mum didn’t speak, she just kept knitting. Brian went over and told her that his mum was knitting him a jumper too. His mouth was orange and fuzzy from the Lucozade.
At eight-thirty on the dot, Fizza’s family said goodbye to her quietly in Urdu. Kashif smiled at me shyly as he left.
The nurse had to remind my family it was closing time. Ivan kissed me and said, Bye, Looby. Time to go back in your basket! Brian couldn’t stop laughing. Did you hear what he said to you, Helen? It’s time to go back in your basket! Did you hear him?!
Fizza and Fiona and Karen thought Ivan was gorgeous. The nurses thought the orange lilies were gorgeous, but they were like hallucinations on my bedside cabinet. They were too bright and hurt my head.
On my third afternoon, Jana and Ivan came in with Joe. They’d been out the night before and Joe had got drunk and told Beryl she looked like a haggis. She had wept most of the night. Jana had told me before that the kids in France where she had taught on her year out had slagged her rotten because of her lip. I wished Joe hadn’t come in.
Two minutes after they’d left, Ivan ran back. I miss you, Looby, he said softly. I really miss you. I just wanted to tell you.
He lifted my hand and kissed it.
I wish you could stay, I said, but you better go, the nurses’ll chase you.
He kissed my floppy hand again and left.
I had another two plasma sessions with the man with the new carpets, and Bob had put me on scary immunosuppressants – prednisolone and azathioprine – to reduce the new antibodies I was producing, and huge unswallowable potassium pills. Possible side effects were an increased appetite, a moon face and excess body hair.
Helen can’t get enough to eat. She laps up bowls of cock-a-leekie soup like a greedy cartoon cat (with three slices of bread and butter!). She develops a craving for cream eggs, especially the ones wrapped in green foil. Her face grows round as the steroids circulate in her blood, protecting her new plasma. She thinks of them as minders, even if they are a bit toxic. For the first time in her life, she has acne.
She has to go back to the hospital weekly to have her blood monitored. One time they tell her that her white cell count is dangerously low, a result of the azathioprine therapy. Make sure she doesn’t get a cold, the polkadot boy doctor warns Rita, it could be dangerous. That’s a hell of a responsibility, Rita replies.
They reduce the drugs gradually. Helen can’t stand the texture of chocolate in her mouth anymore or the smell of Pears soap.
The new Polish plasma had done fuck all. Rag doll dragged round the block by an Alsatian, spat out on the carpet.
| stranger | What did you do today? |
| me | I had a shower and made a cup of tea. |
| stranger | Is that all? |
| me | I tried to wash my hair but my arms were too weak to lather. |
| stranger | That’s a shame. Are you able to read to pass the time? |
| me | Sometimes, but my arms get exhausted holding the book. They feel like they’re burning. And my head feels like it’s being sawed…I’m reading The Naked Civil Servant just now. It makes me laugh. Quentin said he’d get really upset if the kettle wasn’t pointing the right way. |
| stranger | They say laughter’s the best medicine. |
| me | You must think I’m really boring. |
| stranger | Yes, but it’s not your fault, is it? |
| me | I’ve been invited to Rachel’s twenty-first but I can’t go. I’m fed up not being able to go to things. I feel like Cinderella. |
| stranger | It must be so frustrating…[searching for another cliché]…after all, these should be the best days of your life. |
We were all guilty of cliches.
Have to get worse before you get better.
Tomorrow’s another day.
Light at the end of the tunnel was the favourite, but my symptoms continued to synchronise themselves in a vicious kaleidoscopic pattern and all I could see was black.
I felt afraid on my own and would listen for Rita’s key in the door if I wasn’t sleeping. She had most afternoons off from work. She’d bring me up lunch on the blue tray and tell me the gossip from the library. She’d massage my back and legs with deep heat treatments. I constantly smelled of camphor. My daywear had long ago blurred into nightwear. Sweatshirts and leggings for all occasions. Occasions being:
1 Sleeping. Eating. Having shower. Having bath. Having to sit on toilet to brush teeth ‘cos legs so weak. Having to change hands halfway ‘cos arms so weak.
2 Crying. Wanting to be dead. Praying even though atheist.
3 Waiting for phone calls, visitors, letters.
4 Waiting. Waiting. Waiting.
5 Fantasising about: going to work wearing a suit from Next/being on honeymoon with Ivan/dancing, dancing, dancing/inter-railing/running on the spot in a red tracksuit like the athlete in the Lucozade advert.
6 Looking at photos of other self in other life. Tracing finger over old self, a smiling girl in a hockey team. My hockey stick lay like a corpse in the back of my cupboard, club foot poking through my clothes, reminding me of my frailty. I had tried to throw it out twice, but Nab had brought it back in.
7 Crocheting white squares. I’d started a baby blanket for Heather.
8 Conjugating French verbs when my head wasn’t too skewered, so I didn’t forget.
I listened to the radio a lot. There was one DJ I hated. He was always going parachuting or skiing and he took it all for granted. I liked the shipping forecasts and the fishing news. The price of whiting soothed me. I also liked classical music except when it got trumpety and bombastic – then I wanted to kill the people in the orchestra for being so military and noisy. If I moved the radio diagonally and bent the aerial all the way back, I could get French radio stations at nighttime, hissing and fizzling.
Sean always listened to The Smiths in the mornings. When I asked him to turn it down Rita said I had to cut him some slack.
In the evenings if I felt well enough, I’d go downstairs. I liked the social aspect of being in the living room. On Thursdays, I watched Top of the Pops and wondered where they got the energy to sing and dance.
I started watching wildlife programmes. I could enjoy the images without having to follow the plot (like an old woman in a nursing home, without the pink circles of fur).
| stranger | What did you do today? |
| me | I watched a documentary about sea horses. |
| stranger | What did you learn? |