We had illness in common, was that it? Or it was illness that filled that space between us, that absence of possibility. I was unemployed, and you - you'd dropped out of employment. You'd had an operation, and then it came, the illness; you didn't return to work.
I met him once, your business partner. He was half in love with you. He said he'd run the business, and what mattered was that you got better. You said you wanted no phonecalls from him, nothing. Just a monthly cheque. Taken out of the accounts so it wouldn't alert the benefit people, from whom she also recieved a monthly cheque.
I was impressed: you were ready to be seriously ill. To see it through to the end. You said it had been brewing a long time. You'd worked hard, you said, you'd built up the business, you and your partner. But it was waiting all along, you thought, and from your teenage years. You showed me a photo. You as a teenager, long haired and made up. You played keyboards in a band. You toured the workingman's clubs.
But you were ill then, you said; it had already begun. Staying with your uncle and aunt, you said. They didn't want you there, you could feel it. Down by the sea - Brighton, it was. And then you'd come back up North, got a job. Went out with a gangster, you said, who told you how to fiddle the banks. You had a whole secret identity, another you, with another account. And bought two houses, and received two lots of benefits.
Very clever, the whole thing. But now the illness had come. You were ready to be ill, there was no avoiding it. A serious business. You had to wait for illness to pass through you and away. Had to lie down and wait, to welcome it in your own way, to affirm it in its passage. And then you'd rise, one day, ready for the world. Ready as you'd never been, knowing the illness was in you, you said.
And I was ill too, you said. You saw it in me. There was a kind of vacancy, a void. You knew it there. It was what we had in common, you said. We had to let ourselves be ill, you said. You knew the lingo, you'd visited counsellors. And didn't he say, your counsellor, that he thought you were a saint. What you'd put up with, he said. You were saintly, he said, and that he was in love with you.
Because you were pretty, you always had that - your looks, of which you were neglectful, and marvellously so. Because you could neglect them. No make up, no fancy clothes. You smoked rollies and your voice was deep. At night you'd pick at your face for hours, you told me. Smoking rollies and surfing the net (you'd just got connected).
It was illness that drew us together, you decided. The illness in each of us recognised the other. It was time to be ill. To let ourselves be ill, you believed in that. For illness to work through us. That was the summer, you said. Our summer would see our illnesses sprawl. We would be ill together, she could see that. We had to be ready to be ill, to let ourselves be ill. For it to pass through us.
Very well, I thought. For I was feeling ill. Tired, too tired. Thick headed (as I am today, once again on the brink of summer), and that wasn't right, was it? She agreed; it wasn't right. We were ill, the pair of us. And ready to go inside and wait. Ready for the room with blue and pink wallpaper. Ready for the futon. We would have to pace ourselves. I was not to write and she was to take no phonecalls. Days would pass, weeks, and it would be good for both of us, to let ourselves be ill.
You had another ill friend. She'd got sheltered accommodation, not far from the room. We visited her there, in the darkness, a traffic jam outside. It was still and calm in the flat. The rooms were dark. What did she do all day?, we asked her. Watch TV, she said. Read. Catch up on her reading. Clever people like us always get ill, she said. She'd been a businesswoman, she'd worked in the world. Now it was her time. Her time to be ill.
Just as it was our time, you said later. We'd been tough on ourselves, you said. And now we had to be kind. We'd probably be ill all summer, you said, and then we'd see.