Twelve Plastic Chairs (2/2)

 

A big brash man with a deep organic tan clumps in, shod in work boots. He drops his bulk into a mid-row seat with a force that makes its legs screech across the laminate; arranges his things and his limbs almost offensively loudly. Nobody says a word, but invisible cords in the air tighten and tauten. It puts my psychic teeth on edge. He takes out his phone and shouts at someone about picking up a car in broken German. Ich kann kommen heute. Die Auto, kein Kennzeichen. Ist Hausen. Okay, morgen. Ich komm. Then he clumps out again. He is here to pick up his wife’s prescription. Her only medication is one of mine as well. He breezes out of the clinic with the carefree air of the unafflicted.

 

A mother/carer/motherly carer with a flowery straw handbag comes in, locked arm-in-arm with a tall young man in black. She keeps up a constant monologue, low-volume fusses and frets, yes we can do that afterwards but we have to do this first, we don’t have to be here, if you don’t want to be here we can just leave and we won’t see the doctor. Next to me, the man wails and bangs the chair arms with his fists. The mother-carer scolds him, tells him to calm down, sends him to the front desk to get a tissue for his nose. 

 

My neck hurts from being held at a polite outward swivel. I am very tired. 

We could just go home, a man says quietly to the silent Hijabi beside him. She nods and rises.

 

Eventually, a tiny young nurse comes in, says my name like a question, an upward inflection. I almost don’t respond; it feels like I live here now, welded to the waiting room chair. I lumber to her office. 

 

She shares a name I instantly forget, too busy keeping my head above water. She is also drowning, but in a different way: swamped in a white coat, everything about her appearance soft and muted and doelike. She either is or just looks extremely young, with huge round glasses and delicate features. Zierlich, in contrast to me: tierlich. I could be a decade her senior. It feels as though the roles should be reversed. We sit COVID-distance apart as though depression is contagious and she takes a blank sheet, asks who I am, where I am, why I am the way I am. 

 

The computer is on, I want to yell. My file is one click away. Please, just look at it. You have all of this information already. Please, I’m exhausted and I can’t tell this same pathetic story for the ten-thousandth time in my life. I’m begging you. Don’t make me do it. 

 

But I do it anyway. 

 

Have I taken anything before? 

 

I have been medicated longer than not, measured in years of my life. Yes, how much time do you have? This is the list as at July 2025, and counting.

 

Behind their fragile frames, the delicate eyebrows rise a couple of inches. She looks faintly scared. SNRIs work better for me than SSRIs, I tell her, tossing her the life ring, trying to move her on to the next part of the dialogue. 

 

Oh. Creamy forehead knitting in consternation. In that case, we’re running out of options. 

 

Utter despair tinged with black humour consumes me. I think: I think that’s the part you’re only supposed to say in your head.

 

She finally turns to the PC, scrolls a little. Even her scrolling is delicate, barely audible, the miniscule twitch of a tapered finger. Have you had [something with a long name beginning with D]? 

 

The prospect of a new medication dangles in the air in front of me like a lollipop. Yes, I say, drug-desperate, please let me hang my hope on this D-, grabbing it with sticky hands. But Nurse Doe says she has to check with a higher-up first.

 

Back to the waiting room I go, but this time installed in a different chair. A distant part of my awareness, a satellite consciousness, notices that I am not crying and is mildly surprised. I think that pragmatically, factually, I’m probably faintly irritated at the hand of hope being extended only to be potentially snatched away again. I know that I am unmoved, immovable, a deep dry woe writ in stone. 

 

Across the corridor, the reception door shuts, signalling 12:30/lunch break/2.5 hours since I got here. The thick musty smell of institutional food begins to waft out from under the double doors of the inpatient unit. I’m heavy and sleepy now, truly part of the furniture. The voice of the man with the carer echoes in from far away, coalescing into shapeless almost-words like something out of a strange dream. I think I hear a Dr Who ringtone coming from somewhere, but I’m not quite sure. Perhaps it’s another rogue signal filtering in from Lucy’s alternative timeline.

 

A tiny Hispanic man decked out in all-designer (Gucci bumbag, Gucci T-shirt, fancy beanie hat) enters the waiting room and puts a yellow cardboard folder on a chair. He asks me to look after it: me, the least mad of the mad, the most functional of the dysfunctional. After all, you’re not even very sick. I consent.

 

Ja, ja, the Middle Eastern guy says with undisguised bitterness to Nurse Doe when his name is called, towering over her with fists clenched. He actually looks like he’s ready to spit in her face. The nurse reflexively glances around the waiting room with poorly disguised alarm in her eyes, spots me, tells me hurriedly that she’s still waiting for the head nurse to call her back. They leave. He is soon dispatched through the double doors to inpatient care, just as he wanted. I’m not entirely sure why he had to wait so long for the pleasure. 

 

Beanie Boy forgets how to use the clinic door, collides with it like a meteor, shaking the whole building. Then he remembers, re-enters the atmosphere, reclaims his folder from me. Danke. I try to smile. He sits, picks up his phone and starts to make plans, businesslike in spite of his inner chaos: blood tests, other appointments, miscellaneous admin. Goodbye, Papa, he says.

 

By the time Nurse Doe comes to get me, I’m having trouble seeing through the mist that has risen from the silent battlefield, rolling over the corpses on the floor. I’m adrift on one of the lesser clouds, maybe cloud three, certainly not nine. My legs are made of some strange jellylike substance that cannot be trusted. 

 

We go out into the corridor so I can lean against a wall. She dips into the closed reception area and out again, gives me a square of pink paper, forgets to issue instructions that I have to remember to glean from her and tap into my phone’s Notes app with my chipped prehensile thumbs. All the best, she says with actual feeling in her eyes, or perhaps Good luck or Godspeed, depending how you translate it: sweet and young and new enough to this world not to have lost any and all hope of a recovery.  

 

Then I am left to my own devices.

 

I go to the bathroom, though I do not need it. At first, the chipped toilet bowl looks to be filled with a gritty sandlike substance. I lean down to peer closer, then snap myself out of it. Gross. I don’t need to know. Maybe I really am going crazy. 

 

The pharmacy at the end of the road has never, in the history of mankind, had the things I need in stock, but due to its proximity it is always worth giving it a try. Today’s pharmacist has funky glasses with chunky rectangle frames of amber acrylic. He runs an expert (and magnified) eye down the pink wish list in my hand (Merry Christmas, little girl! This year you get the will to live!) and shakes his head in a regretful, I’m on your side type of way. I’m sorry, I’d have to order them in, but you don’t live close by. 

 

The inevitability of it all makes me laugh inside. It’s okay, I’ll go elsewhere. I think he is almost surprised at the levity of my farewell greeting; cuts himself off at the brink of saying Have a nice day. I won’t, but I’ll be okay. I’m going to the shopping centre now, here in my old neck of the woods, my old flat a couple of streets away, back when I was both exactly the same and someone else entirely. I want to lose myself in the lurid glow of consumerism for a couple of hours. Maybe I will find a machine, insert a coin, buy a bottle of unfamiliar liquid and drain it, the way humans do. Proof that I am still alive, that I exist.

 

It is strange when people still actively choose to sit next to me on the train, mothers still instinctively pull their prams up alongside me, little expecting, little knowing. I am the human equivalent of an atomic bomb. A woman in a rose pink headscarf smiles at me from across the platform. Nobody knows where I have been. 

 

Out here, in polite society, it seems my damage is invisible to the naked eye (and polite I am: I generally only break down in private). They, the outsiders, cannot feel my cracks and fissures. A blessing and a curse. They’ve never waged the war inside my head. 

 

I swallow my blueberry white tea and allow myself to consider that maybe, just maybe, the rot will not spread. 

 

Now the sun is out, and, for better or worse, so am I.