That was a four

Fiction, about two adults over 18. She wanted it much harder than she was getting, and said nothing for months because complaining felt ungrateful. Then she said one sentence with two numbers in it.

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

A story by the editor.

I ask people for a number out of ten about forty times a day. Nought is no pain at all, ten is the worst you can imagine, and where would you put it this morning. It is the first thing I say to most people after hello. I have said it to magistrates and to scaffolders, and last spring to a retired bus driver who told me, with a shoulder frozen solid, that it was "a two, love, honestly".

It was not a two. I have been a physiotherapist for twenty-one years and I know exactly what a two looks like getting off a treatment couch, and it does not look like that.

People round down. Nearly all of them, nearly all the time, and for the same reason: they do not want to make a fuss in front of somebody who is trying to help. I know this so thoroughly that I have a private word for it. Then I went home every Thursday from February to November and did it myself.

Callum said yes in January. I had asked him in the car, which is where I seem to ask for things, and he went quiet for most of the dual carriageway and then said he would need to think. He thought about it for eight days, which I later found out included two books and a great many forums.

He did everything right. I want that clear before anything else. He bought a leather strap from a proper maker and oiled it at the kitchen table with the radio on, as if it were a cricket bat. He asked what I wanted and wrote it down. He started gently, because he had read that he should. And afterwards he made tea and brought it upstairs and sat on the edge of the bed and asked, every single time, "Was that all right?"

And every single time I said, "Lovely."

It was lovely. It was also a four.

A four, for the record, is a proper sting. You know it is happening. But you could hold a conversation through it, and I know I could, because one evening in June, about ten minutes in, I realised I had been drafting a discharge letter in my head. Paragraph two. I had got as far as the home exercise programme.

That is not what I had been imagining for most of my adult life.

So why did I not say so. I have asked myself that a good deal, and the honest answer is that it felt ungrateful. Here was a kind man who had never done this before, who had read up and oiled the strap, who had said yes to something I had been braced for him to laugh at. Telling him it was not enough felt like unwrapping a present in front of the person who chose it and asking for the receipt.

There was worse, and I should own it. I helped him get it wrong. I made noises. Nothing dramatic, only the small catch of breath that I assumed a man in his position would want to hear, at strokes that had not earned it. I was marking his work generously and then wondering, privately, why it never improved.

Nine months of that. February, the wet end of May, the whole of the summer, the first cold week of October. Lying there afterwards warm and pink and exactly as awake as I had been when we started, saying "lovely" to a man holding a mug of tea.

The Thursday it changed, I had seen a man at half past two with a rotator cuff problem who told me it was about a three. He had been sleeping in an armchair for a fortnight. I put my pen down and said what I always say, which is: "If you tell me a three, I will treat a three, and you will be back here in six weeks." He laughed, and then he said seven, and then he said, more quietly, that it was probably an eight.

I wrote eight. I did not think about it again until about quarter past nine that evening, face down on our bed, when I noticed I was composing a shopping list.

Afterwards he hung the strap on the back of the door and came back and sat on the edge of the bed in the usual place. "Was that all right?"

I felt the word arrive in my mouth. Lovely. I could feel the shape of it, ready to go, the way you can feel a sneeze coming.

I said, "That was a four."

He did not move.

"I wanted a seven."

I have replayed the next minute a great deal and I am still not sure I have it in the right order.

He said nothing at first. He looked at the strap on the back of the door, as if it might have a view, and then back at me, and I watched him do arithmetic. I could see it happening. He was counting back.

"Since when?"

"February."

"You said lovely."

"It was lovely." That came out wrong, and I knew it as it was leaving. "It was a lovely four."

Then he did something I had not prepared for in nine months of not saying it. He let out a breath that went on for a long time, put his face in his hands, and laughed. Not at me. It was the laugh of a man who has been holding a heavy door open for somebody and has just been told he can let go.

"I thought I was hurting you," he said, into his hands. "Every time. You make that noise and I stop going any harder, because I think that is you at the edge of it. I come downstairs afterwards and my hands are going." He held one up, as if to show me, though it was perfectly steady now. "I have been frightened of that noise since February."

I had made a careful, kind man frightened for nine months, by being polite.

I want to be fair to myself, and also accurate, so here it is. We had been extremely considerate of each other since February, and it had made us both miserable in separate rooms.

He asked me what a seven was. I was glad he asked, because a number on its own tells you almost nothing, and I say that to patients too.

So I gave it to him the way I would want it given to me. A seven is where staying still takes work. Where I need a breath between them and the breath is not optional. Where there is no discharge letter and no shopping list, because there is no room in my head for anything except the next one.

He nodded slowly. Then he said, "Not tonight."

I nearly argued. I had nine months of fours in me and for about ten seconds I was furious. Then he said Saturday, in daylight first, at the kitchen table, sober. When we did it he would start at a two and build, and he would ask me for a number as he went. And there was a condition.

"No more noises for my benefit. If you make a sound I want it to be true. And when I ask for a number I want the real one. Even if it is a three. Especially if it is a three."

I said yes. It was a much bigger thing to agree to than the seven.

On Saturday morning we did it properly, with toast. The strap and his hand. A seven right at the end, and only at the end. Pink is fine, nothing still there by Wednesday. Amber means what it has always meant. He wrote it on the pad we use for shopping, tore the page off and folded it into his wallet.

The evening itself I will keep mostly to myself, because the part that mattered was somewhere I had not expected to find it.

It was in saying "two". He asked, early on, in an ordinary voice, "Number?" and I said "Two," and it was the most exposing word I have said to him in three years together. A two, said out loud, is a request. It means I want a great deal more than this and I am telling you so, and I cannot make a small noise and leave you to guess.

"Three." "Four." I heard myself say four and nearly apologised for it, out of habit. "Five." Somewhere around six I stopped being able to give him a whole word at once, and he waited, without moving, until I had got it out.

At seven I could not have told you my own postcode. There was no letter and no list. There was nothing in my head except the next one, and the noise I made was not for anybody's benefit, and he heard the difference. I know he did, because he said very quietly, "There it is," and then he stopped, exactly where the page in his wallet said he would.

The thing I noticed first, afterwards, was his hands.

He brought the tea up and sat in the usual place, and they were completely steady. For nine months I had taken his quiet afterwards for tenderness, and a lot of it was. The rest, it turned out, had been fright. That had gone. He was easy and pleased with himself and slightly unbearable about it, and he did a short impression of my face at the word five that I will not forgive.

He did not ask whether it was all right. He asked, "What did it reach?"

"Seven."

"And what did you want?"

"Seven."

He nodded, the way you nod at a good result, and drank his tea.

On the Monday a woman of about sixty came in with a sore knee and told me it was a two, really, and she did not want to make a fuss.

I put my pen down. "Are you sure?"

She looked at me for a while. Then she said, "Five. Some mornings six."

I wrote six, and I was more pleased about it than I could possibly have explained to her.