What She Left: Enhanced Edition (23 page)

Everyone from Anne Frank to Bridget Jones has done it, but modern women are embracing the diary-keeping tradition. With a new initiative set to ensure the practice gets a fresh lease of life, Alice Salmon explains how it helped her survive a teenage crisis.

 

I prised one of Dad’s razors out of the packet and slumped to the floor.

It was hot and a lawnmower was whirring in a neighbour’s garden. It was pointless cutting that grass – it would only grow again. I was thirteen and that was how everything felt that summer – endless, futile, never changing or improving. I put my right hand to my left wrist and gave the razor a jangly jerk. For a few glorious, magical moments, it all disappeared – the exam stress, the thirty-four per cent in Biology (I was clearly thick as well as ugly), even the bust-up I’d had with my best friend Meg, so typical of me, accusing her of hating me. Obscured by the urgent, bright inescapability of pain. Overtaken by a more startling revelation: blood.

Alice, you’ve cut yourself
, I thought.
Look what Alice Salmon has done. Look what that silly girl’s gone and done.

‘Daddy,’ I called out, but he wasn’t home. No one was.

Robbie’s radio was playing Britney’s ‘Baby One More Time’ and beyond it – behind it – that lawnmower.
Don’t pass out
, I instructed myself.
DON
’
T
.
PASS
.
OUT
. It was a new, clean cut and it was a new, clean feeling. I heard Mr Woof barking and fear ambushed me: What if it leaves a scar? Ever my father’s daughter, I ran through the practical calculations: I’d wash the towel, get bangles, wear long sleeves. I couldn’t have my parents finding out because I’d hate to upset them. More blood – more of my blood – came out. How near the surface it must have been. I held my wrist under the tap and the water eventually went clear then I put two plasters on the wound in a cross. I put the towel through a hot wash and scrubbed the bathroom until there wasn’t the faintest trace of my insides out.

When my mum saw the plaster and asked what on earth I’d done, I said I’d caught it on a nail walking home from school.

‘My God, we should get that seen to; it might need a tetanus.’

‘It’s nothing,’ I said.

Dad reckoned it was typical me, wrapping my arm up like I’d been at death’s door over a scratch. ‘Always the drama queen,’ he said, ‘my Ace. And what’s this I hear about you cleaning the bathroom, Salmon Fry? What on earth’s got into you?’

‘Where was the nail, Alice?’ Mum asked when he’d left the room.

‘On the way home from school.’

‘
Where
on the way home from school?’ It was a tone I’d heard before. But I could be a convincing liar when I needed to be.

 

I put the date at the top of the page – August 13, 1999 – and it all came tumbling out, initial random rubbish about the rich, vivid
patterns of the seat covers on the bus then more personal stuff. As I wrote the pressure lifted.

It had been a month before then that I’d sat on the bathroom floor and now it was back, the feeling that I was watching life through a pane of thick glass and that, whatever was out there, I wasn’t designed for it.

The feeling I got writing wasn’t dissimilar to the one I’d had in the bathroom, except there wasn’t blood on the floor: there were words on a screen. The cursor moved from left to right, dragging a trail of letters behind it, accumulating into sentences and paragraphs, of my making and yet independent of me. 682 words. 1,394. 2,611. That was my first diary entry and I soon became addicted to it. I wrote in free periods, on trains, buses, in front of
Pop Idol
and when I couldn’t sleep. Later, in uni lecture halls and hunched over my desk at work, concealing my labours like a schoolgirl shielding an exam paper. I wrote on my laptop, in notebooks, on my phone, on scraps of newspapers, on the blank pages in the backs of novels. I wrote everywhere and saved my outpourings religiously: paper copies in boxes and digital ones on memory sticks. I used to imagine the house or flat burning, a dishy fireman holding me back, saying, ‘No, Alice, it’s too dangerous,’ but me breaking free and darting selflessly into the flames to retrieve them. ‘Can’t you see?’ I’d cry out. ‘It’s my diary, it’s
me
.’

If the urge to go back into the bathroom seized me, when what I later came to refer to as
IT
was pressing in on me, I’d open my laptop. Often I’d write in the night or in the deep gnawing trough of a hangover, but the compulsion could grip me without warning. Only later did I learn the expression ‘displacement’. Learnt, as well, that alcohol and drugs had the same mitigating effect, but they weren’t consequence-free. I’d see my reflection on the screen, let go, hang on, make some sense of the madness, my antidote to life, my stereo, then later my iPod, on shuffle,
bouncing from Ricky Martin to Pink, or Robbie to the Peppers, or Steps to R. Kelly.

I realized no one would be interested in it and anyone reading it would be convinced I was delusional, but I didn’t care. I could breathe.

 

When I was sixteen I lost my eyebrows in a fire.

I had to burn my diaries, you see, I simply
had
to. Like a shop closing-down sale, everything had to go.

I’d come home early from school and my mum had them spread open on my bedroom floor. ‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Why are snooping through my stuff?’

‘Baby, you never told me.’

I’d been desperate for three years to tell her about the faint white lines on my left wrist, how they weren’t in fact from a nail on a wall or a broken sash window, a fight with some glass that the glass had won, but now my head went to mush. ‘Get out.’

‘I’m your mum.’

‘How dare you go through my stuff?’ I shrieked. ‘This is private.’

‘There’s so much of me in you,’ she said, and she might have glanced down at my wrist, but the stuff about that was in a leather-bound pad Aunty Anna had given me one Christmas and there was no sign of that. ‘I’m your mum,’ she repeated.

‘Yes,
unfortunately
,’ I said, the old urge galloping through me – to run and not stop until I’d got so far no one would recognize me and then I’d be a different me, unspoiled and cool. ‘I wish you were dead! I wish
I
was dead.’

As soon as I’d got shot of her, I fired up my laptop and repeatedly hit delete. Later, when Mum and Dad had gone out – she was reluctant to leave me, but I’d promised if she gave me an hour’s peace we’d chat later – I gathered up my paper diaries and dumped them in the metal barrel Dad burnt garden rubbish in. Then I
threw a load of petrol over the top from a can in the garage and
whoooosh
it went up in a ginormous orange flame that took off my eyebrows in a rush of warmth and fear.

‘Burn,’ I screamed, ripping the pages out, feeding the flames. I felt nothing for the girl who’d written this rubbish. I was a new me.

It was my sixteenth birthday.

 

The day after I burnt my diaries, I went back into the garden. Charred scraps of paper had blown on to the lawn. A robin appeared on the edge of the bird bath. He flapped his wings, splashed. He was having the
best
time. It occurred to me that I’d like that – to be in water. Swimming. I’d always been rubbish at it, but it would feel lovely: the cool currents, me held up, buoyed, as if I weighed less than myself.

‘It didn’t all burn, love,’ Mum said later that afternoon. ‘I haven’t read any, I swear, but I fetched it in because you might like to have it one day.’

I’m twenty-four now and I still haven’t told my mum about the diary entry I burnt from when I was thirteen called:
Why I went to the bathroom to let the pain out
. This article will force a conversation I’ve been delaying for almost a decade. Perhaps that’s why I was so keen for it to be published. I’ll have that conversation before she reads this piece – and she
will
read it because she reads everything I write, even the dull stuff about planning appeals and nightclub fights; she reads it meticulously. She’s given up cutting them out, her scrapbook got too big – but she never fails to proclaim how wonderful they are and I never fail to get that warm, uplifting bloom: my mum’s proud of me.

I wasn’t trying to kill myself, I’ll tell her first off; all I was trying to do was let the bad stuff out. I’ll tell her, as well, that those feelings never disappear, but you learn coping mechanisms, and for me keeping a diary was the best. Because here’s the
strangest thing – guess what I did after she’d given me the carrier bag containing the black and burnt fragments of me between thirteen and sixteen? I went upstairs, flicked open my laptop and began writing.

Alice Salmon, age sixteen
, I began.

I wrote about how the charred paper had left soot on my fingertips and how I’d smelt it like a baby instinctively exploring the world. I wrote about the robin, how the red of his tiny chest wasn’t exactly red – actually more ochre. How he’d ruffled his feathers and shook himself: his existence the most important thing in the world to him, the only thing in the world.

Sometimes it’s easier to forget, but remembering is what makes us human. Diaries help us do that, leafing those layers of life into order and logic. Anne Frank and Oscar Wilde recognized that. Samuel Pepys did. Sylvia Plath. Even fictitious characters like Bridget Jones do. But most are kept by ordinary people like you and me, and it’s our scribblings that a ground-breaking project aims to celebrate. The National Diary Archive plans to preserve our everyday observations. I might well hand over a copy of mine.

What I did wasn’t unusual; statistics suggest that more than one in ten girls self-harm. I was one of the lucky ones: I got away with it, the small scar virtually invisible now, apparent only at certain angles and in certain lights and only then if you know where to look.

I don’t hate the girl who did it: the one who used to stare at the scalpels in art classes or her dad’s razors in the medicine cabinet and think it would be
so easy
, so easy to drag one of those along the inside of her arm, the little white wrist like the tummy of a fish – one straight line would do it, like she was doing up a zip or tearing pieces of bread to feed the ducks. Far from it. She’s my secret.

‘Are you ready, Alice?’ Mum had called up when I was sixteen and a day.

‘Surprised T.G.I. Friday is open on a Thursday,’ Dad said in the car, his ‘restaurant’ joke.

I laughed and decided to hang on in there, to see how far I could get and where this thing might take me, life. A levels next. Then university, the prospect remote and intriguing: parties, brainy debates, freedom – me, my very own Joey Potter from
Dawson’s
.

I even wrote that down like it mattered. Because it did. It does. It was a diary and I knew all the while I kept one there’d be no blood on the bathroom floor.

 

* More information is available at:

www.youngminds.org.uk

www.selfharm.co.uk

www.mind.org.uk