Precious You

by Helen Monks Takhar

There you are, waiting for me.

  All alone and a complete mess: neck brace, swollen head, tubes. Clicking. Dried blood around a bloated eye. A nightmare. I wonder how attractive Iain would find you now. Would he have chosen you in your iodine-stained surgical gown, or me, restored again? It would be no contest, surely.

  I pull the curtain around your bed, because what happens next is about us and no one else.

  “Time to wake up, Lily.”

  Your right eye is stuck fast. Your left eye reveals itself slowly. You see me and your lid springs open with a grunt. You try to move, but you’re only able to manage the slightest shifts from left to right.

  “What…what are you doing here?” you croak.

  “You owe me an explanation.”

  “From what I hear from Gem, you owe us. A small fortune…so if you’re here for your victory lap…”

  Your eyes close again. You’re acting as if you could simply dismiss me. After all you’ve done. After I spared your life.

  “I’m here for some answers on what you’ve done to me.”

  You regard me with your single black eye again and somewhere under the water-logged puffs of flesh, that familiar malice ripples below the surface.

  “How about what I didn’t do to you.”

  “Oh, Lily, let’s cut the bullshit. Haven’t you had enough yet?”

  A pause as you ready yourself to study my reaction.

  “The troll.”

  “What about the troll? You’d have to ask Asif what he was playing at.”

  “I did.” You’re watching me, unblinking. “When he called me after they’d sacked him. He wasn’t your troll.”

  “Well, of course he’d say that.”

  “You know he wasn’t lying…I worked it out. I know who it was. So do you.”

  A shot of adrenaline in my veins I try to talk over.

  “Oh yeah, and did you also discover who’d racked up ten grand in my name, on my corporate credit card? Who fucked me over on my awards speech in front of hundreds of people?”

  “ ‘Slaughtered.’ ”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Hundreds of kids are literally slaughtered for her drugs.’ It was in Acceptableinthenoughties’s message, after the party. It’s kind of like what that boy said when you’d busted out your cocaine, but it’s so obviously written by somebody old trying to sound young.”

  “Asif—”

  “Asif nothing. You logged on as him and you trolled yourself.”

  “Of all the madness you’ve inflicted on me.”

  “He didn’t want you, but he did want me. You didn’t like it one bit, but you did enjoy having an insurance policy against Gemma, something you could fall back on to show she wasn’t in control as publisher. When you saw Gem suspected it was me, all the better.”

  I breathe.

  Skinless.

  Exposed.

  “Tell the truth for once, Katherine. Then maybe I’ll think about telling you a few things you’ll want to know.”

  I turn away from you and walk to the foot of your bed. I can’t look at you. The injustice of you. You’re lying smashed and broken in your hospital bed, so how is it me whose heart feels like it’s about to give out?

  “You don’t know what it’s like to feel truly desperate, Lily.”

  “Think I’ve had it easy? You think people like me are to blame for how bad you feel about yourself…You throw guilt out to anyone who isn’t you for everything you think’s wrong with your life…not caring who you hurt along the way.” You’re very angry now, spitting words at me through pained grimaces.

  “I was the hurt one! After everything I did for Asif, he’d thrown me aside after five minutes with you. It all hurt like hell. My work, my home, my life, my body. I was supposed to be so much more than this, have so much more than this.”

  “But you had so much. Can’t you see that now?”

  “Is that what this is about? You’ve come to teach me a lesson about being grateful? Go on, then. I’m listening. I deserve to know why you’ve taken my life down to hell.”

  You breathe, manage to move your head toward a bent straw in a surgical cup on the nearby wheeled tray. You close your eyes and your face contorts as we both listen to the water passing uneasily down your throat. I stare at you, gripping my fingers in each hand in anticipation of what you’re about to say. You open your eye again and look me up and down; your vision rests on my clenched fists.

  “Listen, Katherine…I’m tired and I’m sure Gem’s due any second. You should go…this will have to wait for another day.”

  “No. It won’t. I can’t.”

  “I’m sorry. The pain meds, they make me very sleepy. Come back when I’ve had more rest.”

  I shake my head. “Do you really think I’m that stupid? If I walk out of here now, you’ll make sure I never get in again. You’ve no intention of telling me anything.”

  Your gaze shifts to the floor.

  “Do you know what you are, Lily, when all’s said and done?” You say nothing, but I can hear your ragged breath getting faster. You don’t like it when I’m in control; can’t bear it when someone else but you is winning. “You are ten-a-penny. Even if they manage to fix you, those tits of yours will sag, your teeth will yellow, and a hundred thousand people younger, brighter, and more interesting to the world than you will come along. Iain would have got bored with you soon enough, trust me.”

  “You’re wrong.”

  “Well, he’s never going to get the chance to prove me right and that’s worked out rather well for you, hasn’t it? You’ve walked away with all my property with no risk of him throwing you to the dogs when you dared to age, like he did me, like he would have you.”

  “I’m nothing like you! Don’t think that I am…I had no idea Iain was changing his will, but I know why he did it.”

  “Oh yes, I’m sure you have a very good idea. I bet you dripped poison in his ear about me, postcoital suggestions he—”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  A thunderbolt in my chest. I grip the end of your hospital bed.

  “Only six weeks, but I am having Iain’s baby.” A familiar faux-sympathetic smile detectable on your face.

  Words choke my throat. It’s all I can do to whisper, “Are you sure it’s his?”

  “Yes, and it seems fine after the accident. So you see, Iain would never have walked away from me.”

  I feel as if I’m about to fall. “I didn’t deserve any of this,” I say quietly to myself.

  Seeing me shrink, you find a new strength from somewhere. You shuffle your body an inch or two up the bed, resting your weight on your elbows; it’s enough to make me feel like you’re suddenly towering above me.

  “You’ve got exactly what you deserve. You’re on your own, Katherine Ross. You’re completely alone and you’re probably going to have to live that way for the rest of your life, just like I’m going to have to get used to bringing up a baby on my own because…”

  For a moment, I feel as if you are crushing me to nothing.

  “Because it wasn’t enough for you to help him die slowly with drink, was it?”

  I remember when I last felt this weak.

  It was right before I first realized my own strength. Back at my mother’s farm.

  It was when I held firm as my mother asked why she kept finding broken pieces of dry-stone wall on her quad bike’s track to the far paddock. There was no storm, no rogue animals that might have knocked the rocks into her path. Did I know anything about what or who could be making her daily journey so treacherous? I looked right into my mother’s face and I made my shoulders shrug while keeping my voice level.

  “What are you saying?” I ask you now, my breath steady.

  “When I found Iain, on the coffee table, there were traces of cocaine.”r />
  “The inquest said he’d had loads. I knew Iain, much better than you: The coke made him drink more. This time so much that he couldn’t wake up when he needed to.”

  “The traces were neat and horizontal.” Your eye rests on me. “Like Iain said at the party, like lines on the page of a reporter’s notepad…You were there, weren’t you, Katherine? You were involved in his death and now I’m going to have to rely on my mum and Gem, and history gets to repeat itself and that’s not fair! I know it’s your fault! I know how far you’d go to take revenge…I read Creep Feeder, Katherine, and I know exactly what you are.”

  I walk back toward you.

  “OK, Lily. What happens now?”

  I take another step closer.

  “Now…Well…Please. Leave.” Now it’s fear that undulates under the surface of your skin. I can hear it now, seeping into your voice, see it reaching your wide-open eye.

  A step nearer.

  “Gem’s on her way…I think I can hear her.”

  We both listen to the sound of nurses laughing at their station at the far end of the ward. Shift changeover. They wouldn’t necessarily hear a patient in need.

  Suddenly, your eye searches our curtained confine. I could do whatever I wanted with you now. This must be how you felt when you thought you’d won it all: my home, my Iain; when you’d seen me arrive like a tramp, homeless, penniless, a fucking guest at my own partner’s funeral. Now it is you who is without power. You try to sit up fully, but whimper quietly. You’re too weak, in too much pain.

  “Katherine…Please, don’t come any closer.”

  You’re afraid of me. I never wanted it this way, but here we are.

  Closer still.

  “You know who I am to you, don’t you? You don’t want to hurt me…I’m begging you…Katherine, stop, I wrote a blog post yesterday, just for you.” I can feel your breath on my face now, coming fast. “Can I tell you what it said?”

  As close as I could possibly be to you now.

  “I didn’t get round to posting it yet…but in it, I’m asking you if we could start again. Because we have a connection. You understand me. I understand you…You feel it too…You’re what I’ve been looking for…I want you in my life. Would you like that, Katherine?”

  You search every bit of my expression and in return, I examine your pale forehead, the smashed swell of your cheeks, those lips.

  “So maybe you don’t have to buy me out of the flat anymore?” I say to you.

  “Of course not,” you tell me.

  “Maybe I could help you with this baby?”

  “Absolutely. Let’s make plans soon.”

  “Maybe I should move back into the flat? With you?”

  “That…makes total sense.”

  I rest my forehead on yours and wait a moment while our pulses come together once more.

  “And maybe I’m not as fucking clueless and desperate as you think I am.”

  You try to recoil from me, but there’s nowhere to go.

  “Katherine, no!”

  I grasp your shoulders.

  “Do you really think I’m that needy?” I shake you. “Do you honestly believe I’m going to buy your lies? Now? After what you’ve accused me of?”

  “Stop…Nurse!”

  I push you back onto the pillows and clamp my hand over your mouth. You need to hear this. “Listen to me, I’m not going to hurt you. I’ve never wanted to hurt anyone, I’ve only ever wanted to be loved. By my mother. Iain. You.” You grunt and squirm, your left eye darting madly about. “But you all hurt me. And you? You came into my life and you killed everything in it.”

  Your hands are flapping around like wounded birds before eventually finding my forearms and gripping my flesh, begging me to let you speak, but I’m not done yet. “Yes, we do have something.” You moan and you whine beneath my fingers; a machine begins to beep uncontrollably, the hospital itself conspiring to not let me be heard. “There’s something between us and all I’ve ever wanted is to understand it, explore it together.” Your eyes are closed now. “Listen to me!”

  Your neck slumps, all tension, all fight gone from you.

  “Lily!”

  You don’t open your eyes.

  “Come on, Lily. It’s your turn now. I want my answers.”

  Your stillness finally registers.

  You’ve made me silence you forever.

  I’m so angry with you for doing this. Because you’ve cheated me out of what was mine. Again.

  CREEP FEEDER

  There are times when a lamb is a lost cause. You do all the usual tricks, blade of grass up the nose, jab of dextrose, shove them in the warming box, but they’re done for. Some are just too weak. “Born goners.” Worse than them are the ones that take the perfunctory and economically minded attention you give them as love. They don’t want to go back to their mothers and their mothers don’t want them because they stink of you. Best to keep them at arm’s length. This helps even the weak survive.

  Perhaps this is what Mother thought.

  Perhaps her cruelty was actually love. Giving the girl the gift of resilience. To be able to survive on workhouse rations of food, complementing the diet of insults gnawing away at the girl’s soul. Being told for as long as she’d remember how she was the millstone that kept Mother in this hell, how she’d come to nothing, how she was nothing, how she deserved to have nothing and be nothing. No, this could not really be love, the girl concluded.

  The born goners, the ones that can’t come back from hypothermia, you can see it in their eyes.

  Her mother always knows. Shouts at the girl to walk away. When the daughter was younger, it wasn’t easy. Not just watching them die, but after every death or stillbirth, her mother telling her that’s what she had wanted to do to the girl at her birth. The girl’s heart aches. There have been many days when she so wished Mother had let her die.

  A lamb dying is easier for the girl since she’s watched dozens of innocents go, but even now she’s seen the light of life die in many a newborn animal’s eyes, the girl would never say standing by and letting death happen was an effortless thing.

  The girl’s father’s death had not been effortless and neither had watching it been. She knew she was more him than her mother.

  One day, when she is eighteen years old, she finds her father’s old biker jacket in the attic. Slipping it onto her bony shoulders had felt like being held by a ghost. Love. Being loved, the greatest protection anyone can have from the rest of the world. She never wanted to take it off.

  When she comes down to feed the sheep the next day in the jacket, the mother says nothing, but when the girl gets to the breakfast table there is no food, just a quarter glass of milk. The girl knows she is being punished. The same happens for five days.

  The girl will not give up her father’s coat of armor and her mother will not begin feeding her breakfast again until she does.

  Her mother returns from the field the first day the girl decides to show her mother who she really is, that she won’t back down every time, that she can’t be controlled by food. The mother doesn’t dare look her daughter’s show of strength in the face. Instead, the mother asks the girl to look at the dry wall on the west side of the far paddock, tells her it needs fixing because some stones have found their way into the middle of the quad track. She could have been killed.

  On the second day, the girl doesn’t see her mother return from the paddock, but when she comes to the breakfast table she finds four lumps of rock where her food should have been. Mother knows, of course she knows what the girl is doing is deliberate, but to start any kind of dialogue on it would be to admit the girl is fighting back. The girl is a fighter and fighters can win. Mother’s doctrine is that the girl is born to lose. To recognize the fight would be an act of heresy against herself.

 
On the third day, the mother doesn’t return.

  When late afternoon comes, the daughter walks slowly to the far paddock, admires her handiwork, a hidden landscape of stone under muck she’d compacted down to disguise the obstacles that would send her mother’s quad flying eventually.

  The girl is third time lucky, because now her mother is a different shape; her neck at odds with the rest of her, under her quad, wheels facing skywards. The girl has brought a loaf of bread and a can of lager with her. She sits in front of her mother and begins to tear at the loaf with her teeth.

  The mother is no “born goner.” When the girl returns from replacing the rocks and reordering the disrupted earth with her hands and feet, the light in her eyes burns hot and angry still. Though she cannot speak, her mother’s eyes tell the girl all the things she knows already. Her mother’s disappointment. Resentment. Rage. This time, the girl may deserve them.

  Dusk arrives and the light in Mother’s eyes finally goes out. It is done. And now it is time to live.

  That night I saw you dancing in my clothes, in my flat, I went straight to Iain to make him see the lunacy of you having kicked us both out.

  That same night I learned Iain had given up everything—booze, drugs, meat, dairy, fucking gluten—but he knew as well as I did that there were just some occasions when you have to think Fuck it. That’s one of the many, many issues with people your age. You just don’t know when to say Fuck it; have that drink, say exactly what you feel, when you feel it, get off your heads when you need to. To do something in the moment, regardless of the consequences, not decide how you feel about something once you’ve asked Twitter, or once you’ve recorded and shared it. To embark on a course of action after you’ve processed your feelings. To do and say what you want to do exactly when you want to do it is the terrific gift of youth. And there’s a well of forgiveness around your bad choices along the way; the gilded idiocy of youth. Your lot infuriate me because you’re happy to squander the gift of the impetuous at every turn. Iain, in his heart, he still knew the intrinsic goodness of Fuck it.

  He was, in fact, a Fuck it King and I loved him for it. There were times when he was ill with drink that I’d think about reining him in, gently disenabling him, but to do that was to change Iain, and I loved him just the way he was. Not like you.