Pandora’s Box. Giselle Green

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      ‘Did they give you an initial diagnosis of MS?’

      The first time I ever saw Miriam we were both sitting on the green benches outside Neurology. She had brought crossword puzzles and drinks and things and she seemed to know everyone in the department by name. I, on the other hand, was just sitting on my hands, feeling sick to my stomach with nerves. I remember I couldn’t take my eyes off her wheelchair. I wanted desperately to ask her if she’d always been like that or whether it was this illness that had done it to her but at the same time I really didn’t want to know.

      ‘Hi,’ she’d started again when I didn’t answer her. ‘I’m Miriam.’

      ‘Uh, yeah. I’m Shelley. Yeah, they did. They thought it was MS. At first.’

      She had taken a thoughtful sip of her juice carton through a straw.

      ‘And now?’

      ‘Now they think it might be something called AMS.’

      ‘Atypical Myoendocal disease.’ Her eyes had beamed at me. ‘Same as me, then. Welcome to the club! We’re very unique, you know. We’re less than one in five million.’

      ‘I feel honoured,’ I’d muttered under my breath.

      ‘You should feel honoured,’ she’d laughed, and I remember her blue eyes had been warm and bright with humour. ‘It means you now get the best consultant on the block; the gorgeous Doctor Ganz.’

      ‘Uh-huh.’ I’d already met him. He seemed kind. I didn’t think there was any danger I would be falling in love with him, though.

      ‘Just remember that I saw him first,’ she added, but there was a more important possibility rearing itself in my mind just at that moment.

      ‘Does it mean, if it’s atypical MS, that there’s any chance we could get better?’

      That was the one and only time I ever saw a shadow cross Miriam’s face.

      ‘You don’t get better from this, Shelley,’ she told me. ‘It’s atypical, because it actually…’ she hesitated, ‘look, I guess I’d better let them explain it all to you when you go in. They’ll put it so much better than I ever could. Have you had an MRI done yet?’

      ‘That thing where you go in the tunnel and they look to see if there’s any nerve damage?’ I’d nodded but she didn’t say any more and I’d guessed, correctly, that she’d just been trying to distract me. Miriam was the one good thing to have come out of all of this. She was the best friend I ever had. She really was one in five million.

      But the thing is, it was like she was a friend travelling the same road as me, only she happened to be further up ahead than I was. Every time she got a new symptom, I knew it would be only a matter of maybe six months to a year and then I would get it too. She never had any pain until the end, and neither have I had any yet. Nor do I want to. Dr Ganz kept saying to me that these things were all very individual. Nobody could predict how it would go. Not enough people had been studied to make any hard and fast conclusions. The only hard and fast conclusion that I know of is that the condition is, in the end, fatal. Miriam came to the end of her road. It’s a year later for me. I don’t need anybody to spell out what that means. I guess the thing I detest most about my situation is the inevitability of it. I’m like a fish caught in a net. There is no way out. Apart from the way I have thought up.

      Which brings me back to my plan. At least this way I will be drawing my own last breath. And the air I draw will be warm and sweet and full of birdsong and the gentle crash of the waves on the shores of Summer Bay.

      I can’t do it by myself. It’s not something I can do alone, and I don’t really want to be alone at the end. Now all I have to do is persuade someone to help me do it.

       4 Shelley

      SugarShuli has come on MSN just now. She must be having a day off again. Like me, she doesn’t see much point in going to school but her reasons are different to mine. Her parents are bringing a boy over from Pakistan for her and she’s supposed to marry him just as soon as she’s legally allowed.

      SugarShuli says: I’m off sick. How are you?

      ShelleyPixie says: Okay. What’s up?

      SugarShuli says: Nothing really. Just didn’t see much point in going in. What are you doing?

      ShelleyPixie says: Right now, talking to you. I’m waiting for Krok to come online so if I go quiet…

      SugarShuli says: Krok your bf?

      ShelleyPixie says: Sort of. Online thing.

      I haven’t actually met Krok of course, not in the flesh, but he’s sent me a picture of him and his mates when they were doing a gig in a pub in Hammersmith. Krok plays the bass but what he really wants to do is produce music. When he grows up, he says. He’s nineteen now, so I’m not sure when that will be.

      Krok has got this dream: he’s going to set up his own recording studios one day and bring on a load of new young bands playing real music—real musicians, he says, not just pretty people prancing and miming. He says most real musicians are ugly. He isn’t. He has longish hair and the deepest blue eyes. Irish eyes, he tells me. He’s got a cheeky smile.

      SugarShuli says: You two going to meet?

      She means him, I suppose. Are we going to meet? I wish, I only wish I could. Don’t know how it would happen, though. I also worry that he might be put right off me if we ever did. It’s better this way. On the other hand, Daniel might be right with his list of resolutions. We don’t get forever. And I’m getting a lot less of forever than most people count on. I keep thinking that if there are things I want to do then I’d better get on and do them.

      ShelleyPixie says: Yep. Sometime soon. I’m going to meet him.

      SugarShuli says: I’ll be meeting Jallal soon too.

      Surinda—that’s her real name—takes all this marrying Jallal business in her stride. She doesn’t seem to mind. It’s all part of her expectations, she tells me. She says it’s much harder for those people who have to go out and find someone and decide who to marry all for themselves. Hmm…

      ShelleyPixie says: Good looking?

      SugarShuli says: I haven’t seen a picture yet. He comes from a good family and I am assured they have money. That’s what counts, isn’t it?

      ShelleyPixie says: Christ.

      SugarShuli says: You know how it is.

      Hang on a minute, I think Krok has just logged on so she’ll have to shut up for a bit. Krok is more important. I haven’t spoken to him since last Thursday. He’s got a busy schedule at the moment.

      Krok says: Hey Pixie.

      ShelleyPixie says: Hey Krok. How’s it going? Been missing you.

      Krok СКАЧАТЬ