Sarah Vaughan is Not My Mother: A Memoir of Madness (11 page)

 

I take Lester into his room, careful not to slip on the floor, which has just been mopped. Waris follows me and I get him into bed. “That's enough, MaryJane. We leave Lester now.”

She leads me outside. “You're not being yourself. This is not you, all this anger.” It makes me even angrier having her speak down to me like this.

“Well, fuck.” I don't know how to express myself.

“Have you been using drugs?”

I look at the ground. “No.”

“Well, your drug test is due tomorrow and it will show if you have.”

I'm trying to cover up my anger and hide it behind my supposed physical ailment. “I need to see a doctor,” I say. “Not the psych doctor, the other one, Daniel.”

Waris looks at me. “Are you all right? Is it urgent? Are you in pain?”

I have a crippling pain in my ovaries. “Yes.”

“I'll go get you some Panadol.”

I start to wince. “Do you have anything stronger?” I start squinting.

“We'll start with Panadol and see how you go. You can see the doctor tomorrow. He's not in today.”

I follow Waris to the nurses' station and she gives me a pill. She doesn't look very happy with me but I'm in too much pain to do anything about it. I go back outside and have another cigarette. The voice speaks to me as I look at the ground. “You have no ovaries. That pain is from where they put steel bolts to control your movement by remote control. They did it when you were anaesthetised at Jared's house.” Jared is my ex-boyfriend, a junkie. I took a lot of drugs with him. “He anaesthetised you. It wasn't heroin, it was Demerol.”

Just as the voice is speaking Fiona comes over and says, “You ready?”

“Yeah.”

We go to my room and get the hair dye. We go into the bigger bathroom, which has a sink and a mirror. Fiona applies the hair dye and I tell her about Lester.

“Guess I better keep calm.”

“Yeah, you better.” I start to brighten up. “So, how has your morning been?”

She laughs. “Boring, I've been watching TV in the women's lounge. Virginia, she's so weird. She just sits in the corner and talks about Jesus Christ.”

“You better watch out, she'll set the devil on you,” I say.

We start to laugh and she gets a patch of dye on my face. “Don't worry about it,” I say, and mop it with my towel. I tell her that I saw Lloyd and Nga coming out of the toilet.

She looks alarmed. “That guy gives me the creeps. Doesn't he know she's pregnant?”

“He thinks he is doing her a favour. She's only sixteen and thinks she's got some special mission to fulfill.”

Fiona and the rest of them have no idea what's going on in my head. “All done,” she says.

“So I leave it on for an hour?”

“I'd say leave it on until after lunch.” She looks at me questioningly through the mirror. “You are eating lunch, right? You can't survive on a tomato.”

I imagine this is how she speaks to her kids so I say jokingly, “Yes, Mum.”

She takes off her gloves. “Cigarette time?”

“Yeah, why not.”

We go outside and sit at the table. There's no sign of Lester. I'd say that injection will knock him out cold until dinner.

Fiona offers me a cigarette. I don't want to take any more from her so I say, “No thanks. I don't mind rolling.” As I roll myself one Waris comes over and asks me how the pain is.

“It's still there.”

“Okay, I will get you some codeine.”

“So you have pain. That's no good, hun,” Fiona says.

“Just in my stomach. Always have it, don't know what it is.”

I get these pains all over my body, particularly in my stomach, whenever the illness sets in.

“Maybe you need to get tests?”

“I hate getting tests, find the people who give them don't really care.”

I have had several scans done, and because of what the voice told me I felt the people were hurting me, that they were part of a group of people who wanted to harm me.

“Last time they gave me a scan the woman was so rough. I'm never getting another one,” I say.

“I know what you mean.”

“It's not like they know you or even give a shit. And if you have something wrong with you, half the time they don't tell you.”

Waris returns with codeine and some water. “Here you are, darling, this will help.”

I feel relieved to be finally getting some half-decent drugs.

“It's lunchtime.”

“Already?” I say, like a little whining child.

Fiona looks at me. “Yeah, they have it early in here. You not hungry?”

“Not really.”

“Well we don't have to go now.”

“Yeah, let's go in a bit, when the queue has died down,” I say, feeling a bit brighter. I roll another cigarette. There's still no sign of Lester.

“It's like eat, smoke, eat, smoke in here,” Fiona says and laughs.

“It certainly feels that way. Nothing else to do I suppose. I'm going on the van ride today. I could bring you back a coffee, a nice one, depending on where we are going.”

“Oh yes, I'm not allowed out. I haven't been here a week yet.”

“If you're still here next week they'll let you out. I'll go down to the OT room and look on the whiteboard to see where we're going.”

“Okay, then we go to lunch.”

No one is in the OT room because everyone's at lunch. I check the whiteboard; it says Plimmerton. I look at Fiona. “The coffee'll be cold by the time I get back.”

“Oh well, another time.”

6

 

In the dining room, people give me strange looks for having hair dye in. “I might pass on lunch today,” I say to Fiona.

“Really? Are you feeling all right?”

“I feel fine, just no appetite for food. I'll grab a couple of slices of bread and go chill in my room.”

Fiona looks a bit down that I'm leaving.

“I'll see you before I go,” I say, “show you my hair.”

I grab bread and coffee and leave the dining room. I feel relieved not to be in a room with so many people. In my room I sit on the sheet on the ground and put down some bread, my offering of the day for God. My pain has completely gone; it looks like the codeine worked.

The voice starts speaking to me. “Go and get your phone.”

“Look, I'm feeling nice at the moment. I'm not in any pain. I don't need to text you, Rose.”

The voice starts sounding stern. Every item in my room begins to look angry and harsh. “I need to come and see you. You're bleeding and in pain.”

I don't like the tone Rose is using. I look at the orange and say, “I want to speak to my mother.”

“Well, you are speaking to me.” The voice moves through my mouth, very slowly and definitively. I start to wonder whether it's been sent to my head and I am mind-reading. I don't understand what's going on. I scramble around for my Vivid pen but don't find it.

“You need to get your phone.”

I decide I need to get out of my room. Even my bag is making a grimacing scary face; the sheets on my bed look coarse and the folds look sharp.

I go to the nurses' station looking for Waris. She's in the TV room.

“Oh, darling,” she says, “I think it's time you took the dye out.”

I decide to ask for the phone later.

“How is your pain?”

“It is much better. I'd better get this dye out. Can I have a hair dryer?”

Waris jumps up. “Of course you can.”

I get a towel and shampoo from my room. I get into the shower and reluctantly use the shampoo. When I am unwell, both shampoo and soap are the devil because the voice tells me I am African and ‘they' put bleach in them so my skin stays white.

I get in and out very quickly. I don't look in the mirror in case I see something scary. I go into my room and try not to look too hard at anything as I feel God is angry with me and everything will look scary and threatening. I get dressed and look in the bathroom mirror. I'm shocked by what I see. My hair is no longer purple and there is no hint of blonde. I'm not overly pleased. I dry it, and then I get my blue hat, my red hat and my scarves. I decide the blue hat and green scarf go the best with my hair.

I go and look for Fiona. She is at the table where we were sitting in the morning. “Wow, look at your hair. I really like it. It suits you more than purple.”

I feel happy to have her approval. “I don't think I'm quite used to it yet.”

The flasher guy comes over and says, “You dyed your hair. Think I liked it better purple.” He walks away and Fiona says, “Don't listen to him. What would he know? Would you take advice from somebody who likes to flash?”

I laugh. “Nah, probably not.”

 

Fiona has her phone out and is texting. This reminds me that I was meant to get mine, but I still don't want to text that person. “Just texting my husband,” Fiona says. “He says the kids miss me but they want me better. You know, I'm fine. Just frustrates me that people are telling me there's something wrong with me. I just want to go home.”

She starts to cry. I put my arm around her, although I feel somewhat removed from what she's telling me. I say, “Well, I don't think there's anything wrong with you. You're the sanest person here.” I mean what I am saying but I feel helpless to stop her tears.

“And those bastard doctors are never here,” she says. “I still haven't spoken to Dr Aso. He's probably playing golf. Why doesn't he actually come in and help people who need it? I hate being stuck in here. How do you stay so happy?” She reaches for another smoke.

“That's why I do my pictures and play guitar: it stops me going crazy. I try and liberate my mind, stop it being infected. It's not the best environment.”

Fiona turns and faces the wilting flowers in the dried-up soil. “I mean, look at the garden,” she says. “There are hardly any flowers, cigarette butts everywhere, bird shit smeared all over the ground and windows. And round the back, I hear that's where they burn bodies. It's horrible and it's summer.”

I look up at the sky and just then a gust of wind scatters some of the dirt. “Yeah, it's some summer all right. Whenever I end up in here I try to be grateful for the small, simple things, like my sight or my body, otherwise you can end up very depressed.”

Fiona laughs. “I know what you mean. Thanks for cheering me up.”

I look out into the car park. People are lining up for the van ride. “I'd better go,” I say. “I'll bring you back a cold drink, seeing as it's summer.”

I walk through to the day hospital. Rachel and Alicia are there, also Jo, Virginia, Mark, Louis and Anton. Guess the others are either late or not coming.

Just as we walk out the door Nola runs up. “I'm coming too.”

“Yes, okay,” Rachel says, looking a little annoyed.

We pile into the van. I get the window seat and am not happy when Milo Mark sits down beside me. He still has last night's dinner on his T-shirt, today's lunch on his chin and breakfast on his nose. I sit as close to the window as possible and open it so I don't have to smell him.

As we drive down Taranaki Street I look out the window and read the billboards. The voice leads my head to the letters, telling me to text Rose. It then touches my liver and I feel a pain. I often have hallucinations like this. I feel sensations in my head and pains in certain body parts, such as my liver and heart, which I take to symbolise what my voice is telling me. If the voice is mentioning love, I may feel my liver being touched. If the voice wants me to call somebody, I may feel something in my calf. If my ankle gets touched, I take this to mean it's an angel touching me. It's a great comfort to know that the voice, possibly God, and everything it is telling me are real. It's a fantasy come true, as opposed to my being alone. That's what I fear most, being alone. If you're always talking to something, how can you be alone?

 

The voice touches my eye, which I take as being God's way of saying “I love you.” We head on to the motorway and out to Plimmerton. When we get there we get out of the van and go and stand on the beach. It's not warm and there is a gusty wind blowing. I can see waves in the sea spraying water.

Virginia paces up and down the beach while the others walk barefoot along the sand. I notice how slowly they all move. I look around the beach for signs of things that will give me clues as to what is to come. In the early days of my mental illness, before the voice surfaced, I used to comb the streets of Wellington looking for signs. I would trawl for remnants in the rubbish for hours on end. I thought a person had left me the rubbish and following the trail would eventually lead me to them.

As I search the beach Nola comes up and says, “You looking for something?”

“No, what makes you say that?”

“Oh, it just looks like you're looking for something. Why don't you take your boots off and feel the sand on your feet.”

I don't want to take off my boots: you don't get a sense of freedom feeling sand under your feet while being watched and observed by nurses.

Nola puts her feet in the water and says, “It's really nice,” as if trying to convince me.

I half yell back, “I'm sure it is.”

Jo and Rachel stand by the steps. I wonder what they are talking about, probably Jo having a problem. She always seems to be having problems. Alicia comes over and says, “We're going up to get a drink soon. You don't like the beach?”

“No, I love the beach, just don't want to get my boots wet,” I say. I wonder to myself why it has to be such a big deal.

I find a piece of paua, pick it up and put it in my pocket. We pile back into the van and drive to a café one street back from the beach. Everyone else orders coffee but I get a Coke. I ask for two but Alicia says no.

“It's for Fiona.”