All Down Darkness Wide, page 9
In my mind a new universe of possibilities I had never considered before reeled and span open like black holes. Gradually, through halted breaths, I told her what had happened. I hadn’t yet found the time or the courage to tell Elias’s parents about the tablets, the bottle of rum open on the table. I wasn’t sure that they knew the full extent of what had been avoided. At the end of our call, after I had calmed down enough to listen to reason, my mother pressed me.
‘You have to tell them,’ she said. ‘What if he does it again?’
I knew she was right. I sat by the lake and smoked a few more cigarettes, one after the other until my throat was sore. How would I do it? How would I find the words? I tried to calm myself by looking out on the black water, the moon’s pathway rippling over the surface, the tiny wavelets tipping their light against the shore.
When I got back to the house, all the windows were dark except for the long rectangle of the kitchen, where I could see Elias’s father sitting in silence at the dining table. I walked up the steep pathway to the front door and opened it. Before I went to the kitchen, I opened the door to Elias’s room. He was asleep, still fully clothed under the covers, totally still. I closed the door gently and stood in the hallway, taking one deep breath after another. I slipped off my shoes, and went through to speak to his father. I was fearful, and didn’t know how he would react. If he made the same sound that I had, that animal cry, how could I bear it?
When I went into the kitchen he looked up, his eyes sore and red, a glass of tepid water on the table in front of him.
‘I need to tell you something,’ I said, sitting down opposite him.
I took a shaky breath and repeated, as best as I could, what Elias had told me: the bottle of rum he had taken from the garage, the tablets he had packed into his bag, how he had sat at the dining table in the summerhouse, pressed each pill out of its white tray, and gathered them all into small handfuls. How he had made a list of people to call. There was an order, and I realised on repeating it that it must have been difficult for his father to hear. First, there was me, then his brothers, then finally his mother and his father. Perhaps I was the easiest; or perhaps Elias hoped I would stop him before he could go any further. Either way, he had picked up the phone and, after a few rings, I had answered.
Elias’s father cried quietly as I told him this, shaking his head, unable to process it. But as I pieced together the narrative aloud, a new terror dawned on me.
Where were the tablets now?
They hadn’t been on the table with the empty packets and the rum.
Where were they?
Without finishing my sentence, I pushed my chair with a screech away from the table and ran into the hallway, slipping on the varnished wood. I saw Elias’s bag, slung by the door. I grabbed it and pulled it open. Elias’s father had run after me and let out a howl when he saw what was inside the bag. It was stuffed full of pill packets – paracetamol, ibuprofen, antihistamines, antibiotics, tablets for nausea, laxatives, antidiarrheals – everything Elias could find in the bathroom cupboard. As I reached down and pulled out the packets, the bag seemed bottomless. More and more and more. I threw them across the hallway. Half the packets were emptied, but the pills were gone. Had he taken them already? Had he lied to me?
I thought of Elias, totally still and silent on the bed, and I scrambled, pulled open his bedroom door and shook him violently awake.
‘Where are they? Elias! Wake up! Where are they? Where are they? Where are they?’
He didn’t speak. He barely opened his eyes, but he knew what I was asking. With hardly any expression on his face, he moved his hands slowly downwards, and turned out his trouser pockets. Each was stuffed full of pills, all shapes and colours, hundreds of them, spilling out on to the bedsheets. His front pockets, then his back pockets – fists and fists of them.
* * *
*
When Elias and I had lived together in Liverpool – that year before we moved to Gothenburg – we would often walk down to the docks after work in the evening. It was always windy, sometimes buffeting about our heads like a mania, dragging our feet from under us. Other times there was just a light salt-breeze, lifting the fret up off the Mersey and over the quayside walls. Down by the river, on the side of the old docks, inscriptions in roman numerals recorded the tide. You could see them if you stood on the dock wall and leant over it, looking down into the choppy swell of the river. Averaging out the still-water level, the gauge had once been used as the standard for measuring altitude by the Ordnance Survey. Ten metres above sea-level, anywhere in the world, meant ten metres above the measure recorded on this stone wall, just down the road from our flat.
At the top of the meter, close to where our feet were, the numerals read twenty-four, and then descended in increments down to the water. When the river was low enough, and had receded to the point that the silt would dry up and smell, and the gulls would swoop to pick out the flecks of eels in the bed, you could see right down to the bottom. As the tide lowered, the numerals were revealed, right down to the carved ‘I’ – the number one – at the foot of the measure. Elias used to come down to see it often. He would marvel at it, thinking that this, here, was the very foot of it, the place against which the height of all the hills and mountains and moors in the world had been quantified. The imperial city had made itself the measurement of the world it sought to conquer. When we were in Popayán, Elias found, we were nearly 2,000 metres above this point. That time we got altitude sickness in La Paz, we were more than 3,500 metres above it.
When Elias took himself to the summerhouse that day, it felt as though a new depth gauge had been set, a new numeral against which everything else would be measured. The point of suicide, the brink of it, was inscribed, and recalibrated our world. It became the arbiter of all joy and sadness. Everything from now on was judged on its proximity to that lowest numeral. When Elias was sad and wouldn’t get out of bed, I would try desperately to define how far from the light he was, what depth he had attained.
Elias was all that I could cling to. My happiness was no longer my own, but his. My dark days were his dark days. For almost a year after his birthday, I waited anxiously for any sign that the tide was turning, but on and on the waves kept tumbling in, knocking us under. I gripped my phone in my hand everywhere I went. I slept with it in my hand, turned it off silent, fearing more than anything that I would miss a call, would miss the moment when everything repeated and I was not there to stop it. I could hardly bear to sleep at first, terrified of not being awake, of not being alert. Then, as time went by, it wasn’t just a phone call from Elias that I dreaded. I began to think that everyone would call me, everyone I loved, and every call would be their last.
On that first night, after we had flushed the tablets down the toilet, his mother slept on the floor in the doorway, so that if he tried to leave while we were sleeping she would wake up. We effectively barricaded him in, not knowing what else to do. Lying next to him in the downstairs room, reeling through a new world of possible endings, I thought back to the start of the day, when everything was wrong, but I hadn’t known it. It was a bright morning and I had got up early, quietly slipping out of the bed and into the kitchen. I walked with a cake lit with candles down the wooden corridor and into the bedroom, and sang to Elias in bed as he woke, trying to coax a smile, some sign that he was happy to be lifted out of sleep and into the world again. All I can picture now is his face glowing in the light, his deep, haunted eyes, and the Swedish happy birthday song I sang to him in a quiet whisper as the sun drifted through the blinds, Ja, må han leva! Ja, må han leva! Ja, må han leva uti hundrade år! I rolled my r’s as I sang. Yes, may he live, Yes, may he live, Yes, may he live for a hundred years.
* * *
*
The next day – after a disturbed night of almost-sleep – before Elias woke, I got up and sat by the desk. The two mornings seemed to belong to two different lives. As the sun rose, the trees broke with spears of light. It was perverse to sit there, I thought, and watch the world outside beginning to wake – the doors of the garages lifting up and sliding back; the neighbours readying their kids for school; everything carrying on as before when so much had changed. As Elias slept behind me, I noticed something on the painted surface of the desk, something strange, only showing itself now because of the way the morning had pried its way into the room. It was Elias’s name, written in capital letters, with the rubber end of a pencil, so that the word was spelled out in the marking of the eraser on the white gloss veneer. E-L-I-A-S.
I ran my finger along it, feeling its rough, raised shape. E-L-I-A-S. His name, uncovered there like an artefact, a part of him revealed. The writing was a hybrid of doing and undoing, an inscription that, in being inscribed, was also a sort of vanishing. I turned back to see him still asleep, still fully dressed in yesterday’s clothes, and I imagined him sitting here at the desk where I was sitting, one day, perhaps even yesterday, before we left the house, taking out the pencil and making his mark, some word to say I am here. Strange, but beautiful, too – to write his name with an eraser, with the white squeak of the rubber against the desk, perhaps when he least felt its presence, least felt the utility of something that marked his place in the world. His name, something pale and personal – as though he, too, had sat there, thinking about what it was he had been given, and trying to make sense of it by writing it down.
IV
That morning, the GP referred Elias to a hospital in a town on the far border of the municipality, over an hour’s car journey from home. Leaving the suburb meant taking a thin road that tailed through the pine forest. As we drove deeper, the green woods gloomed around us, the tall, dark trees standing in high ranks at each side of the road, like some ancient army watching us carrying the wounded to safety. We stayed quiet for most of the journey – Elias sleeping in the back next to me, or just closing his eyes, shutting out the endless stream of the woods blurring beyond the window. He hardly spoke, but when he did, he slurred slightly, and his voice had a warbling, exhausted thinness. My eyes were tight and sore, and I leant myself against the shuddering window of the car. Trees, trees, trees, and the rhythmic thud of the road. The world outside was on fast forward, as though time was moving past us out there, leaving us behind. When we hurtled out of the forest and into the yellow farmland, rooks lifted over the open fields. Everything was silent, but it was a ringing silence that seemed to pierce right through me. It felt as though my body had been struck, like a tuning fork, held to some alien frequency. Roads, trees, fields, birds. The world was there and somehow we were not.
When we reached the hospital, we parked under a row of maples, their leaves crisp and reddening, their fire slowly burning through to the stem. I opened the door for Elias and he clambered out, moving as though his body were too heavy for him to manage. I kept my head down; afraid, I think, of being seen, of being witnessed. Outside the main lobby a few outdoor tables were strewn in the autumn sun – there were leftover coffee cups, a newspaper, two nurses smoking by the rotating door. Inside, the fresh air was replaced with the ominous smell of the hospital – antiseptic, bleach – everything but the scent of bodies purged away. The receptionist gestured us to wait in a small consulting room, where Elias sat on a plastic-covered bed, his head still bowed, like a prisoner awaiting a sentence. His mother and father took two chairs by a round green coffee table, and I sat on the narrow windowsill, feeling myself set apart from the family unit. A cold draught blew through the old seal around the glass. There were voices outside, but they were dim, the words inaudible. A black crow was tearing apart a foil wrapper, shaking it with its head. It flapped in the dead leaves, which lifted and then fell, briefly animated.
It wasn’t long before there was a light rap on the door. A psychiatric consultant came into the room, a clipboard in her hand, and introduced herself. She asked a few routine questions (name, address, date of birth), but Elias did not speak. He barely raised his head. When I moved to help, about to answer her inquiries for him, she raised her hand gently. I nodded, apologetically, and leant back against the glass. After a few moments, the vacuum of the silence became so heavy that Elias raised his head finally, his eyes meeting hers.
‘Hello, Elias,’ she said, kindly.
No reaction. Then, quietly, he gave a murmured ‘Hello.’
She returned it with an encouraging smile, a slow nod. ‘Why do you think you’re here?’
I couldn’t bear to look at his face. I wanted to take his hand, to let him know I was with him.
Slowly, he began to speak, very quietly, murmuring and hesitant at first, his eyes fixed to the floor under his feet, his hands turning over each other, squeezing and loosening. Then, for the first time, he did what he would have to do over and over in the coming weeks: narrate the story of his birthday, what he had done and why he had done it. The consultant offered a sympathetic silence, the occasional encouraging nod, until his story arrived at the present moment, at the four of us, sitting dumbstruck in a psychiatric ward. It didn’t seem possible that it had all happened in less than a day. I could not recall the person I was on the morning of the day before. That person had no idea what was coming. He was unrecognisable to me now.
After Elias was done, the consultant asked a few more questions, checking details, repeating certain phrases, making sure she understood. Then, as gently as she had arrived, she left us. As she walked out of the room, the silence descended again over us. We were taken to an adjoining ward where the main doors locked electronically, so that only the staff could let anyone enter or leave. A doctor lifted her key-card to the black box by the doorframe: the light switched green and the lock clunked open. Inside, there was a main corridor, a few consulting rooms to our right, numbered bedrooms along the left, and at the end a dining room with a hatch canteen, a few sofas, a TV playing on mute.
At the main door we were met by two nurses. They spoke softly but authoritatively in Swedish, addressing us, but their words came too quickly for me to process. They saw my confusion and pointed to a laminated poster on the wall of the corridor. Did we have anything on us that might be sharp? Did we have any pills, any cigarette lighters, any strings or cables? Any knives, any scissors, any solvents? There was a locked closet, we learned, where they kept the contraband. We searched our pockets and patted them innocently to show they were empty. Already I felt like I had mistakenly stepped out of line. They led us along the corridor to room No. 10, which was to be Elias’s room, and out of nowhere I blurted out, ‘My shoes!’
They looked at me, not understanding.
‘Sorry, ummm, my shoes, they have laces.’ I pointed down to them, as though to prove it. ‘Is that . . . are they OK?’
Yes, shoelaces were fine, they said, just so long as I didn’t leave the shoes lying around.
We went inside the bedroom. At first it appeared normal, if bare. A small single bed, an armchair, an adjoining laminate bathroom. Elias sat on the bed, then lay down, closing his eyes. As I sat in the armchair, leaving him to rest, I began to notice small absences, small precautions. The bins, for a start, didn’t have bags. The window blinds were behind security glazing and had no cord. There was no table lamp by the bed; nothing to soften the almost constant glare of the overhead lighting. Anything that might be used to hurt oneself was gone: doorknobs, rounded hinges, towel-bars. All the furniture was weighted down. Later, I learned that this was to stop patients from barricading themselves into their rooms. My eyes darted around, and I began to see in what wasn’t there, in the absences, a sort of dark inversion of a room, an inventory of all the ways a person might harm themselves, a key to all the vulnerabilities of the body. The slit wrist, the ruptured throat, and those ways beyond any I could have imagined before. Doorknobs, plastic bags, table lamps, shoelaces: my mind raced through images, a litany of violence, of possible futures, possible endings. I held my hands close to my face, as though I might betray myself. I was there for support, not for panic. As Elias rested, and his parents went to speak to the doctor, I stood up, walked to the window and stared out of it at the cars in the car park, the families, the buses arriving and departing, and I thought how impossible it was that Elias and I could go out into that world again. Behind me, voices drifted in from the corridor: nurses, patients, a woman screaming for her son, another crying that all her teeth were missing. I pushed my forehead against the cold glass and closed my eyes.
During that first day there was a long schedule of meetings: nurses, doctors, a medication review, a treatment plan. Nothing set in stone, no promises. When I spoke to the consultant alone, I wanted to know what had happened and how it would be fixed. A chemical imbalance set right; a trauma healed; a definite cause with a definite solution. The mind, I learned, was not quite so amenable as that. Meanwhile, Elias’s father drove back to the house to get a bag of things – clothes, a book, the laptop. His mother went out to the shop to buy anything she could think of that Elias might eat. Most of the day I spent sitting next to him on his bed, mostly in silence, watching daytime TV. Occasionally, I would reach out to touch him, but he was stony and unmoving, his body almost uninhabited, his mind elsewhere.
We watched hours of reruns of the same Swedish gameshow. The contestants had to guess what city they were in by watching a video of a train approaching a station. Clues in the landscape, the occasional road sign, the architecture. Each was quickly apprehended, until someone pressed a buzzer and shouted Munich! or Barcelona! or Tallinn! The train would start off miles outside the city, and the quicker the answer was called, the more points were won. Elias had been everywhere, and loved to travel. Eventually, with a sort of reluctant mumble, he started to guess along. He was disarmingly good at it, and it gave me hope to see his eyes moving across the screen, invested. Mostly, I just spluttered wrong answers or gave up too soon. Sometimes one of the contestants would guess it almost straight away, when all I could see was a bare track stretching into the distance. And then there were the occasional rounds where the train would start off along the tracks, the video streaming: the trees flashing to open fields, then slowly the greenery would thin out and there were houses, then high-rises, then the station approaching, and the whole panel of contestants would sit, flustered, confused, and still none of them could guess where it was they had arrived.
