Painkiller (2 page)

I wake up…

… Not good today.

I open my eyes and my Angry Friend’s sitting on my chest, gnawing at my innards with his incisors. My own teeth have been trying to grind together all night, and they’ve been mashing against my mouth guard.

This means the muscles in my neck have tightened into rock-like sculptures.

This means the blood to my head is constricted, and a searing headache is lancing into my right eye.

This means… It’s an average day in the life of Mrs Monica Wood and her Angry Friend.

My phone beeps, and beeps again to remind me that it’s just beeped. I moan as I know I have to move to reach it. Groaning. Gasping. My fingers fumble over the bedside table and the phone tumbles to the floor. Even the
flumph
as it hits the bedroom carpet sends shudders into my body.

Shit.

Straining. Stretching. Pushing the covers back. Sometimes they’re too heavy for me to move and I stay there, entombed like a dead Pharaoh
.
Willing myself to stand up. Then willing myself to bend down.

It’s another text from Niall.
U ok? Niall xxx

It’s his fifth U OK? text this month. I haven’t replied to any of them yet, because they all arrived at bad times, when the tips of my fingers couldn’t bear to make contact with the phone screen. And when the pain had not been so bad, my mind erased the memory that I got a text, and I only remembered again when the agony in my fingertips reminded me.

I think about just replying
No, that is y I’m not replying. Go away
. But he’s a useful person to have around. I think about replying politely but I don’t even have the energy to do that. I have to look after myself today.

So I send nothing at all, and concentrate on getting downstairs.

Men always find ways of not speaking, do you notice that? Anything to avoid words. It’s like their mouths are permanently on low battery. For example, it would take words for Dominic to ask ‘Is it OK to hug today?’ Instead, he has developed a habit, call it more a
strategy
, so when he leaves for work he just plants a kiss on my forehead like I’m eight years old.

It really irritates me, but we’ve argued about so many little things in the last five years I let some of them go, which is bad, because when you’ve got chronic neuropathic pain, it’s the little things that matter; like me being left to carry the towels downstairs to the washing machine, like him buying the big cartons of milk, the ones I find impossible to lift.

So he goes to work, and I’m left alone with my Angry Friend.

I don’t know why I created a character for my pain. It’s just another thing I can’t remember. It doesn’t sound like something I would come up with on my own. Perhaps it was Angelina’s idea to humanise it, so I would have someone I could swear at, someone I could blame for all the shit I endure every day.

Perhaps it was Dr Kumar’s suggestion, that it’s an established medical thingummy that’s been scientifically proven to ease the psychological pressure on blah blah blah. Whatever. Sometimes it works, and I can laugh in the face of my Angry Friend, and sometimes he’s laughing in
my
face, and I wish he’d never been born.

Sometimes, like today, my Angry Friend has me by the throat.

It takes me a long time to get dressed. I’m hobbling about like an old woman because my toes have curled over, cowering under my feet, and I have to prise them free, one at a time.

I avoid a shower because I’m worried about slipping and hitting my head on the edge of the bath. It’s happened before. The nights without sleep can take its toll, and this is definitely one of the woozy days.

I sit in the study, starting work with a cup of tea and my first collection of painkillers for the day.

I used to be a theatrical agent, an incredibly successful one. That’s why I’m lurching around a very expensive house in North Kensington. I did flirt with becoming an actress once, and I went to drama school for a year, but I soon realised that sitting round waiting for things to happen and smiling prettily at idiotic leading men wasn’t my style.

I set up a small office in Soho, and within five years you couldn’t watch a drama or comedy on television without seeing one of my clients. I represented half of the cast of
Chucking Out Time
, the British romcom that stormed through multiplexes a decade ago.

Well, to quote a Coldplay song: ‘That was when I ruled the world.’

I was invincible then, and producers and directors quaked and fawned in my presence. I earned much more than Dominic; it was incredible to think that he and I once talked about him escaping his miserable existence in advertising and becoming a house husband.

And then the accident came, and I couldn’t walk, or stand up, or think, and I stopped being a theatrical agent very quickly.

And now Dominic is our sole breadwinner, and we can barely make ends meet. Scrub that: we
can’t
make ends meet; his wage is pitiful, and the mortgage is being paid off with the interest from my savings account, which is getting smaller all the time. Less savings, less interest, no mortgage payments, and then… What then?

So now, to stave off financial ruin and homelessness, I’m trying to be an agent again. It’s early days (well, actually, two years) and it’s a slow painful process (ha ha).

I only have two clients at the moment: a retired stuntwoman who is usually billed as ‘Old Lady Who Falls Into Hedge’ in the credits of sitcoms; and Larry, an extremely thuggish-looking man with a dubious past who makes a lot of money playing tough guys in films and detective series. They don’t need an agent; they can make a good living without one. I need them more than they need me, but the one thing they have in common are hearts of pure gold. They know my situation and are very happy for me to take their calls and my 15 per cent commission.

I go into my side of the computer. My picture has a photo of a sunflower on it, and underneath there’s a white box, waiting for my password. I type in ‘Dominic’.
Peck peck peck peck peck peck peck.

Soon I’m staring at my emails, waiting for one of them to make sense. I try to reply to one.

Deer Sir
, I type.

Half of the words have little wiggly red lines under them. I know what I’ve written would make the eight-year-old version of me giggle, but I just can’t form the correct spellings in my head any more; just like I sometimes can’t form words when I speak.

I try to click on spellcheck, but my arm goes into spasm and I spill the tea all over my white T-shirt.

I strip off like a demented hooker, throw my shirt into the wash, and go and get paper towels. Thank God none of it went on the keyboard. I throw one of Dominic’s baggy T-shirts on, then lower myself slowly onto my hands and knees, tears springing into my eyes, and try to wipe the floor around the desk. I’m on my hands and knees when I have another spasm, my arms go from under me, and I pass out, colliding with the floor.

I regain consciousness.

Ow. Ow ow ow.
 

I could have been out two minutes, or the whole morning. From the sunshine hitting the blinds, I’m guessing I wasn’t out long. I realise I can’t get up.

The tiniest movement makes my vision darken, the heat surges, and I start to fall down the rabbit hole again. I’m stuck down here for the duration.

I lie on the furry rug, placed here especially for days like these. After a while, the cold of the marble floor seeps through. I have nothing to do but wait. My eyes are pointing under the desk, fixed on the dormant radiator, the dust and the spiders.

I must get Agnieszka to hoover under here
, I think.

Then the phone rings. And rings. And rings. Even noises are hurting me. I have to stop it. I pull an arm out from under my body, and tug at the telephone cord until it falls off the desk and hits me.

Ow
.

That’s so funny.

More pain.

I stretch out across the floor and I wrestle with the receiver.

‘Hi, sis.’ It’s Jesse. Her dutiful, weekly call.

‘Hi. Jesse. Good to hear from you.’

‘You sound different.’

‘I’m having a little lie-down.’

‘Good for you.’

I have no wish to tell my sister what’s happened. She never understands, she’ll just freak out and send an ambulance or something.

‘How’s tricks?’

‘Tricks are fine. How’s yours? How’s work?’

She goes into a ten-minute diatribe about the stupid owner of the restaurant and how she won’t change Jesse’s shift. Jesse is a chef, a good one, and having a job where she hides in a back room and shouts at people is a great fit for her, but it’s not good for nurturing her minimal listening skills.

I’m just lying there, holding the phone to my ear. I can’t move my head, so my vision is trained at the waste-paper basket. I can see the little bits of the letter through the wire mesh.

There, hanging on the edge of the basket, is a tiny fragment. The word ‘burden’ is intact, perfectly preserved on this little piece of paper. It dangles above me, twisting in the breeze from the open door.

Jesse gets to the climax of the story, where she threatens to leave and the manageress falls to her knees and begs her to stay, if only for the sake of the day’s specials, and I’m watching the tiny piece of paper dance.

‘How’s your back?’

I fight the urge to sigh. ‘There’s nothing wrong with my back. As I keep saying. I have pain that originates from my damaged sciatic nerve.’

‘The one in your back.’

‘If you like, attached to somewhere near my back.’

‘So I was right to ask you about your back. Because I just read an article on BBC online. They got this woman with a completely severed spine, like completely literally severed, literally, you know…’

Not again.
 

‘Like there’s not even bits of muscle holding it together, and she looked really awful in the photo, with the neck thing, like Christopher Reeve had, and guess what? They built her a new one, a metal one, more aluminium, really. She’s windsurfing again. Her dog’s really happy about it.’

‘And how does that help me, actually?’

‘Well, it just goes to show —’

‘Yes, Jesse, it just goes to show how surgery to mend spines is coming on in leaps and bounds…’

‘Exactly.’

‘… But the accident injured my sciatic nerve. It’s the place where all the tiny nerve endings join up, like a central processing unit in a computer.’

‘I know what a computer is. Don’t patronise me, Mon.’

‘I’m not patronising you.’

‘Mon, I’m a chef. I know what patronising sounds like. That’s what I do.’

‘All right, whatever. So my sciatic nerve got injured in the accident and it’s gone a bit crazy, and even though the pain of the accident is gone, it doesn’t know that. What it’s doing now is randomly sending messages of pain to all parts of my body and there’s not a damn thing any surgeon can do about it.’

‘Yes, but…’ Jesse was like a dog with a bone. No one told her she was wrong; no one told her how to run her kitchen, or how to run her life, or how to run
my
life. ‘It’s all the same thing. Surgeons can do miracles now…’

How many times have we had this conversation? Who was the one with the memory lapses, my sister or me?
The muscles in my neck are really bunching together now, they’re squeezing tighter, and the headache is howling around my brain.
I need Niall. I need him right now.

‘They can’t do miracles on me. Look, working on a spine is easy in comparison; like fixing the axle on a car. Fixing the nerves in the body is like trying to change the colour of a red car to blue by agitating the paint job with a blow torch.’

‘Good image.’

‘That’s my pain specialist for you. On my first appointment, he quite cheerfully told me that they’ll be happily mending spines and making the paralysed walk, decades before they even start to understand how the nervous system works.’

‘Oh.’

‘So he told me the chances that a new surgical procedure would come along and help me are minimal. So I’m really happy for the windsurfer, and I’m really happy for the dog, but —’

‘Your pain specialist told you that on your
first
appointment?’

‘Yes.’

‘“Minimal”? he said that? “Minimal”? His exact word?’

‘Oh yes. I remember that word. When I forget my own name, the word “minimal” will be burnt on my cerebral cortex.’

‘That was a bit shitty.’

‘Well, he believed in being upfront about these things.’

‘I’d hate to be on a first date with him. God, can you imagine. “Jesse, I’m going to level with you, I’m a doctor, so even if you skip dessert, the chances of you losing weight in order to be sufficiently attractive for me to want sex with you are
minimal
…
”
’

I laugh, and it encourages her.

‘“And to be utterly frank, Jesse, even if we do have sex, I have to tell you that my chances of making you come are not good. I’m sorry to inform you that my penis is completely
minimal
…”’

I’m laughing a lot now, and it’s jolting me, but I don’t mind. I’m glad she’s phoned. It takes a while to get to that point, but I always end up glad.

Half an hour later, I hear the key in the door. Of course, it’s Wednesday.

‘Got to go now, sis, cleaner’s here.’

High up on the window sill is a photo of Dominic and me, and I can just see it. There we are, perpetually dressed for our wedding in Dunfermline. Our sunny smiles are plastered on our faces, daring the cold and the wind to blow them both away.