Very Nearly Normal

by Hannah Sunderland

  We both looked up at the same time, his breath on my face. I frowned and let my hands fall away.

  ‘Come with me,’ he said, turning and slowly making his way out of the kitchen and to a room I hadn’t been in before. Just off the hall was a pair of large wooden doors. He slid one open and stepped inside what had once been a study, but was now a makeshift hospital ward. A single bed sat below the window, a puzzle book with a half-finished crossword sat on the table beside it. The desk was now a pharmacy, covered in ten, fifteen different types of medication. I stepped inside and he slid the door closed behind me.

  It felt too intimate being in a room alone with him.

  ‘What is it that you have?’ I asked, turning over one of the drug boxes with my finger.

  ‘That doesn’t matter.’ He waved my question aside and sat down on the edge of the bed, his face creasing as his knees bent. He tried his best to hide the whimper of pain as he landed but I heard it all the same.

  ‘Theo.’ His name felt familiar and alien in my mouth. I kept my voice as stern and emotionless as I could. ‘I watched you collapse and saw you dragged into an ambulance. Then you abandoned me in the waiting room and told me that I wasn’t wanted anymore. Now your bloody sister has dragged me back into this saga and I still don’t know what’s going on. So, you’re going to tell me, in explicit detail, what is wrong with you and when I know the same as everybody else, then we can talk about whatever you want.’

  ‘I see your temper hasn’t changed.’ He sighed and looked down at his hands as he spoke.

  I moved a book from a chair and, as I turned it over, I saw the cover. Jane Eyre. I sat down, my eyes hard, my jaw clenched.

  ‘You read it then?’ I said, holding up the book before I placed it on the floor.

  ‘I’m almost finished. I really like it. It reminds me of you quite a bit.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m anything like Jane.’

  ‘Neither do I. Mr Rochester is the one you’re like.’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘So, you think I’m like a cantankerous, hot-headed older man.’

  ‘In some ways, yes.’ He tried to smile but I was having none of it.

  ‘Thank you, that’s so flattering. Now, tell me everything, from the very beginning. If I have questions, I will ask them. Go.’

  He took a breath and looked down at his hands; the skin was dry. When he eventually spoke, his tone was reluctant.

  ‘When Mum died, I became ill,’ he began.

  ‘How ill?’

  ‘Let’s just say that I didn’t see myself turning twenty-six. I wrote letters to everyone I loved and left them somewhere they would find them, just in case. I had to take time away from boxing. I hated it. I’d worked so hard and got so far and every day away from it was a step in the wrong direction. I couldn’t do anything for myself except lie in bed and wait to get either better or worse. I became weak, my muscles faded, my fitness all but vanished.’

  He paused, swallowed, carried on. ‘For a good few months, we were all pretty certain that I was going to die and even if Tessa and Dad hadn’t accepted it yet, I had. I remember thinking that nothing could be worse than waking up every morning and counting the seconds until I could go back to bed and be unconscious again, not even dying.’ I heard the telltale wobble in his voice as his eyes became slick with tears. His chin began to judder and all I wanted to do was to rush forward and steady it.

  But I couldn’t let myself fall back into the trap. Since he’d been gone, I’d built myself up into the person that I had always wanted to be. I was happy and I couldn’t let that slip for anyone and especially not for the man who’d sent me away.

  ‘No one knew what was wrong with me and, in the end, they all thought that I was a hypochondriac. They tested me for everything: cancer, infectious diseases, TB, AIDS, lupus, everything that I could be tested for, I was tested for. But they all came back clear and so I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. They gave me drugs for it, but they didn’t help; if anything they made things worse, so I stopped taking them.’

  I remembered the diazepam and how I’d found it discarded away from the others.

  ‘I tried to box again, but my body wouldn’t let me. I just couldn’t do it anymore.’ He laughed a cold, joyless single laugh and looked down at his hands, which were clasped tightly on his lap. ‘All my life I’d worked to get to Team GB and just when I’d finally got there, I couldn’t do it anymore. Jenny had loved the lifestyle of going to the fights and parties and mingling with the future gold medallists. Then I became ill, I lost my looks, my sport, my everything. It became clear that I wasn’t getting any better and she realised that, if this was going to last forever, she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life looking after me. So, she packed her things and left her engagement ring on the bedside table while I slept. She didn’t even say goodbye.’

  I remembered her words to me at the market, ‘I left him for a reason. You’re better off, trust me.’ Had that been her only reasoning, because she saw Theo as a burden and nothing else?

  ‘After four or five months I began to get better.’ His eyes slowly filled with tears that had yet to fall. ‘It took a long time, but I got back to normal, or as normal as I would ever be again. I took it easy and within a year I could go about my life as if it had never happened. It all but went away for four years; then I met you.’ He looked up and met my eye. I looked away. I couldn’t make eye contact with him. If I did, then I would be putty in his hands. ‘I knew that doing certain things made me worse but I did them anyway because I didn’t want you to miss out on anything; I didn’t want me to miss out on anything.’

  ‘What happened this time?’ I kept my voice cold, calm.

  ‘The same, only worse. I couldn’t walk for a while, still can’t, not properly anyway.’

  ‘Do they know what it is?’

  He nodded. ‘Most doctors don’t know much about it, it’s a relatively newly discovered illness, but luckily I found someone who did. I got diagnosed a month ago by a specialist. It’s a rare cell condition called mast cell activation syndrome.’

  ‘I’ve never heard of it,’ I said.

  ‘Not many people have. It’s where the cells that are meant to protect me from infection and injury work too hard and leak harmful chemicals into my body. I have allergic reactions for no reason, triggered by my body and nothing else. I’d always thought that I was allergic to nuts – turns out I’m not, I’m allergic to myself. The nuts just don’t help matters.’ He smiled as if it was funny; it wasn’t funny at all.

  ‘Sometimes my throat and mouth swell up and I wake in the night, gasping while my tongue blocks the air and makes it so I can’t even swallow the drugs that could help me. I have inflammatory arthritis in my knees, elbows and hips; that’s why I needed the wheelchair, but I’m getting stronger now and I’m doing well. I’m already down to just the one crutch.’

  ‘Why did it come back?’ I asked.

  ‘I was trying to fight how I felt by pretending I was fine and by doing so I let the illness win. I stopped taking my medication, simply because I didn’t see why everyone else should go about their day without having to keep stopping to take six different types of medicine. I’m meant to have a strict diet and I can’t drink alcohol and basically, I have to live like a hermit. Everything is a trigger for an attack. I get worse if I’m too hot or too cold, if I’m nervous or excited, if I smell a strong perfume or if I exercise. Even having sex sets it off.’

  I sat back in the chair realising just how much risk he’d put himself in while I’d been around. We’d eaten anything and everything, we’d drunk (me much more than him), we’d had sex, we’d climbed a bloody mountain together, and all the time it was harming him.

  I leaned forward, his eyes meeting mine again. A shiver ran through me.

  ‘Why did you try so hard to hide it? Why didn’t you just tell me?’ I asked.

  ‘Because once you’re ill, like properly ill, that’s all people see. After the first time, all pe
ople did was ask me how I was feeling and about the treatments and tests I’d had done, like the illness had taken over me and that’s all I was now. I wasn’t a boxer, I wasn’t engaged, I wasn’t anything but my illness and it infuriated me.’

  I took a breath and kept myself composed. The next question was going to hurt.

  ‘Why did you send me away?’ I felt myself on the verge of breaking. I gritted my teeth and waited for his reply.

  ‘Because—’ he rubbed his face with his hands and sighed ‘—because who wants this?’ He held out his arms, wincing, and gestured to the room around us. ‘This is why Jenny left me, because I went from being the person I want to be to the person I am.’

  I looked down at the floor then back to him, gathering my thoughts and trying to quell the anger.

  ‘Have I got this right? You were scared I’d leave you because this wasn’t what I wanted, so you sent me away, for my own good?’ I asked with a furrowed brow.

  ‘I didn’t think I could cope with having another person I loved leave me, so I beat you to it. Why else would I have told you to go?’

  I stood up angrily, the chair legs clattering against the ground. ‘Because you didn’t love me like I loved you! Because you didn’t want to see me! You were bored of me!’

  ‘Bored of you? No, I wasn’t!’ He pushed himself, shakily, to standing. I watched him struggle, sighed dramatically and then handed him his crutch. ‘When this gets bad, and believe me, it gets bad, I move like a pensioner. I need help doing the simplest of tasks, my skin gets covered in red wheals and all I do is lie in bed all day wondering when this will all be over and I’ll have another reprieve.’

  ‘You didn’t give me a choice!’ I spat.

  He scrunched his face in frustration, his eyes moistening as his voice rose to a shout. ‘This is for life, Effie! I am stuck with this until the day I die and if you’d have stayed then you’d have been stuck too.’

  ‘I wanted to be stuck with you.’

  He ignored my words and carried on. ‘This thing it works in cycles. I can be fine, stable and eating and drinking and doing what I want for months, years even, and then everything will turn. I’m stuck like this forever, but that doesn’t mean you have to be too.’

  He wiped at his eyes, getting rid of the tears before they could fall, like they angered him.

  I stepped back. ‘You told me that you didn’t love me.’

  ‘I lied. I loved you; I still do.’

  ‘What about everything your dad said?’

  ‘I begged him to say it. I convinced him that it was for the best,’ he replied, reaching out for my hand. I moved it away. ‘After what happened with Jenny, he didn’t need much convincing. I loved Jenny more than anything and she broke me when she left.’ His eyes pleaded with me to listen, to understand why he’d done what he had. ‘I love you so much – more than I ever loved her. I don’t know what it is about you, but I think I knew I’d fall in love with you from the moment I saw you in that diner. If you’d have left me, then it would have been so much worse.’

  ‘But you lost me anyway!’

  ‘Knowing that you still loved me was better than sticking it out and seeing you grow to resent me.’

  ‘Resent you? It’s like you don’t know me at all. How could you do that? How could you do that to me when you knew I had no one else.’ I felt the tears on my cheeks before I even knew that I was crying.

  ‘I was only thinking of you.’

  I turned to him and almost screamed the words he’d once said to me. ‘No, you were thinking of you! How dare you think you could make a decision like that on my behalf! It wasn’t your choice, it was mine and I would have chosen to stay.’

  I sat down and sobbed into my hands as Theo stood and watched me, not knowing if it was all right for him to touch me.

  ‘You don’t understand what you did, Theo.’ I bawled into my hands, my palms becoming slick with tears and saliva. ‘I had absolutely no one. I thought that I’d done something wrong or that I was unlovable and it was all because you thought you knew better than me.’ I let my hands fall after I wiped the tears from my cheeks. ‘Jesus Christ, Theo, I even thought about killing myself.’

  He recoiled slightly and his own tears fell.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Eff. I almost called you so many times,’ he said, his hand reaching out to mine. This time I let it sit there, his thumb moving over my skin. After we had both calmed, he sat down defeatedly. ‘I had the phone in my hand on Christmas Day when you rang. I almost picked up but I didn’t know what I could say. Then, I got your voicemail and it sounded like everything was going so well for you. You finished the list, you moved out, you … you met someone new.’

  I wiped my face again and turned to him.

  ‘What’s he like?’ He tried to smile. It was the fakest smile I’d ever seen. ‘In fact, don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.’ He shook the thought from his head.

  ‘His name is Caleb. He looks nothing like you. He’s vegetarian, he collects enamel pins and he works for the homeless charity that I volunteer for.’ Theo looked up into my eyes and nodded, his chin puckering. ‘And I don’t love him. Not in that way anyway. We’re just friends.’

  ‘Oh.’ He didn’t even try to hide his relief. ‘I’m so sorry, Effie. I truly thought that it was for the best.’

  ‘You broke my heart when you sent that letter. You undid all the good you’d done since I’d met you.’

  He shook his head and wiped his cheeks. ‘Maybe I did ruin all the good I’d done, but I didn’t ruin what you’d done.’ He held out his hands and smiled. ‘Look at you. You’re happy, you’re strong, you’re confident. You’re exactly where you wanted to be and I had nothing to do with that. That was all you.’

  I shook my head and looked away from him; looking at him for too long made my heart hurt too much. ‘No, I’m not exactly where I wanted to be, Theo. I wanted to be with you.’

  ‘And what about now?’ he asked, his shoulders sagging. ‘Do you still want to be with me now that I can’t walk without help or go more than three hours without swallowing some kind of drug?’

  I thought about telling him that I didn’t and what that would mean for me. I’d get back in the car and drive Otis home to the empty flat. I’d probably order myself a pizza, drink a bottle of wine and put on some soppy film that would have me bawling into the stuffed crust within ten minutes. I could leave and never turn back. But I knew that if I did do that, I would forever be glancing over my shoulder, looking for him and feeling his absence in everything I did, every memory I made, every moment I lived. He reached out his hand, his wan fingers brandishing a tissue. I took it, my fingers brushing his, and wiped my cheeks dry. I looked into his eyes, filled with pain, both physical and otherwise, and held his gaze as I knelt down between his knees.

  I lifted a hand to his cheek and it felt like drinking a glass of chilled water when dying of thirst. He closed his eyes and leaned in to my skin, his hand pressing my palm closer to his cheek. That would have been the perfect time for me to say something romantic, to tell him that I loved him and that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life missing him, but what I said instead was, ‘Theodore Alwyn Morgan, you’re a fucking idiot.’

  His face drew into a smile, which caused a tear to fall down onto my thumb; he wiped it away with his hand and looked into my eyes. I leaned forward and kissed him and it felt like coming home.

  I had thought that I’d be spending New Year’s pressed into the armchair in my parents’ house, watching the fireworks on BBC and toasting in the next 365 days with a glass of Prosecco, or at Caleb’s, awkwardly mingling with his family and friends and watching middle-aged couples getting smashed. Instead the New Year passed me by without the usual pageantry as I lay in bed with Theo in my arms and Otis at my feet, looking out through the window and watching the moon travel across the sky; the faint sound of fireworks echoing in the distance.

  It was taking me a long time to fall asleep, my head was too full of n
oise to find a quiet moment. The anger at all those wasted days, those months spent in misery, all for nothing.

  ‘Happy New Year, Effie,’ he said, the tip of his nose against mine.

  I looked into his eyes, blurred and distorted by our proximity. But no matter how blurred they became, I would always know that they were his. They were the only eyes I wanted to look into, to be this close to.

  ‘Happy New Year,’ I replied.

  When I woke the next morning, I felt the weight of Theo against me and I breathed the smell of his hair. For a second I thought I was dreaming or dead and on my way to some sort of heaven.

  I lay there for a while, watching him sleep and fretting about the way his breaths rasped in his throat. It must have taken a lot for him to send me away when he loved me like he did, but I guess he loved me enough to want a happy life for me, a life without the troubles he would face. But what he didn’t know was that the happy life he wanted for me wasn’t possible without him. I had been close and I was happy, but there would have forever been something missing.

  I saw Tessa pass the window with a steaming mug in her hand on her way down to the lake and I slid out of bed. I pulled one of Theo’s jumpers over my sleep-crinkled clothes, slipped on my boots and left the room as quietly as I could, Otis trotting along at my side.

  I walked to the kitchen and made my way to the back door.

  ‘Good morning.’ I jumped and turned to see Rhys sitting at the table with a coffee in his hands, his lack of sleep clearly etched around his eyes.

  ‘You scared me.’ I held my hand to my chest and took a few steps towards the table.

  He sighed heavily and looked down into his half-empty mug. ‘Do you want some?’ He pointed to the cafetière that steamed beside him. I nodded and moved to get a mug from the kitchen.