Abi Morgan - This Is Not A Pity Memoir

For Jacob, Jesse, and Mabel

... Deeply deeply

I regard the brain as a computer which will stop working when the components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken down computers; that is a fairy tale for people afraid of the dark.

STEPHEN HAWKING

I ts dark and Im pissed off. Ive slept in the spare room again, so I am in no mood for chat. When I go in, I do my usual.

Is it your head again? Have you taken paracetamol?

But not in a nice way. In a way that he and I know will communicate my fatigue and frustration. The spare room is also his office. With an expensive pull-down bed. Meant for the occasional guest or my mother. Not for a week now. A week Ive slept in the spare room because I snore. I keep him awake with my snoring. Or to be frank, he keeps me awake with his snoring. Louder than mine. Though this is a point of dispute. A continual point of dispute. But for now, hes the one with the headache.

I dont feel great.

Its 7 a.m. and I want to drop our kids at school and get my coffee and go to work. The coffee that is the very expensive kind that I buy every day from the same, very expensive coffee shop. Only today you have your hand on your forehead and you tell me it feels like there is a knife running from the top of your scalp into the back of your neck. So, Ill get steroids, from your doctor. Something I can do. Something Im good at. And its not that were not used to this. Its not that this is not par for the course. Ill get a few hours work in, this morning, and then drive and pick up your medication and get sushi for our son to celebrate his last GCSE, which is today, and then bring them back at lunchtime.

Can you cope until then, Jacob?

Theres silence.

Youre a terrible nurse, you reply.

And I thinkyoure right. I am a terrible nurse. Im not built for this. A decade of rifling around for paracetamol and cold packs, and nights in the spare room. And then I lean in to kiss you and you say

Whats it like to have everything?

And I say

I dont have everything. Because youre not well.

Buying sushi is a complicated business. I am nervous to stray from the path. No eel or anything that looks too like a sliver of cold egg custard perched atop a small boat of rice. But still, I buy too much. And wasabi peas, which I detest but which I know Jacob likes to flick into his mouth, lying on the sofa watching The Simpsons when I am working somewhere, elsewhere in the house.

How can he live with such an unbearable lightness of being?

I like The Simpsons, but it never makes me laugh. My days are spent constructing story, manipulating truths, assimilating life into fiction. To be performed, acted in, filmed, shot. I watch movies and comedies with the precise and earnest eye of a surgeon. Not because I believe I am anything special. I am a writer. Although that would denote a certain level of expertise. But in truth I feel a fraud. Uneducated. Unbrilliant. At times, frankly, illiterate. I lie about the books Ive read. I am always trying not to be found out. If I am going to see a film, I prefer to have read all the reviews and to know the plot, beforehand. The joy I get is in piecing together the narrative. I like being one step ahead of the audience, with my insider knowledge, like some secondhand moonlighting cop, sifting over the pieces, working out how it is done. How it is being crafted.

Because shes actually a ghost, I want to scream.

Or

Hes in the boot of the car.

Of course hes in the boot of the car.

I like to know how my story is going to end. And when I dont know there is a kind of blind panic, which unsettles, unnerves, terrifies me. Like a wet finger run around the rim of the glass. I have to wait until the sound of this reverberating hum dissolves. Settles into silence again. And only then can I begin to breathe.

The chef rolls and slices and arranges sushi in flowered plastic trays with such grace. A master at his craft. I watch, waiting in front of the counter. I appreciate this. Afterwards Ill run to my office, as I have missed my deadline. Its Friday and on Friday I am usually writing an email of apology that will fly into the arms of some small production company, where they will read it and sink a little, knowing they have to wait another weekend for that script that is already several weeks too late.

But today I have an excuse.

I have errands to run, steroids to pick up, a mission to accomplish.

I drive to Queen Square. A scrubby square of grass and rose beds marked out in black railings where the drunks and the dogs and the visitors and patients in wheelchairs and staring, nervous parents walk, two steps behind their sick children, let out for the afternoon from Great Ormond Street for air and sun. Today office workers are flopped on the grass, cheek by jowl with dust-covered builders from a nearby construction site, swigging Cokes and laughing in the heat.

Its June.

Did I say the month was June?

I walk to the pharmacy inside the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, a warren of doors and grubby plastic and disoriented old ladies gripping outpatient letters and nurses wheeling oxygen tanks. At the pharmacy I wait for the small white paper box of steroids that I hope will bring relief for the symptoms that Jacob has had for the last seven years, the MS that we try not to name, but which hovers dark and damp, like fret on a cold day, threatening to disrupt another evening, another holiday.

And then Im out, weaving my way back to the car.

Yes, its June.

So, I must have picked up the steroids and after, after, thats when I drive to get sushi. For our son. To celebrate. Yes, I bought sushi after. Otherwise it would have sat in a warm car. And I dont do that. I know I wouldnt have done that.

In the car, I slide the box of pills onto the dashboard. And suddenly I am crying.

Not crying. Sobbing.

Not sobbing.

Bawling.

Because I am tired of the years of steroids. And nights on the spare bed. And the passive aggression that accompanies every exchange as we tread around, over, and under this illness.

And Im tired of pretending that any of this is OK.

It is not OK.

It is not OK.

The roar of a crowd and football commentary filters up from the living room TV before I have even opened the front door. The dog helicopters like some crazed fan until I put down my bags. I placate him with a pat and a scratch. He loves me more than anyone, because I feed him and walk him, mainly.

I call out to Jesse, lost to FIFA, mid-match.

Did you go up to see Dad? I say.

Silence.

I take this to mean no.

I put the sushi in the fridge, and then head upstairs to our bedroom. Four flights of stairs, and when I open the bedroom door, I am already congratulating myself on all I have achieved.

It is now 2 p.m., and I am incredible.

I am invincible.

Ive got this nailed.

Did I say congratulations to my son?

The bed is empty, illuminated by the light from the bathroom.

Or was the bathroom door closed?

I turn and that is when I see you.

Jacob?

You are lying on the bathroom floor. A narrow tiled white space that I complained reminded me of a sanatorium when it was finished. And which I got locked in only a week ago and had to shout down to you, banging the door with such violence that, two days later, I see I have left a dent in the wood. You rescued me.

The door is open.

Jacob?

I tell myself, You are cooling down. The day is hot, and though the blinds are down, the room is always stifling. You must have come into the bathroom to cool down on the cold tiled floor. And have fallen asleep.

I lean over and try to rouse you. For a minute I cant decide if your lips are blue. Or, are you wearing lipstick? And then I see that you have dried blood caked around your mouth.