I barracked: ‘Brilliant’ and ‘You’ve done it. Fantastic. Good girl.’ I ran up to hug her but she pushed me sideways, lurched from my hold and skipped back onto the bricks for a dance. She was too free for human holding, I presumed. Free of death-fear for now, and that needs dancing not constriction. I leapt up to dance with her. She star-jumped straight down and strode off and skipped some more, her plait swinging with flicky pendulum energy.
When we got to the van she told me to wait before I turned on the ignition. She was breathing heavily, not from skipping and dancing, from anger. ‘Do you know why all this happened?’ She pulled her plait to her mouth for biting. ‘Have you any idea?’
I thought she was attempting a philosophical statement. I expected her to continue with ‘It has happened to help me grow as a person’—like people do on TV chat shows. But she meant the questionnaire question about abortion.
‘Do you know there are possible links? Do you know that you not wanting our baby could have so fucked up my hormones it brought cancer down on me?’
When someone says such a thing to your face you can only answer no firmly and be silent. I was no doctor; I had no grounds for arguing science. My only defence was a puny ‘It was your decision too.’ I did have the wits to follow up with, ‘Why rake up that shit? You want to spoil your two-year milestone? You want to spend it having a fight on what are deemed possible links?’
‘You really do owe me. You will always owe me. I own you because of this.’
‘What do you mean, own? Nobody owns anybody.’
‘I own you.’
‘Bullshit.’
‘I will never be free because of this cancer. And therefore you can never be free. That’s your punishment.’
‘Who decided I have to be punished?’
‘I did.’
‘We can’t own people.’
She nibbled a crunch of flesh inside her bottom lip. Her face skewed into a fighterly sneer as she bit deeper. I dreaded a rifle or weedkiller moment was imminent. It seemed a logical leap to there from this human-ownership rubbish. Not that it was rubbish in Tilda’s mind. It was justice to her.
I don’t see justice in ownership of people—I didn’t then; I don’t now. If she mentioned rifles and weedkiller I promised myself to let her have it. I would serve up a new strategy: I’d say, ‘You go buy a fucking rifle, go on. You buy weedkiller. You drink it or shoot yourself or whatever you want to do. Don’t drag me into it. You’re on your own.’
This would be Swahili to sensible people. I don’t fully understand some of it myself. I don’t understand how she could talk punishment of me one minute and start laughing the next. That’s what she did. She laughed like it was April Fools’. Laughed as if her ownership statement was just her quirky humour. She apologised for going too far. ‘I don’t expect to own you,’ she said. ‘You’re so easy to wind up sometimes.’
Maybe I am, but it did feel scary. I wanted to bolt there and then. Maybe not forever. Maybe only an hour, to prove I was still a free man.
She could well have been fishing, trying to work out how far she could push me before I left her. No one abandons a person who is facing dying—it’s a low act; most people are too decent or guilt-ridden. But Tilda wasn’t dying any longer, not in the near future. It made sense she would want to test my commitment by using a bully-bluff technique like the ownership argument: if I stayed after that, I must love her. A strange way to ascertain love? With our Swahili everything was possible.
Chapter 51
Massaging is best done first with the fingertips. My fingertips had to stroke both sides of Tilda’s fingers. I then pushed my palm over her knuckles, her wrist, forearm, elbow. Heavier stroking the further up the arm I got, forcing the fluid towards her shoulder, and up and over her shoulder to disperse it behind her ribcage. I stood in front of her and she sat elevating her arm for my cradling. Someone observing from a distance might have thought I was planing timber, given my action.
I used my left palm for starters until it tired. Then switched to my right hand and planed in long flourishes—a hundred strokes. A minute’s break. A hundred more. The swelling was not always easy to shift. It was a stubborn liquid, thick and treacly. I could feel it squash and ripple under my touch. In between strokes it flooded back in and flattened out under Tilda’s skin as if attempting to avoid me. Liquid can’t think but it can harden into pea-sized lumps, form a row of lump peas that grow up overnight and refuse to leave the next day. Sometimes it took two weeks of stroking—once in the morning, once at night—until I hit the sweet spot of weakness and the peas burst like inner blisters.
In between my stroking Tilda performed her own massages, her right arm aloft over her head, left palm sweeping along it. Roff said the more massaging, the better. She took that as an instruction to do it always. He prescribed she wear a special medical sleeve, elasticised and matched to tone with her skin pinks. It came with a gauntlet to keep pressure tight around her fingers. ‘A gauntlet,’ she grinned. She liked the soldier sound of gauntlet, the warrior implications: what could be more suitable for her elephant war!
Before and after stroking I always touched wood that all her fingers had so far remained fingers, had not turned to toes on her. She added bandages to the ritual for extra pressure after massaging: small bandages for her fingers, bigger hand ones, large crepe rolls for her arm. She practised binding herself without needing my help. A mummy look was preferable to an elephant, she said. She never wore the look outside. The sleeve, yes. But not the mummy. Only I bore witness to it in the privacy of our home.
Bandaging through the night became essential when Tilda measured that her arm was 4 centimetres wider one morning. ‘You don’t mind sleeping next to this, do you?’ she asked.
I said I didn’t mind at all. She said we could swap sides in bed if the mummy was an obstacle. She meant an obstacle to my comfort in sleeping, but an obstacle to congressing was also implied.
I said, ‘So what if it is an obstacle? Your arm is more important.’ It astounded me that she could think I’d want to congress with the mummy present. Couldn’t she look in the mirror and judge objectively herself? The wad of that arm was an ugly impediment. I never let on, of course. I was blank-faced discreet. Not even the advice of vodka, too much of it of an evening, got me cruel enough to make elephant jibes. I kept them under my breath.
What a relief when the wad—it must have weighed 10 kilos fully trussed—whacked me one night and made my nose bleed as Tilda stretched out in her dreams. ‘It was an accident, sweetheart. Sorry.’ She petted my forehead and gave her hankie for my blood. I overacted the extent of the pain to make her apologise more and admit that the arm was a hideous and dangerous weapon. I then said, ‘No, it’s not hideous,’ but that was just to have her contradict me and curse the wad.
‘You shouldn’t be in the same bed as me,’ she said.
‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s not. I’ve just hurt you. People will think I did it deliberately.’
‘It’s nothing.’
Tilda suggested that from now on I sleep in the futon room, for my own safety. To think of it as a practical measure until her swelling issue was resolved.
Okay, I relented, not so fast as to seem pleased. I blew my nose to string out another trickle of bleeding snot.