Coming Undone by Terri White (bill gates books recommendations .TXT) 📕

Those who came to try to rescue him and who would later bury him would know that I was there. Or someone like me. That he had done something so brutal, so beyond forgiveness and understanding that I had no option but to end him like he ended me. I had to end what he started all those years ago. And for me to live, to survive, he had to die.

CHAPTER 13

The rage blossomed, touched the far reaches of me. I had believed that all I needed was to reach London and my life would be OK; I would be OK. But it hadn’t worked out like that. What few gaps were left untouched by rage were filled with sadness. And I needed to get it out of me.

I lay in the dry, empty white bath, ran the water, splashing over and around my skin, until it filled up around me. I left the cold tap untouched; the water that gushed and flowed over me scalded my skin a deep, livid red, the colour of poppies in November.

I took the plastic lady razor in my hands, captivated by the promise of what lay ahead. I hadn’t yet learnt to smash the razor out of its plastic casing, so it was a much harder, bloodier job. I took shallow breaths, held it in my right hand, lifted my thigh and an arm out of the water. I placed the razor against my skin, gritted my teeth, swallowed, shut my eyes tight and yanked down, across, as hard as I could. It pared me open and blood spilled out of the slices and onto my skin and down into the bath water, which became pink and cloudy right up to my neck. I put my head beneath the surface of water, mouth open and dark in the diluted iron I was floating in.

The monsters were inside me. The one monster. I felt him beneath the covers; I saw the shape of him at night, felt the touch of him on my sliced skin. I broke beneath him all over again, our bones blended together until I couldn’t see where he ended and I began. We were the same person; he’d had hold of me for almost all of my life. But I hadn’t realised it, thought I had relegated him to the shadows. And now he was back to claim what was his: me. The thread that had been left on the floor as a little girl, he’d picked up in both hands and made it into rope for me. I drank every night, picked up a cheap bottle of red from the local shop and skipped food altogether. My obsession with hurting myself grew and grew.

I’d been involved with a new man, older than me, who seemed to know me absolutely and not at all. He thought I was mad; I was mad. I called him over and over, desperate to be told we were OK, but really that I was OK. I would wake up of a morning, not really sure what I’d done the night before. I went out, drank too much, woke in the early hours to go to the toilet and found the entire bathroom painted in bright red vomit – it was in the sink, on the ceiling, on the door, on the toilet. I got on my hands and knees to clean it up and by the time daylight came I couldn’t remember if it was ever there or if it had been a violent nightmare.

The days and the nights passed in the same high-pitched frequency. I walked from one room, one street, to another, never really knowing where I was, who I was. I barely registered the people I passed as I did. Whether I knew them or not. The thick layer between me and the world numbed me, kept me safe, but isolated me entirely. Inside the white warmth, I slowly went more mad. I couldn’t sleep, except for when I was unconscious from drinking. I became deranged. I stockpiled pills, painkillers from over the counter and emptied them into a drawer. I texted the man and my mum to say that I loved them. The first handful went down the hardest. The tablets were dry, my swallow tentative, scared. The cheap red wine added a layer of roughage to the pills, made my throat close and gag.

Once the first fistful was out of the way, the second, the third, the fourth were easier. I drank and drank the very bad wine. I lay on the bed, waiting for the gradual drift-off that I’d seen, read about. But I just felt sad, mad and sick. I was sick in my own mouth and swallowed it down. I played the same song over and over, the repetition like the car that went round and round the block soothing the baby.

Then, banging. The shout of ‘Fire Brigade’. I stayed perfectly still, presuming that I could make them disappear by willing it so.

They started to try to break the door down. The banging got louder; the rhythmic booming calmed me. Fifteen minutes later, the door had still not given way, and they were not giving up. There seemed to be no other way out. I went downstairs to my flatmate’s room. She had so far slept through the many men trying to crash through the front door below.

‘There are some people who want to get in,’ I said.

She looked at me, in my underwear, cuts showing, crying, and she finally heard the banging. Then she was up, on her feet, and there were people, people, people. They wanted to know what I’d taken; they were not so bothered about why. I’d taken the paracetamol tablets. My skin had come out in hives. I’d turned red all over and couldn’t stop crying. They asked about my cuts. I told everyone that I just wanted to