I say, I’m not hungry at all.
He kisses the top of my head as he leaves.
I dreamt we had a baby made of lettuce last night.
Tell me later, he says, I have to go.
I wonder if he’s really gone back to work or if he’s gone to fuck Lucia. I wonder if I’ll have to call in sick tomorrow.
She’d stayed with us before Christmas when her central heating wasn’t working. It was supposed to be for a couple of nights, but two nights had become two weeks. She’d given me a bag of Guatemalan worry dolls. For under your pillow, she’d said.
I know, I said, I’ve had them before.
She went on, girlishly, Tell them your worries before you sleep, and in the morning, they’ll all be gone!
I’m worried you’ll sleep with my boyfriend, I’d said into myself.
She’d slept on the sofa bed in the study. One morning, I’d been woken by loud voices and laughing. I got up. The sofa bed was sticking up in the middle of the floor like a monstrous orange sculpture. It’s stuck, said Lucia, giggling, I don’t know what I’ve done! They’d wrestled with it for a while and finally managed to collapse it and fold it up. Sorry we woke you, Helen, he said. We didn’t want to leave you with it all day.
I’d hated him referring to Lucia and him as ‘we’. I’d watched them go out to the car. I grudged their intimacy, their shared knowledge of genes and proteins. She was beginning to annoy me with her skittishness, her smart coat and boots, so matching and groomed. I’d gone back to bed and tried to sleep more, but I couldn’t settle: they had to go – I felt agitated, just knowing they were there. I’d scooped the tiny Guatemalans from under my pillow and thrown them in the bin, covering them with rubbish so no one else would see them.
NB. Helen’s boyfriend and Lucia work together, their affair, however, may be psychosomatic, it’s causing Helen pain, but it’s not really there! Sometimes she sees them, Lucia, so eager to please in her short skirt and boots, him leaning over to kiss her.
She’s so fucking fragile, Lu, he says, I can’t take it anymore.
IT IS MY policy never to ask people what they do. If they want to tell me, that’s fine, but I would never ask. I understand the dread of being asked.
| stranger | What do you do? |
| me | I work one afternoon a week. I’ve been ill (for fifteen years). |
| stranger | You don’t look ill. |
| me | That’s good, isn’t it? |
| stranger | You seem to have a lot of energy. |
| me | That’s ‘cos we’re sitting down just talking. |
| stranger | Why can’t you do a job where you can sit down? |
| me | Because it’s not just my legs. If I overdo it my arms feel mashed up and my head shuts down. I can’t think straight. |
| stranger | I see. |
| me | You don’t believe me, do you? |
| stranger | No, not really. |
| me | I’ve got more fucking ‘O’ grades and Highers than you’ve had hot dinners, so please just leave me alone. (Into myself.) |
It was the same when I used to go to the post office to cash my sickness benefit – the people behind the counter looked at me suspiciously, especially if I was wearing lipstick.
I am thirty-five, but I still depend on Rita and Nab. Rita works part-time as a librarian. She trained as a nurse and stopped when she had me. Nab’s exotic, he grew up in Greenland. His Danish father taught there. Nab’s a hospital engineer. He’s high up.
They met on holiday in Tenerife: divorced Nab with his son Finn, and divorced Rita with me and my brother Sean. Rita’d used her savings to get a four-star hotel – we’d had a horrible three-star hotel in Alicante two years before, and my granny had spent the first day cleaning her room with Dettol. I still have my Alicante souvenir, a donkey with yellow nylon fur, peeling now, revealing the cheap grey plastic underneath.
Nab hired a car and took us round the island. Sean and I admired the bougainvillea and sheer drops politely. Finn was cool and wore black clogs. He was bored shitless. Volcanic rock didn’t impress him. Nab was easy to love but Rita and I secretly laughed at his Scandinavian Jesus sandals.
My real father Peter had his own dental practice above a butcher’s shop. He had minty breath and slept with his nurses. (A little more suction, please, Denise!) When you went through the close to get to the surgery upstairs, you could smell the meat from the butcher’s delivery entrance. Sometimes there was blood on the ground. There was a fish-tank in the waiting room and the goldfish always had a string of white shit hanging from its tail.
Peter left when I was ten but we still went to him for fillings. I didn’t find the divorce traumatic – I’d never really liked him. The only thing I have in common with him is that we both love raw onion.
Sean is four years younger than me. We grew up on the Bonnie Banks. Our house was right next to the park. You nipped over the fence, jumped the ditch, ran past the Michael tree (a boy called Michael fell off it and died), through the rhododendrons, and you were at the top of a huge grassy hill, Loch Lomond spread out in front of you.
Every spring the park was carpeted with bluebells. We’d pick Rita giant bunches for her birthday, Mother’s Day and Easter. She must’ve been sick of them – they’re not exactly fragrant. In fact, bluebells stink. (Also, they are toxic to deer and cattle.)
And, there is Brian, I depend on him too, for his big wide love, Rita’s youngest brother, brain-damaged at birth, not profoundly, but enough to make him happy.
I HAVEN’T ALWAYS been ill. Once upon a time, I got lots of ‘A’s and played right-inner for the school hockey team. I wasn’t very good but that’s not the point. I loved the clatter of the game and the gorgeous
