A nurse came to her cell. Nancy took the pills she gave her and washed them down with water, then opened her mouth to show that they were gone.
‘That’s a good girl,’ said the nurse approvingly.
Nancy bared her teeth in a smile.
She took the pills the next morning as well.
She did sit-ups and press-ups.
She recited things to herself – snatches of half-remembered poems, the times table, holiday phrases of French and Spanish, anything to hold herself tethered to the world outside.
She ate the gluey sandwiches they brought to her, the plasticky bread sticking to her teeth. She even said thank you. When had she last eaten a proper meal? She couldn’t remember. She must have been given food since arriving here, but the hours and days were just a grey sludge. The last meal she could recollect was in the flat – spaghetti with roasted tomatoes and feta cheese. She hadn’t even made it herself. It had been given to her and she had eaten it dutifully, knowing she was being watched. It had been so long since she had cooked a proper meal, though since she was a child, cooking had been her passion.
Out of the blue, she had the clearest memory of first learning how to crack open an egg and separate the yolk from the white, letting the gloop of the white slide into a clean bowl while the yolk remained in the shell. Six yolks for custard. She loved making custard. Slow cooking. Dough rising into a pillow.
She put a forearm across her eyes and in the darkness let herself imagine the meal she would cook when she got out of here. It was winter. Something simple, warming. She would make a creamy, satisfying dhal with coconut milk and lime.
In her mind, she went through the steps: she sliced the onions thinly with her favourite knife; sizzled them in olive oil; roasted coriander and cumin seeds till their aroma was in her nostrils; crushed garlic, cut chillies into little rounds. She added the lentils, coconut milk and vegetable stock, and stirred, steam in her face. While it slowly cooked, she would make yoghurt flatbreads to mop it up, a crisp green salad, a glass of red wine in her hand. She would eat it alone, dreamily, only thinking about what it tasted like, letting the good flavours comfort her.
She slid into a deep sleep.
On the third day she was allowed back into her own room.
She sat in the common room and watched a programme about house improvements in a wash of drugged drowsiness. Her distress stood to one side. Her anger felt like a fire that had almost dulled to its embers. Almost.
There were other women there as well. The middle-aged one from earlier; one who rocked from side to side and bit her fingers; one with a mop of blonde hair and bright red nails who introduced herself as Gloria; one who couldn’t sit in one place for long but went to stand at the window, staring out at the night. Nancy wondered if any of them was the one who had sobbed like an abandoned child.
She swallowed down her pills the next morning. The clock in the common room said it was ten past eleven, but it had said that last night as well. She played a game of Scrabble with the young woman who had lent her the mobile phone. She was called Josie and had vertical scars on her wrists. She was nineteen and had tried to take her own life on multiple occasions, the first when she was only fifteen. She had been sectioned four times before, twice when she was still a minor, and had been in Oakwood Place for two weeks and three days. She said it was by far the grimmest, nastiest place she’d been put in, and was notorious for its harshness. Everyone who came here was made worse, not better. Someone should do something about it but no one ever would. They had all become invisible.
She easily beat Nancy at Scrabble.
‘My name is Nancy North.’ Nancy sketched a smile at the seven women sitting in the circle. She felt self-conscious, tongue-tied, and had no idea what to say next. She tried to imagine herself talking to Helena, with her soft white hair and her deep brown eyes, but her head was humming and there were floaters in her eyes, adding to her befuddled sense that this experience was real and at the same time a horrible dream from which she might lurch awake. ‘I’ve not been here long,’ she added.
‘You’ve made enough noise though,’ said one of the women, sitting across from her. She had long dark hair in braids and a curved nose like a beak. The woman next to her gave a chuckle.
Nancy clenched her fists. Her nails dug into the soft flesh of her palms.
‘Sorry,’ she said meekly.
‘I’m glad you’re with us today, Nancy,’ said the therapist.
Nancy would have known she was the therapist even if she hadn’t already introduced herself at the door. She was quite young, probably in her late thirties or early forties, with a nimbus of soft black hair around her oval face, and she wore tapered trousers in a muted check, a grey flannel shirt, neat ankle boots. Her skin was smooth, her nails shone and she sat very upright. She had come from the outside and everything about her was clean, tidy, pleasing.
Most of the women in the circle sat in disarray, with their tatty clothes and slumped shoulders – and Nancy was among them. When she had climbed out of bed this morning, she had pulled on the same clothes that she had worn yesterday, given her hair a cursory brush before tying it back. She had seen her face in the mirror: tired, pale, bruised, fearful. A couple of the women were more smartly dressed and looked alert. But even they looked like inmates: perhaps the expression in their eyes. Perhaps the powerlessness that bound them all together.
‘I thought it was a good idea,’ she said.
‘Would you like to tell us what brought you to Oakwood?’
Nancy looked at the therapist, so professionally friendly, and then round the circle.
‘I heard voices.’ She spoke flatly and kept her gaze fixed on the window. ‘They weren’t real.’
That at least was the truth.
The therapist nodded at her encouragingly, leaning forward slightly in a posture of availability. She wants me to spill my guts, thought Nancy. That’s what this circle is all about – women sharing their torment and showing their pain. The doctor had called it having insight.
‘I know I need to work hard to have insight into my condition,’ she said in her robot voice. ‘Only then can I move on.’
‘Fuck that.’ The woman with braids spoke in a loud voice, almost a shout. ‘What did your voices tell you? Did they tell you you were Joan of Arc or something?’
‘They told me I wasn’t safe.’
That was true as well.
The woman beside Nancy put a hand on her arm. She had a face made of wrinkles.
‘Nobody’s safe, babe. Have you lived this long without knowing that?’