Charlie was the first person I met in here. Or the first I remember meeting. The initial twenty-four hours were a black hole of numbness where new people merged together into one faceless blur, and even after that I remained in shock, my brain dull with disbelief. I wasn’t looking to make friends because I was so convinced I wouldn’t be staying. As soon as they realized there was nothing wrong with me, I’d be off.
I didn’t let myself think about Emily, or what had happened. Instead I focused on Danny and how he’d looked in the registry office when he’d said that line about sickness and health and held my hands in his and I could feel his whole body shaking.
I didn’t – wouldn’t – think about my sister Megan and the things she’d said about him. Some things are too hard to forgive.
Danny has wavy brown hair. He likes to keep it close cropped, says it’s easier to manage, but I prefer it when it’s longer and falls across his eyes. He’s broad across the shoulders and when I clasp my hands around the tops of his arms they don’t reach. But his mouth is full and soft, and his chin has a slight dent that fits perfectly when he rests it on the top of my head.
Danny would get me out of here.
I had no idea then that it was Danny who’d wanted me in.
So when Charlie came over and introduced herself on the first full day, I wasn’t forthcoming.
‘Your first time?’ she asked. No need to ask how she guessed.
‘Uh-huh.’ Nodding. Wanting her gone so I could be alone to unpack the fog in my head and understand what had happened.
‘It’s really not so bad.’
She had a lovely soft, lilting voice with a laugh bubbling away there under the surface of it, like she was thinking of something amusing that at any moment she might share with you. Curls the colour of freshly turned soil, green eyes, high cheekbones that shone where they caught the light.
I made one of those ‘yeah, right’ faces. That first day, I couldn’t see past the locks on the doors and the rounded corners on the furniture and the fact the laces had been taken out of my Converse shoes so I had to shuffle about to keep them on my feet, and the way my jeans wouldn’t stay up because I wasn’t allowed a belt, and the skeletal girl reading a book in the corner while a machine fed her through a tube in her nose.
My body was in mourning for the baby that was gone, breasts achy, hormones ricocheting around inside me, so that one minute I was buzzing with nerves sharpened into points, the next slumped over with grief, oblivious to the tears running down my face.
Once I’d had a chance to view the clinic with dispassionate eyes, I could see that she was right. There are far worse places to be. This is a private clinic and everything about it reflects the price we pay to be here. The old building is tastefully decorated, the wide oak floorboards scattered with muted rugs and there are comfortable sofas in the TV lounge where we sit and watch movies on Friday nights. We each have our own beige bedroom with en suite bathroom. We bring photographs from home, and jolly prints to brighten up the walls, although the glass in the frames isn’t really glass so it smudges easily.
But I couldn’t see any of that when Joni brought me downstairs, even though I’d begged to stay in my room.
‘No one is going to force you,’ she’d said. ‘But I should point out that non-compliance may be flagged up as something requiring further exploration, which may mean you end up spending longer in here than otherwise.’
‘I’m not staying in this place,’ I told her. ‘There’s been a mistake.’
But when she led the way into the cafeteria I followed her.
Though I was dismissive of her attempts to be friendly, Charlie didn’t turn away from me. She’d seen it before and, anyway, she never judged people. That’s why everyone liked her. When I started to get better I’d joke that I was jealous of her popularity. ‘Good job you’re suicidal, otherwise I’d have to kill you,’ I told her once. We laughed a lot about that.
It doesn’t seem so funny now.
Odelle was the next one to approach me. In a place like this there are some people, like Charlie, whose wounds are all internal, buried so deep no one would ever guess that there were deformed places hidden there, lumpy with scar tissue. Then there are others, like Stella, whose damage is on the surface. Unmissable. Odelle was one of those. A long-time anorexic, her head, with its thinning mousy-brown hair, was balanced on her neck like the top of a lollipop. Her body was swathed in outsized clothes – T-shirts, jumpers – that revealed themselves like layers of old wallpaper through the gap at the front of her zip-up hoody (cordless, of course). Her face, close up, was covered in a soft, apricot fuzz of downy hairs, soft as suede.
‘You mustn’t be scared,’ she said. And though I hadn’t felt any fear up till then, being too mired in self-pity, now, all of a sudden, my skin began to prickle.
‘We’re all friendly here,’ she went on. ‘Stick with me, and I’ll look after you.’
As Odelle was talking, a memory was pricking at the back of my mind of the time we moved to London from Cambridge because Dad had changed job and I had to start a new school and was allocated a girl to show me around on the first day. I could still recall the showy-off way in which she paraded me around the corridors like a new pet. ‘This is Hannah. She’s new,’ she’d declare, and people would shoot me looks of sympathy.
At twenty-five, Odelle is seven years younger than me, so I try to make allowances but, sometimes, being with her feels like someone scraping sandpaper over every one of my nerve endings.
Odelle is an habituée of psychiatric institutions. If mental clinics gave loyalty points, she’d have the free drink, the coffee maker and the spa weekend. ‘There isn’t anything I don’t know,’ she announced as she shepherded me from room to room. Psychiatric patients tend to form different tribes, Odelle told me. The Emos, like Charlie, for whom life is a deep, dark void; EDies, like Odelle, battling eating disorders, swapping tips on how to bulk up on water to cheat the scales, vying with each other over concave stomachs and thigh gaps; addicts of all persuasions; OCDs, like Sofia, with their habits and their tics and their obsessive thoughts running on a loop; bipolars, like Nina, veering from comatose to manic, on a perpetual emotional bungee jump. And then there are the rest. All damaged in our own way.
‘Where do you fit?’ Odelle wanted to know.
I thought of telling her about Emily, but the words built up, unsaid, in my mouth until I feared I would choke.
‘It’s complicated.’
Sofia was crying, big sobs that tore from her lungs.
Odelle had introduced me to her earlier that first evening, explaining that she had the room next to mine. That night, I lay in my bed listening to her and wishing I was back in my own bed in our first-floor flat in Haringey, north London, with Danny’s arm around me, my face buried in his chest.
On the days we both worked in London, I used to get up earlier than him to catch a train to my job as a publicist for a children’s book publisher. Danny would still be in bed when I left for work. Lying awake in my room at The Meadows, listening to Sofia through the wall, I remembered how he used to look so alone in that big bed, his arm flung out, reaching for a me who was no longer there.
Now when he comes to visit it’s as if he’s a stranger.
The next morning, when I went into the cafeteria for breakfast, Sofia was already there at the buffet table, her eyes puffy. After piling food on to her tray (not one of the EDies, then), she started making her way towards one of the three round pine tables, all perfectly laid, as if in a top-class hotel. Halfway there, she stopped, still, for a few seconds. Then, with a resigned air, she retraced her steps to the buffet station, replaced her yogurt pot and the banana, scraped the cereal into the bin, stacked up her plates next to the rest of the dirty dishes, and began making her selection again, choosing exactly the same items.
‘She had a bad thought,’ said Charlie, reading the question in my face. ‘Probably about something horrible happening to one of her children. It usually is. So then she has to get rid of everything infected with that bad thought. Sometimes it’s the clothes she’s wearing. This time it looks like it’s the food she’s carrying.’
I opened my mouth to say, ‘But that’s crazy,’ then closed it again.
When I had come to know her better, Sofia told me, I’d be disgusted by her if I knew the things that went through her head, the thoughts she had about strangers, friends and family. Not fantasies. The opposite of those. Nauseating sexual thoughts that came unbidden into her head. I told her that nothing disgusted me any more. But that’s not what I meant. What I meant was that nothing surprised me any more.
At least, not until my friends started dying.
Sofia was in her late thirties, but time hadn’t been kind to her and at first I put her at a decade older. Capillaries had burst like fireworks under the pale skin of her face, so her cheeks had a rough, ruddy edge to them, and her shoulder-length frizzy hair, which she wore pushed back from her face with a velvet band, was the faded orange of a canvas deckchair at the end of a long, hot summer. She was large-boned and wide-shouldered and wore baggy cardigans and shapeless mid-calf skirts.
She had two children – a son of nine and a daughter of twelve – who dutifully trooped in to see her on Sunday afternoons, ushered in by Sofia’s husband, Rob, a short, slight man with a perpetual air of having boarded the wrong bus. On those occasions, Sofia would make a Herculean effort to curb her behaviours – the repetitions, the doubling back, the constant changing of clothes. But the effort of holding herself in would show and, after a few hours, she’d be leaning forward rigidly in her chair, her lips moving as she counted the taps of her hand against the side of the chair.
After they’d left, Charlie or I would hold her while she sobbed until our T-shirts were soaked through.
I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. She didn’t want to kill herself.
She wanted to get better. For them.