Playing for the Ashes (70 page)

I said, throwing two kibbles between us for my ante, “I don’t know when. I know how. There’s a difference.”

“But you’ve more idea than most.”

“What kind of satisfaction is there supposed to be in that? I’d be glad to trade knowledge for ignorance and bliss.”

“What would you do differently, if you were ignorant like the rest of us?”

I fanned out my cards and wondered about the statistical possibility of rejecting three of them and ending up with a full house. Slim to none, I decided. I discarded. Max dealt. I rearranged. I decided to bluff. I
fli
cked six more kibbles onto the table between us, saying, “Okay, baby. Let’s play.”

“Well?” he asked. “What would you do? If you were ignorant like the rest of us.”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’d still be here. But things would be different because I could compete.”

“With Chris? Why in God’s name would you ever feel the need—”

“Not with Chris. With her.”

Max puffed out his lips. He picked up his cards. He rearranged them. At last he looked over the tops of them at me, his single eye unusually bright. He had the kindness not to feign lack of knowledge. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know you were aware. He doesn’t mean to be cruel.”

“He isn’t being cruel. He’s being discreet. He’s never even mentioned her name.”

“Chris cares for you, girlie.”

I shot him a look that said, “Wither, you berk.”

He said, “You know I’m speaking the truth.”

“That doesn’t exactly make despair go down easier. Chris cares for the animals as well.”

Max and I looked long and hard at each other. I could tell what he was thinking. If he’d spoken the truth, so had I.

I never thought it would be this way. I thought I’d stop wanting. I thought I’d give up. I thought I’d say, “Well, that’s that, isn’t it,” and accept this rotten poker hand without trying to shift the cards. But I’ve managed nothing more than hiding hunger and anger. I realise this is more than I would have managed at one time, but it’s small enough cause for celebration.

One stumble. That’s what started the descent. One minor stumble just a year ago as I was getting out of the mini-van. At first I put it down to being in a hurry. I opened the van door, took a step, and stumbled trying to negotiate the distance from the level of the street to the height of the kerb. Before I realised what had happened, I was sprawled on the pavement with a cut on my chin, tasting blood where my teeth had sunk into my lip. Beans was snif
fin
g my hair in some concern, and Toast was nosing through the oranges that had rolled from my grocery bag into the gutter.

I thought, “Clumsy oaf,” and pushed myself to my knees. Everything felt bruised but nothing felt broken. I pressed the arm of my jersey to my chin, brought it away streaked with blood, and said, “Damn.” I gathered up the oranges, told the dogs to come along, and picked my way down the steps to the tow path along the canal.

When I was crossing the workroom that night with the dogs leaping round, eager for their nighttime run, Chris said, “What’ve you done to yourself, Livie?”

“Done?”

“You’re limping.”

I’d taken a fall, I told him. It was nothing much. I must have pulled a muscle.

“You won’t want to run, then. Have a rest. I’ll take the dogs out when I
fin
ish here.”

“I can cope.”

“You’re sure?”

“I wouldn’t say so if I wasn’t.”

I climbed the stairs and went out. I spent a few minutes gingerly stretching. Nothing actually hurt, which seemed rather odd, because if I’d pulled a muscle, torn a ligament, or broken a bone, I’d feel it, wouldn’t I? I felt nothing, other than the limp itself when it occurred each time I tried to move my right leg.

I must have looked like Toast that night, attempting to jog along the canal with the dogs in front of me. All I could manage was the short distance to the bridge. When the dogs scrambled up the steps to head as usual down Maida Avenue towards Lisson Grove and the Grand Union Canal, I called them back. They hesitated, clearly confused, caught between tradition and cooperation.

“Come on, you two,” I said. “Not tonight.”

And not any night that succeeded it. The next day my right foot wasn’t working properly. I was helping the zoo’s ultrasound team move their equipment into a tapir’s enclosure where they were going to monitor her pregnancy. I had the bucket of apples and carrots. The team had the trolley with the machine. One of them said to me, “What’s gone wrong with you, Livie?” which was the
fir
st indication I had that I was dragging my foot behind me in a movement that looked like step-shuf
fle
-bob-step.

What caused me disquiet was the fact that both times—with the limp and with the foot dragging—I’d not realised I was doing it.

“Could be a pinched nerve,” Chris said that night. “That’d cut off feeling.” He took my foot in his hand and turned it right and left.

I watched his fingers probe. “Wouldn’t it feel worse if it was nerves? Wouldn’t it tingle or ache or something?”

He lowered my foot to the floor. “Could be something else.”

“What?”

“We’ll speak to Max, shall we?”

Max tapped against the sole and the ball of my foot. He ran a wheel with tiny serrations along my
fle
sh and asked me to describe what I felt. He pulled at his nose and knocked his index finger against his chin. He suggested we take ourselves to a doctor.

He said, “How long has it been like this?”

I said, “Nearly a week.”

He talked about Harley Street, a specialist there, and the need to have some de
fin
itive answers.

“What is it?” I asked. “You know, don’t you? You don’t want to say. God, is it cancer? D’you think I’ve got a tumour?”

“A vet has no real expertise in human disease, girlie.”

I said, “Disease.
Disease
. What is it?”

He said he didn’t know. He said it looked to him like something might be affecting my neurons.

I recalled Chris’s amateur diagnosis. “Pinched nerve?”

Chris murmured, “Central nervous system, Livie.”

The walls seemed to shimmy in my direction. “What?” I asked. “Central nervous system? What?”

Max said, “The neurons are cells: body, axon, and dendrites. They conduct impulses to the brain. If they’re—”

“A brain tumour?” I grasped his arm. “Max, d’you think I’ve got a brain tumour?”

He squeezed my hand. “What you’ve got is a case of the panics,” he said. “You need to have some tests and put your mind at ease. Now, what about that game of chess we left un
fin
ished, Christopher?”

Max sounded breezy but when he left that night, I heard him talking to Chris on the tow path. I couldn’t make out any of the words, just the single time he said my name. When Chris came back inside to fetch the dogs for their final run, I said, “He knows what the problem is, doesn’t he? He knows it’s serious. Why won’t he tell me? I heard him talking about me. I heard him tell you. You tell me, Chris. Because if you don’t—”

Chris came to my chair and held my head against his stomach for a moment, his hand warm against my ear. He jiggled me playfully. “Hedgehog,” he said. “You’re getting too prickly. What he said was that he can ring some friends to ring some friends to get you in quick to see this Harley Street bloke. I told him to go ahead and make the calls. I think that’s best. Okay?”

I pulled away. “Look at me, Chris.”

“What?” His face was composed.

“He told you something else.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because he called me Olivia.”

Chris shook his head in exasperation. He tilted mine. He bent and brushed a kiss against my lips. He’d never kissed me before. He’s never kissed me since. The dry,
fle
eting pressure of his mouth against mine told me more than I wanted to know.

I began the first round of visiting doctors and taking tests. They started with the simple things: blood and urine. They moved on to general X-rays. From there, I was treated to the science fiction experience of sliding into what looked like a futuristic iron lung for an MRI. After studying the results—with me sitting in a chair across the desk in an office so richly panelled it looked like a movie set and Chris waiting in reception because I didn’t want him to be there when I heard the worst— the doctor said only, “We’re going to have to do a spinal tap. When shall I arrange it?”

“Why? Why don’t you know now? Why can’t you tell me? I don’t want any more tests. And least of all that. It’s horrible, isn’t it? I know what it’s like. The needles and the
flu
id. I don’t want it. Nothing more.”

He tapped his fingers together, resting his hands on the ever-growing file of my test results. “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s necessary.”

“But what do you
think
?”

“That you’re going to have to have this test. And then we’ll see how everything adds up.”

People with money probably have this sort of test in some posh private hospital with
flo
wers in the corridors, carpet on the
flo
or, and music playing. I had it courtesy of the National Health. A medical student performed it, which didn’t give me a lot of confidence perhaps because of the fact that his supervisor was standing over him issuing instructions in medical mumbo jumbo that included incisive questions such as, “Excuse me, but exactly which lumbar vertebra are you targetting there, Harris?” Afterwards, I lay in the required position—flat on my back, head downwards—and tried to ignore the rapid pulse that seemed to beat along my spine, and tried to ignore the sense of foreboding I’d had in bed this very morning when the muscles in my right leg had begun to vibrate as if they had a will of their own.

I put it down to nerves.

The final test occurred several days later, in the doctor’s examining room. There, seating me on a table that was covered with leather as soft as the centre of a baby’s palm, he put his hand on the ball of my right foot.

“Push,” he said.

I did what I could.

“Push again.”

I did.

He held out his hands for my own. “Push.”

“This isn’t about my hands.”

“Push.”

I did.

He nodded, made some notations on the papers in my file, nodded again. He said, “Come with me,” and took me back to his office. He disappeared. He returned with Chris.

I felt my hackles rise and said, “What’s this?” but instead of answering, he gestured not to the chairs opposite his desk but to a sofa that stood beneath a darkly hued painting of a country scene: enormous hills, a river, hulking trees, and a girl with a leafy switch herding cows. Among all the details of that late morning in Harley Street, how odd it is that I still remember that painting. I only glanced at it once.

He drew a wingback chair over to join us. He brought along my file although he didn’t refer to it. He sat, placed the file on his lap, and poured some water from a decanter on the coffee table between us. He held the decanter up, offering. Chris said no. I was parched and said yes.

“It appears to be a disorder called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis,” the doctor said.

Tension left me like water breaking through a dike. A disorder. Hallelujah. A disorder. A
disorder
. No disease after all. Not a tumour. Not a cancer. Thank God. Thank God.

Next to me on the sofa, Chris stirred and leaned forward. “Amyo—what?”

“Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. It’s a disorder affecting the motor neurons. It’s usually shortened to ALS.”

“What do I take for it?” I asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“There are no drugs available, I’m afraid.”

“Oh. Well, I s’pose there wouldn’t be. Not for a disorder. What do I do to take care of it, then? Exercise? Physical therapy?”

The doctor ran his fingers along the edge of the file as if to straighten papers inside that were already perfectly lined up together. “Actually, there is nothing you can do,” he said.

“You mean I’m going to limp and twitch for the rest of my life.”

“No,” he said, “you won’t do that.”

There was something in his voice that made my stomach push my breakfast in the direction of my throat. I tasted the nasty
fla
vour of bile. There was a window just next to the sofa, and through the translucent curtains I could see the shape of a tree, still bare-branched although it was late April. Plane tree, I thought needlessly, they always take the longest to leaf, no abandoned bird nests in it, how nice it would be to climb in summer, I never had a tree house, I remember the conkers growing at the side of the stream in Kent… and playing conkers, with the chestnut whistling like a cowboy’s lariat above my head.

“I’m terribly sorry to tell you this,” the doctor said, “but it’s—”

“I don’t want to know.”

“Livie.” Chris reached for my hand. I pushed him off.