Shoot the Damn Dog: A Memoir of Depression (12 page)

In this state of internal conflict and pressure, cracks inevitably begin to show, often in ways that may go unrecognised, such as eating too much or too little, drinking too much, working too hard, a string of failed relationships or mild depression. If these, too, go unresolved the pressure-cooker of conflict reaches breaking point and can lead to a physical or mental breakdown.

In order to break the treaty, we have to learn to ask for and then, just as crucially, accept help. First, though, it is important to understand ourselves, and to discover what it is that we need. Habits set up over a lifetime may be hard to break but, certainly, it is easier once you have identified them.

I am standing in a room in my third psychiatric hospital. The unit I am in is part of the Addictions Treatment Programme. I am doing time: twenty-eight days. In other words, I am in rehab. I am being rehabilitated, turned back into a sober, responsible human being.

I am here because I am a drunk.

I am a drunk, I think, because I learned to use alcohol to try to crush my pain. I never used to drink so much, nor with such deliberate, destructive savagery, before the pain came. Before I became depressed, I had a pretty normal relationship with alcohol. I drank to party, I drank to celebrate, I drank after a rough day at work, I drank when I felt shy or anxious. So does most of the world.

I also, and perhaps this is where I am different, drank when I felt sad or low to make myself feel better. When the mood shifted, I went right back to drinking normally but in the process, I learned that alcohol is the best anaesthetic in the world. If I drank, I did not feel. I did not want to feel. So, when I was severely depressed, I drank all the time.

I drank in the morning and in the evening. I drank in the afternoon and in the night. Pain follows no timetables.

Which would have been bad enough, except that I did not want to drink. I just wanted to feel free from pain. And I knew, in that part of my brain that was still robustly sane, that alcohol would not free me from pain, except temporarily. I knew that alcohol was a depressive, that I was taking an antidepressive pill with one hand and a bottled depressive with the other. I also knew that I was trying to kill myself. Alcoholism is a slow, ugly form of suicide.

By the time I get to rehab, I have what my psychiatrist calls ‘a dual diagnosis’. I am both depressed and alcoholic. I know that if I continue to drink, I will continue to be depressed. The chemical changes wrought in the brain by alcohol will not allow the chemical changes wrought by depression to come back into balance. It is a never-ending story.

As my shrink explained, ‘You have to find your way into alcoholism which means drinking sufficient amounts to develop a dependency. Why you do that is open to interpretation. But once you have developed a dependency, you have an addiction not only to alcohol but also to a pattern of behaviour. The only way out of an addiction is to stop the substance abuse, and to learn new ways of behaviour.’

I could stop for a day, a week or a month. I could stop drinking for three months or even six. Stopping is easy. Staying stopped is overwhelmingly difficult if you are drinking to stop pain.

I know that I have to stop, for ever. I have to learn new ways of behaviour. Which is how I came to be standing in a room and participating in drama therapy. Otherwise there is nothing, other than the ugly, grinding, sickening afflictions that are alcoholism and depression, that would persuade me to stand in a room with a group of adults and pretend that we were trees.

Nothing.

‘Sally,’ says the drama therapist, ‘this week, it is your turn to play the central character in the group.’

The therapist is a loud-voiced woman, wearing layers of clothing tangled up with beads, in every sort of colour and pattern. I suppose she thinks she looks theatrical. I do not like her, but whether it is the fussy style, the person she is (bossy, abrasive, condescendingly kind) or the work she does that I do not like, I cannot say. Or perhaps it’s just the mood I’m in, which is not good.

‘Do I have to?’ I am sullen.

‘Yes. You’ve been avoiding it for three weeks. This is your final week. You have to.’

Fuck.

‘OK,’ I say.

‘I want you to be the person you were when you were last truly happy.’

‘Truly?’ I say. ‘Not just a bit, or quite, or slightly or very? Not wildly, or deeply, or hysterically happy? Just truly, truly?’

She sighs. ‘Stop using words,’ she says. ‘Don’t question. Just be. Be that person.’

And so I am. I am eight years old and I am living in Aden. The group plays different characters: my mother, my father, my two brothers, my friends. And then they make me leave the place where I was truly happy.

And I cry and I cry.

Afterwards, the therapist stops me. ‘That was good,’ she says, ‘very productive.’

‘Sure,’ I say. ‘It was good.’

I say it was good, but I don’t think it. I think it was hateful and arch and hideously self-conscious. I’d much rather talk a blue streak about emotional pain than be forced, physically, to inhabit it, let alone act it out.

There have been times in group therapy when I have thought, if one more person talks about my inner child or theirs, I swear I’ll punch them. Or I’ll chuck my toys right out of the pram.

But I cannot deny, much as I would like to (and in that session of drama therapy I would have really, really liked to), that being forced to re-experience old, locked-away pain helps to release it. Not immediately, and not without effort, but little by little it recedes.

Nor did the irony of my behaviour in agreeing with something I did not feel escape me. I saw it as a well-worn paradigm of my emotional patterns. I say one thing, and I feel another. I set myself up for perpetual conflict and where there is conflict, there is pain.

They say that in order to change our behaviour, we first have to understand our behaviour. And so I have to ask myself, how did I get to be like this?

I am in Aden, when I was a child and I was happy.

I trail up the road to school, my feet sliding in the loose sand. The sun is fearsome though it is only six thirty in the morning. School is a short walk from our house, along a potholed road banked by sand.

The tarmac melts in the heat, so it is never smooth. In front of the school is a bigger road. I have to be careful here because big lorries thunder up and down it on their way to and from the army base.

I saw a dead boy on this road. He was six years old and my younger brother’s best friend. A big wheel from an army lorry went over his chest and dirtied his clean white aertex shirt. I watched his mother come up the road, her arms flailing so wildly she looked as if she was drowning. She was screaming and screaming, her mouth a big, black ugly circle.

Otherwise there is no traffic to speak of, just the occasional dusty car.

My parents’ car is a white Ford, with sides like fish fins and red fake leather seats. My brothers and me slide around on the bench seat in the back while Mum drives. She wears cotton shift dresses in bright colours and her silver-grey hair is fixed in a bun on top of her head.

She is not old. She is beautiful. Her hair turned grey when she was very young. I think it makes her look special even though she doesn’t really like it. Mum’s blue eyes are hidden away behind rhinestone-studded glasses. I love those glasses. They’re pearly grey, like the inside of the oyster shells that Dad and I chip off the rocks. I like to eat oysters, standing in the sea. Dad loves oysters too. We are the oyster eaters. The others don’t bother.

Dad says Aden is one of the hottest places on earth, which is why our house is built on stone pillars, lifted high up to catch the breezes that sometimes come. My parents’ bedroom is the only one in the house with air conditioning. I sneak in there sometimes and put my hands against the metal ridges, feeling the cold air freeze my fingers. I don’t think Aden is very hot. It seems just right to me.

I am eight. My dog, Bimbo, is half-corgi and half-sausage dog. The corgi bit of him makes the sausage part quite stout. We also have a giant tortoise, although he’s not exactly ours. He lives in the garden beneath our house. Mum says he’s always been there, even before us. We sit on him sometimes and try to ride him like cowboys but he is so slow that we give up quite quickly.

He once escaped the garden and went and parked himself in a garage behind a big Land Rover, which reversed over him. When we got him back, he was bleeding on the top part of his shell. It got better in the end but the bleeding part came back a lighter colour than the rest, so we always know who he is.

Our house is surrounded by high walls and palm trees. I am constantly in trouble for climbing the walls. I like to sit on top of them and watch people go by. Mum says I’m too much of a tomboy in my baggy cotton shorts, with my bare, skinny brown chest and feet. Once, I sat up there and watched a sandstorm come in, the sky turning rusty brown as the horizon filled with sand, the wind picking it up off the ground as it moved across the desert.

When it came closer, it looked like great big orange clouds were boiling up the sky and we had to go into the house and batten down the windows and doors. For ages, it rained sand but it didn’t fall straight, like rain. It whipped around the house, chased by a shrieking wind. You couldn’t go out and see it. The sand rubbed all your skin right off, like sandpaper, or it got in your eyes so you went blind.

Afterwards the veranda was covered with sand, pushed in drifts up against the walls. The garden looked like a beach. Mum said it was a bore, it took so much cleaning up, but my brothers and I loved it.

My younger brother, Tony, is walking up the road behind me, kicking his feet. He is six and does not want to go to school this morning. He wants to play on his bike. We have a bike-riding place in the area under the pillars in the house. The ground is made of shiny stone so it hurts if you fall off.

It took me ages to learn to ride my bike and take off the balancers. Dad kept saying it was easy, but it wasn’t. Then, one day, just like magic, I took my feet off the ground and I was swooshing around the pillars and belting out into the garden. One day, my brothers strung a piece of rope between the pillars. When I rode past, they pulled it tight. It got me across the neck so I fell off my bike and hurt myself. The rope hurt my neck too. It had a thick pink graze across it.

Tony trails along behind me, his white-blond head bent as he searches for interesting things in the sand. He is cross because I said he had to go to school. Dad has already gone to the office; he leaves at six when Mum is still in her bedroom. We are not allowed to wake her in the morning, it is too early, she says. The servants give us breakfast, which we eat outside on the veranda, where it is coolest.

My older brother Mike, who is ten, is at school in England. I try to imagine him there, but I can’t. He says it is cold all the time, even in the summer. I’ve seen the swimming pool at his school. It’s surrounded by dark green bushes and big trees and there are always leaves in the water which is dark green and slimy. When we went to visit him, I put my hand in the swimming pool. It is really cold but they have to swim in it in the summer, even if it is raining.

It hardly ever rains in Aden.

I was five when Mike left, and he was seven. We stood on the balcony at the airport. The airport has a bright, sharp smell. Dad says it’s the fuel from the aeroplanes. I love that smell. We watched as Mike climbed the rickety metal steps to the aeroplane. It had big propellers, which made him look really small. In the sun, his hair was shiny white and his skinny brown legs looked funny in his new, grey shorts. They are wool so they must be really scratchy. And he has to wear a jacket too, poor thing, except that he says it’s called a blazer.

He did not turn around to wave, or perhaps he did and I did not see him. After he left, I sometimes used to go and sit in his bedroom. It feels lonely and sad without him. I share a room with Tony. He has the bed on the left and I have the one on the right. We keep Michael’s room empty for him, for when he comes home on school holidays.

He’s not the same, though. Not like he was when he lived with us. He’s really quiet and pale from having no sun. Sometimes he gets cross with Tony and me for no reason. He tells us we’re behaving like children. When I say, ‘that’s because we are,’ he thumps me. He never talks about boarding school or England, even if you ask. He says we wouldn’t understand.

I walk through the school gates. They’re not really gates, just a gap in the wall to divide the sand outside from the gardens inside, which are cool and planted with tall palms and banana trees with huge fringed leaves and bright purple bougainvillaea. I sometimes sit there and read before school starts. Reading is the thing I like to do best in the whole world.

The school building is long and low, arranged in a big three-sided square around a smaller square of sandy earth, which is the playground, and the place where we have morning assembly. The classrooms are along each side with verandas in front of them, to shade us from the sun.

At the end is a sort of stage, where the headmaster stands for assembly. We gather in the dusty playground and sing hymns in the burning morning sun, the punched holes in our sandals slowly filling with gritty sand. Sometimes, we put on plays. I was an angel once. I wore a white robe that Mum made from a sheet and a halo made from a wire coat hanger. It dug into my shoulders.

Our desks are arranged in another square inside the classroom with our teacher, Mrs Gould, sitting at the front. Her desk is the only one in her bit of the square so she doesn’t have to turn her head to see us. She never misses a thing so we are very good and quiet. Only the ceiling fans make a noise, like a rickety swoosh. I love the sound of ceiling fans. They make such a slow comforting noise. I like the way they are always there, that they never change.

I like Mrs Gould too even though she is very old and fat and wears her grey-brown hair in a bun. She wears glasses too but they’re not like Mum’s. They’re really serious. She looks very fierce and strict but that’s just the way she looks, not the way she is. She just pretends to be strict. Mum says she dotes on me. I am her pet because I’m clever and always come top of the class. I don’t like to come second. I don’t know why, I just don’t. Mrs Gould wrote in my report, ‘Sally must learn to suffer fools more gladly.’

Mum thinks that’s really funny so I suppose it must be good.

We start school at six thirty and finish at twelve thirty, when we go home. It is too hot to go to school in the afternoon. That’s why we start so early, so we can learn in the cool of the morning. Dad comes home at one, when we eat lunch. It is too hot for him to work too. He says if we lived in England, he would have to work all day. I can’t imagine why but he says it’s because it’s dark in the mornings so you have to start work much later and then it takes all day to catch up. He says it’s the same at English schools.