Madness Read Free Page B

than I imagined it.
    â€˜You’ve just had ECT,’ says the voice.
    â€˜Why am I here?’ I ask.
    â€˜Kate, you’ve just had your first ECT.’
    I sit up, rip the IV line out of my arm and try to get out of bed over the railings. I struggle with the sheets, I can’t feel my feet, I can’t remember why I’ve been arrested, ‘What have I done?’ I shout. People appear from various directions. ‘Don’t touch me! Please! No! I haven’t done anything wrong.’ The world is turning too fast, I am back down on the bed and injected with something that makes everything peculiar and fuzzy.
    â€˜You were very confused, we’ve had to give you some midazolam,’ says Anna when I wake up again. I’m still confused. A few hot tears ooze their way out of my red, hot eyes. I am numbed so effectively by the midazolam that I understand why they call it a chemical restraint.
    â€˜Do you have a faith?’ Anna asks.
    â€˜Pardon?’
    â€˜Do you believe in God?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜How are you going to heal?’ she asks.
    â€˜Hammer and nails,’ I answer. She takes my hand.
    Back on the ward, the music therapist has come in with his guitar for a sing-along. We sit around him in a circle and sing Crowded House, Cat Stevens, Bob Dylan and Gary Jules . . . mad world . . . Linda walks into the room and attempts to sit on his knee.
    â€˜Linda, I can’t play like this,’ he says. ‘Sit down over there.’
    Linda makes kissing noises, ‘Ooh, you’re hot!’ she says.
    The music opens up a kind of conduit between my brain and heart. Even though my back and arms and legs feel like they’ve been put on the rack and it takes me a whole minute to stand up because of post-ECT muscle spasms, the music – guitar notes and the act of singing – is a flash, then a ray, warm like bath water, almost human.
    â€˜Where’s your shirt, Coby?’ asks Lisa B later, in the main room. He ignores her.
    â€˜Coby, you can’t walk around without a shirt.’ She takes him by the arm and walks him down the corridor to the bedrooms. In the courtyard someone has strung the inside tape of a cassette across the trees from one end of the courtyard to the other. It shimmers and shivers in the breeze like a sudden sculpture. I walk outside slowly and raise my hands in the air in homage.
    â€˜Coby and Hana,’ says a nurse, walking past fast with a large pair of scissors. It takes them over an hour to get it down; despite their best efforts strings of tape are taken up by the wind, drawn heavenward, are flying; the clouds make a superb backdrop.
    Evenings I curl into one of the grey vinyl chairs in front of the TV. Nothing on the television looks familiar. I can’t remember ever having seen the newsreaders, I can’t understand the news, the stories are foreign and confusing, my eyes won’t focus. This is life without punctuation. This is a commentary of rappers whose dance I barely keep up with, round and about they go free as air, they do not acknowledge, but rather breeze through and past and between as though nothing else exists, their hair in my head is quite red, tangled, curling at the ends, mixed with air and light it shimmers. I can’t quite grasp them, rein them in, slow them down, they are turning, looking at me, laughing, are gone.
    One patient is arguing with another in the hall. ‘Just give me a fuckin’ cigarette,’ the new patient says. ‘Just one.’
    â€˜Get your own,’ the other says.
    â€˜Fuckin’ bitch.’ The new patient walks towards me up the corridor. She’s wearing hospital pyjamas several sizes too small, the fat around her hips and abdomen is leaking over the sides, she smells musty, like the aftermath of sex. Her face is large and round and her eyes show sorrow to their very depths and something else – a labyrinthine