Painkiller (4 page)

‘Hey ho,’ she drawls. ‘It’s still sex, even if you’re lying there like a stranded fish. I had a boyfriend who was a bit of a closet necrophiliac. Had this thing about me playing dead during sex. I had to stay absolutely still while he did his business.’

My eyebrows catapult up my forehead in shock.

‘My God. How horrible.’

‘Not so bad, it was rather restful actually. Better than those “athletic” men who want you to turn cartwheels across the bedroom, but yes, playing dead can get a bit samey. One night I decided to make it more interesting. I became a zombie and bit him on the nipple. We split up a few minutes later.’

I give a full snort, throwing the froth from my cappuccino onto the saucer.

‘Well we don’t quite do that. We get by.’

‘Good for you both. Seriously, girl, don’t worry about Dominic. He’s a keeper.’

‘Angelina,’ I say slowly, ‘was I… was I in a dark place when I… just after the accident?’

She looks at me steadily, almost frozen. Her mascara-strewn eyes flicker, just the once.

‘Yes, darling. You were in a very dark place.’

‘Did I talk about ending it all?’

‘With Dominic?’

‘With everything.’

‘Oh.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, you did.’

‘Oh.’

She thinks for a while. (
For too long)

‘Are we talking about your suicide attempt?’ she says at last.

‘You knew about that?’

She sighs. ‘Of course I knew about that.’

‘And you didn’t tell me?’

‘Mon… It’s really not important now.’

‘But it’s what I did…’

‘Mon…’

‘I did that thing – or I tried to. Even if I can’t remember it now, it’s still something I did. I have a right to know those things. I should know about all the things I did. You can’t keep things from me… It’s my own… history.’

‘It’s
ancient
history, darling. You were in a bad place. When I came to visit you in the first year, when you had to lie on your back and stare at the ceiling all day, you talked about ending it, yeah, so I came every day, just to make sure you were hanging on in there, but even though you talked about it, when Dominic told me what happened, I didn’t believe it of you… You were too much of a fighter, girlie. That’s who you are now. So forget about that other Monica. The one who tried to do that. She’s long gone.’

‘I can’t believe you didn’t tell me. And I can’t believe Dominic —’

‘Dominic loves you. And he knows you’ve got enough crap without shovelling more of it on your plate…’

She grabs my hand, very lightly.

‘Darling. You once told me something that’s always stayed with me, something your doctor told you. You told me that the brain has a survival mechanism, it throws bad things in the rubbish, so it can carry on.’

‘Yes, that’s right. The brain does that. It takes the horror away. That’s why women are stupid enough to have that second baby, because they can’t remember the screaming agony of childbirth. And why torture victims stay sane after the experience, they can’t remember the intensity of the pain they suffered…’ I blink away a tear. ‘Unless they’re tortured every day, all the time. Like me.’

The pressure on my hand intensifies, but not too much.

‘So maybe you forgot about that moment of madness for a reason. Do me a favour, Mon. A favour for your best friend. Promise you’ll put the memory of it back in the box, and forget about it again. Just live your life, move on, and pretend it never happened.’

I think about it.

‘I suppose you’re right…’

‘Promise you’ll forget?’

‘Promise.’

I leave her after an hour; I’d like to stay longer but the chair is (
killing me
), and I have a place to go.

As I climb back into my car and scoop my blue disabled card off the dashboard, the old woman lowers her
Telegraph
and glares at me, a look that says nothing, just to say
I’m looking at you.

If she had sunglasses, she would have pulled them down her nose to demonstrate how much she was looking at me.

I give her a big, charming (
dead
) lopsided smile and drive off.

I wake up…

… And the pain hits me like a wall.

God’s punishment for my happy moment with Angelina.

I stare at the ceiling, and I scream. I count the seconds, trying to leave a whole minute before I allow myself to scream again.

And I do that until the room goes dark and I hear his footsteps.

I wake up…

… And the pain is slightly less.

And I still feel like screaming, but only every ten minutes or so.

Sometimes having slightly less pain is worse. Because it allows the tiniest window for the mind to think; to appreciate the glacial passage of time, stretching out the day. For me, the past is a discoloured bruise and the future is an unspoken nightmare, so to stay sane, I try to only live in the present tense.

Take your mind somewhere else.
 

Anywhere else.
 

Please.
 

My hand reaches for my book of Keats’ sonnets on the bedside table.

I can’t read novels any more, because I get so far into a book, and the pages I read fade from my mind, and I lose the thread of the story. So I read poems instead. The Romantic poets.

When I’m trapped in bed, pale and fading away, I sometimes fancy myself as a romantic poet. There are little notes in the margins of my book, stray rhyming couplets, thoughts, notions, foundations that I might build upon, for a larger work. I fantasise about channelling my pain into something creative, like Keats. But my pain doesn’t work like that. Not quite.

For example, this is Keats’ last sonnet. His very last sonnet.

I suppose it should make me sad, but most of the time it makes me giggle like a mad thing. I think he’s pleading that he can be constant and awake, and that is what I have already achieved, though the constant is pain. Living for ever is the ideal, which I can only contemplate as a horrific nightmare.

I could never use the word ‘eternal’ in a poem. Even thinking about the word makes me shudder. Perhaps I’ll never be a poet because I cannot face words like that. Being creative adds to the experience of life, and everything in my life is designed to take that away.

I do hope to cry at Keats’s poems, one day. I know they should make me sad. But the only time I cried is when Dominic gave me a book on Keats’s life, and I found he died far, far away from home, in Rome. I found out that in the weeks before his death from tuberculosis, his friends kept his laudanum from him, because they were worried that he would use it to commit suicide.

So for the sake of a few more miserable weeks of existence, he died in agony, without his painkillers.

That was when I cried. For him. And for the fact that he could write a poem about life and even use the word ‘eternal’ when he was in such pain; well it gave me some kind of hope. Not a lot, but some.

I look at the notes I made in the margins. I give out a croaking laugh. This is another reason why I can’t be a poet. The pencil squiggles are crude, unintelligible: like a drunken spider has staggered across the poems. I can’t read any of it. I think I can make out the word ‘rose’, and perhaps, yes…

There is the word ‘burden’.

But it looks like ‘bourbon’, or ‘boden’ or ‘bidden’, but I’m guessing it’s ‘burden’.

I open my bedside drawer and find the matchbox. There is the fragment of letter still inside, with

burden
 

written on it.

I look at it.

I realise something. There is definitely something wrong with the bit of paper. With the whole note.

I can barely write words, even now, with the new combination of painkillers. I can’t write legible notes in my book of poems, and I can’t type a letter without misspelling half of the words.

I experiment in the margin of my book of Keats. I put the fragment of paper back in the matchbox, and try to write the word ‘burden’ in the margin of one of the pages with a pencil.

It comes out as a shaky scrawl.

And I’ve spelt it ‘burdon’.

How did I write it then? How? Back then, when things were so very bad? How could I have written such a perfect note, with perfect spelling, and beautiful handwriting?
 

Perhaps I took a lot of time over the note. Perhaps I planned it one letter at a time. I wrote it very slowly.
 

That makes sense.
 

But if I was in such great pain, so much so, that I made the decision there and then
…
 

…
Dominic said he’d just popped out for a paper, just for a few minutes. How did I have time to plan it?
 

I try to think about it, but I can’t concentrate on anything; nothing but the way I’m feeling. I was hoping the poems would distract me, but distraction doesn’t always work.

Things bleed in.

I’m powerless to stop my mind spinning to the past. About last week. All I can think is why couldn’t the man from Atos have come today, and not last week? It would have been much easier if he’d seen me like this.

He came round to see if I deserved my disabled blue badge and couple of quid a week from the government. He came to see if I
looked
like an invalid. Just like what the little old man with his dog was expecting to see. He had to know if I looked the part.

His boxes on his questionnaire, the ones he had to tick, they were always about surface. His questions were: ‘Can you walk thirty feet?’ or ‘Can you dress yourself?’ Not ‘What kind of hellish conversations do you have over the breakfast table, and just how much did you scream with rage when your husband got his sleeve in his scrambled eggs?’

So Dom and I dressed up, and got our props out; the old walking sticks I used to use, we even got out Dominic’s mum’s old wheelchair and left it in the hall. I’d not washed my hair, and I combed olive oil through it to make it look lank. I wore my rattiest cardigan and put a blanket over my knees.

Dressing the set.

I wondered if the Atos man would turn up in the same sick-brown suit as he did last year. And he did. The very same one with the stains around the crotch, and the shoulders speckled with dandruff, and he carried a very old briefcase. He mumbled, very quietly, as if he was ashamed at the words that were coming out of his mouth.

He did seem like a pretend doctor, as though we were all playing parts, including him. I wondered if he used to be a proper doctor, and he’d had a nervous breakdown, or got struck off, and this was the only work he could get.

So in he came and Dominic showed him into the living room, and I gave him the feeblest of handshakes, and he settled down and he went through his questions:

Him: ‘Do you have a dog?’

Me: ‘No.’

Him: ‘Do you ever use public transport?’

Me: ‘No.’

Him: ‘Do you own a car?’

Me: ‘Yes…’

That was the prelude to the killer question. That was followed up by: ‘Do you drive?’

I knew this question would come up: this was the logic of the bureaucratically challenged. If you can drive yourself, then you don’t need to be classified as disabled. If you’re not classified disabled then you don’t need a disabled badge. Why they even bother to make blue disabled badges for cars, I haven’t the foggiest, but I was ready for him.

‘Yes… But I rarely drive the car, because it causes me too much pain. My husband drives me most of the time. I keep my licence going, in case there’s a cure, but I can’t go for more than a mile before I turn back.’

Lies. Dominic hates it so much. He’s got that Catholic thing about not bearing false witness. But I point out it’s for the greater good. And if Dominic grumbles some more I point out that if he felt so strongly about it, he shouldn’t have taken a job in fucking advertising.

Him: ‘Do you go to the hairdresser’s?’

Me: ‘Yes, but my husband drives me, and I can’t bend my head back at the sink so they never wash my hair.’

And on it went.

Then he came up with a question I hadn’t heard before. I hadn’t heard it myself, but I’d read about it on the internet, where other people who suffer chronic pain and are on disability benefit get together and reminisce about their horror stories at the hands of Atos.

‘How much pain relief do your drugs give you? Would you say ten per cent? Twenty per cent?’

Another trick question. If you give a percentage, then Atos conclude that the drugs are working; ergo they enable you to function. If you’re able to function then you are not disabled. No disability, no disability benefits. Several people had been caught out this way already.

‘It’s not like that,’ I said. ‘It’s not a question of how much pain relief I get.’

‘I see. But how much relief would you say you do get? Forty per cent?’

His pencil was hovering over a collection of boxes.

‘No.’

‘Thirty per cent?’

‘No!’

‘Twenty-five per cent?’

‘Listen to me, “doctor”,’ I said. My anger was rising and stabbing me in the legs. ‘It’s not a question of percentage. It’s not twenty or thirty per cent. My drugs don’t take the pain away. There’s no actual relief.’

‘Shall we say fifty per cent?’ he mumbled.

‘No! I will not say a percentage.’

‘Have a think.’

‘I will not “have a think”! Look – I want you to write this down. Write this: “The drugs bring down the levels of pain so that Monica Wood doesn’t actually kill herself.” Can you write that down?’

He looked at me. He showed no sign of writing anything.

‘Dominic!’ I shouted. ‘Dominic! Come in here!’

Dominic rushed in, glaring at the Atos man. ‘What? What’s up?’

‘I want you here. I want you to witness this. This man is not listening to my answers. He’s refusing to do as I ask. He’s not listening to me.’

Slowly, remorselessly, we forced him to put down, word for word, what I wanted him to write, in the margins of the page. The man didn’t look very happy, but he did it, and after he’d finished, Dominic read what he’d written, like a teacher marking homework.

And then we went on with the tests. Dominic didn’t leave.

The Atos man then took out a plastic tube and asked me to blow into it, as if I was a drunk at the side of the road. It looked like something that kids use to inflate balloons with, and it had been inside his briefcase; not in a plastic bag or anything, not sterilised.

Dominic erupted. ‘What are you doing?’

The mumbling doctor looked at Dominic in surprise.

‘She’s not a horse. That’s not sterilised. It’s just been rattling around in your case.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sure this must be disturbing for you.’

‘But it’s not clean. And why are you asking her to blow into anything? She’s got neuropathic pain. You know she’s got asthma. It’s in her notes. You should have her notes. Why are you getting her to blow into a filthy piece of plastic? What’s the point of it? You’re just risking giving her a lung infection.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘This must be very distressing for you.’

This was not the time. Dominic was talking to a script, and not a person. I made a tiny movement of my head, warning him.

Back off.
 

Answer one of the questions wrong, and you were branded an evil state sponger, chucked off the disability register and drowned in red tape. The joke is this: this whole miserable circus is about saving the government money – well, I never wanted the disabled allowance in the first place. I didn’t want their bloody charity. What I needed was the blue disabled badge to put in my car windscreen. I was desperate to keep the badge because, on my bad days, that lack of fuss when parking, the few extra couple of feet nearer to the supermarket, they made all the difference to me.

On the bad days.

But as you can guess, the Atos form doesn’t have a box that says ‘good days’ and ‘bad days’. It just has boxes that say, ‘Can you walk unaided?’ And if you’re truthful, and you say, ‘Yes, sometimes, on a good day’, it just goes down on the form as ‘yes’ and there go your benefits and your badge, and there’s nothing left to do but put in endless appeals and allow the bureaucracy to swallow you whole.

As soon as he left I sagged onto the sofa, unable to hold myself up. Dominic lunged forward to catch me, and we gripped each other, listening to each other breathing, holding each other like we were lovers.

It’s only now that I realise how silly that thought was: we
are
lovers. Sometimes, it just doesn’t feel that way any more.

‘God,’ I said. ‘What an ordeal.’

I felt Dominic’s shoulders tighten. He doesn’t like me using religious swear words, but at that moment, I didn’t have the energy to apologise.

‘My pain levels are through the roof. You’d have thought they’d want me functioning so they could take their money away. What kind of sadistic country does this to its disabled citizens? Poke them with a stick, make them dance, drive them into a wheelchair or an early grave – just to make sure they’re getting value for money.’

‘It’s not fair,’ said Dominic.

‘You’re telling me. Christ…’

‘
It’s not fair
,’ he repeated. ‘It’s… just… not fair.’

At that moment, I realised that Dominic wasn’t talking to me any more. His anger was rising, and like a lot of men, he was turning it in on himself. I used to see it in a few of my old boyfriends. Rage rising at the world became rage at themselves, and then it all collapses in a soufflé of self-pity. It’s not pretty.

‘Hey, handsome,’ I said pressing my forehead to his. ‘Why not make us a cup of tea?’

He came to his senses, shaking his head like a dog coming out of a pond. ‘Yes of course. Earl Grey? Decaf?’

‘That would be lovely.’

He smiled again. ‘Coming right up.’

So he left, and I pushed my pain back into myself, in case it further inflamed his anger.

It’s all very well him having qualms about bearing false witness
, I thought.
But he doesn’t mind it when I lie to him.