Etched on Me Read online

  “Fucking ace.” I turned to Miss. “What about you?”

  “Well,” she said, “I did struggle, you know that. But I was lucky in that Curran gave me a built-in reason to—”

  “So you’re saying I should have a kid?”

  Now I got the vexed sigh. “For the love of God, Lesley, stop mouthing off and just listen.”

  I sat up straighter. Tucked my hands in my lap like it was finally storytime.

  “Here’s the bottom line, smart-ass,” Miss said. “You don’t have to do A-levels. You don’t have to soul-search. You don’t even have to want to live.”

  Whew. Awesome. I leaned back against the couch, ready to check out of the reality hostel again.

  “Oh, no, you don’t.” She shook my knee. “Get back here. We’re not finished yet.”

  I sat up reluctantly, leaning forward to keep my attention steady. My eyes watered.

  “I—I do want to,” I whispered. “I mean, I want to want to live. Does that make sense?”

  Jascha nodded. “Completely.”

  “But how do I get there? Do I have to believe in a higher power? Give it up to Jesus? I really hope not, ’cause I’m tired of giving it up to omnipotent guys.” I heard Miss chuckle. “And it’s tempting to think that if I found a way to believe in something, I could . . .” I covered my face with my hands. “But . . .” Jittery exhale. “I don’t know how.”

  From both the left and right, I felt Miss and Jascha draw my hands down gently and enfold them in theirs.

  “Just stay alive and show up, angel,” Miss said. “We’ll do the believing for you.”

  • • •

  Stay alive and show up. That mandate took the Easier Said Than Done Prize, but goddamn if I didn’t get on it. Baby steps, mind you, like answering the check-in question (Hi my name is Lesley, yes I want to gnaw my own arm off, no I’m not going to do it, scale of one to ten my mood is a fat fucking zeeero) during morning group, or standing next to the other girls during our cigarette break.

  I rang the Kremskys every night. Mostly I’d talk to Jascha, mainly because he was the mellower one, but also because it was such fun to listen to Miss’s background commentary and domestic grumblings (my favorite, even though it reminded me of Clare, being “Jesus H., Nigella, why do your recipes have to be so freaking complicated?”). Another time I told him they were going to start us on some “innovative and pioneering” new therapy from America, to which he dryly responded, “Best watch out for those transatlantic imports.”

  Miss muttered something I reckoned was a Russian obscenity, and then called out, “Put her on speakerphone. I want to hear all about this divine intervention.”

  “It’s called DBT,” I said.

  “Which stands for what, darlin’?”

  “Dialectical behavior therapy,” I parroted from the information leaflet they’d given us, just as the line broke up.

  “Diabolical behavior therapy?” she repeated.

  “That, too, I suppose,” I said, laughing.

  “Doesn’t involve more soul postcards, does it?”

  “Nope. It’s some Buddhist crap.”

  “And Francesca’s on board with this?”

  “Thrilled. Says the woman who’s gonna run it is re-vo-lu-tion-ary.”

  “Speaking of revolution, how’s your chocolate stash?”

  “Almost gone.”

  “I’ll send you some more tomorrow if you promise you’ll get out of bed in time for the first Zen garden walk.”

  “Deal.”

  • • •

  Francesca’s diabolical revolutionary was actually a petite Anglo-Indian woman clad in a floral blouse and khaki trousers, her gray-tipped black hair gathered back in a ponytail (to prevent one of us from tearing it out in rage, I surmised). Her name was Dr. Patel, but she asked us to call her by the less formal “Dr. P.” since she considered us her partners in therapy. When I heard that I immediately thought of smarmy Kath, but then Dr. P. followed her statement with a startling confession: “Therapists can fail.”

  At this, a bunch of us started nodding, like fuck yeah, you can. Still, she made a brilliant impression, owning up that way.

  In fact, the more she talked, the more validated I felt. I mean, here she was telling us, a bunch of adolescent arsonists and junkies and runaways and psych ward frequent fliers, that given the tremendous amount of pain represented both in our life circumstances and our feelings, we were—get this—doing the best we could.

  In the words of Carina, who’d drunk drain cleaner and hammered nails into her arms before she’d arrived at the Lodge: “Motherfucking what?”

  Sure, the handful of us who were lucky enough to have people like Miss or Francesca in our lives had heard that in some form or fashion, but from a mental health professional, the person who wrote the illegible-but-damning proclamations in our charts? Nobody, never.

  We looked around at each other, giving Did she just say what I think she just said? glances, trying to camouflage them as contemptuous, bored eye-rolls, but inside I knew we were all delirious with glee. I wanted to cartwheel down the corridor, run screaming through the high-walled garden, get the benediction tattooed on my forehead.

  I’d barely had time to bask in that affirming glow when Dr. P. moved straightaway to her next allegation: that we needed to change. “But you just said we’re doing the best we can,” I protested.

  “Ah, that’s where the dialectic comes in,” Dr. P. said. “Because those two things can be true at once, even if they seem contradictory.”

  “So you’re going to compliment us and kick our arses at the same time,” Carina said.

  Dr. P. smiled. “In a manner of speaking.”

  “You’re not going to make us do trauma work, are you?” I asked.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “Our first goal is to help you get the behaviors that are threatening your life under control.”

  Yeah, I’d heard that one before.

  “Doesn’t that mean talking about childhood rubbish?” Janine, this time, who’d no doubt heard it, too.

  “Actually,” Dr. P. said, “no. If you dive into those memories before you’re stable enough, it can hurt rather than help. So, to start out, we’ll focus on learning to manage your emotions and giving you skills to help you deal with your self-harm urges.”

  Managing. Dealing. Skills. The words were practical and prosaic, not nearly as sexy and quasi-inspiring as the Phoenix’s promises of transformation, but the thought of embodying them gave me a quiet, unexpected thrill—at least until Dr. P. started handing out rectangular pieces of heavy paper way too reminiscent of soul cards for comfort.

  Once I saw one up close, though, I realized it was the diametrical (dialectical?) opposite of Lora’s art workshop creations. The flipping thing was a Monday-through-Sunday chore chart, crammed full of boxes to tick and numbers to record: cumulative daily amounts of anger and sadness and shame and happiness, assigned ratings from one to ten; impulses and attempts to self-harm and commit suicide, similarly tallied and quantified. Like morning check-in on steroids, or a time sheet for kamikaze pilots.

  “Your weekly homework,” Dr. P. said.

  All the other girls were moaning about how this was bullshit and turning them into lab rats and they weren’t having any of it, but I was so relieved to be let off the trauma hook that I could have kissed Dr. P. in gratitude (totally platonically, Phoenix staff, I swear!). No talking about feelings, just identifying them, giving them nice safe numerical values. Now that I could manage. That I could handle.

  “I’ll warn you,” Dr. P. said, “this will be quite challenging stuff. Hardest work of your lives, perhaps. But you’ll not be doing it alone.”

  We turned the scorecards over to find her pager number printed on the opposite side. “You’re always welcome to phone me whenever you need coaching.”

  “During office hours, you mean?” Janine asked.

  “No. Anytime.”

  Of course none of us believed that, so we had to
interrogate her, in true Miss-telling-off-the-unit-head style:

  “Will you really ring us back?”

  “Within the hour.”

  “Even on weekends?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even in the middle of the night?”

  “Yes.”

  I put my hand up. “Dr. P., are you currently in treatment for your masochism diagnosis?”

  She laughed. “I’m not a masochist, Lesley,” she said. “Just a recovery tour guide.”

  • • •

  At the first group session, I sat munching my hard-earned revolution chocolate, watching Dr. P. draw two intersecting circles on a whiteboard.

  She turned around to face us, tapping the marker in her palm. “Everything you’re going to learn here,” she said, “is built around the idea of mindfulness.”

  Uh-oh. Zen alert.

  Carina yawned and leaned her head on her arms. “Hate to break it to you,” she said, “but I lost my mind ages ago.”

  “Don’t worry,” Dr. P. said. “You’ve actually got three.”

  We all frowned at her, wary and befuddled, thinking, What dodgy school you take your medical degree from, “Dr.” P.?

  “Now,” Dr. P. said, “I realize this sounds utterly ridiculous. But here, let me show you.”

  She drew a line radiating out from the right half-moon on the board, and wrote RATIONAL MIND beside it. This part of you, she said, was the detached one—not dissociative so much as all about the facts, like a police reporter (Perpetrator X forced lewd act Y upon victim Z) or a medical textbook (Consumption of one hundred and twenty aspirin tablets will likely induce coma and hepatic toxicity).

  Next, Dr. P. added a line for the left half-moon and wrote EMOTION MIND. No trouble grasping that one: intense, overblown, mercurial. “Any guesses as to whether the R or the E gives you the most trouble?”

  “E always gives me trouble,” quipped Michaela, who’d been a raver before she’d become a last-resort resident.

  We all laughed, but then Janine put up her hand and said, “Dr. P., are you saying we should just be zombies?”

  “Certainly not,” Dr. P. said. “Your emotion mind is just as vital and essential as your rational one. It just needs to be kept in check so you don’t act in ways you’ll regret later.”

  “Is that where the third mind comes in?” I asked.

  “Bingo.” She shaded in the intersected parts of the circle, then wrote WISE MIND above them.

  “This,” she said, jabbing at the dark spots, “is the part of you that you’ll learn to access, the part that will keep you in balance.”

  Oh, please. “I don’t think that part came factory-installed in my brain,” I said.

  Dr. P. laughed. “May not seem so, Lesley, but it’s there. And together we’ll find ways to strengthen it, so that you can be the boss of your emotions and thoughts, instead of the other way round.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Carina said. “You can’t control those things. They just pop up. They just happen.”

  “Again, it might seem that way. But the truth is you can, with heaps of practice, retrain your brain. It’s like a naughty puppy who doesn’t know any better than to chew up shoes or tip over the dustbin.”

  I pictured my greyhound as a lanky little thing, playful but a touch feral, its narrow, sliver-nailed feet sliding on a slick floor, its energy boundless and hyperkinetic. Not a manipulative monster or a stupid fuckup, just a tenacious four-legged fumbler.

  Aww, bless. My poor houndie. I wanted to hug its neck, stroke its head, offer it little treats from my palm.

  “We’re not going to have to smack its bottom with rolled-up newspaper, are we?” I asked.

  “Oh, no. We’ll be gentle but firm with it, same as you would with a young child.”

  I tried to picture myself back in the day, riding on his shoulders and the carousel at Margate, no closets or choke holds, my chatter bright, my knickers clean. The very thought made my eyelashes flutter and my hands curl and my fingernails stab my palms.

  I think Dr. P. could sense she was losing me, because right after that she said, “Let’s move on to our first skill, shall we?”

  I waited for some mystical consciousness-expanding practice or ten-step checklist, but her directive was so simple I couldn’t believe my ears:

  “Breathe.”

  Yep. Apparently I’d not received the memo that breathing—hell, even being aware of your breath—was an art. Most people, Dr. P. told us, breathed super shallow in their throats, all constricted, which only made them tenser, but if you breathed in deep, just like in the Kate Bush song about nuclear war, and sent the air down to your belly, all that delicious oxygen would get to your tissues faster and you’d feel more centered and calm.

  Of course she made us give it a go. My initial attempts felt like inhaling my first cigarette, weird and awkward and dizzy-making, but after a few more I felt rather relaxed. Not Valium- or ceiling-level relaxed, but still.

  “What you’ve just done,” Dr. P. said, “is the quickest, easiest way to get in touch with your Wise Mind. Practice it this week.”

  • • •

  After that, DBT and our trio of minds became a standing joke round the unit. We’d pretend we were rappers, swaggering about going “D to the B to the T, yo,” or if someone jumped the dinner queue or took too long on the phone, we’d put her in her place with a crisp “Hey, quit using your Twat Mind, would you?”

  Par for the course, that snark (I mean, God forbid we actually allowed ourselves some optimism, right?). But then Janine reported back that she had paged Dr. P. at three in the morning (not for a prank, but with a real panic attack), and not only had Dr. P. rung her back, she’d actually been kind and helpful, so much so that Janine fell back asleep without meds.

  Well. Dr. P. was our heroine after that. We devoured her suggestions, taking notes during group and practicing meditation in the garden on break, fixing our lazy gazes on clouds, attempting to, in mindfulness-speak, “observe without judgment.”

  Easy to do when I was lounging about looking at the sky, but when I was losing it? Ha. When a girl on telly reminded me of Clare or I started thinking about what a disappointment I was compared to Miss’s off-to-Oxford son, I went right from zero to ten on the shame-anger-sadness scale.

  “Your Buddhist mind game doesn’t work,” I announced to Dr. P. when I sat down in her office for our first individual session. “I tried it, and I still felt like shit.”

  “Did you harm yourself less, though?”

  I handed my diary card over to her. She scanned it, then nodded approvingly. “Wow, quite the drop since last week.”

  “Big flipping deal,” I said, crossing my arms.

  “Yes.” Her voice was sharp, almost Miss-like. “It is.”

  “But I still feel like shit,” I repeated, my voice rising into petulance.

  “Lesley,” Dr. P. said quietly, leaning back in her chair, “these skills aren’t like an inoculation that guarantees protection from illness. They don’t even guarantee you positive emotions.”

  “Then what’s the point of all this form filling and deep breathing?”

  “To make bad situations bearable.”

  I let out a sound partway between a scoff and a laugh. “Seriously? That’s the goal?”

  She nodded. “Sometimes, that’s all we can do.”

  I shook my head. “You’re a bloody fraud. Getting paid two hundred an hour to tell me I just have to put up with”—here I pounded the arm of my chair with my fist—“the fact that I lost my scholarship, and my girlfriend, and my freedom, and my thirteen-year-old virginity to my own dad?”

  “Not put up with. Not condone. Just accept.”

  “Fucking cow.” I leaned over to her nearby bookshelf, grabbed a paperback, and flung it at her. “What part of ‘horrid injustice’ don’t you get?”

  Dr. P. caught the book with one hand. “Oh, I grasp the concept of unfair treatment quite well,” she said. “Particularly when I’m on t
he receiving end.”

  My greyhound tucked its skinny tail beneath its legs. “Sorry,” I mumbled.

  “It’s all right,” she said, handing the book back to me. “I’d be tempted to hurl things too if I were in your position.”

  I leaned over to tuck the slim volume into place next to a giant red-and-white hardcover. “Then why are you asking me to accept it?”

  “Because radical acceptance beats choosing to be permanently miserable.”

  “Hey, now,” I said, my fingers skimming along the spine of the big book like a threat. “I didn’t choose for any of this to happen to me.”

  “Of course not. But that doesn’t change the fact that it happened.”

  I snorted. “Thanks for the news flash, Dr. Pea-Brain.”

  Dr. P. looked away for a moment, the fingers of one hand tapping her chin. Then she turned back to me.

  “All right,” she said. “If we’re both in agreement, the question I have for you is: What do you want to happen now?” A sly smile. “Other than me getting a concussion, I mean.”

  Scrambly with desire, my Emotion Mind ran down the inner wish list:

  Clare slipping into my bed.

  The Kremskys adopting me and only me.

  My father hanging from a rope in his prison cell.

  “I want to be the one who makes things happen,” I said.

  I expected Dr. P. to cheer me on or at least look pleased, but instead she peered at me, perplexed. “And you don’t think you already are?”

  I shrugged. “Not like I’ve much room to decide anything while I’m stuck here.”

  “Oh,” Dr. P. said, “I’d be inclined to disagree.”

  Now it was my turn to give her the quizzical stare.

  “Lesley, I know you feel trapped and powerless,” she went on, “but even from this brief time we’ve spent together, I can tell you’re a young woman with heaps of drive and energy.”

  Oh, please, I thought. You’re talking to the girl who wore the same tracksuit bottoms and hoodie for weeks, who up until recently defined a decent day as one in which she never had to speak.

  “The decision is all yours, my dear,” Dr. P. said. “You can either continue to pour that energy into putting out cigarettes on your arms, or harness it to build a life worth living.”