Billygean.co.uk

I was going to blog about how MindReader became an uncle, and how it feels to have a job again, but then my body started doing strange things and as always happiness is eclipsed by this.

My exams start tomorrow. Four in five days, and then my life as a student ends forever. It should be a sort of momentous relief, that I will no longer be judged on (basically) how many hours I put into something, hot how good it is, but it’s not. Instead it is a kind of guilt-ridden end to something I perhaps went back to too early.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m functional, but there’s a sort of sinister heaviness, a needing 12 hours’ sleep, not 10, of feeling like I’d rather be lying down than not. I went into work (paid work) today for three hours which perhaps wasn’t one of my smartest moves but I couldn’t lie about in the house feeling guilty about doing nothing any longer. It hasn’t made me feel any worse, which is what I mean – I’m not sick-sick, but I don’t feel right either.

I think I am entirely freaked out by having to go into the building where it all went wrong for me. I am never 100% around exams – bad luck, or working myself too hard – and I will probably never get over the shock of having walked out of an exam: I will always think it is happening again.

It’s also unfair. I am under prepared, because of my health. And whether that’s my fault or not, whether I can do anything about it or not, is never going to be okay.

What would be good if I could relax and go into the exam knowing I did all I could. But I can’t. Instead I feel shaky, not ready, and entirely like I am ready to finish being a student altogether.

Words?!

I step out of work (work! How weird to say when 5 months ago you couldn’t sit up all day) and into the blazing sunshine. I am tired, but not that sinister achey-tired that I used to be. Indeed I feel almost entirely normal after 5 hours on my feet, demonstrating bubble bars to people.

I walk down the hill, past the red buses and up towards the post office. The sun beats down on my back and I shift my bag full of free samples SO I GET TO KNOW THE PRODUCTS.

I push past some people and open the door of the cool post office.

“Hi I’m here to collect a parcel,” I say. It is MindReader’s present from DoctorSister. He had been musing about learning to play the guitar so – a day of ebaying later – and one arrived.

He motions to hand me the massive cardboard box over the counter. “Don’t worry it’s really light,” he says.

I reach my hands up and promptly crumple onto the floor. “That is NOT light,” I say, whilst EVERYBODY IN THE POST OFFICE WATCHES.

“Right,” he says. “Do you want to take it out of its box?”

I faff with scissors and the packaging and my temporary lack of nails (have fallen off the nail-biting wagon) and eventually out comes a shiny guitar.

“Thanks,” I say as he gives me a receipt.

I walk out of the post office and crowds have formed. There are police everywhere and music playing – and – partitions everywhere.

I shake my head, beginning to think it might be nap time. The sun is boiling. I have to get across the street to get home.

A man is selling rainbow flags and I clock that it is gay pride. I smile slightly as a van full of gyrating topless men goes past and relent and take a few photos.

As the vans go past and the honking begins to fade I attempt to cross the street. I didn’t see the gay pride football team coming. I pick up the guitar and prepare to cross.

“Excuse me love,” one of them shouts, “play us a song then!”

I stop. They think I am in the parade. They think I am able to play a guitar!

I wish I had a witty punchline, but the truth is I did what any of you would do – I said “no” rather curtly and scarpered off home, where I slept for four hours straight.

Today is my first day of work.

It should be momentous, right?

Except: I’m a twat.

MindReader is away, always a recipe for Billygean going MAD. Felt quite relaxed, went to bed at midnight, trying to be realistic. I think I had half an hour’s sleep between 3 and 4 and another half an hour between 6 and 7.

This should be interesting.

MindReader and I are at a Maximo Park gig. I have had some problems with gigs in the past, namely that they seemed to fall at inconvenient times (ie. between January and December 08!) and served as nice little reminders of what I was missing.

This time, we are there by 7:30, sipping drinks and idly watching the first support act.

MindReader places an arm around my shoulders, curling his hand so it sits on my collar bone and I concentrate on not getting hot under the collar at a concert. “You alright?” He says. “Do you want to sit down?”

I smile and remember one night last summer when he dared to so much as indicate that my illness was difficult for him, too. We were in the car in a storm, shadows of the pelting rain forming spots on his hands on the steering wheel. I blew up, and regretted it ever since.

“You know what,” I shout into his ear over the music, my drink sloshing everywhere.

“What?” He says smiling.

“I know all this,” I gesture, “was shit for you too, you know.”

Maximo Park come on.

“Sorry?” he says over the roars of the crowd surging forward and lifting me off my feet.

“I know my illness was rubbish for you, too,” I say.

“Oh, good,” he says, baffled.

Maximo Park launch into one of their best songs. The lyrics are pure poetry:

On our knees against the window sill
Watching the sheet lightening fly
Our hands caught spray from the open window
A blanket of light, a whitewashed sky

MindReader is still staring at me, puzzled. “Happy birthday!” I say and pull him towards me as the lights flash around us.

I am out for something like the fourth night in a row. I twiddle my straw as I eye Stranger, (actually more of a friend of a friend) for he, too, is a fatigue survivor. Of course, the first, and only time we ever spoke, was before it happened to me, too.

He’s standing with a beer, and laughing, and came out to the pub straight from work. He looks normal. He is sort of an idol for a fatigued person.

“Hi,” I say, squeezing past people in the crowded hot pub.

“Hello,” he says, with the classic head tilt. “And how are you – we haven’t spoken since…?”

I acknowledge the head tilt with one of my own. “I’m okay,” I say. “I’m basically normal except I need a lot of sleep.”

“Ah,” he nods and laughs knowingly. “The question is will we ever be normal again?”

“Does it get better?” I say, for it is half past one in the morning and I’m exhausted.

He looks up. “With enough time, and enough will,” he says. “It’s rubbish isn’t it? You wouldn’t know it but my knees and elbows are killing.”

“It’s better than it was,” I nod, and our eyes meet, mutually remembering a time when we couldn’t reach up to style our hair. “And we DO appreciate being in the pub!”

“Yes but none of these bastards do!” he says, laughing. “Why should we appreciate being able to leave the house and stand up?”

I sigh and smile.

“In hundreds of years, people will look at people like us and wonder how we got ignored and nobody could figure out what was wrong, and it will have been something really simple,” he says.

I yawn. “And until then?”

“Until then,” he says, “just keep going.”

“They want me to be able to do double entry bookkeeping though,” OldHousemate says. And by OldHousemate, I don’t mean that she’s 90, just that I used to live with her.

“Oh God,” I say.

“Have you done it?”

“I passed an exam on it last year, but I couldn’t tell you what it was,” I say. “I just memorised what to do.”

“Ah. Can you imagine if I got the job?! And then when they came to train me I’d be like – so what’s money?”

I laugh. “I got confused about numbers today. We had to work out redundancy payments in employment law… And we had to do 9 times 1 times 2.5, and my friend said it mattered what order you did it in…”

“No it doesn’t!” OldHousemate says.

“Well I thought that! But I couldn’t explain why.”

“Okay – 9 times 1 is 18.”

“9 times 1 is 18,” I say, deadpan.

“Oh, woops. Ignore me!”

On THAT Easter weekend, when I thought it was happening again, I made a plea for you not to forget about me. I received comments and emails and texts in response.

A very good friend of mine wrote the following:

Personally I love a good beer garden, so let’s say – the Dirty Duck in Stratford. We’ll have summer dresses (obviously) and be drinking Pimms and, though I’m playing it cool, I’m probably secretly overly excited that there is an RSC actor at the table but one.

I scanned her words, eagerly, for she is one of those people who gives really, really good advice: not stock-piled cliches, and, in this instance at least, raw sympathy, too. Something about it struck me, possibly the ‘but one’ realism, and carried me to the beer garden from my sic bed for a moment.

Today, MindReader and I went to Stratford. Walking to the theatre (and the butterfly farm and out to DINNER), I saw the dirty duck and smiled, a nod to a past me who would be very happy with this outcome indeed.

Gluten free scone!!

Obligatory MR’s bum shot

I INSISTED on going in the spider house. And then promptly had something resembling a panic attack.

The jury’s still out on whether they poisoned me with wheat (usually takes a day or two to tell) but so far so good – they knew what glutn was, check, and used separate utensils, double check

Introducing:

Atticus and Boo (a lepard and pearl danio respectively), and Dorothy, The Cowardly Lion and The Scarecorw (three zebra danios).

But what this space as we are getting TWENTY more!