Neurectomy

Content Note: mention of suicide

<Mum has lye poisoning.>

Charming. Three dots oscillate under the first text my little sister has sent me since our Nanna died. I’d stop on the pavement, but an old man lumping an IKEA bag of laundry is tailgating my heels. The evening air is waxen, and the laundromat’s door handle is chalked with detergent. My sister’s next message,

<She says you’re not home yet. Why not?>

makes my left hand freeze around the metal.

I don’t know which affronts me more – the idea that I’ve travelled the length of the country to visit Mum, or the implication that her household is “home”. If I didn’t know that my trip to A&E would be squashed beneath the Trump Card of whatever Mum’s done to herself this time, I would crack my stalled bones from the handle, phalange by phalange.

“What’s the matter, pet?” the old man coos. His accent is Geordie, a language of cooing.

“Hand’s locked up,” I grate out. It flares up with stress. Deep breaths, box breaths, just breathe, don’t overthink. Shit.

“Do you need a hand, pet?”

I need a new hand. I need a new nervous system. Scandalised that I’ve called it out personally, it relinquishes, and I release the door.

†

The old Geordie hoofs a washing machine to turn it back on. I sit alone on a row of crimson plastic chairs with bevelled seats, indented in the middle island of washers. Washing machines double-stack the back wall in a wide-mouthed grimace, loose teeth chattering through their cycles. Electrical appliances, huffy customers, and long windows don’t help with the scabby air. I’ll never fuss over which wash-pods to buy again – every brand and scent and medium has congealed to the base note of the base chemicals. Sodium hydroxide, mainly: lye.

I don’t respond to my sister.

†

Grubby suds drool from where panels have come loose on the machines. I wince my fingers from the lip of the seat, because sticky condensation has pooled in the plastic grooves. The old Geordie is gone. Two young women curse as they dredge their cargo trousers and matching Merino jerseys from a dryer for the fourth time. Six dryers to thirty-six washers. They’re clustered beside a doorless gap leading to what must be a maintenance room. Ironing boards in various stages of being burned and fraying lean against the wall, though I don’t see any irons.

<Seriously, where are you?>

<My connection in Birmingham got cancelled. I’ll be here tonight. See you tomorrow.>

I had a two-hour layover before my connection in Birmingham. I am one town away from where my sister, Flora, lives. I’m staying the night in the laundromat.

The women give up and leave. They need to get back to their tent up in the fells. Their urgency implies they’re wild-camping – illegally. Matching chestnut bobs and hands could mean they’re sisters, but they’re bickering like lovers. I get no more clues before I’m left by myself.

I check my phone. Not even nine o’clock. The screen darkens, and I pull the brightness up manually. The battery icon is red. It’s in saver mode. Shit. It’s done the thing again – plunged from 39% to 7%.

To conserve charge, I turn my phone off.

†

A family with two giddy children enters as the sun is swallowed by a fell. The fairy lights haloing a Wetherspoons across the road plink on.

Tourists. They don’t know how to work the washer in their Airbnb. These lake-towns are so overrun by holiday companies and landlords-turned-BnB hosts that the national park no longer features in nature documentaries. It’s a safari of booking site logos slathered on windows of centuries-old slate cottages, 3D-printed bobbleheads of Beatrix Potter and William Wordsworth, and stag-dos terrorising the bus system. I heard my first in-person deep-south American accent at the bus interchange this morning. One for the spotter’s guide –

My right lung jams.

It doesn’t unstick straight away. I daren’t breathe with the other, in case that one has gone too. Box breathe. Box breathe, the one-lung box breathes. Don’t think about lungs – what lungs? – no lungs, box breathe.

It unsticks.

Outwardly, there was no indication that I had stopped breathing. The children fritz around the island, around me, oblivious. My lungs never stay frozen for too long. The day my nerves don’t unstick will be the day I go on a ventilator, or I die.

The family pulls their load from the machine. There are other machines with other people’s laundry in them, wheels of whites buffering around the circumference of the glass. One washer is determined to turn on at random and run through its forty-eight-minute cycle on an empty stomach, over and over. The family’s dryer groans as though it has PCOS pain in its water tank.

They collect their dry-ish laundry and leave for their holiday home. The parents have no idea that, for the instant my lung stuck, their ability to perform CPR was my difference between dying and not dying in a laundromat.

†

Flora hasn’t replied. Nanna, whose birthname really was ‘Nanna’, had been our father’s mother. Grandmama and Grandpa are Mum’s parents, all about chintz and AGA cookers, Folio Society books, and commemorative Princess Diana plates armouring their cul-de-sac bungalow. Grandmama manned the desk at a GP for fifteen years, and Grandpa used to fix the radar systems on naval ships. In all their silent-generation proper-ness, I’m not sure what path they thought their only daughter would take, but selling homemade soap out of a horse box probably wasn’t it.

Flora will have forced Mum to go to hospital. An accident with raw lye won’t be salved by mashing Carpenter Weed flowers or Traveller’s Foot into dishwater-coloured tinctures.

It’s like a protest, to what happened to my dad’s father, to what would have happened to my dad, to what will happen to me, that she won’t stand for anyone other than her brewing up medicines. In an alternate universe, Mum would definitely be one of those activists who get arrested and lumbered into the back of a van with her legs still crossed, loofa-plant earplugs thumb-tacked in.

†

My chest shuts off again. Left lung. I count four buffering rotations from the machine in front of me. It flares up when I’m stressed. Am I stressed?

I’m not worried about Mum. Flora is militant about our health. When I went to college, she hounded me for not texting Mum enough updates.

<Think of Dad and Grandad. Think of you. Think of what she’s gone through.>

I turn on my phone to check it again. 3%. It’s not even midnight. The lights of the Spoons go out in a wave. Outside, the last bus whirrs past. It reminds me of a submersible, disembodied, teal-lit windows propelling through the dark. I’m tempted to run out and hail it, but it terminates at the station a whole three-minute trudge away.

The fact that I’ve been caught out without a phone bothers me. When I’m alone in strange places, I need access to 999. Doom via ill-preparedness would make Grandpa too ashamed to speak at my funeral.

†

I rootle through my tote. Clothes, toiletries and other essentials – except for snacks, I realise – are in the rucksack wedged between my legs.

A skein of Alpaca wool for Flora to ferry to my mother, dyed purple to blue to green; an envelope-sized kalamata bloomer for me; a honeyed goat’s cheese log for Flora. I chose it because it’s rolled in edible flowers, and she’ll eat anything that looks like a novelty soap. One thing that my mother and I actually agreed on was that Flora’s zeal for those American sweet shops, which pop up like zits on every UK high street, would result in blue intestines, losing a lot of money – seriously, what business do Jolly Ranchers and Fluff have being that expensive? – and probably a few teeth in the process.

I won’t tell her it’s goat’s cheese. I think mum has said in front of her, too many times, that goat’s cheese is bad because, “It just tastes like you’ve licked the goat.”

I waft the bloomer towards my nose. It’s supposed to smell of an olive grove, of Italy, and saltine Mediterranean bread. It just smells like supermarket. Usually, I can’t resist olive bread. I tunnel it back into the bag.

Flora won’t eat the cheese, I decide. It’s too unconventional. She’ll pluck the petals from the outside, and then the log will sweat inside the fridge until it grows fur. I pick a Barbie-pink petal from the end and put the flavourless thing on my tongue. Moulding dairy is probably one of the last things on the planet that will evolve a winter coat.

The cerulean, wet colour of the refrigerator-style lighting makes the laundromat look cold, but night is no longer the Earth’s cool side of the pillow. I think about the heating sky, the Super El Niña, of an atmosphere cable-knit with greenhouse gas and missiles, of Russia and America, atomic fallout reaching the highest cairns of the fells.

In a nuclear blast, what would my chances of survival be if I climbed into one of the washing machines? Didn’t Indiana Jones survive one in a fridge? Dying in the dark and damp, I might as well have died in the womb.

Another family member fated to die inside an internal organ.

Someone at college never quite looked at me the same way again after I said something that I shouldn’t have. We were waiting for an early-morning train into London. The station was surrounded by brutalist flats, and the sky wasn’t particularly pretty, but I’ll be damned if I didn’t come out with –

“I’d rather die on the tracks out here than on the Underground. I’d like to be able to see the sky.”

The same is true for now, I think. I’d rather my last lungful be of radiation, under an apocalyptic sky, than of someone else’s underwear.

I inhale, and my breathing blows out like a tyre again. Four-and-a-half rotations.

†

I’ve lost count of how many forty-eight-minute cycles the broken washer has slurped through. No change in the sky outside. My phone won’t turn back on. I pluck an orange petal from the cheese and pinch it onto my tongue. How old was I when I stopped wearing watches? My forefinger and thumb become stone on my bottom teeth.

This is new.

Box breathe, box breathe, binds breath…

“Ah-halk…”

My noises aren’t mine.

My hand is dead, though I feel its pulse through my incisors – the halfway-to-corpse is blocking my mouth, my nerves are an anemone, piked in the touch-pool by alien hands.

“Ah-ha’alp…”

Box breathe, box breathe, don’t think, just breathe, anemone, deep breaths, neurectomy, don’t breathe…

My eyes are sutured to the glass, a black hole, box breathe, before me. The iron lung, lungs-turned-iron, my lungs are turning to iron, my legs are stuck, my spine is a pin, I am stiffer than a dead thing.

That crazed washer pummels into a spin-drive, shellacking the wall like an animal desperate to escape a trap, like the heartbeat of an animal that is about to die.

The last image I see is the limescaled portholes of the washers.

The head isn’t dead yet. I’m not dead…

†

I’m not dead. I was sarcophagised inside rigor mortis, briefly buried alive within my flesh.

I don’t think all of me locked up, just my hand. The rest was panic. Box breathe.

I’ve been free for however long it’s taken for the rogue machine to return to its soaking stage – and for me to acknowledge that this much sticking in one night isn’t normal.

That was the most extreme I’ve ever had of the most extreme symptom of the disease. Others include weird swellings, sore joints, a wheezing cough from bothered lungs, all very reactive to stress and adrenaline. Something has been setting me off, and it’s neither what’s going on with Mum, nor the prospect of seeing Flora for the first time in four years.

These walls of steel-rimmed windows are uncaring. My sore chest is filled with the fug of unwashed human things mixed with washing chemicals. That repeating machine clanks into another tumble.

With no people, daylight, food, or phone, I can’t ignore what this moist and heaving space is to me.

†

My Grandad spent twenty-four years inside an iron lung. He inherited a disease that caused degenerative intermittent paralysis, degenerative because slowly, the things which stuck stopped unsticking. Nanna, his wife, said that his right foot used to trip him up whenever his ankle locked. Regular tripping jumbled into a permanent limp. She said he broke an arm at the elbow when this happened on the stairs. His arm was never the same again either – it took to freezing whenever he watched the cricket.

Nanna told me that the disease didn’t affect his lungs, never had done, until two-thirds of his diaphragm paralysed.

Dad had it in his back. I remember once, I was playing on the kitchen floor when he loped from his office, bent double. Mum wasn’t as anti-hospital as she is now, but Dad refused to go, and I think it’s because he was still shadowed by his father’s ordeal in the iron lung. Perhaps it was more my dad than anything else, which pushed my mum into who she is. Perhaps I’m wrong to hate her as much as I do.

She pawed birch leaf oil into his back, but he was locked up until after dinner.

In the end, dad couldn’t bear the prospect of a ventilator, the modern iron lung, or of dying through slow, sadistically slow, asphyxiation. More than anything, I don’t think he could bear to watch me suffocate in his ever-stumbling footsteps. My left hand started locking when I was five; I was diagnosed by the time I was six. My death sentence was his. He took his own life before I turned nine.

It never gets to me. Why is that getting to me now?

I’m bent double, not actively sobbing, but unable to meet myself in the window of the washing machine opposite. The dewed glass does not care, Mother Nature does not care – but Mum cares, however much she whelves her concern beneath wishy-washy homoeopathy. Dad cared.

I gulp along with the rogue washer, not through tears but on furry, lye-infused air, and wriggle my fingers like garden worms. I’m stressed, I’m sad, it’s time for something to lock up…

 Apparently, the first bout of paralysis my parents noticed was in my left little finger, and that’s what hardens now. Their realisation only gave words to what I’d known already – it’s always lived in my lungs.

†

The washer rushes into another spin-dry, and I imagine whirling around at the speed of the machine. I might puke. I don’t want my oesophagus to lock up mid-vomit.

†

My Grandad chose his own death too. There are two photos in the album, one shot down the empty head-hole of the iron lung – the image is indistinguishable from the dormant washing machines – and another with my grandfather newly enwombed. He’s not looking at the camera. He stares over the metal monster as though he hadn’t fully comprehended what it meant to lose his entire body until that moment. Nanna said that she and Dad couldn’t stomach seeing him like that, that Grandad couldn’t stomach being like that.

He and his defunct diaphragm were wheelchair-bound but free for almost five weeks before it stiffened in his sleep.

Nanna left me the framed photo of a trip to the beach, Grandad’s gaze haunted but resolute. Somehow, he had found a way to die on his feet long after they’d turned to stone.

†

The mad washer has fallen silent by the time the sky lightens enough to fog out my thoughts. It is between dawn and the sunrise. Pale highlights on the seats and machinery blur away stains and tidemarks. The heat has broken, and a cold current threads through slivers of open window. It carries away stale mildew, refreshing the room with car exhaust, baking, coffee, and an herbal downwind blowing straight from the surrounding fells. The town hasn’t cluttered yet; the world isn’t feverishly close. The day is about to begin.

I could be anywhere in the world right now, in any rural market town about to become busy. Laundromats must look the same anywhere; they must have looked this way ever since washing machines first looked like this.

Anywhere, in any time – this is indefinity.

My existence isn’t indefinite, but un-definite. My life could end like my father’s, or like my father’s father, of old age like my Nanna, choked around a ventilator, nuked out of living memory, or lying in Mum’s hay meadow, having collapsed. Anywhere, at any time.

I’m in the abatement after the nightmare. It’s terrifying when part of my body teeters beyond the veil, a part that could pull the rest of me with it. Flora did not inherit our nerve-disease. Thank God. I know I need to go and see her. Perhaps there’s something in my brain which makes me stick too, me as a person. I might visit Mum – before my footfall fades.

†

The first bus of the morning chugs past the laundromat – sounds like a spin-dry, losing stamina.