The Weight of Loss Page 3

  ‘Don’t I normally have to wait a few days?’

  Marianne panicked. She preferred an interval in which she could compose herself for something like this.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure someone will be free to do it. Just wait here.’

  Doctor Hind got up abruptly, closing the door with a bang as she left.

  Marianne stared at the three faces on the desk. The oldest child wasn’t looking directly at the lens of the camera; she resisted her mother, always, in this room. Photographs were fatal, Marianne thought, because they pinned us to the wall of another’s consciousness without our consent. And we are never privy to the impressions we’re giving of ourselves.

  When Doctor Hind returned, she motioned for Marianne to stand.

  ‘There’s a nurse free to take your blood now. It won’t take long.’

  Marianne picked up her bag and jacket from the floor, tucked them under her arm and followed Doctor Hind through the door back into the corridor again.

  She was a teenager the last time she’d had a blood test, and her mother had been there. She had started sobbing a few minutes afterwards, which seemed to alarm everyone in the room because the procedure had been quick and the pain was done. She always had delayed reactions to incidents that, after a prolonged state of suspense, she realised had disturbed her in a manner she hadn’t anticipated. The prick of the needle had offended her that time because she’d arrogantly assumed it wouldn’t.

  She’d already argued with her mother that morning and had a test coming up later in the day. She also recalled having an abscess agonisingly close to her anus, which she couldn’t bear to admit to anyone, but which she touched every morning to check it was still there, a secret sign of her secret suffering. When she sat before the nurse, she was haughty and aloof, rolling her eyes when the inevitable chit-chat about school began to fill the awkward silence. When she felt the needle plunge deeper into her arm than she thought it would, the heat of her anger died abruptly. It was as though something froze the activity of her brain, a hotbed of thought she’d gathered to herself like a duvet, and she felt a frightening vacancy in its place, a sense of loss, or rather an anticipation of loss – that, without her fury, she had nothing. Beyond hostility, she had no other recourse with which to engage with anything or anybody. And it was only years later that Marianne could make any sense of what she felt.

  This nurse barked instructions at Marianne while barely making eye contact. She pressed Marianne’s arm at different points and snapped at her to relax.

  ‘It’s not that easy!’ Marianne said.

  She wished she hadn’t said anything. The nurse gave her a smile that was not designed to placate her. She also paused, as though she wished to suspend what she was doing, so she could patronise the patient and reveal at the same time that there was no urgency at all. They stared at one another for a few more seconds and Marianne welcomed the return of that ancient adolescent anger. She had never really outgrown it.

  Her fist was closed but her veins could not tighten and flex themselves as she wished. She watched the flimsy blue lines across the inside of her elbow as the nurse selected one without letting Marianne know which one. Last time, Marianne had been instructed to turn her head away and look at the wall behind them. This time, she watched because she thought it was essential. The real pain was seeing the shadow of the needle, she knew that now. The prick was bearable, so bearable it ventured dangerously close to pleasure – the rarefied pleasure of having exceeded a limit previously dreaded in the imagination. But the shadow of the needle under the skin – that was different. She hated to see something that didn’t belong in her blood, a passing guest, but an intruder nonetheless, and that continued to move without obstruction. When the needle wormed its way back out of the vein, she had an urge to squeeze the spot shut with her fingers.

  ‘You allergic to plasters?’ the nurse asked as she placed a sticker on the sample.

  ‘No.’

  She was gentler in placing a plaster on Marianne, pressing it down without undue pressure.

  ‘You’ll get the results in a week.’

  That afternoon, Richard was already cooking when Marianne got home. The radio was playing and he had it turned down low, presumably so it wouldn’t dominate his thoughts. He once said he couldn’t focus with too much background noise, yet he frequently engaged with news bulletins on the radio, listening out for signs of progress or impending catastrophe in the world – Marianne wasn’t sure what his vigilance was really for. He’d colonised the kitchen while she’d been away; there were vegetables out on the work surfaces and on the island in the middle of the room, alongside egg noodles, garlic and a bottle of soy sauce. Stir-fry then, she thought gloomily. There wouldn’t be any meat.

  ‘Hi,’ he said when she closed the door, barely looking round. His face was shiny. ‘Got off a bit early today and I’m starving so I decided fuck it – I’m making dinner now.’

  Marianne looked at her watch. ‘It’s five. This is way too early. Why are you home so early?’

  He dipped his head towards her when he spoke, and she noticed the parting of his hair was slightly greasy.

  ‘I told Steve I had to leave early. I never ask. He knows I never ask. He also knows he fucked me over today so he couldn’t deny me this at least.’

  ‘But why did you need to leave early?’

  Richard stared at her blankly.

  ‘Because I wanted to.’

  Marianne slapped her bag down on the island and pulled out a chair.

  ‘I don’t know.’ Richard shrugged. ‘Call it nihilism. I deserved that promotion. And to find out that smug bitch, Lisa, got bumped up when she’s only been there a year…’ He had nothing to say for a few seconds and rattled the vegetables around the frying pan so some of them went overboard.

  Marianne didn’t have anything to say either. She rested her head on her bag.

  ‘Hopefully she’ll get knocked up down the line – that’ll even things out a bit.’

  Marianne laughed. ‘Maybe in ten years.’

  With some effort, Richard dropped the scowl that was cramping his face. He turned around and looked at Marianne with that sudden abortive expression, the blankness of purpose, which she knew well enough herself.

  ‘I sound like an absolute arsehole,’ he said.

  ‘You’re allowed to lose it now and again. Jesus.’

  He moved closer to Marianne but something caught his attention on the radio and he cocked his head towards it. A word in particular had been said that distracted him. He turned up the volume.

  ‘…has been officially declared as a breakthrough in medical science. Doctors are hoping that this is the way forward in treating the most malignant forms of cancer…’

  ‘They were talking about this before on the BBC,’ Richard said. ‘Some sort of plant has been discovered that has anti-cancerous properties. They found it in the Lake District.’

  ‘Mum and Dad used to take us to the Lakes in the summer. They were the best holidays we ever had. Marie and I went skinny dipping in the early hours…’

  Richard frowned, and she could see he was afraid she’d go into more detail and never stop. She fell silent so he could listen to the broadcast.

  ‘This is a new breed of angiosperm, a self-seeding one, that’s never been seen before. A sample was sent anonymously to the Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge, for cancer research, where Professor David Sexton was able to test the seed pods of the flower.’

  A different voice filtered through on the radio, more nervous and grasping.

  ‘It’s amazed all of us here. My job is to research the growth of cancerous cells and monitor how they “hijack” healthy cells. What we’ve learned so far from the seeds of this plant is that they contain a chemical compound that slows down and effectively traps those cells that corrupt the others. It’s early days but we’re now trying to replicate this compound to manufacture a new drug for future patients, and the possibilities for treating various forms of
cancer are endless from this stage onward. This is a huge breakthrough.’

  The former measured tone of the broadcaster returned.

  ‘We’re getting a flood of comments from Twitter. Sarah Rose from Leeds says, “It’s time the world had some good news…”’

  Richard was nodding quietly. Marianne snorted at the last part.

  ‘What?’ He looked at her sharply.

  ‘Sorry. I just hate Twitter.’

  ‘Still,’ he said, turning the radio back down again, ‘that is phenomenal. If only it happened years earlier.’

  ‘If only it happened centuries earlier. If only cancer never existed in the first place.’

  He stared at her. His shoulders were rigid. She was being crass and there was no reason for it, or at least she couldn’t see why she had felt the impulse to be cruel.

  Richard’s mother was dying of bowel cancer. Radiotherapy hadn’t worked, and she’d spent the last few months incontinent. Her death was privately welcomed by Marianne, because she was disturbed that anyone could continue to exist in such a humiliating way. Her spirit had once been sharply erect, like an invisible spear through her spine, propping up her body. When they found her sitting in her own shit one day, when her legs had grown numb, Marianne was unnerved by how little the woman complained. There was no passing stage in which she softened and phlegmatic anger gave way to some last-minute pink-eyed tenderness before the end. She just negated herself. She stopped talking. She stopped looking anybody directly in the eye. She was waiting for the end, the ultimate anaesthetic. To be nothing was her aim, the thing she single-mindedly sat in wait for, driving herself towards that goal as though her will was growing sharp again only for the event that would undo it.

  She had been lost in thought while Richard dished up and set out two plates on the counter. His shoulders sloped morosely.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. She pushed her bag off the table.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry for being nasty.’

  ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It’s not. I’m really sorry.’

  Marianne reached for his wrist and closed her fingers around it. Richard looked down and placed his hand over hers. They stared at one another.

  ‘I don’t mean to be horrible,’ Marianne said. She felt a heat rising through her face and clutched his hand firmly. ‘I sometimes hear myself saying these words and I don’t know where they come from. I hope you know, I really do…’

  She had been about to say something that hadn’t been said before. They both heard it die in her throat.

  She didn’t want to say anything that might be false and would eventually compromise her. It was in these moments that she saw the shadow of a truth she had no courage, as yet, to face; that she was strongly disposed towards love, had sensed something like it pressing on her thoughts, but she wasn’t certain of its legitimacy. It was more like a flinching passion, born out of sorrow and regret, perhaps even the intimation of loss.

  She was effectively mourning the end of their life together while it was still in progress, had barely just begun. And the strength of this feeling was so similar to what she supposed love to be that she was convinced it cancelled the end of itself. She’d feel an intense wave of pity, the kind that made her slightly sick, and her passion would flow back to its source.

  She couldn’t deny that she felt most strongly towards Richard when he was defenceless. It might be when he told a joke that landed flat in front of his friends, or when his mother spoke over him and pretended he wasn’t there. Marianne had a morbid desire to see him collapse under the strain of himself. That was when her ‘love’ crawled out of its lair to meet him.

  She was only truly aroused when his mind darkened, when she saw something that briefly mirrored her own panic and, when they made love, occasionally received it. The force of his body was a shock, not the kind that urged reciprocity but, rather, forbade and crushed it. Her energy gave way and she was gradually nullified, her responses broken down. All along she thought she could expel loss by adopting someone else’s pain, diluting hers to lose its terrible potency. When he finally pulsed through, she felt opposed to him and panicked that it was too late to revoke access. Marie was still there. Or rather, she wasn’t. That chilling fact was freshly realised in the worst moments, causing her muscles to constrict as it passed through. It was then that she yearned for the purity of her own despair.

  This kind of lust was too bleak to constitute real, lasting love. She knew she would have to end it soon. She was presently treading water, waiting for the plunge.

  She let go of his wrist and cradled her hands in her lap. He had been watching her closely as she gradually lost composure and sank away from him.

  ‘I didn’t even ask – how was your appointment?’ Richard said.

  His voice was even.

  ‘Yeah, it was… I don’t know. I said the pills aren’t really having much of an effect at the moment. but she said it’s normal to take this long. I showed her the hair. Hairs. There are three now.’

  ‘In the same place?’

  ‘One is here, on the back of my neck.’ Marianne turned her back to Richard and bent her head.

  He dropped his fork and stood to have a look. She wasn’t expecting him to pull on it, so the pain made her a little sick.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘Sorry. I just don’t like it.’

  ‘I asked her to do that but I guess she forgot. Or I forgot. I had a blood test after I saw her.’

  ‘Does she know why they’re growing there?’ Richard asked.

  ‘No. She said she’d probably find something telling from the blood results. I just have to wait a week.’

  She nursed a hand on her back, running her palm over her tailbone.

  ‘Did you get my antihistamines?’ Richard asked.

  ‘Oh shit.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘It’s fine. You had a blood test.’

  Marianne frowned at him.

  ‘Well, I can imagine you just wanted to come home.’

  ‘I’ve had blood tests before. It was the nurse who stressed me out more than the needle. She was an absolute bully.’

  ‘You bring it out in people.’ He said it casually.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘I’m joking!’ he said.

  He leaned forward and kissed her. She was always surprised how tender his mouth could be.

  That night, Marianne fell asleep watching one side of Richard’s face. She thought he was always slightly aware of her in some sense but he was partially submerged, one eye pressed shut against the pillow as he materialised into the unconscious. Or rather, became immaterial, unfettered. She touched his face the most when he wasn’t aware of it, or of anything. The eyebrow she could see dived at an angle into the pillow, frowning at nothing.

  She wished she was aware of the moment in which she too entered the other side of everything; but, like death, immersion defies recollection. She was awake and then she was not. The gulf in between might have lasted ten seconds, but what she could remember was just a fraction of it. A series of images jerked through the darkness, all of which she’d never retrieve beyond the seconds in which they emerged. Apart from one.

  She was in a forest she distinctly remembered from her childhood, one to which her parents often took her and Marie. It was somewhere in Windermere and she was wet – very wet, not just a little, as though she’d just emerged from the lake itself. And she was alone. She dripped barefoot through the forest, leaving damp footprints. Her hands were dry and dirty from touching the trees for balance. Now and again, a jagged piece of bark fell away in her hand.

  Marie’s voice came from inside one of those trees. There was a pause when Marianne approached an ash tree.

  ‘They put me here, Mari. They put me here.’

  The voice came from a very deep centre in the trunk. Marianne might have believed it if someone told her the hollow extended to the underside of the world. The roots
were very high, like Marie was flexing them and she could lift them from the earth.

  The voice shuddered and came back low.

  ‘They thought I could rest here – but I asked to be cremated, Mari!’

  Marianne saw that the tree was split somewhere from the top and, if she pulled both ends of the bark, there was an opening. But when she reached to peel the corners back, a smell from the inside caused her to fall back.

  ‘Mari!’

  She knew, with that fatal certainty in which dreams are construed, that she would see a perverted copy of Marie inside the tree. A glittering mass of bloody limbs and nerve endings that tailed off into the dark. She vaguely recalled the illustrations in her biology textbooks at school, of the human body reduced to its nervous outline. There was a mouth where Marie’s voice had filtered through, but it was the helm of something awful that didn’t make sense.

  She must not have moved her head far from Richard’s as, for days afterwards, he claimed he still had a tiny ringing in his left ear. She only came to when he slapped her with a strength she’d never suspected of him.

  ‘Stop it!’ he bellowed, sitting up fast. She was burning in her pillow. ‘What the fuck!’

  She knew then that she’d screamed, because when she stopped, the silence startled her. She sat up too and stared at Richard.

  ‘Why did you hit me?’

  ‘You yelled in my ear!’

  He tossed the duvet aside and got up to wander the room. Marianne remembered the image she’d seen seconds earlier.

  ‘Marie.’

  Grief came in hot flashes. She ran her fingers through her hair and dug them up and down the scalp quickly. Richard swooped back down to pull her hands away.

  ‘Marie,’ she said to him emptily. ‘Marie!’

  It was coming, and she pre-empted it with her fingernails, now tearing at Richard’s T-shirt, bunching it up in her fists. The black spot opened up in her head, and inside of it, the nucleus itself, was Marie and her failure to exist. The revelation grew with every second like a cancerous cell, multiplying so quickly she thought she would grow mad. Marie was outside of the universe. Enormous and infinite as it was, it failed to contain her; it contained no sign of her. The black spot had reached the optic nerves behind Marianne’s eyes, and she saw nothing. Richard was tugging her everywhere he could to stop her free-falling into the space inside her head.