“So now ye know why I want them to give me a needle and send me on ma way,” he says. “All that goin’ on inside ma heid, it’s drivin’ me out of ma mind. I canna take it any mair. I just want it all ta end. I don’t want ta hurt anybody.” He lets out a bray of pain. “Why didn’t they put a bullet in me out there in Helmand and bury me in the sand? Why Grace?”
He folds himself further, tighter, forehead pressed to his knees, and she lets him cry until his eyes run dry. All the while he clings onto her hand as if his life depends on it. She won’t flinch, even though the hold is so tight that the bones of her fingers grate on one another, the pain exquisite.
There are no words to stem the flow of pain from this broken heart, and so she runs her hand up and down his back in slow comforting strokes, offering a quiet presence of calm in his sea of torment, and they sit entwined on the flimsy bed as she kisses his hot neck and hushes him, and tears of her own find their way onto her face.
In time his crying subsides into choked gasps. He sits up, clears his throat, and releases her from his clasp to grind his fists into red, swollen eyes. In silence he clambers off the cot and limps over to the wash bowl at the window.
While he splashes his face with cold water, Grace massages her fingers, urging blood back into their paper whiteness, turning them pink and blotchy, the fingertips fizzing with pins and needles as the blood flow returns.
“I’m sorry,” he says, hanging the rough towel back on its nail. “That wasn’t a very manly thing to do.” He shoogles the kettle. “I’ll make some tea, shall I? I think we could both use some.”
He makes a brave effort of trying to smile, and fails. The muscles just won’t work and he gives up, too fatigued to try again. He can wipe away the dirt and the tear stains, but not the deep haunting sadness in his eyes. It’s going to take more than a weep and a cuddle and a cup of tea to do that.
Chapter 32
Such a massive jolt to Colin’s psychological state is sure to have impacted on his physical one, Grace knows, as it did to her when her stress level built to an intolerable level, and so it comes as no surprise when she gets a phone call from Simon Gibbs the next day informing her that Colin is exhibiting some worrying symptoms.
“He has a high temperature and everything that goes with it – rigours, hypertension and agitation. With his immune system not being quite tip top, we’ve taken some precautionary bloods to rule out infection. There is a pretty nasty summer cold doing the rounds so there’s always a chance it could be that, but I’ve been around cases like this long enough to know what’s really wrong. Ever heard of stress fever?”
“Yes, I have,” she says. “I’ve had it myself more than a few times.”
“So you know that a few days rest in bed with peace and quiet, paracetamol and no undue stresses should see him right.”
“Yes. Would a visit do some good?”
“If it were up to me, I’d say yes, come, calm him down … but it’s not my decision to make. Although, you don’t have to actually come here to do that, do you?”
“No.”
“You know, I don’t think I’ll ever get my head around that.” Sigh. “We’ll keep a close eye on him here, don’t worry.”
“I know you will.”
“And you’ll look out for him … wherever he is?”
“Yes.”
“If you can put off your trip out here until next Saturday, I’ll get a visit penned in–”
“Thank you.”
“I’m sorry to mess you about, but … you know–”
“Don’t worry about it, it’s not your fault. I can wait a few days more. Thanks for letting me know.”
“I’ll let you know if anything changes.”
“Yes. Please do. Goodbye, and thank you.”
She hangs up and looks across at Colin, who is holding up a pair of her stark white Markies knickers, more functional than frivolous, stretching the elastic at the waist.
“Fit in the name o’ the wee man are these?”
“Gimmethose!” She reaches for them and he snatches them away, thrusting them behind his back.
“My granny had some jest like these,” he says. “Huge great bags they were. She used ta call them her harvest festivals.”
“Huh?
“All is safely gathered in?” He lets the elastic twang back to its original shape. “Mind you, she was the size of a barn. These must hang like a hammock on your skinny backside, though.”
“Cheeky bugger. Put them down, or I’ll make you wear them.”
He drops them back onto the laundry pile as if they are on fire and thrusts his hands deep into his pockets.
“That was all very cryptic,” he says.
“What was?”
“On the phone. I take it that was your new best friend Simon Gibbs. Is the corpse ready for burial yet?”
“Soon will be if you don’t stop being so awful. No, he was just confirming what we already know, that you are a bit poorly and you’ll be better soon. Nothing to worry about unduly. You’ve developed what’s known as a stress fever. It’s not serious. It will pass. Simon’s going to ensure you get plenty of fluids and paracetamol and bed rest, so you are excused physical therapy for the next couple of days. You’re going to be just fine.”
“Aye, that’ll be shining. Proper pair of Florence Nightingales aren’t ye?”
“There’s no need to be sarcy. We’re just looking out for you. Somebody has to.”
He smiles self consciously. “Aye, I know.” He frowns. “What?”
“Something else I’ve done to you,” she says, gathering up her discarded panties, along with two other pairs and a couple of virginal white bras, and stuffing them all into the top drawer of a set of four – out of sight, out of temptation.
“I got you all upset and angry by saying those hurtful things.”
“You told the truth.”
“And pushed your stress level off the scale, and look what’s happened. You had a breakdown, the garden is wrecked and now you’re sick.”
“Could all be a coincidence.”
“No, it’s not. The physical and the psychological are inextricably linked, one body one mind. Stress one and it shows in the other, and vice versa. I should know.” She puts neatly ironed and folded tshirts into the next drawer. “Maybe I should stay away from you in future, so it won’t happen again.”
Colin seizes her by the elbows. “No! Don’t ever think of doing that. You can’t.”
“It’s what you’ve always wanted–”
“I’ve changed ma mind.”
He locks eyes with her for a moment, the look intense, pleading, needy. Who is she kidding? She couldn’t stay away from him if she wanted to.
“Okay,” she says, and gifts him a small smile of reassurance. She then returns to sorting her laundry.
“So, have you ventured here for any particular reason, apart from rummaging through my pants?”
“No’ really,” Colin says, “apart from feeling a bit under the weather and looking for a bit of sympathy.”
“Dictionary, remember?”
“Didn’t have one ta hand.”
Colin watches Grace work at hanging shirts and pairing shoes neatly in the closet.
“Okay, that’s me done,” she says, and scoots onto the bed, patting the cover beside her. “Come sit with me where it’s comfy.”
Colin climbs on beside her and she snuggles up close to him.
“I hereby call to order the inaugural meeting of the mutual misery society,” she says. “There’s a special offer on today for new members, a buy-one-get-one-free comfort package. We can have one each.” She leans back against the headboard. “What shall we talk about? Anything you like. Got plans for the holidays?”
Colin sucks in a deep breath, shrugs to the ceiling, and blows out a steady stream of air.
“Or we could just sit here in companionable silence and watch the clock go round,” she says.
Colin closes his eyes and sighs. “
We always seem to be talking about me, doing things for me,” he says. “How about we talk about you for a change?”
“You couldn’t have picked a more boring subject if you’d tried, but if that’s what you want to do, what do you want to know?”
He takes hold of her left wrist, slender and fragile in his large hand, eases up the sleeve of her sweater and sweeps his thumb over a criss-crossing network of fine silver lines. “I noticed these before, but didn’t like to ask.”
“Oh those,” Grace says dismissively. “I tripped over and fell on a bag of razor blades. Careless, huh?”
Colin tugs the sleeve down, stretching the cuff over the fleshy pad at the base of her thumb, hiding everything. “Sorry. Didn’t mean ta intrude.”
Silence.
Grace pushes the sleeve back up as far as her elbow. “I don’t notice them anymore,” she says. “They are practically invisible unless you get the light just right.”
She holds her arm up, turning the inside toward the window, changing the angle until a series of parallel lines spring into stark relief.
Colin takes her arm and lets his fingertip trace the lines, the touch so delicate as to be barely there. “I can feel them,” he says. “Like little train tracks. Straight lines across here; little bumps here and here where the stitches went in.”
Once again she notices his accent has mellowed, as it tends to when he risks lowering his defences enough to allow a glimpse of his caring side.
“You used to cut yourself didn’t you?” he says.
She nods slowly.
“Why would you do something like that to yourself? Spoil yourself?”
“I started when I was about sixteen,” she says. “There were all kinds of things going on all at once – important exams, about to start college, my mum being… mum, raging teenage hormones, you name it. A million things piling up and threatening to overwhelm me, and I knew if I let them, control of my own life would slip inexorably away and I’d never get it back. The pain, the blood, it helped me focus, acting like a kind of safety valve, releasing all the bad things building up inside me like pus in a putrid boil. It would work for a while, and then the cycle would start all over again. Once I got to be a fully fledged adult, however, I was expected to behave like one, which of course brought a whole new raft of pressures to bear, and the pain and blood routine didn’t work any more. Eventually I got to the stage where I couldn’t take any more and there was only one thing left to do”
“What did you do?”
“The first time? I kept on cutting. Slashed open my wrists with a kitchen knife. Didn’t work, obviously, because I didn’t know you are supposed to cut down from the elbow and then across a few times to open up the veins. That way you bleed out really quickly. Messy, but effective. I’d only managed about half a pint before the vessels spasmed and the bloodflow stopped… and it really hurt.”
Colin raises the scar ravaged wrist to his lips and kisses it gently. “Go on,” he says.
“The second time, this time, I went for something less dramatic, and less painful. Pills and vodka. Slip quietly away. No trouble to anyone. Except that didn’t work either. I puked a fair number of them up on Alec’s fancy Turkish rug. I hadn’t absorbed enough to kill me, just enough to knock me unconscious and give me a seizure. Woke up in hospital three days later and then fell under the care of Malcolm Pettit, my new therapist. Two failures. Something else to be added to a very long list of things Grace Dove fucked up.”
“When did this happen?”
“Coincidentally, about the same time as you slipped into your current catatonic episode.”
Colin frowns, considering. “Do you … do you think the two are connected?” he says. “That your seizure and my … difficulties–” He brings his hands together in a silent clap.
“Brought us together?” she says. “Yes. I do. Absolutely. Your condition’s got them all scratching their heads by the way. You’ve given them a real puzzler as to what to do for the best to bring you out of it. When I told Simon that there was nothing he could do, that you were taking a leave of absence in the garden and you’ll be back when you jolly well feel like it, he thought I’d gone completely off my trolley.” Sigh. “Unfortunately, my therapist thinks so too.”
“He wants you to stop the treatment, doesn’t he?” Colin says. “Give up and walk away.”
“Yes, but I’m not going to, because it’s not therapy any more, at least not the way he intended it to be. It started out that way even though in my heart of hearts I never thought anything would come of it. I only went along with it because Mal was so keen to try it, and because I didn’t really have any choice.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s much more than that … it’s been a lifesaver, and I couldn’t have done it without you. If anything happens to you, either here or … out there, if you die and I don’t have you on the receiving end of my bitching and whining and moaning, then it’s very likely I’ll end up back in the Psych ward, in the nice room with no windows and the soft wallpaper, or throwing myself off the North Sea ferry.”
Silence.
“At least you have the wherewithal and the opportunities available if and when you want,” Colin says. “I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve invited Death to come and put me out of my misery. Pleaded with him to make one of the nurses make a mistake with the drugs and overdose me. I’ll go willingly, make it easy for Him, but He’s not interested. He’d rather take those who don’t deserve to die, who don’t want to, those who fight back. I think he likes the challenge. I’ve thought about all the ways I could top maself, but without someone ta help me do it, I’m gain nowhere. Nayb’dy’s gain ta risk prison by putting a pistol to my head and putting a bullet in my brainpan are they? The simplest way would be to starve myself to death, but I can’t even do that when I’m being force fed. That’s how useless I am.”
A huge sigh of dejection pours out of him, and the pair of them sit slouched against the headboard, mutual despondency oozing into the room.
“Good God, we’re a right pair of happy little monkeys today aren’t we?” Grace says. “All this talk of death and dying. It’s bloody macabre. Good job we’ve seen sense and changed our minds isn’t it?”
“Have you?”
“For today at least. You?”
“For today.”
She rests her head against Colin’s shoulder. “What I said the other day, in the garden, about you pulling your socks up and making the best of things, I meant it, although I didn’t mean it to come out as it did, all preachy and high handed. It’s something I can’t always control and it gets me into trouble sometimes. It’s one of the curses of the manic mind, running off at the mouth before my brain has got into gear and had a chance to catch up. It’s like being on a see saw. Can’t get a word out one minute, like a verbal Gatling gun the next, particularly if I’m upset or–”
She shrugs.
“Ye certainly can talk, I’ll gi ye that,” says Colin, the corners of his mouth just about turning up. “Drives me mental sometimes the way ye blether on. I jest want ta yell at ye ta put a sock in it fer God’s sake. Ye ken though, once the tide of pish had ebbed away, there was this wee nugget of sense left behind, and now I’ve had time ta think aboot it, to study the nugget, I ken now fit ye were trying to say. It was a metaphorical application of the boot of knowledge to ma seat of learning, an inspirational speech aimed at getting me to shift ma arse into gear and get moving towards getting better, even though ye ken I’m a lost cause.”
“You see! Nothing will ever be achieved with that mindset. You are not a lost cause. There is hope for everyone. Look at Ben Parkinson for example. The worst ever battlefield injuries sustained in modern warfare to be survived. Yes he’s lost both his legs and had over forty other injuries, including severe brain damage. He can hardly speak and needs 24 hour care, but he has a wicked sense of humour and an indomitable spirit, and with a little help from his friends and family and some really good or
ganisations, he lives a relatively normal life now. Compared to him you have nothing more than a splinter in your thumb. The main stumbling block to your recovery is in here…” She touches a finger to his temple. “That’s where the changes have to be made.”
“Easier said than done.”
“And you can do it. But you can bet your back teeth that once you have, if I even suspect you of falling back into old ways, you’re going to be on the receiving end of another swift kicking that will be a lot more shall we say … motivational.”
She puts her hand on his leg, feeling the muscle beneath the soft corduroy fabric of his pants go taut and start to tremble, his hyper-vigilance giving a kick to his fight or flight instinct.
“I want you to get your life back, Colin. I want you to get better. I want you to be able to tell those PTSD demons to fuck off back where they came from, because you have things to do with your life and you don’t need them there getting in the way, trying to screw it up. I want you to leave Pelham on your own two … I was going to say feet, but you know what I mean.”
“You want a lot of things … things you might not be able to have.”
“I’m going to make it my heart’s work to see that you stride back out into the world with your head held high, proud of what you’ve achieved, of the odds you’ve overcome. It’s going to be a long hard road for sure, but you can do it. I know you can. I have every faith in you. You can go back to the garden if you need to, now and again when you need a little quiet ‘me’ time, but your life has to be lived outside in the real world, not cloistered behind the walls of either Pelham Chase or your own garden of stones.”
Colin chews on the inside of his cheek, mouth flooded with warm saliva, stomach lurching, the prospect of leaving his twin safe havens and facing the real world again making him feel sick.
“You okay?” Grace says. “You’ve gone a bit … grey.”
He nods. “Aye.”
“We’ll take things gradually, one tiny little step at a time,” she says. “It’s going to be really tough, even with help, and it’s going to take a long time, years maybe, but if you are willing to make the effort, to have confidence that you can do it, you will do it.”
In The Garden Of Stones Page 22