The flare

Fiction, about two adults over 18. A story about arithmetic, mostly. When your body sends the bill two days later, everything becomes a decision about what you are willing to pay for.

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

A story by the editor.

Monday was bad. I knew Monday would be bad on Thursday, when we agreed to Saturday, and I said yes anyway, and I would say yes again.

People find that difficult. I have been finding it not difficult for about eight years now, and the gap between those two positions is most of what I want to write down.

Fibromyalgia, diagnosed at thirty-one after the usual four years of being told I was tired and stressed and possibly a bit down. I am forty-two now. The important thing to understand, if you have never lived next to something like this, is that the pain is not an event. It is the weather.

It is there when I wake up at a four or a five, and the whole day is built on top of that number, and the number moves for reasons I can sometimes predict and often cannot.

Which means the scale everybody uses is useless to me. A nurse once asked me to rate my pain out of ten and I said six, and she looked concerned, and I had to explain that six was a fairly good afternoon and I had driven myself there.

It also means I have become an accountant. Every plan is a transaction. A wedding in Norwich costs me two days. A supermarket shop on foot costs a morning. I do not describe this to people as bravery, because it is not, it is just budgeting, and I resent enormously being told I am inspiring for going to Sainsbury's.

So. Saturday.

Marcus and I have been doing this for three years and the arrangement is entirely built around the arithmetic. We do not book anything for the Sunday. I do not work Mondays, which was a decision I made about my job rather than about him.

We start early in the evening rather than late, because being upright past ten costs me more than the session does. And it is short. Twenty-five minutes, perhaps thirty. He does not go past that even if I ask, and I do sometimes ask, and one of the reasons I keep him is that he says no.

The other thing we do, which took a year to work out, is that he never asks me how I am feeling during. It sounds counterintuitive. But I am at a four or a five before we start, so "are you all right" produces an answer that is technically accurate and completely useless. Instead he asks specific things. Is your hip talking to you. Are your hands cold. Can you feel your left foot properly. Those I can answer without translating.

The session stays out of this, partly because it is ours and partly because it was unremarkable by any standard except mine. Over the arm of the sofa, with the cushion arrangement we have refined over three years and which looks ridiculous and works. Hand, then the leather strap, which spreads and does not bite.

What I will say is that for about eleven minutes in the middle of it, I could not feel the four.

That is the whole thing. That is what I am buying. For eleven minutes there was one signal instead of the permanent background static of a body that hurts for no reason and has hurt for no reason since my late twenties. One clear, loud, entirely explicable sensation, arriving because a specific person did a specific thing on purpose, in a room I could point to, for a reason I chose.

Pain I chose. That is the distinction and it is not a small one. Everything else that hurts me is weather. This is the only pain in my life that has an author, a start time and an end.

Sunday was fine. Sunday is always fine, which catches people out.

That delay is the cruellest piece of design in the whole condition. If the bill arrived on the night, everybody would understand it, including me. Instead there is a clear day in between, long enough for anyone watching to conclude I got away with it, and long enough for me to start hoping the same thing. I have stopped hoping. Hoping is what makes Monday feel like a punishment rather than an invoice.

Monday I woke up at about an eight. Hands stiff and useless for the first hour. That specific bone-deep ache in the tops of my thighs that has nothing to do with where I was hit. Brain like wet sand: I lost the word for colander, and stood in the kitchen holding it, and had to describe it to Marcus as the spaghetti thing.

This is a flare. It would have happened anyway, at some point, for some reason or none. Saturday made it more likely and probably made it a Monday rather than a Thursday. I knew that. I built the week around it. I had food in the freezer from the previous Wednesday, when I was at a three and cooking felt possible, because past-me is constantly leaving presents for future-me and that is what living with this actually looks like.

Now the part that annoys me.

My sister rang on the Monday, heard my voice, and did the thing. "Oh, Els. Was it worth it?"

She means well. She has meant well for eleven years. And I know what she is doing, because she does it about the wedding in Norwich and the walk we did in the Peaks and everything else that costs me something, which is: totting up my ledger for me and arriving at a different answer.

Here is my answer. Yes. Obviously yes.

Because the alternative is a life spent so carefully that nothing is ever spent on anything. I have met women who took that road, who protect the budget so fiercely that there is never anything in the account but a balance, and they are not less ill than me. They are exactly as ill and they have less. The whole point of having a budget is that you are allowed to buy things with it.

And there is something else underneath it that I have never said to my sister, because I do not have the words that would not upset her. When you have a body that hurts you at random for fifteen years, being able to hand it to somebody on a Saturday and say do this, exactly this, for this long, is not damage.

It is the single most authoritative thing I do. My body does what it likes to me for fifty-one weekends a year. On the fifty-second I am the one who signed for it.

Marcus was here on the Monday, working from the kitchen table, doing nothing much. He brought me tea and did not ask if it had been worth it, because we settled that on Thursday when I said yes to Saturday, and re-litigating a decision after somebody has paid for it is a mean thing to do.

At about four he said, without looking up: "Second Saturday in November, or is that too close to your mum's birthday?"

And I got the diary. At an eight, with the wet-sand brain, and no word for colander, I got the diary out and we worked out what it would cost and put it in.