You were ill and I were ill - but which one of us was iller? I went out, it is true. Round the block, past the alcoholics, up the road. Outside - though I was tired, thick with tiredness, and the air seemed heavy. But you - you wouldn't leave the room. And for how many weeks?
But we went to the doctor, didn't we - the same one? One, then another to the doctor, once a month. Wasn't it you who recommended that specialist to me? Didn't you send me to her? You knew the diagnosis she would make. You told me what to say, and I said it. The same diagnosis - it was no surprise. And thereafter I was to see her once a month, in the basement of the surgery.
A bus ride away, a long walk - because we'd faked our addresses, hadn't we? To be able to get into the surgery that specialised in our condition, as it was now. Our condition, the pair of us, identically ill, intimate in our illness. As I remember, we offered you a room at the house. You were to move in, we said. We were concerned. You had a room upstairs from me. We made up the bed. But when you came, you didn't want it. You never felt welcome enough. You felt we didn't want you there. But we did, we said so.
You doubted us, and you stayed in my room. Not to take up space, you said. In my room, and your grey, unused car outside. When was it broken into? We followed the trail of the burglars, picking up broken CD cases. I was afraid, paranoid. You said it was part of the illness, that you too were afraid. But I saw no fear in you. You were defiant, angry.
Weeks passed, and little happened. I wanted to watch films, but you found them too loud. You wanted to play computer games. I wanted to try to exercise, despite everything. You laughed at that. Weeks passed - a whole summer. On a day like today, bright and sunny, I said we should go on a picnic and you took the hamper from the boot of your car.
Out to the Ees, to a field at its edge. It always felt like going back in time going there. Ruined buildings. Overgrown grass. A bit like Tarkovsky's Zone on the edge of Chorlton. Open space, wide skies. And that summer - how long ago? - a haze like a delay in time, as though one moment could not free itself from another. Outside, but you wanted to go in.
You were agoraphobic, you said. It was part of the condition, you said, and didn't I feel it? Both agoraphobic and claustrophobic, you said. And liable to panic attacks, you said. Out in the air, the open air, it was too much for you - the space, the wide sky, the summer haze. I thought: I'm trapped in illness with you. I thought: we're both ill, and this is insane.
But that insanity carried us along for a few more weeks. Months, perhaps. To the end of summer, perhaps. And longer, even - to the beginning of autumn. It was madness. Thick tiredness, heavy days, and no going out. The walls of the room. The futon, the computer stand, the television, the sofa: that was our world.
And illness thickened inside us. We were dazed. And only a small window open to let the air in. Summer outside, the hazy sky, but we were too dazed for summer; we missed it. Weeks passed, months. Were we good for one another? Was this how we should live?
And then you left, and went back to your house. You needed money, I think. Needed to sell your houses, I think. For in a former life, another life, you were a landlady and businesswoman. Once upon a time, both of those, and successful, with two houses - one sizeable, divided into flats - and at what age?
You left to manage your affairs, to prepare things. It was autumn, and you drove away. And I, what did I do? Fell deeper into the arms of illness. I was more ill, but then, gradually, woke up. I began to wake over the days and weeks. Woke and - went back to work. You had disappeared from my life. We were bad for one another, you said. And after all, you can't spend you whole life on benefits, you said. But from where had you found your strength? From where did it come?
I stopped visiting the doctor in the basement, though I still have the book she lent me. She was a specialist in our condition, you had said. But what condition? Illness evaporated. Illness fell from me, and I flew through the days like a missile. 'So you're better', you said on the phone. Better? I'm not sure I was ill, I said. 'Oh you were ill. And so was I'.
Very well, I thought, and remembered a friend of hers who was far more advanced in illness than us. That friend who lived and breathed illness, and whom we visited once in her sheltered accommodation. We were getting ill too, we said. It's the world, she said, it's terrible. She had been a businesswoman, too, but no longer. The inside had opened to enclose her.
Days and nights passed in her flat, alone in her flat. Sheltered accommodation for the long term ill. Is that what we wanted? To draw a shelter over our heads and stay there from year to year? We were all ill, she said, all of us, everyone out there. She gestured to the traffic jam outside the window. Everyone's ill, if only they realised it. I think she thought of herself as a pioneer, or like Pound's poet as the antennae of the race, quivering sensitively ahead of the rest of us.
We saw one another at Christmas, and then, after that, not at all. You'd had a breakdown, I'd heard. And things got much worse. I won't remember it here. But you were locked up, weren't you? And I, on the other side of the city, was getting on with my life, as they say. Walking up and down the road, past the alcoholics. Walking to give a shape to my days, an orientation.
Had the illness gone? Had it disappeared into the sky? It was watching us all, I thought. Just as the woman had said in her flat. We were all ill, even the mothers who pushed babies along in three wheeled prams. Even the media types in cafes. Ill, and the illest one was ill for us, for all our sakes, there inside her sheltered accommodation.