After the operation

Fiction, about two adults over 18. Nobody warns you that a man being careful with you looks identical, from the outside, to a man who has gone off you.

Fiction. Every character in this story is a consenting adult over 18.

A story by the editor.

The thing I wanted to say was eight words long. I had it word perfect by the time we got to four months, and I still could not get it out of my mouth by the end of February.

Here it is. I want you to smack me again, please.

Eight words. I have said harder things than that to a man in a call centre.

The background is the whole problem, so I will do it quickly.

Dan and I had six years of this before my back went. Not constantly. Once a fortnight, roughly, and more often when work was bad, and the shape of it never changed. I would be unbearable for about four days. He would notice a day before I did.

Then at some point on a Sunday evening he would say my name in a particular way, from the bottom of the stairs, and I would go up, and twenty minutes later I was a person again. That was the arrangement. After the first year neither of us ever had to explain it out loud.

We stopped in the spring, when the disc at the bottom of my spine went from a nuisance to something I could not stand up straight with, and a physio I liked very much told me to stop doing anything I would not want to explain to a surgeon.

Then there was the operation, in August, which took twice as long as they said and which I will leave where it is. Then there was the part nobody warns you about, where they hand your body back to you in a condition you do not recognise and everyone expects you to carry on.

And Dan became careful.

I want to be fair to him, because he was kind for every single day of it. He carried things. He got up in the night to help me turn over without being asked and made a point of never mentioning that he had. He put a hand flat on my shoulder when he went past me with the washing basket, which is a thing you do to a colleague.

He had not touched me on purpose since the summer.

That is the distinction I could not have explained to anybody at the time, and it took me until about month five to find the words for it even inside my own head. Everything that happened to my body between August and March happened for a reason. Dressings, stitches out, physio, being helped up off a sofa. All of it necessary. None of it about me.

At four in the morning, in a dark room with nothing to look at but a wall, the arithmetic only ever went one way. He had been there when I came round. He had seen me at my absolute limit, and then in a hospital gown that would not do up at the back, in tears because I could not reach my own feet to put a sock on.

Of course he had gone off me. I would have gone off me. There was a version of that thought I could hold at eleven in the morning with a coffee, where it sounded ridiculous, and a version at four which did not sound ridiculous at all.

So I rehearsed. In the shower, mostly, which is the only place with a door on it.

I nearly said it in the car outside Sainsbury's in February and said something about the recycling instead. I typed it into a note on my phone at least three times and deleted it each time before I got to the end. Once I got as far as "Dan, can I ask you something" and he looked up from the sink with such open, tired willingness that I asked him whether we had any stamps.

What stopped me was the second I could see coming. One second of Dan working out how to be nice about it. If I asked and he hesitated, I would have my answer about the other question as well, and then I would have to go on living in that house with it.

It came out on a Thursday in March, badly, and not in any of the ways I had practised.

He asked me if I was all right. He had asked me if I was all right perhaps four hundred times by then, always in the same soft voice, and I had come to dread the sound of it. I said, "Stop asking me that." Then I stood at the sink with a tea towel in my hands and said, "You never touch me."

There was a long pause. Then he said, "I thought you didn't want me to."

We had the entire conversation standing up in the kitchen, me leaning on the worktop because sitting was still worse than standing. It turned out he had been reading things at two in the morning while I slept.

One of them said there is no date, and that the answer is whenever she wants it, and that a man pushing for a timetable has told you something about himself. Dan, being Dan, had read that as an instruction to say nothing at all, ever, until spoken to. He had then waited seven months for a woman who could not open her mouth.

Two people being enormously considerate at each other from opposite sides of a landing. For most of a year.

We did it the following Tuesday, at about nine, with the curtains drawn and the door pulled to, and my walking stick, which I no longer really needed and still could not bring myself to leave downstairs, propped against the chest of drawers.

We tried over his knee first because that is what we had always done, and it did not work. The bend of it pulled at the scar and I said no before I had really decided to, and he had me up off him in about a second and a half without making it into an event.

I lay flat on the bed on my front instead, straight, the way the physio has me lie for the exercises. That was better. I could not see his face, which I wanted, and nothing in my back was bending, which I wanted more.

He asked what I wanted. I said hand only, and not hard, and nowhere near the scar. He said if I told him to stop he would stop, and I said I knew that, and he said, "Say it back to me anyway," so I said it back to him.

Then we both had to wait, because the stick chose that moment to slide down the side of the chest of drawers and hit the floor like a dropped plank.

We stayed exactly where we were, like burglars, although there was nobody else in the house to hear it. He put his hand on my shoulder and we started again in whispers, for no reason either of us could have given you, except that whispering is how we had been speaking to each other since August.

The first one was almost nothing. Genuinely nothing, less than he would have used to get my attention in a kitchen a year ago. I laughed, which I had not expected to do, and he said "shush" and did another one.

We got to about twenty. It cannot have been ninety seconds altogether.

Then I said wait, and he stopped instantly, and put his hand flat between my shoulder blades and left it there. Neither of us had expected to be finished that early. I think we had both assumed there was a good deal more evening in it than that.

It had not hurt. Nothing about it had hurt, the back included.

A man had put his hand on me twenty times in a row for no reason other than that he wanted to, and my body had spent seven months being handled exclusively for maintenance. The gap between those two things went through me like a door coming open in a cold house. I cried the way you cry when you have been holding something with both hands for a long time and somebody takes it off you.

Not elegantly, either. Loudly enough that I thought about the people next door.

He got onto the bed beside me, slowly, on the side away from the scar, and did not say a single useful thing for about five minutes, which was correct. At one point my phone went off on the bedside table with the alarm for my evening tablets, and we both lay there and let it ring itself out, the way you let somebody else's car alarm go. It stopped.

I said, into the duvet, "I thought you had gone off me."

He took so long to answer that it frightened me. Then I worked out what the silence was. He was too furious with himself to get a sentence out. What he eventually said was that he had assumed I would tell him when I wanted anything at all, and that until then the safest thing available to him was nothing. He had been about as right as it is possible to be wrong.

We have done it four times since, and it is nowhere near what it was, and it is going to be a while. I mind about that a great deal less than I would have predicted in February.

Last Sunday he said my name from the bottom of the stairs in the particular way, and I went up. It was the first hour in over a year that had not been on a list.

He carried my stick up for me, although I have not leaned on it in weeks. He still carries things. I have decided I can live with that.