Is anybody there?
Cold hands collide with my skin. Nudge. Turn. My eyes prised open with fingers. A blaze of light, a torch the size of a pen wages an assault on each pupil. A voice with an accent tells a story about a teenage overdose, stomach pumped. Attempted suicide. Multiple pills. Lucky.
Is that what you call it.
A language of numbers and letters, bloods and things. Things and blood. Discussed. A white coat, a clipboard in her arms, looks down at a chart. Pauses.
Increase sedation, the white coat says.
Pulled under again.
The next time I come round Mike’s at my side. Air in my heart leaks, a balloon deflates. He’s split open, his body bent over the bed. I can’t speak, I’ve lost my voice, I’ve lost more than that. I squeeze his hand, he looks up.
‘Milly, you’re awake. Thank god you’re awake.’
I try to reply, say sorry he couldn’t fix me, I hate me, I’m bad on the inside.
‘Don’t try and talk, you need to rest,’ he says.
He reaches above my head, presses a button. My pupils blink question marks, he reads them well, tells me a story. My story.
‘You took an overdose, you didn’t come down for breakfast so I came to check, the bathroom door was locked, we had to force it open. You’ve had your stomach pumped and you’re heavily sedated still, everything’s bound to be fuzzy for a while but you’re going to be okay.’
The door to my room opens, I struggle to focus but the blonde hair gives her away.
‘She’s awake.’
‘Yes, still spaced out on the meds, but awake.’
Saskia doesn’t come to the bedside, stays back, but says, good, I’m glad, should we call someone?
‘I have, one of the nurses should be here in a minute. Okay, Milly?’
I nod but I’m not sure I’ll last. Eyelids, heavy. Mike, a speck. Smudged. The room is a boat. Seasick. A shadow, shiny and huge, a whale swims under, surfaces beside me, mouth open wide. I look inside. A mistake. I’ve made so many. They look back at me, their faces scared, hands reach out to me. I lean out of my boat as far as I can, I want to save them. A voice says ‘No’. I’ve never heard him speak but I think it is god, the one I don’t believe in. He laughs. Hard and relentless. The sea becomes wild, I can’t get to them now. Nine, if I count. They hang their heads, they know what awaits, the whale closes its mouth, dives out of sight. I’m pulled back to the white, the room, too bright. A nurse speaks to Mike and Saskia, come with me please, June’s here. The next time I open my eyes Phoebe is there. Is she? Smile for the camera, dog-face. No, please don’t, my voice a whisper, a foreigner to me. Too late. A flash in my face. You’re the spit of your mother. I close my eyes, open them again straight away but she’s not there, never was, my mind playing tricks on me.
There’s a TV mounted on the wall, switched on but no volume, subtitles roll along the bottom of the screen. Headlines about the sinking of a ferry and just for a second I thought I saw your face. A machine to my left, previously a sleepy steady beat, now louder, attached to my heart, registers a reaction to you. I try to slow my breathing but the beeping gets faster, I close my eyes, pull me under again, please. I look back at the TV, the news is finished if it was ever on, a game show instead, contestants making up words.
I try to sit up, no strength in my arms. The conversation between June, Saskia and Mike. Where will I go? The new family won’t want me now. We’re not sure we can have that kind of person in our house, they’ll say, isn’t she better off staying where she is? Yes, I am, I realize that now. I want to stay. Room for us both, Phoebe and me. Please.
I turn back to the TV, your face fills the screen. Underneath, one word, flashing. Enlarged.
ESCAPED
You nod and smile, tell me you’re coming for me. I hear someone screaming and realize it’s me. I thrash in the bed, the butterfly in the back of my hand flies off, other tubes and wires too. The machine monitoring my heart emits an alarm, a dull continuous tone, the wire has come off, can’t detect a heartbeat. Heartless. Can’t. Find. My. Heart. A doctor runs in, calm down, calm down, he says, pushing my shoulders into the bed. Mike and Saskia enter the room next. The doctor shouts for somebody to get Olanzapine, 5mg IM.
‘She’s coming for me,’ I hear myself say.
‘Nobody’s coming for you, Milly, you’re safe.’
The nine little somethings watch from the corner of the room, their heads low, eyes moist, down-turned mouths.
A white coat.
A needle.
Sleep.
34
I’m transferred from the medical ward to the teenage psychiatric unit. It won’t be for long Mike reasoned, a short focused admission to review your medication. No more than a week. He couldn’t look me in the eyes when he said the word ‘medication’, as if it was his fault. Too blasé with handing them out, he thinks.
A nurse monitors my every move, they call it constant observation. A one on one. A clipboard hangs on the wall outside my room, every hour, on the hour, a tick on the page.
Toilet. Tick. Lunch. Tick. Alive. Tick.
Can I be left alone? No.
Can I go online? No.
Can I leave?
A slow shake of the head.
This time I play by the rules, I even take the pills they give me, maybe they help as I sleep for hours and don’t see you once. June’s been in a couple of times, said my placement with the Newmonts had been extended until after Christmas but following that I’ll be moved into a new family. I ask her if Phoebe knows what happened. No. She thinks you had appendicitis, Mike told her there’d been a few complications but you’d be home soon.
How will she do it, I wonder. How will she tell everyone who I am?
The girl in the room next to mine visits too. She cradles a stuffed rabbit. Prozac meet Milly. Milly meet Prozac. Why is he called Prozac, I asked her. She laughed, replied in a sing-song voice, my psychiatrist asks me that too. Yesterday the girl came into my room, stood at the side of my bed fondling the inner pink bits of the rabbit’s ears, and said, I tell my psychiatrist I call bunny Prozac because he makes me feel better.
Josie, out of Milly’s room please, one of the nurses said.
Quick, she said, give me your hand. She guided my finger through a hole in the rabbit’s fur, another belly full of pills. But really it’s because bunny likes Prozac too, she said, winked and pirouetted out of my room.
Little blue pills, gifts from the gods or the psychiatrists who prescribe them who think they are gods. I want to tell her to take them, do as they say, but I used to be her, squirrelling them away. Take them, don’t take them, placebo spelt backwards is Obecalp. 10mg of Obecalp for the girl in room five please. I learnt fast at the first secure unit I stayed in, became wise to the language they used to try and fool us. Looking back, maybe I was the fool because after almost a week of staying here, taking my pills and talking to the nurses, I feel better.