My child being back again throws me out of kilter. I try to keep away from the pills. After all, there’s no reason to be unhappy any more. But I have been playing host to my worries and fears for too long. I can’t throw them out that easily. They keep knocking at the door again. I gradually reduce the doses anyway. I taper down. Then everything starts to close in on me again. My hackles are raised. I decide not to let it get me down. I want to be there for my children. I don’t want Elly to have a mother who is stoned. So I try to cope without the pills. But just when I’m lulled into a sense of security, when I think I’m free, the films start. They flicker in front of my mind’s eye. I can’t stop them. While I’m baking a cake, brushing my teeth, ironing my dress. Over and over again I watch my own demise. I see my body sailing off a bridge or hanging limply in the seatbelt in the fog of exhaust fumes. Sometimes I jump in front of a train. I feel the pain. And yet I know that I can’t actually kill myself. I don’t have the courage. Longing for death is just an outlet for the stress. But it’s the one thing that I can’t get under control. I pinch myself, I clamp my teeth together, I do press-ups to distract myself. I don’t want to go back to the cotton wool of the pills. But my nerves are stretched tight enough to snap. My veins throb in my neck. I tell myself that nothing and no one can make these films come true. But I can’t even read to the end of the headlines in the newspapers. Even before the end of the word I can hear pounding: over. End. Gone. These three words are my constant background noise; it stifles all other perceptions. Just as I think I’m going to explode, the death films stop. Gingerly, I raise my head above the parapet. No stones come hurling down onto my skull. I apply some blusher. The brush caresses my skin. I barely have a chance to enjoy the touch before I have to screw my eyes shut again. The sharp edge of a piece of paper slices through my pupil. It comes at me over and over. Slashes my cornea. Slowly, extravagantly. I run round the block. Scoop water into my face. That makes the paper disappear. But as soon as I’m calm, as soon as I try to sit still, the paper cuts into my eye again. It scythes through the jelly-like substance in my eyeball. I go back to my sweet pink friends. Swallow them before I go to sleep. They look so harmless. But they knock me out in thirty minutes or less. I dissolve. Sleep like a stone. I never wake with a start, I never lie awake thinking things over when my sweet pink friends have come to visit. They relax me. In the morning, my head is still fuzzy. I stumble into the bathroom. I can put up with the dizziness, water retention, and weight gain. The tablets wrap an apron of fat round me. My joints swell up. But the pills also lift the ceiling over my head a few centimetres higher. I can stretch and yawn again, I stop picking fights. The mental image of the sharp paper edge milling into my eyeball disappears. It’s such a relief. I can’t tell anyone about the films, or the sheet of paper. I’m ashamed of this nonsense. At the same time it makes me afraid. I wonder whether the despair will get the better of me some time. I need to make sure it doesn’t, at all costs. My children need me. I have to be there for them. I just need a little bit of poison. The doctor says: If only you knew how many people take pills. Don’t be so hard on yourself, she says. Do you need one hundred or two hundred? I try to take myself seriously even as a junkie. I look after myself. I look after my children. I’m not mad. But that’s what Elly’s therapist claims on the phone. She doesn’t say it out loud. But she repeats her words slowly and emphatically. As if I’m a foreigner. The therapist believes that Elly is not my child. That she is a stranger. I’m her mother, I say. I drive off. I need Elly. I can’t go back into the darkness. I can’t lose her again. It’s a matter of life and death.