Little Star

After a few days of fruitless discussions, they started to give her pills. Small, oval pills with a groove in the middle. The days and the weeks flowed together, and she didn’t know how much time had passed when a glimmer of light began to seep into her immense darkness. She remembered the feeling of a fire blanket being thrown over her. Now she could see a tiny gap. The voices around her became clearer, the contours more defined.

For a few days she simply lay, sat or stood looking out through that gap, registering what was happening around her and taking it in. She was neither happy nor sad, but there was no doubt that she was alive.

Eventually she opened the gap a little wider and stepped out. She wasn’t exactly a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but she was transformed. She was Teresa the empty one, but she wore her shell and pretended that she was alive in a way that convinced even her. Sometimes she even thought it was real.

She carried on taking the medication, which she had discovered was called Fontex and was the same as Prozac, and went for counselling. She could remember the old Teresa now, the way she had been, and that was the role she played. Once again she did it so convincingly that she sometimes believed it herself.

At the end of February, almost two months after she had been admitted, she was allowed to go home. In the back seat of the car she sat and looked at her hands. They were her hands. They were attached to her body, and they belonged to her. She understood that now.

Two weeks before she was discharged, her class teacher had come to visit and brought her some school books, and Teresa had worked hard. The school work itself was no problem; the reading and the mathematical problems flowed straight into her mind and were dealt with rapidly, since they were no longer disturbed by the skeins of expectation and anxiety which are part of flesh and blood human beings. In two weeks she covered everything she had missed, and more besides.

When she went back to school the others kept a certain distance, which she regarded as completely natural. Jenny, who was about to undergo yet another operation to straighten her nose, spat out, ‘Oh look, the local headcase. Home from the loony bin, are you?’ but fell silent when Teresa looked at her.

Johannes and Agnes had been to visit her the day after the teacher came, and they made no attempt to avoid her in school. During one break time Teresa told them a little bit about life in the psychiatric unit and the difficulties that arose on a ward where any object that could be adapted for suicide had been removed. Amusing anecdotes.

She watched them as she talked, and a voice inside her head said: They’re so lovely. I like them so much. It was true, and at the same time it wasn’t true, because she needed to say it to herself, trying to establish a fact that she knew ought to be there, but that she just couldn’t feel.

It was easier with Micke.

A couple of days after she came back, as she was ambling around the playground during break, she saw him standing smoking outside the gym equipment storeroom. She went over and took the cigarette he offered her, took a couple of careful drags and managed not to cough.

‘How are you?’ asked Micke. ‘I mean, are you a real psycho now?’

‘I don’t know. Yes, I suppose I am. I have to take pills.’

‘My mother takes pills. Loads of them. She sometimes flips out completely if she forgets to take them.’

‘What do you mean, she flips out?’

‘Well, once she went completely…she started yelling that there was a pig hiding in the oven.’

‘An ordinary pig?’

‘No, a cooked one. Although it was still alive and it was going to jump out and bite her.’ Micke looked at Teresa. ‘But that’s not the same as what you’ve got, is it?’

‘Don’t know. Maybe it could be if I work on it.’

Micke laughed out loud and Teresa felt…not happy, but totally unpressured. Micke didn’t make any demands. Even Agnes and Johannes felt like a threat. They expected a certain kind of behaviour from her, she had to conform. Micke, on the other hand, seemed to have a more relaxed attitude towards her since she became a psycho. That was something.

It took three days after she had been discharged before she felt able to go near the computer. During the long period in the unit she had been weaned off it. As she looked at the big metal box, the screen and the keyboard, she thought she was looking at a source of infection. If she pressed the power button, the sickness would come pouring out.

But Theres. Theres.

Teresa took a deep breath, sat down at her desk and opened the lid of Pandora’s box, logged into her email account. Tons of spam had come in during her absence, and in amongst all the rubbish were five, no six, messages from Theres. The last one was dated six weeks ago.

She opened them and read them. Each message was only one or two lines long, and apart from the first two, they were all short questions. Why didn’t she write, why didn’t she reply. In the last line of the last message Theres stated simply, ‘i’m not writing any more’. The rest was spam.

A feeling of sorrow began to rise up inside Teresa, but was stopped before it became painful. Sometimes she thought she could see the medication working in her body. What she saw was a chainsaw; the blade shot out and sheared off the top and bottom of her emotional register. The crown and the roots. Leaving her with a bare trunk to drag around.

She read the last message again, and clicked on reply. Then she wrote:

I’ve been ill. I was in hospital. I didn’t have a computer.

I couldn’t write.

I’m back home now. I miss you. Can I come over at the weekend?

She sent the message, then sat on her bed and read through Ekelof’s ‘Voices Under the Earth’ three times. She understood every single word.

I long to move from the black square to the white.

I long to move from the red strand to the blue.

She flicked back and forth through the paperback edition of his collected poems. She hadn’t had it with her in the unit, because she had never really got Ekelof. Now she found that almost every poem spoke to her, and that he had suddenly become her favourite poet. Gunnar Ekelof. He knew.

This creature, Nameless

comes to life in a closed room

With no other opening but the gap

through which he is forced to emerge

Now he is on the move

is empty in

a fulfilled world

Amazed, she read on and found other poems that struck a chord, other descriptions of things with which she was already familiar. It was almost difficult to put the book aside while she checked her messages. Yes. Theres had replied.

good that you’re home come here soon

Joy gathered itself, ready to make a huge leap in her breast. Then the chainsaw was there, slicing through her happiness as it fled, so that it fell down between her ribs and landed as a mutilated little stump of pleasure. But pleasure nonetheless.

It took a couple of long conversations with Maria, in which Goran was on Teresa’s side, before she was given permission to go. Teresa, forced to resort to a ploy that was beneath her dignity, said, ‘It’s the only thing I enjoy.’ Maria gave in, and Teresa felt vaguely grubby. But she was allowed to go, that was the important thing. As long as she remembered to take her tablets.

This was Maria’s new hobby horse. Since Teresa’s stay in the unit her attitude had changed from being completely ignorant and therefore deeply sceptical of psychiatric drugs to regarding Fontex as God’s gift to mankind. It was thanks to the pills that Teresa was back home and functioning, that they didn’t have to have a depressed child. Teresa wasn’t quite so sure, but for the time being she carried on taking them three times a day.

On the Saturday she packed her tablets, her new-found friend Ekelof and her MP3 player. Bright Eyes had