said.
‘Don’t
worry,’ said Keith, slightly disappointed. ‘She’s like that with all of us and
I suppose I could hardly have expected her to suddenly open up and tell you her
deepest darkest thoughts.’
‘We’ll
keep an eye,’ said Marie. ‘She seems fine but there may be stuff going on
underneath.’
24 November 1983, aged
15
It was Thursday
Fifteen-year-old Alice, languid, miserable, bored, pessimistic and prickly,
always felt slightly better on a Thursday because Top Of The Pops was
on. She loved her dad very much but his repertoire of Dylan and other American
folk singers didn’t say anything to her about the dark thoughts and feelings
she carried inside. Most of these she attempted to suppress in the family home
because having a mother who was little more than a ghostly figure in the house
these days meant that the balance of good-naturedness and optimism was a step
away from disintegrating. It only took one of Alice’s fearsome, teenage moods
to lay a big black cloud over the place, something Keith with his studied nonchalance
and desperate cheeriness could not cope with as’ well as Gina.
These
days Keith smoked a bit more dope than he used to, carefully avoiding discovery
by Alice, as he somehow felt he owed it to her to normalise her life as much as
possible, given that her mother set a skewed example of what a child’s
upbringing should be. But Alice always knew when Keith had smoked a joint
because his natural befuddledness would become more marked and he would exhibit
a fatuousness not normally present. He laughed much more easily at stupid
things and wasn’t very good at getting the conundrum at the end of Countdown, a word game that had recently started on the new Channel 4.
Gina
didn’t do much apart from smoke cigarettes and drift aimlessly round the house.
Every month she continued to have her long-acting injection which dampened down
her spirit to the point of her having no spirit at all. Alice watched her
helplessly, hoping that one day Gina would throw off the yoke of her medication
and go completely bloody mad for a few days. Alice knew this was unreasonable,
though. Gina’s psychiatrist had told Keith and Alice that he thought Gina was
suffering from de Clerambault’s syndrome, a psychotic condition — ‘A bit like
schizophrenia, when someone is out of touch with reality,’ he’d said to them,
doing his best to couch his explanation in layman’s terms. He’d also explained
that the illness involved Gina being convinced that the weatherman was in love
with her and interpreting completely innocent actions on his part as a sign
that this was the case.
‘Like
what?’ Keith had asked.
‘Well,’
Dr Desmond said, ‘he might make a movement with his hands or look in a
particular way and Gina will impose an interpretation all of her own. We call this
ideas of reference.’
He’d
also told them about some of the other symptoms. He said Gina might hear
voices, may become paranoid or might be confused in her thinking.
‘But
the drugs will help, won’t they?’ Keith had said hopefully.
‘To an
extent,’ he had answered, ‘but really the drugs are just damping down the worst
of Gina’s symptoms rather than taking them away, and of course the drugs
themselves have side effects that aren’t too pleasant. Gina may slow up, become
withdrawn and may get a slight tremor.’
‘And
how do we deal with that?’ said Keith.
‘By
prescribing another drug, I’m afraid,’ he’d said, aware that the barely hidden
look of disdain on Keith’s face was an appropriate response to how little
psychiatry had achieved in terms of treating the myriad subtleties that made up
the damaged human mind.
So
Keith and Alice had had to become resigned over the years to the ravaging of
Gina and her personality and to gradually accept that through a combination of
the illness and the drugs, the butterfly had turned back into a cocoon.
Keith
had tried to explain this as
‘Don’t
worry,’ said Keith, slightly disappointed. ‘She’s like that with all of us and
I suppose I could hardly have expected her to suddenly open up and tell you her
deepest darkest thoughts.’
‘We’ll
keep an eye,’ said Marie. ‘She seems fine but there may be stuff going on
underneath.’
24 November 1983, aged
15
It was Thursday
Fifteen-year-old Alice, languid, miserable, bored, pessimistic and prickly,
always felt slightly better on a Thursday because Top Of The Pops was
on. She loved her dad very much but his repertoire of Dylan and other American
folk singers didn’t say anything to her about the dark thoughts and feelings
she carried inside. Most of these she attempted to suppress in the family home
because having a mother who was little more than a ghostly figure in the house
these days meant that the balance of good-naturedness and optimism was a step
away from disintegrating. It only took one of Alice’s fearsome, teenage moods
to lay a big black cloud over the place, something Keith with his studied nonchalance
and desperate cheeriness could not cope with as’ well as Gina.
These
days Keith smoked a bit more dope than he used to, carefully avoiding discovery
by Alice, as he somehow felt he owed it to her to normalise her life as much as
possible, given that her mother set a skewed example of what a child’s
upbringing should be. But Alice always knew when Keith had smoked a joint
because his natural befuddledness would become more marked and he would exhibit
a fatuousness not normally present. He laughed much more easily at stupid
things and wasn’t very good at getting the conundrum at the end of Countdown, a word game that had recently started on the new Channel 4.
Gina
didn’t do much apart from smoke cigarettes and drift aimlessly round the house.
Every month she continued to have her long-acting injection which dampened down
her spirit to the point of her having no spirit at all. Alice watched her
helplessly, hoping that one day Gina would throw off the yoke of her medication
and go completely bloody mad for a few days. Alice knew this was unreasonable,
though. Gina’s psychiatrist had told Keith and Alice that he thought Gina was
suffering from de Clerambault’s syndrome, a psychotic condition — ‘A bit like
schizophrenia, when someone is out of touch with reality,’ he’d said to them,
doing his best to couch his explanation in layman’s terms. He’d also explained
that the illness involved Gina being convinced that the weatherman was in love
with her and interpreting completely innocent actions on his part as a sign
that this was the case.
‘Like
what?’ Keith had asked.
‘Well,’
Dr Desmond said, ‘he might make a movement with his hands or look in a
particular way and Gina will impose an interpretation all of her own. We call this
ideas of reference.’
He’d
also told them about some of the other symptoms. He said Gina might hear
voices, may become paranoid or might be confused in her thinking.
‘But
the drugs will help, won’t they?’ Keith had said hopefully.
‘To an
extent,’ he had answered, ‘but really the drugs are just damping down the worst
of Gina’s symptoms rather than taking them away, and of course the drugs
themselves have side effects that aren’t too pleasant. Gina may slow up, become
withdrawn and may get a slight tremor.’
‘And
how do we deal with that?’ said Keith.
‘By
prescribing another drug, I’m afraid,’ he’d said, aware that the barely hidden
look of disdain on Keith’s face was an appropriate response to how little
psychiatry had achieved in terms of treating the myriad subtleties that made up
the damaged human mind.
So
Keith and Alice had had to become resigned over the years to the ravaging of
Gina and her personality and to gradually accept that through a combination of
the illness and the drugs, the butterfly had turned back into a cocoon.
Keith
had tried to explain this as
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