looked severely at as I sipped at the cream from the top.
‘It’s always a little watery in here,’ I said, avoiding his gaze, ‘but you don’t really want it properly thick when you’re eating anyway.’
‘It’s a meal in of itself, right?’
‘Yeah.’
We were quiet again; Bernard’s phone went off, and he smiled at me, apologised and darted into one corner of the room to answer it. Rather than take out my notebook again, and face that word, I took another mouthful and let my head fall backwards.
I was sat on a refurbished church pew, given padding and ink-stained to give it the look of real vintage furniture. As it was so positioned against the wall, my head could rest on the bottom of the windowsill which ran immediately behind me. When the waitress entered with Bernard’s coffee, standing atop its little white saucer, I immediately wondered at what she saw.
Bernard was there, of course – he would hold her attention first, in the way he paced across the room like a man possessed; he alternated between hushed whispers and raucous laughter – raucous enough to imitate the howling rage that rolled outside the hotel’s door. He cut a very fine figure, I noted, as I closed my eyes and imagined seeing him through hers. He was tall, with the chiselled cheekbones of a cocaine addict puffed out by success. He reeked of wealth, I knew, and he had the presence to dominate the room. Even if I had been the one standing, gesticulating to his invisible companion, he would have leant back in his chair with perfect balance, offered her an easy smile and flashed his eyes at her and the sunlight coming through that uncluttered window would have caught his hair and he would have been her Victoria – Dr Bernard Victor.
But what would she have seen when she turned to our table? A tallish figure, pale skinned and sickly in the sunlight. She would have seen me bathing in the warmth of a star, with my neck tilted back and my Adam’s apple poking prodigiously from a slim neck. She would have seen dark hair, falling around my face and curling where it hit the windowsill. She would have seen a well-worn shirt above inconspicuously stained jeans, she would have seen fingers resting on the table like I was swearing in a court of law, edging ever closer to my Guinness again – she wouldn’t have seen my eyes, my teeth; she wouldn’t know that I was ill, sick, with my heart beating in my throat and my bones pushing outwards against my muscles, warring with my veins and my arteries, constrained by tendons.
I raised my head and thanked her when she placed his coffee on the table – she smiled at me, nervously, like I had to be placated, and moved back towards the bar. She was pretty; too pretty to work at the Raven Hotel in Wigan, with fascists and fascistic anti-fascists and the weapons of fascism, disguised as men, holding the two at bay as they clashed together in the street.
She left and I smiled, and wished I spoke French. She might be too pretty to work at the Raven Hotel, but she was just pretty enough to be a barmaid or a waitress at l'hôtel corbeau. I righted my head, twisted left and right to relieve the developing strains and caught sight of myself in the mirror beside me. Since I had chosen my seat, I had avoided staring into the mirror, but I now caught a fleeting glance of myself or, at least, the silhouette. I was a ragged figure; my clothes didn’t quite fit me anymore, they were always a little too loose or large or cut far too short; perhaps it was that which marked my illness – try as I might, I may never resemble a normal person ever again. I saw Bernard’s reflection look at me oddly for a moment before he hung up the call.
‘Sorry about that,’ he smiled at me, but it was a distant smile – strained, ‘it’s a work thing.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘you gotta go?’
‘No, no, nothing like that.’ He almost sounded regretful; I’d never heard that before.
He sat down again and started to put sugar into his coffee; I watched him in silence as he took three, four, five, six, seven packets of sugar, ripped them all in one motion and upended them into the black liquid. He stirred it for a moment, looking into the cup as it swirled, like a black whirlpool and he was Poseidon.
‘You’re sick.’
‘I know; that’s why I came to you.’
A smile just behind his lips, somewhere between his teeth, I thought; he looked at me over the porcelain rim of the cup – his eyes creaking back into positive position.
‘Tell me again – tell me it all again.’ He had that voice now, that doctored voice – it was perfect, and seemed to lilt towards the end, like something soothing; a suggestion, not a medical command. I took another drink to clear my throat and, then, I cleared my throat.
‘I don’t know what to call it, but there is something wrong with me. I can feel it, even now, I can feel it. It moves through my veins or my arteries or something every single morning, without fail. I can feel it rising from the soles of my feet, from my heels, and by the end of the day it’s just flooded me. It’s a kind of overwhelming pressure and everything seems to fall away – at the same time, everything is so near, so vivid in its distance that I’m like a, I dunno, a HD camera given some blurring filter, you know?’ He nodded, softly, encouragingly. ‘It’s like, like rage; like, like distance and there’s this claustrophobic thing, like I’m being choked, like my brain’s being starved and, I don’t know, it’s just some, some thing, that I just can’t get away from, cos’ it’s inside me; do you know what I mean?’ I leant forward, letting my elbows rest on the table and my hands seemed to move of their own accord. ‘No, you don’t; it’s not rage, it’s not anger or misery, it’s nothing like that. They’re too, too quick, they’re like the snap of lightning across a synapse, right? This thing, it’s, it’s, it’s the roll of thunder through the subconscious, you know, building a wave - building this storm in my blood that just rattles and rolls and rises until it hits me and I’m drowning in it.’ Like the snapping of fingers, I leant back and immediately felt the shame of my words burning in me – I felt guilty; was I overreacting? Surely everyone felt this way? If not, maybe I just needed some more iron in my system, or to down some foul, powdery calcium tablet every morning.
‘You said that you’d done research into it, right? Did you find anything out?’ He leaned forward when I moved back, like we were attached by some unbreakable cord – razor thin wire of professional interest and, I hoped, a little personal concern.
‘No – nothing; nothing concrete anyway.’ I looked into his eyes for a moment, quite accidentally.
‘Chips?’ The waitress’ voice broke into the space between us and snapped the wire – we looked up at her and Bernard leant back, running a hand through his hair. She placed our food in front of us and, almost immediately, I regretted not asking for something else. His breakfast made my stomach turn with longing, and the small amount of chips I had, artistically placed inside a plastic basket that was designed to look like it had been woven from rope, looked sorry when compared to his black bacon, still hissing with heat and fat and the egg which he burst over his toast like a surgeon.
‘How long does it take to kick in; this feeling of yours? You said by the end of the day?’ He unwrapped the butter the waitress had brought with his meal and he began to smear it into his slightly overdone toast like a mystic – such simple movements, but so obviously showing his confidence, his health; he wasn’t even paying attention to it, I knew. His eyes were on me.
‘Yeah, well; as I said, most of the day, usually.’ He looked down at his meal for a moment, as though deciding where to begin, but his eyes shot up to me questioningly, ‘I mean, I can feel it crawling up my body. I couldn’t feel it at all when I first got up, but now I can feel it in my ankles and below – it’s like they’re in a warm liquid, something more like a jelly than water. I can feel the warmth all over them, feel the gentle pressure, but there’s nothing I can do about it. When it first started, I had a habit of taking my shoes off, my socks, and letting the cooler air reach my bare skin, but it never made a difference. As soon as this jelly-sickness wraps itself around them, they might as well be dead to me; I can’t feel sensation f
rom them, I just know they are there, just the warmth that seems to come from within them, no matter what atmosphere their surface is exposed to, hidden from, whatever.’
The butter was melting into his bread, like a city sinking beneath the waves, or shrivelling beneath a nuclear summer. I stuffed a few chips in my mouth as he waited, expectantly; I didn’t have much else to say – how could I? How could I explain this thing, this illness which was so alien to me and, yet, so familiar that it was routine? It was life! Just another thing to fight, like hunger or sleep or thirst.
‘It was the specialist on the phone, just then.’ He said, cutting into his slightly blackened sausage – he speared one end skilfully, rolled it in the over-flowing egg yolk, and stuffed it into his mouth. ‘You know; the woman I told you about?’
‘Oh, yeah.’ I pulled one long chip out of the basket and bit half of it off. ‘What did she say?’
‘She said she hasn’t heard of it before – but then, we didn’t really expect her to have done. She’ll see you at the end of the week, if you’re free? Just after the election?’
‘Sure; you book me in?’ I finished my chip.
‘I told her you’d be there on Friday; she’ll email a time over