Not Committing Suicide

This is an excerpt from my unpublished novel "The Mummy and Daddy Christmas Present Fund"

Friday 24^th October 1975

I didn’t really try to commit suicide. I’d just like to get that straight at the start of this. It is a long story. But maybe I would have tried to commit suicide if I really had been sure that I would manage it.

And I’d also like to tell you right now, if you are thinking of committing suicide, well if you are not 100% sure you can manage it, then don’t bother, because you are going to have a real problem dealing with all the problems of not committing suicide after you haven’t done it, plus you will still be landed with the same problems you had previously which drove you to trying to commit suicide in the first place. So my advice to you is, unless you are completely certain you are going to be successful, just forget about the whole idea.

And plus: if you were doing it with the intention of not really committing suicide at all, but just kind of as an attempt to see what might happen, then forget that idea as well. It really is a waste of your time, plus all the unpleasant time spent filling out forms in the hospital, etc. can be put to better use on your part. Like for example how to really commit suicide without failing, if you are still interested.

Alternatively, you could just wait until you actually die of other causes, life is so short, and there are so many opportunities for dying either by accident or illness. You might not have to wait that long. So it would render all your efforts pointless. And exhausting.

It started when we moved to Lincolnshire. That was back in 1973 when we moved up from London. My worst fears were realized. The school I had to go to, the High School, was really old-fashioned compared to my London school, and the whole curriculum was different. For example, they were only just starting German in the Lower Fifth, that was the form I went into (which really means the 4^th form in normal English) and I had already had two years of German. And they had all been doing Latin since the year dot and of course I had never done Latin, because at my London school we had the choice between Latin or German. Well, the Lower Fifth was the point where they sorted out the clever girls from the not so clever girls, and the clever girls were allowed to continue doing Latin, while the not so clever girls had to do Cookery. That included me, of course. The Latin teacher refused to take me into her class even though I said I was good at languages and I would pick it up really quickly. Cookery!

There were other curriculum problems such as they did a completely different kind of Maths than we had done in London, so in the entrance exam for Maths I only got 29%, and was therefore placed in the lowest division for Maths with a pretty poor teacher, Mrs. Merck. While Mrs. Merck was teaching, nobody was listening at all. In fact everyone was doing something else, just not Maths. This was not conducive to getting Maths O level, which I needed to go to University.

I had got such a high mark in the entrance exam for French (98%) that they thought it must be a fluke and put me in the second division for French instead of the first! This was the last straw. I had no motivation left at all.

As for Sciences, well. I had to battle with Chemistry and Biology which were two mysteries and both classes were held by elderly and confused teachers. (One of them had had a stroke the term before and could no longer speak properly).

I got a friend straight away. She was sitting at the desk in front of me and turned round within about 10 minutes of me sitting down on the first day. She said, “What’s your star sign?” I was a bit surprised and had to think. I said, “Aries,” which made her click her tongue in an annoyed way and just turn back round again.

But Ashley (that was the girl’s name) and I did become friends very quickly, despite me being an Aries (she is a Sagittarius). In the meantime I know that Arians and Sagittarians get on very well because they are both fire signs. Ashley has really got me interested in Astrology. But at the time she had just split up with her boyfriend who was an Arian, and she was a bit pissed off with all Arians. (Actually her boyfriend was in prison for dealing drugs).

Ashley was the most interesting person I had ever met in my life. She was only fourteen (well we were all only fourteen at the time) but she had already had sex and knew all about it (with the boyfriend in prison). Her father is a famous ex-football player and they live in a huge Tudor house with a swimming pool. Everything in the house is incredibly posh. They have a large St. Bernard dog and her parents drive a Daimler. And I started going to stay with Ashley most weekends and she became my best friend.

At that time, Ashley only wore black and told me she thought she was actually a witch. She smoked and burned joss sticks and listened to music by Pink Floyd and Deep Purple. She dyed her hair platinum blonde and always seemed to have a lot of money because she got an allowance of ten pounds a month from her parents, which was supposed to include the bus fare to and from school, but Ashley was able to save some of this money because either she didn’t buy a bus ticket or she hitch-hiked. Ashley hitch-hiked everywhere.

Even though her parents are really strict, you can tell that they love Ashley and her brother very much and really want the best for them. What I like best about their family is that they will sit down and discuss things with each other, and everybody’s opinion is heard. Although Ashley’s father always insists that he is right, and her mother is very dominant, they still listen to what Ashley has to say. Her opinion still counts. In our family, if you are not of the same opinion as my mother, she starts shouting and then doesn’t speak to you for days. My opinion doesn’t count for anything in our family, and neither does Dad’s. Lucy never voices an opinion, I think this is her tactic for trying to stay popular with everyone. And Jonathon just barges through everything, he is just rude and domineering. And funnily enough, Mum takes his part every single time.

The only problem with Ashley is that she has another best friend called Stacey, who is even more weird than she is. Stacey also dresses only in black and is also into Astrology (she’s a Virgo) and is also convinced she is a witch. She also listens to Pink Floyd and Deep Purple and burns joss sticks and has a boyfriend and has had loads of sex. Actually both Ashley and Stacey also smoke dope and they have offered it to me several times but I have refused. But I did start to smoke cigarettes.

Stacey has even more money than Ashley because her parents are just waiting until she and her brother leave home so that they can get divorced, and they don’t speak to each other but they both give Stacey and her brother lots of money, as compensation for the bad family situation I suppose. And Stacey’s father has accused Stacey’s mother of having a lesbian relationship with the lady next door (which might be true). So Stacey is also always inviting us round, to do things like paint her bedroom silver and paint a big black zodiac on her door and drink wine and have petting sessions with boyfriends (I haven’t got one). She can do anything she likes, her parents are hardly ever there and they don’t seem to care.

Stacey is always telling you that she is “incredibly beautiful” and how she went out at the weekend and ended up in a pub with five different men who all told her she was “incredibly beautiful” and all wanted to go to bed with her. And at school Stacey and Ashley stuck together like glue and I was a bit the spare wheel, back in the Lower Fifth. But at the weekends I was mostly with Ashley so that was OK. But what with the awful situation in school and the fact that just everyone seemed to have a boyfriend and I had no chance of that at all, due to all my spots, I was pretty miserable.

I started to pretend to be ill about once a week, so I didn’t have to go to school. And nobody seemed to really notice or care. The worst part of that first term in the Lower Fifth was that Dad was not at home. His company was not moving up to the city until the following January, so Dad spent the first four months after we moved commuting back down to London, which made me wonder why we had moved that summer in the first place. We could have stayed another year in London, and Dad could have commuted up to the city for the first few months of the following year. But it hadn’t worked out like that. So he only came home at the weekends and Mum seemed to withdraw into herself more and more and there were just fights all the time, between me and Jonathon and me against Jonathon and Mum.

Our family seemed to be really dysfunctional without Dad.

We bought a detached house on a new housing estate in a village. It is just outside the town but it might as well be on the moon. There are two buses a day and they both go to the town. By the time we got into the Upper Fifth, I was already hitch-hiking everywhere. You can tell that this is not South-East London.

There is nothing to do in this village so I just lived for the times when I could go to Ashley’s or even Stacey’s. I was so miserable that I started to feel that I just couldn’t cope with anything any more and so when I found a bottle containing valium tablets in the cupboard (with Mum’s name on) I took one. I don’t know what I expected it to do, but I had heard (from Stacey and Ashley) that valium was supposed to cure depression. Stacey had already been to a pyschiatrist and they both said it was really “in” to go to a pyschiatrist and take tablets.

I started to write a new novel. I called it “The Ethereal Book” and basically it was just kind of a diary about school and everybody there, and about how I was feeling. It really did help me to write it all down. Tessa, one of the girls in our class, is also into writing and she knew I was writing the novel. She asked me if she could read some of it and I did give her parts, which she seemed to enjoy.

And then one day, right at the end of the summer term in the Upper Fifth, Mrs. Merck the awful Maths teacher told me she wanted to speak to me after the class. Mrs. Merck was actually leaving after this term to go and teach somewhere else. And not a moment too soon, was the only thing I had to say about that.

My opinion of Mrs. Merck was so low by this time that I couldn’t imagine that she would have anything of any value to say to me at all. And then I got quite a surprise. Mrs. Merck asked me why I seemed to be so miserable and was making so little effort and doing so badly at school when it was obvious that I had a lot of potential and could do a lot better.

Well! Frankly, I could have asked Mrs. Merck the same question about herself! But instead, I was so amazed because this was the very first time in two years of this continued and futile misery that anyone at all had noticed how unhappy I was and cared enough to ask me about it!

And then it all kind of spilled out. It was as if Mrs. Merck had unzipped a bag that was full to bursting and everything just fell out. I couldn’t stop crying and I couldn’t stop talking and telling her about all the things that were wrong in my life and Mrs. Merck just listened and she was very sympathetic. She tried very hard to make me feel better and to find a solution. Which she couldn’t of course. It wasn’t going to be as simple as that. But when she heard about The Ethereal Book, she asked me if I would like her to read some of it. And of course I said yes.

I brought The Ethereal Book to school straight away the next day and gave it to Mrs. Merck. And then I remained in fear and trembling worrying what she was going to say about it. After a couple of days Mrs. Merck brought the book back and told me that she had really enjoyed reading it and that I really could write very well. This was the greatest praise anyone had ever given me, and suddenly I just had motivation to continue living. It was as if I had woken up and realized that life was going on and I was still allowed to take part in it.

After that, during the last week of the summer term, Mrs. Merck and I met and spoke often. She had four children and one of them was a girl around my age. And at the end of the week I suddenly realized that I would not see Mrs. Merck again as she was leaving the school. And I also realized that I had very quickly become quite dependent on her.

When I told her this, Mrs. Merck said that it was no problem and that we could continue to meet, just the two of us. This was a really strange situation because Mrs. Merck had been there all the time, for the last two years, and my opinion of her had been that she was a waste of space. But suddenly, she had turned into a fairy godmother, and here she was saying that the two of us could meet each other, outside of school, in the future. You did not meet privately with teachers outside of school, even if you were sixteen and just about to go into the Lower Sixth.

And then Mrs. Merck and I started meeting outside of school, in the first week of the summer holidays. She drove over all the way from Rutland (I don’t know what she told her family) and I hitch-hiked into town and told my Mum that I was going to see Stacey. And then Mrs. Merck and I would sit in her car and talk, and the last time I saw her, I told her that I really loved her and I didn’t know what I was going to do without her. I could tell that she didn’t know what to say about that.

I said, “It’s all right for you, you are happy and content.”

And she replied, “Content, maybe. Happy…” She just stared out of the front windscreen and didn’t look at me.

She was going on holiday with her family, she told me, and she would be back in two weeks, we could meet again then. And that she would write me letters from where she was staying. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the next two weeks but of course I had to accept it. And she did write to me. They were very personal letters and they meant the world to me. Although she did write that her family had priority and that she would not have that much time to meet me in the future. And she said, several times, that it would perhaps be better if I went to see a pyschiatrist if I was so miserable, because a pyschiatrist would surely help be able to me.

I read the letters again and again and counted the days until 6^th August, when I knew she was going to return. But when 6^th August came, Mrs. Merck didn’t contact me. And after a few days I tried to phone her, when everyone was out of our house, and she was quite annoyed and told me not to phone her at home. She would not be able to explain my phone calls to her husband and family. She said that she couldn’t meet me, that she had no time at the moment. And that I should really go to see a pyschiatrist. And that she would only agree to meet me again if I told her that I was being treated by a pyschiatrist.

Well I had no choice. If I wanted to see Mrs. Merck again, I had to go to a pyschiatrist. So I booked an appointment at the local hospital for the following week.

I cannot describe my devastation. I didn’t understand why she suddenly seemed to have changed her mind. I wasn’t asking her to leave her husband and family and run away with me! I hadn’t told Ashley or Stacey anything about my meetings with Mrs. Merck and I was bursting again inside. I wanted to talk to someone, find out why she was rejecting me. There must be a reason. In order to understand, I would have to find out the reason. And that was when I thought of Miss Mortimer.

Miss Mortimer was the Physics teacher at our school and she lived by herself in a little house in our village. It was about fifteen minutes’ walk from our house. I didn’t know her at all, as you can imagine, because I had not taken Physics (it had been the option of Physics or German, which shows you how screwed up our curriculum was). But Miss Mortimer knew Mrs. Merck and I thought that maybe she could give me a tip about Mrs. Merck’s personality, or maybe some event that had occurred which would give me a clue to understanding her behaviour.

It was a very weak idea and I don’t really know what I hoped to achieve, but I was desperate and all I knew was that I had to talk to someone who knew Mrs. Merck.

So I looked up Miss Mortimer’s number in the phone book and called her, again when there was noone in our house. And when she came to the phone, I told her who I was and that I had wanted to ask her something about school, but then I lost my nerve and said I was sorry to have bothered her and that I had to go.

And that was that, I thought. It had been a ridiculous idea.

I went out to see Ashley and when I came home, Mum said, “That teacher from your school rang. Miss Mortimer, the one who lives in the village. She said that she wanted to invite you for tea and raspberries tomorrow afternoon?”

Mum was very surprised and I can tell you I was even more surprised. I did not want to go and see Miss Mortimer and I didn’t want to talk to her any more and I don’t even like raspberries! But now I felt completely trapped. I could not turn down an invitation from a teacher at school, who knows what consequences that might have! And the thing was, now Mum was a bit alerted to the fact that something was going on. I would have to play it very cool.

So I just said, Oh, OK, and the next afternoon I went round to see Miss Mortimer.

Miss Mortimer’s name is Nora and she lives in a little old terraced house near the church. She has several cats and migraine. It seems that her migraine is so bad that she often just has to lie in bed all day. She is 34 years old and I have to say she is not very pretty (and that’s something, coming from me). She looks exactly like you might expect a Physics teacher to look. And she is so certainly no replacement for Mrs. Merck. But she was very interested in me.

She had all the tea things and raspberries laid out, as promised, and told me that she had taken the liberty of calling me back (she had also found our number in the phone book – that phone book has a lot to answer for) because she had felt that I maybe had a problem and I needed to talk about it.

Well she was right there. Thing was, I didn’t really want to tell Miss Mortimer about my problem.

But Miss Mortimer persisted, and in the end, I did tell her, kind of, maybe not absolutely everything, but most of it, and I did ask her a lot about Mrs. Merck and whether she understood why she was now behaving as she was.

Miss Mortimer said slowly, “Anna Merck is not really someone who I liked very much. She was not exactly popular. She was not really considered to be a very good teacher.”

Well no news there then! I was pretty sure I had failed Maths O level and would have to be retaking it in the autumn.

Miss Mortimer asked me when I was going to see the psychiatrist and I said, Tomorrow, and she said, Well, you should come to see me straight afterwards then.

It was difficult to reconcile my feeling that I really did not want to see Miss Mortimer again with my need to talk about Mrs. Merck. In the end I decided that after I had seen the psychiatrist, I would return to the little terraced house, and tell my Mum that I was going to see Stacey.

The pyschiatrist was Indian and his English was not very good. I couldn’t understand a lot of what he was saying. His surgery room was also very large. He sat at a desk and did not even really turn and face me completely, and I sat on a hard-backed chair fairly far away from him near the door. Frankly, I could not even see him clearly due to I was not wearing my glasses and he was so far away. During our short conversation, we did not hit it off with each other at all.

I told him that I was very depressed and that I had come to see him because a friend who was concerned about me had told me to. I also told him that I had secretly been taking my Mum’s Valium and that it seemed to help me. The pyschiatrist asked me if I wet the bed when I was small. I couldn’t believe he asked me that! That is the kind of question that everyone thinks a pyschiatrist will ask you and what is it going to tell him! And, no, I never wet the bed.

He only asked me about three or four questions, one of the others being did I have a problem getting to sleep at nights. So I said, yes, sometimes. The appointment lasted about fifteen minutes. When I came out I had a prescription for Valium, and for Triptysol. That is a sleeping tablet. I went straight to the chemist and bought them. There seemed to be hundreds of them. The Triptysol were little yellow tablets and the Valium were larger and blue. I was supposed to take three Valium a day, and two Triptysol at night.

But the worst part of it was what was printed in tiny capital letters on each of the tablets. The word was: MERCK. That was the name of the pharmaceutical company that made the tablets. It seemed to me like too much of a coincidence.

I went straight away round to Miss Mortimer’s house. She had been in bed with a migraine but she got up and made some tea while I showed her the Merck tablets. That was the first time I mentioned suicide. I said that I really couldn’t see any point in going on living and that the trip to the pyschiatrist had not helped at all.

Miss Mortimer told me that it was very difficult to commit suicide with tablets, because you didn’t know what the correct dosage for suicide was. She told me that a student in her class at university had tried to commit suicide with 31 paracetamol but that that had been too many and so she was just very sick afterwards. I asked Miss Mortimer what the correct dosage would be then, and Miss Mortimer looked at me and said, “I am not telling you.”

Then she stood up and asked me to give her all the tablets. She disappeared into the house with the two bottles and when she came back she was holding two little plastic containers like the ones used in the science lab at school. One had a blue dot on the top, and one had a yellow dot.

“I’ve put a few Valium into this container,” Miss Mortimer said, indicating the one with the blue top. “You can tell they’re Valium because they’re also blue. And I’ve put a few Triptysol into this container, with the yellow dot. You can tell that too because they’re yellow. And I’m keeping the rest of the tablets here.”

“You can’t keep my tablets,” I said. “They’re mine.”

“Well, when you need some more you can come and get them from me,” Miss Mortimer replied. And that was that.

The first evening, I just took half a Valium and one Triptysol. That was only half of the prescribed evening dose and I hadn’t even taken the day-time dose. And I went to sleep straight away. The next afternoon, I was still asleep at two o’clock and Mum was shaking me awake.

“Lizzie! Lizzie! Wake up! Why won’t you wake up?” She seemed very worried. I could hardly open my eyes.

“I’ve been trying to wake you up for two hours!” Mum cried. “What is the matter? Are you on drugs?”

This was a bit too close to the truth. Obviously, these tablets were very, very strong.

“Of course I’m not on drugs,” I said. I went to see Miss Mortimer and she was in bed with a migraine. So I made her a cup of tea and told her about the effect of the tablets and we talked about Mrs. Merck again.

“I don’t think you should contact Mrs. Merck again,” Miss Mortimer said. “And you have to be very careful with those tablets. Try not to take them too often.”

I told Ashley and Stacey about the pyschiatrist and the tablets, and hoped that they would be impressed. They brushed it off as if it were nothing. And actually, that was fine with me really. I knew that they really were impressed but they didn’t treat me as if I were a psycho or something. Of course I didn’t tell them about Miss Mortimer and Mrs. Merck. I didn’t tell anyone about that.

Stacey wanted to go to London to see the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Ashley couldn’t go and normally I wouldn’t be allowed to go either. My parents would barely let me go out in the evenings to a pub, which was difficult, because that was where Ashley and Stacey spent most of their evenings out, in pubs. But somehow I managed to persuade my parents to let me go up to London with Stacey, under the condition that I was home by midnight. I was only allowed to go to the show and then come straight home. So I said that was fine.

We had just started in the Lower Sixth and the number of girls in our school year had diminished. A lot of the bossy boarders had left to go to colleges nearer their homes and a lot of the day girls had left as well, to get jobs or go to technical colleges. We have some privileges as sixth-formers. For example, we can go into town in the lunch hour, and we have some free lessons when we are supposed to do prep. And we have a common room and a coffee machine. It is a little better than it was in the Upper Fifth.

Stacey had been becoming a bit impossible. Ashley and I talked about her a lot. It seemed that she has really started to live in a bit of a dream world. It was no longer just about how “incredibly beautiful” she was, but she kept telling us both stories that simply could not be true, for example that men in Ferraris picked her up from home on Saturday mornings and took her to their aunts’ stateley homes for breakfast. And she was served by maids and afterwards the men told her that they want to go to bed with her, because she was so “incredibly beautiful” but respected her for her refusal. Stuff like that.

Ashley actually phoned Stacey’s brother once to ask him if Stacey had been picked up that morning by anybody and he told her that Stacey had been up in her room all day.

However, just because Stacey was going a bit potty it was not a reason to dismiss her as a friend, so we put up with it and still went round with her. Although Ashley was becoming more my friend than Stacey’s.

And because so many girls had left, all the friendship combinations were changing. So Tessa now spent a lot more time with us, because her best friend Clare had gone, and Yu Lin, who is half-Chinese and very beautiful, was also becoming a part of our clique.

So Stacey and I went up to The Rocky Horror Picture Show just a few weeks ago, and it was really good. And it was really wonderful to be back in London again, if only just for one evening. But after the show, Stacey wanted to go to a pub. And I told her I had to be home by midnight. And then we had a row. Because Stacey said we could get a later train and it didn’t matter if we got home at one or two in the morning. Well it didn’t matter to Stacey, because her parents don’t seem to care. But my parents would not allow me out again and my Mum would probably phone the police if I didn’t get home by midnight!

Anyway, in the end, I convinced her not to go to the pub and we got the train to get us home by midnight. Stacey was really annoyed, which was a shame, because it was a bad end to a nice evening.

It was just a few days later that it happened. I could not seem to stop being depressed and my life seemed to be going nowhere. Home life was terrible. It still is. Jonathon provokes me all the time, I yell at him, and Mum comes in and hits me and I get sent to my room. And nobody talks to me for days. It is always the same scenario. I am always being sent upstairs in the middle of dinner. And because the room I share with Lucy is right above the dining room, I can hear every word that Mum continues to shout about me. These are mainly “bitch” and “bloody woman” and the like. I am sure she yells so loud deliberately so that I can hear. And Dad just doesn’t seem to have any power any more at all. Jonathon is terribly rude to Dad and Dad just doesn’t react.

Mum has told me that when I am 18 I will have to “get out” and Jonathon has started doing a countdown. He has worked out that I will have to stay at home till the end of the Upper Sixth so that I will be “getting out” at the end of July the year after next. So he comes down every morning and tells me how many days it is until I have to “get out”. “Only 675 days till you get out,” he will greet me with, for example.

I had no boyfriend and I was not even interested in one any more. I was pining with love for Mrs. Merck who had not contacted me again. I could not even write any more.

The tablets seemed to help so little that I had hardly taken any during the two months since I had acquired them. And then one day, just about three weeks ago, it all got too much. One morning about 11 o’clock, I took a quarter of a Valium and half a Triptysol, and I went down to the bar at the Tudor Hotel, at the end of the road from school. In my school uniform.

I walked right into the bar and ordered a martini. Then I sat down and drank it. And I can tell you that with just the first sip of that martini, I thought that the world was going to come crashing around my head. Everything seemed to be swimming. And it seemed as if I was going up, and then I was coming down. And I felt as if I was in another place.

I don’t know what the Tudor was doing serving me a martini. It was just after 11 o’clock in the morning and I was in my school uniform, for heaven’s sake! And I am not even 18!

By the time I had finished the martini I decided I should go back to school but I can tell you I could hardly walk up the street! I had to hold the walls of the houses to move along. And when I got into the common room Stacey was there and she took one look at me and said, “Christ! What happened?” And I said, “I took some of the tablets”, and then I just sat down and put my head in my hands.

After that things happened pretty quick. It seemed pretty quick to me, at any rate, but I expect that about half an hour must have passed. Because the next thing was that suddenly my form mistress was carting me off to the headmistress’ office and Miss Mortimer was already sitting there and Stacey had already been interviewed.

Miss Cray is one of the most horrible people I have ever met. If you were going to write a book about a girls’ boarding school, and I’m not talking about a Malory Towers boarding school, more like a St. Trinian’s, you would have Miss Cray as the horrible headmistress. She strides around in a long black gown trying to scare people. And she calls everyone “Gal!” (not the teachers of course).

She was absolutely furious with me and started yelling at me as soon as I got in there. And I was supposed to be standing. She didn’t even let me sit down even though I was feeling pretty sick. So I just sat down on the floor and Miss Mortimer came and stood next to me and just stood there stroking my hair. And Miss Cray was yelling at me all the time. Mostly she was yelling, “How many tablets did you take?” And I just refused to tell her. Because it was none of her business. And because finally, I was getting some attention. Some publicity. And even bad publicity is good.

Miss Mortimer kept trying to defend me and Miss Cray yelled at her to shut up. She said that they had already ordered an ambulance to take me to the City Hospital and I said that was ridiculous and Miss Cray shouted, “Be quiet, gal!” Miss Cray had also called my Mum which was almost worse than calling an ambulance, as my Mum would have to come home from the school she was teaching at and she would not be happy about everyone at her school knowing that her daughter had taken an overdose of pills (which I hadn’t).

It transpired that Stacey had been in Miss Cray’s office beforehand and had told them that I had been acting very strangely and that the weekend before, we had been up to London and that I had been hysterical because I had just wanted to go home, and couldn’t take being away from home, and poor Stacey had had to try to calm me down and look after me. And she had realized then that I was starting to have a nervous breakdown. And Miss Cray thought that that was very significant.

Thanks Stacey.

At the City Hospital they pumped my stomach and they must have been a bit pissed off to find practically nothing in it. I know it was not a good idea to drink the martini on top of the tablets but I don’t think it would have killed me. I had not been trying to commit suicide, I had just had enough and wanted to “get high”, I suppose. Stacey and Ashley were always talking about that. I had thought it might somehow help me. But as you can see, it just got me into a big mess.

I had to spend three days in the City Hospital and I saw a pyschiatrist once or twice. It was all a bit pointless really. I spent a lot of time talking to the other inmates, who were people who really had tried to commit suicide. One of them was a woman with three children and a bottle of pills. She was really desperate. But the thing is, I remembered what Miss Mortimer had told me about how it was really difficult to commit suicide with pills. I guess that lady didn’t know about that when she tried. Because she just got sick as well.

My parents didn’t really visit me. My Mum was furious. She remained furious for the whole three days, and when she and Dad came to pick me up she was still fuming. My parents put me in the car and nobody said a word to me for most of the journey home, then just before we got into the village, Mum turned round to me and shouted, “Why did you do it?”

It was an enormous question and it was not really the right atmosphere to start explaining things.

“Your teacher told me,” Mum said. “Your Mrs. Merck phoned me in August and told me you were bothering her. What did you think you were doing?”

“Mrs. Merck phoned you?” It was incredible. My mother had known about Mrs. Merck all the time. Mrs. Merck had broken the confidence and called my Mum. And told her I was bothering her. And she had never said a word to me, just told me that she would only continue to meet me if I went to a pyschiatrist.

“And the town hospital phoned me too,” Mum snapped. “The pyschiatrist phoned me and told me that you had been for an appointment. And they told me that you are completely neurotic.”

The pyschiatrist got that from just four questions? How neurotic must I be?

“Why did they call you?” I asked feebly. I could not believe that this was happening. She had known everything all the time. And she had done nothing.

“They had to call me, Lizzie! You’re only 16!”

Dad said nothing.

“Dad understands me,” I mumbled. “I have a good relationship with Dad. We have an understanding.”

This was too much for Mum, I think. She just exploded. “Relationship!” she screamed. “You have no relationship with Dad! There is no “relationship” between you and your father! There is no “understanding”!”

Dad still said nothing.

“Dad?” I said.

Nobody said anything. After then it was quiet all the way home.

Miss Cray suspended me from school for three days. She said I had to see a pyschiatrist. The pyschiatrist comes to our house once a week in the evenings. He drinks a lot of Dad’s whisky and we talk about writing and the theatre. He says there seems to have been a storm in a teacup and maybe Miss Cray should go to a pyschiatrist. He is not coming any more after next week. He says I am cured.

Ashley phoned when I got home and I told her about Stacey. We don’t speak to Stacey any more. She is completely isolated in her little dream world now because she has no other friends.

And a boy called Ian who I met at a party phoned me and asked me to go on a date.

Yu Lin and Tessa are in our clique now. So it is the four of us. I am angry with Mrs. Merck. Miss Mortimer called and wanted to see me but I don’t want to see her. I don’t know why. I just think it is better if I don’t see her any more. She is having a lot of migraines at the moment and she is written off sick. I am very sorry for her but I can’t see her. I do actually feel really bad about that. She was kind to me and she didn’t betray any confidences.

On the whole though, I am much happier now. I will be very careful in the future about trusting people. And I have thrown all the pills away. Apart from the ones Miss Mortimer still has, of course.