J.S. Lark - After You Fell

‘And pizza. Sorry, it’s more their party than yours,’ Mim whispers.

I don’t mind. If the boys are happy, I’m happy.

I have been guilty of spoiling Simon’s boys as if they are mine since they were born. They are a relief for the craving in my womb.

Dan hated me talking about children. He always said he wanted children, but then changed his mind two years ago.

‘Don’t go on about children, you can’t have them, you are too ill, stop talking about babies, even if we adopt how are you going to look after a child?’

Every time he said words like that there was another sharp pin stabbing into the voodoo effigy of me, the effigy it felt as if he held in his hand.

Then he told me, ‘I don’t love you any more. You have to go,’ driving a kitchen knife into my sick heart and making it shatter.

He moved his pregnant mistress in a week after Simon had loaded up the car with the boxes, bags and cases packed full of my half of our life together.

Every day, since the day I moved out of the flat, was a day to endure – surviving long enough to get this heart.

That was the end.

Now I have the heart.

This is the beginning.

It whispers to me all the time. The heart.

A coverall smile gathers up my expression as I walk into the house behind Mim; the smile I have given everyone who has asked how I feel over the years.

Simon’s hand touches my waist as he leans to put the case on the floor near the stairs in the hall. ‘Welcome home. I’ll take your case up after we’ve eaten.’

‘Thank you.’ The children and Mim are in the kitchen already. I turn, stretching up to wrap my arms around his neck. It pulls my chest. I hold on tight and pull him down a little.

He is six years older and six inches taller. I have stretched up to hold him for as long as I can remember.

His arms slide around my middle to return the hug. I kiss his cheek. He kisses mine. The world is perfect for a moment.

‘You’ll be all right.’

I nod as I let go, my cheek pricked by the hairs of his short beard. ‘I know I will. I’m excited.’

Excited because I know that one day soon I am going to start my own family.

Colour creeps up from his neck into his cheeks. The pink tint in Simon’s skin when he or I mention anything that might refer to Dan keeps telling me Simon feels guilty. Dan was, is, his friend.

Simon introduced Dan to me in my first year at college. Dan asked me out that day. But how we ended is not Simon’s fault and Simon took me in, looking after me for the last few months. Just as he did when we were children.

This man, my brother, is the perfect man. Mim is lucky.

‘Daddy. Auntie Helen. Hurry up. We’re hungry!’ The children shout from the kitchen as the mouth-watering smell of melted cheese and pepperoni wafts into the hall.

Simon smiles. There is a look in his eyes that I have seen for as long as I can remember. I see this look in my mind’s eye every night before I go to sleep. The expression says ‘I love you’ with no need for words.

I see that look from a young boy, and I am standing in another hall, in another house, and the boy … I don’t know him.

Will he be my child?

Am I connecting with spirits from the future now as well as the past?

‘You first.’ Simon’s hand lifts. ‘It’s your coming-home party. But go on up to bed if you start feeling too ill.’

‘Yes, Dad.’

A low laugh follows my movement.

A muffled ringtone vibrates through the fabric of my suitcase behind us. I turn back, pointing. ‘My phone.’

‘I’ll get it.’ Simon turns, bends to release the zip on the suitcase, takes out the phone and looks at the caller ID. ‘It’s Chloe.’ He puts the phone in my outstretched palm just as the ringing stops. ‘I’ll call her back after we’ve eaten.’ I slip the phone into the back pocket of my jeans.

‘She can come over if you want her to.’

‘Tomorrow. I’m too tired tonight.’

‘Whenever suits the two of you.’

The radio plays from its position at the end of the kitchen work surface; talking and singing to me as I skim through the internet pages, sliding the stories up on the small screen of my phone.

Even little things like this, like being able to concentrate on anything in the world outside my head, was hard in the years that illness stole my life. In the end, all I had the energy to do was sit in a chair and watch television and it was hard to even concentrate on that.

It is impossible for other people to imagine what it’s like to be trapped in a body that can’t do anything. My thoughts were busy controlling my breaths and cluttered with weakness, while pain constantly screamed, even through the fog of painkillers.

I thought about suicide when Dan and I split up. But whilst there was still a chance of being able to live properly with someone else’s heart, I held onto that cliff edge of hope for months. Living for when the time came.

The time is now, and ever since I have come back to Simon’s I’ve been feeling like a sprinter in the starting blocks waiting for the gun to go off. And when it does, I am going to run so hard and fast, just because I can.

Pump-pump. Pump-pump.

The sound of my heart continually talks to me. The blood thrusting through my body, making all my senses alert.

I can read today, I can read and soak up information like a sponge dropped into water, and at the same time I am listening to music.

The pulse of my heartbeat follows the baseline of the song on the radio – expressing its power.

If I could see my own aura, would it have changed? Would I now have some of the aura of the person whose body is muddled up with mine?

I still feel them. If it is them. I feel someone here. Someone who came back from the hospital with me. I think they’re trying to press their emotions into my heart, but it is just a pressure in my bloodstream that I do not understand.

A repeated knock rattles the thin glass in the back door; double glazing is still on Simon and Mim’s to do list in their 1920s terrace.

Before I respond the door handle twists. ‘Hello.’

‘Chloe.’ I stand up. ‘You made me jump.’ But I knew she was coming to make me lunch.

She smiles with the captivating look that made me fall for her friendship when I was sixteen. Before then my friendships had been brief play-dates and playground-mates. The foster homes and hospitals Simon and I had travelled around on a never-ending roller coaster meant I didn’t attach myself to people because in days or weeks we would move on.

I had not let proper friendships form until I had obtained control over my own life. Dan and Chloe came along at the same time; friends arriving like red London buses. They had become as important to me as extra limbs after only a few weeks.

Dan told me I was needy, that I had desperately been waiting for friends, and when I had found them I clung on.

I told him that if he’d had a childhood like mine and Simon’s he would know the value of loyalty and people who care about you.

Dan had not valued me.

Chloe’s dark hair tickles my ear as she holds me and I hold her. She values my friendship as much as I value hers. I have Chloe as well as Simon and the boys.

The scent of the perfume she always wears calms me immediately.

‘You look so well.’ Chloe’s voice is deep, sexy; it draws attention to everything she says. It made me gravitate towards her. It makes men gravitate towards her. When we were younger and I was well enough to go out there was always a pack of men around her by the end of the night.

Chloe’s aura is golden; it is shades of yellow, orange and amber.