The Skeleton Cupboard (26 page)

My mouth was dry. Everyone turned to look at me.

“OK,” I croaked.

Linda leaned across and squeezed my hand. I was shaking.

*   *   *

Sitting at the back of the church, I felt guilty for being tearful. I hadn't really known Eleanor very long and it seemed selfish to indulge my own sorrow.

Looking through the sea of black in front of me, I stared at the back of Mollie's head at the front of the church sitting to the right of her mother's coffin. I could not see her expression except when she occasionally leaned forward to wipe her eyes or blow her nose.

I sat among the entire staff team and some of the young women from the ward. Looking around the church, I saw faces of people that I had never met, some probably relatives who bore the family resemblance, others pretty young women whom I had seen in the photos stuck around Mollie's bed space on the ward.

The priest stopped speaking and Mollie stood up to walk to the lectern. She looked so small and fragile as she walked past her mother's coffin without looking at it. My muscles twitched with the urge to run to her and envelop her in my arms, to rock her, to hold her.

Mollie opened the book in front of her and, in a strong voice, began to speak: “I am reading this for Mummy. ‘Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep.'”

I couldn't breathe as I waited for Mollie to compose herself and begin to read.

Do not stand at my grave and weep;

I am not there, I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

As Mollie paused, the sound of her father sobbing loudly into the shoulder of one of his older daughters filled the hushed church. Sniffles and sobs began to echo from all directions as the collective grief was finally given permission to release itself.

Mollie continued:

When you awaken in the morning's hush

I am the swift uplifting rush …

Her voice faltered. She then took a deep breath and carried on.

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

And then her voice broke as her tears began to flow.

Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there, I did not die.

*   *   *

That was what Mollie had screamed at me over and over again as I held her in my arms in the counseling room on the ward.

“She isn't dead. No, please—that's not true. Please tell me you're wrong. She is not dead. Please tell me Mummy did not die.”

In that moment there was nothing for me to say. No cognitive challenge, no systemic interpretation, no well-timed intervention. In that moment, words were ineffective. As we sat together on the floor with her tears soaking my shirt, all I could do was hold Mollie and rock her until her family arrived.

 

Six

DODGING STONES

When I entered the working world, my mother, once a senior nurse, advised me sagely, “Darling, never shit on your own doorstep.”

Mum warned me of the dangers in engaging in a relationship with one's colleagues, but I ignored her. At the drug-dependency unit, the psychiatrist and senior doctor was strong, sure and decisive. As I fumbled to understand my patients, he listened calmly, interpreted my meandering thoughts and congratulated me on my intuition. He was flirtatious and I allowed myself to be reeled in.

He wasn't my type physically, but he looked sharp and sexy in his charcoal-gray suit, white shirt open at the collar and Church's shoes. He had welcomed me to the DDU on my first day with an hour-long induction meeting in his office. He sat behind his desk with his feet up, leaning back in his chair, arms behind his head. I'd bloody read Desmond Morris's
The Naked Ape
and done a whole undergraduate degree module on body language, so why the hell was I mesmerized by this person trying so hard to be the alpha male?

I was finally in my last placement; I was splitting my time between the DDU and a palliative-care unit—a new center for the research and treatment of those with HIV and AIDS.

Leaving Mollie had been difficult. With Imogen, she sat in a place in my mind that I have struggled not to return to with sadness over the years. For Mollie, my feelings were more complex: I was saddened by her loss but I undertood what it meant. There had been no evidence in the accident report to indicate that Eleanor had done anything to cause the crash. But her sudden departure had perversely given Mollie the space she needed to move on in her life.

Mollie was discharged from the ward before I left the placement. She was back at school, still focused on the idea of being a doctor. I held on to an anxiety that she now had no choice but to fulfill the role expected of her—to train as a doctor and, even more so after the tragic loss of her mother, look after the family.

Before she left, we spent time working through her shock and grief, which she expressed in her sketches and drawings. Her art was her form of emotional communication, and I wondered how she would cope with life without being the artist she so clearly was. Would she periodically return to food restriction as a way of communicating her feelings when life as a doctor, as a motherless woman, became overwhelming for her? At our last session she gave me a sketch that she had drawn of me; I still treasure it.

I would never know what became of Mollie. Just as I would never know what became of Ray or Imogen, or Marion, or any of the other wonderful people I had worked with. These unanswered questions were just part of the job. As I was learning to do, I shifted my mind into my next and final training challenge: drugs and death.

The DDU was based on the ground floor of an old hospital on a busy, polluted road that led into the center of the city, opposite a large run-down estate, a notorious den full of drug dealers. Corridors of offices ran off the large open-plan waiting area where seats were bolted to the floor and pictures hung so out of arm's reach that they almost met the ceiling. I shared my office with two other drug workers—both nice and friendly and not too dissimilar-looking to the unit clientele. At the back of the DDU were the counseling rooms, also containing bolted-down chairs, positioned so that the panic button was always in easy reach, and two larger group rooms.

The pharmacy/needle exchange was behind a locked door at the back of the unit and looked like a bunker, built in reinforced concrete and thickly plated glass. This was the hub where methadone and all other pharmaceutical delights were dispensed under the highest security to one patient at a time. Clean needles were exchanged for blunt, dirty, possibly infected ones, which were swiftly deposited into sharps bins with one-way-entry, self-securing lids. Laminated posters advising staff on the immediate protocol following a needle-stick injury were displayed everywhere.

The psychiatrist was the only staff member to have his own office, and the biggest one at that. His pictures were hung at normal height, his coffee brought to him in his own special mug.

The whole place was painted white; it was clean and completely characterless. As the doors opened every morning at nine o'clock, an endless stream of some of the most dirty and destitute people I had ever seen would come steadily trickling in. It took me a long time to get my head around the fact that this waiting room was housing a population that lived within one of the wealthiest cities in the developed world. In that room the malnourished sat alongside those covered in sores, the broken and the discarded.

The place, however, was calm. There was rarely any violence, and I soon realized that this was because the staff team treated those they cared for with respect. Within our white, characterless bubble, we provided a haven, a tranquillity and warmth where everyone was acknowledged and greeted; often we struggled to get people to leave as they snuggled into their chairs in order to catch some comfortable sleep where they would, for a short time, be safe, warm and dry. For many, this was home.

The psychiatrist seemed to make himself available to me whenever I needed him. He was charming. In the chaos of the early-morning walk-in clinic he was clearly “the man.” The receptionists loved him, the nurses loved him and so did I—we were his pride.

Being a competitive kind of gal, I decided that I would be number-one lioness. He and I worked on some tricky cases together, and he always told me how he couldn't have managed them without me. I loved his validation and luxuriated in the envious glances of my colleagues.

After work I would spend time in his office. We would drink coffee and talk about the day's challenges. I was impressed by his ability to immediately see the problem, to specify the intervention. I wanted to be like him—to see, know and then fix.

“Why didn't you do medicine,” he asked me, “and then specialize in psychiatry? A-level results not quite good enough?”

Actually my A-level results hadn't been great, especially compared with those of the brainy girls I went to school with. At my pushy all-girls school, which I had hated, I preferred hanging out with the boys from the local boys' school to spending hours rote-learning facts I had no interest in knowing.

My school was one of those where the girls who got into Oxbridge were asked to troop across the stage in assembly to receive a gracious handshake from our tough headmistress. I, and those other thickies like me heading off to some “inferior” university, sat at the back of the school hall and applauded. At a sixth-form parents' evening, my parents were told that I would never be a “highflier”; my mother later reported that she had wanted to slap that particular teacher around the face.

Academic elitism, I hated it—still do—and the head psychiatrist's comments reflected that very same culture. How transparently patronizing—he epitomized everything that was arrogant about the medical model. Pathetically, though, at that time and in that moment I was too busy being flattered by his attention to notice.

He took my hand; he said that “the deans of all the medical schools in all the land” should have met me.

“If I'd had the chance to meet you fresh from school,” he said, “and was able to interview you, there would be no doubt in my mind that you'd have been on the medical training course straight away. A-level results notwithstanding.”

He said all that as he looked directly into my eyes, and I knew that he could hear my breath catch in my throat. I wanted to kiss him. And so much more.

And so the flirtation continued until, a few weeks later, at the end of a long, hot, difficult morning, our relationship was consummated—in the most disappointing way.

The day started when I opened the clinic door and a woman fell in onto the floor. She fell so quickly I couldn't catch her. She was young and thin with dyed yellow-blond hair, strawlike from overbleaching, dark roots growing in at the hairline—not an unusual look in clinics in that part of town. The multiple gold hoops in her small ears jangled as her head bounced off the floor. There was dried blood under her nose and the beginnings of a nasty swelling on her left cheekbone. Her right eye was yellow and green with the faded remnants of a bruise that had been fresh the previous week.

Battered women are really awful to see, but not unusually shocking after your tenth viewing. In that clinic the fist seemed to be a common form of communication. But what I had never seen was a battered woman with the brand name and logo of an expensive on-trend sneaker stamped into her face. The trademark was etched in purple welts on pale, undernourished skin.

The other staff at the clinic knew this woman. Her name was Mo, and she came from a notorious local family. Everyone in the local health, social and educational services knew her, her parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins too numerous to name. Mo was often dropping into the clinic looking for “a few drops more of the methadone”—she'd been mugged for the last lot we gave her; it had spilled; she had had to share it with her ma.

She knew the drill in a way that at first I didn't, and for a while she would emerge from the toilet to hand me cold urine in a small plastic cup as evidence that “No, I swear on my late granddaddy's grave, I am not using”—and indeed a dipstick test proved her words true. In those early days I hadn't worked out that cold urine could have been anyone's smuggled in—her little sister's probably. I eventually learned not to accept urine from someone like Mo unless it had been deposited in the cup while in the unit and handed over body-temperature warm.

That morning, there was Mo, lying at my feet, facially branded like a gruesome sports advertising billboard. She was groaning, clearly alive, but not in good shape.

The psychiatrist examined her on the floor and then we scooped her up and took her into his office. A nurse came to deal with cuts and bruises, and then left once her task was over—I knew she wanted to be me, staying in the room with our alpha dog.

I spent a lot of the day with Mo: She had a full physical examination; ointments were applied to festering cigarette burns on her fragile skin; swabs revealed a sexually transmitted infection and pills were prescribed. She drank cup after cup of hot, sweet tea and ate her way through a loaf of bread, toasted, buttered and covered in thick layers of jam.

As she ate, her vulnerability touched me. She began to talk.

“I love him to bits,” she declared.

“Why, Mo? He beats you and he burns you.”

“He can't help it, bless him. He's not a bad fella. He came from a rough lot.”

She gobbled her toast like a small, hungry child, her mouth covered in jam; I wanted to cuddle her.

“I am sure he loves you, Mo,” I lied, “but he has a violent way of showing it, and unless he gets help to sort his anger out, you will always be his punching bag.”