Painkiller
Authors: N.J. Fountain
N.J. Fountain is an award-winning comedy writer, chiefly known for his work on the radio and television show
Dead Ringers
. He has also contributed to programmes such as
Have I Got News For You, 2DTV
and the children’s sitcom
Scoop
. He also writes for
Private Eye.
Published by Sphere
978-0-7515-6120-3
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © N.J. Fountain 2016
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
‘If’ lyrics by Neil Hannon reproduced with kind permission of Damaged Pop Music/Domino Publishing Company Ltd. © 1997 Damaged Pop Music/Domino Publishing Company Ltd.
‘Comfortably Numb’ lyrics by Dar Williams, Roger Waters, David Jon Gilmour, © Roger Waters Music Overseas Ltd, Pink Floyd Music Publr. Inc., Floyd Music Publishers Ltd, Artemis Muziekuitgeverij B.V., Burning Fields Music.
‘Viva La Vida’ lyrics by Christopher Anthony John Martin, Guy Rupert Berryman, William Champion, Jonathan Mark Buckland © Universal Music Publishing Group
Poem (
If I could place a curtain round these steps
…) reproduced with kind permission of Nicola Bryant
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.
SPHERE
Little, Brown Book Group
Carmelite House
50 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DZ
Table of Contents
If you were a tree
I could put my arms around you
And you could not complain
If you were a tree
I could carve my name into your side
And you would not cry
Because trees don’t cry.
NEIL
HANNON
I am sleeping on my own tonight; my Angry Friend is awake. Dominic is asleep, and I had to go to the spare room.
I need something, anything, to concentrate on, because I know I will be awake with my Angry Friend all night. So I open drawers. I search through cards, papers, looking for old love letters to reread, and I find the letter at the bottom of a basket.
It is brittle to the touch, even though the date at the top suggests it is only four years old. It looks as though it has been folded and refolded until the paper wore out. It smells odd. A chemical odour.
The paper is decorated in autumn leaves, scattered around the edge. I recognise the pattern. I also recognise the handwriting. It says:
Dear Dominic
I am sorry I have to write this, but not as sorry as I feel that you have to read this. I cannot go on like this. I really do not wish to leave you, but my body is still lying at the bottom of a deep dark hole, and twelve months later, I can see no way of climbing out. When I wake every morning I know I should be thanking the world that I have your love and support, but instead I’m just counting the seconds until the drugs manage to take me back to sleep.
I feel such a burden to you. You are young and can start again. You deserve that chance.
By the time you read this I will be dead. Do not grieve for me, for I am now without pain. When we meet again it will be wondrous for both of us.
Yours truly for ever,
Monica
XXX
I don’t remember writing the letter; but then, I don’t remember lots of things. I just wonder why it’s there. I put the basket back in the cupboard and lie back on the bed with the letter in my hand, and wait until morning.
Perhaps trying to focus on the letter will take my mind off my Angry Friend
, I think.
I am wrong, of course.
Dominic lowers his newspaper and smiles at me when I come down the stairs. He doesn’t have to ask where I was when he’d woken up alone; he knows the ritual.
‘Long night?’ is all he says.
‘Very,’ I say.
He springs up. ‘Breakfast?’
‘I’ll get it.’
‘No, I’ll do it. It’s no trouble.’
‘No really, I need to move about. I don’t want to sit.’
He pops his bottom lip out. After all these years, he still isn’t used to it; the rhythm of chivalry dies hard with him. He instinctively reached for me in the early days after the accident, to comfort me, and he couldn’t bear it when I recoiled. His hand used to hover over the small of my back when we walked to the car, not knowing if his touch was a comforting presence or an agonising weapon.
I busy myself in the kitchen.
‘Are you going to work today?’ I call.
‘Yes. I’m meeting with a client. Low-fat spread. They’re bored with it being seen as just healthy. They want fun and healthy.’
‘Ah.’
‘I think we want different things. He wants talking cows that talk like drug dealers and do that twerky dance. I want to punch him. I think we’re going to have to meet in the middle on that score.’
Dominic works in advertising. I always think it sounds fun, but if I try talking to him about it for more than a minute he starts to froth around the mouth. I watch him through the door as I make my breakfast. He really is still a handsome man. I remember when I had friends, and we used to get invited to dinner parties, and I saw them with their husbands, and I was shocked by how quickly the men expanded like balloon animals from year to year, big round ugly things with huge bellies and no necks.
Sure, he’s put on a bit of weight
, I think,
that’s to be expected. He spends a lot of time parked behind that computer.
But his hair, even though grey, is still recognisable from our wedding photos. He hasn’t lost a lot of it, from the front, anyway, and his face, though
very
round now, still has an impish, cheeky youthfulness.
I make my breakfast and lower myself into a high-backed chair, one of the ones we have bought since the accident.
‘I was in the spare room, just going through things, trying to take my mind off, as I do…’ I am trying to keep my voice casual. ‘When I came across this…’
I put the letter on the table between us. He makes a big play of reapplying his reading glasses to his nose, and unfolds the frail piece of paper.
He takes a long time to read it; far longer than it should have taken. He eventually puts the letter down and removes his glasses, plopping one of the arms in his mouth, and he makes a quizzical expression.
‘Yes?’
‘Well, I just wondered if you could talk to me about it.’
‘What would you like me to say?’
‘Um… Everything?’
‘Oh.’ He looks down at his crumb-laden plate, and then looks up again. ‘It was about four years ago… Before we got the drugs right.’
‘OK.’
‘… Well, you were lying on the floor all the time. You couldn’t bear to be touched. You couldn’t comb your hair. You couldn’t take a bath…’
‘I remember all that, Dominic, tell me about the letter!’
My Angry Friend makes me speak sharply. He picks at the loose threads of my mind and unravels my patience. Dominic raises his eyebrows, but he doesn’t comment on it.
‘You hadn’t slept in days, and it didn’t look like things were ever going to get any better. I popped out for a few minutes, just to get a paper, and you’d written the note and left it on the table.’
‘I’d tried to commit suicide?’
‘You were going to try. You’d crawled to the cabinet and got the pills out; you said you were going to overdose but you must have passed out.’
‘Jesus. I’m sorry you had to come home to that.’
He flinches when I say ‘Jesus’.
‘I was just glad I came home early, and found you when I did.’
I pick up the letter. ‘I must have been in a very dark place.’
‘Very. But you’re not there now.’
He pushes his hand across the table, trying to reach my fingers, but I’m slightly too far away.
‘It’s just odd,’ I continue.
‘What’s odd?’
‘Well… What’s it doing in the box?’
He returns to his newspaper. ‘Why shouldn’t it be in the box?’
‘Keeping an old suicide letter. It just doesn’t seem… well, it just doesn’t seem right.’
Dominic looks like he’s thinking.
‘Why not?’
‘It just doesn’t. It feels freaky.’
‘I think you wanted to keep it, because you wanted to know how far you’d fallen. You wanted to look back on it and say “at least I’m not there now”.’
I think about this. ‘That doesn’t sound like something I’d do.’
He shrugs. ‘Well, that’s what you said, or something like that.’ He goes on, ‘I didn’t think it a good idea at all. I said you should destroy it, but you didn’t want to.’
I look at the letter. ‘Well, I don’t know what I said then, but I don’t want it now. Frankly, it makes me feel ill.’
Dominic shrugs again and holds his hands up in surrender. ‘Well, that’s fine too. Shall I tear it up now?’
‘Ah… Yes.’
‘Sure?’
‘Yes. Definitely.’
He reaches across and takes it, and tears it precisely in half, and then in half again, carrying on until there is a little pile of peach confetti on the table. Then he brushes the bits off the table into his palm, and walks to the downstairs office, and empties his hand into the waste-paper basket. Then he goes back to the paper, without a single word. I have been married to him for ten years now, and I know when he gets grumpy and he’s not reading the paper. He’s just staring at the black shapes of the words, waiting for his temper to subside.
So I eat my muesli, and he simmers down, and the pages of the newspaper start to turn again, and we don’t talk about the letter again that morning.
And that, I thought, was the end of the matter.
There are whole months that are a blur to me. That’s the thing about my life. My pain consumes half of my mind, and the drugs that deal with the pain consume the other half.
Whole sections of my memory got shut off. I can’t remember places I’ve been to and books I’ve read.
And – and this is the really tragic thing for me – I can’t remember a life without pain.
I don’t remember the tune Dominic and I listened to on our honeymoon in Egypt. I had signed my name ‘Monica Wood’ in the hotel register, still practising my signature, and we’d got room service to change the pillows because I’m allergic to feathers.
We had a meal by candlelight in the open air, and the stars were very clear and very close, and there was a dreadful violinist who moved between the tables of the restaurant and only played one tune and wouldn’t leave us alone, and had us in stitches all night.
Dom laughed so much in the room afterwards he had a nose bleed.
When I realised I couldn’t remember what tune the violinist played, even though we heard it dozens of times, I panicked and started crying uncontrollably. It was just like that Christmas Eve when I was a little girl, tucked in my bed, and I couldn’t remember the name I was going to call the rabbit I was getting from Father Christmas in the morning, and I cried because I thought I had lost the name for ever. My mother sat on my bed, and stroked my hair, and told me I was going to call it ‘Jumpy’.
I was lying on the floor, a year after my accident, and I realised I couldn’t remember the tune the violinist played, and I sobbed. I must have sobbed, or made some kind of noise, because Dom came rushing in from the kitchen, his hands still wet from washing up. He knelt on the floor, bending over me, asking me, ‘What’s wrong?’ The silly things we say sometimes. Something is always wrong. We both know that. The question should have been ‘What’s
more
wrong?’ but that just sounds silly. We both knew what he meant.
I told him about the violinist; and that I couldn’t remember. He told me the tune was the theme music from
The Godfather
.
‘That’s why we were laughing so much,’ said Dominic. ‘He played it so many times, and it was meant to be romantic but it was so sinister. And I said he must have really done his research, because he knew it was your favourite film, and he was going to play the tune as many times as you’d watched it, and that… that made us laugh even more. We shook the bed until two o’clock because we couldn’t stop laughing.’
The Godfather
.
I clutched at the piece of information like a drowning man clutching at a piece of driftwood. I was still thinking of
The Godfather
when the cocktail of painkillers started to send me to sleep.
Then I was crying again.
I realised I couldn’t remember seeing
The Godfather
, or anything about it. Even though Dominic told me it was my favourite film.
Dominic has always been brilliant. He has treated my pain like a crusade. Like it was a mission from God. He would heal the sick.
He would make the lame walk.
He would cure me.
He scoured the websites and periodicals for new drugs, new treatments. It was Dominic who found out that Gabapentin was becoming Pregabalin, even before my pain specialist.
Gabapentin was this drug that I took at the beginning, before there were drugs for chronic pain. Gabapentin wasn’t for pain relief; it was designed for epileptics. It was engineered to cut off certain signals to the brain, to stop sufferers flailing about.
In short: it kind of worked, but it made me imagine the wardrobes in my bedroom were trying to eat me, so it was counter-productive, to say the least.
But it was Dominic who found out that they were refining the part of the drug that dealt with the pain centres of the brain, and this meant, finally, that
a) I could speak, get out of bed, wipe my bottom, etc., and
b) I could go to the window without trying to jump out of it.
But no drugs are that specific; no drugs just do that single thing that they’re supposed to do. There are always side effects, hallucinations, paranoia. The particular combination of drugs I’m on now have erased a huge chunk of my memory, from way way back at the start of the accident, when things were very very bad.
The mind – and the body – they both have ways of surviving. They shut down the horror and carry on.
It can be frustrating, sometimes. My mind is like the suicide note; folded and dog-eared until the words are hard to make out, and now ripped into shreds.
But there are still fragments.