A big, fat, gold-star anticlimax
An exclusive extract from Helen Murray Taylor's forthcoming book, love lay down beside me and we wept
Content warning: this extract talks about suicide and mental illness
When I was twenty-eight, I bought myself a violet linen mini dress from the sale in Jigsaw, Covent Garden. Ten years later it was the dress I was wearing when I killed myself.
The dress was plain in shape, cut on the bias, with capped sleeves and a wide neckline that almost hung off my shoulders. The linen cloth was criss-crossed with diamonds of fine stripes in dark purple. In its simplicity, it was little short of a classic. You could say a little short, full stop. When I bought it, we’d been living down south for two years but I had not adapted. The humid summers in central London still managed to get their sticky fingers into me. The city aggravated an already precarious state of affairs, a stead anxiety- sweating that threatened to burst into a torrent under the most minimal provocation and that even industrial-strength antiperspirant was incapable of damming. I wore my new dress once in the height of summer and then, mortified by the deluge which appeared under my armpits and at the base of my spine and turned the violet black, I never wore it again.
That was, at least, until many years later when I discovered that the lithium I was taking miraculously stopped my anxiety-sweating. The drug dried my mouth and made my tongue stick to my teeth when I spoke. It set off tremors in my hands and in my legs, and it made my head shake of its own accord. It made me unable to walk in a straight line and it turned my writing to a microscopic scrawl that could only be read with a magnifying glass.
But it opened up a plethora of wardrobe opportunities. For ten years the Jigsaw dress lay screwed up at the bottom of the wardrobe until I decided, for no particular reason, to resurrect it that morning. Given my decision-making capacity at that time, that in itself was an act of unusual resolve. Despite being bombarded daily with well- meaning advice along the lines of small steps to be taken one after another, the reality was that I was barely capable of choosing which foot to put forward first, never mind which shoes to wear while doing it. It is odd that I should have chosen that particular day to select an untried, untested, almost entirely new (give or take a decade or so) outfit. But that is what I did.
The smell at the back of our wardrobe reminds me of my gran’s house, a nostalgic smell that had persuaded me to persuade Mark that our first flat was definitely worth buying ( feel at home here), a smell I associated with oak floorboards, threadbare rugs from distant lands and antique furniture, but which I later came to realise was actually woodworm, damp and stale fags. And so, on that morning, clutching my find, I resurfaced from the wardrobe depths and assessed the crinkled linen. As expected, it had a vague whiff of raw oak and neglect, but the smell was not unpleasant. When I held the dress up by its drooping shoulders it looked several sizes too big for me, but that didn’t worry me either. After the weight I had lost, it would show off my collarbones to their razor-sharp best. I tried it on. Peering over the knobbles of my shoulders, I admired first one side and then the other in the wardrobe mirror. My hair hung limply down my back. My legs dangled below the hem like pieces of loose thread. I smiled at myself, pleasantly impressed by what was reflected, blinded no doubt by the excitement of the big day. During the wilderness years, I was delighted to remark, the dress had not gone out of fashion. Mainly, of course, because it had never been in.
Impressed though I was, I couldn’t stay all day admiring myself. There were things to be getting on with.
In London, the dress had been a summer dress to be worn (the once) with bare legs and sandals, but this was Glasgow and it was already September. Summer was drawing its last asthmatic breaths. I pulled on black leggings and shoved my feet into a pair of double-tongued, low-rise Converse.
A few hours later, wearing that very dress and the rest, I was to be found in the resus room of A&E at the Western Infirmary, half comatose and fading fast, while some poor house officer tried and failed to get a line in me.
Of course, it is facile to blame the dress. But the facts are irrefutable. Whichever way you look at it, there is no way it would have been possible for me to pass the afternoon in my garden swallowing pills and swigging back gin on 2 September in the thirty- eighth year of my life wearing that particular Jigsaw dress if, ten years earlier, I had left the shop empty- handed.
So, fuck it. I’m blaming the dress.
You don’t have to be a brain surgeon to work out that I didn’t actually die. But the deceit here is not that I survived. The deceit is that I write flippantly, as if it is something to laugh about. It isn’t funny. Nothing about suicide is funny. Not for the person who completes or doesn’t. Not for those entangled in it or those forsaken by it. And not for those left asking if they did enough.
I crashed several times that night. I’ve asked Mark for details but he is too traumatised to remember more than impressions. Cardiac arrest. Ventricular fibrillation. Asystole. Clinically dead but not until they call it.
I don’t know who saved me. I don’t know who pumped my heart or cleared my airway. I don’t know who masked me and turned on the oxygen. I don’t know who cut through my dress and stuck on the defibrillator pads, who charged the machine and shocked my heart. I don’t know who found an open vein for the IV, who injected the adrenaline, or who intubated me and attached me to a ventilator. I don’t know who stuck the central line into my neck, who threaded the arterial line through my femoral artery, who titrated the drugs to bolster my failing heart, to stop my blood pressure plummeting and my kidneys from failing. I don’t know who treated my seizures and my pulmonary oedema. I don’t know who monitored mypulse, my oxygen levels, my brainwaves, my fluid balance. I don’t know who and I don’t know how many.
But I do know what it is like to skirt the edges of death. There was no tunnel. No white light.
There was no rush of memories. No ciné reel of my life.
There were no angels. No spirits. No precipices.
No falls.
There wasn’t a shower of bliss or a jolt of terror. I didn’t float above the drama watching the panic to resuscitate me. It wasn’t any of the things you hear. Any of the things you might expect. Any of the things you might hope.
I’ll tell you what it was.
It was a big, fat, fucking, gold-star anticlimax.
It was exactly…
Nothing.
Helen Murray Taylor’s love lay down beside me and we wept, will be published by Unbound on April 17, and is now available to pre-order