When Daddy Comes Home (15 page)

I saw again the image of that bleak bedsitter where Antoinette, huddled in bed, had lost the ability to wake and face a new day. I felt the terror that had finally imprisoned her, the terror of a world that had become inhabited with her enemies.

A
n hour after the doctor visited her in her bedsitter and slid the needle into her arm, Antoinette entered hospital for the second time. She was again admitted to the psychiatric wing of the forbidding mental hospital that stood in gloomy splendour on the outskirts of Belfast.

The psychiatric ward stood apart from the main building of the hospital and had a light airy décor that gave the patients there the illusion that it was a different world to the one the inmates of the long-stay wards inhabited. But the threat of the main building, the huge red-brick monument of a bygone age, always hung over them, for they knew that should they not respond to treatment it would only take a few minutes for them to be transferred to that other world; a world of barred windows, shabby uniforms and of mind-numbing drugs.

Antoinette was admitted to a side ward of the psychiatric wing. The following day she had her first electric shock treatment.

Her head hurt, nausea rose in her throat and she vomited into a small bowl that was held nearby. She opened her eyes briefly and saw a hazy figure in a blue and white dress. She could hear
a jumble of meaningless sounds and a word that kept being repeated – ‘Antoinette’ – but she no longer recognized it as her name.

Gradually some physical strength returned but with it came the whispering voices. They were in the room, terrifying her. Desperate to escape them, she threw herself from the bed and fled from the ward and down the corridor. The whispers followed her. Her long hospital nightgown flapped around her bare ankles, almost tripping her as she tried to outrun her pursuers. She only stopped when, blinded by her fear, she slammed into a wall. She slid down it with her fists clenched tightly over her ears as she tried uselessly to block out the sounds inside her head.

Hands reached out to lift her. She heard that name again and crouched on the floor with both arms raised to protect herself from her tormentors. She wanted to beg them not to hurt her, but she had lost the ability to form words. Instead an animal keening, chilling in its desperation, left her mouth.

Another needle pricked her arm. Then she was picked up and placed into a wheelchair, almost unconscious. She was taken back to her room where, mercifully, she slept.

When she woke a man was sitting beside her bed.

‘Ah, so youDre awake, are you?’ he said, as her eyes flickered open. Confused she tried to focus on him but his words made very little sense to her.

‘Don’t you remember me, Antoinette? I was one of the doctors who treated you when you were here two years ago.’

She didn’t remember. She did not know where she had been two years ago or where she was now, and she turned her head away to block out the sound of the words. His was just another
voice that lied to her and mocked her. She heard the murmur of it and, with her face still averted, squeezed her eyes tightly shut in that hope that he would simply disappear. In the end, she felt him leave. Then she opened her eyes again and looked fearfully at her surroundings.

The curtains were drawn back from her bed and she saw people passing by and felt them staring at her. She pulled herself angrily out of bed, shuffled to the curtains and pulled them shut. This was her space; she wanted no intruders in it.

Later the nurses helped her put on a dressing gown, then held her gently by the arms and led her to the canteen. Once there, she turned her chair to face the wall. If she couldn’t see other people, she reasoned, they could not see her.

Her mind was jumbled. She was dazed and disorientated but she still searched for the white light of oblivion. She wanted to crawl into it but the treatment had made her forget why.

The nurses tried to talk to her but she refused to speak in the hope that if she didn’t, then she also would also cease to hear the voices around her. When food was held out to her she shook her head vehemently but only a whimper escaped her throat. Tablets were placed in her mouth and a glass of water held for her to sip. She swallowed them and then retreated into sleep.

It was time for her next electric shock treatment. She had no idea how long it had been since the last one, or how long she had been in the ward at all. The nurses said it would help her but Antoinette no longer cared. She had abandoned the real world and had no desire to return to it. Her days were spent
in a drug-induced daze and at night she was helped to sleep by more and stronger pills. Still she refused to talk.

Nurses would sit by her bedside, hold her hand, repeat her name but the only response they got was another bout of silent weeping, as tears fell down her face.

‘Antoinette, talk to me,’ the female psychiatrist pleaded for the third time that morning. ‘We want to help you, we want you to get well again. Won’t you help us? Don’t you want to get better?’

Antoinette finally turned her head and looked into the face of her doctor for the first time. She had heard her voice before. The nurses had brought her to this psychiatrist several times in the hope that some bond would be forged and the therapy could start.

For the first time in three weeks, she spoke in a croaky but childish voice. ‘You can’t help me.’

‘Why not?’

There was a long pause before Antoinette finally replied. ‘I have a secret, a secret. Only I know what it is. You don’t know.’

‘What is the secret?’

‘We are all dead. I’m dead, and so are you. We’ve died.’

‘If we are all dead, then where are we now?’

‘We are in hell, but nobody knows – only me.’ Her eyes met those of her psychiatrist but she didn’t see her. Instead she saw only her ghosts. She starting rocking backwards and forwards, her hands grasping her knees. Her voice rose in a chant, ‘We’re dead. We are all dead.’ Over and over she sang it, until it made her laugh because she knew that the doctor did not believe her.

The doctor asked in a calm, soft voice, ‘Why do you think you are the only person who thinks that?’

But Antoinette had withdrawn deep into herself again and turned her face away. The doctor called for the nurses to take her back to the ward and her therapy was over.

Back on the ward she drew the curtains round her bed and sat in the middle of it. Clasping her hands over her knees, she rocked back and forward again while high-pitched giggles escaped her as she thought about her secret and how she was the only person who knew it to be true.

The next day they increased her sedatives and continued the electric shock treatment.

There was no sign of her depression lifting. Instead, the four sessions of an electric current being run through her brain had only made her retreat deeper into herself. If its purpose was to cloud her memory and help her to forget the past until she was able to deal with it gradually, it had failed. For now, the nightmares that haunted her sleep penetrated her waking hours.

The horrific sensation of being out of control, of being chased and of falling now overcame her during the day, increasing her panic and the whispers that taunted her were never silent. She hid in her bed with the curtains drawn, trying to find a refuge from her terrors, and refused to speak, thinking if she was never heard she would become invisible.

When she was taken from her bed to the canteen, she faced the wall in the belief that her wish had been granted and she was now invisible. And she did not want to see all the people around her who were dead but didn’t know it.

The fifth electric shock seemed to bring a result. This time she did not try to run as soon as consciousness returned, the clouds in her head lifted and she knew one thing: she was thirsty.

‘Nurse, can I have a drink of tea?’ she asked.

The ward sister was so surprised at the request that she hurried to the kitchen and made it herself. She held out the cup to Antoinette.

Taking it in both hands, she sipped tentatively. She struggled to see through the fog in her brain, trying to understand where she was and who she was.

‘Is there anything else you want, Antoinette?’ asked the ward sister.

‘My mother,’ she answered. ‘I want my mother.’

A silence hung for a second in the air.

‘She can’t come quite yet,’ said the sister in a comforting voice. ‘But I’m sure she will soon, especially when she hears how well youDre doing. You must be getting better – this is the first time you’ve spoken to me since you arrived.’

‘Yes,’ said Antoinette without emotion, and sipped again at her drink.

W
ake up.’

Antoinette felt a slight shake of her shoulder. Her eyes flickered open and she found herself looking into blue eyes set under sandy brows. It was a familiar face – but who was it?

‘It’s me, Gus. Don’t you remember me?’

As she heard the voice again, she recognized Gus, the girl she had made friends with on the first occasion she had stayed in the hospital two years before. She looked at her groggily and saw the open friendliness on her face. Antoinette stretched out a hesitant hand to her. She felt the warm flesh of the other girl’s hand and knew she was real.

‘Gus,’ she said, confused. Gus couldn’t be here. She had left a long time ago. Antoinette could remember her parents coming to collect her.

Gus saw the puzzled look on her face and gave her hand a light squeeze. ‘I’m back,’ she said, answering her friend’s unspoken question.

‘Why?’

Gus rolled up her sleeve and showed the thin scars that rose in jagged lines from the wrist to several inches above the elbow. Antoinette could see that old ones had been opened up again; many were barely healed.

‘Why?’ she repeated.

Tears brimmed in Gus’s eyes and she hastily brushed them aside. Antoinette raised her other hand and gently stroked the face looking down at her, wiping away a tear drop as she did so.

‘I’m back for the third time. You know we all come back,’ Gus said simply. ‘You know, sometimes I feel I can’t get any lower. When I’ve hit the bottom, I try and tell myself that the only way forward is to start climbing up. On other days, just as I think I’ve clawed myself out of the black hole and I’m standing on the edge, I feel myself falling back in.’

Antoinette thought of her own nightmare where invisible claws tried to drag her down and understood exactly what her friend meant. She understood where she had been. What she did not understand was what had driven Gus to such desperate measures. ‘But why, Gus? You have lovely parents, a family that care for you. Why you?’ She struggled to understand.

‘Why am I screaming silently? Why do I do this to myself when I have everything you would die to have, is that what you are asking? If I knew, if I only knew, I could stop. But it’s the only time I feel in control. My parents do everything they can to understand, everything they can to help, but the only time I feel in charge of my own life is when I cut myself.’ A look of deep sadness mixed with total bewilderment crossed her face. ‘So what happened to you?’ She turned Antoinette’s hand over and looked at the wrists but saw no fresh scars there.

There was a long pause before Antoinette replied at last, ‘My mother took him back.’

Gus knew who
he
was. She squeezed her friend’s hand. ‘Then what happened?’

‘I don’t know. Everything just got muddled and the next thing I knew I woke up in here. I get so tired – tired of trying to make sense of my life and tired of trying to survive.’ And, as though to prove the point, she felt her eyes begin to close but this time as she drifted off to sleep she felt more peaceful than she had done for months. Gus, she felt, understood in a way that the doctors never could, for she also lived in the same black place.

The nurses saw the two girls talking and left them alone. If Gus was breaking through their youngest patient’s defences, they did not want to interfere. They knew that patients could often have a better understanding of each other than anyone else, and that the friendships that sprung up in hospital could help in the healing process.

It did not take Gus very long to piece together what had been the final reason for Antoinette’s breakdown. When Antoinette had woken from her sleep, Gus returned, sat on her friend’s bed and looked sternly at her.

‘Look, I’m sick, but you are just unhappy. Your misery has been too much to bear so you’ve tried to disappear inside yourself.’ Gus spoke as though she was determined to break down all the barriers that Antoinette had erected around herself. ‘What you have to understand is that people often are unkind to those they have wronged. People don’t like having a guilty conscience and they resent their victim for giving it to them. That’s your mother, all right. It seems to me that your father is different.’ Gus grimaced with dislike at the thought of a man she had never met and continued, ‘He just despises you for letting him do what he did to you. When you were little you had no choice. But you do now.’ She paused to make sure that Antoinette was paying attention and then said gravely, ‘You have to get away from them or at least put a stop to how they
treat you. It’s possible that if you had stood up to him, shown him he had no effect on you, then he would have left you alone. And as for your mother…well, she would always have followed him and she’ll never change.’

‘What makes you think that my father despises me?’ asked Antoinette, stung.

‘Because of what I feel about my parents. They would do anything to make me better. They love me whatever I do to hurt them. They buy me anything I want. They blame themselves for what is wrong with me. Although I love them, I can’t help feeling contemptuous of them for it.’

‘I’m scared, Gus,’ Antoinette admitted. ‘Scared of being out there.’

‘How can it be any worse than what you live with now? Don’t you see what your parents do to you? They undermine you at every opportunity. They bully you and reduce you to something pitiful. But there’s a life out there, so take it up with both hands or you will end up back in this hospital over and over again. Now come on, it’s time for dinner.’

Gus smiled and helped Antoinette up and to get dressed. They went together to the dining room and, for the first time since she had been admitted, Antoinette ate without looking at the wall.