I Looked Away by Jane Corry

Author:Jane Corry
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780241984642
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2019-06-20T00:00:00+00:00

33

Ellie

From my prison-cell window, I see a large white van arrive. It pulls into the courtyard below. Uniformed armed guards are bringing out a woman. She is young and is wearing beige trousers and a smart jacket, which suggests our latest ‘resident’ might have come straight from court.

She looks bewildered, just as I did when I arrived at this place. Like she’s being led to the gallows. It was a bit like that at Highbridge.

ECT is frowned upon now, and even back then many professionals had stopped using it. But this was a private institution, and the people who ran it were a law unto themselves.

We were in a different part of the San. This part looked like an operating theatre, just like the one in Angels, which I used to watch on television with Grandma Greenway long before Michael changed everything. The walls around me didn’t have any pictures. There was a light blaring down on me. I was lying on a raised bed. A man in a white coat who said he was an anaesthetist was there, and also Cornelius.

One of the nurses was holding my left hand. Another, my right. There were straps across my chest to restrain me. I could feel something on my head too, rather like a helmet. There was no way I could make a dash for it.

‘Start counting backwards,’ said Cornelius. ‘Ten, nine, eight …’

When I opened my eyes, I thought for a minute that I was back in my old bedroom with its pretty blue-and-pink-flowered curtains and the bed that my brother Michael liked to jump on.

‘Ellie? Can you hear me?’

My father! He’d come to get me out of bed for school. Afterwards, we might go to the park. Michael would want a swing. ‘Push me, Ellie. Push! Higher! Higher!’

‘Ellie?’

This didn’t sound like my father’s voice, I realized. It was much deeper. And he couldn’t be getting me out of bed for school because I was at boarding school, wasn’t I? Maybe there’d be a letter from Peter in my pigeonhole and a drawing from Michael with a big red crayon cross for a kiss at the bottom.

‘How do you feel, Ellie?’

A man was looking down at me. His piercing blue eyes seemed familiar but I couldn’t quite place him.

‘What’s my name, Ellie?’

I tried very hard but I just couldn’t remember. Saliva was drooling down my mouth. It felt wet and nasty.

‘Do you know where you are?’

I started at the white walls and the lights. It didn’t look like boarding school after all.

Suddenly I felt sick. I retched violently into a bowl that someone was holding out for me. And then I fell asleep again.

The experience was repeated several times. It must have gone on for months because when we began, there were leaves on the trees outside. When it finally finished, the branches were bare. But it’s hard to be specific, because the ‘treatment’, as they called it, affected my short-term memory. I was also very tired. No longer did I struggle when they said it was time for ‘another session’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.