Chapter 6
SIX
Aidan
When I was a kid, I spoke so rarely that my teachers thought there was something wrong with me. They sent me to a speech therapist who concluded I was a sullen little git who needed to get out more, so I joined the football club until I got kicked out for fighting.
I have no explanation for what’s happening to me now. For how the few hours a day Ludo sits with me have become the highlight of my miserable life, and how much I talk when I run out of questions to ask him.
He wants to know about the trees I save instead of the ones I cut down, and he doesn’t ask how I came to fall out of one.
“It depends why I’m working on it,” I explain as he eats an orange, the only edible thing that came with lunch.
“If the landowner wants it cut down and destroyed, there’s not much I can do about it, but Bernard, my boss, charges less for treating diseased trees, so councils and nature trusts usually opt for that. ”
Ludo meticulously removes the pith from his orange segment before he slides it into his mouth. “How do you save a diseased tree?”
“Depends how sick it is.”
“Oh.”
I take that as my cue to continue. “Like, if the tree is dying, sometimes it’s kinder to remove it, to give up the resources you might use trying to save it to other trees.”
“That makes sense.”
“Yeah, but it takes a lot for a tree to be a lost cause. I never make the decision in one day. I always go back, unless someone else has already tried to fell it and I have to finish the job.” I don’t add that this particular habit has caused more run-ins with Bernard than anything else or that another tree surgeon’s sloppy work is what has landed me flat on my back.
I don’t say anything like that, because the truth is, I’m trying not to think about it.
Chances are, I’ll never climb another tree, for fun or otherwise, and I’m not down with accepting that.
“What if a tree can be saved? What do you do?”
Ludo’s soft voice brings me back to the present, and I’m so fucking grateful to him I nearly say so.
Then I realise he’s asked me the same question twice, and I haven’t given him an answer.
“Check the roots and surrounding area for anything that’s limiting nutrition.
Then I cut the diseased bits off, but you have to do it right.
You can’t just go at it with a saw and hope for the best.”
“In case you end up worse than when you started?”
“Exactly. Trees are like humans. Open wounds don’t do them no good.”
Ludo chews slowly, deliberately, and drops the rest of his orange on my tray—he’s already disposed of the weird meat dish neither of us could eat. Somehow he knew I couldn’t look at it. Or maybe he couldn’t look at it and the distinction between us is blurred.
I don’t like the look in his face though. And I don’t want him to go hungry. “Have my yoghurt.”
“Huh?”
“My yoghurt.” I push it towards him. “I’ve gone off them.”
“Why?”
“Do I need a reason?”
Ludo shrugs and takes the yoghurt and I watch him eat it, tracing every swallow as though I can track the calcium into his slender bones.
Why’s that so important to you?
I have no idea about that either, and perhaps this is what my life will be from now on—a never-ending series of shit I don’t understand.
Before . . . this, before him, my existence was simple.
I hated everyone and they didn’t much like me, and I was okay with that.
Worrying about other people never crossed my mind, and I shoved aside anyone who dared to care about me.
Michael said it was like I flicked a switch in my brain . . . like I did it on purpose.
Maybe I did.
A nurse exits the nurse station and begins her rounds of the beds, telling visitors they have to leave. Ludo sighs, and immediately my senses jump with a desperate need to find out why. I don’t ask, though. That would be simple. Instead I tilt my head sideways and hope he’ll get the hint.
“I have a psychiatrist coming to see me today,” he says. “She wants to change my medication.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “I’ve had a mini meltdown over the last few days. I do that sometimes, when my brain can’t decide if it wants to be yellow or black.”
“Huh?”
Another sigh, and Ludo stands, still holding my yoghurt pot and a spoon. “Manic or depressed. Up or down. She doesn’t listen when I tell her I’ll be fine if they’d only let me go home.”
I run my gaze up and down his slim legs . . . legs that are currently in a far better condition than my own. “You can’t make a run for it?”
“Nah. They’ll section me. Good idea, though. Ten years ago I might’ve got away with it.”
He ducks around the curtain before I can respond, and a heavy weight settles over my chest, like it does every time he slips away.
Some days he comes back for an evening visit, but I already know this isn’t one of those days, and an irrational hatred for his psychiatrist spreads through me until it’s all I can think about.
Fuck. I bring my hands to my face and drive my fists into my eye sockets. You have no right to think anything about his psychiatrist. You don’t know shit.
But I want to. And that scares me. Out in the real world, I dip when I catch feelings for people, mostly after offending them to the point where they won’t come looking for me.
But I can’t do that here, can’t do it with Ludo, and the flip side of being desperate for his company has become an obsession.
A nurse brings me a dose of the codeine pills the docs have replaced my morphine pump with. I pretend to swallow them but stash them with my morning dose under my pillow. I’ll take them tonight, when I’m sure Ludo won’t come back, praying they’ll keep me asleep until morning.
You daft prick. But I can’t help it. The solitude that was once my BFF has started to suffocate me, and even if that doesn’t kill me, the irony will.
Later that day, it’s my turn for an unwelcome welfare visit—a policeman who wants my accident statement.
“I don’t have one. I was up, and then I was down.”
The vague echo of Ludo’s words bugs me enough to ignore the officer’s resigned sigh. Perhaps he’s found out I don’t have the best history with coppers. Whatever. I don’t care. I have nothing to say to him that doesn’t involve being at the top of the world and then at the bottom.
Up and down.
Yellow and black.
Ludo
I’m beginning to hate Dr Farsi. When she screws with my normal, it’s hard to remember the times when she’s been the only constant in my life. That she’s a good doctor, and it’s me, as always, messing things up.
“I don’t want to take more lithium. It fucks me up.”
Dr Farsi slow blinks like she always does when I so very rarely swear at her, as if my colourful language is validation for whatever she’s itching to tell me about how I should feel.
“Ludo,” she says after years of addressing me with my whole name.
“The dosage you’re on may not be high enough, given the episodes you’ve had in the last week. ”
“Anxiety isn’t bipolar. You’ve told me that a hundred times.”
“Yes, but one can exacerbate the other. Controlling your bipolar effectively will make the rest of your life easier.”
I scowl. “Not if it makes me a zombie. I’d rather feel everything than nothing.”
It’s a conversation that goes round in circles. Eventually I agree to the higher dose just to get rid of her, reasoning with my anxious self that I can cut the tablets in half. Or ditch them—
No. You don’t do that anymore, remember?
Of course I remember. Mania and meds mess with my short-term memory, but I never forget nightmares. Can’t, because they’re real, and so when the little paper cups come around, I swallow the new pill.
Numbness creeps through me far quicker than it should.
It’s psychosomatic and I know it, but knowing something and believing it isn’t the same thing.
I picture the numbness as the army of ants I see every day, marching en masse to ambush my mood.
I let them for a little while, but agitation overwhelms me.
I have to move, even if I only get as far as the next bed before a nurse tells me to return to my own.
Luck is rarely on my side, but today the nurse doling out the drugs pays me no heed as I ghost past her. I go to the bathroom and brush my teeth while I stare at myself in the mirror, even though I know it will do me no good.
My skin is too pale. My English father robbed me of the chance to have my cousin’s Mediterranean complexion.
I lack Angelo’s poise too. Always have. Where he was a beautiful child, all big brown eyes and grace, I was gangly and awkward, and now, though I’ve grown into my limbs, I’m sullen to those who don’t know me and inexplicable to those who do.
Aidan falls somewhere in the middle.
It wasn’t my intention to visit him again today.
Some days I can’t help myself. Others I fight to remember what happens when my brain becomes obsessed.
When it can’t let go of things that aren’t mine.
On those days, I visit him once and try not to imagine trailing my fingertip along his strong forearm like I did one time.
I try not to imagine anything at all, to live in the moment and enjoy the bubble I’ve built around the short time I get to spend with him.
Aidan isn’t much of a conversationalist, but that’s okay.
Even his silence soothes me in ways I can’t explain.
I’m close to his bed before I know it, but for the first time ever, he’s not alone.
A grave-faced doctor is sitting in my chair, and my heart turns over.
Sometimes, when I force myself not to stare at Aidan too much, I forget he’s hurt.
The gash on his head has healed to an angry line, and a series of plain T-shirts now cover the bruises and scrapes from his fall.
He’s taken to hiding his leg under a blanket, as if he doesn’t want to look at it, and I’m so hypnotised by the rest of him that I forget it’s there.