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

that I would fall. My despair was quieted just for a moment by the thought of my body dropping through the air like a stone, hitting the ground. I remember how the cold air soothed my cheek as I looked out over the houses and gardens that surrounded us. I didn’t look at the ground directly below but knew it was there, could see my body spreadeagled, face-down on the grass, limbs at extraordinary, impossible angles.

No one tells you how to be mad when you’re six, when you’re seven; no one tells you what it looks like, sounds like, feels like. But no one tells you how not to be, either. Or why you shouldn’t be. I would sneak biros from the dresser drawer, snap them in half and pull the splintered plastic edges down my arms. I watched myself crying in the mirror while 10cc tried to drown out the kids playing outside. They were still too loud. It had been coming a while, even then. How can it have been coming a while? At six, at seven? The pain, the burden, the weight already felt like too much to bear. My slight shoulders buckled and corrected, while I struggled to stay on two feet.

So, it was no great surprise, really, that I ended up on that ledge. Or that twenty-seven years on, and three thousand miles away, I would end up on another. The wire across the windows replacing the shoelaces that kept me safe when I tried to fall, when I believed I could, would. The pain of the past, shaped and shrouded in black, shaking off the soil I’d buried it under, comes crawling towards me, moaning as it drags and pulls itself along. It inches through the door here on the psych ward and I feel it pulling at my hair, let it loosen the pins I’d just fought desperately to keep.

I stand at the window, looking at the fluorescent-lit bricks of the building opposite, the outline of the city as it roars and settles. I dream of flying, of being, for the very first time, free – even while all I can hear is the ground rushing towards me.

CHAPTER 3

Here’s where it begins. Or rather, here’s where it ends. Six nights prior, in a charmless midtown sports bar, ceiling lights down low, blue LED strip-lights plotting the exact dimensions of the room. Three of the walls are decorated with framed pictures of the city through the ages and neon bar signs depicting bubbles running down the outside of a jauntily angled beer glass, bright green lucky clovers tucked into the corner of the glowing tube.

I’m here at the invitation of a man I know from back home in England, though barely. He suggested drinks as a guise to ask me for a job. I said yes so I could drink with an excuse and company. As the third pint empties into my throat and the bottom of the glass hits the table, he leaves, to get back to his wife. I stay drinking, without excuse, without company and without question. After three drinks I need none.

As I swallow more, the crowd blurs and fizzes and rattles around me. I look up and it reaches the very edges of the room: four deep at the bar, every red plastic stool smothered in damp skin and cloth. Everyone is represented: office workers, restaurant servers, shop assistants, management execs, bartenders from other bars down the block. Ice hockey is on every single television screen that papers the wall: the clashing and crashing of sticks and bones blares out in waves, sliced through with screams and whoops from the room with increasing frequency. No time passes; hours disappear, and I look up again and the people have disappeared, dissolving into the air around me. I count the people on one hand, maybe the beginnings of two. Those of us who stayed beyond the acceptable post-work drinking hours and were now into our time. Where conversation isn’t the point. Drinking is. It’s the only point.

Then, now, nothing.

Blackouts are a weekly, daily visitor by then. I no longer wait to be seduced; I chase, hunt them down hungrily, teeth, tongue bared. Wine follows whisky follows anything wet and strong until the plug is kicked clean out of the base of my brain. I close my eyes and enjoy the slide, the floor taking off my face.

Now, then, eyes open. I’m naked in my own bed, blotchy limbs tangled up in stained black sheets. I squint, flinch in the glare of the sunlight snaking through the bars on the window of my third-floor walk-up. My fists closed tight, I’m spreadeagled on the mattress. I’m holding something so hard my fingers have gone white. I uncurl first the left, then the right, and see an orange pill bottle tucked in each. Both are empty; they were full before, a doctor’s order to take one of each a day ignored, not for the first time. Patting myself down, I find a few of the bright blue tablets stuck to my hot skin: jammed against my spine, slipped behind my ear, tucked inside the fold of my damp knee. I pluck them off one by one, put one wobbly foot on the floor and clutch the corner of the mattress to steady me, momentarily. Three more pills scatter beneath my toes, running far and wide in their bid for escape. Apart from the half-handful of plucky desperate deserters, I’ve swallowed down everything in those two bottles, though not a single memory of a gulp remains in my mind, no matter how much I rummage.

I’m still breathing, still alive, but will I die today? Tonight? When I next sleep? I’m afraid, suddenly. The urge to vomit is overwhelming and I buckle, my body folding in half at the waist under the sheer force of a heave, my mouth filling with water. I spit it out into my palm before scrunching