Coldbrook

Sunday
1

Just before dawn on the day when the world changed for ever, Jayne Woodhams wished that she could die. For her it was not an unusual thought, and neither was the anger that followed.

‘Okay, babe,’ Tommy said. ‘It’s okay.’ And she groaned some more because it never was.

Dawn made the Knoxville skyline beautiful. Their second-floor apartment looked out over Fort Dickerson Park, and the Appalachian Mountains were silhouetted against the sky by the new day emerging from beyond. Such beauty sometimes held Jayne entranced and gave her every reason to live, but some mornings — like this one — it passed her by. The first pains of the day forbade beauty, and today the agony seemed worse than usual.

Tommy knelt beside her on the bed. He’d thrown back the covers even as she stirred, and now he was slowly massaging her feet and lower legs, working the feeling back in, pressing away the nightly muscle paralysis that her condition brought on. A year ago they’d seen a consultant in Cleveland who’d told her to wake every hour and exercise for five minutes. That had reduced the pain by maybe a fifth, but she spent her life exhausted, and the tiredness brought on a more fiery discomfort later in the day. Two years before that, a herbalist in Nashville had prescribed a paste to be applied to her worst-affected parts every night before bed. For three weeks Tommy had followed the herbalist’s instructions, mixing the gloop and smearing it across her lower legs and knees, elbows, shoulders and hips. There had been no obvious change, and at the beginning of the fourth week Tommy had shown her the weeping sores between his fingers from where he was having an allergic reaction to something in the paste. Medicines, muscle relaxants, hypnosis, acupuncture, a hydrotherapy bath, and more: they had gone from consultant to doctor to quack in their search for something that would ease her pain. And, in the end, they had learned to trust themselves.

Jayne slept badly, woke in agony, and Tommy was there every morning to massage her back to life. In the last six years, since she was sixteen and he fifteen, there had been perhaps twenty mornings when he had not been there to welcome in the dawn — and its pain — with her. His devotion had precluded college, and a job which meant frequent travelling, and he had settled into an easy, unfulfilling office job just so that he could be with her. She’d protested every step of the way, but her protestations made him angrier than she had ever seen him. They had soon stopped. I’ve never done anything I didn’t want to do, he’d told her, as if that made the limiting of his life for the sake of hers more acceptable.

She felt his hands moving up towards her knees and winced in readiness.

‘Knees now. Ready?’

‘No.’

‘Here we go.’

‘Touch me there and I’ll fucking kill you, you fucking torturer.’

‘Big talk.’ Tommy started working the area around her knees with his fingertips, a steady pressure to start with, growing harder and stronger as he plumbed the depths of her pain.

Jayne gritted her teeth, but she had long ago given up trying to hold back her tears.

Though treatment of her condition had varied with everyone she had consulted, at least three doctors had agreed upon a name: churu. One of them told her he had never seen a case, and that when he researched it he found only sixteen recorded cases. He said he was surprised it even had a name. It was a condition of the brain and nervous system. No one knew where it originated, or why it happened. Of the previous sixteen cases, the oldest to die had been a man in Argentina — at the ripe old age of twenty-six.

‘I’m going to rip your fucking head off!’ she growled as Tommy ground his thumbs around the tops of her knees. She had never loved him so much.

Tommy, grim-faced as ever at the pain he caused, worked on while Jayne lived through it. It usually took half an hour before she could sit up on her own, but this morning she felt stiffer than usual, and even flexing her arms and turning her head sent bolts of pain through her body. The sun would be up and the streets outside buzzing before she felt even half-human.

After her knees, he moved on to her hips, grinning as he pulled up her nightshirt.

‘Helpless before me,’ he cackled, running his hands up her inner thighs.

Jayne kneed him in the side, grimacing at the flaring pain but finding his gasp worth it. ‘Later, slave,’ she said, ‘if you perform your duties well.’ She settled again, hips on fire, legs now merely simmering after Tommy’s ministrations, but she could never feel angry at him. Not after what he had done. He was a young guy devoted to a young woman in an old woman’s body, a woman who could sometimes barely walk, who could well be dead in the next few years. Every morning she woke up and wished for death, and Tommy was there to save her life.

‘Thought we could go down to the park later,’ he said, working his thumbs across her hip bones as his fingers pressed beneath. ‘Picnic, couple of books, bottle of wine.’

‘Feeling all horny now you’ve spent half an hour touching me up?’

‘Always horny,’ Tommy said.

Jayne frowned as he worked harder around her hips, but as his hands moved on the pain was lessening to a background glow, and movement returned. It was as if he brought her back to the world every morning, and sometimes she laughed at people’s perception of their relationship. Everyone saw Jayne as the strong one — the sufferer, the fighter — but Tommy was the rock to which she clung.

‘Park sounds good,’ she said.

He sat back on his haunches and she saw the beads of sweat on his brow. He swept his long hair back from his face, blinking faster, and she knew he wanted to get finished.

‘I’ll do my shoulders,’ she said.

‘Sure?’ He pretended to be hurt, but she could read him so well. He never complained, but that didn’t mean that he enjoyed this morning ritual. She could hardly blame him. And she saw, and understood the need. He was her addiction.

‘Sure.’ She reached up with her left hand and started massaging her right shoulder, biting back a gasp at the pain it caused her. No one could tell her why the churu affected muscles around joints more than anywhere else. One of the more honest consultants had said that it was such a rare disease. Certainly no one really knew much about it, and no one was willing to spend the money to research it. He’d finished with, If what you’re doing works for you, keep doing it.

Well, fuck them.

‘Okay,’ Tommy said, standing beside the bed, stretching, watching her, when all he really wanted right then was to go out into the small kitchen. ‘Well, I’ll have a smoke, then.’

‘Okay. Thanks, babe.’

‘Don’t call me babe.’ He delivered the familiar line with the usual sternness, then breezed through to their kitchen. Moments later Jayne heard the scratch of a match and Tommy’s satisfied sigh, and soon after that the first whiff of pot hit her. He’s started rolling them ready the night before and he’ll have two before we leave the apartment, she thought. But she couldn’t judge him. It was only pot.

She worked at her shoulders, left and right, and soon she would be able to rise, shower and dress. Sunday was her favourite day.