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

‘Did you sign some forms?’ I ask.

‘Maybe … I don’t know!’ she says. ‘I was just so tired and wanted to sleep. But now they won’t let me out. They say I’d have to appeal. I’ll just do my three days.’

‘But what if they won’t let you out after that?’ I say, articulating my deep fear. I am really testing the water for my own path forwards. Trying to work out the likelihood that I won’t be able to get out. Aware that my own day three is tomorrow.

She shrugs. ‘I’m going to get my friend to break me out.’ I can’t tell if she’s joking.

To the right of the nurses’ station, opposite one of the two payphones, is the TV room. Well, technically, actually, the TV corner. It’s a continuation of the corridor, with enough furniture in it to arguably constitute a room. Erratically stocked bookshelves, five rows of plastic chairs three deep and a dust-coated TV mounted onto the wall. Around it, at the allotted, agreed TV times (briefly in the morning, the afternoon and then for a longer stretch at night) listed on the schedule that is stuck onto the walls, sit most of the other patients.

As soon as it’s the scheduled hour, we take our seats. All necks, faces, ears, eyes, minds directed up into the corner, through the TV screen, through the cables and wires to a reality happening somewhere other than here. No one speaks. Everyone simply stares up.

CHUNG-CHUNG.

The opening bars of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. The noise that had resonated around every apartment I’d lived in for the last few years. Every day, every night, I’d sought comfort in the dark, in the stories of women who had been pared and pillaged like me. Each episode saw them, faces bruised, bodies smashed, hearts emptied out, getting justice. I would watch episode after episode, my heart hammering every time The Bad Man paid for his Awful Crimes. The victim, the woman, walking straight-backed, proud, resilient into her future. Made whole again by the destruction of the one who’d tried his best to bloody her beyond redemption, to ruin her forever.

The TV shudders on the bracket. It amazes me that this is considered acceptable entertainment for a room full of psychiatric patients. We watch episode after episode: stories of rape, murder, abuse, unimaginable cruelties visited on the weakest, most vulnerable. Everyone sits unflinching, unmoving, as crimes are committed, justice served.

Later, I go to the AA meeting, thinking it’ll be one mark in my favour with the doctors. It’s held in a small side room opposite the break room. Inside are eight other people from the ward and a woman who’s come in from the outside world to tell us her story. I’m the only first-timer in the room and I’m given an information leaflet that I squeeze into a ball in my hands.

The woman from the outside begins talking. There’s a small window above her head that looks out onto the street, the sky, a building nearby. The glimpse of the world is intoxicating and my head spins.

She’s like me, kind of. She had a good job, friends, but as she drank more and more, she ended up in situations that I’d lived too. Blacking out, upsetting those she loved, falling down the stairs, breaking a bone, almost getting arrested. My teeth start to lightly clatter as my face bristles and throbs in recognition; the voice in my head saying that I don’t belong here gets a little quieter. Every excuse I’ve come up with, every way I’ve rationalised starts to feel slippery between my fingers. She speaks of how much better her life has become. How happy she is, now that she’s committed to the programme and submitted to the higher power.

Others are invited to share their stories. James from the ward starts to talk. He’s tall, grey-haired, wears glasses. In his khaki shorts and sandals, you’d take him to be an off-duty estate agent or ad sales guy. He turned up in New York a handful of days ago, running from another city he didn’t want to be, or couldn’t be, in any more. He had no money, nowhere to stay and just a bagful of clothes. He went to a bar and hooked up with an older man he wasn’t attracted to, just so he’d have somewhere to sleep. They stayed up doing pills for a couple of days. It’s not clear if it was the drugs or the hook-up that sent him spiralling but he ended up in the emergency room and then here.

His family are down south, but he isn’t so welcome after multiple relapses and addictions and arrests. He has nieces and nephews who need to be sheltered and shielded from his behaviour. He nods as he recounts this, while tears fill his eyes. He has spent decades hustling for money, booze, drugs, a roof over his head. Decades being passed around and used, using others. He’s been diagnosed as bipolar and medicated for some time, but he always goes back to the drugs he gets off the street; the prescriptions are never enough.

I think of my own niece, the love of my life: what I owe her. How much I don’t want to let her down. I keep listening. I don’t speak in this session, but I put my hands in the palms of others when everyone stands to say the serenity prayer at the end. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, And the wisdom to know the difference. The girl like me smiles and says, ‘Keep coming back.’

CHAPTER 26

It’s the next afternoon and TV hour again. I’m seated four rows back. The man in front of me – a grey-haired, middle-class dad – starts to jerk backwards and forwards, the legs of his chair scraping in quick movements along the floor, like