She’s so fucking fragile, Lu, he says, I can’t take it anymore.
IT IS MY policy never to ask people what they do. If they want to tell me, that’s fine, but I would never ask. I understand the dread of being asked.
| stranger | What do you do? |
| me | I work one afternoon a week. I’ve been ill (for fifteen years). |
| stranger | You don’t look ill. |
| me | That’s good, isn’t it? |
| stranger | You seem to have a lot of energy. |
| me | That’s ‘cos we’re sitting down just talking. |
| stranger | Why can’t you do a job where you can sit down? |
| me | Because it’s not just my legs. If I overdo it my arms feel mashed up and my head shuts down. I can’t think straight. |
| stranger | I see. |
| me | You don’t believe me, do you? |
| stranger | No, not really. |
| me | I’ve got more fucking ‘O’ grades and Highers than you’ve had hot dinners, so please just leave me alone. (Into myself.) |
It was the same when I used to go to the post office to cash my sickness benefit – the people behind the counter looked at me suspiciously, especially if I was wearing lipstick.
I am thirty-five, but I still depend on Rita and Nab. Rita works part-time as a librarian. She trained as a nurse and stopped when she had me. Nab’s exotic, he grew up in Greenland. His Danish father taught there. Nab’s a hospital engineer. He’s high up.
They met on holiday in Tenerife: divorced Nab with his son Finn, and divorced Rita with me and my brother Sean. Rita’d used her savings to get a four-star hotel – we’d had a horrible three-star hotel in Alicante two years before, and my granny had spent the first day cleaning her room with Dettol. I still have my Alicante souvenir, a donkey with yellow nylon fur, peeling now, revealing the cheap grey plastic underneath.
Nab hired a car and took us round the island. Sean and I admired the bougainvillea and sheer drops politely. Finn was cool and wore black clogs. He was bored shitless. Volcanic rock didn’t impress him. Nab was easy to love but Rita and I secretly laughed at his Scandinavian Jesus sandals.
My real father Peter had his own dental practice above a butcher’s shop. He had minty breath and slept with his nurses. (A little more suction, please, Denise!) When you went through the close to get to the surgery upstairs, you could smell the meat from the butcher’s delivery entrance. Sometimes there was blood on the ground. There was a fish-tank in the waiting room and the goldfish always had a string of white shit hanging from its tail.
Peter left when I was ten but we still went to him for fillings. I didn’t find the divorce traumatic – I’d never really liked him. The only thing I have in common with him is that we both love raw onion.
Sean is four years younger than me. We grew up on the Bonnie Banks. Our house was right next to the park. You nipped over the fence, jumped the ditch, ran past the Michael tree (a boy called Michael fell off it and died), through the rhododendrons, and you were at the top of a huge grassy hill, Loch Lomond spread out in front of you.
Every spring the park was carpeted with bluebells. We’d pick Rita giant bunches for her birthday, Mother’s Day and Easter. She must’ve been sick of them – they’re not exactly fragrant. In fact, bluebells stink. (Also, they are toxic to deer and cattle.)
And, there is Brian, I depend on him too, for his big wide love, Rita’s youngest brother, brain-damaged at birth, not profoundly, but enough to make him happy.
I HAVEN’T ALWAYS been ill. Once upon a time, I got lots of ‘A’s and played right-inner for the school hockey team. I wasn’t very good but that’s not the point. I loved the clatter of the game and the gorgeous bruises and the orange segments at half-time. I loved the adrenaline at the start, the jamming and locking of sticks when the centre-forwards fought for possession of the ball.
Ground, Stick! Ground, Stick! Ground, Stick! BALL!
We had to wear disgusting maroon hockey skirts. We envied the nearby private school whose uniform was deep lilac and much sexier.
When we left school, my best friend Rachel and I got summer jobs at the Swan Hotel. The staff had to wear tartan. Rachel and I wore mini kilts and flirted with the chefs. The bottle boy was always trying to get Rachel to go down to the cellar with him.
The local speed-boat owners came regularly with their beer bellies and Alsatians. Dogs weren’t allowed, so the Alsatians clipped along the pier, barking at the swans while their owners devoured scampi-in-the-basket washed down by pints of heavy. Coach parties were a nightmare, tea and coffee for eighty. Josie, the woman who made the sandwiches, would test if the bread was defrosted by holding the cold slices against her hairy face. The tourists nibbled on their egg and cress and gazed out at Ben Lomond, blissfully unknowing. When it was quiet, I would sit at the bar, folding napkins, remembering how Peter used to bring us here on Sundays for chicken-in-the-basket. Sean and I would sneak into the ball-room and slide on the polished dance floor. Rita would be staring out at the loch. She hated it when her husband played happy families.
Sometimes, after our shifts, we would go up the park and hide in the rhododendrons and get stoned with the commis chefs. We’d talk rubbish, pissing ourselves laughing amongst the crimson flowers and shiny leaves. One time, we put dope in tea and watched Yellow Submarine at the bar manager’s flat. Nothing for an hour then my elbows were made of cotton and my tongue felt like sawdust. It was a bit scary. I kept saying, I’ve got cotton elbows, but Rachel couldn’t stop laughing.
In my first year at university, I commuted, thought nothing of the mile walk to the train station. Why would I?
I met Hadi, handsome and narcissistic, at the beginning of the second term. He was Libyan and had his own flat and a fat black cat called Blue because she liked the blues. When Hadi had the munchies he would overfeed her, tipping Whiskas onto a saucer, tapping the spoon against the rim to get her attention: Come on, fat lady, come to eat! Hadi hardly ever went to his engineering lectures and got his friends to photocopy their notes for him.
His erection was bent like a banana and he rolled his eyes when he came. I thought this was normal. The third time we had sex he complained about using Durex (‘stupid skins’) and said I should go on the pill. I told him I wouldn’t have sex without a condom because I didn’t know his history. He pouted and accused me of being neurotic and clinical about