Tessa rang Scott from the payphone. Strange they still had one. A real old payphone with clunky slit for a ten pence piece and that beep-beep sound. Weird.
“It was the man in the trilby.” She had to get it out quickly in case they stopped her, she’d known that happen; the line go mysteriously dead, or whir, a purr as if someone else was listening. “Can you hear me?” she whispered, but Scott breathed that long, slow out-breath that drove her crazy. It didn’t matter. She had to get the information across. “I think he was CIA.”
“Okay, okay.” At last, his voice, steady, samey, she couldn’t tell if he’d taken it in.
“Okay.” She replaced the receiver. Leaned against the wall.
Her slippers were pink, old and soft. Shuffle, shuffle, to her room, her shins pale and hairy, a shallow gash that had dried to a rivulet of blood; a middle-aged mess sticking out of black leggings which stopped below the knee, her feet disappeared into the faded mules. Scott had brought them in instead of her white ones. Not the feet, the slippers.
Her room was trashed. It was amazing she hadn’t broken the window. Desk down on its knees, bed pulled away from the wall, mattress in a backflip.
“We wanted you to see it before we cleaned it up.” Nurse Ratchet stood behind her. They all looked the same after a while if you’d been in enough. Half of them knew her by name. All right Tessa. Back again, are we? they’d said when she’d arrived.
She sat on the floor amongst the chaos, on the small piece of floor that was left. She sat with her legs crossed as if she were a schoolgirl, as if it were morning assembly. When had it started? When had she got so ill that she’d never got better, been so covered in the slime of mental illness that every slice of her dripped with it? The first time it happened, they’d said it was the pot that had flipped her head. Like the mattress, she thought, staring at it. Too much pot and not enough sleep, an excitable constitution and a weak and faulty brain that misfired chemicals and made her crazy. Nothing to do with her sisters shutting her in a cupboard when she was six. Nothing to do with them giving her magic mushrooms and whispering through the door that she was dead. There was much from her childhood that she couldn’t remember but she’d never forgotten that hour or was it five minutes or was it forever. The scratch of brick on her bare shoulder, the empty lightbulb socket that knocked her head, the memory of dust and swirl of air claustrophobic, the taste of earth from the mushroom they’d made her eat, go on Tess, don’t be a baby, you can be like Alice In Wonderland. A repeating pattern of feelings which had not let her be, a connecting tissue she’d tried to break. But it was hardly the basis for a lifetime of failure; that’s what they said when she tried to talk about it, they being family, friends, her psychiatrist. They said everyone suffered in their childhood.
Another Nurse Ratchet: the small, silent one from Manila, leant down to Tessa on the floor. “Take.” In one hand a small plastic cup, in the other one of paper with concertina sides.
She swallowed the pill and chased it with the water. “Can I get tea?”
“I bring it to you.”
That was fine. She didn’t feel like walking the corridor anyway. Her room, like her thoughts, encased her.
She’d had to make it all right, not just the event, but the aftermath when nothing happened, and no one said anything at all. She remembered her burst into yellow light, the kitchen bright, her mother at the counter chopping carrots, the dog expectant at her feet. They made me eat them and her mother without stopping wash your hands. At supper her sisters they weren’t real, and it was only one and her father dear, dear. Oh, how they’d laughed. A funny family story. Ha ha.
A week ago, Freddy was crouched at the top of the stairs, his face pressed against the banisters. A week ago, Scott was shouting, and the police were holding her down. The police car that had tailed her, the zebra running into the trees, the CIA waiting by the hat stand. The only thing to do was attack the house; destroy the kitchen, turn over the bathroom, throw everything in water. She’d tried to change it all around; get rid of the suffocating walls, but they’d stopped her, she knew it was them making the drawings change, the builders cancel, the architect put down the phone. She’d played it very cool on the journey in. Very cool. She knew the drill.
The stink of institution, Nurse Ratchet held Tessa’s arm, shuffle, shuffle down the corridor to another room of single bed, locked window, a desk at which to write contrition. A cup of tepid Chamomile tea. She sat on the bed, her hands tucked between her legs.
The first time she’d had an episode it had been a relief, an immeasurable gasp of air that had filled her lungs and made sense of the shouting, as if up to that point she’d been holding her breath. When she was twenty-one, they’d called it manic depression. She’d been at Manchester University. The Hacienda had reopened, the city was shot through with life, and the drugs were plentiful: ecstasy, acid, speed, anything you wanted, as much as you wanted, and cheap like the clubs, and the cider in the student bar. She hadn’t been sleeping, she hadn’t been working much either, essays half done and finished on the bus, late to lectures, tutorials missed; she’d been called in to see her tutor twice. But she didn’t care, it was only her first year, and she was having too much fun. Except she couldn’t sleep.
To begin with it was just after parties, and who could sleep then anyway, with amphetamines coursing their veins? They all smoked a lot of pot to bring them down, but it did the opposite to Tessa, it charged her up. One night of no sleep was okay, she could handle that. But then it became two, then three in a row, and she’d be so wired she couldn’t see straight. She went to the doctor for sleeping pills, he gave her enough for a week, to reset her body clock, but after they ran out, she was worse. Her brain wouldn’t shut up, her jaw ached, and she was frightened to go out.
It was Clare who’d persuaded her to see the doctor again, Clare who’d she’d met in her first week at university, both on acid they’d found themselves in an airlock between entrance hall and corridors and laughed till they’d peed, instantly friends. This time the doctor said she might think about going home for a while, he could write to her tutor. He said she was suffering from stress.
Was that the word for it, when every minute of the day her thoughts told her she was in danger? All she wanted was to lie down, to make the noise stop but it never stopped, it never shut up, it followed her everywhere. That’s when the lists began. Writing down a strategy was the only moment of quiet. Tidy desk, write essay, write out timetable, shop, food, hair but as the lists got longer, the panic rose and she’d screw them up, and the suffocation would be back, the stultifying immobilization, the couldn’t breathe. She had visions of earthquakes, buildings collapsing, children being crushed, her own hand disappearing under rubble.
She’d left before the end of term; she’d taken the train south. At King’s Cross she was followed by a man in a hat. She lost him on the tube, but at Victoria he reappeared in Next where she’d gone to buy a straw Stetson, better to disguise herself. He got on her train, and the chill sense that she was hunted followed her all the way to her parents’ house; they lived in West Sussex then, they were yet to move to the sunshine of southern Spain. Theirs was a white cottage on the village green with a neat garden, low-beamed rooms, a bright, sunny kitchen and a cupboard under the stairs.
The chill was there as she got off the train, as she searched the platform for her father, there as she put her bag down in the hall. Everything was wrong. It was moving too fast. Her childhood room was different. Someone changed the placement of her things in little incremental ways that only she could see.
“Lunch,” her mother called up the stairs.
Perhaps if she rearranged everything.
“Lunch, Tessa,” her mother shouted louder.
In the kitchen, cold beef salad, and crushed potatoes with chives. Her mother wiping her hands. Her father with a gin and tonic. Sunshine, tiled floor, scrunched-up floral blinds, the dog scrabbling about his bowl, his nails clicking when he trotted over to greet her. Tessa put her hand down and scratched his head. She hoped her face was as bright as the surfaces, the sunshine, the ice in her father’s glass.
“Just have the salad.” Her mother moved the potatoes out of reach.
They’d taken her away after she ran at her mother with a kitchen knife.
“Where did it come from?” Her mother leaned forward; the psychiatrist leaned back. Tessa noticed how her mother’s neat behind hardly touched the chair in the communal sitting room of The Priory, as if the place could infect her.
A month in that white castle in Richmond where ravens gathered on the ramparts and the richly painted rooms made you wonder what fairytale you’d landed in. A month of sedatives and group therapy and climbing out of her window with new friends. They found magic mushrooms growing in the garden. When her mother came to take her home, she said I do hope you’ll listen to the doctors and take more care of yourself now. As if everything that had happened had been Tessa’s fault. As if she’d been too sloppy with herself.
“Think of it like diabetes.” The psychiatrist had leant her elbows on the desk. “You’d take insulin, wouldn’t you? That’s all they are, an adjustment to your chemistry. Your brain’s misfiring. If we get you on the right dose, you can lead a normal life.”
But what did they know about normal? What did anyone know?
“Accepting you have an illness is the first step.”
Did that woman with the neat brown eyes and neat brown hair, and cardigan and pearls, really think she knew the road better than Tessa?
“It’s a propensity, we don’t really know what sets it off in some people and not in others,” the psychiatrist had explained to Tessa’s mother. “Perhaps there’s a history in the family…?” Her mother had let the question lift away on the warm summer air that had drifted in through the open windows. “Or simply puberty, the onset of hormones,” continued the psychiatrist hurriedly, “pregnancy, drugs, a traumatic event…”
Tessa had thrown her flowered teacup across the room.
They’d called it a chemical imbalance, and she’d tried to agree. She’d taken her pills and let them lean their full weight upon the door. They’d told her to forget the thoughts that possessed her, to ignore the incessant banging. They’d said her brain was a broken thing. But it wasn’t her brain, it was the hinges, the lock, the six-year-old girl in meltdown. She kept pushing that cupboard door open, trying to burst out; the lock, the hinges weakened with every escape, and as the years passed and she’d gone from university, to job, to marriage she’d found that to kick it open was the only way to feel alive.
The pill kicked in about the same time she decided she was getting bored. Shuffle-shuffle to the patient’s lounge, Ethel by the kitchen hatch, arguing about sugar. String around her cardigan, a skirt too long, an effort given up. That’s me, thought Tessa. That’s me twenty years from now. By the window was Carrie, an elfin girl who talked to no one, and in the armchairs were Derek and Clive, who treated the place like a retreat. The first thing Clive had said when she’d met them was: We’re not the real Derek and Clive. And Derek had said: We just happen to be called Derek and Clive.
“Good times,” said Clive to no one in particular. He’d been in and out of institutions since he was seven. It was amazing what you could learn in a week, how open they were with each other. If only the psychiatrists knew.
“We heard you had a party,” said Derek.
She’d imagined all sorts of things for her life, sat with clear intentions, done ceremonies; there were subtle altars all over her house, places she’d put special objects, a stone, a flower, a card, places where she’d lit incense and candles, where she’d wished and believed and thought careful what you wish for while trying to hold the line between humility and power. She didn’t understand any of it. She’d found a therapist who said you are held and banged a drum while tapping Tessa on the head. She’d stopped going after Scott had drawn the line at singing bowls. Maybe you should try clearing up once in a while he’d snapped, and she’d chucked the wooden mallet in the bin. The only thing holding Tessa right now were 1200mgs of Amisulpride and this chair, which made her itch.
Clive farted and Derek said, “Your health.”
She flicked through an old magazine. Maybe it really was 2001. It was hard to tell.
“Someone to see you, Tessa,” said Nurse Ratchet from the doorway.
“I’m busy.”
“Not so busy as to see a friend, now, are you? Don’t be silly.”
Yes, that’s what she was. Silly.
She didn’t recognize her at first. If Clive hadn’t pointed and said, “um, um, you know, EastEnders, no, no, Casualty. Casualty!” she might not have placed her at all.
COME ON. It’s SO GOOD. ⚡️
All of this. All the time. Your style and urgency capture me. This month I’m doing short posts on Thursday’s that explore mental health. Do I have your permission to share this?