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

When I got to the hospital they told me that I could have died, that if I’d just gone to sleep I would have done – not immediately, beautifully, serenely – but later, once the paracetamol had eaten my liver and other organs. Then it would have been too late. They gave me an IV drip. The man came; he brought a book of poetry called Staying Alive. He left and I didn’t see him again.

Someone, I’m not sure who, apparently called my mum. She didn’t jump in a car, onto a train. She stayed at home. Said there was nothing she could do anyway. Then, by surreal coincidence, her friend overdosed on insulin a few hours later. She went to her bedside. She called me afterwards on the hospital phone and said, ‘How can people be so selfish as to do that to themselves?’ I agreed.

She didn’t come that night or at all. I woke up the next morning and my best friend, who’d been in Manchester, was sitting at the end of my bed. My eyes filled with tears at this moment of extraordinary kindness, a kindness I wasn’t used to and struggled to recognise.

The nurses changed shift and the new one stopped by my bed, examined the IV and my notes and tutted, ‘I thought so.’ Apparently I looked like the kind of girl who would try to commit suicide.

I was due to go home the next day, but the psychiatrist I’d seen once since being admitted needed to speak to me. The man and my flatmate had been to see her. They told her that they didn’t think I was well enough to go home. My flatmate said she was convinced that she’d come home to find me hanged from a noose off the ceiling. I was livid. How dare she expose me to them?

The doctor suggested that I stay in the hospital. I refused. She mentioned sectioning. I argued against it. I lied beautifully. I wasn’t suicidal; I’d never really been suicidal. I hadn’t even really been depressed. I’d just been having a hard time. I talked my way out of it. She let me go home. My friend’s dad came down. He made dinner, put food in the oven, talked to me about life and what it meant, ultimately, and I was so desperately sad and grateful for this act, I thought my heart might stop right there and then.

But it still felt like it was just the first act. That it wasn’t over. That the shadow would be back to claim me again. I waited for him.

CHAPTER 14

I’m sitting in Heathrow. It’s May 2012. I have a slight pile of dollars – ending my life in London had pretty much entirely cleared me out – and a copy of American Psycho. That and one giant pink plastic Primark suitcase is all I have with which to start my new life in New York, where I’ve taken a job on a magazine.

I sit outside W.H. Smith, my legs frozen at the thought of walking to the gate. I want to go; I really do. I think. But I have a weight in my stomach that won’t shift. A rock lassoed with rope and tied to the bottom of my rib cage. Every movement reminds me that it’s there, as I walk down the white corridors, along the moving metal pathways and arrive at the gate. The plane’s there. Once I step onto that plane, I know it’s all going to change. Everything.

I clutch my tote bag and handbag tight. When I get up, too quickly, jerking as they call out the row number my ears have been listening for, my fingers flex open and both of my bags fly through the air and land at the feet of a suited man who glances at me with thinly veiled irritation. Heat and colour rush to my face and I’m so, so sorry, on my knees, pushing two-pence pieces and bits of torn-up paper, red lipsticks without lids and tampons that have no wrappers back inside the bags. As I kneel among the mess of the life I am not really leaving behind, but carrying on with me, I remind myself that I don’t believe in signs and, if I did, I certainly wouldn’t believe in one as heavy-handed as this.

The plane takes off and the zooming, zapping excitement, the kind that is supposed to crash through your bloodstream and into your bones at moments like this, is absent. I muster up a touch of fear, an emotion I’m innately more comfortable with, asking for wine, hoping that this will prove to be the kindling for the feelings I’ve misplaced. Possibly never had.

I arrive in New York, knowing that the answer to everything, the way to fill the gaps inside me, is on the other side of the Arrivals gate. I get in the line for a yellow taxi and then I’m in the back.

Speeding speeding speeding speeding.

The skyline comes into view, the one that I’ve dreamed of, fantasised about, touched and tasted in films, in books. The lights, the noise, the fever I beckon into my open ears. In the middle of the skyline, the Empire State Building rises, her majesty cutting through the cotton clouds, her mystery, her seduction in full flow.

Before I’d ever even set foot on the hot pavement, the city was burned on my brain. Not just what it looked like, but what I thought it felt like. From the Brooklyn brownstones and the Manhattan rooftops to the steaming manholes and the glittering skyline: I’d seen it and experienced it thousands of times over.

Whenever stress made my shoulders sag or I shared sour words with a friend, I’d escape to that bit of my brain marked ‘New York’ and wander the streets there, feeling free. I knew that the city was not only holding the life I’d been waiting to live, but the best version of