Painkiller (7 page)

I stood up, glowering at him, and strode purposefully across the room. I made sure I walked like a god. One foot confidently in front of the other, arms held firmly at my sides. I strode like a superhero past the Trivial Pursuit machine. I turned heads with my determined, masculine stride. I barged into the Ladies, thrust the door aside, and nearly crushed a girl against the hand-dryer in the process.

Then I sagged, holding onto a basin, gasping and scrabbling for purchase on the damp porcelain, and sobbing with the effort. Thank God for ladies’ pub toilets. There are a million reasons to cry in them, so you can honk as hard and as noisily as you like. No one freaked out, and I got sympathetic
I’ve-been-there
glances from women as they left and entered the cubicles.

They didn’t want to intrude.
It’s not as bad as it seems. You’ll get over him.
That’s what they were thinking.

But it
was
as bad as it seems, and ‘him’ was my Angry Friend, so they were so very (
wrong wrong wrong
)
.

Five minutes later I emerged and strode out, doing my superhero walk, as if I was Wonder Woman, and I sat down on my stool and took a big manly swig, finishing my filthy horrible tomato juice, and said, ‘You see?’

Niall sighed. ‘Sorry. It’s more obvious now.’

‘Get lost! What’s more obvious?’

‘You favour your right side. Your shoulders are an inch higher than they should be. Nerve pain begets muscle pain. Muscle pain distorts the body. You carry on ignoring it and you’re going to spend the next decade curled up like a woodlouse.’

‘Charming.’

‘Sorry to be blunt. Seriously. I see people with bad posture due to pain all the time.’

‘I thought I was able to hide it.’

‘Maybe you thought that. Trouble was, all that effort and you were doomed to fail, because the body you’re working on is already twisted out of shape,’ he said. ‘That’s how chronic neuropathic pain cripples so many people, and it doesn’t have to happen. If you get a sharp pain, like a burn or a punch in the head, the muscles react. You tense up. If you suffer from pain twenty-four-seven, they’re tensing up all the time.’ He held his big hands apart and pushed them together until they locked around each other. ‘They contract, and when they do that, they twist you out of shape.’

‘Oh great,’ I said, gloomily. ‘It’s bad enough feeling like this, but now I’m going to end up like some scrunched up mutant, limping along the pavements with my head tucked under my arm.’

Niall laughed. ‘No, you won’t end up like that. You don’t seem like the kind of woman to let that happen.’

I blushed.
This well-toned version of Niall Stewart is young enough to be my son
, I thought.

‘You need a good massage.’

‘I’ve just had a massage.’

‘Not the ones they give at the gym. That’s just tickling the muscles. You need a good deep-tissue massage,’ he said.

‘Really?’ I smiled, and this time it was his turn to blush.

‘Seriously, I can do a lot for you. Just say yes, twenty minutes on a table with me, and you will feel the difference.’

‘That’s what’s all the boys say,’ I said. And this time we both blushed together.

What have I got to lose?
I thought.

Twenty minutes later, and Niall was driving me to a swanky hotel in Holland Park. He explained it had a huge well-equipped spa centre, and – it just so happened – he worked there at weekends as a trainer and masseur. There were rooms we could use, if we picked the right time of day. And – it also just so happened – after lunch was one of those right times.

We went into the foyer and I sat on big ugly chairs while Niall went to reception. He explained he had to get them to ring downstairs and check if any rooms were available. There were, and soon we were in a dimly lit chamber dominated by a long low table, fuzzy with steam and filled with the heady smell of lavender.

This has got to be the most elaborate chat-up line in history
, I thought.

I emerged from the changing rooms, hugging a thick fluffy dressing gown against my body. Niall was standing by the table, and he gestured me over.

‘Step into my office,’ he grinned.

I carefully pressed the gown against my private bits.

‘Now, I have to examine you. I need you to remove the dressing gown.’

‘Yeah, right.’

‘Seriously, I do.’

‘Seriously… you don’t.’

‘I need to have a proper look at your posture, so I know where to concentrate.’

‘I’m sure you’ll need no help knowing where to concentrate.’

‘Fine.’ He threw his hands up in surrender. ‘If you can’t take this seriously…’

I dropped the dressing gown to the floor and stood there, defiantly, in my not-bad-for-a-forty-three-year-old nakedness. ‘This seriously enough?’

He choked and cast his eyes to the ceiling. ‘You are supposed to keep your underwear on.’

‘Oh.’

I jumped back into the changing room and struggled with my knickers and bra. ‘That wasn’t embarrassing in the slightest,’ I shouted.

‘I did say. Just now. Five minutes ago.’

‘I’m sure you did.’

‘It wasn’t a… I did say.’

‘I’m sure you did. I’m sorry. I find it difficult to concentrate on what people say. The pain gets in the way.’

‘Of course.’

‘So what did you think?’

‘Fantastic. Just fantastic.’

‘I meant about my posture.’

‘Ah. Of course. Well, before my brain shut down from overheating, I noticed that my initial diagnosis was correct. Your shoulders are a mess, and the muscles in your left side have contracted.’

I re-emerged, and at his gesture I positioned myself face down and exposed my back and bum to the elements. He positioned the flat of his hands either side of my spine.

‘Hands not too cold?’

‘No, it’s fine.’

He’s not going to rape me. He’s gone to far too much trouble
, I thought.

He can’t rape me, anyway, there’s people walking in and out of that steam room every other minute
, I thought.

Please, God, don’t let me get moist while I’m lying here
, I thought.

It wasn’t erotic in the slightest
. Hellfire!
Even to a hardened pain-junkie like me, it was fucking agony. He buried his elbow in my shoulder, making me want to scream. He worked his way up my back, stretching the spine, pushing at my hip.

‘As I thought,’ he said grimly, ‘the muscles have really pulled you out of shape.’

As he pummelled my body I stared fixedly through the hole in the table, eyes wandering over the shapes in the marble floor. There was a very round whorl in the pattern, and I imagined it was a huge clock, and imagined the second hand of the huge clock lurching its way around the dial slowly, slowly.
Don’t think ‘agonising slowness’, don’t think ‘painfully slow’, just think
…
Just don’t think. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. There goes the second hand, away from the four
…
Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Over the five Thunk. Thunk. Thunk. Towards the six
…
Just twenty more times around the dial
…

And then he said, ‘I’m done.’

I got up off the table and stood, and walked around the room, afraid I might break into little bits. I caught my reflection in a shiny wall, and saw I had grown bright red goggles, where the hole in the table had left a mark around my face.

My hip was sore, but felt wonderful. Every limb felt lighter. My Angry Friend was still with me, of course, but the other pains, the muscular ones I had taken for granted as part of the general shitness of the way I felt, had eased considerably. The dull headache, the one I’d had since March, had gone.

‘That’s amazing,’ I said, balancing myself on the balls of my feet. ‘I feel like I’ve grown another three inches.’

‘You’re standing taller, I can see it from here. And your shoulders have dropped.’

I moved my head, and the action was glorious and uneventful. No cracks, no twinges, no stabbing feeling between the eyes.

‘My God. My doctor told me not to expect any miracles. This comes close to a miracle in my book.’

Niall was getting embarrassed again. He coughed. ‘It’s nothing really. You just need to release the muscles, keep them from seizing up. They will start to bunch up again with the pain, almost straight away, so it’s a never-ending process, I’m afraid.’

I nipped back into the dressing room and grabbed my jeans. ‘Don’t worry about that. My life is filled with never-ending processes. I take my drugs three times a day. I attach electrodes to my body to try and hold back the pain. I put my mouth guard in every night to stop myself grinding my teeth to a fine powder… One more never-ending process I can deal with, especially if it produces results like this. How much do I owe you?’

‘Call it a free sample.’

‘Well, thank you. You don’t know how much this means. I am so grateful.’

Of course I burst into tears. The release. The kindness. It was impossible not to. He cautiously entered the changing rooms and held me, patting my shoulder very gently like my mum used to.

‘I would advise you to let me do this to you regularly. My rates are very reasonable.’

And so I let him do it to me regularly.

I took his mobile number, he took mine, and we met up every two to three weeks. He put me through the blissful agonies of deep-tissue massage, then his ‘payment’ was to let me buy him a sparkling water in the hotel bar afterwards.

I got to know a bit about Niall. He liked extreme sports like rock climbing and paragliding. He was single. When he said that, a spasm hit me, as if my entire body tensed up for battle, and a klaxon in my chest sounded. I told myself it was just another pain spasm.

He enjoyed acting, but he never thought he was quite good enough at it. He said it to provoke a reaction, and when I said nothing, he caught my eye. ‘I take it from your silence you agree.’

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘My silence means I can’t remember a great deal. I remember you got a lot of work. You were always working…’

‘Not really the same thing.’

‘If it’s any consolation, if I was your agent you were probably a very good actor. I never took on rubbish.’

‘Yes, that’s what you used to say to me. “I never take on rubbish.” You use to say it all the time – well, whenever you saw me. That was your motto.’

‘Did I say that? I suppose I must have done. I can’t remember that either.’

He snorted. ‘That was your catchphrase! You can’t even remember your catchphrase? Weird…’

He was starting to irritate, acting like I was a curiosity. Like some of the friends I used to have, who used to poke me with their words, hoping to see me wince.

He continued. ‘The last time you said it to me, I was really down. I didn’t get a part, and I thought I’d done very well in the auditions, and you emailed me and told me that to keep my pecker up, that I was really good, and you didn’t take on rubbish, and to keep trying, no matter what obstacles were thrown in my way, and it really made an impression. I even printed the email out and… I… well…’

‘What?’

‘I framed it.’

‘You framed it?’

‘Ah. Yes.’

‘Did you hang it up?’

‘Um. Yes.’

I was enjoying myself now. ‘You’re kidding. Please tell me you put it in your toilet.’

‘You’re embarrassing me. Let’s talk about something else.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like… How did you get this way? How did all this…’ he gestured at my body, like I was a prize in a quiz show, ‘how did this happen to you?’

‘I had an accident.’

‘Yes.’

He waited. He had a big ‘and…?’ expression on his face.

I thought about it. I was in such joy from the easing of the pain, I didn’t feel like dwelling on it here. It felt so… negative. Backward-looking. I didn’t want to talk about it. Not in this place of miracles.

‘No,’ I said at last. ‘Not here. I don’t really want to talk about it. I hope you understand. It doesn’t matter any more.’

‘OK. I’ll not mention it again.’

‘Good.’

He didn’t pursue it but just said, ‘So you didn’t have a kid, then.’

Wow,
I thought.
This was pain. An old kind of pain. Nothing to do with nerve pain. A good old-fashioned emotional punch-in-the-gut.

Oblivious, he continued, ‘I just heard you were going on maternity leave, that’s all. That’s why I thought you disappeared from the agency. I must have got the wrong end of the stick. Do you have children?’

‘No,’ I said, too quickly. ‘So let’s talk about something else. Please.’

He pulled a face like a slapped puppy and fell silent. We sat there, trying to think of something else to talk about. Eventually, we groped to a few subjects, and the conversation spluttered back to life.

We met more times, and chatted amiably like old friends. I was relieved that Niall obediently dropped it, but I felt that he was always hovering over the subject of my accident, like a drowsy bee near a flower, waiting until it was safe to land.

I just couldn’t face it.

Back to today. I park in the hotel car park, and walk into the reception area.

It’s been months since I last met Niall here. The hotel has had a facelift, like hotels do, because, like women, they can never decide if the world wants them to be practical or decorative. This particular hotel was moving from functional brown to stylish cream. Gone were the thick chairs with the dark wipe-clean panels; now there are curved taupe sofas with pale leather cushions.

Next year, after those pretty cream cushions become filthy grey, I guarantee it’ll probably go back to functional.

I can’t make up my mind whether I’m hard-wearing or decorative, because I feel the accident split me in two and made me into both; like a tiny doll with pink accessories and gorgeous hair discovered in the wreckage of a plane crash. As my weary and confused husband knows, there’s just no way to talk, to relate to, to just
be
with me, nothing that encompasses both facets of who or what I am. I’m very vulnerable and yet life has proved me invulnerable; an elegant vase that falls and smashes into a million pieces and yet stays whole, all at that same moment.