[Buttons.]

As I made my way downstairs I noticed three unfamiliar faces. They introduced themselves as Cathy, Rowan and Caitlin, and joined us in the dining room downstairs as we waited for the staff to get organised. Apparently all three were either out patients or phasing out living in the unit and only returned for education and trips, with the exception of Cathy, who still stayed the odd few days in the unit. I warmed to Cathy instantly, though I recognised the complex hallmarks of obsessive compulsive disorder, and the frail frame of anorexia, which saddened me to see in someone so bright and vibrant. We were both major fans of Harry Potter and spent the remaining half an hour so wait quizzing each other on anything and everything Harry Potter. Eventually I floored her with a question on Weasley’s Wizard Wheezes, and we left the table to wait with the others outside the unit’s van.


The bus journey was an agglomeration of humour, and the giddiness of profligacy. By the time we arrived outside the cinema every person, patient and staff was high on laughter and liberty. Walking to the building I entertaining a fleeting thought of running away, maybe buying some blades, but just as suddenly as it flashed through, it vanished, leaving me whole and unhampered.


Walking through the cinema doors was a simultaneously soothing and scintillating experience. Cinemas had always had that effect on me, and I breathed air deep into my lungs, carrying with it the scents of sweets, fresh popcorn and sizzling hot dogs. Joining the queue that had already formed for the Harry Potter film we waited with Gina while Y.S went to buy the tickets, then, Gina included, all pretended not to know Y.S as she chatted loudly to people in the queue.

After what seemed like an age we filed into a row in the cinema, Cathy on my left, Em on my right. We joked and teased through the adverts, though Y.S shushed us during the trailers, and then the familiar music sounded, and we were transported into a world of magic and mayhem, far away from the monotonous misery of our own lives. Once or twice I glanced down the row at the patients, intently watching the film, on the surface no different from any other teenager, yet each and every one had suffered more than anybody ever deserved to suffer, and were still struggling to survive.


There was Em, fiercely loyal with a fiery beauty all her own that she was completely blind to; Dillon in the top 10% of the country for sports, and trapped in a place where that talent was wasted on games of pool with patients; Catherine, sweet, kind, creative Catherine whose past walked like a ghost at her shoulder; Riana, small gutsy and gorgeous, her spirit confined to the same walls for months…all of these incredible individuals imprisoned, not so much by the unit, but by themselves…