The Dark Threads (26 page)

I turned and walked a few paces back down the drive, then stopped again, feeling dreadfully ill. Despite the pouring rain, I briefly, though seriously in my desperation, considered spending the night sleeping under a hedge in a field. But what about tomorrow? Where could I go? Where did I belong? I didn't feel I belonged anywhere and wished I could melt away into the ground. Pushing my fringe out of my face I tilted my head upwards to catch the cool, soothing raindrops on my hot, aching forehead. Then, feeling as if I was walking to the gallows, I trudged towards the main entrance.

I rang the ‘Enquiries' bell in the foyer and said to the tall, thin-faced man, presumably a night porter, who peered through a glass partition at me: ‘I'd like to be admitted to this hospital.' The look on his face almost made me smile despite my misery and fears. With widened eyes and a gaping mouth he looked completely gormless. Cautiously, he slid the window open a little further and stared through the gap at me.

‘What is it you want? Who are you?'

‘I'm a day patient,' I explained. ‘My doctor is Dr Shaw. When I saw him earlier today he said I could be admitted and I said … I said I didn't want to be, but … but now I've changed my mind.'

‘Dr Shaw's gone home. You'll have to come back tomorrow.'

I hadn't anticipated any difficulty in getting myself admitted for surely anyone who walked into a mental hospital like that asking to be taken in must be nuts enough to require it immediately.

‘But I'm ill. I'm mentally ill,' I informed him indignantly. Surely this was the Open Sesame password. He scratched his head and stared at me.

‘Oh, can't I be admitted now?' I begged him.

It was unbelievable.
This can't be happening to me, it can't. It's all just a
strange dream
. How many times had I thought that during the past few years? How many times? Now here was I, after all my hard-won insights and firm convictions about the harmfulness of psychiatry, after my previous experiences as an in-patient, after all that optimism and certainty that I was right when I stopped taking the tablets and after, only a few hours earlier, telling Dr Shaw I'd sooner die than ever become an in-patient again – here was I
pleading to be let in.

After asking my name the man at the reception window disappeared, saying he was going to try ringing Dr Shaw at home. He returned about fifteen minutes later and asked, ‘Do you know where Prieston Ward is?' I nodded.

‘Well, go and report to the sister on Prieston. She's been told to expect you.'

‘Thank you,' I said, looking up at him and sharing his obvious relief at solving his little problem.

Thank you? The final irony! Where would it end? Perhaps next I'd be crawling on my knees before my keepers saying: Thank you for teaching me I'm sick, thank you for screwing me up, and thank you, oh thank you, for turning me into a mental patient unable to function in the outside world.

I endured the humiliation of admission procedures quietly and co-operatively. The sister, who looked not much older than me, and another young nurse, giggled at their own private jokes as they frisked me over.

‘I'll have to take that from you but you'll get it back later,' Sister said, pointing to my pendant. I handed it to her and she opened it to look at the photographs inside of myself aged seventeen and Mark, one of my former boyfriends who had bought me that pendant and put our photos inside.

‘Is that really you?' Sister asked.

I felt embarrassed. She might well ask if the long-haired, smiling teenager in the photograph who looked wide awake and full of life was really me. Was it? Oh to be seventeen again, even with all the confusion about life and religion and everything just the same as it was then, I thought wistfully.

‘He's nice. Is he your boyfriend?'

‘No, not now. I haven't seen him for a long time. I … I don't know what made me wear this pendant again,' I stuttered, feeling myself blush.

‘Hey, come and look at this,' she said, calling the other young nurse over.

A tired-looking doctor with an enormous stomach hanging over his trousers arrived to give me a cursory medical examination. For some reason, which no doubt made sense to him, he kept prodding and tapping the soles of my feet as I sat with my legs stretched out on a bed.

‘I thought my head, not my feet, was the problem,' I said in a weak attempt at a joke, which he met with a surly look.

I was given a hospital nightgown to wear, a large, shapeless utility garment with a neckline that hung almost down to my waist. Curling up between the crisp, white sheets of the hospital bed, I fell asleep at once. But somewhere between night and day, I found myself lying in the shadows staring up at a green light, like the one I'd seen a few years ago in hospital. Hospital? Oh, please not the hospital again, I whispered. Please let it be just a bad dream that I'll wake up from soon. I closed my eyes tightly to shut it out but when I opened them again the green light was still there. I blinked, rubbed my eyes and made sure I was awake. But that green light was still there. It really
was
there.

Perhaps I'll
never
be able to get away from this place, I thought, as an icy breeze wafted over me, chilling my bones.

CASE NO. 10826

The few days she spent at the Y.W.C.A. proved to be an intolerable strain because she felt isolated and alone and could not mix with the large number of girls and young women. She finally ran away in desperation and could not face a return to the situation at the hostel.

Dr Shaw

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

T
HERE WAS ONE FAMILIAR
face in Prieston Ward: Elsie, whom I'd played draughts with on my first day at the day hospital. She was in a confused, restless state: rocking, mumbling to herself and seemed afraid, agitated.

‘Hello, Elsie,' I said, sitting beside her in the day room after breakfast and gently stroking her hand. She calmed down but stared at me blankly. Then her face lit up in recognition.

‘Oh, hello, Jean. Have you come to see me?'

‘I've come to join you,' I replied.

A nurse pushed the drugs trolley into the room. I was given vitamin and iron pills. And Melleril. I didn't feel strong enough to attempt to refuse the Melleril and, anyway, I was unsure now that I should. Although still keen to be free from drugs, it had occurred to me that ceasing abruptly was not a wise method.

The patients in Prieston were all elderly women, except for Katie, Anita and myself. Katie, a long-haired, jeans-clad teenager, carried a denim shoulder bag covered in brightly coloured little round stickers depicting a funny smiling face and the words: ‘Smile, God Loves You!' Anita, a wife and mother, perhaps in her late thirties, sat silently staring into space most of the time, but occasionally she would turn to me and say: ‘I don't want any treatment. I've never been right since I had ECT.'

Lisa sat smiling to herself, while Hilda, a small, plump woman, kept pulling up her wrinkled stockings and saying to anyone and everyone: ‘Do you want a mint?' Louise sometimes exploded with, ‘Oh shut up about mints, Hilda,' but most of the time nobody took any notice of Hilda's litany. Edith kept saying, ‘I shouldn't be in here.' She, too, was ignored except by Louise who responded every now and then with, ‘For God's sake, Edith, stop moaning. You've as much reason as any of us to be in here.'

‘No, I shouldn't be here. I shouldn't,' Edith retorted indignantly. She paused. ‘I'm scared of the outside world.' If she wasn't telling us that she shouldn't be in here, she was telling us that she was scared of the outside world.

Agnes kept acting like one possessed. It was a belief of my old Pentecostal church that evil spirits can possess people and speak through them. Although on the one hand this seemed like superstitious nonsense to me, sometimes I had to wonder. Agnes was a small, shrunken, hunch-backed woman. She would sit for hours slapping her head with her hand, saying ‘Damn you, God! Damn you, God! Damn you!' in a deep voice that sounded different from the pathetic voice which sometimes pleaded, ‘Leave me alone, go away,' in between the curses against God and the string of obscenities that poured forth. Once, after the ‘Damn you, God!' had been going on loud and long, Agnes stared across at me and ‘the voice' that had just been cursing God cried out: ‘It's all right for that young girl over there.' Agnes was pointing across directly at me but her eyes looked unseeing; I'd heard she was almost blind. ‘It's all right for her,' the deep voice continued. ‘Hers is only for a time, but ours is for eternity.'

Could it be possible that demons, jealous demons, were speaking about me, saying that my suffering was only for a time but they would be banished to hell for all eternity? Or was that a very sick way to think? I decided I'd better try to push these thoughts from my mind, along with the thoughts about psychiatry doing me harm, until I felt stronger. I would think about it all later, but I knew that now, while walking a tightrope across a dark chasm, was not the right time. All I had to do at present while Agnes was ranting and raving at me, while all around me was darkness and confusion, was to look straight ahead and concentrate on keeping my balance, retaining my sanity.

Anita asked me the way to the toilet and when I replied, ‘About halfway down that corridor and it's on your right,' she waved her hand and asked hesitantly in hushed, self-conscious tones, ‘Is that my right?' Later that day, while washing the mountains of crockery after dinner with several other patients, Anita picked up a damp dishcloth and began to ‘dry' the plates with that, before turning to whisper to me, ‘Is this a tea-towel?'

‘No, this is a tea-towel,' I replied, handing her a spare one from the radiator, but my brain was so fuddled that I found myself looking at the dishcloth and thinking ‘Dishcloth? For washing up?' and then at the tea-towel and thinking, ‘Tea-towel? For drying? Yes, I
am
right.' And I realised how much Anita, too, was probably painfully aware of her confusion, aware that part of her mind wasn't functioning properly, scared that she didn't know where the toilet was or how to distinguish between dishcloths and tea-towels. She glanced at me with eyes that showed the humiliation of being unsure, of having to ask; the pain and fear of feeling your mind is disintegrating, your whole world is crumbling. I knew I could so easily fall from the tightrope to land on the same side as Anita but, fortunately, I managed to keep my balance.

Dr Copeland and Mr Jordan used to tell me I was different from the other patients. But now I had to ask myself, was I
really
different? I could see so much of myself in the others. In patients such as Edith saying ‘I shouldn't be here'; in patients such as Anita saying she didn't want any treatment and hadn't been right since having ECT; in patients such as Katie who wanted to believe in a God who loved her. And it didn't stop there. No matter how bizarrely a patient talked or behaved, I could see in each one of them an uncanny resemblance to some facet of myself.

I was sitting among some elderly patients who might be hospitalised until they escaped in death and, seeing in them a reflection of myself, I was thinking my situation was as hopeless as theirs. But then the mirror image faded as I realised that at least one big tangible difference between them and me was that they were old and I was young. My life stretched out in front of me; I might have over seventy years of it left. I wasn't ready yet to give myself up for dead.

I went across to the OT block before Sister had a chance to ask me why I wasn't there. Everyone was sitting on wooden fold-up chairs in the hall. The Head Therapist was waving her arms about at the front leading a sing-song, accompanied by another therapist playing the piano, to the sound of lots of rattling cans. Each patient was holding two cans.

‘Come along now. Let's have you all singing and rattling your cans in time to the music.'

I took my place among the other patients. A therapist handed me a song sheet from the musical
The King and I
and two Pepsi cans filled with something that rattled. So there I was sitting rattling my tin cans, asking myself for the hundredth time how this could be happening to me, and singing about not letting anyone suspect that I'm afraid.

We stopped for a tea break and a tall, thin woman, who was bald except for a few wispy tufts on top of her head, rushed up and flung her arms around me.

‘Jean! Oh, hello, Jean. It's so good to see you.'

I looked at her, trying in vain to recollect who she was.

‘You don't recognise me, do you?' she asked, looking a little hurt. ‘Oh, Jean, it's me. Georgina.'

‘Georgina! But I thought …'

‘You thought I'd snuffed it, didn't you? I was in a coma for ages, but here I am. Back from the grave.'

Back from the grave seemed an apt description for someone who looked more like a walking corpse than the Georgina I'd known. She pulled a chair up and brought her cup of tea over.

‘The doctors didn't expect me to live,' she said. ‘When I came out of the coma Dr Shaw was bending over me saying I was the luckiest person alive because I'd pulled through against the odds. Lucky? Why can't they understand that I want to die? I think people should have the right to take their own lives if they want to. Don't you think so, Jean?'

Good old Georgina was forcing my brain to creak into action. A brain that could barely manage to think further than dishcloths and tea-towels was being pushed back into thinking about the deeper issues of life and death.

‘Perhaps so,' I said slowly, pulling my thoughts together and trying to sort out my views. ‘If I had a terminal illness that was leading to a slow, agonising death, I'd like to have the right to speed things up a bit if I chose. But don't you think when you're feeling better, you might be glad they didn't let you die? I know it's awful to feel depressed but these feelings can pass.'

Georgina looked thoughtful. She shook her head. ‘If I decide I want to die, I should have the right to kill myself. Oh well, here's to another failed attempt.'

I wondered if it wasn't so much that she'd attempted to kill herself and failed, but rather that she'd decided to take all the risks but allow fate to make the ultimate decision. How much longer could she go on playing Russian roulette with her life?

My parents came to visit me. Brian brought them in his battered old Mini. I saw Brian only briefly when it was time for my parents to leave. He stood looking around the ward and I saw him watching Agnes banging her head. I thought Brian's face showed a mixture of embarrassment and curiosity. He seemed anxious to leave.

On another visit my father came alone. We sat facing each other at a Formica-topped table in the dining room where patients normally sat with their visitors. He began telling me his troubles: how Brian and Mum were getting on his nerves and so on. My expression might have made him realise that I didn't want to hear all that. He stopped. ‘But I shouldn't be burdening you with
my
troubles now, should I?'

After an awkward silence he put his hand on the table and moved it along in crab-like motions. ‘Look, Jean. I've brought my pet crab to see you.'

‘Dad! I'm not a child any more,' I said coldly.

He looked hurt. I felt guilty, knowing he'd meant well. We sat in silence while I stared miserably at the now collapsed crab lying flat on the table.

Celia, my newest friend who I'd met through Mandy, visited before leaving for Paris with her fiancé. The following day Celia's sister, Helen, came to see me, much to my surprise. I'd only met her once before when I'd had tea at Celia's house. She was such a warm, friendly person that my shyness with her soon melted. We planned to go to a beginner's course of dancing lessons when I left the hospital. When I left the hospital … My optimism grew. Things were going to be all right.

Mandy wrote to me. She'd just got engaged and her letter was full of happiness as she described her ring and wedding plans. She said she wanted me, her best friend, to be a bridesmaid and that I'd better hurry up and get out of hospital so I could go for my dress fitting.

‘Does anyone want a mint?' piped up Hilda.

‘Yes please. I'll have a mint,' said Ada, a new patient.

I broke off from reading Mandy's letter to watch as I'd been wondering before what would happen if somebody took Hilda up on her offer. Ada came over to her holding out her hand for the mint.

‘You can't have one,' Hilda retorted indignantly.

The two women glared at each other, then Louise intervened.

‘If you've got some mints, Hilda, then give Ada one. Have you got any or haven't you?'

‘No, I haven't,' replied a subdued Hilda. Louise could be quite formidable.

‘Well, why do you keep asking people if they want a mint when you haven't got any?' Louise snapped. ‘You're bloody mental. No wonder you're in this place.'

I chuckled to myself, but then another little drama unfolded and this one pained me.

Lisa stood up and announced: ‘Life's too short for arguing, isn't it? Let's have some fun. I'm going to make you laugh.' She danced, clowned about in front of us, told some jokes, tried to organise some party games, while all the time her eyes looked sadder than sad. She got no response from her audience except from Louise who sighed, yawned, and said, ‘Oh for heaven's sake, Lisa, sit down and shut up. Can't you see you're getting on everyone's nerves?'

Lisa continued her comedy routine. Perhaps at some time in her past she'd been the life and soul of the party. Not here. She was the saddest clown I had ever seen. She tried hard to organise some games, tried to get participation from her drugged, unhappy audience, tried hard to make us laugh and it was so sad that it made me feel like crying.

It's all there in a mental hospital: life in caricature; the whole gamut of human emotions. Like Edith, I used to think ‘I shouldn't be here' and, looking back, I don't suppose I should have been. But who should?

For a time, I lived with these people and my fate became entangled with theirs. But only for a time. From the shadows of a mental hospital ward, I listened and waited and watched the world – the world of Agnes, Louise, Edith, Lisa and all the other patients, of the doctors, nurses, bleak corridors, drugs and ECT. That world was painfully confused. It was dark and long and narrow, like a tunnel. But somewhere outside was a different world, bigger and wider with plenty of room for me. I decided that if it still wasn't too late, if I wasn't going to spend the rest of my life in a drugged semi-functioning state, then one day I would write a book about all this.

I leant back in my armchair in the day room and took stock of my life. Now I was back as an in-patient, this time in a ‘chronic' ward where most of the other patients were old women with, seemingly, no hope. They were waiting to die. Whatever aspirations may once have flowered inside them had withered. My heart ached for them but my sympathy, like my good intentions, was no help at all to them and a threat to my own well-being. So I was trying desperately, though somewhat unsuccessfully, to be unaffected by my present surroundings, and to close my eyes and mind to the sadness of those around me.

Sometimes I seemed to be doing extremely well in this respect. I had even got to the stage where I could smile at the jokes in the book Helen had brought me, while the patient sitting next to me was saying repeatedly in a pathetic, pleading voice: ‘Please God, let me die, let me die, I can't bear it, I can't go on …'; while Agnes opposite was banging her head sharply with the palm of her hand, screaming, ‘Damn you, God! Damn you, God! Damn you!'; while Edith, whose vacant, senseless expression cruelly mocked her words, was saying for the umpteenth time to anyone who cared to listen that she most certainly should not be in here, but that she was scared of the outside world.