Hospital Food #1

In your tribute album to the world
You must never forget
To sing the one about the cat
Who's always getting wet
He's always got a problem
He's a very bitter dude
And now he is complaining
'bout his hospital food

- Eels, "Hospital Food"


At first I was in trouble for expecting my tray to be brought to me in bed - after all, I was in a hospital, and supposed to be sick, right? The B-Man, my good-for-nothing psychiatrist, should have warned me. My next faux pas involved wearing my pyjamas in the so-called dining room. Blue and red flannelette men's pyjamas that hung off me, and that I still eat my breakfast in now and then. The night before I'd tied my hair into two plaits, that were now as frizzled as hangman's rope, and my eyes were still crusty with sleep. I was seventeen, and my skin showed it.

I found my tray, that came with a piece of paper with certain items ticked off: toast, butter, stewed apple, orange juice. I found an empty table; I wasn't ready for conversation yet. The stewed apple held a particular fascination; it didn't taste very good but there was plenty of it, a tongue in the mouth of its hemispherical container. It was an endurance test, requiring my entire energy and focus to plough through, thereby distracting me from my surroundings. This cannot be happening to me.

I became vaguely aware of a presence beside me, a tall young man with a deep voice, who plucked my spare hand from my lap and shook it as I continued to eat. I didn't look at him, didn't look away from the stewed apple, didn't take in his name. He knew what mine was, of course.

"Ruth, may I remind you that pyjamas are not allowed in the dining room, and you need to get dressed for breakfast. You also need to be in the day room by nine o'clock for the daily meeting. And make sure you finish your cereal."

I got up and walked away, still without looking at him, and went back to bed. It was a quarter to nine.

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One day I was escorted over to the clinical sciences building and propped up in a wicker chair in front of a television that played Sally Jessy Raphael, Oprah and Donahue. A nurse gave two pills and a cocktail glass of water, and inserted a hypodermic needle into the crook of my elbow. What's in the pills, I asked. Fenfluramine, she said, it won't hurt you. Half an hour later, when first blood was drawn, I was feeling distinctly sick.

For the next few hours I drifted in and out of consciousness while the residents of nudist complexes and siblings who knock each other's teeth out justified themselves to the world. An ad came on for Pizza Hut, and as the ropes of cheese stretched from pizza to slice as it was picked up from the pan, I realised both how hungry I was, and how sick the thought of food made me.

Every once in a while the nurse came back in and turned the little tap on the needle and syphoned off a few ounces of blood. Then she shot something up my arm, anti-coagulant she said, whatever it was it was like lemonade for my veins. The B-Man wandered in occasionally; I once woke to find his bejewelled hand on mine.

When they finally removed the needle, my arm was stuck in an invisible sling, and so was my appetite.

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My eating habits were the subject of much speculation. The only boxes I ticked on the lunch menu were for sandwiches and jelly, and dinner I couldn't stomach at all. Dinner - some meat, chicken, or fish dish - was cooked en masse well before time and dumped and left to cool in plastic microwave containers, before being given a cursory zap and shipped to the wards. Lifting the lid, I soon learned to recognise the unrecognisable, congealed sauce covering an unspecified form of protein like a wet scab.

Although my weight was normal, my behaviour was taken for an eating disorder. Every day I was warned that I would soon be tube-fed. "If this behaviour continues, there will be consequences, Ruth. And that's not a threat, it's a promise." Every day I was warned about the inappropriateness of sexual relationships between patients and staff. "I am the nurse and you are the patient, there can be nothing between us," he said, in response to my request that he pass the sugar. Apparently my pyjamas were provocative, my manner flirtatious, the way I walked a tease. I was very attractive and I knew it, he said. So I stayed in my room a lot and was careful not to speak to any male, patient or staff, unless they spoke to me first. One weekend while everyone else was on leave, he came into my room, wrenched the blind on the door up - "This stays up when I come in here; I know what you're up to" - and ordered me out into the day room. "You think you're so hot, but you're nothing but a useless brat." I tried to cry discreetly. Later that day he dragged me to the staff cafeteria to watch him eat, wrestled me onto the bed to extract a letter I was writing, and almost tore the door off my wardrobe.

As midnight approached, under the bright lights of the interrogation, or "music", room, he read my palm and told me my misfortune: "You are a very sick little girl and unless you start to cooperate with me you will end up in a nuthouse, a real nuthouse, not just this three-star motel for those dickheads out there. You can't continue to live this way, doing and saying what you please and leaving newspapers lying around everywhere. The world will not allow you to be the way you are."

I shrugged, too tired to argue. "Well, why don't you just kill me now. It would save me a lot of suffering and everyone else a lot of money. Go on, do it - no one will know, they'll just think I killed myself."

"No, that would be too easy. I hate you and I want you to suffer, just as I did. I want you to suffer the most exquisite pain imaginable, and to think of me when you do."

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Lunch time, the next day, and by then I was right off my food. He brought sandwiches and jelly in on a tray, and an uneasy silence reigned as I spooned the jelly out of its cup while sitting at my desk, nose-deep in a textbook. He lay on my bed watching me, after oddly having asked my permission to do so.

"Ruth."

"Mmm-hm?"

"Ruth."

"What?" I said, spinning around. But by then he was on the floor, at my feet, grasping for legs, desk legs it turned out, as I jumped from the chair. "I wish... I want to..." He shook my desk by its legs and the pens and books on top were hit by landslides and earthquakes. "You... I don't know... you have a certain minxish quality that makes me go weak at the knees."

I didn't know what to say. No, actually I did. "Get up. You're regressing."

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When I got out, I found that my mother had had the carpet steam-cleaned, the front verandah painted and the curtains replaced. She’d ransacked my room and rearranged the furniture so that my bed faced west, away from where I’ve been. The effect was eerie, like a cleft in history, or a step sideways into another dimension. Looking back at the house from the bus stop of a morning, it seemed that Andy Warhol had silk-screened my world. At school, Sister Geraldine, reading from A Brief History of Time, told us that every particle has an antiparticle, and that there could be whole antiworlds made out of antiparticles. “However, if you meet your antiself, don't shake hands! You would both vanish in a great flash of light.” No one asked where I’d been.

On the radio a very annoying little man called Wallace Fairweather flogged insurance to anyone who’d listen. He just would not shut up and leave whatever poor unfortunate he’d buttonholed alone. There were plane crashes and car chases, a black man in a white Bronco; I knew that from then on I’ll always be the first to hear the news. Planes gliding into buildings to the tune of pompous instrumentals and torches shone into the mouths of captured dictators would be the bread and butter of my small hours. But then I had an psychology exam to sit, which I did, two days after I got out. At the forty-five minute mark I put down my pen and whacked my hand hard on the desk until my mind cleared. I'd barely studied. I hadn’t had to: he'd already told me the answers.

When I looked in the mirror I saw that my pupils were dilated, and that my future had screwed down to a dot. I was always hot, slightly puffed, and having to compose myself as if something had just happened. Rather than sudden surges of feeling crashing over me and leaving me stunned, a milder but constant sense of alarm kept me moving, kept my attention from focusing on anything in particular. I knew where I’d been, but often not what I’d seen.

It began as a clear-headed application of operant conditioning, as an elastic band around my arm that I flicked whenever he entered my thoughts. Then, in the bathtub and in a fix, I resorted to pinching myself, so that bruises speckled my arms like kittens’ footprints, and later I found new uses for butterfly clips and clothes pegs. Eventually, I smashed a glass inside a plastic bag and began cutting my arms and legs with the shards.

One day I realised that I’d been branded: under the floral explosion on my left arm there were fresh pink scratches that spelled death in nine letters. When I looked in the mirror, my face was no longer my own.