Dear Diary

Spring 2002

It is eleven o’clock in the morning. I have not done any work yet today. I haven’t done any work for days, months… years if you count books, my only real work, the only work I value; what with Alex’s unhappinesses, and now this. Others find their work disrupted when babies first come along. But that was easy. Easy to find the discipline, even with three in terry nappies, one at nursery school, no car, no help, no money.

I remember when Shaun was on a conference and I wasn’t well, and I had to pile all three of them onto a tricycle to get Serena to nursery school, and then dash back to get them occupied long enough to meet a deadline: one of my first writing commissions, for a magazine. The day before I’d been issued with notice to quit the house by the end of the week. With Shaun away. His first post, as Assistant Curate in North London, was due to end and he was looking for another, and his boss, our vicar, thought it was “businesslike” to evict us.

It was possible to cope with all, then. It didn’t sap the spirit in the way that this does.

Upstairs there is a terrible, dark and brooding presence. It is like a thunderstorm waking to break.

I have been out to Starbucks to buy hot chocolate and an almond croissant. There was a time when I would have thought, I can’t afford Starbucks; but I have run out of other ideas. Besides, so much money has been poured down the drain, it now transpires, over the last year and more, that it seems futile to baulk over a few more pounds. All the savings Granny gave her in her post office account, hundreds of pounds being preserved for some special treat or project, all bled away. All Serena’s too, lent secretly to her sick sister, our Iphigenia, to appease this awful god that is poisoning all our lives.

I understand now, about the changelings left by the hidden people. She is gone. The ray of laughter and music we once knew is long gone. It went into hospital and what came back eventually, when they were done, the husk that was spat out, was this, this other, this possessed thing, this thing bewitched by the powerful doctors with their hidden arts and powers. We thought she was escaping from hospital, I thought I had outwitted the doctor by stealing her back again. What I now realise is that it was already too late.

They took her by various strategies. A friend, a close and dear friend, saying we must let her go, because she will do it again and one day she will do it for real. She wouldn’t, I knew that. But they frighten me and bully me, and I don’t stand up to them. Why, when my own child was at stake, why didn’t I? Because they came in the guise of friends. And because they threatened suicide. I know how suicide is, how much worse than accident or murder, because it nearly happened to Alex. But do you really think, I say angrily now, do you really think suicide would have been worse than this? Death would be sweet, compared with this. Death would be easy: no more awful hoping that she might come back.

A few days after she came home, after what I thought was she had come home, I went into the room, the guest room, not her room, where she was not exactly sleeping but brooding, and found a snow storm. Every page, every Indian-paper-thin page, individually torn out of her bible, the bible she was given as a baby at her baptism, and the room was white. The bible that had tormented and taunted her with her illness and God’s deafness and his unheeded promises.

She must get up, the doctor had said, the witch doctor who had to let her go. She must get up, and out, and do something, do a job or something. I was outraged, that she could contemplate labour for this child, such a bright child, who had been snatched out of her education so prematurely by these wicked doctors. I would not have it. I will not send her to work. She will finish her studies, she will. Make sure she gets up every day, the doctor said, to work or attend school or anything. I smiled, happy to agree to anything, so that she should be free.

But how? How do you get something, so solid and heavy, up and out of bed? How do you insist? Do you scream, do you steal the bedclothes, do you drive her to tear every page out of her bible?

You go to Starbucks and buy her favourite treat and pray, or leave your friends to pray for you because you have no emotional or spiritual resources any more, because all you have left is the tiniest trickle in the bottom of the vast wide empty riverbed, so dry it doesn’t even catch the sunlight any more. You hope that hot chocolate will do it, because you simply can’t think of anything any more. You plead. You go up every few minutes and plead. Your favourite treat, downstairs in the kitchen.

Two hours later, I wrap the almond croissant, her favourite, their most expensive, in a paper napkin for some use, sometime… something. I don’t know what, but something. It cost too much to waste. I pour the now cold chocolate down the sink.

I still have not done any work. Not for a long, long time, nor a long long time to come.

Common sense

Present Day.

I like Bink’s new shrink.

I can’t quite believe I’m using like and shrink in the same sentence, but life is full of surprises. 

We – Bink, Shaun and I (and how extraordinary is that, that parents can be welcomed as part of the healing process, instead of demonised as the culprits) – sit in Professor David Veale’s pleasant Georgian study in the North London Priory, and I think I’m listening to myself talking.

“Do you eat healthily?” he asks her. Given that the day before, Bink had turned up at teatime in a highly agitated state, pacing the kitchen floor like a caged tiger, saying she couldn’t talk to me unless I accompanied her to the pub where she could have a pint, a ciggie and a meal as she hadn’t eaten since the previous Friday (five days earlier), I knew the answer to this one.

“A good Mediterranean diet, with lots of pro-biotics and fresh vegetables.”

Bink writes carefully, in her diary, in the correct coloured ink for food.

“In bed by midnight, up by eight, would be good. It’s not just children and animals who love routine: it’s very good for the body, and for all of us.”

I am listening to a psychiatrist who is talking sense. Can this be real?

He tells her, in all seriousness – just as I would, in all seriousness but without any impact whatsoever in my case – that next time she is feeling stressed, instead of popping a pill she should dive into cold water (having first established this is practical: we do as it happens have an unheated pool at the bottom of our garden) and this will calm her down without the need for chemicals.

Where, of course, Professor Veale has the edge on me is that he can give scientific reasons for all the common sense I’ve been trying to sell to Bink for the last eighteen years or so. He can tell her what it does to the body’s neural transmitters when you put an icepack on your forehead.

Now, if I’d known that, the last time Bink was having a hissy fit, threatening her brother with a knife so we had to call the police because she was screaming that she wouldn’t have an ambulance because they shove her full of pills and inject her with the sort of knock-out you'd use to fell a rogue elephant in full rampage mode, I could have just put her head in a bucket of ice.

Something I have often wanted to do, believe me, but have never had the letters after my name to justify the impulse.

A couple of hours later, after she’d had her therapy session too – and yes, she likes the therapist and says she can work with her as well – she stopped and smelt a rose.

“See!” she said, proudly. “I’m doing as I was told. Smelling the flowers to calm me down.”

“Lovely,” I said. “Has it worked?”

“Nah. I don’t like the smell of roses.”

This is going to go well, Bink’s relationship with the Priory. I feel full of hope for the first time in many, many years.

And I really like a shrink who talks sense.

Bink Bonkers

For two decades my life and the lives of everyone in my family – most particularly my dear daughter Bink's own life and almost every breath she has breathed – have been dominated and devastated and all but destroyed by her terrible, harrowing, evil and wicked mental illness. It has been an insatiable black hole sucking energy, happiness, health from every one of us; leaving her a shadowed ruin of the sparky and wonderful and gifted and infectiously magnetic child she once was.

I have barely written about it... in public, anyway: I have reams in the private pages of my diary and hidden corners of my laptop.

It was simply too dreadful to tell.

Twelve years ago I even turned down an astonishingly generous advance on a book about her, when she was 21 and stunningly beautiful and seemed almost well... and for ever since I have wondered what strange, apparently self-sabotaging instinct prompted me to do so. For years friends, family, agents and publishers have told me to blog; to tell; to publish. For years I have refrained.

Not any more.

There have been many false and heartbreaking surges of hope. Many times I've said to myself, and to her, "You can be well." This hope; that chance; the other opportunity have come and gone and left her, now, as ill as she has ever been.

I am an incorrigible optimist. I have to be: there isn't much else to hold on to. When she was first hospitalised, aged 16, and life seemed almost as awful as it could be, my father said to me over and over again, "She will get well: you have to believe it."

And I do. I still believe it. Nearly twenty years from that agonisingly painful time and I persist in believing she can be well. A dozen and a half loyal friends have been praying for her for years, and still are. Presumably they believe enough to persevere. Unless they are mostly being kind to me and praying for me to survive.

She is about to start treatment again. The best treatment, I hope, in the world. I am going to believe again, yet again. That in a year or two my daughter will be, miraculously, the wonderful and extraordinary and gifted and gorgeous woman God made her to be, even though she missed all the joyous girlhood He had planned for her.

It is a statement of faith. Like any statement of faith it could end in failure, disillusion and despair. But I choose not to believe that it will and I choose not to countenance defeat.

This is going to be the story of that recovery, as it unfolds. Come with me; stay with me. Witness a miracle happen in real time.