Blood Sisters(3)

There are three name stickers by three bells. My landlord’s. The other tenant’s. And a blank. Mine. I reach for my key. Into the main hall where the post is left. Nothing for me. The second key lets me into my ground-floor, one-bedroom apartment. I’d have liked a room on the first floor (it would have felt safer) but I couldn’t find one at the time and I was desperate. Now I am used to it, although I always make sure the windows are locked before I leave the house.

Shutting the door, I kick off my shoes and chuck my bag on to the second-hand beige Ikea sofa.

The yearning has become more intense. It’s been building up inside me all day but now it’s reached its crescendo. Hurry. Fast. My hands dive down for the sliver of blue in my jacket pocket like an alcoholic might reach for the bottle. To think that something so small can do such damage!

Today it’s the turn of my right wrist. Far enough from the artery. But deeper than yesterday’s. I gasp as the jagged edge scores my skin: a dark thrill flashes through me followed by the pain. I need both.

But it’s no good. It doesn’t hurt enough. Never does.

For it’s the cuts we hide inside that really do the damage. They rub and they niggle and they bruise and they bleed. And as the pain and anxiety grow in your head, they become far more dangerous than a visible open wound. Until eventually you have to do something.

And now that time has come.





2


September 2016


Kitty


‘Knit one, purl one,’ sang Oh Tee. ‘Knit one, purl one.’

Kitty wanted to throttle her. Knit? Purl? Who was she kidding? Their stitches – Oh Tee’s included – were sliding all over the place. Twisted up in woollen knots. Off the needles entirely. Or even lying on the ground in a pool of urine, courtesy of Dawn-In-The-Room-Next-Door who had been incontinent and ‘never the same in the head’ since her pushchair had collided with a lorry some thirty years earlier. Ironic, since her mother had only just succeeded in potty training her at the time.

Kitty knew the details because she’d overheard Dawn’s mother telling the staff. She did so, every time she visited. One afternoon a year. Two o’clock, Christmas Eve. On the dot. No one knew what Dawn’s mother did during the rest of the year, but it sure as hell wasn’t looking after her daughter.

‘Knit one! Purl one!’

Oh Tee’s chant was getting louder, as if volume might make up for the piss-soaked slipped stitches and sheer inadequacy.

‘You’re going too fast!’ Kitty wanted to scream. ‘My good hand can’t keep up.’

Sometimes the other hand thought it could work too, but it never did. This was upsetting if she wanted to do something. But not if she didn’t. Like now. Occupational therapy – or Oh Tee, as the teacher gaily called it – was SO boring. It wasn’t just the knitting. It was the tying of the shoelaces. Left over right and right over left or was it the other way round? So fucking hard to remember!

Kitty was pretty sure that she used to be able to do her shoelaces herself. But when she tried to pin down her memory, it kept breaking up into tiny bits. Like specks of coloured dust in the sunlight.

‘Recall can be affected after damage like hers.’ That’s what she’d overheard a doctor saying to Friday Mum. ‘So she may not have any long-term memories.’ Friday Mum had looked sadder than the mother on Kitty’s wooden picture board; the one the staff had given her to point at the drawings with her good hand so she could communicate. Hah! More like guess what she was trying to say. They were always getting it wrong.

Education classes were meant to help. She was pretending to learn her alphabet again, although she already knew it. In fact, it was good fun to give the letters new meanings. M was for the Memory she’d bloody well gone and ‘lost’. ‘Look in the wardrobe,’ Kitty sometimes joked. ‘Maybe it’s there.’ But no one laughed because they couldn’t understand her.

A was for the Accident she’d had. ‘What kind of accident?’ she would ask the staff over and over again.

But no one ever told her. ‘Poor Kitty,’ they would say instead. ‘All she can do is babble.’

If only they knew what was going on in her head!

J was for James. That was her surname. Or, at least, that’s what it said on her bedroom door along with the list of tablets she had to be given every day. F was for Frontal and L was for Lobes. Kitty knew what Frontal Lobes were from the conversation the doctor had had with Friday Mum. They were the ‘part of the brain that’s responsible for coordination and mood swings and a great deal more’.

Perhaps the ‘great deal more’ included the bits that Kitty couldn’t get out of her mouth. She didn’t have a speech impediment, the doctor had explained to Friday Mum, as if Kitty wasn’t there. Her brain just wouldn’t translate her thoughts into words. ‘Some brain injuries make patients swear, even if they weren’t habitual swearers before. Of course, as Kitty doesn’t talk, it’s hard for us to know exactly what’s going on in her mind.’

‘Put your needles away now, everyone.’

The carers started tucking in wheelchair blankets and making clucking noises as though they were a brood of bloody hens. ‘Some of us,’ Kitty wanted to scream, ‘used to be like you once.’

Not everyone, of course. Duncan with the plain round glasses had been born like this. Deprived of oxygen during birth. Could speak after a fashion but was ‘mentally unpredictable’. Hospital notes ‘gone missing’. Blah, blah, blah. Usual story. They heard it all here. Except the most important story. Like what had happened to her.