Bandaging through the night became essential when Tilda measured that her arm was 4 centimetres wider one morning. ‘You don’t mind sleeping next to this, do you?’ she asked.
I said I didn’t mind at all. She said we could swap sides in bed if the mummy was an obstacle. She meant an obstacle to my comfort in sleeping, but an obstacle to congressing was also implied.
I said, ‘So what if it is an obstacle? Your arm is more important.’ It astounded me that she could think I’d want to congress with the mummy present. Couldn’t she look in the mirror and judge objectively herself? The wad of that arm was an ugly impediment. I never let on, of course. I was blank-faced discreet. Not even the advice of vodka, too much of it of an evening, got me cruel enough to make elephant jibes. I kept them under my breath.
What a relief when the wad—it must have weighed 10 kilos fully trussed—whacked me one night and made my nose bleed as Tilda stretched out in her dreams. ‘It was an accident, sweetheart. Sorry.’ She petted my forehead and gave her hankie for my blood. I overacted the extent of the pain to make her apologise more and admit that the arm was a hideous and dangerous weapon. I then said, ‘No, it’s not hideous,’ but that was just to have her contradict me and curse the wad.
‘You shouldn’t be in the same bed as me,’ she said.
‘It’s fine.’
‘It’s not. I’ve just hurt you. People will think I did it deliberately.’
‘It’s nothing.’
Tilda suggested that from now on I sleep in the futon room, for my own safety. To think of it as a practical measure until her swelling issue was resolved.
Okay, I relented, not so fast as to seem pleased. I blew my nose to string out another trickle of bleeding snot.
It was quite something to get into a bed alone after such a long time. A true sanctuary, as a bed should be. Not just the extra space but the solitude. No expectation to kiss or have to caress or worse. Between the elephant and the massaging, the hair-counting and weedkiller, I had lost desire for Tilda’s body. That’s natural, isn’t it? I did not want intimate contact. Even a servicing did not tempt me.
Chapter 52
My massage duty has continued from that time till now—two sessions a day. There are no oils involved: oils dull the friction. There must be heat from the contact of skin on skin; it helps the elephant juices flow more freely; the veins and muscles yield like reeds in a current. I must have a knack for it, massaging, so Tilda always reckoned. I’ve done the arm a power of good. Since my first goes at it the swelling has mostly been contained. Just 1 centimetre refuses to budge at the wrist; and where the gauntlet stops mitten-like above the fingernails there is a tendency for inflammation, especially in hot weather. It has stabilised, she says. Not elephant anymore, just hefty human.
To be honest, if I didn’t massage I doubt there’d be much difference. I do it anyway. Tilda calls it ‘precautionary’. I think of it as habit. It’s the most physical contact we have. It has often crossed my mind as being a form of substitute congressing for her: she closes her eyes as if in ecstasy.
For me it’s the opposite. I tend to bow my head and swallow a lot to keep down nausea. Massaging the dry way we do creates a noise like static as our chafing skins warm up. I’ve worn earplugs in the past—bits of cottonwool pushed in deep so Tilda wouldn’t see them—but they make the static switch to a deeper register, a distorted humming. I hear it in my insides; my stomach squirms like a bout of motion sickness. I stroke quicker these days to get the session finished.
It never helped the nausea to have an image repeatedly circulate in my head. An irrational one that I was sure had no firm basis in science, but was awfully convincing: my nausea was the direct result of Tilda’s cancer or lymphoedema exiting her body and, via the massage connection, trying to penetrate mine. The static was the push and pull of my immune system mounting a defence. It was too late for defences, I was certain some days. I felt so unwell I believed a dark quantity must surely have got in.
Before massaging I have touched wood in so many sets of threes I’ve believed calluses might form on my hands doing it, ones so tough it would be impossible for infection to drill through.
Chapter 53
My new futon sanctuary got my mind ticking along clearly and helped my swagger return. Being alone in bed can do that for you. You are less reminded that you share your life with someone. It sharpens your resourcefulness, your self-reliance. I would lie in my sanctuary, scheming. I was making plans that did not include Tilda. I had decided to activate my backstop. I had decided it was time to ring my father. It was time to tell him, ‘Norm, I’m coming home.’
I wouldn’t say I was estranged from my parents. I had written three or four letters, all neatly typed to look professional, like I was knuckling down to grasp basic technology. I left out details that might give the wrong impression: my pitiful pay cheque, for instance; that I lived among mouse plagues. Scintilla was a thriving agricultural Eden by my telling. I was benefiting from observing another culture and other farming methods.
I hardly mentioned Tilda. When I did mention her I used the term my lady friend rather than name her. Backstop logic. They wouldn’t worry they were losing a son to some woman in a foreign land. They wouldn’t get it into their heads to fly out and inspect her like marital livestock. I wrote of Tilda’s cancer in a way that big-noted me: I was being a rock to this lady friend until her recovery was certain. The implication was that I wasn’t permanently shackled.
In their replies I could hear Norm dictating his news to my mother: mortality rates for spring lambing had been normal; weekly rainfall for the year had been average; an average number of hay bales was expected in the summer cut; he intended locking up fifty acres to grow winter silage; his Noble Bijou gelding, Stride For Stride, placed third at Otaki, then won at Te Rapa in the wet. The old girl spelt it out in her embroiderly longhand but his serious tone came through predictable and comforting to me. They were letters that kept a polite distance. I wasn’t interrogated, which I took as clever: they didn’t want to push me away with questions and judging.
I rang the morning Tilda popped out to register for Social Security money. Social Security! What other two words make a grown-up feel so fallen? Tilda saw it as her right, given her health. She made it sound like illness had its virtues and rewards. To me welfare money signified failure and indolence. Name me anyone who comes from rural stock who thinks otherwise. Handouts are for bludgers. Tilda was going to take one anyway.
I sat down on the hallway phone stool and composed myself. I had not called them for almost a year and this call would take some swallowing of pride. Yet I convinced myself no swallowing was necessary. It was my Norm I’d be talking to. He’d be so excited I was coming home he’d say, ‘I’m over the moon.’ He’d say, ‘I’ll put champagne on ice.’ I couldn’t wait to hear the emotion in his voice, his manly effort of holding back tears. Me and him and our thousand acres.
‘Son,’ Norm said. It was him doing the swallowing. ‘Son. Colin. How can I put this? Your mother and I have decided to sell up. We’ve come to the conclusion it’s time to retire, take it quiet. Wind down. The worry has been killing us.’
‘Worry? What’s the worry? I want to come home.’ I presumed by worry they meant worrying about me. ‘Aren’t you excited?’
‘Son, the last few years have worried us sick and dealt us some blows.’ He swallowed loudly, a choking wet squelch. He said, ‘Sorry.’
‘Sorry for what?’
He swallowed again. Sorry for the ’87 stock-market crash. Sorry for listening to his damned accountant. That’s who he blamed for dangling too tempting a carrot in his face. Borrow big and buy shares instead of land and sheep. Build up strong off-farm assets and enjoy tax breaks and dividends. The market soars and a man gets richer than farmers ever are. Pipedreams! Markets soar all right. And markets also collapse. This one did with an almighty thump and brought Norm d
own with it. Since then he’d spent three years fighting bankruptcy. If he liquidated everything—property, sheep, cows, tractors, fertiliser spreaders, horses—he could clear his debt to zero and have enough cash for a modest townhouse, a nice porch to rock a chair on.
‘We didn’t want to worry you with it. I thought it could be resolved.’ He swallowed again and said another sorry. Said it pleadingly, as if the word was really his hand and he wanted me to hold it and forgive him his folly. ‘My ticker’s been playing up with all the pressure of juggling the finances. But you yourself are fine? You yourself are okay?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s the main thing. You’re in a good job going by what you’ve written to us. You sound settled, you with your lady friend and all. Is she over her troubles? Seems like you’ve taken on quite a responsibility. I’m proud of you for that, son.’
He was waiting for a response from me. I didn’t give him one.
He said, ‘You were never much interested in running the place anyway. Farming wasn’t your go. You had greener pastures. It’s no skin off your nose, then.’
My mother could not come to the phone. Norm said, ‘She likes to bend the elbow in the mornings these days. To be frank, I figure if it makes her happy, why stop her?’
I said, ‘Fair enough.’ I could not bear to hear him anymore. I said, ‘Fair enough. No worries,’ without parting my teeth. I said it with hate and love and anger. I was never one for talking back to him. He deserved talking back to now, I was sure of that. I had in me a savage talking-back, but the pattern was too ingrained. ‘It is skin off my nose. But not a lot of skin,’ was all I said. ‘You’re right, I’m doing well. I’ve landed on my feet. In fact, I have to go. I’m up to my ears in work.’
He hoped I would write to him regularly, and that we’d talk again soon.
‘Sure. No worries.’
He thanked me for taking the bad news so well.
‘Sure. No worries.’
Write regularly? Talk again soon? Write nothing, say nothing was the punishment he deserved. I vowed it with all the fury of unsaid words.
Chapter 54
If you bawl and sob when you are alone, no audience of others, then you mean it. It’s not a performance. The tears have welled up in your humid head and need a way out. It’s like looking underwater. A breeze of light brings flies through the window. They want to nest in your hair and drink from your nose, and you let them. Enough alcohol injects a general deadening but it’s only short-term. You are senile with headaches and slow eyesight afterwards.
They say when parents die we are left as orphans. No matter how old we are, that’s our loneliest. When they go broke—I can attest to this—you are loneliest too. The home that founded you is over. You are lost, fixed to nothing. You are frightened and shambling. You cry. I lay in that state in the futon sanctuary.
It could fix anything, this sanctuary, with a solitary sleep and a stretch and a yawn. Not this time. By morning it was as if my body was trying to burst. My legs had turned a puce colour. From the kneecap down, like a burn on my shins, lumps hard as pebbles appeared. Four skin-marbles so sore the slightest air seemed to punch them.
My feet had gone blue-purple. I hadn’t been woken by the usual cranky crows and pigeons in the spouting—it was pain that stabbed me awake. I sat up intending to swing my legs to the floor and stand but my legs had too much extra weight. They were not my legs, they were lead legs with lumps and a bloated surface. My feet were like kitchen gloves when you blow into them. The ankles no longer showed knobby bones but were flesh-balloons in the blue-purple colour, turning kindling-red in patches. My shins too.
I pinched and rubbed my thigh skin. It felt normal and painless. Whatever was happening to me stopped just short of my kneecaps. The skin there had formed a powdery layer—I could lean forward and with a puff make my skin go puff. Beneath this powder my flesh was splitting and peeling like sunburn. There were hundreds of splits going longways and crossways between the lumps, some exposing the moist quick.
I slid off the futon and eased myself to the floor. As soon as my legs were no longer horizontal, fire-blood filled them and I lost my breath from the agony. I dragged myself up into the lying position, flat as I could to make the blood subside. ‘Tilda,’ I yelled. ‘Tilda!’ I yelled ‘fuck off’ to flies parking on my sticky pain. ‘Tilda!’
Naturally I diagnosed the massaging as the cause. Never mind good sense, my massaging of Tilda was contagious after all. I wanted to accuse her there and then as she rushed to my calling but I had no breath for forming sentences.
She bent over my lower half and gasped Jesus.
‘Don’t, don’t, don’t.’ I waved to her not to breathe so hard. The air she spoke with was too heavy on my skin.
She diagnosed spiders somewhere in the bedding. It had to be a white-tail. If not, bull ants or centipedes. She had bare feet and jigged her dislike of creepy crawlies as if they were mounting her toes. She demanded I allow her to reach over and around me to check in the sheets and blankets, lift the pillow. She picked up one of my sneakers, shook it upside down in case of insect infestation and grasped it as a killing weapon.
It was no more spiders than Tilda’s fluids leaking in me. It was rheumatoid arthritis, and those lumps and flaming skin were a complication called erythema nodosum, explained Dr Philpott, kneeling by the futon and mmming his fascination at my ailment. ‘Quite a rare condition, and boy have you got a doozy of an outbreak.’
‘I’m only twenty-seven. Arthritis is for old people.’
‘No, no, no,’ he corrected me, pricking my artery for a blood sample. ‘We inherit these things. It’s in our genes. All we need are triggers. Has something happened to trigger this in you?’
‘Maybe,’ I replied, and mumbled ‘family worries’. I left it vague as that. ‘Usual trouble, type of thing.’
I was ashamed I was fathered by a bankrupt. I had no backstop left—my father had made me a bankrupt too. Estranged. From then on I used that word to eliminate the subject of parents from my life. I used it with a casual shrug, dropping my chin to signal weariness. Estranged and shrugs go well together. People think: Ah yes, the usual family tensions. No further explanation required.
Now I am ashamed to have been ashamed.
Chapter 55
The treatment was simple: lie flat on my back, legs uncovered because the sheets weighed a tonne. Tilda brought cups of tea, soup and finger toast because my appetite withered the bigger my legs grew. I was the elephant now. Philpott prescribed a white lotion to cool the pain but its application was sadism: tongue depressors are the gentlest of implements; they could have been broadswords when used to smear my legs.
The worst discomfort was toilet time. I could drag myself there, keeping the legs flat and free of pain. I didn’t need Tilda for this section of the ordeal. The journey was merely thirty seconds long. It was the toilet bowl I needed Tilda for. For lifting me onto the seat and holding my legs up while I directed my penis downward and pissed. The fire throbbed less if my legs were held level with my waist. She held them at bath time too. Her seeing me splash my privates clean didn’t faze me in the slightest. It was all part of what happens when you’re a couple and one is offering the other helpfulness.
Where I drew the line was bowel movements. Bowel movements are our own business, given the smell and fart noise, the brown sight of what we store in us. She could turn her head away and close her eyes but not her nostrils and hearing. I made her leave the bathroom so I could get on with it alone.
I was able to hold my bowels in for two days. Not the third. By the third I was packed hard and needed releasing. Tilda supported me with her good arm until I was throned in position, then I made her scamper out the door while I exploded, leaning sideways, legs splayed upward like doing sit-ups. I had to empty out fast before my legs gave way and crashed down. If that happened I needed Tilda to come and pick them
up in the presence of smell. I practised my toilet sit-ups in bed. I could last thirty seconds if I gripped the cistern with one hand for balance. I wiped myself by lurching left and twisting side-on and using the toilet roll holder for purchase.
It took four weeks for the ballooning to reach its peak. By then my shin skin had turned to dry scabs. The redness had darkened to suntan bronze and itched and could not be scratched or else it brought on worse pain. My ankles were bruise-blue and would not flex. My feet lost their nails and were weeks off being ready to fit a shoe. Leprosy, I named my lower half. Tilda liked that: leprosy to match her mummification. The president-servant balance had swung more even. We had equality of deformities.
‘Two crocks together,’ she said, dabbing Philpott’s pain-paint on me. Her tongue protruded from her mouth corner with the effort of nursing. ‘We’re in the same boat.’ If she hit a raw section she gasped ‘Sorry, sweetie’ and kissed my forehead like a brave infant’s.
When the job was done she prompted me, ‘It’s your turn now,’ and wedged two pillows behind my back. She unclipped her overalls and crouched on the floor at a height suitable for my left palm to stroke her arm the hundred times without causing my legs to twist and suffer.
You would have thought my imagination would settle down but my squirming stomach still got to me: I still had that notion of Tilda’s disease trying to transfer into my system. My condition did at least provide an excuse to stop stroking before a hundred. I had physical weakness to thank for fading at fifty. ‘I’m buggered,’ I said, and slumped. Tilda had no option but to forgive me. She held my good hands in her fat hand and lay her good legs beside my leprosy legs and contentedly fell asleep.
I practised taking a blanket over my legs. I would have to withstand one eventually—winter nights would freeze me otherwise. But the reason for wanting to cover them was to stop Tilda looking. She took too much heart from our ugly equality for my liking.
The Amateur Science of Love Page 13