Rabbit Hole Read online

  I told them I thought I was doing well, that the meds were really working and that I wasn’t thinking any of the ridiculous things I’d been thinking when I first arrived. I told them I felt like I was me again. Marcus and the other nurse said that was very encouraging to hear and told the judge I was responding well to treatment. That sounded good at the time, but looking back of course, what it really meant was: so more treatment is definitely a good idea.

  You live and learn, right?

  Even then, I still felt like I was in with a chance, until they read out an email from Andy. I’ll have a lot more to say about him later on, but all you need to know for the moment is that Andy’s the bloke I’d been in a relationship with until six weeks earlier, when I’d smashed him over the head with a wine bottle.

  He was worried about me, that was the gist of his email. He wanted the doctors and the judge to know how very concerned he was, following a phone conversation with me a few nights before, when I had allegedly told him I still suspected he was not who he said he was. When I got hysterical and said that I wouldn’t hesitate to hurt him if I needed to defend myself against him or any of the others.

  She still believes all that rubbish, he said, the conspiracy stuff.

  She threatened me.

  There was a bit of shouting after that was read out, I can tell you. Crying and shouting and I might have kicked my chair over. While the judge was telling me to calm down, I was telling her that Andy was full of it, that I’d never said any such thing and that he was gaslighting me like he always did. Making it all up because of what had happened the last time I’d seen him.

  The bottle, all that.

  Anyway, to cut a long tribunal short, I walked out after that and it wasn’t until about twenty minutes later that Simon found me and told me the decision. They would send it in writing within a few days, he said, along with information about when I could apply again, but I’d already decided that I wouldn’t bother. Nobody enjoys repeatedly banging their head against a wall, do they? Well, except Graham, who likes it so much that he has a permanent dent in his forehead and they have to keep repainting his favourite bit of wall to get the blood off.

  That afternoon, after the tribunal, when I’d calmed down a bit and had some lunch, I was sitting with Ilias in the music room. I was wearing my headphones even though I wasn’t actually listening to anything. Sometimes I am, but if I’m honest, most of the time the cable just runs into my pocket. It’s a good way to avoid having to talk to people.

  Ilias waved because he had something to say so I sighed and took the headphones off. Waited.

  ‘I’m glad you’re staying,’ he said.

  ‘I’m fucking not,’ I said.

  Someone started shouting a few rooms down, something about money they’d had stolen. Ilias and I listened for a minute, then lost interest.

  ‘Do you want to play chess?’

  I told him I didn’t, same as I always do. I’ve never seen Ilias play chess and I’m not convinced he knows how. I’ve never even seen a chess set in here, although there are some jigsaws in a cupboard.

  ‘What day is it?’ Ilias asked.

  ‘Friday,’ I said.

  ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow.’ No flies on Ilias. ‘Saturday, then Sunday.’ Just a nasty rash on his neck. ‘Saturdays are rubbish, aren’t they?’

  I couldn’t disagree with him, though the truth is I was never a big fan of the weekend in any case. All that pressure to relax and enjoy yourself. That was if you had a weekend. Criminals don’t tend to take the weekend off, the opposite if anything, so working as a copper never really gave me much time to go to car-boot sales or pop to the garden centre anyway. One of the things I liked about the job.

  ‘Boring. Saturdays are so boring.’

  Like I said before . . .

  ‘They last so much longer than all the other days and nothing interesting ever happens.’ Ilias looked sad. ‘I don’t mean like fights or whatever, because they’re boring, too. I mean, something really interesting.’

  Remember what I said about memory? What I might and might not have done? I can’t swear to it, but I really hope that, just before Ilias broke wind as noisily as ever before wandering away to see if anyone else fancied playing chess, I said, ‘Careful what you wish for.’

  THREE

  The alarm goes off in this place a couple of times a week, more if it’s a full moon, so it’s not like it’s that big a deal. Yeah, the nurses snap to it fast enough, but the patients don’t rush around panicking or anything like that. Mostly you just carry on chatting shit – albeit a bit louder – or eating your tea or whatever until it stops. But this time there was a scream first, so it was pretty obvious something bad had happened.

  Debbie, the nurse who found the body, has got quite a gob on her.

  This was the Saturday night, just before eleven o’clock, and most people were already in bed. I was sitting with Shaun and The Thing in the canteen – which in a pointless attempt to sound a bit more upmarket is officially called the dining room – just letting the last meal of the day go down a bit and talking about nothing.

  Music probably, or telly. Bitching about the fact that Lauren never lets anyone else get hold of the TV remote.

  When we walked out into the hall, we could see Debbie running from the corridor where the men’s bedrooms are, so that’s when I knew it was her who had done the screaming and most likely her that had sounded the alarm. All the staff have personal alarms attached to their belts and, if they press them, it makes the big alarm go off all over the unit. I remember a patient getting hold of one once and hiding it, then pressing it when he was bored and causing mayhem for days.

  Anyway, Debbie looked seriously upset.

  The three of us stood and watched as George and Femi came tearing out of the nurses’ station, and even though Debbie was trying to be professional and keeping her voice down when she spoke to them, once the alarm had stopped we all heard her say Kevin’s name and the look on the other nurses’ faces told us everything we needed to know.

  ‘Fuck,’ Shaun said. ‘Oh, Christ, oh fuck.’ He started scratching hard at his neck and chest, so I took hold of his arm and told him it was going to be all right.

  ‘Maybe the Thing got him,’ The Thing said.

  I stepped away from them and moved as close as I could to where the nurses were huddled so as to try and hear a bit more, but George looked at me and shook his head. Then they all hurried back down the men’s corridor, presumably heading for Kevin’s room to take a look at what Debbie had found. A few minutes later, Debbie and Femi came back, grim-faced, and shortly after that George began herding those who had been in the other rooms on the men’s corridor towards the lobby. Most of them stumbled along peacefully enough, bleary-eyed, one or two clutching their duvets around them. A few were shouting about being woken up and demanding to know what was going on.

  ‘You can’t make me leave my room.’

  ‘I’m sorry, but—’

  ‘It’s my room.’

  ‘There’s been an incident—’

  ‘I don’t care.’

  Once the bedrooms had been emptied – well, apart from Kevin’s, because that poor soul wasn’t going anywhere for the time being – George stood guard at the entrance to the corridor to make sure that nobody went back. He just stared and raised one of his big hands whenever anyone looked like they were about to. Under normal circumstances, that would probably have been Marcus’s job as ward manager, but he doesn’t work nights. I wondered if anyone had called him, if he was on his way in, but I don’t remember seeing him until the next day.

  ‘Where are we going to sleep?’ Ilias asked. ‘I’m tired.’

  ‘We will get it all sorted out,’ Femi said.

  It was easier said than done, of course. With eight or nine blokes to find rooms for and no spare places on the female corridor – even as a t
emporary measure – it took some doing. Drugged up and sleepy as most of them were, nobody was very happy about the situation. Ilias and The Thing immediately volunteered to take the two ‘seclusion’ rooms and planted themselves outside the doors to make damn sure they got them. There happened to be a couple of empty rooms on the ward directly opposite this one and a few more on the floor below, though nobody was particularly keen on that, because by all accounts there’s some hardcore head-cases down there. There wasn’t much choice in the end and, except for a couple of the Informals who were collected by ambulance and taken to a nearby hospital, all the male patients were bedded down again by the time the police arrived.

  That was the worst bit for me, the real kick in the teeth.

  Shunted out of the way, like I was useless.

  Like I was the same as the rest of them.

  Even though it was the men’s corridor where the ‘incident’ had taken place, the nurses made it clear straight away that they wanted all the female patients who weren’t in bed already to return to their rooms.

  I was wide awake, buzzing with it, but not being anything like ready for bed wasn’t the most annoying thing. I marched straight up to Femi like she didn’t know the rules. ‘We don’t have to be in bed until midnight.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But this is not . . . normal. We need everyone in their rooms so that the police can do their job when they get here.’

  ‘That’s the point,’ I said. ‘I can help.’ My fingers were itching to wrap themselves around a warrant card that wasn’t there. ‘I know how this works.’

  Femi just nodded, flashed a thin smile, then placed a hand in the small of my back and pushed. I pushed back, but only because I was pissed off. I knew it was a waste of time, because I could already see Lauren and Donna and a few of the others who had been woken up by all the commotion drifting back towards their rooms.

  ‘It’s not fair,’ I said.

  ‘We have a protocol,’ Femi said.

  ‘When someone dies, you mean?’

  Femi said nothing, just made sure I was moving in the right direction.

  ‘Kevin is dead, isn’t he?’

  For obvious reasons, women are not allowed on the men’s corridor and vice versa. For some of the same reasons they’re not awfully keen on anyone going into anyone else’s bedroom. I mean, privacy is important to everyone, I get that. That doesn’t mean certain stuff doesn’t happen between patients, because trust me, it certainly does. In plain sight, quite often, because I’ve seen them at it.

  A quick hand-job in the corner of the music room.

  A fumble in the bushes when patients are allowed outside.

  Still, isn’t it nice to know they have rules that are meant to prevent such terrible things?

  I reckoned, though, that with everything that was happening on the ward that evening, and with coppers causing chaos all over the show, the staff would probably be way too busy to worry about an innocent spot of bedroom-hopping. So, half an hour after I’d been safely tucked up, I knocked quietly on a couple of doors and brought L-Plate and Donna back to my room to see what they made of it all.

  ‘He killed himself, didn’t he.’ Donna wasn’t asking a question.

  ‘Most obvious explanation,’ L-Plate said. She was sitting on the end of my bed brushing her hair, wearing expensive pyjamas with embroidered stars on them that her parents had brought her from home. ‘I don’t think he’s been awfully happy lately.’

  L-Plate’s lovely, but even if you discount the heroin and the flat-Earth stuff, she’s not the sharpest tool in the box. ‘How many people in here are happy?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, yeah . . . but even less happy than usual.’

  ‘Topped himself,’ Donna said. ‘Course he has.’

  ‘How’s he done that, then?’ I stared around my room, a replica of the other nineteen on the ward. A single bed and a grimy window behind a rip-proof curtain. A chair made deliberately heavy so nobody can throw it. A wardrobe with three shelves and nothing you can hang anything from.

  Least of all yourself.

  ‘You want to do it bad enough, you find a way,’ Donna said.

  Donna, the Walker, who was here because she’s threatened to do it countless times, who has been doing it for several years in one of the slowest and cruellest ways possible. I looked at her, perched on the chair that probably weighed three times what she did. Wrists that a baby could wrap its hands around and a collarbone knitting-needle-thin beneath her ratty pink dressing gown. ‘Not sure I buy it,’ I said.

  Killing yourself in here is actually incredibly difficult and you won’t be surprised to hear that’s because it’s supposed to be. If you’re deemed to be at risk, then they tend to keep an eye on you, like all the time. Plus, you’re permanently denied anything you might be able to hurt yourself with, and even when you first come in, when you’re getting the measure of the place and the staff are getting the measure of you, they take away anything they class as risky.

  That first night, once I’d stopped wailing and trying to kick whichever nurse was daft enough to get close, they took away all sorts.

  My trainers (laces, right?).

  My belt (OK).

  Nail scissors (fair enough).

  Tweezers (annoying).

  A bra with under-wiring (taking the piss).

  They confiscate your phone, too, and God knows how anyone is supposed to kill themselves with a Samsung. Maybe they’re worried you might choke yourself with it, or call a hitman to come and do the job for you, but to be fair, unless there’s some specific reason not to, they do give it back within a couple of days.

  I mean, thank Christ, right?

  If I wasn’t allowed my phone, I think I might actually want to kill myself.

  ‘So, what do you think happened, Al?’ L-Plate asked.

  I didn’t tell her what I thought because, to be honest, I was scared as much as anything. I was excited, don’t get me wrong, all those professional instincts starting to kick in, but I was . . . wary. Right then, with a body cooling just yards away, it was no more than a feeling and I try to steer clear of those, with good reason. Eighteen months before, I’d had a feeling that the crack-head who’d invited us in to his flat on the Mile End Road was harmless. If it hadn’t been for that, there wouldn’t have been any PTSD or any need for the variety of things I poured and snorted and popped into my body to numb that pain. I would not have ended up thinking that the people I loved most in the world were trying to kill me or that strangers could read my mind. I would not have hurt anyone.

  Looking at L-Plate, I could feel myself starting to shake a little. I tried to smile and shoved my hands beneath my thighs so she wouldn’t see.

  I said, ‘I really don’t know.’

  It was a feeling that put me in here.

  FOUR

  Fleet Ward (home to yours truly for the time being) is located directly opposite Effra Ward, one of four acute psychiatric wards in the notably knackered and unattractive Shackleton Unit – the dedicated Mental Health Facility at Hendon Community Hospital. Fleet – don’t ask me, the names are something to do with lost rivers of London – is a mixed ward that can take up to twenty-one patients at a push, but usually holds somewhere between fifteen to eighteen. Normally, there’s more or less a fifty-fifty split between men and women, and around the same when it comes to the voluntary patients – the ‘Informals’ – and those who had no say-so in the matter.

  Those of us who were dragged here, kicking and screaming.

  Or were tricked into it.

  Or don’t even remember.

  I don’t tend to hang around much with the voluntary lot, because there doesn’t seem any point trying to get to know them. Most of the time, they’re only in for a few days and some of them are only here at all because they’re homeless and fancy a bed for a couple of nights and four meals a day. ‘
Revolving door’ patients, that’s what the nurses call them. In, out, then back in again, when they get fed up with cardboard mattresses and getting pissed on by arseholes in the middle of the night. When it all gets too much or there’s a cold snap.

  Fair play to them, they’re probably every bit as messed up as the rest of us, but as far as the business with Kevin and everything that happened afterwards goes, they’re not that important.

  So, for now I’ll stick to talking about those who were around at the time and, in most cases, still are. The strangest of the strangers who, ironically, stop me going mad. My fellow Fleet Ward Fuck-Ups. My best friends and, every now and again, worst enemies. My tribe . . . my family.

  This wild and wet-brained gang of giddy kippers I knock about with.

  The sectioned . . .

  So, to coin a poncey phrase . . . allow me to introduce the ladies and gentlemen of the chorus.

  Blokes to begin with, I think, because there’s a fair few to remember.

  KEVIN. Well . . . dead, obviously, but it doesn’t seem right or kind that’s all he is, or all you ever know about him. He was ten years younger than me and he supported West Ham, which was a shame, but there you go. He had ‘issues’, of course, and you can take it as read that everyone I’m going to describe has plenty, so I won’t use that stupid word again. Kevin’s were all about his parents, I think, but he never went into details. He was one of the friendliest in here. Too friendly sometimes, if I’m honest, meaning that certain people took advantage and he didn’t really stand up for himself enough, which you’ve got to in this place. I think he was a skinhead before he came in and I remember how much he smiled when he showed me his tattoos. He had a lovely smile. I never found out how he ended up on Fleet Ward, what went on before he was sectioned, but I do know there’d been a lot of drugs, probably still were . . . well, you’ll see.

  He was fit, too, I don’t mind telling you that.

  GRAHAM, aka The Waiter. I should point out that nearly all these nicknames are ones I’ve come up with myself and most of the people concerned don’t even know about them. I’ve always been rubbish at putting names with faces, so they helped me remember who was who early on, and now sometimes I use real names and sometimes the ones I’ve made up, depending on my mood or my memory, or how drugged up I am, which tends to affect both those things. This one isn’t the most inspired nickname, I’m well aware of that, but it works. Graham doesn’t bring people meals or carry drinks or anything like that. He’s the waiter because he waits, simple as that. All the bloody time, waiting. You always know where Graham is, because once he’s had his breakfast he’ll be standing at the meds hatch, waiting for it to open. As soon as he’s taken his meds, he’ll be outside the dining room waiting for them to start dishing up lunch. Then back to the meds hatch, then the dining room, then the meds hatch again, same daft routine every day. You get used to seeing him, just standing there staring into space, always the first in line even if it’s half an hour early. Once, when it had started to get on my tits a bit, I marched up to the meds hatch (which wasn’t due to open for like an hour) and asked him what the hell he was standing there for, what the point was. He looked at me like I was an idiot and said, ‘I don’t like queuing.’