The Anti-Cool Girl (16 page)

‘Leesin,' he said. ‘We have mental ward here. But eet's not what she wants, trust me. These people are crazy. They feenger-paint in there. Do you want to just sit around feenger-painting?'

‘Rosie is suicidal,' Jacob snapped. ‘She has said that if she goes home, she will try to kill herself again. She doesn't give a fuck about being with people who finger-paint. She just needs help. I can't believe that she's reaching out and nobody is willing
to help her. Surely there's a duty of care issue, if you send her home and she dies? In fact, I'd like to see you write it in the chart – “Rosie has said if we send her home she will kill herself.” Write that down.'

The moustache porn doctor looked at me. ‘Have you thought of speceefic plan?'

‘Of course she's thought of a specific fucking plan,' Jacob said. ‘Last night she took over a hundred pills. How's that for a plan? She needs help.'

‘Fine,' the doc said, throwing his arms up in the air like he'd just lost at Bingo. ‘We will admit her. I'm telling you, though, she will hate it.'

Jacob saved my life that day. If he hadn't been there, I would have given up and gone home, and I hate to think what I would have done. When up against Australia's shitty public mental-health system, never underestimate the power of having a very sassy gay man on your side. He was not going to stop until that possibly-once-a-porn-star doctor gave me a bed.

And what a bed it was. An ER nurse took me over to the separate mental hospital. It was about a five-minute walk away, fenced off with barbed wire. The doors were locked, and security checked us as we walked in. I was taken to the room that I would stay in for the next few weeks. Everything was suicide-proof. There was nowhere you could hang anything. The windows were made of two layers of glass, so that the blinds could sit
between them and not be touched. There were no knobs on any of the drawers, cupboards or doors.

I sat on the tiny, single hospital bed for a while and took a long, deep breath. I was safe. I couldn't hurt myself here. For the first time in days, I started to feel calm.

I quietly ventured out to the main area to see what I had signed up for (and to possibly get in on that finger-painting, if it really was a thing). It was pretty grim. I'd describe the decor as ‘suicide-proof nursing home chic'. There was a main common area, with a tiny TV. Next to that was the nurses' station and the kitchen, our only access to which was via a window that food came out of. The yard outside was basically just some grass and a table and chairs. It was surrounded by a very ominous looking, very high fence.

The toilets were . . . well, have you ever tried going to the toilet at a train station? Imagine that, but if the toilet was used exclusively by mentally ill people. In the first one I entered, I found shit smeared on the walls. The others all smelled like they'd recently had smeared shit cleaned from the walls.

Then there were the patients. I think the majority of them were homeless, and I actually saw one of them begging on George Street in Sydney a few years later. One man had just had some serious brain surgery, which had left him with a shaved head and a mammoth scar. With no clothes and no possessions, he had to walk around wearing hospital-issued pyjamas, and, thanks to the surgery, everything he did was in slow motion. I
once timed him take over five minutes to lift his hand, scratch his face, then put his hand back down again. There were two pretty rough women who I think had been transferred there from some nightmarish rehab–prison hybrid. They were epic and horrifying, and if they weren't calling each other ‘fuckin' cunts', they were looking for someone else to go after. One guy walked around with a tampon in his mouth, which I could never quite work out, although given how little I understood periods when I first got them, I'm surprised I had never tried that myself. Then, of course, there was PK, the man who insisted on walking around wearing nothing but his bedsheet as a toga.

I mostly kept to myself, except at mealtimes, which were terrifying. The dinner line was competitive, usually with the rough ‘cunt' ladies leading the charge. It was like a school canteen but with sixty mentally ill adults hustling for a bigger portion of gravy. More than a few fights broke out in that line, probably because a lot of those people had been having to hustle for food for a very long time. I gladly took last position every night, even if it did mean I got the dodgy, overcooked end piece of lamb. I would rather eat dry meat than get stabbed with a fork.

I spent virtually my entire first week sleeping. Public mental-health care isn't exactly hands on: you are basically just plonked in a locked building to stop you from being harmful either to yourself, or to others. The plan to help you stops there. Every few days, I would see a psychiatrist for five minutes to make sure
my medication was right, and that was it. The rest of the time I could watch the tiny TV, ‘feenger-paint' or sit in the garden and watch the rough ladies yell ‘cunt' at each other. That's about it. I preferred (partly out of terror, but mostly out of the need to be alone) to stay in my room. Where I slept and slept and slept and slept. A nurse would sometimes come in and wake me to give me a pill, then I would go back to sleep.

After that first week of sleep, my brain felt less chaotic. I started to stay up all night writing. Writing journals, writing letters to Luka that I would never send. Writing obsessively, page after page after page, trying to figure out exactly how I ended up in a mental ward at the age of twenty-four.

I thought a lot about why I had relied so much on Josh and Luka to get me through. I thought about the kind of person I had imagined I would be when I grew up. All those Oscars speeches I used to give in my room, all those incredible goals I was sure I was going to achieve. I had never pictured a man in any of that. Why had I now become so desperate to be loved that I tried to kill myself when I got dumped?

My writing sessions became very self-indulgent and existential. There was lots of staring out the window, sighing deeply and trying to collect my thoughts. I didn't keep any of those pages, but I'm sure I'd cringe if I looked at them now. It'd be like seeing a high-school book covered in pictures of Justin Timberlake back when his hair looked like two-minute noodles.

But all that feverish, stream-of-consciousness word vomit did lead me to realise one thing: there was a lot of trauma from my past that I needed to deal with, and nobody could deal with it but me. I needed to learn how to be alone. I needed to learn how to be my own hero.

I needed to stop waiting for a man to fly in and save me. I needed to stop pretending I was cool enough to take drugs in club bathrooms. I needed to roll up my sleeves, get to work on my mental health, and fly in and save my own damn self.

So, after three and a half weeks in the mental institution (most of which I spent trying not to get killed in the dinner line), I got out of bed, brushed my hair and told them I wanted to leave. I was going to conquer life! I was going to be like Winona Ryder at the end of that movie where she was nuts! I was going to be like any female character who finds herself at the end of any feel-good movie! I was going to get my damn shit together!

Then I spent the next three years hiding in my room, slowly gaining ninety kilos. Whoops.

‘Mummy?'

That was all I needed to say for her to snap into action. She booked me on a flight, using her very limited cash, to go and stay with her and her boyfriend in Dubbo. She explained things the way they needed to be explained to someone who's beyond hysterical.

‘Rosanna. You need to get out of bed, darling. You need to pack a bag with some clothes. How long has it been since you've had a shower? Okay, you need to take a shower. Your plane leaves in four hours, so as soon as you're ready, call a taxi and go to the airport. But you can't leave any later than 2pm. When you get to Dubbo, get into a taxi and go to the address that I text you. It's going to be alright, darling. You can stay here as long as you need. What do you feel like for dinner? Rick wants to cook you something special.'

Just like when I was little, something about her calling me ‘darling' calmed me down. My mum was always the last person I called for any kind of help with, well, anything. She was usually drunk or belligerent or just wanted to bitch about how one of my sisters had come over and eaten all her cabanossi. But after spending almost a month in a mental home, even I just needed my mummy.

And she understood that. She was the only person in my life who understood what I was going through. She understood what it felt like to have your brain insist that death is the only option, then to wake up the next day and have your brain laugh at you and say, ‘Lol, jokes, you fucking nutcase.' She was the only person who understood that I was incapable of being an adult right then. That I could barely get out of bed, let alone book a flight. That even having to speak was like trying to force my body to lift an anvil. My mum knew that the dishes piled next to my bed couldn't be washed. She knew that I couldn't just ‘go for a run'. She knew that my body was stone, and my mind was trying to eat itself.

My mum knew all of that because she'd been there herself, so many times. She knew that all I needed was to be taken care of, because that's all she'd wanted, so many times in the past. I needed my mummy, and my mummy finally felt like she was in a position to help.

I got on the plane to Dubbo.

She came to the door in her dressing gown, and pulled me
into a warm hug. I just wanted to suck every inch of her in and never let go. Apparently, when I was a baby, I would scream like a freaking banshee unless my mum was holding me. Nobody else could stop the crying. It probably had something to do with the fact that she took off when I was a few weeks old to party with her friends in Sydney, and would take off sporadically after that. I think I was a baby genius – even then I knew her presence was never going to be guaranteed, so when she was around, I insisted on being held, damn it.

And here I was again, twenty-four years old, getting the hug I desperately needed. Inside, Rick was already cooking me dinner, and the couch had been made up like a bed. Neither of them said anything about why I was there or where I'd been, they just welcomed me into their home and got to work looking after me. I flopped down on the couch and didn't get up again for my entire visit. They brought meals to my lap so I wouldn't have to move. My mum sat with me at night, and for the first time ever, we drank together. She sat with me at my laptop and listened as I read aloud the insufferable, long emails I was planning on sending Luka. She nodded earnestly and told me that they definitely weren't ridiculous or desperate when they absolutely were. We laughed about my sisters and watched TV together, and I snuggled into her shoulder while I fell asleep. We talked about how nobody understands what it feels like to have such pain and emptiness inside you that you can barely move or speak. We talked about
how the brain in your head when you try to kill yourself is different from the brain in your head when you feel fine.

As I sat on that couch in Dubbo, eating roast chicken and cheesy potato bake and drinking cheap wine, I realised that I was so lucky to have a mother who understood what it felt like to be surrounded by darkness. As she took care of me and cleared my plates away and didn't complain that I hadn't showered once since I'd arrived, I realised that she was the only person in my life who really understood what it felt like to have no control over your brain. Just like when I was a baby, she was the only one who could comfort me now. She had failed me so many times before, but this week, this one week, she was there. And I couldn't help but think about how I had seen her in just as much pain a few years before, and I'd left her on her own. Just a few years earlier, when I was twenty-one and staying with Mum for a few weeks while I looked for a place of my own, I had stood by and watched through a window while she tried to kill herself.

Thirty seconds earlier and I would've walked straight past that window and not seen a thing. Thirty seconds earlier and I would've made it to my bedroom, never noticing that my mum was outside, trying to hang herself in the darkness.

But it wasn't thirty seconds earlier, and as soon as I saw her through that window, dragging a flimsy dining-room chair towards the front yard's only tree, I knew what she was doing.

And I had so been looking forward to watching
Letterman.

I should have known that the evening was going to end in a particularly dramatic suicide attempt. After starting on her first bottle of wine mid-afternoon, by the time she finished her fourth at 7pm, she had already reached what I like to call her ‘Dignified Royal' stage (a stage which involves far too much faux indignation for someone who only makes it to the toilet half the time).

It usually consisted of her sitting in the living room like a freshly crowned beauty queen, head held high and movements so fluid she was practically floating. Her cheap wine might as well be Cristal, her pleather couch a throne.

And there she would sit, taking grand, calculated sips from her mug of booze as she held her cigarette between her fingers like a sexy Disney villain.

‘Rosanna,' she would say, in an accent that fell somewhere between her North Shore childhood and the cockroach-infested Liverpool rental where she currently sat. ‘You, darling, have gained so much weight.' (No response.)

Or, ‘How did I end up surrounded by so many fucking bogans?' (No response.)

Or, ‘Why can't I fucking just send a fucking text to your fucking sister without the fucking thing being a fucking fuck?' (Sympathy shrug.)

I tried to keep her company for a while that night, but after a few hours of being picked apart by someone wearing green eyeliner
and no pants, I decided it was probably in my best interest to bail out. I went to my room, turned on the TV and closed the door.

Nothing ever made me feel quite as safe as the sound of my bedroom door closing. TV and bed had been my refuge since childhood. As long as I had a door that closed and a show that made me laugh, I could pretend the mother in the next room was the perfect mix of Carol Brady and Lorelai Gilmore. I would have even settled for Roseanne, to be honest. I was pretty much just aiming for someone who didn't drunkenly listen to ‘Bitter Sweet Symphony' on repeat (usually while snot-crying and eating olives out of a jar).

I'd had a TV friend in my room since I was four years old, and it was still keeping me company in my twenties. But on this particular night, just minutes before
Letterman
was about to start, my body betrayed me. I was forced to leave the confines of my free-to-air sanctuary. Basically, I needed to wee.

And it was on my way back to bed, as I walked past the upstairs window, that I spotted her dragging that bloody chair to that bloody tree.

Damn you, bladder.

I could tell she was thinking about how fabulously tragic the whole thing would look. She was wearing a pink satin dressing gown and nothing else – no doubt hoping that it would fall open dramatically as she hung, displaying the body that always got her through tough times.

The glow of the streetlights revealed that she had placed her frizzy curls into as elegant an up-do as she could manage, and she was definitely wearing more jewellery than she had been just hours earlier.

I stood silently at the window and watched as she positioned the chair under the tree. I was surprised to see she'd had the forethought to take rope, although I had no clue where she'd got it. I'd like to say she'd been on a morbid version of one of her shoplifting sprees, but considering the lack of planning that had most likely gone into this, I assumed tonight's hardware probably came from a store called the Neighbour's Clothesline.

She hoisted her mystery rope over the sturdiest-looking branch the tree had to offer, and carefully climbed up on the chair (as best as a person who's been drinking for nine hours can). Her dressing gown slipped open – perhaps a little too early for her dramatic reveal, but impromptu performances like this rarely went to plan.

She put the makeshift noose around her neck. She tightened it.

I knew I should be moving by now. But my feet were frozen to the floor, my eyes fixated on her face.

What if I just let it happen this time? What if I pretended it was thirty seconds earlier? What if I had never seen anything through that window, and I was already sitting in bed watching Letterman bounce jokes off Paul Shaffer? Nobody knew I was standing there. Nobody knew I was watching. Nobody knew
that I left my room to wee. That thirty seconds was my clay to mould.

She was struggling with the chair now, trying to tip it over. She couldn't use her hands, and the rope was too short to readjust, so she just ended up rocking her whole body from side to side, trying to build up enough momentum to get the bloody thing to move.

And just as I was thinking that attempted suicide, along with coughing and vomiting, was probably one of the more unattractive things a person could do while naked, the chair tipped over.

She hung from the tree, gown open, feet shaking. And I didn't move. I just stood there, watching.

I just stood there.

I thought back to the time, years before, when I was just a kid, and I sat with her on the side of the road, desperately trying to think of the right response to, ‘But, Rosie, I just want to die.'

I told her that her daughters needed her. That she needed to see us grow up. I told her I was going to write books and win an Oscar and become a millionaire and buy her a house and then she'd never have to worry about anything again. I told her I would take care of her, but I was only nine, so she needed to wait just a little longer.

I told her I was cold and wanted to go inside.

I thought back to the time I found her in a random park in the middle of the night, a slit in her left wrist so deep I was actually a little impressed she had managed it with such a flimsy kitchen knife. She sat on the grass quietly, staring blankly ahead as I tried to hold the gash together with a tea towel. I walked her home and put her to bed, then spent the entire night trying not to fall asleep so the grip I had on her wrist wouldn't loosen.

‘Move, Rosie.
Move.'
I silently willed my body to leap into action, but it remained frozen in front of the window. It felt heavy. Tired. The glow of the TV was luring me to my room, and the idea of rest seemed too good to pass up. Rest for her. Rest for me. Rest, finally, for all of us.

I could pretend I'd walked past that window thirty seconds earlier. And I could just let it happen.

My mind was grappling with the complexities of a decision I should not have been attempting to make while wearing Hello Kitty pyjamas. But before I could make a choice, before I could decide whether I wanted those thirty seconds to exist or not, it happened.

The branch broke. The fucking branch broke. My mum fell to the ground, gasping for breath and ruining her frizzy up-do.

The decision had been made for me.

I watched as she slowly rose to her feet and (in what I considered an odd moment to suddenly feel modest) closed her
dressing gown. She took the rope from around her neck and dropped it on the grass. Then she just walked back inside.

And that was it.

I heard the downstairs TV switch on, and the unmistakable clink of a wine bottle hitting a glass. I took one final look at the branch lying on the front lawn, before heading into my room and closing the door.

Thirty seconds earlier, and I would have missed the whole thing.

Her feet were only off the ground for a fleeting moment, but that branch breaking meant I never got to make my own decision. Was I just about to move? Was I just about to snap into action? Was I just about to run to her aid, like I had so many times before?

That branch breaking means I'll never truly know if I would have saved my mother's life that night.

Thirty seconds earlier, and I wouldn't have to spend the rest of my life wondering if I'm the kind of person who would just watch her mother die.

And as I sat on that couch in Dubbo a few years later, desperately clinging to every ounce of comfort she was giving me, I felt so guilty knowing that once I had given her none. Even though I knew that her comfort wouldn't last, and that once I got home it wouldn't be long before the drunken, abusive phone calls would start up again. But she had given me this one
week. She knew she was the only one who understood, and she flew me out to her couch in Dubbo and fed me and tucked me in and stroked my hair and called me darling.

She gave me what I needed that week, and if the branch hadn't broken, I'd have been all alone. Just like she was the night I watched her nearly die.