A few days passed, Teresa ate small portions of baby food, drank water and lay in her bed. It was only when she gradually began to talk that they realised they might need some help after all.
It was Göran who was sitting by her bed trying to get her to drink a little more water when Teresa suddenly said, ‘There’s nothing.’
Perhaps he should have been pleased that she was talking at long last so they could work out what was wrong, but what she said wasn’t exactly something to celebrate.
‘What do you mean?’ he said. ‘There’s…there’s everything. Everything exists.’
‘Not for me.’
Göran’s eyes darted around the room as if he were searching for something to hold up as real, as evidence. He fastened on a bowl of yellow plastic beads, and a distant memory drifted up like a mist, struggling to find a solid form, and failing. Something about yellow beads and existing. Something about Teresa and another, better time. Teresa mumbled something and Göran leaned closer. ‘What did you say?’
‘I have to go to the other side.’
‘What other side?’
‘Where you become dead and are given life.’
Three hours later Göran and Maria were sitting with Teresa between them in a room at the psychiatric service centre in Rimsta. Teresa’s temporary descent into leaden misery was one thing, but her talk about dying crossed a line. They couldn’t ignore that.
Göran and Maria’s ideas about psychiatric care were somewhat exaggerated. They had expected a lot of white, and silence. White coats, white rooms, closed doors; so they were positively stunned when the person who greeted them was a perfectly ordinary middle-aged woman in street clothes. She showed them into a room which looked considerably less sterile than a normal doctor’s surgery.
A long conversation followed, during which Göran and Maria described the period leading up to Teresa’s present condition as best they could, and explained what had finally made them contact the psychiatric service. Teresa didn’t say a word.
Eventually the doctor turned to her and asked, ‘How do you feel? Are your parents right to think you want to take your own life?’
Teresa slowly shook her head without saying anything. When the doctor had waited a while and was on the point of asking a follow-up question, Teresa said, ‘I have no life. It’s empty. I can’t take it. No one can take it.’
The doctor stood up and went over to Göran and Maria. ‘Would you mind waiting outside for a while so that I can have a little chat with Teresa on her own?’
Ten minutes later they were called back in. The doctor was sitting next to Teresa with one hand resting on the arm of her chair as if establishing some kind of ownership. When Göran and Maria had sat down she said, ‘I think we’re going to let Teresa stay here for a couple of days, then we’ll see how we get on.’
‘But what’s the matter with her?’ asked Maria.
‘It’s a little early to say, but I think it would be helpful if we could talk a little more with Teresa.’
While they were waiting Göran had read through some of the information leaflets in the other room, including one on suicidal tendencies in young people. He was therefore able to ask, ‘Will you be keeping her under observation?’
The doctor smiled. ‘We will, yes. You can feel completely reassured.’
But they didn’t feel reassured. As Göran and Maria were driving home to fetch some things for Teresa, Maria launched into a long and mildly hysterical monologue, the key point of which was what they had done wrong.
Göran, who had got some idea from the information leaflets, tried to reassure her that depression was often a purely medical condition, a chemical imbalance for which no one could be blamed, but Maria didn’t want to hear that. She went through the last few months with a fine-tooth comb, and reached the obvious conclusion: it was those trips to Stockholm. What had she actually been doing there?
Göran, on the other hand, maintained that Teresa had been much happier since she started spending time with Theres, but to no avail. The trips to Stockholm were the element in Teresa’s life that had changed, and in some way they were at the root of the problem.
As Maria packed a bag with clothes, books and her MP3 player in Teresa’s room, Göran stood looking at the bowl of yellow beads. When he picked one up and held it between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, his left hand found its way up to his collarbone. And he remembered.
If I didn’t exist, then nobody would be holding this bead.
Picking her up from the childminder. The afternoons at the kitchen table. All those necklaces made from plastic beads. Where did they go?
There’s nothing.
Göran’s stomach contracted and he began to cry. Maria asked him to stop.
Teresa was taken into care. People were taking care of her. They passed like shadows outside the window of her eyes. Sometimes their voices reached her, sometimes food was pushed into her mouth and she swallowed it. Right at the back of her consciousness sat a very small Teresa who was perfectly aware of what was happening, but her clarity of mind did not reach the big body. She vegetated. She waited.
From time to time there were periods when her brain worked as it should. She would think, she would feel. It was the emptiness that was the problem. She couldn’t remember how it had felt not to be empty, to have a wall of flesh and blood to protect her from the world. It no longer existed.
Her situation could be described as a state of constant fear, overshadowing everything. She was afraid of moving, afraid of eating, afraid of speaking. The fear came from the emptiness, from being utterly defenceless. If she reached out a hand it might crack like an eggshell when it touched the world. She kept still.
After a few days of fruitless discussions, they started to give her pills. Small, oval pills with a groove in the middle. The days and the weeks flowed together, and she didn’t know how much time had passed when a glimmer of light began to seep into her immense darkness. She remembered the feeling of a fire blanket being thrown over her. Now she could see a tiny gap. The voices around her became clearer, the contours more defined.
For a few days she simply lay, sat or stood looking out through that gap, registering what was happening around her and taking it in. She was neither happy nor sad, but there was no doubt that she was alive.
Eventually she opened the gap a little wider and stepped out. She wasn’t exactly a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis, but she was transformed. She was Teresa the empty one, but she wore her shell and pretended that she was alive in a way that convinced even her. Sometimes she even thought it was real.
She carried on taking the medication, which she had discovered was called Fontex and was the same as Prozac, and went for counselling. She could remember the old Teresa now, the way she had been, and that was the role she played. Once again she did it so convincingly that she sometimes believed it herself.
At the end of February, almost two months after she had been admitted, she was allowed to go home. In the back seat of the car she sat and looked at her hands. They were her hands. They were attached to her body, and they belonged to her. She understood that now.
Two weeks before she was discharged, her class teacher had come to visit and brought her some school books, and Teresa had worked hard. The school work itself was no problem; the reading and the mathematical problems flowed straight into her mind and were dealt with rapidly, since they were no longer disturbed by the skeins of expectation and anxiety which are part of flesh and blood human beings. In two weeks she covered everything she had missed, and more besides.