Summer 2003
There is a tiny garden outside the hospital. More of a courtyard, really, with bushes that are failing to thrive in this small, shaded space, and cracked paving stones where ever-hopeful shoots of weeds bravely reach for the sky.
It’s mainly used as a smoking area, even though smoking isn’t allowed. The staff turn a blind eye, and both patients and visitors sneak out here, surreptitiously skulking beneath the draped curtain of the sole weeping willow, puffing away.
Jess is sitting on a metal bench, next to her mother. Ruth is perfectly turned out in her tweed skirt and small-heeled shoes and matching handbag. Her hair is sprayed into place, and only her gray eyes give any indication that she is distressed.
By her side, Jess is small and shriveled and pale. Her hair is flat to her head, greasy and lifeless, and she wears over-washed jogging trousers, bra-less beneath her baggy T-shirt and the dressing gown she has wrapped around herself. It’s a warm day, but Jess always seems to feel cold—always trembling, always weak, like a vampire snuck into her bed at night and drained all her energy.
Ruth glances around, eyes widening at the woman in the corner of the courtyard, who is standing with her face to a bleak concrete wall, talking loudly to herself.
“It’s OK,” says Jess, seeing her expression. “That’s Martina. She’s all right.”
“You’ll be moving soon, Jess,” she says briskly, averting her gaze from Martina’s bobbling head and frantically waving arms. “We’ve found somewhere nicer for you.”
Jess understands what she’s being told, but it doesn’t provoke any kind of reaction. She still has a flimsy grasp on the world around her, and isn’t entirely sure if it’s not all a dream. Everything feels hazy and unreal, seen through a mist of cotton wool and strange colors.
Sometimes she thinks her legs don’t work anymore, and has to stay in bed as she will fall to the floor if she tries to walk. Sometimes she watches the repeats of Frasier on the television hoisted high up on the wall of the ward, and thinks Dr. Crane is her psychiatrist. Sometimes she thinks perhaps she is a ghost, and nobody can even see her.
What she rarely feels is upset, by any of these things. She is a dream patient on a busy and demanding ward: she does not fight, she does not self-harm, she does not scream through the night or urinate in public or attack the nurses or accuse them of carrying out government-sponsored drug trials on her. The loudest thing she ever does, barely registered by the staff, is quietly sing a sad-sounding song to herself: something with the words “baby, I love you” over and over again.
She has been in this place for two months now, and the anger at being brought here by the strange people who invaded her home has faded. Everything has faded, and she has become resigned to the routine of her days.
She takes her medications, and listens to the doctors, and silently survives. She accepts that she is swaddled in her new world, that it’s wrapped around her so tight it’s almost smothered her memories of the old world, and that for the time being, maybe that’s for the best. The old world hurt too much.
Then, every week, her mother comes to visit. She brings Jess perfume she doesn’t use and magazines she doesn’t read and snacks she doesn’t eat. What her mother never brings is the answer to the question that she asks repeatedly.
“When is Joe coming to see me, Mum?” she says, feeling the familiarity of words she has used before, like a muscle memory. She’s asked this question already, she knows—possibly weeks ago, possibly minutes ago, she’s not sure. It might be that she’s never asked, just thinks she has. Or that it’s all she has said for years. Time doesn’t seem to work the same way now.
Ruth’s mouth purses tightly, her lipstick running into tiny wrinkles in the stretched skin around it. She takes her daughter’s hand.
“Oh, my beautiful little girl,” she says, stroking her lank hair back from pale skin, assessing her in the way that mothers do. Seeing the dullness in the eyes, the cheekbones piercing through weight loss, the slow blinking of a person twice removed from the world around her. “What have we done to you?”
Jess accepts her touches, feeling neither comforted nor repelled by them. She licks dry lips, and says again: “When is Joe coming to see me, Mum?”
She thinks she may have asked this before, but she still isn’t sure.
Her mum composes her face into a look that even now, Jess recognizes as her Serious Talk face. It’s good that she can recognize the Serious Talk face. Or any face at all.
When her mum first started visiting, it was harder than this. Everyone was sad or angry or scared, and nobody knew what was going to happen next. Some days Jess didn’t know who her mother was, and other days she did know, but still wouldn’t talk to her. Wouldn’t talk to anybody, still furious with them all, sure they wanted to hurt her.
Now, she’s told by her psychiatrist, the crisis point has passed, and from now on things will start to get better—she will start to get better. There will be a lot of work to do, though. The doctor keeps saying this, as though it’s something Jess can solve by simply being more industrious and trying harder.
So now when her mother visits, she knows who she is. She knows there is a lot of work to do. She knows her mother is going to tell her something important. She knows she needs to pay attention, to drag her sluggish and bruised mind awake. Her mother has put on her Serious Talk face, and she must listen.
Her mother starts to speak, and in that moment Jess remembers that she thinks she saw Joe, sometime before now. Perhaps a day ago, or a month. She thought she saw him outside a window, outside her new world, trying to get in. She thought she saw him dragged away by the big men who guard the portcullis, who operate the drawbridge, who feed the crocodiles that live in the moat. But she can’t be sure.
“I think he came, Mum,” she says flatly, staring at the weeping willow. “I think he came but he couldn’t get into the castle.”
“No. Joe didn’t come, Jessica. And Joe isn’t going to come,” her mother says, looking at Jess, staring into her eyes, as though she is willing her to understand. Sit up straight, pay attention, pay attention, pay attention—this is a Very Important Announcement.
Jess sits up straight, stabbing her fingers into the fleecy fabric of her gown, wrapping them up to keep them warm.
“He isn’t coming?” she asks, to prove that she’s alert. That she’s being good, and doing what she should. If she’d always been good, she wouldn’t be here, would she, in this place?
“No. He’s left, Jessica. He said he can’t cope with any of this anymore—that he’s sorry, but he needs a fresh start. He’s moved to London, and he’s asked us not to contact him again. He thinks it would be for the best for everyone if he just . . . disappeared. We don’t know where he’s living, or his new phone number, and he asked us to say goodbye to you. To wish you the best of luck, and to tell you that he hopes you feel better soon.”
Jess has her head perched on one side, like a bird listening very hard, and she is rocking slightly, backward and forward, frowning as she goes over the words and tries to make sense of them. She opens her mouth to ask another question, but her mother takes hold of her hand and rubs her fingers briskly.
“No point asking me anything else, dear—I don’t have the answers. He’s gone, that’s all I know, and he won’t be coming back. But don’t worry, I’m still here, and your dad, and we’ll always look after you—you know that, don’t you?”
“Joe’s gone? Joe’s not coming to visit?”
“That’s right, sweetheart. He’s sorry about it, but he won’t be coming back. He’s gone for good.”
“Gone for good,” Jess echoes slowly, blinking at her mother with huge eyes, processing the new information.
When she reacts, it starts quietly, with a single tear slowly rolling from the corner of one eye. Then the tears flow from both eyes. Then the rocking becomes more pronounced, and the fingers pulling at the fleece of the dressing gown start to tear and tug and twist.
A high-pitched noise comes from Jess’s lips, almost like a whistle, with breathy pauses between while she sucks in air. She is panicking, and this is how it sounds on the outside. The whistling noise gets louder, and the rocking gets so frantic she topples forward and falls from the bench.
She lies on the concrete, long hair twisted around her face. Her legs twitch, and the whistle evolves into a shout, and the shout transforms into a scream.
Ruth is on her feet, staring down at this writhing mass of limbs and hair and tears and snot and wailing. At her daughter. At her baby girl, destroyed.
She has no idea what to do, especially when the other woman out here—Martina?—joins in with the wailing, like it’s some kind of infectious aural disease.
She crouches down, reaches out to hold Jess, or at least to shield her head as it jerks and thrashes. She is pushed out of the way by the arrival of two of the nurses. They wear a gray uniform that makes them look more like guards, with heavy belts and thick-soled shoes. One of them scoops Jess up as though she is weightless, talking to her in a no-nonsense voice and not looking at all upset or horrified at what is happening. As though she’s seen it all before, and is neither moved nor startled by it.
Between them the two women get Jess upright, and half carry, half walk her back inside, where she can be checked and treated and, if necessary, restrained.
“Come on now, Jess, love, you’ll be all right,” one says as they drag her through the doorway, still screaming. “Should have known you were too good to be true . . .”
Ruth is left outside, trembling and humiliated and filled with both remorse and determination. She picks up her handbag, smooths down her skirt, and tells herself that everything will be OK. Everything will settle. Everything will work out for the best.