Late, in the afternoon, I got up and went to the kitchen. I tried to eat but couldn’t. Water made me feel nauseous. My hips ached from lying on my side in a ball. Patrick called and I cried on the phone and said sorry, sorry, sorry. He said he would change his flight. He said, ‘Can you try and go out? Go to the Ladies’ Pond. Take a taxi the whole way.’ He said, ‘Martha, I love you so much.’ I hung up, promising to call Ingrid, but too ashamed once he had gone, imagining her arriving and finding me this way.
From above, I watched myself get up and move slowly around the flat like I was so old, a woman at the end of her life. I dragged on my swimsuit, put clothes over it, put toothpaste in my mouth, left the flat. The effort of pushing open the building’s heavy outer door took my breath away.
There was too much noise, heat, too many people coming towards me and buses thundering past me so near the curb, I went home again. Patrick called, I cried on the phone. He said his plane was leaving in an hour, he would be back so soon.
I asked him to stay on the phone and talk to me and I could just listen. I told him I was very scared.
‘Of what?’
‘Me.’
He said, ‘You won’t do anything, will you?’ He wanted me to promise. I said I couldn’t. He said in that case, Martha, please go to the hospital straight away.
I knew that I wouldn’t. But as it got dark again, I began to feel scared of the flat, its ringing silence, the dead air. Patrick was out of reach on the plane by then. I crawled on my hands and knees to the door and waited outside for a taxi with my back pressed against a brick wall. My brain laughed at me, look at how stupid you are, crawling across the floor, look at you being scared to go outside.
*
The doctor in emergency said, ‘Why have you brought yourself here today?’ He didn’t sit down.
My hair was in my eyes and sticking to my wet face and the stream running from my nose but I didn’t have the energy to lift my arm and push it away. I told him it was because I was so tired. He said I needed to speak up, and asked if I was having thoughts about hurting myself. I said no, I said I just wanted to not exist any more and asked if there was something he could give me that would make me go away, but in a way that wouldn’t hurt anyone or make a mess. Then I stopped talking because he said I seemed more intelligent than that, sounding frustrated.
Although I didn’t look up from the spot of floor I had been staring at since I was put into the room, I sensed him looking at my notes, then heard the door open, suck across the lino and click shut. He was gone for so long that I began to believe the hospital had closed and I was alone, locked in. I scratched my wrists and stared at the floor. He came back, it felt like hours later. Patrick was with him. I didn’t know how he knew where I was, and I was filled with shame because he had to come home for me, his miserable wife slumped in a plastic hospital chair, too stupid even to raise her head.
They talked about me between themselves. I heard the doctor say, ‘Listen, I can find her a bed but it would be an NHS facility and,’ more quietly, ‘you’ll know that public psych wards are not nice places.’ I didn’t interrupt. ‘In my opinion, she’s better off going home.’ He said, ‘I can give her something that will calm her down and we can touch base in the morning.’
Patrick crouched beside my chair, holding the armrest, and moved my hair. He asked me if I felt like I should go in, just for a bit. He said it was up to me. I said no thank you. I had always been too afraid to be among those people in case they didn’t think it was weird I was there. In case the doctors wouldn’t let me go. I wanted Patrick to grab me by the wrists and drag me there so that I did not have to decide. I wanted him not to believe me when I said it was fine.
‘Are you sure?’
I said yes, and pushed my hair off my face properly as I stood up. I said he didn’t have to worry, I just needed some sleep.
The doctor said, ‘There we go, she’s already perking up.’
Patrick drove us back without speaking. His expression was blank. At home, he could not get his key in the lock and, just once, he kicked the base of the door. It was the most violent thing I have ever seen him do.
In the bathroom I took all of what the doctor had given me without reading the dose, took off my clothes and the swimsuit, which had left red lines all over my body, and slept for twenty-three hours. In brief moments of consciousness, I would open my eyes and see Patrick sitting in a chair in the corner of our room. I saw that he had put a plate of toast on the bedside table. Later, that he’d taken it away again. I said sorry, but I’m not sure it was ever out loud.