suddenly start to shout and try to hurt themselves, or someone else, and who had to be wrestled to the ground by nurses and given injections that turned them – for a while, at least – from ranting, arm-flailing lunatics into limply passive, dead-eyed zombies.
Some of the other patients were suffering from schizophrenia, and they could be the most alarming of all. One moment they’d be talking to you quite normally, and then, suddenly, they’d fly into a rage and accuse you of saying something you hadn’t said. You’d stumble away from them, your heart racing with shock, and then you’d begin to wonder if you actually had said it after all. And that was even more frightening than the uncontrollable fury you’d just witnessed, because it meant that you never knew what was real and what was in your imagination, or whether perhaps you were crazier than they were.
One day, I was sitting in the day room with a woman who was telling me how much she hated the hospital and the doctors and nurses. She started talking about her family and about how she longed to be at home, and then she suddenly stood up, took a knife from inside the sleeve of her cardigan and tried to slit her throat. I don’t know how she’d got hold of the knife, but, fortunately, it was too blunt for her to be able to sever the artery in her neck and kill herself. She made a good attempt, though, and I can remember hearing the sound of what were actually my own wild-animal-like screams as I jumped up from the table, knocking over my chair in my haste to get away from the blood that had started to pour from the wound in her throat.
One of the reasons I was frightened of the other patients was because they weren’t like me. And then sometimes I’d be even more afraid because I began to think that perhaps they were, and that I’d be locked up with them for ever. I felt as though I was drowning, looking upwards from just below the surface of the water as I struggled to break through into the air and breathe, but never quite managing to do so.
Because of the medication I was taking, everything seemed blurred and unreal. I felt detached from what was going on around me, as though I’d turned in on myself and was living inside my own head, looking out. I was being dragged back to my childhood because of everything I was remembering and, like a child trying to comfort herself, I’d often sit on the floor in the corner of a room, curled into a ball and rocking backwards and forwards. Sometimes I’d hear the sound of someone crying, and it was only when I stopped rocking for a moment so that I could listen that I realised it was me. Great sobs of despair would rise up from somewhere deep inside me, where they’d been locked away for years. But, no matter how much I cried, I never felt any better.
I’d never forgotten my father’s violence towards me when I was a child, and how brutally he used to punish me whenever I did anything ‘naughty’. Often over the years, though, when I thought about my childhood, I could almost see something else – something dark and malignant that my mind didn’t want to remember. And, while I was in the hospital, those almost-thoughts became memories of the most terrible of all the things my father had done to me when I was a young child – memories that my brain had locked away when I was in my early teens, leaving me with an inexplicable sense of guilt and unhappiness that had underscored every aspect of my life for years.
I’d been desperately unhappy as a teenager; I’d hated my life and I’d hated myself, for reasons I’d never understood. I’d lived with a constant, inexplicable sense of self-disgust and a sometimes overpowering anger that would cause me to lash out and want to hurt people. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, and there was no one I could turn to for help. So I’d tried to hide my self-loathing and the turmoil of my emotions beneath a façade of bravado and bad behaviour.
Then, for some reason, the birth of my child had triggered the unlocking of some of those previously repressed memories. At first, they were just flashes of unfocused images; but, gradually, they became complete pictures that I didn’t want to look at but that I could no longer ignore. And, eventually, my brain had blown a fuse and I’d become so mentally disorientated and so uncertain of what was real and what I was imagining that my mind had been unable to process any thoughts or function on any level at all, which was when I’d ended up in hospital.
Luckily, though, I had a wonderful psychiatrist. Dr Hendriks was the first person I’d ever talked to about the things I was remembering, and I was reluctant to talk about them at all to begin with, not least because it was almost impossible to find the words to describe the images I was seeing. But Dr Hendriks always listened without judging me and, perhaps most importantly of all, he made it clear that not only did he believe what I was telling him, but that he didn’t blame me for what had happened to me as a child. Because, as well as beginning to remember what my father used to do to me, and what he allowed and encouraged his friends to do too, I remembered that he had always told me that all of it was my fault – and the responsibility of that belief was a burden I’d carried throughout my life.
I’d been at the hospital for just a few days when I walked out of the day room one morning and heard a commotion at the end of the corridor. There were often quarrels and scuffles of one sort or another – patients fighting amongst themselves or arguing with the nurses – and I’d quickly learned to be wary and alert to the signs that indicated something was kicking off. So, without looking overtly in the direction from which the noise was coming, I stopped and listened.
In every door along the corridor there was a small window, but it was only the one in the door at the end that looked out on to the normal, unlocked world outside. I glanced quickly towards it and could see part of what appeared to be an enormous bunch of flowers. On my side of the door – the locked, crazy side – there were two nurses. The smaller one of the two was on tiptoes, looking out through the window, while the other one stood at right-angles to her, glancing back down the corridor in my direction.
As soon as the second nurse saw me standing nervously in the doorway of the day room, she scurried towards me.
‘Go back, Katie,’ she said, looking directly into my face and nodding a couple of times, as if to encourage me to do what she was asking. ‘Go back in the day room. Please. It’s just for a moment.’
There was an urgency in her voice that made the muscles of my stomach contract, and I stepped quickly back into the room. The nurse closed the door behind me and I stood for a moment, my whole body shaking violently, and tried to breathe. Then I turned to look through the little window in the door. But all I could see were the neat brown curls at the back of the nurse’s head. So, instead of looking, I listened, one ear pressed against the wired glass.
I could hear the subdued murmur of a woman’s voice, which was interrupted periodically by a man saying something loud and angry. For a few seconds, everything was quiet, and then a different man spoke in a slow, authoritative voice. The first man shouted, a door slammed and then there was silence.
My heart was racing and, as I took a step away from the day-room door, I could see the damp imprint of my hand where it had been pressed against the glass of the window. At that moment, the nurse turned and smiled at me and then she opened the door.
‘Well done, love,’ she said. ‘You can pop out now.’
‘Who was it?’ I whispered. ‘Who was the man who was shouting?’ But I already knew the answer.
‘It was your father,’ the nurse said. She smiled a quick, apologetic smile.
Usually, the staff avoided any kind of physical contact with the patients, except when they had to restrain someone who had become violent and was threatening to hurt themselves or someone else. For some reason, though, the nurse touched my arm lightly as she added, ‘My word! Now there’s a man who knows what he wants and intends to get it.’
I pressed my hands against my stomach, trying to stop the sick feeling rising up into my throat, and then I asked, in a barely audible voice, ‘And what did he want?’
