Electric Blue Peugeot 206 Verve by Iona Bowden

After my suicide attempt when I was nineteen, my mother and I sat in her car. The car was an electric blue Peugeot 206 verve. The salesman told her it was once driven into a loch, she bought it anyway. It constantly broke down on hills so she would navigate Edinburgh, a city of hills, based on which route had the least. However, its favourite place to break down was busy junctions. She would sit with it on the side of the road, whilst fellow motorists jeered and swore at her, as if she had deliberately decided to block the junction. She would be completely unfazed and swear back at them. She kept that car for 16 years.

My mother is a working class single mother. She is working class because she lives in a scheme, has a huge tv, and is deeply stern and hard willed- but secretly very loving. She has drilled into me, since I gained human consciousness, that I am working class. It is the single most crystal clear aspect of my identity. I wrote my UCAS personal statement about being working class and a teacher commented that it came across like I had a “chip on my shoulder”. Both my mother and I took it as a compliment. I grew up watching my mother survive despite poverty and hardship. She worked three jobs to keep me clothed, warm and fed. I always noticed I was different from other children, my clothes didn’t fit right, I didn’t do dance, or go on holidays. Being working class does not equate poverty, the presence of poverty just repeatedly reminds you of what you are. I find the poverty of my childhood largely ineffable, but it gave me a grit that could not be learned nor taught.

I first became unwell at 12, and this grit metamorphosed into guilt. My illness was anorexia. It is a strangely paradoxical conundrum to have anorexia and be working class. How do you turn down food that your mother has spent her last £5 on? How do you turn down food when your mother isn’t having a meal herself? How do you turn down food when this meal is the reason the heating isn’t on? The shame of this consumed me but did not stop the anorexia, it persisted month after month, year after year. My anorexia was like the hot air balloon in eye tests, it got closer, far away, close again, it retreated, it was back again; If you looked long enough, it was always there.

My anorexia was missed during my school years. I don’t know why, I hypothesise because firstly thinness is praised, and secondly that teachers expected a child like me to appear unkempt and malnourished. My mother noticed but did not understand it. It was not something she’d seen, it wasn’t something people like us had, so we didn’t discuss it. So, she silently hoped if she ignored it, that it would go away. And it did, after I finished high school, for a year. Following high school I went to university, the first in my family. For my first year, my anorexia subsided, and I finally lived free from its grasp, feeling the guilt and shame begin to fade. For the first time, I felt like a success- like I had escaped the low expectations set for the working class. Everything my mother had sacrificed for me felt meaningful. If I did well at university, her suffering wouldn’t have been in vain. However, this naive relief was short-lived.

My second year of university marked the second time I became unwell. I was eighteen, I moved out and I very quickly became progressively unwell. My anorexia returned with an unspeakable vengeance, but this time it was different. Accompanying and triumphing over the anorexia was something I had never experienced before; I didn’t want to live anymore. This feeling simultaneously was both completely foreign and peculiarly familiar, like a lighthouse in the fog I had been unknowingly slowly approaching all my life. I did not know how to articulate this feeling to anyone, especially not my mother. Being suicidal to me felt like the cardinal sin of my upbringing and where I was from. Worst of all, it felt like the ultimate betrayal of everything my mother had sacrificed for and given to me. It was the most gruelling, all-encompassing secret I’ve ever had to keep. My life began to expeditiously fall apart, like bricks flying off a building in a hurricane. I stopped going to work, missed seven of my friends’ birthdays and abandoned university.

I also stopped going back to the scheme I was from as I would be full of abashment. It is made up of people like my mother, who are surviving, seemingly without complaint. Going home made me feel like my suffering was a result of my personal inadequacy. I felt like I was dishonouring my community, which was built on perseverance and endurance. I avoided my mother like the plague. They often like to say that you cannot tell people are struggling, which is true in many cases. But with me, it felt starkly obvious, everyone knew, everyone could tell. That I could not hide it from others felt like an added defeat. I did not want her to tell, I did not want her to know. The idea of her looking at me differently was killing me anyway. The only solution in my eyes, was to become completely alone, so no one would know, so no one would care.

The thing about isolating yourself is that you become worse and suicide creeps closer day by day. I sat in my room, with only my thoughts, that eventually became exclusively suicidal. When I was unwell before, suicide was never an option for me, this time it felt like my only option. The only person who I explicitly told about my suicidal thoughts was my GP. It is an unspoken phenomenon that doctors don’t believe young women when they clearly and definitively articulate suicidal thoughts. I was misunderstood and further defeated; the extent of my anorexia support was being weighed every two weeks. My anorexia and suicidal thoughts were pushed into in a volatile pas de deux that eventually rendered me silent. Sometimes, late at night, I would sit with my phone on my mother’s contact screen. I would never call, just stare for hours, reading the numbers over and over again like a secret code I could not crack. I justified to myself that she would never understand. Even if I did call her, even if she would have understood, I knew I could have never found the words. I could never tell her; after the life she’s tirelessly given to me, I did not want it anymore.

The only time I remember seeing my mother during this time was my grandmother’s funeral.

My grandmother was from the rural working class, so she was a protestant that loved the Daily Mail. The funeral was the only day I was free from the thoughts. My mother and I did not cry, unlike most of the family. We were both stoic, calm, and relaxed as if we had something to prove to everyone there. My mother has consistently reiterated to me throughout my life that it is selfish to cry in front of children, something my grandmother had drilled into her. I spent the ceremony on a pew with my four-year-old nephew, whilst his mother, my sister, was behind us crying. I stared at him whilst he obliviously played with his toy dinosaur and wondered whether he would cry at my funeral. I decided to read the eulogy because no one else would. My grandmother had cancer for many years, but that did not kill her, the radiation treatment eventually did. I read an excerpt of a Walt Whitman poem, the only line of which I recall is ‘battles are lost in the same spirit in which they are won.’ As I read the poem, I maintained constant eye contact with my mother in futile hope she would understand why I chose it.

At the wake, my mother made her way around family members, friends, acquaintances. Shaking their hands, hugging them. I sat at a table alone with my grandfather who had dementia. I remember people looking at us in pity and sadness, like we were a ship anchored in a storm. I liked that my grandfather did not view me differently that day, it was strangely comforting that he didn’t know who I was anymore, so he couldn’t judge me based on the standards of who I was mere months ago. My mother eventually stood by the door, alone, and said goodbye one by one to every single person that left. I hoped she would stop me, tell me to come home, demand even, showing that she understood, and I would not have to tell her anything. Once most people had left, she then doted on my openly devastated sister, but her eyes followed me vigilantly as I walked out the door. Then I went to my flat, alone, and the thoughts seeped their way back in, suffocating me like thick black tar.

The isolating eventually culminated on my nineteenth birthday, a month after the funeral. I didn’t want the birthday. After I survived my attempt, I knew I had to tell my mother. I still couldn’t. My childhood played in my head like a kaleidoscope in the hours after. Her tiredness when she picked me up from after school club, the sadness in her eyes when I asked why we didn’t go to Spain like the other families, the gifts for my birthday she’d saved all year for each a symbol of sacrifice, her driving me to my contact visits with the man who abused her, the meals she made for me that I did not eat.

The next day I had a counselling appointment at my university. My counsellor was a kind, gentle man. He had been the only person I had seen in the weeks leading up to the attempt. I never explicitly told him I was suicidal, but the thoughts were intertwined with every word I said. He didn’t look surprised when I told him what had happened. After much hushed discussion, I was presented with a choice, they would call an ambulance for me, or they would call my mother. Finally, after my counsellor promised he’d tell her so I wouldn’t have to, I opted for the latter.

My mother picked me up in her electric blue Peugeot 206 verve. As I waited for her to arrive, thoughts raced through my mind. That she wouldn’t understand that I had betrayed her, that she would never, ever, forgive me for this trespass of her sacrifice. She arrived and quietly spoke to the counsellor. I could not hear what they were saying but he looked scared. She is a foreboding, almost intimidating woman, but I love that about her. She looked at me with a blank expression on her face and ushered with her hand for me to get up. We left the building in silence. I could hear my dragging footsteps and her slow, steady breathing. We got into the car. She put the keys in the ignition, the engine light came on and began to beep. She stopped and turned to me and looked me straight in the eyes. Her eyes are deep brown, mine are light blue. Usually they are stern, almost cold, this time they were full of warmth, full of understanding. She says, “You know, when I look at you, it’s like looking in a mirror, it scares me.” Then she turned the ignition on and off five times until the engine light disappeared and the beeping stopped. Finally, she drove me home for the first time in months, where she fed me every day, where I eventually got better.

Illustration by Laura Darling