'Your illness. You don't like to talk about that, do you? What was wrong with you exactly?' No one knows, I tell him. I couldn't get a diagnosis. Or not a reliable one, anyway.
W. believes I was ill, he says. It's not just my usual kind of fantasy. He can tell by my reserve on the topic. Usually I'll talk about anything – anything. Usually, I'll share the most intimate details of my life. But this time …
My life was bleak, wasn't it? I must have thought I was at the end. W. is someone who might say he thinks he's at the end, but he has no idea what it might mean, he says, to be at the end. – 'At the end of your wits. At the end of your tether: that was your life, wasn't it?'
He knows it involved a lot of drinking, my illness, W. says. Hadn't I said as much? Fourpacks of lager from Kwik Save. Stale gingerbread men from a discount Greggs. Stale eclairs with yellow cream. And days and days on the sofa, cake crumbs all around me. Days on the sofa, with the smell of sweet, stale beer, the curtains drawn against the day.
What did I do? Watch TV, W. remembers my telling him that. He's had to piece together the story of my illness, he says. But he sees it all now. A fat man, growing fatter, slouched with the TV in front of him. A fat man in tracksuit bottoms and a teeshirt, daytime TV, spilled beer, drawn curtains …
What was it that kept me from cutting my own throat?, W. asks. Why didn't I book myself in to one of those Swiss suicide clinics? He'd've done if he'd have had my life.
What was wrong with me?, W. asks. Tiredness, that was it, wasn't it? I'd been a hamster on the wheel, hadn't I? I'd run too much, too far. I'd outrun myself. Time to catch up. Time to do myself in.
In the end, I could barely lift my arms, W. remembers my telling him. My hands were not mine. I thought I'd have to get sheltered accommodation. That really would have been the end, wouldn't it?, W. says. Sheltered accommodation. Sheltered from what? And who would bring me gingerbread men? Who stale eclairs with yellow cream?
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