Etched on Me Read online

  I’d already devoured the anemic steak and was tucking into my fruit cup when I heard voices in the hallway.

  “You do understand that . . . doesn’t cooperate . . . have to section her?” Another male doctor, older sounding than Mr. Stingy Anesthetic.

  “Yes. Of course.” Francesca.

  I set my spoon down. “Miss,” I said, my voice trembling.

  Miss turned from where she stood stretching by the end of the gurney. “Hmm?”

  “When you went into hospital, how long were you there?”

  “Just three days.”

  A long weekend. I tried to picture myself back at school on Tuesday, my battle scars hidden, but couldn’t.

  “And did it . . . did it help?”

  Miss ran her hands over her bare arms. “Yes,” she said. “It did.”

  • • •

  A few minutes later, Francesca came in, crisp and bustling in her aubergine-colored suit, carrying a bin bag full of my clothes. When I saw her flustered face, my shame rose, swift and potent as my earlier panic.

  “Francesca,” I said, my lips quaking. “I didn’t mean to be any trouble, really, I—”

  “Don’t apologize,” she said, patting my good hand, which had just got freed from its drip. “You’ve been through so much.”

  I glanced at the bag. “What’s that for?”

  “Well, I’ve had a chat with the psychiatrist on staff,” Francesca said, her voice brightening back into its usual Hello, my name is Francesca, and I’ll be your bureaucratic hostess this evening tone, “and we decided it’d be best if you stayed here for a bit. Just out of concern for your—”

  “Give me the paperwork,” I said.

  Francesca looked surprised, as if she’d been expecting me to throw a tantrum. “Good on you. What a trouper.”

  After I’d signed the consent form, Miss smoothed my blanket and Francesca switched off the overhead light so I could rest. When I drifted this time, it was into the softest of sleeps, brief but beatific. I rolled awake to glimpse Miss and Francesca sitting next to each other, their faces shadowy in the dim crack of light beneath my room’s closed door. Francesca had lent Miss her blazer to keep warm, and they both held the remains of sandwiches in their laps.

  Soon as they saw I’d awakened, they set their cellophane wrappers aside and resumed their posts next to me. My guardian angels. One dark, one bright.

  “They’re almost ready for you, love,” Francesca said. Her voice was gentle, but her proclamation sounded ominous. I pictured predators hungrily licking their lips, awaiting my arrival, ready to devour.

  When a male orderly came in and pulled my trolley towards the door, I reached with my good hand for Miss as she and Francesca walked me to the lifts.

  The orderly punched the UP button. Francesca squeezed my shoulder. Miss kissed me on the forehead. The descending lift’s bell dinged, the juggernaut rolled, and then I was both a meek body constrained and a mind bobbing wildly on a metal ceiling.

  5

  I didn’t come back down until I heard the scrape-turn of keys in a lock. I opened my eyes to see another orderly holding open a heavy door, whose small window’s glass was obscured by a typed sign that read WARNING: ELOPEMENT RISK. I pictured star-crossed lovers on the run, jumping turnstiles and sprinting across train tracks, their fingers laced.

  The orderly behind my head rolled me into the unit’s main hallway and parked me by the nurses’ station. A female staff worker in her forties, whose expression was so flat it made me wonder if she shouldn’t be a patient instead, helped me sit up and slide off the trolley.

  I looked down at my gown, so skimpy it left my legs bare to the upper thigh. “My clothes,” I said hoarsely. My blanket too, I wanted to add, but I knew the fact that Miss had wrapped it around my shoulders didn’t make it mine.

  Trolley-pusher tossed my bin bag to the nurse. “You’ll need to check it for contraband.”

  Contraband? I thought. What is this, a prison?

  And then I realized: Elopement risk. Not of brazen lovers, but of broken people. I looked towards the door. Watched it swing open, then slam shut, as the trolley disappeared. Something in my body listed, as if I were still that greyhound racing across Islington Green.

  “Careful there.” Nurse Ought-to-Be-a-Patient steadied the same shoulder Francesca had squeezed, and guided me towards a private toilet across the hall.

  “What—”

  “Body search.” She held the door open.

  “I, um, I . . .” Tears welled in my eyes. “Please, can’t you just—”

  “Go.” She waved a hand towards the sink. Sat down atop the toilet lid and uncapped a pen, drumming it against the metal teeth of her clipboard. “Take off your socks, please.”

  Socks. That was benign enough, right? I grabbed the sink edge to steady myself, yanking each fuzzy wad of hospital-issue gray cotton from my feet and flinging it in a ball on the yellow-and-white tile.

  “Stand up and untie the back of your gown for me.”

  My shoulders clenched. The face in the mirror, gaunt knife-edge pixie, wavered somewhere between a gasp and a glower, her narrow eyes hard.

  “Miss Holloway, if you don’t cooperate, I’ll have no choice but to bring in more staff.”

  I thought of the male orderly who’d held the door open. My good arm reached up, hesitated for one stubborn moment, and then fumbled to unknot the strings.

  I heard the squeak of the toilet seat as the nurse stood. In my reflection, I could see her behind me, tilting her head in that same hrm motion Miss had while she was cutting my hair.

  “Take your knickers down.”

  Shit shit fucking shit no.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “I have to check inside all your clothing. In case you’re concealing any—”

  “What—what would I hide in my underwear?”

  “Oh, you’d be surprised.” Her face crinkled a little in equally surprising sympathy. “I know this is awkward, dearie, but let’s just hurry and get it over with, shall we?”

  I nodded. Bent down and slid my knickers to my ankles as fast as I could, widening my stance and opening my knees just enough to show her that I wasn’t packing heat or smuggling heroin.

  “There’s a girl. Turn round?”

  I yanked my knickers back up and spun, my thinly clad behind thwacking up against the hard porcelain of the sink. The nurse stepped in close, so close that I could smell the pungency of her breath, all cinnamon chewing gum and nicotine.

  “I’ll need you to take your gown down in the front as well.”

  I forced my shoulders to drop. Shimmied the fabric down for her to appraise my breasts and belly.

  “All done.”

  I lunged for the coarse cotton scrap, pulling it up to my shoulders, hugging it to me as the nurse hefted my bag with all the care of a rubbish collector. “We’ll sort through this in your room.”

  Hostel déjà vu, right down to the desk-dresser combo, only with two major differences. One: this room didn’t have a lock. And two: it did have a security camera. Little beady eye, just like the courts’ satellite feed, right up in the corner, giving me a surreptitious wink.

  “Is that on all the time?” I asked.

  “Wouldn’t serve its purpose if it weren’t.” The nurse sat on my bed and gestured for me to join her. I wished she’d have gone for the chair, given me a bit of space, but who was I to ask for such things? Locks, privacy, breathing room—those liberties were for people who could be trusted to refrain from cutting open their arms, not me.

  “What about the toilets?”

  She jerked her thumb in the direction of another door behind her. “En suite bath. You can dress in there.”

  Thank God. Oh, thank God.

  While I was offering up silent prayers of gratitude for my ability to hairwash and shit in peace, Nurse Ought-to-Be was rummaging through my bin bag like an emaciated rat, tossing each scrap onto the blanket and sorting the lot into piles. Tracksuit bottom
s: yes. Drawstring hoodie: no. Bras went into an ambiguous third pile. “We’ll let you have those once you’ve got through your twenty-four-hour observation period.”

  At that point, the surreality of the situation began to thoroughly sink in. I was, by my own volition, sequestered in a place where lingerie was considered a weapon.

  I pulled my legs up to my chest and draped my arms loosely around them, rocking back and forth as if I were back at the hostel with my headphones.

  The nurse gave me an authoritative glance. “You look a bit agitated,” she said. “Would you like a PRN?”

  “A what?” I asked, my question muffled by my lowered head’s brace against my knees.

  “Medication for anxiety. You can ask for it as needed.”

  What I need, I thought, is my schoolbag and my blade and Ulysses. But wasn’t any way I was going to get those—even assuming Nurse Kennedy or the girls had salvaged them from the stall. Might as well take what I could get, even if it was a chalky tablet that would make me feel ethereal as the spun candyfloss my dad had once bought me on the boardwalk at Margate.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’d be good.”

  • • •

  Once re-dressed, I edged my way into the dayroom, where a motley crew of men and women sat on a cluster of couches watching telly. I’d been placed on an adult unit since the ward for young people was full, and I felt horridly out of place: tiniest, loneliest, most adrift.

  I went over to the kitchenette area and poured myself a few sips’ worth of cold water from the tap. On the cracked beige laminate level with my eyes, a former patient had affixed a long strip of masking tape on which he or she had written, in spiky print, the words RISE ABOVE.

  I emptied the pill I’d been given into my palm. Pressed my palm to my mouth. Swigged. Swallowed. Turned around to see a salt-and-pepper-haired gent take his place before the telly, switching it off.

  Mumbles and groans ensued, but he kept his cool. “All right, now, this will only take a few minutes.”

  He wasn’t kidding. The primer on nutter-hostel civility went like this: “Please bathe, at least for the benefit of your fellow patients. Decide mutually on the genre of the evening movie. There will be no viewing of porn or ordering out of pizza, so please don’t ask.”

  While he ran down the etiquette column, another man, the patient closest to me in age (early twenties, maybe?), paced back and forth in front of the coffee machine, inches from where I stood.

  He glanced over at me, his eyes darting up and down my body, his voice a husky mutter. “Hey, baby.”

  I tore down the hall to my room. Grabbed a chair and dragged it up against the door with my good arm. I knew the blinky eye would catch me barricading myself, but I didn’t care.

  I crawled onto the bed and curled up in a fetal position, covering my face with my hands, breathing hard into my cupped palms. Not where I belong, I thought. Not not not not no.

  I gasped my way through the shudders and rolled over onto my stomach. Rested my face against the waffle weave of the blanket. Tried not to long for the identical one that Miss had draped about her own shoulders, then tucked around me.

  • • •

  Two days later, Francesca worked her magic and found a rare open spot on a residential unit up in Nottingham that specialized in girls like me. A ceremonial returning of my bra and shoelaces, and off I went, past the ELOPEMENT RISK warning and down the civilian stairwell, Miss on my one side, Francesca on the other.

  Neither of them could leave work to come with me for the long trip, but just having them there to see me off at St. Pancras was comfort enough. Right before I got on the train, Miss handed me a care package: my schoolbag, with my CD player and copy of Ulysses tucked inside. I flung my arms around her waist beneath her coat, and hung on for what felt like forever.

  6

  I’ll never forget my first glimpse of the ward: a giant wall mural of a firebird, dead ringer for the one on Miss’s shoulder blade, its mouth breathing out the words WELCOME TO THE PHOENIX UNIT in a huffed line of curvy script. Later on, I’d find out from my records that the place’s full name was the Phoenix Unit for Severe Adolescent Personality Disorders. Later on, Clare and I would shorten its title to the Phoenix, trying to make it sound edgy.

  But right then, standing there bewildered and amazed, I had no idea I’d ever need to pull my records in my own defense, or that I’d even meet Clare. I just figured all that resurrection action was a good omen.

  Meanwhile, Kath, the unit director, was bustling me down the empty hall, pointing out a maze of classrooms: art workshop, yoga studio, ADL kitchen. Wait, huh?

  “Activities of Daily Living,” she explained, upon seeing my stupefied look. “You know, cookery, cleanup.”

  Oh, yeah. That mundane stuff regular people did. “Got it.”

  She led me into a cute common area with floral couches and hardwood floors. In one corner stood a white upright piano; in another, a large oak bookcase. “No telly?” I asked.

  “It can be distressing for some patients, and besides, we want you all to stay engaged.” She tapped a corkboard on which a weekly schedule was prominently posted.

  I stepped closer to read the chart. Groups galore, from eight in the morning till eight at night.

  “Where’s everyone right now?” I asked.

  “They’ve gone out to the shops for the afternoon. Another ADL training.”

  For fuck’s sake, I wanted to snort. I’m sick in the head, not so stupid I need lessons on how to navigate the aisles at Tesco’s. But I figured Kath, being a teen girl wackjob specialist, had some method to her own therapeutic madness, and so I just nodded and said, “Oh, nice.”

  “Let me show you your room.”

  Still no door locks, I noticed, but then again, there’d not been locks anywhere. “It’s an open ward?”

  “Yes. We’re all about personal responsibility here.”

  Sounded good to me, at least until I saw the pair of beds. Crap.

  “Your roommate is in our eating disorders track”—Kath said this brightly, as if it were a career path—“so I’ll have to ask you not to keep food in here.”

  I nodded again and sat down slowly on the bed across from the window, which I assumed, thanks to its duvet’s lack of adornment, was mine. On my absentee roommate’s bed, a teddy bear watched me with glass eyes cloudy as cataracts. The sight of its milky, soulful stare, coupled with its neck’s rakish gingham bow, made me want to simultaneously punch it and cry.

  I slid back on the bed, scooping my bags into my lap. “You don’t need to search these, do you?”

  Kath shook her head. “We’ve not got contraband lists here.”

  Whoa. Now I was intrigued. “Any other rules I should know about?”

  Kath grabbed a chair and cozied up next to me.

  “We prefer to think of them as guiding principles,” she said, “but yes, there are a few.”

  I leaned back against the wall, waiting for the etiquette litany.

  “First one is individual accountability. We do our best to keep this a safe and supportive space, but we also want you to own up to your choices and manage your own behavior.”

  “Which means . . . what?” I asked.

  “Well, for starters, you’ll have much more freedom than in most hospitals. You’ll chop with regular knives in the kitchen and use regular scissors in the art room, just as you would at home.”

  My stomach dropped. I couldn’t decide whether to feel terrified or ecstatic.

  “Those areas will be locked in the evening after lights out, but otherwise we don’t play nanny.”

  “So what’s—”

  “The catch?” Kath’s voice dropped into a lower, almost Miss-esque register, like feathers floating down onto hard ground. “A zero-tolerance policy towards destructive behaviors.”

  “Zero?” I whispered.

  Kath nodded. “One incident of self-harm—cutting, purging, anything at all—is grounds for immediate discharge.”


  Holy fuck.

  “Okay,” I said. “What else?”

  “We don’t permit romantic relationships between patients.”

  That gave me pause. Not because I thought the rule was unfair, but because I couldn’t imagine that even being a problem. “Other girls have . . . taken up with each other?”

  “A few times. Many patients here struggle with poor boundaries.”

  Now, when I think of the answer she gave, I want to slap her. Not saying people like me always have their boundaries sorted out, or that the Phoenix hadn’t the right to make rules, but the way she said it made it clear she believed that there was only one plausible reason two mad girls would get together.

  Back then, though, I wasn’t planning on hooking up with anyone, so I just gave her my automatic response to any dictate: “Right, sure, I understand.”

  Kath smiled. “It’s lovely to see someone so motivated. I think you’re going to do brilliantly here.”

  • • •

  For my first six weeks, Kath’s prediction proved right. She’d designated that time as an “assessment and adjustment” period, which meant that I didn’t have to go to therapy, just participate in the fluffier stuff like collage group. That was run by a gauzy-skirted woman called Lora, who wore a bloodstone pendant and called herself a “holistic health” nurse. She’d hand out textured pieces of art matting the size of big postcards, and we’d sit for an hour round a table with glue and real, not rounded, scissors, clipping pictures we liked out of magazines.

  Simple primary school stuff, right? But then it got wacky, ’cause this wasn’t just any collaging: this was a view into “The Soul.” Every time Lora said that in a reverent whisper, it was all I could do not to fall about laughing at the idea of the National Health Service paying God knows how many thousand pounds a year, and Francesca working God knows how many miracles, for me to find my existential bliss in a copy of Hello!

  “Just wait till your six weeks is up,” my roommate, Dara, warned me one night, twirling in long-limbed pirouette atop her duvet. “Then they baptize you in flipping fire.”

  “Meaning what?” I asked from where I sat at my desk, fingering my stack of Introducing . . . Lesley Holloway’s Soul! postcards.