The To-Do List (18 page)

       
Given that both breathlessness and confusion were part of my everyday life (as a thirtysomething asthmatic writer who finds the ordering system at Nandos Chicken way too complicated), I had been in a state of alert for the onset of chicken pox ever since.

       
I couldn’t even take solace in the fact that there was a high chance, statistically speaking, that it wouldn’t kill me because the other fact I knew about chicken pox in adults was that it was painful. And not just, ‘Ooh, that’s a bit uncomfortable,’ but the kind of pain which, when my wife’s friend Heather came down with it at the age of thirty-four, she described as being ‘. . .
easily
worse than childbirth’.

       
Now, while I’d never actually given birth I had seen the process up close and personal twice now, and the thought that I might have to endure something described as . . . ‘
easily
worse than child birth’, terrified me. To go through something that’s ‘. . .
easily
worse than child birth’, and not even get a lifetime’s supply of decent father’s day presents in return seemed to be very wrong indeed.

       
‘You’re sure it’s chicken pox?’ I asked as I slowly edged out of the room.

       
‘She’s got the spots. She’s got the high temperature. And I’ve had texts from some of the pre-school mums and a couple of their kids have got it too.’

       
I felt my throat tighten. I’d always known this day would come once we had kids but I’d never imagined it would happen so soon.

       
‘And there’s no way you could have made a mistake?’ I asked. ‘You know, mistaken some finger-painting splatters for a sore?’

       
‘Babe, there’s no two ways about it, Lydia’s got chicken pox.’

       
I glanced at my daughter lying quietly on her bed, looking incredibly sorry for herself. I took a deep breath and took a couple of steps closer.

       
‘How are you feeling, sweetie?’

       
‘Okay, Daddy. Can I have a kiss please?’

       
I looked over at Claire, then back to Lydia. I was being thrown a challenge by the gods of good parenting: deny my poorly child a kiss versus saving myself from a pain easily worse than childbirth. It was like
Sophie’s Choice
only without the Nazis.

       
‘It’s nothing like
Sophie’s Choice
,’ snorted Claire as I made my literary allusion aloud. She threw me a lifeline. ‘Daddy’s got to go and do something important, sweetie,’ she explained to our daughter. ‘Maybe he’ll come and kiss you when you’ve managed to get to sleep.’

       
‘But I want a kiss from Daddy now!’ wailed Lydia her face crumpling.

       
Before I knew it the words: ‘Of course Daddy will kiss you, sweetie,’ had left my lips. I held my breath and strode purposefully into the contamination zone. I gave her a big hug and kissed her on the cheek.

       
‘Thank you, Daddy,’ she said looking up at me. ‘I feel much better already.’

       
‘No problem, sweetie.’ I exhaled the last remnants of my oxygen reserve. ‘But Daddy’s got to go now.’ Trying my best not to faint, I left the room, shed my clothes in the hallway and informing Claire that nothing less than a boil wash would do, strode naked to the bathroom for a hundred-degree-Celsius shower.

       
A week passed and I convinced myself that after all my fussing and whining I had natural inbuilt immunity to the dreaded pox. Perhaps I’d already had it before and both my parents and I had forgotten about it.

       
Lydia had been fine once her temperature had come down and was stir crazy after her brief spell in quarantine. Today was the end of all that. Having fully scabbed over she was to be allowed out and was going to make the most of it all. We lay in bed contemplating plans for the day. I was going to do a few List things in the morning, at midday we’d meet up with our friends John and Sue for lunch, then we’d go to the cinema for the first time since Maisie had been born.

       
It was going to be a good day.

       
My hand casually brushed against my bare chest. My fingertips felt wet. I tried to locate the source of the wetness and found a tiny burst pustule. My brain went into denial. ‘It’s just a spot,’ I told myself, going into the bathroom and looking in the mirror over the sink. But it wasn’t just a single spot. There were two on my scalp, three on my face, one on my chest and a couple of others on my legs and shoulders.

       
I let out a small scream of anguish.

       
‘What’s the matter?’ Claire found me curled up in a foetal position on the floor next to the sink. ‘Are you all right? Have you hurt yourself?’

       
‘I’ve got the pox,’ I whispered pathetically. ‘Listen,’ I choked back man tears, ‘I think you should leave now and take the children with you. I don’t want them to see their old dad sobbing like a schoolgirl before he passes to the other side.’

       
‘It’s chicken pox, not smallpox,’ said Claire briskly. ‘And I don’t expect you’ll be passing anywhere for a while yet.’ She bundled me back into bed, and left me trying to imagine what A PAIN EASILY WORSE THAN CHILDBIRTH would be like. I’d broken my leg once playing football and it had killed. Would it be worse than that? Or how about the time that I had gastric flu? The pain in my stomach had seemed unbearable. Would it be worse than that? And what about when I cut my shoulder open falling off my bike when I was five? I’d howled for days after that at the very thought of all the pain I’d been through. Just as I was beginning to whip myself up into a real frenzy Claire returned wielding a posh electronic thermometer, which she jabbed into my ear. When it made a loud beeping noise she examined the screen.

       
‘You’ve got a temperature,’ she said with all the authority of an especially grumpy Hugh Laurie. ‘I’m going to call the out-of-hours doctor, tell them that you’re an asthmatic and insist that they give you the anti-viral medicine to reduce the effects of the pox.’

       
I sat bolt upright. ‘There’s anti-viral medicine?’

       
Claire nodded sagely. ‘Apparently as long as you take it within twenty-four hours of the first spot appearing it can reduce the effects of the virus quite considerably.’

       
I looked at my wife with newly acquired admiration.

       
‘How do you know all this stuff?’ I asked.

       
‘Google,’ she replied. ‘The second I realised Lydia had got it I knew you’d somehow end up getting it too.’ She shook her head. ‘Right, you start getting dressed, I’ll take the kids to your mum’s and when we get back we’ll head out to the doctor’s.’

       
Not only did the nice doctor sympathise with my affliction, he also gave me a course of Acyclovir and informed me that if I felt even the slightest bit worried I should return without hesitation.

       
I returned to my bed, took the tablets and waited for full health to return. It didn’t happen. Instead, I suddenly went very cold, and then I went very hot and then I started coughing a lot while drifting in and out of a feverish sleep. When I woke up a few hours later I tried to call Claire and discovered two things: first, my vocal chords had completely stopped functioning and second, by process of deduction (the newspaper with Monday’s date on it gave the game away) I had been asleep a lot longer than a few hours. I tried to get up but my legs wouldn’t follow my commands and so I had no choice but to wait patiently for someone to discover me. It didn’t take long. First on the scene was Lydia, long since recovered from her own encounter with the pox and now standing in the bedroom doorway considering me with a watchful gaze.

       
‘You’re awake, Daddy.’ She climbed up onto the bed next to me. I nodded as enthusiastically as I could.

       
‘You’ve been asleep a long time.’

       
I nodded again.

       
‘Daddy? Why aren’t you talking? Are you being silly?’

       
I shook my head but she clearly didn’t believe me because in a perfect replication of her mother, she rolled her eyes and then bellowed at the top of her lungs: “MUMMY! DADDY’S BEING SILLY AND PRETENDING THAT HE CAN’T TALK!’

       
Duly summoned, Claire came up the stairs carrying Maisie and joined Lydia in staring at me.

       
‘I thought you were never going to wake up,’ she said.

       
‘I can’t speak,’ I mouthed silently. ‘Voice gone.’

       
‘I told you, Mummy. I told you he was pretending that he couldn’t speak.’

       
‘I really can’t speak,’ I mouthed in the hope that they might be able to lip-read. ‘I really have lost my voice.’

       
Claire rolled her eyes. ‘Come on, Mike! Enough’s enough!’

       
There was a loud thump. A loud thump that happened to be me falling out of bed as I’d reached for a pen in order to write, ‘I’m not joking’. Normally, falling out of bed onto my head would have resulted in a modicum of yelling and shouting. Voiceless, all I could do was open and close my mouth like a flailing goldfish on dry land.

       
‘You really have lost your voice, haven’t you?’ Claire apologised profusely as she helped me back into bed. She handed me a pen and notebook on which I wrote, ‘Don’t worry about not believing me, don’t worry about the fact that I’ve been asleep for the best part of twenty-four hours . . . now that I know that Acyclovir isn’t working just call the doctor again and make sure he gives me something . . . anything at all . . . to stop A PAIN EASILY WORSE THAN CHILDBIRTH.’

In the end, somewhat disappointingly (given the amount of time and effort I had expended trying to avoid it) the Acyclovir must have worked because THE PAIN EASILY WORSE THAN CHILDBIRTH never materialised. Instead, I suffered a smattering of blisters, some mild itching, a raised temperature and a comedy lost voice. It did take it out of me physically though and for days after the fever had gone and the blisters were on the way to healing themselves, all I felt up to was lying on the sofa watching various repeats of
Murder She Wrote
on TV.

       
It was a week and a half before I was back to normal and at least another couple of days before the To-Do List got any kind of serious consideration. Even without counting up all the ticks it was clear I was getting behind and needed to get back on track as soon as possible.

Chapter 17: ‘Find out if you really are related to Abraham Lincoln.’

A couple of days later having thrown myself into activities as diverse as re-seeding the lawn (18), using a UV pen to mark valuables with postcode (144), and having had a go at learning basic HTML (832), Claire and I were settled down on the sofa in preparation for an evening of top televisual entertainment: Item 14: Season One of
The O.C
.

       
‘So how are things going so far?’ Claire asked as she skipped through the DVD menu.

       
‘Just look at me, I’m practically svelte.’

       
‘Indeed you are, but other than the diet, how is the whole List thing going?’

       
I shrugged. ‘It’s okay, I suppose.’

       
‘Only okay?’

       
‘I knew it would be hard but not actually
this
hard. Even the easy ticks aren’t that easy and the difficult ticks are even more difficult than you think they will be. As time goes on and I start more things, I’m running around frantically spinning plates like a circus act in an effort to keep all these things going at once.’

       
‘Are you going to carry on with it?’

       
‘I know it sounds mad given everything that I’ve just said, but even though it is really difficult, it is already paying dividends. I’ve got more energy and when I’m working on the book I’m more focused because I know I haven’t got all day to mess about it with it.’

       
‘So what’s next for you To Do?’

       
‘I’m tracing my family tree.’

       
Claire looked perplexed. ‘Mike, your family are from the West Indies. How are you going to do that from Birmingham?’

       
I shrugged and turned off the TV. ‘I don’t know really. But it’s a good job I sorted out Item 611 back in January.’

       
‘What was Item 611?’

       
I paused, reluctant to continue because I knew that Claire would blow a fuse.

       
‘Come on, what is it?’

       
‘ “Renew passport because you never know when you might need to leave the country in a hurry.” ’

       
Before I could even form a defence, steam was coming out of my wife’s ears.

       
‘I can’t believe you’re planning to fly off round the world and leave me to cope with the kids on my own!’

       
‘Not necessarily, babe,’ I tried my best to calm her down. ‘Only if the need arises.’

       
‘How long for?’

       
I faked confusion to buy myself a few blissful moments of calm. ‘What do you mean?’

       
‘Exactly what I said,’ she snapped. ‘Should you go gallivanting around the world for this part of your To-Do List, how long would you go for?’

       
There was nowhere left to hide. It wasn’t as though flying to Jamaica was like getting the train to London. At best it was a twenty-odd-hour flight each way and with all the various bits of research I’d need to do I’d be pushing it to be done in less than a week and a half.