Lime Marmalade

Name: Darlene

Age: 20 years and 5 months

Affliction: depression, paranoia and a possible personality disorder

Doctor's Notes: patient suffers from insomnia, repeated behaviours and no desire to marry. She is moody, disruptive and more than often has bursts of fear or anger in which she refuses to come out from her room. She is currently on a diet of vegetables and biscuits in an effort to get her to eat healthy foods. She is emaciated and often refuses dinner.

***

Darlene's Diary,

Location: The Table in the Corner of the Room.

Until last week, I was in a cell by myself. To be honest, I thought I would have liked a roommate - psychiatric institutions get lonely. I was eventually told that this isn't like prison and I won't be getting a friend to board with. I'd sit on my floor a lot, bouncing a small tennis ball off the wall opposite me. I'd read a book, I'd lie down and nap, I would stare out of a barred window and focus on where the metal of the cell met the grass of the hill that went upwards to freedom.

There was a daisy that grew there in the spring, every spring, almost like clockwork. Then it died. I sat back down in my space by the corner of the room and one day I heard the door next to me lock. There was a bit of a muffled argument before a clear voice, a woman, said 'you can't keep me locked in here forever.' But there was no reply. I was surprised I could hear her so well. These walls are supposed to be soundproof. But then again if I was bouncing my ball at night because I couldn't sleep, there would no doubt be a nurse coming into the room to tell me to stop as I was disturbing other inmates. I should've known.

I couldn't sleep that night and so, I stayed up bouncing my ball off the wall again and, right on midnight, the nurse came in and told me to keep it quiet. Almost a minute after she left I heard the clarity of 'are you awake?' from the other side of the wall. I had no idea whether she was talking to me and so, I didn't reply. But then, a moment later, 'you were bouncing a ball weren't you? are you still awake?' I replied with 'yes' in a slow, steady voice - trying not to sound alarmed, angry, or even frightened. You could say there was no emotion in my voice whatsoever. Instinctively, I looked over my shoulder to the wall, as if I expected a ghoulish face to be right behind me. But no, all that met my gaze was the light blueish-green of the painted stones. The colour of a death row execution chamber.

'Would you like to be friends?' The voice came back. 'My name is Violet.'

I felt my vocal chords quiver in the darkness, as if they were all huddling together in my throat and hugging each other around a campfire. My throat became increasingly hot until I almost coughed out my name in reply. 'Yes...yeah... sure, I'll be your friend...' I'd forgotten to reply to that part. I felt like I could no longer speak, so I asked her why she was here and let her do the talking for the next two and a half hours...

***

Violet's Narrative from the Room Next Door

I am surprised that someone wants my side of the story because to this day, I don't think I've done anything wrong. I honestly cannot believe I am here. They can't keep me locked away forever, they didn't even try to listen to me. So much for justice in this country. Well, you've probably heard a lot of the arguing, the back and forth, already. I have a personality disorder yes, I will admit that. I have had one since before I married my husband and I was on medication that was treating me quite well until some time last year.

You see, I got married young to a gentleman who I was probably not as in love with as I had initially claimed when he asked me to marry him. Eventually, he found out that I was slowly but surely going off the thought of being with him for the rest of my life. It began slowly as I started to distance myself from conversation, I would go to bed early especially when he brought his friends around to our house and often, I would refuse to visit his parents on important dates for family gatherings. But it slowly got worse.

My husband worked with vulnerable children in an institution like this one. He was one of the doctors who would go around and check on them. They had disabilities when it came to learning, I had only met them once at a fundraiser, but they were very sweet young darlings. It was there that I met with a teenager with quite severe difficulties with reading. She was a fourteen-year-old teenager with the mind of a five-year-old. She told me she wanted to speak to me by myself and so, I walked with her down an empty and fairly depressing hallway.

Whilst we were walking there was an air of dread that sank over me, I had no idea who this child was or where she was leading me. Finally, when we got to the end of the hallway, she held out her arm and reached for a crack in the wall. She pulled it slowly until it broke from the wall. There was a secret door there. I will be honest with you here, I was very scared by this point. I didn't know anything about this child and more importantly (and possibly urgently) nobody knew I had walked off with the girl. Deducing that nobody knew where I was in the few seconds between her opening the 'door' and leading me in, I just said some simple prayers under my breath.

Inside the room there a bed with chains on it. It was perhaps as big as if it was made for four or five single beds, but only two were within. One of the beds was well-made with linen sheets like I had at home, and the other had simple white sheets - that was the one with the chains. Both of the beds had been pushed up against opposite walls, but directly opposite each other. In the middle of the room, directly between the two beds, I could see where a fence might be put - I attempted to ignore it.

I tried to make light conversation. 'Those are like the bed sheets I have at home!' I forced a chuckle and she turned to me with big, almost crying eyes.

'...like I have at home...' I repeated under my breath. They were exactly like the ones I had at home. No. They were the ones I had at home. They were taken from my home. I turned back to the girl. 'What goes on here darling?' And thus began a tale of abject terror.

***

Sophie's Tale of Terror,

Recorded word-for-word in the sweet girl's style of careful speech by Violet on a napkin taken from the fundraiser

I might not be very clever but I know what I have seen. You see miss, my parents dropped me off here when I was little. I don't know how old I was but I don't remember what they look like. It was then that I started seeing your husband every week. He would come into our room and if we were not in bed properly, he would take us to the punishing room.

This is where I've brought you now. That's the bed where we have to sleep without medicine or food or even water. We aren't allowed to use the bathroom and we aren't allowed to talk to anyone. The longest I had ever been in here was three days because I'd been bad and your husband said I had to sleep on the bad kid's bed in the punishing room.

We are chained to the bed with nothing. On the other bed, there are people who come in, he said they are other medicine people. They come to watch what happens when food, water and medicine is taken away from us. They have cameras, they have notebooks and sometimes, they throw things at us.

***

Violet's Narrative Cont'd

Sophie broke down in tears at this point and told me she was scared because she'd not been going to sleep on time. She said that her legs hurt after one of the other children ran into her by accident. She showed me a fairly large purple bruise and some swelling which looked like it needed immediate medical attention. She told me this was why she hadn't been sleeping - she was in pain at night. She was terrified as she knew my husband was aware and she cried at the thought of being back in this room.

I was horrified. This child, and possibly numerous other children had been victims of vitriolic abuse by no other than my own husband. I scooped up her little emaciated body and left the party with immediate effect. If nobody knew I was with the girl down the hallway then nobody would care where I went next. I listed myself as her mother and checked her into the hospital to get treated for what was seen as a badly broken leg. She was all wrapped up and I took her back to my house, putting her in the guest room. She had only a small brown bag that looked like a sack.

As I tucked her in, I asked her what was in her sack and she said that it was her 'friends'. Now, as someone who suffers mental afflictions, I was definitely concerned about the 'friends' in her sack. When I opened it after she had gone to sleep, I found a jar of dead slugs. They were dead. Without further interruption, I poured the dead slugs into a tray in the back garden and collected some live and rather disgusting fellows that had taken to eating the plants the gardener had only put down last month. These ones were alive. But what to do with the dead ones?

I left them in a tray in the shed whilst I thought about it. If my husband was abusing children (and by this point there was no doubt in my mind), then these dead slugs might come in handy. All I needed for inspiration was a lack of certain mental illness medications. I poured them down into the bin and after a few hours, I had the most wonderful idea.

A long story short, I shoved those slugs into a blender at three in the morning. Dead slugs in a blender produce a mush relatively similar to that of a lime marmalade. I tossed my head back in triumph and buttered his toasts for breakfast at seven. Complete with lime marmalade which had run out last week, but was miraculously replaced. His favourite. I took some real time on these ones - you have no idea how long I spent making the marmalade extra special for him. He still had no idea that our guest room was occupied and I was about to keep it that way.

When he had left for work, complaining of a stomach ache, I started on dinner, working the slugs especially into food that only he would eat. I would eat a few hours before, then complain of a woman's affliction and take myself to bed early. It worked and I managed to slip into Sophie's room where I tended to her broken leg with a light medical rub which would slowly erase the bruising and help the swelling go down. After redressing her wound, I would feed her a specially made sandwich - toasted with lovely meats she had never tried before. She would often reply about how my husband wouldn't let any of the 'girl children' have meat because there was only a small amount and the boys needed it more.

She was very happy.

After eating slug-infested food for a week, my husband collapsed at work. I received a phone call some time during the day, I don't remember exactly when but the sun was still out and it was winter. I left the house, leaving the child to nap, and went to his workplace. As a piece of irony had hit him on the head, he had collapsed in the 'punishing room' whilst showing another doctor around. It was now well-known to the public already that my husband had a secret room for having people 'study' and marvel at children who were victims of rampant abuse and abandonment at their most vulnerable. It was no surprise that none of the women had any sympathy for him.

On the hospital bed he said he was looking for a child who had escaped. I asked him what he meant. He turned to me, grey and getting greyer and told me that there was a teenager who had run away and needed to be found immediately. The female nurses looked about, some in tears, muttering to each other about how evil my husband was, that he had probably murdered the poor child and hidden the body. According to them, he was just pretending to look for her. I told them that Sophie had been living with us as I helped her leg heal from a bump. My husband overheard. It was incredible. He could no longer speak straight. He could no longer move properly. He could barely keep himself awake - or even alive.

I went to the hospital with him and by this point, you could tell in his eyes that he didn't love me anymore. But I still fed him his favourite lime marmalade on toast, telling him I had bought it because it's his favourite and he was sick. As a compassionate wife, I wanted to make him feel better but I could sense he had started suspecting something more was going on. Be that as it may, he took the toast anyway and that night, died in horrific pain. I watched as he writhed, unable to even be sick even though he was hurling and heaving. He could still see me, he could still hear me. And so, just before he succumbed to this affliction, I picked up the lime marmalade and showed it to him.

'Slugs.' I said. 'Blended.'

The look of absolute fear in his eyes was hopefully justice for the kind of look of terror I saw in Sophie's eyes when she led me to that horrible room.

As he died, I turned around and left. I play 'mourning wife' surprisingly well.

As you can imagine, the child recovered fully and I sent her to live with my cousin across the seas, telling her the same thing I'm about to tell you. As a piece of advice: never put your medications in the bin. You might go crazier than you ever planned to. After my husband's death I started to experience hallucinations and boughts of insanity.

Everyone put it down to grief but only some knew about my 'disorder'. My cousin was one of them and so, Sophie is now thriving in a specialist school and very happy. The nurses have made the hospital my husband used to rule over a newer, kinder, more maternal institution where children are treated with hugs and bedtime stories.

Eventually, I tried to kill a cat in my neighbour's garden. I don't remember the incident but that's ultimately how I ended up here. It's fair, but they can't keep me here forever.

***

Darlene's Diary Cont'd

I didn't understand why she was telling me all of this but I got more scared than I was before. I felt a fear wash over me which told me that maybe, I didn't want to meet Violet at all. On one hand, she did something noble, but on the other hand she could've just shot him and got it over with. But perhaps a shooting would've been too obvious - she would be in prison and not here.

The last thing she told me is that she was going to get some sleep. She said 'good night' and I didn't hear anything but her quiet whistles of sleep until the sun rose the next morning. We were 'woken up' by the nurse doing her rounds but I hadn't slept that night. I rubbed my eyes and was led to the breakfast room. Toast, lime marmalade, I pushed it away.

I don't think I'm gonna eat today.

But instead of getting angry at the people around me, instead of frustration being released. I felt something wash over me, like a stare. It was something deep and intense in my soul. I tilted my head up from the plate and saw a brunette with a pale face and curls, staring me down with a maddening smile.

I looked back at the plate and then back at her. She picked up the toast and bit into it. Her eyes, staring into mine.