Page 1 of Pictures of Him

Now

It’s my favourite nurse, the one who brushes my hair gently, taking care never to catch the bristles in a knot, and who dabs at my face with a warm flannel rather than the vicious wiping that some of the others indulge in. I could react. I never do.

She talks to me constantly as she works, lifting my upper lip so that she can scrub my teeth with delicate little circular motions, raising a glass of water to my mouth and telling me: ‘Take a big swig now, my darling, and swill it around.’

She calls me ‘beauty’ or ‘darling’, never Catherine. Sometimes I can focus on her words for a little while before the tug of dreams pulls me back to you.

‘Your family are coming today,’ she says.

My little girl will be patting my face with her small, soft hands, my boy standing silently by my chair, watching with his grave eyes. My husband will talk to me, telling me about his day with the note of self-consciousness that is always there. Who can blame him? Bloody embarrassing talking to a brick wall, day after day.

‘Hello, Catherine,’ he’ll say, always my name now.

Beauty. Catherine. Just labels that hold no meaning. I am whoever they want me to be. Mostly I sit still while the words whirl above me, dancing golden specks of dust caught in the sun.

‘Recovery’ – this word is said a lot. By Sam, who says it in a tense, passive-aggressive kind of way, and by the psychiatrist, whose pronouncement is more hazy, more hip-swinging, easy come, easy go. Who’s counting? he seems to say. Sam is, Sam is counting. He wants to know how much longer he has to wait: a week, a month, the rest of his life? How much longer before his wife comes back to him?

But I am drifting, drifting. I am a girl again, nineteen, almost twenty. I am loved, wholly, with a passion that has flooded my bones and my blood and my brain. There is only this, this warmth, this light, this fierce, pin-bright happiness. And it is so good to be here, if I can just hold it, just freeze it right at this moment.

‘I won’t ever leave you,’ I say, and you pull me tighter into your arms and we fall asleep that way, wrapped up like a parcel, and I won’t wake all night. But then I do wake and, just like that, the axis spins and everything changes.

The nurse is back. She has an accent, but I have yet to be able to concentrate long enough to work out where she’s from.

‘Here they are, beauty. Here’s your family come to see you. She’s lost in her world of dreams today, aren’t you, my darling? Talk to her, won’t you, she hears it all.’

Daisy is kneeling by my chair, her head in my lap. I feel Sam lift up my hands, first one, then the other, and placethem on top of her tight dark curls. I feel Joe’s presence, standing as he always does just to the right of my chair. Joe doesn’t speak to me any more.

When he first came he would say, ‘Hello, Mum,’ the tersest of greetings, nothing more, and in those two, biting words all I could hear was my son’s quiet fury. I can’t help him, I can’t help anyone.

Sam is standing by the window, a blur of dark clothes, his tall, thin body blocking out half the light, obscuring the view of my tree. I’d like him to move. Just a couple of feet would make all the difference.

‘Talk to us, Catherine. Please. Show us that you can.’

I hear the desperation in Sam’s voice more than the actual words, and beneath it, several layers down, I can hear his frustration. He is the kindest man, Sam, he is here, after all, day after day, with no promise of my return, no date set for us to squeak our way across the hospital floors, out into the tarmac gloom of the car park and away from my lonely tree. But I also hear the words he will not say, the silent accusation of wilfulness, of selfishness.

‘So she could speak if she wanted to?’ he asks Greg, the psychiatrist, with his New Balance trainers and his side-parted hair.

‘Not exactly,’ Greg tells him. ‘Physically, yes, she’s capable of it, but she has lost the power of speech. It’s not something that can be reversed at will. We have to look at all the reasons why she’s stopped speaking. Most likely it’s an unconscious avoidance strategy. It’s her way of refusing to absorb intolerable information. Catherine shut down because she couldn’t cope with what happened at Shute Park that day. She can’t process the trauma of it, so insteadshe represses the memory. Not talking is her defence.’

Greg blinds Sam with some medical terminology, describing the dissociative disorder that is supposedly afflicting me; he even alludes to Freud.

‘In the nineteenth century this kind of behaviour was much more common, especially in women. You might have heard of the hysterics?’ he says, upbeat and conversational, like he’s at a dinner party. I feel rather than see Sam’s resentment. ‘Often those afflicted might experience numbness or fits or amnesia. In Catherine’s case she is unable to speak; to her it’s literally as if her vocal cords have been frozen. We call it elective mutism.’

Later on it’s Greg who squats down beside my chair, knees cracking, and gives me an idea, something to work with, something that will allow me to spend more time with you.

‘I think I know where you are in your head,’ he says, and I feel the insistence of his eyes even though I’m looking out at the garden, focused on my tree. ‘You’re stuck there, aren’t you? Right at the end. And I wonder if it might help to go back to the beginning, to put everything that happened in some kind of order. I know it’s hard, Catherine, but you do need to get it straight in your mind.’

You could think of it as a story, he tells me in a soft, lulling voice, the kind I always used when the children had nightmares. Think of someone you can tell it to, he says, and this bit is easy.

It’s our story, yours and mine, and so, of course, I will tell it to you.

Fifteen years earlier

Do we start with once upon a time; is that how we’ll do it, my love? Once there was a girl who knew nothing of love or lust or the peculiar sense of freedom you bestowed upon her. She had arrived at university with her brand new Samsonite suitcase and her matching Cath Kidston bedding, an only child, indulged, adored, who’d existed in a helium-pumped triumvirate for all of her eighteen years. She began to make friends, one of them her future husband, as the story goes. Everything came easily: a fellow English student who metamorphosed seamlessly into a best friend, a position on the student newspaper, a trio of A grades that exempted her from exams. Six weeks into her second year, just as the trees were beginning to show off with their golds and crimsons and banana yellows, a boy blew into her tutorial, unexpectedly, earth-shatteringly. The boy was you.

There were five or six of us in the tutorial that day in a circle of shabby, mismatched armchairs, listening to Professor Hardman describe Milton’s portrayal of Satan as a military hero. He had a flat, soporific voice, this professor, and the blue-white skin of the exhumed, and he spokewith his eyes closed, one hand cradling his left breast as if he suspected an imminent heart attack.

The door flew open and you came through it wearing yesterday’s crumpled clothes and with your hair standing on end, though nothing could hide your beauty. Every single student in the room knew your name.

---