I’m sure he’ll manage to divide himself. It’s not as if he’s not going to be the one looking after her, is it?
I suppose not, I said. D’you think I’m being selfish?
Well, it’s easy to be a bit self-focused when you’re ill for a long time. It’s not so much selfish.
Okay. Thanks again for the tea.
On her way downstairs Rita shouted up, I don’t think you should be listening to Leonard Cohen. He’s not exactly uplifting, is he?
Today her arms and legs are being eaten by moths. (So much for the yellow capsules.)
The Tree and the Salutation of the Sun are out of the question. She likes the eye exercises and the Rabbit (you just kneel). She can do the Fish up to the part where you have to lift your legs. Her favourite is the one where you lie still and pretend you’re dead.
After her yoga class she distracts herself by looking through the arched window at the athletic moments in her life:
Tap-dancing in a black leotard and black shoes: I’m a pink toothbrush, you’re a blue toothbrush, have we met somewhere before?! Rita used to sew sequins onto her costumes.
Doing walk-overs and crabs in the back garden with Rachel. They were both in love with Nadia Comaneci.
Eight mile sponsored walk with the Brownies. The girl she was holding hands with threw up macaroni cheese.
Running for a bus at secondary school. They never sent enough. At four o’clock the whole school would run to the back gates and you’d try to cram yourself onto a bus. You’d get lifted off your feet in the scuffle of wet duffel coats and Adidas bags.
Scoring a goal out of fear in a hockey match after the teacher shouted at her at half-time for not playing well.
Climbing the Ben with Richard, getting stoned at the top. By the time they got down they looked like they had mumps, they were so badly bitten by midges.
Inter-railing with Rachel. They lugged their rucksacks from Glasgow to London to Paris to Nice to Geneva to Innsbruck to Munich to Wiesbaden. And back again.
Marching with thousands of other students. Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! Out! Out! Out!
Sex with Ivan in Zakynthos. He lay on the beach looking at the moon while she fucked him. He was drunk and wanted to throw his contact lenses in the sea because he had sand in his eyes.
Sex with Ivan.
Sex with Ivan.
Sex with Ivan.
Rita must be burning rubbish. Helen can smell the smoke from the garden. She crumples up her athletic moments and throws them on the fire, and the memory of sex with Ivan curls up in the smoke and disappears.
Helen may be moth-eaten but she still has her uses: her friends and brother sit at the end of her bed and ask her to fix their relationships.
Richard is having doubts about Clare. They’ve been engaged for six months. Helen thinks he could do better. (Clare is very sexy but she isn’t bright enough for him. She just wants someone who’ll keep her in Benetton sweaters and holidays in Corfu, and she knows he’ll inherit his dad’s carpet business.) Helen says she doesn’t know how he can be with someone who reads the Daily Mail, but Richard defends her, saying, She only reads it ‘cos her parents read it. She’s really got a heart of gold.
Sean fancies Nellie, a girl in his psychology class. She smiles at him a lot but he doesn’t know if this means anything. He wants to know what he should do. He’s too shy to ask her out. She’s always with a posse of admirers. He sat in the Reading Room for two hours one Friday, hoping she’d come in.
Jana’s sleeping with a guy in her Rimbaud tutorial. His girlfriend’s at Lancaster University. Jana feels guilty, but not that guilty. It’s just a fling, she says. Anyway, I’m going to Barcelona next term.
Helen thinks she should start her own agony aunt column, Dear Looby…
Dear Looby,
I am terrified my boyfriend will dump me. I have a mystery illness and I’ve had to leave university. He lives ninety miles away and I can’t visit him, he has to come to me. I only see him every three weeks but I write him lots of letters. He’s very good-looking and kind and supportive and I’m worried someone else is going to snap him up. What should I do?
With best wishes,
Helen.
Sometimes I go to the supermarket with Rita. She tells me what she needs and I write the shopping-list before we go. I feel like a child pretending to help. Sometimes I’m in the car putting my seat belt on and I have to go back inside because I feel too ill.
I take her arm and we walk slowly up the aisles. I have to sit down at the checkout. I watch the groceries being nudged along the conveyor belt. You buy all this food, just to shit it out, what’s the point?
Christmas again. Penguin count ten.
Ivan came for New Year. We stayed in alone and watched Scotch and Wry and ate too many Twiglets. Everyone else was at Richard’s. After the bells we went to bed and I made him come (comme une sucette, like a lollipop!). He’d tried to make me come, but I couldn’t, everything was too jangled and I was scared I’d wet myself.
He wanted to see My Beautiful Laundrette before he went back to Dundee. He’d been going on about it the whole holiday. It’s supposed to be brilliant, he said. Rez has seen it. What’s the worst thing that could happen if we go?
My head will stove in and we’ll have to leave in the middle, I said. It’s not fair to you, and well disturb everyone, climbing over the seats.
We’ll sit near the aisle, he said, and if we have to leave we have to leave. Fuck everyone else! You were okay up the loch a few weeks ago, why won’t you be okay at the cinema? It’s only ten miles away, it’s not Timbuktu.
I’ve told you. The loch’s much nearer. I feel safe there.
Come on, Looby. It’ll be worth it. It’s two and half years since we went to the cinema, when you dragged me to see that shite film Diva.
That’s not true. We saw The Big Chill after I came home from France. Please don’t put pressure on me to go. And Diva wasn’t shite!
I’m not putting pressure on you. I just want you to see this. I promise I’ll look after you. You’ve managed to go into town to the hospital with Rita all those times. And that’s a longer journey.
I know it is, but I feel safe with Rita. She really understands how crappy I can feel.
I’ll look after you, he said. I swear I will.
When we came out of the cinema my legs were shaking and I had popcorn stuck to my coat. Ivan’d had to park a few streets away. I sat in the foyer while he went to get the car. I’d loved the film and was euphoric to be mingling with other cinema-goers. They didn’t know that my head was shifting inside and that I wasn’t going back to my flat with my boyfriend, but back to my parents’ to hibernate.
One night, Helen hears someone on the radio say: The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. They are quoting the psychiatrist Eric Berne. These words fix themselves in her head. It comforts her to think that healthy people – who go to uni, who go to work, who go to parties, who go inter-railing, who trek in the Himalayas – are merely structuring their waking hours.
She just structures hers differently.
Stoic and Hellenic.
Nothing to do with Greece.
11
New Bras
ONE DAY, WITHOUT warning, a pension book arrived for me in the post. Since Bob’s diagnosis, I’d been sending in six-monthly sick notes and filling in forms with humiliating questions, but I didn’t know I was a pensioner. They’d just been sending me giros.
It was like the book my granny had for Brian, long and thin like a skinny beige chequebook. Euphemistically known as a Monday Book.
Front page: HELEN FLEET. PLEASE DO NOT BEND.
Inside page: SEVERE DISABLEMENT ALLOWANCE.
Contents: perforated weekly payments to be signed for at the post office.
But I’m not disabled! I wailed to Rita. I’m exhausted and dizzy and weak and my life’s ruined, but I’m not disabled!
I think it’s a good sign, said Rita. I
t’s a confirmation of how debilitating your illness is. It’s a slap in the face for all the detractors.
But I’m severely debilitated, I said, not severely disabled.
I was mortified and hid it in the drawer with my bras and pants and only took it out on Mondays.
The post office is a quarter of a mile. Sometimes Rita goes herself and cashes the slip for me. Sometimes she runs me there and waits in the car while I wait behind blue-haired women and liver-spotted men and my legs burn. Sometimes I see Mrs Blonski.
On good days we walk, me leaning on Rita, like an old woman. We pass the house of the Latin teacher who killed himself, and the house owned by Italians, painted lilac to cheer themselves up when it rains.
Rita came through and told me there was a boy on the phone. I was making cheese scones, sitting down to roll the pastry.
Hello, doll, how are you doing? It was Callum.
He told me the Lomond Herald was interviewing people with the mystery illness. If I agreed to the interview, he would come with the reporter and take my photograph.
It’d be good to see you anyway, doll, he said.
When I hung up, the phone had floury fingerprints.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I’d need to get Marion to come over and trim my hair – I didn’t want to look a mess in the local paper.
I was starving. I often was in the middle of the night.
I went downstairs to get a banana. There was a dead bee in the fruit bowl, on its back with its legs half folded. It was huge. Its death seemed staged, as if someone had placed it there for me to find. I lifted it out with the turquoise washing-up gloves and tons of toilet paper so I couldn’t feel it. I put it in the bin and it fell into an old Whiskas can.
The birds hadn’t started yet. All you could hear was the fridge buzzing. I ripped a banana from the bunch and thought about Mr Cummings’ grocery van. Rita used to send us out with the string bag and the shopping list and Mr Cummings would always say, Would you like some nice bananas for your mother? The second syllable of bananas was elongated because of his English accent. We used to do impersonations of him.
After eating the ba-nah-na I brushed my teeth and went back to bed.
stranger What did you do today?
me I made cheese scones and put a dead bee in the bin.
When I eventually fell asleep I dreamt that Marion was cutting my hair and I had shrubs growing out of my head.
The journalist from the Lomond Herald was called Angus. He was wearing a worn-out hacking jacket with velvet elbows. When he spoke, beads of saliva formed in the corners of his mouth.
I sat on our new January sales Chesterfield, hugging my knees, while Angus asked me the usual questions. Rita and Nab sat obediently on the other Chesterfield, at right angles to me. Sean was moping in the kitchen.
I got pins and needles during the interview and had to slap my legs to get rid of them. This happens all the time, I said. Even after five minutes in one position. And I’m always waking up in the middle of the night with elephant trunk arms. My circulation’s not right.
Angus jotted it all down in his spiral pad.
I felt like a tape-recording of myself, I’d described the onset of the illness so often.
He asked Rita some questions too. She told him how helpless she’d felt, seeing me so ill and not being able to do anything, and what a relief the diagnosis had been.
Afterwards, Rita made Earl Grey tea and breaded ham sandwiches while Angus chatted to Nab and Sean (who was now moping in the living room).
Callum took some photos and I tried to look pale and interesting. When he’d finished he sat down beside me and grinned.
Don’t use those photos if they’re horrible, I said.
They’ll be lovely, he said. You should patent that neck of yours.
I’ll put it on my THINGS TO DO WHEN I’M BETTER LIST, I said.
I like your hair like that.
Thanks, I said. Bobs are back in. I’ve got a woman who comes to the house.
So how’s that handsome boyfriend of yours doing?
He’s fine. He’s in Dundee doing a post-graduate course in pharmacology.
I knew he was a bright boy. You must miss him.
Intensely, I said, but he’s coming back to Glasgow to do his PhD. Are you still with Roquia?
Nah. She moved to Stirling but we’re still friends. She’s doing politics there. D’you mind if I have a roily?
A what?
A roll-up. I’m dying for one. Will your mum mind?
No, she smokes now and then. There’s an ashtray on the table.
Is that an ashtray? It looks more like an ornament.
It’s Danish, I said. Everything here’s Danish since Nab.
He took out his tin and his Rizla papers. He had long fingers.
You’re not putting dope in it, are you?
I’d love to, he said, laughing. Have you got any?
Yeah, there’s a stash upstairs, I said. So will you be developing these photos yourself?
Nah, the technician develops them but I’ll bring you the contact sheet if you want and you can choose which one you want. I’ll have a word with the picture editor. The article won’t be out for a couple of weeks yet, Angus is interviewing a few people.
I’d love to be able to develop my own photos, I said. It seems so glamorous.
There’s nothing to it. I could teach you sometime if you want.
I don’t have a darkroom.
You can use any wee room, as long as it’s completely blacked out. Have you got a spare room here?
There’s an office cum boxroom upstairs.
That’d do.
What about the trays and chemicals?
I could bring those.
What else d’you need?
An enlarger. He sniggered and licked the side of the cigarette paper, rolling it up slimly and perfectly. I’d like to show you my enlarger some time.
What else? I said.
A safelight.
What else?
He grinned and said, Paper.
It seems like an awful palaver.
It’s a piece of cake. You can be the next Diane Arbus.
Who’s Diane Arbus?
She was from New York and took photos of dwarves and transvestites. I’ve got a book of her photos, I’ll bring it round if you want. She killed herself.
Why did she kill herself?
She was unhappy…why does anyone kill themselves?
Lots of reasons, I said.
Angus, d’you know why Diane Arbus killed herself? said Callum.
Never heard of her, said Angus.
That’s journalists for you, said Callum. They know nothing.
Rita brought the sandwiches through. Angus didn’t drink Earl Grey and asked if we had any ‘normal stuff. His saliva beads got worse when he ate, stretching into thin wires as he chewed.
When they’d left I told Rita I had something to confess.
What is it? she said.
Callum’s the one who flattened your hollyhocks before I went to France.
She frowned. Doesn’t surprise me. He seems a bit strange. He’s a bit gangly, isn’t he, all arms and legs? And he doesn’t seem very clean. He got ash all over the new sofa.
I’m sorry, I said. He said he’d bring the contact sheets over and I can choose the photo for the interview.
God, Helen, it’s not the front page of the Observer! The photo’s not really important, is it? It’s what we said that matters.
Why are you snapping at me?
Because you’re preoccupied by something that’s trivial, that’s why.
I just don’t want to look like a pie. My face always looks flat in photos. So does yours, you know it does. Our cheekbones don’t come out.
Maybe you look like a pie because you do look like a pie, said Sean.
Shut your face.
Don’t you two start arguing, said Rita. Please.
He said he’d teach me photography, I said.
> Where does he live? said Rita.
Electric flats, I said.
What on earth are the electric flats?
They’re the council flats with blue verandas next to our old primary school, said Sean.
Why electric? said Rita.
I think because the verandas are electric blue, I said.
That’s shite, said Sean.
Who asked you? I said.
Can’t you see that guy’s totally acting it?! he said. He’s not going to teach you photography. He’s a head case.
He’s not a head case!
He is. He’s a drug dealer.
No, he’s not!
You’re so naive, Helen. He’s a head case, so’s his sister.
You’re the naive one. You think he’s a drug dealer ‘cos he lives in a council house. Granny and Grandad must be drug dealers too then. And Brian.
You live in a bubble, Helen.
Why don’t you go and play with yourself, you horrible little boy?
Piss off.
Sean, don’t talk to your sister like that.
What, I can’t swear at her because she’s ill?! What’ll happen, will she crumble and die?!
I can’t help being ill! It’s not my fault!
Enough! said Rita. Both of you go upstairs if you can’t be civil to one another. Nab and I would like some peace if it’s not too much to ask.
Now, people, let’s calm down, said Nab. We don’t need to fight, do we?
Happy Larry started it, I said.
I’m staying downstairs, said Sean. I want to watch A Very Peculiar Practice.
So do I, I said.
I looked at my family divided between the Chesterfields and wondered if the interview had upset them. I knew I was on a high because Callum had been flirting with me. I wondered if I was being solipsistic (it was my new favourite word, I’d found it when I was looking up soliloquy, in a panic ‘cos I’d forgotten how to spell it).
Before going to bed Sean came through to my room. I’m sorry about before, he said. I’m pissed off because I asked Nellie out today when we were in the Grosvenor and she said no but she’d love to be my friend. She says she feels really relaxed with me.
The State of Me Page 8
