CHAPTER 3

Sofa so Good 

I drag myself out of bed and draw back the curtains. These days, I often have a real job just to motivate myself to get out of bed, although, I think part of that is down to the stultifying effects of the ant-viral medication. “Here we go,” I thought gloomily, “Another day in paradise – I don’t think!” It was bloody teeming down again.

I used to love the rain, probably something to do with my Irish roots, but not anymore. I hate it now and it seems to do nothing but rain around these parts.

“What the hell am I doing here?” I ask myself despondently. How had I ended up back in Blackburn, the very place I’d been trying to escape from all my life? Well, the answer to that was quite simple. It had been thanks to Brian of course. In fact, when I came to think about it, everything, past future and present, had been and was still being down to him. But he wasn’t here anymore – or was he? It sometimes felt like he was, but maybe that was just wishful thinking on my part. The absence of his physical presence was an aching void, yet I felt he was still out there somewhere, even though I knew it was impossible because I’d been with him when he died and I swear, I’d  felt his spirit flying over my shoulder. I had no doubt however that his ghostly presence was still hanging around and although I should have been glad that we still had some connection, be it only in spirit form, it felt like he was spying on me  rather than watching over me. In other words, it felt like he was still trying to control me and that’s what I didn’t like. Why wouldn’t he leave me alone?

Those first terrible months after he’d died, I’d often sensed his presence and even a fleeting shadow of him lurking on my stairs, wearing the red devil mask with the curved gold horns he’d bought when we were in Barcelona and used to like to terrify me with. Well, he was terrifying me now that was for sure. If he was so intent on hanging around in spirit form, why not present himself as the Brian I had loved for most of my life and not the powerful, schizophrenic Brian, others (myself included) had had good reason to fear. He was obviously out to control me from beyond the grave and that thought was enough to send shudders down my spine. I didn’t want to be controlled by him anymore, or by anyone for that matter, least of all a ghost.

It was always after midnight when he appeared and always in the same place. He never appeared during the day.

“What do you want now?” I’d ask him impatiently, before quickly scurrying into my bedroom. I’d started locking my bedroom door, as if that would keep him out! His tortured spirit could obviously not rest in peace. That’s what they say, isn’t it, about certain ghosts? But what were you supposed to do with the pesky things? Waft some rosemary in the air, wear a cross; light a candle to send them on their way.

On their way where? The great beyond; wherever and whatever that may be?

Talking of the great beyond, I’d driven all the way to Liverpool to see this woman, a psychotherapist or something, who claimed in her brochure that she could help recently bereaved people like me who were suffering from the affects of grief.

The first thing she told me to do was to imagine Brian very big, towering over me like a huge shadow, which given the circumstances of his continued presence on my stairs was not hard to do, then shrink him in my mind and send him off to stand in the corner of the room.

“Like a naughty boy?” I asked her.

“If you like,” she said.

“There he goes, he’s over there in the corner,” I tell her. I was enjoying this, it was affording me an unaccustomed feeling of power over him for a change, “But he looks like a MacDougall’s flour man with a round smiling face – a tiny Brian in a big bowler hat!”

“Good,” she praised me, “I can see you’re going to be very good at this.”

“So what do I do about the blue then?” was my next question.

“The blue?” she repeated raising an intellectual eyebrow, which I noticed was in desperate need of plucking and about to join forces with her other one. My mum had always warned me to beware of people whose eyebrows met in the middle, a sure sign of the devil she said.

“The blue,” I sighed, “I can’t look at anything blue without thinking of him.”

“Colour association,” she scribbled on her pad, “Well, um, in that case you must get rid of everything blue,” she ordered, as if that were obvious and the easiest thing in the world to do.

“How on earth do I do that?” I wanted to know, “How do I get rid of the blue sky, the blue sea; my own blue eyes staring back at me when I looked in the mirror, lost and lonely and missing him still.”

“You just have to move on,” she told me briskly.

“Where to?” I thought she meant move away and leave Blackburn, “I can’t leave now. I’m battling with his family and his executors because they’re not adhering to his wishes.” 

“I meant move on mentally,” she scowled, “But a change of habitat is always helpful in order to leave the past behind,” she sniffed dryly. “However, if you can’t move location, then make changes to your habitat, move your furniture around, change your room, buy some new curtains, but obviously not blue.”

If only it were that simple. Anyway, who did she think she was, Carol bloody Smiley Smiley? Linda buy this sofa Barker, Laurence Llewellyn Bowen?

But nevertheless, I took her advice. Out went the green sofas Brian and I had bought together and off down to the salerooms. I bought some new ones, some blue ones. Bloody hell, why did I do that? What was the matter with me?

All right, I thought, I’ll get the decorators in to paint the walls then move everything around, like she said – disrupt the energy; a bit of feng shui might do the trick.

It didn’t.

I know, I had another idea, I’ll try painting the bedroom, but I’ll do it myself this time, a nice restful pink and move the bed to the other side of the room, then maybe I can get some sleep.

There, that felt better already. But I go to bed that night and from over the new colour coordinated duvet, I cast my gaze approvingly around the room until my eyes hit upon a tiny scrap of paper, lying in the middle of the floor. “That won’t do,” I tut scoldingly and reluctantly get out of bed, bend down to throw it away then stop dead in my tracks. It was Brian’s note to me, the one he’d written in his spidery handwriting, just before he died.

“I’ve always loved you Adrienne.”

How the hell had it got there? It was in the study locked away with all my special papers. I’d nearly thrown it away.

He was still hanging around then.

Right, I asked the space at the top of the stairs where he usually stands, what do you want me to do? Carry on fighting the Executors to insist that your wishes are carried out? That’s what I’m doing isn’t it? 

Don’t stop painting, don’t stop sculpting?

OK, OK, but I’m getting weak. For some reason my legs had started to ache when I tried to walk upstairs. Try as I might, they didn’t want to work anymore. Push, push and up we go. And I kept losing my voice. Where was it going?

Then I got thrush in my mouth. I thought you only got that on your privates.

“Babies often get it,” the doctor informed me, “It’s quite common, take this,” he handed me a magic potion.

I swallowed it every few hours, as directed and away it went. Then back it came again.

“It’s back again doctor.”

“Try these antibiotics,” he scribbled a prescription.

But my voice kept coming and going.  I never knew if it was going to work or not. Must be something seriously wrong with me I thought, so back to the doctor for some tests and off goes the swab to the lab, but they can find nothing untoward.

I was working on a plaster model of the sculpture entitled ‘The Couple’ that Brian and I had planned just before he died. Keeping up the momentum and honouring my promise to him that I would carry on sculpting. Must be the plaster dust from sanding the model, I decide. I know what I’ll do, I’ll wear a mask. I should wear one really anyway, health and safety and all that. But I keep pulling it off. It hangs under my chin, strung around my neck like a huge goita. Then one day, I dropped the plaster as I was working on it. It fell out of my hands and broke in two – just like that!

Bugger! Stuck it back together again with some Araldite, but it was chipped and jagged with parts missing. A bit like me!

What was missing?

Brian was.

Alright, enough is enough I thought. I know what I’ll do; I’ll go away. I’ll go back to Ibiza for a while, get right away from him and his pesky ghost. I can see Ben, my errant son, who had gone back to live there, keep tabs on what he was doing and at the same time make sure he wasn’t doing any. It was taking ‘tabs’ that had caused all his problems, that and the fact that I had been too preoccupied with Brian to see what was going on. I can see that now, although I couldn’t at the time. It was hard to see beyond Brian. He was that kind of man. Anyway, I thought, or rather Brian thought that Ben was old enough to manage without his ‘over protective mother’. But in truth it was because he wanted me all to himself, without the added complication of a teenage son tagging along.

Decision made, I book a ticket, pack a bag and feel better immediately.

Ibiza, my erstwhile home, it felt great to be back; Ben seemed to be in good form, I got to see all my old friends without Brian’s jealousy to intervene – sun, sea, no stairs, no ghosts.

“What’s happened to your lovely hair?” everyone kept asking me. “It’s gone a bit thin hasn’t it, why did you have it cut?”

“I didn’t,” I tell them. “It must be the menopause. It keeps falling out. I must be short of hormones or something.”

I go to see a Spanish doctor – the bloody thrush is back, must think its migration time.

“Chew raw garlic,” he prescribes, “And eat live yoghurt.”

“At the same time?” I ask horrified.

“Drink this tea made from tree bark, it has ant-fungal properties,” he advises.

It tastes foul.

“Buy a tongue scraper,” he recommends as I slink out of the door.

Yuk!

The Spanish think garlic is the cure for everything, but it wasn’t enough to cure what was ailing me and neither, for that matter, was the live yoghurt, the foul tree bark nor the bloody tongue scraper. My voice continued to keep coming and going, but I put it down to the weather. It was winter after all and unaccustomarily cold for Ibiza.

I start acting a bit odd. People start to notice. Then I have to buy some more sofas for the flat.

“Why?” my friend Anne asks me, “What’s wrong with the ones you’ve got?”

“Wrong colour,” I tell her, “They have to be yellow.”

I drive miles in the dark on my own to a huge warehouse, somewhere near the airport, stacked full of sofas covered in sheets of heavy plastic. I search and search until I find them. Not really the yellow I had in mind, more of a custard colour really, but I have to have them regardless. Two for the price of one – great! Will they fit in the flat? Don’t care.

They arrive the next day on the back of a lorry. Not enough room for them of course, so I change the rest of the furniture this way and that, but I’m feeling weak, no one there to help me. Ben has gone out. He doesn’t like change. It makes him nervous.

I started to sweat, used my knees to push things around the room, recalling the time  in the hotel in the Lake District, the one Brian and I had escaped to when we’d found out he only had a few months left to live. He’d suffered a bad reaction from the stuff they’d pumped into him for the tests and was lying prostrate on the bed, burning with fever. He’d wanted to be nearer the window, so I’d pushed the heavy bed with him lying on it across the room with my knees. Then I suddenly remembered Brian had suffered from Thrush. Funny, I’d never thought of that before.

I finally manage to squeeze the new sofas in. They are a horrible colour, hideous in fact and I hate them, so I cover them with white cotton bed sheets. There, that’s better. I light the fire with some rolled up newspaper and sweat some more, then run a hot bath, soak there till the water starts to feel cold, then go to bed. I start shivering sometime in the night, teeth chattering away by themselves, talking to myself, calling out for my mum, my dad, Brian.

In the morning Ben comes in to my bedroom, demands some money, then goes out. I hear the telephone ringing in the living room, but I’m too weak to get up and answer it. Ben comes back at some point and disappears inside his room. I hear the doorbell ring again and again over the repetitive thumps and beats of his Techno music. I know he won’t answer the door or let anyone in as he’s still going through his paranoid stage, caused by the drugs. But I’m too ill to care.

I toss and turn all that night, burning with fever, throwing up into a plastic bowl, my head hurting like hell as though someone was hitting it with a hammer.

My friend Anne finally manages to force her way through the door, past Ben, to find me curled up in a shivering heap, talking rubbish.

“That paranoid son of yours wouldn’t let me in,” she told me crossly, “I’ve been ringing and ringing. I knew something was wrong. Let me get you a clean nightie and here, I’ve made you some chicken soup.” 

“Get your bony hands of me,” I push her away.

“Right, I’m calling for the doctor,” she sniffs bossily.

“I’m not going to any bloody Spanish hospital,” I swear from inside the plastic bowl.

“You’ll do as you’re told,” she marches to the phone.

An ambulance arrives with a wail of sirens and whisks me off to the noisy Spanish hospital, where I am subjected to countless indignities then they attempt to put me in one of those long tube-like machines to be x-rayed.

“I’ve got claustrophobia,” I try to tell them as they strap me in. “I can’t go in that.”

“Put these headphones on,” a bossy Spanish nurse plonks them over my head.

It sounded like Ben’s horrible Techno music thumping in my ears.

I eventually come out the other end of the tube then I’m plonked in a wheelchair and whizzed through a maze of endless brightly lit corridors then left on a high bed in a room all by myself. Someone, a man in a scruffy white coat, eventually comes along and wires me up to a cow udder drip dangling from a pole, then shoves a mask over my face.

“What’s up with me?” I mumble through the mask in Spanish, but he obviously didn’t understand my muffled attempt at the lingo and with an uncomprehending shrug of the shoulder, disappears.

Pneumonia, the doctor declares the next morning on his rounds. Funny kind of pneumonia, I think. Different from the kind I had before. I could still breathe, even fancied a cigarette.

More x-rays, blood tests every two minutes, my arms were black and blue. Spanish nurses are not known for their delicacy. Then to my horror I was wheeled off down to theatre where a tube was thrust up my nose and down my throat with some kind of camera attached to it, to see what was going on down there. Nothing it turned out, at least nothing that shouldn’t be going on. The specialist couldn’t understand it. 

After a few days, I start to feel a bit better, but I’m lonely in the room on my own forced to talk to myself, the cleaners, the walls and my mum of course, every day on the phone.

“Come home,” she nags.

“As soon as the doctors will let me,” I sniff pitifully.

It was nearly Christmas. Ben didn’t come to visit me. He doesn’t like hospitals. Most of the other patients had been allowed to go home. Their rooms were empty. I pace the deserted corridors in my dressing gown and ride up and down in the lift to pass the time. I make endless trips to the vending machine. I go to see the Christmas tree and Nativity in reception six times a day. The surly receptionist is sick of the sight of me – I am sick of the sight of her.

The doctor finally tells me I can go back to England and I am wheeled to the plane in a wheelchair, clutching my laptop on my knees. I can’t even lift it to put it in the overhead lockers. 

Back in Blackburn my mum nurses me back to health and once I’ve recovered, we decide to go back to Ibiza. Its spring by this time and all the wild flowers are out. Poppies everywhere; wild orchids, butterflies flittering around; it was beautiful and everything was going just fine, then would you believe it, the bloody thrush comes back. Off I go again to see a homeopathic doctor this time, in Ibiza town, and my friend Anne comes with me. The doctor chats about this and that, then asks me lots of questions about my sex life, which of course is now non existent since Brian died. I tell him about the trauma of Brian dying from sudden liver cancer and he shakes his head in sympathy, but he doesn’t examine me. Bit strange I think. I try to show him the rash that has suddenly appeared all over my body and the strange bullet hole like spots, exactly the same as Brian’s, which itch like hell, but he doesn’t seem particularly interested.

“Would you like to have some tests?” he asks brightly.

“Of course,” I agree, anything, although I’d already had every test known to man, or at least I’d thought I had, in the hospital. He sends me off for a blood test with a long list of things to test me for.  A lot of the things I don’t recognize because they are written in Spanish, but some I do and HIV is one of them. But of course I didn’t need to worry about that, did I? After all, I’d just come out of hospital. Surely they would have tested me for that? Wouldn’t they?

He makes another appointment for me in three weeks time, but several days later I get a message on my answer machine from his secretary to come to his office urgently. And that’s when I found out.

Then I had to go back and tell my mum. She was sitting waiting for me at the café on the seafront we always used to frequent. It was a beautiful day I recall and the beach was filling up with tourists laying their brightly coloured towels on the sand and putting up striped umbrellas. Children were excitedly splashing in the waves. It felt all wrong, the sun being out, the happy faces, the bright colours. This wasn’t the right scenario to break the news to my poor mum. I will always remember the look of horror on her face, which she quickly tried to disguise.

“Don’t worry love,” she squeezed my shaking hand, “At least its not cancer. We can cope with this.”

We get on the first plane back to England.