20. The Mouse, Part II
The thing you can't hold
In this edition: pain, and what it does to us. This one’s about as intense as it gets from me, friends. A lot of heavy themes here again – grief, death, trauma, animal suffering and death, reckoning with the body, surgery and medical stuff. It’s dark, but I will steer clear of actual gore as much as I possibly can – I’ve had a bad time lately, but I truly don’t want to create a bad time for you as a reader. We’re trying for catharsis, for navigation of the labyrinth in company. As the title suggests, this is part two of an ongoing story. Part one is here. Be gentle with yourself, today might not be the right day for this piece for you.
Pain makes a puppet of me.
Its hands fold my spine over, twisting me in upon myself. It flails my limbs about the room, string-jerked, helplessly seeking a way out of the sensation, out of my own bones and muscle. The surgeons have done something terrible to me, I think. They lied to me. I lie on the bathroom floor for hours, for days, pleading with my body to stop. Stop anything. Stop everything. I think about the mouse.
“Oh god.”
I’d thought it a bit strange the mouse had stayed in that one corner of the box the whole time we were walking, and now we could see why. It had peeled up a section of the duct tape John used to secure the base, and had been thrashing around in its grip. Its hind leg, tail, and the rear part of its body are tangled in the tape. There’s something weird and fluid in its movements, but I can’t quite pinpoint it.
“How do we do this?” John is examining the mouse, trying to figure out how to extricate it from its miserable corner. “Oh, no. Oh no.”
“Why is it doing that?” asks Max, stricken.
“I think you were right,” I say, “I think there’s something wrong with it.”
In the face of suffering, there is first a moment of wrenching comprehension. The lens of the world has shifted, from the bright sunny mouse-rehousing adventure we were just on, to something with sinister edges. This is the first time I have seen the tiny creature I have carried all this way – I didn’t see it crouching too-still, too-slow in the hallway, I didn’t see its shift from floor to bowl to box, from motionless to too much movement. It’s smaller than I’d imagined.
It is May 2019, and I am living in Bolzano, in the north of Italy, on a research stay for two months. I get an email from Rachel checking my arrival time for my upcoming visit to see them in Tuscany at the end of this week, and telling me that unfortunately Peter’s not doing well – he’s in hospital, the trip back to Australia for his mother’s 99th birthday was hard on him, and if I don’t want to come down to visit under these circumstances it’s perfectly okay.
I read what she’s written, but don’t absorb the detail. She’s telling me about the excellent rehabilitation centre he’s in, how much improvement there’s been, how cheerful and relaxed and efficient the atmosphere is. My brain only feeds me fear: he’s suffering.
I call her, my fingers curled into guilty spirals. “I’m so sorry, I just… it’s the, you know, it’s the father-figure in dire health straits,” I say. “I don’t think I can do it, I don’t think I can see him like this.”
She is soothing, practical. “That’s absolutely alright, you’re making the right decision.”
I cannot possibly deserve this kindness, I think. Coward. “I’m sorry. I’m not – I’m not doing great just now.” When are you coming down to visit?
“Now listen, Caitlin – it’s okay. We’ll see you down here again when he’s doing better, okay? We can do Christmas together this year, if all goes well.”
After we hang up, I stare at the bed in the tiny apartment I’ve been renting from a friend. I’ll be thirty in a few weeks, and I can’t even pull myself together enough for this. He could go all the way to Australia for Aunty Mim’s birthday, even with what it cost him. Rachel’s voice was so warm, and I know Peter is going to be disappointed. He messages me to tell me I should still come down, but I don’t have to visit him, in fact if you come ANYWHERE near the hospital I’ll set the dogs loose! - I should just use the chance to get a break and relax. I love you very very very much, I reply.
Later, at Christmas, they’ll tell me it was for the best I didn’t come – things got much worse shortly afterwards, and recovery took a long time. He wears an oxygen tube most of the time now, carts a tank about in a little trolley, refers to it idly as “this bloody thing.” I call Peter old man, teasingly, like I always have, and he tells me good-naturedly to fuck off. I can’t tell him that it’s gone from being a joke to being a prayer.
I curl up on their couch, mouth full of fruit mince pie, cat asleep beside me. I can see Peter and Rachel in the sunken half-story kitchen below us, slow dancing together, fully absorbed. I take a surreptitious video on my phone, thinking about the shape this memory will take.
Pain makes an obscenity of me.
It holds my jaw, drags my tongue, makes me babble uncontrollably. “Please, please,” I am vulgar, my body is contorting around a point. The surgery addressed an unhealed wound by re-cutting it, and asking my body to try again and do it better this time. Nobody told me this is what would be asked of me. They said I’d be better after a few days. This is not a few days. I scream around a towel I’ve stuffed into my own mouth, trying not to frighten the neighbours’ children. A slice of my mind detaches, observes my writhing form. What the fuck are you doing, it asks me. You need help. I reach for my phone.
“I think we can manage this together.”
John’s worried about fully detaching the tape from the bottom of the box, in case the mouse runs off with it still tangled around its body.
“It’s – I don’t think it’s going anywhere,” I say, hesitantly.
Max holds the box still, I secure the mouse – gingerly, delicately, keeping clear of its mouth, just in case – and John starts pulling gently at the tape.
“Oh no,” John keeps saying. “Here we go – here we go.”
Our hands are tender, intricate. We free its tail, then its belly, then its tail gets caught again. We coo at it, I eventually give in and hold its little body, stressed in the knowledge that I don’t have any sanitiser with me. Finally, finally, its hind leg is free. It was a small little weight in the box, and now it is soft and warm in my palm. But it is still convulsing, over and over.
I place it gently in the dirt. It moves as though a bent wire were being rotated along its vertebrae, undulating. It’s not making any noise, just rippling, again and again and again.
I try not to think hospice bed. I try not to think.
“You said maybe it was poisoned, right?” While we were back at the flat, Max and John had been speculating as to its strange demeanour. Maybe someone else in the building was setting out poison.
“Or it’s scared out of its mind,” says John.
“If it’s poisoned, we can’t just leave it here. If something eats it, a bird, then the bird will get poisoned too,” I say.
Max is quiet, watching the mouse miserably.
“Maybe –“ says John, and stops.
The three of us sit there, a silent vigil. The mouse keeps roiling in the dust. The moment is so long.
“We have to kill it,” I say.
For almost a year now, I have been locked in a wrestling match with my own body’s minor inabilities to stay knit together.
Last summer I sprained my ankle. Then I sprained it again, and again, and again – roughly once a month from mid-June until the first of October. Each time I posted a photo of my left foot, elevated and smothered in an ice pack, I would gather increasingly agitated messages from my friends. What’s going on?! You might need physiotherapy, you might need surgery, you might need to be confined to a bubble for the rest of your existence to prevent this sort of thing. I sprained it in Berlin, in Amsterdam, in Tallinn. I had to take it easy on the hills of Marseille, as Carrington and I wandered around getting our bearings. I made jokes about needing an exorcist or energy cleaner or wise old woman living in the hut in the forest to come and perform some sort of ritual over me.
I’ve had issues with my ankles for years. The mild hypermobility that used to be kind of fun and weird when I was younger now just means I have to work extra hard at not injuring myself.
I used to fall over and bounce back up, and whoever I was with at the time would be alarmed and I’d be fine. “Elastic ankles,” I’d say, and continue on walking. It didn’t really seem like I was injuring myself, since it didn’t hurt beyond an initial twinge. I usually was dealing more with the embarrassment of stumbling or fully falling over, and drawing attention to myself. Eventually I learned to just lean into the schtick. Just another mundanely weird thing about me, like not being able to feel how cold it currently is, or choking on drinks a lot, or not being able to stop laughing once I get stuck in a fit. My nervous system has some bugs.
I became less able to deal with the pain.
Then a tooth cracked in early January, and my dentist tried for three wrenching weeks to save it until I eventually begged her to get it out of my head. What is happening to me? I thought, scrolling on my health app through thirty doctor, dentist and physio appointments in three months.
Then in February something in my mind snapped. Not my actual brain, thank god, but I was cut loose from my own psyche in a way I couldn’t remember experiencing before. I developed a temporary speech impediment, words piling up behind my teeth like loose bricks and needing to be heaved, individually, out of my mouth. It took me weeks to decode my own body’s messages to me, and when I finally did I was mortified. Sometimes, the body is not subtle. Sometimes, it’s telling you that bouncing back up is only pushing the problem further down the road.
The surgery wasn’t for any of these things, but it did feel emblematic. The scar tissue is in fact the problem, it’s pretending to be healed but it isn’t, it needs to be sliced out and then it has to heal properly on its own. By the time we reached May, I knew I had to do the hard work of actually looking after myself. I put together a WhatsApp group, made a roster, rounded up friends.
We’re here. We love you. We want to help.
Nobody moves, yet.
“Even if we bury it, something might still dig it up,” says Max.
“We can’t leave it like this though,” I reply.
And then I stand up, and look around. One of the concrete bench supports has crumbled, and a large chunk is lying on the ground. I walk over, and pick it up, and by the time I turn around John is behind me.
“No, Cait. Give it to me.”
I hesitate, looking at him. I can see in his face the memory of me, yesterday, after sending that voice note to Peter. What do you say when it’s the last thing you’ll say to someone? It boils down to three things, more or less: I’m sorry. Thank you. I love you. I sent it, and then I crumpled in on myself and howled.
“You don’t have to do this today, not today.”
John is resolute, right up until the moment the weight of the concrete chunk transfers from my hand to his. Deliberate action turns to uncertainty, and he looks back to where the mouse is on the ground.
“Go, uh,” he waves over in the direction of the path, “somewhere you don’t have to see it.”
I walk reluctantly towards the other side of the circle. Max gets up and moves away from the mouse too, facing into the trees. I turn and watch John, who is kneeling with his back to me.
I can see the tiny, twisting form on the ground still. John’s head is bowed, looking at it. He raises his arms once, drops them, shoulders tense. He half-lifts the concrete a second time, freezes, and lowers it slowly again. He turns his head towards me and sees me watching. I know, for certain, in that moment – he won’t.
“No?” I say, shaking my head a little. It’s too far to hear.
He gets up, face scrunched. “God it’s horrible, it’s horrible to even try to do it.” I am walking back over to him, taking the concrete from his hands. He doesn’t resist. “Oh god.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “I can do it.”
Pain makes a supplicant of me.
I stand in the shower, my back arched and rigid under the flowing water like a stone gargoyle. I think, There’s only so many times you can ask for help before you wear people out. I think, I cannot keep going like this. I think of the doctors, who, when I woke from general anaesthetic in pain and fear, and my words started piling like bricks in my mouth again, and I started silently crying and couldn’t stop, simply ignored me. Pretended it wasn’t happening. Insisted I ought to be fine. Became impatient, disdainful, indignant. I wonder which is causing me more pain, the physical agony or the prospect of asking, again, for someone to help me, to come and comfort me.
But they come, day after day.
Crista comes with me to the clinic, holds me tight and whispers reassurances in my ear when I emerge from the recovery room, still crying. Betül argues with the doctors, reproaches their lack of professionalism, organises the car home, sits with me until I can talk again. Arielle sleeps on my couch to watch over me, and runs errands and reads my tarot cards. Luca cooks ramen, and brings craft supplies and books and sits with me for hours making tiny clay models. When the pain gets too bad, Moon calls me from her own sick bed and talks me steadily through the panic until help arrives. Marina sits beside me as the pain renders me semi-conscious and strokes my hair back over my ear, presses a cold pack to my forehead, holds my hand and tells me I’ll be okay. Rhys drives us all the way across the city to an emergency clinic, and waits outside all afternoon to drive us home. Theodore rubs my back and sits by my hospital gurney for hours and goes to three different pharmacies looking for the right ointment for me. Robin comes with me to the follow-up appointment a week later, and soothes me through the distress brought on yet again by those fucking terrible doctors. Hamza brings homemade daal, and contact lens solution, and patiently talks me back into feeling like a human again. Ferdi takes me to the doctors when it becomes clear something is still very wrong, and then to the hospital. They all wait, they listen, they gather, they hold. They ask again, and again, do you need anything?
On the second day after the surgery, I get the second email from Rachel. It’s been three weeks since the first one. It says: Peter died very peacefully, two weeks ago.
I have the concrete in my hands. I am kneeling in the dirt.
I don’t know if the others are watching me. I wonder what they’ll think of me, after I do this.
The mouse turns over and over and over. My stomach turns with it. Don’t draw this out, I tell myself. There is just pain now, and you can make it stop. The mouse is already gone.
Something shifts in my brain. I take a deep breath and look at the tiny, agonised form.
I’m sorry I have to do this. Thank you for being in the world. Go with love. I’m not religious, but I’ll offer up a prayer to a dying mouse.
And then I lift the concrete, and bring it down.
Hi friends. Hope you’re all looking after yourselves out there. I wrote this whole thing in one day while I was recovering from the first surgery. I now have a second surgery tomorrow, which is also my birthday, incredibly. Part three will come soon - it’s already written, I’ll just publish it when I’m home probably.
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