Painkiller (9 page)

I can hear the conversation between Niall and Lorraine, even though it is being exchanged in snarled whispers. It’s the drugs. I just can’t help it.

Niall’s been a naughty boy about child support, says Lorraine. Niall counters by saying he knows damn well she’s seeing someone, so why can’t he dip into his pocket? Why can’t he make an honest woman out of her, and pay for Peter’s clothes and shoes? She says it’s none of his damn business, and Niall should man up, take responsibility for his child, and stop whining.

After ten minutes, Lorraine notices Peter is on my lap, and her face contorts into maternal outrage. She struggles to her feet and totters towards me as fast as her Manolo Blahniks will allow.

‘I have to go,’ I say to Peter.

‘OK,’ says Peter, not that bothered.

‘See you.’ I smile, and I pat Peter on the head. ‘Thanks for sharing your book, Peter.’

‘It’s not my book,’ he says pityingly. ‘I found it on the table. They have it for the babies to read.’

‘Well, thank you for sharing the hotel’s book,’ I say. ‘It’s just a big shame that you don’t like tigers.’

‘But I do like —’

‘Rarr!’ I say, curling my fingers into talons before he finishes. And he giggles hysterically. He is still giggling when his mother gets to him, and I’m on the other side of the hotel’s revolving door.

I’m sitting back, keeping my breathing steady, mustering up the strength to drive home.

Thank God for automatic cars.
 

I’m thinking about little Peter; about his tiny fat fingers turning the quilted pages, the smell of his thick mousy hair. When my arms circled him to keep him safe, I felt the tiny rise-and-fall breathing of his chest, and the comforting prickle of his jumper on the palms of my hands.

I can still feel the weight of his little bottom on my lap. This time the pain is a reminder of my time with him, so I embrace it.

I would have been a good mother.
 

I don’t drive home. Even in my desperate state, when I turn the key and pull out of my parking space, I don’t drive home. Just like when I went to the pub with Niall, my body is taking me on an adventure and my mind is tagging along for a ride.

I find myself in the multi-storey car park belonging to the hospital, driving round and round to get up to the roof. Not to get treatment, of course. What I have is beyond the abilities of anything Casualty can give me.

This is where I had my ‘accident’.

I reach the top of the multi-storey, and the world explodes with light. Gravel crunches under the weight of my driving shoes as I walk from the middle to the tarmac around the edge.

I gaze out over Kensington High Street, and beyond. You can see the whole of west London from here; so many cranes in the air, building the future. It’s cold and blustery. The wind plucks at my clothing. This kind of view deserves a poem. Perhaps I should try to write one. The sky is glorious, a beautiful pale blue, so very pale blue, almost white, like…

Like the colour of my amitriptyline pills.
 

No, it’s like a sparrow’s egg. Like the paint job on my first car. Like our bathroom. Like the romper suit I bought for Jesse’s little boy…

Like the colour of my amitriptyline pills.
 

Shit!

My mind struggles to kid itself that it thought of all those glorious things first, but it’s fooling nobody. I know the first thing that popped into my head.

(
amitriptyline pills
)

Shit!

Shit shit shit!

My Angry Friend has robbed me of my body, my career, my friends, my hopes for motherhood, and he’s bloody near taken my sanity. And now he’s poisoned my imagination. Some hope for me becoming a poet.

I turn round and look at the stairwell from where I emerged. This is where my Angry Friend took all those things from me.

This time, I count the steps. There were twenty-two.
Of course. There had to be twenty-two
.

Thud thud thud.
 

This is where I fell, just there, and everyone was so relieved that it had not been worse, that I had not broken my spine.

(
Ha ha ha
)

Minor surgery, nothing more.

When the pain stayed, they said it was just residual effects from the surgery. When the pain got worse they said it was a side effect of the injury healing itself. When it got unbearable, they admitted that my acute neuropathic pain had been replaced by chronic neuropathic pain, and that it might be here to stay…

That whole first year I can’t remember, but I was dimly aware of a blur of plot twists, each one bringing fresh hell into my life. I felt like a teenager in a horror film; where every revelation took me deeper and deeper into a nightmare. I often think, if those luckless teenagers were blessed with self-awareness, they would review their situation. An hour ago, they were packing for a nice summer vacation, now their friends are dead and a zombie with a chainsaw is chasing them in the wood.

And they would ask themselves, ‘How exactly did I get from there to here?’

Because I can’t quite work it out. My mind can’t fit it all in my head. I try to work it out but I can’t, and no one can quite explain the whole thing to me.

I knew I was at the hospital because Dominic and I had been trying for a baby. He told me that. We’d been trying to conceive for some time. We had both been getting tested to see if the problem was at my end, or his, and that had also been another long period of discovery, full of twists and shocks, but finally, success. Wouldn’t you know it, my lady parts were perfectly functional, and we discovered that Dominic’s sperm was rather lazy and lackadaisical, lacking ‘get up and go’.

But things had been done, plastic tubes had been inserted, and then we were told there was a life growing inside me. I’m sorry to say that I can’t remember that moment either, but Dominic used to describe it to me. He used to do it so well, exaggerating the significance of that fateful moment every time he told it, until there was a star hovering above the ultrasound machine, and three wise men waiting in the hospital’s Costa Coffee.

Then he started to sound like he didn’t want to describe it any more, and so I stopped asking.

I had come up to the roof to get the car, to drive it down to Dominic who was buying a newspaper in the hospital shop. The morning was very busy, and we had to park on the top floor. I reached the roof of the hospital, up the steps, coming out into the morning daylight. I must have looked at the skyline of London, this view, the one I’m looking at again, which I guess would have been the last thing I would have seen as a woman without pain. Then someone found me at the bottom of the stairwell, and I couldn’t move, and there was something sticking in the small of my back: my stiletto heel. Lying there, wounded and helpless, about forty feet above the Casualty department.

How ironic.

Two lives had been extinguished that day; the tiny blob of orange growing inside me, and the life of Monica Wood, agent, sister, wife, prospective mother.

And no matter how much of a blur my life has become, no matter how many chunks of my memory float away, I remember the flat of the hand against my back. The hand that propelled me into the stairwell.

They all say that I imagined it.

I didn’t.

Because that hand pushed me, and the owner of that hand left me for dead.

I’ve not come up here since…

Well, not since the accident.

I mean, why would I? What would be the point? To investigate the scene of the crime, find some hitherto undiscovered vital piece of evidence that would be left miraculously intact after five years exposed to the elements?

Evidence that would lead me to the door of my mystery assailant?

Even as I’m laughing at myself for even thinking about the idea, I find myself looking around, looking for footprints, or patches of blood, or bits of cloth torn from my attacker’s clothes, fluttering in the breeze.

Nothing. (
Of course not. Stupid, stupid woman
)

Maybe that’s why I’m obsessing about my suicide letter. It just
feels
like a piece of evidence, an item discovered in the first act of a creaky old whodunnit play, or placed in a bag in the first minutes of a TV thriller.

Perhaps the letter is exactly what it seems to be; a letter written by a woman in pain who wanted to die. Perhaps it’s just me, trying to find some drama in the discovery. Perhaps I’ve worked in the entertainment industry for far too long.

As my head swivels from right to left and back again, shapes appear on the edge of my peripheral vision, fat black blobs appear in front of me, floating around like airborne slugs. I’m used to these things; they appear from time to time when I’m exhausted by the pain.

But these weren’t slugs. They were three figures, floating, hovering over the edge of the concrete wall and the black metal fence. Three smiling, elderly figures: my parents and Dominic’s mother. Sometimes, in my head, in my muffled, fuzzy, drug-soaked brain, reality leaks into my dreams; visions of pain and torture that are carried into my slumber as a hangover from the day’s suffering.

And sometimes, even more frighteningly, dreams leak into my reality.

Shit!
 

I can’t stay up here, not this far off the ground!
I can see myself happily walking off the edge of the building trying to shake hands with the dead.

I walk back to the steps, shielding my head from the visions that float on the horizon, fearing that they, like sirens, will lure me to my doom. I go to the top of the stairwell, and I nearly miss my footing and fall down the steps.

As I said. Irony.

I don’t stop walking until I’m leaning on my car door, fighting to retrieve the keys from my pocket, then I hoist myself into the car seat with a grateful sigh.

I go home and I can hear Dominic busying himself in the kitchen, clattering and clanging and hurting my ears.

‘Hello!’ I call.

‘In the kitchen!’ he calls back.

The pain levels are making me lose control of my thoughts. My Angry Friend is laughing, and my brain is hot and rebellious.

Of course you’re in the kitchen. I can hear that.
 

Why
 

did you say that?
 

Why
 

did you have to say that? You could have just said ‘hello’ back, but that was too simple for you, you had to say you were in the kitchen when I can bloody well hear you’re in the kitchen!
 

Why
 

would you need to say you’re in the kitchen? It’s not a big house. Are you saying I can’t manage to find you in the house without you helping me?
 

Am I that helpless? Is that how I appear to you?
 

There’s a beige square lying in the hallway. A letter – and it’s addressed to me. A white-hot spear of rage pierces my belly.

He must have come in from work and ignored it.
 

How
 

could he have done that?
 

He knows how I feel. He knows how much effort it takes for me sometimes, to reach down. You knew that and you came in and you
 

just walked past it.
 

‘Oh, that’s all right, I can see from here it’s Monica’s letter, she can pick it up. I’ll go and get myself a drink and potter around in the kitchen. I did my bit this morning, when I brought her up a cup of tea. She can pick up her damn stupid letter. She can do that. She can pick it up.’
 

Yes,
 

I’m not doing anything at the moment. I can pick up my own damn letter.
 

I bend over as far as I dare, holding my breath so I can release it when the pain comes. My fingertips scrabble for the edge of the envelope. I tickle it into my grasp, breathe out, pick it up and open it.

God, that was quick!
Dr Kumar must have been on to the clinic the second I had left, and they must have made the appointment there and then.