Playing for the Ashes (71 page)

“I’m afraid it’s progressive,” the doctor said.

I could tell he was watching me, but I was watching the tree.

It’s a disorder that affects the spinal cord, he said slowly so that I would understand, and the lower brain stem, and the large motor neurons of the cerebral cortex. It results in the progressive degeneration of motor neurons as well as the progressive weakening and ultimate wasting of muscles.

“You don’t know I’ve got it,” I said. “You can’t be sure.”

I could seek a second opinion, he told me. In fact, he suggested I do so. He went on to talk about the evidence he’d gathered: the results of the spinal tap, the general loss of muscle tone, the weakness of my muscular response. He said the disorder usually affects the hands first, moving up the forearms and the shoulders and attacking the lower extremities later. In my case, however, it seemed to be proceeding in the opposite direction.

“So I could have something else,” I pointed out. “So you can’t be sure, can you?”

He agreed that no medical science was ever exact. But then he said, “Let me ask you this.

Have you had any fibrillation of the muscles in

your leg?”

“Fib—what?”

“Rapid twitching. Vibrations.”

I turned back to the window. We’d put the conkers on strings, we’d swung them in the air, the sound they’d made was
whssst… whssst…whssst
, we’d pretended to be American cowboys, we’d lassoed calves with conkers instead of with ropes.

“Livie?” Chris said. “Have your muscles— ”

“It doesn’t mean anything. And anyway, I can beat it. I can get cured. I need to exercise more.”

So that’s what I did at first. Rapid walking, climbing stairs, lifting weights. I thought, Muscular weakness is all it is. I’ll pull through this. I’ve pulled through everything else, haven’t I? Nothing’s got me down for long, and this won’t, either.

I continued to go on assaults, fired by fear and anger. I would prove them wrong, I told myself. I would make my body perform like a machine.

For five months Chris allowed me to maintain my position as a liberator until the
fir
st night I slowed the unit down. Then he moved me to sentry, saying, “No arguments, Livie,” when I shouted, “You can’t! You’re making me a laughing stock! You aren’t giving me a chance to build back my strength. I want to be in, with you, with the rest.
Chris
!” He said I needed to face the facts. I said I’d show him facts, I would, and I took myself off to the teaching hospital to gather them through another round of tests.

The results were the same. The atmosphere in which I received them was different. No posh office this time, but a cubicle off a busy corridor down which trolleys were rolled with grim-reaper frequency. When the doctor shut the door, turned her chair to face me, and sat with her knees practically touching mine, I knew.

She dwelt upon what bright spots there were, although she called ALS a disease and did not use the more palatable word,
disorder
. She said my condition would worsen steadily, but slowly,
slowly
, she stressed. My muscles would first become weak, then they would atrophy. As the nerve cells in the brain and spinal cord degenerated, they would begin sending irregular impulses to the muscles in my arms and legs, which would fi brillate. The disease would progress from my feet and legs, from my hands and arms, inward, until I was completely paralysed. However, she stressed in her motherly voice, I would always keep control of my bladder and sphincter. And my intelligence and awareness would never be affected, even in the terminal stages of the disease when it advanced to my lungs and caused them to atrophy as well.

“You mean I’ll know exactly how disgusting I am,” I said.

She said, placing the tips of her
fin
gers on my kneecap, “You know, Olivia, I seriously doubt Stephen Hawking thinks of himself as disgusting. You know who he is, don’t you?”

“Stephen Hawking? What’s he got to do with…” I backed my chair away. I’d seen him in newspapers. I’d seen him on the telly. The electric wheelchair, the attendants, the computerised voice. “That’s ALS?” I said.

The doctor said, “Yes. Motor Neuron Disease. It’s marvellous to think how he’s defied the odds all these years. Anything’s possible and you mustn’t forget it.”

“Possible? What?”

“To live. The progress of this disease is generally eighteen months to seven years. Tell Hawking that. He’s survived more than thirty.”

“But…like that. In a chair. Hooked up…I can’t. I don’t want—”

“You’ll astonish yourself with what you want and what you can do. Wait and see.”

I had to leave Chris once I knew the worst. I wouldn’t be able to hold my own round the barge, and I didn’t intend to stay on and become a charity case. I went back to Little Venice and starting shoving my things in rucksacks. I’d go back to Earl’s Court and find a bed-sit. I’d keep my job in the zoo as long as I could and once I couldn’t manage that, there’d be something else. Did a bloke care if he was screwing a tart whose legs couldn’t lock round his arse any longer? whose feet couldn’t walk in those
fiv
e-inch heels? Whatever happened to Archie and his whips and his leather? It’d been several years. Would he still like it if his Mary Immaculate smacked him into an ecstatic frenzy while she was under a sentence of death? Would he like it better, in fact, if he knew? We would see.

I was writing Chris a note at the table in the galley when he came home. He said, “Got a sizable project in Fulham that should set us up properly for a while. One of those mansion flats. You should see the rooms, Livie. They’re…” He paused at the galley door. He lowered a roll of sketches to the table. “What’s this, then?” He straddled a chair and touched his foot to one of my rucksacks. “You taking in laundry or something?”

“I’m clearing off,” I said.

“Why?”

“It’s time. We’re going separate ways. Have been for ages. No use keeping the corpse unburied till it rots. You know.” I stabbed a full stop onto the last sentence I was writing and poked the pencil among the others in their new potatoes tin. I shoved the note his way and pushed myself to my feet.

He said, “So it’s true.”

I jerked the first rucksack onto my shoulders. “What?”

“ALS.”

“What if it is?”

“You must have been told today. That’s why…this.” He read the note. He folded it carefully. “You’ve misspelled
inevitable
. It’s got an
a
in it.”

“Whatever.” I scooped up the second rucksack. “
A
or
i
don’t change the facts, do they? A bloke and a girl can’t live together like this without things falling apart eventually.”

“
Inevitable
was what you said in the note.”

“You’ve got your work and I’ve got—”

“ALS. That’s why you’re clearing off.” He put the note in his pocket. “Odd, Livie. I never saw you for a quitter.”

“I’m not quitting anything. I’m just leaving. This isn’t about ALS. It’s about you and me. What I want. What you want. Who I am. Who you are. It’s not going to work.”

“It’s been working for more than four years.”

“Not for me it hasn’t. It’s…” I hooked one arm into the second rucksack and one arm into the third. I caught sight of my re
fle
ction in the galley window. I looked like a hunchback with saddlebags. “Listen, it’s not normal, living like this. You and me. It’s freaky. Like being in a sideshow. Come see the celibates. I feel like I’m in a convent or something. It isn’t life, this. I can’t cope with it, okay?”

He used his fingers to count off the points as he responded. “Freaky. Sideshow. Celibate. Convent. Have you ever read
Hamlet
?”

“What’s
Hamlet
got to do with the price of cheese?”

“Someone says something about protesting too much.”

“I’m not protesting a
fla
ming thing.”

“Laying out too many arguments or denials,” he explained. “And they don’t make sense. Especially when one considers the fact that you’ve never been celibate for more than a week.”

“That’s a rotten lie!” I dropped the rucksacks from my arms. I heard the click of dog nails against the linoleum as Beans came in from the workroom to give the sacks a sniffover.

“Is it?” Chris reached for an apple from a bowl on the dresser and polished it idly against his worn flannel shirt. “What about the zoo?”

“What
about
the zoo?”

“You’ve been there—what is it?—nearly two years? How many of those blokes have you done it with?”

I felt the heat surge into my face. “You’ve got some cheek.”

“So you haven’t been celibate. So we can rest that argument. And the one about the convent as well.”

I shook off the third rucksack and dropped it with the others. Beans thrust his nose beneath the rucksack’s flap. He made a sound like
blubber-snarf
as he found something to his liking. I pushed him away. “You listen,” I began, “and you listen good. There’s nothing wrong with liking sex. There’s nothing wrong with wanting it. I like it and I want it and—”

“Which leaves us with sideshow and freak,” he said.

My mouth gaped. I snapped it shut.

“Don’t you agree?” he asked. “We’re using the process of elimination here, Livie.”

“You calling me a freak?”

“You said celibate, convent, sideshow, and freak. We’ve dismissed the first two. Now we’re examining the others. We’re looking for the truth.”

“Well, I’ll give you truth, Mr. Shrivelcock Faraday. When I meet a bloke who likes it like I do and wants it as well, then we do it. We have a good time. And if you want to condemn me for something as natural as breathing, then go ahead and condemn and enjoy yourself. But you’ll have to do your judging without an audience because I’m sick to death of your holier-than-thou’s, so I’m clearing out.”

“Because you can’t abide living with a freak?”

“Hallelujah. The lad’s finally got it right.”

“Or because you’re afraid that you’ll become one yourself and end up discovering that
I
can’t abide it?”

I countered with a laugh. “No chance of that. There’s nothing wrong with me. We established that. I’m one hundred percent woman who likes having it off with one hundred percent man. That’s been the case from the first, and I’m not ashamed to admit it to anyone.”

He bit into his apple. Toast showed up and put his nose on Chris’s knee. Beans nudged one of my rucksacks along the
flo
or.

“Good rebuttal if I was referring to sex,” Chris said. “But as I’m not, you’ve lost the advantage.”

“This isn’t about ALS,” I said patiently. “This is you and me. And our differences.”

“Part of which is ALS, as you’ll no doubt agree.”

“Oh balls.” I waved him off. I squatted to fasten the buckle of the rucksack where Beans had done his exploring. “Believe what you want. Whatever goes easier on your ego, okay?”

“You’re projecting, Livie.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“That it’s a far sight easier on your ego to leave now, rather than run the risk of seeing what happens between us when the disease starts getting worse.”

I leapt, with a stumble, back to my feet. “It’s not a disease. It’s a bloody disorder.”

He turned his apple in his
fin
gers, three bites taken from it. I saw he’d eaten his way into a bruise. The pith was mudcoloured. It looked inedible. He took a bite directly from the damaged spot. I shuddered. He chewed.

“Why don’t you give me a chance?” he asked.

“To what?”

“Prove myself. Be your friend.”

“Oh please. Don’t get smarmy. That makes my skin crawl.” I wrestled into the straps of the rucksacks again. I went to the table where my shoulder bag lay, spilling its contents. I shoved them inside. “Play-act at sainthood with someone else,” I said. “Go back to Earl’s Court. Find yourself another tart. But leave me alone.” I began to pull the shoulder bag from the table. He leaned forward and circled his fingers round my arm.

“You still don’t get it, do you?”

I tried to jerk away but he held me
fir
m. “What?”

“Sometimes people love each other just to love each other, Livie.”

“And sometimes people go parched from spitting at the moon.”

“Hasn’t anyone ever loved you without expectation? Without demanding something in return?”

I pulled away from him but still I couldn’t loosen his grip. My flesh would bruise where his fingers held me. I’d find their marks in the morning.

“I love you,” he said. “I admit it’s not the way you want to be loved. It’s not the way you think of men and women loving and being together. But it’s love all the same. It’s real and it’s there. Most of all, it’s there. And the way I see it, that kind of love is enough to get us through. Which is a far sight more than you can expect to get from some bloke you
fin
d on the street.”