‘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 The idea of this final crutch being withdrawn sent ice down my spine.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.
16
A LETTER, UNDELIVERED
Hello Abby.
I don’t know how else to start this letter. I’ve been looking at a blank sheet of paper for God knows how long, and this is all I’ve come up with. But it’s probably best to keep things simple. Please assume that my words fall short of what I actually want to say.