I have a teaspoon in my hand. I’m looking out the window from my room. I know something isn’t right. I can’t work out what or why.
Brown brick, two-storey high buildings flank the rich green grass that no one ever walks on. Shrubs are dotted at intervals so measured it looks like a ruler was used. Quaint wooden benches that no one ever sits on. It’s ornamental and contrived, nothing like my garden at home and more fitting for an industrial estate. It doesn’t quite hide the looming high metal fence that surrounds us, but I gaze regardless.
It’s so quiet I can hear the guard turning the pages of his book. He sits outside my door and opens the slot every ten minutes to check I’m asleep in my bed.
I’ve been standing here for hours ignoring him and he seems okay with it, what he doesn’t know is that I’m escaping. I’m using the teaspoon I stole earlier and I’m digging the window out of the frame.
It’s a slow job. They keep sedating me. Sometimes I can’t remember what I’m doing with the spoon, but I feel calm and numb, my thoughts drifting between the grass and the spoon.
The sky is pitch dark. However, light floods the grounds from underneath, illuminating the outdoors like a sunny day. Maybe that’s what’s making me feel uneasy, night shouldn’t look like day. I know it’s so they can see someone if they escape. They won’t see me though, I’m a fast runner.
‘Cora, I need you to get into bed, it’s a quarter past two in the morning, come on!’
The voice would have made me jump if I didn’t feel so heavy and I hadn’t seen her reflection standing behind me in the window. I turn, growling at the guard who obviously told the nurse I wasn’t in bed. Men can’t come in here, only women.
‘I need a sleeping tablet,’ I try to tell her in a slow monotone voice.
She laughs, says I’m not getting anything else and steers me into bed. I pull the covers hard, so they billow and come to rest on me, including my head. I hear her leave and the scrape of metal as the hatch closes. I feel my body sink into the mattress that is too soft, resting on the bed that is too small. I inhale, the sheet sucks into my mouth then back out again. I imagine it’s a plastic bag and I’m suffocating, dying.
My mind wanders. I know exactly where I am and have a rough idea of why I’m here. It’s not my first rodeo. In fact, I’ve spent a third of my adult life in this hospital. I just don’t remember coming here.
I feel the madness coursing through me again, I need to break free and run, I need… I need… I don’t know what I need, it’s all so confusing, where will I go? I can’t go home. My husband Ryan was the one who put me in here, and I don’t have any clothes or shoes or money or a phone, I have nothing. If only I could get that triple-glazed window out of the frame with my teaspoon! Then everything would be ok again.
Ryan. Suddenly I feel sad, and I want him here with me, I hope he’s ok. I don’t think I would have killed him. I only got a knife because I didn’t know who he was. I thought he’d broken into the house and then got into bed with me. When I looked at him his features were distorted and his voice was deep and gravelly, it wasn’t him. I was trying to defend myself from an intruder, I would never hurt Ryan.
Except I did.
I’m not a violent person, I’ve never been violent. They say mentally ill people hurt themselves not other people.
‘That’s not true,’ a dark whisper from the depths of my brain reminds me.
Flashes appear of punching a patient, then trying to steal her bag and attacking my neighbour last week, while in my underwear in the street. ‘No!’ I scream. ‘She had stolen my chocolate biscuits!’
The hatch screeches. ‘Are you ok Cora?’ The guard.
‘Fine!’ I shout from under my cave of white sheets.
Laughter catches me now as another memory comes to me. Ryan had taken the dog for a walk, but I thought he’d stolen him, and I called the police. Ryan had to sit in the police car for over an hour, while I peeked out from behind the curtains, watching our 65kg Rottweiler continuously jump on the policeman, trying to steal his radio from his top pocket.
‘Cora?’
I can’t answer the guard from laughing. It keeps building and building until it’s out of control. I’m spinning in freefall mania. The more I try to stop, the worse it becomes, echoing throughout the small room, my sheet is whipped from my face, and I see three nurses come into my space. The injection in my thigh is painless and within seconds, blackness pulls me into sleep.
The next morning my sister comes to visit, interrupting a siege-like situation in the main corridor at reception. I’m lying on the floor with two male nurses holding me down, screaming that my laptop had been stolen. I was trying to call 999 at reception. She walked in at the end of the fiasco as I was about to be dragged back to my room.
Now that I’ve settled down, she joins me, bringing in a chair to sit beside my bed. We look exactly like each other, with big blue eyes and downturned full lips that we inherited from my gran. Except, she has a scar on her upper lip from when our childhood dog bit her, but you can barely see it. It’s like looking in a mirror except I have blonde hair and hers is dark. My mind goes to the movies, we could switch places.
Julia is too goody two shoes for something like that though and something tells me I’m in big trouble. Her strained face and fake smile betray her.
‘How are you feeling today?’ She’s doing her best to sound caring and not shout at me.
‘I need my laptop, it’s been stolen,’ I whisper shout. It’s all I care about right now.
‘You certainly seem more lucid,’ she says upbeat.
‘Julia, phone the police. Give me your phone.’
Pausing for a while, she eventually confesses, ‘I have all your things, I took them when you were admitted.’
‘Why?’
‘You can’t have them in here.’ Now she looks really uncomfortable, and I think she’s lying, that’s what everyone does when you’re in here. They lie and conspire and hurt you by taking away your things. ‘Do you remember the day you were brought in?’
‘Yes,’ I reply immediately while giving her a withering look to say, ‘Of course, I remember,’ when in fact I don’t. I don’t remember a thing.
‘Do you remember taking off all your clothes and running around naked in the men’s ward?’
I don’t and I wonder if this is a test to see if I’m crazy.
‘Well, another patient took your clothes and put them on, she walked past Ryan and he recognised them.’ She sighs with the memory as if thinking about it made her feel tired all over again.
‘I had to take all of your things away from here, I took them home,’ she pauses for a while, looking down at her hands. ‘I’ve never seen you this bad, we actually thought you might die this time.’
‘I just need my laptop. Go home and get it.’
‘No! Why do you need it? Ryan said you shouldn’t have it anyway. He’s been checking your messages recently and you’re been sending abusive emails from your business. You aren’t well Cora.’
‘How am I supposed to work and write and study if I don’t have it?’
‘You’re supposed to be resting, you’ve only been in here a week.’
A week. I thought it had been a couple of days. Heat prickles my skin and my stomach floors, I can’t live without my laptop, my whole life is on there. I won’t be able to function! How will I know what to have for dinner?
I listen as she rambles on about me crawling on the floor running my hands along the skirting boards and how I wouldn’t let anyone stand on the floor as it was covered in diamonds. I show no reaction when she tells me I’ve been detained for a year this time.
She explains anyway. ‘You told your psychiatrist that you were going to kill everyone on the ward, so I think it will be a year. And your toilet doesn’t work, you stuffed your clothes and the cans of diet irn bru I brought for you in it. Why would you do something like that?’
I don’t have any diet irn bru?
‘I think the nurse did it. Can you bring me more?’ I tell her but she doesn’t look convinced.
Relief washes over me when she finally leaves. The scent of her perfume left behind, the one I don’t like and now my whole room reeks of it. Julia will never give me my laptop back, that’s why Ryan didn’t take it, because he would, but I know where she lives. I have a teaspoon and I will break in and get it.
First, I need to break out of here.
This short story was part of my English Literature and Creative Writing BA degree coursework. I was awarded a 2:1 in 2023. I am now studying for an MA in Creative Writing. I think the stories should be read, rather than collecting dust in my Mac. So, for fun, I’ve posted them in their original form, unedited and imperfect. Please feel free to share your thoughts below.
Oh, and some are autobiographical, can you guess which ones?
Carolyne
