Bloodletting Read Online Free

early. I just needed to get through the next twelve hours.
    I promised her I’d look after myself, then put down the phone, relieved but shaking.What little knowledge I had of mental hospitals came from films like One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Frances. I had visions of people shuffling around in their pyjamas, drugged into tranquillity. I thought of bars on windows, linoleum floors and the invasive smell of disinfectant. But if that was what it took to stop me hurting myself, then I was prepared to submit.
    I didn’t call anyone. I had never intended to. It was too hard to deal with other people, particularly those I knew. On the one hand I didn’t want to spread my miserable feelings; on the other, I couldn’t disguise them anymore. I felt like a leper and it was better just to stay out of the way. I did go to bed early though, my mind whirling as I stared at the buttercup walls. In a moment of enthusiasm when I’d first moved in, I’d painted them. It felt like they were ridiculing me in their cheerfulness. But finally something was going to happen. It was all about to be taken out of my hands.
    I fell asleep exhausted.
    Rodney was home when I woke up the next morning. I was going to have to say something about going away. I could kill two birds with one stone: he had a car so I could get a lift and I could also tell him a bit about what was going on in my head, not the thoughts of self-harm of course, but the depression. I could stop pretending that things were okay. Pretending was not only exhausting, it was also making me dislike Rodney intensely. Somehow I felt that it was his fault I couldn’t be honest. No-one talks about self-harm, so no-one talks about self-harm. It’s still a taboo subject—and no wonder. I certainly didn’t want to burden anyone with what was happening in my head. It was too graphic, too frightening. It wasn’t fair to talk about it.
    While he understood the idea of depression, Rodney seemed surprised that I should need to go to hospital. I looked fine. Nevertheless, he was happy to drive me there. He wasn’t happy to come in: we weren’t friends after all, just flatmates. Rodney left me and my small suitcase on the footpath outside a large grey building with dark tinted windows. If not for the sign saying ‘Ambulances this way’ it could have been an office block.
    Initially, I couldn’t even find the reception area. The café on the ground floor was closed and there seemed to be nowhere else to ask for directions. The place was deserted and all I wanted to do was sit down and cry. It wasn’t fair; this was too hard. Going to hospital was supposed to make me feel better, not worse. I was there though. I’d made the effort and I wasn’t going to let a small thing like not being able to find the entrance put me off. Besides, I wasn’t up to going home. And then I saw the lift. It had been in front of me the entire time, along with a few chairs, pot plants, several unmarked doors and a sign listing the floors and wards. I got in and pressed the button for Level 3, reception, my hand shaking. It wasn’t too late to change my mind.
    But I didn’t.
    Level 3 was carpeted and painted in what the decorators must have thought were soothing shades of apricot. I went through two heavy doors, both of which had glass panels at face height. (I learnt later that these doors could be locked electronically from reception.) At the end of the corridor I could see several nurses in uniform and various other people milling about. I headed in that direction. Like a movie in slow motion, it seemed to take forever to reach them. I felt sick, weak and pathetic. What kept going over and over in my mind was that I was physically well and that this was a hospital. I had no need to be there.
    The clinic normally didn’t admit people on the weekends, which was why the downstairs reception was closed. I was expected though. I bit the inside of my cheek and followed a friendly nurse to a room with