The Mirror World of Melody Black

15

SHARPS

I was awoken around midday, groggy and disorientated. A nurse was tapping me on my shoulder, long after most would have given up. She told me that she’d also been in at eight, with breakfast, but it had proven impossible to rouse me. ‘Dead to the world, you were.’

I didn’t reply. The comment was pointless. I didn’t want to get involved in a pointless conversation.

‘Still, lunch soon,’ she went on. ‘Can’t have you missing a second meal.’

‘I’m not hungry,’ I said. ‘I just want to sleep.’

The nurse tutted in a way that suggested what I wanted was no longer relevant. ‘Doctors’ orders,’ she insisted. ‘I’m to make sure you eat before we move you.’

I shrugged – or tried to shrug – my heavy shoulders to let her know that I wasn’t going to play her ridiculous game. I had no curiosity about what the doctors had planned for the next twenty-four hours. I told her that if they wanted to move me to another ward, they could just as well do it while I slept. I had no intention of getting up.

‘You’re not going to a different ward,’ the nurse countered. ‘You’re going to a different hospital. St Charles. It’s all been arranged. They’re expecting you mid-afternoon.’

‘I can’t walk,’ I persisted. ‘I’m too tired.’

The nurse smiled benevolently. ‘You don’t have to walk. One of the porters will be very happy to take you down to the ambulance in a wheelchair. After lunch.’

‘I’m too tired to chew,’ I told her. It was childish but I didn’t care. The thought of food made me sick.

‘It’s soup,’ the nurse said. ‘You don’t have to chew, either.’

Someone from the psychiatric liaison team came in immediately after lunch. He told me I was being moved to St Charles because it had a specialized mental health unit and would provide a much more suitable environment for my recovery. But I knew this was just a euphemism. What he really meant was that they had locked wards there. That was why it would be more suitable.

At two o’clock, with my blue dress and my handbag and my Harvey Nichols underwear heaped in my lap, I was wheeled down to the ambulance and driven a couple of miles across west London to another imposing Victorian hospital. Same stained brickwork and turrets and daunting iron gates. The only difference was that it was in a nicer part of the city. Instead of a maximum-security prison next door, there was a Carmelite monastery.

The ambulance passed through the open gates and followed a small road to the back of the hospital complex, where the mental health unit was housed in its own three-storey annexe. In contrast to its almost Gothic surroundings, the mental health unit was as modern and nondescript as a newly built block of flats, the sort of building you’d pass on the street without a second glance. Inside, it was obvious that every element of the décor – from the bright blue carpets to the potted rubber plants – had been chosen to reinforce the impression that this was not a hospital at all. The only thing that gave the game away was the doors. Past reception, they were all magnetically locked and could only be opened with staff key cards.

They took me through to a ward called Nile. The wards were all named after rivers for some reason. There was also Amazon, Danube, Ganges and Thames. I never found out why. Maybe it was another way to make the mental unit seem less institutional. Maybe there was some other hidden significance. All I found out, upon my admission, was that Nile was the psychiatric intensive care ward. It was a closed ward housing the psychotics, the suicidal and those deemed at high risk of absconding. It should have been called Styx.

I asked the nurse who was wheeling me through to my room if I was allowed visitors.

‘Usually,’ he said. ‘As long as they’re scheduled. A doctor will talk to you about it later. You’ll have a personalized care plan.’

‘I don’t want any visitors,’ I told him. ‘I only want to see Dr Barbara. No one else.’

Time passed. I’m not sure how much.

I was back on the lithium and feeling like a zombie, which, on the whole, was an improvement. Undead felt so much better than alive at that point. Actually dead would have felt better still, but no one was prepared to give me this option. A couple of rashly scrawled midnight signatures and my right to death had been irrevocably waived.

The downsides of lithium: headaches, stomach aches, nausea like you wouldn’t believe, tremors, perpetual lethargy, the inability to read, dizziness, constipation, weight gain.

The upsides: the inability to think, a memory that’s shot to pieces, spending most of the day asleep.

I would have spent all day – every day – asleep had it not been for the doctors and nurses, who were constantly bothering me. First there was the incessant feeding. Three times a day, a nurse came to watch me eat, not leaving until every plastic spoonful had disappeared. They had me on a strict two-thousand-calorie, sodium-controlled diet. I also had to drink two litres of water a day. It didn’t matter that I was neither hungry nor thirsty. The nurse would stay as long as it took. I assumed that if I refused to eat or drink I’d be fed through a tube, like the girl opposite. Occasionally, I wondered if this wouldn’t be an easier option.

When it wasn’t food, it was blood. My lithium levels were being monitored almost continually. Mere moments after the first blood test of the day, it seemed I was being shaken awake for the second, the third, the fourth. If I’d had a cannula, it might have been possible for them to draw the blood while I went on sleeping, but, of course, I wasn’t allowed a cannula. Cannulas counted as sharps and were not permitted on the ward. Neither were my house keys or nail file. Both had been taken from my handbag upon my arrival. They’d also taken my compact, because of the mirror (a ‘potential sharp’), and my cigarette lighter, for more obvious reasons. The compact meant nothing to me – it wasn’t as if I was going to worry about applying make-up – but the lighter pained me like a missing limb every time I thought of it. If I wanted to go for a cigarette, I had to be chaperoned down to the garden by a nurse who never took her eyes off me. The garden was surrounded by a twelve-foot-high metal fence, beyond which there were tall trellises that blocked out any view of the outside world. You could hear traffic, and occasionally pedestrians, passing on the side road that abutted the hospital, but you could see nothing.

Smoking was the only activity in which I retained any semblance of interest, and whenever I was being uncooperative, refusing to sit up for blood tests or water, the nurses would bribe me with cigarettes. At night-time, I was put on nicotine patches.

I tried to stop washing, too. Of all the pointless activities that constituted my day, this seemed by far the most pointless. I wasn’t going anywhere. I wasn’t seeing anyone who wasn’t mental, or so used to dealing with the mental that it made no difference. And washing seemed such a monumental and fruitless effort. I’d just get dirty again.

I explained the situation to the nurses, as best I could, but that only seemed to make matters worse. Every other day, one of them would march me down to the shower and wait outside while I went through the same mindless farce. The shower had a lock on the temperature control so you couldn’t burn yourself. Nevertheless, I was still on ten-minute checks; if my shower lasted longer than that, the nurse would poke her head around the door to make sure that everything was okay.

My showers never lasted more than ten minutes, and I didn’t bother with soap or shampoo. I just stood under the tepid water like a mannequin until the nurse started knocking on the door. I didn’t shave my legs either. I wasn’t allowed a razor unsupervised, and after a few days, my leg and underarm hair was downy rather than prickly, so had ceased to be a problem.

One day, long after time had stopped meaning anything, I happened to catch sight of my reflection as I was undressing for my shower. The only mirrors on the ward were in the toilets and shower rooms, and because of my continual torpor and shaky vision, I rarely bothered to look in them. But on this day my attention was snared out of pure bewilderment. For several moments, I didn’t recognize my own face. My skin was pale and oily. My hair was a dirty blonde mop. My cheeks looked too fat and my eyes too narrow. I thought the fatness was probably because of the lithium and the hours upon hours of lying perfectly still. Unfortunately, there was nothing much I could do about this. There was no chance of hiding and later disposing of my meals, much less the lithium. The nurses watched me far too closely. But I couldn’t stand seeing myself like this in the mirror: a pale, greasy blob.

After a few minutes of gruelling thought, the solution I struck upon was this: I would make sure I didn’t look in the mirror again.

‘How are you feeling?’ Dr Barry asked.

‘Worse.’

He nodded, as if this were the only possible answer. Which it was. How could anyone hope to get better in a place like this?

‘How about the nausea?’

I shrugged.

‘On a scale of one to ten; ten being very bad, one being—’

‘Ten.’

‘Ten?’

I shrugged again. It wasn’t really a ten and he knew it. If anything, the nausea was starting to taper off. But I couldn’t stand the way he was looming over me with his patronizing eyes and his stupid ten-point scale of wellbeing. Dr Barry was constantly making me quantify things that it made no sense to quantify. I resolved that if he asked me to rate my mood, one to ten, just one more time, I’d tell him zero and be done with it. No more talking for the rest of the day. It was times like this I wished I’d been admitted to the Carmelite monastery instead. At least then I’d have some peace. You could bet those nuns knew when to shut the fuck up.

Although he was up against some stiff competition, Dr Barry was by far the worst doctor I’d ever met. He was about eight feet tall and had a beard that made my skin crawl. His default expression was one of smug complacency, except when he knew you were looking at him, when he’d contort his features into a poor imitation of paternal concern. In all honesty, I had no idea why he was even allowed to practise psychiatry. If he’d taken a photo of me, any moron on the street would have been able to diagnose my mood after a single glance. Yet Dr Barry lacked either the initiative or the imagination to discern anything without first conducting a ten-minute questionnaire. I could only assume that he’d been hired based on his height alone. It was probably useful to have a giant on psychiatric intensive care, whatever his medical incompetence.

I didn’t know if Barry was Dr Barry’s first or second name, but I presumed the latter. He wasn’t the sort of doctor who would offer up his first name, which lost him a lot of respect in my book. Of course, if it turned out that I was wrong, and Barry really was his first name, I’d have had an even harder time respecting him. But that wasn’t the point.

He stared at me for a few moments, his face smug and complacent, and I stared straight back. He didn’t have the balls to tell me I was a lying bitch and my nausea couldn’t possibly be a ten, not still. If he’d said that, I might have been able to warm to him a little. But instead, he just rubbed his beard, then decided to placate me with more medication. ‘I’ll have one of the nurses bring an anti-emetic with your lunch,’ he said. ‘How’s your appetite?’

I couldn’t remember which way the scale ran for appetite, and I didn’t care. ‘Six and a half,’ I told him. Then I pulled the thin NHS covers over my eyes and waited for him to go away.

‘You are getting better,’ Dr Barbara insisted, and I felt a surge of weary disappointment.

‘I’m worse,’ I mumbled, hardly bothered if my voice was audible or not. ‘Every day I’m worse.’

This truth was so self-evident to me that it was inconceivable no one else had noticed. Yet they talked, instead, of positive signs: the fact that I was sleeping less, that I could now sustain a conversation for more than two minutes if I chose to do so (which I rarely did). They didn’t seem to realize or care that this was all just surface.

Inside, I was broken. Every hour I had to spend awake, or even half awake, was an ordeal, from the moment the nurses arrived with breakfast until lights out in the evening. And the worst part was that I knew it would go on and on like this for ever. Every morning I awoke with the hollow notion, seeming to emanate from my stomach, that I had another day to get through. Then I’d wonder how many more days there’d be after this one. The figure I came up with was ten thousand. I don’t know why. And when I tried to think about all those days and what they might mean, I could only envisage them as an endless line of dominoes, every one a double blank and falling in horrible slow motion. One domino every twenty-four hours.

I decided that this – the sheer hopelessness of my situation – must be why everyone was now insisting that I was getting better, despite so much evidence to the contrary. You couldn’t trust doctors to be straight with you when you were beyond help. They didn’t want to make their lives difficult by admitting you were a terminal case. Of course, Dr Barbara used to be different, but now she’d finally snapped as well. I’d made her snap. I’d pushed her and pushed her and now she was lying to me too, pretending I was improving so she’d have an excuse to stop coming. I thought for a reckless moment that I should make things easy for her, remove her from my visitors list along with everyone else. Except Dr Barbara was still bringing my cigarettes every couple of days. The idea of this final crutch being withdrawn sent ice down my spine. Smoking was the only thing I had left – the only thing that could possibly help those dominoes to fall faster – and I knew I’d fight to the last to preserve this precious resource. There was no way I’d do anything to force Dr Barbara’s hand.

In the meantime, I’d just have to put up with her mendacity, in the same way that I had put up with her bringing in clothes and toiletries, and all the other daily accoutrements that no longer held any relevance to my life. There was an overnight bag stuffed into the bottom of the bedside cupboard which I’d never bothered to unzip. I knew that Beck must have packed it for her, and I couldn’t bear to think about that. More to the point, there was no reason I could imagine why I would choose to wear my own clothes rather than the ones the hospital provided. The very idea of choosing which clothes to wear seemed a colossal and futile effort. Why wear one thing instead of another? Much simpler to let the nurses take charge and replace my NHS nightgown whenever they deemed it necessary.

Unfortunately, Dr Barbara had not stopped with the pointless overnight bag. Some time after, there had been a pen and a book of crossword puzzles. Later still, when she knew that my headaches and nausea were starting to subside, she’d brought in an imposing copy of Gone with the Wind, which had sat untouched for the past few days. Initially, I went through the motions of opening the book and running my eyes back and forth across the countless rows of text, but it might as well have been printed in Arabic. Even though I’d seen the film, the words evoked nothing for me; they passed through my mind like flour through a sieve. For a long time, I wondered why Dr Barbara had brought me such a long and difficult book, one that had no significance or connection to anything I knew about. She claimed that it had just been sitting on one of her bookshelves and she’d thought I might like it. But this seemed implausible. After a while, I realized a more likely explanation was that she’d chosen it because it was long and difficult. It was something to keep me fruitlessly occupied, in the same way that prisoners were made to sew mailbags or break up stones with a pickaxe. If I managed to read a page a day – which seemed a very ambitious goal – then Gone with the Wind would keep me busy for the next three years. After that, Dr Barbara would probably bring me War and Peace or something. Anna Karenina would have been a better choice, but there was no chance she’d bring me that because of the suicide.

‘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.