A to Z of You and Me

by James Hannah

  “No, well, that was never going to happen, was it?”

  “No, I’ve just had mine done, so…” She dabs at the edges of her hair, and I sort of do a little singular snort laugh. Funny. She’s funny. And how easily we fall back on those years of practice about how we slot together. The rhythms of a person, they become ingrained. These are the Laura patterns I’ve known all my life. It feels… It does, it feels nice, all this. It feels like me and Laura. Feels like home.

  “I got you some grapes,” she says, reaching down and drawing out a brown paper bag. “Sorry, it looks a bit feeble now. I would have got you something else, but—”

  “Fine, it’s fine,” I say. “What do you buy for the man who has…you know.”

  Her face tightens into a frown. “Kidney failure?”

  I look at her and let go another laugh and break out into a gurgling cough. “That’s not quite what I meant.”

  She sits and watches me while I cough, and I think she might be a bit shocked.

  “What would Mum say if she could see us now, eh?” I say.

  “She’d say, Shoes up, bags up, coats up.” The old clarion call of Mum as she came in the front door to find we’d wrecked the house on our return from school.

  “You sound just like her, you know.”

  “Oh, don’t. Mal always used to say—”

  My face must drop, because she stops suddenly and looks me directly in the eye, her mouth still open, like gasping.

  “I don’t want to talk about Mal,” I say flatly. I reach across to unhook the oxygen mask from the top of the oxygen canister—its elastic straps come free at the second attempt. I lay it by me, more for something to do than because I’m short of breath.

  “Look, Ivo, I’ve wanted to talk to you about everything since Mum’s funeral,” she says, working two fingers at her temple and closing her eyes. “I thought it might bring us together. I really meant to talk with you, but you never—”

  She croaks as she reaches out for words, but none come.

  “You’re my sister,” I say. The words emerge ultraquiet. “It is supposed to mean something. You weren’t there. For me.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You went with him. The one time I needed you to stand by me and support me, you made your choice. You disappeared off with him.”

  “I wanted to support you. I did. But I had to make a choice.”

  “You weren’t there for Mum either, when she needed you.”

  “I couldn’t do it. There was no way,” she says, with real desperation. “You and her were always close, but I didn’t have that with her. She hated me some days.”

  “She never hated you.”

  “Some days.”

  I look away. I don’t know what I remember from those days.

  My heart is pounding. It’s pounding, pounding. All the meaning of the last decade and more hangs in the air between us, undivined.

  “There were years…six years he was in prison. I was on my own,” she says. “You wouldn’t see me, would you? You wouldn’t see anyone.”

  “I saw Mum.”

  “Mum was scared to talk to you about anything that might upset you. She thought she’d push you away. But the few times I talked to her, she just said she wanted us all to be together again.”

  “Yeah, I know.” I know, I know.

  “But it didn’t happen, did it? She never got to see that happen. And that’s not all my fault.”

  A great burning swell of acid regret rises now. I’m so sorry, Mum. I could have tried harder. I should have done better.

  The tension breaks, and we sit there in silence awhile. After everything, I don’t want to blame her for stuff that’s not her fault.

  “I’m not blameless,” I say quietly. “I never claimed I was blameless.”

  “No, nor me,” she says. “Poor Mum.”

  “Poor Mum.”

  And so very easily Laura tips once more into tears. Thick, wet silence, and there’s nothing I can do. I’m just going to have to let the arc rise, rise, and slowly crest and descend, slowly, slowly descend again until she comes back to earth.

  “Er…hello.”

  I look up at the doorway, and there he is. Kelvin himself.

  “Oh, hello,” mumbles Laura, working at her nostril with a tissue. “Come in.”

  Kelvin glances over at me. I look away. He shuffles a meter or so inside the door, technically in. Look at him, loving the job of chauffeuring Laura around. Designed to be a lackey for her. In the hope that maybe one day she’ll fall into his arms.

  “So how are we doing?” he says with a falsely light air.

  “We’re…talking,” says Laura. “When I can stop bursting into tears.”

  Kelvin roots around in his wax jacket pocket for a clean tissue. “Here you go.”

  Laura takes it… Sense of some intimacy between them? I don’t know. What do I know? It’s been ten years. None of my business.

  “Have you asked him?” Kelvin says to Laura.

  She shakes her head.

  “What?” I say.

  “I brought her here for a reason, mate. I know you didn’t want to see her, and I’ll take the blame for that. But there’s a reason.”

  “A few of us… Well, we’ve been supporting Mal these last few years,” says Laura. She looks up at the ceiling and exhales again with the effort of everything. “Giving him help and support through prison. We did a lot of visiting, helped prepare him for coming home. But he’s struggled. He has struggled.”

  Kelvin nods sagely.

  “He’s got himself a bit of a habit—drugs, you know. Impossible to avoid in prison; they’re everywhere. So he leans heavily on me and his dad and mum. He can’t really hold down a job yet. But we try to understand, and we can put up with all that. And”—she smiles now, with some kind of pride—“it’s working. It’s definitely working, because he’s been starting to get himself sorted, and…well, there’s been some real hope for him. But…” She looks down at her knees and stops midflow.

  “There’s the thing with you, Ivo,” says Kelvin.

  “It’s there, every day,” says Laura. “It’s a big knot.”

  “All he wants to do,” says Kelvin, “is have the chance of setting the record straight.”

  Laura leans forward and puts a hand on my bedcover. I feel the vibration. “Just to have five minutes of your time. You were like the brother he never had. He really used to look up to you. He still does.”

  I ignore the obvious clichés and bullshit; it’s as much as I can do to hold in a laugh. We fall to an awkward silence, but no: I don’t want to let it settle in.

  “I can’t see him,” I say.

  Their heads both do the same: lift to some kind of internal music. Some preagreed strategy.

  “I can’t. I can’t do that. I can’t see him.”

  Kelvin contemplates me a moment and draws in a great and steadying breath. “Listen, mate,” he says, “I know you don’t want to hear it, but he’s up to the eyeballs in regret. He knows he’s done wrong, and he’s full of remorse about it. And he’s…he’s got no way of getting rid of it.”

  I turn away. Look out of the window. Look at the magnolia tree.

  Laura peers up at me nervously. One of her eyelids sticks shut briefly. “You wouldn’t even have to say anything. You could maybe let him say what he has to say, and he’ll go.”

  “No,” I say. “No.”

  “Please…five minutes, I swear that’s all it would need. Please just give him five minutes of your time.”

  I draw myself up and cough at the effort, but I need to get up the presence to combat this. Finally, finally, something inside me breaks. “When is it, right, when is it that this will just fucking leave me alone?”

  Silence.

  The two of them, there, looking a
t me.

  “When is it that you can say, now, here, that what happened was wrong? What happened was wrong, and there’s no going back?”

  “Mal’s gone missing,” says Laura.

  Silence.

  Kelvin stares pointedly at the floor.

  “Missing?”

  “He’s been gone over a week. Ten days.”

  “We’ve had a word with the Missing Persons people,” says Kelvin in a low voice. “We’re supposed to try to think of a way to solve as many of the problems he was having as possible. Hopefully let him see that home is worth valuing, and he’s not coming back to the same unchanged mess.”

  I look down at my hands, colorless and cold. I begin to rub them firmly together to give them life.

  “And all of it, the whole lot of it, points to you. The situation with you. We want to arrange some contact between you, if that’s agreeable to you, and if—”

  “We think he might try to come here,” says Laura. “He knows he needs to…to sort things out while he’s still got time. While you have time.”

  “Here? He doesn’t know where I am.”

  “He does,” says Laura, in a small voice. “I told him. Before he left.”

  “But—”

  Surely, surely they wouldn’t let someone in here if I didn’t want to see them? But they let Laura in, didn’t they? My heart begins to thunder in my chest, and all the strength sweeps out of my limbs. Surely this is a place of rest. “Get Sheila,” I say. “Tell Sheila I won’t see him in here.”

  “Please, just—”

  “Get Sheila.”

  • • •

  Sheila returns to my room in a flap.

  “Have they gone?” I ask.

  “Yes, yes, they’ve gone.”

  “No visitors.”

  “I’m so sorry. I thought you knew it was your sister. I thought you were a bit more open to seeing people because you said let her in.”

  “I thought it was… No, no. No visitors.”

  “I’m sorry, that was my mistake.” She looks shocked. “Who is this person, anyway? The one you don’t want to see?”

  “It’s her boyfriend. He wants to see me. But I don’t want to see him, all right?”

  “Right… Well, we do ask everyone to check in at reception, so—”

  “Is there anything more you can do? Securitywise?”

  “OK,” she says, retrieving a sizable set of keys from her uniform pocket. “Here’s what we’ll do.” Calming voice. Professional voice. “Before anything else, we’re going to take a while and calm it down and see if we can take it one step at a time. Is that OK?”

  There’s a familiar tone. That’s a you tone. A keep-it-in-perspective tone. She’s saying come on, come on, don’t let the paranoia leak into everything.

  “We’re all in a dither here, aren’t we? So if it’s OK with you, I want to spend some time on this.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So, first things first: I’m going to get you a bit of something to calm you down a touch, all right? Take the edge off.”

  “No, you’re not listening—”

  “I am, lovey. I’m hearing every word you say. And I just want to take the edge off so we can talk about things calmly and do the right thing, first time.”

  Her eyes stay fixed on me as her head gently nods up and down.

  “OK,” I say. “OK.”

  “I’ll be back in five. Max.”

  She leaves the room, picking through her keys for the meds cupboard.

  I lie down on the bed, on my side, fetal. Need to focus, focus. Press my head down firmly to feel something. Man, punched deep in the pillow, it honestly actually pounds. Every pulse a hammer blow, each blow muting my hearing, recovering enough in time to be muted again. My heart connected to my head. It’s pressure, isn’t it? It’s making me scrunch my eyes up tight—tight, like tight—and that stops the pound-pound, by making it one long pound for a few moments. It’s my heart; it’s the pulses pulsing, pulse pound, and it will not stop. It’s my heart beating the blood around me, and it just will not stop. I want a stop.

  I’ve got my fists up clenched, clutching the bedsheets around my jaw. Beneath the sheets, the agitation. It’s all rest; restless rest. My feet shifting in the sheets. Right forward, left back; left forward, right back. My only relief, to offset the hell in my head: marching through the linen like a slumbering foot soldier. Now that’s the only sound, the soft shiff, shiff, and the occasional zip of a toenail scratching against the cotton.

  It’s the morphine. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s why Mal’s going to come here: it’s a fucking bursting bank of clinical morphine, diamorphine. I’m not joking, I’m not joking; that’s the only outcome. He’s got Kelvin and Laura wrapped around his little finger, and they think he wants to be forgiven. He doesn’t want to be forgiven. He—

  And the pain and realization shoots down my neck and penetrates deep into my back, so deep as to come out the front into my chest, like getting kicked in the kidneys, jars out the breastbone, and blooms up through my chest, tight. Nausea blooms and churns within.

  The door sucks shut in the corridor, and I look up at my doorway with a start.

  It’s Sheila, finally.

  “OK,” she says. “I’ve got a sedative here, just to get us back on an even keel.”

  I sit up and look at her, and she must read my mind.

  “Do you trust me?” she says.

  I nod.

  She hands me a pill and a beaker of water, and I take it.

  “Now,” she says, sitting lightly on the arm of the visitors’ chair, “are you able to tell me a little bit about this?”

  “About what?”

  “About the visitor you don’t want to see. It helps if I know what I’m looking for.”

  “It’s a man. His name’s Malachy Sampson.”

  “And why does he want to see you?”

  “We used to be friends. He’s been seeing my sister.”

  “OK.”

  “But he’s dangerous. He’s properly bad news. He’s not long out of prison. So, what you were saying about the store full of drugs and needles…?”

  She starts to show the right amount of unease. I’m getting through to her, and it’s beginning to encroach on her responsibilities. “OK, well, that’s helpful for me to know, at least.”

  “He could do this. I’m sure that’s what he’s after, and I think he’s going to try to come and get me.”

  I know how this sounds.

  Her face softens in exactly the way I hoped it wouldn’t.

  “He’s going to think I put him in prison. He’s going to wonder why I didn’t fight to keep him out—”

  “Listen,” she says. “I’ll look into this, and I’ll make sure we do everything we need to do to keep you feeling safe and secure.”

  “Thank you,” I say, looking up at her.

  “But I know what you’re like, Ivo. You’re the type of person who’s got this worry-shaped hole in the middle of your head. And it doesn’t matter what’s going on; it doesn’t matter what I do to make things better—you’re going to fill it with whatever’s in front of you at the time. You’re not the first to do this, and I daresay you won’t be the last. So do yourself a favor and keep yourself occupied, all right? It’ll help, I promise.”

  I

  Intestine

  Yeah, now it comes up.

  Intestine.

  I could do a whole A to Z of my life’s worth of intestinal misery. What have I ever done to be cursed with a body that deals with any level of stress with a punch straight to the gut?

  Three nights I threw up when I moved to secondary school. I didn’t know where any of the classrooms were; I had all new lessons, and I’d been warned these were all going to be much more difficult; I had to wear a new unif
orm—all that stuff, like a putrefying knot in my belly.

  My first day at the garden center, aged eighteen, I threw up in the break room at the sheer amount of new information they were giving me about how to operate the tills. Within a fortnight I was even doing returns and refunds without having to think about it. It’s easy, it’s easy. But my intestines had to have their moment.

  It’s like something has not been worth doing if I haven’t thrown up in contemplating it.

  • • •

  “Poor love,” you say, stroking my back as my stomach muscles spasm again and I am subjected to another involuntary heave of fetid breath and spittle. “Come here…” You hand me a pat of tissue and a tall glass of fresh water. I swill out my mouth and spit down the toilet. Flush it away.

  I slip on your dressing gown and look down.

  “It makes my arms look really long.”

  “It’s pretty. Come on, back to bed.”

  I shuffle across the landing, trying hard, trying very hard not to shuffle. It’s all in the mind. I need to stride purposefully, pretend I am coping absolutely fine with your announcement of going away.

  I’ll shuffle.

  Honestly, who throws up at the merest tiniest little upheaval like their girlfriend going away? I’m an absolute lily.

  “Here you go,” you say, placing the sick bowl on the floor beside the bed and climbing in beside me. “What does this mean for the insulin you’ve injected? You’d just eaten—does it mean you’ve got to eat something else to soak up the excess?”

  I frown and cough to clear my throat. “Oh, I don’t know. I’ve got a leaflet somewhere about sick days. I think it’s fine. I’ll test in a while and see from that.”

  “OK. As long as you’ve got that covered.”

  “Covered,” I say, snapping my fingers and winking at you in a funky gesture of all-rightness.

  “Listen,” you say, “Ivo. I’ve decided. I’m not going to go on this work transfer.”

  “No, Mia. No, you can’t—”

  “It’s three months away. It’s too much. Especially, you know, if I’m not sure I… Well, I don’t even know if I want to do nursing anymore.”

  “What? Why not?”

  Your face grows unexpectedly sullen, and you hug your knees through the duvet.