Heart-Shaped Bruise (4 page)

I sat there for a moment or two, smiling to myself, but when I heard Doctor Gilyard write something in her notebook, the corners of my mouth drooped. ‘What?’ I asked, sitting forward. ‘What are you writing?’

She stopped and looked up at me. ‘Why does it bother you so much, Emily?’

‘Because I didn’t say anything worth noting. I didn’t tell you
anything
.’

She closed the notebook and put her hand on top of it. It made my heart throb like a fresh bruise. ‘These sessions aren’t just about what you say, Emily, they’re also about how you react to what
I
say.’

I flew out of my chair and paced over to her bookcase. My hands were shaking so much I had to reach out for one of the shelves.

‘I didn’t tell you anything,’ I wanted to shout, but it came out as a whisper.

‘You told me rather a lot, actually.’ I heard the leather notebook creak as she opened it again. ‘You told me about your cat, a cat your father brought home not long after your mother left, presumably as a way of consoling you or distracting you from asking where she was. A cat who instinctively chases squirrels but then doesn’t know what to do with them.’

‘So?’ I glared at her across the office. ‘What does that have to do with anything? It’s just a stupid story. It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘But it does, Emily. The things we reach for when we’re trying to avoid talking about something else sometimes mean as much.’

‘What? That’s ridiculous!’ I took a step forward then, my fists clenched.

But she just lifted her chin to look at me. ‘You were thinking
of Duck because when you found Juliet you didn’t do anything. You’re Duck and Juliet is the squirrel.’

I stared at her for a moment, then turned and retreated to the bookcase. I looked at a textbook but the title on the spine was out of focus. ‘Why are you doing this to me?’

‘Why are you doing this to yourself, Emily?’

Always a question with a question.

Thursday. Poached eggs for breakfast. I hate poached eggs so Naomi ate mine. And Lily’s. And Val’s.

‘Want those?’ she asked the new girl who must have been admitted after we went to bed last night.

It was the first thing anyone had said to her, but that wasn’t unusual. There are only fifteen beds in this unit, which isn’t nearly enough given that there are seven hundred girls in Archway and everyone here must be a bit unbalanced to have done what they’ve done.

We’re all craving something. Mourning someone.

But seven hundred inmates into fifteen beds doesn’t fit, so this place is more like a sick bay; girls come, they cry, claw and scream, then they sleep and when they wake up, they’re sent back to the main wing. That’s why the unit is set up the way it is:
fifteen cells, ten on the ground floor and five on top, all of them facing the nurse’s office. In the main wing, they eat on tables in the space between, but we have a separate room, which is next to Doctor Gilyard’s office, in case one of us loses it. That way they can lock us in until it passes.

The ten cells on the ground floor are for the girls who won’t be here long. Plus, there are two cells with glazed doors for the ones on suicide watch. That’s where Lily was when she got here last month. Naomi and I were fascinated by her; most of the girls on suicide watch are too drugged-up to move, but Lily flitted around the cell, from corner to corner, wall to wall, like a butterfly trapped in a room.

It was kind of beautiful.

If you found this notebook, you must be on the top row like me. Naughty girl. Right now it’s me, Naomi, Val, Reta and a sociopath called Ruth, who hasn’t been around much recently because she’s been going back and forth between the Old Bailey for her trial. We’re the lifers. We’re not going anywhere. We’re all on remand, but we’ll come back here after we’re sentenced, because Archway is the only young offenders institution in London with a psych unit. We’re also the ones who pose a threat to ourselves or the people around us. I haven’t laid a finger on anyone since I got here, but I’m Emily Koll, so that’s earned me the middle cell.

I’m queen of the fucking castle.

‘Erin needs to finish her breakfast,’ a nurse said when Naomi went for her plate.

Another anorexic, like Lily.

I must have been staring, because she stiffened.

‘What you looking at?’ she spat. ‘I ain’t scared of you, Crazy Koll.’

‘No. You’re just scared of carbs.’ I rolled my eyes, but it stung, I won’t lie. I haven’t been called that in a while. The
Sun
was particularly fond of that nickname, if I recall.

‘Emily,’ the nurse said, approaching the table.

‘What? She started on me!’

‘Be the bigger person.’

‘I wouldn’t be here if I could be the bigger person, would I?’

That earned a titter from the table. Even the new girl’s face softened.

‘Do you have a happy place?’ Naomi asked as soon as the nurse walked away.

‘Maladoth,’ Reta piped up with a wistful smile. ‘It’s so beautiful. The sky’s burnt orange and the citadel is enclosed in a mighty glass dome that shines under the twin suns. Beyond that, the mountains go on for ever – slopes of deep red grass, capped with snow.’

Whatever. ‘I think she just described Gallifrey,’ I told Naomi, lowering my voice.

She frowned. ‘Galli – what?’

‘Gallifrey. You know?
Doctor Who
.’

‘Don’t listen to anything she has to say; she’s as mad as cheese.’

‘How’s that schizophrenia thing working out for you?’

‘Great. I just need a happy place. What’s yours?’

‘The Electric Ballroom,’ I told her, inspecting my nails.

‘No, a happy place,’ she said, mopping up the yolk on her plate with a piece of bread. I wanted to vomit, so Lily and the new girl must have been ready to faint. ‘Somewhere you go when things go all woo-woo in your head.’

I stared at her. ‘Woo-woo? Really, Naomi? You’ve been here six months and the best you’ve got is
woo-woo
?’

She shrugged. ‘It’s woo-woo.’

I turned to Lily for support, but she shrugged too. ‘It’s better than doolally.’

I was appalled. ‘Is this what it’s come to? Saying woo-woo because it’s better than doolally? Isn’t a woo-woo a cocktail?’

‘You’d know, alcy,’ Naomi said with a smirk.

A lesser soul might have kicked her under the table. I just knocked my tea over the rest of her breakfast. ‘Oh, how clumsy of me!’

‘Fucking hell, Ems!’ she gasped, jumping back.

I feigned horror. ‘Ladies don’t say fuck, they say pardon.’

‘They teach you that at your fancy school?’

‘That and an unyielding sense of entitlement.’

She called me something I won’t repeat as the tea spilled over the edge of the table, on to her lap. I cackled, but Lily looked confused. ‘I don’t have a happy place.’

‘Doctor G seems to think we need one,’ Naomi huffed as the nurse wandered over and handed her a wodge of paper napkins. The nurse gave me a look that told me I was on nicotine smackdown again, then wandered off again.

‘But where?’ Lily asked. ‘Somewhere safe, like a forest?’

‘Forests aren’t safe,’ I snorted, and her little face folded. ‘Read a book, Lil; they’re full of vampires and werewolves.’

‘She’s winding you up, Lil,’ Naomi said, wiping the tea my way across the table. ‘Forests are perfectly safe. Especially the ones in your head.’

‘Why do you wanna know about our happy place, anyway?’ I asked, grabbing a napkin and wiping the tea Naomi’s way again.

‘Doctor G asked me about mine in our session yesterday, and I don’t have one. Do I need one? I can’t stop thinking about it. I didn’t sleep a wink last night!’

‘You got a happy place, Val?’ I asked with a laugh, but I was seething.

So when I saw Doctor Gilyard this afternoon, I let rip.

‘This is so unfair!’ I spat, pointing at her. ‘You make me talk about Juliet and Dad and Uncle Alex and—’ I couldn’t say his name so I stopped for breath, my heart shuddering. ‘And you sit here talking to Naomi about her happy place? What is that? Why can’t we talk about stuff like that?’

She nodded. ‘Would you like to talk about stuff like that, Emily?’

‘No,’ I told her, crossing my arms.

‘Do you have a happy place, Emily?’

I ignored her, determined not to tell her a thing after the last time.

‘Is it the cottage in Brighton?’ she asked, and my heart stopped.

The woman is a witch.

I’m not allowed to have a cigarette for the rest of the day because I told one of the nurses to get fucked in art therapy this afternoon. We were making a card for Val who’s in court tomorrow and won’t be back. Naomi overhead Doctor Gilyard saying that she’ll probably get a suspended sentence because she is ‘too vulnerable’ for prison and would benefit at an out-patient facility, which is Doctor Gilyard for
too mad for us
.

I didn’t object to making a card, but when I was confronted with a pair of childproof scissors and a tube of glitter, I kind of lost my shit. Hence, the nicotine smack-down. (With hindsight, I guess that’s why they give us childproof scissors here.) So Lily let me have her cigarette after lunch in exchange for blasting me with questions.

‘What was the college like? Was it nice?’ she asked, all but
bouncing. ‘I’m going to college when I get out of here.’

I scoffed. ‘It was a shit-hole.’

I wish there was a more delicate word to describe it, but nothing about the College of North London is delicate. My old school, St Jude’s, is delicate. It’s a neat, long building with ivy bubbling over its walls. There’s a sundial on the front lawn and a statue of St Jude by the entrance to the library, his brass toe worn down because it’s supposed to bring you luck if you rub his foot. It’s a good school. A small school. Four hundred girls living under its sloped slate roof, each of us pretending that we didn’t miss home as we taped photographs to the walls next to our beds.

The College of North London is a beast in comparison. It’s a wide, low building that squats in the middle of the high street, its glass front reflecting the buses and cars that roll by like smudges of crayon. There are no trees, no lawn, no elderly rose bushes like at St Jude’s, just a car park, a cash machine and a few worn benches, the wood split and the varnish brittle.

Lily looked crushed. ‘It can’t have been that bad.’

‘It was! It’s one of those grim, 1970s buildings. Kind of like here.’

I looked up at the chewed chewing gum-coloured walls, then down at the cracked floor tiles and realised that I wasn’t being melodramatic, for once.

‘And nothing worked,’ I told her. ‘The lifts. Toilets. Everything was old and grey and broken. It would be
weeks
before anything got fixed, if it got fixed at all.’

She winced and I smiled playfully, thrilled that she didn’t know I was teasing her.

‘But I loved it,’ I said and she perked up. ‘There were eight thousand students, Lil.
Eight thousand
. St Jude’s was so quiet. It was all glossy and gilt edged. But the College of North London was a mess. There was always someone in your way and it was so noisy! Phones and music and voices
everywhere
.’ I threw my hands up. ‘It was
alive
! There was always something going on. You’d turn a corner, and there’d be a couple kissing; you’d turn another and two girls would be screaming at each other. And people laughed, Lil,
out loud
. You’d be walking down the stairs and you’d hear this great
BOOM
of laughter that would make your bones rattle.’ I shook my head. ‘No one at St Jude’s laughed. They chuckled or they giggled, but they didn’t laugh.’

‘Do you miss it?’ she asked when I stopped to take a drag on my cigarette.

‘Of course.’

‘Would you go back?’

I thought about that for a moment and my heart turned to pulp.

‘You can’t go back, Lily,’ I said with a small shrug.

I waited for her shoulders to fall, but she just smiled. ‘That’s why you can’t take anything for granted. You don’t know what you have until it’s gone.’

She looked so proud of herself that I smiled back, even though I don’t believe that. We all know what we had, don’t we? We just never thought we could lose it.

Naomi’s boyfriend didn’t visit today, so she was first in line for her meds. I’ve been itching to tease her about it all day, but as I was about to, Lily pulled out a drawing.

‘What’s that?’ Naomi frowned as Lily held it up.

‘It’s my happy place.’ She grinned, her shoulders back. ‘I drew it in Art.’

(She always says it like that – Art – as though it’s a lesson, not an attempt to kill us slowly.)

‘Here are the trees,’ she said, pointing to the brown lines with the green scribbled blobs on top of them. ‘And the wild flowers and the babbling brook.’

‘Hey non nonny,’ I sang, but they ignored me.

‘
. . .
and here’s the treehouse where you can sleep.’

Naomi blinked at her as she handed over the drawing. ‘Me?’

‘Yeah. You’ve been so sad. I thought you might like to borrow it.’

I have to remind myself that Lily is sixteen sometimes. Regression, Doctor Gilyard calls it. It’s a defence mechanism, she says. A lot of the girls in here do it to avoid dealing with whatever landed them here. Me, I’ve gone the other way; I feel ancient sometimes, like an old woman sitting in her favourite chair telling tales of her misspent youth.

‘Don’t get too close to the babbling brook,’ I warned Naomi with a wink.

I expected her to laugh, but she burst into tears.

I turned to Lily, horrified. ‘Wait. What? What’s that?’ I asked, pointing my roll-up at Naomi. ‘What’s she doing? Has she gone woo-woo?’

‘She’s crying, Emily,’ Lily said, stroking Naomi’s hair.

‘Why?’

‘Because I’m not dead inside!’ Naomi roared. ‘Comfort me!’

I tried to take the drawing from Naomi, but she wouldn’t give it to me. ‘Stop it, Emily!’ she hissed. ‘No mocking the happy place.’

‘I’m not going to mock it, I just want to show you something. See?’ I pointed at a space between the trees. ‘Look who’s in the happy place?’ They both leaned forward, peering at the drawing. ‘It’s Jake Gyllenhaal.’