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

undressed, takes the tuna-fish sandwich out of her knickers, unwraps it and eats it, slowly and methodically, licking each finger as she does.

CHAPTER 27

We hear the screaming before we see where it’s come from: the guttural howling ringing out on a loop. Each cycle abruptly halted with a sharp intake, then swallow of breath before it begins again.

We exchange glances across the table – mine as the new girl, unfamiliar with what could have caused the screaming, panicked, searching, looking for answers. Those with a little more time under their belt have a knowing look born of knowledge and experience. They have seen this before. Everyone cranes their necks to look out into the corridor. There, with a member of staff either side, is a thirty-something Asian-American woman, who is currently baring her throat to the ceiling, digging her socked feet into the polished floor in vain. They’re pulling her towards the door by the nurses’ station that I haven’t seen anyone go through yet.

‘I’m gonna sue you,’ she shouts between screams. ‘You are so going to regret this!’ She attempts a laugh before screaming again.

‘Where are they taking her?’ I ask.

‘Seclusion,’ says Daniel. ‘The padded cell.’

Seeing my alarm, he pushes his glasses up his nose and collapses into laughter.

‘What?!’ I say.

Sarah rolls her eyes, puts a palm on the table and shares what sounds like part-truth, part-horror, part-mythology: ‘If someone’s not … cooperating, or has properly lost it, they get taken to isolation for a day or two.’

Apparently in the room there is no bed frame, no desk, no TV. Just a mattress on the floor. Whoever is in there is on twenty-four-hour watch. A member of staff, sentry-like, sits on a plastic chair in the corner, their back against the wall. They say the walls, the floors, the doors are all white. I think about what it must be like to be inside that bleached, blank room, the proximity of one person whose only job is to watch you. Do you try to make conversation with them, stare past them? I can barely imagine how thin the minutes and hours would become, stretching out for eternity in there.

Apparently, The Screamer will be kept in there until the ‘episode’ passes.

It passes by the next day, when she pads through the communal space in front of the nurses’ station. She’s no longer screaming, but she’s clearly furious, her jaw hard and square. It’s phone hour – the time when friends and family can call one of the two payphones or, if you have a telephone card, you can call them. She waits in line, people eyeing her warily, pretending not to listen, but desperate to hear who she can possibly be calling and what she can be saying. It turns out that she’s calling her lawyer. And it’s a good lawyer. She’s telling him that he needs to get her out, right now.

If you disagree with the hospital’s decision to commit you, you’re able to appeal their decision. There is a hospital ‘courtroom’ where cases are heard every few days. I had been told about the process when I asked about my options. I’d also been told that it usually results in people being kept in for longer. It delays everything and also shows the doctors that you are unable or unwilling to accept the reality of your problems and their help. I decided, without much thought, through a fog of fear and panic, that I wouldn’t appeal. That I wouldn’t fight. I’d be a good girl – a role I knew how to play to a tee – until they decided I could leave.

And in this sense, oddly, the rhythm of the hospital suits me. I’ve always been a good girl. Excelled at it, in fact. I’d been born with, or at least had instilled at an early age, a desire to please, to be given approval and the warmth of attention. People could feel it radiate off me. It gave me a neediness that made my mum’s skin itch. I needed her, specifically. She felt it whenever we were in the same room, my eyes, always pleading and hopeful, turned towards her as she did her best to deflect. Men felt it. Saw my need and along with it compliance, if not a willingness to be coerced with ease. They knew part of me would likely be grateful, that calling me ‘special’ would quell the desire to fight. That being the first person to tell me I was worth something would wrongfoot me enough to blur the lines of what was wrong and what was right and was this love?

The days and nights in the hospital are simple and structured in a straight line around one thing and one thing only: being a good girl and getting the fuck out of there. The days always begin the same way: I wake up, though I have never really slept that well – an opened-every-ten-minutes door, writing on clipboards and constant low lights making sleep impossible. The first night I’d woken up pretty much every time the nurse pushed the handle and moved their upper body inside. Startled, fingers gripping the starched sheets, as I remembered once again where I was and what they were doing. They weren’t an intruder, leaning in, bringing in danger, violating the safety of my space. They were there to keep the danger out or at least keep it down, tightly locked inside me. Their job was to stop it coming out of me and smothering me as I slept. There were no curtains on the windows, just the wire mesh, which blocked out next to no sunlight. I’ve accepted this as my new reality, submitted to it with speed and ease.

But this woman isn’t. She is fighting. Hard. Rumour on the ward is that she’s a high-powered exec in a big tech company. She has a huge job, a six-figure salary and, frankly, they’ve fucked with the wrong person.