Isabel's Healing

by Maggie McIntyre

  When Bryony returned, now looking neat and business-like in a crisp white polo shirt and blue chinos, she pushed Isabel’s chair round to seat her at the table, and fetched a cushion as before, to protect her spine.

  “Let’s get started. I’ve topped up the lap-top battery, so we can sit here at the table without wires trailing everywhere.” She looked the picture of positivity.

  Oh, well, better crack on.

  Isabel had decided how to organize her stories of climate change impact into various categories, tidal catastrophes from low lying lands like Bangladesh and the Pacific islands, flooding from inland sources like snow melt in the Himalayas, and drought from altered weather patterns as in sub-Saharan Africa and Australia. It made for a horrendous catalogue of potential disasters, with the loss of large numbers of people’s lives. In her present imprisoned state, she tried not to relish her Cassandra-like prophecies of doom. World affairs were far more important than her broken bones after all.

  “Of course, the Eastern sea-board of the USA will be as badly affected as anywhere in the world. Half the population there only lives a few meters about the current sea-level.”

  Bryony had been dutifully typing up her dictated notes for more than an hour and a half, when she finally stopped, and said. “Isabel, this is all so damn depressing. No wonder you find it hard to smile.”

  She was only half joking. “Is there anything we personally can do now, to help the situation?”

  “Well, we need to run the car we have, while we’re here. If I was buying a new one of course it should be electric, but I won’t be driving for months, and anyway, In London it’s hardly necessary.

  “The electricity locally is from a hydro-electric plant. I also know I should give up eating meat. If the world’s red meat consumption dropped by 50% that would make a real difference, because half the grain and soya grown on the planet goes just to feed livestock.”

  Isabel was a paid-up member of Greenpeace, but she was conscious she now sounded like an editorial from Resurgence magazine, and the moral strictures sounded banal even to her. Bryony didn’t react cynically to them at all however.

  “Well, say no more. For the eight weeks when I’m here, cooking for you, I can stop using meat in our meals. How does that sound?”

  The girl’s voice held quite a straightforward challenge, which made Isabel think twice before dismissing it out of hand. There were some meals with meat which she did enjoy very much, but there was no point preaching about it on paper if she wasn’t prepared to at least give vegetarianism a go, and as Bryony said, she had her very own catering service on hand to deliver the meals. She just hoped they wouldn’t be living just on beans on toast though.

  “How good are you at vegetarian cooking?”

  “Well, I’m not super experienced. But it can’t be that hard. There are dozens of online recipe sites. If in doubt we could always have beans on toast.”

  Oh, well, she probably deserved that!

  “I am sure you can do better than that. Very well girl, look up some ideas and then you could drive me down into town tomorrow and stock up. Let’s make it one of our themes for the summer.”

  Bryony noticed how Isabel had started talking about ‘our’ and ‘we,’ and was thinking of something other than her own 5ft 5ins worth of suffering humanity.

  “Oh, good. I’ll make a spreadsheet and we can plan meals together. Now we’ve stopped, can I make us a cup of coffee? It’s Fairtrade”. She grinned as she spoke, but Isabel took the bait.

  “Now, stop that, don’t mock. I’m not such a kill-joy. Don’t make me out to be a food fascist, but when one’s been with struggling coffee-farmers on the foothills round Mount Kenya...”

  “I know. Blah, blah.”

  Isabel realized that the girl was no longer scared of her if she could show some cheek and tease her.

  Bryony went over to fill the kettle, and qualified her remark. “It’s good that you are committed to making the world a better place. I wish I did more.”

  “You are making my piece of the world a much better place. That’s enough for now.”

  Isabel looked away from her as she spoke, so her eyes and facial expression were hidden, but Bryony felt an unusually warm feeling curl up from her stomach.

  “Gee, thanks,” she said, in a very poor Groucho Marx impression. “Now I think you should have a biscuit along with your coffee. I’m hoping to build you up somewhat before we go back to the hospital to have you cut out of those casts. I found some in a tin. Tell me your favorites, and we’ll get some more with the shopping.”

  “I never normally eat biscuits. I try to avoid sugar.”

  “Oh, well maybe I’ll just have one anyway. I’ll have to think of some other method of helping you regain weight.”

  “Oh, very well, if you insist. Actually I was being hypocritical. I do like those chocolate biscuits with a slab of dark chocolate on one side.”

  They sat together, and over Elevenses of coffee and stale digestives, Bryony made up a spreadsheet on her lap-top, with the next eight weeks’ dates stretching down the left hand side.

  She made three columns for breakfast, lunch and supper, and then with a few others. She called these W, E, S, M, and then another W and another S.

  “Whatever are all these letters for?”

  “They are a sort of time sheet, to record what we do. W is working on the book. We can record the Hours and we can also put down word-count if you like. E is for fresh air and exercise. You’ll get the fresh air and I’ll get the exercise. Maybe we can go down to sea sometime and walk along the beach some days. S is for the hours of sleep you achieve every night, and M stands for medicines, the amount you take, as I really hope we can cut back on your potentially addictive painkillers. The other W is for your weight. There’s no point recording it while the plaster casts are weighing you down, but once you are free of those I hope to see you put on at least ten pounds before I leave.”

  “Humph, all very organized. I expect to see professionally produced graphs with all this data before you’ve finished. And what’s with the final S?”

  “Smiles. How many smiles I can pull out of you in a day.”

  “Right little Pollyanna, aren’t you?”

  “If you like. Look, smile again now, and I’ll record it.”

  “Don’t be stupid.”

  “There, I’ve recorded it now, and put it in the box. You can’t un-smile your smile, not now it’s official.”

  Bel’s face cracked out of its normal semi-impatient frown and she smiled again, she couldn’t help it. The girl was ridiculous, but she was also somewhat adorable, though she‘d never let her know it. She looked again down at the spreadsheet. All those weeks together in front of them. It couldn’t be all work, pain and global misery, that wouldn’t be fair on Bryony. They should take some car trips to explore the region, and maybe Bryony had friends she might like to have come to visit. After another hour on the book, the day’s word count target had been met, and Isabel decided enough was enough. She had coped very well with the lower dosage of pain relief, but now she needed to rest. With very little persuasion she let Bryony wheel her through to the bedroom and hoist her up onto the bed. The girl pulled three pillows behind her, so her neck and shoulders were supported, and two more under her feet. She felt like a little snooze.

  “What will you do between now and lunch?”

  “Go over the work we did this morning while it’s fresh in my mind, and correct the typos. Then you can read through again after lunch and make any more corrections needed.”

  “Will you take me into the woods again afterwards? I would like that.”

  “Sure, I’d like it too. It’s so quiet. But we’ve seen no-one up here anyway since Friday, have we? It’s only been just us.”

  “That’s enough.”

  Isabel closed her eyes, and with a tiny touch of her fingers, Bryony watched her fall asleep. She wasn’t sure what she’d meant by her last comment. Did she mean Bryony had blathered
on for long enough and she wanted her to stop, or was she trying to say that being with Bryony was enough, was sufficient for her? If it was the second, then Bryony felt endorsed. She was doing her job. So far, so good. But she realized it was very early days. As long as they kept moving forward, that was the main thing.

  The process of healing was so complex. Sometimes, as in a stab wound, the healing had to come from the inside out. If wounds festered on the inside, then the body would never recover, but the skeleton, the bones, had a remarkable ability to knit together and might one day be even stronger. The ability to make new bones was something which fascinated Bryony more than anything. And then there was the ability of the body to accept an implant, like a new hip or knee joint, and not reject it. All this truly intrigued her.

  But healing also involved the mind, and what one might possibly call the spirit. Isabel was not a happy woman. Why would she be? But there was something else going on behind her eyes, something Bryony could not fathom. She wondered if the painkillers were actually making the woman depressed. It was a known phenomenon. She made a mental note to look it up on Dr. Google and maybe add it into the questions she was already formulating in relation to her patient.

  Bryony knew she had at least another hour or more before Isabel would wake, as she had the day before, but she did as she’d promised, and set about editing all her notes. Sitting at the kitchen table, she raised the size of the font to make reading easy and not too tiring on the brain, and saved the documents together in a new folder. Then she worked hard for an hour, and was pleased with the edited version of chapter two.

  Afterwards, she brewed a fresh pot of coffee and sat down to enjoy it, while out of curiosity she Googled Isabel’s name. There were many entries, but her eye was drawn firstly to a Wikipedia article all about her new boss which ran to several hundred words. She read it with intense interest, but when she came to the personal life details at the end, she took a sharp breath in. It said, “Partner from 2006 to 2017: Carrie Montarini. 1970 to 2017.” Carrie Montarini was obviously on Wikipedia as well.

  Bryony clicked on the name. Carrie Montarini had been a well-known Italian film-maker and photo-journalist, who had specialized in women’s issues, and campaigned for gay rights across the world. She’d been shot dead two years before, in suspicious circumstances in Eastern Europe while researching a new lead about sex trafficking of girls from Monrovia into the West.

  There was a picture of a handsome, merry looking woman with very curly hair, of mixed race. Against her personal details it cross-referenced back to Isabel as her partner. There were many other references to further reading, which Bryony saved for future reading.

  Bryony sipped her coffee and thought about this shocking news in relation to Isabel. It wasn’t just the crash which had destroyed her life then, it was losing her lover, her partner of eleven years, under such tragic circumstances. How bleak she must feel, how furious with the world. And, of course, it naturally confirmed her as a lesbian. Had Bryony’s gaydar picked any of that up? Well, they had only known each other for not much more than twenty-four hours and nurse/patient intimacy had revealed nothing of that sort.

  Bryony found this confirmation of what she had suspected rather unsettling, but decided it was none of her business, unless Isabel wished to make it so. But the fact that Isabel was in reality just like a widow, still grieving over the violent death of her life partner. This doubled her resolve to do the best she could for her, to make her well and help her healing. She was beginning really to respect her, and she physically enjoyed the business of caring for her.

  Anyone, gay or straight, would see she was a fascinating, attractive woman, so it was such a shame she considered herself only as a hideous mess. Bryony determined to restore Isabel to full health and re-launch her on the world. There must be loads of legible women out there who could mend her broken heart. It would be a truly worthy project.

  Isabel woke in a much better mood than she had the previous morning, and was content to sit and read through their last session’s work while Bryony finished their lunch preparation, chicken filets and baby spinach, with new potatoes and carrots.

  “Do we have any more meat to eat up before we turn veggie?” Isabel asked her to her back as she watched her stirring something on the stove.

  “Well, no, only some tinned corned beef. There is cheese though, and plenty of eggs. We will soon run short of vegetables and salads themselves though. Let’s get some tomorrow. I’m quite excited by this project. I’ve written out some menu ideas. You must tell me your favorites.”

  “I’m very fond of Italian food.”

  Bryony congratulated herself on not going pink, well; she didn’t think she had blushed. It wasn’t as though Isabel had specifically not wanted her to know about her dead partner. In fact she remembered her actually saying to look her up on Google if she wanted to know more about her.

  But she did feel reticent about letting Isabel know she had been researching her, and also about how to bring up the obviously painful subject of her bereavement only two years ago. It might be beneficial to talk about Carrie, or rather let Isabel talk, but she would hope for the right moment to slip it into their conversations. Maybe this mention of Italian food was a signpost she could follow, but she was just too shy to pursue it. She wasn’t a psychiatrist, or a trained counselor, and had so many issues herself about repressed emotions; she knew she probably was the last person to be any good at it.

  So for now, she let it go. They sat at the table, and she cut up Isabel’s food. Would each day be more or less the same, right until the end of the summer? Well, no, obviously not. They were now on a planned route with lots of challenges. Healing Isabel’s bones and restoring her strength, completing her manuscript to a point where it could be sent off to her agent or editor, trialing a vegetarian lifestyle, there was much to achieve. But Bryony knew she had missed from the list all the challenges relating to her own problems, and it wasn’t just her academic work which daunted her. She had one very big decision to make, and some issues to confront. She hadn’t been honest with herself about all her motivations for burrowing herself away up here in Wales, the biggest of which sat like a large grey elephant staring at her in her bedroom every evening.

  Chapter 10

  It all started with sex, or the lack of it, or the reason for it, or her complicated feelings about it. Bryony liked the idea of sex; it was just the practical aspect of it which defeated her. She wasn’t frigid, she wasn’t prudish, and no, she didn’t hate her body.

  But from the first time she had tried to experiment with proper intercourse, all the sexual arousal seemed to seep away from her body like water out of a leaking basin. Sometimes she wondered if she needed the female equivalent of Viagra. Why couldn’t she climax?

  The first time had been with a boy from the boy’s grammar school up the road, a boy who used to sit behind her on the bus going home, and make constant rude comments about her “Hoity-toity” airs and graces. Bryony and her best mate Lynne used to sometimes deliberately sit in front of him, in order to drive him and his friend wild with lust, or so they joked.

  Really it was just the puppy games all fourteen years old play on wet bus rides in late November, when the afternoons are already dark at 4pm, and nothing lies ahead but homework, and in Bryony’s case, a querulous grandmother needing her elastic stockings adjusting.

  By the age of fifteen, they’d each paired off. Lynne sat with Bruce Chandler, and they “made out” on the back seat. Bryony tolerated Mike Stubbs and let him occasionally feel down her bra and up her skirt. He was one of the studs from the boys’ school by now, and his acne had begun to clear up. Different in so many ways from the other girls in her set, Mike’s persistent attentions made her feel normal, like she fitted in, like she wasn’t just a nerd, even though she was top in her class in all her science subjects, and was already taking math a year early, to make room for additional math next year.

  By the time she turned sixteen, Bryony l
et Mike have sex with her in his parents’ bedroom one Sunday afternoon while they were away visiting his grandmother in Bournemouth. She had been waiting for this for two years, and determined that it would be a rite of passage she needed to get through to get her childhood over and done with.

  If she’d had a mother she could confide in, she might have seen things differently, but she didn’t. Mum was a picture inside an old diary, one she treasured, but now only looked at a few times a year.

  Her grandmother was beyond the pale. They could enjoy an episode of Emmerdale together, and her Granny was always pleased when she came home with another good school report, but aside from that, there was no common meeting ground.

  Bryony channeled out her grandmother’s constant health concerns sometimes, by actually wearing earphones attached to her I-Player list, or an interesting pod-cast while she helped her bath and dress, and counted out her pills. Granny never noticed; she just thought Bryony was ‘away with the fairies’ as she put it. She was too deaf to hear the music or words creeping out of the I-Phone.

  So Bryony had to figure out her own moral compass, and she soon realized that, like smoking (yuck), drinking (Who wants to lose control, and throw up in the street?) and drugs, (‘No way!’) casual sex was yet another vice she was doomed not to enjoy.

  Mike was ecstatic. He had done it. He had actually done it, and with one of the prettiest girls in year 10 as well. They had definitely had intercourse, true. Bryony immediately wiped his “stuff” off her thighs without disguising her distaste for the stickiness, and went off to the bathroom to take a quick shower. When she emerged, she tried to look like a girl who had just lost her virginity to a good-looking boy who proved he could perform adequately. In reality she was totally underwhelmed. It didn’t matter, because Mike had enough enthusiasm for them both.

  “Great, heh? Fantastic. Did you come?”