Three nights in and the pain is almost too much.
Every joint aches, every place where bone rubs on bone, sinew reaches into bone, where muscle twists around bone, I feel as if I am splintering into myself, cracking within from the depths of me. The places that hurt are all of the usual joints where any of us may rub away a lifetime of cartilage and find ourselves left with bone on bone, the places that get us all in the end—knees and hips, lower back, shoulders—but for me the pain is more than simply the aging of my skeleton and what surrounds it. This pain rises up at every point where a human body might bend or twist, reach or stretch, ricocheting internal agonies from bone to flesh and back again.
Each one of the knuckles on my fingers and my toes is a site of concentrated suffering. She shall cry wounding wherever she goes. My neck, my elbows, my wrists, are racked from inside. Every one of the knobbly vertebrae counting down my spine sing out their individual pain-name as I try to rest, give myself to the ground. I hope that lying might be easier than sitting, standing easier than lying. Decades of this pain have taught me that there is no easier way, have shown me the steps I must pass through to come to ease, and still I shift in my chair, lift in my bed, turn in my pose in vain hope.
My body moves because it cannot be still in pain, my mind a labyrinth of pointless suggestions, each one tried a dozen times or more. I know there is no remedy, no solution, just the pain, standing, sitting, sleeping, not sleeping, living with pain and, even so, I search for respite. I practise giving in to it, I meditate on ignoring it, I attempt revelling in it because there is nothing to be done, yet maybe this is the one thing that can be done, and I greet my pain as one long-known.
There is no way round but allowing it and eventually, every other option tried and failed, I do. I cede. You would think that after all these years I would have learned to give in sooner, taught myself to accept, to stay with, instead of trying to outrun, the inner mutilation. But I am not that evolved, have not yet become one who, confronted with her own mortality, can stare it in the face with equanimity. I look away, shadow my gaze, blink in coyness and fear and, eventually, as ever, pain takes my chin in her firm grasp, turns my lined face to hers and demands I look her in the eyes. Then, finally, I yield, give in, surrender. This pain is all of me. And what it heralds, what it reveals, is all and only mine.
Of course, I had a choice. I could have taken myself to the highest bridge and jumped into the abyss beneath, or thrown myself in front of a speeding train, a rush-hour bus heavy with urgent passengers. I could have filled my pockets with sea-smoothed stones and laid me down to welcome the rising tide. I have done none of these things because in the months or years between bouts of pain and revelation I lived as easily as you do, as normally as you do.
(Are you easy? Normal? No, neither am I, but we are all so skilled at the pretence, aren’t we?)
I did not kill myself, I had no choice but to bear it. I have borne it for decades now.
* * *
The first time it happened, I was a girl edging into a woman. Given what comes after the pain I have often thought how useful it would be if I could link these bone and muscle and tissue pains to the pain of my own bleeding, one linked to the other, blood to blood in a womanly echo. That is how nice stories go, but it is not what happened and this is not a nice story. I was well into my fifteenth year, accommodated to my personal lunar cycle when the pain cycle began, the other rhythm that has ruled my life for more than five decades.
The orbit of my torment is not regular, it matches no heavenly bodies even though it is deeply ingrained in earthbound ones, bound for the earth. The irregularity means that even after all this time it creeps up on me and I can be in the throes before I realise I am part of it again, my darker cycle.
Since I became menopausal this has been my only cycle and it has come more often. In my youth I experienced it just once or twice a decade, more than enough for a growing person, one already feeling too fiercely the shifts and uncertainties as we begin to make our way in our teens and twenties, those awful years of no belonging, no true home. When my children were small the episodes of pain came more often, but I attributed that to any mother’s mortal fears for her child, every mother’s excessive imaginings—though I did not need imagination to understand excess. The children left home, their fathers went too, and since I have lived alone I have paid more attention to this other pattern, the pattern only I possess. While I cannot track when it will arrive, it does not match weeks or months, count in sevens or twelves, I have come to know intimately the path it will follow once it is with me, when it takes me up, fills me up.
Today is my third day of pain, tonight will be the third night; I know I will sleep very little if at all. When I wake tomorrow the world will look quite different.
I didn’t know any of this the first time. I had the pains, yes, but my mother called them growing pains. My father thought I was trying to get out of school. My sister complained I’d kept her awake all night with my groaning, even though we had separate rooms by then and I knew that her nights were disturbed by her dreams of Clyde Forster, not my suffering. Before I understood that the pain was easier to bear by giving in to it, I tried to walk through it, work through it. I found that concentrating on something else, anything else, was useful if not entirely successful.
That morning I concentrated on the awful blood on the heavy boots of the lollipop lady. I imagined we would get to school and there would be an assembly about the dreadful accident that had happened before we all arrived. When no assembly was called and we trooped off to English, Biology, French with no call to come together and offer up prayers for the dearly departed, I decided the blood must have come from one of her cats. We knew the lollipop lady had a dozen cats or more. Her house was the old and smelly one at the end of Marshall Road, right where our ordinary town streets hit the beginning of the big dual carriageway. It must have been one of her cats, squashed beneath the wheels of an uncaring businessman’s company car as he raced to the meeting that would finalise his bonus, or broken beneath the huge tyres of the buses that drove factory workers from our little town to the dark new city four miles west. By the time our school day ended with ninety minutes of quadratic equations, the room and my brain slowed down by sun pouring through the afternoon windows, the pain had receded to less than a memory. It was a past itch of hurt, once there, now nothing even to remind me it had gone.
It came back three years later. By then I was training as a nurse. I was not drawn to nursing as a caring profession, nor was my own experience of pain the reason I had decided to train. I wanted to leave home, to get out of our stifling little town. I thought myself better than our parents and their factory jobs in the city. I knew I was neither as capable nor as interested in learning as my sister with her university place, and took the only route open to girls like me from people like mine.
Nursing paid a little while we trained and offered a small room in the nurses’ home; it was a way of getting out while not risking too much. I did not yet understand that there is no cocoon against risk.
Two years into my training I believed myself an independent nineteen-year-old. I had a prescription for the pill and a boyfriend in his third year of medical school; we were starting to weave dreams for a future together and thought ourselves very fine indeed. Our plans to share a small flat the following year would have been daring if my parents had been at all interested in what I did with my life, if his Nigerian family had any suspicions that he was wasting his precious study time with a poor white girl from a small town family. Mine were not and his did not and so we rolled into an easy two-step that allowed each of us to believe we were braver than we were while also offering ready access to the frantic and fulfilling sex our youthful bodies demanded.
The nurses’ home backed on to a graveyard, a crowded place of angels with broken wings standing sentry above young wives taken too soon in childbirth, dead children alongside them. Elizabeth aged nine years, Charles aged six years, Mary Alice four months, much beloved. Beyond the long dead babies was an Edwardian monstrosity of a church with no redeeming features. In a nod to the twentieth century the hospital trustees, a fat group of great and good who prided themselves on bettering this tired city and lifting it above the factories that enabled their largesse, had installed in the church tower an automated bell that tolled each hour from six in the morning until midnight, with a tedious peal at midday. No matter how late we nurses had gone to bed after our night shift, crawling back to our cupboard rooms with aching feet and eyes gritty from the night, the church bell assured us of our location and the exact hour we were failing to sleep.
My shift finished as usual at eight that morning, we talked through the handover until eight thirty, I left the hospital and made the short walk to the nurses’ home, rubbing dry eyes with hands that stank of liniment and bandages from my stint on the elderly ward, all arthritis and wasting lives. I sluiced away the worst of the night in the communal bathroom that served eighteen young women, pulled the thin curtains against the damp summer day and lay myself down on my bed. I had not even pulled up the covers before I fell asleep.
When the pain woke me the church bell was tolling midday. I came to, groggy and uncertain. By our second year we prided ourselves on hearing the bell every hour, noting its lunchtime alarm, but doing no more than shifting in our beds, turning the pillow to the cool side to sleep on. This was not an ordinary day.
The pain arrived with the repetitive peal and it did not leave me. It was different from the pain I experienced at fifteen, somehow both more on the surface of me—this time my skin hurt as much as the places where my bones met—and also deeper, in the marrow of me. It may be that by my second year of training I had words for these parts of me, for the capillaries that opened to allow burning blood to flow through, for the specific nerves ripping at me from deep inside muscle fibre, and that knowledge may have made my suffering more specific.
I lay for a full hour and marvelled at what was happening within me. From midday until the one o’clock bell I twisted and turned, sweated and froze, uttered guttural groans with my fist in my mouth to leave my neighbours sleeping and whispered into the foetid air of my tiny room the worst curses my Nigerian lover had taught me. I did all this and somehow lifted above the pain. I watched myself, observing from far within my mind while simultaneously experiencing each interminable second.
By early afternoon the pain had ebbed a little. This was to become the pattern for many decades of my life, a sudden onslaught, a slow leaving and then a pulsing of the pain, to and from my body, to and from myself, to and from the me that resided in the body and the me that cowered in my mind, watching pain run its course in morbid fascination. By the time I was washed and dressed ready for my shift the pain had receded to searing blossoms of agony every five to seven minutes, one burst in my lower back, the next in my left shoulder, the third stabbing between my intercostal muscles on the right-hand side, the fourth a solid burn at the back of my right eye. It travelled around my body, taking up residence for three, four, five impossible breaths and then moving on. I knew I could not explain it and therefore I would bear it. I thought I could bear it.
That night I sat beside an old man shunted out of the medical ward to a side room where he might more privately die of the disease that was choking him, locking air out of his lungs until all he could breathe was blood, his nose and mouth dripping with it. He died just after four thirty as the summer sun was making its way up over our tired city, his wife fifteen minutes too late to kiss him goodbye. My body kept on with the pulsating pain throughout his last hours and into that waking day, the wife’s first without him for fifty-two years. I was in the process of tidying him away when there was an emergency in the ward. I left the old lady with her dead old man and, as I had been trained, came running at the call of “Nurse!”
The call came from a surgeon I had not met before. I had done a brief surgical rota in my first year, but our longer training was yet to come. He wore surgical scrubs, mask, cap, but it was the blood that showed his profession, blood on his gloved hands, blood on the front of his gown, blood on his forehead where a clumsy surgical nurse must have wiped his brow during a tense procedure and mingled a patient’s blood with the sweat of his work. Two of my fellow trainee nurses were fussing over a middle-aged man. He’d been in for gallbladder surgery two days ago and was healing far too slowly, his drains were clogged, his scar red and inflamed. The surgeon shouted at them to step back, lurched forward to look at the man and roared as his leg caught on the patient’s catheter drain, urine spraying his scrubs a dark blue that made the blood stand out all the more.
He practically spat his instructions to the two flustered nurses, rattled off a list of drugs the sister needed to order up immediately, demanded the man be brought to him in theatre in four hours if the drugs did not take effect and turned on his heel, tearing off the filthy scrubs as he went, dropping them at the door to our ward so we could watch him stride away in a suit of arrogantly elegant midnight blue.
Sister Watkins glared after him and ordered one of the two nurses to deal with the man’s catheter and the other to pick up the scrubs. She wasn’t having her ward stinking of urine for the morning handover, she knew exactly what Sister Murphy would think of that.
“Not to mention all the blood on his scrubs, Sister,” I said, rushing to help my fellow trainee.
The first-year nurse looked at me. “What blood?”
Sister Watkins hissed at her to get on with the cleaning and hadn’t the patients been disturbed enough, before turning to me with an odd look on her face. “Were you with the old man when he died, Nurse?”
“Yes, Sister, but his wife’s in there now and I heard the call for a nurse, so I came to help.”
She smiled. Unlike Sister Murphy, Watkins was kind to us new nurses.
“I don’t imagine you’ve had too many dark deaths yet and his wasn’t a pretty sight, of course you’ve blood on the brain. Not to worry, you go and take the wife to get a cup of tea now. I’ll send someone to wash the man down with you, and then you can tidy up the room and hopefully their children will be here soon. Off you go. It will be easier from now on. The first nasty death is always the worst. I think I saw blood wherever I looked for a fortnight or more after my first.”
She was gone then to a call at the other end of the ward, the poor men in Surgical Three were not to get any sleep that night. I went back to look after my widow, to tidy up the dead man, and to marvel that my pain had disappeared in the more immediate fuss caused by death and piss. The rest of the shift was busy but without incident and I was in bed and listening to the church bell toll nine before I realised that Sister Watkins had been reassuring me because she thought I hadn’t seen blood on the surgeon’s scrubs at all, that it was simply a result of having been so close to a bloody death. Perhaps she was right. As I fell asleep I remembered the blood under his fingernails. Caked and dried brown.
* * *
The twins were three and my baby was six days old when the health visitor arrived and I refused to let her touch the baby, screamed blue murder as she reached out for him with her crimson blood hands. When my marriage broke up, when our daring, sex-centred love had not proved strong enough to withstand colicky twins, sleepless nights, the ongoing grind of daily racism, he moved home to Lagos and I found a job in a small town with a strong need for a part-time practice nurse and far enough from my family to no longer feel their ‘told you so’ looks.
I knew the health visitor; we worked alongside each other. She was ten years older than me, middle-aged well before her time, and had been kind about my marriage breakup, my need for part-time work, generous with her baby-care advice for the twins. She had turned decidedly sniffy when I told her about the pregnancy. Her words were that she’d have thought twins were more than enough for one woman on her own, but I know she was more annoyed that I was screwing the town’s only eligible single man. When I became pregnant and chose to keep the baby, keep the man as a friend and for sometimes-sex, she was horrified.
“Look, you’re a modern young woman, you don’t have to have this baby, you know.”
“I know.”
“I mean,” she hesitated, “I could help, if you like. There’s a woman I know, I assist her sometimes. Only young girls, you understand, or where things have gone wrong, the girls from the special school or up at the psych unit. Or some of these farm girls,” she said, warming to her theme, “they’ve seen plenty of it with the animals, think they know everything, and then they’re as surprised as Christmas when they fall.”
“But don’t some of them want…?”
She smiled. I think she thought the smile was coy but it was cruel. “Oh, they all think they want their babies, but they’re only children themselves, not old enough to know. Anyway, I just wanted to say, I could help, no one needs to know.”
“You mean you perform abortions on them without their consent?”
She was cold now, sharp. “A twelve-year-old cannot give consent. Her parents do.”
We did not speak again after that. We passed each other files and folders in the surgery. I paid particular attention to agitated mothers and young daughters in the waiting room and our health visitor’s subsequent half-days off. I should probably have told someone, but I was seven and a half months pregnant, alone with twins, my eligible lover had gone off me as the bloom faded and the heavy ankles and tired face flooded in—I didn’t have the energy. And in the weeks that followed, the cow-time weeks when I became slower and daily more nesting, settling, gathering in, I forgot everything but my little ones and the baby to come.
It was an easy birth compared to the twins; my lover was generous in his gifts if not his time or interest. I went home quiet and comfortable and happy with my lot, baby-love hormones flooding my body. Yes, I felt pain, but of course I did; the twins had been a caesarean birth, this was natural in its agonies, natural in its tears and rips, natural in its slow time too. But I welcomed that, I had wanted that experience. I went home and felt every moment of my uterus contracting, my body re-finding itself. It did not occur to me that these pains were those pains.
She only came to my little house down that long country lane because it was her job. I had known she would have to, I’d thought we would be polite, get it done, all would be well. But I could not hand him over to her, I couldn’t let her hold him, touch him. She was blood-soaked, wet with it, from her fingertips to her elbows.
They decided it was a post-partum psychosis, moved me to the hospital, put me under the observation of a psychiatrist and two nurses. I was fine, outside of her presence I was fine. When they mentioned her name I began to shake, all I could see was the blood.
For a single mother back then, with no partner, two brown babies and one white, I was very lucky. I had made a good impression in that town, everyone loves a practice nurse who remembers their name, takes care to be kind to them. I was not sectioned: it was a one-off incident; I promised to take it easy; I promised to be a good girl.
I kept that promise. I had worked it out. There was blood on their hands, their clothes, their faces, caked in their nails and pooled around their boots. They had been deep in blood and I could see it. My pains were a harbinger of their guilt. I had three children to look after, I did not mention the blood again, I did not scream when I saw it, I simply paid closer attention to any twinge or ache, to the blossoming pain when it finally arose, years apart each time, and then I looked out for the person I should avoid. The next person whose guilt I could read in red.
Five years later it was the twins’ PE teacher, a fit and strapping young man who had been, they said, a hero in the army. I went to a parent-teacher meeting and met him stuffing his face with Victoria sponge, blood running from the centre of his forehead into his eyes, nose, mouth. He munched on blood-soaked cake and I went home via evensong, found Jesus in the heart of a secretly evangelical Anglican vicar. My children left the state system that week and I became a dedicated church-goer until the end of their primary schooling.
My youngest was twenty-one and away at university when I married again, the twins travelling on two different continents. We had a register office wedding, our signatures, his oldest friend for witness. She was the best friend of his first wife, the wife who’d died of cancer over twenty years ago. Theirs had been Love Story and he the perfect grieving Ryan O’Neal who waited two decades to find me. He’d waited far beyond the acceptable period of mourning, everyone was delighted for him, delighted for us. I had not experienced the pains for sixteen years. I was almost forty.
I was careless.
I let down my guard, let him love me into a relaxation that meant I almost forgot the pain, forgot what I knew about it. Memory does strange things, it reduces the extremity of hurt, dampens down once-intense fear. It made me believe that perhaps they were all right when they told me it was my mind seeing things, not truth in blood. Nothing had happened, I was seeing blood that wasn’t there, I was wrong, mad, not bad, mistaken, not quite sane. The kind psychotherapist explained that my axis was tilted ever such a little and I saw things that were not hidden, as I had once assumed, but actually nonexistent. I saw things invented by my over-active mind or spirit or heart, perhaps all three.
I almost allowed myself to believe them. It was so much nicer to believe them, to be part of it all instead of standing outside, watching for blood. But my body knew, even when I denied what I had once understood, my gut knew, my muscles knew, my bones and tendons and sinews, my organs and the grey matter that is my brain, every piece of me that is solid and fibre and real, that is not thought or feeling, but real, actual, all of that part of me knew.
And one day that part of me, body-me, real me, insisted I see the truth, pulled me out of my soft mattress of complacency to show me the truth again. I hated my body for doing this to me.
Don’t we always? Wouldn’t we all prefer to go with the tide, float on gentle waves of trust and faith in each other, prefer not to see the truth, especially not the secrets our loved ones have hidden so well?
Whisper it to yourself, you know the answer.
My son came home from America. My first-born who arrived ten minutes before his sister and yet was always the shyer, quieter of the two. My son came home after four years away, living in a desert ashram, a forest retreat, a commune in a mangrove swamp. He had sent letters and emails, totems hand-carved from the driftwood of his journeying into himself. I felt his arrival. An hour before his delayed plane finally landed at Heathrow, forty minutes after it had started lazily circling London waiting for permission to land, the skies too busy that cold Tuesday afternoon, my pain had begun. It started in my uterus and this time I didn’t lie to myself. It was not period pain, it felt everything and nothing like period pain. This was mother-love revealed in terror. Not my boy, please not my boy.
But yes, of course, my boy.
Why not? Why should my family be immune? Why should any family be immune? Why should yours?
I held him and wanted to vomit. He was tall and fine, very beautiful and so tired. I stroked his matted hair, his tattooed back and his triple-scarred shoulder. He told me every cut line meant something and I believed him. I sat beside him in the back of the car, my husband driving ahead, a taxi-driver for our reunion, and my beautiful boy who was a blood-stained man lay his head in my lap and fell asleep. I sat perfectly still, pain coursing through every breath of me, and stared at the places where blood was marked on him. Both hands. His left foot. Each of the three shades of blood were slightly different, one to match each scar on his upper left shoulder at the front, just where it turned into chest. I could read the blood as easily as I could read the lies he had fed me in his emails and postcards home.
A week later, when he had caught up on his sleep, eaten everything I put before him with an appetite more voracious than anything he’d ever had as a child or teenager, when I was still in pain, while I still saw the blood on his hands, his foot, saw it smeared from him to his bedsheets, rubbed into the towels he left on the bathroom floor—no doubt the ashram and the retreat and the commune all had staff, he had a mother—I decided it was time to ask him for the truth. I told him to come with me for a walk along the beach and, perhaps it was my tone, perhaps he was just tired of sitting inside. He agreed easily. My husband and I moved out here two years ago; my husband is a painter, he came for the light. I came because I could not risk being around people, there is too much blood that I do not want to see. And then my son brought it home.
We walked along the shore, the North Sea smacking and punching at the sand, dragging it deep, and I asked him to tell me everything. I told him I was his mother, there was nothing he could not tell me. He told me nothing. He talked about his spirit and his senses, prattled about early-morning yoga and late-night chanting, of shared values and a hope for humanity. He assured me that he had not given up, but that it was a hard life in community. It was too tough to continually give of himself to others with no respite. My big boy, a foot or more taller than me, scooped me close to him with his bloodied hands and held me tight, telling me he had come home to rest with me, find his strength, enable him to go back out there and make the difference he was born to make.
I stood with my back to the roaring sea and I looked up into his beautiful face and I begged him to tell me about the people he had killed. I asked if it was an accident or murder. I promised him I would love him anyway but that I had to know. I told him how clearly I could see the blood on his hands, on his foot, how I lay awake at night imagining him stomping someone to death, the boot in the face, the steel toecap to an exploding liver, toxins and bile and death. I sobbed in physical pain and heart sorrow and the agony of a body that had grown him inside me, pleaded with him to tell me what had happened, give me the stories, whatever they were. I had never felt the pains so strongly, never been so sure I was right.
He was confused, bewildered. He denied it all at first. But I took his arms, his hands, I showed him where I saw the blood, I traced the lines of it, described the different shades. I knelt at his bare feet as the tide came in and tried to knock me over, knelt and showed him the blood that was not washed away, how it stayed on his skin. I promised him I could hear the truth, my hearing it would make him well again, whole again. And then we were both on our knees, he crying and clawing at me, shaking all over, me scrabbling in the sand, trying to beat the tide, pull the truth from him before the sea dragged me away.
My boy could not swim. He never got the hang of it. Even as a little child, he sank straight to the bottom of the pool. He was a little precious stone. A tall, thin, broken precious stone, soothed and shaped by rough sand on his soft scarred skin, rolled in roiling waves. I didn’t want to let him go but the pain in my arms was too deep, too much. My hands were seized up with cold and a deep bone ache that meant I could feel nothing else, I could not feel his skin on mine, his hand in mine. I could not feel his hand.
They said we looked like the Pietà. It felt more like solace. It must have been unbearable for him to be in the world, knowing what he had on him, death on his hands, his body. No wonder he had marked his skin with such ferocity, but all the tattoos did was make the red of the blood seem deeper, richer. The waves washed us both clean. When they found us I was almost gone myself, holding him close and feeling his body get colder and colder. The sun was long gone, the tide that had left us was on the turn. But I did not hurt, it was as if the water had peeled his crimes from his skin and at the same time had washed away my pain. For the first time in decades the pains were truly gone. Yes, they had receded for many years at a time, but I always had the fear of a return. This, giving my son to the sea, accepting ease in return, this felt like an exchange. I was spent.
I explained about the blood, of course, but I do understand it was hard for them to believe me. They were surprised that neither of my husbands knew of what I had endured, nor did my work colleagues, friends. When they went further back they noticed certain connections. A PE teacher who left the school in such a hurry, a rumour put about that he had been caught looking at the children as they undressed; he had left in order to escape questioning. A health visitor, nearing retirement, who had sent a typed letter of resignation and never gone back. It was on headed notepaper and she was definitely nearing the end of her time. A surgeon who had been asked out by a young nurse, presumably left his lovely wife and lovely home and lovely life for her too, no word, no message. A lollipop lady who one day toppled down the steep stairs in her old house, undiscovered for ten days, her half-feral cats left to fend for themselves, to feed themselves on her corpse.
When a woman is quiet, kind, unassuming, when she has a nice job and a nice enough life, nothing too bright, nothing too glamourous, it is easy to ignore her, easy to think that she has nothing to do with the big dramas of life.
When a woman can no longer ignore her own pain, can no longer ignore the evidence of her own eyes, then—perhaps—it is time to pay attention.
They are very kind to me here. All of them, the staff and the other residents. They prefer us to say residents, they say it makes the place feel less institutional. But I know where I am, I know who I am, what I feel, what I see.
Three days ago the pains began again. I’m looking forward to seeing the young woman who comes to visit on Wednesday afternoons. We talk and she takes notes. She thinks she is listening to me, and I’m sure she is, in her own way. But now that my pain has started, now the sap of agony is rising, my eyes will see more clearly. I am looking forward to what she shows me.