How Did You Get Those Scars?

You can tell what a society fears by the euphemisms it uses.

Death usually tops the list. When you die you kick the bucket, pass over, cross the veil, are at peace, at rest, give up the ghost, gone to a better place, all rather optimistic. The reality is different, which is why we chose to sugar-coat it.

The same goes for mental health. We are looneys, off our rockers, nuts, away with the fairies, bananas, lost our marbles, have bats in the belfry, have a screw loose. Likewise, the places we put our nutters suffer a similar nomenclature as we dump them in the looney bin, the asylum, Bedlam.

We fear death because it ends us but we fear insanity more, I say. It is the undoing of us, a reminder to the wider society at large there is no normal, no benchmark, no standard that any of us really can measure up to.

High-society Georgians actually paid to see the lunatics at Bedlam when it first opened. They were mesmerised by those who had irredeemably slipped the shackles of normalcy.

I’ve always rather liked the asylum as a term for the psychiatric ward because it was asylum, in its proper sense. We were all there seeking asylum, refuge from daily life. It was a place where judgment of our conditions was suspended.

Even though I was shadowed by my Of Mice And Men minders in Kevin and Dave, life for me after a few weeks of Haldol and Dothiepin, ice cream and chess, had settled down on the ward. The doctors, instead of threatening me with stories of unsuccesul experiments, had finally calibrated my dosage and my mind had accepted I was a) not dead and b) now Sectioned in a psychiatric ward.

Knowing both of these facts didn’t really help. I was utterly overwhelmed by the shame and stupidity of my actions that had taken me down this patch. I had thrown away a lot in pursuit of finding my inner self. What gurus don’t mention when you seek out your inner self or guardian angel is that they may not be benign. What if you plumbed your inner depths and instead of beatific enlightenment found something just as real, but darker?

Playing chess everyday with Brian made me quite the chess player. His brain ran at a million miles a minute which saw him working from the end game backwards. Mine, on the other hand, was dulled by the drugs so I worked with patterns and the interlocking strategies that could be combined. I rarely won unless we played first thing in the morning before the med round. His thoughts were always all over the place — a rare window of opportunity for me.

There was no music, radio or TV on the ward. It would set some people off but there was a daily soundtrack in Kathleen. Kathleen was in her 60s and had a compulsive disorder that made her feel thirsty all the time. When I first arrived it simply confirmed that I was in some kind of Tarterus and Kathleen represented a Sisyphian figure of distress. Pretty much every few minutes Kathleen would ask for a drink of water from the nurses.

“Can I have a drink of water?”

“In a few minutes, Kathleen,” would come the reply.

It was relentless but we got used to it. In fact, when Kathleen was ill for a few days with a chest complaint, we missed the white noise of her complaints.

‘It’s too quiet,’ Brian would say. ‘I can’t think.’ I scored a few more victories that week.

We all smoked prodigiously, the only ward on the site where you could, and in the evenings we would swap chess and ice cream trading for pool and table tennis. A woman called Alice was the queen of pool. She was a lone parent who lived locally in Darlington but was inside for reasons I couldn’t fathom. She was bubbly, cheerful, even-tempered and seemed to be on top of everything. Me, Brian and Alice hung out a fair bit. They were good company.

One day though we were playing pool — my minders usually played ping-pong — and Alice said suddenly she had to leave. It was odd but Brian just stepped up and took her place. Half an hour later she was back carrying two shopping bags full to the brim of fun-size Mars bars and bottles of Coke.

‘Aha, I could use a boost,’ said Brian, still hungry despite his ice cream tub diet. He dove into one of the bags, as did I.

Meanwhile, Alice took the other bag and sat on the chair behind the door, out of sight of my minders while Brian and I continued battling it on the green baize. We were arguing about who was spots and who was stripes when we heard the noise. It sounded like a hollow burp gone wrong mixed with dry wretching. And then a stench filled the room. Immediately, Kevin and Dave dropped their table tennis bats and dived towards the door shouting.

We followed.

Behind the door, sat on the plastic chair her head over the bin, was Alice, the ends of her hair covered in vomit. Vomit was plastered everywhere, frothing in a bath of Coke and half-digested Mars bars, individual layers of caramel and chocolate still visible as they floated on a bin full of wrappers.

I’ll never forget Alice’s face. Terror. Terror and pleading. Terror at the mania that had gripped her forcing her bulimia to take total and utter compulsive control over her. And pleading for someone to make it stop.

Brian helped her up but Alice vomited again, wearily. It spewed onto his buttoned up shirt and he let go as if electrocuted. He quickly undid the shirt as if he was on fire.

And that’s when I saw them. The scars. Every inch of his arms, every inch of his torso was covered in small, regular scars. Nothing drastic like stab wounds or suchlike but weals and welts from repetitive cuts, probably drawn across his skin with a knife or razor. Mixed with the scars were fag burns. Not the accidental kind.

Brian looked embarrassed.

‘I just need to feel something, Gaz. I’m dead inside.’

Next time: Why They Play Pink Floyd In The Psych Ward