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.