by Ruth Dugdall
The chances of being hit by lightning are 1 in 600,000. The chances of being killed in a fire are 1 in 70,900. Still feel safe?
You and I both know that one of the first laws of an actuary’s work is that human beings have a distorted view of risk. They don’t see the whole picture. Our perceptions are twisted by stories in the media, by films, by our own personalities and experiences. So, despite the unlikely odds, we still worry about being raped or murdered. We hear a sound in the night and think of burglars, not mice. We’re programmed to imagine bad things happening to us, as opposed to good things, even if the good are more likely. It’s a kind of protective pessimism: if we worry about the worst happening, it may miss our door.
Likewise, people who are blessed, who are lucky, worry that their good fortune will ‘run out’, as if there is just one quota of happiness and they are using their store up and are destined for imminent tragedy. We believe in fate. Insurance companies exploit this, and I’ve always hated those adverts for life insurance, the bereft wife with her child, thinking back to when her husband told her insurance was a waste of money. The message is clear: protect yourself with anxiety. If you don’t worry, it will happen to you. Don’t walk under a ladder, don’t let a black cat cross your path. Be lucky.
Even before my luck ran out, I didn’t feel safe. But my fears, fire and lightning and train crashes, were more likely. Despite all my neuroses and obsessive tics, I never thought a disease had already found a home in my brain, maybe a decade ago. It was something I’d vaguely heard about but, like everyone else, I thought it was something that happened to other people. I couldn’t even spell it. The chances of being diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease are 1 in 12,000,000. In disease terms, I’ve won the lottery several times over.
I thought about telling Robin. In many ways it’d make it easier. She’s never shown any signs of doubt about helping me die, but any niggling worries would soon go if she knew I had a terminal illness.
Terminal, like an airport or train station. A final destination. To terminate: to end, to cease. My illness is my final stop. I shall be getting out there.
But any thoughts I might have about telling her, disappear when I’m in her home. You should see it, Krish. It’s like a show home! It’s so clean, so white. The surfaces sparkle. Nothing in the fridge is dripping or stained, as if the cartons and wrappers have been wiped and cleaned, like a show fridge. ‘This food is for display only. Please don’t attempt to eat it’. How can I tell Robin that I carry disease? It’d be like bringing a sick rat into her clean home. She’d shrink back, she wouldn’t be able to touch me. I understand her cleanliness; it’s an obsessiveness I recognise. I can’t bear the idea that she’d refuse to kiss me. I could reassure her, tell her that CJD is almost impossible to catch. Kissing and sex are not the way it travels but she wouldn’t be reassured, not totally. The idea would be in her head.
I’m not a fool. My illness would clear Robin of blame for her part in my death. It’d give a reason for my suicide and remove any suggestion that my death wasn’t euthanasia. If they discover the CJD, that is, which is unlikely. Even during autopsy, CJD is a hard thing to determine. It requires the removal of the brain, a special process that they’re unlikely to do. My medical records are with my old doctor: finding them would take a great deal of tracking down, when I no longer live in that area. The only written knowledge of my illness is this diary.
It’s why I’ll send this to you, Krish. I need someone to know the whole truth, and to understand what I’m doing.
The only person I need to persuade right now is Robin. There’s a deal to be made, and I don’t think she’ll find the price is too high. The sums, the numbers all equal the result. I’ve balanced both sides of the equation, and she has her own reasons, no doubt, for agreeing to help me. All she needs is faith.
But first she must prove that she can do it.
2nd May
I’ll die next month. I’ve settled on June 16th. I chose the day specially. It was the day of my parent’s car crash. The day I started to believe in God.
I needed to book annual leave for the Friday because we’ve decided on midnight. Krish, thank you for agreeing to cover for me. I told you I was taking a trip to Brighton. A mini-break. All Mr Filet needs to do is sign my leave card. This is a detail, I know, but I don’t want anyone to notice I’m gone until it’s too late. If I simply didn’t turn up to work on Friday you’d call the bungalow, or get HR to do it, and when they found no answer someone might suggest alerting the police. Unreliability isn’t in my nature. It’s easier to plan my absence and when I don’t turn up on Monday morning it will be too late.
Robin and I have talked about it. We’ve agreed that she’ll call the police, but only when I’m dead. She’ll have to be patient and wait until there’s no chance of resuscitation. She’ll have my suicide note, ready to hand over. I hope they won’t interview her, take her to some scummy cell, but I guess there are procedures to follow. She’s told me not to worry, that she’ll be fine. She tells me to think only of the moment, the instant of my death. She tells me it’ll be amazing.
I wrote my suicide note at work today. I like to be prepared. I was just finishing it when you decided to go to the machine for coffee and came to my side of the desk, to put the paper cup in front of me. I was conscious of the notepaper, the pen in my hand. You probably didn’t even notice but I bundled the letter into the drawer. Then you did something that surprised me. You put a hand on my shoulder and asked if I was okay.
You’d never touched me before, and your hand was warm. You removed the hand but not your gaze and I saw that you really cared. It embarrassed me, and I told you I was fine, but you didn’t believe me, did you?
Then you did something for me, gave me the dealer’s phone number. I needed it, Krish – I need cannabis to steady me. I know you didn’t want to hand the number over, that you’re worried about it but eventually you agreed. Thanks for that.
Cate looked away from the words on the screen, and rubbed her eyes. So the suicide note was written a month before David actually died. He was certainly organised. Her head hurt and jelly-like shapes were floating across her vision.
The diary was a testimony to his depravity, and Cate now felt that Alice was the victim. The disease may even now be growing inside her, slowly taking root. She had a right to know what she had risked in eating David, what he had subjected her to. Alice had a right to know why he had asked her to eat him. But first Cate had someone else she needed to speak with, someone who might be able to help.
Thirty
1993
She was lying on the floor, naked and very still. Just as she should be. But Alice watched Lee, and thought that it would never be quite right. Lee fidgeted too much and moaned she was cold. This wasn’t working for either girl. The feeling Alice chased was a ghost memory, quickly gone after one sweet taste. All she wanted was to experience it again, that feeling of love, but each time she tried it slipped further away. Was she forgetting? It was twelve years ago and she had only been four. Sometimes she had to screw her face up, really concentrate, to get the feeling back. If she forgot what her real mother looked like, the smell of that room, the taste of the sandwich, she would be lost. She knew that. Lee tried her best, but just didn’t get it. And she’d become shy with her body, her sixteenth year had brought puppy fat and breasts and she needed soft words and caresses when Alice would have prefered to be silent. Alice sighed; it would have to do. She dropped onto the floor, next to her friend, and slid a hand across her waist, thicker than it was, skin was no longer clear. She was spotty. Poor Lee, no wonder the other girls at school ignored her. Alice felt a wave of protectiveness for her friend who never seems to notice what others said, who lay naked just for her. Wearing only the fresh nail varnish that Alice had carefully painted onto her toenails.
Alice put her head to her friend’s soft chest, and listened to her heart which quickened as she tightened her grip around her waist, and Lee turned her he
ad, wanting a kiss. Alice could feel her warm mouth on her hair and whispered, “Lie still!” Lee always ruined it by moving.
In the bedroom they lay, thinking only of love, and they didn’t hear the soft tread of Alice’s mother coming upstairs with a pile of washing.
Mrs Dunn paused, and wondered for the hundredth time what it was they did in there, so silently. She worried about things, things she’s heard about on the TV, like drugs. Like solvent abuse, apparently just sniffing a pot of nail polish can kill instantly. Do you know what your teenager is up to? The headline demanded that morning, making her flinch. Her daughter was so contained, so aloof, that she knew she would not know. The room always smelt of nail polish after Lee had visited. If they were sniffing solvents in there…
She couldn’t discuss this with Alice. She hadn’t the words. But if she should happen upon them, if she had an innocent reason to go into the bedroom and found them in the act…
Telling herself that this was what any good mother would do, she made her way up the stairs, silently avoiding the steps that would groan under her weight, stopping when she was outside Alice’s door, her hand raised in the air by the handle. She listened at the door, fingers touching the aluminium blade of the handle, daring herself to push it down. Finally, she opened the door.
She didn’t find them, as she expected, bent over a pot of candy pink nail varnish, inhaling fumes. Instead, she found them on the floor. Lee was naked, on her back, and alongside her was Alice, holding her tight. She was sucking her breast.
Alice was excelling at her studies, absorbing facts and ideas at a marvellous rate. She was hungry for knowledge, for understanding, and it was clear she would go far. Her decision to remain at school to take A levels was welcomed by all her teachers: we wish her well with her continuing education. That’s what her form tutor said in last year’s report card. But Alice didn’t excel at everything; she failed at the break times, at lunchtime. She failed at interaction with others. In the sixth form block, the other young women avoided her. Lee was no longer at the school so Alice was always alone between lessons. She often sat in the library, surrounded by a barricade of books.
She didn’t care about not having friends. It was their loss, their error, if they couldn’t see what a good friend she would be. She held her nose in the air and looked down on them and they hated her for it. She taught herself to rise above such pettiness. She resolved not to desire friendships, and she still had Lee. Why would she need more than one friend?
Lee worked as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool, and talked of joining the Forces. She’d worked hard at getting in shape and valued strength and fitness. Lee wasn’t like Alice, she couldn’t immerse herself in learning. She preferred practical subjects, using her hands.
Alice used her brain, her mind. Of all her three A levels, Alice was best at English. The teacher encouraged her, told her she should think about studying it at degree level; he said she had a knack for interpretation. The interpretation of words and details. She had a literary eye. And then she discovered Keats. They were studying Ode on a Grecian Urn:
More happy love! More happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy’d,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above…
Alice understood immediately how the figures on the urn were immortal. Understood straight away how a frozen image could transcend the inferior, too-human passions. She thought of her mother, of that single image that had haunted her down the years; her immortal Mummy, frozen in time on the bedsit floor, forever beautiful, eternally loved.
Alice had found a way to be understood. The Romantics gave her a world in which her feelings made sense. The relief was immeasurable.
Between poetry and Lee there was little choice. The ethereal over the physical.
Lee was heavier now, weighed down by swimmers’ shoulders, muscular thighs and smelling of chlorine. Alice no longer asked her to strip, and anyway she wouldn’t feel safe since her mother found them. Nothing was said, but her mother stopped coming to her room. She wouldn’t say anything to her father, Alice was sure.
Alice knew she wasn’t a lesbian. Her desire transcended gender. What she wanted from Lee wasn’t sexual. Her need for Lee’s body, for the stillness of her flesh, was spiritual. But how could she explain that to her mother? She would never understand. Instead, Alice would bide her time until she could escape. And Keats was showing her the way.
Alice was in the doctor’s waiting room, but she wasn’t sick. Her mother, who brought her there, was in with the doctor. The waiting room was full and two children fought over the dirty dolls’ house in the corner. Alice assumed her mother had asked her to come along because she wanted moral support. She’d been tearful all morning, and bleached the floor twice before they left home. Maybe she needed more anti-depressants. Alice yawned and waited.
When her mother appeared she looked older, her eyes weary and her forehead wrinkled with worry, but then Alice sometimes forgot that she was an elderly woman. Her smile was thin and her hands were clasped around themselves as she said in a whisper, “Come with me, Alice. The doctor wants to see us together.”
Alice’s heart thumped, in spite of her controlled teenage nonchalance, all chalky foundation and red lips and feet encased in Doc Martens, her heart had no disguise. It hurt to think her mother was unwell.
The doctor’s door was open, under a large sign announcing ‘Room K’. Eleven rooms; so many sick people. Her mother stood aside and Alice took the chair pointed out to her by the man behind the desk.
It wasn’t their usual doctor. This man was older, with a bushy beard and tiny dark eyes. He wore a brown cord jacket with leather patches, and looked nothing like the other GPs, who wore smart shirts with ties, or bow ties. This doctor looked like a hippy.
“Now then, Miss Dunn. Or may I call you Alice?”
Alice mumbled yes, but she was surprised. When had a doctor wanted to call her by her name? She looked to her mother, who had taken the opposite seat and was studying the floor, maybe thinking how dirty it was. Her mother looked so pale and faded. She must be dying, thought Alice, a sharp grip squeezing her heart. That was why this doctor wanted to call her by name. She braced herself for bad news.
“And you must call me Dr Murray,” he smiled, as if he’d just told a clever joke, then placed his hands flat on the desk, a magician showing he had nothing up his sleeves. “Alice, I’m not a medical doctor but a clinical psychologist. Your mum has referred you because she has concerns about you.”
Her mother was still staring down at the carpet. Dr Murray smiled at Alice, as if these concerns were good things. Alice glowered under her white foundation, realising that she was the reason they were here. Her mother had referred her! Her mother wasn’t sick at all.
“Now, Alice, I explained to your mum that at sixteen you’re not strictly speaking a child anymore, so any assistance I can give must be with your full consent.” He paused, smiling, inviting trust. “So your mum will leave us in a little while, and you and I will have a chat. But first I want you to hear from her why she is so worried. Mrs Dunn?”
Alice watched her mother struggle with words, which eventually came out defiantly and accompanied by sniffs.
“You’ve always been so withdrawn, Alice. You’ve never had any friends to speak of. Except for Lee, of course. I just thought you were shy. But then, after I found you both… ”
“You told him, didn’t you?” Hot anger burst in her chest.
“Alice, what else could I do? It’s not natural… ” She started to cry.
Dr Murray pushed a box of tissues across the desk, saying in a kind but firm tone, “Now, Mrs Dunn, I’ve already said that homosexuality is not a sign of psychological disturbance. All sixteen-year-olds have issues around their sexuality.”
The penny dropped on what he was saying. It is all Alice could do to keep her voice level. “I’m not gay! Is that what she told you?”
“No, Dr Murray! This has nothing to do with my mother. I’m not a lesbian. I don’t find any woman even slightly fanciable.”
“But your mother said that she found you and your friend – ”
Alice erupted, “Especially not Lee – she’s spotty and fat!”
Her mother had stopped blowing her nose. Dr Murray cocked his head in curiosity. “Oh? But Lee is your best friend?”
“She’s not a friend. She’s a leech I can’t shake off.”
“So do you have any friends?” He was interested, and so was her mother.
Alice pushed out her lower lip and looked at them both like they were idiots. “I don’t need any friends. I have poetry.”
“Poetry? You like reading?”
Alice’s mouth becomes a sneer. “No, I don’t like reading. I live in images. I can achieve a state of sensation without the need for reason.” She looked over to her mother. “I would hardly expect her to understand that.”
