Coming Undone by Terri White (ebook reader with highlight function .TXT) 📗

empty page, erasing before I can colour myself into being again. I take the jet-black liquid eyeliner from the inner corners of my eye across and flick up at the sides. Blackest black mascara on each individual lash. Deep red lipstick stains my mouth into a violent permanent smile.

I pack the few items of clothes a friend has snatched for me from my apartment. My wardrobe is normally a carefully cultivated mishmash of second-hand dresses, shirts, skirts, T-shirts. Taken as separate pieces they look like the wardrobe of a deranged woman, but put together, it’s something approaching a look. A look that I could hide – exist safely – within. Grabbed at random, however, none of it worked. But it’s all I have with me to take to the next hospital: my wardrobe for the psych ward. My pink A-line dress; white shirt; a knee-skimming black dress that sticks to me in the bits that matter and those that don’t; a dogtooth mini skirt; an oversized T-shirt for my friend’s punk band; thick white tights; off-colour ankle socks; black tights with a ladder by the gusset; vintage lace-up brogues; a striped blue, white and red shirt with a dagger collar; navy blue cropped trousers; a thick yellow mini skirt.

I place my clothes, along with my make-up, a hairbrush and toiletries – moisturiser, hairspray, deodorant – and my laptop neatly in the big transparent plastic bag I’ve been allocated. The bags that you’re given when you leave or join an institution – a care home, a prison, a hospital. The sign that your belongings are, were, never really yours. They belong not just to whoever had given them to you, but to the world. The people who now have every right to see your knickers and your socks and your lipstick on display.

I wait. And wait. Visitors to surrounding beds come and go. The food trolley goes past en route to other beds. ‘None for me,’ I remind the porter with a smile, ‘I’m going to be out of here any minute!’ On the hour, every hour, I walk to the nurses’ station, still smiling while anxiously asking for an update. ‘It’s on its way,’ they say, on the hour, every hour. As each hour passes, I become more and more anxious. I can’t spend another night here in this ward, simply waiting.

It has taken several tear-fuelled conversations to my insurance company and the hospital administration team to sort the bed in the psych ward out for me. If it’s lost, I’ll be sent to the back of the queue. I feel beyond desperate just thinking about it.

I sit, stand, pace; I ask again. I don’t want to go to the bathroom in case they come and leave without me. The sun sinks a little lower. My bladder remains full. My fingers leave marks in the sides of the chair.

Eventually, several hours later, the paramedics appear: my rescuers. A middle-aged man and a young woman, swinging her high, tight ponytail, chewing gum. ‘We’ve had the worst day,’ they say to no one in particular as they pass the nurses’ station to collect me. They leave the gurney they were pushing in the corridor and come to the side of my bed.

‘Right,’ they say. ‘Time to get you on there.’

‘No thanks!’ I chirp, standing bolt-straight to attention as they invite me to get on the stretcher.

The female paramedic shakes her head. It’s not a request. ‘You have to,’ the man then chips in. ‘And we have to strap you in. It’s procedure.’

I look at the body-shaped stretcher, take a moment to steady myself. The thought of being strapped down, unable to move, takes the breath straight out of my body. They wait. Eventually, I climb up, covering my backside, as they ask me to cross my arms over my body, pull first a sheet then a blanket over me and strap me definitely not in, but down – tight, with black belts pulled across my body. They start to wheel me out and this is the exact moment the trembling starts at my ankles: an immediate, physical manifestation of the panic blossoming, opening wide, in my chest. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. Help me. Please. God. I don’t know who I’m looking at, for, but not for the first time that week, I look up. Up through the ceiling tiles, the electrical cables, the concrete, the tiles, the clouds, into the stratosphere, the sky beyond the sky we cannot see, no matter how hard we try.

As they continue wheeling me through the corridors to the elevators, the eyes of other patients and their family members fall on me, before bouncing swiftly away. Everyone can see the madness. The shame. They don’t want to be touched by it. There aren’t many other reasons to be tied down. I smile widely, red filling my cheeks. The skin in the corners of my mouth cracks, ever so slightly. My smile freezes still. They push me into the lift, talking over me; she casually texts; they laugh. As we get to the exit, my heart leaps. Through the doors, I can see the sunshine, the sky, the people hurrying, the cars speeding: New York, alive right there, just feet away.

I haven’t been outside, on concrete, felt the wind, tasted New York’s dirty air on my tongue, in almost a week. As the gurney pushes the external doors open with a bang of metal on metal, the air flies in and I instinctively open my mouth, gulping it down. If my hands had been free, I’d have been clutching at it, greedy with need. In the following seven or eight seconds it takes them to push me from the hospital exit to the ambulance doors, the wall of sun, wind, noise, clamour, chatter hits me square in the chest. Sirens collide with horns, meet screeching tires, melded with screams.

The paramedics continue to chat cheerily over my head, seemingly immune to the miracle happening all around us.