TURBINE | KAPOHAU

Mania was bright like a hot house lamp, it started to burn. I took my hand off the tiller, well and truly. Off, obnoxious, to a hospital mental ward, to a room in its belly, to a harshness unlike any I had known.  

I.

 It was so fucked. 

I had thought, this is the moment when my life will change. I had been so sad and now I felt so possible, like me and the moment were back in love, making out. In the warm embrace of my friends, talking shit, processing, growing up in the autumn air that felt like spring.   

And then HOSPITAL. A flying tackle of the body, spirit and soul. A shock. But not one that ripples and rends the earth open. Not a shock of expansion. A shock of doors closing, bonds tightening. The clanging of a cell door, a punch to the face. A straightjacket, the pain of containment, and grief for all the movement lost.  

The first time, I was lured to the hospital with the promise of KFC. I hadn’t eaten in days. My ribcage showed through like my skin was lace. I remember being in the car as the windows misted up, feeling hot and delicate. I was sure that the person in the car opposite was them, the mysterious person I had been waiting to see.  

Then I was on my stomach on the hospital floor, three or four members of staff holding my hands behind my back or kneeling on my legs. I was screaming for my mum, crying and screaming. They were bending my hand back and I told them that I had an old injury on my arm. I said, ‘You’re hurting me.’ I remember one of them saying, ‘We know.’ 

Strange to be restrained. Strange to be a liability, something that has to be shut down like a nuclear power plant, until someone with an American accent and a walkie-talkie says, ‘We’ve got her under control.’ 

The contrast between where I’d been and where I was now was brutal. Like those nightmares where you wake up in the dream, thinking you are actually awake. Nightmares inside nightmares. A mirror maze. The nightmare didn’t leak slowly into life, but was suddenly and terrifyingly there, like a jump scare in a horror movie.  

I felt the nightmare brought to life trained my neural pathways to take the shortcut to horror. The transport between nightmare and reality went from a steam-engine railway to a bullet train. That first hospital visit was the moment I lost trust.  I was put in seclusion, to dwell in my paranoia and feel how completely I was alone.  

II.

 Hooves clatter on the linoleum floor.  

They serve me from a fateful needle and feed me through the door that never shuts, or never opens. The metal room. The belly of the institution, red like organs, brown like blood. No sheets, no curtains, no soft swatch of linen, cotton, silk or velvet to eyelash the metal window. The window, reinforced, shows your reflection. You must be dead or fake or made of nothing, your borders blurred into fuzz, this is what you see there.  

The metal room. Will it someday rust, grow scratches in the door? Missives from past prisoners written in scrambling letters, names and accusations, pleas. Tallies of hours or days, messages: 

Let me the fuck out of here.  

Will green grow through the walls and floor, as if the roots of plants have soaked in blood and flourished? Will progress hammer down the metal cell, answering the call of my fists against the door?  

Or will I rot while the beast waits in the corner, red eyes watching.  

III. 

 The last time I was in seclusion, the door had a button on the inside that said open. It didn’t work. I took a photo and put it on Instagram. I really felt it summed things up quite nicely.  

IV.

The smell of the hospital soap was milky and basic.  

We used it for everything. Shampoo, conditioner, body wash – I lathered it in torrents of gunk on my body, in my hair. I wanted to drink the stuff, or absorb it through my skin or wear it like latex, a slippery, iridescent layer between me and the world. It was white and viscous, bubbling into a meek foam when mixed with water. 

In the hospital, the shower was a place of solitude – respite, relief, safety – except when some of the men from the ward hovered like wasps around the window in the bathroom door, until one of the nurses started to stand guard.  He turned them away casually. Gently and with humour, like we were all in on the same joke – what a ridiculous place this is that makes us angels and animals. The soap was almost sweet, not the sour, astringent, chemical soap that might be expected in an institution, where everything is bulk, brandless, efficient and without fuss. What a fluke, to find this creamy nectar in such an unlikely place.   

Thank God they have the very same stuff in the bathrooms at the community mental health service on Adelaide Road. I wash in it for ecstatic minutes then inhale the smell from my hands. I have even, abashedly, squirted the stuff on a paper towel, folded it into my pocket, like tucking a child into bed, and carried it home. Why did the smell of the hospital make me feel safe, despite the pain of that place?  

Toast that has gone cold and been reheated in a microwave gives a pleasing chewy texture that is soft on the teeth and the tongue. The streaks of marmite and liberal butter absorb into the bread. Sometimes in the hospital I would fold the toast in half and eat it like a quesadilla. Sometimes I would pile it with peanut butter and sprinkle powdered hot chocolate on top and call it a Snickers bar. 

The food was served on a plastic tray at breakfast and dinner and in a brown paper bag at lunch. At breakfast time I would erupt, a manic military of one, from my room into the early morning. The same nurse who would take his post outside the shower would offer to toast the cold toast again. I specifically wanted it microwaved. Sometimes I would swan into the kitchen and press buttons myself. It was like going in the staff room at high school. No one objected. Turns out charisma doesn’t disappear with sanity. What are we as patients, as humans, but the specificity of our demands, the ways we require the world to accommodate us. We the mad are an inconvenience, what will we show about ways to rebel? 

Then, if it suited my schedule, to the shower. In a different hospital, on the women’s only ward (progress) to a shower with a solid door. No more hateful window. Only a call button for the nurses in case of emergency. A mental institution is a place where you are always reminded of where you are, of watching eyes, as if the cure for madness is to be truly, entirely exposed. 

When it might be the cause.