The Edge

I came back to reality in the bath. The jumps where my conscious mind slips away and I go into my own head act like a wrong frame in a roll of film. I remember the parked car, my good Samaritan, the taxi driving past but then nothing until I became aware of the bath water growing cold. I know I was doing something during this time but not what it was.

The bath water has truly grown cold and the bubbles have all disappeared so I rise from the tub and dry myself. Pyjamas waiting on the towel rail. Black.

In the kitchen, my sister Amy. Amy is only eleven months younger than I am, my parents “lucky surprise”. Currently doing her physio training, having already completed excellent A levels, a degree and somehow juggling her own social life with looking after me. Fairer than I am, like an opposite. Light hair, spray tanned skin, light eyes, taller and more athletic. I am still soft from years of sitting or lying in chairs and sofas and beds in hospital.

She is making two cups of tea for her and Greg, the lovely Greg, her boyfriend who shares her with me. He doesn’t understand our bond but he try s hard to accept it. He even hugs me as if we are friends. Its sweet.

“Feeling better? I did wonder if you would end up leaving early but you seemed quite enthusiastic at the thought of meeting new people so I let it slide.” I have no memory of being enthusiastic about the party but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. I nod and ask if she has had a nice evening. Amy isn’t fooled.

“That man who brought you home, was everything alright? You seemed rather...out of it when you got back. Who was he anyway?”

I explain about the leaving, the saga of the wrong bag and then gashing my leg. Amy bends to inspect my knee, freshly dressed and looking less gory than previously.

“Bloody old tarmac roads, but you'll live. So he turned out to be a lecturer, did he? Weird that you hadn’t met him before.”

I explain the sabbatical and different area of literature. Amy nodded and completed her tea making task, making for the door with the two large mugs in her hands. Me alone in the dark kitchen wondering what I should do next. Bed wins.

Around five in the morning Kelly re enters the house, hitting every wall like a dodgem car as she weaves to her room, pausing to fling my forgotten bag into my room as she passes, along with a slurred message about returning the one I stole to Danni. Later on, around lunch time, she surfaces to find a glass of water and tells me she will return the bag to the girl herself, I'm in no trouble, easy mistake. Eyes lowered, looking at Amy every so often. I guess this situation has already been discussed and Amy has smoothed the waters. I nod, give Amy a squeeze and go back to my room to enjoy a night of reading accompanied by a glass of cola and medication.

My room is my sanctuary. The house is a rental, of course, but in a decent part of the city and well insulated walls. I am sensitive to the cold after years of institutionalisation and so Amy deliberately found somewhere which would feel comfortable to me. Comfortable, in a quiet neighbourhood, with a corner shop nearby so if I am having a bad day I can still stock up on toast, tea and cola.

My room in on the ground floor, at the back of the house, and is always slightly dark which makes me feel like a little mole. I eschew the overhead light normally, unless I am cleaning, because it's bright white makes me feel unsettled. The usual white walls have been made better by hanging some framed posters of my favourite paintings, a task which took Amy and I the better part of our first weekend here. I have collected lamps and torches since I was a small child with a night light and so I have arranged some of my favourites, each with different coloured bulbs, so I can enjoy true mood lighting.

An IKEA wardrobe in pale wood with my clothes neatly folded or hung, a desk with my work on top, my laptop and ipod dock- a gift from Amy when I got my degree- and the last wall dominated by an enormous bookshelf complete the room. The bed is my own, since I refuse to sleep on a mattress used by anyone else, and is just starting to have that pleasing hollow when I habitually sleep. Curtains in a duck egg blue, backed with blackout fabric so that my sleep in uninterrupted. Beside the bed my night stand with my newest acquisition, a dawn simulator alarm clock which I take a true pleasure in waking up to.

In the night stand drawer, my meds. I have one of those plastic compartmentalised organisers which I fill each week. The boxes of pills stacked underneath. A memo book for recording any unusual behaviour and my black spells. Under these, the file where I store my medical correspondence.

Medication is a way of life for me. I cannot live without it. Literally. Without pills, I cannot sleep, forget to eat, hallucinate, panic and am reduced to a foetal ball on the floor. I suffer terrible migraines, find it hard to keep my balance and often vomit from the pain and disorientation. With pills, I can study, I can write, I can remember to eat and drink, I can try to maintain a life. I never think about life without pills. They control my moods, what I see, what I hear, they allow me to penetrate the upside-down vision that is the world around me. Borderline Personality Disorder is the medical term. It has kept me permanently resident in a mental hospital for the past decade until my sister stepped in to champion me so that, with medical observation and support, I am allowed out into the world to study for my MA and try to adjust to life outside.

For ten years I kept company with the people that society distrusts. With good reason. Over my “stay” I had four different room mates. One cut herself and the staff checked on her every 15 minutes to ensure she wasn’t enjoying a midnight bleed. Another had terrible arrested development due to serious sexual abuse and insisted on me telling her bedtime stories over and over until she slept. The third had a habit of rearranging my things, helping herself to items which she found interesting or alluring. Fortunately for me she was moved quickly. My favourite and longest room mate was Heather, another borderline who was also a horrific insomniac. Once I had gone to sleep, she would amuse herself by reading or doing tapestry work by night light. She exercised beside her bed, wrote in her diary and made friendship bracelets when staff took away her needles after a mild “incident”. I have very little tolerance for most people as they feel utterly remote from me. Only crazy people seem safe.

Before the hospital, I was an isolated and odd child who became an isolated and obsessive teenager. One way and another I continue to have few friends. I enjoy correspondence with some who are still in treatment, I have a couple of people on my MA course who I meet for coffee and study groups and I have Amy. Since leaving treatment I have not chosen to acquaint myself with others and certainly not men. This was one of my treatment teams rules. I should not attempt to date for some time to come as it could either allow me to bury my feelings in mindless sex or provoke another “episode” of psychosis. I have no wish to break this rule. I don’t know how good my self control is and leaving a trail of dead men in my wake isn’t a good way to test myself. One is enough.

My bed has only ever had me in it. My old room in my parents house, that bed too was innocent. I have never been with a man or a woman because the only one I desired I killed.

The year I turned 15, the voices in my head grew too loud. I had always heard them whispering, waiting in the shadows or just around the corner out of sight but at 15, in history class, they just grew too damn loud. It sounded like the bodies of birds hitting a window at speed. I had to run to the toilets to be sick. I began to fear company. Even in a hushed classroom, I felt overwhelmed. Alone, I could try to shut everything out. I played my music so loud that I thought I would go deaf. Always on the headphones and then I would walk and walk, begin to run then slow down if someone saw me. I sought the quiet places, the lonely places. Dark places.

Nights, I took to walking, I never had been much of a sleeper with panic driving me awake by five am. Now I couldn’t sleep at all. I had long before perfected the talent of eating dinner with my sister in front of the TV then purging it back up. Now I escalated that so my body was driven by starvation to mania. I stayed up writing until the house was quiet then I snuck out and wandered the streets like a lost animal. Deliberately walked into dark places where no one should have been, secretly hoping that the trouble I sought would be there. Back to my home by four am, cram food into my mouth like a starving beast then purging until I felt empty enough to sleep.

I started watching Matt Hawkins. He was just a guy in my school, a year or two above me, nothing out of the ordinary. I cannot even picture his face now. I know he had brown hair. I know I used to look round the school displays for photos of him to steal and take home but I burned them on the last night.

He caught my eye when he ran for school captain. A silly made up office which meant he did the readings in assembly or at speech day, gave speeches to visiting parents and dignitary and was in charge of the prefects. And the Sixth form bar. I used alcohol to blunt the fear during the hours at school. He caught me sneaking into the bar one morning when I should have been in class. I never stayed a whole lesson in class. A trip to the bathroom, a trip to the nurse, an excuse that I had left a book in my locker. All just to get away and run or walk fast to go with the thoughts speeding through my head. And of course, to smoke an illicit cigarette, or a swift drink. No one ever noticed. I sat with my head over my books, pen in hand or doodling. Or reading a novel under my desk. The teachers never stopped me, I suppose because I had mastered hearing the last sentences they said before picking me up on my inattention. Parroting back their words, they decided I could listen and read at the same time so I was left free to escape reality and my dream-world into a written world. I carried a hip flask in my bra- had large breasts, developed early, decided my bra was better than my knickers as the flask couldn’t slip. Thanks to the schools baggy blouse, jumper and blazer, it was easy to disguise. I filled it with whiskey or vodka or brandy from my father's drinks cupboard.

That day in March I had drank too much at break time. It was freezing, a scalding cold wind made my hands blue while I smoked behind the music block. I had drank to stay warm, the blazer giving no protection. Now I needed to refill. It was only 11 am. I asked to go see the matron during physics and snaked quickly to the building where the common rooms, the matrons office and the student bar were. The bar was on the top floor, with the prefects rooms opposite. I snuck up there, listening carefully and found that the bar was open. Some one was restocking it. I saw a prefects blazered back come out carrying an empty box and go towards the locked cupboard where the supply’s for the bar and snack machines were kept. Once he was inside I slipped into the bar and grabbed at the nearest bottle. I remember it was peach schnapps. I pushed it into my inside pocket and turned to leave. Matt Hawkins was in the doorway holding a box of beer cans. He demanded a reason for my presence, said I had been going to sneak a drink but he had come back too quickly. He put the beers on the counter top and grabbed at the schnapps bottle in my blazer. He asked if my tits were usually shaped like that. I said he should find out. He took me at my word and for a swift grope, I got away with my prize.

After that, he swapped me alcohol for favours. I had grown tired of watering down my dad's Scotch and would meet him when he was refilling the bar. Locked in, with no one to disturb us, I learned to please him with kisses, with letting him touch me, with touching him. I found his penis both velvet soft and strangely solid the first time, like an alien thing. After that I learned to like it, to crave it. I grew to crave the illicitness of what we were doing, to want the feigned closeness of what we were doing to change into real care for each other. I started to see significance in what was simply lust and experimentation. I started to think he loved me, that I loved him, that he liked our having a secret. I liked that when I was with him, the voices became quiet and I actually had peace.

I never let him inside me, I never let him lick me but all else I allowed. I wandered around school manic with sleepless nights and hunger and the thoughts and voices in my head, I wandered around drunk on Matt and alcohol. I thought it- he- was grounding me, making the voices stop. Making the fear stop. The never ending fear. So my obsession grew. I followed him like an invisible puppy, he never saw me but I saw him. I spied on him and dreamed about how it would be when he came out and confessed our love to our fellow students, how it would be when we finally made love or got married or a million other stupid pathetic fantasy’s. The night of the strictly supervised party to celebrate GCSE exams, in May, I was high as a kite on no sleep and purging the dinner we had been given. I drank scotch from my flask in the loo’s then danced a storm in intoxicated haze. And saw Matt kissing a girl in my class. He and some of the other prefects were “chaperoning” us. He was kissing one of the many blonde, loud, popular girls in front of the entire year. She was wearing electric blue, tight and shiny with silver heels. I was wearing a black dress and flat shoes and felt like my world had collapsed. I should have gone home. I should have cried or slapped him or just kept dancing. Instead.....

Instead I wound up in a mental hospital and my sister had to change schools and my parents moved away and any chance evidence that I existed has been erased from the house of education where I was an inmate. Matt has a framed picture in the school chapel and a dedicational merit cup that is given out on speech days to the head boy.