Painkiller (11 page)

‘Fine. Whatever,’ I say.

‘OK, good, so let’s —’

‘And what about my accident?’

‘What about it?’

‘The
accident
, Dominic.
The accident!
Do you think I’m mad? Do you think it was just an accident and the drugs are making me mad?’

He breathes out heavily, through his nose this time, and I can hear a faint whistle. He’s irritated. He wishes this conversation wasn’t happening.

‘Look, if you think that’s how it happened, then I believe you. But the police didn’t.’

I stopped, sniffing, snivelling, wiping my nose. ‘What?’

‘We’ve been here. We’ve done this. They couldn’t find anything. No evidence of anyone up there when you were. And there were no cameras up there to prove accident or otherwise.’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘If we’d made a complaint at the time… but as we made it months later there was only so much they could do…’

‘I don’t
remember any of this
…’

‘I know. I’m sorry you can’t remember all this, and I am seriously sorry I have to explain it again. And again.’

He went to the fridge and looked inside.

‘How about a Mars Bar for dessert?’

‘Lovely.’

I struggle to the bathroom to clean my face, take my drugs, and when I come back down he’s in the living room, his finger on the TV remote, ready to order a movie. He’s picked something mindless and stupid to take our minds off what’s happened, because he knows the drill.

I feel chilled to the bone, even though the central heating is on maximum – that’s what happens sometimes; my Angry Friend siphons off my body heat and I end up shivering while Dominic’s walking around in a T-shirt – so Dominic makes me three hot water bottles, and I snuggle under a throw until the movie finishes, and we watch television on the sofa until there is no more television left to watch.

He makes love to me that night. When we go to bed he has already dimmed the lights, and he’d bought candles that smelt of lavender and rose.

I know he planned to, and he wanted to, but I also know it wasn’t a good night for this, but I crave normality, so I acquiesce.

He tries long and hard, but I can’t orgasm. Someone is laughing at me, dragging my attention from achieving a climax. Finally I just look up into his eyes and say, ‘Dominic, please. I love you. It doesn’t matter.’

His shoulders sag in grim acceptance, then he raises himself up, accelerates, and I nibble his ear, which always excites him, and soon he’s coming, surging noisily into me with a cry of defeat. He flops onto the pillow next to mine, breathing deeply. I can already feel the warmth and wetness on my thigh.

‘That was lovely,’ I said.

He doesn’t answer.

‘Hold my hand.’

He takes my hand.

‘It’s always lovely. To be close to you. That’s all I need. That’s all I want.’

He keeps holding my hand. I’m very tired. I’m nodding off.

And then there is silence, as he leaves me alone with my Angry Friend, but that night he doesn’t keep me awake. He takes me on a trip.

Sometimes Dominic listened to Monica’s breathing into the night, and most of the time he could hear that her breath wasn’t quite slow enough, and he knew that she was still awake, desperately trying to push her head under, like a nervous child playing dare in the swimming baths, trying and failing and always bobbing back to the surface. But now he could definitely hear the tell-tale pshhhh-pshhhh of deep sleep; the slow rhythmic rush of air in and out of her nose.

Silently, so very very quietly, he got up and shuffled his feet into his silly tiger slippers. He went downstairs and into the study. He sat at the keyboard and switched on the computer.

He went to the JPEGs on the other side of the screen and clicked on the scans of the information leaflets of the drugs Monica took every day. Dominic was very organised and kept them all together; after all, he was living with a person not quite in her right mind – he needed to know what might be around the next corner.

He knew he was in a bad place, but he could never remember how he got from
there
to
here.

The list went on and on, with every symptom known to medical science, from the prosaic (kidney failure) to the poetic (inappropriate behaviour) but as far as Dominic was concerned, there was only one that filled his waking thoughts.

loss of memory
 

Every day he thanked the Lord for the side effects; the exquisite double-edged sword that caused her to forget those things that happened. The bad things she made him do. It wasn’t his fault; he
had
to do those things.

But now all that looked like changing, and now he had to do the bad things again.

‘Why?’ he muttered under his breath.

But there was no answer.

I’m back on the roof of the car park.

I’m not alone; there’s my mum and dad, standing smiling. There are Dominic’s parents, and they’re smiling too. They’re all smiling and all dressed in the clothes they wore at our wedding.

I look around for Dominic, but he isn’t here.

I look down at myself. I’m not wearing my wedding dress; I’m wearing the filthy sweat-stained T-shirt I wore in the first year of the accident, the one with the happy bunny rabbits bouncing on it. The one I never stopped wearing because I couldn’t dress myself and I couldn’t bear to be touched. The T-shirt is long, but it’s not long enough. I tug it down, pulling it over my thighs, stretching the middle bunny rabbit’s cheeky smile into a slack-jawed yawn, covering the soiled knickers I woke up wearing, day after day after day.

But I know this is a wedding and I have to walk to the semicircle of smiles waiting for me; they are standing there waiting for me, standing too near the edge. I walk to them, holding my shirt down as I go.

And there is Niall, there, by the top of the steps, in his lycra shorts, and he is jogging on the spot. ‘You’re not walking straight!’ he shouts angrily. ‘Stand up straight! This is your big day!’

And I try to straighten up, but the T-shirt isn’t long enough, and then I am suddenly bare from the waist down, and I don’t want to show my mother and my future in-laws my nakedness. I know I stink, because my mind tells me I haven’t had a bath in a long time.

Niall gets very angry. ‘Posture!’ he screams. ‘Posture!’

I scuttle to the edge of the roof, to the relatives. ‘Please,’ I say. ‘We’re not quite ready yet. Dominic’s got lazy sperm.’ But they just smile at me. They aren’t standing on the roof, they are over the edge, hovering above the ground without a care in the world.

I look down at their shoes, and down and down and down, and I can see the entrance to the hospital, and I can see a tiny blue and yellow Mini driving around below, trundling round in circles like a drowsy wasp. It’s Jesse’s car, the first one she bought when she left college. The one she ploughed into a tree on her twenty-first birthday.

‘Jesse!’ I scream down. ‘Jesse!’

But the little car shows no sign of stopping. It just potters aimlessly around the entrance, but there are no parking spaces. Eventually it gives up and drives out. I am so high up I can see it moving along the main road, getting smaller and smaller, until buildings and trees swallow it up.

I look back at the entrance, and notice that there’s someone else watching Jesse’s car, a figure dressed in black with a luminous bib, like a car park attendant. He looks up at me, and even though I’m hundreds of feet above the ground and he’s standing by the entrance I can see his face like I’m nose to nose with him. It’s a round, young face with thinning blond hair and a feeble ginger moustache, which is narrow and barely formed.

‘Is that everything, Monica?’ he says. ‘Is there anything else you want to tell me?’

I think I’m nodding.

‘Are you sure?’

He looks disappointed in me, and I feel very guilty and look away, and everyone is gone, the parents, Niall… I look back down and the man with the feeble moustache has gone too.

I’m aware I’m cold, and I’m too near the edge, but my body won’t let me walk back to the centre. My mind is screaming at me to get to safety, but my feet stay put.

There’s a crunch of gravel, a shape at the top of the stairwell, and a figure appears, out of focus. Pixelated. I stare hard, because I know this is the one who pushed me. I just know it. I strain my eyes to see who it is, but the person remains a cloud on the horizon.

Intangible, like smoke.

I hear a scuffle behind me and I whirl around, and I’m nose to nose with the cloud. It envelops me like a morning mist, and I’m feeling very, very cold.

The cloud forms into a giant hand, with long pointed black fingernails. It shoves me with all its might, and I fall, and I fall, and I fall.

Down and down and down.

I’m thinking:
This is a dream, I know it’s a dream but if I hit the bottom in my dream then I will die I know I will that’s what they say that’s what they say that’s what

When I wake up, I’m drowning in sweat and clawing at the darkness. I lie in the matted remains of the bedcovers, snatching air into my lungs with big whooping gasps. My arm flails across to Dominic’s side and finds…

Nothing. He’s not there.

I struggle up and stare sightlessly into the darkness. ‘Dom?’ I say quietly. ‘Dominic, are you there?’

I struggle out of bed, slowly, waves of pain pushing me down, telling me to stay where I am, but I want to know. I inch downstairs and hobble from room to room, until I see a glow from under the study door.

Then the door opens and I’m blinded by the light, and Dominic is in the doorway.

‘Monica!’ he says. ‘What are you doing up?’

‘I woke up and you weren’t there.’

‘I couldn’t sleep. I remembered I had an email to send.’ He grabs my elbow gently. ‘Let’s get you back to bed.’

‘Dominic,’ I blurt. ‘I’m sorry about the argument.’

I stumble, and he can see I’m in trouble. He leads me back to my bed, and I stare at the ceiling while he sits in a chair, reading a couple of chapters from the dumb thriller he’s got on his bedside table. Any distraction is good.

He reads the thriller to me until three o’clock, until his voice is hoarse, and the book is over, and then he reads me
The Velveteen Rabbit
, which is one of my childhood favourites, and then his voice gives up and he kisses me goodnight. Then he goes into the spare room. He can see I’m in a bad way, so he doesn’t even ask to share the bed.

He is such a good man.

I am so lucky to have him.

I lie in bed, still awake, still listening to the chuckle of my Angry Friend, thinking about my life, and even in my pit of pain, I laugh. My memory has folded in on itself, like a well-thumbed suicide note.

Folded so often you can see the cracks.

I wake up…

… And the pain hits me, like I’ve driven at full speed into a wall.

My Angry Friend is going to make me (
pay you bitch
) for the car park steps, the argument with Niall, the fight with Dominic, the child on my lap.
Especially
the child on my lap. My Angry Friend is a bit of a (
bastard
) like that.

I’m not going anywhere today.

My Angry Friend has locked me inside my house, inside my bedroom, inside my bed, inside my body, inside my head, and hidden the key for the foreseeable future.

My eyes follow patterns in the ceiling, the swirls of plaster, the stem of the lamp; sometimes the swirls are foam bubbles in a coffee cup, sometimes they are wind-blown clouds. Once, when I was very bad, they used to move, undulating and surging like the tide on a beach.

My eyes flick to the dressing table mirror to catch a glimpse of myself. It’s difficult to see where Monica ends and the rest of the world begins. I’m halfway to heaven; pillow, pyjamas, face, duvet. All is white.

I listlessly flick the channels with the remote, hopping from property show, to antique show, and back to property show again. Nothing that could hold my attention for more than a few seconds, let alone distract me from the (
fucking
) pain.

I switch on the DVD player with the other remote, and a couple being shown around a cottage disappears from the screen and is replaced by a menu page; Marlon Brando wandering around an orchard.

Dominic remembered. He’s put
The Godfather
in the machine.

I click ‘play’, and I reacquaint myself with what used to be my favourite film. I get past the severed horse’s head, the man shot in the throat, but when James Caan dances with agony while bullets pepper his car, I have to turn it off. Even watching this violence; this tiny, decades-old violence trapped in a little screen inside a television inside a cupboard, it makes my pain levels rise in sympathy.

It occurs to me that perhaps my brain told me to forget about
The Godfather
because it knew it was bad for me. It also occurs to me – the other thing I’ve forgotten about, the suicide attempt…

Perhaps I’ve forgotten all the other violent memories too.

I squeeze the remote, switch off the DVD player, and it’s replaced by daytime television. Too loud. My thumb scrambles to the volume button.

My eyes are captivated by the moving images. People talking on sofas without pain. People sitting behind desks without pain. People dancing and singing without pain. The whole world is a party to which I’m not invited. The people sitting on sofas wave goodbye and smile, and dissolve to adverts. The adverts are even louder than the programmes, and my ears scream along with my body.

The adverts. At least they have people in pain. People falling off ladders and getting whiplash from a seatbelt. Granted, after making a phone call they’re happy again, but for those few brief seconds

and there’s Niall.

It’s happening again.
 

Oh God,
 

it’s happening again. Just like in the study.
 

Not again
…
 

He’s jogging through a park, muscles swelling and deflating with the vigorous movement of his arms. And then he’s collapsing on a park bench and he’s clutching his stomach, and sandwiches and peanuts are dancing around him. And now he’s necking a glutinous pink drink, and then he’s smiling at me in relief.

A person without pain.

The hallucination happened once before; I think I might have been thinking about him. That time he grinned impishly at me when he was cleaning a filthy kitchen with a wondrous liquid, holding it up so I could read the label. Taunting me. Housework? In this condition?
Fuck off.

I must stop thinking about him.
 

But it’s like when someone asks you not to think of something, and you immediately think of it. What’s that called?
Irony, I guess.

Stop thinking about Niall. I must stop
—
 

The letter box clatters.

A letter.

Second post.

Another letter.

I’m irrationally excited. My life seems to be shaped by the discovery of important letters these days. The suicide letter, the letter from the hospital…

Perhaps it’s another one from the hospital. Perhaps it’s new information. Perhaps after lots and lots of trials they’ve suddenly realised the capsaicin cure is permanent and I can convince Dominic that it’s worth the risk
.

Can I get downstairs? I decide against it. But lying there, I cannot get the image out of my head, a beige rectangular shape, sitting there on the mat.

I flop out of bed like a landed salmon and squirm my way to the door, and slowly, slowly, out into the hall.

The view down the stairs looks dizzying, vertiginous; and the dream floods back into my addled brain.
I could have been climbing off a ledge of a tall building.
By bracing myself against the banisters, I find I can inch down the steps without jarring myself.

There it is, but it doesn’t look like it’s from the hospital. It’s large and red; so red that it’s blended in with the colour of the carpet. A large coffin-shaped envelope with my name and address on the front, handwritten in an exquisite stretched-out copperplate style. I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing. I wonder if I’m still in the dream, and that the letter is an invitation to fall off the top of the car park in my underwear again.

I open it, and the card is also coffin shaped, but this is in a shiny black. I can see my shadowy reflection in it, my eyes obscured in pools of darkness cast by my brow.

 

It smells exquisite. A wonderful, familiar, chemical smell.

It’s in one week’s time
, I think.
I want to go to this. I so want to go to this. I need to go to this.

I crawl back to bed, clutching my prize, and I settle back down. Body and mind are inextricably linked, but it’s only people who go through what I’ve gone through who really appreciate what that means.

I have hope in my hand, and my Angry Friend is already retreating, snarling into a corner. I close my eyes…

… And then I’m waking up.

And below me, the back gate bangs shut.

It can’t be Agnieszka. It’s not her day. It’s not Agnieszka. She wouldn’t come in the back gate anyway. It leads to a narrow passage that connects the other gardens on the street, and some empty garages. No one comes in that way.

I struggle upright but I can’t move. My expedition downstairs has created more problems.

I try to push the duvet off my body
Jesus, I can’t even do that
so I half crawl, half slide to the edge of the bed, and look down at the floor. It’s a hell of a long way down. But I have to know who’s out there.

I roll myself off the bed.

My cry, as I impact with the carpet, is loud and raw, and frightens me when I hear it.

Sometimes, I have to do this, because my screams are the only way of my brain letting my body know that it’s in serious trouble.
Knives are in my back. My arms and legs are embedded with cutlery
.
I’m in a splatter movie with no ‘splat’. There should be blood
, I think.
There should be blood. Why is there no blood? It’s not fair that there’s no blood. I have all this feeling and nothing to show for it, no proof. I’m just a woman lying on the floor with her hands pointing to the air in submission and fingers curled into talons
,
like I’m hiding under an invisible plank of wood. If there was blood, I would get a proper scream of horror, not some sympathetic sigh from my husband, or maternal cry from my cleaner. I want to hear a scream. I want to hear a scream from someone once in a while. If only from me.

Rolling and moaning, rolling and moaning, and slowly, slowly, on my belly, with elbows in the air, and hands pushing my body along, lizard-like, to the window, then grab the legs of the, go on (
grab the chair!
) Now hold it, hold the chair, drag yourself up, elbows on the seat, arms on the seat, QUICKLY now! I’m tired, I’m so tired (
no time to be tired
).
You have to get up there, get up there, got to see who’s there. Find out. You have to find out. (
Come on, you bitch, don’t wimp out like this!
) And I put a spurt on, up, bum on the seat, another scream, I’m twisting my spine, I have to bring my legs round until I’m sitting parallel to the window, and my shoulders and hips are facing the same way, and there’s the ledge, an inch above my head, and I try to reach it but my arms can’t move up, they can’t do it, so I hold on to the curtain sash and move the hands up the rope, and I’m screaming again, glorious and loud, as there’s no one about, and when they’re far enough up the rope – I’m ready.

I’m ready.
 

I’m
…
ready.
 

Ready.
 

(
Go on, what are you waiting for? Stand up
)

I can’t. I need to
…
 

(
Stand up, you bitch!
)

All right, keep your hair on, you fucking cow! I just need to do this
…
my way.
 

(
Then fucking hurry up, bitch!
)

Anger. I need anger.
 

I need to think of things to make me angry.
The Godfather
. The old man and his dog. The Atos ‘doctor’ with his sick-brown cheap suit with the stains and the briefcase with the dirty plastic tube. My dad’s car and my pet bunny rabbit. The spade on his shoulder, still with blood on it. How could you be so stupid, Adrian?

And Dominic.
 

Dominic with his world-weary sigh and his ‘you’re not thinking straight’ comment.
 

And in conclusion, your honour
…
 

‘FUCCKKK! FUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKKKK!’ I allow the explosion of rage and frustration to propel myself up until I am standing upright, and I collapse on the window sill, whimpering, with tears of relief, hugging the coolness of the painted wood. And I look out of the window.

And then I realise my glasses are still on my bedside table.

The tears turn to hysterical laughter as I look out and see two small green blobs (the lawn) and one long grey blob (the path) and a brown blob (the gate and shed and fence), and by the brown blob there is a small dark blue blob with a white blob on it.

Concentrate. You can make sense of what you see.
 

There’s a big blue blob; moving around, man in a suit. And he’s by the bins. He’s looking in the bins. No. He’s looking under the bins.

(
What the fuck is he
) my body quivers with a sudden surge of panic, and it shoots up my spine. And there’s that familiar feeling. There’s that rush of heat, like someone’s opened the door to hell…

Here we go again

Alice falls down into the rabbit hole
…

It felt crazy to dig in broad daylight but luckily they had high walls around the garden, so Dominic felt reasonably confident that he wouldn’t be overseen.

It was far more risky to dig in darkness, by his reckoning. Monica rarely slept, there was always that danger she would hear the telltale sounds; the click of the back door, the crunch of gravel, the scrape of the bin, and the sound of metal on stone as he started to break the earth. And if anyone saw him digging, then a man with a shovel in the garden during the day would be much more easy to explain than a man with a shovel in the garden at three in the morning.

When Dominic found the bag, it had completely perished, crumpled and compacted in the earth. Brown slime slipped out of the leather seams. He looped the straps around the end of the spade and placed it gently down on the edge of the rockery. He pulled on a gardening glove and wiped off the worst of the mud, excavating with his fingers until he found the zip, and tugged until the bag grew a huge flapping maw.

Nothing inside.

Dominic’s mouth gaped open like the bag.

Where had it gone?
 

Where had the gun gone?
 

Where?
 

His mind flapped in all directions, like a plastic bag caught in the wind. Then he thought of Larry, and fury clouded his thoughts. He knew Larry had taken it. It was just like him.

Then he looked up, and saw Monica in the window.