Blink of an Eye

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Carmel

Sometimes I checked on her. But not always. Sometimes I had to restrain myself. Bite down on my urges, sacrifice my own need for reassurance for her right to be independent, to be treated like an adult.

I almost didn’t. It was getting late. Nearly midnight. I’d just got back from Evie and Lucy’s. We’d had a meal and a good chat. There were even moments when I forgot about our troubles, so I was more relaxed when I got home than I had been earlier.

I hesitated outside her door and then carried on to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Leave it, I told myself. But the familiar anxiety was rising slowly, and as soon as I acknowledged it was there, I knew I’d not get any sleep until I’d dealt with it. It was almost like OCD: the voodoo that if I checked there’d be nothing to worry about and if I didn’t something terrible would happen to her. A stupid ritual to placate the gods.

So I crept back along the hall and turned her door handle as quietly as possible, though there was always a tiny squeak in the mechanism.

The smell of vomit hit me immediately, acidic and repulsive, making my mouth water, and I gagged in a reflex response.

I snapped the light on and a wave of dread slammed into me. She was on the bed, something terribly wrong in the colour of her face and the sick on the pillow.

My heart hammering, my spine tingling with fear, I touched her neck, calling her name over and over again: ‘Naomi, Naomi, Naomi.’ A chant to summon her.

I couldn’t feel a pulse, couldn’t tell if she was breathing. The panic was bright in me like a fire and I screamed for Phil and stuck my fingers in her mouth. ABC. ABC. The mnemonic from first-aid training in my head. There was nothing in her mouth. I breathed into her, ignoring the sickly smell, and began CPR.

Phil was there, he didn’t need telling; he called an ambulance. They seemed to take forever but later we learnt it was just eight minutes. He was talking as I kept pumping away, telling them the names of the pills she’d taken, answering questions about her status, about her health. He had her note in his hand and this desperate, harrowed look on his face.

I was cursing her, this child of mine, cursing her and praying. I could not bear to lose her. Could not bear it. I would have torn open her chest and squeezed her heart with my bare hands if I’d had the means. There was a tide ebbing and flowing in me, rolling from fear to fury and back, currents swirling as I tried to make her breathe.

I don’t remember much about the ambulance arriving. The paramedics had a preternatural calm about them, as though they were running at a slower pace than the rest of us. I wanted to hurry them, my words spilling like coins from a jackpot, brash and fast and noisy.

They put a mask on her, I remember that, and they used a defibrillator. They injected her with something. I knew, because they did those things, that she had died.

For the second time she had died.

And then we were at the hospital and she was stable, they said, though they didn’t know yet how long she had been without oxygen. Or what the consequences might be.

She was so lucky. There was no brain damage. But she refused to talk to us at first. Shrank from our touch and screwed up her eyes. The mental health service got involved and recommended discharge to one of their rehabilitation units. She was deemed to be at risk of serious self-harm.

To be honest, I was relieved she was not coming home. Not yet. I didn’t trust her, and the strain of watching over her would have been intolerable.

Phil and I went back and talked and wept, him making big barking noises like some seal, which tore at my heart. It was impossible to resist the impulse towards self-recrimination: I should have seen it coming, should have dragged her to the doctor, should have known! Yes, I’d realized she was getting depressed but I’d no idea that she’d been suicidal. I should have known.

‘I was thinking of Petey again,’ Phil said, his eyes watery. ‘Oh God, if you’d not gone in…’

‘But I did.’ I held his face in my hands and kissed his forehead.

We tried to put one foot in front of the other. There’s no avoiding the particularly cruel guilt that suicide or attempted suicide bestows on those who love the person involved. Like with Petey’s death, relatives and friends struggle not only with grief but a profound burden of culpability. It’s a false burden – we are not responsible for the person’s choice to end their life, we do not have the power – but on an emotional level it is very hard not to feel that we have failed in our care, in our love. That if we’d only been better, stronger, wiser, more worthy of love they wouldn’t have killed themselves.

Phil and I have must have spent most of that ensuing week talking about Naomi, and what she’d tried to do. It haunted us, even more than the accident had done, if that were possible, because this was deliberate, planned, intentional. Our daughter had not wanted to live any more.

I felt as though something had been ripped away inside. I’ve never felt so vulnerable, so hurt. Betrayed, even.

I berated myself for not having spotted the signs; with all my professional training, I should have seen, should have known. Her behaviour in the last few weeks, the way she acted at the committal hearing. Phil listened to me pick away at it. He was wounded too. He rang the Samaritans. He said it helped, it was good to talk to someone completely objective, who didn’t know any of us, whose responses weren’t coloured by shock or surprise. Who could talk very practically about the position he was in and what he realistically could and couldn’t do.

We weren’t allowed to visit for the first couple of weeks, while Naomi was assessed and plans were put in place.

It was a respite.

I was critical of myself, but I found it even harder when Suzanne came round. ‘How could she?’ she asked, looking sad rather than cross. Tears glistened in her eyes. I wondered if she regretted her break with Naomi and had some sympathy for her sister, or if she was actually just sad for us, for what we were going through.

Then she talked about the baby and how Jonty was busy with the editing, and I felt myself growing more and more tense, my comments curt and parsimonious. She didn’t notice. Until I let fly. ‘We needed you, Suzanne; I needed you, not just Naomi, and you let us down.’

She flinched. ‘Just because-’

‘No.’ I raised my hand to quieten her. ‘I’ll say my piece. You decided to wash your hands of us, of your sister.’

‘Well, she’d been drinking.’ She stuck her neck out. Raised her chin, still determined to stand her ground.

‘That’s not the issue. Whether she was drink-driving or not, a terrible thing happened: to the little girl and her family, and to your sister, who was in the car and nearly died and is facing a prison sentence. And you have been spiteful and uncaring and judgemental.’

‘Mum…’ Her lip trembled.

‘I needed you on my side. You called her selfish, remember? You’re the most selfish person I know.’

Her eyes filled with tears; the spots of colour on her cheeks faded. ‘Look,’ she started, ‘if I’d known she was going to-’

‘Consequences,’ I laughed, ‘that’s the point, isn’t it? We don’t always know what’s coming. But family, Suzanne. We will live the rest of our lives under this shadow. Not only what happened to Lily Vasey, but Naomi’s suicide attempt. How bleak do you think things got for her? Can you imagine?’

‘You’re blaming me?’ she said, quivering.

‘No, I’m not blaming you for that. But I am angry with you for letting us down. Naomi spent half her life looking for your approval, desperate to please her big sister. You’ve no idea how much your rejection hurt her.’

‘She tell you that?’

‘I could see it,’ I said through clenched teeth.

There was a pause, and I felt weary, tired to the marrow.

Suzanne cleared her throat, touched her earring. ‘What do you want me to do?’ she said in a small voice.

‘I don’t know. That’s up to you. Think about it. An apology might be a start.’

‘Right,’ she said. And left.

And I swallowed the tears that threatened and tried to stop shaking.

Naomi

Most of the people on the unit are friendly. There’s one who doesn’t ever talk, who doesn’t even seem to see or hear anything that’s going on. Which must be nice; she just looks through everything. She’s about Mum’s age, dresses quite smart. She has bandages on her wrists.

There are two other women, look a bit like mother and daughter but they’re not related, and they talk all the time. Like something bad might happen if they pause for breath. Nosy, too, but they don’t give you a chance to answer, just talk about their own mental health or what the unit’s like, what treatments they’re on.

Then there’s a really shaky guy. He just looks like he’ll shatter. Everything startles him and he trembles constantly. I don’t know if the shaking is a side effect from the drugs or if he’s got some physical problem or what.

The staff are sound, generally. There’s one bloke, though, and he’s always picking on people, he has this really sneery, patronizing way of talking, but he’s the only one really.

We’re here to be assessed and treated and then hopefully returned ‘to the community’. There’s a secure unit across the way, but that’s for people who might be a danger to others, rather than just to themselves, or those dead set on suicide who have to have someone with them every single second.

You get assessed when you first come in and they decide what treatment to start, then you keep on seeing either a doctor or the psychiatrist maybe every second or third day except weekends. But in between, all the staff in the unit are assessing you all the time, not just whether you take your medication but how you relate to people and if you join in with things and if you eat the food, which is revolting. Some people here have eating disorders and it really can’t help: if you haven’t got one when you come in here, you’ll probably have one by the time you leave. The staff, they’re always asking how you’re feeling and encouraging you to think about the future. Getting stronger and going home.

There isn’t any set pattern to the sessions with the psychiatrist. Though she usually asks me if I’ve had any suicidal thoughts or impulses. Today I say no. Then she asks me how my night was.

‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I slept a bit better.’

‘What would you like to talk about?’

‘I don’t know.’

There’s a pause, and we let it stretch out a bit, then I say, ‘I had a dream about the accident.’

‘Tell me about it.’

‘There was Alex and me, we were in a boat, not a car, and we were trying to steer it but it kept going the wrong way. Then it was just me, I was all alone, and there was a bump and the boat changed into a car. I got out and looked underneath and there was a body there.’ I feel a bit sick as I say it. ‘And I drove off. That was it.’

‘Did the dream wake you up?’

‘Yes.’

‘And how did you feel?’

‘Dirty, rotten.’ It’s something I’ve said before. The sense that there is something spoiled in me.

‘Anything else?’

‘Frightened. I was running, even though I was in the car.’

‘And Alex wasn’t in the car with you?’

‘No.’

‘You said there was just you, on your own. And we talked about isolation the other day. Do you feel isolated?’

‘Pretty much.’ This makes me tearful. ‘Apart from Mum and Dad and Becky, I suppose. And I miss Alex.’ Sometimes I think maybe I’ll get back in touch with him again.

‘But not Suzanne?’

I shake my head; my stomach cramps at the thought of her. At her dislike of me, her disapproval.

‘You said before that you are angry at how Suzanne makes you feel?’

‘Yes. She only has to say some little thing and it makes me feel lousy.’

‘That’s an old pattern?’

‘Yes.’

‘And in the past, how would you respond if she said something that hurt you?’

‘I’d answer back or brush it off but inside I’d be really upset.’

‘Answer back?’ she echoes.

I smile. ‘Like she’s a teacher or something.’

She nods. ‘What would you like to change?’

These are the hardest questions. Whenever I’m supposed to look ahead or think of the future, my throat closes and my eyes burn. ‘I want to feel all right again and I don’t want to go to prison. I want everything to change.’ I shake my head. ‘I want to rewrite history.’

She gives a half-smile, even though I’m getting upset. It’s reassuring in a funny way. People here aren’t scared of shows of emotion and that helps make them less scary.

‘There’s an exercise I’d like you to do.’ She reaches for a piece of paper from the side table and hands it to me. ‘Take this with you and draw a picture of your family, stick figures, whatever works, but I want you to do it without thinking too much about it, in just five minutes. And don’t alter anything. Bring it next time. Okay?’

We have an activity room where we do art therapy and music and that. I often go there to avoid the telly, which is on all the time in the lounge; sometimes I get the urge to punch it out, then I would be Miss Popularity. I never could draw, but they have other stuff here too, like modelling clay. I do that. I remember Suzanne and me as kids spent hours with Play-Doh, making little meals, cakes and pizzas and spaghetti shapes, with the machine thing that we had; like a giant garlic press. It smelt of salty marzipan. I used to lick my palms afterwards to get the taste. When I think of that, I feel like crying.

Soon I’ll be allowed visitors, and after that the plan is to discharge me. I’m not ready to go home yet, even though it can be stressful living like this with a bunch of strangers. And it’s hard to sleep. One of the girls, bit younger than me, she has these episodes, screaming in the night, seeing things crawling on her. She wakes everyone up. She’s a bit like Grandma, having delusions. At least it’s good Grandma’s in a home and not a hospital. Good for us more than for her; she’d probably not notice the difference. Sometimes I think this is good practice for going to prison. But I guess prison will be much worse. Heavier, darker. I don’t have to share a room here, I suppose that’s one big difference. We’re in a new building; most of us have a single room with en suite. The main thing here is the boredom.

It’s like being marooned or something. Like I’m on a raft, floating far away from my previous life. I can’t imagine seeing anyone in here from out there. And in here people don’t know who I was. Only who I am now. The one who ran into the little girl, the one who made a serious attempt to end her own life. A mentalist.

We’re all in the same boat, so no one’s judging me. Some of the people make me laugh; we all try and cheer each other up and look out for each other. Some of them seem quite tough, but you know they can’t be really or they wouldn’t be here. There’s a sort of tenderness; does that sound naff? But there really is. We’re all fragile and we’re kind to each other.

Lots of time we spend outside, in this little garden area, all enclosed. Most people smoke, the staff as well, and although there are notices everywhere about it being a non-smoking environment and no smoking on hospital trust property, they let us do it outside.

I am now very good at Scrabble.

I’m not looking forward to seeing Mum and Dad really. I just feel so shitty. They’re gonna be so hurt by what I did, and I can’t ever put that right.