Etched on Me Read online

  “Shit. I’m sorry.” Her hand flew back up to her mouth. Her face flushed. “I’m just so—” Now her lips were trembling. “We thought you’d . . .”

  Yeah, well, that was the plan, I would have snapped, had the damn breathing tube not been in the way. I hated myself for my spiteful urges, but I just couldn’t stand to watch her—to feel her—act like a distraught mother, her vulnerability threatening to pry my own apart. Like veins, like mouths, like thighs. All those things they’d opened to take charge of me, to force me to stay.

  I reached for my notepad. Not angry? I wrote.

  Her face did the melt. Her hand moved up to stroke my hair, and then my cheek. “No,” she whispered. “No, baby. Oh, God, no.”

  Should have made me happy, that. Or at very least relieved. But somehow it felt worse than if she’d stormed in vexed, shouting me down.

  I pulled away from her and rolled over onto my right side, best I could without dislodging all the medical junk. From behind me, I heard a breathy protest of a gasp.

  “Lesley, please. Don’t—”

  I propped my notepad against the metal rail. Printed, in inept capitals, the words I’m still ashamed to have written: FUCK OFF.

  Her gasp turned into a sob. For a horrible minute, I lay there unmoving, trying to convince myself I was unmoved. But then I saw the pained, trapped-in-the-middle look on Mr. Miss’s face, and heard the low keen of Miss weeping in earnest, and rolled back over.

  She stood there with a palm to her forehead, her eyes moist little slits, her cheeks red and glistening and splotchy.

  I grabbed the guardrails on each side and hoisted myself till I was properly sat up. Heart monitor commenced blipping like mad, but I didn’t care. I reached out one arm to her—beckoning, conciliatory.

  She shuffled towards me, uncertain. Her fingers fumbled with the top of the bed rail, her eyes questioning. I nodded. Sank back. Waited for the clicky sound of the pull-release, just as I had the autumn before at Accident and Emergency. Felt the comfort of her slow lower onto the mattress next to me.

  I reached up, my hospital gown slipping off one shoulder, and pressed my palm to her damp cheek. Her lashes blinked faster. The muscles in my neck tightened, aching to lift my head back up. The muscles in my throat fought, desperate to let me speak.

  With my free hand, I grabbed the notepad again and crossed out the insult. Wrote beneath it, Train schedule = true. Scrawled a childish heart.

  “I know you do,” she whispered.

  Don’t deserve u. Or yr nice husband.

  At that, a sighing, exasperated reach for nightstand tissues.

  But I’m like yr dad. I’m mine now.

  Miss dabbed daintily at her eyes. Leaned down, till she was inches from my face. “Knock that shit off.”

  I heard the scrape-squeal of Mr. Miss’s chair shoved back. “Gloriochka—”

  She put up a hand to silence him, then turned back to me. “Lesley,” she said, “do you have any idea what I’ve been doing for the last forty-eight goddamn hours?”

  Sitting here? I wrote.

  “Yes,” she said. “Singing you ‘Best of the Screaming Women’ and sponging the vomit out of your hair.”

  Eww, manky. Poor Miss.

  “Now do you really think I’d do that for someone I thought was undeserving, much less a sexual predator?”

  No, but the police . . .

  She ran a hand through her hair. Bit her lip.

  Mr. Miss came over and stood by the bed to read my last written line. “Lesley,” he said softly, “don’t give them the ammunition of your shame.”

  • • •

  When the constable finally came round, I’d just gotten my throat tube out and was sitting up delicately sipping ginger ale from a straw with my posse clustered round me—Miss and her husband (Jascha, that was his name, I finally remembered) and Francesca, who’d driven up from London to oversee the occasion.

  They’d sent a woman, thankfully, who looked even more butch than me (yet another good omen?). I’d feared it would be a giant interrogation, but she just asked a few questions, carefully phrased basics, like how old we’d been and whether everyone had been agreeable to what she termed “the acts,” at which point I started spluttering my drink everywhere and croaking plaintively about love, and then Miss and Jascha were rubbing my back, and the nurse appeared with a Valium, and Francesca jumped up and said in her bureaucratic hostess voice, “Constable Vickers, my client is still quite ill and obviously stressed, so perhaps that’s enough for now?”

  Next morning, my guardian angels went back down to London, which would have been cause for yet another tachycardia-inducing freak-out, if not for the fact that Jascha—being the artiste with the flexible schedule and all—was able to stay up there with me.

  He never asked me about what I’d done, or about Clare; he didn’t even try to keep tabs on whether I was “having any suicidal thoughts” (unlike the nurses, who inquired every fifteen minutes). He just kept it simple and kind: Did I want more ice cream from the freezer down the hall? Would I like a magazine? It was rather like having a personal assistant who just happened to understand the desire to put “make it all end” on your to-do list.

  I was a pretty boring boss, I’m sure, since most of the time I just licked chocolate-vanilla swirl off plastic spoons, and tried not to scratch at my drip line, and avoided thinking about anything by floating up to the ceiling or, better yet, sleeping.

  Every so often, though, when the afternoon started slouching towards dusk, in that little pocket of time between three o’clock shift change and dinner, I’d feel a sudden desire to speak. No catalyst, just random blurtings.

  “Sorry I was such a bitch to your wife.” (My first statement, to which he replied, “It’s all right; she’s got bitchy moments in spades herself.”)

  “You probably think I’m a melodramatic teenage twat, OD-ing over someone who isn’t even dead.”

  And then, after he’d assured me he didn’t: “Come on, you at least think it was a stupid hookup that only happened ’cause we were in the loony bin together, right?”

  He set his own magazine down and leaned forward, forearms on his knees. “You’ve heard the story of how Gloria and I got together, haven’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “I sat on my hands for a year,” he said. “Telling myself it wouldn’t work, that a bond predicated on us both having lost spouses was a disaster in the making. When she decided to move back to America, I loaded her suitcases in my car, drove her to Heathrow, watched her walk down a Jetway.”

  “Stoic, aren’t ya?”

  He laughed a little. “Most of the time. But that night . . .” He shook his head. “Boshe moi, I was a mess.”

  “You get drunk to forget her?”

  “Stopped myself just before I dialed her mobile.”

  I snorted. “Right, ’cause telling her you loved her a year later while she was at a psych eval was so much more classy.”

  He waved his magazine at me in chastisement. “Mock not your ice cream fetcher, molodaya devushka.”

  “Sorry. Go on. Moral of your story was . . . ?”

  “That if I had it to do over, I’d not spend so much time debating whether our connection was just misery loving company or legit. Because that’s wasted energy. That’s cowardice.”

  I glanced over at him. “So you think Clare and I were real.”

  “Real, and brave.”

  “As fuck?”

  A small smile. “Absolutely.”

  • • •

  With the following weekend came two pieces of news, courtesy of Constable Vickers and the hospital lab: I was not going to be prosecuted, and my liver was not going to be permanently ruined.

  The second announcement was a relief, but the first still begged a question: What would happen to me now? Wasn’t like I had many choices to pick from. The Phoenix wouldn’t take me back. Hawthorn Hill, no matter how much Miss might lobby, couldn’t give me a second chance. And Clare? Con
stable V. had warned me, in diplomatic Francesca style, that trying to contact her would be a “quite unwise idea.”

  By the time Saturday suppertime rolled round, doctors were signing off on my discharge summary. Nurses busied themselves removing the last of my drip lines. Jascha made one last ice cream run while Miss helped me into my clothes: big old hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, super cozy. Scissor pop of the plastic bracelet, gathering up of the bin bag and guitar case, and then we were off to a private waiting room to meet Francesca for the post-release brainstorm.

  I figured she’d have a decent plan in place, but as we all sat down, me in the middle between Miss and Jascha, Francesca across the coffee table, I could feel my anxiety rising.

  You won’t be homeless, I told myself. They’ve all still got your back.

  “Been a rough week for everyone, hasn’t it?” Francesca said.

  Um, yeah, the three of us nodded.

  “I’ve been thinking about our options, Lesley,” she continued, “and I’m afraid there’s only one appropriate placement left.”

  My hands gripped the rounded-off wooden trim of my chair’s arms. “Which is . . . what?”

  “A secure unit.”

  ELOPEMENT RISK. Darting eyes. Hey, baby.

  “Secure?” I repeated. “You mean, like they have for criminals?”

  “Well, some patients are on forensic status, yes, but—”

  “How long?”

  “Several months, depending on—”

  “Several months? Locked up? With felons?” I sputtered. “No.” I stood up. “No.”

  Miss grabbed my arm. “Les, sit down. Let Francesca ex—”

  I spun around to face her. “Don’t tell me you’re in on this, too.”

  “I’m not ‘in’ on anything, honey,” she said quietly. “I just think you should—”

  “What? Sign up to get groped and accused of shit again?” I thrust my hands in my hoodie pockets. Strode towards the room’s closed door. “Fuck that. I’m not doing it.”

  As I slunk past Francesca, she touched my elbow, so gently I stopped. “Lesley,” she said, “you know how this works.”

  Shit. Shit.

  “Come on, Francesca,” I whispered. “I’m not a flipping grapefruit. Don’t section me.”

  She ran her fingers over the bridge of her nose. Picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to me. I took one look at the pair of doctors’ signatures, and tossed it back at her. Ran over to Miss and Jascha and knelt down before them, clutching both their hands.

  “Please,” I whimpered. “Let me stay with you. I’ll be good. I promise.”

  Miss bit her lip. Shook her head.

  “But you told me,” I said, my eyes burning with tears. “You said I was always welcome.”

  “And you are,” she whispered. “We just . . .” Her eyes welled up. “You need to be safe, Lesley.”

  “I’ll be safer with you than I will in that place. Please.” I buried my face in her lap.

  She bent down and pressed her lips to my hair. When she spoke, her voice was so husky I could barely hear her. “I’m sorry.”

  I jerked away and turned to Jascha. “You get it,” I said. “Tell them they’re wrong.”

  His face stayed steady but mournful. When he leaned forward this time, there was no Russian-studded teasing. His eyes were grave.

  “Lesley,” he said, “if we took you home tonight, could you guarantee us you’d not open up the medicine cabinet and pinch another bottle of pills?”

  “You—you could hide them,” I stammered.

  “What about when we’re at work?”

  Fuck, I knew where he was going. “I can’t . . . I don’t . . . I wouldn’t.”

  “Bullshit,” Miss said. “You’d be turning the house upside down the second we left.”

  I lowered my face onto my knees. My shoulders quaked. My breath shook.

  “Gloriochka, back off her.”

  “No,” I said, lifting my head. “She’s right.” The tears dripped from my chin. Once I started, wasn’t any way I could stop. “I’ve been thinking about it all week. I thought I’d feel better once the police crap got sorted, but it’s not . . . I don’t . . .”

  And then I dissolved into a heap of rocking and babbling, and Francesca came over and knelt behind me and draped her arm round my shoulders, and Miss wiped the corners of my eyes, and Jascha pulled me up gently by my hands, and somehow the three of them got me out of the room and down the lift and across the car park and into the backseat of Miss’s Volkswagen, bound for the Midlands and the Zen rubbish that would save my life.

  12

  Claymoor Lodge. The name sounds like it ought to belong to a distinguished estate or a stately hotel, but in reality it was a flat-roofed concrete compound whose amenities included barbed wire fences and air-locked front doors.

  For my first few weeks there, I was totally out of control, and not just by normal-people standards, either: slamming myself into walls, banging my skull on my bed’s headboard, trying to disassemble the classroom pencil sharpener in an attempt to retrieve its blade and reopen my forearm.

  Part of my acting out was just pure unbridled fury at being stuck there, but I was also testing the staff, pushing their buttons like a tantrumming two-year-old, pleading for reassurance that, no matter what I did, they’d let me stay.

  Which of course they would, seeing as how Claymoor Lodge was the final stop on the national treatment train. Most of us, they knew, would otherwise end up dead or in jail or down at King’s Cross selling ourselves, so our chances of being sent packing were pretty much nil.

  What they did do, though, was put me on complete lockdown. No guitar, no garden access, no cigarettes (which, to my current nursing-mum disgust, I took up smoking while there), no phone calls, no visits. Only places I could go were the dining hall or the dayroom (which wasn’t cozy at all, just a track-lit cluster of hard couches), and even there a staffer sat constantly at my elbow, ready to head off a self-flagellating fit.

  At first when they held me back or took me down to keep me from harming myself, I screamed and struggled, hurling epithets and spit, but eventually I quit fighting—not because I wanted to but because I had no energy left. Just lay in my room, listless, silent. When they dragged me out of bed for breakfast, I’d hunch over the table, my head bowed like a catatonic ragdoll’s.

  Then they started piling on my privileges, like Christmas morning, in the hopes that I’d snap out of my torpor. Guitar? Never so much as opened the case. Phone card? Nary a dip in its balance. Cigarette break? I went, but hunkered down in the garden as far away as I could get from the other girls, staring numbly into the curlicues of smoke my lips huffed.

  Come June, after school let out, Miss and Jascha drove up to visit. Last trick in the bag, sure to delight me, right, but all I did—all I could do—was slump into their open arms. Soon as she saw the state I was in, Miss went into über-Miss mode, marching over to grill the unit director: “What’s going on here? Are you overmedicating her?”

  I sat on the dayroom couch with Jascha, my cheek leaned into his shoulder, his arm draped behind me. “Just wait,” he whispered into the top of my head. “She’ll be on him about why this place doesn’t offer A-levels next.”

  Sure enough, a few seconds later, there she went, lecturing him about not letting my keen intelligence go to waste, while he fought for an edgewise defense. “Madam, most of our residents don’t possess even the most basic literacy and numeracy skills, so we’ve got to—”

  “What? Cater to the lowest common denominator, and let this extraordinary girl languish?”

  “Boshe moi, Gloriochka,” Jascha murmured. “Give it a rest already.”

  For the first time since my birthday two months earlier, I let out a little laugh. Hoarse, muted, but a laugh nonetheless.

  He smiled down at me. “Let me go talk to her.”

  I gave him a grateful nod and lay down, curled on my side with my fists tucked beneath my chin. The track-lit ceilin
g twinkled, called out Come on up, its promises so tantalizing I couldn’t help but close my eyes and ascend.

  At the touch of Miss’s hand on my shoulder, indeterminable minutes later, I swooped back down in shaky flight. Opened my eyes again to see her and Jascha on the floor beside me, knelt down the same way I’d done in desperate supplication in the hospital waiting room.

  “Save your speech, Miss,” I muttered. “I’m not doing your precious A-levels.”

  I expected her shoulders to drop or her throat to loosen with a rueful sigh, but they didn’t.

  “So you’re not vexed?” I asked, sitting up slowly.

  When she shook her head, I gave her a disbelieving glare.

  “Look,” Jascha said, “I know they’re keen to draw you out here, get you to participate, stop being . . . what was that term the program director used?” He glanced at Miss.

  “ ‘Treatment resistant,’ ” Miss replied, in her best dryly scoffing Last time I checked that wasn’t part of the National Curriculum voice.

  “Right. And we’re not saying you shouldn’t try. We just . . . want you to know that there’s no pressure.”

  I shot Miss another skeptical look. She lowered her chin, then raised it again.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’m not going to lie. Part of me does want to haul you up and shake you by the shoulders till you rejoin the land of the living.”

  “Why?” I asked. “To make you feel better?”

  I could tell from her nascent lip-chew and her cheeks’ flush that I’d called her out.

  “No,” she said.

  “Tell me the real reason, then.”

  “I don’t have it.”

  Oh, hell. “Let me guess,” I said, snickering. “I’ve got to search within myself to find the answer.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or it might find you.”

  “Like a stalker?”

  She laughed. “Not exactly.”

  “I know you think that’s bollocks,” Jascha said. “And I don’t blame you.”

  “Did you think it was bollocks, after your acci—”

  “Are you joking? I threw get-well bouquets at people who so much as suggested my life could still have purpose.”