Last week’s joke quickly becomes this week’s nightmare – and so it proved last month, with the good ship Carlos sailing into a perfect storm and Not Quite Wife hitting a personal nadir of near-tragic proportions.
I was supping a cocktail at Lola’s godparents’ house when the phone rang and someone began unfurling a wave of urgent Mandarin in my ear. “Loz, there’s a Chinaman on the phone,” I explained in fluent English. “What’s he on about?” It pays to hang out sometimes with Harvard-educated polymaths like Godfather Loz: a few minutes passed, and he delivered me a blistering bombshell.
“Dude, it’s pretty bad. Nadia is at the hospital. She’s cut her wrists.” First thought: Oh, f*ck. F*ck. Second thought: F*ck, f*ck, f*ck! I think I even spoke my thoughts aloud. Not only am I a bad husband, I told myself: I’m so bad, I drive people to suicide. I always thought that Not Quite Wife was slightly nuts, but this?
After a bit of manic Googling, I found the hospital and jumped in a cab to Tongzhou, wondering how it had all gotten so bad. The hospital was everything the Third World has tooffer. In the emergency ward (room, rather), passed out on something between a bed and a bench, curled, hooked up to a drip with heavily bandaged wrists, was my Not Quite Wife, Nadia. Passed out and temporarily safe from herself.
I just stared, not knowing what to do. A phone call jolted me to my senses: Godparents, best mate and a friend, visiting from Guangzhou with poor timing, were cabbing it out to help. And a great help they were, paying medical bills, bringing spare clothes and arranging to careof baby Lola while I worked out what the hell to do.
Lola would spend the next few days being ferried between various babysitters. My, but what a motley crew they were: A middle-aged, booze-soaked Icelandic divorcee; and a coupleof lively lesbians from Chile and Italy respectively. Yet Lolaabsolutely loved all her new short-term parents and was almost reluctant to come home. Who could blame her?
Over the next few days, I gingerly attempted to find out what had driven Nadia to such extreme measures. Health professionals seemed to agree that her actions were more of the ‘cry for help’ variety (what cynics might call attention-seeking) rather than anything else. Well, I needed help too, now more than ever. But suicide, attempted or not, just isn’t an option when you’re a new parent.
What actually triggered the bloodletting – while not be- ing the underlying cause – was pathetically trifling. Nadia had found a dress in our bedroom (not mine) and a completely SFW picture of an ex-girlfriend on my laptop; what Nadia was doing on my laptop, I didn’t ask. That such insignificant findings could lead to such drastic behavior beggars belief. But she has self-harmed in the past and the truth is, there are significant long-term issues at work in Nadia’s mind, the full extent of which I may never fully know.
Obviously, Nadia needed more than just bandages to heal and I set about arranging for her to see a specialist. In a country that hugely stigmatizes the mentally ill – to the point where such maladies can mean the revokingof visas – I was advised to use a Western hospital. This created a whole new set of problems. Psychiatrist or psychologist? Psychologists thought ‘talk therapy’ (with its attendant weekly fees) would be best. Psychiatrists, meanwhile, suggested medication.
An appointment was made for the latter – yet despite being paid more than the average migrant makes in a month, the doctor declared the need fora few more sessions before he could properly diagnose. I imagined strangling him intensely, while screaming, “Just give us the f*cking drugs, you overpaid tit” (but enoughof my sexual fantasies). The partial conclusion was Clinical Depression of the mild, recurrent variety, which was baffling to me. If slashing your own wrists is mild, what is a severe case? Presumably you’d need to be dead, at the least, for a serious depression to be diagnosed.
Thankfully, Nadia seems a lot better now and has vowed to be more positive about things from now on. Her hair has been dyed a bright, fluorescent red to celebrate the new phase. I’m under- going a curious mix of guilt and exasperation. I should probably have realized Not Quite Wife was finding things difficult: few friends, often looking after an infant, alone, in a foreign land with an emotionless Englishman who doesn’t show her much love; I wasn’t able to provide her with all the support she needed.
Initially, I’d resolved to not write about any of this, but I spoke to Nadia and was given the OK. Maybe it will, as she suggests, help her move on in some way, draw a line under things – perhaps even laugh about them. Yeah, we’ll see.
Meanwhile, we have introduced a few new routines to make things easier for everybody. A friend has been living with us when I’m at work. Nadia is going out and meeting people more. And I’m going to try to be less of a heartless bastard. As I said: we’ll see.
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