The Testament of Jessie Lamb (14 page)

‘But why are the researchers doing it? There must be a reason.'

‘What could excuse that? I'm going down there as soon as things settle down at home–'

‘What's happened?'

‘He's in hospital. Mum didn't want me to but I finally rang the doctor, and they came for him in an ambulance. He was so busy raving on he didn't even notice until they'd got him outside.'

‘Is he OK?'

Baz shrugged. ‘Mum's going to see him twice a day. She says he seems calmer. I don't know.' He glanced at his watch. ‘I've got to go. She'll be getting home soon.' He picked up the metronome from the lid of the piano and put it in his rucksack.

‘Baz?'

‘Yeah, they know I'm taking it. Mine's broken, and I've got another exam.' He edged towards the door. ‘Mum gets upset, it's better if I'm there when she comes home.'

His mum was bonkers too, I realised. I walked to the playing field door with him and said goodbye. Checked my mobile. I hadn't told him about my Dad; well, he had enough to think about. And as soon as things got better with his parents, he'd be off to join Nat, saving the lives of animals.

Sal wasn't in college again–she hadn't been in all week but I was pretty sure she'd come back from Birmingham, so I called at her house on my way home. She was there, watching a DVD. She urged me into the front room and insisted on starting it again from the beginning. ‘You should see this, Jess, you should just see it. It's horrendous.'

I didn't want to see a DVD, I wanted to talk, but it was hopeless. It was playing before I could get a word in. And the DVD was–well, everybody's seen it now. But back then I hadn't even heard of it. She got it from the FLAME women. It was the most horrible upsetting DVD I've ever seen in my life. It's the film of some women who had MDS. But it isn't one of those ‘diary-of-an-illness' type programmes, where you go through the stages of anxiety and fear with the person, trying different kinds of treatment and hoping for the best. Where you feel that even though he or she may die in the end, the person has learned something and taught you something. It's not like that at all. They don't even tell you the names of the women, they just show them being ill. Bumping into things. Swearing. Repeating words over and over. Falling down and having fits. Women in homes, in hospitals, in different countries, even outside, lying on the ground. Women dead. The point about it is they don't show the women like people you could care about, they show them like animals, in disgusting states, naked, puking up. People say its pornography. FLAME say it's a record of what's really happened, that people have been pretending not to see, and covering with flowers.

‘This'll show them,' said Sal.

‘It's not like that now. They put MDS women to sleep, no one has to have all that awful–'

‘Put them to sleep?' she shrieked. ‘Put them to sleep? We're not talking about aged pets, we're talking about young women. Women who
die
. If you don't have to watch them going mad first, that makes it OK, does it?'

There wasn't anything I could say.

‘We're going to campaign with this–we're going to really make them sit up and notice. Imagine if these were men, dying like this. D'you think there'd still be no cure?'

By the end of the DVD I felt sick and wretched, and Sal was completely hyper. I left her ringing up her FLAME friends. I didn't let myself look at my mobile till I got home but it didn't make any difference; still nothing. The kitchen smelled foul and when I looked in the bin I saw Mum had dumped a load of filthy old fag ends. She'd promised me she'd stopped smoking. As if. Like agreeing not to buy more new clothes, when I knew perfectly well the grey wool jacket on the bannisters had just come from Jigsaw. A supposedly educated, intelligent person. If this was the best she could do after being asked and told, what hope was there?

When Mum came in she tried to entice me out for a meal. She followed me up to my room. ‘I know you're worried about Joe, Jessie, but so am I. This atmosphere's making it even worse.'

‘Your smoking is making the atmosphere worse,' I told her.

She went into her own room and it was quiet. I wondered if she was crying. I knew I was horrible. I wished none of today had happened, I wished I was someone else. Sal was in FLAME, Baz was leaving, and Dad thought it was alright to never even contact me again.

I turned off the light and opened the curtain and lay looking up at the beech tree. It was a tracery of black against the sky. The lower branches had a bit of an orange shine to them, from the streetlamp. Behind the black branches the sky was vaguely dark, no stars or moon–just clouds reflecting light pollution. I felt like a creature in a cage. Whichever direction I paced or turned, my way was blocked. There was nothing I could do–I was powerless. I had to find a way out.

Something began to relieve the pressure in my head before I even knew what it was. A pinhole of light. It was the freedom I felt, the night of the blue dress. Imagining I could be a volunteer. How pleased Dad would be if I volunteered (thought I). He couldn't go on being angry with me then, he'd have to see my mind had been occupied with much more important things than Mum's stupid affair. He'd be proud of me. I could almost hear him saying, ‘My heroic Jesseroon!'

How crazy, how crazy how crazy that seems now. But that's what I thought. I lay still, hardly breathing, and allowed myself to float into the ocean of space that was opening before me. To do something straightforward, where there would be no tangled argument and no compromise. Something that would make a difference to the world. Something it was within my power to do without having to rely on anyone else. Something that would make Dad proud. I pulled my pillow and duvet off the bed and wrapped myself up on the floor, so I could go on and on staring at the beech, letting that freedom unroll. The freedom to act. The freedom to do something I had decided for myself.

When we discuss it he harps on about that all the time. ‘You volunteered because of me. Because of what I said. If I'd never mentioned it, it would never even have entered your head.'

It's dark outside and he has brought two mugs of cocoa upstairs, and untied my right hand so I can hold the mug by its handle. ‘Dad, undo my other hand. Please.'

He takes the cocoa off me (I seem to have taught him not to trust me!), undoes my left, then passes me back the cocoa and moves smartly out of range.

‘It's OK. I won't try anything. I just wanted to warm my hands.' I flex my left wrist and wiggle my fingers. Luxury. I wrap both hands around the mug. It is a solid triangle of comfort. I can lose myself in the loveliness of its heat and smell; all there is is cocoa.

I have to drag myself back to the argument. It keeps feeling so nearly within reach, the moment of convincing him, that I have to keep plugging away at it. It's impossible that he won't understand. ‘I didn't volunteer because of you. If you'd never mentioned it, it would have hit me in the face when I heard it on the news. It is the thing I need to do, so one way or another it would have found me.'

‘But you lose me here, Jess. I can't buy it–this destiny stuff, this
thing I need to do
. You're a free agent. You can do
anything
with your life.'

‘I know. Listen. Let me explain–because it
is
freedom. That's what it is.'

‘You never used to be a fatalist. Where's the girl who said Hinduism was ridiculous, when I explained it to you?'

‘Father of Wisdom. This isn't Hinduism. This is something I
know
.'

He's shaking his head. Outside, far away in the dark night, a dog barks. Yesterday I tried screaming and he gagged me; my throat still feels raw, and my bottom lip is split at the side. Explain. Explain to him; if only he could see.

‘And then I wasn't even there,' he says. ‘I told you about it, and then I buggered off. If I'd been there for you to talk to–'

‘It wouldn't have made any difference. I didn't just go,
oh yeah, I'll volunteer
. You know? It
grew
. That's how I knew it was meant to be.'

‘Jess–'

‘OK. OK. I'll tell you what it was like. It was like getting in and swimming in the sea.'

He wiggles his eyebrows at me in the old way, meaning he thinks I'm a loony, and I laugh.

‘It's true. Listen. On a big wide beach, MDS is the waves, and you're trying to get in the water. At first you're on the edge of the beach, playing about. But the tide is coming in. The first waves, they just froth around your feet, they're cold but still quite small, and you can run giggling up the beach.'

‘Interpret, oh poetic one.'

‘That's hearing the first news about MDS, when I was too young and silly to understand. Then bigger waves start to come, one after another. They break against your legs and you feel the force of the water smashing against you, and the undertow sucking your ankles. Then the water's getting deeper, the waves slam into your body and you stagger from the force of them, they almost knock you over.'

‘I get the picture.'

‘The heavy weight of the water beats against you. But you stand upright and resist it and keep walking. And then you're in quite deep, your head and shoulders are clear and your feet are still flat on the sand, but the water is deep and smooth all around you, and when the next wave comes it's not breaking, because they break closer in to shore. It's just a swell, a smooth running mound of water rolling towards you. And when it comes it doesn't beat against you, it doesn't smash its strength against yours. It simply lifts you off your feet. It lifts you up and carries you, and you start swimming in the sea.'

‘You start swimming in MDS?'

‘Don't be thick.'

‘Which one equals volunteering, among all these waves? Or is that the tsunami that's coming to drown you?'

‘It's about accepting what's happening and finding a way to deal with it.'

‘Your metaphors are as illogical as your thinking, Jess.'

I swirl the last of the cocoa round in my mug, trying to get the chocolaty sludge at the bottom to mix in. I wish he could understand. I wish this would stop. ‘Can I talk to Mum?'

‘Why?'

‘I just want to.'

‘OK.' He dials the number on his mobile and passes it to me. How quickly could I dial 999? Before he got it off me? If he left the phone with me for just a
minute
, I could do it.

‘Hello?'

‘Mum.'

‘Jessie! Where are you?'

‘Where d'you think?'

‘Are you alright? Is Joe there?'

‘He's here. He told me I could ring you.'

‘You're angry now but honestly Jess, in the long run you will see things differently.'

‘I don't think so.' I'm trying to see where the 9 is while holding the unfamiliar phone to my ear. Mum is saying something else, I can't follow. ‘Sorry? What?' I inch the phone up into my eye line and cover the 9 with my thumb. End this call–end this call and then–

Dad leans forward and grabs it. ‘That's enough.' He puts it to his ear. ‘Cath, sorry. But I can't trust her with the phone. Look, I'll call you later. Yes. We're fine.'

‘What did you think I was going to do?' I say angrily.

‘The thing you were thinking of doing.'

‘You're not a mind reader.'

‘No, I wish I was, then maybe this would make some sense to me.'

‘
I
wish you were.' The saddest thing about this room is the way there is no curtain. There's something so bleak about light reflecting on a night-time window, when you can't see out. A black shiny dead end. I'd prefer sitting and talking in the dark, so I could see there's a sky outside.

I am not going to think about the dark. What you have to remember is that light changes. Everything changes. Even though the window looks black from here, there
is
light outside. Another kind of light. ‘D'you remember the glow worms?'

He looks at me blankly.

‘In Cornwall? When we went on holiday.'

‘The glow worms! Yes. On the verge at the side of that lane.'

‘I thought they were shining green and you said no, it's because they're buried in the grass.'

‘Did I?'

‘You picked one up for me, on a leaf, but it was still greeny-yellow, so you had to admit–'

He nearly grins. ‘You are occasionally right. But not now.' There's a silence. ‘They shine to attract a mate,' he says.

‘Father of Wisdom.'

We look at each other.

‘Please let me go. Please.'

He shakes his head.

We sit in silence, holding our empty mugs.

So I volunteered.

I hurried out of the warm clinic because I didn't want to have to talk to any of the other girls. Coming out of the revolving door was like jumping into ice-water, I felt the skin on my face shrivelling in the cold. Then I was already at the stop before I remembered the bus strike.