by Julie Cohen
I wince.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t make sense at all.’
He leans forward and holds his head in his hands.
‘You don’t have to stay,’ I tell him. ‘I’ll be all right.’
‘No,’ he says to the floor. ‘No, you won’t. You must be – you must be very frightened.’
Tears come to my eyes because he’s right. I’m terrified that I may have ruined everything because of something wrong with my brain. I’m terrified that there may be something growing inside me that could rob me of myself. Kill me, by inches, like cancer killed my mother.
I can’t tell Quinn this. I can’t ask for his sympathy when I’ve wronged him. I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand before he can see I’m crying.
‘I’m just very tired,’ I whisper.
He clears his throat. He raises his head, but doesn’t look at me.
‘The doctor says you need your rest,’ he says. ‘Go ahead and get some sleep.’ He pulls his newspaper out of his pocket where he’s stowed it. It’s the Express, not one of his normal newspapers. He must have picked it up here at the hospital. The headlines are something about Syria, something about pensioners succumbing to the heat.
He meets my gaze and I see it all: his pain, his worry, his anger, his resignation. Every bit of it my fault.
‘You should go home,’ I say.
‘You’re my wife. You’re still my wife. You shouldn’t be alone.’ He opens his newspaper again, and that’s the end of the discussion. I close my eyes. Through the noise of the ward, I can hear the tiny movements he makes.
Chapter Thirty
THE WARD ISN’T quiet at night. Beeping, shuffling feet, talking, groaning, and someone is even singing in another room. But when I wake up the air is full of frangipani. I can almost see the flowers in the dim light.
I reach for the call button but stop before I press it. This is beautiful. This is my mother, this is my lover, this is my youth and my past.
It transforms the ward into a paradise. They think it’s a sickness and they want to take it away from me.
I slip out of bed. Quinn isn’t here; he must have gone home to sleep. At some point I’ve been put into a hospital nightgown. The floor is cold under my bare feet and I pause, trying to formulate a plan. I don’t have a car. I’ll need a cab. But I’ll have to get dressed first. Unhook myself from this IV. I check the cabinet beside the bed and find a plastic bag with my dress, my shoes, my handbag. Do I have money enough to get back to London? Will they let me go? What will happen if I pull this IV out? Will I trip some sort of alarm? They can’t keep you in hospital against your will, can they? What if your husband wants you to be here?
I look around. No one seems to have noticed, not yet. I need help. And my heart leaps and I know just who I need to see. Who will help me.
I find my mobile in my handbag, stuff everything back in the plastic bag and back in the cabinet, then get into bed. I pull the sheet up around my head so that no one will see what I’m doing. You’re not supposed to use mobile phones in hospital, are you?
Ewan’s phone goes straight to voicemail. ‘Ewan, how do you know if you really love me?’ I ask it. ‘It’s madness, isn’t it? It doesn’t make any sense.’
His voicemail doesn’t answer my questions. I should be calling the nurse. I should be telling her to adjust my medication. ‘Everything has become much more complicated,’ I tell Ewan, via the message. ‘I can’t tell you about it right now. But maybe later. Don’t ring me. It’s not safe.’
I hang up the phone and I realize what I’ve done. Is this what I’ve done before? Did I text Ewan my address this way, when I was temporarily out of my mind? What else have I said in this state? What else have I done? My heart is pounding so fast, I feel so happy and the happiness is all wrong.
I grope for the nurse call button and press it. A nurse appears within half a minute.
‘I’m afraid,’ I tell her. ‘I think I need some help.’
Quinn
STANDING ON THE other side of the curtain, a plastic cup of tea in his hand, on his way back to his post, he heard her on her phone, asking Ewan if he really loved her.
When he’d got up to go to the vending machine, she’d been asleep. Sleep erased the shadows under her eyes, the pale sick hue of her skin, hardly different from the shade of her pillowcase. It made her look as if she were dreaming of love. He remembered the word she had used earlier to the doctor: bliss.
‘It’s madness, isn’t it?’ she said on the other side of the curtain, into her phone. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’
Quinn turned around. He tossed the cup of tea into the bin by the ward reception desk. He rang Suz as he was walking down the corridor towards the exit.
‘Can I have a lift home?’ he asked her. ‘I came out without enough money for a cab.’
‘Ten minutes,’ said Suz, although from her voice he knew he’d woken her. Because that was what you did in his family. If someone you loved needed help, you gave it. Without thinking, without questioning, without weighing the cost to yourself.
But when your wife was ringing her lover from her hospital bed, enough was enough. For anyone.
It was warm outside but cooler than in the ward. He’d gone into A&E in full afternoon sunshine, and the hours had slipped away into darkness. Even at one o’clock in the morning, there was a patient in a hospital nightgown leaning against the railing outside the entrance smoking a cigarette. She didn’t look as if she was enjoying it.
Suz pulled up about fifteen minutes after the smoking patient had ground her fag end into the pavement and gone back inside. He opened the passenger side door and got in. She didn’t drive away, but regarded him instead. ‘You look like shit.’
‘I don’t feel too bad.’
‘That’s a lie.’ She was wearing pyjama bottoms and a T-shirt. ‘How is she? Any diagnosis yet?’
‘They still haven’t told us what’s wrong, but hopefully tomorrow, once she’s had more tests, they’ll know more. She’s sleeping a lot. It seems to be the only thing she wants to do.’ Aside from ringing her lover.
‘Do they think it’s a brain tumour?’
‘They say it could be lots of things. She’s been having seizures for a while now. Mild ones. Smells, feelings. She didn’t tell anyone.’ He tipped his head back against the seat. ‘I should have known.’
‘How could you have known if she never told you?’
‘She asked me if I had any particular smells that led to memories. Ones that were so strong that it felt as if you were actually living through those memories again. She had all these things she’d collected – perfume, bottles of oil, a clove-studded orange – and she was sniffing them. I thought it was just a … Felicity question.’
Suz kept the motor idling. A taxi pulled up in front of her, collected a passenger, and drove off. ‘You’ve had an awful time,’ she said. ‘But I think she must have been frightened. Do you think that’s why she’s been …’
‘The seizures make her feel as if she’s in love. With that other man.’
‘Oh.’ Suz let that sink in. ‘That’s weird.’
‘Apparently that’s why she went to find him. She says.’
‘Do you believe that?’
‘I don’t know.’
Suz sighed. ‘What are you going to do?’
I am going to go home, have a shower, get into bed and continue the process of learning to sleep alone.
Instead he said, ‘Did Dad have an affair that time?’
Suz didn’t ask what time he meant. They had never spoken of it: the time of the raised voices behind doors, the time of Dad always late coming home, the time of sandwiches for supper. He and Suz had sat in the back seat of the car and tried not to listen as their parents whispered viciously in the front. They’d each kept their eyes on their own book.
Suz turned off the ignition. ‘I think so,’ she said.
‘I thought it was my fault.’
‘I thought it was mine too. I thought it was because I was different. But it couldn’t have been. That’s just the way children think.’
‘It got better, didn’t it?’
‘It’s better now,’ Suz said. ‘I tried to ask Mum about it once a few years ago, and she changed the subject. She talked about foxes getting into the bins instead.’
‘I don’t think they’re unhappy. But how can you tell, when they’re always the same?’
‘I don’t think Mum would ever admit to being unhappy. Can you imagine it? But no. I don’t think they’re unhappy. I think they rub along fine.’
‘I think it was that woman who worked with him, the one with the short hair. She wasn’t anything special.’
‘Maybe she didn’t have to be. Is … he? The man that … is he something special?’
‘I didn’t really see him. I don’t think I’d recognize him on the street. I was more focused on Felicity.’
‘I’m so sorry, Quinn.’ Suz pushed her hair behind her ears. ‘Mum, yesterday. I thought she was going to rip out Felicity’s throat. I haven’t seen her that angry in years. Not since … the time you’re talking about.’
‘What made Mum stay, if Dad had an affair? Was it vows, or did she not want to be on her own? It would have been hard for her on her own. I thought about that when Dad had his heart attack. She wouldn’t be able to cope.’
‘She’d have us. I think she stayed because she loved him.’
‘And why didn’t he leave? He must have felt something for that woman. What made him choose us instead?’
‘Maybe it was habit.’
‘Is that what love is, then? Just getting used to something?’
Suz put her hand on the key, ready to turn it.
‘I should have known,’ said Quinn. ‘I should have asked her. I should have asked Felicity what was wrong. But I was too afraid of the answer.’
His sister sighed. ‘It’s not your fault, Quinn. We’re all like that. It’s what our family is like. We talk and talk and we don’t ask the questions.’
‘No, it is my fault. I’m supposed to be some sort of journalist, but when it matters, I don’t ask. Not even you. We don’t talk, not about anything that matters.’
‘We’re talking now,’ said Suz. She touched his shoulder. ‘I always knew we would, if we needed to.’
‘It’s habit,’ he said, staring out of the window. ‘It’s all bloody habit. It’s easier than facing the truth.’
Suz squeezed his shoulder, and put her hands back on the wheel. ‘Are we going?’
A deep breath. ‘No. I’ll stay.’
‘Are you sure? You could do with some sleep.’
‘I need you to bring some things for her, please. She needs a toothbrush, and some of her own pyjamas. A hairbrush and a flannel and soap. Her dressing gown. She’d probably like a book and maybe a sketch pad. Can you bring those tomorrow morning?’
Suz nodded. He opened the door and stepped back out onto the pavement, where the smoking woman had come outside for another cigarette.
Chapter Thirty-one
THE DOCTOR HAS four students with him today. They all have notebooks and they are all scribbling madly even before he starts speaking to me.
‘Well, Felicity, it looks like we’ve worked out what’s causing your seizures.’
The last time he spoke to me it was ‘Mrs Wickham’. I suppose once a man has seen several maps of the inside of your head, he has the right to call you by your first name. He’s been inside my head in almost every way possible, I think, short of cutting it open. I’ve been injected with dye through my arteries and inserted into machines which riddled me with bullet-firing noises; the doctors have attached electrodes to me, told me to draw pictures, asked me questions, shone lights for me to follow. The neurologist said that the mind was the last place of mystery, but I think he was just trying to make me feel as if I had a few private thoughts that the scans couldn’t detect.
Quinn has read the Observer, the Independent, the Telegraph, The Times, as well as the Oxford Times and the Maidenhead Advertiser. He’s done the crosswords in all of them; he’s asked for my help with some of the clues, but other than that, we’ve barely spoken. He went home briefly while I was having my tests, to take a shower and a nap, but from the looks of him, he didn’t sleep much then or last night either.
They’ve changed my seizure meds, and there hasn’t been the faintest whisper of frangipani. I can only vaguely remember ringing Ewan last night and leaving a message. Or rather I don’t remember the message itself, but I remember the facts of it, in the way that you remember the events or symbols of a dream when waking, without being able to picture them: I asked him if he really loved me. I told him not to ring me. Whilst Quinn was gone, I turned my phone back on and checked it. Ewan had rung five times, so I turned it off again.
I’m in an enormous mess. I feel as if I am two people and I don’t know which one is real.
The doctor pulls up a chair; his minions remain standing a respectful few paces behind him. ‘First, let me explain how we started our investigation. As you and I discussed yesterday, you’ve been experiencing some seizures involving olfactory hallucinations paired with the experience of an intense, unprompted emotion. Your GP diagnosed this as migrainous aura because you have had a history of migraines. By the way, as a matter of interest, would you say this emotion was attached to any particular remembered experience in your past, or was it a dissociated feeling?’
‘It’s associated with a time and a person from my past,’ I say. ‘The smell is, too. They’re both about something that happened ten years ago.’
‘Interesting.’ The minions scribble madly. ‘Well, that’s another confirmation of our initial suspicion that you were experiencing temporal lobe seizures. These seizures often have an emotional or memory aspect, though not always, of course. It’s a vast oversimplification, but we think of the temporal lobe as being the place where we remember and feel. Anyway, as we were saying, these seizures were often followed by a feeling of euphoria and you were able to operate normally or almost normally before and afterwards. However, recently the frequency has increased, and yesterday you experienced a tonic-clonic seizure, leading to your admission in an unconscious state.’
I’m not sure whether he’s saying all of this for my benefit, or for that of the students.
‘The CT scan detected a mass in the left temporal lobe. You can see it here.’ He passes me a picture of an outline of a thick bright white egg shape printed on glossy black paper. The egg is filled with variegated grey. It’s my skull in cross-section, seen from the top. Everything is symmetrical except for a light spot near the centre, as if someone has left a large kidney bean inside my brain.
It is terrifying. This is me.
‘You said the left temporal lobe,’ I say. ‘This is on the right.’
‘CT scans are inverted.’
‘Is it a tumour?’ asks Quinn, leaning over to look at it. ‘She had the scan yesterday. Why didn’t you show us this then?’
‘We wanted to make certain we knew what it was, before alarming you unnecessarily.’
‘I’m alarmed right now,’ I say.
‘It’s not an unusual problem,’ says the doctor, ‘though it is quite large, and the positioning is rare. Here’s a sagittal image from the MRI you had this morning. That is, a side-on image. You can see the mass clearly.’
This print-out is more of a Hallowe’en horror than the other one. I can see my skull from the side, looking more fragile here, my eyeballs as round shadows, my clenched teeth, and the soft coils of my brain. There’s a glowing sphere in the centre of it, a few inches behind my eyeballs. He passes me another print-out, this one from the top. The mass glows less here, and is more of a bean than a sphere. But it is still something that definitely should not be in my head.
‘I can’t feel it,’ I say. ‘Surely I should be able to feel something that’s this big?’
‘You have been feeling it, as a scent and an
emotion. It’s been putting pressure on your temporal lobe and causing the seizures. Most likely it’s grown lately, which is why the seizures have become more frequent and why you had a tonic-clonic. It’s been putting pressure on all of your brain, not just this little bit.’
‘But what is it?’ asks Quinn. ‘What can be done about it?’
‘Ah, so this print-out shows us exactly what it is.’ Dr Chin hands over another piece of paper with a flourish. It’s as if he’s enjoying the slow reveal, like a burlesque dancer. I glance at the four students, who are rapt, and pretty much prove my suspicions: this is a show for them. I hope they’re enjoying it.
The last picture is not recognizably mine or anyone’s head. It looks like a round sac filled with water into which someone has released a slow stream of black dye; or possibly a fluid tree in autumn drawn by a watercolour artist. One of the branches has a black lump on it, a full bladder.
‘This is a cerebral angiogram. A picture of the arteries in your brain. As you can see here, one of the arteries in the left posterior has ballooned out into an aneurysm.’
Quinn’s hand lands on my shoulder. As he has avoided touching me – aside possibly from the time when he scraped me up from the grass – I can tell this isn’t good news.
‘Is that like a blood clot?’ I ask.
‘It’s a weakness in the walls of the artery. It bulges out and fills with blood, which is why this one is growing. It’s causing pressure in your temporal lobe, which in turn is causing autonomic aura – the funny tingle in your stomach you describe, which is typical of temporal lobe seizures – along with somatosensory hallucination of smell, and the psychic aura of emotion. Love,’ he adds with relish. ‘It’s one of the great philosophical questions of the universe: what is love? In your case, the answer is right here on this angiogram. Love is caused by this malformation of the artery in your brain.’
The students are going crazy with the writing now.
‘I am guessing that love caused by aneurysm is fairly rare,’ I say.
