The Asylum for Wayward Victorian Girls Read online

  To anyone who should ever chance to find this diary once I am gone: If you do not know what a clitoridectomy is, enjoy your ignorance, for I shall not be the one to enlighten you.

  hospital entry 20: if leeches ate peaches

  Since my incarceration, I have drawn more pictures of more leeches than could possibly be healthy. Not that I am aware of the statistically agreed upon number of leeches that would be considered healthy, but anyway, my notebook is filled with them, and rats too, and I fear it has become an obsession—before, it was merely a fetish.

  Turning through the pages, it is pathetically clear what I’m doing: I am creating characters—personalities—just to have someone to talk to.

  Every few days, an inmate’s parents or even an embarrassed husband will come to visit, tears and shame in their downcast eyes, not wanting to look at our surroundings, not wanting to see how horrible they are. The visitors sit quietly in a corner of the Day Room, trying hard to ignore the rest of us.

  But I? I have never been so utterly alone as I am now—completely isolated and entirely forgotten. No one has come to visit me. No one has even called. It’s not their fault—nobody knows where to find me, and there is nobody to tell them.

  I am forgotten even by the staff, which is what happens when you’ve been here longer than a week; you become a fixture—something that exists here, like the stained green sofa or the buzzing fluorescent lights. As long as you’re not screaming, you don’t need to be attended to. And, even if you are, well, good luck.

  Though I was positively drowning in disturbing doctor visits downstairs in the Emergency Ward, I have not seen a proper doctor since my arrival in Maximum Security—counselors and nutritionists, yes, but no doctor; I have not been scheduled a single hour with a psychiatrist—nothing. Which is not to say that a doctor has not been seeing me.

  Two days into my residency in Maximum Security, who was there waiting for me in my prison-barred bedroom? Dr. Sharp. From behind the Day Room door where he thinks I can’t see him, who lurks, just staring at me? Dr. Sharp. In the makeshift classroom where we lunatics are forced to sit together in circles and draw pictures in finger paint, I hear a voice from the table behind me, and who’s there, just waiting for me to turn around? Let’s all say it together now: DR. FUCKING SHARP.

  I am officially creeped out now—I am being stalked within a mental hospital by the chief resident psychiatrist, whilst being held here against my will. Does it get any crazier than this? Dr. Sharp doesn’t work up here in Maximum Security. He has absolutely no reason to be here, for he directs his attentions toward no one but me, and, by being here, he is neglecting his duties elsewhere. I wonder what the staff thinks about this? Surely they must notice.

  I’ve had enough. I turn to face the Doctor; he is smiling flirtatiously; he’s been waiting for me to notice him . . . surprise! I will say nothing. I will not acknowledge him. If he believes I welcome his impromptu appearances, he will never stop. I turn back to my table with a sudden renewed interest in the work of art a manic kid called Brian is painting for me as a gift. I return to my own painting—it is a portrait of yet another leech, gasping for blood, starving. Above the leech are the words:

  “That’s very good!” says Dr. Sharp, from over my shoulder.

  And, finally, I snap.

  Rising from my orange plastic chair, I advance toward the Doctor, meeting him eye to eye.

  “If leeches ate peaches instead of my blood, then I would be free to drink tea in the mud!”

  Did I just say that out loud? What the hell am I doing?

  The Doctor is flustered.

  “Uh, what was that? You’ve lost me,” he says, still smiling.

  I am angry and it feels so good to free it, even in my own peculiar way.

  “How could you possibly think,” I begin, my voice rising involuntarily with each word, “that this . . . this was the place to put a suicidally depressed girl? Have you no idea what goes on up here?”

  I’m chastising the head shrink in front of everybody, and I don’t care. Besides, I’m the only one here who hasn’t yet had a screaming fit, and maybe it’s about time I try to fit in.

  “What do you mean?” asks Dr. Sharp, now looking shocked—wounded even. “What happened?”

  “What happened? Where shall I begin? Let’s start with poor Lucy over here.”

  I point to a shy older woman in the corner who, like me, does not belong here.

  “She’s lucky to be alive, and why? Because she nearly got her head bashed in by a schizophrenic wielding a goddamned guitar. Why doesn’t somebody ask her what happened?”

  Lucy looks embarrassed, but it gives me strength to have somebody to fight for. I can never fight for myself, but, for others, I can kill.

  “I swear, Emilie,” says Dr. Sharp, “things like that almost never happen up here.”

  “Really, Doctor? Really? Because, how would you know that? When was the last time you were up here with the crazies? The real crazies—not the people who have had a bad day, or who have popped a few too many pills. How much time do you spend up here in Maximum Security?”

  I’m in his face now.

  “Permit me to enlighten you: ‘Things like that’ happen here every fucking day.”

  “What . . . what do you mean?” stammers Dr. Sharp; I guess our “date” isn’t going quite as he had planned.

  I tell him how terrorizing it is for me to be in the constant vicinity of loud and aggressive males—how I am more depressed, more emaciated, more afraid, and more ill in every way than I have ever been in the entirety of my life.

  “Look, I’m shaking! I can’t stop shaking!” I say. “Oh, yes, I’m feeling really safe here—I am so much less suicidal now. In fact, I’m fucking cured, so get me the hell out of here!”

  Hmm. Maybe I can fight for myself after all.

  Dr. Sharp mumbles some weak apology as the counselor who is supervising art hour announces that time is up and we all have to return to the Day Room for afternoon drugs. The inmates shuffle out of the room, leaving their sticky messes behind.

  “Emilie, time to go,” the counselor tells me.

  “I’m coming!” I shout.

  Can’t she see I’m having a conversation?

  “You put me here,” I tell Dr. Sharp. “You are responsible for this. Did you really think that this is where I belonged?”

  “Emilie,” calls the counselor again, “we have to go.”

  “I’m coming!” I shout again.

  “Dr. Sharp . . . I tried to kill myself. I am a sad, sad girl. This is not where you put a sad girl to make her get happy.”

  “Emilie!” shouts the counselor, her patience having reached its natural end.

  I turn to collect my leech painting as Dr. Sharp stands in front of me looking bewildered; when I turn back, he is slinking away without a word.

  It’s time for drugs.

  I take my place in the med-line and receive my pills in their paper cup as the nurse watches me with her hawk eye to make sure I’m not tonguing them. Patients tongue their drugs (holding the pills temporarily inside of their mouths when they’re being watched, removing them when they’re not) for any of three reasons: They could spit them out, they could stockpile the pills and use them as currency within the nuttery, or they could stockpile the pills and take them all at once, overdosing being one of the very few ways in which a patient can exercise any control over herself and her body.

  I haven’t yet learned the fine art of tonguing, so I swallow the drugs. Afterwards, I shut myself in the bathroom and cry.

  Asylum Letter No. XXVIII

  I often forget why I am here—what it is that has branded me ‘mad’, and then I remember my crime: I attempted to take my own life.

  By all logic, I had every reason to do so, if not the right. Even now, I have no motivation whatever to continue on in this world, such as
it is, were it not for the promise I made to Anne in the churchyard.

  But no, I am not honest, Diary, there is something more: An undeniable bond has developed between many of us. We give each other a reason to keep fighting, to keep waiting, though for what we do not know. For Madam Mournington to leave her Ward Key in the lock? For the visiting inspectors to look beyond the pretty veneers? For mercy? Perhaps, but also we fear leaving each other alone in this place.

  Whilst it is positively shocking how many girls are here for wishing to die and failing at it, it is even more incredible how many in the world outside are succeeding. News from beyond the gates is bursting with suicides—bodies found poisoned, washed up on the shore, smashed upon the rocks, or fished from the river, just as I had been. The press is not kind to our memories. In exercising the one option remaining after all others had deserted us, we are weak and wicked; we have committed an offense against God himself, and we are thus condemned to burn for it. Anne was denied a proper burial because she had sinned against God and nature and was thus unclean, unprincipled, and destined for Hell or something like it. She had defied the religious belief in the sanctity of life. But whose life? Was her life sacred? Who protected her? Who is protecting us?

  You must not think, Diary, that I recommend suicide under any circumstance—I do not! I merely question the sanity of those who would criminalize, and, worse, brand as insane, the poor, the wretched, the oppressed, the persecuted, the abused, who find a death of their own choosing preferable to a life of someone else’s. I was one of those girls.

  The only thing more alarming to me than the growing rate of female suicide in London is the phenomenon of the artist intent on glamourising the act. The papers are full of them—images of ladies in mid-air, hair flowing, their lovely forms falling to lovelier deaths driven by beautiful despair, and even the forbidden peek of an occasional ankle beneath a diaphanous nightgown, framed by the proscenium arch of a perfect, moonlit sky . . . all serve to idolize—perhaps even, dare I breathe it, to sexualize—this image of the fallen and falling female.

  Undoubtedly, many of these images are marvelous in their execution and even touching in their sentiment, but they are not honouring us; they are glorifying our perceived (perhaps assigned?) weakness, belittling our suffering, and cheapening our deaths, thereby encouraging all.

  hospital entry 21: four o’clock

  It’s happening again.

  There is a phenomenon that occurs in the minds of many manic depressives when entering into either a manic or a depressive state that nobody claims to understand, but that bipolars from the far corners of the world can attest to: the consistent waking up at four o’clock in the morning. And when I say four o’clock, I mean four o’clock on the fucking dot.

  How many times have I given myself chills, waking up yet again after only two hours of sleep and looking over at the blinking red of a digital alarm clock only to see that number staring back at me? I’ve lost count. And the thing is, you don’t just wake up. You wake up with your mind racing, music churning over and over inside your head, the internal noise, words, pictures, absolutely unbearable, and it is absolutely impossible to go back to sleep.

  I used to lie in bed for as long as I could stand the torture before giving up and rising to go and work at something or other, but, in recent months, I’d stopped bothering. When the clock strikes four, I’m up and out of bed, making the tea (it is four o’clock after all) and sitting down to scribble things. It is enough to drive one mad if one wasn’t already, which I suppose is impossible since madness is the only reason this happens.

  Here in the Psych Ward, I do not have the luxury of getting up to write a symphony or make a pot of Lady Grey, and so I lie in the dark, my cellmates creeping silently about the room, counting the minutes until the alarm buzzes, the fluorescent lights flicker on, and the nurse’s voice pipes in announcing that it is morning, as though it were not morning until she said so.

  I am no longer responding to the sleeping pills as I should be and I know that I am on the verge of a manic state. Their drugs are doing nothing but making me sick.

  Seeing metaphors in everything again.

  One of the defining characteristics of my thought process when entering into a manic state is my uncontrollable compulsion (redundant?) to make everything related in some way to everything else. This involuntary association game spins swiftly out of control, and so rapidly, so relentlessly, that ordinary words cannot keep up, and so, automatically, my brain switches gear from words to pictures, then continues on the same bend, though now entirely in metaphor.

  A person with a mental illness becomes a child with a parasitic twin, becomes a flea upon a Plague Rat, becomes a sniper with a gun shooting at JFK, becomes the shadow that stalks you throughout your entire existence, and all this only in pictures, because words are too slow. If I manage to pause, the words are there, waiting, all lined up in the right order, and sometimes with witty (or so I like to delude myself) captions corresponding to the pictures . . . but words are not necessary. The whole world exists without them.

  There must be a name for this kind of brain that must make metaphors of everything, that sees pictures in every word, words in every picture, words in every word, hears numbers, sees letters, tastes music, and has a corresponding color for every note of the scale, letter of the alphabet, day of the year . . . or perhaps it is not important or special enough to have a name. Perhaps it is simply called “being awake.”

  Sometimes, these sensory phantoms correspond with each other, but I cannot discern what the association between the differing symbols means. In one particular case, the note “A” is brown, and so is the number “5”, and the letter “F”. The following makes a bit more sense: The note “B” is blue, dark blue, as is the letter “B” and the number “2”. The note “C” is a warm, creamy white and has a light glowing from the inside. The letter “C” is also cream, but without the light, as is the number “1”. Then, we connect the number “1” as corresponding to the note “C”, being the first note of the most basic diatonic scale.

  Now, here is where things begin to get a little fuzzy, because many symbols are not solid, ordinary colors. Some are oddly changeable combinations of colors like green and yellow, but with lights showing through and a shadow over one side. These colors have no names, so I categorize them as simply “greenish” or “reddish black,” knowing that these descriptions do no justice to what I am seeing in my mind, or in the air before me.

  A peculiarity: The numbers “10”, “100”, “1000”, “10,000”, and all variants of ones and zeroes, are always a combination of all the other colors, with the resulting color “pixels”, as it were, vibrating so quickly that the number becomes almost transparent.

  It is precisely because the notes and corresponding colors trigger an emotional reaction that a piece by Bach in the key of b minor is not only the color blue, but potentially suicide-inducing.

  NOTES:

  A = Brown

  B = Dark Blue

  C = Cream

  D = Golden

  E = Yellow

  F = Brown

  G = Rust

  LETTERS:

  A = Dark Red

  B = Dark Blue

  C = Cream

  D = Golden

  E = Yellow

  F = Brown

  G = Rust

  H = Brown

  I = Gray

  J = Yellowish Brown

  K = Brownish Yellow

  L = Grayish

  M = Green

  N = Brownish Gold

  O = Cream

  P = Dark Purply Blue

  Q = Brownish Orange

  R = Reddish Black

  S = Greenish Bluish Black

  T = Brownish Black

  U = Beige

  V = Yellowish Green

  W = Light Greenish

  X = Black

  Y = Yellow

  Z = Black

  NUMBERS:

/>   1 = Cream

  2 = Dark Blue

  3 = Green

  4 = Salmon

  5 = Dark Brown

  6 = Pale Yellow

  7 = Golden Orange

  8 = Green

  9 = Gray

  10 = Combination

  11 = Silver

  12 = Blue

  13 = Green

  14 = Salmon

  15 = Brown

  16 = Green

  17 = Golden Orange

  18 = Green

  19 = Gray

  20 = Blue

  30 = Green

  40 = Salmon

  50 = Brown

  60 = Light Yellow

  70 = Golden Orange

  80 = Green

  90 = Gray

  100 = Combination

  Asylum Letter No. XXIX

  Every Spring, the Asylum opens its false doors to society’s elite for the purpose of fundraising, as well as for Dr. Stockill getting his name in the papers, fame being a thing he covets. Madam Mournington thrives upon her role as Mistress of Ceremonies, and orders everyone about in her strident tongue like a commanding general.

  Veronica has described to me last year’s event: the Asylum’s ‘Mad Tea Party’.

  Befeathered ladies and their gentlemen had been served an extravagant tea inside an enormous tent erected upon our front lawn. The inmates who were not wholly unappetizing to look at had been directed to ‘frolic’ within viewing distance in their shifts and stockings, with a chain whipping promised if they misbehaved or made a run for the gate.