All the Things We Never Said

  Dear Reader,

  When I think back to my teenage years, the most vivid memories are those of depression. Of the many times I cried myself to sleep, of the self-harm, and the periods of complete numbness. I grew up in a very traditional Bengali Muslim family, similar to that of my character Mehreen. In our culture, there is little understanding of mental illness. I remember assuming I was abnormal, that there was no one who could understand me. It was also around this time that I found YA literature. I grew obsessed with books on the topic of mental health, becoming overwhelmed at the notion that someone understood what was happening; someone felt the same (even if they were fictitious). But I noticed that all the protagonists of these books were white. No one had that extra layer of feeling their culture and religion were at odds with their mental illness. Which is why I wrote All The Things We Never Said. I wanted Muslim teens who suffer from depression and anxiety to feel seen, to feel understood, to know they’re not alone. It’s the book I wish I’d had as a teenager.

  It’s also a homage to my best friend. Emily and I have been friends since we were twelve, but neither of us knew the other suffered with a mental illness until our twenties. Emily is my support group. I don’t know where I’d be without her, without the books I read, without the strangers I’ve connected with on the Internet who deal with the same problems. Such discussions have been my saviour, and I think the more we talk about mental health, the more we can help those in need.

  Please note that this book deals with sensitive issues that some may find triggering. Here is a list of topics included and links to helpful resources.

  To Mum, for just letting me get on with it.

  Contents

  1. MEHREEN

  2. CARA

  3. OLIVIA

  4. MEHREEN

  5. CARA

  6. OLIVIA

  7. MEHREEN

  8. CARA

  9. CARA

  10. MEHREEN

  11. CARA

  12. MEHREEN

  13. CARA

  14. OLIVIA

  15. MEHREEN

  16. CARA

  17. OLIVIA

  18. MEHREEN

  19. OLIVIA

  20. CARA

  21. MEHREEN

  22. OLIVIA

  23. CARA

  24. MEHREEN

  25. MEHREEN

  26. MEHREEN

  27. MEHREEN

  28. OLIVIA

  29. CARA

  30. OLIVIA

  31. MEHREEN

  32. CARA

  33. OLIVIA

  34. MEHREEN

  35. CARA

  36. MEHREEN

  37. CARA

  38. CARA

  39. MEHREEN

  40. CARA

  41. OLIVIA

  42. CARA

  43. CARA

  44. MEHREEN

  45. OLIVIA

  46. CARA

  47. OLIVIA

  48. MEHREEN

  49. MEHREEN

  50. OLIVIA

  51. MEHREEN

  52. OLIVIA

  53. CARA

  54. MEHREEN

  55. OLIVIA

  56. MEHREEN

  57. OLIVIA

  58. CARA

  59. MEHREEN

  60. OLIVIA

  61. CARA

  62. MEHREEN

  63. CARA

  64. OLIVIA

  65. OLIVIA

  66. OLIVIA

  67. CARA

  68. CARA

  69. OLIVIA

  70. MEHREEN

  71. MEHREEN

  72. CARA

  73. MEHREEN

  74. OLIVIA

  EPILOGUE

  RESOURCES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  1. MEHREEN

  4th April

  Bismillah hir-Rahman nir-Rahim . . .

  In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful . . .

  I take a deep breath and step onto the prayer mat, ready to start the dawn prayers. As I mutter verses from the Quran under my breath, I lose myself in the rhythm, letting the Arabic flow through me, cleansing me from head to toe. Mum is kneeling on the mat next to mine. As she turns her head to the left, I see she’s got a slight smile on her face, a visual expression of the serenity that encapsulates her when she prays. The same sense of serenity I yearn for every time I pray.

  My religion has always meant a lot to me. People make fun of how much it dictates my life, but it’s the only thing that’s kept me going so far. Sometimes, when the Chaos in my brain is so loud that it feels like my head is about to crack open, I have actually found some comfort in prayer. Not like a ray of sunshine floating down or anything, but it . . . it soothes me, drowns out the incessant voices in my head – for a while, anyway. I can’t really explain it. I guess I’m just a no-questions-asked believer. I believe in God, I believe in heaven, I believe that the afterlife is what we should be preparing for, that it’s the only place I’ll find true peace.

  Mum finishes her prayers and leaves the room, but I stay kneeling on the mat. It’s said that dawn is the best time to ask for things, so I start a little personal prayer.

  Allah,

  I feel like there’s something wrong with me: something completely and utterly unfixable. I just want to live a life where I don’t keep being overwhelmed by sadness. Where I don’t suddenly feel like someone has punched me in the gut and I can’t breathe, can’t think, can’t see – when my head is so crammed with worry that I can’t even focus on what I’m doing, who I’m with, or even whether I’m breathing. I’m fed up of feeling like this, of being continuously battered by what I call ‘the Chaos’. I want my brain to slow down, to just . . . be normal. I need something to live for, Allah, because right now the only thing keeping me here is you. And I’m starting to feel like that’s not enough.

  As usual, I find myself so overcome with tears that I can’t continue. I curl up on the prayer mat in the foetal position, squeezing my eyes shut, clenching all my muscles, trying to push away the darkness.

  ‘Mehreen! Come down and eat!’ My mother’s voice is at the pitch that tells me this isn’t the first time she’s called. When I stand up, my body is stiff and the sun is blazing through the curtains. I wipe my face and compose myself before making my way downstairs.

  In the kitchen, Mum is at her position by the sink, furiously scrubbing a pan and talking about some drama involving her family back in Bangladesh, while Dad sits at the head of the table, tapping away on his phone, paying no attention to her whatsoever. The Angry Birds theme tune hums quietly around the room. Imran is leaning against the counter near the toaster, also on his phone. I slip into the room, fix myself some cereal and sit down at the other end of the table.

  No one looks up.

  No one says anything.

  I spoon some Shreddies into my mouth, feeling the hard ridges of the cereal poke and prod my cheeks and gums. I chew extra hard, trying to cover up the Chaos that’s starting to seep through. The Angry Birds theme changes to the melody of having lost a life; Dad grunts, then lets the phone clatter to the table. Imran laughs as he butters his toast. I watch from the far end of the room as Mum dries her hands and touches Imran on the back to squeeze past him to the cupboard. She pulls out a plate and silently hands it to him. He sighs and drops the toast onto the plate before taking a seat next to Dad, who’s picked up his phone again.

  ‘Want me to do it?’ Imran asks with his mouth full.

  ‘Almost got it,’ Dad mumbles. The lost-a-life tune plays a few seconds later. ‘Dammit!’

  Imran laughs, snatches the phone and starts tapping away.

  Watching the three of them is like watching a totally normal famil
y interacting. It’s nothing momentous, what they’re doing, but it’s the little things that make a family a proper family.

  Mum’s started chopping some vegetables on the counter. I drop my bowl in the sink, roll up my sleeves and grab the sponge.

  ‘What’re those marks on your wrist?’ she asks, turning her head to look at me, the knife poised mid-slice. Her eyes are firmly fixed on my wrist.

  There’s a jolt in my chest. The heart I thought had become stagnant starts up again. Jumps straight into my throat.

  This is it.

  The moment I’ve been both dreading and hoping for.

  I shake my arm to loosen my sleeve so that it rolls down and covers the scars, but it only slips down a little. My heart is thudding so hard I can feel it against my top.

  I stare at her intently, hoping that she’ll finally see me, that this pressure, this pain, will finally go. When I was a kid, Mum used to be able to fix everything with a few words and a kiss; I’ve been secretly longing for her to do the same with whatever’s happening in my head. But when she does finally make eye contact, nothing happens. There’s no love on her face, no concern. Her brow is creased, her posture stiff.

  ‘Did you get them from your bangles?’ she asks, her eyes only lingering on my face for a second before returning to her chore. ‘I told you to stop wearing such cheap jewellery.’

  Of course she doesn’t see. She doesn’t realise because things like this don’t exist for her. In her world, there’s only sunshine and butterflies. No one ever hurts. No one ever feels the need to not exist. Everything is perfect.

  ‘It wasn’t a bangle,’ I whisper, shaking the excess water off my bowl before placing it on the drying rack. I shove my sleeves down.

  ‘Bangle, bracelet, same thing,’ she says, chopping in Morse code. ‘Why don’t you use all that time you spend in your room to find a job instead? That way you could afford things that don’t ruin your body.’

  I stare at the knife as it moves up and down between her fingers, willing it to slip, wishing it were my skin beneath it.

  ‘Who’d want to hire her?’ Imran laughs from the table, his eyes still glued to Dad’s phone. ‘It’s not like she’s actually good at anything. Besides being a loser.’

  I get that urge rushing through my body, that tight constriction in the middle of my chest, my wrists beginning to itch. There’s already an image in my head of the trail of red, the sense of relief I’ll achieve. I wrap my fingers around my wrist and squeeze.

  Dad’s phone lets out an upbeat melody and he whoops, patting Imran on the shoulder as he takes his phone to start the next level. Imran sits back in his chair, looking smug. His gaze moves to me, but before he can even start his next insult, I’m out of the room, up the stairs, slamming my bedroom door.

  The need to cut is a physical thing. My wrists pulse, my heart races, my nails dig into my palms to try to quell the rage within me. But that’s never enough. I’m not strong enough to resist. Weak and pathetic, that’s me all over. Every time I do it, I hate myself, literally hate myself for doing that to my body. But once the thought enters my mind, there’s no other way to get rid of it. So I kneel on the floor and take out the craft knife that’s hiding under my mattress, like the loser I am.

  When I’m done and have tidied everything up, I log on to my laptop, feeling completely spent. Cutting usually makes the Chaos quieten down for a bit; it’s one of the only times I can actually think clearly.

  I load up the website I haven’t been able to get out of my head since I stumbled across it a few weeks ago. MementoMori.com – a website with a simple message on the homepage.

  Fill out a questionnaire to be matched with a suicide partner and have a pact tailored to your needs.

  It’s like something clicked into place when I found this site. As if it had appeared to me as a sign. I’ve been thinking about suicide a lot recently, but I’ve also always felt that it was out of my reach. I may not be the best Muslim, but I know that suicide is a sin, that I’ll regret it in the afterlife. The thing I crave most goes against my core beliefs. And as much as I try, I can’t change my stance on that. But when I found MementoMori, I realised maybe there was a way out. What I needed was someone else to take away the guilt, take the blame. If I were to join MementoMori, then I wouldn’t be the one responsible.

  I’ve been visiting the website on a daily basis ever since. I downloaded the information pack, and have read through the questionnaire hundreds of times. I have my answers written, ready to be uploaded and submitted, ready for me to get this process started, to make it inevitable.

  1.Full name

  2.Age

  3.Location

  4.Why do you want to die?

  It seems simple enough. Everyone should have a reason for wanting to die – otherwise why do it? But I haven’t just got divorced, or lost a kid. I’m not being bullied and I’m definitely not pregnant. So why? Why do I feel like this? I’ve tried to answer the question so many times, but I can’t get it to come out right. My words always sound whiny; I fear the match-makers will read it and decide that I should just stick it out and wait for life to get better. And there’s no way I can do that. So instead I delete the story I’d written about how I feel like I don’t belong, how I feel invisible and inconsequential. I jab the backspace button on my laptop as hard as I can until the slate is blank once more. I decide that a shorter answer is probably better, and realise that my problems can be summed up in one simple sentence:

  I can’t handle the pain of being alive any more.

  My wrist is pulsing again, my vision blurry from my tears. I hear Mum’s laughter float up the stairs and think about her detached reaction to my scars. Without even rereading the rest of my answers, I upload my questionnaire to the website, click the box to accept their terms and conditions and press the submit button before the doubts can creep back in.

  2. CARA

  You’d think Mum would just go shopping without me, or leave me outside with the dogs on their leads. (I told her I could make a sign that says ‘Hungry Disabled Orphan’ and make a few quid, but she just rolled her eyes.) For some reason though, she forces me to go in every time, which means I have to be around other people. And I fucking hate other people.

  I feel like a bloke being dragged clothes shopping by his girlfriend, having to wait outside the dressing room in that little space saved for men. Unfortunately there’s no space reserved for people in wheelchairs. Most of the time there’s barely enough room for me to go up the aisles. More than once I’ve knocked over a whole bunch of clothes, the fabric becoming trapped in my chair as I tried to escape.

  ‘I need to grab that biology textbook for you,’ Mum says as we leave yet another shop. ‘We’re starting digestion after the Easter hols, and I need to brush up on it myself before trying to teach you it.’

  I say nothing.

  ‘I saw this experiment idea on one of those home-schooling forums. We just need to get some baking soda and . . .’

  I stop listening. Her yapping gets really fucking annoying after a while. She thinks that by talking to me all the time she’ll make me . . . not depressed or something. It’s why she’s always dragging me out, as if misery is stuck inside our house.

  The sky is so dark it looks like it’s about to start pissing it down again. I’m surprised Mum isn’t already holding an umbrella over me. I keep my eyes straight ahead as I move towards the crossing. I can tell everyone who passes by is eyeballing me, whether it’s a quick maybe-she-didn’t-notice-me look or the braver I’ll-stare-as-long-and-hard-as-I-want-to look that mostly comes from old women or little kids too young to be embarrassed. At the traffic lights, I reach out to push the button for the crossing, but a chubby woman with a dog gets there first.

  ‘I’ll get that for ya, darlin’,’ she says, practically shoving me out of the way.

  She looks right at me as she presses the button, her eyes skimming over my face, over my wheelchair, settling on my body as she tries to diagnose me,
tries to piece together my story.

  I turn away, wishing she’d disappear, that her yappy fluff-ball would eat her up or at least bite her on the ankle so she’ll stop giving me the pity face. She stands silently and I know she’s waiting for me to thank her. For me to act like the damsel in distress I so obviously am.

  I’ve mostly learned to tune people out. Learned not to bother putting up a fight. Stopped trying to make them see that while I might not be able to use my legs any more, I still have a functioning brain. That I’m still a person.

  Or maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m only half a human now. (Paraplegic humour, get it?)

  I ignore the woman and look straight ahead, wishing I had the courage to move forward right now, straight into the middle of the busy road.

  But that wouldn’t work; what kind of monster doesn’t do an emergency stop for a cripple?

  The woman’s hovering so close I can smell the vinegarladen chips she just ate. Her dog sniffs at my ankle, then the right wheel. He lifts his leg.

  ‘Michael, no!’ She tugs on the lead and jerks the dog back before he actually manages to piss. He whimpers. ‘I’m so sorry!’ she says. To Mum, not me. ‘He’s just a bit . . . over-friendly sometimes.’

  ‘Oh, it’s no problem,’ Mum says. ‘He’s a cutie. What breed?’

  Vinegar Lady launches into a full-blown conversation about her rat of a dog who’s now sniffing at my feet again. I zone out, just listening to the slosh of the tyres on the wet road, the clatter as they go over grates. Wondering what it’d sound like if a car rammed into my chair.

  Then Vinegar Lady is whispering, and I know she’s talking about me. My disability. You’d think she’d be more subtle, especially since I’m right in fucking front of her. Of course Mum doesn’t hesitate to give out the gory details.

  ‘. . . car accident ten months ago . . .’

  I try to block it out, block her voice out, block the whole world out, focus just on the pedestrian-crossing light. Why the hell hasn’t it turned green yet?