It was most persistent and unbearable on her hands. The joints and creases of each finger developed small spot-like sacs. Scratch them until they were torn, and your own skin and blood lined your nails, and the eczematous torture persisted. Then the soft bases of her wrists. Then the entire hand.
An old foe, this, thought beaten years ago. The antagonist of childhood, known in all its degrading forms of ambush and sabotage. She waged the old hopeless campaign. Cold water, and anything that hurt the itching areas into temporary passivity. Salt, or alcohol. Even ash.
She bought antihistamines as soon as a chemist opened, and spent the day feeling doped and sluggish, and especially, at war with herself.
And the knife-paining slid sharply into her stomach before the day died, and this time, it stayed.
After the first minutes, she found she could endure it, but felt if she moved suddenly it really would turn into a knife and cut the coils of her intestines to shreds.
Aiee, instant harakiri, sickly jokes, sweating, crying without sound, staying immobile all the long tense night,
But even in the anguish, the busy noisy part of her mind still analyses.
You have given up your home. Because the burden of uselessness became too much. Because the loneliness of being a stranger to everyone grows. Because knowledge of your selfishness has grown to be unendurable. Mentally, I am almost drowned. I'm not made for fighting this kind of battle. Spiritually, I still hope… idiot Holmes, you are not charitable, you do not have the gracemeet of faith, faith in anything. Why hope? Because, because, I can do nothing else… and you call yourself bright? Hah!
When the pain did knife in, despite her rigid stillness, she bit her lips bloody to stop from screaming.
God not here I can't.
It seared.
For dislocated minutes.
Suddenly ceased.
Shortly after, weak with relief that the knife had been withdrawn, she slept. The itch was in abeyance. As she sank wearily through
sea that seemed to have neither touch nor bottom, she collected the tears that slid down her cheeks and grinned in their salt embrace.
"Why do you want sleeping tablets?"
"Because I want to sleep eh."
The doctor smiles, a little superciliously.
"We can gather that, but what is preventing you from sleeping?"
"Nervous eczema," she flicks a scarred wrist briefly towards him, "and," she hesitates, but ahh what the hell, "stomach pain."
"Indigestion? Or, umm, heartburn?"
"Oath, no. I could clear those up fast. This feels like, well, like a knife might if you were being stabbed."
He seems surprised.
"Does it occur often?"
"It's happened twice before, but this time was too bad. I couldn't take it."
He notes something on a pad.
"Nothing unusual to eat or drink beforehand?"
"Nope."
"Are you, umm, entirely regular in your toilet habits? Any recent alteration in them, or discharge?"
"I never looked. I shit the same as I always have."
The doctor sniffs.
"Where does this pain occur precisely?"
She pointed.
"Would you lift your clothes a little?"
Denim jacket, sharkskin jerkin bedecked with fringes, silk shirt, mushroom white Holmes type skin —-
He palpated the area with his fingers. They are soft and cold and dry.
He frowns.
"You haven't had a blow to the stomach recently?"
"
"You have noticed the swelling and hardness there?"
"Yep."
He asks, full of non-professional curiosity, "Well, why didn't you ask me about it first? It's the real reason for your visit, isn't it?"
"It isn't. I came because I needed something to help me sleep. Whisky gets to be too hard on the liver. That, that swelling is a matter about which I am entirely incurious."
"When it causes you substantial distress? Come, come. I think we'd better have some tests done right away."
"I think we won't," says Kerewin coldly. "I said I wasn't interested."
The doctor puts his pen down, and polishes his glasses slowly.
"I think," he says, searching for gentleness, "that this may be
rather more serious than you imagine. I think it would be better if we found out what the swelling was, and why it is causing you pain."
He has found a certain professional gentleness, speaking to her as though she were an excited idiot child.
She takes the same tone for her answer.
"I think I have a generously large imagination. I think I have covered all possibilities ranging from tumorous growth to invasion by alien fungi. And as I said, it doesn't interest me further. I wish for something to assist me to sleep. If you will also prescribe a strong painkiller, I'll even manifest gratefulness. If you won't do either, I'll stick to my whisky."
He says bluntly,
"It may be cancer. There is definitely an unusual growth there, not an intestinal blockage. The sooner it is examined and removed, the better your chance of survival."
"I am not interested. Ah, do you have difficulty understanding English? I've said that three times."
He looks like he's going to froth at the mouth. "Do you know," speaking quickly and intensely, "have you any idea of what someone dying of cancer goes through? The agony they suffer? Do you know "
"You are getting beyond yourself, little medicine man," her voice is controlled and gentle. "How do you know I want to live? What say this is a nice neat no-questions-asked-after way of committing suicide?"
His jaw hangs open.
There is a curious inevitability about the whole scene, as though it were destined to be played out like this from the moment she arrived in town. It was remote, like watching someone else in a play. It didn't feel real.
"Don't talk to me anymore," she says quietly. "Just write me a prescription. After all, that's what most of you jokers do, most of the time. Oblige me, continue the practice. In your code put, for pain, and for sleeping when needed. And I'll say ta and go away forever, okay?"
He had spoken more, passionately.
Kerewin had sat and looked at him with the same sort of expression she kept for viewing new varieties of spiders. He had finished abruptly, flushing under her stare.
"It is your life," he had said.
And she made him an answer that surprised her as much as it did the helpless medic.
"It was," she said.
But somewhere long ago it left me.
The promised joys were arid nothings.
The destiny was never proclaimed, and never fulfilled.
She was walking in the park. Park? Several dozen trees, all exotics, and neatly trimmed lawns. A forlorn pondshell, empty of water and children, filled with dead leaves.
The leaves were everywhere, in deep piles, brown and wilted. When she scuffled through them, they rustled sullenly as if the movement annoyed them.
Snarling leaves, eh Holmes? and threw back her head and surprised herself again, with laughter.
There was a bolete under a nearby beech. She squatted down and examined it carefully. The slightly viscid top was hole-free. Ah, no maggots have chanced upon this feast… she plucked it carefully, and held it in her cracked and weeping hands. The cap spread a royal nine inches. She felt in her pocket for a collecting bag, and fitted the bolete carefully in.
"I'll cook it in butter with herbs even," she whispered to herself, and as she stood, the two phials of pills clinked a merry requiem in her pocket.