Human Remains

had possessed me and was subjecting me to a trial that had no apparent end.
    I had medical investigations, one after another: scans, therapy, with weeks of waiting in between. Advice on how to manage the pain. Alternative therapies, too. I went to the pain clinic at the hospital though it never really helped much, other than to dull everything with medication – and the ordeal of getting there in the car cancelled all that out. My doctor kept signing me off work until in the end I decided it was easier to resign. By then I’d signed up with a proper claims company to try to get some sort of compensation from one or other of the drivers who had been responsible for ruining my life. They warned me it might take years, and I couldn’t help but wonder what difference would money make anyway. Even money couldn’t take the pain away. But Graham had insisted, and once I’d started the ball rolling I lacked the motivation to stop it again.
    Those drivers had ruined my life, completely. Everything that had been normal for me was in that instant thrown up in the air and smashed. I had no job. I couldn’t get out in the garden, which I had always loved so much. I couldn’t sit comfortably in the car, even as a passenger, so I rarely went out of the house. Graham and I had been talking about having kids one day, but how could I even contemplate starting a family?
    I thought sometimes that it might have been easier if the accident had just snapped my spinal cord and paralysed me, because then it would have been obvious to everyone. As it was, I looked perfectly normal. Nobody can see pain. They have no frame of reference for pain that’s happening to someone else. They can only see inactivity – which they interpret as laziness. My friends and family, who called round often at first, gradually stopped coming round. They all thought I should just make more of an effort to get over it, that I wasn’t helping myself by staying in bed or on the couch, that I should try a little bit at a time and that it would get better. They thought that staying still was making the problem worse. And meanwhile the pain came in waves which made me miserable, and irritable, and so I snapped at the few people who persevered with me, and eventually they stopped bothering with me too.
    The thing that hurt more than any of it, though, was Graham. I was happy with him, but you never know how people are going to deal with problems until you have to face them. We never got married so he never promised all that ‘sickness and health’ shit. It kind of went without saying, I thought, and if the situations had been reversed I would have done everything I could to take care of him. But there you go.
    The worst accident he’d ever had was a broken ankle playing rugby, and it had healed well with proper physio afterwards. He thought what had happened to me was the same thing, or maybe that the pain of my accident should, logically, be less than the pain of his, since I hadn’t broken any bones. He got fed up with taking time off work to ferry me to medical appointments that were always inconclusive. Like the others, he couldn’t deal with the way my moods had changed, and when the pain was particularly bad he would go. He would just walk out of the house, take his wallet and his car keys and his mobile phone and go somewhere else, to the pub or to his sister’s, or just somewhere he could forget about his miserable sick partner.
    When he did that, I was relieved, because it meant I could make noise then – I could cry and moan and swear about the fucking pain and my fucking back and he wouldn’t have to listen.
    And of course it wasn’t just the misery and the extra effort of fetching and carrying, of helping me dress and getting a takeaway every other night or getting the shopping in. We had no intimacy any more. Even on good days, when the pain subsided to a dull ache, the most we could do was hold each other and kiss. He needed more, of course, and didn’t like to ask or push me, because he was afraid of making it worse. And even when I felt alright and could have tried, I was afraid to start anything that I might not be able to finish.
    He lasted five months after the accident. I don’t know if it was a gradual build-up or if I said or did something that triggered it, but one morning I woke up and he wasn’t there. He’d left a note on the downstairs table.
    His sister came round at the weekend and together we packed up his things as