In Wimborne everyone tacked pictures round their beds, and my collection has grown steadily over three years. I cart them over to Austen and stick them up: a Technicolor wallpaper of photos, concert tickets, postcards, and pages ripped from magazines. Most importantly, an assortment of paper notes I’ve saved with cute messages on them from Georgia and Ellie—handwritten proof of a stellar performance that sold out every night these last three years, though no one ever knew it was happening.
LILY—Can we go for a run later? I loveeee you!
Lilz you are the best and I’m so lucky to have you as my friend. Xxxx
I have my same crepe flower chains, same spotty duvet cover, same—
Oh, but it isn’t the same, it just isn’t, because by myself with you this room is so quiet it might as well roar. Lessons finished at 3:00 p.m. today, and we came straight back here. We dumped our folders and patent pencil case on the desk, and then the door shut behind us with a soft click. The other voices in the corridor went out like lights, but that was when the bomb went off.
You took me straight to:
You took me there, sat rigid on the end of the bed for hours and hours, and might have kept me there forever were it not that it’s 7:00 p.m. now, which means it’s time for roll call.
We resurface from our room and paste a neutral expression over our face. Girls upon girls are cramming into the common room in small groups; the noise of their conversations all at once is a jungle sound track with no way in. A group of sofas face our new housemaster, Mr. Elingham, who stands at the front of the room, waiting to tick names off on a sheet.
There’s nowhere left to sit! But then, thank god, we see Ellie and Scarlett, scooting apart from each other on the sofa and patting an opening between them. We walk over and perch there, panic brewing because our knees are touching theirs.
Whoooosh! A girl called Stephanie zooms in. “Make way!” she calls, throwing herself upon us and lying sprawled there with her bum on our lap and her shoulders and head in Scarlett’s arms. The feeling of her on top of us is overwhelming; she’s a giant burbling baby in our arms. Our faces are too close. We are certain she smells something on our breath, our body; here comes another girl, pauses to look down at us, arms akimbo in faux outrage at the lack of space, before laughing. “Budge up!”—
(Girls upon
girls upon
girls upon
girls)
We stink! There are too many of us on this sofa, and they all know—
Scarlett nudges us, turning a dial and twizzling us back in from between stations. Mr. Elingham is looking at us expectantly.
Argh! She revs. Tsk tsk, what a little freak you are! Don’t you know your own name when it’s called?
“Yes?” we answer. He gives us a warm smile, ticks the paper, and continues down the list before starting to read out notices. I sit through it, trying not to do anything that will make her even angrier. It finally ends, Stephanie pushes off, and She marches me back to my room before Ellie and Scarlett can get in the way.
The mirror nailed to the wall is confronting.
A face stares back, but I can’t call it my own. I place my hands on either side of it and open my mouth to scream. I am not brave enough to make noise, but I open my mouth wider and watch my nose scrunch itself into a dragon snout, my eyes squeezing into slits. I didn’t know it was possible to shout on mute, but it is.
I open and close my mouth:
Arrrrrrrrghhh!
Then I pull the skin on my cheeks down hard, so the fleshy salmon rims of my lower eyelids flip outward. There’s me, finally seen as I should be, twisted into something as monstrous as I feel.
Whhhhhhhhy, I mouth. Whhhhhhhhy?
WHAT ARE YOU DOING? She yells. This behavior is the height of vanity. And you’re going to leave disgusting smudges on the glass.
I drop to the floor, forehead on knees and arms plaited around legs. It suddenly seems essential that I make myself as small as possible.
I don’t care, I say. I don’t care what happens anymore as long as it doesn’t involve letters and lists. I want to die. There. Are you happy?
I just want it to end.
It’s my idea, I said it first. But She seizes it and molds it into her own shape. I feel her seep into my arms, her grip supplanting mine. The relief! It is always better to be held by someone other than yourself.
So we’re in agreement. We can’t go on like this. We need to be somewhere that doesn’t involve interactions with people day in, day out. It’s making you so unhappy, poor thing. We’ll fix it. But we need to work together on this. Because we’re on the same team.
Aren’t we?
If you want to come home from boarding school, you have to be sick. Crying doesn’t do it. Neither does lying in bed.
We can do sickness.
We make our throat raspy and throw up a few times. We do jumping jacks and put a hot water bottle to our head until we are over a hundred degrees.
“Gosh, you are hot,” says Matron, clicking her tongue, and then, a little later: “Your mother’s just called.” She rearranges the wet flannel on our head and smooths down the covers. “She’s on her way now to get you.”
Mum makes it in under two hours. She picks us up and chucks our bag in the trunk, and we whir down country lanes in silence.
Then she breaks it—smash—one hundred million shards—exploding nebulas of words and words and words—
“What the hell is the matter with you anyway?”
We hit a pothole, and the car stalls. The radio we hadn’t realized was on shuts up momentarily and rebounds like one of those annoying dolls with the weight in their bottom so they can’t topple over.
“I don’t know. Can we get something to eat?”
“Yes.”
We pull over at the next gas station.
“Do you want to get out?”
We shake our head.
“Well, what do you want then?”
While she’s inside, some men in a white van pull up. They are ogling us like there is no one inside our head to notice. We worry that we might get pregnant with their child as a punishment for letting them look when we should be charging out of the car and screaming in defense of feminism, so we give them the finger. They honk.
We sit shivering in our parka. Mum appears, running across the tarmac through sheets of rain made neon against the dark by car headlamps, shielding her hair with her arm and darting between the pumps. She passes us a plastic bag containing Jammie Dodgers biscuits and raspberries.
“Thanks.”
We eat in silence and listen to the rustle of packaging on our lap and the chomping of jaws and temples.
It isn’t much of a homecoming. Mum runs us a bath and watches us sit in it until the water goes cold. We hunch over our stubbly legs and offend her with our modesty. Then she brings us a scabby towel and looks away while we stand up, dripping suds, waiting to get wrapped up like a newborn.
In the morning we seek advice from the herbal therapist who lives in our town. His name is Monty, and we are told that he is well respected by the homeopathic community. Mum loves his shop and treats him with a level of respect befitting a brain surgeon.
She explains that we are feeling blue. We are embarrassed, but Mum says, “It’s okay, we can trust this man, he knows lots about medicine and how to make people like you feel better. He just wants to ask you a few questions.”
“Do you study biology, Lily? Do you understand about the importance of maintaining healthy mineral levels in the blood, Lily?” He has a thick South African accent. We wish he would stop saying our name like he knows us.
“I used to study it, but I dropped it for A-level.”
“When exactly did you become sick?”
“I don’t know that I—”
“Fever?”
“Sorry?”
“Shaky? Clammy? Wake up in the night in a hot sweat—take off all your clothes, only to find yourself shivering fifteen minutes later and reaching for a pair of thick socks?”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“How do you feel right now?”
“Tired.”
“How often do you stool?”
Pause.
“I have a chair in my room. I’m not sure?”
Apparently this is not the right answer. People laugh. He gives us hippie pills that come in old-fashioned-looking brown glass bottles with gold lids. They will rebalance our energy levels and make us feel better.
Thanking him, Mum ushers us back into the car. Glancing back, we see him doing some sort of farewell Buddha bow from the window.
On Tuesday Mum takes us to the GP, who measures our blood pressure and sends us off for iron and thyroid gland hormone testing. We go to the local walk-in center with a long doctor’s scrawl of things lab technicians need to search for in our body.
A spiky-haired Hungarian nurse jabs at our arm a few times, struggling to find a vein. A doddery old man with slack lips and a drooly chin leers in at us through a crack in the curtain. The nurse slaps a shiny bravery sticker we are too old for on our shirt. The truth is, we are sixteen now. If she knew, would she have taken the sticker back? She says to call back in a few days’ time if we haven’t heard.
After that we spend the next few days in bed, lying as still as possible because it’s easier not to do things wrong this way. The GP calls on Friday to say the levels of everything in our body are fine.
“A bit low on iron. You could take supplements if you like. It probably wouldn’t make much difference. It’s a personal choice. Talk to your mother about it.”
School phones too. “Is Lily coming back soon?” Something about Sunday night and everyone needing a bit of a rest sometimes. Mum hangs up. She comes to tell us, but we pad away from where our ear has been against the door and rush back into bed. We pretend to be asleep. Our heart beats fast, racing with deceit.
Sunday comes around too fast. All too soon we are back in the car headed for school, leaving London behind, fleeing lampposts, surrendering light and traffic for hedgerows and the moon.
“You’ll have to see the school doctor,” says our housemaster, a few hours after Mum has gone.
Mr. Elingham has only been our housemaster for a few weeks, but we can tell he has already mentally picked us out as being a potentially problematic pupil. This is probably partly because in the first week we were in Austen, he caught us going through the bin in the middle of the night like a deranged posh girl playing a hobo.
We were doing this because we had become worried that we might have thrown away a piece of paper with highly incriminating information on it, without actually remembering the act of throwing it away. We were gripped by the urge to root around in the bin and make sure we hadn’t, so that no one was able to use the information to destroy our life.
Only Mr. Elingham didn’t know that. He just stood there wide-eyed and startled, as if his teacher training hadn’t prepared him properly. We were startled too. We dropped the banana skin between our thumb and forefinger and whizzed our hands behind our back in the hope that he wouldn’t notice our latex gloves. We stuttered an excuse about having lost something, but we could tell he didn’t buy it.
“I’m not ill,” we reply.
“You missed a week of school. In my book that counts as unwell—”
“I was tired—”
“I’ve booked you in for four o’clock on Tuesday.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“No one’s writing you a prescription, no one’s saying anything serious. You missed a week of school, and now you have to go to one thirty-minute appointment. In my book that’s a small price to pay. Don’t you think?”
Mr. Elingham has a lot of stupid ideas in his book.
It’s Tuesday, 4:37 p.m. Two younger students have gone in already: one with a sprained ankle and the other with a tummy ache.
She says: Whatever you do, do not mention me.
“I hope you don’t mind,” Tess the school nurse whisper-shouts across the waiting room, “we just have to make sure the sick folks get seen first.”
We’re waiting for an hour.
Who cares? says my friend.
I care, I say.
We backward-flip through July’s Teen Vogue and Glamour. Across from us, pamphlets in a rack advertise the best treatment for various common ailments, like in a real doctor’s office instead of this private-school attempt at one.
“Lol. I have neither of those, innit,” says a spotty girl with big boobs in the year above, pointing at leaflets about safe sex and skin cancer. “Should that make me happy or sad man?” She turns to her friend in search of the recognition her joke deserves.
“Both,” the friend assents. “It means you’re cray, and you got your whole life ahead of you. Ya know what I’m saying bruv?”
Why do the children of the rich insist on talking like this? It makes us mad.
We look out the window and carry on with our lists.
“The doctor will see you now,” calls Tess. Dr. Ford has a lazy eye and frumpy jeans, but something about her is liberating.
So I tell her, tell her the secret. Not all of it.
She is screaming:
So I don’t tell Dr. Ford about us. I simply say that I make lists about things, day and night, and that I can’t stop it.
I don’t talk for long, maybe forty-five seconds, just long enough to get the basics out. Dr. Ford listens quietly and nods encouragingly. When I’m finished, she looks at me expectantly for a few seconds, as if she’s waiting for something else. What is she waiting for? She pushes a box of tissues toward me.
Oh, that.
“I’m not much of a crier,” I say.
Dr. Ford tells me I may have a mental health problem (“Because I didn’t cry?” “No, because of what you said before you didn’t cry”), and then she mentions a different patient who had to stay up all night knitting, or she thought bad things would happen. This doesn’t really sound like what I have, but I nod because I don’t want to be rude. She says I have to see a specialist.
Dr. Ford refers us to Dr. Finch, who we are about to see for the first time.
My friend does not like the idea of Dr. Finch.
Dr. Finch practices in a hospital half an hour from school, and Mum drives from London to Kent to take us.
We plummet down topsy-turvy roads with the sunlight flash-flashing through the hedgerows.
She is restless. She thrashes about like a small child in uncomfortable lace clothing.
We turn left and enter the
—PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL.