He hoped I would write to him regularly, and that we’d talk again soon.
‘Sure. No worries.’
He thanked me for taking the bad news so well.
‘Sure. No worries.’
Write regularly? Talk again soon? Write nothing, say nothing was the punishment he deserved. I vowed it with all the fury of unsaid words.
Chapter 54
If you bawl and sob when you are alone, no audience of others, then you mean it. It’s not a performance. The tears have welled up in your humid head and need a way out. It’s like looking underwater. A breeze of light brings flies through the window. They want to nest in your hair and drink from your nose, and you let them. Enough alcohol injects a general deadening but it’s only short-term. You are senile with headaches and slow eyesight afterwards.
They say when parents die we are left as orphans. No matter how old we are, that’s our loneliest. When they go broke—I can attest to this—you are loneliest too. The home that founded you is over. You are lost, fixed to nothing. You are frightened and shambling. You cry. I lay in that state in the futon sanctuary.
It could fix anything, this sanctuary, with a solitary sleep and a stretch and a yawn. Not this time. By morning it was as if my body was trying to burst. My legs had turned a puce colour. From the kneecap down, like a burn on my shins, lumps hard as pebbles appeared. Four skin-marbles so sore the slightest air seemed to punch them.
My feet had gone blue-purple. I hadn’t been woken by the usual cranky crows and pigeons in the spouting—it was pain that stabbed me awake. I sat up intending to swing my legs to the floor and stand but my legs had too much extra weight. They were not my legs, they were lead legs with lumps and a bloated surface. My feet were like kitchen gloves when you blow into them. The ankles no longer showed knobby bones but were flesh-balloons in the blue-purple colour, turning kindling-red in patches. My shins too.
I pinched and rubbed my thigh skin. It felt normal and painless. Whatever was happening to me stopped just short of my kneecaps. The skin there had formed a powdery layer—I could lean forward and with a puff make my skin go puff. Beneath this powder my flesh was splitting and peeling like sunburn. There were hundreds of splits going longways and crossways between the lumps, some exposing the moist quick.
I slid off the futon and eased myself to the floor. As soon as my legs were no longer horizontal, fire-blood filled them and I lost my breath from the agony. I dragged myself up into the lying position, flat as I could to make the blood subside. ‘Tilda,’ I yelled. ‘Tilda!’ I yelled ‘fuck off’ to flies parking on my sticky pain. ‘Tilda!’
Naturally I diagnosed the massaging as the cause. Never mind good sense, my massaging of Tilda was contagious after all. I wanted to accuse her there and then as she rushed to my calling but I had no breath for forming sentences.
She bent over my lower half and gasped Jesus.
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t.’ I waved to her not to breathe so hard. The air she spoke with was too heavy on my skin.
She diagnosed spiders somewhere in the bedding. It had to be a white-tail. If not, bull ants or centipedes. She had bare feet and jigged her dislike of creepy crawlies as if they were mounting her toes. She demanded I allow her to reach over and around me to check in the sheets and blankets, lift the pillow. She picked up one of my sneakers, shook it upside down in case of insect infestation and grasped it as a killing weapon.
It was no more spiders than Tilda’s fluids leaking in me. It was rheumatoid arthritis, and those lumps and flaming skin were a complication called erythema nodosum, explained Dr Philpott, kneeling by the futon and mmming his fascination at my ailment. ‘Quite a rare condition, and boy have you got a doozy of an outbreak.’
‘I’m only twenty-seven. Arthritis is for old people.’
‘No, no, no,’ he corrected me, pricking my artery for a blood sample. ‘We inherit these things. It’s in our genes. All we need are triggers. Has something happened to trigger this in you?’
‘Maybe,’ I replied, and mumbled ‘family worries’. I left it vague as that. ‘Usual trouble, type of thing.’
I was ashamed I was fathered by a bankrupt. I had no backstop left—my father had made me a bankrupt too. Estranged. From then on I used that word to eliminate the subject of parents from my life. I used it with a casual shrug, dropping my chin to signal weariness. Estranged and shrugs go well together. People think: Ah yes, the usual family tensions. No further explanation required.
Now I am ashamed to have been ashamed.
Chapter 55
The treatment was simple: lie flat on my back, legs uncovered because the sheets weighed a tonne. Tilda brought cups of tea, soup and finger toast because my appetite withered the bigger my legs grew. I was the elephant now. Philpott prescribed a white lotion to cool the pain but its application was sadism: tongue depressors are the gentlest of implements; they could have been broadswords when used to smear my legs.
The worst discomfort was toilet time. I could drag myself there, keeping the legs flat and free of pain. I didn’t need Tilda for this section of the ordeal. The journey was merely thirty seconds long. It was the toilet bowl I needed Tilda for. For lifting me onto the seat and holding my legs up while I directed my penis downward and pissed. The fire throbbed less if my legs were held level with my waist. She held them at bath time too. Her seeing me splash my privates clean didn’t faze me in the slightest. It was all part of what happens when you’re a couple and one is offering the other helpfulness.
Where I drew the line was bowel movements. Bowel movements are our own business, given the smell and fart noise, the brown sight of what we store in us. She could turn her head away and close her eyes but not her nostrils and hearing. I made her leave the bathroom so I could get on with it alone.
I was able to hold my bowels in for two days. Not the third. By the third I was packed hard and needed releasing. Tilda supported me with her good arm until I was throned in position, then I made her scamper out the door while I exploded, leaning sideways, legs splayed upward like doing sit-ups. I had to empty out fast before my legs gave way and crashed down. If that happened I needed Tilda to come and pick them up in the presence of smell. I practised my toilet sit-ups in bed. I could last thirty seconds if I gripped the cistern with one hand for balance. I wiped myself by lurching left and twisting side-on and using the toilet roll holder for purchase.
It took four weeks for the ballooning to reach its peak. By then my shin skin had turned to dry scabs. The redness had darkened to suntan bronze and itched and could not be scratched or else it brought on worse pain. My ankles were bruise-blue and would not flex. My feet lost their nails and were weeks off being ready to fit a shoe. Leprosy, I named my lower half. Tilda liked that: leprosy to match her mummification. The president-servant balance had swung more even. We had equality of deformities.
‘Two crocks together,’ she said, dabbing Philpott’s pain-paint on me. Her tongue protruded from her mouth corner with the effort of nursing. ‘We’re in the same boat.’ If she hit a raw section she gasped ‘Sorry, sweetie’ and kissed my forehead like a brave infant’s.