Billygean.co.uk

MindReader is not a very emotional person.

Well actually that’s not quite true. He probably is, he just doesn’t proclaim things like he feels like Emily Bronte when it’s thundering, or that he is feeling Very Sad when the cake turns out burnt and rubbish, like I do.

That Sunday I woke up late, walked around some pools and lakes with MadFather, and it was actually quite liberating to not check my phone all the time. Obviously I couldn’t leave it at home because of the wonderful GPS maps that lead us on a lovely walk! Oh, beautiful iphone! You are worth the interest rates I am paying on my overdraft(s)!

I went to BathShop for the afternoon, sorted soaps and smiled while I served customers. I left BathShop in the early evening, the weather warm enough for just a black dress and flip flops. I walked past people drinking, stood at tall metal tables outside trendy pubs, and someone puffed a plume of smoke right into my mouth. I don’t dislike it; it reminds me of holidays and festivals.

I glanced at my phone and saw the voicemail flashing. It was simply lovely, as clichéd as it sounds, to hear his voice again, his profuse apologies for the total lack of contact.

I got home, made two coffees and tidied the flat.

He came in with a massive grin on his face. And, even though he didn’t say anything, when he put his arms around me he took a big lungful of the scent of my hair.

“What would you like to do today?” MadFather says. I shrug. I am feeling slightly better – thank god, thank god – but I am supposed to be going on a hen night out and the thought of walking across Birmingham and staying awake fills me with dread. I phone and cancel, and try not to feel like it is June 2008.

“Try and go on a little walk?” I say.

We end up near a rural, pretty part of HomeTown, about a twenty minute drive from our house.

“I’ve never walked this way along the canal,” MadFather says, pointing, so we set off. We see some lupins, and he tells me about a Monty Python sketch. We see an entire field of wheat which I pose by.

MadFather stops suddenly. “Is that -?” he says.

I look up, and, incredibly bizarrely, OldestFriend and her fiance are stood in front of us.

“But – you live in London!” I say, incomprehensibly.

“What are you doing here?” she says.

“Just – walking,” I say. “You?”

“Same.”

We part ways and MadFather and I laugh about coincidences. We deicde to loop around the road, not walk back down the canal.

OldestFriend and her fiance appear to have the opposite thought. We bump into them again. Clearly it is meant to be.

“What’re you doing for the rest of the day?” OldestFriend says once we have stopped laughing.

“We’re going to go to the Hungry horse Craft Centre!” I say.

“Ooh!” OldestFriend says. “Ooh!”

And that is how we end up in a children’s cafe painting ceramic mugs.

I should probably say here that in year seven at school (age 11/12) OldestFriend and I were in different classes. Unbeknownst to the other we both decided to make a Boyzone tape rack in woodwork. The Boyzone sign is half a white stick man on a black background and vice versa on the other side. Needless to say mine was a muddle of grey, a very badly drawn stick man, and the logo itself wasn’t even a circle so the tape rack rocked. I remember hating the other person who had done the same tape rack but so, so, so much better.

I think we realised at about the same moment when OldestFriend saw my tape rack in my room one day and said “it’s YOU!”. And that’s sort of how we became friends.

From thereon, she drew all my things for me in art. She is now an interior designer.

We sit down in the cafe and I order some drinks. MadFather looks amused and bored and exchanged a glance with OldestFriend’s fiance as they check the wimbledon score together on the beautiful iphone.

I faff about and draw some awful drawing on my mug until the woman kindly suggests I use a TRACING BOOK.

I do not point out that my artistic talents do not even stretch to tracing.

I draw a sunflower and present it to OldestFriend. She stifles a laugh. “It looks like – it looks like a cat on a pole!” she says eventually, erupting. She re-draws the circle for me, because I cannot even draw around a coin.

I spill some paint, which MadFather mops up, while also helping me to choose which brush to use. I paint the inside of my mug yellow, and the woman remarks that it looks like somebody has weed in it.

I draw a monkey, which OldestFriend re-draws, and then I paint inthe wrong part so I have a monkey and its foot about an inch away, which has to be washed off by the woman, who thinks I am a complete moron.

I draw a bumble bee, and leave its wings white which I have since realised won’t show up as ANYTHING on the final mug, except a black and white stripy non-circle.

Eventually we take our mugs up to the till. OldestFriend’s mug is a perfect replica of her cat, the handle being the tail.

“Is this of – some significance?” The woman says, picking up my mug with its assortment of slightly deformed, mis-sized animals.

“Um, no…” I say.

She looks at my kindly. “Well, at least you had a nice time,” she says.

She looks at OldestFriend’s mug. “Now this is beautiful! Don’t those colours go well together!”

I catch OldestFriend’s eye and hide a smile.

“Now you just need to bring this back next week when you collect them,” the woman says to me, “though I think we’ll remember yours.”

OldestFriend’s espresso cup

“So,” MadFather says. “How are you feeling?”

“Bit crap,” I say, and give a sniff. “But not too crap to function. Just – you know – warning signs.”

I look out of the window and mentally work out how many hours until MindReader’s return. I haven’t heard a thing, which is oddly familiar. Indeed he went away for about this long – with no mobile reception – pretty much on this day last year.

“Shall we do this work then?” he says.

It is satisfying, for us both, to do achieve something and to finish it and relax at 7pm.

We go to the cinema (My Sister’s Keeper: good, but why must they always change the ending?), I get home and have a fabulous bath and light a few candles around my home bedroom.

I miss MindReader, my heart says, and I imagine telling him about my day. As it is, I don’t even know if he got to the deepest darkest bits of Wales okay.

I sit up straight and look at the flames. This time around, I can walk, or run, and be paid to do work at a desk. This was unthinkable last time around. Furthermore, I am me again. Not a brief extension of a boyfriend who could walk just fine, but me, with my own normal worries and likes and dislikes.

This time, I think, there will be no crying, no hysterical text messages, no matter how bad my health gets. This time, it will be different.

MindReader, MadFather and I are fruit picking. MindReader is about to go away for three days, and has taken some annual leave to do fun stuff.

I am half-distracted by fears of a cold. That slight heaviness, body protesting at walking, sore throat. Sigh.

MindReader’s arm encircles my waist as he pops a raspberry into my mouth. I kiss him, full on the lips.

“This one’s green!” MadFather says, a few rows of raspberries along.

This sort of inane outburst is quite common for MadFather.

MindReader and I turn to look at him.

He blows into the stem of the green raspberry.

“What…?” I say.

“I’m just making it ripe,” MadFather says. “You have to blow really, really hard.”

“Oh,” I say, thinking.

“That’s why it’s called blowing raspberries,” MindReader says.

“Ohh, I SEE,” I say, and go about picking some green raspberries ready to blow.

I stand up to see MindReader and MadFather silently laughing.

“Oh,” I say, “OH.”

MindReader and I are at the BFG.

We are surrounded by little people. They are constantly walking along the rows of the seats, so every few seconds we both have to stand up.

“Erm,” I say. And stop, and think quietly to myself.

I knew the BFG was a children’s book. And looking back I actually think I have seen this particular performance when I was about 11. And yet – I didn’t put two and two together that this might be a performance for children when I ordered it for MindReader’s birthday. Because it was his favourite book AS A CHILD.

I sigh. “Sorry about this,” I say, as the lights dim and some adults appear on the stage, doing that annoying shouty, stampy thing where they overact and pretend to be children but actually appear to be slightly stupid adults on acid.

“Baa baa black sheep,” MindReader sings under his breath.

It is ten past eight on a Monday morning. MindReader and I have had breakfast together on a weekday for the first time in 18 months.

I walk up Church street, past the cathedral and through the flower beds. I had almost forgotten what the early-morning air was like. Somehow crisper, almost autumnal-feeling. I draw my cardigan tighter around myself.

“Billygean?” a voice says.

“Oh – hi!” I say.

It is OldLawFriend. She was in my year, and now she’s a lawyer, evidentially on her way to the office for 8:15am.

“You’re looking well!” she says, and I smirk.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Are you – you know – basically all better now?”

I squint into the sun. I am on my way to BathShop for the second 8.30am shift this weekend. I do not feel great, but, at the moment, I am doing it, and, as MindReader says, I should actually be quite proud of having just the one job let alone two (I work from home for a law firm. Go me!)

“Basically,” I say. “It took 18 months.”

“Congratulations,” she says.

We chat some more, about non-contentious probate and a department of personal damages. And then I go sort my soaps out for the customers and smile slightly.

“What you playing?” I say to MindReader, who is strumming away on his new guitar.

“Not saying,” he says. MindReader is very shy.

“Please,” I say, rolling off the sofa and trying to grab his music book.

“No!” he says.

I leave it, for this is how MindReader responds.

I play with my phone. “It’s supposed to be Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” he says after a few minutes.

I nod. “I THOUGHT it sounded like that,” I say.

He strums another chord. And a few more.

“Coming for to carry me hooome,” I sing.

“I was playing the next song.”

I poke Stranger in the ribs. We are both at a wedding.

“So,” I say, “how do you deal with the possibility that it can come back?”

Stranger doesn’t miss a beat, for this appears to be what we do. “A very good question,” he says, sipping something that smells like alcoholic licorice.

“You know, at first, I lived in abject fear of every sniffle – people with colds were exiled and I washed everything I cooked with obsessively. My parents thought I had a serious mental disorder…which at the time, I think I did,” he smirks.

I smile, remembering washing my hands in the college bathrooms after my friend sneezed. It seemed logical, at the time, to then wash the doorhandles of our flat too, until MindReader sat me down.

“I think,” Stranger continues, “I started to try and not think of myself as a person with an illness, tried to stop taking about CFS and rejected those thoughts that seemed to try to confirm that I couldn’t do things. This took about three months. I read somewhere that although sharing is sometimes good, for many people constantly reliving all those bad experiences isn’t. Its been so long I cant really explain much, its like asking a person who’s been running for 10 years how they run, they’d probably say they just get on with putting one foot in front of the other, right?”

He pauses. And then says “I’m not afraid of it coming back any more because I live with the results of it.”

I catch my breath. Sometimes, fatigue is all I think about, even though I am technically better. Unexpected days where I cannot do anything wait in the wings, and the constant monitoring of my body makes me wonder that, although I’m better physically, perhaps there is a mental recovery that needs to happen, too.

And even though i know exactly what he means, and even though I am stood on some wooden decking, glass of wine in hand and high heels on, I confess I have no idea where to start.

“I have alien hair?” I say to MindReader as he walks in from work.

“What kind of alien?” he says, looking at his phone.

“An alien with awful hair.”

He looks up. “It’s fine,” he says. And then he does this thing. He sort of – wipes his hand over his stubble, covering a smirk. It has the effect of making him appear quite disgusted.

I put it up and add a headband. A tuft remains poking straight upwards, behind the headband.

“It’s AWFUL,” I say.

MindReader looks. And then looks again. “Why is it DOING that?”

“Hi!” I say as MindReader comes in. I am conked out on the sofa. Working for money is TIRING.

“Hey,” he says.

“Good day?”

“No,” he says. “Something bad happened.”

My stomach gives a little lurch. MindReader is ALWAYS fine. “What?”

He sighs. “I leaned over to pick up an elastic band and my boxers split.”