How can we help you? What should we do?”

I love him so much. But: “I don’t know.”

It’s by now very hard to get words out at all. I’m in a trance. Someone with deep spiritual awareness might be in such a trance as I, who am so deeply lost. That night at a restaurant dinner, I hold my arm on the scalding hot radiator to try to feel my way back into my skin, call my body back to me (the burns I make are my Bat Signal in the sky). But I don’t come back to me. And I’m taken to the hospital the next morning.

I don’t recall how we got to the Priory (again, like a drunk or a patient recovering from anesthesia, you remember the
where but not the how). I clearly remember being admitted by a Chinese nurse who became affronted when I answered his questions in monotone.

“Why she not want talk to me? Why she don’t like me?” he asked my mother.

“Um, she just tried to kill herself.”

He storms out in a huff and a new nurse comes to finish for him.

Just sign here, they tell my mother.

And she does.

I have officially been committed, pending reevaluation.

I haven’t been home to London in a long time, before being forced back, and my visitors are few and far between. And random. The closest friends can’t face it. The acquaintances I’ve held at a distance see it, maybe, as a way to get to know me, although there is currently no “me” to know.

Matthew—“Handsome Matthew,” a boy I knew when I lived in Brighton—brings me a McDonald’s belt he found in the trash, and a copy of
Against Nature
by Joris-Karl Huysmans. Andrew—I don’t recall his last name, but I know we went on a date once and I stole a T-shirt from his skateboard store and he drank Goldschläger in St. James’s Park—brings me a Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band sweatshirt from a charity shop. Even though I can’t remember his last name, I still wear the sweater all the time. There is a hole over the “E,” which is over my heart. He knows (I must have told him on our one date) how much I love Bruce Springsteen. I admire the lad for pursuing his crush to a mental ward.

I play “Human Touch” by Bruce and his wife, Patti, on my Walkman at night: the line about a little touch-up and a little paint takes me to a time when, after school, as a very little girl, I would ritually lock myself in the bathroom and cover my face in makeup, starting expertly—sharp eyeliner, dainty lips—before devolving soon enough into evil clown face. I’d take a good look at the terrible face. Then I would wash it all off and go downstairs for dinner. I can see the line from there to cutting. Before the cutting but after the face paint, when I would learn a bad word, I would write it on my thighs or stomach and wear it to assembly under my school clothes. “Fuck.” “Cunt.” “Whore.” School assembly was frightening because I was so sure I would stand up and shout the words I had on my skin.

There are much crazier people than me in the Priory. The dog-woman, who stares. I always thought Joan Crawford was a great movie star because she made staring her hallmark, her “thing.” This old lady is more like Eddie, the dog from
Frasier
. She just stares at people as they come into her sightline. It’s all she does.

There’s a very sexy teenage girl who, to stop cutting herself, plucks each and every hair off her legs and then wordlessly, without realizing, leans over and plucks my eyebrows. My cats do this, diligently licking themselves until they are accidentally licking each other.

On my third or fourth day there, they bring in a homeless boy who has, like many patients, been picked up from the streets. He has a swastika carved into his forehead because voices told him to do it. I am extremely scared of him, so I force myself to make conversation. He asks what I’m
listening to on my Walkman and, ashamed, I say, “George Michael.” “I like George Michael,” he says, furious at me for making it seem shameful. Never use pop culture as delineator with someone who hears voices. You don’t know what they hear between the melodies. On my last day, I leave him my Walkman and all my music. I wonder if it’s easier to navigate a stay in a psychiatric hospital now iPods exist, or if it impedes progress.

There is a lovely middle-aged man, a straitlaced dad with small children, calm and sweet and I cannot for the life of me work out what’s wrong with him, so even is his voice and energy. It turns out that he broke his leg and arm climbing a generator pole. He waited until he healed and then did it again. “Why did you do it again?” he is asked in group therapy. “Why that pole?”

He looks at the therapist like she’s mad. “Because that’s the pole that leads to heaven.”

The grounds are very beautiful at the Priory. Somewhat Edward Gorey, a little Aubrey Beardsley. One expects to see peacocks, and I imagine there must be patients who, in fact, do see peacocks. It is a place for a gothic love affair. A place to hide from the world. It isn’t until I leave that place that I go out and find love for the first time. That could be because I got well (I doubt it) or because the grounds have, by osmosis, worked their way into me. This is love: beautiful, secret, overgrown, last chance.

A nurse from the juvenile ward comes up to me in the cafeteria one day. “Emma?” I blink. It takes a moment to recognize her as a friend of a friend. We all used to go dancing. Thankfully, I am too tired and too medicated to feel
any embarrassment, even when she asks, “So … how have you been?”

I look at her a moment. “Not so good.”

She lets it go and moves on with her rounds.

For some reason, I care deeply about what I wear in the hospital. I’m still thin enough to wear curious things.

Have you ever eaten something appalling for breakfast, something really bad for you, a chocolate cake, and just thought, “Fuck it, this is bad, I’d better keep going? Christ, this is making me feel horrible, I’d better have more?”

And then have you ever left the last bite, less than the last bite, a morsel, a crumb even, and said to yourself, “There, I didn’t finish it. That didn’t really happen. You don’t process the calories unless it’s the final crumby morsel. Everyone knows that. So, we’re cool, right?”

And you walk away whistling and try to think of worse things you might leave a crumb of, come lunchtime. If that all sounds bulimic, it is. The mind-set is: I’ve started on a path I’d prefer not to be on and I’m ashamed so I’d better just keep going. Somewhere along the line it becomes a perfectly routine and reasonable thing to be doing of an afternoon. All self-inflicted pain is excess consumption—heroin, crack, sex, food—even anorexia is its own path you can’t turn back from, more air, more nothing, space filled, to bursting, with space. Anorexia didn’t suit me, because I couldn’t make it work fast enough. The medium is the message, and my medium was cutting and bulimia.

Chicken and egg: Which comes first, looking at yourself with burst blood vessels on your eyes and vomit in your
hair and having to cut yourself because you’re so ugly? Or eating everything in the cupboard to try to hold down how ugly the cutting has made you? It is madness. And if you don’t know who you are, or if your real self has drifted away from you with the undertow, madness at least gives you an identity.

It’s the same with self-loathing. You’re probably just normal and normal-looking but that’s not a real identity, not the way ugliness is. Normality, just accepting that you’re probably normal-looking, lacks the force field of self-disgust.

If you don’t know who you are, madness gives you something to believe in, and whilst I am locked away at the Priory, melting into mine, GH makes the public eye with his. On our group TV, there’s a flicker of him being interviewed about his first big film. He seems drunk. “What,” I say to my anorexic pal, “a fool.”

She snorts. “I wouldn’t kick him out of bed.” She doesn’t have the strength to kick.

I also snuck in a disposable camera.

This turns out to be not smart, as patients begin to act out. One woman shows up to see me with burns on her cheeks where she’s set fire to herself with a lighter. I put my camera away. I use up the film taking photos of myself in my bed, proto-MySpace pictures, cheeks sucked in, lips pouting. I’ve noticed it since in Lindsay Lohan’s and Britney Spears’s self-portraits: they always suck in their cheeks and pout no matter the circumstances, seemingly unaware that it’s the scars, not the cheekbones, that catch the light in their Twitter posts.

After a week, I’m still fuzzy, but boredom is starting to creep in around the edges. In art therapy I paint a picture of young Rod Stewart and title it
Rod the Mod!
I cannot tell you what possessed me. He means nothing to me, but it is a good likeness. The art teacher makes a big fuss and says it’s very revealing. I feel sorry for her. The middle-aged dad draws the telegraph pole he cannot stop climbing. It means everything to him. She moves past it quickly.

The pills they have me on leave me catatonic for much of the day. It feels like I’m moving in mud. Mum says my eyes are rolling back in my head. “Maybe,” I agree, and think about how much I like circles, and Kandinsky, and then visiting hour is used up and she leaves. Because I’m a suicide case, after lights-out, they check on me every five minutes. A few days before I am let out altogether, my mum is allowed to take me into London for a Saturday visit. We go to the movies,
Erin Brockovich
, for which Julia Roberts wins an Oscar whilst forgetting to thank Erin Brockovich herself. Can it be true that I ride the tube back to the hospital alone? I know that I look people in the eye until they have to look away. There is an element of being so frightened of myself that I’m gratified to find I frighten the public at large. I am allowed out after two weeks, diagnosed as a rapid cycle manic-depressive, which is to say, instead of six months in bed then six months raving, my mood changes wildly within an hour.

I don’t think the Priory was especially helpful, beyond giving me a forced vacation from life and debts it would take many years to pay off.

GROVELANDS PRIORY HOSPITAL

INITIAL TESTS & ASSESSMENTS                                £300.00

(Charged once on an admission in addition to bed fee)

DAILY BED FEE—Standard                                        £325.00

DAILY BED FEE—High Dependency                           £355.00

DAILY CONSULTANT FEE                                           £45.00

(A daily fee charged by your consultant for retaining clinical responsibility for your care. Although the consultant is responsible for your care throughout your stay, they may not see you every.)

The daily bed fee covers accommodation (single room with bathroom), basic nursing care, duty psychiatrist and junior doctor cover, medication, treatment programme, and all meals.

A deposit of £3000.00 is required on admission, followed by £3000.00 weekly thereafter for the duration of the admission (please see “Financial Requirements for Self-funding Admissions”
).

ADDITIONAL CLINICAL CHARGES

(Billed where appropriate)

Initial Consultant’s Fee                     Charged per consultant

Special Nursing                                                        £26.00

(Charged per hour in addition to the Standard Daily Bed Fee)

ECG                                                                  £96.00 each

ECT                                                                £211.00 each

Physiotherapy                                       Charged per session

Ambulance/Transport                           Charged per journey

Nurse Escort                                                    £19 per hour

X-rays & Scans                                  Charged per procedure

Family Therapy                                       £85.00 per session

Discharge Medication                                       £10 per day

ADDITIONAL PERSONAL EXPENSES

Newspapers/Magazines etc.                      Charged per item

Telephone calls                                                24p per unit

Guest Meals (tickets available on Reception)

Main Meal                                                         £7.50 each

Snack                                                                £3.50 each

THERAPEUTIC LEAVE                                       DISCHARGE

1st and 2nd night
—Charged full daily fee Before 2pm

No Charge

3rd night away
—Charged half daily fee 2pm–6pm

Charged half full daily fee

Subsequent nights
—no charge After 6pm

Charged full daily fee

My first night back home, Dad is doodling in felt-tip pen on pages of the
National Enquirer
. He looks up from his work and says, “I would like to stay home all day and draw mustaches on pictures of Britney Spears.” Spears is still young and desirable, not yet Blanche DuBois in Daisy Dukes.
I hope his mustachioing her so close to my exit from the psych ward did not doom Britney, by ink, to the same fate.