Billygean.co.uk

I am 24 today.

I sit silently in the oh-so-tepid bath feeling a bit sorry for myself, if I’m honest.

Oh no – not that.

I didn’t sleep enough, due to a combination of dance music and builders doing overtime, and although I have nothing of the all-over-body can’t brush my teeth tiredness, I still feel rubbish and it has a tendency to spoil things.

I crush a purple seed and it leaves a trail of bubbles behind it. I reach behind me for my shower gel.

I open the bottle and jasmine blooms out of it.

And then I remember. This time last year; too sick to sit up to eat Chinese food. Days later, MindReader and I went on a spa day to rooms full of jasmine-scented steam, and I collapsed into each room to the stares of strangers, too sick to sit up, let alone walk. I spread the jasmine shower gel over me and relish, not only being able to do precisely what i want, with a little tiredness, but knowing that that damn soy sauce in that Chinese was what was making me sick.

I dry myself, dress, and open the door with a smile.

MindReader and I are spooned in bed, watching Masterchef on Larry the Laptop.

Somebody annoying has just won, but as he rings his wife to tell her the news and she screams, I roll over and sob into MindReader’s shoulder anyway.

“What would I say?” I say into his t shirt. “If you rang me when you’d won MasterChef? Give me your best one-liner?”

MindReader smiles and thinks for a moment.

“Where’s the remote?” he says finally.

“Argh,” I say to the laptop. “Just WORK.”

“What?” Mindreader says gently, and kind of resignedly.

“I have been trying to log into my Smile bank account and it’s telling me I have to enter a PIN that I don’t have…”

MindReader scoots across the living room and sits next to me, an arm draped over my shoulders.

I try twice more and get banned from the website. “Forget it!” I say, and flick around to my email. An email pops up from BT, clamining we owe them the £161 we paid last week.

“WHAT,” I say. “We paid you!”

MindReader rubs my shoulder and takes the laptop. He clicks around for a few minutes and then turns to me. “I think we’ll have to ring them,” he says.

“Oh for God’s sake. I sat here for ages with all these bills and got really stressed and achieved NOTHING.”

“Billygean,” MindReader says, his mouth shaking slightly as he tried not to smile. “That’s your life.”

“How late did you revise?” Acquaintance says to me on Friday afternoon as I head into the exam room.

I think for a moment. “5pm?” I say, remembering taking a good book to bed at 5pm shortly to be joined by MindReader, who curled around me like a bean after work where we both lay talking until dinnertime.

“God you HAVE chilled out,” he says. “I stayed up til 1!”

I smile.

The paper goes without a hitch (subject to what I’m about to blog). It is the last exam. Three and a half hours. The only issue my body has with this is that it has to eat halfway through, which I can deal with. I write my final sentence and pack up my things.

Acquaintance is outside.

“How did you find it?” I say.

“Oh fine, fine,” he says.

“Did anything you studied last night come up?”

“No,” he says, “completely pointless. But I’ll always do it.”

I smirk slightly remembering a former self who was just the same.

I walk quickly back to our empty flat, for MindReader left whilst I was in my exam for a stag ‘do, walk straight into the bedroom, kick off my boots and add some slinky shoes and a layer of lipstick.

I meet OldHousemates in town. We discuss what I can eat, as per, peeing and pooping in front of boyfriends AGAIN, and what we keep in our bedside cabinets.

As I leave them with hugs I realise Birmingham is unseasonably warm and remove my scarf. People are drinking at the tables outside of the pubs that line my walk home. St Paul’s Square is lit up, people silhouetted against the amber background. My heels clack along the pebbles and i swing my handbag low.

Exams done, I think. Good friends. Wonderful boyfriend. Healthy.

I let myself into the flat and turn on the light. In the middle of the room is a bunch of daffodils. “Congratulations on the exams,” the note reads. “I’m so proud of you, Dxxx.”

Perfect.

This time last year, MindReader and I were in the car. It was pissing it down, the rain forming an oily cover all over the car. I think I knew I wasn’t going to sit the exam even then.

I wore no make up, my hair snarled from sleep.

As soon as I picked up my pen I knew. The thought of having the pick up a book of legislation – and actually understand it – and then write it down was too much. It was exhaustion, and nothing mattered except getting out. I cast MindReader a regretful backwards glance as he carried on with the exam, and lay down for the best part of nine months thereafter.

I wanted it to be utterly different this year. But one of the things I am having to come to terms with is that there are still – for now – those blip days. The days where I’m ravenous, light headed, and the days where I’m just shattered. Yesterday was one such day but today – so far – isn’t.

The sun is shining brightly and I am going to wear a beautiful dress to sit these exams, full make up and all.

This year, it will be different.

Yes, it is better to have Coeliac disease than chronic fatigue.

Yes, it is sort of a miracle cure.

Yes I am pleased.

All that said.

AUTO-IMMUNE DISORDERS ARE A PAIN.

Sleepiness has gone. And been replaced by INSATIABLE HUNGER. I mean two bowls of (gluten free) pasta and a loaf of bread hunger. And then a yoghurt. And then a banana. You get the message.

And then – an hour later – the whole thing again.

I HAVE EVEN CHECKED MY STOOL FOR WORMS.

The culprit, my cousin thinks, after me giving him the lowdown on everything I have eaten for a month, was either:

a) Some crisps containing a trace of barley that were marked suitable for Coeliacs. Meaning: they had less than 200 parts per million of gluten in them. PER MILLION. Fussy body.

b) a breadcrumb on my counter that I may have put my hand on and then bitten my fingernail.

So yes. It is better. But it is NOT GREAT.

“At the time, though,” I say, “I didn’t think anything coule be worse than having M.E.”

“It’s very good for mindfullness,” OldTutor says, a hand over one eye, peering at me through the cracks between his fingers.

“Mindfullness?”

“Yes you know, knowing you can deal with anything.”

“Hm.”

OldTutor mmms and sips his macciato. “Did you hear about that Italian supermodel who had some disease -” a wave of the hand, “and she had to have her hands and feet chopped off?”

“Erm – no,” I say, feeling sheepish.

“That’s sort of my standard for how bad things are.”

“I see,” I said, my bedridden-tv-watching-rice-cake-eating former life not seeming so bad.

“Right you I had better go – let me know when you’re next around the University -”

“I’m supposed to have a dentist appointment there soon,” I say.

“Oh,” OldTutor says.

“I hate the dentist,” I say.

“I don’t ever go,” OldTutor says.

A man is coming over to fix our boiler. We’ll call him BrummieBoilerMan. It is half past 9 and I am a pyjama-clad zombie.

The buzzer goes. Feeling a little bit smug, whilst of course pretending I live in a New York loft-style apparment, I press the door open button and resume my stalking on Facebook and pretending to work.

Some time goes by. I stop clicking around and look up. Where is BrummieBoilerMan?

I walk the three paces to the front door (it’s a small flat) and peer out. Then I realise I am wearing purple sheep pyjamas and cow print booties and shut it again.

I make a coffee and drum my fingers on the work surface.

I straighten my hair (quite a long task).

Fuck it, I think, not many people have moved in yet, and grab my keys.

I walk to the lift which creaks and freaks me out and press floor one. Yes. You have to go to floor one then down the stairs to the ground floor. If you press ground floor you end up by some bins and ringing your boyfriend to come and collect you from the middle of nowhere. MindReader had to draw me a map so I could get out and go to college.

The lift stops on floor two. I cringe.

A middle-ages ma gets in and says nothing. He glances at my feet and his mouth slackens slightly, more in fear than amazement, I think.

“Are you – um – first floor?” he says. Like – are you going to go outside?

“Er – yes,” I say.

It turns out BrummieBoilerMan was knocking on my door at this very moment.

I stir in our bed, and sigh slightly. It is 7pm and I have been napping. This has become a regular thing and means I am less of a zombie in the evenings. But – sleepiness had been so little of a feature in all this “fatigue” nonsense that I thought I might not have to go through this stage: my body is not quite there yet, I think, and, as usual, I will be ever so slightly less than happy until it is where I want it to be.

MindReader comes in. “Oh!” he says. “You’re napping.”

“Yep,” I say, stretching languidly. “What’s that smell?”

I pad into the kitchen and MindReader is making a batch of bubbling, scented curry. Fenugreek leaves, coriander seeds, fennel lie scattered along the work surface. He squeezes some creamed coconut into the curry, a smear of white, and adds a cinnamon stick. It really does smell good.

I sink into an armchair as he resumes cooking and hands me a decaf-coffee. I pull on my socks that have been resting on a warm radiator and watch the snow falling lightly outside against a navy-blue backdrop of sky. I catch his eye as I light a candle or two. And – I take back what I thought earlier.

I am happy.

“OldHousemate asked if we used that pestle and mortar,” I say to MindReader as I walk past him to show OldHousemate the bedroom. “And I said yes VERY smugly.”

“Well – you stir things in it,” he says smirking. It’s true.

“Ah, do you struggle to crush things?” OldHousemate says, admiring our freshly-tidied bedroom. “This is nice by the way, big!”

“I do,” I say. We often do this. Have multiple conversations, that is. “The cloves that I put in the gingerbread just fly out everywhere.”

“I know. My boyfriend bruises garlic in it and when I try to do it it just flies out.”

I stare blankly.

“I can imagine Billygean’s face from in here,” MindReader calls from the kitchen.