Swimming Upstream (23 page)

“Okay.”

Sandy hesitated in the doorway and smiled at me.

“Thanks for being so kind,” I added, touched and a
little overwhelmed by his compassion.

Sandy saw my discomfort, and simply said: “You’re
highly valued here, Lizzie. Please come and find me if you want to talk. Any
time.”

When I got home I called Zara again. Tim answered
the phone.

“Lizzie.” He said. “I’m glad you called. I was
just about to call you.”

“Oh, okay. What's up? And is Zara there?”

“Well that’s what I was going to call you about.
She's not very well. She's in hospital.”

“In hospital?” My heart started thumping. “Has she
had an accident?”

“No. Nothing like that. But Shelley took her in around
lunchtime.” He paused. “She's in Strauss ward.”

“What for?” I asked. “What's wrong with her?”

“Lizzie, Strauss is the psychiatric ward,” Tim
said quietly.

“Oh. I see.” Suddenly everything made sense.

“She’s a voluntary patient at the moment. But I’m
not sure if she is going to stay. Shelley’s called her Dad. If she fights it
they’ll section her.”

“Oh God. I knew something was wrong. She seemed
depressed, and I didn’t do anything.” I started racking my brain for all the
warning signs, all the clues, all the times I might have turned my back on her
and been too stupid to realise. “I should have been there for her. Looked after
her. Maybe it wouldn’t have got this bad.”

Tim sighed. “It's not your fault, really Lizzie. We
were living with her, and we didn’t see it coming. Or at least, I think Shelley
did, but she wasn’t sure. Anyway, there isn't anything anyone could have done. She
needed professional help. She's not... what you have to understand, Lizzie...
she's really not very well. At all. And this isn’t the first time, apparently.”

“Oh,” I said. “I see.” Although I didn't see, not
really, and Tim was frightening me.

“Thank you for letting me know,” I said.

“Go and see her,” said Tim.

“I don’t know if she will want to see me,” I said.
“She was pretty angry with me earlier.”

“That’s just the
illness,” said Tim. “Give it till tomorrow. Let the meds kick in, then go and
see her. She needs her friends right now.”

It was strange, going through the courtyard and past the
fountain and up the steps into the ward with the big brick walls looming up
around me, just as they had been in my dream. In fact, it felt a bit as though
I were in a dream, because I'd been up since four and now this, all this with
Zara, had a feel of something quite surreal.

I didn't feel as though I could walk straight in,
because the ward Sister was at the reception desk talking on the telephone to
someone about picking up a Miss Jenkins' scripts for her and whether or not she
was going to need to “come back in and see us again.” She kept repeating “come
back in and see us”, and talked slowly and clearly as if she were talking to a
child, although she obviously wasn't. She was wearing a pair of very large
thick glasses. I watched her neck moving up and down inside her dark blue
collar. Every time she spoke, the white piping round the edge wobbled.

Finally, she put down the receiver and turned and
looked at me.

“Can I help?”

“I'm here to visit Zara Lewis,” I said.

“Ah, Zara,” she said. She pointed to the day room.
“You can go on in. She's just having her tea.”

Zara wasn't having any tea. She was sitting round
a table with four or five other patients, who were all eating in silence. Zara
was staring into space, her eyes all red and bulgy from crying, her hands
hanging down by her sides. Her food lay untouched in front of her. I walked
over and put my arms round her. She turned and clutched hold of me with a frail
white hand.

“Who are you?” asked the woman sitting next to
her. She turned her sharp beaky face towards me. “What do you want?” she
rasped.

“Come on,” I whispered. Zara stood up obediently. A
man sitting opposite pushed his chair back and stood up too.

“Sit down, Mr Stevens,” said one of the
auxiliaries, coming into the day room.

“She hasn't finished her tea,” she added, to me.

“She doesn't want it,” I said, ignoring the look
of disapproval from the auxiliary, and took Zara by the hand.

“Where's your room?” I asked her.

It had only been a couple of days since I'd last
seen her, but I hadn’t realised how much weight she had actually lost. She was
wearing a pair of denim dungarees that I'd never seen before. They were draping
from her bony shoulders and hanging shapelessly around her as if they were
dangling from a broken coat hanger. Underneath, she was wearing a white t-shirt.
Her arms were almost the same colour.

She led me down the corridor past the nursing
office, where the ward Sister and one of the nurses were sitting down and
having a cup of tea. The Sister looked up as we passed, analysing us both
through her thick lenses.

Zara stopped, as if she'd been caught doing
something wrong. “Is it all right if I take my friend to my room?” she asked,
nervously.

“Yes Zara, you can do that,” said the Sister,
nodding. She smiled at me. I could see she thought I was a good influence. I
started planning Zara's escape.

We carried on down the hallway. A good-looking
young guy of about twenty wandered past us. He was nicely dressed in a checked
shirt and jeans and Nike trainers.

“Hello Zara,” he said, without smiling.

“Hello Sean,” she said. “That's Sean,” she told
me, after he'd passed us.

“He looks nice,” I said.

“He's schizophrenic,” said Zara.

She stopped. “This is my room,” she said. We
entered a small whitewashed single room with a hospital bed set in the middle
and a table and a sink by the window, which overlooked the courtyard below. I
sat down on the radiator, which was one of the old big chunky ones, painted
hospital green.

“So, have they told you what's wrong?” I asked
her.

“Depression,” she said. “That's what they say. I’m
clinically depressed.”

“Well, that’s pretty obvious. Do you get to talk
to anyone? Are you seeing anyone, a psychiatrist?” I asked her.

She stared at me and shook her head. She picked up
a notepad from a table by the window. “How do you spell psychiatrist?” she
asked me.

“I'm sure they'll…” I began.

“I forget everything,” she said, at the same time.
She looked at me. “I can't remember anything from one minute to the next. I
can't even read a book, because I keep forgetting what the story's about.”

I bit my lip. I could see that planning her escape
had been a little dramatic and naive, not to mention premature. She wasn't
going to be going anywhere, not for a while yet. She stood there by the table,
by the window with her notepad, poised and serious like a badly dressed
secretary, her forehead creased up into the old familiar frown.

I spelled “Psychiatrist” for her.

“These are my things,” said Zara, putting down the
pen and notepad and picking up a piece of rose quartz that Catherine had given
her for Christmas and a postcard with a Monet flower print on the front. She
sat down on the bed.

“Can I?” I sat down next to her.

She nodded. I took the postcard from her and
turned it over. It was from her mum. It said, in big childlike print: “Dear
Zara, Don't worry things will get better soon, Love MUM.”

“Why has she written “Mum” in great big capital
letters?” I asked.

“I don't know,” said Zara, staring out of the
window.

“Is she coming?”

Zara shook her head. “Dad can't get the time off
work to drive her.” I looked up at her. “She doesn't want to,” she said, her
red-rimmed eyes filling up with tears. “That's all. I phoned yesterday and
asked if they could come and get me, and bring me home. Mum said, “This isn't
going to be like last time, is it Zara?” And then she said it wasn't practical
because Aunty Margaret and Uncle John have broken up and Aunty Margaret's
staying, and there's all that to deal with and plus my sister's home from Uni,
and she said it would be best all round if I just tried to carry on.”

When she finished speaking she was shaking. I put
my arms round her and stroked her hair. It was wispy and wet, somehow, and it
was sticking to her head. She leaned against my shoulder.

She said, “You think growing up is like - it's
like, one day you're going to wake up with a bowl of cherries and life
membership to the “Sorted Out Club.”” Tears were running down her cheeks. “But
you know,” she continued, “it just goes on, and on, and on…”

“I know,” I said, because I did.

We sat for a long while
without speaking; me holding Zara, and her leaning against my shoulder and both
of us rocking gently back and forth while the sunlight beamed in through the
gaps in the trees and made small fluttering leaf-shaped patterns on the wall
beside us. There was nothing else to say, because there weren't any more words.

The following day, after my shift, I went straight back to
the hospital. Zara was in her room.

“It's really embarrassing,” she said. “Everyone
knows me.” She was sitting on her bed wearing a black crocheted top and jeans,
which were bunched in around her waist with a flowery leather belt. Her hands
lay palms upwards on the bed beside her and I could see faint blue veins
trickling down the inside of her pale arms. “With the senior staff, I've kind
of got used to it and they've been really nice to me but every time one of the
Grade A nurses comes on the ward and sees me, they give me this look and I want
to hang my head in shame.”

“They probably just feel for you Zara. They’re
nurses. They care. You’ve got nothing to be ashamed of,” I said.

Zara looked up at me, anxiously. Her eyes were
still red and puffy, and weeping slightly. “That's easy for you to say. But
people judge you when they find out you've had a breakdown.” She wiped at her
eyes with the back of her hand. “You wouldn't believe how differently they
behave. I know from last time. It's like everyone's sitting around waiting for
you to crack up all the time.”

I got up and fetched her a tissue from the box on
the windowsill.

“I didn’t know about last time,” I said. “You
didn’t tell me.”

“I thought you wouldn’t want to know me.”

“How could you think that?”

“I didn’t know it was going to happen again.”

I peered out of the window. “Do you want to go for
a walk?” I asked her.

Zara blew her nose. “I don't know if they'll let
me.”

“They'll let you,” I said. “I’ve already asked.
Come on, it’ll do you good. Let’s go and have a picnic. I've brought some food.”

We walked round the courtyard a couple of times
and sat on a bench by the fountain. I opened my bag. I'd bought all Zara's
favourite food from a deli in Upper Street; there were apples, fresh sardines,
hard-boiled eggs and a packet of Highland oatcakes.

Zara looked disinterested. “I'm not really hungry,”
she said.

“You have to eat,” I coaxed her gently. She stared
up at the fountain and said nothing.

When we got back inside I left Zara in the day
room with Sean and went to speak to the Sister. “She’s upset,” I said. “She’s
not eating. Are you sure the drugs are working?”

“She's a lot better than she was,” said the
Sister. She put down a file she was holding and turned to face me. “Much better
than she was when she first came in to see us.” There it was again: “Came in to
see us”, as if it were an enjoyable little day trip that lots of people made,
just because it was such a nice place to be. I couldn’t help but smile.

“So what is it?” I asked her. “What’s wrong with
her? I mean, apart from being depressed.”

 “It’s called psychosis,” explained the Sister.

“What caused it?”

“Well, that’s not something that’s so easy to
establish. But believe me,” she said. “There's a lot of strange things that can
go through your mind when you haven't slept properly for weeks. Her body's been
under tremendous strain,” she said. “But she's going to get better.” She
smiled. “Don’t you worry. She’s on the mend.”

I smiled back at her. I
could see why they called them Angels.

I crossed Smithfield and headed up towards Faringdon tube.
I turned into St John Street and walked up towards the Angel, then turned right
into Essex Road. I realised that I hadn’t seen Uncle Silbert for several weeks
and it seemed unlikely that Zara had either. Nor was she going to be visiting
him for a while. I would have to take over, I decided, make sure he was okay. I
would have to make time for regular visits.

The lift wasn't working, and so I had to walk up
all twelve flights of stairs. The stairwell smelled of urine, like the lift had
done, only for longer. I reached the top, breathless, and knocked on the door. I
stayed away from the railings.

I could see Uncle Silbert shuffling down the
hallway through the frosted glass. He didn’t have his walking frame and he took
a long time to reach the door, which made me feel guilty. He opened the door
wide and stood back, breathing heavily and nodding his head at the same time,
as if he had been expecting me. “Ah, Elizabeth, come in.”

I followed him back down the hallway to the
kitchen where the same one ring on the old gas stove was burning. The flat
still smelled of dust and pastry. I wondered if he would allow me to have a
clean up for him but decided against asking, for fear of offending him.

Uncle Silbert lowered himself into his brown
armchair and I sat down on the stool by the stove.

“Shall I put the kettle on?”

Uncle Silbert nodded, coughed and pointed to the
cake tin on the table.

“No. Thank you,” I said. “But let me make you some
tea. Have you eaten? I could cook for you if you like?”

He shook his head. “No, no. Don’t you trouble
yourself, my dear. No need.”