I came to see you a couple of days ago, or I tried to. I made it as far as reception. I thought that if I could get someone to call you – if you knew I was already there – then you’d have to change your mind and let me in. Turns out you’re not taking calls, either. I should have known. I’ve left about twenty messages on your mobile.
They sent a doctor out eventually. He was nice. He made me a cup of coffee and let me rant at him for five minutes. Then he repeated what I already knew: he couldn’t let me see you, couldn’t even take a message, since this is expressly against your wishes. Barbara finally agreed to pass this letter on, but only when she thinks you’re ‘capable of reading it’. That paints a pretty bleak picture.
Needless to say, the doctor I saw at reception couldn’t tell me anything about how you are – patient confidentiality. All he could give me were generalities: that you were in a safe environment and would be receiving the best possible care, etc., etc.
I had a plan, of sorts, when I walked into the hospital. I was going to wait as long as it took, just refuse to leave until someone had communicated with you on my behalf, or at least given me some concrete information. Instead, I found myself leaving within half an hour, having apologized profusely to the doctor and receptionist. All very British. They gave me a number I could call if I needed to speak to anyone again. It’s for some sort of mental health support charity. I haven’t used it yet.
I’m sorry: a couple of pages in and I’m already sounding bitter and self-pitying. That really isn’t my intention. I’m not telling you any of this to make you feel bad. I imagine you feel bad enough already – much worse than I do.
I have this problem that never seems to get any easier. When you’re at your lowest, I always think that there must be some magic combination of words that would help you. But I can never find them. They’re always just beyond my grasp.
All I can find to say right now is that I’m here for you, whenever you’re ready.
There’s one other thing too, and again it’s something you might not find particularly easy to hear. But I promised I’d tell you if I managed to get in touch.
Your mum phoned, the day after you went into hospital. I hadn’t really figured out what I was going to say to your family at that point – I was hoping I’d get the chance to see you first – but I wasn’t going to lie to her, obviously. She’s called or texted every day for the past week, and yesterday she came over to the flat. (She was here at ten, so God knows when she left Exeter.)
She’s worried: that goes without saying. She’s worried and she wants you to call her. Please just think about it.
I love you. I miss you. I don’t think there’s anything else I can add.
Beck x
17
FAKING IT
When you want to die, smiling is not easy. I discovered this the next morning when the nurse brought my breakfast.
It was premeditated, of course. After I put my cobalt-blue dress back in the bedside cupboard, I stayed awake for a few hours, planning my first move.
It seemed simple in principle: a slight reconfiguration of the eyes and mouth, just to let her know that I was pleased to see her, that I was grateful for my cereal.
The nurse’s sharp recoil told me that I’d got it wrong somehow.
Later, I spent several minutes in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to understand and correct my error. I had the vague recollection that all primates could smile, and it wasn’t a skill that had to be learned. Baby primates could smile just a few weeks after birth – even those born blind. So why did it seem so unnatural? My mouth felt tense and tremulous, like overstretched elastic. But maybe this wouldn’t be discernible to an outside observer? My lips at least appeared to be curving in the right direction. The bigger problem was my eyes. I’d read somewhere that you could always tell a genuine smile by looking at the eyes rather than the mouth.
I covered my mouth with a hand and stared straight ahead. Two doll’s eyes stared back, as cold and hard as marbles. I didn’t know how to rectify this.
Soon the nurse was tapping on the bathroom door.
I gave up.
The problem, I later realized, was that I’d started with far too big a step. I couldn’t fake a smile right now – any more than I could recalibrate the hollow monotone of my voice. These things would have to be practised, rebuilt piece by piece. In the meantime, I should think small. I should focus on the small cosmetic changes that I had some hope of effecting.
I started by washing again. Real washing, as opposed to sluicing myself off once every forty-eight hours. Soap, shampoo – the works. A couple of days later, I asked to borrow a disposable razor and spent the next fifteen minutes shaving my legs under the unflinching gaze of one of the nurses. It took fifteen minutes because I had to concentrate on every stroke. All my nerves were shrieking at me, telling me to press down as hard as I could. And that would have been disastrous. It would have set me back weeks. I kept my eyes locked on their task, thinking only of the endgame.
When I’d finished, I had a long nap, then spent the rest of the day reading the first chapter of Gone with the Wind. That felt even harder than shaving my legs, but it was an investment worth making. Both the day shift and the night shift saw that I was reading. They could see how engrossed I was.
I don’t know exactly how long it took me to get off psychiatric intensive care – time was still hazy – but it must have been less than a week. It all seemed much too easy.
I washed. I read. I dressed myself in my own clothes. When Dr Barry asked me how I was, I told him three or four rather than zero. These scores seemed unfeasibly high to my mind, but he never questioned them. Instead, he marked them on my chart, and soon the evidence of my ‘recovery’ was there for all to see, plotted on a tidy graph.
It was a monstrous sham, but it was a sham that no one felt inclined to question. Even Dr Barbara, whom I’d assumed would see through my pretences in an instant, seemed content to accept the signs at face value. It helped, I suppose, that I didn’t have to lie to Dr Barbara directly. She wasn’t going to ask me to rate my mood out of ten. She was noting the subtler measures of my improvement: the fact that I’d made a bookmark out of a folded paper towel, and this had started to creep down the vast bulk of Gone with the Wind; the fact that my hair was washed and brushed. I didn’t have to make anything too explicit with Dr Barbara.
It helped, too, that my face was beginning to give hints of expressive capability. I couldn’t yet manage anything approaching a warm smile – let alone a happy smile – but I could do a passable impression of a brave smile, something that told the outside world I was at least trying.
Still, it struck me that it took so little; just a few minor changes in demeanour and I was indisputably on the mend. So what, exactly, defined the line between crazy and not crazy? The more I thought about it, the more it seemed that sanity was just a matter of behaviour. Its degrees could be measured by the cleanliness of your hair, the set of your facial features, how you respond to a series of social cues.
For the doctors and nurses, this was what sanity was.
Although there was no substance underlying my sham recovery, I could still appreciate the several ways in which being off psychiatric intensive care was better than being on it. First, there were fewer nurses. I’m not sure what the staff to patient ratio had been on Nile, but I am certain there were more of them than us. Amazon, where I now found myself, was closer to being a regular hospital ward. There might have been six to eight nurses present at any one time – slightly fewer at night.