Postcards at Christmas Page 7

  Then he says, ‘What happened to me?’

  SUMMER

  16

  ‘Shit!’

  ‘Are you okay?’ asks Simeon.

  ‘Yep,’ I reply tightly. ‘I just stubbed my toe. It’s nothing.’

  For a moment the pain overwhelms me and I catch my breath as I wait for the worst of it to pass. I sink on to the edge of the bed and rub my foot gingerly. My eyes fill with tears but that’s not entirely to do with the pain. This is the third time today that I’ve bruised a part of my anatomy on Simeon’s bed and I’m running out of resources to deal with the constant impediments to my everyday life. It’s my own fault. The bed has been in our sitting room for six weeks now, ever since he was discharged from hospital. You would think that I’d be used to it and could negotiate my way around its unforgiving and inconvenient corners but it appears not. There just isn’t the room to have a bed in our living space.

  But we have no choice. The only way that the hospital would release Simeon into my care rather than to a rehabilitation centre was if he had a bed on the ground floor, and slam bang in the middle of our sitting room is the only place it will fit. It’s a nightmare though. The sofa is pushed up as close to the wall as it will go and you can’t see the television because the bed is stuck in between the two. There is no room for Lily’s play mat except on the bed and then I have the ever-constant fear that she will crawl off the edge. I’d bought her one of those walker things but it turns out that it was a waste of money because the only place she can use it is in our narrow hallway, the kitchen being out of bounds for obvious reasons. By the time the bed has gone she’ll probably have grown out of it.

  Of course, I mustn’t grumble. My little lot really isn’t that terrible and Simeon feels bad enough about all the problems his accident has caused us as it is. I don’t need to pile any more guilt on his shoulders, real or imagined.

  But secretly, I can’t help it. Sometimes I’m so resentful of how what happened at Easter has impacted on my life. I know I shouldn’t attach blame – it was just an accident – but absolutely none of it was my fault. I didn’t even suggest the stupid bike ride in the first place. Every time I start to think like this, though, I feel so ashamed. It’s unforgiveable of me and the idea that I could even begin to be angry with Sim brings with it guilt like you’d never believe, especially when I see how much he is struggling with recovery.

  I check myself. I hate it when I get like this. Resentful and bitter. I know it’s not the real me talking and that I’m only like this because I’m on my knees with exhaustion and in great pain from the encounter with the bedstead. It makes me feel guilty that I could even have thoughts like this and yet there they are, skulking around in the dark parts of my mind like sneak thieves. Or even out in the open thumbing their noses at me like they are doing right now.

  I’m doing my best to make things run smoothly, though. I’d be lying if I said it was easy, but we’re holding on. Just about. I work from home so I have no boss to appease and Mrs P is helping out whenever she can, fitting us in around her own job. I’d like to pay her to work for us full time like she did when Dad was ill but there just isn’t the money for that.

  Then there are all his appointments. Neurologist, physiotherapist, occupational therapist, GP, the list goes on and on. Someone has to get him to all of those. I do my best and Beth helps with Lily when she can but I feel like I am being pulled so tight that the slightest bit of extra tension will be all it takes for me to snap.

  I’ve had to stop taking on any new work. I should be running into my busiest time, with brides thinking about their dresses for this time next year but I just have no spare capacity. I hate turning people away, especially when I’ve been recommended, but what can I do? This is my life now.

  Things are starting to get easier, though, they really are. After Simeon first woke up he had no control over most of his body. He had to be manhandled, quite literally as I just wasn’t strong enough, into a wheelchair for his daily sessions in the pool and then in the gym with the hospital physios. And gradually, he relearned how to walk, step by agonising step.

  And I was there, encouraging him, trying to preserve his dignity when he dissolved into tears of frustration at what he saw as his own ineptitude, letting him shout and scream at me about the injustice of it all until he was hoarse. I have been a pillar of strength apparently. Everyone tells me how marvellous I am, and how well I’m coping, and how Simeon is so lucky to have me. But I’m bone-tired with it all and deep inside I feel like a fraud because of all the bad feeling I’m secretly harbouring. I try to keep smiling, though. No one wants to hear how I’m doing, not really.

  And there is good news. Simeon is improving a little bit every day. He can walk with sticks now and his balance is much better, although not good enough to be trusted on the stairs, hence the bed in the middle of our living space. I sometimes wonder if he knows that I’m reaching the end of my tether – he must surely have noticed – but I think he is pretty close to the end of his as well.

  ‘You should take more care,’ he says as I rub at my foot. ‘We don’t need two crocks in the house.’

  He doesn’t say this in a kind way. He rarely says anything kind to me these days.

  ‘Yes. Sorry,’ I reply, my jaw clenched tightly so that I don’t let what I really think escape. ‘I might give Beth a ring,’ I say, ‘and ask her if she fancies meeting up for a quick coffee later. Would you be all right on your own for an hour or two?’

  ‘I’m not a cripple,’ he spits at me.

  I take a deep breath before I reply.

  ‘Of course not. I was just checking. I can stay here if you’d rather.’

  ‘No, you go. Enjoy yourself.’

  He says this as if he really means the total opposite.

  ‘Right, I’ll ring Beth,’ I say, ignoring his tone. ‘I’ll take Lily with me.’

  ‘I can look after my own daughter,’ he says but we both know that he can’t.

  An hour later I’m sitting in Beth’s kitchen. It’s easier to stay at her house when Lily is with me than to risk a café and have my baby perform the screaming ab dabs when she can’t get out of the high chair. Unsurprisingly, given my mood, the coffee quickly morphs into wine. It’s not a good idea because I still have tea to make and Lily to bath and Simeon to get into bed but, frankly, I don’t care. And Beth can see how wretched I’m feeling. In fact, I imagine that my desperation is obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to look.

  ‘I feel like such a shitty person,’ I tell her. ‘Which fiancée resents caring for her loved one? What does that even make me? A monster, that’s what. It’s a good job we didn’t get as far as the wedding. “In sickness and in health”? That’s a good one. Like I could take a vow like that, knowing how crap I am now, before we’re even married.’

  Beth sighs and pushes my hair away from where it has fallen in front of my face so she can look right into my eyes.

  ‘You are doing a brilliant job,’ she says. ‘Anyone would find what you’re facing super-hard to deal with. And it’s only natural that it’s grinding you down. Caring for someone twenty-four seven is exhausting.’

  She’s a nurse so she knows what she’s talking about and totally understands that part of it. But, really, the physical caring for Simeon is the least of my worries. It must show on my face.

  ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’ she asks.

  I feel my bottom lip start to tremble.

  ‘What is it?’ she asks. There is so much compassion in her voice that that makes me cry on its own. I hate it if she’s nice to me just when I’m trying to hold it together. I always crumble.

  I want to tell her. I want it out of my head but I am so mortified by my feelings that the shame stays my tongue for a moment.

  ‘The thing is,’ I begin after a long pause. ‘The thing is, well, I love Simeon. You know how much I love him, don’t you?’

  She nods enthusiastically. ‘Of course I do. Anyone can see that.�
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  ‘But when I pictured our life together, our future, it was with the old Simeon. The one that could dress himself and didn’t need me to take him to the loo. The question I keep asking myself is: do I love him enough to spend the rest of my life with him if this is how it’s going to be?’

  I suddenly feel sick. The words are spoken. There’s no taking them back. I have revealed my darkest secret to Beth and now I am entirely at her mercy, vulnerable beyond any point that I am comfortable with. And yet it feels good to have said it out loud. A burden slips from my shoulders like melting snow from a roof top.

  ‘Do you hate me?’ I ask her.

  There is an ominous pause.

  Maybe she does actually hate me now. It must have been too much, being quite so very honest. Beth is Simeon’s friend too. What did I expect her to do with guardianship of my hideous, unthinkable thoughts? I have put her in an impossible position. How can she possibly move on from here? I have ruined everything. My friendship with her, my relationship with Sim, my business, my life. It’s all in tatters around me.

  ‘No,’ she says finally, her eyes brimming with tears. ‘Of course I don’t hate you. You are my best friend. You are going to have to try a whole lot harder than that to shake me off. And I’m not even surprised that you’re thinking like that. In fact, I’d be surprised if you weren’t. This isn’t what you signed up for, Ca.’

  I shake my head, relief flooding over me.

  ‘I don’t want to leave him,’ I add, desperate that she doesn’t misinterpret what I’m saying. ‘I love him. It’s just that I’ve had these thoughts and I don’t know what to do with them.’

  Beth tips her head to one side like she’s talking to a child, which is pretty much how I feel.

  ‘You don’t have to do anything with them,’ she says. Her tone is soft and reassuring. ‘You can think them and talk about them and acknowledge their place in your head. The worst thing you could possibly do is to bury them. Do you need time to yourself? Should I arrange for Angie to move in for a while? Or you and Lily could come and stay here for a couple of days and I’ll look after Sim at your place?’

  The thought of deserting Simeon immediately fills me with panic and as this is my gut response to her suggestions, I draw some comfort from it.

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘No. He needs me. I can’t abandon him, even for a few days. I wouldn’t do it to him. It would destroy him.’

  Beth nods. ‘Well, that’s clear!’ she says. ‘So, for now, are you able to carry on as you are?’

  ‘Yes,’ I whisper.

  ‘Then that’s what we’ll do. You keep going and whenever it gets too hard you can come and talk to me and we’ll fix it. We can take each week as it comes.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Beth.’

  She comes and hugs me and then Lily, who has been sitting on the rug in front of us, puts her arms up into the air to be picked up and we all squish into one big embrace.

  When we pull apart though I look at Beth again.

  ‘Now what?’ she says in mock impatience.

  ‘There’s something else,’ I say.

  She looks at me patiently. I take a deep breath.

  ‘We need to cancel the wedding.’

  17

  BETH

  I’m worried about Cara. More worried than usual, I mean. It’s good that she’s got me to talk to and I don’t blame her for questioning whether she can truly cope with life with Simeon as he is and might always be. I’d be more worried if she hadn’t had thoughts like that. But if she’s not careful she’s going to let this terrible guilt that she’s carrying consume her entirely.

  Ever since we were little girls with our hair in pigtails Cara has been a deep thinker. If there was a way of approaching something that involved feeling guilty about it then she would find it. I suspect a lot of the blame for that can be laid at her father’s feet. Whether intentionally or not, he placed an unbearable burden on the shoulders of his children and neither of them has made it into adulthood unscathed by that. And then finding out about her mum hasn’t helped. I know she’s worried that what happened there was somehow her fault. Even though we’ve talked it through until we are hoarse, I’m sure she’s still carrying guilt about that too.

  But then she met Simeon and her outlook changed. It’s as if he turned the colour up on her world, made things more vivid and less shadowy for her. And Lily is the icing on the cake. They both adore her. Anyone can see that.

  That’s why this whole situation is so unfair. It’s like something has come along and stomped all over Cara’s new green shoots, trampling them back into the mud. I worry just how many times she can keep bouncing back.

  I say the same to Mark. We’ve kept in touch, the two of us. Cara would kill me if she knew but someone had to tell him how Simeon is doing, and I’m certain that she wouldn’t. I know that she wasn’t keen on him when they met but they would have got over that if the Easter weekend had panned out the way everyone planned. As it is, she seems to have taken that initial dislike and allowed it to grow into something dark and forbidding, totally out of proportion with her original misgivings about him.

  I once mentioned Mark to her in passing, just trying to build some bridges between the pair of them. I honestly could not believe the way she reacted to the mere sound of his name. It was totally irrational. She became like a woman possessed, swearing and cursing about him and how much he was to blame for where she now finds herself. I bet his ears were on fire. It’s as if she’s taken all her fear, frustration and anger and dumped it on poor Mark. She must know that it makes no sense but it seems to be a coping mechanism of sorts for her.

  I haven’t told Mark how bad it’s got. He’s offered to come up more than once to visit Simeon but I keep putting him off with feeble excuses. I’m sure he doesn’t believe me but hopefully he has no inkling just how much Cara blames him for everything that’s happened. I was hoping that the wedding would give her the chance to get to know him properly so that she could let it all go but now that isn’t going to happen either.

  ‘I think they are going to postpone the wedding,’ I tell Mark when I ring him with my update on Simeon’s condition. ‘Cara wants to wait until Sim is stronger.’

  I hear Mark sigh.

  ‘That’s a shame,’ he says. ‘But if they think it’s the right thing to do . . .’

  ‘Well, he’s still using his sticks,’ I say, wincing as I speak. I might have made out that Simeon’s recovery was slightly more advanced than it actually is. I don’t want Mark feeling guilty too. ‘We can’t have them missing out on their first dance.’

  I try to make my voice light but from the silence at the other end of the phone I’m not sure that Mark is fooled.

  ‘And you’re sure it wouldn’t help if I came up,’ he asks yet again.

  ‘Maybe next month,’ I reply and hope that my lies don’t come back to bite me.

  18

  CARA

  I’ve been putting this discussion off for weeks. It’s been creeping up on me, week by week. Every time I see the calendar hanging in the kitchen with the big red heart drawn around Saturday 25th July I feel sick. To start with, the wedding felt so far away that there was no point worrying about it. I’d just assumed that Simeon would be better by then, either completely or certainly enough to walk me up the aisle (not that we were planning on having an aisle but you know what I mean).

  But as the weeks have dragged on it’s become more and more apparent that he won’t be ready. At this rate, he’ll still be walking with his sticks and even though we haven’t discussed it, I know that he’d hate that. Everyone’s eyes on his faltering progress and all those wafts of sympathy, for him, for us, them all thinking what a shame it is and how it could all have been so different if only . . .

  I have to make it clear that this isn’t my own, terrible and recently confessed, thoughts that are fuelling these doubts. This is nothing to do with how I feel about where we are and entirely to do with Simeon’s health and
the practicalities.

  The problem I face now, though, is that we’ve never discussed this, never even mooted the mere possibility of needing to postpone (or cancel?) the wedding. In the early days after the accident the wedding felt like an incentive, something for us to aim for in terms of Simeon’s recovery, but now it feels like a mocking signpost of how very far we still have to go.

  I think the main reason that I’ve never brought up the possibility of changing the date with Simeon is the fear of how he might react if I did. He has enough on his plate as it is and I don’t want to make things any worse for him. But as the weeks tick on and the wedding gets closer and closer, I know that I can’t avoid the subject any longer.

  In practical terms, postponing the wedding isn’t that big a deal. It’s not as if we’ve done much organising already. Beth had found a fabulous restaurant with a marriage licence which was available on the day we wanted and so she got them to pencil us in. I’d messaged Michael and Marianne and told them to tell Mum and keep the weekend free and I’d sent a postcard to Simeon’s parents with a picture of the venue on it and a long string of exclamation marks next to the date. I’d meant to tell Ursula and Skyler, my aunt and cousin who live in San Francisco, but I hadn’t got round to it and then there had been the accident at Easter and contacting them suddenly wasn’t a priority. I hadn’t even thought about making my dress and the rest of what normally happens at a wedding was never even on the cards for our quiet, low-key affair.

  If we are going to postpone, though, I need to tell the venue sooner rather than later. It’s only fair.

  But first I need to talk to Simeon.

  His days follow a distinct pattern. When he wakes up he’s usually relatively positive. He can see the tiny, incremental improvements that he’s making day by day and often points them out to me.

  ‘I stood to clean my teeth without my sticks this morning,’ he’ll tell me proudly, or ‘I poured my own orange juice and I didn’t spill a drop! Go me!’