Poetry From The Back Of My Hand

The Jim Burley Affair

The air is so fresh the day they section Anne that she is almost happy. It feels as though it is raining raw meat as the rain is heavy and squishy and plops, rather than falls down. She is wearing her Sunday best dress, the one that she had worn to church only hours before, and the sweater her nan knitted her.
“Why am I here?” she asks her mum, more out of curiosity than anger.
“Because of the incident this morning at the church, and the suicide attempt in the afternoon” her mum replies. Her mum begins to cry before looking at Fiona and stopping, wiping her tears away with the cuff of her sleeve.
“What happened this morning?”
“You tried to stab the priest.”
“Oh.”
“Yes, oh”
“Shouldn’t I be in prison?”
“No, you used a banana.”
“Oh.”
“Why, did you do it dear?”
“I had to..”
“I see.”
“What do you see?”

They are in the little room reserved for guests that holds little more than a desk and a couple of plastic chairs, and waiting for Doctor Neil to return to assess her. She has already met him and now knows what to expect. They have been told that she will remain there for at least a couple of days while they get her settled on medication but apart from that told little more than to wait.
Anne starts to pace the floor up and down, saying “Doctor Neil must really love me” to herself.
Her mum ignores thinks that it is directed at her and leans forward to catch what she is saying, but can’t make any of the sounds that Fiona is making distinguishable from the mumbling so leans back and waits with Fiona.
“Doctor must really love me.” Fiona says to her mum this time.
Her mum is about to correct her, say something is wrong with her and that she is here for a valid reason but the door opens and Doctor Neil comes in.
Her mother has to leave the room for the assessment to take place, which relieves Anne, a fact that she does not try to hide from anyone.
“You should go” she keeps on saying to her mother, interrupting both her and the Doctor.
“How are you feeling now” Doctor Neil begins once her mum has left.
“Fine, just fine. I just want to go home now thank you very much.”
“I’m afraid that is not possible for the time being. You will have to stay.
He asks her questions, questions, which she ignores while she stares past him at the wall with posters that read ‘asking for help is the hardest part’ and ‘the Crest Team are here to help.’
“I think that you should stay here, and am going to write that in the report. Now your mum expressed some anxiety about your stay here, but I assure you everything will be okay.”
Can I go home now.”
“No. Do you want your mum in here?”
“No.”
“I think that you may be suffering from psychosis. This usually occurs when there has been a severe incident in your life such as a loss. Has anything unusual happened to you recently?”
“I, umm I.”
“It’s okay, you can take your time.’
“My dad died, and… and”
“Yes.”
“I lost my job.”
“When did you start feeling down?”
“After my dad died.”
“when did he pass away?”
“Three months ago.”
“And when did you loose your job?”
“A month ago.”
“It says here that you self harm, when was the last time you hurt yourself?”
“I’m… I’m not sure.”
“Okay, that’s enough for now. I am putting you on Risperidone. You can leave here once you’re safely settled on it and a home treatment team will visit you.”
“Okay.”
“You can go to lunch now.”
Still dressed in her Sunday best she looks out of place in the food hall. The patients seem to walk around like zombies, with their hands stretched out in front of them. Compared to them she is normal. She doesn’t quite understand why she is there. She understands that the Doctor has a thing for her and that he had used his power for his advantage, but other than that understands little else.
She starts talking to herself, using her hands to articulate her thoughts, “why, didn’t he just say he liked me? does he suspect I don’t like him that way? Have I met him before today? No, I would have noticed such a shiny baldhead, seen its shine from my church pew or wherever I was at the time. He must be simply an opportunist. I must be part of the staff as they haven’t given me any medication yet, maybe I can learn to like him, and he is a Doctor after all.”
Anne fetches her lunch, which consists of fries, a casserole and peas and sat as far from the other patients as possible, which means she sits next to the staff. She looks around for the Doctor’s baldhead, before realizing that he must eat separately from them and wonders whether or not he is watching her and the others eat. She stops eating and looks around at the other patients, but they don’t seem as if they are being watched, so continues eating.
The first person she meets is Bridgette in the television room after afternoon tea. Bridgette is a little older than herself and not obviously ill like the others. She approaches Anne, extending her hand out for her to shake before saying her name and smiling. Anne is as polite as she can be as she wants to create a good impression, but she doesn’t talk to her the way she would have spoken to someone before today, but chooses to go and lie on her bed.
She rests her head on the flat pillow, curls up like a foetus and starts humming. She closes her eyes, and tries to think about something other than that day, but all she can see when she closes her eyes are the priest’s peculiarly big blue startled eyes opening then frowning after she had stabbed him.
She holds her hand over her stomach and feels a kick deep inside her. It is the same dull kick that had earlier made her think she was pregnant and subsequently tell her mum about the overdose. She knows that without the kick she would be dead now and the thought that she might be pregnant makes her smile then laugh and roll over on her back.
She sees herself on her bed at home cramming tablet after tablet in her mouth. She had laid out in front of her a Friends video, the book ‘PS I Love You’ and a letter that she had written to him, her old manager’s manager Mark. It had made perfect sense at the time the way apples made sense but knew she could not explain it to anyone else, as they wouldn’t even understand who he was in her life.
She missed him though, the way she missed her old boyfriend and began to cry the way she had when she had broken up with her boyfriend as if nothing could stop her and as if she would cry forever.
Mark, or Marcus as she called him, was actually Mark Mitchell, head of her section of the bank and not some one who dealt with her directly. He shuffled past her desk a few times a day, and seemed to be walking on air when he did walk past.
The first time Fiona met Mark was the first time she fell in love with someone at first sight. At a little over five feet seven inches he was small in stature and petite compared to her at five feet and eight inches. In heels she was six foot and towered over Mark, a thing she liked to do. In a short space of time he became important to her for the simple reason that he represented something that was unobtainable.
She hadn’t thought of him until recently when her dad had died and failed to make the connection between them that made her think of one every time she thought of the other.
She closes her eyes sees Mark at his desk, with his hair carefully gelled backwards and tells him to visit her where she now is. Once she sees him next to her in the room she smiles and says hello to him.
In the middle of summoning Mark to her room she hears a knock at the door, it opens and Bridgette comes in. Dressed in hospital paper-thin pyjamas, with a body that is thin and wasting away, Bridgette looks like a toilet roll holder. Fiona tries to turn away, after staring bleary eyed at her in the doorway. Bridgette comes in though and sits on her bed, gently clasping Fiona to her chest. She let herself crumble in Bridgette’s arms and begins to sob uncontrollably. She stays that way until the bell for dinner rings.
They go to dinner hand in hand, this time sitting away from the workers. She isn’t one of them it is clear to her now, but what isn’t clear to her is who she is in here. She doesn’t feel like Fiona, doesn’t see herself when she looks into the mirror. Someone else stares back at her, someone that is suffocating her and stopping her from seeing herself clearly.

After dinner, she goes straight to Bridgette’s room, who sits on the bed plaiting her hair. Together they dress up in Bridgette’s dresses and stared at themselves in the mirror, dancing to r’nb music then hip-hop.
“Why are you here?” Bridgette says once the dancing had finished and they were smoking on the floor.
“”They say I have Psychosis”
“What’s that?”
“I hear voices and see things which aren’t there.”
“Oh.”
“How about you?”
“Not sure.”
They start dancing again, and this time don’t stop until it’s time to take medication and say goodnight. When Fiona leaves, Bridgette is tucked up in bed and falling asleep.
Fiona is tired but can’t sleep properly that night even though her medication makes her drowsy. Instead she drifts in and out of sleep, hearing her notes read out to her in between dreams of him.
He comes to visit her in her dreams, and hugs her. For a moment she is the centre of his world as he is hers.
She wakes up at five in the morning and at first thinks that the bell for breakfast has gone off, but when she looks outside it is still dark, and still very much night time.
Things weren’t always this bad, weren’t always this confusing, there was a time when she was happy and though that time was far away from the present, didn’t feel untouchable. If anything it felt very much obtainable but somehow not real as well.
She falls asleep again just before the bell for breakfast goes, so sleeps through its rings. When she wakes up this time there is a hand covering her mouth and a body on top of her. It is Bridgette. Fiona screams through the fingers that are clasped around her lips, but doesn’t hear any sound come out of her mouth. She tries again to scream, to utter a single sound or syllable but nothing comes out. Instead the fingers tighten their grip on her. She gnaws away at them, as it is all that she can do under Bridgette’s weight but does little more than tighten the grip again.
At last the fingers come away from her mouth and she can breath, and now no longer scared she pushes Bridgette off her. Now free from Bridgette, she peels herself off her bed and begins to cry. This time Bridgette does not comfort her, but starts to laugh uncontrollably and then hiss like a snake before clasping her own hand to her mouth and leaving. As she leaves she beckons Fiona to follow her, and so she does. The hall is empty as is the television room in which they sit down.
“Why on earth did you do that for? You scared me.”
She does not get a response though.
“You could have killed me” Fiona continues, pulling her fingers through her hair.
“Should have. You lied. You said you like me but you weren’t there for breakfast.”
“I didn’t lie, sometimes things just happen, things you can’t stop.”
It takes Fiona a while to realise Bridgette is changed, she seems more out of control, and like the others walks as if blindfolded with her hands stretched out in front of her.
“They’ve put you on meds haven’t they?”
“So.”
“Bastards, you don’t need it.”
‘Yes I do. Go away leave me alone.”
Fiona purses her lips together and then bites at them. “I am not going on meds” she says emphatically just as Nurse Aldgate walks in.
“Yes you are dear” Nurse Aldgate says. “Everyone does in the end. It’s better that way.”