Painkiller (8 page)

Niall is sitting uncomfortably on one of the new, impractical sofas, and he springs up to meet me, lunging to carry my bag.

‘You’re here. Great. Finally,’ he says, unnecessarily.

He’s got a look on his face. I’ve seen that look before. He looks like a wounded date, left waiting for hours in a restaurant, drinking water and chewing the flowers, hoping she turns up before the kitchens close.

I know I hadn’t seen him in months but I do have a habit of not showing up. My condition often derails my day. Niall’s making me feel guilty. He has no
right
to make me feel guilty. I feel tension gathering in my shoulders.

‘I’ve already got the room downstairs,’ he says, gesturing to the lifts. ‘Shall we go?’

Back in the steamy atmosphere of the massage room, I manage to relax a little. I dip into the changing rooms and shrug off my shirt and skirt. The hotel dressing gown is there waiting for me, soft and freshly laundered.

I lie on the table, and brace myself. Niall is too eager to get started, and his hands are still cold. I suck in a sharp breath. He doesn’t notice.

‘Where have you been? I haven’t seen you for months.’

‘The usual. Pain. It’s been rough. I haven’t been up to visiting.’

‘You didn’t reply to my texts.’

‘No I didn’t. The pain stops me doing little things too. I have told you that. Oww. I guess you weren’t listening.’

‘I thought you’d disappeared again. Forgotten about me.’

‘It’s been rough. I haven’t been up to coming out.’

His knuckles press into the small of my back and drag ever so slowly up my spine. The agony is immediate and profound.

‘Fuck…’

Niall ignores my expletive.

‘If you can’t come out, then I should come to see you.’

‘I’ve told you that as well. I’m a private person. I don’t want you coming to my house. I don’t want therapy at home.’

‘I’m not anyone.’ He sounds hurt.

‘Sorry, Niall. I’ve got nothing against you, but my home is my sanctuary. It’s my personal place where I try to conduct a normal life, as wife and human being and normal member of the human race —’

I gasp at the sudden pressure.

‘— Mr Atos comes into my home every six months and I feel I have to fumigate the place. I don’t want therapists and consultants in my house, sitting on my sofa and turning my house into a surrogate clinic. Meeting here with you works for me fine.’

The reason I don’t want him in the house is because this feels too much like I’m having an affair.
 

That’s what I’m really thinking.

‘Well it’s not working is it, because this…’

His hands find a knobbly bit of muscle, and I howl.

‘… is not good. Not good at all. You’ve left it far too long.’

‘I can’t help it, if I haven’t been up to it. As I said, it’s been rough.’

‘If it’s rough, then that’s more reason than ever for me to come over.’

‘Yes, Mum.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘So am I. I have days, really bad days.’

‘We all have bad days.’

‘Oh God, you’re not going to try the tough-love thing, like my sister? You’d better not tell me to pull myself together, or I will bite your bollocks off.’

He’s not ready for my anger, and it unbalances him. How ironic, as he was the one who saw how unbalanced I was in the beginning. ‘I’m just saying we all have bad days. It’s how we deal with them —’

‘Oh fuck off,’ I snap.

‘That’s not a positive attitude. I’m trying to help.’

‘Oh, fuck off some more. And when you’ve finished fucking off, fuck off some more. And then come back and fuck off again.’

My pain is rising now. It roars around my body like a forest fire.

‘No one has bad days like me,’ I say eventually. ‘I have days when I can do nothing, absolutely nothing.’

‘Well of course we —’

‘Don’t interrupt. Sometimes I am a living, breathing dead body, lying in state. Sometimes I open my eyes in the morning and pray for the day to end. Don’t be one of those stupid people, who think because I’ve got a head on my shoulders and legs under my body that I can text and answer the door and make you a cup of tea and sit and talk and think like a normal human being. Because I can’t.’

‘I know, but a lot of it is state of mind.’

‘Are you trying to raise my pain levels? Because that’s what you’re doing right now.’

I can’t take any more.

‘Stop it,’ I say, and get up off the table. ‘I can’t do this now. You’ve upset me. And when I get upset it exacerbates the nerve pain. I’ve told you this a dozen times but I guess you didn’t listen. No one really listens when I talk about my pain.’

I stumble back into the changing room and put my clothes on. Niall doesn’t know what to say.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says eventually, through the partition.

‘It’s a bit late for that.’

‘I shouldn’t have said those things.’

‘… Is the correct answer,’ I say bitterly. ‘You win a food mixer.’

‘Let me take you to the hotel restaurant for lunch. On me.’

‘What? You are priceless.’

‘Please, so I can say sorry.’

‘So you can feel better about yourself? No thank you. I would like to concentrate on me feeling better, thank you very much.’

‘You need to calm down, and you need to stay inside, in the warmth, and you need a full stomach. Let me help you recover enough to drive home.’

He’s right. So against my best wishes, I’m in the restaurant. The big stodgy lunch has been very naughty, but it was very badly needed. The restaurant has a fire, and I’m feeling warm inside and out. The pickaxe in my head is now just a toothpick, I still feel like shit, but I’m feeling more relaxed. Not the way everyone else understands the English word ‘relaxed’ but how the little country that is Greater Monikastan understands it. In Greater Monikastan ‘relaxed’ means ‘slightly less pain’.

Niall apologised profusely for the first five minutes, but he had the good sense to sense that even that irritates me, and he now makes light, bright conversation about politics, television, music… Anything but talk about my pain. I appreciate that.

But this situation, this is the reason why I’m never giving Niall my address. I have visions of him gripped by a zeal to cure me, like Dominic had in the old days. I have nightmares of him turning up uninvited on my doorstep, a sloppy lopsided stupid grin on his face like one of his cheery text messages, and putting me through pain, shame and agony on the spot, whether I want it or not. I can’t cope with that. This has to be on my terms. I have to control this thing or the walls will crumble, and my life will be invaded by Niall and people like Niall, and I will be a full-time patient and plaything for people with creams and pills and massage tables.

I don’t know how to explain this to him without hurting him. So I don’t try. I just try to communicate what it’s like to be me, and hope he gets the message.

Niall wants to be a good boy again; he wants to examine what he has done like a knotty muscle, and give it a thorough massage. ‘I shouldn’t have talked like that, but I was anxious. I hadn’t seen you in a long while, and I thought you had… forgotten about me.’

‘Well I’m here.’ I waggle a finger at my face. ‘Almost alive and almost kicking.’

‘I couldn’t stop myself.’ He was getting angry with himself. ‘I know all about how your pain works, how stress makes it worse, but I still carried on.’

‘I laughed when Dr Kumar explained it to me,’ I say. ‘“You should avoid stress, Monica,” he said. “The nerves will turn that fight-or-flight response into more pain.” God how I laughed when he said that. The irony.’

Niall is starting to mope now, like he is the victim in all this. ‘I knew all that. I turned a good day into a bad day.’

‘Niall, don’t worry. I know your chronic condition.’

‘My
condition
?’

‘Your life is afflicted by a bad case of being a bloke.’

I say it lightly, and he purses his lips, trying to take the joke in good part.
He wants to be different from the rest
, I think.
I can see it. He wants to be the confidant, the one who can hold my hand, the one who understands.

‘OK,’ I say. ‘Let me tell you about a
bad
day. A day when I was suspended over hot needles, when the pills didn’t do anything but turn my brain upside down; when the shapes in the wallpaper were laughing at me and the pavement outside looked so inviting to splat against. I developed a theory; I reasoned that if there was less of my body to feel pain, then it would be bearable.

‘I went to my doctor and talked seriously about the possibility of getting my arms and legs amputated. I would have rather lived the rest of my life as a paperweight than endure my life as it was. Dr Kumar entertained my theory. I was sweating buckets in his office, trying not to end up as a pool of insensible offal under his chair, and he was seriously talking about amputation, and I was seriously listening.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He said, and I quote…’ I put on my best Dr Kumar voice, ‘“It is not that ridiculous. It is actually a method they use with wounded soldiers.” He said it in that lovely way of his, the way he avoids all contractions, like a robot. There’s no “it’s”, no “she’s”. I love it.’

People who hail from the Indian subcontinent have such a beautiful precise way of speaking, I think, it’s as though they’re still in love with the English language. It’s why I’ve kept Dr Kumar longer than the others.

‘Anyway, he told me that the soldiers that lose limbs sometimes get a variation on phantom-limb syndrome. They’re feeling that limbs are still present when they’re gone. Sometimes arms and legs that are causing pain get blown off in action, but it happens so abruptly that their nervous system doesn’t realise they’re missing. Dr Kumar said it was “like a magician whipping away a tablecloth and leaving all the plates on the table…”’

I smile at Niall. ‘Even though I love his speech patterns, I’m
less
keen on Dr Kumar’s analogies. So they’re still feeling searing agony from limbs that just are not there any more. Kumar said it was a terrible disorientating condition to endure, but I couldn’t muster up much sympathy, obviously. Well, to cut a long story very short, very very short, they found that by taking an extra inch or two off the stump, a body would “get the message”, sometimes, so to speak, and stop sending pain signals into the brain.’

Niall speaks at last. ‘So what did you say?’

‘What did you think I said? “Then let’s do it. Take the fuckers off. Take my arms and legs off. All of them. Right now.”’

Niall looks shocked. I go into my Dr Kumar voice. ‘“Wait a moment, Monica. Hold those horses. This is the problem we will be having with that approach; your pains in your arms and legs do not start there, they start in your sciatic nerve, and we cannot remove that. Once again we come up against the mystery that is the nervous system. No matter what extremities of your body we remove, there is no possibility that your pain will cease.” And I said, “There will be if you remove my head.”’

Niall laughs at last. I laugh too.

‘So he strongly advised me not to pursue this course of action. So I admitted defeat, and took my horribly intact body back home.’

He digests this.

‘What I’m trying to say, I’m sorry I snapped at you. I say things that I know I don’t mean. It’s the pain talking. Or rather it’s a different me.’

‘That’s OK.’

‘No, it’s not. So enough with the “that’s OK” stuff. Let me explain.’ I speak slowly, choosing my words carefully. ‘So many things have happened to my body over the last five years, and most of the time my mind has been dragged screaming along behind, like a man with his coat caught in the doors of an underground train. I’ve just found out I tried to commit suicide, four years ago, and I can’t even remember…’

His eyes widen.

‘… so what with the pain and the drugs doing things to my brain, sometimes I feel I’ve lost sight of the real me. I don’t know which me is here on which day. I’m not even sure which me is sitting here now… That’s not very clear, is it?’

‘No, it sounds perfectly clear,’ he says calmly.

‘It’s like… Take last month. I’m in the kitchen, and I’m screaming at Dominic, like
really
screaming at him, for forgetting to unload the dishwasher…’

He listens very intently. All men are wolves, deep down, and wolves sense weakness. They always listen intently to attractive women talking about marital strife at home.

‘Would the painless me have ever done that? No. Would the painless me look at the pain-racked me screaming about a fucking dishwasher, and be horrified at what I was doing? Would the pain-racked me kill someone, cut off her legs, have an affair, or would she not? I don’t honestly know. I know the pain-free me would be horrified if I did any of those things, but I couldn’t say honestly, hand on heart, that a pain-racked me wouldn’t just say, “Fuck it, life’s too short.”’

He nods vigorously.

‘It’s like there’s lots of me, like loads of Monicas from alternative dimensions. Sometimes I’m a bad Monica with evil thoughts in my head, like I’ve been driven insane by the pain. Sometimes I’m a good Monica, who has been made a better person
because
of the pain. But
both
of those Monicas come from the pain, so perhaps there’s
another
Monica, the real one that I’ve completely lost track of.’

Niall drinks his sparkling water. Finally he says, ‘Would you like me to drive you home?’

‘That’s very sweet of you, Niall, but there would be no point. My car would still be here.’

‘I could drive you there, drive back, drive your car to your house, and take a taxi back.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘It’s no bother.’

I’m too tired to argue, so I just have to be rude. Close it down.

‘And I’m not an invalid, Niall. I’m just in a fucking world of pain.’

That ends my confession.

Monica was out today, so Dominic took the opportunity to phone in sick and go ‘home’.

He went ‘home’ every six months or so, so he and his dad could sit in the front room together and not talk to each other, but nowadays he felt like he was coming to a foreign country.

Of course, he knew very well that Scotland
was
a foreign country, but it never quite felt like that before; not when he first moved down south in the nineties and started travelling ‘home’ to his parents. He put this ‘other country’ feeling down to the journey rather than any shifts towards nationalism in the political landscape. Trains were more like planes these days, with their comfy seats and smart waistcoated stewards, their wi-fi, and their sing-song bing-bong announcements. Every effort was made to fool the commuter into thinking they were embarking on an international flight to somewhere exotic.

So when the eye-watering flatness of Peterborough and the undulating landscape of Yorkshire gave way to rocks and crags, he imagined the undercarriage wheels unfolding, and the train gliding down to land in Edinburgh.

It felt odd, not going to see his dad, but it couldn’t be helped. He really didn’t have time. Not this time. Once he got to Dunfermline he power-walked along the quiet, tree-lined street, watching the cross appear amongst the chimney pots, like a satellite dish calibrated to pick up signals from heaven. It grew fatter and blacker, and soon, beneath it, there it was; the church,
his
church, just as he remembered it. Old and shabby, coated with soot and exhaust fumes, squashed between two gleaming office buildings like a rotten tooth interrupting a dazzling smile.

The interior hadn’t changed much. Not in years. There were collages on the wall, trees with leaves fashioned using the paint-smeared hands of Sunday school infants, and there was a brightly coloured crèche decorated with fat cushions and a wooden Noah’s ark, complete with smiling animals.
A crèche!
When he came here as a boy they didn’t even have hassocks. Father Jerome had a thing against them. Father Jerome had a thing against everything.

Truth to tell, he still hated the place, and almost gave an involuntary gag as he stood in the vestibule.

He focused on the confessional. God’s photo-booth. That’s what he and the other choir boys called it. There was a photo-booth in Woolworths in Dunfermline high street, just the same shape and size, and he and his mates crammed into it. They used to put 50p in the slot and tried to confess all their sins before the machine stopped flashing. Their faces and mouths were a crazed blur on the strip of photos that dropped, wet and glistening, into the little cage at the front. That was a very long time ago. He wondered where the photos were now. He wondered fleetingly where James Rennie and Spud Ferguson were now. Working in whatever shop replaced Woolworths, if he knew them.

He’d rung ahead, as was proper, and when he entered the booth, heavy with the smell of beeswax and damp, there was the extra, sandalwood odour of Father Hancock’s hastily shaved chin.

‘Long time no see, Dominic,’ the priest’s voice rumbled through the screen. ‘Not that I can see you through this bloody thing, but I’m guessing you’re somewhere in there.’

‘Hello, Father.’

‘I was surprised to get your call for confession. I must make a little confession myself. I never thought I’d see you back here again. I thought you’d gone off to London.’

‘I live in London, Father. I’m just in the area today.’

He was ‘just in the area today’. That was funny. An eleven hour train journey, five and a half hours here, and five and a half hours back again.

‘And you came to see me? I’m flattered, my son.’

Dominic said nothing.

‘Well… OK then… I suppose we should…?’

‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,’ Dominic said, low and urgent. ‘It’s been three months since my last confession.’

‘So… What can I do for you, my son?’

‘I have had thoughts. Bad thoughts. I’ve had… urges… In my head. Terrible thoughts.’

‘We’ve all had those thoughts, my son. There’s nothing to be ashamed of.’

‘I’ve been thinking that… I… I want to kill my wife.’

Father Hancock’s breathing spluttered to a halt. A low wheeze sounded from the grille as he let out a lungful of air. ‘Now why would you want to think such a terrible thing, my son?’

‘Lots of reasons.’

‘Marriage is a very hard road. Love is a delicate thing, but even when it fades, it can endure. You just need to —’

‘Don’t misunderstand me, I do love my wife.’

‘I see?’

‘Yes, Father. With all my heart.’

‘Well, then, you have to help me, Dominic. I have to say I’m a little confused here. I do recall I conducted the ceremony. And… I do believe that was the last time I saw you. Yes. Yes, I do I believe it was. The last time I saw you, you were sitting on a gravestone in a force nine gale, raindrops being snatched off your nose in the wind, and you were telling me that you loved your new wife, and you wanted to protect her from the evils of this world. And I thought, “My experience tells me that here is a bond that will last.” And here you are telling me you love her. Why on earth would you ever think of harming her?’

‘It’s not that simple, Father.’

‘It never is.’

‘She has pain. Deep chronic pain.’

‘I see.’

‘She’s had it five years. It’s tough. For me. It’s not easy, living with the pain.’

‘You aren’t living with the pain, my son. Your wife is living with the pain.’

‘That’s just it. I do live with the pain. All the time. The pain makes her impossible. Sometimes…’

‘That’s why she needs you, my son.’

‘I know that, Father. But sometimes it feels like I’m not living with my wife any more, just the pain. Sometimes, maybe most times, I’m on my own, just as my dad was on his own when Mum was near the end of her life, when the cancer had completely devoured her. He was just living with a piece of meat that happened to have the same name as the woman he’d once married.’

‘Very sad and tragic, Dominic, but that’s not quite the same.’

‘It is, Father. Sometimes it feels like Monica disappears, that all trace of her gets wiped from existence, and all that remains is pain, a crying, screeching, bitching, nagging, physical representation of pain. And I live with this Thing That Is Not My Wife, day in, day out, day in, day out.’

‘It’s still not the same. You can talk with your wife. She still knows she loves you.’

‘But at least my dad got peace sometimes, at least Mum was passive when she was on the morphine, and he could read a book or listen to the radio. Not with Monica. When someone is in that much pain, then the Rest of the World is always wrong, and in Monica’s case, the Rest of the World is me.’

‘But you are so lucky, my son. I’ve had strong men and women in here, weeping for their husbands and wives, taken by Alzheimer’s. It’s the living death, the silence that they can’t stand.’

‘I live for silence. I
dream
for silence sometimes. I fantasise about it.’

‘Dominic… You and your wife, you still love each other, and she still knows she loves you. You know you can talk things through.’

‘You don’t get it. You don’t understand.’

‘I’m trying, my son.’

‘I can’t talk things through. Not at all.’

‘You can. Of course you can.’

‘I can’t. Monica complains about me not speaking, but how can I? When every word I say is a step, and every step is part of a journey across a live minefield, where every step might blow up in my face… Well, I err on the side of not speaking. Wouldn’t you?

‘You see, Father, everybody talks about how the accident, the pain, how it changed Monica…’

‘Well…’

‘No one ever noticed that it changed me, too.’

‘You must put these dark thoughts out of your mind, my son.’

‘I’ll try, Father.’

‘You of all people know that the flesh can be weak. But that was why God made the soul within you unchanging and everlasting. You might think yourself changed, but you are the same loving husband you always were. Call upon God for strength, and He will answer.’

‘I will, Father.’

‘Go in peace, my son.’

Dominic’s fingers were drumming on the wall of the confessional. Father Hancock sensed his impatience and gabbled through the sacrament. He assured the Father of his contrition and was assigned penance for his shameful thoughts. The moment Father Hancock struggled out of his side of the booth, Dominic dashed out of the church and practically ran back to the train station. He had to get his connection to Edinburgh, and then he’d be back home by seven at the latest.

They say that truth is stranger than fiction; that our lives are far more improbable than stories.

From my experience, I am the best person in the world to say that observation is completely and utterly true. My life is one fat collection of ironies; and coincidence is the handmaiden of irony.

We leave the hotel restaurant, and there is a little boy playing on the table in front of the reception. He’s about four years old, and he’s arranging the magazines in some order that I can’t quite discern. He has a mop of tousled brown hair and he’s wearing a Thomas the Tank Engine jumper which is slightly too small for him. I notice with some satisfaction that his grimy fingers have already marked the white leather cushions.

Niall tenses. His eyes dart around, sensing danger. He thinks I don’t notice, but I do.

The drugs make me notice everything, whether I want to or not.

Niall keeps walking to the boy, who looks up from his monumental task and smiles at him. ‘Hello, Daddy,’ he says to Niall. ‘Look what I’m doing.’

‘That’s lovely, Peter,’ says Niall, ‘very pretty. Where’s Mummy?’

‘She’s gone for a wee-wee,’ says Peter. He points to the ladies’ toilet. ‘Over there.’

‘I see,’ mutters Niall. ‘So… She’s left you on your own.’

‘She’s only gone for a wee-wee.’ Peter is exasperated. ‘The lady behind the desk is watching me.’

The lady behind the reception desk gives Peter (and us) a fluttery little wave. Peter waves back. Stupidly, I give the same wave to the receptionist.

Niall doesn’t know what to do. He wanders around the perimeter of the reception like he’s in a cage, stalking in a wide circle until he comes back to me. Then he’s staring at me as if he wishes I would evaporate, but I’m not going anywhere.

‘Oh, OK. Right. I’m going to… You should…’

‘I didn’t know you had a wife.’

‘I don’t. Ex-wife.’

‘Or a child.’

‘Well…’

‘I thought you’d have mentioned it. You told me you liked to do paragliding, and rock climbing, and you told me your favourite actor was Peter O’Toole, and you were thrilled to meet him when he did
Jeffery Bernard is Unwell
in the West End, when you sold ice creams at the Apollo —’

‘I didn’t want to,’ he snaps.

‘— and you told me you were a fan of Sting, and had seen him eighteen times in concert, but you’ve never mentioned —’

‘Let’s make a deal, OK?’ He looks at me with sudden, quiet anger. ‘I don’t bring up your accident, do I? You don’t bring up my ex-wife and son.’

I blink. ‘OK.’

‘Good.’

The next thing I see is a woman walking from the toilets. She doesn’t look happy. She is pretty, with large hazel eyes, dazzling cheekbones and immaculate teeth. I am quite struck by her elegant long coat, and her shiny black hair.

I’m also struck by how like me she looks.

‘Well, well, fancy meeting you here.’ Her eyes flick from Niall to me, and scans me with unvarnished disgust. ‘Is this the new one?’

He steps in front of me. ‘She’s a friend.’

‘Of course she is,’ she sneers.

‘What are you doing here, Lorraine? Are you following me?’

‘I come here all the time,’ she laughs, echoing Niall’s words to me when we met in the gym. She pulls a sour smile. ‘I didn’t have to follow you, Niall. Claudia uses this place all the time. She saw you two lovebirds come in and she phoned me. Why? Is it a problem? Goodness, you haven’t been avoiding me, have you? By any chance?’

Niall looks at me with a pain-stricken face. ‘I’m so sorry. I can’t tell you how sorry I am about this. I hope this confrontation hasn’t elevated your pain levels.’

Lorraine demands his attention. ‘Never mind about her pain levels, worry about your own.’

‘I have nothing to say to you.’

‘Well I’ve got a lot to say to you.’

Niall and Lorraine are edging slowly away from me, towards the back of the hotel, so they can swear at each other without upsetting their son. Lorraine flings herself on a couch near the restaurant, and Niall paces angrily in front of her, back and forth. I can guess their conversation is about money or, specifically, maintenance, but in case there’s any doubt, Lorraine leans forward, puts her hand up to Niall’s face and rubs her thumb and first finger together.

I suddenly realise I’m left alone with Peter. I sit down, not too close, but not too near. You hear stories of adults being accused of all sorts of things. But Peter has no such reservations. He trots over to me. ‘Do you like tigers?’ he says.

‘Oh I love —’

‘Rarr!’ he says abruptly, before I have a chance to finish, curling his tiny hands into talons. He finds this very funny. He tells me it’s a joke he’s learned from Kevin in playschool.

‘They can kill you.’

‘Oh, certainly.’

‘I think tigers are awesome. Kevin likes them too.’

He advances on me, holding a big squishy book with a tiger on it. ‘Here you go.’ He puts the book on my lap, then clambers up to join it.

Oh Christ fuck fuck fuck fuck
. My body screams.
I can’t take this. I can’t take this. This is too much for me.

But I don’t put Peter on the floor. I can no more put the child down than I can wish away my pain. I read him the story about the tiger, twice, while the pain paces around my hips in a wide circle and snarls to the world. I look nervously across to the receptionist, but she just smiles back at us. Obviously she saw Niall with me, Peter with his mummy, Niall with Peter, and she’s assumed I’m some friend of the family or a child-minding aunt.