He starts to fold up my clothes. ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I need to take something to wear.’ As is becoming routine, he shakes his head: I can’t have my clothes yet. Not for the first day or two. He doesn’t say why, though the next day another patient tells me I ‘have to earn them’. No one from the hospital staff has said this is the case, but these words hit me. Earn my own clothes, the right not to have my backside hanging out. It feels like punishment. Like a marking of those newly mad or at least newly declared mad: the shuffling in socks and gaping gowns making you look as unkempt and loose, as wild, as lacking in civility and humanity as you feel. And with it comes a new feeling: shame. Like being painted with a thick brush from the ends of the hairs on your toes to the ends of the hair on your head.
The humiliation stirs a fist of anger within me. But I don’t say anything; I don’t put kindling against the flame and allow it to burn bigger. I just nod. Smile. My confiscated belongings are taken to a storage room at the end of the corridor, to sit in their plastic bag in a box, next to a row of other plastic bags in boxes. If I want anything from it, I’m to ask and they will supervise me using whatever it is I need. But they ask that people don’t do that unless it’s absolutely necessary. I wonder what necessary really means. And how many seconds you’d have to smash the mirror and take the thickest of the jagged shards to the thinnest part of your throat before anyone noticed or bothered to try and stop you.
He gestures to my hair, to the bobby pins keeping my beehive erect. ‘No, no, no,’ I say, a little too quickly, suddenly acutely aware of the speed, emphasis, intonation and volume of what I say. Every word. I push the ends of my fingers into my palm to cause me to pause, allow a beat and then say, calmly: ‘They’re not sharp, honestly, they’re just hair grips.’ He looks confused. ‘Um, bobby pins. Please, let me keep them. Look, touch one.’ I pull one out of my hair to show him, handing it over, showing him how to run his finger over the cold, round, perfectly harmless edge. He nods, hands it back and I let out a deep sigh of relief. In truth, it’s probably not entirely harmless. I almost certainly could do something to my body with it. With enough force, will, pressure and impact. But right now, my mind isn’t on gutting myself with a hair grip, but on retaining what is left of my dignity, however tiny the pieces I’m gathering in my palm. As of this moment, my hair, my beehive, the grips holding it all in place, is all I have. I can’t lose it now, the scraps of me.
He starts to leave, trailing my plastic bag behind him on the floor before pausing. ‘There are no closed doors in here. They must be kept open.’ I nod again. Smile again. And then it’s just me. I sit on the bed, salt on my tongue, swallowing the taste of vomit as it rises to graze the back of my throat. It burns. My eyes burn. My belly burns. The fire fills me, quietly.
I take my first proper look around the room. I see that my room is for two patients, though the second bed hasn’t yet been slept in and the very few belongings I’ve been allowed to keep are the only ones in the room. There are two desks, two chairs, two thin beds, with white sheets and green blankets tucked in tightly, two glaring strip-lights above. A bathroom with a shower, the plastic yellow cubicle built into the corner of the room, a sink, a mirror and a toilet. I’m so relieved that there’s no one else in the room to witness me stripped back and full of terror. I don’t know if I’ll be joined by a roommate or when. As I do in every room, scared of who or what will come through the door, I take the bed closest to the window.
Looking up, I see the looming towers that make the shape of New York, the city glimmering and winking through the black wire mesh pulled tight across the window. Every window down the farthest wall is covered in the same black wire mesh. Everything viewed through it has a grey, used-up look. Like it’s been left out in the sun, the colour burned off the top after years of brutal exposure.
We’re up eight floors high. I think of ripping the mesh open with my fingers and trying to smash through the window with my balled fists. But I don’t. I breathe, consider the new land ahead. Uncharted territory. I’m thirty-four years old and now, I suppose, finally, officially mad.
I was seven the first time I went mad, I think. Six? Maybe it wasn’t actually the first time. But it was the first time that I remember, remember feeling it, hearing it, being it. The breeze in my belly becoming a squall, picking up scraps that rattled out a new, distorted tune on my ribs. I’d clambered out of the bedroom window of our council house, a window which would come to be tied tightly shut with white shoelaces, to keep me in. Balancing on the ledge, I knew absolutely that I wouldn’t fly,
