A changeling in rehab
Aug. 27th, 2009 11:53 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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writing_shadowsDay One
The cuts went down badly at admission.
In retrospect, Venice thought, she probably should have anticipated this. It wasn’t as if she’d never been in rehab before. She’d just never turned up to the Priory with a series of knife cuts running from her throat downwards.
“Did you do this to yourself, Venice?” the nurse asked, eyes wide with professional concern. Another nurse was already brandishing the cotton wool and a small bottle of colourless liquid which Venice was sure was going to hurt far more than the original cuts had at all.
“No,” she said and then “yes,” because she could see the nurse picking up a pen, and knew that this was going to come up in counselling later. The one thing Venice had learnt about counselling over the years (and the counsellors) was that they tended to decide early on what they wanted to talk to you about and then fixated on that. Her desire to talk about her sex life with a stranger in tasteful smart casuals was minimal, and her fear of having to explain her connection with the man who had cut her up was surprisingly significant, whereas her willingness to work through a self harm problem she didn’t have was considerably higher.
She wrapped her arms around herself uncomfortably and tried to look vulnerable.
“I…I did it,” she said, and then “I don’t like to talk about it. Ouch!”
The nurse dabbed determinedly at her cuts with some kind of anti-sceptic.
”Well,” she said. “You’re lucky. These won’t scar. But I am going to have to mention this in my report. Are you ready for your blood test?”
Day Three
At night, Venice carefully unpicked the stitches on the teddy bear that she’d been allowed to bring with her, and pulled out the diazepam she’d sewn into his belly. It wasn’t her drug of choice, but it was the drug that she needed to get her through the three weeks she was trapped here.
Ever since that night in Klosters, when she had taken more acid than she ever had done before in her life, and woken up in Hyde Park a year later, she had suffered from bad dreams.
At first she had thought they would stop in time. They were just after effects of whatever weird psychotic episode she had had. They would fade like the eerie memories of walking through her own flat, and finding a collection of holiday snaps that showed her in places she had never been, or receiving replies to e mails she had never sent. One year on from the freakish afternoon, when she had watched Mr Sleete quietly shoot the girl who looked like her in the toilets of Chelsea Police Station, those incidents seldom happened. Only the memories remained, and those were easier and easier to dismiss.
But the bad dreams kept coming.
Some nights they were just odd dreams. She woke up craving seeds, and her voice sometimes sounded unusually harsh and cracked on odd syllables in the morning.
On other nights, the dreams were bright and vivid and she woke screaming, unable to endure being indoors. On those mornings she had issues with the walls of her flat seeming too close, the ceiling too low. One morning she had woken up in a stranger’s flat, with security bars on the windows, and he had woken to find her screaming and beating herself against those bars, for reasons that she didn’t understand.
You can’t do that in a psychiatric hospital.
So she had to make sure she didn’t dream.
Day Five
In the mornings, Venice was allowed to walk around the gardens. This was less restful than she suspected it was meant to be. Other people seemed to enjoy these walks. She had seen them, sitting beneath trees, or gazing at the water lilies in the pond.
Venice, on the other hand, seemed to slip into some kind of hallucinatory trance whenever she went into the gardens. Narrow gravel laid paths ran between nearly cropped hedges in the gardens, and on two occasions she had found herself turning corners to find the hedges suddenly grown impossibly high, and the sky shrunk to a tiny patch of an indeterminate colour in the distance. Tiny creatures flickered past the corner of her vision, and the air suddenly became thick with perfume.
She carefully retraced her steps, until the hedge shrunk back to its normal size, and closed her eyes and counted to ten. Next time when she turned that corner, the garden seemed perfectly mundane and the only things she could see moving were a pair of squirrels.
She avoided the garden for a few days after that, sticking to the patio. A vague memory nagged at her brain. She had a feeling that someone at the Crazy Fairy Support Group (as she dubbed it in her mind) had talked about something like this. It was rather like the feathers in her hair, or the flowers growing out of that pretty Rosalba girl’s skin. It was ridiculous, but it wasn’t purely a hallucination. It had a little too much impact for that.
She wondered absent mindedly if it was worth looking into whether the Priory walls were still there in the strange looking glass world, but decided against it. She was meant to be easily findable here, and asking psychiatric nurses to deal with anything out of the ordinary when it pertained to a patient was just asking for trouble.
Day Seven
By the end of the first week Venice was going quietly insane with boredom.
”Why do you think that is?” her psychiatrist said. She bit back her immediate reply, which featured a rather scathing analysis of the social appeal of middle aged men in crumpled linen.
Later that evening she dug out her mascara and lip gloss and offered an orderly oral sex if he would just let her use his mobile phone. He flushed, awkwardly, and said that was against the rules and could she please not ask him that again, but later on he came back to change her pillows, and lingered around the doorway for longer than he should have done. Venice chewed provocatively on a pencil whilst she sprawled on her bed, and after a few minutes he came in and shut the door behind him hurriedly.
“Look…you can’t tell anyone…I could lose my job for this…”
And Venice discovered, much to her amusement, that a very simple act of fellatio could be far more exciting than any number of infinitely more exotic practices by simply setting it in the middle of a psychiatric in-patient institution.
She wondered if she could get her new friend to smuggle her some cocaine for next time.
Day Eleven
Venice’s psychiatrist was mildly fixated on the series of shallow cuts across her body. He stared at them, almost hungrily, his eyes tracing the roadmap they made through her skin.
He sighed over the one that ran just parallel to her jugular.
”You got very lucky there,” he said, and made a small note in his notebook. “Were you trying to kill yourself?”
”No! God, no!” Venice said with real horror. Suicide attempts could get you locked away for months, if not longer, and currently she was close to actually going crazy after a week.
The psychiatrist said nothing, but made another small note in his book, and then gently unbuttoned her shirt without asking. He ran the blunt end of his pen alongside one of her cuts, which sliced across her breast, and then vanished beneath her bra.
“To cut yourself on your breast, Venice,” he said, “means that you’re really giving up on yourself. You’re mutilating your own fertility.”
He leant back and let Venice re-button her own blouse, whilst he studied her with a kind of detached interest. “Why would you do that?” he said, in a tone which had about as much concern as psychiatrists ever showed. It was the third time he had asked that question in this session alone. He hadn’t even mentioned drug use.
Venice stared at her hands because it seemed to be the accepted posture when talking about these things and wondered if Rex Black would find it clingy if she sent him flowers to say ‘thank you’. Maybe not flowers, actually. They were a little cliché.
Day Eighteen
Rehab was, Venice thought, remarkably like boarding school. In fact, just being there was practically forcing her to regress to the age of fourteen, which surprisingly made the craving for drugs significantly stronger. On the outside, she could go for days without anything stronger than chamomile tea. One evening spent eating overcooked food in a cafeteria, and she was craving narcotic cocktails for dessert.
She had only been allowed to bring a limited number of clothes, and her last fresh outfit was five days ago. After this she’d tried to wear the same clothes over and over again, and then cracked. For the last two days she had been sending them off to the Priory laundry, where they always came back with an odd smell which wasn’t quite anti-sceptic or disinfectant but made Venice think of it. She had given up rather on make up. She figured her skin could do with a break and her initial summing up of the Priory’s current intake of neurotics, addicts and anorexics hadn’t located anyone she really wanted to look nice for.
When she looked in the mirror in the mornings she looked uncomfortably young. She didn’t look twenty four. She looked like a schoolgirl. That thought actually disturbed her more than the feathers in her hair, or the crazy eyes with the pupils that kept spinning out in different directions.
In the evening she was allowed to watch television in the group sitting room, where a painfully thin girl walked up and down repeatedly in an attempt to burn off calories. Venice curled up in a large armchair with a sketchpad and quietly drew the girl, over and over again, envying the beautiful curve of her bones beneath her skin.
When Venice left the television room, she stuck two fingers down her throat and made herself vomit until she tasted bile.
Day Twenty One
On her last day at the Priory, Venice went for a walk down by the pond, and crouched beside it for some time. Her reflection floated up from the depths, looking almost human in the uncertain water.
Tomorrow, she’d be free. Perhaps she’d call Bryony again. She quite liked her. Or maybe not. She tried not to make too many plans.
Her psychiatrist seemed happy with her. He was confident that he’d made a lot of progress with her, but wanted her to consider ongoing cognitive behavioural therapy. He’d given her a list of names she could call.
Outside the Priory, everything seemed a little louder, a little faster. Her father hadn’t been able to pick her up, but he’d sent a car and driver for her. The driver had even carried her bag. Venice sat curled up in the corner of the back seat, with her knees pulled to her chest. She felt tired, and strangely empty.
Up ahead, she could see the sweep of the Thames, as they reached Chelsea Embankment. Soon she’d be home. She should go home, really, but she hated the idea of going from being alone in one bedroom to being alone in another. She could get high at home – she did have an extensive stash currently residing in a false compartment at the bottom of a pot plant – but she wasn’t entirely convinced that would really help much with the stupid hollow feeling she had in her belly.
She wanted people, noise, warmth.
Venice glanced down at the clock on the orderly’s mobile phone (did she want to keep it? He might start calling her if she kept it) and saw that it was 1 pm. She chewed on her lip. Where on earth do you find people in London at 1 pm on a Sunday?
The car had turned away from the Chelsea Embankment, and was making its way down the narrow roads which lead to Venice’s front door. She leant forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.
“Not this way,” she said. “Not here.”
He frowned.
”Well, where do you want me to take you, Miss Fortescue,”
“Anywhere,” she said. “Anywhere but here.”
The cuts went down badly at admission.
In retrospect, Venice thought, she probably should have anticipated this. It wasn’t as if she’d never been in rehab before. She’d just never turned up to the Priory with a series of knife cuts running from her throat downwards.
“Did you do this to yourself, Venice?” the nurse asked, eyes wide with professional concern. Another nurse was already brandishing the cotton wool and a small bottle of colourless liquid which Venice was sure was going to hurt far more than the original cuts had at all.
“No,” she said and then “yes,” because she could see the nurse picking up a pen, and knew that this was going to come up in counselling later. The one thing Venice had learnt about counselling over the years (and the counsellors) was that they tended to decide early on what they wanted to talk to you about and then fixated on that. Her desire to talk about her sex life with a stranger in tasteful smart casuals was minimal, and her fear of having to explain her connection with the man who had cut her up was surprisingly significant, whereas her willingness to work through a self harm problem she didn’t have was considerably higher.
She wrapped her arms around herself uncomfortably and tried to look vulnerable.
“I…I did it,” she said, and then “I don’t like to talk about it. Ouch!”
The nurse dabbed determinedly at her cuts with some kind of anti-sceptic.
”Well,” she said. “You’re lucky. These won’t scar. But I am going to have to mention this in my report. Are you ready for your blood test?”
Day Three
At night, Venice carefully unpicked the stitches on the teddy bear that she’d been allowed to bring with her, and pulled out the diazepam she’d sewn into his belly. It wasn’t her drug of choice, but it was the drug that she needed to get her through the three weeks she was trapped here.
Ever since that night in Klosters, when she had taken more acid than she ever had done before in her life, and woken up in Hyde Park a year later, she had suffered from bad dreams.
At first she had thought they would stop in time. They were just after effects of whatever weird psychotic episode she had had. They would fade like the eerie memories of walking through her own flat, and finding a collection of holiday snaps that showed her in places she had never been, or receiving replies to e mails she had never sent. One year on from the freakish afternoon, when she had watched Mr Sleete quietly shoot the girl who looked like her in the toilets of Chelsea Police Station, those incidents seldom happened. Only the memories remained, and those were easier and easier to dismiss.
But the bad dreams kept coming.
Some nights they were just odd dreams. She woke up craving seeds, and her voice sometimes sounded unusually harsh and cracked on odd syllables in the morning.
On other nights, the dreams were bright and vivid and she woke screaming, unable to endure being indoors. On those mornings she had issues with the walls of her flat seeming too close, the ceiling too low. One morning she had woken up in a stranger’s flat, with security bars on the windows, and he had woken to find her screaming and beating herself against those bars, for reasons that she didn’t understand.
You can’t do that in a psychiatric hospital.
So she had to make sure she didn’t dream.
Day Five
In the mornings, Venice was allowed to walk around the gardens. This was less restful than she suspected it was meant to be. Other people seemed to enjoy these walks. She had seen them, sitting beneath trees, or gazing at the water lilies in the pond.
Venice, on the other hand, seemed to slip into some kind of hallucinatory trance whenever she went into the gardens. Narrow gravel laid paths ran between nearly cropped hedges in the gardens, and on two occasions she had found herself turning corners to find the hedges suddenly grown impossibly high, and the sky shrunk to a tiny patch of an indeterminate colour in the distance. Tiny creatures flickered past the corner of her vision, and the air suddenly became thick with perfume.
She carefully retraced her steps, until the hedge shrunk back to its normal size, and closed her eyes and counted to ten. Next time when she turned that corner, the garden seemed perfectly mundane and the only things she could see moving were a pair of squirrels.
She avoided the garden for a few days after that, sticking to the patio. A vague memory nagged at her brain. She had a feeling that someone at the Crazy Fairy Support Group (as she dubbed it in her mind) had talked about something like this. It was rather like the feathers in her hair, or the flowers growing out of that pretty Rosalba girl’s skin. It was ridiculous, but it wasn’t purely a hallucination. It had a little too much impact for that.
She wondered absent mindedly if it was worth looking into whether the Priory walls were still there in the strange looking glass world, but decided against it. She was meant to be easily findable here, and asking psychiatric nurses to deal with anything out of the ordinary when it pertained to a patient was just asking for trouble.
Day Seven
By the end of the first week Venice was going quietly insane with boredom.
”Why do you think that is?” her psychiatrist said. She bit back her immediate reply, which featured a rather scathing analysis of the social appeal of middle aged men in crumpled linen.
Later that evening she dug out her mascara and lip gloss and offered an orderly oral sex if he would just let her use his mobile phone. He flushed, awkwardly, and said that was against the rules and could she please not ask him that again, but later on he came back to change her pillows, and lingered around the doorway for longer than he should have done. Venice chewed provocatively on a pencil whilst she sprawled on her bed, and after a few minutes he came in and shut the door behind him hurriedly.
“Look…you can’t tell anyone…I could lose my job for this…”
And Venice discovered, much to her amusement, that a very simple act of fellatio could be far more exciting than any number of infinitely more exotic practices by simply setting it in the middle of a psychiatric in-patient institution.
She wondered if she could get her new friend to smuggle her some cocaine for next time.
Day Eleven
Venice’s psychiatrist was mildly fixated on the series of shallow cuts across her body. He stared at them, almost hungrily, his eyes tracing the roadmap they made through her skin.
He sighed over the one that ran just parallel to her jugular.
”You got very lucky there,” he said, and made a small note in his notebook. “Were you trying to kill yourself?”
”No! God, no!” Venice said with real horror. Suicide attempts could get you locked away for months, if not longer, and currently she was close to actually going crazy after a week.
The psychiatrist said nothing, but made another small note in his book, and then gently unbuttoned her shirt without asking. He ran the blunt end of his pen alongside one of her cuts, which sliced across her breast, and then vanished beneath her bra.
“To cut yourself on your breast, Venice,” he said, “means that you’re really giving up on yourself. You’re mutilating your own fertility.”
He leant back and let Venice re-button her own blouse, whilst he studied her with a kind of detached interest. “Why would you do that?” he said, in a tone which had about as much concern as psychiatrists ever showed. It was the third time he had asked that question in this session alone. He hadn’t even mentioned drug use.
Venice stared at her hands because it seemed to be the accepted posture when talking about these things and wondered if Rex Black would find it clingy if she sent him flowers to say ‘thank you’. Maybe not flowers, actually. They were a little cliché.
Day Eighteen
Rehab was, Venice thought, remarkably like boarding school. In fact, just being there was practically forcing her to regress to the age of fourteen, which surprisingly made the craving for drugs significantly stronger. On the outside, she could go for days without anything stronger than chamomile tea. One evening spent eating overcooked food in a cafeteria, and she was craving narcotic cocktails for dessert.
She had only been allowed to bring a limited number of clothes, and her last fresh outfit was five days ago. After this she’d tried to wear the same clothes over and over again, and then cracked. For the last two days she had been sending them off to the Priory laundry, where they always came back with an odd smell which wasn’t quite anti-sceptic or disinfectant but made Venice think of it. She had given up rather on make up. She figured her skin could do with a break and her initial summing up of the Priory’s current intake of neurotics, addicts and anorexics hadn’t located anyone she really wanted to look nice for.
When she looked in the mirror in the mornings she looked uncomfortably young. She didn’t look twenty four. She looked like a schoolgirl. That thought actually disturbed her more than the feathers in her hair, or the crazy eyes with the pupils that kept spinning out in different directions.
In the evening she was allowed to watch television in the group sitting room, where a painfully thin girl walked up and down repeatedly in an attempt to burn off calories. Venice curled up in a large armchair with a sketchpad and quietly drew the girl, over and over again, envying the beautiful curve of her bones beneath her skin.
When Venice left the television room, she stuck two fingers down her throat and made herself vomit until she tasted bile.
Day Twenty One
On her last day at the Priory, Venice went for a walk down by the pond, and crouched beside it for some time. Her reflection floated up from the depths, looking almost human in the uncertain water.
Tomorrow, she’d be free. Perhaps she’d call Bryony again. She quite liked her. Or maybe not. She tried not to make too many plans.
Her psychiatrist seemed happy with her. He was confident that he’d made a lot of progress with her, but wanted her to consider ongoing cognitive behavioural therapy. He’d given her a list of names she could call.
Outside the Priory, everything seemed a little louder, a little faster. Her father hadn’t been able to pick her up, but he’d sent a car and driver for her. The driver had even carried her bag. Venice sat curled up in the corner of the back seat, with her knees pulled to her chest. She felt tired, and strangely empty.
Up ahead, she could see the sweep of the Thames, as they reached Chelsea Embankment. Soon she’d be home. She should go home, really, but she hated the idea of going from being alone in one bedroom to being alone in another. She could get high at home – she did have an extensive stash currently residing in a false compartment at the bottom of a pot plant – but she wasn’t entirely convinced that would really help much with the stupid hollow feeling she had in her belly.
She wanted people, noise, warmth.
Venice glanced down at the clock on the orderly’s mobile phone (did she want to keep it? He might start calling her if she kept it) and saw that it was 1 pm. She chewed on her lip. Where on earth do you find people in London at 1 pm on a Sunday?
The car had turned away from the Chelsea Embankment, and was making its way down the narrow roads which lead to Venice’s front door. She leant forward and tapped the driver on the shoulder.
“Not this way,” she said. “Not here.”
He frowned.
”Well, where do you want me to take you, Miss Fortescue,”
“Anywhere,” she said. “Anywhere but here.”
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Date: 2009-08-27 11:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 12:11 pm (UTC)Of course, she might die, but no great loss...
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Date: 2009-08-27 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 12:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 01:26 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-08-27 11:36 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 11:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 11:46 am (UTC)Aieee!
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Date: 2009-08-27 12:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 01:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-08-27 12:01 pm (UTC)