“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get this done.”
I’d almost forgotten why we were there. Gus helped me to my feet and steered me to the reception desk. He filled out forms for me and pointed at places I needed to sign. Somehow I still possessed my battered driving licence. The receptionist photocopied it and reminded me I’d need to return within the month with proof I was living at Gus’s address.
A month. Shit. I’d had plans to be gone two weeks ago, and yet I was still here, surgically attached to Gus’s side as he parented me through the simple fucking process of registering for medical care.
“He needs an appointment,” Gus said when the paperwork was done. “Is the sit and wait clinic running today?”
“Until half eleven. Take a seat.”
Gus towed me back to the hard plastic chairs we’d left behind.
“We don’t have to do this today,” I protested. “I can come back.”
“Or you could stay and get it sorted now.”
“Sorted?” I laughed without humour. “Don’t you think if there was a magic pill I’d have swallowed it by now?”
“I didn’t mean sorted in the literal sense. I know what it’s like to recover from surgery, dude. I know it takes time.”
Of course he did. He had a drawer full of meds leftover from knee surgery. Shamefully, I’d forgotten that too. Self-absorbed prick. “What happened to your knee?”
Gus sat down and gestured for me to do the same. “Slid down a ladder too fast. Landed bad. It was only cartilage damage, though. I can’t imagine what it was like to break the bones.”
Unbidden, memories of waking up to rods protruding from my shattered shoulder flashed through my mind. I couldn’t recall much with any clarity, but fuck, I remembered the pain. “It’s a weird thing,” I said slowly. “To realise your bones are fragile things, not something invisible that you take for granted.”
Gus nodded. “Like lots of stuff, I’d imagine. Can I ask you something?”
“Not if you’re about to compare my shitty bone-breaking analogy to my relationship with my brother.”
“I’m not.”
I nodded for him to continue. He folded his arms across his chest, dashing my hopes that he might touch me again. “What happened to your knuckles? I feel like I’m missing something really obvious.”
“Oh.” I sat back in my chair. “I already told you it’s stupid.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t tell me why, so I reckon it’s probably not.”
“Fucking psychic, are you?”
“Do I need to be to understand you?”
“Why do you want to understand me?”
Gus rolled his eyes. Just like he’d done at my reticent, closed-book motherfucker of a brother, and something inside me gave way. A wall I’d perhaps not known was there. I wasn’t like Luke. I couldn’t be, or we were all fucked.
All? Right. Cos there was a fucking army of people wanting to hear my tales of woe.
But Gus wanted to listen, and I’d run out of reasons not to let him.
I blew out a noisy breath. “I punch stuff when my shoulder hurts...like, really hurts. You know, the kind of pain that consumes every part of you until you can’t think about anything else.”
“I know it,” Gus said. “Paracetamol doesn’t touch it, but couldn’t you have got a prescription from the hospital?”
“You need an appointment for that, with the surgeon, and I didn’t have a fixed address, so...anyway, I had some dodgy morphine pills for a while. They helped, but I promised Luke I wouldn’t score street drugs anymore, so when they ran out, I found a way to cope that I didn’t need anyone else for.”
I didn’t add that my first attempt had seen me slamming my good shoulder against a brick wall. That my second had involved hot candle wax and whisky. The horror in Gus’s stricken expression was enough, and I’d bared my soul enough for one day.
A doctor emerged from a room and called my name. I got up and left Gus alone with whatever he was thinking.
Whatever he was thinking turned out to be him being even more obsessed with what I ate than normal. “We need to cook something.”
I glanced up from reading the leaflet from my physiotherapy referral. “Cook? I thought we’d already established that was a health hazard.”
“No, we admitted we both can’t be bothered, not that it was permanent.”
The irony. I did need to eat, though. Or my fancy new chronic pain meds would give me an ulcer. “There’s loads of Super Noodles in the cupboard. I’ll make them.”
“You’re not eating that junk.”
If anyone else had said that to me, I might’ve decked them, but Gus spoke so absently, and with such worry in his earnest gaze that I took no offence. “It’s not junk, and for fifty pence a pack, who the fuck cares?”
Gus said nothing and went back to opening and shutting the fridge. I ignored him for a while, but eventually, the squeak and thunk of the fridge door was enough to drive me to my feet.
I came behind him and shut the fridge. “Are you so hungry that you’ve gone past the point of reasonable thought?”
“Whoever said I was reasonable?”
Everyone who’s ever met you. But that was beside the point, and I suddenly felt like the world’s biggest arsehole. Escorting me to the doctor had taken three hours of his day, then he’d skipped lunch to patch up an old lady’s roof for free while I’d huddled in the van counting the hours until the slow-acting drugs the GP had prescribed took effect.
I still couldn’t feel any marked difference, and my shoulder throbbed with every breath I took, but Gus being tired and hungry hurt more.
Especially as it was all my fault.
I reached around him and opened the fridge again. It hadn’t changed since I’d looked in it last night, and perhaps that was my fault too. If I hadn’t spent all my money on cigarettes and crappy noodles that wouldn’t sustain Gus longer than ten minutes, I might’ve
