Of course, the practical result of this lower staffing ratio was less supervision. There still weren’t locks on the bathroom doors, but most days I could get through a whole shower without anyone interrupting me. Far better than this, though, was the fact that I could now smoke unsupervised. The move to Amazon had come with all sorts of trusts and privileges that would have been unimaginable on Nile. Previously banned personal effects – house keys, nail files, lighters – were retrieved from the locker room behind the main reception. The keys were superfluous, obviously, but I suppose some psychiatrist somewhere had decided there was an important symbolism implicit in their return – the promise that I was one step closer to my eventual release.
I was more impressed by the symbolism of the lighter, since this meant I was now trusted not to set myself or others on fire. For several hours after its return, the lighter never left my person. The keys I buried at the bottom of my bag. They were another item I did not want to think about.
If Nile was essentially a prison, then Amazon was a halfway house, the sheltered accommodation set up to provide a safe transition back to the outside world. At times, it felt no more terrible than a hall of residence – if you allowed yourself to forget that all its residents were insane.
Amazon Ward was a long L-shaped corridor with a dozen bedrooms leading off it. There was a small kitchen, containing a kettle and a microwave and an always-full fruit bowl, which adjoined a larger dining area with two round tables. Opposite the nurses’ station was the dayroom, where there were sofas and magazines and a television that seemed to be permanently tuned to Homes Under the Hammer. This, I suppose, was someone’s concept of safe viewing – the kind of innocuous daytime programming suited to a group of damaged and fragile women. Except I found Homes Under the Hammer anything but innocuous, and I was willing to bet I was not the only one. Homes Under the Hammer was a programme in which smug, middle-aged idiots bought and sold property, usually generating a huge profit while simultaneously pricing the rest of the population out of the market. These people all owned homes already. Many of them owned multiple homes, which was why they were able to borrow such vast sums of money from the bank. They used phrases like ‘strengthening my portfolio’, and were constantly referring to the ladder.
I avoided the dayroom whenever I could, but this was not always possible. Because on Amazon, independent movement was not just permitted, it was continually encouraged. If you tried to stay in bed past nine in the morning, it wouldn’t be long before a nurse was opening the curtains and ushering you into one of the communal areas. This was the flipside of greater freedom. With it came caveats – rules and responsibilities.
Paradoxically, there had been far fewer rules on Nile. On Nile there was really just one rule: no sharps. With that rule in place, we were pretty much left to ourselves. Apart from meals and medication, there was very little to segment the days, and time slid past like a glacier – huge and blank and structureless. And there wasn’t any communal space on Nile – not in any meaningful sense. Each separate bed might as well have been a separate universe. Two dozen personal hells, with no connection between them.
But on Amazon no one was allowed to languish. Treatment no longer meant lithium, Thorazine or ECT – or that wasn’t all it meant. Now there were various therapies to be attended: individual therapy, group therapy, art therapy.
Against all odds, I soon found myself missing Dr Barry. He may have been a prick, but at least when he asked me a question, I knew the difference between a good and bad answer. Unfortunately, it seemed that Dr Barry was permanently confined to psychiatric intensive care, where his massive frame was a constant boon and his lack of interpersonal skills neither here nor there.
In his place, I was assigned a new personal therapist. Her job was to help me develop and implement my personal care plan. All the patients had personal therapists and personal care plans. Except we were no longer referred to as patients. Now we were called service users – as if this were a library or swimming pool.
It felt beyond ridiculous, but I kept telling myself that these games had to be played.
My personal therapist was called Dr Hadley. Hadley was her surname. Her first name was Lisa. She told me I could call her Lisa if I preferred.
I called her Dr Hadley – mostly because I had to keep reminding myself she was a real doctor. Dr Hadley didn’t look like a real doctor. She looked like an actress who had been badly miscast. And this was just the start of the problem.
The more I looked at her, the more I realized that Dr Hadley actually resembled me in many ways. She was like a better version of me: a little older – early thirties at a push – a little taller; a warmer complexion; much more accomplished. She was a little slimmer, too – at least at the moment – and her hair was a better shade of blonde: rich and honey-hued, where mine, of late, had taken on the appearance of straw on a cloudy day.
I didn’t know how I was going to cope with therapy with Dr Hadley.
The smoking area was pretty much indiscernible from the one on Nile. It occupied a small courtyard, surrounded on three sides by bricks and by trees, trellises and the prison-style fence on the other. But for that fence, it could have been any suburban patio: neatly paved, bordered with low-maintenance shrubs and plants. There was a cheap plastic table and four matching chairs, and it was in one of these chairs, in the late afternoon of my second day on Amazon, that I sat smoking my seventh cigarette and listening to my iPod, which I’d discovered at the bottom of my handbag.
Listening to music was a risk, I knew. It was the kind of thing that might have tipped me back over the edge a few days ago – and bursting into tears in one of the communal areas was not part of my plan; I had resolved to keep any crying minimal and private. But when I finally plucked up the courage to press play, I was relieved to find that the music didn’t really affect me one way or the other. It was just one more way to block out the external world, and this was my prime objective that day. I was struggling to adjust to people – to people not simply lying motionless in beds, or, at worst, talking to themselves in corridors, but actually wanting things from me: eye contact, acknowledgement, talk. I didn’t want to talk to anyone, and I didn’t want other people’s conversations buzzing in the background. I just wanted to smoke in peace. Wearing my earphones, I thought, was the perfect deterrent to any social interaction.
But it turned out this was just wishful thinking.
There was nothing very remarkable about the girl who sat down next to me – nothing except her age. She was obviously very young; she couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty, I thought. She was wearing a dark red vest top with shorts and sandals – it was, after all, still a blazing hot summer; as perfect a summer as you ever get in England. This was something that never failed to surprise me, every time I went outside. I don’t know why. I suppose there was a part of me that thought the weather should be paying more attention to the turn my life had taken, not just carrying on regardless.
The girl was small. She had very straight dark brown hair cut just above her shoulders. Her forearms were latticed with scars, some old and pale, some red and recent.
I observed all this in a swift, furtive glance, then fixed my eyes back on the parallel lines of the metal fence. I needed my sunglasses, I realized. Then I could look wherever I wanted. I could look at her arms to my heart’s content and she’d never know. But the courtyard was almost permanently in shade from the high walls and trees. I couldn’t wear sunglasses without looking like I was wearing them to hide something.