Don’t Tell Mummy (21 page)

Wearily, I climbed out of bed, splashed cold water onto my face and dressed hurriedly. For the second time in a few months I walked to the newsagents to purchase the local paper. Taking it to a nearby coffee shop I ringed around the situations vacant that required no qualifications and offered accommodation, frightened of phoning someone who might know David and Rosa.

One advertisement stood out: ‘Large country house needs au pair to help with two pre-school children. Accommodation to be provided, good wages for right applicant.’

After I rang to make my appointment for the late afternoon of that day, I dressed in the same clothes I’d worn all those weeks ago to my first interview. This time I felt no excitement, no feeling of starting a new life, just a dull acceptance of what I now knew the future held for me. Again I took the bus into central Belfast, and then changed to the one that would take me to my country destination. On my arrival I saw not the overgrown hedges and tall trees from my memories of Cooldaragh, but neatly boxed hedges lining a drive which led to a square grey Georgian house, its high narrow windows facing the manicured green lawns. No overgrown rhododendron bushes for children to play in here, no trickling stream where frogs could be found. Instead, circles of earth planted with rose bushes provided the only splashes of colour to break up the uniform green.

Nor was there a smiling Rosa with her twinkling eyes answering the bell to me. Instead a cool-looking blonde, as manicured as her lawns, opened the door. As she led me through the hall into her colour-coordinated sitting room, with roses arranged in crystal vases standing on small mahogany tables, I wondered where the children were. My unspoken question was answered when she told me they were in the nursery with her temporary help.

Once again my rehearsed story worked its magic; once again it was agreed that I would move into a room arranged as a bed-sitter, and my wages would be £3 per week. This time I would have a television in my room, not being
part of a family here, but it was agreed I would eat my evening meal with them. After these formalities had been gone through, I was taken to meet my two charges, a boy and a girl again, both with the blonde good looks of their mother. I thought then that in such an organized household boy first, girl second was just what they would have ordered.

While waiting for her husband, plates of crust-less sandwiches were brought into the sitting room by a maid. Tea from a large silver pot was poured into thin china cups, sugar being added with small silver tongs, as I perched on the edge of a velvet wing-back chair. She told me that her husband was a merchant banker, that her last au pair had gone to England and that she wanted someone to stay until both children reached school age in one year and two respectively.

I agreed to that – after all what choice did I have? But already I knew that she and I would never be friends. I was just a paid servant to her. Then I wondered if maybe that was better. At least I would not be under any illusion that I was part of a family that was not mine.

Briefly, before my departure, I was introduced to her husband, a tall slim man in his early thirties, whose polite smile did not reach his eyes.

Again, I caught the two buses to my mother’s, repacked my suitcase and told her about my new job. For once she seemed happy: she had finally found work, she informed me, as manageress of a coffee shop. She told me how much she liked the owner, an enthusiastic young man of twenty-eight, who had just started his own business.

In the smart Georgian house, the cold loneliness of my isolation seemed to penetrate my skin. As each day passed I
felt increasingly benumbed. I would eat with the family most evenings, and then go to my room to either read or watch television. This family I felt no bond with. I still missed Rosa and her children, and the warmth I’d felt in their home.

On my fourth day off, knowing that my mother was working, I went to visit her at the coffee shop. She was transformed: a new short hairstyle, carefully applied make-up, matching red lipstick and nail varnish all gave her a youthful, modern appearance. She smiled brightly at me, but the love I was searching for was not in her eyes.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked.

‘Can we have coffee together?’ I said, but I was thinking, ‘I’m here because I miss you.’

‘Oh, darling,’ she replied, ‘of course we can have a quick cup, but it’s lunchtime soon, and we get really busy.’

We sat on the banquet seating, served by a young waitress in her deep pink and cream uniform, which was unlike most of the waitresses in Belfast then, who still wore black and white. My mother asked me how I liked my work and the family. I described everything to her in detail, the house, gardens and the children, but omitted to say that, while it was much grander than Rosa’s and David’s, it lacked the warmth and fun.

To my mother, I knew, I had described the house of her dreams, but to me it was a building rather than a home. Less than an hour later, after a quick hug and another bright smile from my mother, I was back on the pavement again with the rest of my free day stretching in front of me.

A kaleidoscope of faces with varying expressions from disdain to anger floated before me and their voices rang in my ears. First was my father’s. His mocking smile as he told
me time and again: ‘Your mother won’t love you if you tell. Everyone will blame you.’ Next, my mother’s black angry stare on the night I was bleeding to death, her whisper to the doctor as she told him to send me to the further hospital. My grandmother’s stern expression, from which all traces of love had disappeared. The dislike that showed in my cousin Nora’s face when she had opened the door, shielding her child from me. Their combined voices echoed in my head.

‘Antoinette, you are not welcome. We know about you and your father. Go away, don’t ever come back. Don’t ever come back.’

I felt the pain of each rejection again. Tears misted my eyes as I relived that final one when David sent me packing from his home. The despair I had fought against when I had stood with my meagre possessions, hurriedly packed into my one small suitcase, returned and lodged inside me. Pride, my only remaining weapon, left me, and in its place grief and self-pity moved in. No longer could I see that elusive silver lining to the black cloud of my life. It was simply not there.

Nobody, I thought, could ever love me. No one ever had, not the real me. Oh yes, they had loved the pretty girl dressed in smock dresses, the clever child with good school reports, the helpful teenager, always ready to baby-sit. But who had loved the pregnant me, the sexually aware me, the frightened me? Not even my mother.

All around I could see groups of friends, or couples happy with each other. People, who belonged to families, people who were loved. I sat there, an isolated, invisible alien in an unwelcoming world, a world that I had only been happy in for the first six of my fifteen years. Momentary happiness
had fleetingly come, but never stayed. Rejection, the hardest emotion to deal with, had put me in a mental cage. I had no door back into the world of people. The only door I could see was the one marked ‘exit’.

Could I stay for ever in that cage where no love, companionship or even acceptance visited? The only answer to that was ‘no’, the only option to leave.

Knowing that whiskey dulled pain, I walked to the nearest pub. The invisible me ordered a double in that male-dominated refuge, and greedily drank it down. The barman saw a potential drunk and refused me a second one.

‘What’s the matter, love? Boyfriend trouble? You’ll find another one, pretty girl like you.’

His words sounded like they came from somewhere far away. Paranoia joined despair and, instead of hearing kindness in his voice, I heard mocking tones of derision.

Leaving the warmth of the pub, gripped with a cold determination, I walked to the nearby chemist. There I bought a large bottle of aspirin and a packet of razor blades. The invisible me then walked to an off-licence and bought my last purchase, a bottle of Bush Mill’s Whiskey. Armed with my exit kit, I went to a public toilet.

A pale face loomed in the mirror as I stood, toasting myself with the bottle, gulping down the whiskey and aspirins. The mixture rose back up my throat, my eyes streaming each time I choked. More whiskey and more tablets went down, until both bottles were emptied. I dropped them into the bin and entered a cubicle. I put down the seat and sat on it, then slowly opened the packet of razor blades. Selecting one, I cut into myself systematically, starting at the wrist and rising two inches above it. Fifteen slashes, one for each year of the life I no longer wanted.
Blood slowly oozed down over my hands between my fingers, then dripped onto the floor. Mesmerized, I watched its journey, wondering how long it would take my body to empty out. My lids became heavy and started closing as the world darkened and a buzzing set up in my ears. I felt myself slipping sideways, felt the cool of the wall where my head rested against it. Then I felt no more.

I
ndistinct words from two voices penetrated my consciousness. The first a deep masculine one; the second the higher-pitched tones of a female.

‘We know you’re awake. Come on, open your eyes,’ said the masculine voice.

A cool soft hand took mine, and I heard the female voice. ‘Come on dear, we want to help you. Open your eyes now.’

Reluctantly I did as they asked.

I was lying in a bed in a small white room. My lips struggled to form words and I felt a peculiar sensation in my mouth; an object was stopping any sound escaping. My tongue touched something solid and hard. Then I realized this hard thing was sliding up from deep inside me, up into my throat and out through my lips.

Two people came into focus and I recognized that one was a nurse while the other, dressed in tweed jacket with a clerical collar, was a minister. Dimly I realized I was in a hospital, then gagged as a rush of vomit, hot and burning, rose in my throat. Hands placed a bowl under my head and now that the tube-like object, which later I learnt was a stomach pump, had done its job, my body heaved with the exertion of emptying all the toxins out.

When at last the attack was over, I lay back, hearing a constant ringing in my ears. A desire to sleep again made me close my eyes but the voices were not going to let me slip away so easily.

I heard them asking who I was and where I lived, but I hardly knew the answers to that myself. My hand was held, and liking the feeling of comfort it gave me, I gripped tightly.

‘Come on, open your eyes again,’ the minister said. ‘We’ll let you sleep when you’ve answered a few questions.’

I forced my lids apart again to find his kind blue eyes looking at me, with nothing but concern on his face. It was the kindness I saw there that made me cry, choking sobs that shook my body as much as the vomiting had. Still the nurse’s hand held mine while his wiped my face.

I could hear comforting noises of the sort mothers usually make to their babies. Gradually I felt soothed, the crying stopped and when he asked me my name again I told him it was Antoinette, even though I had come to hate it. Antoinette was the name ‘he’ called me, the name his mother addressed me by and the name the school had used when they expelled me. Toni, the person I wanted to be, had managed to elude me.

The next question came: how old was I?

‘Fifteen,’ I told him and braced myself for the question I knew would follow.

‘Antoinette, why did you do it?’

My eyes dropped to my hands and I saw the bandaged wrists. The compassion in his voice made me cry again, silently this time. Unchecked, the tears ran down my face until I managed to stutter out some of my story. I told them my father had gone to prison because he had made me preg
nant, that I had no home and nobody wanted me. I did not want to live because I had nothing to live for.

I couldn’t bring myself to open every wound, to tell them of all the rejection I had experienced, how it had made me feel so worthless, so unloved. Or the guilt I felt, because my mother’s life was in ruins and I knew she blamed me for it. Neither did I talk about the dream I had nurtured, of my father being discovered and adults rushing to surround me with love and care. Nor did I tell them how I had dreamt of my mother whisking me away from him and taking me somewhere safe. The reality of what had followed the discovery of ‘our secret’ had been more than I could bear. I did not explain how the back of my neck tingled, or describe the sinking, sick sensations that crept into my stomach every time I went into a shop and felt the silence thicken. I always knew that the buzz of conversation I heard go up the moment I left was about me.

Gradually I had come to see myself through the eyes of others, someone to be ignored to such an extent that they would eventually disappear. I was someone so tainted that others feared that by even recognizing my existence they too would be sullied.

Not only did I have nothing, but I
was
nothing. And yet some tiny spark of pride still remained, stopping me from talking about those feelings. I never did; it was almost as if I hoped that by not verbalizing them I could make them cease to exist.

I heard the nurse’s intake of breath and then she asked the next question

‘What happened to the baby?’ Maybe she envisioned my having given birth and it being left in a doorway
somewhere. It made me feel angry that she would think such a thing of me.

‘They gave me an abortion,’ I said baldly; fifteen-year-olds were not expected to use such words.

‘Antoinette, if you were released would you try again?’ the nurse asked, but neither of them bothered to wait for my answer – they knew what it would be.

The minister took the address of where I had worked and promised to collect my clothes, while the nurse gave me a cold drink and I fell into another sleep, still with the constant noises in my ears – the results of the poisons I had put into my body.

The next time I awoke another man was sitting by my bed.

‘Antoinette, would you like a drink?’ he asked gently as he saw my eyes flutter.

‘Tea,’ I croaked in reply. My tongue felt too big for my mouth and my throat hurt.

The buzzing was fainter but my head ached with a throbbing pain.

‘Can I have a pain killer?’ I asked weakly.

‘That will have to get better naturally,’ he replied. Then, as if deciding I deserved to be given a reason, he continued, ‘We’ve spent some time pumping aspirin out of you.’ He paused for a few moments before going on. ‘Antoinette, I’m a doctor, but a doctor of the mind, a psychiatrist. Do you know what that means?’

I nodded. It was of no interest to me who he was: I just wanted to drink my tea and go back to sleep. He, however, had not finished what he wanted to say.

‘I’ve arranged a transfer for you, to the local psychiatric hospital. They’ll know how to treat you there. You’re suffering from an illness; it’s called severe depression.’

That was a statement I could agree with. He patted me on the shoulder, assured me I would feel better soon, and left. It was a reassurance I had no faith in. A few minutes later, still wrapped in hospital clothes, clutching my suitcase, which the minister had fetched for me, I was placed in an ambulance and made the short journey to Purdysburn mental hospital.

We drove past the massive red-brick structure, which in Victorian days had been a poorhouse but now housed the long-stay patients, to a single-storey building. This was their newest unit, the psychiatric section, where I was to be admitted. I was the youngest patient there by several years.

That first night I hardly took in my surroundings. Still drowsy from the overdose, I slept until I was woken the following morning. The curtains around my bed were drawn and a cheerful voice told me to get up, wash and come to breakfast. I looked to see where the voice had come from and saw a young nurse with a smile so open and friendly that I found myself smiling back. Standing next to her was a tall, slim blonde-haired girl a few years older than me who the nurse introduced.

‘This is Gus. She’ll show you the ropes.’

With that she disappeared, leaving us alone. Gus’s constant chatter, which I welcomed, washed over me. I could take refuge in silence because she only ever paused in order to take a breath or to emit a nervous, high-pitched laugh. This, I was soon to learn, was the flip side of depression.

She showed me the bathrooms, waited for me to wash and dress, then led me to the small dining room. As my disorientation gradually left me I became aware of my surroundings. Both the ward and the dining room were painted in pale
colours, large windows letting light stream in, creating an airy, tranquil space. All the other patients were already seated and Gus quickly introduced me to the twenty or so people there. I’d heard horror stories of the mental hospitals; stories about how, once admitted, people could disappear into the system and never emerge. But I’d never been told about the psychiatric unit, a fairly new venture.

Everyone looked so normal. The patients of both sexes ranged from late teens to early fifties and, I was soon to learn, came from all walks of life. Depression and alcohol abuse, the two main reasons why they had been admitted, had no respect for either age or class.

Over the weeks I spent there I learnt most of their stories. There was the wealthy estate agent’s wife, who had been made to feel inferior by her husband’s philandering and secretly drank. Like me she had taken an overdose. Unlike me, however, hers was an accident. Her mind dulled by gin, she forgot how many tranquillizers she’d taken and kept repeating the dose. Then there was a young couple who had met in the unit a year before. They were both being treated for alcohol abuse when they met, fell in love and discharged themselves. But instead of walking off hand-in-hand into the sunset they walked to the nearest pub.

Some patients were sitting quietly, their tranquillizers keeping their brains sluggish while the doctors waited for their depression to lift and control to pass from the drugs to the person. One woman especially caught my attention. With a mass of bright red hair, creamy skin and green eyes she was the prettiest member of the group and the quietest.

I felt my eyes being drawn to her constantly throughout the meal. She, however, never met my gaze, eating her meal with downcast eyes. She seemed completely unaware of both
her surroundings and her fellow patients and her blank indifference aroused my interest.

At the end of the meal a nurse came to her table, gently took her by the arm and led her back to the ward. There she was placed in a chair, her knees covered by a blanket as she gazed mutely into space while the hours passed.

My curiosity was piqued and at the first opportunity I asked Gus who she was.

‘She’s the wife of a doctor,’ she told me. ‘If she wasn’t she wouldn’t be in this ward any more.’

‘What’s wrong with her?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know, but some women get very depressed when they have a baby and she’s been in here for over a year. When she came here she spoke, but she doesn’t even do that any more.’

‘Will she get better?’ but even as the question left my lips I knew she wouldn’t.

For some reason this mattered to me. This woman, whom I had never met before, had aroused my curiosity and my pity. I knew about that space we can go to where the world no longer touches us and reality drifts away, but instinctively I knew her space was in a far deeper place than mine had ever been.

‘Well, if she doesn’t, she’ll get transferred; that’s what happens if we don’t respond to treatment.’ Gus seemed indifferent to the woman’s fate and, not wanting to know where she would be taken to, I ceased my enquiries.

After breakfast I was questioned about my medical history by the staff nurse and told not to leave the ward as the doctor would want to see me to assess my treatment and prescribe, if needed, any drugs. An hour later I had the first of many meetings with a psychiatrist. He took copious notes
as I talked but then, just when I was beginning to relax with him, asked the one question that made any future rapport between us impossible.

‘Antoinette, did you ever enjoy your father’s advances?’

Even when I replied, ‘Never,’ he still persisted.

‘Surely,’ he said, ‘you are a teenager, so you must have had some desires.’

At that moment I switched off, letting his voice float in the air, making my mind go blank so that his words could not affect me. I did not tell him about the town that had made me an outcast, how I felt worthless and demeaned, how I still wanted my mother’s love, or how I thought my life had no hope. Nor did I confide that inside I had screamed with pain at the rejections and numerous slights I’d received. How I had temporarily forgotten the judge’s words and seen myself through my accusers’ eyes as contemptible. Instead I found another mask – no longer the one of the well-behaved schoolgirl and happy family member, but of someone suspicious of authority and indifferent to help.

They gave me tests to measure my IQ, and asked me if I heard voices in my head, voices that commanded me to take various actions. The last question was: did I feel people were talking about me?

‘I don’t think it,’ I retorted, ‘I know it.’

But that just evoked a supercilious smile and a flutter of his hand as he wrote busily. I found out later that the report said I was surly, uncooperative and paranoid.

Because of my age they decided to treat me without drugs and, even more importantly, without electric shocks. Instead therapy was prescribed on a daily basis.

At every hour-long session one of the three psychiatrists assigned to my case asked me questions about my feelings
and thoughts, which I answered as briefly as I could. My depression I hid under a protective screen of indifference. The one question to which I would never give them the answer they wanted was, ‘Had I enjoyed any of the sex?’

They kept on asking the same thing. I think they thought I had and that only by confessing would I start to get better. They were not trying to be unkind, I knew that; they just had their preconceived ideas and refused to accept the truth. Did they really imagine I thought that being beaten, having whiskey poured down my throat and suffering mental torture was enjoyable?

How long had I been depressed was another often repeated question. How long did they think, I wanted to shout at them. When my life changed at six would have been the correct answer; but I knew it was not the one they wanted to hear. A few weeks was what I told them. I’d learnt exactly what could happen to a patient they thought was a danger to themselves or incurable: transfer to a locked ward and a disappearance from life as we know it.

Outside our insular unit lay the red-brick building of the old poorhouse with its small, mean, barred windows and its long dark corridors smelling of disinfectant and must. Surrounding this mass of bricks were single-storey buildings where, depending on the severity of the mental illness, long-term patients dressed in hospital uniforms lived. We often saw them being herded into groups as they were taken for their daily exercise by baton armed nurses.