Read Repeat It Today With Tears Online
Authors: Anne Peile
If I could not have made him warm and breathing again then I would have taken off any clothing I had and lain down beside him and instead he could have passed his coldness into me so that we were both of us become numb. Just before the coldness took hold I think I would have heard him speak to me to tell me that it was all all right. Once in the room in Oakley Street he said to me, ‘I hope you know how much I love you, Susanna, because, God help me, I could never put it into words.’
F
It was easy to become adapted to living here because for the first months I was what Trevor calls very doped up. I slept, or I merely gazed into the foreground space a great deal, dozing with my eyes open. I was conscious of things going on around me only in so far as you notice a fly buzzing against a windowpane or a television set in another flat. Therefore, by the time I was more aware of my surroundings and they reduced the dosages, I was already accustomed to this place.
Beyond the window it is South-west London still, but somewhere near Tooting Common so I see no familiar landmarks. What I do see are the network of covered walkways and the external metal staircases. It is an extraordinary work of
engineering, this institution. Precisionist painters in ’thirties America made pictures of buildings like this, although theirs were in the main factories and warehouses, not, I think, mental hospitals. Sometimes I read assiduously on painting and painting styles, sometimes I am unable to – in the illustrative plates just the placement of a hand or the fall of light from a window or the portrayal of the sitter’s age can set me off. In the beginning Trevor and the man in charge who conducted my first assessment would ask me why I was so interested in art. I told them that I did not know, I just was.
‘I think you do know, Susanna,’ said the man in charge.
‘Piss off,’ I replied and I began to worry at the stripe of dark red stitches up my arm.
I am very knowledgeable now but only in the areas on which I have been able to obtain works of reference. Sister Anna Maria, the nun with the library trolley, does her best but such books are not easy to come by and so there are extensive gaps in my learning. Whole genres must go uncomprehended.
Here in the room in the asylum at Tooting Bec I play a waiting game and so do they, those who have charged themselves with making me better. At first I presumed that they only wanted to cure me of my grief, which was ridiculous, and to stop me cutting my hands and then my left arm. I can tell you that did not work either, the flesh of that limb being quite transformed nowadays. I do not think that my father, who once told me about a man in an American novel who was so obsessed with women’s arms that he got an erection just at the sight of bare ones, would be able to recognise it anymore. The thing being that when I cut it a lot infections take hold and so now there is considerable scarring, my skin like the moon’s surface or an arid
landscape of pits and cracks, sometimes flushed and febrile. Human bodies can produce all by themselves the most marvellous tones and pigments, simply by the processes of injury or of sickness. From a bookstall on the Left Bank Francis Bacon once bought an old volume on diseases of the mouth; he recorded that he was entranced by the beauty of the coloured illustrations.
It is only the left one that I cut; I am quite particular about that. At morning break in the brown painted cloakroom of Clapham County School a third-form girl read out extracts from the teenage magazine
Jackie
. The air was redolent with the smell of plimsolls and cheese and onion crisps. The magazine was a special edition for Valentine’s Day; it offered salient facts in heart shaped frames stating that February 14th was the birds’ wedding day and that the Romans chose the third finger of the left hand for the ring because it had the closest connecting communication to the heart. I went home and told Lin but she said how the hell would they have known that.
After a time in the Springfield Hospital at Tooting Bec I came to understand that it was not simply the grieving or the cutting that they are seeking to address. They are waiting for my admissions: for me to admit that I remember what I did, to tell them about it, all of it, and to acknowledge that it was wrong. Good luck to them in their endeavour. I have been here a long time now. Bonnie Jean has saved for and enjoyed a trip home to family in Barbados. The main man from my very first assessment, whom I dislike for his pipe smoking and for other things, has been on a lengthy sabbatical. I hoped that on his return he would eschew our pointless weekly sessions but he did not. His name is Derrick Hearn and you can sometimes glimpse him in his private moments applying a plastic comb to his hair on which, unfashionably, he uses Brylcreem. I sense that he intends
to make some sexual advance towards me and to write a paper on my state of mind and deviancy. If he ever did the first I would harm myself good and proper. I do not know, as I have been sectioned, whether I have any rights to stop him doing the second.
My mother had me committed. On the 14th November 1972 I swallowed the bottle full of sleeping tablets that the elderly GP on Clapham Common West Side had prescribed to stop me banging my head against the wall in the long nights. I took them with some of Ron’s whisky which was rather a cheap brand with a golden cap to serve as a measure. After that I opened up my left arm with the carving knife from the wrist to the elbow.
‘Ah, it’s the flowery scent,’ Jack used to say when I had newly applied Diorissimo on leaving work to go to him. ‘Come here, come here to me, Susie, and let me breathe it in, breathe you in.’ And he would bend his head like a courtier and put his face against each of my wrists in turn and then, lifting my long hair, seek the places behind my ears. Diorissimo is a young girl’s scent. I began the cut just at that point on my left wrist that I used to spray. I wonder if the flesh there had held a faint residue of fragrance, like some velvet treasure an old woman has put away in tissue paper. If so, the blood would have washed away all trace of it.
When my mother saw she said, ‘I’ll have you committed,’ and she did.
Unlike the others, Trevor has not had many absences. He works very hard and dedicates long hours to his case notes. Only for a fortnight in the summer does he absent himself, he takes his wife on holiday to Spain, he says it makes up for him not being around much otherwise. This year they both got food poisoning from shellfish. Trevor is plump and earnest and badger bearded. His appearance is generally crumpled and often in mid-afternoon he attempts to boost his flagging energy levels with a
peanut Marathon bar. He makes weak jokes and to indicate the punchline he gives a snorting laugh within his badgery beard. He calls all us patients by our first names and he strives to be our friend but try as he might we know that at the day’s end he will go home and we will not.
I calculate that I am the only one here who does not want to leave. If anyone asks me where my home is I tell them that I do not have one anymore. Once someone persisted, a dark-haired woman named Sally who claimed to have been an air hostess with BEA. ‘Where did you used to live then?’ she asked.
‘By the river,’ I said and immediately regretted it in case she told the doctors and they used it as evidence of my having a memory after all. I thought she might have been an impostor, a spy planted to draw me out. Certainly her appearance was a lot smarter than the rest of us. As though abstracted I rose from the jigsaw of the bridge at Henley that we had been doing together. I went to sit on the floor, affecting the hugging and rocking movement which I had seen vacant-eyed others enact until staff bent down and spoke to them in exaggerated pronunciation, as they would have addressed themselves to foreigners with little grasp of English. I need not have worried, next day Sally was moved on to somewhere non-NHS.
I prefer Trevor to be present during the sessions with the pipe man but this is not always possible. On one of the interminable meetings the latter said to me, ‘You are a clever girl, Susanna. I want you to tell me what you have done wrong.’
‘I haven’t done anything wrong.’
‘You did things which were very wrong, didn’t you?’
‘No, I didn’t.’
One of the children on Alison’s estate was once challenged,
on the pavement, by a shopkeeper who accused him of stealing. We bystanders could clearly see the item that the boy was holding behind his back. Escape seemed quite impossible, it was surely all up for him, the insouciant thief, whose name was Kevin. But Kevin stood his ground, literally, with planted legs in school uniform trousers which were grease marked and frayed above the hem.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ he had said in round blue-eyed disbelief at such an allegation. He ran some of the words together as though there were a ‘ch’ sound at the end of what.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said to pipe man Mr Derrick.
‘Yes, you do.’
His office was on the ground floor, at the building’s corner so that there were two windows. He sat with his back to these.
‘We know and you know that the reason you are here, mainly, is that you had been doing something very wrong, hadn’t you?’
At the moment when it seemed most hopeless in the standoff with the shopkeeper, thieving Kevin had suddenly flung the stolen item into the air so that its crude coloured packaging soared heavenwards in an arc of blue and yellow. Then he ran like a hound, leaping and jumping and bounding high as the hero in a nursery rhyme.
‘You did something that’s not allowed by law, something that’s frowned upon by the medical profession, by the church, by society as a whole; it’s a taboo.’
‘My sister has a scent called that, but it’s spelt with a u at the end. Tabu by Dana. I don’t like it, personally, it’s awfully strong.’
‘What was it that brought you in here to us?’
‘An ambulance.’
‘Don’t be a silly girl, Susanna.’
I stared over at the mantelpiece where there was a pipe rack. I wondered if I really was still a girl, now that I was older and I had cut off all my hair. I used the tiny nail scissors which they had forgotten to remove from the back of my little pink manicure set. Bonnie Jean shook her head sorrowfully as she knelt to pick up all the long thick chestnut strands and put them into the paper rubbish bags which they hang on the side of hospital lockers. There was so much that she needed three bags.
‘Darling,’ she said, ‘now why did you go and do a thing like that?’
‘… for heaven’s sake look at you,’ said love-at-first-sight Jack, ‘with your long, long hair… ’
What possible use was it to me now?
‘Admitting that what you did was wrong is the first step towards your recovery, Susanna.’
I concentrated on the carpet which was blue speckled with black.
‘You’ll have to tell us, sooner or later, it might as well be now.’
On the desk Derrick man had a shallow glass pen tray filled with paperclips. I opened one out and began prodding my hand with the end of its wire.
‘That is called stippling,’ Jack explained, showing me how he had filled in a space in a landscape. ‘You take a brush, quite a thick soft one, and you move it like this.’
The end of the paperclip was too blunt. I had only just started to bring up blood in the stipples when Trevor got up and came across to me. ‘Hey,’ he said and gently he took the paperclip away.
‘I think we should leave it there today,’ he said and he led me away though I knew that grease-headed Mr Derrick did not agree.
That, more or less, is how it goes with me. Periodically I am led to a consulting room, they keep on insisting that I must remember and that I must be contrite, I persist in obstructing their advances. Sooner or later they lead me away again, back to the room where I live all my days and all my nights.
The loveliest nights are the ones when Jack comes to me in dreams. ‘Susie,’ he whispers to me, ‘Susie, are you awake?… I want you all over again.’
I don’t have visitors. At first my mother was brought in to attend the psychotherapy sessions. Dr Derrick and a woman asked questions about sex. I said nothing. My mother was expected to go back to my room with me when the hour was over. On the first occasion she unpacked a brightly coloured shopping bag. There was some clothing, a packet of Maryland Cookies, a bottle of lemon squash and a book of crossword puzzles.
She put the squash on the top of my locker and said, ‘You needn’t tell them anything about what happened that night.’
I began to hum; I did not know what the tune was. Perhaps it wasn’t a tune, just a rhythm, like the sound of a train.
‘Do you hear me, Susanna?’
I made the humming louder.
‘You bloody well will listen to what I’m saying to you. They down there…’ she jerked her angry head in the direction of the consulting wing, ‘they know as much as they need to know about you and this sordid bloody business. Everyone thinks that he probably committed suicide. You dare to give them even an inkling, the slightest idea, that it wasn’t that and it will all come out in the papers and in court and everywhere else. You wouldn’t want the whole world knowing what a filthy pervert your precious father was, now would you?’
I altered the humming; I thought it was closest to ‘For All the Saints’.
‘Would you? I know damn well that you understand a lot more than you make out, don’t think you can fool me.’ She set down the pile of clothing which I knew would smell of cigarette smoke and fried cooking.