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

sound of desperation and pain that I can’t bear to hear.

I’m on a stretcher by the nurses’ station, my sobs giving rhythm, a pulse, to the room, which spins. A nurse all in white, with a thick Eastern European accent, leans over my body and takes my arms. She has short, spiky blonde hair. I think about touching it, half move my hand into the expanse between us, and then pull it back again.

‘Why did you do this?’ she pleads. ‘I’m not judging you. I don’t know what your problems are. But this is never the answer. Tomorrow is always better.’

I cry, harder now. She continues, urging me to let God into my heart, and her empathy cuts me open and everything I feel pours out. The machines attached to me beep a tune I don’t recognise as the room turns white and then black and then white and then black. People walk past, bodies grazing the stretcher as they peer at the crying, vomiting woman.

Then I’m moved into a small cubicle, given some privacy by curtains. My knees press against the white wall, which is scuffed and smeared. I lie there and the doctors pass in a group every hour on the hour – new eyes, same look, same mantra:

‘Terri White, thirty-four, overdose while drinking.’

They sing the same song, each time with the same tone, the same intonation. Te-rri-White-over-dose-while-drink-ing. I sing along; sometimes they’re there to be the chorus, other times I hold the solo alone. I look out and meet their eyes, enjoying the flinch as they look directly at my hard, stained face. I smile at some of them, head swaying to and fro as they break my gaze as soon as they can, a flash of horror touching the corners of their mouths.

My cubicle mate, just half an arm away, is an elderly woman in a patterned headscarf who burps, coughs and hacks, her ribs revealed on every breath she sucks in. Every breath looks like it may be her last.

The young mousy-haired doctor who appears by my bed – ‘I’m looking for the overdose lady’ – pushes wirerimmed glasses up her nose as she asks:

‘Why did you do this, Miss White?’

‘Well, presumably I wanted to die,’ I say.

I actually want to admit that I can’t say for sure. I remember desire: the desire not to be here, simply not to be anywhere. Not so much a lust for death as a lust for nothing at all. A hunger, a need to be filled with nothing. And the quickest way to get that, to be that, was to die. Could she not understand that?

I have never been afraid of dying. But the thought that I could, would, live hundreds, even thousands of days in the same pain I’d spent the hundreds, thousands of days prior to this one in, terrified me. And in truth, so many of life’s choices are simply the triumph of one kind of fear over another. But I don’t say any of this, can’t find the words, can’t make my tongue curl and roll and dart.

‘But have you wanted to die?’

Yes?

‘Before, in your life?’

Yes. Of course.

‘Did you want to die then?’

When?

‘Last night.’

I don’t know. I can’t really remember. I presume so.

‘Do you want to die now?’

What, right now?

‘Yes.’

Well, yes.

Because right then, I do. I really do.

Then more questions, a new stranger, who I can only see the outline of: long hair, slim shoulders, thin arms. She says she needs to tick or not tick the boxes that sit on her piece of paper in a list.

‘Were you trying to kill yourself?’

As I’ve said: yes. I presume I was.

‘Do you have a history of self-harm?’

Yes.

‘Have you tried to harm yourself before?’

Yes.

‘How many times?’

Many.

‘When?’

Often.

‘Recently?’

Yes.

‘Do you have thoughts of harming other people?’

No, only myself.

‘Do you want to be dead?’

Yes, right now, I do.

I answer, slurring my words. The room still swings and sways. Everything lurches. I lurch. I remember most of it, but possibly not all of it. I’m not sure whether I get it all right. Did I tell her of the razor blades I used to open up my thighs with? The skin I sliced through on my arm last year, right through the fat and tissue, that’s still not healed? Of the time, twelve years ago, when three firemen took an axe to my front door? I can’t remember.

I’m so away from myself, my mind, my good sense, that it doesn’t occur to me to lie. I’m convinced that she can see straight into my heart, straight into my truth. She knows what I’ve done: of the booze and bleeding and pills. The dreams of rope and razors.

Hours pass, the doctor returns, an apparition with a frown. What she says doesn’t make much sense the first time.

‘The combination of pills you’ve taken doesn’t normally kill you, as an overdose, actually,’ she says, underlining my accidental failure. ‘But we need you to stay in for observation. Because it can, sometimes, cause arrhythmia and sudden death, some hours later.’

I weigh up what she’s saying. Consider it, figuring we’re talking a few hours, tops.

‘OK. But I can go home then, yes?’

A quick calculation reassures me that I’d be out for Sunday brunch, a solo topping-up occasion, and then work as normal on Monday. There’ll barely be a dent in my normal life, my normal schedule. Things will go back to as they were. As they are. Whatever that is.

‘Well, the cardiac observation is for twenty-four hours. But then, when a bed is available, you’ll be transferred to the psychiatric ward.’ Do I laugh? I think I might laugh. She pauses, frowns, harder now.

‘We cannot let you go,’ she says slowly, while looking at me like I’ve taken leave of any senses I have remaining. I let out a choked cry, a sound I can’t place or identify coming from the back of my throat. I’m shaking my head.

‘No! No: it was an accident. There’s no need.’

‘You said you wanted to die, Miss White.’

‘I didn’t know