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

of hours and still can’t believe this is now my reality. I shut my eyes tighter, desperate to make them go away, but the hum and the hard consonants crash into my peace. I turn back over, pull the blanket up to my chin and will myself to sleep, the only place I can escape and be free from the insanity all around me.

A couple of hours later and I’m awake again. The woman next to me is sitting up in bed, reading, her nightie pulled up now, her breasts safely encased inside her bra. She peers at me over the edge of her reading glasses as if she’s only just noticed me. She’s in her seventies, has a strong, chiselled jaw, pronounced eye sockets, strong, arched nose, nostrils like almonds. She’s tanned, speckled and sprinkled with brown marks that the sun has given her body. I’ll soon see that she walks with a slight stoop, her legs swollen and coarse, a layer of softness over her thighs and stomach that dances when she walks, swaying slightly side to side.

‘Hello,’ she says, offering her handshake, overjoyed to hear that I’m also a foreigner when I reply. She’s an artist, she’s called Ana. She splits her time between San Francisco, New York and Berlin. She eyes me carefully. ‘Are you a reader?’ Yes, yes I am. She seems happy. ‘Oh, thank heavens I’m sharing with you,’ she says, and then: ‘Ugh, I bet everyone in here is crazy.’ I laugh, feel a momentary lightness as I do. Buoyed by her recognition – I’m not like them. I’m like her. Normal.

She doesn’t want to come with me to breakfast, but I feel I must go. It’s what sane people do and I’m conscious of the Note Takers. I put on the hospital gown, the socks, my hair, the bits of make-up I’ve been allowed to keep. I look in the mirror above the sink in the bathroom and try to work out if I could smash it and use the pieces against, on, myself. I could smash it with a chair, with my fist, with my head. How much could I pull out and use in the right place before they came in and here and got me? Not enough, I think. Not enough.

I take a deep breath, walk out into the hallway, join the steady stream of people moving towards the corridor where the food trolleys are parked. I hold the back of my gown together, try to keep the heat out of my cheeks as the other patients look at my New Girl Gown and Just Admitted Socks.

‘Hi,’ says a nurse. ‘Terri? As you weren’t here in time to order your breakfast, you’ll just have to take what’s left over.’

I wait until all the other patients have taken their trays – their names called out one by one, surnames only – and have cereal, milk and juice. Taking my tray, I walk into the dining room (cum therapy room, cum meeting room) and look around nervously. Small groups sit together, nothing outwardly noticeable binding them into their gangs. They look up as I shuffle into the room in my socks, then look at each other. No one makes eye contact with me, to let me know it’s OK, they get it; they’ve been here too. But then I spot a woman on her own. Brown hair, unbrushed and knotted like rope, that keeps falling in her eyes as she blinks it away, never moving it away, out, with her fingers. The dark circles swallow her eyes, her T-shirt is stained and her soft belly rests over the waistband of her jogging bottoms. I walk over to the table.

‘Hello, how are you?’

She stares.

‘I’m Terri,’ I say by way of an introduction that she definitely didn’t ask for.

‘Would I be able to sit down?’

She doesn’t respond. I nod at the chairs.

‘Can I?’

She looks away. I take this as a yes and sit down, the whole room going back to their conversations once I open my carton of milk. She never looks up again, pushing her spoon into her mouth before she’s finished swallowing what was last put in there.

After breakfast, we form another line (there is a lot of queueing in psych wards). We have our temperature, pulse and blood pressure taken, one by one, sitting in the plastic chair opposite the nurses’ station. We then queue up again to get our meds. Once you hit the front, the nurse checks your wristband and your medical forms and gives you your medication in a small paper cup. Just like in the movies. You have to swallow them as they watch, stick your tongue out in proof. Just like in the movies. I’ve been prescribed Prozac and propranolol. I will tell the doctor that I feel better immediately. I don’t. I don’t feel anything. Not a single tremor or tickle. But I need him to believe in my transformation: the epiphany of medication, the pharmaceutical salvation that he’s charged in with, clasping it in his hand like an unsheathed sword.

I panic at how I’m coming across. I know that I can seem cold, hard. Judgemental and superior, even. And at times, I am all of these things and worse. I’m trembling with nerves and fear, the twisting and spinning of my guts. But I need to make sure none of this spills out. If I let my brain and body go, they’ll never be reconciled again.

I’ve read those awful stories in the paper: those people who threw themselves under trains, surviving while the train kept them together, falling to bits as the car is lifted off them. But the cuts, the incisions which severed, chopped me up, couldn’t be seen to the naked eye. So, for now, all of my effort has to be spent ensuring that it stays this way. Falling apart here and getting fixed isn’t even an option. I can’t allow that to happen. I won’t.

Later that morning, I meet