The Dark Threads (7 page)

My eyes remained dry; I felt too drugged and distant for tears. I didn't say anything. There seemed nothing left to say.

‘Oh God, I … I'm sorry,' he said standing up. ‘I can't bear it any more.'

I followed him to the door of the ward where we kissed goodbye. Suddenly he took hold of me by the shoulders and shook me: ‘Please, Jean, don't …' His voice faltered but his grip on my shoulders tightened till it hurt. ‘Don't allow this to happen to you.'

With these words he walked out of the ward and out of my life. I never saw him again.

Jackie visited me just once towards the end of my stay. We'd been friends since primary school but now I felt self-conscious with her, aware of how four months in this institution had taken its toll. She didn't disguise her shock at seeing the pathetic, drugged creature I had become.

‘My God, what's happened to you? You're a big fat zombie!' She screwed up her forehead in shocked surprise.

‘Let's go sit down,' I said, nodding to the visiting area. Since I'd greeted her at the door of the ward she'd remained standing there, looking reluctant to come right inside.

We went to sit down and she continued to stare at me. ‘Your eyes are half closed, your speech and movement is all slow, your body is swollen and your face is so bloated you look like you've got mumps.'

‘It's only a temporary thing 'cos of the drugs,' I said, attempting to make light of it.

‘But, Jean, I've never seen a person change so much and in such a short time as you have since coming in here. I'm absolutely staggered.'

‘Hey, steady on, it's OK, Jackie,' I said, smiling weakly. ‘I'm still the same person underneath.' I was desperate to convince myself of that. But I feared I would never be the same again.

And when the transformation was complete; when I had lost my job, my boyfriend, my self-esteem, and had turned into a fat, spotty, zombie-like creature who moved and thought slowly, when I had become withdrawn even with my closest friends (with whom I'd never been shy before), when I felt worse than I had ever felt in my rotten, lousy, fucked-up life and wished I could sleep for ever in a deep, dreamless kind of slumber, they finally decided I was ready to be discharged.

CASE NO. 10826

Progress:

None. There was no essential change in the patient's state in spite of treatment.

Condition on Discharge

Not improved.

Final Diagnosis

Schizophrenia.

Dr Sugden

PART TWO

THE TUNNEL

Selves diminished
we return
to a world of narrowed dreams
piecing together memory fragments
for the long journey ahead.

Leonard Frank, from ‘Aftermath'

CHAPTER SEVEN

I
AWOKE AT SEVEN
but there was no green light above my bed and no uniformed figures reminding a sleepy ward that it was time to get up. My parents and brother were out, doing their bus-conducting shifts. I turned over, and the next time I awoke it was three in the afternoon. Hunger brought me downstairs just long enough to eat several slices of bread and jam. I swallowed the prescribed dosage of pills, climbed back into bed and pulled the sheets over my head. This is how I spent most of my time during the first days, weeks – how long? – following my discharge.

I couldn't help but reduce my drugs, being often asleep when a dose was due, so gradually their knockout effect eased up a bit. One day while hovering in a twilight world between sleeping and waking I thought about Danny's last words to me: ‘Don't allow this to happen to you.' I wondered if I forced myself to go through the motions of living, something might connect and I'd come alive again. With this in mind, I dragged myself into a sitting position, disentangled myself from the dirty, dishevelled sheets and covers, and swung my legs over the side of the bed.

The sight of my dirty arms and legs filled me with repulsion and I was about to go to the bathroom to have the wash I so badly needed when, catching sight of myself in the full-length wardrobe mirror, I gasped.
It wasn't me!
A mental patient wearing my nightgown stared back. She had heavy-lidded, dull eyes set in a bloated face, a floppy fringe and long, straight, greasy hair which hung lankly down to her waist. A big, red lump stood out angrily on her chin and another on her neck. She was a very fat girl.

I backed away, my face still riveted to the girl in the mirror, then hurriedly pulled open a drawer and fished out a crumpled newspaper cutting of an article I'd written a few months before going into hospital. Below the words ‘“Let's bridge that age gap” says teenager' there was a photograph of a slim, attractive, smiling teenager with
my
name underneath it. Yes, this was me: the girl in the photograph. And these were my clothes – the size 12 mini-skirts and dresses, which hung lifelessly in the wardrobe, were made to fit a neat, slim figure. I stared back at the fat, ugly girl in the mirror and tears sprang to her eyes.

‘That's not me,' I said, wiping my moist eyes on the back of my hand, while the girl in the mirror did likewise. ‘That girl who is watching me and mimicking my every movement is not me.'

‘I
can't
go out tonight. I look a sight and none of my clothes fit me,' I lamented to my mother as I sat on the settee one Saturday afternoon drying my hair, my old blue dressing-gown pulled tight round my swollen body. In an attempt to rejoin the world of ‘normal' teenagers, I'd arranged to meet Mandy that evening.

‘Listen, love, why don't you go into town and buy some new clothes?' Mum suggested. ‘You can buy a bigger size until your other clothes fit you again.'

Until my other clothes fit me again? I brightened up at the thought that perhaps this fat, ugly, dozy, pathetic creature I was learning to live with had only taken up temporary residence in me. Mum got out her purse and pushed some money into my hand. ‘Here, love, take this and go buy yourself summat.'

I went outside feeling like a toad that had crawled out of a hole, blinking uncertainly in the bright sunlight. On the bus I thought the conductor kept staring at me. Had he seen me before and was surprised at how my appearance had changed? Perhaps my brother had told him I was a mental hospital patient. Brian had said everyone working on this bus route knew. Or was I getting paranoid and just imagining the conductor was staring?

In a boutique I tried on a skirt two sizes larger than my normal size but even that was too tight. I'd never before had a weight problem, except for a slight worry that I was too thin. As I returned the skirt to the rack, a young assistant approached me. Her short, psychedelic-patterned mini-dress hugged her sylph-like body and revealed long, slender legs. ‘Would you like to try it on?'

‘I have done, but it's too tight. I'm just putting it back.'

‘The larger sizes are over there,' she said, pointing to the racks cruelly marked ‘Outsize'. ‘Would you like to look …'

‘No, I'll leave it, thank you,' I said abruptly, hurrying from the darkened boutique clutching tightly to remnants of battered vanity. Being fat was a new experience for me.

I went to a large department store and quickly bought a cheap skirt made with ample material and an elasticated waist. I'd always enjoyed buying clothes before, but this shopping expedition was painful. As a reward for getting a tiresome chore over with, I went in the coffee shop and treated myself to a large cream bun, and as soon as I finished eating it I bought another one. Who cared?

I couldn't get too hung up about losing my looks once I got over the initial shock because what worried me most was the death-like change that had taken place on the inside.

No, Dr Sugden, you were wrong to think that there was ‘no essential change in the patient's state in spite of treatment'. By the time you were writing this in my case notes I had, indeed, been changed. Wholly and deeply and for ever changed. If the treatment brings greater problems and pain than what is supposedly being treated, isn't there something wrong, Dr Sugden? Isn't there something horribly wrong?

It was hard going out in the evenings again, trying to pick up the threads of my life where I'd left them four months ago. The world of pubs, discos and nightclubs still seemed shallow but I daren't withdraw from the social scene any longer in case I lost touch with my friends. Friends. How precious they were to me. Friends like Mandy and Jackie. How much I needed them. How much I owed them. Without friends, I don't think I could have survived.

Flower Power was still alive in the spring of 1969. Long-haired hippies wearing bells and flowers around their necks pointed the way to a glorious ‘alternative' society. It didn't seem as if almost two years had passed since the ‘Summer of Love' when Scott Mackenzie topped the charts with ‘San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Flowers in Your Hair)'. Everyone seemed to think this was a wonderful era. Before hospital I'd often failed to see what there was about the sixties to get so excited about, but at least there'd been some fun times too. Not so now. The drugged and electro-shocked me found life more bewildering and depressing than ever.

I tried to tell myself that our generation was lucky to be freed from the sexual hang-ups and inhibitions of previous generations. We could carry a condom in our handbags. Or, better still, take the pill. Have an abortion. Experiment with drugs and blow our minds. Wow! Wasn't it great to be a teenager in the Swinging Sixties? But, having grown world-weary beyond my years, I didn't need to scratch far below the surface to see the pain and sadness beneath the glamour.

Sitting in a pub with Mandy one evening she looked at me sadly and said, ‘You're only a shadow of the old Jean I knew.'

‘Quite a large shadow though,' I laughed.

Mandy smiled. ‘Well, it's good to see you haven't lost your sense of humour. I still keep seeing flashes of that. But tell me what happened. What was it like in the hospital?'

‘I didn't exactly enjoy it,' I said flippantly. ‘Cor, look at that lad over there. He's dishy, isn't he?'

I didn't want to talk about the hospital, didn't even want to think about it just now. The feeling that I'd been violated and perhaps permanently damaged was more than I could bear.

‘I don't understand,' Mandy said. She put down her glass of lager and stared at me. ‘You seemed OK until you went in there and then you became all slowed down and it's as if the drugs are draining the life and soul out of you. But what's supposed to be wrong with you? I mean what are they treating?'

‘Mental illness, I suppose,' I offered by way of explanation.

‘But you're not mentally ill,' Mandy said.

‘I think perhaps I am,' I said slowly, tracing the design on a beer mat with my finger. I wondered if this was how members of Alcoholics Anonymous felt when they first publicly admitted to being an alcoholic.

Mandy looked at me long and hard. ‘I'll never believe that about you,' she said with feeling. ‘Never.'

I don't know if Mandy's faith in my mental health would have wavered if she'd seen me in the café or at the church youth meeting, around this time.

I was eating with my family in a fish and chip café when Brian tried to rope me into a nonsensical argument. I must be crazy, he said, because I'd been in a ‘loony bin' so that proved it and everyone he'd told thought so too. When he got tired of the hospital ‘digs', he went on to say that I didn't belong in our family and it was time I learnt I wasn't wanted. Throughout the meal he carried on like this while I just continued to eat, quietly listening in my drugged and ECT-induced state of apathy.

Recently Brian had heard me mention to Dad I'd seen Eileen Barrett, a pastor's daughter, in a pub – very unusual for someone from that Pentecostal church. Brian didn't even know Eileen, but after berating me at length for going to dance halls and pubs, he added: ‘Eileen Barrett doesn't go in pubs.' I don't know why after not reacting so far to Brian's silly talk, this finally ignited my flattened emotions. I flung the spoonful of sugar I'd been about to put into my coffee across the table into his face, along with the spoon, and shouted: ‘YOU'RE FUCKING STUPID!'

The sound of knives and forks scraping plates and the chatter in the café ceased abruptly while people turned and stared.

‘Jean, cut that language out!' my mother hissed, her face turning to the colour of the tomato sauce.

‘I'll kill you!' Brian said as he tried to get the sugar out of his hair where it had settled like dandruff.

Some elderly ladies a few tables away stared at me in disgust before resuming eating with much tutting, head-shaking and grumbling about not knowing what the world was coming to these days with foul-mouthed young people like me around.

‘I'm going now. I've never been so shown up in my life,' Mum said, standing up. ‘I'm disgusted with you, Jean.'

‘It was Brian's fault,' Dad said. ‘I don't know how Jean managed to ignore him for so long.'

But Brian wasn't to blame for the incident at church. This took place one Wednesday evening when nostalgic longing for my old beliefs drew me to the youth meeting. Maybe I was hoping for a miracle to dispel my doubts and make me as happy, innocent and uncomplicated as the teenagers there seemed to be. But when Mr Roberts began talking about God's love, I felt so isolated and pained. No matter how much I wanted to believe, I couldn't help but see countless flaws in Christian beliefs. Unable to contain myself, I interrupted the meeting cutting off Mr Roberts mid-sentence by blurting out: ‘IT'S A LOAD OF RUBBISH!'

Heads turned and a moment of uneasy silence followed as in the café. Mr Roberts gave me a quick but searching look. He proceeded to carry on with the meeting but was flustered. I'd once heard him give his testimony saying he used to stammer but God had helped him overcome it. He hadn't stammered for the past thirty years, Praise the Lord, he had said. As he stammered his way through the next few sentences of his talk about God's love I was too embarrassed and ashamed to look at him. Nobody could have been more thankful than me when he managed to regain his composure and normal speech. I had no difficulty in not speaking for the rest of the meeting: I was trying not to cry.

As soon as I could do so without attracting further attention to myself, I left the church and hurried away into the darkness. I roamed the streets aimlessly, thinking about how things at church hadn't changed since I used to enjoy going with Jackie. The church, the preaching and the people were the same. It hadn't made any difference how much I'd wept and struggled and tasted something of a world of despair I barely knew existed before. How could everything else be the same when the sun and moon had fallen out of the sky, plunging my world into darkness? How could everything else be the same when I had changed so much?

Sometimes I wondered if Dad thought about the faith we'd once shared. He'd always said he was leaning on me, but now I didn't feel strong enough to keep myself out of the gutter, never mind lift anyone else out of it. Dad was spending a lot of time with his mate Joe, driving around the red-light areas. He showed me a photo of a teenage prostitute called Nicola lying naked on a bed in a provocative position.

‘She tells me she only does it 'cos she needs the money,' he said.

I stared at this photo and wondered if Nicola was happy with her way of life, if she ever had thoughts and feelings and conflicts like mine. Well, why not? We were both products – or victims? – of the same society.

‘Dad, do you remember …' I said, as I handed back the photo. A tear rolled silently down my face. ‘Do you remember when we used to pray together?' I caught the tear on my tongue and tasted salt.

‘Yes, I remember,' he said, slipping his warm hand into mine and squeezing it tightly. He sighed. ‘Something's gone awfully wrong, hasn't it? But yes, Jean, I do still remember.' And there were tears in his eyes, too.

One afternoon when my parents and brother were out on their bus-conducting shifts, Pastor West turned up unexpectedly. I was lying on my bed, zonked out on Melleril. Recognising his car through my bedroom window, I sleepily made my way downstairs to unlock the door. I was wearing grubby pyjamas and my old blue dressing-gown. My hair, in need of washing and combing, hung down in greasy bacon strings. Aware I looked a mess, I could hardly meet his gaze and I was further embarrassed and ashamed by the state of the house, which I had made no effort to clean or tidy.

‘Would you like some coffee? I was just going to make some.'

I seemed to be moving, talking and thinking all in slow motion, so I made my coffee extra strong in the hope that it would quickly revive me.