want to be judged against what I was before. I wanted to be among strangers who’d never known me as someone who could walk. I wanted to present this as a
The physicist smiles. ‘I can see that. And that’s one of the reasons—’ He stops. ‘You’re cleverer than I am, Gabrielle. And you have a mean streak. So listen. You’re not to ridicule me and make me feel like a twat.’
‘Just please don’t tell me you admire me for my courage.’
‘I wasn’t going to,’ he says, standing up and moving his chair away from me. ‘Put your arms round my neck,’ he says, leaning down. I reach up to him. The physicist’s chest is broad, as warm as bread from the oven. I can feel the thump of his heart. Which means he can feel mine too. ‘Hold on tight.’ He’s clasping my whole torso close to his. ‘I was going to say,’ he says, lifting me bodily out of the chair and settling me against him with my knees over the crook of his arm. He is big and I am small but I’m still worried that I must feel like a sack of potatoes though he bears my weight as if it’s nothing. Then his face is next to mine and he’s rocking us both. We stay like that for a while, swaying together in the warm night air. The sky has darkened and the moon is a pallid crescent. It’s absurd. It’s romantic. It’s ridiculous. I love it and I want to die, but not in the way I usually want to die. ‘What I was going to say was, it’s one of the reasons I keep wanting to do this.’
‘What, weight-training?’ Why can’t I stop myself?
‘Spoil it again and I’ll drop you. Just shut up and listen because I’m being romantic here.’ Yes, I think. You are. And I can’t handle it. It will kill me. It will kill my belief that I am no longer a woman. No, worse, it will revive the hope that I am, and then all that can happen is that it will be shredded. I close my eyes. ‘It’s one of the reasons I keep wanting to hold you in my arms,’ says the physicist. ‘And then kiss you.’
‘Did you like that?’ he says finally, as our lips part. It was spectacularly potent. I am like a recovering alcoholic going back on the booze. I’d forgotten what kissing was like, what kissing does to the rest of you. But my body — what’s left of it — hadn’t. Hasn’t. Is now in a turmoil of wanting, and not knowing how to get, how to have.
‘Frazer Melville.’ It’s as though his name has been trapped inside me and his kiss has released it. He settles me on the sofa, still holding me close. ‘Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville, Frazer Melville.’ Like my Spanish mantra, it’s similar to rolling a strange taste around on my tongue, a taste I could get addicted to. I want more. Of his name, of everything, of him.
He pulls back to look at me. ‘Answer my question.’ He sounds proud but a little pinch of worry has appeared on the bridge of his nose. ‘Did you like it?’
When no human being of the opposite sex, public health professionals excepting, has touched you intimately in two years—
The feel of another body. The press of lips. It’s too much for me. I am done for.
‘Well,’ I say, trying to sound hard-boiled but failing. ‘The thing is, I’m supposed to have an insight into people’s psyches. And an understanding of body language and the human impulse. It’s the basic job description.’
‘Meaning?’
‘That if you were giving out any signals, I missed them.’
‘But your lack of professional skills aside, my question was: did you like it?’
‘No. I hated it,’ I say. I am aware of the muscles around my mouth. They are doing something they’re not used to doing. It’s not that I don’t smile, I realise. It’s that I don’t normally smile this wide. It’s the mad banana smile from my nephew’s birthday card. No, I didn’t pick up his signals. Not properly. But he picked up mine: the ones I only half-knew I was giving. Oh, OK. The cleavage thing, the make-up, the perfume, the straight-out-of- hospital-into-green-stilettos — I know. But. ‘But just to be sure, why not do it again two or three more times,’ I say coolly, pulling a swatch of hair across my bald patch. ‘And I’ll let you know my final decision.’
In rehab, I read a manual about paralysis and sexuality, entitled
‘Kiss me again, Frazer Melville,’ I tell him. ‘And then take me to bed.’
Later, as I fall asleep next to him, with the fan churning the hot night-air across our skin, I know something important. I am still a woman whose body can experience physical delight. A woman who has missed, more than she ever admitted, the intimacy, tenderness and intensity of sex. And if her lower section can’t muster an orgasm, her nipples and brain most certainly can.
Chapter Six
The trouble with the principle of ‘time out’ is that one patient’s personal hell is another’s idea of a cushy number. Like any bottomless pit, Bethany Krall, freshly ensconced in the peer-free zone referred to as ‘seclusion’, is enjoying the increased attention levels she is receiving. Therapist contact has been upped to five hours a day in the wake of her attack on Newton, and she is on ‘one-to-one’: 24-hour risk-assessment with a nurse in continuous attendance, who will be watching for self-harming behaviour. We’re on a rota basis. Her food is brought in on a tray. ‘Room service,’ she calls it: that, too, suits her current narcissistic mood. When she needs the toilet, she is escorted there by Lola or another female nurse, who keeps her in full view at all times. Lola has told me that Bethany makes the most of this, and performs scatological running commentaries for the benefit of her audience. We discuss the damage she has inflicted but she is unrepentant. Instead, she is eager to know the gory details. In particular, which part of the globe the surgeon extracted from Newton’s scrotum when removing his irretrievably damaged testicle.
‘I’m betting it was Scandinavia. As in Norway, Finland, Sweden and Denmark.’ If nothing else, it seems her knowledge of geography has expanded, thanks to the atlas she’s brought in with her.
‘Perhaps if you stay in solitary confinement long enough, you’ll eventually get an education and become Bethany Krall, Professor of Earth Sciences,’ I suggest. She laughs, a dirty, full-throated laugh that is too old for her, and the braces on her teeth flash in the light. Twinkle twinkle. There has been a lot of gaiety from Bethany since she has been moved to a bare cell in McGrath Wing, where we now find ourselves, with Rafik in attendance. But none of it is of the balanced-member-of-the-community variety.
‘I wonder if that episode reminded you of anything that happened two years ago, at home?’
She smiles patronisingly. ‘Wrong questions again, Wheels. You’re one fuck of a slow learner. By the time you get what’s going on, you and your spazmobile will be, like, ten metres underwater. Bibble babble, with bubbles. Hey, joke.’ Oh well, I think. So be it. Nothing can get me down today. I smile benignly at little Bethany Krall because I can afford to.
I am a woman who has had sex.
I could ask for more intensive sessions with Bethany in the wake of her attack on Newton. But resuming our previous arrangement would run
‘How’s Newton doing in hospital? Ungk. Are you sure you have the physical backup you need for this job? Gah. Has your confidence taken a battering in the wake of this? Ungk. Have you done your police statement? Do you need some time off, now that the thing’s been paperworked?’
I struggled to answer him coherently and convincingly as he to’d-and-fro’d, shovelling his sweaty air from one side of the room to the other, as though it were a task he could later tick off the day’s list: transport X molecules of gas from A to B. I stuck to my plan of keeping it short. The tiny digital clock on his exercise device showed me that our entire conversation lasted one minute forty-eight seconds. At the end of which I showed him the drawing Bethany had made of the stick-figure.
He raised his eyebrows. ‘Good work. Pursue it.’
