When I was in the hospital, I knew a girl who collected her own body parts. Not her fingers or her limbs or anything of great importance like that, but the smaller pieces of herself that most people lose every day without thinking too much about it. Strands of hair, nail fragments, flakes of dead skin, and other pieces of that nature were what she was fixated on keeping. I suppose she just couldn’t stand the idea of those tiny traces of herself being out there in the world, mingling and melting into everything else that made up the universe. She confided to me once that the very idea of it made her feel a kind of disgust so violent that it kept her up at night just thinking about it. And she couldn’t stop thinking about it. Ever. That was why she was in the hospital, of course. We weren’t supposed to discuss our diagnoses with fellow patients, but she confided to me on one of many long, lazy days sitting in the common room that the psychiatrists suspected that she had some form of extreme bodily OCD. I had politely pretended to be shocked. She didn’t talk to many of the other girls, you see. Let alone about her condition.
Her name was Claire Thomas. She was twenty-six years old, and she had been at the Blackford Gardens Mental Institution for Young Women and Girls since she was fourteen years old, though I didn’t know most of this until we had already been in the same ward at the hospital together for several months. Her name was one of the first that I had learned when I entered the ward the weekend before my twenty-second birthday. It was an easy one to remember because I had overheard two of the orderlies calling her ‘Nightmare-Claire’ after unsuccessfully attempting to coax her out of her room for the daily afternoon walk around the hospital grounds on my second day of admittance. I soon learned that this was a frequent occurrence. More time outside meant a higher risk that she could lose a part of herself to the world. It was difficult to control the environment outside. One gust of wind and she could potentially lose several strands of hair, a few flakes of skin, maybe even an eyelash or two. It was safer for her to stay inside the hospital, where the elements were easier to control, and the freshly buffed vinyl flooring meant that even if she did lose a piece of herself, she could always find and retrieve it again before scampering off to her room and filing it away in her strange museum.
If you had seen her sitting in the common room reading one of her beaten up old novels at her usual spot by the window, her legs folded neatly underneath her, and the sun casting a warm glow upon her, you probably wouldn’t have known that there was anything wrong with her. There were a few of us like that at Blackford. Those who were not emaciated, who did not speak strangely, did not have crazed looks lodged permanently into our eyeballs, and who people from the outside would not have suspected had anything wrong with us based solely on our appearance. Claire in particular was like that. She had always looked so well put together that when she broke down it was always a shock, even to those of us who knew the full extent of her compulsions. She always had her hair pulled back in a tight, low knot, fastened with a baby blue ribbon that brought out her turquoise eyes and showed off her narrow, doe-like facial features. Sometimes she wore a yellow ribbon instead, but it was obvious that she preferred the blue one– a present from her absent older sister, I would later come to learn. This formal hairstyle was supposed to prevent her dark hair from naturally shedding as much as possible, and it was the best that she could do with what she had without wearing some kind of hat or hood, which the orderlies would not allow indoors. I’m sure that if she could, she would have worn some sort of air-tight body suit like the ones that the astronauts wore when we watched the moon landing together on the small black and white screen in the television room. I could just picture her walking around the ward in those heavy space boots, moving as if in slow motion from one room to another. Instead, on her body she wore long sleeved cashmere jumpers, even in the summer. These she liked because the soft wool easily caught any debris that might fall off of her, the stray strands of hair and tiny flakes of white dandruff clinging to the soft fuzzy texture of the fibres around her shoulders like tiny snowflakes.
The topic of those pricey cashmere jumpers happened to be what started our friendship. I also wore long sleeves all year round, but for very different reasons than Claire. I was a cutter, and embarrassed of it. I didn’t own a single t-shirt, short sleeved blouse, or skirt that couldn’t be worn with thick tights underneath, and Claire picked up on this a few months into my time at the hospital after the freezing winter months turned into a pleasant spring, and later into one of the warmest summers on record and I still had not shed my coat of long sleeves and trousers. She first acknowledged it in the autumn, when it was beginning to become acceptable to wear snug sweaters again, and she saw me scratching at a wound on my forearm through the itchy fabric of my synthetic cardigan. I must have reopened the cut, because the blood had started to bleed through to the outer side of the chartreuse sleeve.
‘Cashmere is a lot less itchy than other types of wool,’ she had said casually over her book. I knew that she had to be talking to me because we were the only people in the common room at that time apart from one warden who she made a point of never talking to after he had forced her out of her room for a short walk a few months prior, but I had still looked around the room to make sure that it was actually me that she was addressing.
‘Oh, really?’ I’d stuttered awkwardly, ‘I’ve never owned any cashmere.’
‘I see.’
That had been the end of the conversation, and I had not expected anything more to come from it other than Claire Thomas deciding not to socialise with me again, since I was clearly from a poorer and less cultured background than her, having never owned anything cashmere. The next morning however, when I had left my room to go down the hall to the shared bathrooms, there was a soft square package wrapped up in brown paper waiting for me on the floor outside my door with a small note attached to it.
‘To Anna,’ it said in elegant cursive, ‘I’d like you to have this. It was a Christmas present from my mother, but brown does not suit me well.’ There was no signature to indicate who it was from, but it didn’t need one. Inside the package was an unworn ash brown cardigan, made out of the softest material I have ever owned.
I had worn the cardigan that she gave me that same day, and she’d nodded in a neighbourly manner just once when I saw her at breakfast, letting the corners of her mouth curl up ever so slightly, before returning her attention back to her toast and marmalade. We started to talk a lot more frequently after that day, swapping book recommendations and lightly gossiping about the other girls on the ward when they weren’t around. There were times, when we were chatting over breakfast, or sipping tea together after dinner time, when I completely forgot that there was anything wrong with us. That I was there because I was so depressed that I couldn’t stop hurting myself, or that Claire was deemed unable to function as a normal member of society outside of the hospital due to her obsessive tendencies. There were even some days during our friendship where I didn’t mind being institutionalised in Blackford Gardens. Where I could fall asleep easily, looking forward to being there with Claire the next day, reading together on the springy old armchairs in the common room and talking about nothing. I knew that our doctors didn’t like our alliance much. Claire almost always refused to go outside for walks or any other supervised outdoor activities like gardening and birdwatching, which they insisted were just as important for our recovery as the drugs they prescribed to us. This of course meant that I started to go out less too. I had tried to persuade Claire to come outside a handful of times towards the start of our friendship, but I soon learned that it was almost always pointless. Claire was stubborn, and once she dug her heels in, there was no moving her from the comfort that she felt in the more predictable indoor environment. One of my clearest visual memories of her is from one of the days that I went outside with the others while she stayed inside the ward. It had been an unusually warm day in March, and a small picnic had spontaneously been thrown together for us to enjoy in the gardens that afternoon. We had all been eager to go out in the sun after a miserable winter, myself included. Claire, unsurprisingly, was the exception and did not want to leave her bubble but she had encouraged me to go amiably and had settled in quite happily for an afternoon by herself in her room. It had been a surprisingly fun day out at the picnic. The wardens had helped us to set up some simple outdoor games like lawn bowls and croquet, and us girls had laughed hysterically together at our shoddy attempts at sportsmanship as we played together inelegantly. I had been giggling happily with a couple of the other girls from the ward when I happened to look up at the barred windows where our common room was. I was surprised to see Claire standing inside, watching us from within the old red brick building. She stood very straight in her pale yellow cardigan behind the glass, and I could see one of the tails of her baby blue ribbon resting softly on her shoulder. She had an expression on her face that I had never seen there before. I could only just make it out from my place on the lawn three storeys down, but it was an unmistakable, all-encompassing look of sadness. Seeing my friend, who was usually so stoic, with an expression of such vulnerability on her face was so shocking to me that I had looked away quickly, feeling embarrassed, and pretended that I hadn’t noticed her up at the window. When I looked back up again a few minutes later, she was gone. Claire and I had barely spoken to each other for the remainder of that day, and I had been afraid that things would go back to how they had been before we had become friends. It soon turned out that I had been wrong to worry about this, however, and if anything Claire seemed to be more open with me than ever before. Not long after that, she had even shown me her collection.
I had heard the orderlies mention her collection in exasperated conversations both with Claire and with each other a number of times, but I had never thought too hard about what it actually was, or what it would look like. We had not gone into her room with the intention of looking at the collection, rather it was so that Claire could show me her new leather-bound Heron Books collection of Robert Louis Stevenson novels that her parents had just bought her, but it was hard to ignore the other, much larger collection that she had accrued once we were there. It took up at least a quarter of her room, and it was impeccably organised. Most of the boxes were laid out neatly on a grand, dark oak bookcase that took up most of the wall on the right hand side of her room. On the floor beside the bookcase were a few much larger cases. I kept stealing glances over at the collection, and eventually Claire had rolled her eyes and told me to go over and take a look at it if I really wanted to. The collection was clearly well cared for, and I remember thinking about the display shelves that my mother had kept when I was a child, which were always so dusty and unwelcoming in comparison. There were a number of different shapes and sizes of boxes, many of them very pretty and ornate looking. In a trance, I had asked Claire, ‘Can I take a closer look at some of them?’
As soon as I asked I had felt embarrassed by my intrusive inclinations but, to my surprise, Claire had answered gently, ‘I’ll show you instead.’
She retrieved some latex gloves and told me to put them on, which I had done obediently, though she never once invited me to touch any of the objects that she showed me. One by one, she took the boxes down from the shelves and explained to me with the formal authority of an experienced museum tour guide what was in each one, how long she had had that particular part of the collection, and how regularly she added to it. The first box that she showed me was the oldest in the collection, and the only article that she had not collected herself. It contained her baby teeth, and the tiny white bones clattered around in the dainty white porcelain trinket box like a rattle as she carefully replaced them back in their spot at the top of the bookshelf using an old wooden foot stool. Her parents had collected them as they had fallen out when she was a child and given them to her when she was old enough to take care of them herself. There was one milk tooth missing, which she had swallowed as an oblivious child before her parents could save it, she informed me regretfully. She kept this box on the highest shelf because she knew that it was unlikely that she would need to add to that particular part of the collection any time soon— she kept the teeth that were still in her mouth in very good condition. My memory of the order in which she showed me each item after that has become foggy, and I remember certain articles better than others. Her blue velvet shoebox full of yellowing, perfectly curved nail clippings, for example, is one that I will remember until the day that I die. The tall glass milk bottle holding her eyelashes stood out amongst the rest, as it was the only transparent container in the collection, and from a distance looked almost like a bottle of thick black tar. Another larger porcelain box, this one with roses painted on its sides, held long, thick lockets of her dark hair tied together with ribbons of various different colours. These were the hairs that she’d kept from each haircut that she had consented or been forced to have over the years. The hairs that she had shed accidentally were kept in a number of separate, less organised zip-lock bags that were themselves stowed away in one of the bigger wooden boxes on the floor. There were some that she did not show me, such as the other large box at the foot of the shelves that she casually told me contained more zip-lock bags, these ones containing rags soaked in her own blood that had flown out of her both naturally and accidentally over the years. One large metallic box that she did show me was full of clear bags holding many strips of sticky paper torn off from lint rollers over the years. The tacky strips were covered in stray hairs, dead skin cells and eyelashes, alongside some tiny fabric particles from the furniture where she had extracted them using the lint roller. I recognised some red fibre particles from one of the sofas in the common room where we often sat together. She explained to me that this particular box held pieces that she was not completely sure were hers or not. They were pieces that she did not want to risk being her own out in the open but, because she could not be sure that they were actually hers, she kept them together in this separate box away from the other articles that she was sure were from her own body. I can still remember the uneasy feeling that I had experienced staring at the contents of that particular box, wondering how many of those long strands of hair, flakes of old dead skin, or tiny eyelashes could be my own.
I began to distance myself from Claire after that day. My doctor had been very happy about this, and I’m sure he thought that it was at his suggestion that I had done so. I knew that he thought that my recovery was regressing due to my spending too much time around her, but that wasn’t why I had almost unconsciously decided to take a step back. It’s been ten years now and I still can't quite put it into words. There was just something so wretchedly sad about being with her in that room that day, looking through her unsettling collection together. The sadness that I had felt had reminded me of the sorrow that I’d seen on Claire’s face up at the barred window from down on the lawn that spring. It was the same breed of sadness that I had been admitted into the hospital to try to expel from my life. The same sadness that had led to my young body looking like a scratched up old car and that had already, at twenty three years old, cost me valuable years of my life that I would never get back. I think that I had known that day, seeing Claire pottering around quite happily amongst her boxes full of teeth and hair, that I did not want to let that emptiness encompass me for the rest of my life, and that I would give almost anything to never feel it again.
Claire realised what I was doing after only two days of what I thought were subtle distancing tactics, and we both knew that we would no longer be friends after a week of no longer sitting together at breakfast. I left the hospital with the blessing of my doctor almost one year to the day afterwards. I moved back in with my parents at first, and then eighteen months later into a small flat in a quiet countryside town where I now work as a waitress. My parents check in on me regularly, and I go back to my hometown to see them once a month. I always stare up at the Blackford Gardens Mental Institution for Young Women and Girls as I drive past it, but never for too long. It was during one of those visits to my hometown that I happened to bump into Julia Evan, a bubbly girl who had been in the same ward as me at the hospital, and had left not long before I had after finishing her treatment for an eating disorder. We had not been close at Blackford, but we had recognised each other from across the room in the small bakery almost immediately, and it was hard to ignore her existence there amongst the pastries, even though I couldn’t think of anything worse than talking to someone who had known me during that period of my life. Julia’s eyes had lit up instantly upon seeing me, and she crossed over to me and started talking brightly and unabashedly about Blackford before I could begin to process what was happening. She was clearly a lot happier to see me than I was to see her, but I had stood there amicably, trying to feign polite interest in her reminisces of Blackford and her life since leaving the hospital, almost in a state of daydreaming until she had brought up Claire and what a shame it was about what had happened to her.
‘I’m sorry, what do you mean about what happened to her?’ I had interrupted as she continued rambling on. I felt like my feet were glued to the floor, and the sweet smell of the pastries in the air suddenly began to make me feel very sick.
‘Oh– you know–’ Julia had stuttered, realising that I did not in fact know what she was talking about.
Julia had proceeded to painfully and apologetically explain to me that Claire had died after jumping out of a window at the hospital the year before, and that she had done this because the staff at the hospital had thrown the entirety of her collection out into the rubbish. It was a test, apparently, to see how she would react. It was irretrievable. I found out from Julia that after the initial meltdown that Claire had had upon finding her life’s obsession gone forever, she had been surprisingly calm. She had only had to spend four days in solitary confinement before going back to the ward and assuming her appointments with her doctor as normal. It was during one of those appointments that she had done it. The meeting was in his office on the top floor, which was unusual, but not unheard of. They weren’t supposed to allow patients into the offices, as they were the only rooms in the hospital that did not have barred windows. While her doctor had left the room briefly during their meeting to use the bathroom, Claire had gone over to the window and thrown herself from it. Her spine had been broken, several of her ribs shattered, and her skull had been fractured. She had died instantly.
I don’t remember how that conversation with Julia ended, or how I got home to my parents afterwards. I spent the rest of that month at home in my childhood bed, and my father called my boss at some point to tell him that I was sick and wouldn’t be able to work for a while. I slept a lot that month, as I often do when I feel like that old sadness is back for good and there is nothing I can do but bury myself in my blankets and pillows and pray for it to end. I dreamt a lot that month too, and all of the dreams were of Claire. Claire up at the barred window, Claire in her bedroom with her boxes, Claire reading with her feet pulled up under her on that old red armchair. I still dream about her occasionally to this day. The last dream I had was of her on the pavement outside the hospital, her skull cracked open, and her blood spilling out across the concrete. Her collection was beside her, the boxes all smashed open, and their contents were scattered all around her, blowing out into the world.
A very moving and interesting story, very well written.