by Marian Keyes
I heard the swish of a cubicle curtain and lots of loud voices giving orders and relaying information. A woman in a doctor’s coat clipped briskly to the scene, followed by two younger-looking blokes, their white coats swinging.
Then – and you could feel the change in energy – all the noise and activity stopped. After a few seconds of absolute nothingness I heard, very clearly, someone saying, ‘Time of death is 17.47.’
Within moments a lifeless body was wheeled past us.
‘Is he … dead?’ Betsy stared with saucer-eyes.
‘A dead person,’ Jeffrey said. ‘Cool.’
He watched the fast-disappearing gurney then he turned back to look at me lying motionless in the bed and the light in his eyes died.
14.17
As I walk home from my parents’ house in my ill-fitting and weather-inappropriate clothes, I notice I have a missed call. My head goes funny when I see who it’s from. And he’s left a message.
I shouldn’t listen to it. Clean break, didn’t I decide?
My fingers are trembling as I hit the keys.
And there’s his voice. Just three words. ‘… I miss you …’
If I wasn’t in the street, I’d double over and howl.
I only realize I’m crying when I notice the interested looks I’m getting from passing car drivers. I hurry towards home and pray that I don’t meet anyone I know.
Once I’ve shut the door safely behind me I do what I’ve been doing for – I count back – two months, three weeks and two days: I get on with things.
I check on Ryan’s video. It hasn’t been viewed since I last watched it this morning and nothing new has been added. We could be in the clear here.
Right, I’d better find some summer clothes. Bad and all as I feel, I’m grateful to have a project so that I don’t have to try to write. Sitting in front of that screen, with an empty head, would leave too much room for terrible thoughts to rush up.
I dive into my spare wardrobe and start pulling out the warm-weather stuff I’d brought from New York. How nicely and neatly I’d hung them up! There’s no evidence at all of the distress I was in when I’d unpacked. I’d have expected hangers to be overloaded and at jingle-jangle angles and for sandals and flip-flops to be in a messy pile on the floor. Instead it looks like an ad for an expensive Italian custom-made wardrobe. I’ve no memory of arranging everything so tidily but it looks like I’d accepted that I really lived here, that this was now my home, maybe for ever.
I’m in a state of shock: I have nothing to wear. None of my New York things fit me. Sometime over the last couple of months, I’ve put on weight. How much exactly, I couldn’t possibly say. There are scales in the bathroom but no way am I standing on them. Anyway, I don’t need to. I have my evidence – nothing fits me.
It’s my … front-piece. Whisper it … belly … I can hardly even think the word. Mentally I clear my throat and force myself to confront head-on the unpalatable truth: I have a belly. Full-blown.
And I always knew this day would dawn …
After a lifetime of barely containing it, the wretched thing has finally snapped its moorings.
I force myself to stand in front of the only full-length mirror in the house. It’s on the inside of the door of the spare wardrobe and I realize that since I got back to Ireland I haven’t looked at myself in it. Obviously because I don’t have much dealings with my spare clothes.
But that’s not the only reason I haven’t noticed my expansion. I’ve been in denial about myself, about my appearance, about my very existence. I’ve ignored my hair, even though it’s clamouring to be cut, and my nails are bitten and broken, even though Karen keeps offering me free manicures.
I’ve simply got through every twenty-four hours, dealing with the fresh set of challenges that each new day offered to me – money, Jeffrey, the great big hole at the centre of me …
I’ve sort of … shut down. I had to, in order to survive.
Although, I’ve eaten a lot for a shut-down person.
Poor Jeffrey. I’d maligned him by thinking he’d shrunk my clothes, when it was my fault all along.
I flick glances at myself. Tiny ones. I can only digest this unpalatable truth in morsels, in little splintered flashes. Is that me? Is that me? I look like an egg on legs. A … belly … on legs.
For the last couple of years I’ve kept the b-word at bay with near-daily running and Pilates and a high-protein eating plan. But my personal-trainer-private-chef life has disappeared and in its place I’ve been given this … front attachment … thing. If I don’t say the name, maybe it will go away. Maybe all it wants is validation and if I ignore it, it’ll eventually slink off and attach itself to another woman who will shower it in attention by grabbing wobbly handfuls and wailing, then immediately dropping to the floor and doing eighteen frantic crunches, then hopping to her feet and Googling How To Get a Flat Tummy in Twenty Minutes.
Yes, I will ignore it. I will carry on as before. I feel calmer now that I have a plan.
Except I still have nothing to wear …
This is a worry.
I won’t be beaten down by this! I am a positive person! And I’m going shopping!
I come home empty-handed and very concerned. I have stumbled over a shocking fact: there is nothing in the shops for a woman of forty-one and a quarter. They don’t make clothes for us. They skip right over my age group. There are sleeveless tops and clingy lurex dresses for the twelve to thirty-nine-year-olds. There are easi-clean trousers with elasticated waists for the sixty-plus gang. But for me, nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
I followed Karen’s lead by trying on ankle-cut skinny jeans and a fancy T-shirt but I looked like an obese schoolboy. Next I went for some tailored linen trousers and looked in the mirror and wondered how Mum had got into the changing room. Then I realized that the person in the mirror was me. Horrors!
No disrespect to Mum. She’s a good-looking woman. For seventy-two. But I’m only forty-one and a quarter and this is not on.
Suddenly I understand why designer clothes are so expensive. Because they’re better cut. Because the fabrics are of a higher quality. I thought I was just paying that extra money for the laugh, so that I could swank around with a DKNY carrier bag, thinking, ‘I’ve made it! And I’ve just proved it by paying two hundred dollars for a plain black skirt that you could get in Zara for a tenner.’
Is this absence of clothing for my generation some sort of plot? To keep us housebound so that our unpalatable ageing will be hidden from the eyes of a youth-centric society? Or to make us spend all our money on lipo? I vow to get to the bottom of it.
As I hurried back to the car park, I cut through a newsagent’s and was mocked by magazine covers, many of them featuring women who each claimed to be ‘Fabulous at 40!’
I stopped in front of one of them. I knew the woman smiling brightly at me; I’d been on her talk show in New York, and let me whisper you something: her ‘Fabulous at 40’ spiel is a tissue of lies. Her face is full of injectables, full of them. She’s mentally ill from chronic hunger. And she’s not forty, she’s thirty-six – she’s cannily aligned herself with the monied forty-plus market, branding herself as a skinny, youthful-looking role model. With her every smile and gesture, she conveys, I am one of you. But her army of acolytes will never look like her, no matter how much of her clothing line they buy. It won’t stop them trying, though. And it won’t stop them blaming themselves when they fail.
‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’
Extract from One Blink at a Time
Most people in intensive care are model patients. That’s because most of them are in a coma. Also, most people’s stay is a short one – either they die or they improve and go to a different ward. But I was in the unusual position of being there for the long haul and the nurses weren’t geared up for that. They didn’t talk to me because they were out of the habit of talking to any of their patients – and what would be the point, seeing as I coul
dn’t reply?
When they turned me or attached a new feeding bag to the port in my stomach, it was done with the same force as if I was unconscious. If a tube popped out of me, they jammed it back in like they were shoving a plug into a socket. Sometimes, mid-manoeuvre, they remembered that I knew what was happening and they apologized.
But those were the only times a member of staff spoke to me and I was nearly mad with loneliness.
There was nothing to distract me – no phone, no Facebook, no food, no books, no music, no conversations, nothing. By nature I was a chatty person – if a thought came into my head I immediately blurted it out, but now it had to bounce off the wall of my skull and back into my brain, with all the thousands of other unuttered thoughts.
I was allowed two visits a day, each a paltry fifteen minutes long. The rest of the time I was locked in my own head and I never stopped worrying. There was a rackety routine in place to take care of Betsy and Jeffrey but every day was a challenge: Mum worked shifts in an old people’s home, Karen was a workaholic – so was Ryan, come to think of it – and Dad’s back could go without a moment’s notice.
I was also anxious about money – Ryan earned a lot but our outgoings were massive and we needed what I earned from the salon.
And even though we had health insurance, like all insurance policies it was riddled with cut-off points and caveats and exemptions. When I’d signed up for it I’d tried my best to understand what was covered but my focus had been on insuring the kids, not Ryan and me.
Bigger than my worry about money was my angst about Betsy’s and Jeffrey’s emotional health – I could see the fear in their eyes every time they tiptoed up to my bed. What would this trauma do to them long term?
Ryan and I tried excruciatingly hard to be good parents, what with the expensive school and all the extra-curricular stuff, but this was going to feck them up rightly. How could it not?
Almost as bad was the guilt I felt about Mum and Dad. I was an adult, their job as my parents was done, yet I was breaking their hearts. It was agonizing when they came to visit – Mum held my hand and wept silently and Dad clenched his jaw and stared hard at the floor. The only thing Dad ever said to me was, ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going.’
The few breaks I got from worrying were spent marvelling at the life I used to live. How lucky I’d been – there I’d be, driving a car and eating raisins that I’d found abandoned in a bag on the floor and giving Betsy a pep-talk about her oboe lessons and deciding I couldn’t be arsed to go to Zumba – multi-tasking like no one’s business, every muscle group in my body involved.
And now here I was, so paralysed I couldn’t even yawn. I’d have given ten years of my life to be able to put on a pair of socks.
I swore that, if I ever got better, I’d regard every single movement I made as a little miracle.
But would I get better? There were moments – about a million times a day – when I was certain that I’d be locked into my useless body for ever.
I kept trying to make my limbs move, I’d concentrate on a particular muscle until I felt my head was going to burst, but nothing ever happened. It was obvious I wasn’t getting any better. But at least I wasn’t getting any worse – I’d been terrified that my eyes would seize up and my one small way of communicating would be blocked, but they had kept working.
All the same, I was finding it hard to stay hopeful. Ryan did his best to stay positive – he really was heroic – but he knew as little as I did.
When I’d first been diagnosed my condition generated a lot of excitement among friends and acquaintances. The chance that I might die added extra lustre. According to Ryan ‘everyone’ was begging to visit me and dozens of well-wishers sent flowers even though Ryan told them that flowers weren’t allowed in ICU. Candles were lit in my honour and I was ‘kept’ in people’s prayers … but the days passed and I didn’t die, and when I was eventually pronounced ‘Stable’, my fans deserted me within moments. Even from my hospital bed, I could feel their deflation. ‘Stable’ is nearly the dullest of all medical descriptions – only ‘Comfortable’ is worse. What people really like is a good ‘Critical’. ‘Critical’ has mothers lingering at the school gates, gleeful with horror, saying sagely, ‘It could be any of us … There but for the grace of God.’
But ‘Stable’? It means if you’re looking for excitement, you’ve backed the wrong horse.
Somehow twenty-three days had gone by – I was like a prisoner scraping lines onto the cell wall, where measuring the passing of time was the only bit of control I had.
I looked at the clock again – there were still nineteen minutes to go before I was turned, and my hip was aflame with pain. I couldn’t take this. I was going to go mad.
But seven more seconds passed and I didn’t lose my mind.
How do you go mad, I wondered. That’s a useful life skill that should be taught in schools. It’d be very handy to be able to go out of your wits when everything got a bit much for you.
I could see the call button – it was less than a metre from my face. I willed my head to move along the pillow, I summoned every ounce of strength inside me, so that I could butt it. I could do this. If I wanted it badly enough, I could make it happen. Weren’t we forever being told that the human will is the strongest force on the planet? I was thinking of all those stories I’d read in Dad’s Reader’s Digests when I was a kid – amazing stories of women single-handedly lifting jeeps in order to save their child’s life, or men walking forty miles through rugged terrain with their injured wife on their back. All I had to do was headbutt one small call button.
But despite the tumult inside me, nothing happened. Wanting something badly enough was no guarantee that it would happen – I’d been misled by X-Factor. Yes, I wanted to move my head. Yes, I was hungry for it. Yes, I was prepared to do whatever it took. But it wasn’t enough.
If only one of the nurses passing by my bed would look at me. Surely they’d see by my eyes that I was in agony? But they didn’t do random checks; the machines took care of everything and nurses only appeared when something started beeping.
The only person who could get me through this was me. Hang on, Stella, I spoke softly to myself, hang on.
So I listened to the ventilator and I counted to seven and I counted to seven again and I pretended that my hip didn’t belong to me and I stopped looking at the clock and I kept counting and I kept counting and … here came two nurses! It was the time! ‘You take the top end,’ one of them said. ‘Careful with the ventilator.’
I was being lifted up and suddenly the pain had stopped and the relief flooded me with ecstasy. I felt high, floaty and joyous. I was set down on my right side and the nurses straightened up my tubes. ‘See you in three hours,’ one of them said, and looked straight into my eyes. I gazed back at her, pitifully grateful for the human contact.
As soon as they were gone, the fear of dying seized me. It was always at its worst in the few moments after someone left my bedside. I’d been wondering if I should get a priest to cleanse my soul. But even if I’d been able to ask, I suspected that God didn’t play by those simple rules. Whatever I had done in my life – and sometimes my misdeeds didn’t seem so terrible and sometimes they did – it was too late now to be forgiven.
My biggest fear used to be something awful happening to my kids, but contemplating my own death was – I was surprised by my selfishness – more frightening.
Here came Ryan, Betsy and Jeffrey! One after the other they kissed my forehead, then backed away quickly, bumping into each other, terrified of dislodging my tubes.
Self-consciously, the kids delivered ‘news’ that they’d saved up since their previous visit, the day before.
‘Oh my gosh!’ Betsy said, with surprise that was badly rehearsed. ‘You haven’t heard? Amber and Logan are on a break!’
Amber was Betsy’s best friend, Logan was Amber’s boyfriend. But maybe not any more …
Tell me! I tried to push encouragin
g vibes out from my eyes. Go on, my sweetie. Any kind of chat is appreciated round here. And I’m so grateful that you’ve knocked that praying business on the head.
‘Yes! They had like this big talk and Logan said he intuited he was holding Amber back? In her personal development? He didn’t want to take a break but he thinks it’s the right thing?’
God, they were so serious, this generation of kids.
… And I wouldn’t be so sure about Logan’s noble motives.
‘Amber is like, devastated? But it’s sort of cute that Logan is so mature –’
Jeffrey, clearly not gripped by the Amber–Logan saga, blurted out, ‘Last night we watched The Apprentice! It was cool.’
Oh God! What about their study? I put a lot of time and energy into making them knuckle down to their schoolwork and I was terrified that Ryan would let it all slide away to nothingness while I was lying here, powerless.
‘They needed a treat.’ Ryan sounded defensive.
Yes, but …
You’d think you wouldn’t worry about things like that, small things, when every day you’re afraid you might die and go to hell, but there you are.
To deflect attention from his misdeed, Ryan picked up my chart. ‘It says you had a good night’s sleep.’
But I hadn’t – it was impossible when the lights in ICU blazed twenty-four hours a day, the burning in my hip woke me up every couple of hours and the three-hour turns happened all through the night.
‘Amber says the break is a good thing. It will make their bond stronger. But, Mom, can I say something? Does it make me a bad person …?’
Say it! Say it!
‘… I think Logan just wants to get with other girls.’
Me too! Remember that business in the summer!
‘I’m like remembering … that girl, in the summer.’