Coming Undone Read online

  He gestures to my hair, to the bobby pins keeping my beehive erect. ‘No, no, no,’ I say, a little too quickly, suddenly acutely aware of the speed, emphasis, intonation and volume of what I say. Every word. I push the ends of my fingers into my palm to cause me to pause, allow a beat and then say, calmly: ‘They’re not sharp, honestly, they’re just hair grips.’ He looks confused. ‘Um, bobby pins. Please, let me keep them. Look, touch one.’ I pull one out of my hair to show him, handing it over, showing him how to run his finger over the cold, round, perfectly harmless edge. He nods, hands it back and I let out a deep sigh of relief. In truth, it’s probably not entirely harmless. I almost certainly could do something to my body with it. With enough force, will, pressure and impact. But right now, my mind isn’t on gutting myself with a hair grip, but on retaining what is left of my dignity, however tiny the pieces I’m gathering in my palm. As of this moment, my hair, my beehive, the grips holding it all in place, is all I have. I can’t lose it now, the scraps of me.

  He starts to leave, trailing my plastic bag behind him on the floor before pausing. ‘There are no closed doors in here. They must be kept open.’ I nod again. Smile again. And then it’s just me. I sit on the bed, salt on my tongue, swallowing the taste of vomit as it rises to graze the back of my throat. It burns. My eyes burn. My belly burns. The fire fills me, quietly.

  I take my first proper look around the room. I see that my room is for two patients, though the second bed hasn’t yet been slept in and the very few belongings I’ve been allowed to keep are the only ones in the room. There are two desks, two chairs, two thin beds, with white sheets and green blankets tucked in tightly, two glaring strip-lights above. A bathroom with a shower, the plastic yellow cubicle built into the corner of the room, a sink, a mirror and a toilet. I’m so relieved that there’s no one else in the room to witness me stripped back and full of terror. I don’t know if I’ll be joined by a roommate or when. As I do in every room, scared of who or what will come through the door, I take the bed closest to the window.

  Looking up, I see the looming towers that make the shape of New York, the city glimmering and winking through the black wire mesh pulled tight across the window. Every window down the farthest wall is covered in the same black wire mesh. Everything viewed through it has a grey, used-up look. Like it’s been left out in the sun, the colour burned off the top after years of brutal exposure.

  We’re up eight floors high. I think of ripping the mesh open with my fingers and trying to smash through the window with my balled fists. But I don’t. I breathe, consider the new land ahead. Uncharted territory. I’m thirty-four years old and now, I suppose, finally, officially mad.

  I was seven the first time I went mad, I think. Six? Maybe it wasn’t actually the first time. But it was the first time that I remember, remember feeling it, hearing it, being it. The breeze in my belly becoming a squall, picking up scraps that rattled out a new, distorted tune on my ribs. I’d clambered out of the bedroom window of our council house, a window which would come to be tied tightly shut with white shoelaces, to keep me in. Balancing on the ledge, I knew absolutely that I wouldn’t fly, that I would fall. My despair was quieted just for a moment by the thought of my body dropping through the air like a stone, hitting the ground. I remember how the cold air soothed my cheek as I looked out over the houses and gardens that surrounded us. I didn’t look at the ground directly below but knew it was there, could see my body spreadeagled, face-down on the grass, limbs at extraordinary, impossible angles.

  No one tells you how to be mad when you’re six, when you’re seven; no one tells you what it looks like, sounds like, feels like. But no one tells you how not to be, either. Or why you shouldn’t be. I would sneak biros from the dresser drawer, snap them in half and pull the splintered plastic edges down my arms. I watched myself crying in the mirror while 10cc tried to drown out the kids playing outside. They were still too loud. It had been coming a while, even then. How can it have been coming a while? At six, at seven? The pain, the burden, the weight already felt like too much to bear. My slight shoulders buckled and corrected, while I struggled to stay on two feet.

  So, it was no great surprise, really, that I ended up on that ledge. Or that twenty-seven years on, and three thousand miles away, I would end up on another. The wire across the windows replacing the shoelaces that kept me safe when I tried to fall, when I believed I could, would. The pain of the past, shaped and shrouded in black, shaking off the soil I’d buried it under, comes crawling towards me, moaning as it drags and pulls itself along. It inches through the door here on the psych ward and I feel it pulling at my hair, let it loosen the pins I’d just fought desperately to keep.

  I stand at the window, looking at the fluorescent-lit bricks of the building opposite, the outline of the city as it roars and settles. I dream of flying, of being, for the very first time, free – even while all I can hear is the ground rushing towards me.

  CHAPTER 3

  Here’s where it begins. Or rather, here’s where it ends. Six nights prior, in a charmless midtown sports bar, ceiling lights down low, blue LED strip-lights plotting the exact dimensions of the room. Three of the walls are decorated with framed pictures of the city through the ages and neon bar signs depicting bubbles running down the outside of a jauntily angled beer glass, bright green lucky clovers tucked into the corner of the glowing tube.

  I’m here at the invitation of a man I know from back home in England, though barely. He suggested drinks as a guise to ask me for a job. I said yes so I could drink with an excuse and company. As the third pint empties into my throat and the bottom of the glass hits the table, he leaves, to get back to his wife. I stay drinking, without excuse, without company and without question. After three drinks I need none.

  As I swallow more, the crowd blurs and fizzes and rattles around me. I look up and it reaches the very edges of the room: four deep at the bar, every red plastic stool smothered in damp skin and cloth. Everyone is represented: office workers, restaurant servers, shop assistants, management execs, bartenders from other bars down the block. Ice hockey is on every single television screen that papers the wall: the clashing and crashing of sticks and bones blares out in waves, sliced through with screams and whoops from the room with increasing frequency. No time passes; hours disappear, and I look up again and the people have disappeared, dissolving into the air around me. I count the people on one hand, maybe the beginnings of two. Those of us who stayed beyond the acceptable post-work drinking hours and were now into our time. Where conversation isn’t the point. Drinking is. It’s the only point.

  Then, now, nothing.

  Blackouts are a weekly, daily visitor by then. I no longer wait to be seduced; I chase, hunt them down hungrily, teeth, tongue bared. Wine follows whisky follows anything wet and strong until the plug is kicked clean out of the base of my brain. I close my eyes and enjoy the slide, the floor taking off my face.

  Now, then, eyes open. I’m naked in my own bed, blotchy limbs tangled up in stained black sheets. I squint, flinch in the glare of the sunlight snaking through the bars on the window of my third-floor walk-up. My fists closed tight, I’m spreadeagled on the mattress. I’m holding something so hard my fingers have gone white. I uncurl first the left, then the right, and see an orange pill bottle tucked in each. Both are empty; they were full before, a doctor’s order to take one of each a day ignored, not for the first time. Patting myself down, I find a few of the bright blue tablets stuck to my hot skin: jammed against my spine, slipped behind my ear, tucked inside the fold of my damp knee. I pluck them off one by one, put one wobbly foot on the floor and clutch the corner of the mattress to steady me, momentarily. Three more pills scatter beneath my toes, running far and wide in their bid for escape. Apart from the half-handful of plucky desperate deserters, I’ve swallowed down everything in those two bottles, though not a single memory of a gulp remains in my mind, no matter how much I rummage.

  I’m still breathing, still alive, but will
I die today? Tonight? When I next sleep? I’m afraid, suddenly. The urge to vomit is overwhelming and I buckle, my body folding in half at the waist under the sheer force of a heave, my mouth filling with water. I spit it out into my palm before scrunching my hand into a fist; bubbles peek and pop through the gap where my knuckles join. It begins to creep up on me. Somehow, perhaps surprisingly, the thought of dying slowly, painfully, while sobering up terrifies me more than anything else at that moment – including surviving – and I heave, bend, baulk and spit again. My ankles shake and I struggle to stay standing without the wall to hold me.

  Two days earlier, my eyes had opened for the first time to fists full of bottles. But that time, they had kept their contents. By my best guess, my suicidal bent was foiled by a mixture of child-protection caps and unconsciousness. Once I’d realised what I’d almost done, I simply swallowed an extra morning Xanax and put the Prozac and mood stabilisers back on my bedside table where I’d taken them from the night before.

  Waking clutching pill bottles like flares wasn’t the first sign that something was, is, wrong. This low, when it came several weeks ago, had been quick and sticky. But that day, like every day, I’d climbed into my dusty pink shower and stood with my body under the water until the skin over it turned scarlet. At pains, as usual, to stand with my hair kept out, to avoid the panic that overwhelmed me when water went over my head, in my eyes, filled my mouth. Then I patted myself with a towel briefly, pulled clothes from the floor over my damp arms and legs, poured drops into my eyeballs, painted my face bright, pinned my hair up higher and higher, tighter and tighter, and walked out of the door with as straight a back as I could manage. I walked, I smiled, I ate, I worked, I breathed in, I breathed out, I drank, I blacked out. Again, again, again, again, again.

  The weeks before this one were just days and nights of sharp, paralysing fragments of pain. Memories incomplete and scattered in different corners of my brain, some beyond recovery. Most nights were missing, as were some days. The minutes and hours before a blackout and the minutes and hours when emerging from one spent googling methods of suicide:

  ‘Painless suicide’

  ‘Hanging yourself + how to’

  ‘Sleeping pills + number to die’

  ‘How to make a noose’

  ‘Slit wrists + how deep + death’

  ‘Instant death + hanging + height’

  The previous Sunday, I’d blinked awake to find myself at the intersection of a street in the West Village, the green man walking flashing in my eyeline. My feet took me to the sidewalk outside a church, its roof rising up into the deepest blue sky. A priest on the steps, white robes glowing and swaying, beckoning me in. I’d read somewhere that priests could spot those truly in trouble, in real mortal danger, their souls set to be lost without a great, selfless intervention. Even in a crowd of thousands, their pain and peril marks them out, the swarm of black that shifts over their shape as they move. I walked towards him slowly, up the steps. He looked right through me as I passed, not noticing the screams bouncing around inside my mind.

  Was I really here?

  Could he see me?

  Could he see the danger?

  The ledge I was on?

  Please see me.

  Help me.

  Please.

  Father.

  Inside, people swayed and sang, hands held aloft, trying to touch God and bring Him into them. I gripped the seat in front, my hands strangling wood. I sobbed, choked, offered up something like a prayer, or at least a plea, to whoever could hear me. I would do anything. I would become His servant. I would forsake everything if He would help me, if someone, anyone, would help me.

  I stared desperately, helplessly, at the priest, as he showered us with a sermon in the shadow of a crucifix. He didn’t look at me once. The hell burned through me and made me disappear, here, in His house. I would never be saved.

  Now, on this Saturday morning, my options are even more limited than they were that day. Driven by cold fear, I decide that I have no choice but to go to the emergency room. I throw on the nearest clothes I find on the floor, straighten up my hair, swill water around in my mouth and head out of the apartment. I walk to the corner two streets away and hail a yellow taxi with hands covered in dried spit. We speed along and I press my hands against the cab window, straining towards the bright, beautiful sunshine-filled sky.

  ‘Why did you do that?’ the admissions nurse in the ER demands as I stand by her desk, crying, heaving. I shake my head, splattering her paperwork with tears as I do. She stares, unmoved. She’s the first of several people to ask me the same obvious, yet impossible question when I say I believe I have taken two bottles of pills. She glances down at the wet patches on the paper in front of her and looks away again.

  ‘I need your insurance card,’ she says flatly. I slide it over the desk and she takes a photograph with a camera I can’t look directly at.

  I’m taken through to the emergency room, not realising that I am voluntarily walking into a room I wouldn’t be able to walk out of again. ‘Why did you do that?’ asks the second nurse. It becomes more of a complaint, an exasperation, than a question. I shake my head, cry again. I’m given a hospital gown to change into and socks.

  The air is tight and fat and hot as a man screams complaints I can’t understand from behind a half-drawn curtain. A single shoe lies on the floor next to another man, shirtless, in bloodied jeans, handcuffed to the bed, spitting. A prison officer sits and keeps watch on a prisoner being treated in the hospital from a plastic chair nearby. Metal clanks against metal as the prisoner hollers and thrashes and kicks. I put my hands over my ears to quieten the screaming, the sound of desperation and pain that I can’t bear to hear.

  I’m on a stretcher by the nurses’ station, my sobs giving rhythm, a pulse, to the room, which spins. A nurse all in white, with a thick Eastern European accent, leans over my body and takes my arms. She has short, spiky blonde hair. I think about touching it, half move my hand into the expanse between us, and then pull it back again.

  ‘Why did you do this?’ she pleads. ‘I’m not judging you. I don’t know what your problems are. But this is never the answer. Tomorrow is always better.’

  I cry, harder now. She continues, urging me to let God into my heart, and her empathy cuts me open and everything I feel pours out. The machines attached to me beep a tune I don’t recognise as the room turns white and then black and then white and then black. People walk past, bodies grazing the stretcher as they peer at the crying, vomiting woman.

  Then I’m moved into a small cubicle, given some privacy by curtains. My knees press against the white wall, which is scuffed and smeared. I lie there and the doctors pass in a group every hour on the hour – new eyes, same look, same mantra:

  ‘Terri White, thirty-four, overdose while drinking.’

  They sing the same song, each time with the same tone, the same intonation. Te-rri-White-over-dose-while-drink-ing. I sing along; sometimes they’re there to be the chorus, other times I hold the solo alone. I look out and meet their eyes, enjoying the flinch as they look directly at my hard, stained face. I smile at some of them, head swaying to and fro as they break my gaze as soon as they can, a flash of horror touching the corners of their mouths.

  My cubicle mate, just half an arm away, is an elderly woman in a patterned headscarf who burps, coughs and hacks, her ribs revealed on every breath she sucks in. Every breath looks like it may be her last.

  The young mousy-haired doctor who appears by my bed – ‘I’m looking for the overdose lady’ – pushes wirerimmed glasses up her nose as she asks:

  ‘Why did you do this, Miss White?’

  ‘Well, presumably I wanted to die,’ I say.

  I actually want to admit that I can’t say for sure. I remember desire: the desire not to be here, simply not to be anywhere. Not so much a lust for death as a lust for nothing at all. A hunger, a need to be filled with nothing. And the quickest way to get that, to be that, was to die. Could
she not understand that?

  I have never been afraid of dying. But the thought that I could, would, live hundreds, even thousands of days in the same pain I’d spent the hundreds, thousands of days prior to this one in, terrified me. And in truth, so many of life’s choices are simply the triumph of one kind of fear over another. But I don’t say any of this, can’t find the words, can’t make my tongue curl and roll and dart.

  ‘But have you wanted to die?’

  Yes?

  ‘Before, in your life?’

  Yes. Of course.

  ‘Did you want to die then?’

  When?

  ‘Last night.’

  I don’t know. I can’t really remember. I presume so.

  ‘Do you want to die now?’

  What, right now?

  ‘Yes.’

  Well, yes.

  Because right then, I do. I really do.

  Then more questions, a new stranger, who I can only see the outline of: long hair, slim shoulders, thin arms. She says she needs to tick or not tick the boxes that sit on her piece of paper in a list.

  ‘Were you trying to kill yourself?’

  As I’ve said: yes. I presume I was.

  ‘Do you have a history of self-harm?’

  Yes.

  ‘Have you tried to harm yourself before?’

  Yes.

  ‘How many times?’

  Many.

  ‘When?’

  Often.

  ‘Recently?’

  Yes.

  ‘Do you have thoughts of harming other people?’

  No, only myself.

  ‘Do you want to be dead?’

  Yes, right now, I do.

  I answer, slurring my words. The room still swings and sways. Everything lurches. I lurch. I remember most of it, but possibly not all of it. I’m not sure whether I get it all right. Did I tell her of the razor blades I used to open up my thighs with? The skin I sliced through on my arm last year, right through the fat and tissue, that’s still not healed? Of the time, twelve years ago, when three firemen took an axe to my front door? I can’t remember.