Authors: Helen FitzGerald
The thing I noticed most about being sick was getting annoyed at absolutely everything. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve always been a grumpy arse, but once I started
dialysis
, grumpiness became an inadequate description of my reaction to the hot water being off (
What
lice-infected
fuckwit moron used all the water?
), to my keys going missing (
When I find the bastard who hid my keys I’m going to kill them!
), to my favourite white T-shirt coming out of the washing grey and splotchy (
Dad, you put black stuff in with the washing. What’s wrong with you – early onset Alzheimer’s? Next-door’s cat could run a house better!
).
I got home from nose-dick Eddie’s at around two in the morning. I must have fainted or fallen asleep and he was kind enough not to kick me out. Gathering my clothes, I left a note on the cardboard-box bedside table: ‘Sorry for talking shite and puking on your bed,’ then hailed a taxi on Pollokshaws Road.
Dad and Kay were asleep in bed and I was still sick as a dog. I had a quick shower then fell into bed.
When I woke up the following evening – day and night had switched places since I dropped out of school to be a dead person – I realised that Dad wasn’t there. He had actually gone to find my mother, like he said. There was a note on the hall table: ‘In Manchester, back tonight. There’s soup in the fridge.’ I ate some cereal and tried to imagine him on a mission. Ha! Dad on a mission. How would be get information out of a murderer in Strangeways? How would he get my mother’s kidney? He couldn’t even get me to set the table.
There was nothing I could do to distract myself. Had he found her? Would he come home with news of her? The television was on, but I was staring beyond the screen for hours, excited, nauseous, terrified.
Kay had the biggest bedroom – the bay-windowed one upstairs overlooking the front garden. I’d always wanted this room, but what would be the point of asking? Kay always got the best things – while I got the murky brown teddy, she got the blue one; I got the tiny white radio alarm clock thing, she got the full CD player with speakers; I wasn’t allowed to go on a date till I was fifteen, she went to the movies with the orchestra guy at fourteen. But hell, even I had to admit she deserved to get better stuff than me.
I sat on her bed. ‘Do you think he’ll find her?’
‘Dunno,’ she said.
‘What do you reckon she’ll say?’
‘Don’t care.’ Kay hadn’t even bothered to look up from her chemistry book.
Fucking Kay. How could she not care? ‘Well, when he finds her, I’m getting
her
kidney. You can have his shitey one,’ I said, slamming her door shut.
*
I was asleep on the sofa when Dad woke me the
following
afternoon. ‘Georgie, Georgie,’ he said. I opened my eyes excitedly, only to be smacked down with the following: ‘I didn’t find her. She went to India a year ago.’
I closed my eyes. What was the point of having hope nowadays? Nothing good ever happened.
‘So that’s it?’ I said, eyes still closed.
‘I’m hiring a private detective.’
‘Whereabouts in India?’ I asked.
He showed me a postcard she’d sent her foster mum. Why had she never sent me one? I touched her words. She’d also touched this card, my mum. I turned it over. The beach looked beautiful. I wouldn’t have gotten in her way. I would have been happy sitting at that cafe watching her be happy.
‘All we can do is wait,’ Dad said.
‘Excellent. I’m good at that.’
*
That night at dialysis, someone had disappeared and someone had arrived.
The rumours about forty-year-old Jimmy being next to go were right. His transplant was a belter. No problems at all, so far. Lucky guy.
The new boy was Brian and he totally looked like a Brian. He had glasses and neat hair and square
shoulders
. He and his Alfred seemed very at ease with each other.
‘How old are you?’ he asked, and I told him
seventeen
.
‘I’m sixteen,’ he said. I wished I hadn’t added a year.
‘Do you think I’m yellow?’ I asked.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Am I?’
‘No,’ I lied again.
When we’d both been purified, I asked Brian if he wanted to go for a drink. Since the whole Eddie endeavour, I knew I couldn’t fall in love sober.
‘Why don’t you come to mine?’ he said. ‘The olds are away and I’ve got some skunk.’
It was looking like a match made in heaven.
‘Are you scared?’ he asked me, sitting cross-legged on the floor of his teenage bedroom.
‘I’ve decided not to think about it.’
‘How can you not?’ He took a grey ring binder from his tidy desk and opened it. Inside were 500 sheets of lined A4 paper. On each line was a date – the first was three years ago. Each day, the sad fuck had marked a cross against the date.
‘Each time the list gets longer, I add the days at the end. According to my current status, I have 1,350 days to wait for a kidney. That’s 771 times at dialysis.’
He’d highlighted four dates each week to indicate his stints at the unit.
‘Jesus Christ, does this not drive you bonkers?’
‘Does it not drive you?’
‘I think about more important things,’ I said.
‘Like?’
‘Like falling in love.’
He leant in as if to say:
I am the one you will fall in love with. I am here to fill that role. With me, you will never be scared.
But Brian fainted before reaching me. Both of us should’ve known to go home to bed after dialysing. Twice in a row I’d broken this cardinal rule.
If Brian hadn’t peed himself at the point of unconsciousness, we might have remained friends. Unfortunately, some of the pee ruined some of his A4 pages. He’d probably do new ones as soon as possible, the retard.
*
Despite a distinct lack of success thus far, I still felt it better to concentrate on finding love than on the facts of my life, which were few and negative. I had dropped out of school and was therefore qualificationless. And I was indeed yellow. My next love-falling attempt told me so when I asked.
‘You are,’ said Reece, ‘but I like yellow girls.’
Reece was a nurse. He was around twenty, cuddly (one stone overweight) and funny. He’d been on duty six times in a row since Brian peed on his home-made waiting list.
‘Is it appropriate to fall in love with a patient?’ I asked Reece one session. (Brian heard, but he didn’t look. He hadn’t looked at me since the whole
pant-pissing
incident two weeks earlier.) Reece had brought me DVDs three times in a row, each more datey than the last. He definitely wanted me.
‘Totally inappropriate,’ he said.
Pause.
Lean in.
Whisper.
‘But I like inappropriate girls.’
Reece met me at a pub called the Bothy. A crappy band was playing on the quarter-inch stage. Grungy types stood and swayed (not too much) at the
alternative
sounds.
It’s probably not a great idea to take class-A drugs when you’ve just come out of dialysis. Up there with bananas. But, hell, I was with a nurse – and he thought it’d be okay. So in the bathroom, I snorted some of his powder through a cut-to-size straw. Sometimes
dancing
comes naturally. Sometimes not. When I got back onto the dance floor, my arms seemed ridiculously large and no matter how hard I tried to feel the music, all I could feel was
them
, dragging my shoulders down as if they were ropes with bricks on the end.
To add to that, a guy with sunglasses on was
standing
at the bar staring at me. He was much cuter than Reece, and I wanted to impress him. I wanted Reece to bugger off so I could make a move on him. He smiled at me, the sunglasses guy. And romantic-comedy style, I responded by immediately walking into a pillar some fucker had put right in the middle of the room. Somehow I managed to stay standing.
‘You okay?’ Reece asked. His face was bright red. His eyes tiny pricks of black. He didn’t really want to know if I was okay. He was a bastard.
‘I’m going home,’ I said, trying not to think about the gorgeous guy at the bar and the enormity of my arms. (What if I couldn’t hold them up any more? What would happen? Would they drop off?)
‘Let me take you,’ Reece said, putting his hand on my back. His hand was as red as his face. Reece was a big red blob.
‘I’m never going to fall in love with you, Reece,’ I said, staggering out, my arms a few steps behind me.
Will had dealt with Georgie’s mood swings for years. Well, not so much swings as heart-wrenching
unhappiness
which manifested itself either in tearful
hopelessness
(
What if I die tomorrow? If I’m run over by a bus tomorrow I will have lived a shit life!
) or in terrifying fits of rage. (Once, she threw a mug of tea at the patio doors because the post was late. Will can’t remember now what letter she’d been expecting.) How on earth, he had wondered, would she cope if anything serious happened? When, aged seven, a friend decided not to come to her birthday party because ‘she just didn’t feel like going to a party’, Georgie vowed never to talk to the offender again, and never did. When an imminent maths test (second year) caused her to yell out of her window to the forty terraces in the street (
My father is a fuckwit and maths is a fucking waste of time
). When, on a family walk at the nearby wind farm, her new jeans sodden from the rain, she fell to the ground and screamed ‘I hate living here. I am not stepping foot outside again until you say we can move to Spain!’
So how on earth would this melodramatic knot of anger react to a life-threatening illness?
It surprised Will, because Georgie’s behaviour changed only marginally. Her rage just turned up a notch to unbridled rage.
It was after midnight when Georgie finally arrived home from the Bothy, which – unbeknownst to her – was the very place her parents had met all those years ago.
‘You look terrible,’ Will said.
‘Fuck you,’ she replied.
‘What did you say?’
‘Thank you,’ she lied.
Will decided, as usual, to let her get away with it. What was the point? And anyway, he had too many other things to worry about. There was mail to not open, bills to not pay. It’d been two weeks since his father had taken away his only income. Since then, he’d watched the reminder notices pile up at the door. The bank had started phoning already, so he’d turned all phones to silent, head firmly in the sand.
‘So are you sleeping with Linda Stewart?’ Georgie said. She was holding his mobile phone.
‘No.’ He wasn’t lying. They’d had an icky scary screw a fortnight earlier, but her husband had come home the following day and he’d heard nothing since. Technically, they’d slept together but they weren’t
sleeping
together.
‘She’s left a message on your phone,’ Georgie said, pressing loudspeaker on the mobile.
‘Give me that. It’s mine,’ he said, but Linda’s voice was already in the room. ‘Will, can I come over after the girls are asleep? He’s still here. But it’s over. I need to see you.’
‘Blah … how disgusting,’ Georgie said. ‘I have images. Youch.’
‘Please don’t listen to my messages.’ Georgie
completely
ignored her father, taking the phone off
loudspeaker
, and pressing 3 to listen to the next.
‘Mr Marion, I’m calling from the Hunters and Collectors,’ a male voice said into Georgie’s ear. ‘I have some news …’
The day before Preston MacMillan of the Hunters and Collectors Private Detective Agency had phoned Will Marion with the good news, Cynthia had been lying on the beach at Dahab, in Egypt. ‘It was the more
difficult
option,’ she was saying. ‘Leaving was actually the brave thing to do.’
‘Bloody right. You’re brave’s what you are. You’re a brave woman.’ She couldn’t for the life of her recall the name of the man she was talking to. He handed back the photograph Cynthia had swapped for his bong. In the photograph were two beautiful little girls, aged three.
It was his turn with the bong.
‘A selfish person would have stayed,’ Cynthia said, touching the photograph.
‘Yep.’ The man exhaled thick smoke into the blue sky. ‘You’re not fuckin’ selfish. I can see a mile away you’re a woman with guts.’
It was Cynthia’s turn again. She tucked her photo into her money belt, took the bong and inhaled. Smoky pride filled her up. What a woman. What a girl. Someone less gutsy would’ve stayed with a man she didn’t love, would have hung around and been a bad mother, ruining those two children for life, as she and Heath had been ruined by their respective
screw-ups
for mothers.
‘What’s your name again?’ she asked the man.
‘Peter,’ he said. ‘But my friends call me Peter.’
They laughed till they were rolling on the carpet that had been set out for them on the sand, a carpet they were supposed to be thinking about purchasing. ‘Can we lie on it for a bit?’ the bloke called Peter had asked the carpet salesman two hours earlier. He and Cynthia had met in the carpet shop, and immediately recognised kindred spirits in each other’s long straggly hair, bright eastern clothing and general f
ucked-out-of-their-mindedness
. ‘We don’t want to buy nothing too scratchy,’ the man called Peter had said.
The salesman, probably the most patient man in the universe, did as they had asked, laying the carpet on the sand before his beach-front shop, and then watched over them as they smoked on top of it. (His best carpet!)
‘I’m Cynthia …’ she said to Peter, holding her sore stomach, ‘but my friends call me …’ It was no use, she couldn’t say it. It was too funny.
‘That’s it!’ the Egyptian salesman said. ‘Get off my rug!’
He pulled it from underneath them, leaving Cynthia and Peter guffawing on the beach.
Over the last year, Cynthia had probably slept with around one hundred men. She was proud of this fact, considering that she was over thirty, okay, over forty, all right all right, the next one, then, but only just. She looked good with clothes on – slim and tanned – and men rarely changed their minds once they saw the stretch marks, track marks, pancake tits and cellulite underneath her youthful vibrant clothing. She’d lost count exactly, but Peter was probably about number 101 and she gave him the attention he deserved in the tent afterwards, asking for little in return.
She had never been selfish. She was an artist, yes, could’ve been a very important one if she’d been the type to lick arse, but she was not selfish. Hence, she left Will Marion all those years ago for
his
sake. Will, as uninspired and ordinary as he was, would be a good parent. He would bring the girls up to be good people. She needed to leave so he could do that.
‘Can I sing you a song?’ she asked the Peter guy a few hours later. He was asleep. She shook his shoulder. ‘Do you want to hear me sing? Peter! Peter!’
‘What?’ He would rather have stayed asleep.
‘I’m a singer. You get a song for free.’
‘Excellent,’ he said, shutting his eyes.
Something had happened to her voice in the years since she’d left Scotland. It almost hurt to sing, and she feared it might have hurt even more to listen. She sang, nevertheless, and Peter had the courtesy to clap (eyes still closed) once she’d finished.
She lay back down beside number 101(ish) and stared at the roof of yet another tent. She missed Heath the same way she missed heroin. She knew he was bad for her, that he hurt her, that he hurt lots of people, that sometimes, when he was angry, he’d scare her so much she’d lock herself in the bathroom for hours on end. How long till his release now? Would she ever stop
loving
him? Could she ever stop wanting him?
She’d never been in love with Will Marion. She liked to try things and at the time she felt she ought to try contentment. In the end, though, suburban family life, a mediocre man and two demanding children could never be more than an interesting experiment.
Heath, on the other hand – where was that
photograph
? Was it in her money belt? Oh God, she didn’t lose it on the beach, did she? She needed a smoke, she found a smoke, lit it, and emptied the belt of its money, passport and snapshots until the small photograph of Heath took the panic away – oh Heath, he had always been much more than an experiment.
They’d both been fourteen years old when they met at the house in Stoke Newington. He’d been with the foster family for several months – what were their names again? John and Petra? Jane and Peter? – she couldn’t recall because she’d only stayed for a few days.
‘Cynthia, this is Heath. He’s the same age as you!’ Peter or John had said. Heath was already six feet tall. And very good looking. And he had fags.
‘Give us one,’ Cynthia said when her new foster father disappeared into the kitchen.
‘Five new pence,’ he said.
‘A shillin’? Give us a fag, I’ll give you a dance.’
‘Why would I want to see you dance?’
‘Because I’ll do it naked.’
Obviously it was a deal. In the garden shed, Cynthia writhed like a post-pubescent – excited to show off the breasts and hair that had recently sprouted. Her dance moves had been perfected in her previous foster home. The social workers’ vigilant vetting had ensured that no black or mixed-race children were cared for by the white carers, that there was adequate square footage in the house to accommodate orphans of both genders, but it had not delved as far as the magazine drawer in the family room, which housed a fantastic variety of porn.
Heath was in love. He gave Cynthia the first of many cigarettes and so began a beautiful romance. In Heath’s attic bedroom at 2 a.m. that night they took their first acid tab together. At 4 p.m. in Boots the Chemists the following day they stole two packets of condoms and three packets of throat lozenges – they had no intention of using the latter. The day after that they stayed off school together. That night after not going to school they wrote a song, smoked grass, kissed, danced, laughed, touched, screwed …
Oh boy, did they screw. Angrily.
The day after, they ran away.
After that, they were in love and inseparable.
One last year with foster carers – the lovely Meredith, who surprised them by not being afraid of them, even appearing to like them.
After that they formed a band and lived life to the full. They did experiments, dared each other to break boundaries (Take this drug! Sing that song! Break into that shop! Seduce that girl while I watch!).
It was passion, Cynthia supposed. Was it passion to want someone so much that you’re willing to put up with the odd beating? To work for him, sometimes, if there was no money for gear, him keeping watch in the living room while she made money in the bedroom? To worry sometimes, that he might go further than a small fracture, that he might go so far as to kill her?
He spent a total of ninety-five days out of prison between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-three. His offences were mainly serious assaults and drugs charges but his sentences were always extended because of his behaviour inside – rioting, drug use, hostage taking, assaults and one dirty protest.
During these years, Cynthia visited regularly, but when she turned thirty-three she decided to try and go straight. Or was Cynthia becoming an everyday woman with an everyday biological clock?
‘I’ve met someone,’ she told Heath in the visits room of Saughton Prison one rainy November.
‘I dare you to marry him,’ Heath snarled.
So she did, but not because of what Heath said, which was really a warning, but because Will, she thought, might be the answer to her problems. He might wean her off heroin and, more importantly, off Heath.
She was too scared to visit Heath again.
At first, Cynthia quite enjoyed being
mollycoddled
. But Will Marion was a bore and sobriety was over-rated. She was glad when Heath appeared on her doorstep and said: ‘Well, if it isn’t Mrs Marion.’ With Heath to make love to on the sly, she thought,
perhaps
she could handle the drudgery of suburban life. Perhaps she could handle being a mother.
*
As Cynthia lay in the tent in Dahab, Peter snoring
beside
her, she congratulated herself once more for
leaving
Will all those years ago. She had made the right decision. She was not cut out for that life, and she would only have made it impossible for Will and the girls. She drew the last of her cigarette and lay back to imagine Heath. The years after she left Will blurred in a drugs haze – how many flats did she and Heath squat in? Who were they living with? She couldn’t
recall
. But it was fun, wasn’t it? Scary sometimes, like the time Heath stole a car for them to get home from a club and closed his eyes as they approached a red light. ‘If we’re meant to be together the universe will protect us,’ he said. ‘Ten seconds? Fifteen?’ He ignored Cynthia’s screams and pushed her arms away from the wheel with his elbows. ‘If God loves us, we’ll survive. If not, I don’t want to live. One, two, three …’ Turned out, God loved Heath and Cynthia a whole bunch more than Miriam from Jedburgh and the Ford Escort she’d just bought. Then there was the time a punter did something she didn’t like and she protested and yelled and Heath came into the bedroom and beat the man’s head against the window pane until he stopped moving. But being scared was similar to fun, wasn’t it?
He got life at the age of forty-two – which meant ten years minimum in HM Prison Manchester. Cynthia waited, and waited. She tried rehab. She tried singing again. She tried making new friends at the local
supermarket
. She tried to make the days pass until he was out. But that last rejection was too much. She decided to deal with his absence the way she had when coke supplies dwindled in Glasgow in 1991. She accepted it. She moved on to something else. She withdrew. She got off the heavy stuff – indeed she stole what was left from the dealers she was living with in Finsbury Park, sold it, and got on a plane.
Zzzz … Someone was fiddling with the zipper of the tent. ‘Excuse me?’ a man said from outside. ‘Is there a Cynthia Marion in there?’