Chapter 16

16

All About You

We are all alone in our pain because whatever we feel is notoriously difficult to share and communicate, and never more so than when we're actually in the throes of agony. In her essay On Being Ill , Virginia Woolf noted, "...There is the poverty of language. English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache... The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare, Donne, Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry." Over the centuries, medicine has compensated for this limitation, devising its own index to measure pain.

In the '70s, Dr. Ronald Melzack began to classify the words patients used most often, including shooting , radiating , stabbing , sickening , etc. This evolved to become the standard measure—The McGill Pain Questionnaire—still widely used in pain clinics around the world.

I keep my phone close in the days that follow our kiss, but Nate doesn't text me. I don't—won't—text him. As the time goes by, our trip to the coast takes on a surreal quality. Images ripple and flicker in my thoughts, leaving a dangerous afterglow, a slow burn of desire and despair. It should have been me that drew a line, acted like a grown-up, not him. I despise myself for wanting him more because of the restraint he displayed.

I distract myself as best I can, run to the river early each morning, watch as the sky ripens from peach pink to deep plum.

Stay in motion. My app tells me I'll burn 520 calories and cut my time by thirty seconds if I keep to my current pace. I focus on my breath. Inhale for five seconds, exhale for five seconds. Yet memory curls like smoke through the cracks. His fingertips on my hip bone, the melt of his mouth on mine. I blame him for this sabotage, that my mind is no longer my own, a rogue state I can no longer govern.

Last thing at night, first thing in the morning, he is there. Is it physical attraction, or something else too? The way we're both shackled to a past that we don't deserve, desperate to break away and start again. Or, if I'm honest, isn't it his unavailability that seduces me more?

I try to divert myself, plan out a new structure for the book. I set targets, deadlines, but my defenses are down. What did we agree on the journey back, that he'd text first on Friday or that I'd go straight to Algos House?

On my run, I speed past rows of gloomy redbrick mansion apartments, beyond the tennis courts and the overpriced garden center. Cutting through the tunnel under the railway arches, I feel the strain in my chest and sprint for the last two minutes, savoring the burn because I know I can stop it whenever I wish. That at least pain is within my control.

Tony is already there on the terrace outside the café, huddled under a blue umbrella and nursing a coffee. In the cold air, his watery eyes take in my jogging gear, narrowing into an expression of bemusement. For him, any form of exercise is a perverse affectation to be avoided at all costs.

"Hi, sis." He waves. "I could do with another, if you're buying." In the morning light I notice his skin looks papery and gray.

"Heavy night?"

"Part of the new regime, is it, jogging every day?" he bats back at me. "Must be getting in shape for someone?"

I avoid the insinuation in his stare. "How's Amira?"

"How's Nate? Long hours you've been working lately." He winks. I pick up his cup, turn sharply away and my trainers scrape abruptly on the gravel as I get him another coffee, and my own. When I come back out, he is hunched over the table, skimming his phone.

"So, come on. I asked first. You two seem pretty into each other."

"Oh, all fine." He shrugs lightly. "I finally got that travel commission I was after. Barcelona to Cádiz by train, eight-hundred miles across Spain starting next week, then down to Tarifa and a ferry trip to Tangier."

"Sounds like a long trip. Maybe a good time for a break from Amira, given you're going away for a while. It's probably for the best, don't you think?"

He squints at me, wounded, his chin juts out a little.

"Why are you so keen to split us up? I'm not going to hurt her. I'm actually hoping she'll join me on the final leg of my Spanish trip."

"Is that really a good idea?" I reason. "It's just that—"

"You think I'm being irresponsible? What about you, Anna?" He stares at me, his features slackening. "A whole day at the seaside with your work colleague?"

I laugh in disbelief. Did Amira tell him? Now I suppose I'll have to assume she tells him everything. Even more reason for them not to be together.

"It was my editor's idea. She suggested a change of scenery to mix things up a bit."

"And did you?" He wraps his hands around his cup. His knuckles look raw and chafed.

I look at him blankly.

"Did you mix things up a bit?" He blinks at me, and I notice the rims of his eyes, pink and watery. "No need to answer. Although I think you already have."

"So what if I did? What's it got to do with you anyway?"

"Anyone else I'd be fine about. You know that, Anna."

I sigh. "Thanks for the concern. I came here because you said you wanted to catch up. Come on, let's walk." I stand, eager to outpace my irritation, and he follows. Together we head toward a patch of woodland and the ornamental lake at the far end of the park.

"Not going to Nate's house this afternoon?"

I shake my head. "Transcribing and writing all day."

"So devoted to your work."

"That's me."

We stop for a moment by a small wooden gate and I step in front of him to open it, keen to keep walking, to move the spotlight elsewhere, but he continues to press in that playful way of his.

"You're not telling me something, A. What is it?"

I smile stiffly. Tony has been using my initial a lot lately—something our mother used to do—maybe to thaw the ice between us.

"I'm stressed, that's all. There's a lot of pressure at the moment to get this book done. The deadline is insane and I just want to get through it."

We chat some more about his upcoming assignments, circling the duck pond back into the neglected woodland where kids climb over the high Victorian walls to mess around at night. There's a patch of burnt grass in the center, the remnants of a recent fire. Graffiti covers the benches nearby.

Tony leans over the bridge, picks up a handful of pebbles, skims them one by one at a beer bottle floating in a tangle of weeds.

"Doesn't he give you the creeps?"

"Who?" I ask, still distracted.

"Nate."

"Not particularly, no."

"I can see what's happening, Anna," he says, giving me one of his sideways looks. "You know Dr. Reid is manipulating you, making you feel special in some way, so you write the book he wants you to write."

I feel my features harden once again. "You don't know him, and you don't need to stress about me. Focus on your travels, a new start, getting away from this place."

"But I'm leaving you all alone. I worry for you, that's all," he says, tilting his face toward me. I sigh. I know however obnoxious his execution can be, deep down he's just trying to help look after me. It's part of the deal.

"Tony, please—" I grip the slim metal rail of the bridge, stare into the brackish water below. I gulp, that familiar catch in my throat as I try to take a full breath. Maybe it's being back with Tony, in this spot, just a couple months past the anniversary of our mom's death, but I feel my childhood rushing up to meet me, my body keeping the score. That night comes back to me in shades of blue. French blue. The color of my father's Ventolin inhaler, his puffer. They were everywhere when I was growing up. In the kitchen drawer where my mom kept the freezer bags and the spare keys, the bathroom cabinet behind the acetaminophen, the glove compartment of his car, a subtle ever-present reminder of my father's asthma.

The scattered cries from children playing on the swings nearby pulls me back. Beside me, Tony's face flashes briefly into something that should be a smile but isn't.

"I guess it must be heaven for a journalist over there. All that nosing around. Have you been inside her room yet?"

"This isn't some silly game, Tony. I'm taking my work on this book seriously."

My phone vibrates and I hold it in my palm, angled away from Tony so he can't see.

"Anna?"

But I'm distracted by the text.

Sorry hvnt been in touch. Back from conference in Oxford. Are you free tomorrow to work on book? Let me know. N

My heart beats in double-time.

"I have to go." I am suddenly lightheaded, dizzy with childish elation as I slip my phone back in my pocket. "Work."

"Anna—" he repeats.

"What is it?" I laugh briskly, on edge, trying to keep the strain from my voice. "You know I love you but I've got to go."

"Funny, I've always wondered..." he muses, his tone contrived, too casual. "You meet Eva. Now here you are doing her memoir. Strange that order of things, don't you think?"

I look up at the sunless sky, register a reflexive shiver through the thin nylon fabric of my tracksuit.

"What the hell do you mean?" I snap, desperate to leave. "I chatted to Eva a couple of years ago for a short interview. That's it."

"Really? I seem to remember you said how inspiring you found her. Didn't she even invite you into a therapy session? You sure you're not becoming a little too obsessed?"

I stare at him, bewildered.

"Please, Tony. I need to go," I repeat, watching his fingers tremble slightly as he rolls another cigarette paper. His tongue darts along its edge, the half-moons of his nails stained with nicotine. When he is finished, he raises the rolled cig to his mouth, lets it rest there.

"And I don't know what you're getting at, but this is bullshit. I get a chance to do this thing that could change my career and you want to ruin it for me."

Every time I try to claim a new world for myself, he somehow taints it. I glance down at my hands gripping the rail, pathetic and limp, and try to see myself through his eyes. As if I'm so eternally malleable, suggestible, someone whose life he thinks he can play with and demean.

"You really like him, don't you?"

"What?" I retort. "Actually, scratch that. I don't want—"

"It's sweet. Kissing in the car like teenagers?"

My jaw tightens and I start to shake, humiliated. "You were there."

I falter, the vision of Tony, my brother, watching from his car. Of course, the slam of that door breaking the moment, maybe when it got too much for him?

"Oh, c'mon, Anna." He lets out one of his little laughs, reaches out to touch my shoulder tenderly. I push his hand away. "If I am your keeper, you only have yourself to blame."