The Most Ill

'Months and then years, falling into illness. How far could we fall, the ill? Always further, even as the city regenerated around us. We were the dregs, the last ones, sick from unemployment, unemployed because we were sick, and switching from sickness benefit to unemployment benefit and back again …

'The walls of the room. The bed, the television, the sofa: this was my world. Days and nights passed in my flat, alone in my flat. Is this what I wanted? To draw a shelter over my head and hide in the half-light?

'I thought of Ann. We're all ill, she had said. Everyone's ill, if only they realised it. She had thought of herself as a kind of pioneer, as an antennae, quivering sensitively ahead of the race. Ann was ready to be seriously ill. She was ready to see it through to the end.

'She'd worked hard – too hard, she'd said. She'd built up her business, she and her business partner. She'd bought her houses. But the illness came, and she had to wait for illness to pass through her and away. Had to lie down and wait, to welcome illness in her own way, and to affirm it as it passed. Only then would she be able to rise, one day, and be ready for the world.

'She has all the time in the world. Time – for what? For falling ill, she said. Really ill. And now it was to be my time, too. I was lucky I met her. Lucky she referred me to her GP. Lucky that I had been referred, in turn, to the specialist. And now? She had fallen away from me. She lay on her own bed in the other side of the city, as I lay in mine. She lay in her own half-darkness, her sheltered accommodation protecting her from the world, and I lay in mine'.

He used to leave messages on her answering machine, knowing she'd be there. She'd promised to listen to them. She'd understand, she said. She was a little further on than him. He was a little behind, catching up. She would listen to him, she said.

'So I'd phone her, and hear her pre-sickness voice on the line. Please leave a message after the beep. I left my messages. Ann, I'm just calling to say … or, Hi Ann, it's me, I hope you're feeling better …

'I remembered Ann's friend Claire, who seemed sicker than both of us, even farther on. Did Ann leave messages on Claire's answering machine? Hi Claire, it's me, Ann. I'm just ringing to say … or, Claire, it's Ann. How are you?

'And to whom did Claire turn?, I thought. Who was more ill than she was? And who did she ring, Claire's friend? Someone, beyond us all, was the Most Ill, I thought. Someone, in some distant suburb, was further on than any of us …

'And meanwhile, illness. And in the meantime, illness. That filled my day. No: it drew my day away from me. There was no more time. No forward movement. Week after week fell into obscurity. Week after hollowed-out week. I'm so bored, I said to Ann's answering machine. Do you think it's possible to die of boredom, I said, really die?

'Sometimes, as the days grew longer, I would remember how Ann and I first met. I remembered in the cafe, unknown to me, talking to this person or that. I remembered her in the cafe garden, taking the sun, or coming in to shelter from the rain, the dreadful Manchester rain', the poet says. 'I remembered her car, her grey Saab, with the power tools in the back.

'Who introduced us, Ann and I? Who told one of us about the other?' He can't remember. Either way, they ended up talking, over a pot of tea. They talked, and it was as though they had always known one another. That's when she said it. She was ill, she told him. He was unemployed, he said. – "You're ill, too", she said. – "And you're also unemployed", he said, although that wasn't really true, she told him later.

She'd become a silent partner in her business. She was sent cheques every month … And she got sickness benefit, too, she said. But she hadn't been feeling well. She couldn't work, not really. Perhaps it was time to sell one of her houses, she said. What did I think? 

'She should sell it, I had said. She should free herself from everything. From everything that might distract her. If you're going to be ill, then be really ill, I told her. I told her what Robert Walser, the author, said when he entered the mental hospital. "I'm not here to write, but to be mad". So he stopped writing. As she, Ann, should stop working. That was what she wanted to hear. That's when she told him about her friend Claire, who had the same condition. She was much further on than her, Ann had said. And we drove over to see her in Ann's grey Saab …'

So one day, in late spring, he phoned her, full of memories. Hi, it's me again, he was going to say. I wanted to know how Claire was. Are you guys still in touch? Or, Hi, Ann, hope you're okay. I was thinking of the cafe the other day – do you remember? And Claire. How is she? But he didn't hear the recorded message on her answering machine. There was no one to take his call.

Was the machine full? He wondered. Hadn't she bothered to empty the machine at all? Or perhaps she'd unplugged the machine. Perhaps she'd had enough of his phonecalls, his messages. Or perhaps she'd moved on, left. Perhaps she was better, and walking out in the spring sunshine … Perhaps she fixing things in her houses with her power tools. Perhaps she was showing round new tenants …

He imagined her opening her front door and standing there, narrow-eyed in the light. He imagined her going out to the car, brushing away the leaves on the bonnet, opening the door, driving away from the kerb, power tools in the boot …

What might have happened between him and Ann?, the poet says. What romance? There are romances that never really begin, the poet says, or that teeter on the edge of beginning, reluctant to step over, as though they carried with them something that would not begin, that would continue to hold them back.

Illness drew them together; illness separated them. Illness was what they had in common; illness held them far apart. Nothing began, nothing was to begin. Ann had retreated. He had.

Now, when he thought of her, it was as something impersonal. A row of arches spanning up into the clouds. The dry bank of a stream. Hadn't he thought he saw her in the swifts feeding their juveniles on the wing, or the grey wagtails on the riverpath?

Once, Ann and he and walked out along the river, quite far, almost all the way to the Botanical Gardens. They'd walked out, talking of nothing in particular, talking of everything, talking of nothing, as the summer filled each topic they touched upon with a kind of lightness, loosening them up into the air like fire balloons.

It felt like a beginning, but in fact it was an end. How many days had he spent like that, thinking he was at the brink of something, that it was a matter of stepping forward? – 'No matter', the poet says. 'No regrets.

'We are made of our defeats', he says. 'From our failures'. Look at him, he says. Do I see a failure? Of course I do, he said. – 'We're stranded in this life', he says. 'Someone left us here. Someone forgot us.

'And what of you, Dane? Who forgot you? Are you going to be like Kurtz, disappearing among the tribes he was supposed to conquer? Are you going to give up your Danish life and disappear into Manchester?' He laughs. 'A Dane in Manchester, a Dane in Manchester …' He finds this very funny.