‘I thought – well, I thought I might Facebook her? If you don’t think that’s nuts?’
‘Tell me about the smile,’ I said.
‘She was waiting – I think. Just looking at me and smiling widely, her eyes all lit up. Like she was coaxing me to do something.’
‘Yeah – Facebook her.’
Wilf’s persistence was nothing like Sadiq’s. Here was true, happy chivalry.
‘Consider it done,’ he said.
We talked of other stuff then. Of the counselling diploma I was doing. Who my friends were. How Reuben and I were managing. I didn’t get to find out what happened until the next visit. Prison was a serialization of my social life.
Now, at home again – wherever that is – I tell Wilf I’ll see him as soon as I can, and hang up. I can no longer avoid thinking about the difference between Wilf’s and Reuben’s visits. Wilf’s eyes had always been squarely on mine, as though I was a person who had lost a leg and it was his job not to look at the stump, to make me feel as normal as possible. Reuben’s eyes had drifted around. To other prisoners. To the guards. Lingering on the multiple locks, the procedures they went through in a closed prison to ensure the dangerous prisoners – me – did not get out.
I wander down the hallway and into the bathroom. I could run a steaming bath, my first in years. Grab a book. The freedom doesn’t feel glorious; it feels frightening. How does anybody ever decide what to do?
I wander further inside. It smells of bleach, which tangs my nostrils.
There’s a tiled windowsill that is empty apart from one shower gel and what looks like a flyer, folded in four. It must have come out of Reuben’s pocket. Tentatively, wanting to know more about this man I’m living with after two years, I unfold it.
I’m surprised to see his name in the upper-left quadrant. Reuben Oliva. Jazz pianist. There’s a photo of him. He’s silhouetted, but I can tell it’s him. That head-bent pose. That theatre. It used to be just for me. It used to be classical music, not jazz. He hated jazz, said it was pretentious. And now … I blink, reading the rest of it. He plays at a jazz club. Every third Thursday of the month.
I discard the flyer. It’s not a big deal. I’ll ask him about it. Later.
Standing in the bathroom, I strip my clothes off, but stop, naked, pick my white T-shirt up, and clutch it in my hands. I bring it to my nose. It smells of nothing. Not the grimy prison smell I used to be able to detect, in those awful early days. Not the dust and the stale food and the cheap detergent. It smells – I realize, as I hold it to my mouth – of home. I can’t take it off. I can’t wash it. I slip it back on over my head. I’ll take it off soon.
I reach my hands down underneath the T-shirt to skim my stomach. Thirty-two. I feel the skin move underneath my fingertips. Thirty-two and I’ve not got much time left to have that auburn-haired baby.
I need to start trying now. Now or never. I’ll ask Reuben that, too. Somehow.
35
Conceal
It’s time for the hospital again, I hope for the last time. I’m sitting in the waiting room. I always shake when I’m here, at my consultant’s office, though I don’t know why. There is nothing scary here. I did an online CBT course, and I try to put it into practice now. One by one, I look at the objects around the room, listing any ways in which they could harm me. The wooden desk in the corner? No. Not scary. The wastepaper bin, full of sheets of paper and one green prescription? No. The photocopier behind the desk? No. I am safe. I am okay.
It is a hospital in the suburbs of Birmingham. A large, white building set back from the street. As I sit in the makeshift waiting room with its high ceilings and dado rails, it is bright, hot sunshine outside. Almost summer. The pavement moves in and out of shadow as a tree blows its leaves around. There’s never a receptionist here. My consultant calls patients himself.
‘Joanna.’ Mr Dingles appears in the door of his office.
I cross the foyer, my shoes squeaking on the linoleum, and follow him.
A total hysterectomy due to the severity of the pelvic trauma. It was the gearstick that did it. I often wonder if it was so severe because I was so slim, without padding, but the medics tell me not.
A punctured lung. I still can’t walk far. I need to sit down on benches in shopping centres and pause for breath at bus stops.
An old tendon injury my hand will never recover from, improperly looked after, and made worse in the crash.
That’s what I did.
That’s what I did to myself.
‘Our last appointment,’ he says kindly. ‘How have you been?’
Mr Dingles is polite to a fault, always enquiring after me, right from my first outpatient visit when I could barely get out of the taxi. He always asked me how I was, as though I wasn’t a patient; enquired as to my weekend plans.
‘Okay,’ I say.
I don’t avoid the hospital appointments, evading treatment, as I might once have done. I turn up, every single time, and battle through. Learning to live with it. My injuries, and the rest.
He gets out his checklist. We use the same one every time I see him, though he is more relaxed about it now.
‘Hot flushes?’ he says.
‘Calming down.’
‘Leg pain?’
‘Still there.’
‘Hand pain from your old injury?’
‘Better.’
‘Breathing.’
‘Shot,’ I say, with a rueful smile.
‘It’ll get there,’ he says, then puts his glasses back on and regards me. ‘Paranoia?’ he says.
I shrug. ‘It’s gone now,’ I say.
I’ve said that in every appointment for the last year, but he still asks.
‘I don’t understand it,’ he said once. ‘Where would paranoia have come from? It doesn’t fit with your other symptoms.’
It had been on my notes, from A&E and intensive care. I had tried to play it down, because it certainly wasn’t medical. But now, two years on, and looking back, I wonder if maybe it was. The ongoing strain of the guilt. The stress hormones in my system. They clouded things over in my mind until I became sure that people were after me. But then I see Ed’s eyes in my mind and still feel sure that he knows.
I don’t know what’s true. I don’t know what’s real.
‘You’re doing well,’ Mr Dingles says.
I nod, quickly. He doesn’t know, of course. He thinks me incredibly unlucky, is all. A woman who forgot to look right, once, as she approached a roundabout. A woman who lives alone in Birmingham. Who is never accompanied by family.
Reuben came to see me in the hospital, and I reiterated our break-up, there and then. Told him I was moving away, to Birmingham. Told him to tell Ed. That I would tell everybody else myself. Reuben argued, until I said I really didn’t love him any more, and then he dropped it. Conceded obediently, like a dog who’d been abused in the past.
Mr Dingles runs his usual batch of tests on me. Scraping things along the soles of my feet. Asking me to spell words backwards. Assessing my gait. Giving me puzzles, which I ace, of course.
He performs a final test on me – making me touch my fingers to my nose – and then we are done. Over a year after. Almost two. We are done.
‘Well,’ he says, ‘I’ve never met someone quite so … who faces up to things so well,’ he says, nodding twice, little head bows as he looks at me. ‘Head on,’ he adds.
I very nearly laugh. Me facing things head on. But he’s right. I read about avoidant personalities on the Internet. It was like I had found a definition of myself in a dictionary. I turned the words over in my mind, and then I changed.
I shake my head quickly, and say goodbye to him.
He lingers in the reception area. ‘Jo,’ he says to me as I turn to leave, extending a hand towards me. Evidently he’s not ready for this to be my last visit, either.
‘Yes?’
‘It will get better,’ he says, holding his hands out, palms up. ‘This isn’t … the end of your improvement.’
I flush with pleasure. I want him to like me. Of course. I’m glad he likes me. I wonder if I am his best patient.
I look around the empty foyer and he stills, looking at me carefully. ‘Take care,’ he says. ‘And give less of a shit.’