Jenny Downham: Before I Die aka Now is Good

‘Brief stinging sensation coming up,’ the doctor says.

Dad strokes my hand with his thumb as waves of static heat push into my bones. It makes me think of the words ‘for ever’, of how there are more dead than living, of how we’re surrounded by ghosts. This should be comforting, but isn’t.

‘Squeeze my hand,’ Dad says.

‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

‘When your mother was in labour with you, she held my hand for fourteen hours and didn’t dislocate any fingers! There’s no way you’re going to hurt me, Tess.’

It’s like electricity, as if my spine got jammed in a toaster and the doctor’s digging it out with a blunt knife.

‘What do you reckon Mum’s doing today?’ I ask. My voice sounds different. Held in. Tight.

‘No idea.’

‘I asked her to come.’

‘Did you?’ Dad sounds surprised.

‘I thought you could hang out in the café together afterwards.’

He frowns. ‘That’s a strange thing to think.’

I close my eyes and imagine I’m a tree drenched in sunlight, that I have no desire beyond the rain. I think of silver water splashing my leaves, soaking my roots, travelling up my veins.

The doctor reels off statistics to the student. He says, ‘Approximately one in a thousand people who have this test suffer some minor nerve injury. There’s also a slight risk of infection, bleeding, or damage to the cartilage.’ Then he pulls out the needle. ‘Good girl,’ he says. ‘All done.’

I half expect him to slap me on the rump, as if I’m an obedient horse. He doesn’t. Instead, he waves three sterile tubes at me. ‘Off to the lab with these.’ He doesn’t even say goodbye, just slides quietly out of the room, student in tow. It’s as if he’s suddenly embarrassed that any of this intimacy happened between us.

But the nurse is lovely. She talks to us as she dresses my back with gauze, then comes round the side of the bed and smiles down at me.

‘You need to lie still for a while now, sweetheart.’

‘I know.’

‘Been here before, eh?’ She turns to Dad. ‘What’re you going to do with yourself?’

‘I’ll sit here and read my book.’

She nods. ‘I’m right outside. You know what to look for when you get home?’

He reels it off like a professional. ‘Chill, fever, stiff neck or headache. Drainage or bleeding, any numbness or loss of strength below the puncture site.’

The nurse is impressed. ‘You’re good!’

When she goes out, Dad smiles at me. ‘Well done, Tess. All over now, eh?’

‘Unless the lab results are bad.’

‘They won’t be.’

‘I’ll be back to having lumbar punctures every week.’

‘Shush! Try and sleep now, baby. It’ll make the time go more quickly.’

He picks up his book, settles back in his chair.

Pinpricks of light like fireflies bat against my eyelids. I can hear my own blood coursing, like hooves pounding the street. The grey light outside the hospital window thickens.

He turns a page.

Behind his shoulder, in the painting, smoke innocently rises from a farmhouse chimney and a woman runs – her face tilted upwards in terror.

‘Get up! Get up!’ Cal shouts. I pull the duvet over my head, but he yanks it straight off again. ‘Dad says if you don’t get up right now, he’s coming upstairs with a wet flannel!’

I roll over, away from him, but he skips round the bed and stands over me, grinning. ‘Dad says you should get up every morning and do something with yourself.’

I kick him hard and pull the duvet back over my head. ‘I don’t give a shit, Cal! Now piss off out of my room.’

I’m surprised at how little I care when he goes.

Noise invades – the thunder of his feet on the stair, the clatter of dishes from the kitchen as he opens the door and doesn’t shut it behind him. Even the smallest sounds reach me – the slosh of milk onto cereal, a spoon spinning in air. Dad tutting as he wipes Cal’s school shirt with a cloth. The cat lapping the floor.

The hall closet opens and Dad gets Cal’s coat for him. I hear the zip, the button at the top to keep his neck warm. I hear the kiss, then the sigh – a great wave of despair washing over the house.

‘Go and say goodbye,’ Dad says.

Cal bounds up the stairs, pauses a moment outside my door, then comes in, right over to the bed.

‘I hope you die while I’m at school!’ he hisses. ‘And I hope it bloody hurts! And I hope they bury you somewhere horrible like the fish shop or the dentist’s!’

Goodbye, little brother, I think. Goodbye, goodbye.

Dad’ll be left in the messy kitchen in his dressing gown and slippers, needing a shave and rubbing his eyes as if surprised to find himself alone. In the last few weeks he’s established a little morning routine. After Cal leaves, he makes himself a coffee, then he tidies the kitchen table, rinses the dishes and puts the washing machine on. This takes approximately twenty minutes. After that he comes and asks me if I slept well, if I’m hungry and what time I’m going to get up. In that order.

When I tell him, ‘No, no and never,’ he gets dressed, then goes back downstairs to his computer, where he taps away for hours, surfing the web for information to keep me alive. I’ve been told there are five stages of grief, and if that’s true, then he’s stuck in stage one: denial.

Strangely, his knock at my door is early today. He hasn’t had his coffee or tidied up. What’s going on? I lie very still as he comes in, shuts the door quietly behind him and kicks his slippers off.

‘Shove up,’ he says. He lifts a corner of the duvet.

‘Dad! What’re you doing?’

‘Getting into bed with you.’

‘I don’t want you to!’

He puts his arm around me and pins me there. His bones are hard. His socks rub against my bare feet.

‘Dad! Get out of my bed!’

‘No.’

I push his arm off and sit up to look at him. He smells of stale smoke and beer and looks older than I remember. I can hear his heart too, which I don’t think is supposed to happen.

‘What the hell are you doing?’

‘You never talk to me, Tess.’

‘And you think this’ll help?’

He shrugs. ‘Maybe.’

‘Would you like it if I came into your bed when you were asleep?’

‘You used to when you were small. You said it was unfair that you had to sleep by yourself. Every night me and Mum let you in because you were lonely.’

I’m sure this isn’t true because I don’t remember it. He may have gone mad.

‘Well, if you’re not getting out of my bed, then I will.’

‘Good,’ he says. ‘I want you to.’

‘And you’re just going to stay there, are you?’

He grins and snuggles down under the duvet. ‘It’s lovely and warm.’

My legs feel weak. I didn’t eat much yesterday and it seems to have made me transparent. I clutch the bedpost, hobble over to the window and look out. It’s still early: the moon’s fading into a pale grey sky.

Dad says, ‘You haven’t seen Zoey for a while.’

‘No.’

‘What happened that night you went clubbing? Did you two fall out?’

Down in the garden, Cal’s orange football looks like a deflated planet on the grass, and next door, that boy is out there again. I press my palms against the window. Every morning he’s outside doing something – raking or digging or fiddling about. Right now he’s hacking brambles from the fence and chucking them in a pile to make a bonfire.

‘Did you hear me, Tess?’

‘Yes, but I’m ignoring you.’

‘Perhaps you should think about going back to school. You’d see some of your other friends then.’

I turn to look at him. ‘I don’t have any other friends – and before you suggest it, I don’t want to make any. I’m not interested in rubberneckers wanting to get to know me so they’ll get sympathy at my funeral.’