“Go on, Shiv! Do it!”
How does she hear him when he is so far below her, way down at the base of the tree, his tiny figure waving up at her, beckoning? But, somehow, Declan’s voice reaches her, perched on her impossibly high branch.
“Go on!”
Jump, he means, because there are no lower branches by which to climb down. All she has to do is lean forward, let gravity do the rest. If he got down OK, then so can she. She imagines herself floating like a leaf, spiralling gently to the ground where her brother is waiting, arms outstretched, to catch her.
“Shiv! Do it!”
She does. She shifts her weight, loosens her hold on the branch. Drops.
The fall lasts for ever and yet it is over in seconds and, although she knows she is plummeting at great speed – can see the ground accelerating towards her – Shiv has no sensation of movement. So the impact, when it comes, surprises her. Literally takes her breath away.
Water.
What she thought was solid ground is water and she is plunging into its depths.
Then, bursting to the surface once more. Swimming for the shore. Calling out to Declan to help her.
“I’m here, Shiv. I’ve got you.”
She turns towards the voice. “Dec?”
“This way.” Hands reach into the water, pull her out, drag her on to the muddy bank at the base of the tree – a face looming into her field of vision as she blinks the water from her eyes. A boy’s face. Not Declan.
“Mikey?”
He smiles. “You’re safe now.”
“Where’s my brother?”
“There.”
Shiv turns to glimpse a figure floating on the surface – limbs disjointed, neck at a strange angle, clothes soaked in blood – and she sees that the water is glass. A great sheet of glass, shattered to a thousand pieces.
To reach him she must—
Frantically, she starts to repair the damage; picking up one glass fragment after another and trying to fit them back together like pieces in a jigsaw puzzle. It’s no use. Her hands are bleeding and the bits of broken glass refuse to attach, to reform into their once-smooth, flawless surface.
Shiv looks up at Mikey, standing over her, watching.
“Help me!” she cries. “Mikey, please, you have to show me what to do.”
Most of her nightmares are like this, now. A terrifying mix of old dreams and new, garbled flashbacks to her brother’s death and the surreal images of her unconscious, with Declan and Mikey so interchangeable she can’t always tell them apart.
In some of the nightmares, the dogs are there: chained up, barking, snarling, trying to get at Shiv or at whichever boy’s body she’s stooped over this time.
The visions come while she’s awake too. More and more, they come. They’re worse at night though. So bad, so real, she’s petrified of letting herself fall asleep.
Dr Pollard has spoken of residents reaching a “tipping point” in this stage of the programme. A point where, instead of staring down into the blackest abyss, their faces begin to tilt – slowly, hesitantly – towards a bright blue sky.
The mind can only take so much darkness before it demands light.
So she would have them believe.
If this is a tipping point for Shiv, it’s not the kind the Director imagines. No gradual rising up towards the heavens but more like a sudden plunge over the edge, into the depths of hell.
She knows the darkness for what it is now. Knows herself for what she is.
He can’t move, she puts in her notebook in Write.
He can’t run.
He can’t swim.
He can’t throw balls, can’t climb trees, can’t dive off a springboard.
He can’t see.
He can’t hear, smell, taste, touch.
He can’t think, can’t speak.
He can’t laugh or cry.
He can’t drink. Can’t eat.
He can’t feel anything ever again. Love, hate. Pain, comfort. Joy, sadness. Hope, despair. Nothing.
He can’t breathe.
He can’t grow up, grow old.
He is nothing. He is nowhere. For all eternity.
I. DID. THIS. TO. HIM.
The passing of time has become difficult to track – she counts the days in “sleeps”, like she did when she was a small child.
Three sleeps since she woke from another nightmare to find her bed soaked in urine. Two sleeps since they showed her the film of Nikos, hands under Dec’s armpits, lifting her brother back onto the boat. One sleep since Shiv retrieved her old Walk jumpsuit from the utility room and started wearing it instead of her regular gear.
Dr Pollard will want to discuss all of this at their next one-to-one. She is concerned about Shiv. “You seem to be straying off course,” she said, the last time they spoke. Four sleeps ago? Three?
“Whose course?” Shiv asked. “Yours or mine?”
Shiv stops eating.
Once she’s thought of it, the decision seems so obvious she wonders why it has taken her till now. So, from here on, she will eat nothing, drink only water.
Day after day, this is what she does.
There’s something purifying about going without food. With each hour that passes, she grows more acutely conscious of the toxins leaching out of her body. Out of her mind too – the poisoned thoughts slowly draining away. Right after Declan’s death – in the days on end when Shiv forgot to eat, or skipped meals, or left food unfinished – she was starving herself out of neglect or inertia, because eating (along with everything else) seemed so pointless. This time is different. Now, she’s doing it deliberately: cleansing herself, emptying herself, focusing herself.
Punishing herself.
It’s tough, at first. Really tough.
But by the third day she is learning to ride out the hunger, and how drinking lots of water can fool her stomach into feeling full. She knows to clasp a pillow to her belly to ease the cramps that sometimes double her over and, when she stands up or moves about, she takes care to hold on to something until the dizziness passes.
She has to be clever, of course. Devious. No clinic lets a patient starve.
At mealtimes, she helps herself to the smallest portions then sneaks some of her food onto Mikey’s plate, or Caron’s, while the dining-room supervisor isn’t looking. She leaves as much as she can get away with or hides bits in her pockets to dispose of later. When it’s OK to eat lunch outdoors, she’ll take a sandwich into the garden, away from prying eyes, and feed it to the birds that gather near her bench. The little food that does pass her lips, she makes sure to puke back up as soon as she can.
At the daily activities, she wears extra layers of clothing to hide her weight loss; rubs her cheeks to make them less pale, less gaunt-looking. In front of staff, she forces herself to act like nothing’s wrong, to move and speak and behave normally.
Mikey understands. But Caron tries to talk her out of it, threatens to tell. So Shiv has to conceal her fasting from Caron too; difficult, but not impossible.
Shiv ought to be wiped out. But she has never felt so alert or so energized. At PTU, the photos and film footage are sharper than ever; in Talk and Write, she gets straight to the heart of things – she speaks, writes, listens brilliantly.
“The monks fasted,” she tells Mikey. “The ones who lived here back when this place was a monastery. It brought them closer to God.”
“Is that what you want?” he asks.
“No, I’m just saying.”
“I don’t believe in all that.” Does he mean fasting, or God? “One of my aunts, right, she comes up to me after the funeral and takes hold of my face in both hands and says, ‘Phoebe is playing with the angels now.’” Mikey sniffs, swallows. “Is that what you think – that your brother’s in heaven, waiting for you?”
Shiv shakes her head. Pulls the pillow into her belly. They’ve been in her room most of the afternoon – another Sunday with no sessions, nothing to do. They haven’t spoken all that much. Sometimes it’s enough for them just to sit in silence.
“Day 50 tomorrow,” Mikey says.
“Really?”
It doesn’t seem possible that they’ll be leaving the Korsakoff Clinic in just eleven days. Can she get away with starving herself for that long?
Her head aches. Her eyes ache.
She closes them. Leans back, hoping the wall’s cold surface will ease the knot of pain that’s been nagging away inside her skull all day. Bad idea. The thump of her headache grows worse; turns, in her mind, to the thud-thud of a tennis ball – so that she can almost believe if she went next door right now she’d find her brother playing bounce-and-catch in Caron’s room.
Four sleeps since she stopped eating.
Today things are not so clear any more, not so sharp. The corridors and rooms of Eden Hall are too gloomy, the daylight from the windows too harsh; a doorway, a banister, a chair, a face float randomly into view then out again – blurred, as though by tears – and she can’t judge their distances. She stumbles on the stairs. Cracks her shin on the low table in Talk. Drops the plastic cup of water when she sets it down. Can’t make out the words she writes in Write…
Was that where she blacked out?
She can’t be sure. She thinks she might have left S-10 after Write – yes, she did; she was walking along the corridor (or was that during the mid-session break?) – anyway, she was walking, or possibly still sitting down, somewhere, when her head went swimmy and her ears filled with the sound of crashing waves.
Shiv doesn’t recall actually fainting, or falling, or her face hitting the ground, or any of that – just the second or so beforehand, and the absolute certainty that it was about to happen. Then, nothing.