The Mystery of Mercy Close (38 page)

What day was it? Who was Beyoncé married to? Was I bleeding?

Saturday. Jay-Z. Yes.

There was a bump on the front of my head and a bump on the back, and blood on my forehead.

Someone had hit me. The nerve. The colossal
nerve
.

It hadn’t been enough to properly hurt me, just to scare me.

But it hadn’t scared me.

Being the contrary type I was, it had the opposite effect. If Wayne’s disappearance was important enough for someone to warn me off looking for him – to
hit
me, for God’s sake! – then I was definitely going to find him.

St Teresa’s was the go-to hospital for breakdowns, where everyone in Dublin – or at least everyone in Dublin who had health insurance – went when they needed ‘someplace for a rest’. It was the dreamy white, Xanax-riddled refuge that featured in so many of the fantasies of Claire and her mates – without any of them ever having been there, of course.

Everyone said it looked like a hotel, but it didn’t. It looked like a hospital. A nice one, I grant you, but it was still definitely a hospital. There were actual windows admitting actual daylight but the beds were definitely hospital beds, narrow and height-adjustable, with metal bars for headboards. And there was no disguising the function of the awful swishy curtains that divided the beds: to provide privacy for when the doctor came in and examined your bottom. (Although I wondered why a doctor would need to examine your bottom in a psychiatric hospital. Perhaps if you were talking through your arse?)

I knew that St Teresa’s had some wards where the doors were locked and where it was a high-security, key-jingling affair to be let in or out, but to get to Blossom ward, where I was going, you simply took the lift to the third floor and walked straight in.

When the lift doors opened, a long corridor made of very nice wood – probably walnut – led up to the nurses’ station. Bedrooms opened off the corridor, each one housing two beds. Full of horrible curiosity I stared into each room I passed. Some were empty and bright and the beds were neatly made. Some had the curtains closed, and hunched
deadened forms lay under blue hospital blankets, their backs towards the door.

It was a strange, terrible thing to discover myself in a psychiatric hospital, but after my meticulous plan to drown myself had failed so humiliatingly I was at the end of my rope and open to all suggestions. When my dog-walking rescuer had suggested that I go into ‘someplace for a rest’, I felt a small bud of hope.

The following morning I rang Dr Waterbury and he rang St Teresa’s, but they had no availability in the nice ward, the ‘hotel-like’ ward. There were some free beds in the not-so-nice Daffodil ward, where the doors were always locked and where poor bastards routinely got strapped to their bed, but I didn’t want to go there.

I almost lost my reason: I
had
to go ‘someplace for a rest’ – it was the only option left to me. I got on the internet, looking for other hotel-like hospitals in Ireland and there were a couple, but they were also full. I’d extended my search to the UK and had just discovered that my health insurance didn’t work there, when, all of a sudden, wonderful news arrived from Dr Waterbury: a space had materialized in Blossom ward. Either someone had rallied with miraculous speed or else – more likely – their health insurance had refused to cough up any more. So less than twelve hours after my late-night swim, I found myself asking Mum to drive me to the nut-house (her phrase, not mine).

When the paperwork in Admissions had been dealt with, a nice girl accompanied Mum and me to Blossom ward, where a nurse called Mary welcomed me warmly and told Mum to hop it. She could come back later, she said, at visiting time.

As Mum scurried away down the corridor with hasty relief, Mary said, ‘I’ll show you to your room. You’re sharing with Camilla; you’ll meet her later. Yours is the bed by the door.’

Mary searched my bags and took away my hairdryer, my phone charger, the belt of my bathrobe (anything I could hang myself with, basically), my underarm razor and all of my tablets, including my vitamin C and – far more worrying – my antidepressants. Even though they hadn’t been helping me, I was terrified of being without them.

‘It’s okay,’ Mary said. ‘The doctor will review your medication and put a plan together for you.’ Oh, I liked the sound of that. A
plan
. ‘You’re under the care of Dr David Kilty,’ she said. ‘He’ll be along to see you in a while.’

‘And what will I do until then?’

She looked at her watch. ‘It’s a bit late for Occupational Therapy. You could watch television – the lounge is just down there. Or you could lie on your bed.’

So I lay on my high narrow bed and wondered what form the miracle cure would take. I didn’t really know what I expected from the place – it was a mystery what happened in psychiatric hospitals. Obviously, I was certain they’d fix me. It was such an extreme step to admit myself to an institution, so I knew they’d respect that and match my gesture with extreme and effective remedies. But once I got down to thinking about the nitty-gritty I wasn’t sure how they were going to go about it.

It was all very quiet out there. No noise coming from the corridor, no noise coming from the other rooms. How long had I been lying here? I looked at my phone, and it was nearly an hour since Mary had left me – what was keeping my doctor? The familiar panic began to rise, but I reminded myself that a miracle plan was going to be put together for me, by
medical experts
, and that I should try to be calm. It was okay, it was all okay.

To distract myself, I decided to violate Camilla’s privacy. She had a teddy on her neatly made bed and a cluster of Get Well Soon cards on her shelf. I opened her locker and found it contained four strap-on hand weights, a travel yoga mat
and two pairs of trainers. Our shared bathroom was full of her stuff – my keen detective eye led me to deduce that she suffered from ‘fine flyaway hair’ – and an inspection of her wardrobe revealed her to be a size six.

There was a knock on the door, startling me in my nosy-poking, and an eleven-year-old boy came in. To my astonishment he introduced himself as Dr David Kilty. Frankly I wondered if he was another patient, one of the delusional ones, but under my rigorous questioning he claimed not only to be thirty-one, but also to have passed all his exams and to have worked as a hospital psychiatrist for almost three years.

‘I don’t know, Dave … Do you mind if I call you Dave?’

‘If that’s what you’d prefer. Although I am a doctor.’

He read the notes Dr Waterbury had forwarded and he asked me detailed questions about my attempt to drown myself.

‘Are you still suicidal?’

‘No …’

‘Why not?’

‘Because …’ Because I’d tried and I’d failed.
Twice
.

My late-night dip had actually been my second attempt to kill myself. Ten days before that I’d given my Alexander McQueen scarf to Claire, written a short apologetic note to the people I loved and swallowed back my sleeping tablets, all ten of them. To my horror, I’d woken up twenty-nine hours later, with no ill effects. Apart from being still alive, of course. No one had even noticed my absence, and having to explain to Claire why she had to return my scarf was the least of my worries. (‘I only gave it to you because I thought I’d be dead and it would be a waste of a good scarf, but I’m still alive so I’d like it back.’) I’d really thought I could depend on the old sleepers to do the trick and it came as a deep shock to discover that killing myself wasn’t as easy as I’d assumed. I was so demoralized that I felt there was no point giving it another go.

But, a few days later, my old can-do spirit returned and I resolved that I’d try again and this time I’d succeed. I spent literally days on the net doing research.

Flinging myself off a high building or cliff was a method that was popular in mythology but – I soon discovered – fiendishly difficult in practice. Local authorities and suicide-prevention had put all kinds of measures in place to stop people hurling themselves to their death.

The basic rule was that if it didn’t have a protective fence around it, it wasn’t high enough. I could chance it and I might get lucky and meet my end, or, more likely, I might break every important bone in my body and have to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair being fed through a straw. That was a risk I couldn’t take.

An overdose of paracetamol was another bust: it didn’t always kill you but it destroyed your liver, so you had to live out your days in pain, discomfort and misery.

Basically it came down to two methods: cutting my wrists or drowning myself. I’d plumped for drowning myself and I planned it
meticulously
. I’d gone out and bought tins of strawberries, the works – and it had still been impossible to achieve.

At that moment, with Dave looking at me with his little prepubescent face, I felt more wretched than I could ever have imagined feeling. I felt worse than suicidal. I was trapped in being alive and I thought my head would explode from the horror of it.

But I was in hospital now and they were going to magically cure me, so I settled for saying, ‘I suppose I’ve got things out of my system. I still feel … crazed, but … I’m in here and you’re going to make me better, right?’

Dave diagnosed me with anxiety and depression – now, there was a bombshell – doubled my dose of antidepressants and, mercifully, prescribed sleeping tablets.

‘I’ll check in with you in a couple of days’ time,’ he said, getting up to leave.

‘What?’ In a panic I jumped off the bed and tried to stop him walking out of the room. ‘Is that all? That can’t be all. What else will you do for me? How are you going to magically cure me?’

‘You can walk in the grounds,’ he said. ‘Nature is very healing. Or you can take relaxation classes or yoga or do occupational therapy.’

‘You’re having me on,’ I said. ‘Occupational therapy? Do you mean like woodwork? Knitting?’

‘Or mosaic work. Or painting. There’s a full programme. People find it helpful.’

‘And that’s
it
?’ I was out of my mind with agitation.

‘There’s
The Wonder of Now
. We’re getting good results with that.’

‘What’s that?’

Dave tried to explain, something about living in the moment, but I was way too distressed to understand or even listen.

‘I need drugs,’ I was pleading. ‘I need special good strong tablets or tranquillizers. Xanax, please give me Xanax.’

But he wouldn’t. Apparently Xanax was only ever prescribed as an emergency short-term measure.

‘I tried to kill myself!’ I said. ‘How bad do I have to be?’

‘You were well enough to admit yourself to hospital.’

‘I’ve admitted myself to a psychiatric hospital,’ I said. ‘Therefore, by definition, I am
very unwell in the head
. Therefore I need Xanax.’

But he just chuckled and said that I was great at arguing and I should consider a career as a barrister. Being in hospital was a good opportunity to find ways to self-soothe, he said. Once again, he pointed me in the direction of occupational therapy and suddenly I understood why mentally ill people were called basket weavers: it was one of the activities that happened in occupational therapy. I am a basket weaver, I thought. I have become a basket weaver.

Camilla was anorexic. She was no trouble. I suppose she didn’t have the energy to be. She ate nothing all day long until the evening, when she had quite a substantial plate of salad. She had a thing about coleslaw
. Had
to have it. Odd. I’d always thought that anorexics simply ate nothing, and certainly this one ate very little, but she did eat and was actually very particular about it.

On my first night she asked me, ‘What are you in for?’

‘Depression.’

‘What kind?’ she asked eagerly. ‘Bipolar? Post-natal?’ The post-natal was particularly exciting because there was a version of it, with fairly extreme psychotic symptoms, that was enjoying a bit of publicity at the time.

‘Just the ordinary sort of depression,’ I said, almost shamefaced. ‘I want to die most of the time.’

‘Oh, that …’

Ten a penny, that type of depression.

To my surprise (category:
extremely
unwelcome), there was no camaraderie or support from the other patients. It wasn’t like the time when my sister Rachel had been in rehab. As far as I could see, everyone there had helped each other.

But in this place everyone was locked in their own private hell. We were all in for different things: anorexia, OCD, bipolar disorder, post-natal depression, and good, plain, old-fashioned nervous breakdowns.

Despite the fact that nervous breakdowns didn’t medically exist (they’d been rebranded as ‘major depressive episodes’), St Teresa’s was wall-to-wall with sufferers. These were men and women who’d been overloaded with demands, from their children, their parents, their banks and their jobs – especially their jobs. People whose responsibilities had built and built and built to a point where their overloaded system just blew a fuse and they’d stopped being able to function at all.

The hospital was their sanctuary. Lots of them had been
patients for several weeks, even months, and they wanted to never leave because while they were there no one could ring them, no one could email them and no one could post them scary letters telling them how much money they owed. While they were in hospital they didn’t have to pick up their Alzheimer’s-riddled mums from police stations, they didn’t have to deal with the bailiffs showing up at their workplace and they didn’t have to run a home and a full-time job on four hours’ sleep a night.

Many of the nervous-breakdown people were those whose businesses had crashed, who owed hundreds of thousands, even millions of euro, money they could never pay back. They were terrified of being tipped back into the outside world, where people were howling for their blood. In St Teresa’s they could sleep and stare out of the window and watch television and let their minds be white and blank. They got peace and quiet and drugs and three meals a day (disgusting, but that’s by the by).