Bloodletting (6 page)

‘How are you feeling?’ It was Annabel. Like me, she had been out for a while but was back.

I wasn’t feeling good.The thought of a violent, cold and harsh place, in which I could be held against my will, was terrifying. But what really hurt was that I was completely responsible for putting myself in this position. For the first time I realised that this wasn’t a game and that I probably couldn’t talk my way out of it. No matter how rational I was able to sound, the evidence was against me.

It took an hour or so for them to locate Dr G—they didn’t want to make a decision without discussing the matter with him. He couldn’t come in so spoke to the nurse on the phone. He didn’t ask to speak to me.

When I heard what the decision was I was stunned.

Everyone else was equally horrified.

‘What will you do? Will you be okay?’

‘Don’t go home; go and stay with someone.’

‘They’re insane.This is ridiculous.They can’t kick you out.’

But they could, and they did. They asked me to pack my bag and leave immediately. I sat there blinking away tears. I couldn’t believe it. I had just been expelled from a psychiatric hospital.

They didn’t explain the reasoning to me, but Dr G had no doubt calculated that as I’d done a fair bit of damage I was unlikely to do any more harm to myself for the next few days. He would also have known that a public hospital wouldn’t have done me any good. His role wasn’t to hand out punishments but to work out a suitable treatment plan. At the time, his actions just seemed callous.

First, I tried calling Catherine. She wasn’t there. I then tried Peter but only got through to his answering machine. There was no-one else I could ask, as no-one else knew I was in hospital. I didn’t have enough money for a taxi so had no choice but to walk to the train station, with my overnight bag over my shoulder and wrist roughly bandaged.The nurse had done that much. The one thing I wasn’t going to do was cry.

When I arrived back at the flat the answering machine flashed at me from the kitchen table. Needing to hear the sound of a human voice, I checked the messages.There was one from Peter.

‘Hi Vic, can you call me as soon as you get this? I rang the hospital and they said you’d left and they weren’t sure where you were.Are you all right? Silly question really. Anyway, I don’t think you should be by yourself. So please call me when you get in.’

I called Peter back and half an hour later he turned up. He’d borrowed someone’s car.‘Pack enough things for at least a week. I really don’t think you should be here at the moment.’ He came upstairs and looked around my room.‘Is there anything you want to give me?’

I went to my desk where I’d put the packet of razors.

‘What brand are they this time?’ he said, before I handed them over.

I told him they were Gillette, that there didn’t seem to be much else on the market. He put them in his backpack to take home. Peter didn’t like safety razors, as they gave him a rash, so was happy to have my cast-offs. Or so he said.

Next I asked if we could visit a medical centre. My wrist, which was now really hurting, needed some attention.

‘Sure, but why didn’t they do it at the hospital?’ Peter looked surprised.

‘Punishment? I don’t know. They didn’t say. Or maybe they did and I don’t remember.’

Once at the medical centre, I didn’t explain much to the doctor. It was too complicated. I had Peter with me so he didn’t ask any questions. Just sewed it up.

Peter watched at the beginning, and then had to be helped out of the room.When I found him afterwards he was sitting down sipping a glass of water, his face a pale green-grey colour.

A little while later, we arrived back at Peter’s college.The first thing he did was listen to his messages.There was one from a voice I recognised.I caught ‘...I can’t believe what she’s done now.When you’ve found her, would you mind calling me? I’d be most grateful.’ The voice sounded tight: annoyed more than anything else, as though she were dealing with a frustrating child.To my mother I guess that’s just what I was.

I was furious that she was talking to Peter like this. It was an invasion of privacy. Peter was my friend, what right did she have to bother him? I was also hurt. She didn’t sound worried. Peter said I was misreading the message, that of course she was worried. He then called her back and assured her I was all right. I refused to talk to her myself. I couldn’t.

I stayed with Peter and his brother Paul, who was on an extended holiday, at a male residential university college for two weeks.The three of us shared a large room, Peter had half the space, and Paul and I took a corner each. I used the communal bathrooms, but tried not to do so at the rush hour before lectures in the mornings, or after touch football games just before dinner in the evenings. At least the bathrooms had shower doors that closed, and separate loos, and they were cleaned daily. While I didn’t actually eat with the boys in the dining room, they brought back meals for me. During the day, I went to the library and managed to do some research and reading, or visited people I knew. I felt fragile but for the first time in a while as though I were living a relatively normal life.

I wasn’t, of course, and had to go home eventually.

A few days after I moved back to the flat, I was sitting downstairs in the kitchen eating dinner with Rodney when there was a loud crack and the lights went out.

We both rushed upstairs towards the source of the noise, and it was then that we saw the smoke. It was billowing out of Rodney’s bedroom. One of his scented candles had fallen over, set the carpet alight and the flames had reached a cord, short-circuiting the power in the entire house.

We got things under control but the smell was appalling, and one corner of Rodney’s room was destroyed. He packed his overnight bag and announced that he was going to stay with his girlfriend until the smell of smoke had gone. It was all very well for him.

I spent the next few days alone in the flat, hating it, hating the smell and hating Rodney. He wasn’t thrilled with me either: I wasn’t the person he’d hoped I’d be when we first met. It was time to move again. While browsing through the share accommodation section of the
Herald
, I saw an ad for a room in a warehouse:‘suitable for use as a studio or as accommodation’. It sounded intriguing, and it would be great to have a chance to paint. Even though I’d dropped out of art school, painting and drawing were what I was happiest doing. (Not that I’d been doing much of either while at college.)

Rodney seemed surprised when I said I was leaving, but I’d made up my mind—and I’d put down a deposit.

The warehouse was a large building that had once been used for wool storage. It had two floors, a gallery space and internal walls made of particle board.The kitchen and bathrooms were concrete and primitive. My space was upstairs with a large window overlooking the road. I’d never had such a big room, so didn’t care that the walls didn’t reach the ceiling.Annabel visited,and looked around silently for quite a while. Finally, she stamped her foot,‘At least the floor seems solid’. My cousin who was in town for a few days, declared the place a fire hazard.

I loved it.

On my first night, one of my new housemates, Simon, invited every-one—there were ten of us at that stage—into his bedroom for a smoke. As I sat on a cushion on the floor, listening to everyone talk, I thought, this is going to be fun—I’ve done the right thing. The other people seemed interested, interesting, and unusually open. Some had known each other before moving in, while others knew the landlord. Only two of us had answered the ads in the paper.

Simon looked about seventeen but must have been older than that, as he already had a successful career as a photographer, judging by the many framed magazine spreads on the walls.Almost without preamble, he told us his history: abusive parents, teenage drug use, prostitution, and then a boyfriend who’d saved him, and introduced him to art. Iwas astonished by his frankness and relieved by it. Keeping secrets was so exhausting—perhaps I wouldn’t have to do it here.

Ian sat next to me. I knew nothing about him, but he’d accused me that morning of being stuck-up. I had, he said, a posh accent, and was too polite. I’d obviously had it easy, according to him.‘So what’s your story?’ Ian asked.‘What are you doing here?’

I told them my recent history. I talked about the mental hospital and the fact, rather than the act, of self-mutilation. And I told them about the manic-depression label. It helped to explain why I wasn’t doing the same thing as all my friends, why I wasn’t working, why I wasn’t living in a flat in the eastern suburbs and throwing dinner parties, and why I was now living in a dirty unheated warehouse.

The people in Simon’s room found what I told them difficult to believe. They hadn’t picked it. Apparently, the fact that I was able to talk cheerfully and smile a lot meant that I didn’t look like the sort who’d want to harm herself. I didn’t fit their stereotypes of wayward teenage girls, prison inmates and traumatised refugees. I seemed too normal.

Ian actually challenged me and suggested that I was making it up. He wanted to see evidence.

While my fresh and healing wounds mesmerised me, I was uncomfortable looking at my scars.The idea of displaying them worried me even more; they were private marks. The room was silent, as everyone looked at me, waiting to see what I’d do and, no doubt, wanting to see them. I’d noticed before that people had a morbid curiosity about them, and as a result I tried to keep them covered.

I considered telling Ian to fuck off, but they’d all see the scars sooner or later. I wasn’t going to be able to get away with long sleeves all summer so it was probably easier to just do it now. I pulled up my sleeve to reveal the haphazard lines. Some of them were still surrounded by pink dots, where the stitches had been taken out.

My new housemates immediately said that I had to stop doing it, and that, while I was living there, I was to tell them if I felt as though I wanted to.They didn’t treat me like I was mad.As I pulled my sleeve back down it seemed as if, maybe, it would all be okay.

I quickly settled in.There was always someone around, as most people at the warehouse didn’t have a job.And they were friendly.There was always someone with whom you could go drawing, or to the pub, the movies or a café.We shared meat-free, wallet-friendly meals, and organised rosters for cleaning.The latter were good in theory, but the guys tended to ignore them, so the bins overflowed regularly and the showers were usually covered in mould. Maintaining any kind of normal hygiene levels was a challenge, but it must have been good for my immune system, as for the entire time I was there I wasn’t sick.

Moving into the warehouse had been about more than changing my address: I’d moved into a different way of life. I was surrounded by people who weren’t trying to succeed, who weren’t competing and who were content to drift, and it was refreshing. I could stop trying so hard.As I wasn’t eligible for a student allowance,the sporadic gallery pay wasn’t enough to live on and I didn’t want to waitress, I signed up for the dole. It was something I never thought I’d do, but then I hadn’t known anyone who was on it. I did now.

Jade and Leigh, a hippie couple, often had friends over.They’d sit around and chat, drink and smoke for hours. And then, quite often, go clubbing.Wherever they went they always invited the rest of us to join them. Given that I’d now completely broken with everyone I knew, I invariably accepted the offers.

Clubbing was something I’d not ever done before, but I took to it quickly.It was a chance to dance and to dress up.As a result of months of not eating much, I had lost a lot of weight. Alice, a fashion student who had the room closest to me, was curvy and very conscious of it. She couldn’t believe that I only wore jeans and oversized T-shirts, anything, as long as it covered me up. Finally, as a result of her niggling, and Simon’s, I bought some tartan hipster hotpants for a dollar at a market.They were both loudly impressed.

‘I’d kill for legs like yours,’ said Alice.

I couldn’t believe it. I’d spent years agonising about my weight, hiding my body, and being ashamed of what I looked like—except for the rare brief periods when my mood was so upbeat I just had to show off. And now someone was jealous of my legs.

It made me brave enough to do something I’d always wanted to do: cut off my hair. For years it had been mousy brown and either chin or shoulder length.The most daring change I’d made was to have it streaked. My mother hated the look of girls with short hair. It was butch. I also worried about having so much of my face on view.With short hair you can’t hide.

With each snip, I kept thinking I’d made a big mistake, but it was too late. I just had to sit there and look at my nervous face in the mirror. ‘Trust me,’ the hairdressesr said,‘it’ll be great.You’ve got lovely features. You’ll feel a different person when I’ve finished with you.’

And I did. I looked and felt very different. I felt fresh, somehow, and clean.As I walked home, I kept stopping to look at my reflection. It didn’t look like me—and that was very liberating. I was finally happy with the way I looked, with where I was living and with my new friends. For the first time in over a year, I didn’t want to hurt myself.