I heave an exhausted sigh. ‘I don’t know if I do any more.’
‘Listen,’ you say, slotting into a practical gear, ‘I’ve got a whole load of notes about renal care. Let me dig them out. I might be able to find some pamphlets I can send you that explain it all.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, touched that you might care. ‘I’m — I’m really—’
‘Sorry, yeah,’ you say.
‘OK, lovey, here we go.’ Sheila’s got a bottle and a spoon. ‘Nothing to it. What I’m going to do is measure out an amount in here—’ she waves the spoon ‘—and then you’ll take that as you might some cough medicine, OK?’
I’m scared. I want you. I want your arms around me. Where’s my blanket? I want my blanket. Should I ask now?
‘And you’ll start to feel the benefits more or less straight away. All right? So by the time the local news comes on the telly, you should be feeling more together.’
‘They should give this to everyone who watches the local news.’ Weak smile.
Sheila laughs.
I want you — I want you to tell me. Am I doing the right thing? If I take this, I’m not coming back.
Fetch my blanket. It’s in the cupboard, isn’t it?
I want to ask Sheila. I should ask her. I’m not sure about this. But you can’t even ask doctors, can you? They’re not allowed to tell you what to do. You’ve got to decide for yourself.
Your health in your hands.
But I’m not the one who’s been through seven years of medical school.
‘I don’t know,’ I say to her.
‘What’s that, lovey?’
‘I don’t know if I want to. Do — do you think I should?’
‘Yeah,’ she smiles. ‘I’d take anything that’s going.’
Oh. She is allowed to tell me what to do. Is she?
‘I just — I don’t want to get addicted. I know, it’s stupid. But — I’ve been addicted, sort of. I mean, why does it have to be down to me? You’ve got all’ — breathe — ‘all these people who are supposed to help you and — and all they say is, “I don’t know, what do you think?”’
She pauses a moment, and sits down in my visitors’ chair, unhurried, offering all the time I need.
‘Listen. No one’s going to make you do anything you don’t want to do. I’m not. Dr Sood’s not. But I’ve seen a lot of people go through what you’re going through. Every day. I don’t want you to do it the hard way.’
‘No.’
‘And it’s only a light solution, OK? It will ease the anxiety. It will ease the symptoms. It’ll stop you worrying. Give you a bit of space in your head.’
‘Right.’
‘So let’s pause a moment, OK? Let me get your blanket for you.’
‘Yeah.’
‘In here, is it?’
‘Yeah.’
She fetches it from the cupboard and helps me draw it around my shoulders. I hook my fingers through the knots.
‘I tell you what, I’ll make you a deal. You take this now, and I’d say by late this evening the effects will have worn off. So, I promise to come back to you this evening, and if you don’t want it, you won’t have it ever again, and that is my absolute solemn promise, OK?’
‘OK.’
OK.
‘Are you ready?’
She takes up the bottle, and carefully charges the spoon, and proffers it.
‘Down the hatch.’
Down the hatch.
Tighten fingers, clutch through crochet. Feel the knots.
‘Now a sip of tea. It’ll take the taste away. There.’
Sip.
Cup rings back into saucer.
‘All right?’
‘Right.’
‘OK.’
‘Is there anything else I can get for you? Your wish is my command.’
‘No. Thank you.’
L
LIPS
YOUR LIPS. The most delicious kisses.
Oh, when I remember your lips.
Lying back here now I long to think of them, but — I can’t.
The perfect pout–
I’m scared to even begin.
Can’t even bring myself to think — to think of the kiss–
No.
Think about it differently. Lips. What was that first kiss?
The first ones were grandma and grandad. Grandad’s was always over-slobbery and beery. Laura used to hate it. I remember every time she would cringe on the way in. I used to quite like the smell of stale beer. Quite fruity.
But I shrank away from grandma’s kisses. She had thin, dry lips, cold and without resistance, like the kiss of a ghost. But the worst bit was there must have been this one-off piece of stubble or something on her top lip, a little to the left of centre — it must have been where she regularly plucked out a hair because every time I had to kiss her goodbye I would be pricked by it, like a little electric shock.
I can’t believe how she put up with me writhing to get away from her, whingeing, There’s a spike on her lip! It hurts!
What must the older generations put up with?
First serious girl kiss: Nicola Peterson.
Aged fourteen, out in the middle of the school playing fields, far away from anyone.
The lunge that girl used to make. The first thing I would see would be this great wide chasm of a cakehole launching itself at me like it knew what it was doing. For a while I thought maybe it was me who was getting it wrong. I didn’t know, did I? Because no one really teaches you how to kiss; where would you start? You have to make it up as you go along.
Her kisses frightened me. That’s not right, is it?
Kelvin thought it was hilarious, but he’d never kissed anyone.
There were four or five in between, all bases reached, virginity merrily dispensed with, but it really was you who taught me to go back and love kissing.
No.
No — I can’t. I can’t unlock it. It’s too — I’m scared to. It might release it all again, just be too much. Too, too much.
Here comes the cavalry.
I venture into my mum’s bedroom, where I’m not really allowed, and find her sitting on the edge of her bed, gazing into her mirror, a collection of make-up shrapnel slithering in beside her on the eiderdown.
Twenty minutes since Laura slammed the front door behind her and left the house shivering, Mum still seems sad.
She sees me — ‘Hiya, bab’ — and her mouth automatically straightens into a smile, but for once she can’t sustain it, even though I smile back.
She is very sad.
She unclicks her lipstick lid and twizzles out the waxy stick, and aims it at her mouth. But before she sets it to her lips, she sighs and lets her hand drop back into her lap.
It’s on instinct that I step forward and reach for the lipstick myself. She lets me have it, still twizzled out.
Delicious smell. One of my favourite smells.
I reach up towards her mouth, and she turns her face towards me to oblige. I begin to apply, top lip, and then bottom lip, in vague imitation of what I’ve seen her do more or less every morning of my childhood. And like more or less every drawing of my childhood, I go over the edges.
And I know I’ve gone over the edges, so I keep going. And Mum keeps her face there. She keeps it there until I’ve drawn a big smiley lipstick face almost all the way up and out to her ears. As I apply the lipstick, the skin of her cheeks is stretched out sideways, and I worry it might be painful, but she doesn’t move, and I need no more encouragement than that.