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Once or twice, some nurse or other has tried a bit of not-so-subtle amateur psychotherapy in an effort to find out why I was standing with my back against the wall, as if on the edge of a precipice. I discovered that the easiest way to combat such intrusion was to stop smiling, adopt a blank stare and ignore them. Eventually they gave up questioning and left me to hide in peace.
The devil is only one face amongst many on my wall. Next to him is a ginger cat, its dozing face trapped in an orange tea rose and tendril tail sweeping down onto the cherub-faced little girl in the peach rose below. The same cat and little girl appear in all the orange and peach roses but in some, the child seems to be sleeping and in others, the cat is wide awake depending on the light or where I’m standing or sitting in my room. Angels in delicate white lilies look down at the child-rose and there are other red roses dotted around between the faces but there is only one containing the devil. And that’s the one in the red rose above my dressing table. He tries to speak to me at night when the lights are turned out but I don’t want to hear what he’s trying to say so I put my fingers in my ears until I fall asleep.
I have no visitors and, except for the fleeting exchanges with the nurses who bring in fresh jugs of chlorinated water or come to administer my medication, my only conversations are with Doctor Powell. This morning, he wanted to talk to me yet again and so I was escorted by the younger female nurse, a newcomer whose name I keep forgetting. It’s something like Jenny or Jemma – I expect I’ll remember it in time. I like her although I find her habit of obsessively sweeping her heavy fringe from her face every few seconds mildly irritating. She speaks to me as if I’m five years old and she is some wise old sage when, in fact, she can be barely twenty, a good ten years younger than me. She also seems preoccupied with what I eat here in the clinic.
‘Did you have a nice breakfast sweetie?’ she asked as she walked briskly along the polished vinyl floor of the corridor, two steps in front of me. One of her shoes squeaked so I could count in twos how many steps it took to get to the doctor’s office.
‘Did you have cooked or continental?’ she chirped.
‘Just coffee,’ I replied as I counted the squeaks in my head … thirteen, fifteen, seventeen.
‘Oh dear,’ she sighed without turning around, ‘You need more than that sweetie. You’ll waste away to nothing.’
As we walked, I considered the concept of wasting away to nothing. It seemed, to me, a very good way to go. No drama, no pain; just a little less of you each day until you were the thickness of a wafer. Then the next day, you’d be nothing and everything would just stop; the voices, the dreams, the endless sessions with Doctor Powell …
We reached our destination on the seventy-seventh squeak. The nurse knocked the heavy wooden door, twisted the gleaming brass door knob and entered the doctor’s room without waiting for an answer. I followed her compliantly.
‘Good morning Doctor Powell,’ she sang cheerfully, ‘here’s Beth to see you.’
‘Ahh yes. Hello Beth, please come in,’ said the doctor as he stood up to greet me. ‘Thank you nurse, that’ll be all.’ At the dismissive comment, the nurse smiled at me and left, closing the door behind her with a positive click. Then it was just the doctor and me.
Doctor Powell’s office was one giant cliché. Along one wall was a run of bookshelves from floor to ceiling, filled to capacity with leather bound volumes documenting thousands of psychological case studies. I noticed the layer of dust that had settled on the top of them and wondered how many of the pages ever see the light of day. In front of the bookshelves was the doctor’s desk, a heavy, dark wood affair with a green leather insert with faux gold edging. The shabby red Persian rug that covered the floor extended to within eighteen inches of the walls leaving a margin of Jacobean stained floorboards on show. Near the window was a large reclining chair in ox-blood leather, which was soft and cracked from the weight of countless troubled minds. The soles of hundreds of pairs of shoes had scuffed the piece of rug in front of the chair and worn the crimson woollen fibres away leaving a hessian patch the size of a dinner plate.
‘Please take a seat Beth,’ said the doctor, gesturing towards the large leather chair. I sat on the edge and used my hands on the worn armrests to push myself back into the seat. I could hear the doctor scratching on the notepad with his cheap ballpoint pen. The huge sycamore tree outside the window was almost bare of leaves and I could see a black and white cat stretched out along one of its lower branches. I’d seen it there before, as it often came to mock me during my sessions with the doctor, staring and winking at me then licking its paws before skulking away, This was its biggest deliberate taunt of all because it could leave whenever it wanted to and I couldn’t.
Once I was settled, the doctor began talking to me about my first day at the clinic and why I was admitted but, as always, I had no recollection of the multi story car-park or what I was doing there so, once again, I had no choice but to accept the doctor’s account of what happened. I knew he was trying to jolt an apparently hidden memory by talking of bare feet and my teetering precariously on the edge of a safety barrier on the top level of the city centre car-park but, as always, it meant nothing to me. It’s as if he was telling me a story about someone else; a stranger, a mad woman who wanted to end it all in an oozing mass on the concrete below.
‘Sectioned under the Mental Health Act’ has always struck me as an odd expression. It sounds as if someone is being divided into little pieces. Maybe it’s easier to study them that way, chopped up into small, observable sections. Since arriving here, I think Doctor Powell has tried to do just that by asking me the same questions week after week. Perhaps he thinks that different parts of me will give him different answers but my answers are always the same. He asks me questions about my failed marriage, about the job I used to have and about my recent holiday in Crete. He also kept asking me about a female called Emily, which I found irritating as I had no idea who he was talking about. I suppose his questions were designed to shed some light on the car park incident but so far, events surrounding that day are as vague as ever.
Three times a week for the last three months I’ve been asked the same questions in the same order. This morning, however, was a little different. Doctor Powell switched the order of the questions around and instead of the usual marriage / job / holiday routine, he started with the holiday. Well, specifically about one particular day on the holiday I’d spent with Sam just before everything started to crumble. He always focuses on that precise day. He doesn’t want to know general things such as why we chose that destination or how we were getting along before we went there. I have no idea why that specific day is of any significance and have given up trying to work it out. True to say it was an unusual day and not particularly pleasant but I fail to see any link between that and the alleged car park incident several months later. I just recount it, robot fashion as it’s all Doctor Powell seems interested in.
As he started his questioning, I stared through the window at the cat stretched out on the branch of the sycamore tree. Its eyes were closed as it washed its ear with a well licked paw. For the moment it was distracted but I knew it was only a matter of time before it would start observing me, as it always did.
‘Tell me what happened on your third day at the villa. The day you decided to relax by the pool.’
I sighed and began to give my account for what seemed like the hundredth time.
‘I was sunbathing on a lounger near the swimming pool. Sam had gone back inside to watch some stupid football match.’
‘How did that make you feel?’ The doctor spoke in a monotone way; even he seemed bored by his clichéd question.
‘How do you think it made me feel? I was furious. We were supposed to be on holiday – you know? Doing things together?’
The black and white cat had finished washing its ears and had started cleaning its face. Lick, stroke, lick, stroke. I was mesmerised by the rhythmic action of its paw circling round and round its smug little face.
The doctor’s voice broke into my thoughts.
‘What happened next?’
‘A cat came out of the bushes next to me and wandered over to where I was lying. It stuck its nose in my bag.’
‘Tell me more about the cat.’
I gave an almost imperceptible sigh, ‘What has this got to do with anything? It was a cat! What can I say? A dark gingery coloured cat! It looked straight at me then stuck its nose in my bag. I think it was looking for food.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘I shooed it away of course! Cheeky thing was rooting through my bag!’
‘And did it go when you chased it away?’
‘Yes. It turned and ran, bolted towards the pool.’ The black and white cat was looking straight at me. Its eyes were wide and unblinking. It was taunting me again. Accusing me. I hated it.
‘And then?’ the doctor continued.
‘It got to the edge of the pool and slipped. I thought cats were agile but the stupid creature slipped and went straight in.’
‘What did you do?’ The Doctor scribbled and scratched, sometimes with a black pen and sometimes with a red one he kept perched above his ear.
‘I didn’t know what to do. I dashed to the side of the pool and knelt down. The cat was thrashing around. I tried to reach it but it was too far from the side. I just froze.’
I stopped talking but in my mind I could still see the dark ginger cat thrashing and circling, its head tipped back, the stark whites of its eyes. Its mouth opening and closing in a desperate, pleading mime. Gasping like a carp suffocating on a river bank, it made an awful gargling noise as its head kept disappearing below the surface.
‘Beth, why didn’t you jump in to save the cat?’
‘Risk my life to save some stupid cat? Why would I do that? I can’t swim. I’ve told you over and over I fell into a canal when I was four. No, I felt sorry for the cat but I couldn’t go into that water.’
I stared at the black and white cat on the branch outside the window and it stared intently back at me. I cast my mind back to a cold March day twenty-six years ago and a family walk beside the old canal. I remembered the slip, the splash and the cold wetness enclosing my head, bubbling through my long hair. I could see the soupy pea-green mass above me as I sank, my heavy woollen coat pulling me down into the darkness, my arms and legs thrashing in a mock climbing motion as if searching for an invisible watery ladder leading to safety. I could taste the gassy water in my mouth as it opened and closed, gasping for any available oxygen, just like the dark ginger cat in the holiday villa swimming pool. I recalled the sharp pull on my hair and then a choking sensation as I was dragged by my father to the surface by the hood of my coat. Then came the frigid air on my face and my frantic thrashing and gasping. I never entered water again after that day.
Once again, the doctor’s voice broke my trance.
‘Tell me about Emily,’ he said calmly. He mentioned this name at every session and I was becoming irritated by it.
‘How many times do I have to tell you? I don’t know anyone called Emily’ I replied, agitated.
Doctor Powell scribbled on his notepad, alternating the black and red pen. I found myself becoming increasingly irritated. What was he writing? What good was it doing?
I jumped to my feet, lurched towards the window and banged the side of my fist against the glass. The black and white cat, startled, turned on itself and ran along the branch before leaping the eight feet to the ground. It raced across the manicured lawn and disappeared into the rhododendron bushes that bordered the clinic garden.
‘I think that’s enough for today, Beth,’ said Doctor Powell and he summoned a nurse on his intercom.
The heavy wooden door swung open just a few seconds later and I was escorted back to my room. Everything was just as I left it and, once the nurse had left, I took my place next to my wardrobe with my back against the wall. I thought about the session with Doctor Powell and felt an inexplicable wave of sadness rise like an unstoppable tide. My throat tightened and my head pounded. Why should I feel this way over a stupid cat that fell into a swimming pool? It wasn’t my fault it drowned!
In an apartment forty miles away a telephone rang.
‘Hello,’ came a deep voice, ‘Sam Jones speaking.’
‘Hello Mr Jones, Doctor Powell at Westwood Clinic here.’
‘Oh, hello Doctor. Any progress with Beth?’
‘None I’m afraid. She doesn’t remember anything about Emily and still insists the incident by the pool involved a ginger cat.’
Sam Jones fell silent and glanced at the photograph on the shelf of a little girl with a mop of chestnut hair.
‘How can a mother let her own child drown then forget she even existed? I just don’t get it doctor.’
‘Well, as I’ve said before, Mr Jones, the trauma of the incident may have caused Beth’s mind to block out what actually happened.’
‘I know – you’ve explained it to me already but I still don’t understand how …’ Sam broke off and swallowed hard as he remembered lifting his daughter’s limp body from the pool in Crete as his wife knelt on the concrete slabs alongside it. He remembered how he screamed at her as he cradled Emily and how Beth had just stared blankly at him, her head cocked to one side. Everything following that harrowing day had been a surreal blur… the flight home, the inquest and, four weeks later, the funeral of his precious three year old daughter. After that, Sam couldn’t stand to be in Beth’s company and moved to a small apartment near his office, although he felt guilty for doing so considering her mental state. A week later he’d been informed of Beth’s suicide attempt at a city centre car park and that she had been sectioned under the mental health act and committed to Westwood Clinic. Sam was relieved because maybe now she’d be able to face up to what she had done.
‘Thanks for the call doctor,’ said Sam, ‘please keep me informed.’
‘I will Mr Jones.’
Thank you Brenda – it was a challenging subject to tackle.
An interesting look at how fragile sanity can be.