Etched on Me Read online

  “Individual therapy. Trauma work.”

  The very word trauma made me want to run for the kitchen and rummage around for a paring knife. Which I very well could have done, seeing as it wasn’t curfew yet, but I didn’t. Not out of any commitment to responsibility or accountability or any of those other “abilities” Kath expected us to magically possess, but out of sheer terror at the prospect of being kicked out.

  Sure, the whole program was twee and jargon-riddled, and my twelve other wardmates (yeah, that made me Lucky Thirteen) were even more gaunt and greyhoundy than I, but the Phoenix had one massive, marvelous thing going for it: safety. Not once did I have to mince down a hallway, stealthy and scared; not once did I have to barricade my door while in the throes of panic. I slept without nightmares and woke without flashbacks. My rigid shoulders relaxed.

  When Christmas rolled round, though, my relief gave way to uninvited pangs of homesickness. I tried to quell them by telling myself that it hadn’t been much of a home anyway, but my mind wouldn’t quit: reminiscing over every awesome present, replaying every holiday special Mum and I had watched together, cuddled up on the couch in front of the telly. Funny how easily my memory committed sins of omission, cleverly leaving out the year when he’d done me so hard I had to lower myself gingerly onto my chair at the dinner table, forgetting that time when I’d gone out on the balcony and dry-heaved into my hands while he nibbled Mum’s ear under the mistletoe.

  Other girls at the Phoenix had shitty parents, too, but they at least showed up, bearing grudges and gifts, shouting and hugging, making our normally unearthly calm unit if not festive, then at least fierce with shared history and fumbling attempts to care. Me, I’d have settled for a cheap card bitching about how I’d ruined Christmas forever, but apparently Mum couldn’t be bothered.

  Thankfully, Miss could, because she made the three-hour pilgrimage up from London to visit. Not on the actual big day (she had her own family, after all), but close enough to it.

  She brought me a store-bought container of Christmas pudding nowhere near as good as Mum’s homemade, which can only be described as epic (perfect ratio of raisins to currants, easy on the orange peel, with a splash of high-end brandy). Still, it was the thought that counted, and I eagerly tucked into a bowlful at the Phoenix’s communal dining table, on the lookout for the traditional tokens hidden inside. Those, Miss said, were homemade, crafted by her sculptor husband. “So that explains your smashing earring collection,” I said, grimacing at the taste of metal.

  I spat the charm into my palm. Saw it was a ring, and snorted. “Right, like anyone’s going to fall in love with me.”

  “And why wouldn’t they?” Her voice was as indignant as if I’d suggested James Joyce shouldn’t be part of the National Curriculum.

  “Come on, Miss. You know.” I swept a hand around the room.

  She reached for a napkin with which to blot her mouth. “Psychiatric hospitalization is hardly a romantic death sentence, Lesley.”

  My envious gaze drank in every inch of her subtle, effortless cool: Doc Martens, black velvet blouse, hair gathered up into a bun with one of those burnished thingies that looks like a posh chopstick.

  “Maybe it wasn’t for you,” I said.

  “And it won’t be for you, either.” She twirled her fork round the edge of the pan to scrape up one last bite of pudding. “It might take a while, but you’ll find someone who’s down with the damage.”

  “If you say so,” I muttered, pushing my chair back. “Hey, wanna make a soul card?”

  In the art workshop, Miss raised an eyebrow at the shelves full of scissors and paper trimmers as I pulled down Lora’s shoebox and flipped through it. “What color’s your aura? We’ve got the whole rainbow in here. Burgundy, chartreuse—”

  “Lesley.” Serious case of I’m so not messing.

  I looked over. “Yeah?”

  “You’re not still injuring, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “And you’re keeping up with school in the midst of all these groups?”

  “Well, not exactly,” I said. “I mean, they have a school here, but it’s only for the younger girls. No A-levels.”

  She sighed.

  “What?” I said, spreading the cards out on the table. “Francesca says this place is the best in the country. You think she’s talking shit?”

  “No,” Miss said carefully, sitting next to me to finger the fanned-out hues.

  I watched as she selected a hunter-green one. “Not black?”

  “My soul abhors clichés. How about yours?”

  “It’s feeling a bit lemony today,” I said, choosing a tart yellow card from the pile.

  We worked in silence for a few minutes, sliding magazines back and forth, swapping our glue bottles when they got too dried out. Every so often, Miss would murmur to herself, “Oh, now that was genius of you, Glor.”

  “Normally you get an hour,” I said. “But this is the abbreviated version. Soul speed dating.”

  “Well, then, let’s see yours first, expert.”

  I showed her my card, which read DAFTSCAREDSACREDSTRANGE in large, akimbo letters.

  Miss’s face came close to doing the melt, but she dialed it back to a soft smile. “Mine’s far less bold.”

  She held it up to reveal a circlet of immaculately glued images:

  An open book, gilded by a nearby lamp.

  A sunlit wooden spoon, nestled in a bright blue porcelain rest.

  The sound hole and burnished body of a guitar, its strings gleaming.

  A woman’s head, lowered against her shadowed lover’s shoulder.

  A woman’s hands, cupping the ripe curve of her pregnant belly.

  Mesmerized, I reached for the card, staring at it for what seemed like ages, my breath held. The feeling the pictures gave me wasn’t inspiration so much as awe, heavy and huge.

  “Okay,” I said quickly, and shoved the card across the table in her direction. “Now you have to fill out the paperwork.”

  She laughed. “You’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” I said, leaning back to grab one of the worksheets Lora kept in a stack. “It’s”—I crooked my fingers into claw-like quotation marks—“ ‘reflective practice.’&”

  As I watched her scan the instructions, I could tell when she’d got to the “image dialogue” part by the sound of her disbelieving laughter.

  “You want me,” she said, “to ask a piece of photo matting . . . a question?”

  I grinned. “That’s how it works.”

  Her brows went all furrowy. “And you find this . . . useful? Meaningful?”

  I shrugged. “It’s okay. Nice brain break.”

  She shook her head. Plucked a pen from a crammed-full coffee jar. Bent intently over the paper for a moment, then passed it back to me.

  Along the typed lines, under the question What is this card trying to tell you?, she’d written in gorgeous English teacher script:

  1. That Francesca really needs to get on this place about upping its academic standards.

  2. That (even though Lesley doesn’t believe it, not now, not yet) all these things and more are possible.

  “Here,” she said, handing her card to me. “Keep it.”

  7

  On New Year’s Day, Amal, one of the strictest staff members, caught Dara with her fingers down her throat, which meant that (true to Kath’s word) she was sent packing within hours. Which meant that I wound up sitting in my room, staring at an empty bed, feeling the dull ache of aloneness yet again. Which meant that Kath decided it was my turn for the fire baptism.

  The therapist she assigned me to was a willowy fortysomething woman called Bethan who watched me with an unnerving composure, her knee-high boots crossed at precise angles, her scarves knotted in elegant, drapey perfection. When she spoke, her voice was maddeningly muted, but her deep-digging questions, coupled with the close quarters of her windowless office, made me so anxious I either flitted to the ceiling or answered with
snarky diffidence.

  “What do you think brought you here?” (Her first query.)

  “The fact it was on the schedule.”

  No hint of a frown. God, I wanted her to frown. “Actually, I meant what brought you to the unit.”

  “What do you think?” I rolled up my sleeve, revealing the angry knot of barely healed tissue on my bad arm.

  “But you came voluntarily. Which suggests to me that you recognized you had things you needed to sort out.”

  “I just wanted to get out of everywhere else I’d been.”

  “You wanted to feel safe.”

  Supper tray, storytime, fluffy duvet.

  “Um, yeah.”

  Still no frown, but a subtle shift in her posture. “I’m noticing a lot of tension, a lot of defensiveness, in both the way you’re speaking and the way you’re holding yourself right now. Is that an accurate impression of how you’re feeling?”

  “I’m not feeling anything.”

  “Physically, or emotionally?”

  I crossed my arms. My gaze went so soft and unfocused the glow from the lamp on her desk began to smear. Lightness in my head, ethereal as the second before you faint. Emptiness in my chest, like a cored-out apple.

  “Both,” I said. “Yes.”

  “Can you think of a possible reason why you might be dissociating at the moment?”

  “Disso-what?”

  “Dissociating,” Bethan repeated. “Checking out. Leaving your body.”

  My eyes narrowed. “How’d you know about that?”

  “It’s very common in people who’ve experienced abuse.”

  “Really?” I said. “I thought I just had a weird brain.”

  Bethan smiled. “Not weird, smart. It protected you from things too hard for you to handle. Helped you survive, even.”

  Thanks, brain.

  “Huh.” Pondering this, I chewed my lip, as if that might bring me back to my body. But my eyes couldn’t stop flitting to her office lamp, and every time they did, I went dizzy and empty again.

  “So, now that you know what dissociation is, any idea as to what—”

  “I don’t like your office,” I said.

  “Because you don’t fancy coming here.”

  “No. It just freaks me out.”

  “Does it remind you of something?”

  Hall closet. Bare bulb. Knuckles punching my mouth. Fingers jamming inside me. Hands pinning my wrists.

  My guts turned inside out, remembering. I slid off the chair and dropped down to the rug, bent double on my knees, my fingers digging into my scalp as I rocked back and forth.

  “Lesley.” Bethan’s voice rose a touch. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  I shook my head over and over.

  “Try to stay grounded. Take some deep breaths.”

  I lowered myself all the way down. Gasped a few stuttery sucks of air.

  “Now sit up slowly.”

  I sat up slowly. Good girl. Look. Good girl, I am.

  “Open your eyes.”

  Tentative slit-flutter.

  “Let’s do some reality testing. Have a look round the room. Pick a few objects that are specific to here, that aren’t in your old memory.”

  I jerked my chin from side to side.

  “Got them?”

  I nodded.

  “Brilliant. Tell me what they are.”

  “Clock. White noise machine thingie. Ugly painting.”

  Another small smile. “Are you feeling calm enough to come back up and talk?”

  I shook my head again.

  “It’s all still there, floating about, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then let’s see what we can do to box it up tight. Remember how we learned about containment in group?”

  Vaguely. Sorta.

  “Yeah,” I said again, hoisting myself up from the floor.

  “Well, that’s such an abstract thing to wrap your mind around that it helps to make it concrete. Let’s come up with an image you can picture and call up when you need it.”

  “Like a real box?”

  “Just like. Have you any ideas?”

  “One of those sealed-off drums for toxic rubbish,” I said.

  “Mmm, well,” Bethan said, adjusting her posture into perfect equilibrium, “we want it to be a container you can open again later, so that you have the option to examine those old memories further.”

  Oh, fuck that fuck that fucking fuck that. No way was I becoming a hall closet archaeologist.

  “It can have a lock, right?”

  “Absolutely.”

  I thought for a second. “Fireproof safe. With fifteen codes to crack.”

  “Perfect. Go ahead and draw it the next time you’ve art workshop. Make it detailed as you can.”

  After I’d agreed and she’d let me go, I stumbled back out into the commons, shaky and exhausted. If this torture was how I was going to recover, I reckoned I’d take a pass on healing, thanks, and staggered off to the unlocked kitchen to scavenge.

  When I got there, I found a new girl standing at the counter, chopping vegetables on a wooden board. Compared to the dancers and drama queens with their liner-rimmed eyes and glistening claret mouths, she looked downright plain, her dark, curly hair suppressed inside a tight plait, her ample figure a mere suggestion beneath her oversized pullover and long, full denim skirt. When she glanced over at me, I could see the glint of her glasses’ frames, bright teal, and the doughy tenderness of her makeup-less face. I felt unmoored, unsure; part of me wanted to hug her in welcome, part of me wanted to mock her seeming serenity, and another part . . . well, it didn’t have words for what it wanted yet, but there was something there that made my gaze keep flickering to her bare mouth.

  “Lesley Holloway?” she asked. Her voice was girlish and high, but soft.

  I took a step backwards, even more unmoored by the fact that she’d figured me out, but also strangely pleased at the idea of her already knowing me in some way.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “They told me I’d recognize you by the hair,” she said shyly. “Or lack of it.”

  At that point, I was seriously butch. Pixie cut whittled down to a buzz.

  “Yeah,” I said again, and then asked, like the biggest idiot in the universe, “Are you new?”

  She nodded. “We’re roommates,” she said, wiping her hand on a towel before extending it to me. “I’m Clare Manning.”

  “Lesley Holloway,” I said, squeezing her hand more tightly than I meant to. Soon as I realized my social skills were failing me, I let my hand drop. “Right. Umm. You knew that.”

  She smiled, widely enough that I could see a chip in her top front tooth. I wondered how a person could smile like that, without faking it, and still be fucked up enough to earn a place at the Phoenix.

  I sat down at the table. “They give you the tour already?”

  “And the groups list.”

  “Out of control, innit?”

  She shrugged and turned back to dicing. “I don’t mind.”

  So she was glad to be there, too. I thought about asking why, but didn’t. Instead I watched the angle of her broad fingers, perfectly poised as Bethan’s suede boots, and the quick efficiency of her chop.

  “Have you a special diet or something?” I asked, watching her swirl a glug of olive oil in the pan and scrape the mushrooms and spring onions and matchstick carrots off the board.

  “No, I just enjoy cookery,” she said. “Calms me down when my mind starts going dodgy places.”

  “You ought to have a show,” I said. “Going Dodgy Places With Clare.”

  It’s a wonder she didn’t slam the hot skillet down on my head, but she didn’t. In fact, she giggled. “Could start with here, couldn’t I?”

  “Yeah. You’d be psychiatry’s answer to Nigella Lawson.”

  “Oh, please.” She shook her head, dismissive as I’d been when I’d gotten the ring in the Christmas pudding.

  “No, I’m serious
,” I said. “You even look a bit like her. Dark hair, and curvy, and all that.”

  I’m not sure why I said it, really; I wasn’t aiming to be flirty. I guess I just wanted to see that chipped smile again. Which I got, along with a blush that made me warm as her face, warm enough to completely forget I’d originally come in the kitchen for a sharp knife.

  • • •

  To hear Phoenix staff talk, you’d think that seconds later I grabbed her and pulled her to the floor and wormed my face inside her sensible skirt, taking her from repression to ecstasy while the sauté pan burned.

  Well, I hate to disappoint the casting director of Suicidal Schoolgirls Gone Wild, but that’s complete and utter bollocks. Honest. We were courteous roommates for days, and good friends for weeks, before things got intense, before things got real.

  A good bit of the slow buildup was due to all the Phoenix’s daily requirements. That, and the fact that Clare and I weren’t particularly alike.

  Take the tops of our dressers, for instance. Mine was a loose, messy constellation of talismans (Ulysses, CD player, Miss’s soul postcard, my never-gonna-happen-in-a-million-years ring token), while Clare’s held a neat, sparse stack (Phoenix worksheet binder, devotionals and school textbooks, a version of the Bible I’d never heard of), so staged it was like she’d arranged it for show in case her parents came in. Which they did, each weekend without fail, and when they weren’t visiting in person, they were ringing her on the hall phone every night. Not just to check in or send their love, but to pray with her, their sessions going on so long that Amal or Kath would have to walk over and point at her watch to hurry Clare along.

  Now I’m not one to dismiss the need for divine intervention (’cause I’ve prayed harder than Mr. and Mrs. Manning over the last six months, let me tell you), but the whole dynamic seemed odd to me. Particularly because Clare, though she never spoke poorly of her parents, seemed utterly detached from it all, her dutiful adherence to their beliefs neither begrudging nor reverent.

  We never talked about why we were sick or what we’d done to land on the Phoenix; unlike the other girls, Clare and I weren’t into brainstorming the best ways to get food out one orifice or another, or comparing self-inflicted tissue damage, or competing for the worst hospital admission story (even though I could have easily won on those last two counts). We poked fun on the surface, but we also sensed in each other a common commitment to survival, whether that entailed chopping aubergines or refusing to sneak from the cutlery drawer.