The Shock of the Fall (Special edition) (17 page)

The nurse pretends to read her magazine. Pressing the phone tightly to my cheek, I whisper. ‘Thank you for calling.’

There is silence at the other end. Then, ‘I can’t hear you, Matt.’

‘How’s your mum?’ I ask.

‘She’s alright. She got a new chair today. She’s bitching about it – says the head rest makes her look disabled. I mean, for fuck’s sake. How disabled does she need to be?’

Someone laughs. There’s someone with him. I ask what he’s up to?

‘How are you, anyway?’ he asks.

‘What you up to?’ I ask again.

‘Having a smoke with Hamed.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah, man. He’s got some killer Green. I’ll bring you some in next time if you want? I would have come today, but you know how it is with—’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

I don’t want him to be smoking with Hamed. I don’t know Hamed. I don’t want the world to keep turning without me on it.

‘How are you, anyway?’ he asks.

‘Ask your fucking brother.’

‘I can’t hear you?’

‘I’m locked up.’

There is silence. Then, ‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’m locked up.’

‘No, before that. You said something about my brother?’

I don’t answer. The nurse flips a page of her magazine, staring straight at me.

‘Come in tomorrow, if you want.’

‘I don’t know about tomorrow, mate. It’s just—’

‘Or the next day.’ I’m clenching the receiver so tight my knuckles ache. I can hear the start-up tune of his X-Box 360.

‘Mate, I’ve gotta go. It’s my ma. She’s calling me. I’ll give you a shout soon, yeah. Catch you later.’

Listen to the automated telephone voice – The other person has cleared. The other person has cleared. The other person has enough shit to worry about without you to deal with too.

Hang up.

Lie in bed. Twisting my sheets into knots.

Get up and request sleeping tablets. One more cigarette. Climb into bed. Wait for sleep.

The viewing slat on my door lifts. Torchlight shines against my chest for a single rise and fall. The viewing slat drops.

As above.

As above.

Get woken by a knock on my bedroom door, and the call for morning medication round. I have a metallic taste in my mouth, a side effect of the sleeping tablets.

(Repeat)

In the smokers’ garden dry leaves scurried across the concrete slabs, or trembled at the high wire fence.

I would watch them, waiting for him to reveal himself. If I kept my mind sharp, stayed alert, he would speak. He had chosen to be with me, not Mum or Dad or his friends from school. He didn’t talk to the doctors, the nurses; I couldn’t expect them to understand.

In my room, at night, if I stayed awake, filling the sink with cold water to splash my face, if the tap choked and spluttered before the water came, he was saying, I’m lonely. When I opened a bottle of Dr Pepper and the caramel bubbles fizzed over the rim, he was asking me to come and play. He could speak through an itch, the certainty of a sneeze, the after-taste of tablets, or the way sugar fell from a spoon.

He was everywhere, and in everything. The smallest parts of him; electrons, protons, neutrons.

If I were more perceptive, if my senses weren’t so blunted by the medicine, I’d be better able to decipher, understand what he meant by the movement of the leaves, or the sideways glances of patients as we sucked endlessly at cigarettes.

Drawing was a way to be somewhere else.

Mum brought me a new sketch pad onto the ward, and the right type of pencils and ink pens. So when I wasn’t smoking or trying to sleep, I did sketches from my imagination.

I’m an okay artist. Mum thinks I’m better than I am. At home she has a drawer full of my pictures and stories, dating way back from when I was little.

For her fiftieth birthday I wanted to give her something special. I was fifteen and knew I wasn’t the easiest teenager to live with. I wanted to let her know that I loved her, and I still cared. I’d decided to try a portrait of her, but when I ran it past Dad he said, ‘Don’t you think she’d prefer one of the family?’ I knew he was right, so I set about doing that instead. I decided to draw us on the couch together, but I wanted it to be a surprise, so what I did was come into the living room whenever she was watching TV or reading or whatever, and I’d make secret notes and partial sketches to help me remember details, like the way she holds her neck slightly to the side, and how she crosses her legs, with one foot wrapped right behind the other ankle.

I think personalities are hidden in these details, and if you capture them properly, you capture the person.

This was a long time after Simon died, and it wasn’t like we thought about him every day. Or I guess Mum might have, but I didn’t. Not so much. And nowhere near as much as I do now. But I decided it wasn’t right to have a family portrait without him in it.

In the end I did something I’m really proud of, and I don’t get to say that often. I took one of the framed pictures of Simon from the mantelpiece – the one of him beaming proudly in his new school uniform – and drew it on the little table beside the couch, where we kept the newspapers. I drew Mum beside him, then myself between her and Dad. I got Mum’s crossed legs pretty much perfect, and I did Dad biting at his bottom lip like he does when he concentrates. Self-portraits are the hardest. It’s hard to capture your own self, or even know what it is. In the end I decided to do myself with a sketchbook on my knees, drawing a picture. And if you look carefully, you can make out the top of the picture – and it’s the one we’re in.

I think that’s sort of what I’m doing now too. I am writing myself into my own story, and I am telling it from within.

On the ward, I sat in the smokers’ garden, and pictured my flat. I thought about my kitchen and drew it, complete with chipped tiles and blistered wallpaper. Nanny Noo is standing at the sink peeling vegetables, with her packet of menthol cigarettes on the counter. When I draw pictures from my mind, I like to think about where I would be standing if I were actually there. I’m standing in the hall, just out of sight. I even put a bit of the door frame along one side. It wasn’t bad, and I was really concentrating on it, so I didn’t notice the other patient glancing over.

Her name was Jessica, I think. She said she liked my picture, and would I maybe draw her too?

When you are drawing something that is in front of you – rather than from the place in your mind where pictures form – it makes you think more about where you are, and feel yourself actually being there. I don’t know if that makes much sense, but it’s true.

Jessica once had a baby girl named Lilly, but Lilly was evil. This is what Jessica told me to explain the scars. She invited me into her room and closed the curtains. I said it would help to draw her in natural light, but then she unbuttoned her blouse and took off her bra and we sat in silence for a while.

I could have drawn other patients; perhaps Tammy in her pink dressing gown, holding her teddy. She would cry at how beautiful it was to be seen. I could have sketched the man who checked his shoes every ten minutes for listening devices, or captured the blur and chaos of Euan as he bounced off the walls, seeking excitement. I could have drawn Susan, who would spend lunchtimes gathering the salt shakers from every table until Alex screamed at her to stop it and they both descended into hour-long sulks. There was Shreena’s hair, matted and greasy, that she would pull out in clumps and leave on surfaces – I could have drawn those, perhaps catching her personality in the parts she chose to shed.

There were nineteen beds on the ward, with new patients arriving as others checked out – like the world’s wackiest hotel. I could have drawn them all. But I only drew Jessica. I drew her half naked in the half-light of her room. And I drew her scars. She’d fed the devil at her breasts, then cut the pain away.

‘It’s perfect, Matt. Thank you.’

‘Okay.’

‘It’s really perfect.’

‘You’re welcome.’

I didn’t want to think about where I was, to feel myself being there. I didn’t draw any other patients, and I didn’t draw the charge nurse in her office the next day, holding my sketch of Jessica, and slowly shaking her head.

‘She said it was perfect,’ I protested weakly.

‘It’s not the point, Matthew.’

‘She asked me to do it.’

‘She felt pressured. And she isn’t well.’

‘This is fucking bollocks.’

‘Please don’t use that language.’

‘Well it is. It is fucking bollocks. I didn’t even want to draw the bitch.’

‘Matthew, that’s enough. Nobody is telling you off. This is about boundaries. Everyone is here to get better, and that includes you. I’m asking that you don’t go in other patients’ rooms, even if they do invite you.’

‘She did.’

‘And I’m asking you not to draw the people here. Between you and me, I see you’re talented.’

‘Please don’t.’

‘Well—’

‘Don’t. I don’t need this. I won’t draw anyone else. I’d decided that already. I never wanted to in the first place.’

‘Okay. Well, let’s leave it at that then. And Matt, I wasn’t telling you off.’

‘Can I go?’

‘Of course.’

I drew Nanny Noo in my kitchen, and the bench at the park where I used to sit with Jacob when we bunked off school. I drew the outside world. If you ever visit my parents’ house, you’ll see my family portrait above the fireplace. Mum loved it. Drawing is a way to be somewhere else.

Thomas half ran, half stumbled – wearing his tomato ketchup-stained tracksuit bottoms, and his Bristol City football shirt.

The alarm made a startled, violent sound.

He made it down the slope to where the water feature wasn’t working, before being caught by Nurse This and Nurse That, and a Third Nurse who was just that moment arriving to work and still had his luminous yellow bicycle clip on around his ankle. I opened my bedroom window as far as it would go, which wasn’t very far – obviously. It was impossible to hear what Nurse This was saying over the shouting.

Thomas wasn’t shouting at her. He was shouting at God, thrusting a Gideon’s Bible towards heaven, howling FuckYoooou, FuckYoooou, FuckYoooou.

He was the closest I got to having a friend in that place. We didn’t talk much, but since the evening we paced the corridor together giving High-Fives, he always ate beside me at lunch, and I shared my tobacco whenever he ran out. The two things he did sometimes talk about were God, and Bristol City Football Club. These were his two great loves, though looking at him now, I guess he’d fallen out with one of them.

Nurse This placed a hand on his back, beneath his long greying dreadlocks. I couldn’t hear her from my room, but she might have said, ‘It’s okay, Thomas. It’s going to be okay. Please. Come back on the ward.’

It would have been kinder to have locked the front door in the first place – except they preferred not to if the ward was calm, so that the voluntary patients wouldn’t feel caged. But it wouldn’t be left unlocked after this. No time soon anyway. Thomas was giving a hearty FuckYoooou to any chance of that.

More nurses gathered around him, sharing glances, moving into position.

I decided to say a prayer, asking God to show a bit of mercy or whatever. I don’t know much about praying, so I rummaged about for my copy of the Gideon’s Bible. There was one in every room. I figured it might give me some pointers.

I found it in my bedside drawer, under my Nintendo DS, and a patient information leaflet about the Mental Health Act.

It was too late. They move so quickly. If I remember right, it was Nurse Whoever gripping hold of Thomas’s head. He was black like Thomas, but with the kind of brick shit-house build you only get by putting in serious hours at the gym. And he had these wonky yellow teeth that looked like they were trying to escape his mouth whenever he smiled.

Nobody was smiling now.

Nurse That had grabbed an arm, holding on so tightly that his knuckles were turning white. He was this gaunt-looking guy with flesh nearly as pale as mine, and this permanently sympathetic look on his face – with his head forever cocked over to the side. He was usually all
Hmm, and how did that make you feel?
But evidently he had a decent grip on him too. Thomas was struggling, but getting nowhere.

Nurse Just Thought I’d Join In For The Hell Of It was on the other arm. He was middle-aged, bald, fat, and sweaty.

I’m being unkind, aren’t I?

It’s not like me to be nasty about how people look. I don’t give a shit about that sort of thing. I’m just feeling pissed off at the moment. I feel angry sometimes when I think about the things I saw in hospital. I feel pissed off now, and I felt pissed off at the time, watching Thomas struggle so hard to escape that his beloved Bristol City shirt caught against the handrail, tearing a huge rip into it.

‘It’s going to be okay, Thomas. It’s going to be okay,’ Nurse This was saying.

As they dragged him back up the slope, I put my Bible away. Half a pouch of Golden Virginia later, the lunch trolley arrived, and what passed for normality in that place continued.

Thomas didn’t come to eat. So I went to the kitchen, made two cups of tea, each with three sugars, and when I was certain nobody was watching, I walked down the corridor and tapped on his door.

‘Thomas, are you in there?’

He didn’t answer.

‘I brought you a cup of tea, mate.’

I lifted the viewing slat a few centimetres. He was curled up on his bed, on his side, with a pillow pressed between his legs, with his eyes closed, sucking his thumb. His torn shirt was draped across the chair, with his Bible placed on top.

I’d never seen a grown man sleeping like that. He looked peaceful, I thought. He looked faraway. Partially visible above the waistband of his tracksuit bottoms, were two small round sticking plasters.