Trust No Bitch: Part 3

Alice Jenkins

Talking therapy was pretty much the paragon of everything Alice had been attempting to avoid for the last 10 (at least) years of her life; skulking around, verbose, sentimental discussions, and tears, lots of them. It was also, unfortunately, the quintessence of her stay at the hospital, meaning that hour long sessions with Colleen were a part of her daily routine. Whilst a lot of the other women were given medication and saw a therapist perhaps two to three times a week, due to the nature of Alice's problem, she could not follow the same treatment program. The only drugs she was permitted were vitamins, toxicity reductants (whatever they were), and beta blockers, which were to be supplemented with more frequent, rigorous therapy. As if that wasn't bad enough, Alice had been told that her release from the hospital was contingent on her continuing to attend those sessions even once she left the place, as well as submitting to regular drug testing. At first, even more choleric than usual as a result of withdrawal symptoms, she had answered every question with an intractable, one word answer, though it became increasingly hard to keep that up. The hands of the clock would seem to ossify, 5 minutes feeling like an entire hour. Talking, she found, made the time go a lot quicker and Colleen, she supposed, was not so bad. A bit of a soft touch, she let Alice get away with saying, for the most part, anything, so long as there were full-blown sentences leaving her mouth. Tucking the sleeves of Gemma's jersey jumper over her hands and leaning back on the sofa, Alice glanced up to where the pristine clock hung over the door; she had already been in there for half an hour, although, they hadn't really discussed anything of substance. Just the usual "What are you planning to do with your stay here?", to which Alice, in a previous session, had once replied "Well, they do say literature thrives on madness...so I don't know. Maybe I'll write a book. Make millions. I could speak to some of the psychotic bitches here, get some good material." She hoped that the throwaway nature of the comment would be made obvious by the involuntary roll of the eyes and that Colleen wouldn't suggest them writing a novella as a part of their next group therapy exercise.

"Don't talk about these girls like that." Colleen had said indignantly. "They are your peers."

"My friend Cleo spoke about these kind of girls like that all the time." Alice had said boredly. "And now she's 6ft underground, with soil in her lungs, maggots in her eyes and not a care in the world. What do you think? If I speak like that too, do I end up the same way?"

But despite the tergiversating, Colleen always went back to the same question.

"Why did you start taking the pills, Alice?"

"I just wanted everything to be perfect." She had eventually replied. "I didn't feel like my work was good enough, so I started taking the amphetamines. I would overthink everything until it felt like my brain was overheating, so I took diazepam. I could never sleep so I took the....I can't even remember what I took for that anymore. But there's a lot of things I took, just because. After a while, you don't really need a reason anymore. You just do it. I suppose, why not? I never cared too much about getting hurt. Never really gave much of a shit about bad things happening to me as long as it was me that was doing it." Alice had paused and gazed at Colleen with feverish, bloodshot eyes. "It'll make me sound like a pretentious arsehole but...have you ever read Sylvia Plath? There was this one quote. I desire the things which will destroy me in the end. Have you heard it before?"

"Not before now, no. But it's fitting, I suppose." Said Colleen, sighing and tapping her biro on her notepad, screwing her mouth up to one side. "Why did you want everything to be perfect so badly?"

"I don't know who I am. I have, like, fragments, if you know what I mean. Like, different parts for different people. But when I try and put the pieces together, they don't fit. Perfect is just like a mould to try and squeeze myself into. Didn't matter if I had to use the drugs to do that, to chip away at a bit of myself so that I slot in better. That was it at first anyway. But now it's all I have, so I cling to it because I have to." Alice had frowned at Colleen, jotting down everything she said in her costly-looking gold notepad. "Why do you make me say things that make me sound insane?" She asked. "I'm not. You should meet some of my friends...they make me look like the most together person you've ever met."