Coming Undone Page 3

  I’m so away from myself, my mind, my good sense, that it doesn’t occur to me to lie. I’m convinced that she can see straight into my heart, straight into my truth. She knows what I’ve done: of the booze and bleeding and pills. The dreams of rope and razors.

  Hours pass, the doctor returns, an apparition with a frown. What she says doesn’t make much sense the first time.

  ‘The combination of pills you’ve taken doesn’t normally kill you, as an overdose, actually,’ she says, underlining my accidental failure. ‘But we need you to stay in for observation. Because it can, sometimes, cause arrhythmia and sudden death, some hours later.’

  I weigh up what she’s saying. Consider it, figuring we’re talking a few hours, tops.

  ‘OK. But I can go home then, yes?’

  A quick calculation reassures me that I’d be out for Sunday brunch, a solo topping-up occasion, and then work as normal on Monday. There’ll barely be a dent in my normal life, my normal schedule. Things will go back to as they were. As they are. Whatever that is.

  ‘Well, the cardiac observation is for twenty-four hours. But then, when a bed is available, you’ll be transferred to the psychiatric ward.’ Do I laugh? I think I might laugh. She pauses, frowns, harder now.

  ‘We cannot let you go,’ she says slowly, while looking at me like I’ve taken leave of any senses I have remaining. I let out a choked cry, a sound I can’t place or identify coming from the back of my throat. I’m shaking my head.

  ‘No! No: it was an accident. There’s no need.’

  ‘You said you wanted to die, Miss White.’

  ‘I didn’t know what I was saying. I feel better now. It was an accident. It’s so silly! I just want to go home.’

  ‘You can’t. You’re not. You won’t. The psychiatric team have made the decision.’

  ‘Well, I’ll sign myself out and take full responsibility. You can’t stop me.’ I try to stand.

  She steps forward. ‘We can and we will.’

  My throat tightens.

  ‘What?’

  My voice breaks.

  ‘Legally, we can and will be holding you for a minimum of seventy-two hours.’

  She explains that the psychiatric ward is fit to burst. That the seventy-two hours can’t begin until I arrive in the ward, under specialised care. She can’t tell me how long I’ll be waiting. But, for now, and until then, I’d be on twenty-four-hour, one-on-one observation.

  I open and close my mouth noiselessly. I think about the goldfish I had as a kid that I would take out of its bowl and pop on the silver corrugated drain by the sink, fascinated by its fight for life. How helpless, desperate and wild-eyed it looked in the face of death. Right at that moment, clutching the wall, cold and hard and rigid under my grasp, I wish I had died. I feel like I am dead. This can’t be life. This can’t be my life. I won’t survive it.

  The doctor writes as I continue to gasp and gulp. Then the Suicide Preventer appears: the soft-faced woman whose job it is to ensure I don’t try again. The first woman in a long line of women. She arrives silently, takes her seat by the curtain, picks up the notepad and watches, constantly, writes, constantly. She looks on as I cry, close my eyes tight.

  She’s small and old and frail. I think of how tiny she looks. How fragile. I could overpower her. I have to get out of here and she’s the only thing between me and the world, between me and freedom. I don’t want to hurt her. I won’t. But I want desperately to run. To say I need the toilet and then just keep walking, a half-pace quicker and quicker until I’m breaking into a run and smashing through these walls until I’m out on the street, feet pounding the sidewalk.

  But even as my mind whirs and plots, I know that they know where I live, where I work, what my life looks like. I filled in too many forms. They will hunt me down and scoop me back up before I can enjoy the true taste of freedom. Things may, unbelievably, get even worse.

  Hours pass, the sick sinks even further into my gums. I’m silent and still, eyes laser-focused on the wall. When I eventually do need to go to the toilet, I stand up. Start to walk. She follows me, just a couple of steps behind. When we get to the door of the disabled bathroom, I turn to face her.

  ‘Can you wait outside, please?’

  ‘I’m sorry, no.’ She shakes her head sadly. ‘Everywhere you go, I go.’ A pause as she waits for the penny to descend. ‘Everywhere.’

  ‘But I really want my privacy,’ I plead. ‘Please.’

  She shakes her head and writes down some words I can’t see on the sheet of paper she’s still carrying with her. She lays the pencil to rest.

  ‘No. Let’s go.’

  I open the door and we walk in together. My feet fight to run, twitch against the fabric of their socks. She locks the door and stands facing me. There’s a small square mirror above the sink and as I turn to face her, I glance at my unrecognisable face, now pink, shiny and swollen, distorted like a party balloon.

  I lift my gown, squat and sit on the toilet seat. I see the red emergency cord hanging down just an inch to my right. I want to pull it. I want it to set me free. Rip a hole in the ceiling that I can fly through, taking off the roof with me. But I stay with my feet on the ground, against white tiles. I open my bladder and pee.

  Pssssssssst.

  My pee turns the water in the bowl bright yellow. The seconds pass.

  Psssttttttttttttttttttt.

  The red from my chest climbs up my throat like ivy and up over my face. I look at my Suicide Preventer and she meets my eyes, holds my gaze. I’m humiliated. I’m newly fucking furious.

  As I sit with my thighs spread, the dark hair between them exposed while I lock eyes with a stranger, I’m aware of how desperate my situation is. How alone I am. I have no phone, no laptop, no numbers and no way of letting anyone know where I am. How would I raise the alarm? And if I did, who could help me, who would help me?

  New York, a city in which I have always felt insignificant, small, a nothing, has swallowed me whole, without care. And there’s no indication when, or if, it will bother spitting me back out.

  CHAPTER 4

  I’m back in my cubicle, wearing a hospital gown, no underwear, with a blanket draped loosely over me. I clasp it between my legs tightly, seeking any comfort I can get. I’m waiting for my ‘transport’ to the cardiac ward. I wait and wait and don’t know how many hours pass as I face the wall, the colour sucked out of my entire body. My chest spasms, contracts, expands, shrinks, flexes, tightens until I think it’s going to split wide open.

  I trace scratches on the wall – the cracks, the point at which the paint splinters and flakes. My right hand holds my legs, touches the coarse hair. I’m trying to become smaller until I disappear entirely. I look at the thin gap, the few inches of space between the bed and the wall, imagining my body slipping down, disappearing completely from view until they – the doctors, the nurses, the other patients – can’t see me, can’t find me.

  The despair and fear comes in waves. The sobs stick inside my windpipe, are occasionally spat out. I put my hand over my mouth, trying desperately to keep my panic private. My breath slows; my lungs fill again. For a moment, three seconds at the most, I’m calm, but it’s an expression of optimism and hope that I can’t sustain.

  As the hands of the clock turn and whir, my nameless, faceless Suicide Preventer is replaced by another. And another. They all look the same. Worried middle-aged women, anxiety stitching the wrinkles into the brows. I look an inch to the left of their face, or an inch to the right. I can’t bear to look directly at them and see the sadness, pity, confusion, disappointment painted on their faces, sinking their eyes deep in their faces.

  They eventually blur and shimmer and morph into one woman, who sits at the end of my bed on the same small plastic chair tucked into a corner, the drawn curtain brushing her arm. I wonder who she is, who loves her, whom she loves, where she goes home to. Whom she’ll tell about the woman who cried and spat and tried to obliterate herself.

  In her l
ap, she clutches the clipboard that they’ve all been clutching, that holds several sheets of white, lined paper that she must fill in constantly, with tiny words in neat, tight handwriting, covering every movement, every twitch, sniff, glance, every act of mine, however small, however seemingly insignificant. She fills it with wave upon wave of black spidery script, her hand rising and falling with my heartbeat. Later, when I’m more present, I’ll become conscious of seeming or not seeming mad, but right now I’m so far away that I don’t know and don’t care how I seem. It feels so unrelated to me.

  More patients come in to share my cubicle, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for hours. I don’t look at them, acknowledge their presence, their faces beige flat circles with no features.

  After some hours in the smudge, the weaving blur, I’m told that I’m about to be taken to the cardiac ward for monitoring. I’ll be given medication to detox from alcohol while I’m there, offsetting the vomiting, the shaking, the other physical withdrawal symptoms. I want to walk, but they say I must be pushed and I must be lying in the bed. In a haze of barely remembered, barely registered set of coordinated movements, mostly by other people, I’m moved out of the ER, through the chained, cussing, coughing of the men I pass, to another floor.

  My wheels come to a rest and I’m parked in the bay closest to the corridor, artificial yellow light flooding in from two sides: from the streets through the window and from the corridor just to my side. Almost immediately, a slight man with sandy hair comes into view, tossing a small rubber ball against the squeaky floors over and over again.

  Bounce, slap, bounce, slap, bounce, slap bounce, slap slap, bounce bounce.

  He strides up and down the corridor, past the window facing into the corridor, peers in, the ball a distraction while he hunts out information. I avoid his eyes and draw the curtains.

  The current Suicide Preventer is installed at the end of my bed. I look at her, seeking solidarity against Rubber Ball Guy who is already testing my broken mind and patience. She looks my way, not quite meeting my eyes. I stare harder. She doesn’t respond, doesn’t acknowledge the noise that is repeating and sinking inside my brain, burrowing down.

  Slap, slap, bounce, bounce bounce slap.

  I move my hands to my head as it repeats and repeats and repeats, echoes in my ears. She studies my reaction, writes, pauses, watches, writes some more. I have my first flash of panic about what she’s writing, recording. What if she doesn’t get that my enraged look is about how really fucking irritating Rubber Ball Guy is? What if she doesn’t see and hear it like I do? And just thinks that I’m, well, nuts? Because I am, right? In here, to her, right now, I’m mad. The gown, the band around my wrist, the file tucked in the end of the bed, they all tell her the same basic, conclusive story: I’m mad. Not to be trusted. Not with myself, not with anyone.

  And suddenly I know what my job is. I have to do everything in my power not to seem mad. My face slips into a mask, hardens and I stare at the wall over her shoulder impassively, without evident emotion.

  I fall asleep and when I wake up it’s three a.m. on the ward. My bed is at the exact point that darkness from the sky and light from the corridor collide, but it’s not this that wakes me up. It’s the noise coming from the bed next to mine, which has had the curtains drawn around it since I’ve arrived. All I’ve seen is scuffling feet; all I’ve heard is whispered conversations. But right now, all I hear is:

  Beep, beep-beep, beep, beep, beep-beep, beep, beep-beep, beep.

  I sit up, now fully awake, irritated. ‘Ugh, that noise,’ I say to the new Suicide Preventer, a different one to the one who was at the foot of my bed when I went to sleep.

  ‘Noise?’ she asks.

  I nod. ‘Can you hear it?’ My hand is to my ear, straining.

  She frowns, asks in broken English, ‘You hear something?’

  I nod again. ‘Yes! Do you hear it?’

  ‘Voices?’ she asks.

  The woman in the cubicle had been talking to the nurse. ‘Well, yes, sometimes, but not right n …’ I start to say, stopping as she immediately starts to write, mouthing quietly to the rhythm of her hand movements.

  I settle back into my pillow and then realise what she thinks I just said. ‘Hang on! No!’ I spring up. ‘Not voices!’

  ‘You hear voices,’ she says.

  ‘No, no, I don’t hear voices! I mean the beeping of the machine, and the voices as they talk.’ This is not helping. ‘But I don’t hear voices that aren’t there!’

  She looks at me quizzically.

  ‘Please!’ I say, trying not to scream. ‘Please, if you’ve written “hears voices” can you please cross it out? I definitely don’t hear voices. Not like that.’

  She makes a motion to scratch something out but no ink leaves her pen and marks the paper. I ask once more, the exact same question, and she now holds the pen completely still. Tears fill my eyes in panic. I’m making it worse. Every word and movement. I need to stop. I lie back, squeeze my eyes shut and try to breathe through the panic clogging my throat up. I turn on my side away from her, resisting the urge to argue more, to explain more, aware that the situation could possibly get even worse than it currently is.

  The next morning, after breakfast, the Suicide Preventer takes me to the shower. I’m given a thin towel and soap. I shuffle to the shower in my hospital gown and socks. We walk inside the shower room. It’s a bleak beige room, with dirty tiles and a shower that drips mournfully. I take off my gown and socks, fold them up and place them on the plastic seat by the door. I try to shield my body from her eyes, turn to face the wall and cover my breasts with one hand and turn the tap on with the other. The water that spits out is cold, flecks my body wet as I try to get myself clean.

  The Suicide Preventer tuts. I turn my head over my shoulder. ‘Why would you do this?’ she says. I frown. ‘You have a beautiful body, you do. So why would you do this?’

  A few hours later, my twenty-four-hour cardiac observation is complete and I’m waiting to be taken to the psychiatric ward upstairs.

  ‘When will I be leaving?’ I ask the nurse.

  She frowns, looks at my chart. ‘Oh, well, it’s pretty much always full,’ she says. ‘It could be several days’.

  My stomach falls. ‘What?’ I say. ‘That’s not possible. They said that I can’t start my psychiatric observation until I’m on the ward – if it’s days and days I could be in here weeks.’

  She shrugs and walks away.

  On the third day, I demand to see the hospital’s psychiatrist, a kindly old man with crumpled skin and thick glasses. There’s very little he can do, he says. They can’t move me up until someone else is ready to leave and they have no clue when that will be. I cry, sobs from my gut and he steps forwards, seemingly moved somewhat. ‘We could try to get another hospital to take you. If they have another bed. And depending on your insurance.’

  I grasp onto the thin sliver of light. ‘Yes, oh, please. What do I need to do?’

  The psychiatric team find me a bed at a hospital uptown, but it’s one that needs my insurance company to approve my treatment before admission. I call my insurance company. A robot on the phone tells me that they have seventy-two hours to process the request. I splutter. ‘Seventy-two hours? No, no, please. You have to sort it faster. I’m stuck in hospital. I’m trapped – please help me.’

  They promise to call back. There is no call. The doctors stay away from my bedside. On Wednesday, four days after that terrible morning in the ER, an orderly arrives by my bed. My heart leaps. I must be being taken upstairs.

  ‘Sorry, miss,’ he says. ‘We’re just moving you to another ward.’

  I’m taken to a half-empty ward, full of quiet and the light from a perfect blue moonlit sky. My bed is tucked by the farthest window. I spent hours dreaming of the Empire State Building. She was why I’d moved here. The promise, the hope, the opportunity and bottled, captured joy she held. With her reflected in my eyes, I felt like everything, all of it, was possible. But
not right now. Right now, she looks like despair, like betrayal. Like sadness and sorrow. How could she lie to me like this? I sleep in her shadow, dreaming of climbing up her elegance, sitting astride the top, squatting over her, making her submit to my pain.

  CHAPTER 5

  Finally, I’m told it’s happening, definitely. That my bed is ready and that an ambulance will be here to transport me. I wake up at dawn, excited as though it’s 25th December.

  I eat breakfast, take a shower under supervision and then sit on the bed, waiting for my morning transfer. I’m not allowed to wear my own clothes, so I’m in a fresh backless patterned hospital gown and socks.

  I’ve pinned the beehive that has been resting in the bedside unit drawer to my head. Bun piece, as high and erect as possible, then a grey sock folded over to cover it, then two pieces of matted clip-in hair, then my own hair, pinned tight, sprayed stock-still with lacquer. My scalp winces and pulsates under the tug and the pull and the push it hasn’t felt now for almost a week. It is the longest time I’ve had my hair down, unpinned, worn ‘naturally’, in several months. I won’t even go to the bodega on the corner of my block without it normally, but quite honestly, the fact that I don’t look like ‘myself’, have my head armour, has been the least of my worries. And I’ve found salvation and a safety of sorts in hiding, incognito without my trademark look. I don’t want anyone to know who I am and what I’m doing there.

  I know how ridiculous I must look, building it straight up, at a ninety-degree angle, while the other patients and their friends and families look on bemused, but it’s the only way I can cling on to the tiny bit of me I still know, or at least recognise. And I need it, in this moment, more than ever.